Muhammed Ibn ‘Ali Ibn ‘Arabi was born in Murcia in southern Spain in 1165 AD (560AH), at the time of the flowering of the Hispano-Arab culture. Since the invasion of the Iberian peninsula by the Moors in 711 AD, the southern half of Spain had been ‘arabised’ under Islamic rule, and Arabic became the common language of all educated people. Here in ‘al-Andalus’ the three major traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam flourished side by side in some measure of harmony, and there were many who regarded them as different roads to the same end. It was an immensely rich and talented world, as we can still see today in buildings like the Alhambra in Granada, or the Great Mosque at Cordoba; a world where the great classics of Greek literature, especially Aristotle and Plato, were translated (first into Arabic and then into Latin) and studied alongside the spiritual teachings of the three Abrahamic religions.
Ibn ‘Arabi grew up in an atmosphere steeped in the most important ideas – scientific, religious and philosophical – of his day. At a time when mass communication was non-existent, this was an essential ingredient in the formation of one of the most brilliant minds in the Western world. As the poem above demonstrates, Ibn ‘Arabi was not content with simply knowing about things, nor with following a particular way. Although many writers have characterised him as a great Sufi teacher firmly rooted in the Islamic world, it would be wrong to limit his appeal to a muslim audience or to see him simply as a great medieval thinker. His sole and overriding aim was to know reality as it is, in whatever way it is depicted. Naturally he expresses himself within the cultural context he knew, but he takes for granted that his readers will have the same unflinching, one-pointed attitude of passion for the truth, and his writings have a very contemporary ring. “All that is left to us by tradition”, he writes, “is mere words. It is up to us to find out what they mean”.
This passion manifested itself at a very early age. During his teens, like many adolescents before him and no doubt since, he used to divide his time between being a serious student – studying the Quran, Islamic law and so on – and having a good time with his friends. In the middle of one of these nightly parties in Seville he heard a voice calling to him, “O Muhammed, it was not for this that you were created”. In consternation he fled and went into retreat for several days in a cemetery. It was here that he had his seminal triple vision in which he met, and received instruction from, Jesus, Moses and Muhammed – an illumination that simultaneously started him upon the spiritual way and established him as a master of it. This vision took place in the mundus imaginalis, the imaginative presence where God reveals Himself directly to the spiritual aspirant; and throughout his life Ibn ‘Arabi was to receive many illuminations of this kind. From this initiating insight he embarked upon the journey of his life; a journey that would not only take him from one end of the Arab-speaking world to the other, but would also reveal the full intensity of the most remarkable spiritual life, which through his writings has affected, shaped, transformed all who come into contact with it.

Principle of Unity

The first page of ‘The Futuhat al-Makkiyah’. Manuscript of Konya, handwritten by Ibn ‘Arabi.
It is difficult to convey anything but inklings of Ibn ‘Arabi’s teachings, since from whatever point of entry one begins, with whatever point of view one holds to be true, it is like stepping into an ocean. As in the case of Bach, even the quantity of his literary output is staggering – some 700 books, treatises and collections of poetry, of which perhaps 400 still survive (one, the ‘Futuhat al-Makkiyah’ (The Meccan Openings) is estimated to run to 17,000 pages in its new edition!). But the problem is not really the sheer volume of work, which would require a lifetime or more to study – it is the extraordinarily high quality of the material which makes tremendous demands upon the reader.

We are given a key to understanding, however, in the triple vision of the three great prophets of the Western world – for to Ibn ‘Arabi these three bring the same message, the same essential religion of love. He considers all prophets and saints to be explainers of this primordial religion:
There is no knowledge except that taken from God, for He alone is the Knower… the prophets, in spite of their great number and the long periods of time which separate them, had no disagreement in knowledge of God, since they took it from God.
‘Futuhat al Makkiyah’ II. 290. Trans. W. Chittick, ‘The Sufi Path of Knowledge’.
Ibn ‘Arabi’s vision points precisely to this direct taking from God, in which there is unanimity across all traditions. In the West, this has sometimes been referred to as the Abrahamic tradition, since it is from the revelation given to the prophet Abraham that the three religions of the Western world flow. (Note: The family of Abraham is meant both historically and spiritually; the Prophet Muhammed said that he had come to purify the religion of Abraham, and Jesus said “Before Abraham was, I am”.). The cardinal point in the Abrahamic perspective is the meaning of monotheism, which has been much misunderstood and to which too little attention has been paid. In this tradition, God is not understood to be a Being, or even the Supreme Being above and beyond the universe, for both conceptions imply that there are other beings outside Him. What is meant by God is simply Being as such. This cannot ever become an object of knowledge or contemplation or thought; it can only be known as unknowable, but simultaneously it presents itself as both knower and known, contemplator and contemplated, lover and beloved. As Ibn ‘Arabi puts it:
… the existence attributed to the created thing is the Being of God, since the possible has no existence. However, the essences of the possible are receptacles for the manifestation of this Being… For the verifiers it has been established that there is nothing in Being but God.
Futuhat II. 69. Trans. W. Chittick.
Thus the fundamental ‘Semitic’ insight is that ultimately the ground of all things, in whatever sphere, is one; and ‘things’, be they the largest mass or the tiniest subatomic particle, are a perpetual state of becoming of that One. There is immediate contact between each thing and its reality, so that each receives Being according to its degree of preparedness; a bee, therefore, determines its own creation as a bee. This is not just an ontological fact, intellectually acceptable as a premise yet without application; there is also – and more importantly perhaps – common ground, in human experience, of discovering this to be true. Each and every life, whether consciously or not, is a voyage of discovery of what this unity of being really means.
The whole of the spiritual life begins, Ibn ‘Arabi would say, in the realisation of this fact, and ends in it. What lies between is the discovery of how this is so at every instant, in the intimate heart of each individual being. So the discovery of God is equally the ceaseless self-discovery of the individual. The world is no longer static, but the dynamic theatre of the Divine manifestation, and every movement in it is essentially a movement in love of God. It is simultaneously “He and not He”, as Ibn ‘Arabi says, just like the image of a person in a mirror. The particular quality that he often employs in his writings is that of the constant interplay of paradox, similar to the Zen koan, to force the mind to reach its limit so that the truth may be seen without limitation.

Source:www.ibnarabisociety.org