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IBRAHIM'S WISDOM
Ibn 'Arabi titles the chapter on Ibrahim 'The Wisdom of Ecstatic Love in the Ibrahimi Word': hikma muhayyamiyya fi kalima Ibrahimiyya. The adjective muhayyamiyya attached to hikma conveys a basic idea here round which Ibn 'Arabi builds his metaphysical explication of Ibrahim's essential truth: a rapturous, ecstatic, even reckless love through which one loses oneself in another. This loss of self (or transcendence of self) may also imply the effacing of the self's boundaries: loss of self in rapturous love of the other may then mean a final blending which renders the self inextricable from and part of the other. The connotations here remain emotional and personal. Indeed, rapturous love may even be associated with being 'out of one's senses', 'beside oneself' or, 'confused, puzzled, baffled'. But why, one might ask, does Ibn 'Arabi associate Ibrahim with this sort of personal experience and how does this idea serve as the foundation of the sufi metaphysics which Ibn 'Arabi explicates generally in the Fusus and with such sharp clarity in this chapter?
Ibn 'Arabi's wisdom of rapturous, mad love in the word of Ibrahim is for him associated with Ibrahim's status in the Qur'an (4:125) as 'God's friend': 'And God took Ibrahim as a friend' (khalil). Thus does Ibn 'Arabi begin with a comment on Qur'an 4:125: 'Al-khalil is called al-khalil because of his penetrating (takhallul) and encompassing everything by which the divine essence is characterised.' Seeing in the Qur'anic khalil, friend, other associations with that linguistic root (kh-l-l), Ibn 'Arabi has, then, in particular designated the verbal noun takhallul, 'penetrating', 'encompassing', 'pervading', as the root meaning which for him most aptly reflects the deeper Qur'anic sense of Ibrahim’s status as 'friend of God'. This 'language game' for Ibn 'Arabi goes far beyond a simple exercise in word and root association. While there is indeed a playful poetry of language here, emanating from Ibn 'Arabi's deep knowledge of the Arabic language and the Qur'anic text, the meaning of takhallul, as the core of khalil for Ibn 'Arabi, signifies the 'impersonal' and abstract realm of the oneness of being or absolute being. Just as Ibn 'Arabi develops this notion elsewhere in the Fusus, his development of it in relation to Ibrahim begins here. Let us look more carefully at what he has thus far done.
TAKHALLUL
From mad, self-dissolving love, to the more sober notion of 'friend of God', to one who pervades and is himself characterised and pervaded by all the attributes which define the divine essence, this is the bare framework of Ibn 'Arabi's initial interpretative thrust. It incorporates the first two parts of the basic tripartite structure of his discussion, Ibrahim's hikma and the takhallul of God and man. The takhallul, as the philosophical extension of the hikma muhayyamiyya, begins to unlock the metaphysical world by providing some terminology of abstraction rather removed from emotional and personalised love and friendship.
This terminology posits a divine essence (dhat ilahiyya) and divine attributes (sifat), the basic formulation and description of God’s nature found in various trends of Islamic thought. There it conceptually 'divides' God into these 'two spheres': His essence, which usually may not be known to us (the theological perspective), and His attributes, which are the 'face' He presents to His creatures through which they will certainly be capable of knowing and understanding Him in some way. The attributes in this formulation are generally derived from God's names in the Qur'an. As is well-known, many versions of this two-fold conception of understanding God were expressed in Islamic thought, sometimes resulting in fierce intellectual polemics. Particularly contentious was the issue of the relationship between the divine essence and attributes: were the attributes, for example, 'added' to the essence, in which case, according to some, God's oneness might be compromised? Or might some other explanation of this relationship, according to others, obviate the doctrinal danger? Ibn 'Arabi does not here address this aspect of the question. He simply employs the formulation of essence and attributes, in his own way and for his own ends. This is, again, in order further to extend the main issue of the divine-human encounter from the personal to the more abstract, as a basis for his own subsequent, metaphysical explication of the relationship between God and man.
The main difference in Ibn 'Arabi's use of the essence attributes model applied to God from its more 'conventional' use by other thinkers is in the notion that a particular human being (al-khalil, Ibrahim) can enter into and fully possess those attributes which characterise the divine essence. Here man would appear fully to take on the traits of God—an absurd (indeed, dangerous) notion from ordinary theological standpoints. Ibn 'Arabi reinforces and further explicates this idea, first with a brief line from an unnamed poet and then with examples drawn from a discussion of the way ordinary things possess attributes. The line of poetry, 'I have entered the way of the [divine] spirit within me; thus was al-khalil named khalil'. This asserts that man becomes clothed in this divine garb by joining the divine spirit (ruh) within himself (bihi).
