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ابن عربی

احوال اور وحدت الوجود

Abstract

This essay attempts to bring Ibn ‘Arabi - the greatest systematizer of Islamic mysticism - into focus. In the beginning, it gives some necessary biographical aspect of his life in order to provide some basic insights into the thought development of his illustrious career. He was born in twelfth century A.D in Mediterranean city of Murcia in the golden age of Muslim Spain which laid foundation of enlightenment and world class knowledge, sacred as well as mundane, in the European content. The Muslim Spain was the first country of the world which promoted a sociointellectual environment based on diversification and cosmopolitan values. Ibn ‘Arabi completed his formal education in the capital city of Seville. Wherein he not only reached the heights of religious and spiritual education but also became committed to the cause of diversification of and deterritorialized humanism. At the age of thirty eight he started a journey to the Islamic East. This Sufi wanderer travelled from monastery to monastery and place to place. Ultimately, he arrived in Mecca – the holiest city he dreamt to see and have direct experience of the Numinous. There he began writing the longest of his many works, the Futuhat al-Makkieya, in which his system of Tauhid- e- Wujudi started taking a proper shape. Ibn ‘Arabi vast and complex system reached its culmination in Fusus- alHikam. His system is combination of classical Sufism, neo Platonic philosophy, and Muslim Theology, exoteric as well as esoteric . I have propounded the thesis that since his interpretation of Wahadat al Wujud remains within the properly looked after boundaries of Immanental and Transcendental aspects of Islamic theism, he cannot treated as monist or as a Sufi belonging to the Natural Mysticism. I have refuted these views as rigorously as I could. I have come to the conclusion that despite all intellectual transgressions he might have committed, Ibn ‘Arabi squarely remains within the limits of Islamic theism. He rejects the view that a Sufi can reach the level of Oneness and insists that since unitive fusion is impossible, there can be no question of incarnation of spirit in a body.

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