4.3.1  The Primordial Cloud

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 his Soul, that is thus called the Universal Soul, or the First Soul, compared to Plotinus emanation ideas that we described in section 6 of chapter II. This Soul is also called the Highest Protected Tablet, in which the First Intellect is going to write what he now knows it is going to happen until the Last Day.

Therefore, the entire Universe is literally a “book” whose Letters and Words are being written by the Highest Pen in Protected Tablet as they are spoken by the Creator through the Breath of the All-Merciful, one of His divine Names directly related to cosmos, since as we have said above that Mercy was the first abstract space in which the creation will appear. In other words, the cosmos is continuously being created by the Single Monad who is going through all the metaphysical, or geometrical, points of space in one linear chronological sequence and the physical world is manifested as a combination of these points.

This is illustrated in Figure 4.4 which shows the Primordial Cloud and its contents down to the Throne on which “Allah established His authority” as He mentioned in Quran [20:5].

Figure 4.4: The Primordial Cloud and what it contains down to the Establishing Throne. the divisions in the outer circle denote the undefined number of Roaming Spirits, one of them is the Universal Intellect from whom our whole Universe descends, while each of the other spirits may have their universes.

According to the account Ibn al-Arabi gives in chapter 371 of the Meccan Revelations, the Universe appeared in the Universal Soul through the Universal Intellect as the result of what he calls an abstract, or spiritual, “marriage”, or progeny. 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 products of the Universal Intellect and the Universal Soul, or equally: time and space. It is to be noted here that this description is essentially similar to Feynman diagrams described in section 5.8 of chapter III, where in the fundamental interaction process two fermions exchange a boson. Also we notice that this description of spiritual marriage and progeny is actually a result of the Principle of Love as the primal cause of motion, as we mentioned in section 3 above and will explain further in chapter VI.

The Universal Soul is equipped with two forces depicted as the two small circles in Figure 4.4: the “intellective force” through which it perceives knowledge, which is a kind of abstract motion that is a change in the mental state, and the “active force” through which it preserves its existence through physical motion.

The first thing the Universal Soul gave rise to, as indicated in the same Figure, is twofold: “the level of Nature” and the “Chaos”, or the “Dust”, or the ‘Prime Matter”. From here on, Ibn al-Arabi uses the symbolic conjugal imagery of the “wedding” of generative elements and of “birth” at each successive level of creation or manifestation.

Thus the Universal Soul first begets Nature and then Prime Matter or Dust. 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.

As we shall explain further in sections 3.2 and 3.3 below, where we are going to expand the contents of the Throne and the Pedestal, that the Pedestal is actually equivalent to the physical world, or the cosmos, with all the galaxies and clusters, because Ibn al-Arabi specified in it the twelve zodiacal constellations, which we now know that they are remote galaxies, whereas he situated the the vast Seven Gardens between and below these galaxies down to the orbs of the other Constellations that contain the twenty eight Moon mansions, which we now know that they are local stars in our own galaxy, as depicted in Figures 4.5 and 4.7 below. Furthermore, Ibn al-Arabi called the orb beyond the twelve zodiacal constellations the “Isotropic Orb”, explaining that it deserves this name because it contains no signs by which its parts could be distinguished, which makes it equivalent to what we know today as the early radiation era, below which is the Universal Body of the whole cosmos as shown in Figure 4.5.

All this description, as we shall see further below, is based on the famous prophetic Hadith that the Seven Heavens and the Earth, which refers to the solar system as we shall explain in section 3.4, are with relation to the Pedestal like a ring in a vast desert, and the Pedestal itself with relation to the Throne is also like a ring in a vast desert. This is the same corresponding ratio we now know between the solar system and the Milky Way galaxy, on one hand, and this galaxy and the whole Universe, on the other hand.

Ibn al-Arabi also explained in many occasions that the Constellations are actually moving with relation to the zodiac that lies far deep in the background space, and he said that these stars move with different speeds, or proper velocities, and some of them take one hundred years to move one arc degree, or thirty six thousand years to complete one full revolution. For example he says: ‘The twenty eight known lunar mansions move in the zodiac, ... these mansions and all the stars therein move in their orbs, but their motion is very slow, that it can’t be observed until after thousands of years. It was written in one of the Pyramids of Egypt, that it had been built when (the constellation of) Aquila was in Leo (zone 5), and now it is in Capricorn (zone 10) as we see it now in the year 634 AH (1236 AD)... and these orbs like all others were empty when they were created, but stars appeared in them later.’ [II.676.28-677.22]

However, since our Universe is a product of the Universal Intellect, that is the Single Monad as we have just explained above, and as it is clearly depicted in Figure 4.4; this Universal Intellect is but only one of unknown number of other Roaming Spirits, each of them is capable of making his own Universe in the same manner as the Universal Intellect that is the Single Monad. We will see further in chapter V, that our Universe is a self-contained complex-time space made of seven levels of time, which sum up to a dynamic three dimensional space. Included in our Universe, therefore, are the hidden Universes of Jinns and Angels, which are two-dimensional and one-dimensional, respectively. This means that each two-dimensional plane is a Universe for Jinns, and each one-dimensional line is a Universe for Angels. Likewise, our own three-dimensional sphere is one of many spheres in the whole multiverse of those Roaming Spirits.

The best analogy to understand this comprehensive picture is to imagine the whole creation like an ocean of dynamic Time, or Eternity, and the Universes are like water droplets which got temporarily separated from this ocean, and they are bouncing off its surface and perhaps annihilating back again into their eternal source. As we have introduced in chapter III, this cosmological model combines together all the major views in modern cosmology, including the Steady State, the Oscillating Universe, and the Big Bang, and it goes beyond that by describing where the Big Bang might have come from and what happened before that and what could happen after the possible Big Crunch, as we shall explain all this further in chapters V and VI.