The Seals of Wisdom

Description

This work will, we are convinced, reach two groups in the present culture and affect them profoundly. One, the personal seeker who wishes to learn the true science of the sufis and not a zionist-orchestrated fantasy of sufic-dancing devoid of either method or system – and two, those scientists who are searching for an underlying framework which allows them to view the multiplicity of existence, the realms of form, while recognising that reality is One.

Mention should also be made of Ibn al-Arabi’s place in the Muslim world today. It is a recognisable sign of the times and an indication of how deeply politics is embedded in the groves of academic that the modern arab is brought up programmed to denounce Ibn al-Arabi by emotive dismissal while in almost every case not having read one of his vast opus which includes over three hundred volumes. I have never met any intellectual opposition to Ibn al-Arabi’s system. I have encountered inadequate philosophical assessments which attempt to reduce his dynamic over-view to a flat two-dimensional Aristotelian grid, and I have encountered vituperative and often irrational attacks which dominant flavour was antipathy rather than disagreement. Hostility is never a sound basis for either argument or illumination of a subject.

Lastly, it is our hope that by the publication of this work in English the Muslim community will cease repeating the slogans they took from the western propagandists that Ibn al-Arabi was a monist who denied the “otherness” of the object. His teaching is nowhere naïve as it is nowhere pantheist. Individual statements of his out of context can appear quite staggering but they must be seen within their setting. Sometimes that setting is a series of deliberate contradictions. Sometimes it is made in a series of negations to drive the intellect to a point where definition collapses. The intention then is never anarchic but specific. It is the intention of the Greatest Master to awaken in the intellect of the seeker that state of bewilderment from which there IS no exit – for there is no dilemma to get out of, as there is no one to get out of it. But already we have abolished the object? No. The reader must make the journey and find out for himself or herself.

From the Introduction by Shaykh Abdal Qadir as-Sufi

13.2 x 21.6 cm. 207 pages

Shaykh Ibn al-‘Arabi

Ibn al-‘Arabi, the Shaykh al-Akbar, the Sultan of the gnostics Muhyiddin Muhammad ibn ‘Ali al-Hatimi at-Ta’i al-Andalusi, was born in Murcia on 17th Ramadan, 560 Hijra, and died in Damascus on 22 Rabi‘ al-Akhar, 638 Hijra.

Shaykh Sayyidi ‘Abd al-Wahhab ash-Sha‘rani wrote a biography of him in his Tabaqat and said, “Among them was the Shaykh, the perfect gnostic, the realised, one of the gnostics of Allah, Sayyidi Muhyiddin Ibn al-‘Arabi, may Allah be pleased with him. The realised among the people of Allah – may He be magnified and exalted! – joined in respecting him in all the knowledges, as his books bear witness to that. None reject him except because of the fineness of his words.”

In the introduction to the book, The Rubies and Jewels in the Clarification of the Beliefs of the Great, by Sayyidi ‘Abd al-Wahhab ash-Sha‘rani, he says:

“He, Ibn al-‘Arabi, may Allah be pleased with him, followed the Book and the Sunna. He said, ‘Whoever casts the balance of the shari‘a from his hand for an instant is destroyed.’ He said, ‘All that occurs to your mind, Allah ta‘ala is different from that.’ This is the creed of the Muslim community until the Hour comes.”

The text of the book