Imaginal Worlds: Ibn al-Arabi and the Problem of Religious Diversity.

• Author: Lewisohn, Leonard

By WILLIAM C. CHITTICK. Albany: STATE UNIVERSiTY OF NEW YORK PRESS, 1994. Pp. vii + 208. $18.95.

It is no exaggeration to say that the works of William C. Chittick stand in the forefront of the recent stream of serious scholarly monographs on Ibn Arabi, among which must be mentioned Michel Chodkiewicz's The Seal of the Saints (Cambridge, 1993) and An Ocean Without Shore: Ibn Arabi, the Book and the Law (Albany, 1993), as well as Claude Addas' Quest for the Red Sulphur: The Life of Ibn Arabi (Cambridge, 1993). The present work is the fruit of some twenty-five years of study of the works of Ibn Arabi, complementing Chittick's earlier study, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-Arabi's Metaphysics of Imagination (Albany, 1989). Whereas the earlier work offers us a vast encyclopedia of the gnostic teachings of Sufism by way of careful selection and presentation, through introductory exposition, of passages from the Futuhat al-Makkiyya, the present work is slightly more restricted in scope, being a collection of some of his most important and seminal essays on the Shaykh al-Akbar, originally written between 1984 and 1992 for conferences or edited volumes, but totally revised as independent chapters in this new work.

Since many of the theological problems dealt with are quite recondite, Chittick skillfully enhances passages of key quotations from the Magister Magnus with his own illuminating commentary on the subtle nuances of meaning. The first section of the book, entitled "Human Perfection," features four chapters on "Oneness of Being," "Microcosm, Macrocosm, and Perfect Man," "Ethics and Antinominianism," and "Self-Knowledge and the Original Human Disposition." Chittick's study of the "Oneness of Being," where some fifteen different connotations of the term in Akbarian thought are listed, is a - if not the - seminal essay on the philosophical meanings of wahdat al-wujud in Western scholarship. Also noteworthy is the chapter on "Ethics and Antinominianism," where Chittick tackles and refutes the criticism often made by Muslim jurists that from the transcendental perspective of wahdat, normal distinctions of good and evil cease to apply and the prescriptions of the Sharia may be ignored.

Through the tapestry of the Shaykh al-Akbar's thought runs the thread of that subtle mode of understanding: imaginal reflection (khayal) - and thus the second section of the book is appropriately entitled "Worlds of Imagination." In its narrowest sense, the word...