Themes & resonances

Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam→al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī, The Life of the Friends of God (Sīrat al-awliyāʾ): the seal of sainthoodLineagefirm

Ibn ʿArabī took up the question of a seal of the saints from al-Tirmidhī, whose questions on the subject he answered at length in the Futūḥāt. The two Seals of chapter 2 develop that inherited question.

✓ Michel Chodkiewicz, Seal of the Saints: Prophethood and Sainthood in the Doctrine of Ibn ʿArabī (1993)

Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam→al-Ghazālī, The Niche of Lights: Adam's abridged formResonance, not influenceprobable

Both authors read the report that God created Adam in His form: al-Ghazālī as an abridged copy of all the world, Ibn ʿArabī as the gathering of the two hands. We claim no dependence here.

Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam→al-Ghazālī, The Niche of Lights: union by metaphorContrastprobable

Al-Ghazālī warns that the gnostics' sayings of union are only a resemblance of union. Chapter 3 says 'You are not He; nay, you are He', holding both statements at once.

al-Fātiḥa→Ibn ʿArabī, Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam and al-Futūḥāt al-makkiyya: the divine names and the name al-RaḥmānLineagefirm

Ibn ʿArabī builds his account of creation on the divine names, and he gives the name All-Merciful a governing place: in the Meccan Openings the Throne is where that name settles. He read and commented on the Quran constantly, and the Fātiḥa's pairing of names is part of the material he works from.

✓ William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-ʿArabī's Metaphysics of Imagination (1989) · William C. Chittick, The Self-Disclosure of God: Principles of Ibn al-ʿArabī's Cosmology (1998)

al-Fātiḥa→The Sufi teaching of the point under the letter bāʾ of the basmalaLineageprobable

A saying widely attributed to ʿAlī holds that the whole Quran is in the Fātiḥa, the Fātiḥa in the basmala, and the basmala in the dot beneath its first letter. The Prayer of Effusion attributed to Ibn ʿArabī calls the Prophet 'the point of the Basmala' in this line of thought.

✓ Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (1975)

Faṣṣ Ādam→al-Ghazālī, The Niche of Lights: Adam's abridged form and 'in His form'Shared sourceprobable

Both al-Ghazālī and Ibn ʿArabī read the hadith that God created Adam in His form as saying the human gathers in small what the cosmos holds at large, though al-Ghazālī stops short of the mirror in which the Real sees Himself.

✓ William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-ʿArabi's Metaphysics of Imagination (1989)

Faṣṣ Shīth→al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī, Khatm al-awliyāʾ (The Seal of the Saints)Lineagefirm

The idea of a seal of sainthood alongside the seal of prophecy was set out by the ninth-century Sufi al-Tirmidhī, and Ibn ʿArabī read his work and answered his list of questions at length in the Futūḥāt. The doctrine of the Seal in this chapter builds on that earlier treatise.

✓ Michel Chodkiewicz, Le Sceau des saints: prophétie et sainteté dans la doctrine d'Ibn Arabî (1986) · Bernd Radtke and John O'Kane, The Concept of Sainthood in Early Islamic Mysticism (1996)

Faṣṣ Nūḥ→al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī, on God as Owner of the possession (mālik al-mulk)Lineagefirm

Ibn ʿArabī names al-Tirmidhī as his source for calling God the Owner of the very possession He delegates to His servants. His close reading of al-Tirmidhī, including answers to the questions al-Tirmidhī posed, is documented.

✓ Claude Addas, Quest for the Red Sulphur: The Life of Ibn ʿArabī (1993)

Faṣṣ Nūḥ→Ibn ʿArabī, Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam, chapters on Adam and Seth: the mirror in which one sees one's own formLineageprobable

The claim that the one who inclines toward the Real sees only his own form in Him develops the mirror teaching of the Seth chapter, where the one to whom the Real discloses Himself sees nothing but his own form. The recurrence of this teaching across Ibn ʿArabī's works is set out in standard scholarship.

✓ William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-ʿArabi's Metaphysics of Imagination (1989)

Faṣṣ Nūḥ→al-Ghazālī, Mishkāt al-anwār: 'Wherever you turn, there is the Face of God'Resonance, not influenceprobable

Both read Q 2:115 as saying that every existent has a face turned to God, though al-Ghazālī keeps a distinction between what is real in itself and what borrows its being, which Ibn ʿArabī here extends to every object of worship.

Faṣṣ Idrīs→Abū l-Qāsim ibn Qasī, Khalʿ al-naʿlayn (The Doffing of the Sandals)Lineagefirm

Ibn ʿArabī names Ibn Qasī and his Khalʿ al-naʿlayn as the source of the teaching that every divine name is named by all the divine names. This is a direct citation of an earlier Andalusian Sufi author whose work he knew.

✓ Michael Ebstein, Mysticism and Philosophy in al-Andalus: Ibn Masarra, Ibn al-ʿArabī and the Ismāʿīlī Tradition (2014) · Claude Addas, Quest for the Red Sulphur: The Life of Ibn ʿArabī (1993)

Faṣṣ Idrīs→Abū Saʿīd al-Kharrāz (d. c. 286/899): God known only by bringing opposites togetherLineageprobable

The chapter quotes the early Baghdad Sufi al-Kharrāz for the saying that God is known only through combining opposites, and makes Kharrāz himself one of the faces of the Real. Ibn ʿArabī builds his reading of Q 57:3 on this inherited saying.

✓ William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-ʿArabi's Metaphysics of Imagination (1989)

Faṣṣ Idrīs→al-Ghazālī, Mishkāt al-anwār: 'God is greater' in no relationResonance, not influenceprobable

al-Ghazālī reads Allāhu akbar to mean that God is greater than being called greater by comparison, since nothing stands beside Him. Ibn ʿArabī makes the same move with the name the High: high over whom, when nothing is there but He.

Faṣṣ Idrīs→al-Qushayrī, al-Risāla: union (jamʿ) and separation (farq)Resonance, not influenceprobable

The chapter closes with the command 'gather and separate', using the pair jamʿ and farq that al-Qushayrī defines among the Sufis' terms: separation sees the servant's acts, union sees all as from God. Ibn ʿArabī turns the pair from a description of states into a way of reading the one entity and its many forms.

Faṣṣ Ibrāhīm→Ibn Masarra of Cordoba (d. 319/931)Lineagefirm

Ibn ʿArabī cites Ibn Masarra by name for placing Abraham with the angel Michael over provisions. This places the chapter inside a documented Andalusian line of reading that runs from Ibn Masarra to Ibn ʿArabī.

✓ Miguel Asín Palacios, Abenmasarra y su escuela: orígenes de la filosofía hispano-musulmana (1914)

Faṣṣ Ibrāhīm→al-Ghazālī, The Niche of Lights: those who see God first and then thingsContrastfirm

Ibn ʿArabī names Abū Ḥāmid as holding that God is known without reflection on the cosmos, and he calls this an error: a bare eternal Essence can be known that way, but its being a god is known only through those over whom it is god. In the Niche, al-Ghazālī ranks highest the one who sees God first and the things through Him, and lower the one who infers Him from things.

Faṣṣ Ibrāhīm→al-Ghazālī, The Niche of Lights: union as metaphor, oneness in truthContrastprobable

Al-Ghazālī treats the ecstatics' talk of union as speech that resembles union and is not to be taken as identity. Ibn ʿArabī states a two-way permeation in which each side carries the other's attributes by right, while his commentators insist that this is no indwelling (ḥulūl).

Faṣṣ Isḥāq→The hadith qudsī 'My heavens and My earth do not contain Me, but the heart of My believing servant contains Me', and Abū Yazīd al-Bisṭāmī on the gnostic's heartLineageprobable

The chapter quotes Abū Yazīd's saying about the Throne lost in a corner of the gnostic's heart and builds on the report of the heart that contains God; Chittick documents how Ibn ʿArabī develops the heart's capacity (wusʿ) from these sources.

✓ William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-ʿArabi's Metaphysics of Imagination (1989)

Faṣṣ Isḥāq→al-Ḥallāj, the saying 'I am the Real' (anā al-ḥaqq)Lineageprobable

The chapter takes up Ḥallāj's famous saying and grants it a limited truth, while heedlessness marks the speaker off from the Real; Massignon documents the saying and its long reception among later Sufis, Ibn ʿArabī among them.

✓ Louis Massignon, La Passion d'al-Hosayn-ibn-Mansour al-Hallaj, martyr mystique de l'Islam (1922)

Faṣṣ Isḥāq→al-Ghazālī, The Niche of Lights: the symbol (mithāl) and dream interpretationResonance, not influenceprobable

Al-Ghazālī also treats the dream image as a symbol to be carried over to its meaning, as when the sun seen in sleep is read as the sultan, and sets the visible world as a likeness of the unseen. The two accounts of taʿbīr sit side by side here as kindred readings.

Faṣṣ Isḥāq→al-Qushayrī, Epistle: absence (ghayba) and presence (ḥuḍūr)Resonance, not influenceprobable

Qushayrī's terms for the heart's presence with the Real and its absence from creatures describe the same field of attention that this chapter turns into a criterion: the servant is always absent from something.

Faṣṣ ʿĪsā→al-Ḥallāj: the pair lāhūt and nāsūtShared sourceprobable

Ibn ʿArabī uses the pair lāhūt and nāsūt, which al-Ḥallāj had used before him; both took the terms from the Christological vocabulary of Syriac and Arabic Christianity, and Ibn ʿArabī redefines them as the life pervading things and the locus that receives it.

✓ Louis Massignon, La passion d'al-Hosayn-ibn-Mansour al-Hallaj, martyr mystique de l'Islam (1922)

Faṣṣ ʿĪsā→al-Ghazālī, The Niche of Lights: 'He is his hearing, his sight and his tongue'Shared sourcefirm

Both read the same ḥadīth of the supererogatory works: al-Ghazālī to explain the gnostics' sense of union, Ibn ʿArabī to say that God speaks on Jesus's tongue and witnesses through him.

✓ William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-ʿArabi's Metaphysics of Imagination (1989)

al-Futūḥāt al-makkiyya→al-Ghazālī's saying: 'there is not in possibility anything more wondrous than what is'Lineagefirm

Passage 27 cites 'the Imām Abū Ḥāmid' by name for the claim that nothing more wondrous than this world remained possible. This claim became the subject of a long controversy, and the Book of Circles quotes the same saying.

✓ Eric L. Ormsby, Theodicy in Islamic Thought: The Dispute over al-Ghazālī's "Best of All Possible Worlds" (1984)

al-Futūḥāt al-makkiyya→Ibn ʿArabī's Andalusian and Maghribi masters, and his arrival at Mecca in 598/1202Lineageprobable

The long letter to his friend in Tunis (passages 45-68) belongs to the same world of named masters that Ibn ʿArabī portrays in the Spirit of Holiness. His biographer reconstructs this circle and the circumstances in which the Futūḥāt was begun at Mecca.

✓ Claude Addas, Ibn ʿArabî ou la quête du Soufre Rouge (1989)

Inshāʾ al-dawāʾir→Ibn ʿArabī, Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam, Ringstone of Adam: the perfect human and vicegerencyLineageprobable

The human being who gathers every divine name and every level of the world, and is therefore vicegerent, is the early doctrine of this book (passages 51 to 54). Ibn ʿArabī restates it decades later in the Fuṣūṣ.

✓ William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-ʿArabi's Metaphysics of Imagination (1989)

Inshāʾ al-dawāʾir→Ibn ʿArabī, Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam, Ringstone of Noah: joining tanzīh and tashbīhLineageprobable

The circles of transcendence and similarity drawn here (passages 55 to 57) set out the doctrine that the Ringstone of Noah later states in argument: declaring God incomparable alone delimits Him, and the knower joins both declarations.

✓ William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-ʿArabi's Metaphysics of Imagination (1989)

Inshāʾ al-dawāʾir→Ibn ʿArabī, al-Futūḥāt al-makkiyya: the realities brought into being according to the namesLineageprobable

The council of the Imam-Names that ask for the world to exist (passages 84 to 89) is told again in the Futūḥāt, where creation proceeds according to the number and order of the divine names.

✓ William C. Chittick, The Self-Disclosure of God: Principles of Ibn al-ʿArabī's Cosmology (1998)

Inshāʾ al-dawāʾir→al-Ghazālī, Mishkāt al-anwār: Adam given an abridged form that gathers all the worldResonance, not influenceprobable

Both texts read the report that God created Adam upon His form as meaning that the human being is a compendium of the world and a symbol of the divine. Al-Ghazālī speaks of an abridged copy, and Ibn ʿArabī of two copies, one outward and one inward.

Rūḥ al-quds→Ibn ʿArabī, al-Futūḥāt al-makkiyya: the Abyssinian companion ʿAbd Allāh BadrLineagefirm

ʿAbd Allāh Badr al-Ḥabashī, who travels with Ibn ʿArabī through several of these portraits, is the same companion praised in the introduction to the Meccan Openings. The two texts belong to one documented circle of teachers and companions.

✓ Claude Addas, Quest for the Red Sulphur: The Life of Ibn ʿArabī (1993)

Rūḥ al-quds→Abū Madyan Shuʿayb (d. 1198) and the Maghribi Sufism of his circleLineagefirm

Abū Madyan is the master behind many of these portraits. Al-Kūmī, al-Mawrūrī and Mūsā al-Sīdarānī were his companions, and Ibn ʿArabī received messages from him without ever meeting him. The book is one of the main sources for his circle.

✓ Vincent J. Cornell, The Way of Abū Madyan: Doctrine and Poetry (1996) · Vincent J. Cornell, Realm of the Saint: Power and Authority in Moroccan Sufism (1998)

Rūḥ al-quds→al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī, Sīrat al-awliyāʾ (The Life of the Friends of God), on the hierarchy of saintsLineageprobable

The Pillars and Substitutes named here belong to a doctrine of hidden saintly ranks that Ibn ʿArabī develops from earlier Sufi writing, and Tirmidhī's treatise is a chief source he engaged. His own Seal of the saints, in the Ringstone of Seth, builds on the same doctrine.

✓ Michel Chodkiewicz, Le Sceau des saints: prophétie et sainteté dans la doctrine d'Ibn Arabî (1986) · Bernd Radtke and John O'Kane, The Concept of Sainthood in Early Islamic Mysticism (1996)

Rūḥ al-quds→al-Qushayrī, al-Risāla (The Epistle on Sufism)Lineageprobable

Ibn ʿArabī names the Epistle himself, saying he had met the Way through a living master before he had read it. The Risāla, with its lives of the early Sufis, is the standard model that his collection of portraits both follows and sets against a living experience.

✓ R. W. J. Austin, Sufis of Andalusia: The Rūḥ al-quds and al-Durrat al-fākhirah of Ibn ʿArabī (1971)

Rūḥ al-quds→al-Ghazālī, The Niche of Lights: the heart as a lampResonance, not influencesuggestive

Ibn ʿArabī sees al-Kūmī in a dream with his breast split open and a lamp shining inside it like the sun, and al-Rundī is found at prayer as a column of light. These images recall al-Ghazālī's exposition of the lamp of the Light Verse, although the text does not cite him here.

Awrād: Sunday→Ibn ʿArabī, Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam, Ringstone of Seth, and the Meccan Openings: the one who looks sees only his own formResonance, not influencefirm

Passage 18 ('I have witnessed none other than myself in my passing away and my subsistence') states in prayer what Ibn ʿArabī sets out in doctrine elsewhere: the one to whom the Real discloses Himself sees his own form in the mirror of the Real, and the youth at the Kaʿba tells him 'you witness only your own entity'.

Awrād: Sunday→Ibn ʿArabī, Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam, Ringstone of Noah: joining tanzīh and tashbīhResonance, not influencefirm

The questions 'How shall I know You, when You are the Inward... how shall I not know You, when You are the Outward' put into the form of address the author's argument in the Ringstone of Noah that declaring God incomparable alone, or similar alone, delimits Him, and that knowledge joins the two.

Awrād: Sunday→al-Ghazālī, Mishkāt al-anwār: passing away from passing away, and oneness when multiplicity is liftedResonance, not influenceprobable

Both describe a state in which the self ceases to be seen and only God is witnessed. Al-Ghazālī keeps it as a state of the knower, called union only by metaphor, while the litany states outright that the Existent is He and 'there is no thing'.

Awrād: Sunday→ʿAbd Allāh al-Anṣārī al-Harawī, Manāzil al-sāʾirīn: closing verses on tawḥīdResonance, not influenceprobable

Al-Anṣārī ends his book of stations with verses saying that no one affirms the oneness of the One, since whoever affirms it sets himself beside Him, and that His oneness is His own affirmation of it. Passage 16 of the litany makes the same claim: 'none has affirmed Your Oneness but You'.

al-Dawr al-aʿlā→The love path of the library: love that runs both waysResonance, not influenceprobable

The curated love path stops at this prayer's sixth section, where Q 5:54 'He loves them and they love Him' is invoked. Beside it stand Ibn ʿArabī's Tarjumān, where the beloved says she is witnessed within the lover's heart, and Ibn al-Fāriḍ's wine drunk in remembrance of the Beloved.

al-Dawr al-aʿlā→al-Ghazālī, The Niche of Lights: 'He is his hearing, his sight' and the friends of GodResonance, not influenceprobable

The prayer asks to be taken into care 'with sainthood' (wilāya) by the Protecting Friend (al-Walī). al-Ghazālī describes the friend of God in whom God becomes the hearing and the sight, the fullest form of the protection that the litany asks for in outward terms.

al-Ṣalāt al-fayḍiyya→Sahl al-Tustarī: the primordial light of Muḥammad (nūr Muḥammad)Lineageprobable

The idea that Muḥammad is a light brought forth before creation, from which the cosmos proceeds, was developed in early Sufism by al-Tustarī and became part of the long tradition of blessings on the Prophet in which this prayer stands.

✓ Gerhard Böwering, The Mystical Vision of Existence in Classical Islam: The Qurʾānic Hermeneutics of the Ṣūfī Sahl At-Tustarī (d. 283/896) (1980) · Annemarie Schimmel, And Muhammad Is His Messenger: The Veneration of the Prophet in Islamic Piety (1985)

al-Ṣalāt al-fayḍiyya→al-Ghazālī, Mishkāt al-anwār: God hidden by the intensity of His lightResonance, not influencefirm

Al-Ghazālī argues that the divine light is hidden because it is too manifest, and he reads 'wherever you turn, there is the Face of God' as the gnostic's vision. The prayer says God's hiddenness is the intensity of His manifestation and asks to see His face wherever one turns. Both work from the same Quranic verses; direct borrowing is not claimed here.

Taqdīs al-shams→al-Ghazālī, The Niche of Lights: God hidden by the intensity of His lightResonance, not influencefirm

al-Ghazālī argues that light is manifestness and that God's light is hidden because of its intensity and because nothing contrasts with it. The prayer says the same thing in address: You have veiled Yourself by the very intensity of Your manifestness. The texts share the Light Verse and the vocabulary of manifestness; this entry claims no direct dependence.

Ḥayy (Ibn Sīnā)→al-Ghazālī, The Niche of Lights: God hidden by the intensity of His manifestnessLineageprobable

Ḥayy's King, whose manifestness is the cause of his hiddenness, returns in al-Ghazālī's argument that the divine light is hidden because it is too manifest and never absent; scholars have traced the Avicennan foundations of al-Ghazālī's account of mystical knowledge.

✓ Alexander Treiger, Inspired Knowledge in Islamic Thought: Al-Ghazālī's Theory of Mystical Cognition and Its Avicennian Foundation (2012)

Risālat al-Ṭayr→al-Ghazālī, The Niche of Lights, and the hadith of the veils of light and darknessResonance, not influenceprobable

Both texts arrange the approach to God as a passage through successive veils. al-Ghazālī orders them as ranks of light and darkness; Ibn Sīnā builds them as palace courtyards, each wider than the one before.

al-Ghurba al-gharbiyya→al-Ghazālī, The Niche of Lights: the Light of lights and the lamp of the Light VerseResonance, not influenceprobable

Both place a graded hierarchy of lights beneath a Light of lights and read the lamp with its oil from the Light Verse as a figure of the soul; the tale's lamp whose light spreads through the house and its One 'above the above and the light of light' sit close to al-Ghazālī's ordering of borrowed lights.

al-Ghurba al-gharbiyya→Ibn ʿArabī, The Meccan Openings: the youth met at the KaʿbaResonance, not influenceprobable

In both works the seeker meets a luminous figure at a sacred height whose radiance overwhelms him to the point of swoon or effacement, and who then instructs him about his own reality.

Ḥayy (Ibn Ṭufayl)→al-Ghazālī, Mishkāt al-anwār (The Niche of Lights): the ecstatic sayings of the knowers and the last class of the veiledLineagefirm

Ibn Ṭufayl cites the Niche by name, discusses its closing section on those who have arrived, and repeats the saying 'Glory be to me' that al-Ghazālī treats as spoken in a state resembling union.

✓ Lenn Evan Goodman, Ibn Tufayl's Hayy Ibn Yaqzan: A Philosophical Tale (1972)

Mishkāt al-anwār→Abū Yazīd al-Bisṭāmī and al-Ḥallāj: the ecstatic sayings 'Glory be to me' and 'I am the Real'Lineagefirm

al-Ghazālī quotes these utterances and treats them as the speech of lovers in intoxication, to be folded away and not taken as doctrine; this belongs to a long Sufi debate over such sayings (shaṭḥ).

✓ Carl W. Ernst, Words of Ecstasy in Sufism (1985)

Hayākil al-nūr→al-Ghazālī, The Niche of Lights: God alone is light in the true senseShared sourceprobable

Both define light as what is manifest in itself and makes other things manifest. Both rank lights up to a first light that is hidden by its own brightness. They build on the same Avicennan psychology and the Quran's Light Verse, each in its own way.

✓ Alexander Treiger, Inspired Knowledge in Islamic Thought: al-Ghazālī's Theory of Mystical Cognition and its Avicennian Foundation (2012)

Risāla fī al-ʿishq→al-Ghazālī, The Niche of Lights: God as the light that is manifest in itselfLineageprobable

Ibn Sīnā holds that the Good discloses itself by its essence and is veiled only by the weakness of recipients; al-Ghazālī's Niche makes light into manifestness and says the hiddenness of God comes from the intensity of His manifestation. Al-Ghazālī's mystical epistemology was built on Avicennan foundations.

