The Islamic world · 1165–1240
Ibn ʿArabī
Andalusian mystic, called “the Greatest Master” by followers
God alone truly exists; the world is God’s continual self-disclosure, and each thing shows a divine name. The “Perfect Human” is the mirror in which God’s names are fully reflected.
Life and thought
Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī was born in 1165 in Murcia, in al-Andalus, and grew up in Seville, where he had visionary experiences in his youth; he is said to have met the aged Ibn Rushd as a boy. Around 1200 he left the West for good, made the pilgrimage to Mecca, where he began his vast Meccan Revelations, travelled through Anatolia and Iraq, and settled in Damascus, where he died in 1240. His followers call him al-Shaykh al-Akbar, “the Greatest Master”.
His central teaching, later summed up as “the oneness of being”, is that only God truly exists. The world is God’s continual self-disclosure: each thing is a place where a divine name, the Merciful, the Knowing, the Creator, becomes visible, and creation is renewed at every instant. Human beings can mirror all the names together; the “Perfect Human”, above all the prophets, reflects God completely. His ideas shaped Sufism, Persian poetry and philosophy, Mullā Ṣadrā among them, and also provoked fierce critics such as Ibn Taymiyya.