Brian Welter Review

Ibn ʿArabī: Vida y enseñanzas del gran místico andalusí
by Fernando Mora, and: Ibn al-ʿArabī and Islamic

Intellectual Culture: From mysticism to philosophy by Caner
K. Dagli (review)
Brian Welter
Journal of Shi'a Islamic Studies, Volume 9, Number 2, Spring 2016, pp. 222-227
(Review)
Published by ICAS Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/isl.2016.0016
For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/646715
Access provided by New York University (10 Jul 2017 20:08 GMT)
Journal of Shi‘a Islamic Studies Spring 2016 ∙ Vol. IX ∙ No. 2
Book Reviews
Ibn ʿArabī: Vida y enseñanzas del gran místico andalusí, by Fernando Mora,
2011. Barcelona: Kairós, 456 pp., €18.75. isbn: 978-8-49988-023-5.
Ibn al‑ʿArabī and Islamic Intellectual Culture: From mysticism to philosophy,

by Caner K. Dagli, 2016. (Routledge Sufi Series, ed. Ian Netton.)
Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge, x + 158 pp., £90.00. isbn:
978-1-13878-001-9.
B r i A n 8e -5 e r
Hsinchu, Taiwan
[email protected]
Taken together, Ibn ʿArabī: Vida y enseñanzas del gran místico andalusí
and Ibn al‑ʿArabī and Islamic Intellectual Culture offer readers a fairly
complete introduction to the life, teaching, and legacy of the medieval
mystic. While Dagli focuses on the school of thought that developed
from followers of Ibn ʿArabī, Mora discusses the Shaykh’s place in the
lively spiritual landscape of the medieval Muslim world from Spain to
the Near East.
Mora interweaves and connects his hero’s physical and spiritual
journeys, tying ‘decisive spiritual revelations’ (62) in 1195 to the city of
Fez, where the Spaniard was staying at the time. Of particular importance
is the non-stop movement around 1204-5 in Iraq, Anatolia, Syria, and
Palestine. The physical centre or place of return of these later excursions
mirrored the inner reality: ‘One characteristic of all these voyages was
the periodic return to the sacred city of Mecca, as if all this touring
could be described as a circular itinerary around the same centre’ (82).
Certain spiritual writings are often associated with specific locales on
these voyages, as in 1205, when a brief stay in Jerusalem was marked by
five works in one month.
Instead of such biographical meanderings, Dagli does not discuss Ibn
222
Book Reviews
ʿArabī so much as the intellectual culture in which his thought came to be

and was later developed by followers. The Shaykh stands as one thinker
in the flow of ideas, over which he had much influence. Later Akbarians
used his writings to develop their own philosophy. Ibn al‑ʿArabī and
Islamic Intellectual Culture is neither a biography nor an analysis of one
man’s thought, but rather a dissection of a certain school of Sufism in
the Islamic world over a few centuries.
Dagli spends much time fine-tuning the distinctions among kalām,
falsafah, and taṣawwuf, highlighting where modern scholarly imprecision
has caused confusion. Despite much interplay among these terms, their
separate agendas and technical denotations must be respected to provide
clarity to Islamic intellectual history, he argues.
This historically broader approach to Ibn ʿArabī turns to the influence
of Avicenna, Ghazālī, and Suhrawardī on the Islamic intellectual
landscape in Ibn ʿArabī’s time. The advocates of kalām, falsafah, and
taṣawwuf jostled with each other for supremacy:
[A]fter Ghazālī, no conceptual system could become broadly

accepted in Islam if the summit of the hierarchy were to
be occupied by mere reason, or espoused the notion that
prophethood only provided what could be found through the
fully realized rational faculty on its own. (51)
Such insights provide us with a sense of the wider implications

of Ibn ʿArabī. They also show how certain Islamic trends, in turn,
worked on him.
In the chapter, ‘Metaphysical preliminaries’, Dagli discusses certain
terms such as ʿayn and ta ʿayyun as used by the relevant medieval authors,
and how these concepts have been translated into the Western world
by Thomas Aquinas. Dagli emphasizes how easily mixed up such lexis
becomes. Making matters worse, words such as equivocal have shifted in
meaning in English. This has led to a lack of clarity, as exemplified with
yet another term:
The main challenge in rendering tashkīk into English as

