Ibn ʿArabī (, ; full name: , ; 1165–1240) was an Andalusian Muslim scholar, mystic, poet, and philosopher, extremely influential within Islamic thought. Out of the 850 works attributed to him, some 700 are authentic while over 400 are still extant. His cosmological teachings became the dominant worldview in many parts of the Muslim world.
His traditional titular is Muḥyīddīn (; The Reviver of Religion). After he died, and specifically among practitioners of Sufism, he was renowned by the honorific title Shaykh al-Akbar (). This, in turn, was the name from which the "Akbarian" school of Sufism derived its name, making him known as Doctor Maximus (The Greatest Teacher) in medieval Europe. Ibn ʿArabī is considered as a saint by some scholars and Muslim communities.
Ibn 'Arabi is known for being the first person to explicitly delineate the concept of "Wahdat ul-Wujud" ("Unity of Being"), a monist doctrine which claimed that all things in the universe are manifestations of a singular "reality". Ibn 'Arabi equated this "reality" with the entity he described as "the Absolute Being" ("al-wujud al-mutlaq"). These philosophical doctrines were denounced by other Sufi clerics like Ala' al-Dawla Simnani as well as by major Ash'arite scholars like Ahmad Sirhindi.
Biography
Ibn ʿArabī born in Murcia, Al-Andalus on the 17th of Ramaḍān 560 AH (28 July 1165 AD), or other sources suggested 27th of Ramaḍān 560 AH (5 August 1165 AD). His first name is Muhammad, but later called 'Abū 'Abdullāh (mean: the father of Abdullāh)—according to classical Arabic tradition—after he had a son. In some of his works, Ibn ‘Arabî referred to himself with fuller versions of his name as Abû ‘Abdullâh Muhammad ibn ‘Alî ibn al-‘Arabî al-Tâ’î al-Hâtimî, where the last three names indicating his noble Arab lineage. And indeed, Hâtim al-Tây’î was well known as a poet of pre-Islamic Arabia from the South Arabian tribe of Tayyi (now Yemen).
Family
Ibn ʿArabī's maternal ancestry was North African Berber. In his Futūḥāt al-Makkīyah, he writes of a deceased maternal uncle, Yahya ibn Yughan al-Sanhaji, a prince of Tlemcen who abandoned wealth for an ascetic life after encountering a Sufi mystic. Whereas his paternal ancestry came from Yemen and belongs to one of the oldest Arab strains in Andalusia. His paternal ancestors emigrated very early to Andalusia, probably during the second wave of the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula.
His father, ‘Ali ibn Muḥammad, served in the Army of Ibn Mardanīsh, the ruler of Murcia. When Murcia fell to the Almohad Caliphate in 1172, Ibn Mardanīsh did not survive the defeat and was killed in battle, leading to his father pledging allegiance to the Almohad Caliph Abū Ya’qūb Yūsuf I. At that time Ibn ʿArabī was only 7 years old, and his family relocated from Murcia to Seville to serve the new ruler.
Ibn ʿArabī had three wives. He married Maryam, a woman from an influential family, when he was still a young adult and lived in Andalusia. Maryam also shared his aspiration to follow the Sufi path, as quoted by Austin in Sufis of Andalusia: "My saintly wife, Maryam bint Muhammad binti Abdun, said, ‘I have seen in my sleep someone whom I have never seen in the flesh, but who appears to me in my moments of (spiritual) ecstasy. He ask me whether I was aspiring to the Way, to which I replied that I was, but that I did not know by what means to arrive at it. He then told me that I would come to it through five things: trust, certainty, patience, resolution and veracity.’ Thus she offered her vision to me (for my consideration) and I told her that was indeed the method of the Folk (Sufis). I myself have never seen one with that degree of mystical experience." When Ibn ʿArabī stayed in Anatolia for several years, according to various Arabic and Persian sources, he married the widow of Majduuddin and took charge of the education of his young son, Sadruddin al-Qunawi. Ibn ʿArabī also mentioned his third wife in his writings, the mother of his son Imāduddin, to whom he bequeathed the first copy of Futūḥāt al-Makkīyah.