i.3.2 The Sufi Cosmology

Other Muslim mystics, known as the Sufis, such as Ibn al-Arabi and his school of many students and followers, also added their own personal esoteric experiences that give many invaluable supplementary details within the previous framework. As we shall explain further in Chapter IV, when we talk about the ultimate symmetry of the oneness of being, the World, according to Sufi cosmology, is God s self-disclosure of Himself, and the creatures are the momentary veils through which He is manifesting.

According to Sufi cosmology, the (essences of the) things are not , since only God is , so all individual entities of the Cosmos are perpetually alternating between Being, and non-existence. Although the things might outwardly seem to be continuously existing in their evolution, nothing is ever repeated the same twice, since their elementary microscopic components are always created anew in different forms, that may still resemble the perished ones, but they are not themselves. In the Meccan Revelations, Ibn al-Arabi says: We have no doubt that everything in the World ceases from existence in the second instance-of-time after its becoming (and then it is re-created again, perpetually). [II.208.27]. This ongoing re-creation process is the main principle behind the Duality of Time Theory that has been introduced in Volume II.

The word World , in Arabic, is derived from alaama , which means sign or symbol , or also trace , so as Ibn al-Arabi often asserts, all (the entities of) the worlds are symbols that refer back to God, their Originator and sole Maintainer. On the other hand, the Cosmos is also called kawn , which means being , since it is derived from the divine creative command kun (Be!), through which the entities of the Cosmos come into the ordered manifesting existence, after they were all preexisting in undefined form in the foreknowledge of God. Therefore, everything in the World is essentially a manifestation of God. Al-Ghazali is famously quoted as saying: there is nothing in possibility more wondrous than what is , because everything reflects God s optimal creativity that suits the present conditions, although that may not gratify everyone, and this also explains the Prophetic saying: Curse not Time, for Allah is Time .

As we noted above, Ibn al-Arabi declares that the fundamental reason for creating the world is divine Love , where Allah says that He was hidden or unknown Treasure, so He loved to become known, thus He created the creation, and revealed Himself to them, in order to grant them the privilege of coming to know Him. Therefore, this Allah s love to become known is a Mercy from Him that He wanted to grant toallHis creatures. This Mercy is, therefore, the first state of the presence of Allah with regard to the world to be created, and hence it formed theabstractspace in which the cosmos would appear. Ibn al-Arabi calls this abstract space as thePrimordial Cloud. The reality of this cloud accepted the forms of the Roaming Spirits that Allah created directly, without any intermediaries. This direct creation caused these angelic Spirits to roam, completely absorbed, in the presence of Allah, knowing nothing but Him. They don t even know about themselves, i.e., they have no self-consciousness. Allah then appointed one of these Spirits and granted him a special epiphany of divine Knowledge that engraved in him all what Allah wants to create, through him, in this entire Cosmos, until the Last Day. The other primal Spirits could not know about that, because they are completely absorbed in divine Presence.

This initial epiphany of knowledge caused this Spirit, that is then called theFirst Intellect, or theUniversal Intellect, or also, using a central Quranic symbol, theHigher Pen, to become aware both of himself and of the other Spirits, while they didn t know about him. Among many other names and descriptions, the First Intellect is also called the Single Monad, especially when we talk about physical creation and the cosmos, but this actually also includes the metaphysical creation as well.

According to Ibn al-Arabi s distinctive, and controversial, conception of theOneness of Being, that we shall explain further in Chapter IV, the realities of things in the Universe are nothing but imaginary forms or reflections of this unique Single Monad that is the only created entity that can be described as havingreal existence, while all other things are merely its various temporal imaginary forms, including vision and the visible, hearing and the heard, imagination and the imaginable, thinking and the thinkable, ... etc [III.404.12]. For this reason also, one of the other interesting names of the Single Monad isEverything, because it is actually creating every single thing, physical and metaphysical.

Therefore, Ibn al-Arabi s Universe comprises both the physical and the abstract worlds. Through the above special epiphany of knowledge, the First Intellect was able to see that he is composed of himself in addition to his further ability to realize or intelligize , which is the consciousness. He also saw that he has an ontic shadow caused by the Light of that special epiphany of knowledge, which was realized through the divine Name the Light . This shadow is hisSoul, that is thus called theUniversal Soul, or theFirst Soul. This Soul is also called theHighest Protected Tablet, in which the First Intellect is going to write what he knows is going to happen until the Last Day.

Therefore, the entire Universe is literally a book whoseletters andwordsare the creatures being written by the Highest Pen in Protected Tablet as they are spoken by the Creator through the Breath of the All-Merciful. For this reason, as we shall see further in Chapter II, there is a perfect one-to-one correspondence between the twenty eight letters of (Arabic) alphabet and the twenty eight elementary particles in the Standard Model, and both are directly related to the same number of lunar mansions, which is a result of multiplying the four elements by the seven skies.

The Universe appeared in the Universal Soul through the Universal Intellect as the result of what Ibn al-Arabi calls an abstract marriage . This is because everything that happens due to a particular cause, or subject, is like a son of this subject who is considered its father , and its mother is the object where the result of this marriage appears or happens. Just as we are all, in our outer bodily dimension, the children of Adam and Eve, all things in the Universe can be considered the progeny of the Universal Intellect and the Universal Soul, or equally: time and space. We can clearly see here the similarities between Ibn al-Arabi s account and ancient mythologies described above, but with much more coherent detailed description, and in this Islamic view there is only One God and these various spheres in the Cosmos may be associated with spirits and angels, but not deities.

The first thing the Universal Soul gave rise to is: the level of Nature and then Chaos , or the Dust , or the Prime Matter . Then Nature and Dust in turn beget their first son , which is called the Universal Body . This symbolic process of cosmic progeny continues in a long and defined series of causes and results until it reaches the soil which refers to physical matter in general. So the physical world appeared after this Universal Body, while before that all was only spiritual or metaphysical.

The Universal Body contains the Throne, on which Allah established his authority [Quran, 20:5], as the Creator and Sustainer of the Universe, all from His divine Name: the All-Merciful, which means that all creatures beneath the Throne are to be granted the creative Mercy of their existence from Him. Inside, or beneath, this divine Throne there appeared the Pedestal, whose relative dimension and plenitude, in comparison to the infinitely vast dimensions of the Throne, Ibn al-Arabi compares here to a tiny ring in a vast desert. And within this Pedestal is the sphere of the divisions of the zodiac, with all the stars and galaxies, and the sphere of the fixed stars, or constellations, including beneath them the separate orbs of the five planets, the Sun, the Moon, and the Earth, as described further in the various corresponding Figures at the beginning of Chapter IV of Volume II.