Veils of Light and Darkness: Thinking Through Ibn Arabi’s Bezels of Wisdom
EDITORS’ NOTE: This essay was originally published as “Ibn Arabi’s Ontology,” a chapter in Evrim Emir-Sayers’ 2024 book, The Veil of Depiction: Painting in Sufism and Phenomenology. To work as a stand-alone piece, the original has been slightly modified. For in-depth treatments of all topics sketched out here, we enthusiastically recommend the book itself. The material is reprinted courtesy of PICT Books.
In a story entitled “Chinese Art and Greek Art,” the renowned Sufi Jalaladdin Rumi (1207-1273) forges a connection between Sufism and Ancient Greek philosophy. The setting is a royal court where Chinese and Greek painters are engaged in a contest of skills. At first, the king orders a debate, but when the Chinese painters start to talk, the Greeks remain silent and leave. The Chinese painters then suggest that each party be given a room to demonstrate its skills, whereupon a large room is divided into two by a veil. While the Chinese request hundreds of colors from the king, the Greeks ask for no colors at all. As the Chinese start to paint, the Greeks simply clean and polish the walls on their side of the room. Once the Chinese have finished their painting, the king arrives in order to appraise both sides. The Greeks remove the veil dividing the room, and the Chinese painting reflects on their polished wall, showing itself even more stunningly than on the wall where it has been painted. “The Greek art,” so Rumi, “is the Sufi way”: it is not simply based on the mastery of knowledge and skill, but on the purification of heart and soul.
Rumi’s message is best understood via the writings of another prominent Sufi, Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi (1165-1240). Ibn Arabi was a prolific writer, but his ontology is succinctly expressed in his Fusus-ul-Hikam (The Bezels of Wisdom), composed in 1230. Described as the work in which Ibn Arabi “presents his thought in its maturest form,” The Bezels of Wisdom outlines the philosopher’s ontology in twenty-seven chapters, each named after a prophet in the Abrahamic-Islamic tradition and using that prophet as a starting point to illuminate a particular aspect of Ibn Arabi’s thought.
Far from systematic in the philosophical sense, the work relies on a scattering of interrelated concepts that are repeated on hand of various examples throughout the text. This should not be misconstrued as randomness: the pedagogical goal of Ibn Arabi’s style is to trigger unplanned mnemonic responses and elicit spontaneous flashes of insight from the reader. For the purposes of our present study, however, we will need to “reconstruct” Ibn Arabi’s core concepts in a systematic fashion.
The Veiling/Unveiling Cosmos
Ibn Arabi views the phenomenal world (the cosmos) as the self-disclosure of the hidden, divine mystery. Chapter 1 of The Bezels of Wisdom begins with the following statement:
The Reality wanted to see the essences of His Most Beautiful Names or, to put it another way, to see His own Essence, in all-inclusive object encompassing the whole [divine] Command, which, qualified by existence, would reveal to Him His own mystery. For the seeing of a thing, itself by itself, is not the same as its seeing itself in another, as it were in a mirror; for it appears to itself in a form that is invested by the location of the vision by that which would only appear to it given the existence of the location and its [the location’s] self-disclosure to it.
The divine as transcendence, to Ibn Arabi, is beyond human cognition: he calls it “the Mystery of Mysteries” or the “Absolute Mystery.” This is the divine aspect of stillness; it involves no self-manifestation (tajalli) of the divine. In fact, the divine cannot manifest itself in its absoluteness; transcending all relations and escaping all definition, it transcends even the concept of God (Allah), which only has meaning in relation to the concept of creation. But since, as Toshihiko Izutsu puts it, “one cannot talk about anything at all without linguistic designation,” Ibn Arabi “uses the word haqq (which literally means Truth or Reality) in referring to the Absolute.”
“Contemplation of the Reality without formal support is not possible,” says Ibn Arabi, “since God, in His Essence, is far beyond all need of the Cosmos. […] Therefore, some form of support is necessary.” In order to become knowable, then, the unknowable needs to manifest itself. This manifestation takes place through the phenomena, which serve to make the hidden mystery visible. At the same time, though, the phenomena function as veils (hijab) that hide the mystery. As Ibn Arabi puts it,
The Reality has described Himself as being hidden in veils of darkness, which are the natural forms, and by veils of light, which are the subtle spirits. The Cosmos consists of that which is gross and that which is subtle and is therefore, in both aspects, the veil [covering] its true self. For the Cosmos does not perceive the Reality as He perceives Himself, nor can it ever not be veiled.
