This study investigates the prophetic tradition in Islam, which states that the fabric of time will become erratic with the coming of the Antichrist. The temporal ontology of one of the most ...influential philosophical thinkers in the Islamic tradition, Muḥyī al-Dīn ibn 'Arabī (d. 638/1240), is employed to decode the tradition and expatiate on the nature of time and how it will manifest in the apocalyptic future. Ibn 'Arabī explains that there are three modalities of temporal reality: 'the day of rest' (yawm al-sabt), 'the omitted days' (ayyām al-salkh), and the 'rotary days' (ayyām al-takwīr). While the first is entirely beyond human perception, the others are not. These three types of days delineate the nature of the future during the apocalyptic days of the Antichrist when the first day of his emergence will be the length of a year, the second a month, and the third a week.
Tunisian Sufi rituals are among a wide array of indigenous North African performance practices that have not received sufficient attention. Focusing on the hadra ritual of the Shadhiliya Sufi order, ...this article explores how ideas derived from Islamic intellectual history have been interwoven into popular Sufi culture, particularly Islamic understandings of epistemology. Citing the works of the twelfth century Islamic philosopher and saint, Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi, the author examines what constitutes knowledge from an Islamic Sufi perspective and how it is acquired through embodied practice. This not only reveals the intellectual value of indigenous Sufi traditions like the hadra ritual, but also raises important questions about how Islamic epistemology and understandings of embodiment can enrich theatrical practice, particularly for North African theatre-makers who are interested in experimenting with indigenous forms.
Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn ‘Arabī (d. 638/1240) is regarded as one of the foremost mystical thinkers in Islam. This paper explores the ways in which he and his followers distinguish between the reality of ...Muḥammad (
al-ḥaqīqa al-Muḥammadiyya
) or the light of Muḥammad (
al-nūr al-Muḥammadī
), as the metaphysical reality of Muḥammad, and his metahistorical manifestation as Muḥammad Ibn ‘Abd Allāh. In his metaphysical reality, Muḥammad is the manifestation of the
qur’ān
, which ‘brings together’ the divine and His creation. Muḥammad’s metaphysical reality, as the primary recipient of the divine outpouring, enables further differentiations of the divine to emerge in the form of the universe, and establishes his connection to the divine. Yet the Qur’an is also temporal in terms of being an historical act of revelation. Likewise, Muḥammad Ibn ‘Abd Allāh, in terms of his physical reality, was temporally circumscribed. It is in these ways, argues Ibn ‘Arabī and his acolytes, that Muḥammad, as reality and personality, brings together the divine and the temporal, in the same manner as the
qur’ān
/Qur’an respectively.
This comparative theological article expands on John Thiel’s article on aporias in theological method. Through an Islamic theo-poetics, it complements the import of hermeneutics in theological method ...with poetics. In an Islamic theo-poetics, aporias are inverted: they are not impassable walls, but “liminal spaces” through which creative imagination and revelation emerge. Reading Eriugena’s Periphyseon through two Persian love lyrics by Ḥāfiẓ (and a later commentary) draws out the poetics of the former, a dialogue often described as an exercise in dialectical reasoning. Attention to the poetics of aporetics offers another way to understand the role of aporia in theology: to cultivate (infinite) desire for God. Theology is a theo-poetic reflection on the mystery of our communal theo(poïe)sis. Along the way, I indicate how theology construed as poetics—not merely hermeneutics—makes theological aesthetics possible, underscores the role of affective knowledge, and reveals how Eriugena the poet shaped Eriugena the dialectician.
The connection between the unity of God and the multiplicity seen in the universe represents the central concern for the Sufi thinker, Muḥyī al-Dīn ibn 'Arabī (d. 638/1240). It deeply affected the ...thought of the Southeast Asian mystic, Ḥamza Fanṣūrī (d. 1590?), and his alleged disciple, Shams al-Dīn al-Sumatra'ī (d. 1630). Traces of this idea, through its popularisation in the poems of Fanṣūrī, exert a powerful influence on the Indonesian intellectual topography to this day. This article investigates the concept of unity and multiplicity, of the One expressed as the many in the phenomenal world, in Ibn 'Arabī's Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam (Ringstones of Wisdom). Through a close textual reading of the chapters of Ādam (Adam) and Ibrāhīm (Abraham) and their various commentaries by the most influential followers of Ibn 'Arabī, it concludes that the representation of 'oneness of being' (waḥdat al-wujūd), which was extensively taught by Fanṣūrī in Aceh, as an erasure of the God-Man divide, is untenable.