✓ Alexander Treiger, Inspired Knowledge in Islamic Thought: Al-Ghazālī's Theory of Mystical Cognition and its Avicennian Foundation (2012)

Risāla fī al-ʿishq→al-Ghazālī, The Niche of Lights: the gnostics' union is only a likeness of unionContrastprobable

Ibn Sīnā accepts the Sufi word 'union' (ittiḥād) as the name for the most perfect reception of the Good's self-disclosure. Al-Ghazālī warns that the ecstatics' words of union only resemble union and must be read as passing away, with oneness held in truth and union in metaphor.

al-Risāla al-Qushayriyya→Ibn ʿArabī, al-Futūḥāt al-makkiyya and the Litanies: the technical vocabulary of states, stations, fanāʾ and baqāʾLineageprobable

Ibn ʿArabī inherited the classical Sufi lexicon that al-Qushayrī codified, and he reworked terms such as ḥāl, maqām, fanāʾ, baqāʾ and tajallī in his own system. His Sunday litany prays in the same pairing: 'My passing away is in You, my subsistence is through You.'

✓ William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-ʿArabi's Metaphysics of Imagination (1989)

al-Risāla al-Qushayriyya→al-Ghazālī, Mishkāt al-anwār: intoxicated sayings and 'passing away from passing away'Lineageprobable

Al-Ghazālī stands in the Khurasanian Sufi line shaped by al-Qushayrī's handbook. His treatment of the ecstatics' sayings as utterances of intoxication, and of union as passing away even from passing away, uses the same vocabulary of sukr, fanāʾ and witnessing.

✓ Alexander Knysh, Islamic Mysticism: A Short History (2000)

al-Ḥikam→Abū al-Ḥasan al-Shādhilī and Abū al-ʿAbbās al-Mursī: the Shādhilī teaching transmitted to Ibn ʿAṭāʾ AllāhLineagefirm

Ibn ʿAṭāʾ Allāh was the disciple of al-Mursī, himself the successor of al-Shādhilī, and the Ḥikam condenses the teaching of that circle, above all on giving up self-direction, which he also treated at length in al-Tanwīr fī isqāṭ al-tadbīr and recorded in his lives of the two masters, Laṭāʾif al-minan.

✓ Paul Nwyia, Ibn ʿAṭāʾ Allāh (m. 709/1309) et la naissance de la confrérie šāḏilite: édition critique et traduction des Ḥikam (1972) · Victor Danner, Ibn ʿAṭāʾillāh's Ṣūfī Aphorisms (Kitāb al-Ḥikam) (1973)

al-Ḥikam→Ibn ʿAbbād of Ronda, commentary on the Ḥikam (Ghayth al-mawāhib al-ʿaliyya) and his lettersLineagefirm

The fourteenth-century Andalusian Shādhilī Ibn ʿAbbād wrote the commentary printed beside each aphorism here, and his letters to disciples keep returning to the Ḥikam's teaching on need, giving up self-direction and contraction and expansion.

✓ Paul Nwyia, Ibn ʿAbbād de Ronda (1332–1390): un mystique prédicateur à la Qarawīyīn de Fès (1961) · John Renard, Ibn ʿAbbād of Ronda: Letters on the Ṣūfī Path (1986)

al-Ḥikam→al-Qushayrī, al-Risāla: the technical terms of the SufisLineageprobable

The Ḥikam uses without defining the vocabulary that al-Qushayrī's Epistle set out (the moment, the state and the station, contraction and expansion, the inrush, passing away), and Ibn ʿAbbād's commentary and letters read the aphorisms through the classical manuals of which al-Qushayrī's is one.

✓ John Renard, Ibn ʿAbbād of Ronda: Letters on the Ṣūfī Path (1986)

al-Ḥikam→al-Ghazālī, Mishkāt al-anwār: God as the only true light, hidden by its own intensityResonance, not influenceprobable

Both texts hold that God is hidden from sight because His light is too manifest, and that the veil lies in the perceiver. Ibn ʿAṭāʾ Allāh compresses into single sentences (166–167, 218) what al-Ghazālī argues at length; we do not here claim a documented borrowing.

al-Maqālīd al-malakūtiyya→al-Ghazālī, The Niche of Lights: the Light Verse and God as the only true existentContrastfirm

Both read the Light Verse (Q 24:35) as more than physical light. Al-Ghazālī calls God the true light and the true existence, while al-Sijistānī withholds even 'existent' from God and reads niche, lamp, glass and star as ranks of the imams and their successors.

Tarjumān al-ashwāq→Ibn ʿArabī, Dhakhāʾir al-aʿlāq (his own commentary on the Tarjumān), and the Meccan circle of NiẓāmLineagefirm

The poems were composed after Ibn ʿArabī met Niẓām, the learned daughter of his host in Mecca. He later wrote his commentary to answer critics who took the verses as merely erotic, and the spiritual readings in our apparatus come from that commentary.

✓ Reynold A. Nicholson, The Tarjumán al-Ashwáq: A Collection of Mystical Odes by Muḥyiʾddín ibn al-ʿArabí (1911) · Claude Addas, Ibn ʿArabî ou la quête du Soufre Rouge (1989)

Tarjumān al-ashwāq→Ibn ʿArabī, al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, introduction: the youth met circling the KaʿbaLineageprobable

Both texts come from Ibn ʿArabī's years in Mecca, and in both the Kaʿba and its rites are carried into the heart. The Futūḥāt calls the heart 'the goal intended, deposited within your visible body', and the Tarjumān makes the heart the valley of stoning and the soul the place of sacrifice.

✓ Claude Addas, Ibn ʿArabî ou la quête du Soufre Rouge (1989)

Tarjumān al-ashwāq→Ibn ʿArabī, Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam: the Real and the servant as each other's mirrorLineageprobable

The last verse gives in a love scene the doctrine the Fuṣūṣ states outright: the one to whom the Real discloses Himself sees only his own form, and the human being is the polished mirror in which the Real sees Its names. The poem reverses the roles, so that the beloved sees herself in the lover.

✓ William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-ʿArabi's Metaphysics of Imagination (1989)

Tarjumān al-ashwāq→al-Ghazālī, The Niche of Lights: the lover's words of union and the passing away from passing awayResonance, not influenceprobable

al-Ghazālī compares the gnostics' utterances of union to 'the words of the lover in a state of excessive passion' and speaks of passing away from oneself. The Tarjumān gives the lover's side of the same experience in verse, and calls life after parting a passing away.

al-Khamriyya→al-Ghazālī, The Niche of Lights: the drunken sayings of the gnosticsContrastprobable

Al-Ghazālī treats the ecstatic sayings of the drunk as speech to be concealed and corrected once reason returns, and calls their union a union by metaphor, while Ibn al-Fāriḍ declares that there is no life for one who lives sober (verse 40). The two agree on one point, since the ode also denies that any body entered another (verse 25).

al-Khamriyya→Ibn ʿArabī, The Interpreter of DesiresResonance, not influenceprobable

Two contemporaries wrote love poems in the classical Arabic manner that were read as mystical. Ibn ʿArabī calls out a roll of beloveds' names (Daʿd, Hind, Salmā) much as Ibn al-Fāriḍ invokes Nuʿm, and both make the Beloved present in the heart when named.

al-Khamriyya→al-Ghazālī, The Niche of Lights: the oil that shines 'though no fire touched it'Resonance, not influenceprobable

Al-Ghazālī expounds the Light Verse, where the oil almost shines untouched by fire, and the ode calls its wine 'light, yet no fire' (verse 22). Both describe a light with no earthly source.

al-ʿAyniyya→Ibn ʿArabī, The Interpreter of Desires (Tarjumān al-ashwāq): the effaced abodesShared sourceprobable

Both poems take over the opening of the classical Arabic ode, the halt at the ruined encampment and the tears shed there, and use it for a spiritual longing. Neither needs the other: each draws on the desert-ode convention.

✓ Jaroslav Stetkevych, The Zephyrs of Najd: The Poetics of Nostalgia in the Classical Arabic Nasīb (1993)

Symposium→Persian Sufi contemplation of human beauty (shāhid-bāzī) and the saying 'the metaphorical is the bridge to the real'Resonance, not influenceprobable

Some Sufis held that love of a beautiful human face (ʿishq majāzī) can lead to love of God (ʿishq ḥaqīqī), much as Diotima's ladder begins with one beautiful body. Ibn ʿArabī's lover who sees himself in another's eye stands near this idea, with no influence claimed.

✓ Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (1975)

Symposium→Ibn ʿArabī, The Spirit of Holiness: Fāṭima of SevilleResonance, not influenceprobable

Socrates learns the things of love from a wise woman, and Ibn ʿArabī served an aged woman of Seville, one of the lovers and knowers of God, whom he counted among his teachers. Both texts place a woman at the origin of the teaching on love, with no connection between them.

✓ Claude Addas, Quest for the Red Sulphur: The Life of Ibn ʿArabī (1993)

Ennead VI.9→Ibn ʿArabī, al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya and the Book of Circles: the point and the circumferenceShared sourceprobable

Ibn ʿArabī's point that faces every point of the circumference with its whole self, so that manyness appears from the One without its becoming many, uses the same figure as chapter 8. The figure reached Arabic through the Arabic Plotinus, which calls the First a centre and Intellect and soul circles; we claim no direct reading of Plotinus by Ibn ʿArabī.

Ennead VI.9→al-Ghazālī, The Niche of Lights: union by metaphor, oneness in truthContrastfirm

Plotinus says plainly that the seer and the seen are one and that there were not two. al-Ghazālī reports the ecstatics' sayings but holds that their state only resembles union, being a passing away from oneself and even from that passing away, while the servant and God remain distinct in reality.

Republic VI–VII→al-Ghazālī, The Niche of Lights: the defects of the outward eyeResonance, not influenceprobable

al-Ghazālī lists the failings of bodily sight and sets the intellect above it as the truer eye, close to Plato's move from the bodily eye to the eye of the soul; his own source is the Quran's Light Verse, and no reading of the Republic is claimed.

Republic VI–VII→al-Qushayrī, The Epistle: knowledge, eye and truth of certaintyResonance, not influenceprobable

The Sufi grades of ʿilm al-yaqīn, ʿayn al-yaqīn and ḥaqq al-yaqīn order knowledge by increasing directness, much as the divided line orders states of the soul by increasing clarity.

Republic VI–VII→al-Qushayrī, The Epistle: al-Junayd urged by al-Sarī to speak to the peopleResonance, not influenceprobable

Al-Junayd held back from teaching until his master pressed him to speak to the people; Plato's knowers likewise prefer to stay above and must be compelled to go down, and the best rulers are those least eager to rule.

Phaedrus→Ibn ʿArabī, The Interpreter of Desires: the beloved who sees herself in the loverResonance, not influenceprobable

In Ibn ʿArabī's poem the beloved marvels at a lover's beauty and is told that she has seen herself in the mirror of a man. Plato's beloved likewise sees himself in the lover without knowing it.

Phaedrus→Ibn al-Fāriḍ, The Wine Ode: drunk before the vine was createdResonance, not influencesuggestive

Ibn al-Fāriḍ's speaker carries an intoxication from before his own coming-to-be, and its mere mention moves even those who never knew it. In the Phaedrus, a vision seen before birth stirs souls that do not understand their own rapture.

Phaedrus→Ibn ʿArabī (attributed), The Prayer of the Highest Circuit: 'cast upon me a love from You'Contrastprobable

In the Phaedrus, love runs upward from the soul, which recollects and longs, while the gods who lead the procession do not love the soul in return. The prayer asks God, named the Loving, to send love down upon the servant, drawing on the Quran's love that moves from God toward the human being.

Ennead I.6→al-Ghazālī, The Niche of Lights: the defects of the outward eye and the eye of the intellectResonance, not influenceprobable

Both distinguish a bodily eye from an inner eye and hold that only the inner one, once freed of its defects, can see the highest light. Ennead I.6 was not among the treatises that reached Arabic, so the likeness is not claimed as influence.

al-Ājurrūmiyya→al-Qushayrī, Naḥw al-qulūb (The Grammar of Hearts)Resonance, not influenceprobable

Two centuries before Ibn Ājurrūm, al-Qushayrī took the categories of Arabic grammar and read them as a grammar of the heart; the primer itself stays within grammar, and the two share only the vocabulary.

al-Ājurrūmiyya→The formula 'there is no god but God' as read by al-Ghazālī and Ibn ʿArabīResonance, not influenceprobable

The chapters on 'lā' of absolute negation and on exception with 'illā' describe the exact construction of the profession of oneness, which al-Ghazālī and Ibn ʿArabī treat as a statement about existence; the primer gives the form with no theology.

al-Ājurrūmiyya→The Sufi 'state' (ḥāl) and the grammarians' circumstantial qualifier (ḥāl)Resonance, not influencesuggestive

The grammatical ḥāl clarifies a passing state of being ('Zayd came riding') and the tamyīz clarifies an essence; the Sufis use the same word ḥāl for a passing spiritual state as distinct from a settled station, as in Ibn ʿArabī's portrait of a teacher whose prevailing state was expansion.

Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam→Ibn Ṭufayl, Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān: the polished bodies that receive lightResonance, not influenceprobable

Ibn Ṭufayl grades bodies by how they receive light, with polished mirrors reflecting it, and Ibn ʿArabī grades loci by their preparedness to receive self-disclosure. Both use the polish of a surface for the capacity of a receiver.

al-Fātiḥa→Ibn Ṭufayl, Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān: the solitary knower who reasons his wayContrastprobable

Ḥayy finds his way toward knowledge of God by observing and reasoning alone on his island. The Fātiḥa's one petition treats the way as something to be shown by God. Ibn Ṭufayl's tale later brings the two routes into agreement, so the contrast is one of starting points.

Faṣṣ Shīth→Ibn Ṭufayl, Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān: polished bodies that receive and return the lightResonance, not influenceprobable

Ibn Ṭufayl's classes of bodies, some of which, like polished mirrors, take the sun's form so fully that they seem to show the sun itself, work with the same image of a receiver whose polish decides what appears in it. The two Andalusian authors are near contemporaries, but no dependence is claimed here.

Faṣṣ Idrīs→Ibn Ṭufayl, Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān: polished bodies that receive lightResonance, not influenceprobable

Ibn Ṭufayl ranks bodies by how they receive the sun's light, some as polished mirrors, while this chapter makes Nature one form shown differently in many mirrors, the differences coming from the locus. Both use the mirror to explain how one source appears unequally.

Inshāʾ al-dawāʾir→Ibn Sīnā, Ilāhiyyāt of al-Shifāʾ: quiddity in itself ('horseness is only horseness')Resonance, not influenceprobable

Ibn Sīnā's quiddity considered in itself, neither universal nor particular, and Ibn ʿArabī's 'woodness', whole in every chair without division (passage 45), share a structure. Ibn ʿArabī goes further and makes his third thing neither existent nor non-existent. We do not claim this passage as a borrowing.

Rūḥ al-quds→Ibn Ṭufayl, Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān: the solitary knower without a teacherContrastfirm

Written in the same Almohad West in the same years, Ibn Ṭufayl's tale has a child reach God alone on an island by observation and reasoning. Ibn ʿArabī's book shows a young man formed entirely through the company, service and discipline of many named masters.

Rūḥ al-quds→Ibn Sīnā, the Ode on the Soul: the dove that weeps for the dwellings aboveContrastprobable

In Ibn Sīnā's ode the soul's longing takes the form of tears for a lost home. Fāṭima of Seville mocks lovers who weep, since the One they love is present to them in every thing and in every moment.

Taqdīs al-shams→Ibn Sīnā, The Recital of Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān: the climes of the angels and the King beyond praiseLineagefirm

Suhrawardī read Ibn Sīnā's recital and wrote his Occidental Exile as its continuation. The hierarchy of separate intellects and moving souls in this prayer is the Avicennian cosmos, and Ḥayy's warning that whoever tries to praise the King fully has erred matches the prayer's claim that the describers cannot describe even the least of the lights.

✓ Henry Corbin, Avicenne et le récit visionnaire (1954)

Ḥayy (Ibn Sīnā)→Ibn Ṭufayl, Ḥayy ibn YaqẓānLineagefirm

Ibn Ṭufayl takes the name Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān from Ibn Sīnā and says so, but he turns the figure around: Ibn Sīnā's Ḥayy is a guide who teaches, while Ibn Ṭufayl's Ḥayy is a child with no teacher who reasons his way to God alone.

✓ Lenn Evan Goodman, Ibn Tufayl's Hayy Ibn Yaqzan: A Philosophical Tale (1972)

Ḥayy (Ibn Sīnā)→Ibn Sīnā, The Recital of the Bird and the Ode on the SoulLineagefirm

The same author tells the soul's captivity and release again as birds caught in a net who cross eight mountains to the King, and as a dove that fell from the highest place; the three works form one cycle of allegories.

✓ Peter Heath, Allegory and Philosophy in Avicenna (Ibn Sînâ) (1992) · Henry Corbin, Avicenne et le récit visionnaire (1954)

Ḥayy (Ibn Sīnā)→al-Fārābī, doctrine of the active intellect (al-ʿaql al-faʿʿāl)Lineagefirm

The allegory of a living, wakeful guide who belongs to a hierarchy of separate intellects rests on the theory of the active intellect and the emanated intellects that Ibn Sīnā developed from al-Fārābī.

✓ Herbert A. Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, on Intellect (1992)

Ḥayy (Ibn Sīnā)→Ibn Ṭufayl, Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān: the solitary child who learns from a gazelle's bodyContrastprobable

Ibn Sīnā's narrator learns from a sage who hands him the map of the worlds, while Ibn Ṭufayl's Ḥayy has no teacher and learns what the soul is by opening the heart of his dead foster mother.

Risālat al-Ṭayr→Ibn Sīnā (traditional attribution), The Ode on the Soul (al-ʿAyniyya)Resonance, not influencefirm

The ode tradition places under the same author's name has a dove held back by a dense snare and barred by a cage from the open height, weeping for dwellings it remembers. Here the bird is a single soul that fell from on high; in the Recital it is a flock that was lured.

Risālat al-Ṭayr→Ibn Sīnā, The Recital of Ḥayy ibn YaqẓānResonance, not influencefirm

Ibn Sīnā's other recital has a sage who names the soul's bad companions and guides it on the journey through the climes. The Bird replaces the single sage with fellow birds who are themselves half-bound, since 'How can the sick heal you?'

✓ Peter Heath, Allegory and Philosophy in Avicenna (Ibn Sînâ) (1992)

Risālat al-Ṭayr→Ibn Ṭufayl, The Tale of Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān: the solitary knowerContrastprobable

Ibn Ṭufayl's Ḥayy reasons his way alone from the body of the gazelle toward God. Ibn Sīnā's bird cannot get out alone: other birds have to open the cage, and the King has to send a messenger.

al-Ghurba al-gharbiyya→Ibn Sīnā, The Recital of Ḥayy ibn YaqẓānLineagefirm

Suhrawardī says in his preface that he read Ibn Sīnā's recital, found that it lacked the highest stage, and wrote this tale to supply it; the western boundary of Ḥayy's cosmic geography becomes his city of exile.

✓ Henry Corbin, Avicenne et le récit visionnaire (1954) · Wheeler M. Thackston, The Mystical and Visionary Treatises of Shihabuddin Yahya Suhrawardi (1982)

al-Ghurba al-gharbiyya→Ibn Sīnā, The Recital of the BirdLineageprobable

Birds caught in a net who escape and cross mountains toward the King supply a model for the captives who glimpse birds and doves from their prison; Suhrawardī is known to have rendered Ibn Sīnā's Recital of the Bird into Persian.

✓ Henry Corbin, Avicenne et le récit visionnaire (1954)

al-Ghurba al-gharbiyya→Ibn Ṭufayl, The Tale of Ḥayy ibn YaqẓānShared sourcefirm

Two contemporaries, one in al-Andalus and one in Syria and Persia, each rewrote Ibn Sīnā's Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān for his own purpose: Ibn Ṭufayl as a story of a solitary knower who reasons his way to God, Suhrawardī as a symbolic exile and return.

✓ Lenn Evan Goodman, Ibn Tufayl's Hayy Ibn Yaqzan: A Philosophical Tale (1972)

al-Ghurba al-gharbiyya→Ibn Sīnā, The Ode on the SoulResonance, not influencefirm

Ibn Sīnā's dove descends from the loftiest station, weeps for the dwellings of the sanctuary and is held by a dense snare; Suhrawardī's exiles receive doves with news of the sanctuary and weep at being cast back from the heights into the abyss.

al-Ghurba al-gharbiyya→Ibn Ṭufayl, The Tale of Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān: the heart found by dissectionContrastprobable

Ibn Ṭufayl's child learns that the soul is distinct from the body by opening the gazelle's heart and reasoning from what he finds; Suhrawardī reaches the same distinction through symbols, where the body appears as a well, a mill and fourteen coffins.

Ḥayy (Ibn Ṭufayl)→Ibn Sīnā, Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān and the 'Oriental wisdom' (ḥikma mashriqiyya); al-Ishārāt wa-l-tanbīhāt on the stations of the knowersLineagefirm

Ibn Ṭufayl takes the names Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, Absāl and Salāmān from Ibn Sīnā, says he is answering a question about Ibn Sīnā's Oriental wisdom, and quotes his account of the flashes of light that become a steady companionship.

✓ Henry Corbin, Avicenne et le récit visionnaire (1954) · Lenn Evan Goodman, Ibn Tufayl's Hayy Ibn Yaqzan: A Philosophical Tale (1972)

Ḥayy (Ibn Ṭufayl)→Ibn Bājja (Ibn al-Ṣāʾigh), Tadbīr al-mutawaḥḥid (The Regime of the Solitary) and the Epistle on ConjunctionLineagefirm

Ibn Ṭufayl quotes Ibn Bājja on conjunction (ittiṣāl) with the active intellect and ranks his speculative attainment below the witnessed state of the saints; Ḥayy's solitude on the island gives narrative form to Ibn Bājja's solitary knower.

