Today we will discuss IBN ARAB – THE MAN WHO SAW GOD IN CREATION
IBN ARAB – THE MAN WHO SAW GOD IN CREATION
A garden among the flames!
My heart can take on any form:
A meadow for gazelles, a monastery for monks,
For the idols, it is temple, for devout pilgrim it is Kaba
The tables of the Torah. The scrolls of the Quran
My creed is Love; Wherever its caravan turns along the way,
That is my belief, my faith.
The author of this enchanting poetry is Muhammed Ibn ‘Ali Ibn’ T Arabi, the great Sufi Master and exponent of the theory of Wahdat-ul-Wujood (Unity of Existence or Being) He was born in AD 1655 in Murcia, a town of Muslim Spain known as Andalus. His adherents in the East called him Sheikh Akbar (Great Master) and the West conferred the title of ‘Doctor Maximus’ to revere his memory.
The environment in which Ibn Arabi grew was marked by some measure of religious harmony as three religious traditions, Le. Jewish, Christian and Islamic existed side-by-side and many regarded them as different pathways leading to the same destination.
The zeitgeist of Contemporary Spain had deeply impacted Ibn Arabi who not only engaged in pursuit of knowledge and ideas but focused on knowing the reality through personal experience. Ibn Arabi is regarded as a Sufi teacher who confined not himself to one tradition or dogma and saw Unity of God in the unity of Creation. His emphatic assertion All that is left to us by tradition is mere words, it is up to us to find out what they mean’ reflects his sensitivity to the demands of the times he was living in.
Ibn Arabi and his philosophy evoked varied reactions, some considered him a saint and others a heretic. His books were banned and once he was forced to flee from Egypt to escape the charge of heresy. The critics strongly resented his emphasis on employing reason to realise the Truth, which was considered by Ibn Arabi as expression of the divine.
In a beautiful simile, he says that ‘light cannot be seen in itself but only through the objects in which it is reflected. Similarly, God can be seen by the reflection on His creation, which is nothing but Himself.”
How the contemporary society reacted to Ibn Arabi is best reflected in a story narrated by Sheikh Muzaffar Ozak and included in Ibn Arabi’s book Futuhat al-Makkiya:
According to the narration, a teacher of Muslim law was giving lecture to his class on the subject of heresy. One student got up and asked if the heretic under study was someone like Ibn Arabi. The teacher responded in the affirmative.
This was during the month of fasting, that, is Ramadan. In the evening after breaking the fast, another student asked the same teacher ‘who according to you is the greatest saint of our times?’ The teacher replied Ibn Arabi’ The students were perplexed and questioned the teacher why only a few hours earlier he had described Ibn Arabi as a heretic The teacher told the students in an affectionate tone that ‘while in college we were among men of orthodoxy, bookish scholars and rigid legists, here we are among men of love’.
This story succinctly portrays Ibn Arabi as a sage who strove to seek harmony in diversity and defined ‘a true seeker as one who cannot stay tied to one form of belief’ In his book Fusus, he warns: ‘Beware of becoming delimited by a specific knotting and disbelieving in everything else, lest great good escape you…Be open to the forms of all beliefs, for God is wider and more tremendous than that He should be constricted by one knotting rather than another Further, he said, ‘men of knowledge know that God manifests in diverse forms’
The universal humanism of Ibn Arabs, firmly rooted in Quran, acknowledged that ‘each person has a unique path to the truth, which unites all paths in itself The impact of his writings has influenced both the Sufism and philosophy and literature of the West. His concept of Unity of Existence or Being’ has much to offer in terms of creating religious harmony and a better and peaceful world.
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