Ibn Arabi

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all The Meccan Openings, The Bezels of Wisdom and The Interpreter of Desires.

The hidden treasure

Ibn Arabi starts from a saying in which God speaks: I was a hidden treasure and I loved to be known, so I created the creatures, that I might be known. Love is the root of the world. The divine names, the Merciful, the Knowing, the Creator and all the rest, long to be shown, and creation is their showing.

He pictures it as a breath. As someone who has held the breath is relieved by breathing out, the Breath of the Merciful relieves the longing of the names, and the world is that breath taking shape, its creatures like the sounds and words that form in a breath.

Self-disclosure

Everything in the world is a place where some name of God appears, and nothing is ever seen but a form of his self-disclosure. That disclosure never repeats itself: God never shows himself twice in the same form, nor in one form to two people. So the world is created anew at every instant, though it seems to stand still, as a river seems to keep its shape while its water is never the same. This, he says, is the new creation that the Qur'an speaks of, about which people are in doubt.

Each thing as God knows it

Before it exists, every thing is known to God as what it is, its fixed entity, and when it comes to be it receives existence according to its own readiness, no more and no less. Knowledge follows the known: God knows each thing as it is, and gives it what its own nature asks. So the gifts of God differ because those who receive them differ, and each thing is given what it is able to bear.

Beyond likeness, and seen in every form

The Real is beyond every likeness, and the Real is seen in every form, and both must be said at once. The verse he takes for the whole teaching reads: nothing is like him, and he is the Hearing, the Seeing. Its first half sets God beyond comparison; its second gives him names that creatures share.

In The Bezels of Wisdom Noah calls his people only to God beyond all likeness, and they do not answer. The complete knower joins the two, and sees that each thing is he in one respect and not he in another.

The polish of the mirror

The Bezels open with Adam. God willed to see the realities of his names in a being that would gather them all. The world had been made, but it was like an unpolished mirror, a shape without a spirit, and Adam was the polishing of that mirror and the spirit of that shape. The complete human being gathers every name in himself, and so he is God's deputy in the world. Each prophet of the book is a bezel, the setting of one jewel of that wisdom, from Adam to Muhammad.

The god of belief

Every believer worships God as his belief pictures him, the god made in belief, and denies him in the forms that other beliefs give him. The knower sees him in every form. Beware, he writes, of being bound to one particular creed and denying what lies outside it, for much good would escape you; God is wider than to be held by one creed rather than another. The heart of the knower takes the shape of whatever form God shows it.

He sings it in The Interpreter of Desires: his heart has become able to take every form, a pasture for gazelles and a cloister for monks, a temple for idols and the pilgrim's Kaaba, the tablets of the Torah and the book of the Qur'an; he follows the religion of love wherever its camels turn. He said it as a Muslim who kept the law of Islam closely all his life.

The world of imagination

Between the spirits and the bodies lies the world of imagination, the isthmus, where meanings take bodies and bodies grow subtle: here angels take human shape, the dead are seen in dreams and visions are seen. It is neither nothing nor solid, and the whole world, he says, is in a sense a dream, as the saying has it that people are asleep and when they die they wake. So a dream must be crossed over: the Arabic word for interpreting a dream means crossing, from the image to what it means.

His example is Abraham, who saw in a dream that he was sacrificing his son and took the image as it stood; but the image meant a ram, and God ransomed the son with the ram. Joseph, who read dreams, crossed them. An image in a dream is to be read, never acted out as it stands.

Love

Nothing but God is loved in anything that is loved, because every beauty is his beauty showing in a form; God is beautiful and loves beauty, as the saying goes. The one who loves a woman or a friend loves God without knowing it, and the knower loves God knowingly in the same forms.

So the language of human love can carry the love of God. Every name, abode, garden and departing caravan in The Interpreter of Desires signifies, as his preface says, divine influences and spiritual revelations, and his commentary reads the poems line by line as the soul's longing for the divine.

The pillars of the path

His path keeps the law and builds on it. In a short book on the saints he names four pillars: silence, withdrawal, hunger and night vigil; above them stand the remembrance of God and courtesy toward God and every creature. Hunger here means eating less, never starving, and vigil means rising in the night to pray, not going without sleep. Each is kept in measure and under a guide, and anyone unwell keeps their meals and their rest.