Gregory A. Lipton A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at ...

370 Pages·2013·1.89 MB·English

by  بسم الله

MAKING ISLAM FIT
IBN ‘ARABI AND THE IDEA OF SUFISM IN THE WEST

Gregory A. Lipton

A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Religious Studies.

Chapel Hill
2013

Approved by:
Carl W. Ernst
Omid Safi
Tony K. Stewart
Juliane Hammer
Cemil Aydin
© 2013
Gregory A. Lipton
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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ABSTRACT

GREGORY A. LIPTON: Making Islam Fit: Ibn ‘Arabi and the Idea of Sufism in the West
(Under the direction of Carl W. Ernst)

This dissertation explores how the medieval writings of the Andalusian
metaphysician Muhyi al-Din Ibn ‘Arabi (d. 1240) have been read in light of particular
Western interpretive assumptions that presuppose shared transhistorical and transcultural
ideals of religious authenticity. Although Ibn ‘Arabi is commonly portrayed in the West as a
premodern Muslim exemplar of religious pluralism who accepted all revealed religions as
contemporaneously valid, a careful reading of his textual positions brings into focus an
absolutist discourse of supersessionism based upon the exclusive superiority of Islam and its
abrogation of all previous religious dispensations. By analyzing the discursive practices that
have been anachronistically employed and normalized in contemporary universalist
constructions of Ibn ‘Arabi and Sufism, this study aims to throw into relief how such
practices are linked to deeper genealogies of modern European thought, how they create
religious and ethnoracial difference, what kinds of religious subjectivities they authorize, and
what kinds they exclude.

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For Bilal

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter
INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................................ 1

Discourses in Play ......................................................................................................... 2

The Framing Tension: Religious Absolutism and the
Mystical Exception ....................................................................................................... 6

Orientations: Constructing the Discursive Image ......................................................... 9

Chapter Outline ........................................................................................................... 18

PART ONE: IMAGINAL FORMATIONS ..................................................................................... 23

I. IN THE TRIUMPHANT LIGHT OF THE SUN: THE PEOPLE OF THE
BOOK AND IBN ‘ARABI ’S DISCOURSE OF QUALIFIED SUBJUGATION ............................ 24

Approaching Ibn ‘Arabi’s Absolutism: Revisiting the Idea of
“Proper” Mysticism .................................................................................................... 29

Interpreting the Tarjumān: Ibn ‘Arabi’s “Religion” and its
Muhammadan Triumph .............................................................................................. 39

Ibn ‘Arabi and the “Infidelity” of the People of the Book .......................................... 60

Ibn ‘Arabi and the Idea of Sufism in a Ghazalian Age ............................................... 68

Ibn ‘Arabi and the Aporia of “Abrogation” (naskh) ................................................... 75

Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 87

II. MAKING STARS SUNS: IBN ‘ARABI IN THE LIGHT OF
SCHUONIAN PERENNIALISM .................................................................................................. 92

Ibn ‘Arabi, the Perennialist “Tradition,” and the Importance
of Schuon .................................................................................................................... 99

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Ibn ‘Arabi and the Transcendent Unity of Religions:
A Perennialist Imperative ......................................................................................... 109

Schuonian Heliocentrism and Ibn ‘Arabi’s Doctrine of Abrogation ........................ 119

Excursus: Epistemological and Soteriological Universalism ................................... 125

Ibn ‘Arabi and the Question of pre-Qur’anic Scriptural
“Corruption” (taḥrīf) ................................................................................................. 131

The Efficacy of Subjugation: A Heteronomous Model ............................................ 151

Conclusion: A Discursive Field Revealed ................................................................ 153

PART TWO: GENEALOGIES AND IDEAL SUBJECTS .......................................................... 162

III. SEAL OF MARIAN SAINTHOOD: SCHUONIAN ARYANISM AND
THE DE-SEMITIZATION OF IBN ‘ARABI ............................................................................. 163

Approaching Schuon’s Aryanist Discourse .............................................................. 168

The 19th Century Aryan Myth and Schuonian Discursivity ..................................... 176

The Schuonian Aryanization of Christianity and Semitization
of Islam ..................................................................................................................... 188

Putting Ibn ‘Arabi in “Esoteric Context”: The Problem of
Ashʿarism .................................................................................................................. 196

