The Fusus al-Hikam is acknowledged to be a summary statement of the sufi metaphysics of the “Greatest Master”, Ibn ‘Arabi (d.1240). It is also recognised that the Fusus is a work of great complexity both in its ideas and its style; and, over the centuries, numerous commentaries have been written on it. Each of the chapters of the Fusas is dedicated to a Qur’an prophet with whom a particular “wisdom” is associated. In Sufi Metaphysics and Quranic Prophets: Ibn’ Arabi’s Thought and Method in the Fusus al-Hikam, Ronald Nettler examines ten chapters from the Fusus which exemplify the ideas, method and perspective of the entire work. Concentrating on a detailed analysis of the text, the author brings out the profound connection and integration of scripture and metaphysics in the world-view of Ibn Arabi. Sufi Metaphysics and Qur’anic Prophets serves not only as an explication of Ibn Arabi’s thought in the Fusus, but is also a great aid in the overall understanding of Ibn Arabi’s thought.

Ronald L. Nettler is university research lecturer in Oriental Studies, Oxford University, and fellow and tutor in Oriental Studies at Mansfield College, Oxford.

Table of Contents

Chapter One:Ibn Arabi: The Man and His ideas and methods
Chapter Two:The Wisdom of Divineness in the Word of Adam
Chapter Three:The Wisdom of Exaltedness in the Word of Musa
Chapter Four:The Wisdom of leadership in the Word of Harun
Chapter Five:The Wisdom of Ecstatic Love in the Word of Ibrahim
Chapter Six:The Wisdom of Unity in the Word of Hud
Chapter Seven:The Wisdom of the Heart in the Word of Shu’ayb
Chapter Eight:The Wisdom of Divine Decree in the Word of Uzayr
Chapter Nine:The Wisdom of Divine Sovereignty in the Word of Zakariyya
Chapter Ten:The Wisdom of Singularity in the Word of Muhammad
Chapter Eleven:A Lutian Epilogue

Other books by or about Ibn 'Arabi from Fons Vitae books:

The Reflective Heart: Discovering Spiritual Intelligence in Ibn 'Arabi’s ‘Meccan Illuminations’ by James Winston Morris

The Unlimited Mercifier Stephen Hirtenstein
The Seven Days of the Heart Ibn 'Arabi
Contemplation of the Holy Mysteries Ibn 'Arabi 
Ibn 'Arabi and Modern Thought Peter Coates 
Divine Sayings Ibn 'Arabi 

[Return to Catalog] - [Fons Vitae titles] - [Sufism] - [Order books] - [Fons Vitae Printable Catalog]

Ibn Arabi, His Sufi Thought and the Fusus al-Hikam

The Man
Muhammad b. 'Ali al-'Arabi al-Hatimi al-Ta'i, commonly known and referred to as Ibn 'Arabi, was a major figure of Islamic religious thought and of sufism, the mystical tradition of Islam. Ibn 'Arabi was born in Murcia in al-Andalus, Islamic Spain, on 27 July 1165 (17 Ramadan 560). He grew up in a privileged position, as a result of his father's various posts of political importance. Inclining in his later teen years toward a quest for intellectual, religious and spiritual truth, Ibn 'Arabi spent the rest of his life on this path. From his late twenties, he began his physical journeys outward from Spain, first to the Maghrib several times and, in following years, to various points in the East. In 1223, Ibn 'Arabi finally settled in Damascus where, now finished with his wanderings, he lived out his remaining years, working assiduously and producing a number of important works; among these was the Fusus al-Hikam, which Ibn 'Arabi claimed to have received in a vision from the Prophet Muhammad in that city.

The long period of travel was for Ibn 'Arabi the physical correlative and the context of his concomitant intellectual and religious journey. Learning from others, as well as himself teaching them during his wanderings, Ibn 'Arabi achieved an impressive literary productivity closely linked with his physical movements. Each place, it seems, provided the human and creative resources which made possible the development and refinement of his outlook. The 'arc' of Ibn 'Arabi's life, as Henri Corbin called it, was in this sense truly integrative. The result was an original perspective that in later Islam served to reorientate religious thought, whether sufi or other, in most profound ways.

Ibn 'Arabi's Sufi Thought
Ibn 'Arabi's sufi thought is highly complex and subtle. In both its method and content, Ibn 'Arabi's thought resists any simple and straightforward understanding; it yields itself only to the most strenuous interpretative efforts and then only partially, often leaving unresolved problems and some degree of ambiguity.