✓ Lawrence I. Conrad (ed.), The World of Ibn Ṭufayl: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān (1996)

Ḥayy (Ibn Ṭufayl)→Ibn Sīnā's 'floating man' and Suhrawardī's argument that one is never unaware of oneselfResonance, not influenceprobable

Ḥayy imagines each limb, even his head, taken away and finds he could do without it, though not without the thing in his chest; Suhrawardī's Temples argue that one knows one's self while unaware of any bodily part. Both separate the self from the body by an exercise of imagination.

Ḥayy (Ibn Ṭufayl)→Ibn al-Nafīs, al-Risāla al-Kāmiliyya (Theologus Autodidactus)Resonance, not influencesuggestive

About a century later the Damascene physician told of a man generated on a desert island who reasons his way to religion and prophecy. Some have read it as an answer to Ibn Ṭufayl; that link has been proposed and has not been established.

✓ Max Meyerhof and Joseph Schacht, The Theologus Autodidactus of Ibn al-Nafīs (1968)

Mishkāt al-anwār→Ibn Sīnā, reading of the Light Verse as the stages of the intellect (al-Ishārāt wa-l-tanbīhāt)Lineagefirm

Ibn Sīnā had already matched the niche, glass, lamp, oil and fire of Q 24:35 to grades of the intellect, and al-Ghazālī's five spirits rework that scheme with the prophetic spirit at its summit.

✓ Alexander Treiger, Inspired Knowledge in Islamic Thought: Al-Ghazālī's Theory of Mystical Cognition and Its Avicennian Foundation (2012)

Mishkāt al-anwār→Ibn Ṭufayl, Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān: his discussion of al-Ghazālī and the MishkātLineagefirm

Ibn Ṭufayl's preface quotes and weighs al-Ghazālī, names the Mishkāt, and discusses the later readers who took its closing section on the veils as a hidden doctrine.

✓ Lenn Evan Goodman, Ibn Tufayl's Hayy Ibn Yaqzan: A Philosophical Tale (1972)

Mishkāt al-anwār→Ibn Ṭufayl, Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān: tasting (dhawq) and the man born blindLineageprobable

Ibn Ṭufayl separates knowledge by reasoning from knowledge by tasting and compares the difference to a blind man who knows colours only by their names, a distinction he frames in dialogue with al-Ghazālī, whose ranks of faith, knowledge and tasting it follows.

✓ Lenn Evan Goodman, Ibn Tufayl's Hayy Ibn Yaqzan: A Philosophical Tale (1972)

Mishkāt al-anwār→Ibn Sīnā, Recital of Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān: the soul's faculties as companionsResonance, not influenceprobable

Both personify the soul's faculties as a household around the knower: al-Ghazālī's eye is the intellect's spy over the storehouse of colours, and Ibn Sīnā's sage describes imagination as a babbler and the passions as unruly companions.

Hayākil al-nūr→Ibn Sīnā: the proofs of the soul, necessary and contingent being, and the emanation of the intellectsLineagefirm

Several parts of the Temples rework Ibn Sīnā's positions. These include the argument that self-awareness survives when every bodily part is forgotten, the three modalities, and the procession of intellects and spheres. Suhrawardī read Ibn Sīnā closely and wrote Persian recitals that answer his.

✓ Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Three Muslim Sages: Avicenna, Suhrawardī, Ibn ʿArabī (1964) · John Walbridge, The Leaven of the Ancients: Suhrawardī and the Heritage of the Greeks (2000)

Hayākil al-nūr→Ibn Ṭufayl, Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān: the animal spirit in the left cavity of the heartShared sourceprobable

Both place the vital spirit, a subtle vapour, in the left cavity of the heart and treat it as the carrier of the soul's powers. Ḥayy finds that cavity empty when he opens the gazelle. Both draw on the Galenic physiology that came to them through Ibn Sīnā's medicine.

✓ Lawrence I. Conrad (ed.), The World of Ibn Ṭufayl: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān (1996)

Hayākil al-nūr→Ibn Sīnā, Ode on the Soul: the dove that descends from the loftiest stationContrastprobable

The Ode pictures the soul as coming down from a higher dwelling that it remembers and mourns. The Temples argues that the soul cannot have existed before the body. It comes to be when the body is ready, as a wick catches fire from a flame without lessening it.

Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ→Ibn Sīnā, Risāla fī al-ʿishq: every being loves its perfection and becomes like the GoodResonance, not influenceprobable

Both arrange beings in a ladder from the elements through plants and animals to the human, each rung oriented toward its perfection, and both speak of the higher overflowing from generosity and the lower becoming like it; Ibn Sīnā makes love the moving force, where the Brethren speak of supply and reception.

Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ→Ibn Ṭufayl, Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān: the child raised by a gazelleContrastprobable

Ḥayy notices, as the Brethren's account of creation does, that animals have fur and weapons while he is naked, and he goes on to master and dissect them in his search for the soul; in the Brethren's fable the animals answer back and ask whether such mastery is a right.

al-Risāla al-Qushayriyya→Ibn Ṭufayl, Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān: the introduction on 'tasting' (dhawq)Lineageprobable

Ibn Ṭufayl's preface speaks of states known only by tasting, cites al-Ghazālī, and compares knowledge by demonstration with direct witnessing, the gradation al-Qushayrī sets out as presence, unveiling and witnessing.

✓ Lenn Evan Goodman, Ibn Tufayl's Hayy Ibn Yaqzan: A Philosophical Tale (1972)

al-Ḥikam→Ibn Sīnā, Risāla fī al-ʿishq: the Good always disclosing itself, veiled only by the recipientResonance, not influenceprobable

Ibn Sīnā writes that the Good's essence discloses itself and is veiled only by the incapacity of what receives it; aphorism 34 says the Real is not veiled, the servant is. The philosopher's cosmos of natural love and the Sufi's call to servanthood frame the same thought differently.

al-Ḥikam→Ibn Sīnā, The Recital of the Bird and The Ode on the Soul: the soul's own flight homeContrastprobable

Ibn Sīnā's birds and dove escape the snare and cross mountains to the King by their own long flight. The Ḥikam says there is no distance between the servant and God for travel to cross (244), that arrival is arrival at knowledge of Him (213), and that the journey exists only in the 'arenas of the souls'.

al-Maqālīd al-malakūtiyya→Ibn Sīnā and Suhrawardī: God as the Necessary ExistentContrastprobable

The falāsifa name the First as necessary of existence, and Suhrawardī's Temples of Light follows them. The thirty-first key denies that being fits even the first creature, let alone the Originator, since 'found' implies a finder.

Tarjumān al-ashwāq→Ibn Sīnā, the Ode on the Soul (al-ʿAyniyya): the dove weeping over effaced encampmentsShared sourceprobable

Ibn Sīnā's soul, a dove cooing over traces effaced by the winds, and Ibn ʿArabī's ruined abodes and ring-dove both draw on the ruins and bird imagery of the classical nasīb. Each bends it to a different end: the philosopher to the soul's exile, the Sufi to the beloved's presence in the heart.

✓ Jaroslav Stetkevych, The Zephyrs of Najd: The Poetics of Nostalgia in the Classical Arabic Nasīb (1993)

al-Khamriyya→Ibn Sīnā, The Ode on the Soul: the covenants of the sanctuaryResonance, not influenceprobable

Both poems give the soul a life before the body. Ibn Sīnā's dove has forgotten the covenants of the sanctuary and weeps for them, while Ibn al-Fāriḍ's drinker keeps an intoxication from before his coming-to-be that the decay of his bones cannot touch (verse 35).

al-ʿAyniyya→Ibn Sīnā, The Recital of the Bird (Risālat al-ṭayr)Lineageprobable

From the same author, the Recital of the Bird tells the soul as a bird caught in a net and a cage, longing for its first home, as the Ode does. The prose recital narrates the escape and the journey to the King that the Ode only touches on.

✓ Henry Corbin, Avicenne et le récit visionnaire (1954)

al-ʿAyniyya→Ibn Sīnā, The Recital of Ḥayy ibn YaqẓānLineageprobable

In this other work by Ibn Sīnā, the wicked companions who bind the soul correspond to the heavy body that fastens on the dove in the Ode. The dark western clime corresponds to the low place where she sets instead of rising.

✓ Henry Corbin, Avicenne et le récit visionnaire (1954)

al-ʿAyniyya→Ibn Ṭufayl, Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān: the dweller who left the houseResonance, not influenceprobable

At the gazelle's death Ḥayy concludes that the one who lived in the body departed before the house fell, leaving the body behind. The Ode's soul likewise sets out and leaves the body 'bound in alliance with the dust'.

Symposium→Ibn Sīnā, Treatise on Love (Risāla fī al-ʿishq)Shared sourceprobable

Ibn Sīnā holds that every being loves its own perfection and that love is the finding of the beautiful and fitting, close to Diotima's love of the good being one's own always. No complete Arabic Symposium is known, and the Platonic doctrine reached him mainly through Plotinian material in the Arabic Plotinus and related Neoplatonic texts.

✓ Peter Adamson, The Arabic Plotinus: A Philosophical Study of the Theology of Aristotle (2002)

Symposium→Ibn Sīnā, The Recital of the Bird: the King's beautyResonance, not influenceprobable

After crossing eight mountains the birds see the King in His beauty when the veil is lifted, as Diotima's lover reaches, at the end of a graded ascent, the sudden sight of the beautiful itself. The shape of the ascent is shared, and no reading of the Symposium is documented.

Ennead VI.9→The Arabic Plotinus (so-called Theology of Aristotle), 9th century, al-Kindī circleLineagefirm

Parts of the Enneads were paraphrased into Arabic in the circle of al-Kindī and circulated under Aristotle's name. The Arabic text carries this treatise's themes of the soul alone with itself, union without loss of essence, and the First Cause as a still centre.

✓ Peter Adamson, The Arabic Plotinus: A Philosophical Study of the 'Theology of Aristotle' (2002) · Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ʿAbbāsid Society (1998)

Ennead VI.9→Ibn Sīnā, the Ode on the Soul (al-ʿAyniyya): the dove that fell from the loftiest stationShared sourceprobable

The soul that descended, forgot its covenants and weeps for the dwellings above matches Plotinus's exile and shedding of wings, which he takes from Plato's Phaedrus. Ibn Sīnā knew and annotated the Arabic Plotinus, so both lines go back to the Platonic myth of the fallen soul.

✓ Dimitri Gutas, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition: Introduction to Reading Avicenna's Philosophical Works (1988)

Ennead VI.9→Ibn Ṭufayl, Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān: the solitary knower and the state that cannot be describedResonance, not influenceprobable

Ibn Ṭufayl opens with a state of radiance and delight that reasoning points toward but cannot contain, and builds a knower who reaches it alone; Plotinus ends with the flight of the alone to the alone, beyond demonstration. We do not claim a direct reading of this treatise by Ibn Ṭufayl.

Republic VI–VII→Ibn Rushd (Averroes), Commentary on Plato's RepublicLineagefirm

With no Arabic Aristotelian Politics available to him, Ibn Rushd commented on the Republic itself, including its account of the philosopher-rulers and their education.

✓ Ralph Lerner, Averroes on Plato's "Republic" (1974)

Republic VI–VII→al-Fārābī, The Philosophy of PlatoLineagefirm

al-Fārābī summarised Plato's dialogues, the Republic among them, and took up its demand that the one who knows must also rule.

✓ Muhsin Mahdi, Alfarabi's Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle (1962)

Republic VI–VII→Ibn Ṭufayl, Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān: the man born blind and the coloursResonance, not influenceprobable

Ibn Ṭufayl compares knowledge by report to a blind man who knows colours only through their names, and the tasted state to his sudden sight; Plato uses the same figure to deny that teaching can put sight into blind eyes.

Republic VI–VII→Ibn Sīnā, The Recital of the Bird: the birds in the netResonance, not influencesuggestive

Ibn Sīnā's bird, caught in a snare, sees free birds through the mesh and asks them to lead it out toward the King, a figure of bondage, glimpse and guided ascent that sits close to the freed prisoner led upward.

Phaedrus→Ibn Sīnā, the Ode on the Soul (al-ʿAyniyya)Resonance, not influenceprobable

Ibn Sīnā's dove comes down unwillingly from the highest place, forgets its covenants and weeps for the dwellings above, which resembles Plato's soul that loses its wings and half forgets what it saw. A direct reading of the Phaedrus is not established here, so the likeness is offered as resonance only.

Phaedrus→Ibn Sīnā, the Recital of the Bird (Risālat al-ṭayr)Resonance, not influenceprobable

Ibn Sīnā's birds with wings caught in a snare free themselves and fly over mountains to see the King's beauty, so that, as in the Phaedrus, a winged soul held down below regains its flight toward a vision of beauty.

✓ Henry Corbin, Avicenne et le récit visionnaire (1954)

Ennead I.6→Ibn Sīnā, The Ode on the Soul: the dove's descent into the bodyResonance, not influenceprobable

Both describe the soul falling from a high home into bodily matter that soils and binds it, and its longing to return. The ode asks why the descent happened at all, a question this treatise leaves aside.

al-Ājurrūmiyya→The debate of Abū Bishr Mattā and Abū Saʿīd al-Sīrāfī on logic and grammar (Baghdad, 932)Contrastfirm

The logician claimed that logic governs meaning in every language, while the grammarian held that meaning is reached only through the grammar of a particular language; the Ājurrūmiyya belongs to the grammarians' side of that quarrel.

✓ D. S. Margoliouth, The Discussion between Abu Bishr Matta and Abu Sa'id al-Sirafi on the Merits of Logic and Grammar (1905)

al-Ājurrūmiyya→Ibn Sīnā, the Ode on the Soul: the hāʾ of descent and the mīm of the centreResonance, not influenceprobable

Ibn Sīnā makes single letters of words carry the soul's fall into the body, much as this primer makes single letters (wāw, alif, yāʾ, nūn) carry case; the poem and the primer share a way of giving weight to the letter, with no link between them.

Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam→Plotinus, Ennead VI.9: the One that needs nothingContrastfirm

Plotinus's One lacks nothing and does not turn toward what comes from it. The Real of the Fuṣūṣ wills to see its Names in another, and chapter 1 insists that the whole is bound to the whole.

Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam→Plotinus, Ennead VI.9.8: the soul's motion around the centreResonance, not influenceprobable

Chapter 3 praises the bewildered one who circles the pole without a 'from' or a 'to', and Plotinus describes the soul as moving around its centre and not in a straight line. Both use the circle for a relation to the source that never leaves it.

al-Fātiḥa→Plotinus, Ennead VI.9: the One that is loved and does not loveContrastfirm

The Fātiḥa's God is named twice by mercy and is addressed as one who favours, helps and guides. Plotinus's One is the goal of the soul's longing, yet it neither turns toward the soul nor answers a request.

Faṣṣ Ādam→Plotinus, Ennead VI.9: the One as wholly self-sufficientContrastfirm

Plotinus's One lacks nothing and has no need to see itself in anything, while here the Real wills to see His names in another, and the names need the cosmos for their manifestation.

Faṣṣ Ādam→Plotinus, Ennead IV.3.12: souls that see their images as in the mirror of DionysusResonance, not influenceprobable

Plotinus also uses the mirror to explain why the higher comes down into a lower locus, though his souls are drawn by their reflections and are not the eye of the One.

Faṣṣ Shīth→Plotinus, Ennead VI.9.4: knowing the One by a presence above knowledgeResonance, not influenceprobable

Plotinus says the One is grasped by a presence (parousia) that exceeds knowledge and ends the treatise with the rule of the mysteries not to divulge, while Ibn ʿArabī's highest knower ends in a silence that knowledge itself gives him. The two share a close in silence, and no dependence of this chapter on the Arabic Plotinus is claimed.

Faṣṣ Nūḥ→Plotinus, Ennead VI.9: the soul that knows itself and turns inward to its sourceShared sourceprobable

The link between knowing oneself and knowing one's principle reaches both Plotinus and the Arabic saying 'Whoever knows himself knows his Lord' from the Delphic maxim, the Arabic side through its later Greek philosophical transmission.

✓ Alexander Altmann, The Delphic Maxim in Medieval Islam and Judaism (in Biblical and Other Studies) (1963)

Faṣṣ Nūḥ→Plotinus, Ennead VI.9: the One that is none of the things it givesContrastfirm

Plotinus secures the One by denying of it every form, while Ibn ʿArabī warns that denial alone delimits the Real and asks that it be joined to the affirmation that the cosmos is His form.

Faṣṣ Nūḥ→Plotinus, Ennead VI.9.8: the soul's circling round its centreResonance, not influenceprobable

Ibn ʿArabī's bewildered one who circles the pole without beginning or end resembles Plotinus's image of the soul moving round the centre from which it comes, with no claim that the one depends on the other here.

Faṣṣ Idrīs→Plotinus, Ennead VI.9: by the One all beings are beings, and the One is not a numerical unitResonance, not influenceprobable

Plotinus says that all beings are beings by the One and warns that the One is not one as a unit among counted things. Ibn ʿArabī's one that brings number into being without being a number makes a similar point by a different argument, and no direct borrowing is claimed here.

Faṣṣ Idrīs→Plotinus, Ennead VI.9: the One beyond every predicateContrastfirm

Plotinus keeps the One clear of all attributes, so that nothing can be said of it. Ibn ʿArabī's High is high because every attribute, praised or blamed, is predicated of Him, and His perfection leaves none outside.

Faṣṣ Ibrāhīm→Plotinus, Ennead VI.9: the One that needs nothing after itContrastprobable

Plotinus's One stands in no relation to what comes after it and is in no way completed by it. Ibn ʿArabī agrees that the Essence in itself is independent, but he makes divinity itself a relation that the creatures bring about, so that God as god has need of the one over whom He is god.

Faṣṣ Isḥāq→Plotinus, Ennead VI.9: the seer becomes one with what is seenContrastprobable

Plotinus describes a vision in which the soul no longer sees two, while this chapter insists that even the knower who may say 'I am the Real' remains distinct, because his attention always lapses somewhere.

al-Futūḥāt al-makkiyya→Plotinus, Ennead VI.9.8: the soul's circling around its centreResonance, not influenceprobable

Plotinus describes the soul's natural motion as a circle around a centre from which it came, and passage 87 describes the compass whose leg returns to its point of beginning. The two images are alike in shape. No direct reading of this treatise by Ibn ʿArabī is claimed.

Inshāʾ al-dawāʾir→Plotinus, Ennead VI.9: the soul's motion around its centreResonance, not influenceprobable

Plotinus pictures the soul as a circle whose centre is the One. Ibn ʿArabī draws the human being as a circle placed between the encompassing circle of the Divine Presence and the circle of the world (passage 56). Both use concentric figures to show a relation of centre to periphery, and no influence is claimed.

Inshāʾ al-dawāʾir→Plotinus, Ennead VI.9: the One beyond beingContrastprobable

For Plotinus the One is beyond being and cannot be called existent. Ibn ʿArabī here calls God absolute Existence, known in that He exists and unknown in quiddity (passages 47, 64 to 65). The unknowable element falls in different places in the two accounts.

Rūḥ al-quds→Porphyry, Life of PlotinusResonance, not influencesuggestive

Porphyry records his teacher's habits, his foresight about his students, and his few ecstatic unions, which is close in kind to Ibn ʿArabī's record of his masters. Plotinus's own account of the soul's return is held in the library, but the Life itself is not, and no link between the two biographical works is claimed.

Awrād: Sunday→Plotinus, Ennead VI.9: the One present to all who can receive itResonance, not influenceprobable

Plotinus says the One is not outside anyone and that the soul fails to rest there because it has not wholly come out of itself; the litany says seeking is the very essence of distance from One who is near and present, and asks for flight from the self.

Awrād: Sunday→Plotinus, Ennead VI.9: the One that is loved and does not turn toward the loverContrastfirm

Plotinus's One does not look upon the soul or answer it. The litany is addressed to a God asked to 'look upon me with the eye of mercy and solicitude' and to 'meet my word with a response', who gives 'before the asking'.

al-Dawr al-aʿlā→Plotinus, Ennead VI.9: the One that is loved and does not loveContrastfirm

In Plotinus the soul dances around the One as its source and longs for it, but the One has no love turned toward the soul. The prayer asks the Loving (al-Wadūd) to cast His love upon the servant, a love that begins from God's side.

al-Ṣalāt al-fayḍiyya→The Arabic Plotinus (the 'Theology of Aristotle') and the falsafa vocabulary of emanation (fayḍ)Lineagesuggestive

The Arabic word fayḍ for the overflowing of being from a first principle entered Islamic thought through the Arabic adaptation of Plotinus and the philosophers who used it. The prayer inherits that word, while making the first effusion a person and grounding it in mercy.

✓ Peter Adamson, The Arabic Plotinus: A Philosophical Study of the 'Theology of Aristotle' (2002)

al-Ṣalāt al-fayḍiyya→Plotinus, Ennead VI.9.8: the centre and the circleResonance, not influenceprobable

Plotinus pictures souls gathered round the One as radii touch a centre. The prayer makes the Prophet the point that runs through the circles of engendered beings and the centre of the encompassment of Inward and Outward. The images match in shape; no influence on the prayer is claimed.

al-Ṣalāt al-fayḍiyya→Plotinus, Ennead VI.9: the One that is loved and does not loveContrastfirm

The prayer calls the first effusion God's beloved, through whom God beholds His own beauty, and asks God to open the door of His love for the one who prays. In Plotinus the soul longs for the One while the One, needing nothing, turns toward nothing.

Taqdīs al-shams→Plotinus, Ennead VI.9, through the Arabic Plotinus (Theology of Aristotle)Lineageprobable

Plotinus says the One is reached neither by knowledge nor by thought, and that we speak of it only in order to point toward it. The prayer's God 'praised by negation', whose attributes are admitted only 'as the necessity of expression requires', belongs to the same line of negative speech, which reached Arabic philosophy through the paraphrase of the Enneads.

✓ Peter Adamson, The Arabic Plotinus: A Philosophical Study of the 'Theology of Aristotle' (2002)

Taqdīs al-shams→The Emperor Julian, Hymn to King HeliosResonance, not influencefirm

Julian's fourth-century hymn praises the sun as a king who mediates between the intelligible gods and the visible world, and who is the image of the Good. Suhrawardī's King of the stars, vicegerent of the Light of Light, holds the same middle place. The resemblance comes from a shared Platonic cosmos; no reading of Julian is claimed.