But while the particulars might function as veils, this does not mean they are mere obstacles to the perception of the reality. Rather, they are “veils” insofar as their very particularity makes it impossible for them to manifest the reality in its undifferentiated form. To describe the way in which the reality is perceived by the particulars by way of the particulars, Ibn Arabi turns to the metaphor of the mirror:
A divine Self-revelation […] occurs only in a form conforming to the essential predisposition of the recipient of such a revelation. Thus, the recipient sees nothing other than his own form in the mirror of the Reality. He does not see the Reality Itself, which is not possible, although he knows that he may see only his [true] form in It. As in the case of the mirror and the beholder, he sees the form in it, but does not see the mirror itself, despite his knowledge that he only sees his own and other images by means of it.
The mirror, in making us visible to ourselves, becomes invisible itself. In order to see the image reflected, we need to not see the mirror itself. According to Ibn Arabi, a phenomenon is both a mirror and the image reflected onto it; an unveiling veil.
Ibn Arabi also explores the relationship between the manifest and the unmanifest through the concepts of dream (or imagination, khayal) and reality. The world of phenomena is a dream state, divorced from what he calls reality: “You are an imagination, as is all that you regard as other than yourself an imagination. All existence is an imagination within an imagination, the only Reality being God, as Self and the Essence.”[16] As long as one revels in the world of particulars and severs ties with the hidden reality, the dream is a nightmare that repeats itself over and over again.
As we have seen, however, the phenomena serve to both veil and unveil. To Ibn Arabi, the dream state is full of symbols that point to the origin of the dream, i.e., reality. The phenomenal world must be interpreted, just like a dream, to reveal the truth it conceals: “When Muhammad said, ‘All men are asleep and when they die they will awake,’ he meant that everything a man sees in this life is of the same kind as that which one sleeping sees; in other words an apparition that requires interpretation.” “The interpreter,” Ibn Arabi adds, “proceeds from the form seen by the dreamer to the form of the thing in itself, if he is successful.” In fact, such interpretation (ta’wil) is the only way to reach the hidden truth behind the phenomena.
As an example of failed interpretation, Ibn Arabi offers the vision in which the prophet Abraham was urged by God to sacrifice his son. “Had he been true to the vision,” Ibn Arabi states, “he would have killed his son, for he believed that it was his son he saw although with God it was nothing other than the Great Sacrifice in the form of his son.” This, to the philosopher, was a failure on the prophet’s part: “He did not interpret what he saw, but took it at its face value, although visions require interpretation.”
Ibn Arabi’s view of the phenomenal world as a dream world does not imply a devaluation of the dream world as somehow “unreal” or “less real” than the reality. The difference between the dream world and reality is that the former consists of individuals and particulars, subjects and objects, things that are distinct from each other, whereas in the latter, everything is united and one. However, we are not talking about two different worlds here, but rather two different perspectives on the same world: ultimately, to Ibn Arabi, dream and reality are only two aspects of the same unity. To awaken, then, means to comprehend the reality in its totality, from which perspective particularity and individuality appear like a dream.
In yet another way, the veiling function of phenomena is as important as their function of unveiling or manifestation, since the particulars could not bear experiencing the overwhelming reality of the hidden mystery in the absence of the phenomenal veil. The point is perfectly illustrated by the following hadith: “God hides Himself behind seventy thousand veils of light and darkness. If He took away these veils, the fulgurating lights of His face would at once destroy the sight of any creature who dared to look at it.”
We can conclude that the divine is engaged in a continuous movement of veiling (self-concealment) and unveiling (self-disclosure). As Ibn Arabi puts it,
The Absolute [….] is nothing other than what comes out outwardly, whereas in the very moment of coming out outwardly it is what conceals itself inwardly. There is no one who sees the Absolute except the Absolute itself, and yet there is no one to whom the Absolute remains hidden. It is the Outward (i.e., self-manifesting) to itself, and yet it is the Inward (i.e., self-concealing) to itself.
While the immanent, phenomenal world is the self-manifesting aspect of this strife and the transcendent absolute is its self-concealing aspect, the self-manifesting aspect also contains a strife within itself since it simultaneously unveils and veils the hidden.
Read the full essay at the Paris Institute.