This is particularly true in the case of the Fusus al-Hikam, but it holds also for Ibn 'Arabi's other works which propound his characteristic sufi metaphysics. The difficulties derive mainly from conceptual and linguistic ambiguity, and complex, overlapping and multilevelled ideas in an esoteric formulation. Additionally, there is a linguistic complexity borne out of literary richness and nuance, as well as the obfuscation generally associated with esoteric ideas. Then, as with much of the literature of medieval Islamic religious thought, there is here also an oral factor. The texts derived to some extent from an interweaving of discussion and writing. The discussion would be absorbed within the texts and the texts in their final forms would thus reflect and contain the discussion. As in most cases the history of this process obviously cannot be reconstructed, for this reason certain ambiguities will remain in the writings. These cannot easily (if at all) be resolved, because they originally arose in discussion and they remain there. In Ibn 'Arabi's work, however, the complexity of his thought and the subtlety of his expression remain the greater problem.

Despite these barriers, modern scholarship, greatly aided by traditional sources, has achieved a certain comprehension of Ibn 'Arabi's outlook. However provisional and sometimes obviously uncertain, our present understanding does constitute a firm foundation for going forward. I should like now, however briefly, to provide some overview of Ibn 'Arabi's thought, in particular as this is relevant to his Fusus al-Hikam.

While the understanding and explication below are my own, they will inevitably reflect also some views of other modern scholars who have contributed to our common base of knowledge. As my purpose here is more general than specific, I may not in all instances cite them, but I remain grateful for their various contributions.

Sufi Metaphysics
The main term I use to describe Ibn 'Arabi's mystical thought is that of sufi metaphysics. This term, in my view, incorporates the experiential, personal element and its profound intellectualisation with Ibn 'Arabi in his metaphysics. By metaphysics here I do not mean a full philosophical doctrine, as more narrowly and precisely formulated in the true philosophical traditions; this is rather a far-reaching intellectual expression of intertwined experience and ideas which addresses ultimate transcendent issues of cosmogony and cosmology, God and man, this world and the next. There is here much that may be drawn from traditional Islamic philosophical and theological thought--especially the problem of the One and the many with its components of classical and post-classical ideas; there are also many elements of the other Islamic religious and secular, intellectual and scientific traditions. Ibn 'Arabi, like many other great medieval Muslim intellectuals, was very much a polymath who brought all he possessed to bear on the issues of his concern. Indeed, it is quite clear even that he saw in his sufi metaphysics a basis for the resolution of the major outstanding problems of Islamic religious thought in his time from a new perspective.

Though sometimes, then, redolent of aspects of philosophical metaphysics, Ibn 'Arabi's outlook goes beyond and differs from the other tradition in its formulations, expressions and content. It is also different in its very reason for being, as an intellectualisation of the earlier tradition of sufism--thus, again, the name 'sufi metaphysics'. For though it would be wrong to deny sufism prior to Ibn 'Arabi, whether 'Western' or 'Eastern', any intellectual attributes or systematisation, the core and focal point of the tradition usually remained decidedly on the side of personal religious experience and its expression. These basic 'mystical' features understandably still remain critical for Ibn 'Arabi and, by his own claim, they define and direct his sufi career; but his sufism must in great part be understood as an intellectualisation of that prior tradition, if it is to be understood at all, and if its significance is to be appreciated. Annemarie Schimmel has put it well:

But whatever the Spanish-born mystic who soon became known as ash-shaikh al-akbar (Magister Magnus) might have intended, there is a world of difference between his approach to religion and the dynamic, personal religion of Hallaj. With Ibn 'Arabi, Islamic mysticism comes close to the mysticism of infinity, and his approach is theosophical or gnostic rather than voluntaristic, for his goal is to lift the veils of ignorance which hide the basic identity of man and the Divine, while in early Sufism the element of personal love between man and God was predominant.

Ibn 'Arabi's sufi metaphysics is vast and vastly complex. Its main ideas, style and method, as said above, render it difficult to penetrate. A focused survey of the main ideas, as these are formulated and appear especially in the Fusus, will give more substance to this general characterisation of the metaphysics; it will also provide a necessary conceptual background for the Qur'anic analyses of the Fusus made in the following chapters. Preliminary to this survey, let us briefly consider Ibn 'Arabi's own view of the origin of the Fusus.

