Ibn 'Arabî: perplexity at the heart of his Sufi thought
Contents
For Grégory Vandamme, perplexity is no defect in Ibn ’Arabî’s thought. The ḥayra, a word for losing one’s bearings, becomes, in his work, a way of looking at reality without locking it inside a definitive explanation. In this interview produced for the Isthme, the scholar of Islam returns to the Andalusian master’s life, to his books and to the notions that have fed centuries of debate.
Interview broadcast on 24 March 2024 on the Isthme YouTube channel. Grégory Vandamme holds a doctorate in religious studies from UCLouvain and is a specialist on Ibn ’Arabî.
A master formed between Andalusia and the East
Ibn ’Arabî was born in Murcia, in al-Andalus, in 1165, into a family close to the Almohad power. The young man moved in the cultivated circles of Seville and, by his own account, was first drawn to horses and to arms. Then came a spiritual crisis, sealed by a retreat in a cemetery: he says he received there a new understanding of religious and metaphysical realities.
Grégory Vandamme insists on this singular starting point. Ibn ’Arabî came neither from a poor background nor from an organised brotherhood; he was taught by masters in al-Andalus and the Maghreb before leaving for the East at around the age of thirty-five. The Hijaz, Iraq, Anatolia: he travelled for years, then settled in Damascus, where he died in 1240.
A meeting with Averroës holds a famous place in the master’s account of his own life. Mr Vandamme is careful to recall that we know only Ibn ’Arabî’s version of it, for Averroës left no testimony. The two men are said to have questioned each other on what reason can reach and on what belongs to unveiling. The answer the mystic reports holds agreement and disagreement together: the point is not to belittle reason, but to refuse to ask it to grasp, alone, all that is.
An immense body of work, but no manual
Ibn ’Arabî composed texts that differ greatly in length and in form. Mr Vandamme mentions some hundred works of established authenticity, from brief treatises to the Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, the vast spiritual summa elaborated over the course of his travels. Cosmology, spiritual realities, religious practice, reading of the Qur’an: his subjects answer one another rather than falling into watertight chapters.
The Qur’an remains the point of return of this thought. Even when he treats a subject seemingly remote from commentary, Ibn ’Arabî looks to the verses for an origin or a key. The work welcomes diverse branches of knowledge and relates them all to a spiritual vision of the world and of the revealed text.
The Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam, known in French as Les Chatons des sagesses and to English readers as The Bezels of Wisdom, enjoy a particular fame. Their brevity does not make them easy. The book condenses ideas into allusive formulae, which have prompted countless commentaries and no less controversy; read on its own, without bearings on its author’s vocabulary and method, it invites you to take one obscure sentence for the whole of his thought.
For a first approach, Mr Vandamme recommends Claude Addas’s introduction, published in English as Ibn ’Arabi: The Voyage of No Return. The book presents the master’s life, his principal writings and the broad lines of his thought. Not a key that spares you the reading of the texts; it is a threshold. The Futūḥāt and the Fuṣūṣ alike call for time, and often for guidance.
The material transmission of these books mattered to his disciples too. Several major works, Mr Vandamme recalls, have come down to us in copies written in Ibn ’Arabî’s own hand or endorsed by him. In the history of medieval texts, such witnesses are precious: they bring us closer to what the author truly wrote, instead of leaving us dependent on later copies. They also say something about the place his companions gave to his works.
A thought taken up, discussed, commented upon
Ibn ’Arabî’s posterity does not rest on a single book. His notions, his vocabulary, his poems circulated in very different Sufi milieux, where commentators took up his texts to explain them or to contest them. His reach, Mr Vandamme notes, extends far beyond the Maghreb and Andalusia, into the Persian, Indian and Malay worlds.
This diffusion does not mean that Ibn ’Arabî founded a brotherhood. Mr Vandamme distinguishes his work from a tariqa endowed with codified practices and teaching: the master of Murcia hands down a perspective, a way of reading and thinking that the paths constituted after him would make their own. His poems and his notions find a place there, sometimes far from the context in which they were framed.
The fortunes of the Fuṣūṣ illustrate this reception. The book’s brevity makes it a convenient ground for commentary, but it opens the door to hasty readings as well: certain passages were isolated and condemned without any account of the general economy of Ibn ’Arabî’s language. The controversy springs, then, not only from doctrinal disagreement; it owes much to the difficulty of a text that presupposes a formation and a context of reading.
Sainthood, prophecy and the seal
The title of ‘Seal of the Muhammadan sainthood’, which tradition attaches to Ibn ’Arabî, has given rise to divergent interpretations. Mr Vandamme points out that the master does not claim it unambiguously. The question nonetheless carries doctrinal weight, for it bears on the relation between sainthood, prophecy and the prophetic mission.
In the reading proposed here, these realities are not three paths foreign to one another. Prophecy takes root in a sainthood that grounds it, whilst the mission of messenger designates a particular function among the prophets. The saints inherit what has been handed down, without thereby receiving a new prophetic revelation. The distinction matters: to speak of spiritual inheritance does not erase the difference between the Prophet and those who come after him.
The word ‘seal’, finally, brings an image of closure and of return; it does not denote merely the last link in a chronology. Mr Vandamme connects it to a vision in which origin and fulfilment answer each other, and in which the Muhammadan reality names a spiritual dimension that precedes the prophetic figures and runs through them. This presentation reflects the reading of Ibn ’Arabî set out in the interview; it does not by itself exhaust the diversity of Muslim interpretations.
