Loading
1165–1240
The Shaykh al-Akbar whose metaphysics of unity Iqbal deploys as a weapon against Kant — even as he refuses to fully endorse it.
Muḥyiddīn Ibn al-‘Arabī, known as al-Shaykh al-Akbar (the Greatest Master), is the single most influential metaphysician in Islamic intellectual history. Born in Murcia in al-Andalus and buried in Damascus, he produced a body of work so vast and so dense that it has defined the terms of Islamic mystical philosophy for eight centuries.
His two masterworks — the Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam (The Bezels of Wisdom) and the al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya (The Meccan Openings) — articulate a metaphysics of unity in which all existence is a self-disclosure (tajallī) of the one divine Reality. This doctrine, later systematised by his followers as waḥdat al-wujūd (unity of being), became the most debated position in Islamic thought.
Iqbal’s relationship to Ibn Arabi is strategically selective. He does not endorse waḥdat al-wujūd wholesale — he fears its tendency toward pantheism and the dissolution of the individual self. But he reaches into Ibn Arabi’s epistemology for one of the Reconstruction’s most devastating moves against Kant: the claim that ‘God is a percept; the world is a concept’ — a direct inversion of Kant’s noumenon–phenomenon distinction.