The Fusus and the Qur'an
My basic approach to Ibn 'Arabi's thought in the Fusus is, then, from a Qur'anic and traditional Islamic perspective. Such a perspective reveals Qur'anic (and, sometimes, also hadith) framework stories as the core round which Ibn 'Arabi builds and explicates his sufi metaphysics. This is effected in the text in different ways, the better to fulfil Ibn 'Arabi's purpose in the various chapters of the Fusus. He might, for example, take certain elements directly from a Qur'anic narrative(s) concerning the prophet to whom a particular chapter is dedicated and construct his framework story in this way. Other Qur'anic passages and selected hadith which are not directly related to that prophet might also be incorporated here. Or, he might construct a Qur'anic 'story' composed of elements which have no overt relation in the Qur'an to the prophet involved, but which for Ibn 'Arabi exemplify important aspects of that prophet's life and character. Or, again, in yet another, less typical, formulation, Ibn 'Arabi might use a framework story based on a hadith narrative not overtly related to the designated prophet and employing some Qur'anic components. Finally, Ibn 'Arabi might use any or all of these, alone or in combination.

Whichever method Ibn 'Arabi employs, Qur'anic and traditional elements, in direct citation or in paraphrase, most often serve in the Fusus as foundation and framework for explicating his metaphysics. Indeed, for him the metaphysics clearly is the meaning of the Qur'an and of some later religious textual traditions. The Fusus thus combines an earthy narrative literature of scripture and prophetic story with an extremely abstruse 'sufi metaphysics', the latter for him presumably reflecting the inner, essential, truth of the former. This genre may be called a form of 'sufi metaphysical story-telling'. It may be considered an Islamic religious literary genre in its own right, introduced and refined by Ibn 'Arabi in the Fusus and perpetuated by later disciples. It is a genre in which Islamic 'popular' and 'high culture' come together, thereby providing a base of appeal also for a wide audience, despite the obvious 'high culture' bias of the Fusus in its abstruse metaphysical message for an esoterically-orientated elite. The 'popular scriptural' part of that base also reflects a continuity of religious culture, from Biblical and post-Biblical, canonical and non-canonical narrative in its many oral and written forms in various times and places, to the Qur'an and its subsequent interpretations in different Islamic contexts. The figures designated as 'prophets' and 'messengers' in the Qur'an of course take pride of place here, as most are central in that continuity of religious culture. The Fusus, with its great prophetic theme, is an important Qur'anic context of that sort and thereby situates Ibn 'Arabi's thought in an even more comprehensive background.

Ibn 'Arabi's metaphysics, so imposing in its presence and so insistent in its demands on the interpreter, is created and given meaning in the Fusus through its integration with that scriptural and traditional narrative. The narrative for Ibn 'Arabi is both a religious literary link with the broader tradition of Islamic (and other) prophetic monotheism as well being his ultimate source in pursuing the insights of his sufi metaphysical theory. Ibn 'Arabi's role in Islamic history as the great intellectual theoretician of sufism must here be seen from this broader narrative perspective. The great genius of his sufi worldview, as expressed so impressively in the Fusus, lies precisely in this integration of religious story and abstract thought.

The present book explicates ten chapters of the Fusus, informed by this view of the text. Through close and detailed analysis of the chosen sections, Ibn 'Arabi's ideas and methods are delineated and his unique literary genre identified. Ibn 'Arabi's achievement in the intellectualisation of sufism may then be seen in its fullness. Apart from the present one, each chapter of the book is a commentary on and analysis of a chapter of the Fusus. I have chosen these particular ten chapters of the Fusus as, in my view, they especially exemplify its ideas, methods and outlook. The Fusus is, in any case, a work which reiterates its main themes throughout, from different angles in the stories of the different prophets. Though any of its chapters would, therefore, convey these themes, the chapters treated here do this particularly well for my purpose. The book is thus conceived as a concise presentation of the worldview of the entire Fusus and thereby of Ibn 'Arabi's sufi metaphysics. One hopes the book will serve the needs of newcomers to Ibn 'Arabi as well as those of advanced students and specialists. The Qur'anic analysis is presented for consideration as a method and interpretation to help us look again at the texts from yet another angle.

[Return to Catalog] - [Fons Vitae titles] - [Sufism] - [Order books] - [Fons Vitae Printable Catalog]