The totality of our being is not only the part which we at present call our person, for this totality also includes another person, a transcendent counterpart which remains invisible to us, what Ibn Arabi designates as our 'eternal individuality' our divine name.
Quotes about arabi (6 Quotes)
When Sufism was at loggerheads with the legalitarian Islam embodied by the doctors of the Law, known as the fuqaha', according to Henry Corbin ... Ibn Arabi made no secret of his disgust at their stupidity, ignorance, and depravity, and such an attitude was not calculated to win their favor. The tension rose, giving rise to denunciations and arrests our shaikh was in mortal peril. At this critical moment the irreducible antagonism between the spiritual Islam of Sufism and legalitarian Islam became patent. Saved by the intervention of a friendly shaikh, Ibn Arabi had but one concern, to flee far from Cairo and its hateful, bigoted canonists. Where was he to seek refuge He returned to Meca (1207).
... Ibn Arabi distinguishes between Allah as God in general and Rabb as the particular Lord, personalized in an individualized and undivided relation with his vassal of love. This individualized relationship on both sides is the foundation of the mystic and chivalric ethic of the fedel d'amore in the service of the personal Lord whose divinity depends on the adoration of his faithful vassal.... It is the passion that the fedele d'amore feels for his Lord which reveals the Lord to Himself. And this always individually, in an 'alone to alone,' which is something very different from universal logic or from a collective participation, because only the knowledge which the fedele has of his Lord is the knowledge which this personal Lord has of him.
He who is the disciple of Khidr possesses sufficient inner strength to seek freely the teaching of all masters. Of this the biography of Ibn Arabi, who frequented all the masters of his day and welcomed their teachings, offers living proof.
Averroes (an integrist Aristotelian master) What manner of solution have you found through divine illumination and inspiration Is it identical with that which we obtain from speculative reflection Ibn Arabi (a young man about 20 years old) Yes and no. Between the yes and the no, spirits take their flight from their matter, and heads are separated from their bodies. Averroes (in a private interview with Ibn Arabi's father) Glory be to God who has let me live at a time distinguished by one of the masters of this experience i.e. Ibn Arabi, one of those who open the locks of His gates. Glory be to God who has accorded me the personal favor of seeing one of them with my own eyes.
Ibn Arabi was above all the disciple of Khidr an invisible master... such a relationship with a hidden spiritual master lends the disciple an essentially 'transhistorical' dimension and presupposes an ability to experience events which are enacted in a reality other than the physical reality of daily life, events which spontaneously transmute themselves into symbols.