Ibn Arabi


Ibn 'Arabī was a Sunni Muslim Arab scholar, Sufi mystic, poet, and Muslim philosopher from al-Andalus, who exercised notable influence within Sufi metaphysics and Islamic thought in general. There are 850 works attributed to Ibn 'Arabi, though only 700 of these are considered authentic, and only 400 are extant. His cosmological teachings became a dominant intellectual framework in many regions of the Muslim world.
His traditional title was Muḥyiddīn. After his death, practitioners of Sufism began referring to him by the honorific title Shaykh al-Akbar, from which the term Akbarism is derived.
Ibn ʿArabī is considered a wali by some scholars and Muslim communities.
Ibn 'Arabī is known for being the first person to explicitly delineate the concept of wahdat al-wujūd, a monist doctrine that claimed that all things in the universe are manifestations of a singular reality. Ibn 'Arabī equated this reality with the entity he called "the Absolute".

Early life

Ibn 'Arabī was born in the Taifa of Murcia, in present-day southeastern Spain, on the 17th of Ramaḍān 560 AH, although other sources suggest the 27th of Ramaḍān 560 AH as an alternative birthdate. His first name was Muhammad. After the birth of his son, he was known as Abū ʿAbdullāh, as is common practice for Arabic names. In some of his works, ibn 'Arabī referred to himself with fuller versions of his name, Abū ʻAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn ʻArabī al-Ṭāʼī al-Ḥātimī, where the last three names indicate his noble lineage from the tribes of Arabia. His relative Ḥātim aṭ-Ṭāʼiyy was well-known as a poet of pre-Islamic Arabia of the Qahtanite tribe of Ṭayyi’.

Family

Ibn 'Arabī came from a mixed background. His father descended from Arab emigrants to al-Andalus in the early years of the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. His mother was presumably of Berber descent. In his Futūḥāt al-Makkīyah, ibn 'Arabī writes of a deceased maternal uncle, a prince of Tlemcen who abandoned wealth for an ascetic life after encountering a Sufi mystic.
His paternal ancestry came from Yemen and belongs to one of the oldest Arab groups in al-Andalus. They may have migrated during the second wave of the Muslim conquest of Iberia.
His father, ʿAli ibn Muḥammad, served in the Army of Ibn Mardanīsh, the ruler of the Taifa of Murcia. When Murcia fell to the Almohad Caliphate in 1172, Ibn Mardanīsh did not survive the defeat and was killed in battle, leading to his father pledging allegiance to the Almohad caliph Abū Ya'qūb Yūsuf I. At the time, ibn Arabi was only 7 years old, and his family relocated from Murcia to Seville to serve the new ruler.
Ibn Arabi had three wives. He married Maryam, a woman from an influential family, when he was still a young adult and lived in Andalusia. Maryam shared his aspiration to follow the Sufi path, as quoted by Austin in Sufis of Andalusia:
During his long stay in Anatolia, according to Arabic and Persian sources, ibn Arabi married Majd al-Dīn's widow and assumed responsibility for the education of her young son, Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi. Ibn Arabi also mentioned his third wife in his writings, the mother of his son Imāduddin, to whom he bequeathed the first copy of Futūḥāt al-Makkīyah.

Teachers

Ibn Arabi studied under many scholars who were mentioned in the ijaza written to al-Muzaffar Ghazi, the ruler of Damascus and son of Al-Adil I. Some of these most prominent scholars of the time were:
His most prominent students include:
  • Badr al-Din al-Habashi
  • Ibn al-Farid was considered by 'Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi among Ibn Arabi's students.
  • Al-Muzaffar Baha' al-Din Ghazi
  • Ibn al-Dubaythi
  • Ibn al-Najjar
  • Diya' al-Din al-Maqdisi
  • Isma'il ibn Sawdakin
  • Sa'd al-Din al-Hamawi
  • Muhyi al-Din Yahya ibn al-Zaki who patronized Ibn Arabi in Damascus, and who arranged that Ibn Arabi be buried in the family cemetery of the Banu al-Zaki. He was a descendant of Zaki al-Din 'Ali b. Muhammad b. al-Zaki, the Shafi'i chief qadi of Damascus, who formed a powerful political alliance with the 'Asakir family, whose members occupied prestigious positions as judges and scholars of the Shafi'i school of Sunni law in Damascus for close to three centuries.
  • Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi
  • Baybars

    First vision

Ibn Arabi grew up at the ruling court and received military training. In his writing al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya, he confessed he preferred playing in a military camp with his friends rather than reading a book. However, when he was a teenager, he experienced his first vision and later wrote of this experience as "the differentiation of the universal reality comprised by that look".
His father, noticing a change in him, mentioned this to philosopher and Judge Ibn Rushd, who asked to meet Ibn Arabi. Ibn Arabi said that from this first meeting, he had learned to perceive a distinction between formal knowledge of rational thought and the unveiling of insights into the nature of things. He then adopted Sufism and dedicated his life to the spiritual path.

