دين بدين الحب!! ابن عربي
Where some read it as “believing in the religion of love”, I can’t help but think about the nuance of the Arabic verb which also means ‘condemn’.. perhaps those who simply fall into it and live it know best what it is all about whereas those who believe it, do not get to taste its magic
Ibn ‘Arabî
Ibn ‘Arabî (1165–1240) can be considered the greatest of all Muslim philosophers, provided we understand philosophy in the broad, modern sense and not simply as the discipline of falsafa, whose outstanding representatives are Avicenna and, many would say, Mullâ Sadrâ. Salman Bashier (2012) has even argued that “the story of Islamic philosophy” depicts an initial rationalistic phase and culminates with an “illuminative phase” best represented by Ibn ‘Arabî. Most Western scholarship and much of the later Islamic tradition have classified Ibn ‘Arabî as a “Sufi”, though he himself did not; his works cover the whole gamut of Islamic sciences, not least Koran commentary, Hadith (sayings of Muhammad), jurisprudence, principles of jurisprudence, theology, philosophy, and mysticism. Unlike al-Ghazâlî, whose range of work is similar to his, he did not usually write in specific genres, but tended rather to integrate and synthesize the sciences in the context of thematic works, ranging in length from one or two folios to several thousand pages. Nor did he depart from the highest level of discourse, or repeat himself in different works. The later Sufi tradition called him al-Shaykh al-Akbar, the Greatest Master, a title that was understood to mean that no one else has been or will be able to unpack the multi-layered significance of the sources of the Islamic tradition with such detail and profundity.
Ibn ‘Arabî’s writings remained unknown in the West until modern times, but they spread throughout the Islamic world within a century of his death. The early Orientalists, with one or two exceptions, paid little attention to him because he had no discernable influence in Europe. His works, moreover, are notoriously difficult, making it easy to dismiss him as a “mystic” or a “pantheist” without trying to read him. Not until books by Henry Corbin (1958) and Toshihiko Izutsu (1966) was he recognized as an extraordinarily broad-ranging and highly original thinker with much to contribute to the world of philosophy. These two scholars, however, limited their attention almost entirely to one of his short works, Fusûs al-hikam (“The Ringstones of the Wisdoms”). Although Ringstones was the focus of a long tradition of commentary, it represents but a tiny fraction of what he offers in his massive al-Futûhât al-makkiyya (“The Meccan Openings”). More recently, scholars have begun to look at this work (which will fill an estimated 15,000 pages in its modern edition), but relatively little of it has been translated into Western languages and what has been translated is still in need of further explanation, interpretation, and contextualization in the history of philosophy (for a stab at the last, see Ebstein 2013).
Several scholars have pointed to parallels between Ibn ‘Arabî and figures like Eckhart and Cusanus (Sells 1994, Shah-Kazemi 2006, Smirnov 1993, Dobie 2009), and others have suggested that he anticipates trends in physics (Yousef 2007) or modern philosophy (Almond 2004, Coates 2002, Dobie 2007). The most serious attempt to fit him into the history of Western philosophy argues that his notion of barzakh (see section 3.4) offers a viable solution to the problem of defining the indefinable, which has dogged epistemology from the time of Aristotle and led to the despair of modern philosophers like Rorty (Bashier 2004). Other scholars have compared him to Eastern thinkers like Shankara, Zhuangzi, and Dôgen (Shah-Kazemi 2006, Izutsu 1966, Izutsu 1977). Nor were the similarities to Eastern thought lost on premodern scholars; during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Muslims of China established a Chinese-language school (the Han Kitab) that drew from Ibn ‘Arabî’s legacy and presented the Islamic worldview in terms drawn from Confucian thought (Murata et al. 2008). Implications of his thought for contemporary concerns have been addressed by a diverse array of scholars and devotees in the Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society, which has been published since 1983. All the attention he has been receiving, and specifically from scholars and thinkers labelled “perennialists,” has led some to question the validity of the modern lenses through which he is often read (Lipton 2018). What follows is an outline of some of the topics he addresses.
Source and further reading : https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ibn-arabi/
فالحب ديني وإيماني”
ابن عربي
“I believe in the religion of Love, whatever direction its caravans may take, for Love is my religion and my faith.” Ibn Arabi
Greta Khoury 