De-Semitizing Ibn ‘Arabi: Finding Vedanta in the Naked Virgin ............................ 207

The Underlying Racism of the Underlying Religion ................................................ 219

Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 231

IV. WITHIN A KANTIAN LOOKING GLASS: REASONABLE SUFISM AND
THE RISE OF IBN ‘ARABI IN THE WESTERN IMAGINARY ........................................... 237

Re-Orienting “Mysticism” via “Reasonable” Sufism ............................................... 242

Discovering Ourselves: The European “Species” of Sufi ......................................... 250

Casting off Cloaks of Servitude: The Kantian Teleology of
“Bare Rational Religion” .......................................................................................... 259

Sufism at the End of History: Otto Pfleiderer and the Triumph of
Kantian Religion ....................................................................................................... 268

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Sufism and W. C. Smith’s Kantian “Mission” of Autonomous Faith ...................... 275

Henry Corbin, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, and Ibn ‘Arabi’s
Persian “Conversion” ................................................................................................ 285

Bernard Lewis, Sufism, and the Kantian Religiosity of
“Judeo-Christian” Civilization .................................................................................. 293

Educating the Muslim Subject: Sufism, Ibn ‘Arabi, and the
“Occidental” Face of God ......................................................................................... 301

Jeffrey Kripal, Ibn ‘Arabi, and Kantian Reform as
“Mystical Denial of Difference” ............................................................................... 307

Conclusion: Ibn ‘Arabi qua Father of Reasonable Sufism and
the End of Semitic Islam ........................................................................................... 312

CONCLUSION

MAKING IBN ‘ARABI FROM ZERO DEGREES: THE QUESTION OF
AUTONOMY AND THE WESTERN IDEA OF UNIVERSALISM ................................................ 317

BIBLIOGRAPHY .............................................................................................................................. 342

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INTRODUCTION

Modernity does not necessarily lead to a decline of religion. What it does lead to,
more or less necessarily, is religious pluralism.1

The following study can be situated as a comparative analysis of religious discourse
broadly construed. It analyzes regnant discourses in the contemporary “Western”2 reception
of the Andalusian metaphysician Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 1240)—or popularly Ibn
ʿArabī—that portray him as a religious pluralist or universalist who accepted all revealed
religions as contemporaneously valid.3 Following the analytical insight that discourse is
determined by that which it excludes,4 this study is built upon a careful and historicized
reading of Ibn ‘Arabi’s textual positions on the religious Other in comparison with prevalent
claims made by some of his most important Western interpreters. Although the weight of

1 Peter L. Berger, “Pluralism, Protestantization, and the Voluntary Principle,” in Democracy and the New
Religious Pluralism, ed. Thomas Banchoff (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 21.
2 Following Talal Asad and Walter Mignolo, I use “Western” and “the West” throughout this study to signify a
critical ideological construct of modernity. As Asad notes, even though the West is not a “verifiable” object or
integrated totality, it remains a global signifier for “innumerable intentions, practices, and discourses” that relate
to a unique historicity claiming to be “the universal civilization.” More specifically, “[t]he West,” according to
Mignolo, “refers to an economic and ideological configuration centered on capitalism, Christianity, and
whiteness […].” See Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Disciplines and Reasons of Power in Christianity
and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 18-19; and Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of
the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003),
435.
3 Ibn ‘Arabi’s full name is Muḥyī al-Dīn Abū ʿAbdallāh Muḥammad b. ʿAlī b. al-ʿArabī al-Ḥātimī al-Ṭāʾī (560-
638 A.H./1165-1240 C.E.). The practice of omitting the definite article “al-“ from “Ibn al-ʿArabī” was
supposedly adopted so as not to confuse him with his fellow Sevillian, the traditionalist Abū Bakr Ibn al-ʿArabī
(d. 1148). See A. Ateş, “Ibn al-ʿArabī,” in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., vol. 3 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1986),
707.
4 Marianne Jørgensen and Louise J. Phillips, “The Field of Discourse Analysis,” in Discourse Analysis as
Theory and Method (London: SAGE Publications, 2002), 27.
such a comparative analysis is brought to bear on individual authors, the chapters that follow
are more concerned with the discursive formations that are (re)produced through their work.
By offering revised readings of Ibn ‘Arabi’s discourse on the religious Other, this study
unfurls a new backdrop against which the discursive practices of his universalist interpreters
are made to stand in sharp relief. The contours that surface enable such practices to be
tracked to deeper lineages of modern European thought and the presuppositions they harbor.
What follows, then, is an attempt to dig out buried formations of religious, ethnoracial, and
civilizational difference that have been normalized within Western universalist discourses on
Ibn ‘Arabi and their accompanying ideas of Sufism. Through critically analyzing the limits of
pluralism imposed in such discourses, this study aims to bring into view how historically
situated ideals frame universalist constructions of religious authenticity, what kinds of
religious subjectivities such ideals authorize, and what kinds they exclude.
Discourses in Play
As the only medieval Muslim “mystic,” or Sufi, to have a Western society—and an
attendant scholarly journal—established in his honor with branches in England and
America,5 the enthusiastic Western reception of Ibn ‘Arabi is exceeded only by that of his
celebrated contemporary Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (d. 1273), who is often cited as the “best-selling”
poet in America.6 While Ibn ‘Arabi is also a revered poet made famous by his verses that
claim to “follow the religion of love,” the bulk of his voluminous corpus is comprised of a
highly specialized and recondite metaphysical prose, making him significantly less accessible