Ḥayy (Ibn Sīnā)→Plotinus, Ennead VI.9: the One beyond knowledge and descriptionResonance, not influenceprobable

Plotinus says we grasp the One by a presence that goes beyond knowledge, and Ḥayy says the King passes beyond the describers' power and that all similitudes turn aside from his path.

Risālat al-Ṭayr→Plotinus, Enneads, as read in Arabic through the Theology of AristotleLineageprobable

Ibn Sīnā wrote glosses on the Arabic paraphrase of Plotinus known as the Theology of Aristotle, which reached him as part of the Neoplatonic account of the soul's descent and return. In Ennead VI.9 the soul sees its source but 'does not remain there' because it has not yet wholly come out, which is close in sense to the ring still left on the bird's foot.

✓ Peter Adamson, The Arabic Plotinus: A Philosophical Study of the Theology of Aristotle (2002)

al-Ghurba al-gharbiyya→Plotinus, Ennead VI.9: why one does not remain thereResonance, not influenceprobable

Plotinus asks why the soul that has reached the vision does not stay, and answers that it has not yet wholly come out of the body; the elder on Sinai tells the exile he must go back to the western prison because he has not wholly cast off the fetter.

Ḥayy (Ibn Ṭufayl)→Plotinus, Ennead VI.9: a grasp of the One that is not by way of knowledgeResonance, not influenceprobable

Plotinus says our awareness of the One comes by a presence superior to knowledge; Ibn Ṭufayl says the saints' state differs from demonstration by witnessing and tasting while contradicting nothing demonstration found. The routes by which Neoplatonic ideas reached him are indirect and are not traced here.

Mishkāt al-anwār→Plotinus, Ennead VI.9: the vision in which seer and seen are no longer twoResonance, not influenceprobable

Plotinus describes a vision where the soul no longer knows itself as two with what it sees, and al-Ghazālī describes a passing away from one's own passing away; al-Ghazālī adds that on waking this should be called union only by resemblance.

Hayākil al-nūr→Plotinus, Enneads, through the Arabic 'Theology of Aristotle': one from the One, and the soul's ascentLineageprobable

The principle that the One produces a single first effect, and the image of the soul that rises out of the body to look on the lights, reached Arabic philosophy through the paraphrase of Enneads IV to VI known as the Theology of Aristotle. Suhrawardī works inside this inheritance.

✓ Peter Adamson, The Arabic Plotinus: A Philosophical Study of the 'Theology of Aristotle' (2002)

Risāla fī al-ʿishq→Plotinus, Ennead VI.9: the One as the object of the soul's loveContrastprobable

In VI.9 the soul loves and turns to the One, which does not turn toward it. Ibn Sīnā's Good loves itself, as Plotinus also allows in VI.8, but it also loves that its self-disclosure be attained by souls, so that they can be called its beloveds.

Risāla fī al-ʿishq→Plotinus, Ennead I.6: beauty is not mere symmetryContrastprobable

Plotinus argues that beauty cannot be defined as proportion, since simple things like light and gold are beautiful. Ibn Sīnā grounds the soul's love of beauty in order and proportion, though he also ties proportion to nearness to the unity of the First.

Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ→Plotinus, Enneads, as read in Arabic through the Plotiniana Arabica (the 'Theology of Aristotle')Lineageprobable

The Brethren's order of Creator, Intellect, Soul and matter, with being overflowing from the first and the Soul needing the Intellect's support, is the Neoplatonic scheme as it circulated in Arabic, and Plotinus's claim that all beings are beings by the One sits behind their question of how existence pervades existing things.

✓ Ian Richard Netton, Muslim Neoplatonists: An Introduction to the Thought of the Brethren of Purity (Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ) (1982) · Peter Adamson, The Arabic Plotinus: A Philosophical Study of the Theology of Aristotle (2002)

Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ→The Book of Causes (Kalām fī maḥḍ al-khayr, the Arabic adaptation of Proclus): the First Cause, Intelligence and SoulResonance, not influenceprobable

Both set a First Cause above everything, a first Intellect that receives from it without mediation, and a Soul below the Intellect through which bodies are governed, and both describe the gift as an overflowing that does not diminish the giver. Neither text names the other; the shared ground is the Arabic Neoplatonism of the ninth and tenth centuries.

al-Risāla al-Qushayriyya→Plotinus, Ennead VI.9.10–11: the seer who no longer sees twoResonance, not influenceprobable

Plotinus says that in the vision the one who sees is no longer distinct from what is seen and cannot report it while it lasts. Al-Qushayrī's 'union of union' consumes every awareness of other than God, and al-Nūrī says witnessing is not sound while a single vein of the servant remains. The two accounts are alike in shape and differ in grounding, since al-Qushayrī binds the state to the law.

al-Risāla al-Qushayriyya→Plotinus and Neoplatonic ascent: union without a binding lawContrastprobable

For al-Qushayrī every reality that is not bound by the law yields nothing, and Dhū l-Nūn's knower keeps his scrupulousness and never lets inward knowledge overturn an outward ruling. Plotinus's return to the One requires purification but no revealed law and no servanthood before a commanding God.

al-Ḥikam→Plotinus, Ennead VI.9: the One present to all, absent only to those who turn awayResonance, not influenceprobable

Plotinus says the One is not outside anyone and is present to all who do not know it; the Ḥikam says one flees from Him from whom there is no separation (42) and is veiled by His nearness (166). There is no transmission between them.

al-Ḥikam→Plotinus, Ennead VI.9: the One that is sought and does not seekContrastfirm

In Plotinus the soul turns and climbs toward a One that does not turn toward it. In the Ḥikam the movement starts from God: He sends the inrush so the servant may come in upon Him (53), covers the servant's attribute with His own (132), and the closing prayer asks 'seek me out by Your mercy' (296).

al-Maqālīd al-malakūtiyya→Plotinus and the Arabic Plotinus (the 'Theology of Aristotle'): the One beyond intellect and beyond beingLineagefirm

Al-Sijistānī's hierarchy of Originator, Intellect, Soul and Nature, and his One set apart from every one, draw on Neoplatonic material that reached Arabic through the paraphrases of Plotinus. Plotinus's own treatise on the One says it is none of the things it gives and is approached by removing all that is predicated.

✓ Paul E. Walker, Early Philosophical Shiism: The Ismaili Neoplatonism of Abū Yaʿqūb al-Sijistānī (1993) · Peter Adamson, The Arabic Plotinus: A Philosophical Study of the Theology of Aristotle (2002)

Tarjumān al-ashwāq→Plotinus, Ennead VI.9: the One that is loved and does not loveContrastprobable

For Plotinus the soul loves and dances around the One, which turns toward nothing below it. In the Tarjumān the beloved speaks, marvels at the lover, and asks whether it is not enough that she is witnessed in his heart, so the longing runs in both directions.

al-Khamriyya→Plotinus, Ennead VI.7.35: intellect 'drunk with nectar'Resonance, not influenceprobable

Plotinus says that intellect in love with the Good becomes drunk with nectar, and that such drunkenness is better than solemnity. The ode likewise prefers drunkenness to sober life, with no known path between the two texts.

al-ʿAyniyya→Plotinus, Enneads IV.8 'On the Descent of the Soul into Bodies', in its Arabic paraphrase (the 'Theology of Aristotle')Shared sourcesuggestive

The questions of why the soul came down, whether willingly, and what it gains from the descent are those of Plotinus in Ennead IV.8, which reached Arabic readers in the paraphrase known as the Theology of Aristotle; the Ode shares this Neoplatonic frame while taking its imagery from Arabic poetry. Our library holds Ennead VI.9, where Plotinus asks why the soul does not remain above.

✓ Peter Adamson, The Arabic Plotinus: A Philosophical Study of the Theology of Aristotle (2002)

Symposium→Plotinus, Enneads I.6, On BeautyLineagefirm

Plotinus reworks Diotima's ladder in his treatise on beauty, moving from bodily beauty to beautiful pursuits, virtues and souls, and on to a Beauty that is no accumulation of flesh, which the soul must become beautiful to see. The later treatise on the One in the library continues this route inward.

✓ Pierre Hadot, Plotin ou la simplicité du regard (1963)

Symposium→Plotinus, Enneads III.5, On Love: Poros and PeniaLineagefirm

Plotinus reads the birth myth of 203b–e as an allegory: Poros is the reason-principle from Intellect, Penia is matter and need, and Love is the soul's activity toward the good born of lack and memory.

Symposium→Hermias of Alexandria, Scholia on the Phaedrus, and Proclus, Platonic Theology ILineagefirm

The later Athenian and Alexandrian commentators quote Diotima's account of the daimonic as binding the second things to the first, and add a personal daimōn set immediately above each human being as guide.

Republic VI–VII→Plotinus, Enneads I.6 and VI.9: the eye that must become sunlike, and the One beyond beingLineagefirm

Plotinus builds on this passage directly: the eye must become sunlike to see the sun (I.6.9, taking up the 'most sunlike' eye of 508b), and the One is grasped neither by knowledge nor by intellection because it lies beyond being (VI.9.4, after 509b).

✓ John M. Rist, Plotinus: The Road to Reality (1967)

Phaedrus→Plotinus, Ennead I.6, On Beauty, and VI.9.9Lineagefirm

Plotinus builds his first treatise on Plato's account of beauty as what wakes the soul's memory and draws it upward, and he takes up the Phaedrus language of the lover's shock and the growth of the inner sight. In VI.9.9 he describes the soul's love for the One with images drawn from Plato's dialogues of love.

✓ John M. Rist, Plotinus: The Road to Reality (1967)

al-Ājurrūmiyya→Plotinus, Ennead VI.9: the One of which nothing may be predicatedContrastprobable

The primer holds that every subject (mubtadaʾ) takes a predicate (khabar) to make complete speech, while Plotinus says that the One admits no predicate at all and that even 'one' is said of it only by way of pointing.

Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam→ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Kāshānī, Commentary on the Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikamLineagefirm

The Fuṣūṣ was read through a line of commentators beginning with Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī's circle. Al-Kāshānī's commentary became one of the standard ways its terms (fixed entities, self-disclosure, preparedness) were systematised.

✓ Toshihiko Izutsu, Sufism and Taoism: A Comparative Study of Key Philosophical Concepts (1983)

Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam→ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Jīlī, The Perfect Human (al-Insān al-kāmil)Lineagefirm

Al-Jīlī wrote a whole treatise on the perfect human. He worked within the Akbarian vocabulary that chapter 1 sets out for Adam as the all-comprehensive being and the vicegerent.

✓ Reynold A. Nicholson, Studies in Islamic Mysticism (1921)

al-Fātiḥa→Ibn ʿArabī's litanies and the Prayer of the Highest Circuit: prayer built by calling on namesResonance, not influenceprobable

Both the Fātiḥa and these litanies proceed by naming God and then asking. The litanies open with the basmala and close by repeating names such as 'O Beneficent'. This entry records the shared form of praise followed by petition and is kept apart from the documented lineage above.

Faṣṣ Ādam→ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Jīlī, al-Insān al-kāmil (The Perfect Human)Lineagefirm

Al-Jīlī, writing about two centuries later, built a whole treatise on the perfect human that works out the doctrine this chapter states in brief: the human who gathers all the names and serves as the Real's mirror.

✓ Reynold A. Nicholson, Studies in Islamic Mysticism (1921)

Faṣṣ Ādam→The commentators on the Fuṣūṣ, above all ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Kāshānī, read through Toshihiko IzutsuLineagefirm

The reading of this chapter as the names seeking manifestation, the immutable entities and the perfect human as mirror, reached modern readers largely through Kāshānī's commentary, which Izutsu used as his guide to the Fuṣūṣ.

✓ Toshihiko Izutsu, Sufism and Taoism: A Comparative Study of Key Philosophical Concepts (1983)

Faṣṣ Ādam→Ibn ʿArabī, The Ringstone of Seth: 'He is your mirror and you are His mirror'Resonance, not influencefirm

The next chapter turns the mirror of this one around: the one to whom the Real discloses Himself sees only his own form, and the Real is the mirror in which he sees himself.

Faṣṣ Ādam→Ibn ʿArabī, The Book of Circles: the human as two copiesResonance, not influencefirm

The earlier treatise already draws the human as a copy of the cosmos and a copy of the divine presence, the same two forms that here make Adam the one created with two hands.

Faṣṣ Shīth→ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Qāshānī, Sharḥ Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikamLineagefirm

Al-Qāshānī's commentary, in the school of Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī, systematised this chapter's teaching on the fixed entities, preparedness and self-disclosure in the form of the receiver. Izutsu reconstructs Ibn ʿArabī's thought largely through this commentary.

✓ Toshihiko Izutsu, Sufism and Taoism: A Comparative Study of Key Philosophical Concepts (1983)

Faṣṣ Shīth→Ibn ʿArabī (attributed), The Prayer of the Highest Circuit: asking through particular NamesResonance, not influencesuggestive

The litany asks each protection through a Name suited to it ('O Withholder, O Repeller', 'O Mighty, O Loving'), which puts into practice the chapter's teaching that every gift comes at the hand of a custodian Name. Because the attribution is uncertain, this entry notes the fit without claiming that one text depends on the other.

Faṣṣ Idrīs→ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Qāshānī, commentary on the Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikamLineagefirm

The commentators after Ibn ʿArabī read the number analogy as the relation of the one existence to its entifications, and the formula 'He, not He' as the distinction between existence and delimitation; al-Qāshānī's commentary is the standard example of this reading.

✓ Toshihiko Izutsu, Sufism and Taoism: A Comparative Study of Key Philosophical Concepts (1983)

Faṣṣ Isḥāq→Ibn ʿArabī, Ringstone of Noah: tanzīh and tashbīhResonance, not influencesuggestive

In another chapter of the same book, Ibn ʿArabī holds that declaring God only incomparable delimits Him; here he says a form of the Real that reason rejects is to be interpreted, while one reason accepts is left as seen. The two chapters work the same tension between reason and form.

Faṣṣ ʿĪsā→ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Qāshānī, commentary on the Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikamLineagefirm

The Fuṣūṣ was read through a chain of commentaries in the school of Ibn ʿArabī, and al-Qāshānī's commentary became a standard way of explaining doctrines such as the Breath of the All-Merciful found in this chapter.

✓ Toshihiko Izutsu, Sufism and Taoism: A Comparative Study of Key Philosophical Concepts (1983)

al-Futūḥāt al-makkiyya→Ibn ʿArabī, Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam: the Seal of the saints and the wall of bricksLineagefirm

The vision in which the Seal sets up a pulpit for the author and calls him his peer (passages 8-10) is developed in his later teaching on the Seal of the saints, set out in the Ringstone of Seth.

✓ Michel Chodkiewicz, Le Sceau des saints: prophétie et sainteté dans la doctrine d'Ibn Arabî (1986)

al-Futūḥāt al-makkiyya→Ibn ʿArabī, Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam: the god created in belief and the mirrorLineagefirm

The divine words 'whoever restricts Me to one form has worshipped his own imagining' (passage 95) state the doctrine that the Fuṣūṣ later expounds, in which the one who receives self-disclosure sees his own form in the mirror of the Real.

✓ William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-ʿArabi's Metaphysics of Imagination (1989)

al-Futūḥāt al-makkiyya→Ibn ʿArabī, Tarjumān al-ashwāq: the Stone, the circuit and the heart as the place of the ritesLineageprobable

The love poems Ibn ʿArabī composed in Mecca in the same years as the opening of the Futūḥāt return to the same rites: touching the Stone, circling the House, and the heart as the valley where the pebbles are cast. They carry into verse the claim of passage 103 that the heart is the true House.

✓ Reynold A. Nicholson, The Tarjumán al-Ashwáq: A Collection of Mystical Odes by Muḥyiʾddín Ibn al-ʿArabí (1911) · Claude Addas, Ibn ʿArabî ou la quête du Soufre Rouge (1989)

Awrād: Sunday→The Akbarian practice of reciting Ibn ʿArabī's weekly litanies (the Wird)Lineageprobable

The Sunday prayers belong to the cycle of seven days of litanies that his followers have copied and recited, alongside other prayers attributed to him such as the Prayer of the Highest Circuit and the Prayer of Effusion.

✓ Pablo Beneito and Stephen Hirtenstein, The Seven Days of the Heart: Awrad al-usbu' (Wird): Prayers for the Nights and Days of the Week (2000)

al-Dawr al-aʿlā→Ibn ʿArabī, The Litanies of Sunday (al-Awrād)Resonance, not influenceprobable

Both are litanies addressed through strings of divine names, asking for a heart turned toward God and for His guarding gaze. Because the Dawr al-aʿlā is only attributed to Ibn ʿArabī, this is set here as a likeness of form within one devotional corpus, and no claim is made about which text shaped the other.

al-Dawr al-aʿlā→Ibn ʿArabī, The Book of Circles and the Ringstone of Adam: the servant taking on the character of the NamesResonance, not influenceprobable

In his doctrinal works the names are the realities through which the Real shows itself and whose traits the servant takes on. The prayer puts this to use: each request is fitted to the name that governs it, so the right name is called for the right need.

al-Dawr al-aʿlā→The Prayer of Effusion (al-Ṣalāt al-fayḍiyya), also attributed to Ibn ʿArabīResonance, not influenceprobable

Both litanies ask for a gift that reaches the servant by way of Muḥammad: here the strengthening given to the Prophet and his binding to the declaration of oneness, there the joining of the servant's branch to his root through blessing on the Prophet.

al-Ṣalāt al-fayḍiyya→Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī and Dāwūd al-Qayṣarī: the scheme of the five divine PresencesLineageprobable

The prayer says the Prophet comprehends the worlds of the five divine Presences. That fivefold scheme was set out and systematised in the school of Ibn ʿArabī by al-Qūnawī and later al-Qayṣarī, which bears on the prayer's attribution and places its vocabulary within that school's reading of Ibn ʿArabī.

✓ William C. Chittick, The Five Divine Presences: From al-Qūnawī to al-Qayṣarī (1982)

al-Ṣalāt al-fayḍiyya→Ibn ʿArabī, al-Futūḥāt al-makkiyya and Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam: the Muhammadan reality and the sealLineageprobable

The prayer gathers into one address the doctrine, worked out in the Futūḥāt and the Fuṣūṣ, that the reality of Muḥammad is the first thing determined, the source from which every prophet and saint draws, and the Reality of realities that is neither existent nor nonexistent.

✓ Michel Chodkiewicz, Le Sceau des saints: prophétie et sainteté dans la doctrine d'Ibn Arabî (1986)

al-Ṣalāt al-fayḍiyya→Ibn ʿArabī, Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam, chapter of Adam: the comprehensive configuration and the mirrorLineageprobable

What the Fuṣūṣ says of Adam, the comprehensive configuration in which the Real sees Itself and the receptacle fixed by the most holy effusion, the prayer says of Muḥammad, 'through whom You beheld the beauty of Your Essence'.

✓ William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-ʿArabi's Metaphysics of Imagination (1989)

Taqdīs al-shams→Ibn ʿArabī, The Litanies of SundayContrastprobable

Both are Sunday litanies from the same decades. Ibn ʿArabī's addresses God directly through His names, while Suhrawardī's first greets the sun and sends the request up a chain of intermediary lights. They agree on the closing thought, that God is veiled by His own light.

Ḥayy (Ibn Sīnā)→Ibn ʿArabī, Meccan Openings, introduction: the youth met at the KaʿbaResonance, not influenceprobable

Ibn ʿArabī meets at the Kaʿba a youth who stands outside ordinary time and tells him to read the details of his form; like Ḥayy's ageless elder, he is a figure whom the visitor must learn to read.

Ḥayy (Ibn Ṭufayl)→Ibn ʿArabī, Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam, Ringstone of Adam: Adam as the polish of the world's mirrorResonance, not influenceprobable

Both authors, Andalusians of neighbouring generations, read the hadith 'God created Adam in His form' through a mirror: for Ibn Ṭufayl the polished body that reproduces the sun's form, for Ibn ʿArabī the human being as the polish in which the Real sees Itself. The figure is shared; no reading of one by the other is claimed.

Mishkāt al-anwār→Ibn ʿArabī, Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam: the Real seeing Itself in the mirror of the humanResonance, not influenceprobable

al-Ghazālī uses the mirror to explain why the gnostic mistakes the form he sees for the Real, while Ibn ʿArabī makes the mirror the very reason for creation; the image is shared and the conclusions differ.

Mishkāt al-anwār→Ibn ʿArabī, Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam, Ringstone of Noah: joining tanzīh and tashbīhResonance, not influenceprobable

al-Ghazālī says the light is with things in one respect and prior to and above them in another, and denies that this is a contradiction; Ibn ʿArabī asks the knower to hold incomparability and similarity together.

Hayākil al-nūr→Ibn ʿArabī, The Ringstone of Seth: the Real seen in the mirror according to the receiverResonance, not influenceprobable

Suhrawardī compares the unchanging Real to a person facing mirrors of different sizes and quality, so that the images vary with the receivers. Ibn ʿArabī, his younger contemporary, says that the one who receives the self-disclosure sees his own form in the mirror of the Real. The images resemble each other, and no influence is claimed.

Risāla fī al-ʿishq→Ibn ʿArabī, Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam, Ringstone of Adam: the Real willed to see ItselfResonance, not influenceprobable

Both make the divine self-disclosure the ground of all existence and give God a desire that it be received: Ibn Sīnā's Good loves that its self-disclosure be attained, and Ibn ʿArabī's Real wills to see itself in the polished mirror of the human being. Our sources here do not document Ibn ʿArabī reading this treatise.

Risāla fī al-ʿishq→Ibn ʿArabī, Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam, Ringstone of Seth: the Real as mirrorResonance, not influenceprobable

Ibn Sīnā compares the universal intellect's reception of the Good to a form appearing in a mirror, an image of the Good that is never its like. Ibn ʿArabī builds a whole account of self-disclosure on the mirror, in which each side sees itself in the other.

Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ→Ibn ʿArabī, Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam (Adam) and Inshāʾ al-dawāʾir: the human being as the gathering of the world's realitiesResonance, not influenceprobable

The Brethren say the human, made of a coarse frame and a simple soul, gathers the realities of all existents; Ibn ʿArabī says the human brings together what the cosmos holds in dispersion and calls him the world in two copies, and turns this into a doctrine of the divine image and vicegerency that the Brethren do not state.

al-Risāla al-Qushayriyya→Ruwaym's saying that knowledge of God is a mirror, beside Ibn ʿArabī's mirror in the Ringstone of SethResonance, not influenceprobable

Ruwaym, quoted by al-Qushayrī, says knowledge of God is a mirror for the knower. Ibn ʿArabī develops the image into a reciprocal mirror between the Real and the servant. The library holds both sides, but we hold no study tracing the one image to the other.

al-Ḥikam→Ibn ʿArabī: the Manifest and the Hidden, and the litany 'When He unveils, there is no other'Resonance, not influenceprobable

Aphorisms 16, 38 and 141 share with Ibn ʿArabī the reading of God as at once Manifest and Hidden, and the saying 'God was and nothing with Him'. The Ḥikam turns this toward the servant's conduct and need; it does not build Ibn ʿArabī's metaphysics of the names and the mirror.

al-Maqālīd al-malakūtiyya→Ibn ʿArabī, Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam, the Ringstone of Noah: joining tanzīh and tashbīhContrastfirm

Both authors say that affirming incomparability alone or likeness alone falls short. Ibn ʿArabī's remedy is to combine the two affirmations, and al-Sijistānī's is to negate both, so the same diagnosis leads to opposite cures.

Tarjumān al-ashwāq→Ibn ʿArabī, The Ringstone of Noah: joining tanzīh and tashbīhResonance, not influenceprobable

The lover torn between Najd and Tihāma, highland and lowland, 'opposites that will never come together', has the same shape as the Fuṣūṣ teaching that declaring God only incomparable, or only similar, falls short. The poem voices as an ache what the treatise states as a rule. We do not claim that the commentary itself makes this link.

Symposium→Ibn ʿArabī: the barzakh and the Reality of the realitiesResonance, not influenceprobable

Ibn ʿArabī's third thing is neither existent nor non-existent, both the world and not the world, much as Diotima's daimōn is neither mortal nor immortal and joins the two sides it stands between. No path of influence is claimed.

✓ William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-ʿArabi's Metaphysics of Imagination (1989)

Ennead I.6→Ibn ʿArabī, The Ringstone of Adam: the unpolished mirror of the worldResonance, not influenceprobable

Plotinus's soul must be scoured of an alien crust before it can see, and Ibn ʿArabī's cosmos is a mirror that waits for its polish in the human being. Both make cleansing the condition of showing what is there.

Ennead I.6→Ibn ʿArabī, The Interpreter of Desires X: the lover who sees himself in the mirrorContrastprobable

Plotinus reads the beautiful shape on water as the trap that drowned Narcissus, while the closing lines of Ibn ʿArabī's poem make seeing oneself in the mirror of another the point of love.

al-Ājurrūmiyya→Ibn ʿArabī, The Book of Circles: the particle of impossibility and the divine willResonance, not influenceprobable

Ibn ʿArabī argues from the behaviour of particles such as 'law' to claims about the divine will, treating grammatical relations as evidence for metaphysics, while the Ājurrūmiyya lists the same kinds of particle only for their effect on case and mood.

al-Ājurrūmiyya→Invocation by the vocative in Ibn ʿArabī's litanies ('O God, O Living, O Self-Subsisting')Resonance, not influenceprobable

The chapter on the vocative gives the rule by which 'yā Allāh' and the names called upon in the litanies take their endings; the litanies are built almost entirely from that one construction.

Faṣṣ Idrīs→Plato, Republic VII and Alcibiades I: only the one who knows should ruleContrastprobable

Plato asks that the knower be compelled to go down and rule, and Socrates tells Alcibiades he may not govern before he knows himself. Ibn ʿArabī accepts that the most ignorant may hold office over the most knowing, and places lasting highness in knowledge, which no dismissal removes, apart from office.

Faṣṣ Ibrāhīm→Plato (attributed), Alcibiades I: the Delphic 'Know yourself' and the eye that sees itself in another eyeLineageprobable

Ibn ʿArabī grounds 'He is not known until we are known' on the saying 'whoever knows himself knows his Lord'. Altmann traced that saying in Arabic and Hebrew sources back to the Greek reception of the Delphic maxim, in which the Alcibiades and its Neoplatonic commentators are central.

✓ Alexander Altmann, The Delphic Maxim in Medieval Islam and Judaism (in Biblical and Other Studies) (1963)

Faṣṣ ʿĪsā→Plato, Alcibiades I: the Delphic 'Know yourself' and its Arabic afterlifeLineageprobable

The chapter cites 'whoever knows himself knows his Lord' to say that knowing the cosmos is knowing the Breath; scholarship has traced how the Delphic maxim passed into Arabic and Hebrew writing and was joined to this saying.

✓ Alexander Altmann, The Delphic Maxim in Medieval Islam and Judaism (in Biblical and Other Studies) (1963)

Inshāʾ al-dawāʾir→Plato, Timaeus 48e–52d: the receptacle (khōra) as a 'third kind'Resonance, not influencesuggestive

Plato adds a third kind, besides being and becoming, that receives all forms and is grasped only by a kind of bastard reasoning. Ibn ʿArabī's third thing is also known only by allusion and comparison, and he lets it be called prime matter (hayūlā) (passages 43, 46). Plato's receptacle is no aspect of God, while Ibn ʿArabī's third thing is conjoined with the Real.

Inshāʾ al-dawāʾir→Plato, Symposium 202e: Love as a daimōn between god and mortalResonance, not influenceprobable

Diotima's daimōn stands between gods and mortals and binds the whole together. Ibn ʿArabī's human being is an isthmus (barzakh) that gathers creation and the Real, like the line that divides shade from sun (passage 54). The two share the figure of the go-between, and no influence is claimed.

Rūḥ al-quds→Plato, Symposium: Diotima of Mantinea teaching SocratesResonance, not influenceprobable

In both texts an older woman instructs a young man who will become the great teacher of his tradition in matters of love. Fāṭima calls herself Ibn ʿArabī's divine mother, and Socrates presents Diotima as the one who taught him. No influence is claimed.

al-Ṣalāt al-fayḍiyya→Plato, Symposium 202e–203a: Love as the daimōn in between (metaxy)Resonance, not influenceprobable

Diotima's Love stands between mortal and immortal, carrying messages across so that the whole is bound together. The prayer's Prophet is the isthmus between existence and nonexistence and the bond tying originated to eternal. The two share the figure of a binding middle term with no line of influence.

Taqdīs al-shams→Plato, Republic VI (508b-509b): the sun as offspring of the GoodResonance, not influenceprobable

Plato makes the sun the visible likeness of the Good, giving light and growth as the Good gives intelligibility and being. Suhrawardī calls the sun a likeness of God's majesty and His vicegerent among bodies. The images match closely, but the Republic was not available in Arabic in full, so no direct reading is claimed.

Ḥayy (Ibn Sīnā)→Plato, Phaedrus 246a–254e: the charioteer and the two horsesResonance, not influenceprobable

Plato pictures the soul as a charioteer with a spirited horse and an unruly appetitive horse, and Ḥayy tells the narrator to ride his reckless and gluttonous companions and use one against the other; the Arabic text is a tale of companions on a road, with imagination as a third, lying scout.

Ḥayy (Ibn Sīnā)→Plato, Symposium 202e: Love as the daimōn who ferries between gods and mortalsResonance, not influenceprobable

Diotima's Love carries messages between the divine and the human, and Ḥayy draws near to the King by addressing and rousing the narrator; both are intermediaries whose work is to lead the human upward.

Risālat al-Ṭayr→Plato, Phaedrus 246a–249d: the winged soulResonance, not influenceprobable

In Plato's myth the soul sheds its wings and falls to earth, and the sight of beauty makes them grow again. Ibn Sīnā's birds keep their wings but are caught by the neck and feet, and they too are drawn upward toward a beauty.

Risālat al-Ṭayr→Plato, Republic VII 514a–517a: the caveResonance, not influenceprobable

Prisoners grow content with their chains until one is freed and led up, and when he comes back his fellows mock him. At the end of the Recital the narrator's brothers likewise say his mind has flown off and prescribe cures for bile.

Risālat al-Ṭayr→Plato, Symposium 211e: the beautiful itself, 'unmixed'Resonance, not influenceprobable

Diotima's beautiful itself is 'pure, clean, unmixed' with anything mortal. Ibn Sīnā's King is the beauty with which no ugliness mixes, and the one who sees him is freed from bewilderment only by his kindness.

al-Ghurba al-gharbiyya→Plato, Republic VII: the allegory of the caveResonance, not influenceprobable

Prisoners chained in a dark place underground, an ascent toward the sun, and a necessary return to the prisoners below form a pattern close to the well of Qayrawān, the climb to Sinai and the enforced return to the West.

Mishkāt al-anwār→Plato, Republic VI: the sun as the likeness of the GoodResonance, not influencesuggestive

Plato's sun gives both visibility and existence to things, as the Good does to what is known; al-Ghazālī's light gives manifestness and existence and is likewise approached through the sun, though his route to this image runs through the Quran and later philosophy.

Risāla fī al-ʿishq→Plato, Symposium 207d: mortal nature seeks to be always by generationShared sourceprobable

Ibn Sīnā says the generative faculty yearns to produce its like so that the species endures, and that reasoned procreation imitates the First Cause; Diotima says mortal nature seeks immortality by leaving behind something new. Both rest on the idea that living things share in the everlasting through their kind.

✓ Dimitri Gutas, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition: Introduction to Reading Avicenna's Philosophical Works (1988)

Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ→Plato, Theaetetus 176b: homoiōsis theōi kata to dynaton, through the late-antique Alexandrian prolegomena to philosophy (Ammonius, Elias, David)Lineagefirm

The Alexandrian introductions to philosophy listed 'becoming like God as far as possible' among the standard definitions of philosophy, and this list of definitions passed into Arabic introductions and encyclopaedias, of which the Brethren's phrase is one instance.

✓ Christel Hein, Definition und Einteilung der Philosophie: Von der spätantiken Einleitungsliteratur zur arabischen Enzyklopädie (1985)

Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ→Plato, Timaeus: the world soul spread through the body of the cosmosResonance, not influencesuggestive

The Brethren's universal Soul, above the encompassing sphere and pervading every body down to the centre of the earth, resembles the soul the demiurge stretches through the cosmos in the Timaeus; the route by which such ideas reached the Brethren is not traced here.

Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ→Plutarch, Gryllus (Bruta animalia ratione uti) and De sollertia animaliumResonance, not influenceprobable

Plutarch lets a man turned into a pig argue that beasts live more virtuously than humans, and elsewhere sets out the keenness of animal senses; the Brethren's camel and hare make similar points against human boasting, with no known route between the two.

Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ→Plato, Republic VI–VII: the Good as the source of being and knowing, and the ascent from the caveResonance, not influenceprobable

Epistle 32 makes the Creator the cause of every being's existence, duration, completeness and perfection, as the one is the source of every number; the Republic makes the Good the source of being and of knowledge, as the sun is of growth and sight. Both picture the soul's task as a climb back up the ranks, which the Brethren close with a call to wake before the Trumpet.

Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ→Plato, Symposium: Diotima's ladder from bodies to the beautiful itselfResonance, not influencesuggestive

Both arrange what exists as a ladder that the soul may climb, Diotima by love from one beautiful body to beauty itself, the Brethren by knowledge from the minerals, plants and animals up through Soul and Intellect to the Creator. The Brethren's ladder is drawn by number and effusion, with no place for erōs; the likeness is in the ascent, not its motive.

al-Risāla al-Qushayriyya→Plato, Republic VII: the eyes of the freed prisoner dazzled and slowly accustomed to the lightResonance, not influenceprobable

Al-Qushayrī's beginners receive glimmers, risings and flashes that are soon overtaken by night, and the strong are those who can bear the light. Plato's prisoner must grow used to the upper world by stages before he can look at the sun. Both describe sight that has to be trained to bear brightness; no influence is claimed.

al-Maqālīd al-malakūtiyya→Plato, Republic VI: the Good 'beyond being' (epekeina tēs ousias)Resonance, not influenceprobable

Plato places the Good above being in rank and power, and al-Sijistānī denies being to the Originator altogether. Any connection would pass through later Neoplatonism, so here it is shown only as resonance.

Tarjumān al-ashwāq→Plato, Alcibiades I 132d-133c: the eye that sees itself in the pupil of another eyeResonance, not influenceprobable

Socrates argues that an eye sees itself when it looks into the pupil (korē) of another eye, and a soul knows itself by looking into the best part of another soul. Ibn ʿArabī's closing verse uses the same optics, since the Arabic for pupil is 'the little human'. No reading of this dialogue by him is claimed.

Tarjumān al-ashwāq→Plato, Symposium: Diotima's ladder from one beautiful body to the beautiful itselfContrastprobable

Diotima's lover climbs away from the beauty of one body toward a beauty 'not infected with human flesh and colours'. The Tarjumān stays with particular maidens, names and places, and the commentary finds divine realities in them as they stand, without leaving them behind.

al-Khamriyya→Plato, Symposium 211e: the beautiful itself, 'pure, clean, unmixed'Resonance, not influencesuggestive

Diotima's final object is beauty unmixed with flesh and colour. The ode urges the reader to take the wine pure and unmixed (ṣirf, verse 36) and gives it beauties that make those who praise it write beautifully (verse 31).

al-ʿAyniyya→Plato, Symposium: Diotima's ladder of ascentContrastprobable

Diotima describes only the climb, step by step from beautiful bodies to the beautiful itself, and gives the lover a way up. The Ode dwells on the fall, and even its ascent ends as a flash of lightning that folds away.

Ennead VI.9→Plato, Symposium: Diotima's speech and the heavenly AphroditeLineagefirm

Plotinus draws on the Symposium for his heavenly and common Aphrodite and for Eros born with Aphrodite (203c), and his ascent past the beautiful things echoes Diotima's climb to the beautiful itself. He then goes past Diotima, since the soul runs beyond even the beautiful.

✓ John M. Rist, Eros and Psyche: Studies in Plato, Plotinus and Origen (1964)

Phaedrus→Plato, Symposium, Diotima's speechResonance, not influenceprobable

Both dialogues give Plato's accounts of love as the way to beauty itself: Diotima's climbs a ladder from one body to the form and speaks of birth in beauty, while the Phaedrus works through recollection and the regrowth of wings. How the two accounts relate to each other is still discussed by scholars.

Phaedrus→Plato (disputed), Alcibiades I: the eye that sees itself in another eyeResonance, not influenceprobable

In both passages a person comes to know himself by looking into another's eyes. The Phaedrus beloved does this without knowing it, while Socrates in the Alcibiades makes it an explicit method of self-knowledge.

Phaedrus→Plato, Republic VII: the prisoner dazzled in the caveResonance, not influenceprobable

In both dialogues the soul is turned toward a reality it can bear only gradually, with pain, dazzlement and the mockery of the many. The Republic explains this through education and the turning of the soul, the Phaedrus through recollection and love.

Ennead I.6→Plato, Symposium 210a–212a: Diotima's ladder to the beautiful itselfLineagefirm

Plotinus's ascent from bodies to conduct to souls to Beauty itself, 'pure and unmingled', follows Diotima's ladder and her language of the final mysteries, which he read and interpreted as a Platonist.

✓ John M. Rist, Plotinus: The Road to Reality (1967)

Ennead I.6→Plato, Phaedrus 250b–251c: beauty shining through sight and the lover's woundLineagefirm

The soul recognising beauty 'as from an ancient knowledge', the shudder and awe at the sight, and the lovers who 'feel the keener wound' take up the Phaedrus account of recollection and the regrowth of wings.

✓ John M. Rist, Plotinus: The Road to Reality (1967)

Ennead I.6→Plato, Republic VI 508b and VII 518c: the eye as the most sunlike organ, and education as turning the eyeLineagefirm

The closing rule that no eye sees the sun unless it has become sunlike reuses Plato's word hēlioeidēs from the sun analogy, and the inner vision that all possess but few use echoes the claim that the power of sight is already in the soul and needs turning.

✓ John M. Rist, Plotinus: The Road to Reality (1967)

Faṣṣ Isḥāq→Suhrawardī, the world of image ('ālam al-mithāl) and the three worldsResonance, not influenceprobable

Suhrawardī also places an intermediate world between the intelligible and the sensible where spiritual realities appear in form. The likeness is one of structure, and no reading of Suhrawardī by Ibn ʿArabī is claimed here.

al-Futūḥāt al-makkiyya→Ibn Sīnā and Suhrawardī, the visionary recitals: the guide met at the edge of the worldResonance, not influenceprobable

In the recitals the soul meets a luminous guide (the elder Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, the father on Sinai) who tells it about its own origin. Ibn ʿArabī's youth plays the same role at the Kaʿba, although here the guide is young and the teaching is read from his body (passage 84).

Awrād: Sunday→Suhrawardī, Taqdīs al-shams: the Sunday prayer to HūrakhshContrastprobable

Both men composed prayers for Sunday. Suhrawardī addresses the sun as a living light whose light ends in the Light of lights, before sanctifying the Highest; Ibn ʿArabī's Sunday prayer asks by 'the light of Your Face' and addresses the Real with no celestial intermediary.

al-Dawr al-aʿlā→Suhrawardī, The Temples of Light: the opening prayer 'O Self-Subsisting One, strengthen us with the light'Resonance, not influenceprobable

Both open by calling on the Living and Self-Subsisting (al-Ḥayy al-Qayyūm, the pair of Q 2:255) and ask for strengthening and steadfastness. The likeness comes from the common Quranic pair, and no influence between the two texts is claimed.

al-Ṣalāt al-fayḍiyya→Suhrawardī, al-Ghurba al-gharbiyya: out of the dark well toward the lightResonance, not influenceprobable

The prayer asks to be brought out of the darkness of 'I-ness' into light and from the grave of the bodily frame to the Resurrection. Suhrawardī's exile climbs out of the well of Qayrawān toward Sinai. Both describe a release from bodily confinement toward a light, in different genres and schools.

Taqdīs al-shams→Suhrawardī, The Temples of Light (Hayākil al-nūr): Hūrakhsh the father and kingLineagefirm

The same author, in the seventh temple of his short treatise, names the sun with the same titles used in this prayer: the holy one, the father, the king, Hūrakhsh the mighty, vanquisher of the dusk. The prayer puts into liturgy what the treatise states as doctrine.

✓ John Walbridge, The Leaven of the Ancients: Suhrawardī and the Heritage of the Greeks (2000)

Taqdīs al-shams→Suhrawardī, The Occidental Exile: the ascending lineage of fathersLineageprobable

In the recital the exile's father tells him of further ancestors, a lineage that ends at the One. The prayer's chain, in which the sun asks its father, who asks his father, up to the God of gods, is the same ladder of intelligences given in the form of a request.

✓ Henry Corbin, En Islam iranien: aspects spirituels et philosophiques, tome II: Sohrawardî et les Platoniciens de Perse (1971)

Ḥayy (Ibn Sīnā)→Suhrawardī, The Occidental Exile (Qiṣṣat al-ghurba al-gharbiyya)Lineagefirm

Suhrawardī wrote his recital as a continuation of Ibn Sīnā's Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, taking up the western exile and carrying the journey to the Sinai of the soul, where a chain of ancestors ends at the One, much as Ḥayy's 'father' leads up to the King.

✓ Henry Corbin, Avicenne et le récit visionnaire (1954)

Risālat al-Ṭayr→Suhrawardī, The Occidental Exile (Qiṣṣat al-ghurba al-gharbiyya), and his Persian version of the Recital of the BirdLineagefirm

Suhrawardī made a Persian version of Ibn Sīnā's Recital of the Bird. In the preface to his own exile tale he names Ibn Sīnā's recitals as the story he means to carry further, and that tale is again one of captives in chains who are freed by a messenger bird and climb a mountain.

✓ Henry Corbin, Avicenna and the Visionary Recital (1960)

Risālat al-Ṭayr→Suhrawardī, The Temples of Light, seventh templeResonance, not influenceprobable

Suhrawardī says the rational souls belong to the angelic world and are kept from it by bodily occupations, which states as doctrine what the Bird shows as a story about birds who have forgotten themselves in their cages.

al-Ghurba al-gharbiyya→Suhrawardī's Ishrāqī doctrine of lights and its commentatorsLineageprobable

The chain of fathers ending in the Light of light gives in symbolic form the hierarchy of lights that Suhrawardī sets out in his philosophical works, which his later readers studied as a single system.

✓ Hossein Ziai, Knowledge and Illumination: A Study of Suhrawardī's Ḥikmat al-ishrāq (1990) · John Walbridge, The Leaven of the Ancients: Suhrawardī and the Heritage of the Greeks (2000)

Ḥayy (Ibn Ṭufayl)→Suhrawardī, al-Ghurba al-gharbiyya (The Occidental Exile)Shared sourcefirm

Suhrawardī in the east and Ibn Ṭufayl in the west, at almost the same moment, each wrote a new tale in answer to Ibn Sīnā's Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān; there is no sign that either knew the other's work.

✓ Henry Corbin, Avicenne et le récit visionnaire (1954)

Mishkāt al-anwār→Suhrawardī, The Temples of Light and the Light of lightsShared sourceprobable

Both build a ranked order of lights ascending to a Light of lights and read the sun as its visible likeness; each draws on Ibn Sīnā's philosophy and its Neoplatonic hierarchy of intellects, and Suhrawardī adds Platonic and old Persian sources of his own.

✓ Alexander Treiger, Inspired Knowledge in Islamic Thought: Al-Ghazālī's Theory of Mystical Cognition and Its Avicennian Foundation (2012) · John Walbridge, The Leaven of the Ancients: Suhrawardī and the Heritage of the Greeks (2000)

Hayākil al-nūr→Suhrawardī, The Sanctification of the Sun: the prayer to HūrakhshResonance, not influencefirm

The Temples gives the sun, Hūrakhsh, the same titles found in the author's own solar litany, such as vanquisher of the dusk, chief of heaven and maker of the day, and calls it the supreme likeness of God. Both texts come from Suhrawardī's hand. Which was written first, and whether one draws on the other, is not established here, so the tie is recorded as shared wording within one body of work.

