I’m currently taking a class on the 13th century Andalusian Islamic poet-mystic-philosopher-theologian Ibn `Arabī, whose worldview is tremendously fascinating and worth studying in depth (if only we had lifetimes enough!). One of the assigned books for the class, William Chittick’s Imaginal Worlds: Ibn al-`Arabī and the Problem of Religious Diversity, closes with two passages from two of Ibn `Arabī’s works; the first is from his Bezels of Wisdom, the second from his magnum opus, the colossal Meccan Revelations:
Beware of becoming delimited by a specific knotting and disbelieving in everything else, lest great good escape you … Be in yourself a matter for the forms of all beliefs, for God is wider and more tremendous than that He should be constricted by one knotting rather than another. (Fuṣūṣ 113)
A “knotting” is a literal translation of the Arabic word Ibn `Arabī uses here, which can be translated more conventionally as “belief system” or “ideology”.
He who counsels his own soul should investigate, during his life in this world, all doctrines concerning God. He should learn from whence each possessor of a doctrine affirms the validity of his doctrine. Once its validity has been affirmed for him in the specific mode in which it is correct for him who holds it, then he should support it in the case of him who believes in it. (II 85.11)
I don’t want to give the impression that these two passages exhaust Ibn `Arabī’s vision of “religious diversity,” or even that this English translation is an accurate representation of his original work, for he is a tremendously complicated thinker and highly verbose writer. Many great, spiritually inclined thinkers from very different backgrounds have spent many, many years over the centuries trying to understand his work, both in its grand design and in its many details. It is always terribly easy to read into someone’s work our own “knotting” (to speak Ibn `Arabī’s language), which is unfair to both them and to us.
However, these passages did speak to me, and for that reason alone I wish to share them (un-analytically!) with everyone.
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