By Hasan Ansari
This article is derived from a transcribed interview with Christian Blake Pye, a Ph.D. candidate researching the intersection of Neoplatonic Islam and Muslim imperial politics during the medieval and early modern periods. The transcription was edited and condensed for clarity.
First and foremost, I know explaining Ibn Arabi is no easy feat, but can you give a brief introduction to his idea of ‘wahadat al-wujud’?
Ibn Arabi’s (d. 1240) wahadat al-wajud (the unity of being) is an extreme form of monotheism. So there isn’t only “no God but God,” but also God is literally the only thing that is. Some will say this notion that all of reality is just God is pantheism, which isn’t really right, but it also isn’t wrong. I think a better way of thinking about it is anything in the universe exists only insofar as God has imparted His quality of being upon that thing. So, God is the Being with a capital ‘B’; all other beings, with a lowercase ‘b’, only have their being through God. The variation that we have in the cosmos is a result of God’s infinite attributes, as God has many divine names, many of which people will never figure out. So anything that exists falls underneath one of God’s attributes and that’s what gives variety to creation. While everything is God, the Godliness of everything varies. God is the most absolute, singular, and maximal form of Godliness. But as things emanate throughout creation, in a sense, God’s being is dispersed. So there is a quarter of God in everything.
Additionally, while God’s existence is imminent in everything, he is also wholly transcendent in his essence, and nothing else shares this transcendence. Paradoxically, this conception of the oneness of God demands a duality of all things being God in existence but not being God in essence.[1] And lastly, Ibn Arabi maintains that humans manifest God’s names more perfectly than any other form of creation. The epitome of God’s names manifested is the Insan al-Kamil (Universal Man or Perfect Man) who is usually associated with the Prophet Muhammed.
How does Ibn Arabi’s philosophy lead to perennialist approaches to religion? Was Ibn Arabi himself a perennialist?
Haqq (derived from a name of Allah meaning Divine Reality or Truth) is something that can be found everywhere. But also since God is infinitely creative, he creates every instant of existence anew and so Haqq is never manifested the exact same way twice. Since all of reality is in constant flux, Haqq is always manifested but it is manifested differently each time, hence the different manifestations of religion. So while there is this perennial core, Ibn Arabi also has a triumphalist view of history. He sees the history of religion being ultimately perfected by the Quran, and manifestations of Haqq can be renewed from now on through the Quran. While other scholars of Ibn Arab’s tradition did give other scriptures equal status to the Quran, Ibn Arabi did not. For Ibn Arabi, the truth of God’s ultimate unity is true insofar as it can be filtered through the Quran and reinterpretations of Islam.
For example, in the story of Noah and the Pagans, Ibn Arabi says that the Pagans were right not to give up their idol worship, for that is the religion that God had decreed for them at that time. Mahmoud Shabestari (d. 1340) takes this position further and says that while Pagans are mistaken to equate God with idols, in actuality there is Divine Truth to idols since all things in reality point towards monotheism. While the Pagans are in error for being unable to realize this, Muslims would also be in error to say that idols don’t point to Divine Truth. Shabestari isn’t equating Islam with Paganism, but he is saying that the same divine truth from Islam is in Paganism, and if the Pagans realized Divine Truths, they would abandon idol worship. So there are other scholars influenced by Ibn Arabi who take the perenniality of his metaphysics further and further, and this reaches its zenith through the reign of Emperor Akbar (d. 1605).
In your article, you talk about Abu Fazl, the Grand Vizier of Akbar, who was influenced by Ibn Arabi, and how he believed that spiritual actualization and knowledge were achieved by reconciling different scriptures. However, other Islamic perennialists, like Syyed Hossein Nasr or Joseph Lumbard, maintain that spiritual actualization must still be achieved within the confines of one tradition. Can you elaborate on these different approaches to universal Divine Truth?
The kind of target that Abu Fazal (d. 1602) and Akbar wanted was one in which different religions could be brought together. There’s a political goal active there: this idea that you can bring these people together under the emperor’s singular authority. In this case, the emperor is the earthly corollary of divine truth. Just as divine truth is comprehensive over all religions, the emperor is also comprehensive of all the religious communities under his authority. And to bring that out, the idea is that you can effectively defeat religious bigotry by having people from different religious groups read each other’s scripture. That’s not to say their ideas were only political and disingenuous, as they likely did truly believe that by comparing and contrasting everyone’s scriptures, one actually will get to a better idea of the truth than if they were to just read one.
For Akbar and others in the early modern period of Islam, his spirituality was dramatically influenced by his political goals. And I think with some, like Hossein Nasser (b. 1933) and Henry Corbin (d. 1978), and several other scholars of Islamic studies who would be described as perennials, they do have that idea that one can find the truth in their own tradition. And that’s, I think, closer to the idea of just leaving other religions to do their own thing, allowing different people to come to the same truth on their own. There’s no active political goal there.
Are there any final remarks from your work that you’d like our readers to know?
Every religious tradition has perennials, they’re not a historical anomaly at all. Mysticism in general, I think, tends towards perennialism. It’s one thing to have people who believe in a transcendentalist view of religion, but I think where history gets really interesting is when these views become socially active, politically active, and legally active principles. And there’s something to be said for how that almost never happens, that we just had this moment from Akbar’s time where perennialist and pluralist thought become implemented as a principle in practice. We don’t have this kind of pluralism now.
Generally, the default position nowadays is either one religion is true or no religions are true. The secular pluralism we have today merely acknowledges that there is a plurality of religions present in the purely descriptive sense, and since this plurality is objectively there, it’s more practical to tolerate one another, but that’s it. There is no divine truth that unites religion there. This is not what was going on in the Mughal Empire. There was a genuine belief in a unity of religions, or at least a unity of religious truth that all the different religions are manifestations of.
I think there’s an interesting problem there for historians, religious studies scholars, and Islamic scholars. The question should be, why does it only happen this one time? And that’s the question I’m trying to answer in my dissertation. Why target then? And why only then? Why not before? Why not after? What made it special? What had to happen between Ibn Arabi and Akbar? What happened over those centuries to make these philosophical ideas politically useful for this reign specifically?
[1] For some further clarification on these philosophical terms, “essence” refers to what makes a thing that particular thing and the attributes that makes it different from other things. Whereas “existence” or “being” refers to whether or not something is.
Hasan Ansari is an undergraduate honors Religious Studies major concentrating in Islamic studies with research interests in Islamic law and philosophy. They are currently the only undergraduate contributor to Religiology.