101 Hadith Qudsi by pImam ibn Arabi

hadith and ibn ¡arabi
It is true that in other works he quotes some ¢ad¨th and ¢ad¨th quds¨ which
have been disputed by scholars on the grounds that their historical chains of
transmission are inadequate. An obvious example is the saying, “I was like a
hidden treasure, and I loved to be known; so I created the world that I might
be known.” Ibn ¡Arab¨ states that he knew this to be sound by spiritual unveiling.
21 However, he did not confuse one kind of knowledge with another,
and ¢ad¨th quds¨ of that kind are not included in this book.
Transmission and reception
In this translation the sayings are presented in the English translation in
their simplest form. That is, the list of people involved in their transmission
is reduced to the minimum in the text, so that the actual sense of the Divine
Saying may be seen as clearly as possible. Many of these ¢ad¨th appear in
collections that had been written down hundreds of years earlier, but for Ibn
¡Arab¨ the process of receiving them was primarily through person-to-person
communication.
Concerning the ¥rst collection of forty ¢ad¨th, Ibn ¡Arab¨ says, “Most
of them I have collected from my companions, and transmitted them on
the authority of the teacher from whom they themselves received them.”
At the end of the ¥rst section, Ibn ¡Arab¨ mentions that he has included in
the lists of transmitters of the ¢ad¨th the names of those companions who
related these ¢ad¨th to him, so that they might also be accounted “learned
and knowing”.
The chains of transmission (isnåd) which Ibn ¡Arab¨ gives are mainly found
in the ¥rst section of forty ¢ad¨th. These isnåds provide the names of all those
mu¢addith¬n (transmitters) from whom Ibn ¡Arab¨ personally received the
¢ad¨th in question, in a line that stretches back to the Prophet, the original
transmitter from God. Eleven different contemporaries are mentioned
as those who transmitted to him personally, although in fact two of them
(marked below with an asterisk) did so only on the authority of the agency
of another. These eleven direct links between Ibn ¡Arab¨ and the rest of the
chain can for the most part be identi¥ed, and a brief biographical sketch is
given here for each of them. The numbers in brackets refer to the number
of the ¢ad¨th in the text of the Mishkåt, where the name of the transmitter
in question appears.
21. This ¢ad¨th, which he often quotes, “is sound on the basis of unveiling (kashf ), but
not established by way of transmission (naql)” (Fut.|II.|399, l.|28).
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