Wahdat al-Wujud

Many have written on wahdat al-wujud, but few have explained it well. Illustrious examples have been used by teachers of the Way to explain what is in reality an experiential point and hopefully we can post some of those articles on this blog soon. Professor Chittick explains the doctrine here very succinctly.

Written by Professor William Chittick. From: [http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/ibn-arabi/]

Ibn ‘Arabî has typically been called the founder of the doctrine of wahdat al-wujûd, the Oneness of Being or the Unity of Existence, but this is misleading, for he never uses the expression. Passages in his writings that approximate it have no special significance, nor are they out of place in the general trend of contemporary philosophy and theology, both of which affirmed the unity of the Necessary Being. Why wahdat al-wujûd was singled out to typify Ibn ‘Arabî's position is not clear. Part of the reason is that he highlights tawhîd as his guiding principle and gives wujûd a special prominence in his vocabulary. It was utterly obvious to him that there is no Real Being but God and that everything other than God is unreal being; this is another way of saying what Avicenna says, that all things are possible or contingent save the Necessary Being. In short, Ibn ‘Arabî, and even more so his followers like Qûnawî, focused on the Real Wujûd as the one, unique reality from which all other reality derives. On the rare occasions when his immediate followers used the expression wahdat al-wujûd, they did not give it a technical sense. The first author to say that Ibn ‘Arabî believed in wahdat al-wujûd seems to have been the Hanbalite polemicist Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), who called it worse than unbelief. According to him, it means that no distinction can be drawn between God and the world. His attack set in motion a long controversy over the term, often with little or no attempt to define it. At least seven different meanings were ascribed to it in the later literature, and Orientalists followed suit, declaring that Ibn ‘Arabî invented the doctrine, and then interpreting it negatively (à la Ibn Taymiyya) or, less commonly, positively (à la ‘Abd al-Rahmân Jâmî [d. 1492], the first of Ibn ‘Arabî's defenders to embrace the expression) (Chittick, 1994b)