Ibn 'Arabi and Modern Thought deals with some of the findings of modern philosophy, social science and psychology, in an open discourse between the ancient and the modern, the traditional and the scientific, the industrial and the personal. It is an invitation to reconsider some of the central and defining ideas of modernity in the light of Ibn 'Arabi's writings on the Unity of Existence.

In these global times it is a curious and pertinent fact that the life and writings of Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi, which constitute one of the most penetrating and extraordinary metaphysical and spiritual teachings the world has ever known, still remain relatively unknown and undiscussed in the Western theoretical architecture of the twenty-first century. 

What is perhaps unexpected is not only the modern ring of much of his thought, but also its ability to reconceptualise modernity's own self-descriptions and understandings, and to bring out hitherto unnoticed features of its landscape. 

Ibn 'Arabi's remarks on causality, time, contingency, necessity, epistemology, ontology, ethics and aesthetics alone would entice even the most wary of modernity's intellectual authorities. 

This ground-breaking book includes extensive notes, bibliography, and name and subject indexes.

Ibn 'Arabi and Modern Thought will appeal to academics and students in the fields of psychology, sociology, and philosophy, as well as readers with an academic and/or personal interest in Ibn 'Arabi.

The author
Until his retirement Peter Coates was Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Lincoln, UK, where he taught courses in the philosophy of psychology. He has been studying the works of Ibn 'Arabi for over 20 years.

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Ibn 'Arabi and Modern Thought - Table of contents

Contents

1. The orientation of this study
Introduction
Ibn 'Arabi's picture of reality
The question about questions: knowledge and its essential direction
Metaphysics, historically positioned discourses and human aspiration
Degrees of knowledge: the principle of immanencing
Ibn 'Arabi and modern thought: a reconfigured topography

2. Ibn 'Arabi: philosophy and reason
Ibn 'Arabi, Averroes and philosophy as demonstrative science
Philosophy, reason and metaphysics
Reason and essential contestability
Reason and commitment
Scientific philosophy
Philosophy of the subject
Wahdat al-wujud, wisdom and reason

3. Ibn 'Arabi and the era
The metaphysics of the era: creation and change
Social science and the emergence of the modern era
The re-orientation of the self: science, technology and industrialization
Modernity, postmodernity and relativism

4. Ibn 'Arabi and the self
The metaphysics of self-knowledge
Modern psychology and the self
Postscript

Notes
Bibliography
Name index
Subject index


A Review

This is a remarkably well informed and wide-ranging study of Ibn ‘Arabi, whose works will be known to some readers. He was one of the greatest Islamic mystical teachers whose work can speak to us across history. 

With his academic background in psychology, Peter Coates initiates a dialogue between the two eras of the 13th and 21st centuries, examining epistemology and metaphysics, the use of reason, the social contexts and finally reflections on the self. Teachers of this calibre are never out of date - they speak across the centuries, and Peter Coates has done a skilful job of communicating the power of Ibn ‘Arabi’s vision.

-David Lorimer, Network, the Scientific and Medical Network Review, April 2002

Extract from Chapter 3: Ibn 'Arabi and the era

Both modernist and postmodernist theories of knowledge are human intellectual constructions which, if we are to follow the warnings of Ibn 'Arabi, cannot arrive at decisive certainty concerning knowledge of the Real. Modernism extols the efficacy of human reason and postmodernism affirms its inevitable relativity. Both are simply theories of knowledge which, from the point of view of Akbarian metaphysics, lack the theophanic epistemological credentials of wahdat al-wujud. 

When Giddens asserts that "modernity is enigmatic at its core, and there seems to be no way the enigma can be 'overcome' ", he is perhaps not only attesting to the inability of the circularity of reason to overcome this enigma but implicitly recognising also the boundaries of reason's own proper playing field. According to Ibn 'Arabi it is a kind of progress for reason to recognize its own epistemological boundaries, for it attests to the incapacity of human beings to reach knowledge of the Real via unaided reason. 

The enigma of modernity can therefore be seen as an indication that we take seriously the possibility of alternative epistemic means of grasping and recognising the significance of the era. We can therefore be reminded of what George Berkeley in The Principle of Human Knowledge records, "We should believe that God has dealt more bountifully with the sons of men than to give to them a strong desire for that knowledge which he had placed quite out of their reach."

For Ibn 'Arabi, the modern era with its particular determining qualities of science, technology, calculative rationality, globalization, its polytheism of values and its matrix of meta-narratives testifies, like all eras, to the ontological fact "Each day He [God] is upon some task". The unique configuration of predominating qualities of the modern era which constitute what the historian Eric Hobsbawn described as "the greatest transformation in history since remote times" are none other than part of the infinity and inherent contents of the Self-disclosure of Being in Its love to be known. To envisage the era in this manner, or to contextualize it from the universal point of view of Ibn 'Arabi, is not to alter phenomena – for they are what they are – but to begin to see "the theatre of manifestation" from its own point of origin and essence rather than it being coloured by the predisposition of a particular theorizer. 

That such a universal wisdom is essentially possible and attainable is at the heart of Ibn 'Arabi's metaphysics.

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