Wahdat al-wujūd


Wahdat al-wujūd is a doctrine in the field of Islamic philosophy and mysticism, according to which the monotheistic God is necessary for existence of all existing things to exist. This doctrine, which in recent research is characterized as ontological monism, is attributed to the Andalusian Sufi Ibn Arabi but was essentially developed by the philosophically oriented interpreters of his works. In the Early Modern Period, it gained great popularity among Sufis. Some Muslim scholars such as Ibn Taymiyya, ʿAbd al-Qādir Badā'ūnī and Ahmad Sirhindi, however, regarded wahdat al-wujūd as a pantheistic heresy in contradiction to Islam and criticized it for leading its followers to antinomianist views. In reality, however, many advocates of wahdat al-wujūd emphasized that this teaching did not provide any justification for transgressing Sharia. The Egyptian scholar Murtada al-Zabidi described wahdat al-wujūd as a "famous problem" that arose between the "people of mystical truth" and the "scholars of the literal sense". The Ni'matullahi master Javad Nurbakhsh was of the opinion that Sufism as a whole was essentially a school of the "unity of being".
Another name for this doctrine is Tawhid wujūdī. The adherents of Wahdat al-Wujūd were also known as Wujūdis or "people of unity".

Formation

Many Muslim scholars regarded Ibn ʿArabī as the founder of the wahdat al-wujūd concept. Thus, al-Dhahabi and Jāmi described Ibn ʿArabī as a “model of those who know about wahdat al-wujūd” or as the “model of the advocates of wahdat al-wujūd”. And the Indian Naqshbandiyya-Sufi Ahmad Sirhindi explained in one of his Maktūbāt: “The first to clearly state the doctrine of existential unity was Shaykh Muhyī l-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī. “ Also Shah Waliullah Dehlawi regarded Ibn ʿArabī as the “leader of those who believe in the wahdat al-wujūd”. In contrast, the Egyptian Azhar scholar Muhammad Ghallāb acquitted Ibn ʿArabī in a 1969 memorial volume dedicated to him of the "heretical" doctrine of Wahdat al-wujūd and claimed that he had nothing to do with it. According to him, it was merely an invention of the Orientalists that Ibn ʿArabī had raised this idea.

Explicit statements of Ibn ʿArabī on the unity of existence

In fact, in the extensive corpus of Ibn ʿArabī's writings, there is not a single place where he uses the expression Wahdat al-wujūd in this form, However, the Syrian scholar Bakri Aladdin has pointed out several passages where Ibn ʿArabī speaks of a unity of existence. These are the following passages:
  • In the 113th chapter of his work al-Futūḥāt al-Makkīya he writes: “Affirm diversity in immutability, but keep it away from existence. Affirm unity in existence, but keep it away from immutability."
  • He expresses a similar view in his Kitāb al-Alif: “Number and multiplicity appear only through His action on intelligible, non-existent levels. Thus, all that is in existence is one, for if it were not one, one could not validly affirm unity with God - praise be to Him."
  • Ibn ʿArabī expresses this idea even more succinctly in his Kitāb al-Jalāla: “Thus the whole of existence is in reality one, and there is nothing beside it”.
  • And in one of his Sufi prayers Ibn ʿArabī asks God: “I ask You, by the secret with which You bring together the complementary opposites, that You bring together for me everything that is disunited in my being in such a way that it lets me experience the unity of Your existence.“ Beneito and Hirtenstein point out that in some manuscripts the relevant passage does not read waḥdat wujūdika, but waḥdat wujūdī.
Mohsen Jahangiri, former professor of philosophy at the University of Tehran, has also pointed out some passages in Ibn ʿArabī's oeuvre where, like the later representatives of the wahdat-al-wujūd doctrine, he limits the principle of existence to God or equates God with existence. These are the following passages:
  • In the eighth chapter of his Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam Ibn ʿArabī explains: “The contingent things actually belong to non-existence, for there is no existence except the existence of the True one with the forms of the states that the contingent things have in themselves and in the entities.”
  • In the 54th chapter of al-Futūḥāt al-Makkīya he writes: “It is established among the seekers of truth that nothing exists except God and, even if we exist, our existence is only through Him. The one whose existence is due to something else, is in reality non-existent.”
  • In the 69th chapter of the same work, which deals with the secrets of prayer, Ibn ʿArabī explains that the true believer speaks only with his Lord and does not take any of the servants of God into his confidence without seeing in it a dialogue with his Lord. He explains: "For God is existence and that which exists, and it is He who is worshipped in every worshiper and in everything, and He is the existence of everything."
  • In the 455th chapter of al-Futūḥāt al-Makkīya he explains that the Quranic statement in Sura 57:3 "He is the First and the Last, the Visible and the Hidden" indicates that God is the whole of existence.

