The in-between: Reflections on the Soul in the Teachings of Ibn ‘Arabi

Abstract

Ibn ‘Arabī was born in Islamic Spain in the middle of the twelfth century, and he died in Damascus in 1240. His most famous contemporary among Muslim philosophers was Averroes, whom he met in his youth, but unlike Averroes, he remained unknown in the West until the present century. Within the Islamic world itself, he was arguably the most influential Muslim philosopher of the past seven hundred years. If he is not normally classified as a philosopher, this is because Islamic “philosophy” (falsafa) tends to be defined as a school of thought that builds upon Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and other Greek thinkers. As such, it is distinguished from two other schools of thought—Kalâm (dogmatic theology) and theoretical Sufism (‘irfân) — both of which cover much of the same intellectual ground, but with different presuppositions and methodologies.