On 14 Apr 2007 04:56:20 -0700, "LUV4ALL-hatred4none"
<mzfr1111@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
> Peace be upon you and your loved ones!
>
Thank you !
I read that Ibn Arabi preached a universal pantheistic religion which
comprises all religions and unites all beliefs.
The following paragraphs are from:
The Rational and Mystical Interpretations of Islam by A. E. Affifi
http://www.religion-online.org/showchapter.asp?title=1656&C=1640
Pantheism did not appear in Muslim mysticism -- or at least not in a
systematic form -- before Muhy al-Din Ibn Arabi (died 638; AD. 1240),
the greatest of all Arabic-speaking mystics of Islam. Pantheistic
tendencies were seen as early as the third century, for instance in
some of the utterances of Bayazid of Bistam (died 261; AD. 875), but
they were not worked out into a consistent pantheistic doctrine. Ibn
Arabi, on the other hand, was the first to produce a full-fledged
pantheistic philosophy which left its indelible marks on the whole of
Sufism ever since his time. The fundamental principle of this
philosophy is the principle of the unity of all Being. His
understanding of this principle is best summed up in his own words:
"Glory to God who created all things, being Himself their very
essence." In his Fusus he says,
O Thou who created all things in Thyself,
Thou unitest that which Thou createst.
Thou createst what existeth infinitely
In Thee, for Thou art the narrow and the All-embracing.
In Islamic pantheism the phenomenal world is reduced to a mere shadow
of reality, and God is regarded as the only real Being who is the
ultimate ground of all that was, is, and will be. There is no actual
duality of God and the phenomenal world, but there is an apparent
duality asserted by the unaided intellect, which is incapable of
comprehending the essential unity of the whole. It is at most a
duality of aspects of One Being -- not of two independent beings.
Looking at the two aspects within one whole, reality is both God and
the universe, the One and the many, the transcendent and the immanent,
the internal and the external. If we think -- as we usually do -- in
terms of duality, we predicate of Reality all pairs of opposite
attributes. But mystic intuition asserts that God is the only Real
Being who is above all description and qualifying attributes, and the
world is a mere illusion.
There is therefore a definite place for God in this philosophy,
although in some respects He is far removed from the God of Islam. Ibn
Arabi makes a distinction which is the dividing line between his
metaphysical theory and his theology; it is a distinction between God
as the unknowable and incommunicable Reality, and God as the object of
belief, wor****p, and love. His conception of God as the object of
belief comes very close to that of the ordinary monotheist, but the
gap between pantheism and strict Muslim monotheism was too great for
him to bridge. God is the object of wor****p not in the sense that He
is exclusively the God of the Muslims, the Christians, or the
adherents of any other religion, but in the sense that He is the
Essence of everything that is wor****ped. He is not to be confined to
any particular form of belief or creed. Everything that is wor****ped
is one of the infinite number of forms in which He reveals Himself. To
confine Him to one particular form to the exclusion of all other forms
is infidelity, and to acknowledge Him in all forms of wor****p is the
true spirit of religion.
This is the universal religion which the pantheistic Ibn Arabi
preaches, a religion which comprises all religions and unites all
beliefs. In his Tarjumanu al-Ashwaq he expresses this conviction,
My heart has become a receptacle of every form;
It is a pasture for gazelles and a convent for Christian monks,
And a temple for idols, and pilgrims’ Ka‘ba,
And the Tablets of the Torah and the Book of the Qur’an.
I follow the religion of love whichever way its camels take;
For this is my religion and my faith.
The religion of love, according to Ibn Arabi, is religion in its
widest and most universal sense. All wor****pers do in fact wor****p
God, although they appear to wor****p their particular gods. And since
love is the essence of wor****p -- for to wor****p is to love to the
extreme -- and since the objects of wor****p are nothing but the
external manifestations of God, it follows that God is both the
supremely beloved and the supremely wor****ped One.
Some alternative pantheist sites:
http://www.pantheism.net
http://www.pantheist.net
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