Sh. Muhyiddin Ibn al-ʿArabī

13 Ibn al-ʿArabī's Overall Worldview Rooted in the Real Being

If we look at the overall worldview of the Muslim philosophers, it was not significantly different from that of the Kalam experts or the Sufis.

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What was different was the language in which it was posed and the relative degree to which transmitted knowledge and intellectual knowledge played roles in its formulation.

This general worldview was given its most extensive and elaborate treatment by Ibn al-ʿArabī.

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One of his great contributions was to show that spiritual practice, moral development, ethical foundations, and ritual behavior were all rooted in the same Real Being that was understood as the source of the objective universe by the philosophical tradition. In other words, for him there was no way to justify a sharp separation between ethics and ontology, or subjectivity and objectivity.^[16]