The Chest of Time

At the beginning of chapter 59 of the Meccan Revelations, Ibn al-Arabi explains that Allah, the Exalted, is the First, and there is no first-ness to anything before Him nor to anything else, whether that exists through Him or independent of Him. He is the One, the Unique, in His Firstness, Glory be to Him. There is nothing that is self-existent apart from Him, because He is the All-Sufficient in Himself, absolutely, and Independent of all other beings.

Following Ibn Sina’s familiar theological school, Ibn al-Arabi divides all things, in terms of their type of existence, into three conclusive categories: necessary, possible (or “contingent” ), and impossible [II.293.1, II.575-576]. Only Allah’s existence is described as “Necessary” or Self-Existent, while absolute non-existence is the impossible. the World, on the other hand, is described as “possible” , or potential, because it is possible to exist, but in order to actually come into existence it needs a determining cause who has to be pre-existent and self-existent; none other than Allah. Therefore, the World is originally non-existence that is possible to exist, and it is always in need of the Creator in order to bring it into existence. The difference between absolute non-existence and possible non-existence is that the latter exists in Allah’s Knowledge, even before it actually comes into real existence, and this foreknowledge is eternal because His knowledge is not other than Himself [I.300.32, II.114.15]. So the World, spatial and temporal, eternally existed or was determined in Allah’s knowledge, but it is being continuously brought into real existence ad infinitum. When Allah brings the entities into real existence, He does so for their sake and not for His, because for Him they are still as they were on their spatial and temporal states, but He is only revealing to them their entities and states, one by one, infinitely and successively. So everything is in need of Allah, the Exalted, for the existence of its essence, not for its essence itself, because its essence is eternally fixed, or immutable in Allah’s foreknowledge, as we explained in the constant entities in Chapter IV of Volume III.