This article offers a way of approaching the question of causality in Ibn ʿ Arabī’s relational and processual metaphysical system. Ibn ʿ Arabī’s metaphysics is relational in the sense that entities ...are perceived as the totality of their relationships to God. The Divine Names are theological categories denoting these relations. It is processual in that it perceives the world as the multiplicity of the incessant and ever-changing process of the manifestations of the divine qualities. The world is recreated anew at each moment and entities are societies of divine acts or theophanies. In this framework, causal power is attributed to God and causality describes the regularity and predictability of the related
theophanic individualities
. The article, then, turns to examine how Ibn ʿArabī presents a
participatory
account of freedom in accordance with his understanding of causality. The paper, first, briefly summarizes different accounts of causality offered by Muslim theologians and philosophers before Ibn ʿArabī. The second section introduces some relevant aspects of Ibn ʿArabī’s metaphysics for our discussion and rethinks the question of causality within this larger framework. The third section discusses the question of freedom and responsibility of the moral agents. Finally, the paper offers a comparative examination of Ibn ʿArabī’s theory of causality.
This study is a comparative analysis of the appearances of the lower and upper Paradise, their divisions, and the journeys to and within them, which appear in mystical Jewish and Islamic sources in ...medieval Iberia. Ibn al-‘Arabī’s vast output on the Gardens of divine reward and their divisions generated a number of instructive comparisons to the eschatological and theosophical writing about the same subject in early Spanish Kabbalah. Although there is no direct historical evidence that kabbalists knew of such Arabic works from the region Catalonia or Andalusia, there are commonalities in fundamental imagery and in ontological and exegetical assumptions that resulted from an internalization of similar patterns of thought. It is quite reasonable to assume that these literary corpora, both products of the thirteenth century, were shaped by common sources from earlier visionary literature. The prevalence of translations of religious writing about ascents on high, produced in Castile in the later thirteenth century, can help explain the sudden appearance of visionary literature on Paradise and its divisions in the writings of Jewish esotericists of the same region. These findings therefore enrich our knowledge of the literary, intellectual, and creative background against which these kabbalists were working when they chose to depict Paradise in the way that they did, at the time that they did.
The concept of the divine form of humanbeing has been mentioned in various descrip-tions in the three largest Abrahamic religions.The Judeo-Christian traditional approach toImago Dei (The Image of ...God) holds threemajor perspectives: substantive, functional,and relational. Ibn 'Arabī, as a Muslimthinker and mystic, explained this conceptthrough the concept of mirror and two otherconcepts, namely the 'Perfect Man' and God'svicegerency. He considered the divine form ofhuman being as a mirror through which Godmanifests Himself. This paper provides acomprehensive overview of Ibn 'Arabī's interpretation in light of Judeo-Christian approaches. Ibn 'Arabī's explanation includesthree approaches. Through the concept of per-fect man, Ibn 'Arabī's explanation approachesthe substantive interpretation, and through theconcept of vicegerency, he reveals the functional interpretation. The paper recognizes arelational interpretation of the divine formthrough some contradictory explanationswhich can be found in his books. This surveyof his explanation also sheds much light onaspects of his anthropological perspective.
Sohrab Sepehri and William Wordsworth’s poems, have repeatedly been compared as they both reflect Pantheism and Emerson’s Over-Soul, yet they have never been studied in the light of Ibn Arabi’s ...Philosophy. The theory of Constant Immanence or renewal of creation expressed by Ibn Arabi can be regarded as an umbrella term to read the selected poems of Sepehri and Wordsworth and detect the similarities between these poets of two distinct milieu. Ibn Arabi’s innovative ideas of constantly renewing creation of the cosmos, the relationship between Man and Nature, Perfect Man and the love of religion have been depicted impressively centuries later in Sepehri’s and Wordsworth’s works. There is a wide tendency to compare the poems of these two poets of different milieu due to their special outlook to nature and their very individualistic worlds and their wide acceptance by both elite and common readers of poetry.
El motivo del derviche girador, el sufí que gira alrededor de su eje en la búsqueda de la verdad divina, está omnipresente en la obra de Mario Bellatin. Menciones al sufismo no solo abundan en las ...obras de Bellatin, sino que también aparecen repetidas veces en el discurso público del escritor. En entrevistas y en entradas en los medios sociales, el autor se describe a sí mismo como un converso al Islam, un monje sufí y un miembro de la Comunidad El Nur-Ashki-Yerráhi ubicada en México D.F. Este artículo aspira a arrojar luz sobre las maneras en que la obra de Bellatin dialoga con el pensamiento del pensador sufí Ibn ‘Arabi. Basándose en siete textos del escritor mexicano, el análisis examinará la manera en que su narrativa se apropia de dos conceptos de Ibn ‘Arabi. Cabe advertir que en su investigación del funcionamiento de la mística islámica en la narrativa de Bellatin, no se pretende aportar un análisis exhaustivo de los textos bajo consideración, sino más bien demostrar cuán arraigados están los conceptos sufís en la obra de Bellatin, por una parte, y analizar la función literaria de dichos conceptos en esa obra, por otra. Por tanto, para el siguiente análisis no importan las verdaderas creencias del propio Bellatin: se investigará cómo su literatura se alimenta de conceptos provenientes del pensamiento sufí. Así, se demostrará que la finalidad de la apropiación del sufismo en la narrativa bellatiniana consiste en crear una obra que aspira a la totalidad desde una dialéctica entre lo uno y lo múltiple.
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