Pilgrimage to Mecca

Ibn Arabi left Andalusia for the first time at age 28 and arrived in Tunis in 1193. After a year in Tunisia, he returned to Andalusia in 1194. His father died soon after Ibn Arabi arrived at Seville. When his mother died some months later, he left Andalusia for the second time and traveled with his two sisters to Fez, Morocco in 1195. He returned to Córdoba, Andalusia in 1198, and left Andalusia crossing from Gibraltar for the last time in 1200. While there, he received a vision instructing him to journey east. He then visited various places in the Maghreb, including Fez, where he accepted spiritual mentorship under Mohammed ibn Qasim al-Tamimi. In 1200, he took leave from one of his most important teachers, Shaykh Abu Ya'qub Yusuf ibn Yakhlaf al-Kumi, then living in the town of Salé. He left Tunisia in 1201 and arrived for the Hajj in 1202. He lived in Mecca for three years, and there began writing his work Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, The Meccan Illuminations—only part of which has been translated into English by scholars such as Eric Winkel.

Journey north

After spending time in Mecca, he traveled across Syria, Palestine, Iraq, and Anatolia. In 1204, ibn Arabi met Majduddīn Isḥāq ibn Yūsuf, a native of Malatya and a man of great standing at the Seljuk court. Ibn Arabi travelled north; first, they visited Medina, entering Baghdad in 1205. This visit allowed him to meet the direct disciples of Abdul Qadir Gilani. Ibn Arabi stayed there for only 12 days because he wanted to visit Mosul to see his friend, 'Alī ibn 'Abdallāh ibn Jāmi', a disciple of the mystic Qaḍīb al-Bān. He spent the month of Ramaḍan in Mosul, and composed Tanazzulāt al-Mawṣiliyya, Kitāb al-Jalāl wa'l-Jamāl and Kunh mā lā Budda lil-MurīdMinhu.

Return south

In 1206, Ibn Arabi visited Jerusalem, Mecca, and Egypt. It was the first time that he had passed through Syria, visiting Aleppo and Damascus.
In 1207, he returned to Mecca, where he continued to study and write, spending his time with his friend Abū Shujā bin Rustam and family, including Niẓām.
The next four to five years of Ibn Arabi's life were spent in these lands. He also kept traveling and holding reading sessions of his works in his presence.

Final years

After leaving al-Andalus for the last time in 1198 at the age of 33 and wandering in the Islamic world for 25 years, in 1223, at the age of 58, ibn Arabi chose Damascus as his final home and dedicated his life to teaching and writing. In this city, he composed the Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam in 1229 and finalized two manuscripts of Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya in 1231 and 1238.

Death

Ibn Arabi died on 22 Rabī' al-Thānī, 638 AH, at the age of 75. He was buried in the Banu Zaki cemetery, the family cemetery of the nobles of Damascus, on Qasiyun Hill, Salihiyya, Damascus.

Legacy

After his death, Ibn Arabi's teachings quickly spread throughout the Islamic world. His writings were not limited to Muslim elites; they spread to other segments of society through the widespread influence of the Sufi orders. Arabi's work also spread widely through works in Persian, Turkish, and Urdu. Many popular poets were trained in the Sufi orders and were inspired by Arabi's concepts.
Contemporary scholars like al-Munawi, Ibn 'Imad al-Hanbali, and al-Fayruzabadi all praised Ibn Arabi as "a righteous friend of Allah and faithful scholar of knowledge", "the absolute mujtahid without doubt", and "the imam of the people of shari'a both in knowledge and in legacy, the educator of the people of the way in practice and in knowledge, and the shaykh of the shaykhs of the people of truth though spiritual experience and understanding".

Islamic law

Although Ibn Arabi stated on more than one occasion that he did not blindly follow any one of the madhhab, he was responsible for copying and preserving books of the literalist Zahiri school, to which there is fierce debate over his adherence. Many prominent ibn Arabi scholars, including Claude Addas, Michel Chodkiewicz, Gril, Eric Winkel, and Mahmoud al-Gorab contend that he did not follow any madhhab. Some scholars, such as Hamza Dudgeon and Ignaz Goldziher, reject this notion. Goldziher held that ibn Arabi belonged either to the Zahiri or Hanbali school.
In an extant manuscript of ibn Hazm, ibn Arabi gives an introduction to the work where he describes a vision he had:
Goldziher says, "The period between the sixth and the seventh century seems to have been the prime of the Ẓāhirite school in Andalusia."
Ibn Arabi did delve into specific details at times and was known for his view that religiously-binding ijma could only serve as a source of sacred law if it was the consensus of the Companions of Muhammad.
Ibn Arabi also expounded on Sufi allegories of the Sharia, building on the work of al-Ghazali and al-Hakim al-Tirmidhi.