âIs God apophatic or kataphatic, according to MuḥyÄ« al-DÄ«n ibn Ê¿ArabÄ«?â This was the first question I was asked at a medical ethics conference by a complete stranger who had discovered my doctoral study was to do with the ubiquitous Sufi. Notwithstanding the abrupt nature of the enquiry, or perhaps because of it, I felt vindicated, for my research addressed this very issue through analysis of the term huwiyya (literally, He-ness or ipseity). But, in so doing, it also followed advice I was given during my first lecture: âMost of you will not make it in academia,â our professor announced rather matter-of-factly, âfor those of you who do, pick a guy.â A question and a guyâthese, then, are the twin pillars upon which is constructed the edifice of my research. My question: What is the true nature of God? My guy: Ê¿Abd al-RazzÄq al-QÄshÄnÄ« (d. 736/1335?), a disciple of the enigmatic Sufi theorist, MuḥyÄ« al-DÄ«n ibn Ê¿ArabÄ« (d. 638/1240). So, technically, there are two guys, but one has to go through the master to get to the disciple.
This work is about the Sufism of Ibn Ê¿ArabÄ« and one of the chief disseminators of his thought, al-QÄshÄnÄ«, specifically. But it is also about mysticism, generally, and the way we perceive God, and the manner in which He interacts with us and we with Him. With articles devoted to him numbering in the thousands, commentaries on the Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam alone in the hundreds, and translations in the scores, Ibn Ê¿ArabÄ« surely is, and has been, one of the most widely read and studied mystics of all time. His style is so tightly honeycombed with preciosity and involutions that it has at once enamoured and beguiled all who have had the good fortune, and bad luck, to stumble upon it.
So what sets this work apart from its precursors? For the answer, we must reconnect with our two acquaintances: the ideaâa detailed analysis conducted from primary texts on a single term that is conspicuously emblematic of his âmonism,â and which is scrupulously contextualized in Ibn Ê¿ArabÄ«âs two most enduringly popular works, the Fuṣūṣ and the FutūḥÄt; and the guyâal-QÄshÄnÄ«, who Toshihiko Iztusu in his seminal work, Sufism and Taoism, relies on more than Ibn Ê¿ArabÄ« himself to elucidate his Sufi Weltanschauung. The former adheres to the Joycian maxim that in the particular is contained the universal, and is a window that no one has yet peeked through; the latter a lacuna that no one has yet filled.