Secondly, what is meant by wujūd is attainment ( ḥuṣūl) and verification ( taḥaqquq) in itself. Firstly, what is meant by wujūd is consciousness ( wijdān), perception ( idrāk) and awareness ( shuʿūr). And when I say wujūd means consciousness and perception, what I have in mind is actually the existent/found thing ( al-mawjūd), which is perceived and felt. The word wujūd is used equally in two different meanings. Going back to the original root meaning of the word wujūd, we can begin with the views of the theologian Fakhr al-dīn al-Rāzī (d.606/1209), which he put forward in his Tafsīr al-kabīr: The Etymological Root of the Word ‘Being, Existence and Finding’ ( wujūd) As the late Osman Yahia put it, ‘Ibn ʿArabī is the grammarian of Islamic esotericism’. There are countless views on waḥdat al-wujūd, but in order to try to solve the puzzle of this complex phenomenon, we suggest returning to the roots of the matter, from which it stemmed and grew, in the hope that we may draw closer to the meaning of waḥdat al-wujūd. The authentic hadiths are the Prophet’s saying, ‘God was and nothing was with Him’, and, ‘The most truthful statement uttered by the Arabs is the saying of Labīd: “is not everything other than God vain?”‘ Whoever has read the Shaykh’s explanation of the meaning of these texts, will not find anything in them to contradict the Divine Law ( sharīʿa) and Unity of God ( tawḥīd)… The Quranic text is the verse: ‘Everything is perishing save His face’ (28:88). Ibn ʿArabī’s understanding of waḥdat al-wujūd in Islam is founded on a Quranic text and two authentic traditions ( ḥadīth). Had they restricted themselves to the Shaykh’s words as they appear, the latter would not require any clarification, for they themselves reveal their meanings, not to mention the lucidity of their structure. Let us mention here the view of a contemporary Sufi, Mahmud Ghurab, who promulgates the ideas of Ibn ʿArabī, despite having reservations regarding some of his books such as Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam:Īnyone who has tried to express Ibn ʿArabī’s understanding of the Oneness of Being has obscured it. By contrast, there were also many jurists, historians and Sufis who defended Ibn ʿArabī, and tried to provide an explanation of waḥdat al-wujūd in line with the Quran and Sunna, and far removed from the understanding of Ibn Taymiyya, who had spread the idea of a materialistic Oneness of Being for the purpose of criticizing it. Sirhindī stated very explicitly that the founder of waḥdat al-wujūd was Ibn ʿArabī: ‘The one who formulated the idea of the Oneness of Being, analysed it and set down its syntax and grammar, is Shaykh Muḥyī al-dīn Ibn al-ʿArabī.’ This statement gives the impression of being a sarcastic eulogy and a vindication for not adopting the views of Ibn ʿArabī, which were labelled as unbelief ( kufr) by Ibn Taymiyya and dozens of jurists ( fuqahāʾ) who followed in his wake. However, at the end of his life he adopted a softer tone towards waḥdat al-wujūd, leading his followers to regard the difference between the two movements as merely a difference in terminology. He consciously and carefully shifted to another movement, that of waḥdat al-shuhūd (Oneness of Witnessing), and may indeed be considered its founder. Aḥmad Sirhindī (d.1034/1624) defended himself against the ‘charge’ of association with Oneness of Being after having been one of its adherents. In the early 10th/16th century, we find a new kind of criticism targeting the same term/school. Clear evidence of this is provided by the most prominent adherents to the Akbarian movement such as ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī, who in his Al-Wujūd al-ḥaqq responded to the charges of Ibn Taymiyya and ʿAlāʾ al-dīn al-Bukhārī (d. The first to have used it, several decades after the death of Ibn ʿArabī in the late 7th century and early 8th century of the Hijri calendar, was Ibn Taymiyya, who employed the term negatively, as a critique and condemnation.įar from denoting unbelief, the term has come to refer to the School of Ibn ʿArabī, with followers keen to reject any suggestion that it could form the basis of a materialistic Oneness of Being, i.e. There is broad agreement amongst Ibn ʿArabī specialists that he did not use the term waḥdat al-wujūd (Oneness of Being or Unity of Existence) in his own writings, and hence did not employ this expression in his Sufi philosophical doctrine. Introduction: The Attribution of Oneness of Being to Ibn ʿArabī
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