5 I.e., The Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society; see www.ibnarabisociety.org/index.html.
6 Carl W. Ernst, “Situating Sufism and Yoga,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 15, no. 1 (2005): 23.
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than Rumi.7 Nevertheless, Ibn ‘Arabi’s monistic leaning “mysticism” has a long-standing and
popular correlation with the so-called doctrine of “the unity of being” (waḥdat al-wujūd).
While the term was never explicitly used by Ibn ‘Arabi himself, it has come to
emblematically represent his unitive metaphysics, signifying God as the ontological reality of
all things.8
Yet more importantly for this study, Ibn ‘Arabi’s doctrine of “the unity of being” is
often associated in the West with the ostensibly similar concept of “the transcendent unity of
religions”—the emblematic phrase associated with the discourse of the Swiss-German
esotericist Frithjof Schuon (d. 1998) and also the title of his first major work.9 In the second
half of the twentieth century, Schuon not only served as the leader of the first organized
“traditional” European Sufi order (ṭarīqa),10 but upon the death of his French Traditionalist
predecessor René Guénon in 1951, he became the foremost representative of the Perennial
Philosophy (philosophia perennis).11 The Transcendent Unity of Religions (De l’Unité

7 Current estimates on the total number of Ibn ‘Arabi’s works range between 300 to 400 works of varying size
that span only a few pages to his multivolume al-Futūḥāt al-makkiyya (The Meccan Openings). The 2004 Dār
Ṣādir edition of the Futūḥāt that I refer to in this study comprises a total of 2949 pages in small Arabic type. See
Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī, al-Futūḥāt al-makkiyya, 9 vols. (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 2004). See also Alexander D.
Knysh, Ibn ‘Arabi in the Later Islamic Tradition: The Making of a Polemical Image in Medieval Islam (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1999), 9.
8 See William Chittick, “Rūmī and waḥdat al-wujūd,” in Poetry and Mysticism in Islam: The Heritage of Rūmī,
ed. Amin Banani, Richard Hovannisian, and Georges Sabagh (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994),
71, 75, 87, passim.
9 E.g., see Eric Geoffroy, Introduction to Sufism: The Inner Path of Islam (Bloomington: World Wisdom,
2010), 184, 187. See also Thierry Zarcone, “Rereadings and Transformations of Sufism in the West,” Diogenes
47, no. 187 (1999): 116.
10 Under the Muslim name of ʿlsa Nūr ad-Dīn, Schuon headed a European branch of the Shādhiliyya-ʿAlāwiyya
tarīqa founded by Ahmad al-ʿAlāwī in Mostaganem, Algeria. See Mark J. Sedgwick, “The ‘Traditionalist’
Shâdhiliyya in the West: Guénonians and Schuonians,” in Une voie soufie dans le monde: la Shâdhiliyya, ed.
Eric Geoffroy (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2005), 461-64.
11 Seyyed Hossein Nasr, “Frithjof Schuon and the Islamic Tradition,” in The Essential Sophia, ed. Seyyed
Hossein Nasr and Katherine O’Brien (Bloomington: World Wisdom, 2006), 258.
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