The Disclosure of the Intervening Image: Ibn 'Arabi on Death

Abstract

One of the best known and most controversial of Muslim thinkers, Ibn 'Arabi was born in Islamic Spain in 1165. He eventually settled in Damascus, where he taught and wrote for twenty years until his death in 1240. His intellectual radiance quickly spread throughout the Islamic world, from Black Africa and the Balkans to Indonesia and China.2 Despite the fact that reformers and modernists have been targeting him since the nineteenth century as an emblem for every shortcoming of traditional Islamic society, in recent years his influence has been making a comeback. Largely dismissed as incoherent by the early Orientalists, he has been regarded with much more respect by recent scholarship. Underlying Ibn 'Arabi's enormous literary output is the concern to explicate reality in all its dimensions. Although thoroughly rooted in the unifying vision offered by the Koran, he speaks as a universalist and not as a particularist, which helps explain some of the hostility that he stirred up even before our modern age of rampant parochialism and passionate ideology. Far from offering a system,

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