    The idea of the unity of existence before Ibn ʿArabī

However, statements of similar content can also be found in Muslim authors before Ibn ʿArabī. As an example we may refer to al-Ghazālī who in the chapter on the love of God in his work Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm ad-dīn writes that nothing having persistence in itself is in existence except the living Persistent, who persists in Himself, everything else exists only through Him. The existence of the universe belongs to the existence of God just as the existence of light belongs to the sun or the existence of the shadow belongs to the shadow-casting tree. Murtadā az-Zabīdī, who wrote a commentary on the Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm ad-dīn, said that if one looks at this statement, one can recognize a tendency towards the Wahdat al-wujūd, which “the people of truth” taught. Al-Ghazālī, he says, referred to them in numerous other places in his book, such as in the chapter on patience and gratitude, where he said: “Contemplation with the eye of the pure Tawhid makes you realize that apart from God, the Exalted, nothing is in existence ', and also in his book Mishkāt al-anwār.
The Arabic expression waḥdat al-wujūd can also be found literally in Shihāb al-Dīn Yahyā al-Suhrawardī. There, it is associated with the ontological position of the primacy of Whatness. According to it, existence is not something that is added to the essence of a thing, but is identical with its essence. If existence were something that was added to whatness, then this addition would only exist through its existence, which would mean an infinite regress, which would be absurd. Thus, the unity of existence is also identical with existence, so that the latter is not completely lost. However, it is not enough to say that the unity of existence is identical with existence or the existence of unity with unity, because the concept of existence is different from the concept of unity and two things cannot be one thing in themselves.

“Wahdat al-wujūd” as the name for Ibn ʿArabī's system of teaching

The fact that Ibn ʿArabī was nevertheless regarded as the founder of the doctrine of wahdat al-wujūd had to do with the fact that, beyond explicit references to the term, his fundamental writings were regarded as elaborations of this doctrine. Thus, the followers of Ibn ʿArabī recognized references to the unity of existence in several of his statements. For example, Ibn ʿArabī says in the first chapter of his Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam that the connection of existing things – meaning God and the rest of things – can be easily recognized because they have something in common, namely individual existence. ʿAfīf al-Dīn at-Tilimsānī, who wrote the first commentary on the Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam, explains in it that Ibn ʿArabī wanted to point to the doctrine of existential unity with this statement. He did not consider it good to mention it explicitly here, but did so elsewhere. Al-Tilimsānī comments on Ibn ʿArabī's further remarks at this point with the statement that he wanted to prepare the ground for identifying the attributes of the proxy with those of the one who appoints him as proxy, in order to finally trace everything back to one entity, namely the existence of God. Overall, he says, Ibn ʿArabī's statements are based on the teaching that existence is one, but the entities are different. These different entities are called Aʿyān thābita. A particularly widely debated statement, which has been considered to express Ibn ʿArabī's understanding of wahdat-al-wujūd, was his exclamation "Praise be to the One who has brought things into being and is Himself identical with them" in the 198th chapter of al-Futūḥāt al-Makkīya.
The Yemeni scholar Sālih ibn Mahdī al-Maqbalī reports a conversation he had with the Kurdish scholar Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Rasūl al-Barzanjī. They both agreed that Ibn ʿArabī's statements in his Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam all revolved around the unity of existence and that his work al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya clarified this. Sirhindī opined that Ibn ʿArabī was the one who “worked out the problem of the unity of existence in chapters and sections and established its syntax and grammar”.

Other early proponents of the doctrine and their statements

Beside Ibn ʿArabī, Ibn Taymiyya mentions the scholars Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi, Ibn Sabʿīn, Ibn al-Farid, ʿĀmir al-Basrī, ʿAfīf al-Dīn at-Tilimsānī, Saʿīd al-Dīn al-Farghānī, Abu al-Hasan al-Shushtari, ʿAbdallāh al-Balyānī and an otherwise unknown Ibn Abī Mansūr al-Misrī as proponents of the Wahdat al-Wujūd doctrine. To these people, whom he refers to collectively as ahl al-waḥda, he attributes the teaching that existence is one and that the necessary existence of the Creator is identical with the contingent existence of the created. The fact that he also assigns Ibn al-Fārid to the ahl al-waḥda may be related to the fact that Saʿīd ad-Dīn al-Farghānī often speaks of Wahdat-al-Wudschūd in his commentary on Ibn al-Fārid's Tāʾīya. Ibn al-Fārid himself never used this term in his poem.
Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi, writing a few centuries later, names Ibn ʿArabī, Ibn al-Fārid, ʿAfīf ad-Dīn at-Tilimsānī, Ibn Sabʿīn and Abd al-Karim al-Jili as the main representatives of the Wahdat al-Wujūd doctrine.