'Arabî and the Mi'râj - Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society

41whoever really knows the Truly Real. So where are you going? It is only a reminder to theworlds (Kor. 81:26-27) of the way things are!"Perfection is nothing but its (or 'His') 141 existence,So whoever misses it is not the perfect one.... 142141 kawnuhu: the term kawn usually refers to the engendered, manifest state of being (translated as"existence" here), so the most obvious reference, given the preceding context, is to the external "world" orwhole manifest "universe" (al-'alam). But as so frequently in Ibn 'Arabi, the pronouns in this verse couldalso be taken, without any ultimate contradiction, to refer either to God (al-haqq, the Truly Real) or evento the human "observer"--i.e., man in his ultimate reality as the "Perfect Man," which may well be what isindicated by "the perfect one" (al-kamil) at the end.142 The concluding, untranslated lines allude to the well-known dangers and illusions involved intaking the ecstatic experience of "extinction" (fana') of the self in contemplation of God as the ultimategoal and highest stage of the spiritual path, at least in this world. This caution, which is probablyconnected with the title of this chapter (see notes 27 and 39 above), is amplified and repeated in thefollowing encounter with Moses (section IV-G), and it is also an important theme in the passage from theK. al-Isra' translated in our article cited at n. 13 above. Although the subject of Aaron's remark is aconstantly repeated theme in Ibn 'Arabi's writing, it should be stressed that those dangers and the ultimatesuperiority of the saints' subsequent "enlightened abiding" (baqa') in the world, as exemplified above allin the life of Muhammad, were likewise stressed almost unanimously in earlier Sufi literature andpractice.The intensity and centrality of Ibn 'Arabi's insistence on the realization of the nature andimportance of this "world" as an essential aspect of human perfection (kamal)--and indeed as the essentialgrounds of man's superiority to the angels and purely spiritual beings--can best be measured bycomparing his writings to the familiar currents of "monistic" mysticism, such as the Sufism of Ibn 'Arabi'sAndalusian contemporary, Ibn Sab'in. See, among others, the careful comparison of these twoperspectives--which have their parallels in many other mystical traditions--in the translation and study ofthe Epitre sur l'Unicite Absolue (R. al-Ahadiya) of Awhad al-Din Balyani (a 13th-century Persian Sufi inthe school of Ibn Sab'in) by M. Chodkiewicz, Paris, 1982.