Hayākil al-nūr→Suhrawardī, The Occidental Exile: the climb to Sinai and the father of the lineageLineagefirm

The Temples states in argument what the Occidental Exile tells as a story: the soul is held captive by bodily powers, climbs toward its holy father the Active Intellect, and joins a lineage of lights that ends in the One. The Exile itself continues Ibn Sīnā's visionary recitals.

✓ Henry Corbin, Avicenne et le récit visionnaire (1954)

Hayākil al-nūr→Mullā Ṣadrā: the gradation of being (tashkīk al-wujūd)Lineageprobable

Suhrawardī's lights differ only in intensity, ranked from the weakest to the Light of Lights. Mullā Ṣadrā read Suhrawardī and applied this model of gradation to existence itself.

✓ Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Ṣadr al-Dīn Shīrāzī and his Transcendent Theosophy (1978)

Risāla fī al-ʿishq→Suhrawardī, The Temples of Light: the souls' love for the lights above themLineageprobable

Suhrawardī's Temples describe the rational souls as kin to the angelic lights and drawn to them in love and likeness, recasting the Avicennan hierarchy of intellects and souls in the language of light. His philosophy grew out of a critical reading of Ibn Sīnā.

✓ Hossein Ziai, Knowledge and Illumination: A Study of Suhrawardī's Ḥikmat al-ishrāq (1990)

Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ→Suhrawardī, Hayākil al-nūr: the souls of the spheres and the ranks of the lightsResonance, not influenceprobable

Both give each heavenly sphere a soul that moves it with an intellect above as its sustainer, and both identify these spiritual movers with what scripture calls angels; Suhrawardī recasts the whole order in the language of light.

al-Ḥikam→Suhrawardī, Hayākil al-nūr, and the Hymn of the Pearl: the soul as a pearl held in the shell of the worldResonance, not influenceprobable

Aphorisms 245–247 call the human a pearl enfolded in the shells of created things and a prisoner within the 'temple' (haykal) of his own self, images that recall Suhrawardī's temples of the soul and the Syriac prince sent for a pearl. These are shared images, with no claimed descent.

al-ʿAyniyya→Suhrawardī, The Occidental Exile (Qiṣṣat al-ghurba al-gharbiyya)Lineagefirm

Suhrawardī says in his preface that he read Ibn Sīnā's Recital of Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān and wrote his own tale to carry it further. His captive soul in the city of the West, who falls back from Sinai into prison, takes up the Avicennan theme of the soul's exile that the Ode states in verse.

✓ Henry Corbin, Avicenne et le récit visionnaire (1954)

al-ʿAyniyya→Suhrawardī, The Temples of Light: rational souls kept from their worldResonance, not influenceprobable

Suhrawardī describes the rational souls as angelic in substance and held back from their own world by bodily occupations, close to the dove held by the snare and barred from the open heights. No particular borrowing from the Ode is claimed.

Ennead VI.9→Suhrawardī, Temples of Light and the Occidental Exile: the soul stripped of the body and the ascent to SinaiLineageprobable

Suhrawardī appeals to Plato and the ancient sages for the experience of putting off the body and seeing lights, and the Arabic Plotinus's 'often I have been alone with my soul' was one of the texts through which that experience reached him. His iron that glows like fire and his exile who climbs toward the source carry the ascent of chapters 9 and 11.

✓ John Walbridge, The Leaven of the Ancients: Suhrawardī and the Heritage of the Greeks (2000)

Republic VI–VII→Suhrawardī, The Occidental Exile: the captives in the well of QayrawānResonance, not influenceprobable

Suhrawardī's captives lie chained at the bottom of a dark well and climb to a palace by night to look out toward home, a figure of the soul held below that sits close to Plato's chained prisoners and their way up to the light.

Phaedrus→Suhrawardī, The Occidental ExileResonance, not influenceprobable

Suhrawardī's captives in the city of the West climb up by night to look toward home and are freed by the hoopoe's letter. This resembles the Phaedrus soul held down in a body that strains upward and is wakened from outside, though in Suhrawardī the waking comes from a message and in Plato from beauty.

Ennead I.6→Suhrawardī, The Temples of Light: the soul cleansed to rejoin the lightsResonance, not influenceprobable

Suhrawardī says the rational soul is kept from its world by bodily attachments and comes to resemble the lights by drawing near them, as heated iron resembles fire. Plotinus likewise says the cleansed soul becomes all Idea and Reason and like God.

Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam→The Quran, sūra 1:2, 'Praise be to God, Lord of the worlds'Lineagefirm

Chapter 3 quotes this verse directly and reads it so that all the forms of the cosmos are tongues of the Real, and every outcome of praise returns to Him. The Fuṣūṣ builds its doctrine throughout on such close readings of Quranic wording.

✓ William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-ʿArabi's Metaphysics of Imagination (1989)

Faṣṣ Shīth→The Quran: the All-Merciful and the Merciful of the BasmalaLineagefirm

The division of gifts into the pure mercy of the All-Merciful (al-Raḥmān) and the mixed mercy of the divine gift is a reading of the Quran's names of mercy, which open the Basmala and the Fātiḥa. Chittick documents how Ibn ʿArabī derives his teaching on mercy and the names from these Quranic terms.

✓ William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-ʿArabi's Metaphysics of Imagination (1989)

Faṣṣ Nūḥ→The Opening of the Quran: 'Praise be to God, Lord of the Worlds' and the straight pathContrastprobable

The chapter cites Q 1:2 to make God both the one who praises and the one praised, and sets its circular bewilderment against the elongated path that has a 'from' and a 'to', which sits in tension with the plain sense of the prayer for the straight path.

Faṣṣ Ibrāhīm→The hadith of supererogatory works (ḥadīth al-nawāfil): 'I become his hearing with which he hears, his sight with which he sees'Lineagefirm

Passage 3 cites this sound report directly to show the Real hidden in the creature as its faculties. The commentators read the two directions of takhallul through the paired 'nearness of supererogatory works' and 'nearness of obligatory works'. Al-Ghazālī cites the same report in the Niche of Lights.

✓ William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-ʿArabi's Metaphysics of Imagination (1989)

Faṣṣ ʿĪsā→The Quranic Jesus verses (Q 3:49, 4:171, 5:110, 5:116-118, 19:17-19) and their Muslim exegesisLineagefirm

The chapter is a close reading of the Quranic passages on Jesus as word and spirit, on the bird of clay and on his answer to God, and it stands in the long Muslim tradition of interpreting these verses. The library also holds Ibn ʿArabī's own allusion to Jesus as the healer of the man born blind and the leper in the Meccan Openings.

✓ Neal Robinson, Christ in Islam and Christianity (1991) · Tarif Khalidi, The Muslim Jesus: Sayings and Stories in Islamic Literature (2001)

al-Futūḥāt al-makkiyya→The hadith of God's transformation in forms at the Resurrection (Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī)Lineagefirm

Passage 94 retells the canonical hadith in which God comes to the people at the Resurrection in a form they do not recognize, and they seek refuge from Him until He appears in a form they know. Ibn ʿArabī makes it a key text for his teaching on self-disclosure.

✓ William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-ʿArabi's Metaphysics of Imagination (1989)

al-Futūḥāt al-makkiyya→The Quran as the text the author becomes: 'I am the Qurʾān and the Seven Oft-Repeated'Lineagefirm

Passage 62 identifies the speaker with the Quran and with the seven verses of the Opening, called in Q 15:87 the Seven Oft-Repeated. Ibn ʿArabī's writing is woven from Quranic citation and allusion throughout.

✓ Michel Chodkiewicz, Un océan sans rivage: Ibn Arabî, le Livre et la Loi (1992)

Rūḥ al-quds→The Quran, sūra 1, al-Fātiḥa, as recited by Fāṭima of SevilleLineagefirm

Fāṭima recites the Fātiḥa with Ibn ʿArabī and, he reports, gives it a form made of air that she sends to bring back an absent husband. The episode is a direct use of the sūra held in the library, and Austin's translation of this book presents it.

✓ R. W. J. Austin, Sufis of Andalusia: The Rūḥ al-quds and al-Durrat al-fākhirah of Ibn ʿArabī (1971)

Awrād: Sunday→The Quran: al-Fātiḥa, and the names First, Last, Manifest and Hidden (Q 57:3), with sūrat al-Ikhlāṣ (Q 112)Lineagefirm

The litany is built from Quranic words: it asks for guidance to God's path in the language of the Fātiḥa, quotes Q 2:156, 6:18, 20:111 and 57:3, and closes the Sunday prayer with the whole of sūra 112. Its paradoxes of Inward and Outward are readings of Q 57:3.

✓ William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-ʿArabi's Metaphysics of Imagination (1989)

al-Dawr al-aʿlā→The Quran, especially al-Fātiḥa: 'Thee alone we ask for help' and 'Praise be to God, Lord of the worlds'Lineagefirm

The prayer is made of quotations from the Quran, each named verse closing a request. It ends with the Fātiḥa's own words of praise, and the prayer as a whole can be read as a long working-out of the Fātiḥa's asking for help (istiʿāna).

✓ Constance E. Padwick, Muslim Devotions: A Study of Prayer-Manuals in Common Use (1961)

Taqdīs al-shams→The Quran on Abraham and the setting sun (Q 6:76-79), as read in al-Ghazālī's Niche of LightsContrastfirm

Abraham turns away from star, moon and sun because they set, and turns his face to the One who originated the heavens. Suhrawardī greets the sun with peace and asks it to intercede, while also calling it obedient to its Originator. Read beside Abraham's refusal, the prayer shows how far a creature can be honoured before honour becomes worship.

al-Ghurba al-gharbiyya→The Quran: the straight path and the stories of Moses, Noah, Lot and KhiḍrLineagefirm

The tale is woven from Quranic phrases: the blessed spot of Moses (Q 28:30), Noah's ship and drowned son, Lot's wife who lags behind, Khiḍr's scuttled boat and the fish that finds its way to the sea (Q 18), and at the moment of awakening God's straight path (Q 6:153), the path asked for in the Opening.

✓ Wheeler M. Thackston, The Mystical and Visionary Treatises of Shihabuddin Yahya Suhrawardi (1982)

Ḥayy (Ibn Ṭufayl)→The Quran: Moses cast into the sea in a chest (Q 20:39) and the raven that shows Cain how to bury his brother (Q 5:31)Lineageprobable

The mother who casts her son in a chest into the water entrusting him to God, and the raven that buries its fellow and teaches Ḥayy to bury the gazelle, retell two Quranic scenes; the litany of the Highest Circuit prays with a phrase from the same verse about Moses.

✓ Lenn Evan Goodman, Ibn Tufayl's Hayy Ibn Yaqzan: A Philosophical Tale (1972)

Hayākil al-nūr→The Quran's God who loves, and Ibn ʿArabī's prayer for a love cast from GodContrastprobable

In the Temples the First loves only its own essence and pays no attention to what is lower, while everything below loves it. The Quran's God and the Akbarian litany speak of, and ask for, a love that reaches out from God to the servant.

al-Risāla al-Qushayriyya→The Quran, al-Fātiḥa 1:5: 'Thee alone we worship; Thee alone we ask for help'Lineagefirm

Al-Qushayrī reads the two halves of this verse as separation (the servant's own act of worship) and union (help that comes only from God). The whole lexicon of the chapter is built on Quranic verses read in this way.

✓ Paul Nwyia, Exégèse coranique et langage mystique (1970)

al-Maqālīd al-malakūtiyya→The Quran's Opening: God addressed by name and attributeContrastprobable

The Fātiḥa names God the Beneficent, the Merciful, Lord and Owner, and the worshipper speaks to Him directly. Al-Sijistānī keeps such names for the level of the Command and the hierarchy, and holds that the Originator Himself is reached only by negating them.

al-ʿAyniyya→Quran 7:172, the primordial covenant (the 'Day of Alast')Resonance, not influencesuggestive

The Quran speaks of a pledge taken from the children of Adam before their birth, which people may later forget, and the Ode's covenants made in the sanctuary and then forgotten have a similar shape. The poem does not cite the verse, so the link is left as a resemblance.

Symposium→The Quran and Ibn ʿArabī's litanies: God as al-Wadūd, the LovingContrastfirm

In Diotima's account the gods lack nothing, so they do not love, and the beautiful itself only receives love. The Quran's God loves and is loved (5:54), and the litany calls on Him as the Loving to cast His love upon the servant.

Ennead VI.9→The Quran and Ibn ʿArabī's litany: the God who loves ('He loves them and they love Him', Q 5:54; 'a love from Me', Q 20:39)Contrastfirm

In chapter 8 the One does not desire us, so as to be around us; only we desire it. The Quran's God loves and is loved, and the Prayer of the Highest Circuit asks the Loving for a love cast from Him, so that love runs both ways.

Ennead VI.9→The soul at peace (al-nafs al-muṭmaʾinna, Q 89:27-28) and the sakīna sent down on the heartResonance, not influenceprobable

The soul that has become rest at the summit and the Quran's tranquil soul called back to its Lord both place stillness at the end of a return. The shape is shared; no influence is claimed either way.

Republic VI–VII→al-Ghazālī, The Niche of Lights: God alone is light in the true sense (Q 24:35)Contrastprobable

For Plato light belongs to the sun, the Good's offspring, while the Good stands higher than light; al-Ghazālī, following the verse 'God is the light of the heavens and the earth', gives the name light to God alone and calls every other light borrowed.

Ennead I.6→Hadith: 'God is beautiful and loves beauty'Contrastprobable

For Plotinus the First is the source of beauty and the object of every soul's love, but it gives without taking and is not said to love. The hadith gives God the name Beautiful and says He loves beauty.

al-Ājurrūmiyya→The Quran, al-Fātiḥa 1:5: 'Thee (alone) we worship' (iyyāka naʿbudu)Lineageprobable

Arabic grammar was built to read the language of the Quran, and the detached pronoun iyyāka listed in the chapter on the direct object is the fronted object of the Fātiḥa's fifth verse, whose placement grammarians and exegetes read as 'Thee alone'.

✓ Kees Versteegh, The Arabic Linguistic Tradition (1997)

al-Fātiḥa→The Lord's Prayer (Matthew 6:9-13)Resonance, not influenceprobable

Both are short communal prayers in the first person plural, recited daily, that move from honouring God's name and rule to petitions for sustenance or guidance and for protection from going wrong. The similarity is one of form and use, and no borrowing is claimed.

Faṣṣ Shīth→Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Mystical Theology: union through unknowingContrastprobable

Dionysius makes unknowing (agnōsia) the way to union with the God beyond all being. Ibn ʿArabī treats the saying 'incapacity to attain perception is perception' as the view of one ignorant in his knowing, and places the highest knower in a silence that, he says, knowledge gave him.

Faṣṣ Nūḥ→Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, The Mystical Theology and The Divine Names: denial and affirmation of GodResonance, not influenceprobable

Dionysius also pairs a way of affirming names of God with a way of denying them, and both authors hold that neither way on its own reaches Him, without any documented contact between them.

✓ Michael A. Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (1994)

Faṣṣ Idrīs→Augustine, Confessions III.6.11: 'interior intimo meo et superior summo meo'Resonance, not influenceprobable

Augustine calls God more inward than his inmost part and higher than his highest. The chapter's God who is 'with you' in highness and yet the Most High above all sharing holds a similar pairing of nearness and height, without any line of influence.

Faṣṣ Ibrāhīm→The Hymn of the Pearl: the robe that is 'two in distinction and yet one in a single likeness'Resonance, not influencesuggestive

The returning prince sees his robe as a mirror of himself, two yet one likeness. The chapter's closing verses speak of 'two faces: He and I' and of each appearing within the other. The two share an image of doubled identity, with no claimed link between them.

Faṣṣ ʿĪsā→Council of Chalcedon (451): Christ one person in two naturesContrastfirm

Chalcedon confesses that divinity and humanity are united in the one person of Christ; Ibn ʿArabī holds that the divine life works through the human form of Jesus while the form and the ruling property remain separable, and he makes every living thing a locus of the same life.

Faṣṣ ʿĪsā→Gospel of John 1:1-14: the Logos that was God and became fleshContrastfirm

John identifies the Word with God and with Jesus alone; for Ibn ʿArabī Jesus is the Word cast to Mary, and yet all existents are words of God, inexhaustible, because each comes from the command 'Be!'.

Faṣṣ ʿĪsā→Gospel of John 20:22: Jesus breathes on the disciples, 'Receive the Holy Spirit'Resonance, not influenceprobable

In both, the breath of Jesus carries spirit and life into what it touches, and Ibn ʿArabī adds Abū Yazīd reviving an ant by breathing on it as a later instance of the same Jesus-like witnessing.

al-Futūḥāt al-makkiyya→The Prologue of the Gospel of John: the Word that was in the beginningResonance, not influencesuggestive

In both texts a figure who comes to exist in history is also said to have existed before creation as the principle through which the world was made. Compare 'I am Aḥmad' spoken to the primordial water (passage 20) with the Word 'in the beginning'. The doctrines differ, and no influence is claimed.

Awrād: Sunday→Pseudo-Dionysius, Mystical Theology, opening prayer to the Trinity beyond beingResonance, not influenceprobable

Both texts pray to a God who cannot be known by the one praying, and ask to be led into a knowing that lies past the knower's own capacity.

Awrād: Sunday→Augustine, Confessions: calling upon a God already within ('You were within me, and I was outside')Resonance, not influenceprobable

Augustine opens by asking how one can call upon God, who must already be present to be called, and later confesses that God was within while he searched outside. The litany asks: 'Is One sought who is near and present?'

al-Dawr al-aʿlā→The Irish lorica 'St Patrick's Breastplate': 'Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ on my right, Christ on my left'Resonance, not influencefirm

Section 9 of the litany asks to be guarded 'from before me and from behind me, from my right and from my left, from above me and from below me'. The breastplate hymn names the same directions as an armour put on by prayer. The two grew up far apart, and the likeness is one of structure only.

al-Ṣalāt al-fayḍiyya→Gospel of John 1:1–3: the Word through whom all things were madeResonance, not influenceprobable

John's Logos is the Word through whom all things come to be. The prayer calls the Prophet the matter of the divine address that passes from the hidden 'Be!' into the visible 'and it is'. The difference is sharp: the Logos is confessed as God, while the prayer's Prophet unites servanthood and lordship and remains a servant.

Taqdīs al-shams→Dionysius the Areopagite, Mystical Theology: the darkness of excess lightResonance, not influenceprobable

Dionysius speaks of a divine darkness that is unapproachable light, and of praising God by removing attributes. The prayer's God is hidden by too much light and praised by negation. The two share a Neoplatonic grammar of negation, reached by separate routes.

Ḥayy (Ibn Sīnā)→Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy: Lady PhilosophyResonance, not influenceprobable

Boethius's prisoner is visited by a woman whose age cannot be fixed, full of vigour yet ancient, who diagnoses his condition and leads him up toward the highest good; Ḥayy is likewise old in years and untouched by decay, and he too begins by reading his listener's nature.

Mishkāt al-anwār→Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite: the divine darkness that is unapproachable lightResonance, not influenceprobable

Dionysius speaks of a darkness that is excess of light and of ranked orders of light-bearing intelligences; al-Ghazālī says the divine light is hidden by the intensity of its manifestness and orders the angels by nearness to the first light.

Hayākil al-nūr→Gospel of John 14:26 and 16:7: the Paraclete who will teach all thingsLineageprobable

Suhrawardī quotes Jesus' promise of the Paraclete. He identifies the Paraclete with the most luminous manifestation, which is entrusted with esoteric interpretation, and ties it to the Holy Spirit, the Active Intellect.

✓ Henry Corbin, En Islam iranien: aspects spirituels et philosophiques, tome II: Sohrawardî et les Platoniciens de Perse (1971)

Risāla fī al-ʿishq→Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Divine Names IV: erōs as a power that runs through all beingsResonance, not influenceprobable

Dionysius describes a divine erōs that moves through every level of being, binding the higher to the lower and turning all things back to the Good. Ibn Sīnā's ʿishq likewise pervades every rank of being and returns it to the First.

Ennead VI.9→Augustine, Confessions VII: the 'books of the Platonists' and the ascent inwardLineagefirm

Augustine reports reading books of the Platonists in Latin translation, and his turn inward and upward to the unchangeable light in Book VII follows the Plotinian ascent of this treatise. His God, unlike the One, is also the God who became flesh, which he says he did not find in those books.

✓ Pierre Courcelle, Recherches sur les Confessions de saint Augustin (1950)

Ennead VI.9→Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Mystical Theology: unknowing and union beyond mindLineageprobable

Dionysius's union with the one beyond being through unknowing continues the claim of chapter 4 that the One is reached by a presence above knowledge. He knew this line through Proclus and later Neoplatonism, and passed it to Latin and Greek Christian mysticism.

✓ Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys (1981) · Michael A. Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (1994)

Ennead I.6→Augustine, City of God and Confessions: the flight to the FatherlandLineagefirm

Augustine read 'books of the Platonists' in Latin translation and echoes this treatise's flight to the Fatherland, a journey made without feet or ship, in his own account of the soul's return to God.

✓ Pierre Courcelle, Recherches sur les Confessions de saint Augustin (1950)

Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam→Śaṅkara, Advaita Vedānta: brahman with and without qualitiesResonance, not influenceprobable

Śaṅkara's distinction between brahman without attributes and brahman as known through attributes resembles the pairing of tanzīh and tashbīh, though the two thinkers had no contact.

✓ Reza Shah-Kazemi, Paths to Transcendence: According to Shankara, Ibn Arabi, and Meister Eckhart (2006)

al-Fātiḥa→The Gāyatrī mantra (Ṛgveda 3.62.10)Resonance, not influencesuggestive

A short verse recited daily by the devout, the Gāyatrī honours the light of the solar deity Savitṛ and asks that it stir or direct our thoughts. Like the Fātiḥa it joins praise to a single request for inward direction.

Faṣṣ Ādam→Abhinavagupta, Tantrāloka: the world as reflection (pratibimba) in the mirror of consciousnessResonance, not influenceprobable

The Kashmiri Śaiva teacher describes the world as an image appearing in the mirror of Śiva's consciousness, which comes to self-recognition, a structure close to the Real seeing Its names in the mirror of the cosmos.

