Ibn ⊂Arabi in the Later Islamic Tradition: The Making of a Polemical Image in Medieval Islam.

• Author: Madelung, Wilfred
• Position: Review

Ibn [subset]Arabi in the Later Islamic Tradition: The Making of a Polemical Image in Medieval Islam. By ALEXANDER D. KNYSH. Albany: STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, 1999. Pp. xvi + 449.

The spiritual heritage of Muhyi 1-Din Ibn al-[subset]Arabi (638/ 1240), the "Greatest Master" (al-shaykh al-akbar) of the Sufis, has been highly controversial in the Islamic world ever since his massive literary output became widely known after his death. During his lifetime, his teaching, restricted mostly to a small group of intimate followers, occasioned little offense. Personally of exemplary conduct and a supporter of strict obedience to the rules of the religious law, he was for the most part hospitably received and well treated by orthodox Sunni scholars and princes both in the Maghrib and in the heartlands of Islam. It was the religious ideas he propounded in his works, especially in his Fusus al-hikam, which soon provoked radical repudiation by many prominent scholars and Sufis. Particularly damaging was the scathing condemnation of his teaching by the Hanbali Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328), whose religious authority in later Sunni Islam has steadily increased.

While older Western studies have sometimes portrayed Ibn al-[subset]Arabi as influenced by non-Islamic, especially Christian, thought, recent research has stressed the orthodox Sunni basis of his teaching, yet also envisaged a universal human appeal in his message. This interpretation of his thought must raise the question as to why it aroused so much hostility among Muslims in contrast, for instance, to that of al-Ghazali, another basically orthodox Sunni mystic, which is widely appreciated both inside and outside Islam. The present book offers a study of the dispute surrounding the work of Ibn al-[subset]Arabi throughout the Muslim world with a focus on its polemical aspect, both against and in favor of the Sufi master. The author emphasizes that, in contrast with the highly sympathetic attitude to Ibn al-[subset]Arabi of most recent Western scholarship, he wishes not to take sides in the conflict about him. At the same time, however, he speaks of Ibn al-[subset]Arabi with considerable admiration, designat ing him the greatest mystic of Islam and describing his most controversial work, the Fusus al-hikam, as a masterpiece, while distancing himself from the charges of heresy and deviation leveled by his opponents, by placing them regularly in parentheses. The book covers the development of the dispute from the seventh/thirteenth to the tenth/sixteenth centuries. It thus concludes its account just before the rise of the Ottoman imperial state, which generally espoused the spiritual heritage of Ibn al-[subset]Arabi, without, however, being able to silence his critics permanently.

In a chapter called "Biographical Prelude' Knysh quotes and discusses the earliest extant biographical reports on Ibn al-[subset]Arabi's career, some of them going back to contemporaries who met him. These are relatively brief and objective and serve as a basis for the examination of later polemical distortion. The results could, however, have been more accurate by observing more carefully the provenance of the reports and comparing them. Knysh fails to note that the accounts of Ibm al-[subset]Arabi's Baghddadi contemporaries Ibn al-Dubaythi and...