The waḥdat al-wujūd, a disputed name
The expression waḥdat al-wujūd, often translated ‘unity of existence’ or ‘oneness of being’, has become a convenient label for Ibn ’Arabî’s thought, among his supporters and his opponents alike. Mr Vandamme draws attention to one precise point: Ibn ’Arabî uses the words waḥda and wujūd, but never the full expression as the technical name of a doctrine. The formula settled among later commentators, who wished to gather several aspects of his thought under a single term. The nuance changes the way the polemics are read.
The term wujūd refers to being, but also, in its Arabic root sense, to finding or to undergoing an experience. For Mr Vandamme it marks a thought that does not reduce existence to the tangible: an image conceived by the mind, a thing perceived by the senses, a spiritual experience: none of these has the same mode of being, yet none is a mere word either. A thing thought and a thing touched are not lived in the same way, though both relate to what is. A delicate distinction; it is what prevents the affirmation of a unity from being mistaken for the claim that all things are identical.
God, in this reading, cannot be reduced to the world. He is the manifest and the hidden, the first and the last, names gathered in verse 3 of surah al-Ḥadīd. Creation unfolds possibilities and relations without limiting the divine being. The immediate charge of pantheism thus misses the question Ibn ’Arabî is asking: how are we to think the presence of God and his transcendence together, without shutting either inside a formula?
This tension explains part of the criticism. To say that Ibn ’Arabî identifies God with the cosmos is to miss the analysis Mr Vandamme offers: the difficulty lies in language itself. Each category illuminates one aspect of reality, and makes us forget, the moment we settle into it, what escapes it. The thinking moves forward by circling back on its own formulations.
In this reading the world is neither separated from God to the point of forming an independent domain, nor identical with God to the point of reducing the divine to the cosmos. Language does not resolve this tension once and for all; it obliges us to hold together propositions we separate too quickly. God manifests himself, but is not limited by what appears.
The ḥayra: learning not to freeze the real
Perplexity, or ḥayra, stands at the centre of the thesis Grégory Vandamme defended at UCLouvain in 2023. In the interview he gives it a concrete image: we lose our bearings when the tracks fade in the desert. Yet the ḥayra does not consist in giving up understanding. It begins where partial explanations stop passing themselves off as the whole of reality.
The same person is someone’s child, another’s parent, a colleague, a neighbour. Each gaze grasps a genuine relation; none exhausts what she is. Perplexity keeps this plurality open. It obliges the intelligence to begin its work again, rather than turning a useful definition into an absolute answer.
This movement does not set reason against spiritual life; it asks us to recognise what reasoning illuminates and what it leaves in shadow. In this sense Mr Vandamme brings the ḥayra close to an experience of reality freed from preconceived categories. One does not stop thinking. One learns not to confuse a correct thought with the totality of what it describes.
The word denotes, then, not a paralysing hesitation but a vigilance. An explanation may be true in a given situation and then fall short when the object changes or another aspect comes to light. To begin reasoning again does not erase what has been understood; it submits it to the test of what now presents itself.
Mr Vandamme connects this gesture to the attention Ibn ’Arabî pays to the Qur’an. Revelation is not, for him, an ornament tacked on to an already finished philosophy: it works reflection from within, directs the questions, displaces categories, sends the reader endlessly back to the text. Perplexity thereby takes on a hermeneutic scope: it keeps reading open.
Grégory Vandamme’s thesis, Ḥayra: la perplexité chez Ibn ’Arabî, deals precisely with this notion, in its epistemological, metaphysical and Qur’anic dimensions. It extends the interview without replacing either the reading of the works or the tradition of commentary that surrounds them.
Reading Ibn ’Arabî without settling for his formulae
At the close of the interview, Mr Vandamme recalls a warning from Sidi Hamza, may God sanctify his secret: to know Ibn ’Arabî’s formulae is not yet to live what they seek to convey. The remark is aimed less at reading than at mechanical repetition. A doctrine can become a garment one wears to be recognised, without one’s way of being in the world being changed by it.
This reservation joins the place Mr Vandamme grants to perplexity. Ibn ’Arabî’s work is not a repertoire of answers to be memorised: it invites us to test its notions in the reading of the Qur’an, in attention to what presents itself, in relation to others. The path does not come down to speaking of unity; it is verified in an existence that remains attentive to what it does not master.
For those who wish to go further, the page on the Tariqa Qadiriya Boutchichiya presents a path in which knowledge is inscribed within a practice and a transmission. You may also read the page on the spiritual guide, or the article on spiritual audition, the samâ’.
Frequently asked questions
Who is Grégory Vandamme?
Grégory Vandamme holds a doctorate in religious studies from UCLouvain. His 2023 thesis deals with the ḥayra, or perplexity, in the thought of Ibn ’Arabî.
What does ḥayra mean?
The ḥayra is a perplexity in which our usual bearings and categories no longer suffice. In Mr Vandamme’s reading, it can keep our gaze available before a reality that refuses to be reduced to a single explanation.
Did Ibn ’Arabî coin the formula waḥdat al-wujūd?
According to Grégory Vandamme, the expression became established among later commentators. Ibn ’Arabî uses the terms waḥda and wujūd separately, without presenting the formula as the technical name of his own doctrine.
Which book should one read to discover Ibn ’Arabî?
In the interview, Mr Vandamme advises Claude Addas’s introduction, The Voyage of No Return. The Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam and the Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya are major works, but reading them calls for bearings.