‘equivocal’ is that if we rely on the medieval sense of ‘equivocal,’
then equivocality is not a good rendering of tashkīk, but if we
rely on a more contemporary sense of ‘equivocal,’ it is. (65)
223
Such points reflect how Dagli keeps his reader in many places at the
same time, including but not limited to philosophy, linguistics, and history.
This coverage of the place of specialized words in Islamic philosophy
often demonstrates wider intellectual tendencies. Anniyyah, which Dagli
defines as ‘thatness’ and connects to Aristotle, was taken up by Kindī,
Fārābī, Avicenna, and Ghazālī, and by a later Akbarian, Jandī, but not by
the school’s founder. This points to the fruitfulness of the commentaries
on Ibn ʿArabī’s work. They took on a philosophical life of their own,
affording opportunities to develop ontology and other branches of
philosophy for centuries. Dagli notes:
Instead of restating their masters’ expositions, each of the

successive thinkers in the Akbarian school make their own
original additions, and speak about their subject matter in
significantly different ways (96).
The Akbarians practiced their founder’s openness, extending the

initial mystical expressions to philosophical undertakings.
Dagli avoids imposing one understanding or interpretation of these
terms. He allows for a certain elasticity, as the Akbarian writings ‘are
heavily dependent on context and usage. It is possible to use anniyyah in
such a way that it represents something more inward or more substantial,
but put it together with huwiyyah, and suddenly anniyyah becomes that
which is more outward and huwiyyah the more true and more substantial’
(99). Such a focus on the contextual aspect of meaning reflects refinement
and even elegance on the part of Dagli’s discussion, as he never fears
subtlety and nuance.
This juggling extends to the wider discussion. Philosophers, mystics,
and expositors of kalām adapted or understood the same terms differently.
This may have depended on historical conditions or authorship. Or, two
or more terms might have pointed to the same referent in various works
or passages. Ibn ʿArabī, he notes,
almost always used ‘identity’ to refer to the forms in God’s

knowledge, although he would sometimes use ‘essence’ (dhāt)
or ‘reality’ (ḥaqīqah) instead. It should be noted that the
Akbarians have recourse to several different ways of talking
about the ‘what is it?’ aspect of things (81).
224
Book Reviews
Here again we see the absence of dogmatism and spiritual sterility in

both the Akbarian project and Dagli’s own analysis.
Mora’s Sufi saint contrasts with Dagli’s mystic-philosopher. The
authors’ direct references to Ibn ʿArabī’s works buttress their distinctive
agendas. Dagli tends to cite philosophical or mystical thoughts, or to
trace the ebb and flow of ontological terms by various Akbarians via
certain citations. Mora highlights autobiographical writings that point
to spiritual development. This gives the latter book a more reader-friendly
and less scholarly feel. The author thus quotes Ibn ‘Arabi’s observations
of a mystical experience rather than any potential intellectual,
philosophical, or theological conclusions:
When I penetrated this locale [the mundus imaginalis], at the

