Rustom/Sourcebook, 73. Ibn ʿArabī: The Meccan Openings

The text presented here is a translation from the highly influential Spanish Sufi philosopher Ibn ʿArabī’s (d. 1240 CE) Meccan Openings on the theme of human nature. Our author tackles this question by making connections between the book of the cosmos, the book of revealed scripture, and the book of the human soul. These texts demonstrate an important feature of Ibn ʿArabī’s philosophical approach—the use of metaphor as method, that is, to see one reality in terms of another and to find identity between different realities based on shared qualities. Our passage also exemplifies the constant dialectical movement between affirming and denying the same reality as another feature of Ibn ʿArabī’s worldview. This dialectic of affirmation and negation is grounded in the logic of the Islamic doctrine of tawḥīd, the declaration of the oneness of God/reality. We are here reminded that negation followed by an affirmation is the logic of creation where everything is both God/not-God, Real/unreal, Subsistent/passing.