time I was in Tunis, I let out an unconscious scream; anyone who
heard it lost their conscience. The women in the neighbouring
terraces who heard it fainted, some even falling down to the
courtyard. However, despite the height from which they fell,
no one was hurt (Mora, 56).
Such extracts make Vida y enseñanzas del gran místico andalusí accessible
and enjoyable.
Whereas Dagli makes precise terminology the main focal point of
his argument, the sometimes less stringent Mora never defines what he
means by mysticism, theology, or cosmology. He perhaps thereby commits
the error that Dagli accuses many writers of doing. One might ask, for
example, whether Mora is using these terms in their western or Islamic,
medieval or modern senses.
Yet Mora can be as careful a scholar as Dagli. First, he criticizes
Henry Corbin for viewing Ibn ʿArabī as a ‘crypto-Shiʿi.’ He blames this
on Corbin’s Shiʿi focus and his involvement in Carl Jung’s Eranos Circle
(121), concluding that the ‘vast writings and the multifaceted feature
of Shaykh al-Akbar are like an immense mirror in which everyone can
see the reflection of his own intellectual and spiritual tendencies’ (122).
He likewise rejects Asin Palacios’s characterization of Ibn ʿArabī as an
esoteric thinker, insisting on the orthodoxy of the admittedly non-
conventional Shaykh.
Second, Mora carefully defines Neoplatonism and its influence on
Islamic thinkers. He notes its different traditions, East and West. He
225
points to the Persian influences on the Neoplatonism that found its way
into Islamic thought.
Perhaps more controversially, Mora compares the Jewish and Islamic
practices of assigning the letters of the Hebrew and Arabic alphabets
numerical values. This led Ibn ʿArabī to claim to have predicted a
Muslim military victory (132). Mora shows how this hermeneutical
method fits in with Ibn ʿArabī’s spiritual view of the world. The ‘science
of letters’ played a role in his acceptance of at least some aspects of
white magic and divination, which perhaps explains why the Shaykh
has never been popular with everyone in the Muslim world. Mora
leaves much of this undefined; more on this may have cleared up some
misunderstandings.
Mora sometimes mentions personalities and friends important to his
book’s hero. Unfortunately, he never pursues this side of things to the
extent that Christian writers do in their contemporary hagiographies
of saints, where relationship success and failure frequently form the
heart of the story. Jon M. Sweeney’s The Enthusiast is largely based on St.
Francis’s friendships with his early followers, for instance. In this sense,
Mora’s book may fall short of Western expectations of what constitutes a
good study of an important religious figure.
Dagli’s demanding work, not at all delving into such quibbles, requires
a level of patience that most people find unappealing nowadays. Yet it
may stand the test of time more than Mora’s book as it offers a strong
technical contribution to the field. Akbarian studies is broad enough
for Ibn al‑ʿArabī and Islamic Intellectual Culture to be but an introduction.
The author’s pithy and careful writing provides a good overview of the
development of metaphysics within this school. The excellent concluding
chapter, which includes the following, exemplifies such writing:
With taṣawwuf it was the Akbarian strand of metaphysical

exposition that, over time, added a discourse that was
‘analytical’ to a literature that was predominantly ‘poetic’ and
didactic; a linear and progressive presentation that developed
unfamiliar metaphysical concepts step-by-step to a literature
that typically presented ideas fully-formed (144).
Dagli succeeds in showing that, starting with Ibn ʿArabī’s writings,

which tended to be almost exclusively imbued with Sufi terms and
226
Book Reviews
assumptions, the Akbarians moved towards incorporating kalām and

falsafah into their taṣawwuf worldview. This echoed the wider Islamic
intellectual strains in the later Middle Ages. Mora remains focused on
the beginnings of that journey.
227

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Ibn ʿArabī: Vida y enseñanzas del gran místico andalusí

by Fernando Mora, and: Ibn al-ʿArabī and Islamic

Published by ICAS Press

For additional information about this article

Ibn al‑ʿArabī and Islamic Intellectual Culture: From mysticism to philosophy,

ʿArabī so much as the intellectual culture in which his thought came to be

[A]fter Ghazālī, no conceptual system could become broadly

Such insights provide us with a sense of the wider implications

The main challenge in rendering tashkīk into English as

Instead of restating their masters’ expositions, each of the

The Akbarians practiced their founder’s openness, extending the

almost always used ‘identity’ to refer to the forms in God’s

Here again we see the absence of dogmatism and spiritual sterility in

When I penetrated this locale [the mundus imaginalis], at the

With taṣawwuf it was the Akbarian strand of metaphysical

Dagli succeeds in showing that, starting with Ibn ʿArabī’s writings,

assumptions, the Akbarians moved towards incorporating kalām and

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