Faṣṣ Nūḥ→Rāmānuja, Śrī Bhāṣya: the world as the body of Brahman, its inner controllerResonance, not influenceprobable

Rāmānuja calls the world the body of Brahman, who governs it from within as a self governs its body, which closely resembles the Real as the governing spirit of the cosmos in passages 3 to 5, with no historical contact.

Faṣṣ Ibrāhīm→Śaṅkara, commentary on the Brahmasūtra: the lordship of Īśvara depends on limiting adjunctsResonance, not influenceprobable

Śaṅkara holds that Brahma's being Lord (Īśvara) depends on the adjuncts of name and form, while Brahman without qualities stands beyond that relation. This resembles Ibn ʿArabī's division between the independent Essence and divinity as a relation to the entities, though the two systems value the world differently.

Awrād: Sunday→Advaita Vedānta: brahman without attributes (nirguṇa) and with attributes (saguṇa)Resonance, not influencesuggestive

The litany's distinction between Unity of the Essence, hidden and unknown, and Oneness of the Names, manifest in all things, is structurally like the Advaita distinction between brahman beyond all qualities and brahman known through qualities.

al-Dawr al-aʿlā→Hindu kavaca hymns, such as the Nārāyaṇa Kavaca of the Bhāgavata PurāṇaResonance, not influenceprobable

A kavaca ('armour') assigns names of a deity to guard each part of the body and each direction, and is recited daily for protection. The Dawr al-aʿlā likewise builds walls and armour out of divine names and verses. The resemblance is of form, with no historical contact claimed.

Taqdīs al-shams→The Gāyatrī mantra (Rig Veda 3.62.10) to SavitṛResonance, not influenceprobable

The Vedic prayer meditates on the splendour of the sun god Savitṛ and asks it to stir our thoughts. Suhrawardī asks, through the sun and the lights above it, that God illumine his soul with holy flashes and divine sciences. Both treat sunlight and the light of understanding as one petition.

Mishkāt al-anwār→Śaṅkara, Advaita Vedānta: the world as borrowed being over BrahmanResonance, not influencesuggestive

Both hold that only one reality exists in its own right and that the many have existence only from it; al-Ghazālī keeps the servant distinct from the Lord and speaks of a face turned toward God, where Śaṅkara identifies the self with Brahman.

Tarjumān al-ashwāq→Jayadeva, Gītagovinda: Rādhā's longing for Kṛṣṇa in separationResonance, not influenceprobable

This twelfth-century Sanskrit poem, near in date to the Tarjumān, sings erotic love in separation (viraha) amid lush scenery, and devotional readers take it as the soul's love for God. It shows the same move of reading desire as devotion, reached independently.

Ennead VI.9→Śaṅkara and Advaita Vedānta: Brahman without qualities (nirguṇa), not an object of knowledgeResonance, not influenceprobable

Both describe a first principle that is none of the things it grounds, cannot be known as an object, and is reached when the knower stops seeing two. The resemblance is structural; there is no known contact between the traditions.

Republic VI–VII→Śaṅkara, Advaita Vedānta: the rope taken for a snake, and two levels of realityResonance, not influenceprobable

Advaita separates conventional reality (vyāvahārika) from the highest (pāramārthika) and treats ignorance (avidyā) as mistaking an appearance for the real, which resembles the prisoners who take shadows for things; there is no historical link.

Phaedrus→Katha Upanishad: the self as rider in the chariot of the bodyResonance, not influenceprobable

The Upanishad pictures the self as lord of a chariot, with the intellect as driver, the mind as reins and the senses as horses, which corresponds to Plato's charioteer and horses. No contact between the two texts is claimed.

al-Ājurrūmiyya→Pāṇini, Aṣṭādhyāyī: the pratyāhāra abbreviationsResonance, not influencesuggestive

The primer gathers the prefixes of the present tense into the mnemonic word 'anaytu', and Pāṇini gathers classes of sounds into short coded syllables; both are devices for memorising a grammar, in unrelated traditions.

Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam→G. W. Leibniz, Monadology: each monad a living mirror of the universeResonance, not influencesuggestive

For Leibniz every substance mirrors the whole from its own point of view and unfolds only what its own concept contains. This resembles the fixed entity whose preparedness decides what it receives.

Faṣṣ Ādam→Leibniz, Monadology (1714): each monad a living mirror of the universeResonance, not influenceprobable

Leibniz's monads each mirror the whole universe from their own point of view, as Ibn ʿArabī's angels and faculties each reflect only a partial share while Adam alone reflects the whole.

Faṣṣ Shīth→G. W. Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics (1686): the complete concept of the individualResonance, not influenceprobable

For Leibniz the complete concept of each possible individual contains all that will ever happen to it, and God in creating gives existence to what that concept already holds, much as here God gives the servant only what his fixed entity gave God to know. The likeness, which extends to Leibniz's claim that no two things are exactly alike and the chapter's claim that nothing in the divine presence repeats, is structural, with no influence in either direction.

Faṣṣ Nūḥ→Spinoza, Ethics: God or NatureResonance, not influencesuggestive

Spinoza's God expressed in all things invites comparison with the cosmos as the Real's form, though Ibn ʿArabī keeps the hidden side of the Real and asks the knower to quiet the veil of nature (ṭabīʿa) in passage 16.

al-Futūḥāt al-makkiyya→Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Essais de Théodicée (1710): the best of all possible worldsResonance, not influenceprobable

Leibniz also argued that the actual world is the best that could have been made. Passage 27 makes a similar claim through al-Ghazālī's saying. There is no known route of influence between the two.

Inshāʾ al-dawāʾir→G. W. Leibniz, Essais de Théodicée (1710): the best of all possible worldsResonance, not influenceprobable

Both reason from God's goodness and power to the claim that the actual world could not be bettered. Leibniz argues from a choice among possible worlds, and Ibn ʿArabī denies choice in God and speaks of a will whose contrary is impossible (passages 19 to 20). This is a resonance and no influence is claimed.

Ḥayy (Ibn Ṭufayl)→Edward Pococke, Philosophus autodidactus (Latin, 1671), and the English versions that followedLineagefirm

The Arabic text was printed at Oxford with a Latin translation in 1671 and put into English several times, and it was read among seventeenth-century English and Dutch thinkers interested in natural reason and the inner light.

✓ G. A. Russell (ed.), The 'Arabick' Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England (1994) · Avner Ben-Zaken, Reading Hayy Ibn-Yaqzan: A Cross-Cultural History of Autodidacticism (2011)

Ḥayy (Ibn Ṭufayl)→William Molyneux's question to John Locke: would a man born blind, given sight, know the cube from the sphere? (Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding, 1694 edition)Resonance, not influenceprobable

Both use a man born blind who gains sight to test how knowledge by description relates to knowledge by seeing. Ibn Ṭufayl's blind man finds nothing unfamiliar, only more clarity; Molyneux and Locke answered that he would not at first recognise the shapes.

Ḥayy (Ibn Ṭufayl)→René Descartes, Les passions de l'âme (1649): the pineal gland as the seat of the soulContrastprobable

Ḥayy reasons that what governs the body must sit in a single central, well-guarded organ and finds it in the heart's empty left chamber; Descartes, by a similar argument from singleness and centrality, placed the soul's principal seat in a small gland in the brain. The arguments match and the organs differ.

Hayākil al-nūr→René Descartes, Meditations II: the thinking self known while the body is doubtedResonance, not influenceprobable

Both argue that the self is not the body from the fact that self-awareness persists while the body or its parts are absent from the mind. No line of transmission from Suhrawardī to Descartes is claimed.

Risāla fī al-ʿishq→Spinoza, Ethics V, props. 35-36: God loves himself with an infinite intellectual loveResonance, not influencefirm

Spinoza says that God loves himself with infinite intellectual love, and that the mind's intellectual love of God is part of that same love. Ibn Sīnā's First Good loves itself most perfectly because it apprehends itself, and its beloveds are the souls that receive it.

Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ→Michel de Montaigne, Essays II.12, 'Apology for Raymond Sebond': human presumption over the animalsResonance, not influenceprobable

Montaigne lists the senses and skills in which animals surpass humans and mocks the human claim to rule them; the Brethren's beasts argue that keener senses belong to animals and that intellect is a gift that gives no ground for boasting.

Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ→Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation: 'Can they suffer?'Resonance, not influenceprobable

The ram, the elephant and the mule ask the king to look at their pain and ask 'Where is the mercy?'; Bentham also makes suffering the measure of how animals may be treated, within a secular ethics of utility.

Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ→René Descartes, Discourse on Method part V: the animal as machineContrastfirm

Descartes denies animals thought and treats their behaviour as mechanism; the Brethren give animals souls, senses and a voice in court, and place the difference only in the human soul's survival after death, which the animals themselves concede.

al-Fātiḥa→The Buddhist Noble Eightfold Path and the middle wayResonance, not influencesuggestive

Both name a single right way set between two errors: in the Fātiḥa those under anger and those who stray, in the Buddha's first sermon indulgence and self-mortification. The Buddhist path is walked by one's own effort, while the Fātiḥa asks God to show it.

Rūḥ al-quds→The Transmission of the Lamp (Jingde chuandeng lu, 1004): lives of the Chan mastersResonance, not influenceprobable

The Chan collection presents enlightenment as passed from master to disciple in encounters, retorts and silences, much as Ibn ʿArabī records the Way as passing through meetings with living teachers. The two arose independently.

Awrād: Sunday→Linji Yixuan (Rinzai), Recorded Sayings: seeking the Buddha as the obstacle to itResonance, not influencesuggestive

Linji tells his students that to go out seeking the Buddha is to miss what is already present in the one seeking; the litany says seeking and aiming are attributes of the servant, and that seeking is the essence of distance.

al-Dawr al-aʿlā→Theravāda paritta chants, such as the Mettā Sutta and the Ratana SuttaResonance, not influenceprobable

Paritta ('protection') texts are chanted to ward off danger. The Mettā Sutta joins that protection to loving-kindness, much as the litany joins its guarding to a love cast upon the speaker. The two traditions differ on whether a personal God is being addressed, and no influence is implied.

al-Ṣalāt al-fayḍiyya→Mahāyāna Buddhism: the three bodies of the Buddha (trikāya)Resonance, not influencesuggestive

The trikāya teaching lets one teacher be at once a historical man and a cosmic body of reality. The prayer likewise speaks of a man who fasted, prayed and journeyed by night, and of the same figure as the first determination and the prime matter of all forms. The likeness is structural only.

Ḥayy (Ibn Sīnā)→Buddhism: the three poisons (greed, hatred, delusion)Resonance, not influenceprobable

Buddhist teaching names desire, hatred and delusion as the three roots of harm, and Ḥayy's three companions are desire, anger and a lying imagination; the Buddhist aim is to uproot them, while Ḥayy asks that they be governed until death releases the soul.

Risālat al-Ṭayr→Dhammapada 174: 'like a bird escaped from a net, few go to heaven'Resonance, not influenceprobable

The Pali verse uses the bird freed from the net as an image for the few who get free of a blind world. The Recital uses the same image for the soul freed from the body's appetites, with no link between them.

al-Ghurba al-gharbiyya→The Ten Ox-Herding Pictures (Kuoan Shiyuan): returning to the marketplaceContrastprobable

In the Zen sequence the return to the town after awakening is the final stage and a free act of compassion; in the tale the return to the western prison is suffered as a grief, softened only by the promise of easy ascent and a final release.

al-Risāla al-Qushayriyya→Tibetan Mahāmudrā teaching: passing meditative experiences (nyams) and stable realization (rtogs)Resonance, not influenceprobable

Al-Qushayrī distinguishes variation (talwīn), the shifting states of one still on the path, from stability (tamkīn), the settled condition of the people of realities. Tibetan teachers likewise warn that bliss, clarity and non-thought are fleeting experiences, distinct from a realization that does not come and go.

al-Ḥikam→Shinran, Pure Land Buddhism: other-power (tariki) and self-power (jiriki)Resonance, not influencesuggestive

Shinran teaches that salvation comes wholly through Amida's power and that trust in one's own practice is an obstacle; the Ḥikam says no aim pursued through oneself is made easy (26), that one should not seek reward for a work one did not do (124), and that the servant arrives only when God covers his attribute (132). The two rest on very different accounts of the world.

al-Maqālīd al-malakūtiyya→Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā: the fourfold negation (catuṣkoṭi)Resonance, not influenceprobable

Nāgārjuna refuses that a thing is, is not, both, or neither, and al-Sijistānī defends 'not qualified and not not-qualified' against the charge of contradiction. Both use logical negation to leave the ultimate unassertable, in wholly separate traditions.

al-ʿAyniyya→Early Buddhist teaching on non-self (anattā)Contrastprobable

The Ode assumes a single soul that existed above, came down, and can return home knowing more. Early Buddhist teaching explains bondage through craving and denies an abiding self that could make such a journey, so liberation there is no homecoming.

Symposium→Early Buddhism: craving (taṇhā) as the origin of sufferingContrastprobable

For the Buddha's second noble truth, craving drives rebirth and suffering and is to be extinguished, while for Diotima desire born of lack is the power that carries the soul upward and is to be trained and redirected. Both begin from lack and draw opposite conclusions from it.

Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam→Laozi and Zhuangzi: the Dao and its myriad thingsResonance, not influenceprobable

Izutsu set the one reality manifest in all forms, and the knower's bewilderment, beside the Daoist Way and its transformations. He offered this as a structural comparison with no claim of contact.

✓ Toshihiko Izutsu, Sufism and Taoism: A Comparative Study of Key Philosophical Concepts (1983)

Faṣṣ Ādam→Liu Zhi, Displaying the Concealment of the Real Realm (a Chinese version of Jāmī's Lawāʾiḥ)Lineageprobable

Akbarian teaching on the Real's self-manifestation and the human who comprehends all things reached Chinese Muslim scholars through Jāmī, and Liu Zhi rendered Jāmī's Lawāʾiḥ into Chinese in Neo-Confucian terms.

✓ Sachiko Murata, Chinese Gleams of Sufi Light: Wang Tai-yü's Great Learning of the Pure and Real and Liu Chih's Displaying the Concealment of the Real Realm (2000)

Faṣṣ Ādam→Laozi and Zhuangzi: paired complements and the sage who holds them togetherResonance, not influenceprobable

The two hands of majesty and beauty, awe and intimacy, gathered in the perfect human, resemble the Daoist pairing of complements held together in the sage, a resemblance studied without any claim of contact.

✓ Sachiko Murata, The Tao of Islam: A Sourcebook on Gender Relationships in Islamic Thought (1992) · Toshihiko Izutsu, Sufism and Taoism: A Comparative Study of Key Philosophical Concepts (1983)

Faṣṣ Shīth→Zhuangzi and Laozi: the Way that gives each thing its own natureResonance, not influenceprobable

Izutsu set Ibn ʿArabī's self-disclosure of the Real beside the Daoist Way, which appears in each thing according to that thing's own nature, so that both describe one source received in endlessly different measures. The comparison is structural, and no contact between the traditions is claimed.

✓ Toshihiko Izutsu, Sufism and Taoism: A Comparative Study of Key Philosophical Concepts (1983)

Faṣṣ Nūḥ→Zhuangzi and Laozi: the nameless Way and its named manifestationsResonance, not influencefirm

Izutsu set Ibn ʿArabī's pairing of the hidden Essence and the manifest names beside the Daoist Way that is both unnamed and present in all things, as a structural comparison with no influence claimed.

✓ Toshihiko Izutsu, Sufism and Taoism: A Comparative Study of Key Philosophical Concepts (1983)

Faṣṣ Idrīs→Zhuangzi, chapter 2 (Qiwu lun): 'this is also that, that is also this'Resonance, not influenceprobable

Zhuangzi lets 'this' and 'that' turn into each other at the pivot of the Way, much as the chapter's 'He, not He; you, not you' affirms and denies the same thing in two respects. Izutsu set Ibn ʿArabī and Zhuangzi side by side as a structural comparison with no claim of contact.

✓ Toshihiko Izutsu, Sufism and Taoism: A Comparative Study of Key Philosophical Concepts (1983)

Faṣṣ ʿĪsā→Zhuangzi: human life as the gathering of qi, death as its dispersalResonance, not influencesuggestive

Both see one breath-like stuff taking on every form, with life appearing wherever it gathers; the Zhuangzi has no divine names and no merciful Breather, so the resemblance is one of structure only.

Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ→Zhuangzi, chapter 9, 'Horses' Hooves' (Mati)Resonance, not influenceprobable

Zhuangzi describes horses living freely on the plains until Bole brands, bridles and drives them, and half of them die; the Brethren's animals tell the same story of free roaming ended by halter, bit and whip, though Zhuangzi aims at the harm done by order itself.

al-Khamriyya→Li Bai, 'Drinking Alone by Moonlight'Resonance, not influencesuggestive

Li Bai drinks with the moon and his shadow as companions, while Ibn al-Fāriḍ makes the full moon the cup and the wine a sun passed round by a crescent (verse 2). Both place drinking among the heavenly bodies, with no connection between them.

Ennead VI.9→Laozi, Daodejing, chapter 1: the dao that can be spoken is not the constant daoResonance, not influencesuggestive

Plotinus says the One is neither to be spoken nor written, and that we write only to point out the road; the Daodejing opens by saying the nameable is not the constant. Both use speech to send the reader past speech, with no relation between them.

Republic VI–VII→Zhuangzi, 'Autumn Floods' (Qiushui): the frog in the wellResonance, not influenceprobable

The frog in a shallow well cannot be told about the sea because it is bound to its place, much as the cave-dwellers mock the one who has seen the sun; the two images arose independently.

Ennead I.6→Zhuangzi, chapter 4: the fasting of the heart (xinzhai)Resonance, not influencesuggestive

Both ask the person to stop relying on ears and eyes and to empty out what clutters the inner self so that a truer perception can arise. The Daoist emptiness has no ladder of beauties leading to a Good.

Faṣṣ Ibrāhīm→Ibn al-Fāriḍ, The Wine Ode: spirit and wine mingled in unionResonance, not influenceprobable

Ibn al-Fāriḍ's wine mingles with the spirit, and he says that separation has come about though the whole is one. This runs alongside Ibn ʿArabī's image of water permeating wool and nourishing what it pervades. The two men were contemporaries, but no dependence between these passages is claimed here.

Faṣṣ ʿĪsā→Ibn al-Fāriḍ, The Wine Ode: the wine that revives the dead and makes the born blind seeResonance, not influenceprobable

The ode gives the primordial wine the powers the Quran gives Jesus, raising the dead and healing the blind, while Ibn ʿArabī gives the same powers to spirit and breath; the two writers were contemporaries, and no influence is claimed here.

al-Ṣalāt al-fayḍiyya→Ibn al-Fāriḍ, al-Khamriyya: 'wine and no vine, while Adam was a father to me'Resonance, not influenceprobable

Ibn al-Fāriḍ's speaker claims a being prior to Adam, as the prayer places Muḥammad before all creation as the first determination and the jewel from which things come. The two contemporaries voice a primordial reality in different genres, ode and litany.

Ḥayy (Ibn Ṭufayl)→Ibn Sīnā, the Ode on the Soul: the dove that descends and dwells among the ruinsResonance, not influenceprobable

Ḥayy concludes that the dweller has left an intact house and will not return to its ruin; Ibn Sīnā's ode tells of a soul come down into the body that weeps for its first dwelling and departs. One is an inference from a corpse, the other a lyric of exile.

Mishkāt al-anwār→Ibn al-Fāriḍ, The Wine Ode: intoxication as the lasting stateContrastprobable

al-Ghazālī treats intoxication as a passing state whose words are corrected once the soul returns to the rule of the intellect; Ibn al-Fāriḍ's poem says there is no life for one who has lived sober.

Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ→Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, Kalīla wa-DimnaResonance, not influencesuggestive

Both put wisdom into the mouths of animals and warn readers not to take the tale as a game; the Brethren say they clothe the realities in words and allusions so as not to be driven from their position.

al-Risāla al-Qushayriyya→Ibn al-Fāriḍ, the Wine Ode (al-Khamriyya)Shared sourceprobable

Al-Qushayrī's terms sukr and ṣaḥw, and tasting and drinking, and Ibn al-Fāriḍ's wine that makes the drinker drunk before the vine was created both draw on the Sufi vocabulary of intoxication. The ode follows the poetic route and the handbook the definitional one.

✓ Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (1975)

Tarjumān al-ashwāq→The pre-Islamic and early Arabic nasīb (the love prelude of the ode), e.g. Imruʾ al-Qays's MuʿallaqaLineagefirm

The Tarjumān takes its imagery and forms from the nasīb: the ruined campsite, the departing litters, the camel-driver, the named beloveds (Hind, Salmā, Lubnā) and the longing for Najd. It inherits these through the continuous reading and imitation of this poetry.

✓ Jaroslav Stetkevych, The Zephyrs of Najd: The Poetics of Nostalgia in the Classical Arabic Nasīb (1993) · Michael A. Sells, Stations of Desire: Love Elegies from Ibn ʿArabi and New Poems (2000)

Tarjumān al-ashwāq→Ibn al-Fāriḍ, the Wine Ode (al-Khamriyya)Shared sourceprobable

Ibn al-Fāriḍ, writing in Cairo in the same decades, also sets divine love in the forms of classical Arabic poetry, in his case the wine song. Both take up the inherited love and wine lyric and fill it with Sufi meaning. No contact between the two men is documented.

✓ Th. Emil Homerin, From Arab Poet to Muslim Saint: Ibn al-Fāriḍ, His Verse, and His Shrine (1994)

al-Khamriyya→The Abbasid wine song (khamriyyāt), above all Abū NuwāsLineagefirm

The ode takes its genre and its stock scenes, such as the tavern, the boon-companions, the cup-bearer, the seal of the jar and the mixing of the wine, from the classical Arabic wine song. It turns these conventions toward a wine that existed before creation.

✓ Philip F. Kennedy, The Wine Song in Classical Arabic Poetry: Abū Nuwās and the Literary Tradition (1997) · Th. Emil Homerin, From Arab Poet to Muslim Saint: Ibn al-Fāriḍ, His Verse, and His Shrine (1994)

Symposium→Ibn al-Fāriḍ, The Wine OdeResonance, not influenceprobable

Poros is drunk on nectar at Aphrodite's birth feast 'for there was no wine yet' (203b), and Ibn al-Fāriḍ's lovers drink a wine before the vine was created. In both an intoxication older than wine stands at the origin of love, a resemblance with no influence behind it.

Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam→Nicholas of Cusa, On the Vision of God (De visione Dei, 1453)Resonance, not influenceprobable

Cusanus has God's seeing and the viewer's being seen coincide, each viewer seeing according to his own capacity, much as chapter 2 makes the Real the seer's mirror and the seer the Real's. Both also let knowing and not knowing meet in the knower, as Ibn ʿArabī's Sunday litany asks how it can know the Inward and how it cannot.

Faṣṣ Idrīs→Nicholas of Cusa, De docta ignorantia (1440): coincidentia oppositorumResonance, not influencefirm

Cusanus held that in God the maximum and the minimum coincide and that God is approached beyond the rule of contradiction. Al-Kharrāz's saying in this chapter makes the knowledge of God depend on bringing opposites together; the two are independent formulations.

al-Futūḥāt al-makkiyya→Nicholas of Cusa, De docta ignorantia (1440): learned ignoranceResonance, not influenceprobable

Passage 105 cites the saying attributed to Abū Bakr, 'incapacity to attain perception is itself perception', and in passage 97 the author takes the form of 'the most complete ignorance'. Cusanus likewise made knowing that one cannot know God the highest knowledge. The two arrived at this through separate routes.

Inshāʾ al-dawāʾir→Ramon Llull, Ars: the divine dignities set on revolving circlesResonance, not influencesuggestive

Llull arranged God's attributes on circles and figures so that their combinations could be seen and learned. Ibn ʿArabī also draws the Names on tables and circles joined by links, so that the doctrine becomes fixed in the imagination (passage 79). Contact between the two has been suggested but is not documented, so this is resonance only.

Awrād: Sunday→Nicholas of Cusa, De docta ignorantia: the coincidence of opposites in GodResonance, not influencesuggestive

Passage 18 lists pairs gathered in the one 'pervading Ipseity' (light and darknesses, hearing and deafness, ignorance and knowledge, silence and speech); Cusa holds that opposites coincide in the infinite. The author's 'knower who is ignorant', described by opposites, sits close to Cusa's learned ignorance.

Ḥayy (Ibn Sīnā)→Dante Alighieri, Paradiso: the ascent through the planetary heavensResonance, not influencesuggestive

The western climes of the Recital are the planetary spheres in order, each kingdom with the character of its planet, and Dante's pilgrim climbs through the same heavens under a guide; no transmission between the two texts is claimed here.

Risāla fī al-ʿishq→Dante, Paradiso XXXIII: the love that moves the sun and the other starsResonance, not influencefirm

Dante ends the Commedia with a love that moves the heavens, and Ibn Sīnā has the angelic souls move the celestial bodies out of love for the First Good. Both draw on a cosmos ordered by love.

Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ→Anselm Turmeda, Disputa de l'ase (1417), and Kalonymus ben Kalonymus's Hebrew version of the animals' caseLineageprobable

The debate of the animals before the king of the jinn was put into Hebrew in the fourteenth century, and Turmeda's Catalan dispute between a friar and an ass reworks the same debate; modern editors of the Arabic text discuss this afterlife.

✓ Lenn E. Goodman and Richard McGregor, Epistles of the Brethren of Purity. The Case of the Animals versus Man Before the King of the Jinn: An Arabic Critical Edition and English Translation of Epistle 22 (2009)

al-Ājurrūmiyya→Donatus, Ars minor, the Latin schoolbook of the parts of speechResonance, not influenceprobable

Like the Ājurrūmiyya in the Arabic-speaking world, Donatus's short catechism of the parts of speech was the first book memorised by pupils across the Latin West for a thousand years; the two primers grew in separate traditions.

Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam→Jacques Lacan, the mirror stageContrastsuggestive

For Lacan the self forms by mistaking an outer image for itself. In chapter 2 the seer truly sees his own form, altered by the locus, and learns that the mirror itself stays unseen.

Faṣṣ Shīth→Jacques Lacan, 'The mirror stage' (1949)Contrastsuggestive

For Lacan the child's first self-image in the mirror is a misrecognition that founds an alienated ego. In this chapter seeing one's own form in the mirror of the Real is the furthest true knowledge open to a creature, although the image is bent by the presence in which it appears and the mirror itself stays unseen.

Faṣṣ Isḥāq→Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900): manifest and latent contentContrastprobable

Both hold that a dream's outward image must be carried over to a hidden meaning. For Freud that meaning comes from the dreamer's own wishes, and for Ibn ʿArabī it is what God intended by the form.

al-Futūḥāt al-makkiyya→C. G. Jung: the puer aeternus, the eternal youth as an image of the selfResonance, not influencesuggestive

Jung read the figure of the divine youth as an image of the self met within. Ibn ʿArabī's youth also turns out to be a mirror: 'what came upon me came from me' (passage 107). The resemblance is one of structure only.

Ḥayy (Ibn Sīnā)→Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1933): the ego as rider of the idResonance, not influencesuggestive

Freud likens the ego to a rider who must guide a stronger horse, and Ḥayy tells the narrator that if he stands firm he will ride his companions and they will not ride him; each is a picture of reason managing forces it cannot remove.

Risāla fī al-ʿishq→Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle: Eros as the drive that holds living substance togetherResonance, not influenceprobable

Freud extends Eros beyond sexuality to a force that preserves and binds living things. Ibn Sīnā extends ʿishq further still, to prime matter and the elements, as the innate drive by which every being keeps its perfection and flees non-being.

Symposium→Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, preface to the fourth edition (1920)Lineagefirm

Freud writes that the widened idea of sexuality in psychoanalysis coincides with 'the Eros of the divine Plato'. Later psychoanalytic talk of sublimation reads Diotima's ladder as the redirecting of one desire toward higher objects.

✓ Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie) (1905)

Ennead VI.9→Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930): the 'oceanic feeling'Contrastprobable

Freud reads the feeling of oneness with everything as a survival of the infant's ego before it separated from the world, a turn backward. Plotinus reads the loss of the boundary between seer and seen as the soul becoming what it was, and calls the one who has fled outside himself the child who, in madness, does not know his father.

Phaedrus→Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id: the rider and the horseResonance, not influencesuggestive

Freud compares the ego to a rider who must hold in check the superior strength of a horse, the id, which resembles the charioteer's struggle with the unruly horse. Freud does not cite the Phaedrus for this image, so it is offered as resonance.

Faṣṣ Ādam→Meister Eckhart, German sermons: 'the eye in which I see God is the same eye in which God sees me'Resonance, not influencefirm

Eckhart's single eye through which God and the soul see each other resembles Ibn ʿArabī's human as the pupil through which the Real looks upon His creation, without any known contact between them.

Faṣṣ Shīth→Meister Eckhart, German sermons: 'the eye in which I see God is the same eye in which God sees me'Resonance, not influenceprobable

Eckhart's saying that one eye serves both God's seeing and the soul's seeing has the same two-way shape as 'He is your mirror in your seeing yourself, and you are His mirror in His seeing His names.' The resemblance is structural, with no claimed contact.

Faṣṣ Ibrāhīm→Meister Eckhart, German sermon 52 (Beati pauperes spiritu): 'if I had not been, God would not have been God'Resonance, not influencefirm

Both separate the Godhead or Essence in itself from 'God' as a name that exists only in relation to creatures, and both say boldly that the creature is a condition of God's being God. This is resonance, with no claimed influence in either direction.

✓ Michael A. Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (1994)

Awrād: Sunday→Meister Eckhart, German sermon 'Beati pauperes spiritu': the poor man who wants, knows and has nothingResonance, not influenceprobable

Eckhart's poverty of spirit goes so far that the self no longer stands before God as a separate knower; the litany's 'realized poverty' likewise ends in a servant with no existence in the very essence of Unity.

✓ Michael A. Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (1994)

Taqdīs al-shams→Francis of Assisi, Canticle of the Creatures: Brother SunResonance, not influencefirm

Francis praises God for Brother Sun, 'who is day, and by him You give us light', saying the sun bears the likeness of the Most High. Suhrawardī, a few decades earlier, calls the sun maker of the day by God's command and a likeness of His majesty. The two poems share a devotion to the sun as a sign that praises its maker.

al-Risāla al-Qushayriyya→Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises: the rules for the discernment of spiritsResonance, not influenceprobable

Ignatius sorts inner movements into those from the good spirit and those from the enemy, and treats consolation and desolation much as al-Qushayrī treats expansion and contraction: as states to be met with steadiness and right conduct. The resemblance is structural.

al-Ḥikam→John of the Cross, The Dark Night and The Ascent of Mount CarmelResonance, not influenceprobable

Asín Palacios proposed that the Shādhilī teaching, through Ibn ʿAbbād, anticipated John of the Cross on the dark night, detachment and the value of aridity; aphorisms 152 and 175–177 on the night of contraction show the likeness. The claim of influence is disputed, so it is given here as a resemblance only.

✓ Miguel Asín Palacios, Un precursor hispanomusulmán de San Juan de la Cruz (1933) · Luce López-Baralt, San Juan de la Cruz y el Islam: estudio sobre las filiaciones semíticas de su literatura mística (1985)

al-Ḥikam→Jean-Pierre de Caussade (attributed), Abandonment to Divine Providence: the sacrament of the present momentResonance, not influenceprobable

The eighteenth-century French teaching of abandonment asks the soul to accept what each moment brings as God's will; the Ḥikam says each moment carries a fresh claim of God that cannot be made up (208) and that wanting something other than what God shows in the moment is ignorance (18). No contact between the two is claimed.

Tarjumān al-ashwāq→John of the Cross, Cántico espiritual with his commentaryResonance, not influenceprobable

The Spanish Carmelite wrote a love poem of seeking and absence in the idiom of the Song of Songs, and then a prose commentary reading each stanza as a stage of the soul's way to God. The form closely matches the Tarjumān and its commentary, with no link between them claimed.

al-Fātiḥa→Aristotle, Metaphysics Λ: the unmoved mover that thinks only itselfContrastfirm

Aristotle's first principle moves the heavens as an object of desire and thinks only its own thinking, so it is not a being one could ask for help. Verse 5 of the Fātiḥa addresses God directly as the one from whom help is sought.

al-Futūḥāt al-makkiyya→Aristotle's unmoved mover, which moves the heavens as an object of love and does not turn toward themContrastprobable

Aristotle's first principle is circled by the heavens and knows only itself. The House that 'exults in those who circle around it' (passage 79) and the Lord who speaks to the one circling it answer the circuit, so in this text the centre responds to those who move around it.

Inshāʾ al-dawāʾir→Aristotle, Categories, in its Arabic translation: the ten categoriesLineageprobable

Ibn ʿArabī counts the existents as ten, substance and accident with eight others (where, how, time, quantity and the rest), which is the Aristotelian list as it reached Arabic logic through the translations. He then says that all ten are gathered in the human being alone (passages 50 to 51).

✓ Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ʿAbbāsid Society (1998)

Taqdīs al-shams→Aristotle, Metaphysics XII (Lambda): the first mover moves as an object of loveLineageprobable

The sun 'moving in love for the majesty of its Maker through the motion of its sphere' restates, through its Arabic transmission, Aristotle's view that the heavens move out of love for an unmoved principle. The doctrine reached Suhrawardī through the Arabic translations and Ibn Sīnā.

✓ Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ʿAbbāsid Society (1998)

Hayākil al-nūr→Aristotle, Metaphysics Λ: the unmoved mover moves as the object of loveLineageprobable

Suhrawardī says that the spheres move voluntarily, that each has a beloved light above it, and that their motion never ends because what they seek is unending. This continues Aristotle's idea that the prime mover moves as a beloved moves, which reached him as reworked by Ibn Sīnā.

✓ Dimitri Gutas, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition (1988)

Risāla fī al-ʿishq→Aristotle, Metaphysics Λ.7: the unmoved mover moves as an object of love (kinei hōs erōmenon)Lineagefirm

Ibn Sīnā's angelic souls move the heavens out of love for the First and in assimilation to it, which develops Aristotle's account of a first mover that moves the spheres by being loved. Book Lambda was available in Arabic, and Ibn Sīnā wrote on it.

✓ Dimitri Gutas, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition: Introduction to Reading Avicenna's Philosophical Works (1988)

al-Risāla al-Qushayriyya→Polemon's Physiognomy, translated into Arabic as a science of firāsaContrastprobable

Arabic used the same word, firāsa, for the Greek art of reading character from the face and body. Al-Qushayrī's insight is a light cast into the heart and earned by lowered gaze and lawful food, and it reads hidden thoughts where the physiognomist reads features.

✓ Simon Swain (ed.), Seeing the Face, Seeing the Soul: Polemon's Physiognomy from Classical Antiquity to Medieval Islam (2007)

al-Ājurrūmiyya→Aristotle and the Greek grammatical tradition: noun (onoma) and verb (rhēma)Lineagesuggestive

The threefold division into noun, verb and particle has been argued to reflect Greek logical and grammatical categories reaching early Arabic grammar through Syriac and translation; the thesis is argued in scholarship and remains debated.

✓ C. H. M. Versteegh, Greek Elements in Arabic Linguistic Thinking (1977)

Faṣṣ Isḥāq→Henry Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ʿArabīLineagefirm

Corbin's study builds its account of the creative imagination and of himma on Ibn ʿArabī's texts, including the doctrine that the knower creates by aspiration and preserves by attention, and it shaped how this chapter was read in Europe.

✓ Henry Corbin, L'Imagination créatrice dans le soufisme d'Ibn ʿArabî (1958)

Faṣṣ Isḥāq→Arabic oneirocriticism (taʿbīr al-ruʾyā), including the Arabic version of Artemidorus' OneirocriticaResonance, not influencesuggestive

The milk read as knowledge and the cows read as years belong to a wider art of dream interpretation in Arabic, which Fahd surveys alongside the Arabic Artemidorus. No use of Artemidorus by Ibn ʿArabī is claimed.

✓ Toufic Fahd, La Divination arabe: études religieuses, sociologiques et folkloriques sur le milieu natif de l'Islam (1966)

al-Futūḥāt al-makkiyya→Henry Corbin's reading of the mystic youth at the KaʿbaLineagefirm

Corbin placed this meeting with the youth (passages 75, 81), and the circumambulation that frames it, at the centre of his account of Ibn ʿArabī's visionary experience and his theory of the imaginal world.

✓ Henry Corbin, L'imagination créatrice dans le soufisme d'Ibn ʿArabî (1958)

Inshāʾ al-dawāʾir→H. S. Nyberg, critical edition of Inshāʾ al-dawāʾir in Kleinere Schriften des Ibn al-ʿArabīLineagefirm

Our text and its apparatus notes derive from Nyberg's Leiden edition. Nyberg's German introduction also offered one of the first modern studies of Ibn ʿArabī's doctrine of the third thing and the perfect human.

✓ H. S. Nyberg, Kleinere Schriften des Ibn al-ʿArabī (1919)

Ḥayy (Ibn Ṭufayl)→Jean Itard's reports on Victor, the wild boy of Aveyron (1801)Contrastfirm

Ḥayy, raised by a gazelle, imitates animal cries and goes on to anatomy and metaphysics unaided; the real child found in the woods of Aveyron never acquired speech and made little progress in abstract thought despite years of teaching.

al-Risāla al-Qushayriyya→William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: transiency and passivity as marks of mystical statesResonance, not influenceprobable

James lists transiency and passivity among the marks of mystical states. Al-Qushayrī says states arrive without being sought or acquired and come and go, which is why some held that only a lasting quality deserves the name 'state'.

al-Khamriyya→R. A. Nicholson's translation and study of Ibn al-Fāriḍ's odesLineagefirm

Nicholson's English version is the one set beside this text in the library. His study presented Ibn al-Fāriḍ's mystical odes to English readers.

✓ Reynold A. Nicholson, Studies in Islamic Mysticism (1921)

Symposium→Anders Nygren: agapē against erōsContrastfirm

Nygren set Diotima's erōs, an acquisitive love that climbs out of need toward its object, against Christian agapē, a love that descends and gives without lack. His distinction keeps the Symposium at the centre of debates on Christian love.

✓ Anders Nygren, Den kristna kärmakstanken genom tiderna: Eros och Agape (Swedish original, part I 1930; English trans. Agape and Eros, 1932/1953) (1930)

al-Fātiḥa→Psalms 23:3 and 27:11: 'paths of righteousness', 'lead me in a plain path'Resonance, not influenceprobable

The psalmist asks to be led on a level or right path, using the image of the road for a life under God's guidance, much as the Fātiḥa asks to be shown the straight path. The shared image is recorded here without a claim of transmission.

Faṣṣ Ādam→Genesis Rabbah 8: the angels argue against the creation of manResonance, not influenceprobable

The midrash has ministering angels dispute whether the human should be made, as Q 2:30 has the angels object, and Ibn ʿArabī reads their objection as the limit of beings who know only their own names.

Faṣṣ Ibrāhīm→Genesis 18: Abraham receives the three visitors at MamreShared sourceprobable

The chapter ties the custom of feeding guests to Abraham. The Quran's story of Abraham's honoured guests and the Genesis story of the visitors at Mamre both draw on the narrative of Abraham as the host of divine messengers, reaching the two scriptures by different routes.

✓ Reuven Firestone, Journeys in Holy Lands: The Evolution of the Abraham-Ishmael Legends in Islamic Exegesis (1990)

Faṣṣ Isḥāq→Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed III.24, on the binding of IsaacContrastfirm

Maimonides reads Abraham's readiness to sacrifice as proof that a prophet holds his vision certain even when it comes in a dream. Ibn ʿArabī reads the same readiness as a failure to interpret the dream.

al-Dawr al-aʿlā→The Jewish bedtime Shema: 'On my right Michael, on my left Gabriel, before me Uriel, behind me Raphael'Resonance, not influenceprobable

The night prayer places angels around the sleeper on each side, as the litany calls on 'guardians who follow one another, before him and behind him' (Q 13:11). Both picture protection as a ring of guardians set in place by recitation. No borrowing is claimed.

al-Maqālīd al-malakūtiyya→Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed I: the negative attributesResonance, not influenceprobable

Maimonides also holds that positive attributes cannot be said of God and that only negations bring the mind nearer. Unlike al-Sijistānī he does not go on to negate the negations. The two share a philosophical setting, and no influence is claimed.

al-Khamriyya→Philo of Alexandria: 'sober drunkenness' (methē nēphalios)Resonance, not influenceprobable

Philo uses the paradox of a sober drunkenness for the soul possessed by God, a phrase later taken up by the Church Fathers. The ode's wine that brings no sin and refines character (verses 5, 18-19) sits in the same paradox by an independent route.

✓ Hans Lewy, Sobria ebrietas: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der antiken Mystik (1929)

Faṣṣ Ādam→Nicholas of Cusa, On the Vision of God (1453)Resonance, not influenceprobable

Cusanus makes God's seeing and the creature's being seen one act, and says each sees God according to its own measure, close to 'no one knows of the Real anything except what his own essence gives him'.

Faṣṣ Nūḥ→Nicholas of Cusa, De docta ignorantia: the coincidence of oppositesResonance, not influenceprobable

Cusanus's God in whom opposites coincide, known through a learned ignorance, echoes the rule that incomparability and similarity be affirmed together and the praise of bewilderment, as a resemblance only.

Symposium→Marsilio Ficino, De amore (Commentary on the Symposium)Lineagefirm

Ficino's commentary retells Diotima's speech at a Florentine banquet, turns the ladder into steps from body to soul to angel to God, and reads bodily beauty as light whose source is truth.

Symposium→Baldassare Castiglione, The Courtier, Book IV: Bembo's stair of loveLineagefirm

Through Ficino, Diotima's ladder passes into courtly conversation: Bembo leads the courtier from one lady's beauty to universal beauty and then to heavenly beauty.

Phaedrus→Marsilio Ficino, commentary on the PhaedrusLineagefirm

Ficino translated the Phaedrus into Latin and wrote a commentary that read the charioteer, the wings and divine madness as a Christian Platonist account of the soul's ascent.

✓ Michael J. B. Allen, Marsilio Ficino and the Phaedran Charioteer (1981)

Ennead I.6→Marsilio Ficino, Latin translation and commentary of the Enneads (1492)Lineagefirm

Ficino translated the whole of Plotinus into Latin, and his theory of beauty as a light of form shining through matter rests on this treatise and on the Symposium.

✓ Paul Oskar Kristeller, The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino (1943)

Ennead I.6→Michelangelo: sculpture as taking awayResonance, not influencesuggestive

Plotinus tells the soul to cut away what is excessive until a face appears, and Michelangelo described sculpture as freeing a figure by removal. The image is set side by side here without a claim that he took it from this text.

Faṣṣ Shīth→Ashʿarite kalām: God's knowledge as an attribute superadded to the EssenceContrastfirm

On 'until We know' (Q 47:31) the Ashʿarite theologians place the newness in the attachment of an eternal attribute of knowledge added to the Essence, which Ibn ʿArabī grants is the best reason can reach before setting against it the unveiled knower's view that God's knowledge follows the fixed entity. His Book of Circles works through the same questions about knowledge and non-existents.

Faṣṣ Shīth→Basran Muʿtazila (Abū Hāshim and his school): the non-existent as a 'thing' (shayʾ)Resonance, not influenceprobable

The Basran Muʿtazila held that a possible thing is already a 'thing' with its own nature before it exists, which resembles Ibn ʿArabī's entities that are fixed (thābita) in God's knowledge though non-existent. The likeness is in structure only, and this entry makes no claim that he took the idea from them.

✓ Richard M. Frank, Beings and Their Attributes: The Teaching of the Basrian School of the Muʿtazila in the Classical Period (1978)

Faṣṣ Nūḥ→The Muʿtazila: divine unity secured by denying the attributes (tanzīh)Contrastfirm

The theologians who made incomparability the whole of God's unity stand for the believer of passage 1 who halts at tanzīh and, in Ibn ʿArabī's view, believes in part of revelation only.

✓ Harry Austryn Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Kalam (1976)

Faṣṣ Idrīs→Ibn Taymiyya's polemics against the Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikamLineagefirm

Formulas of this chapter, such as the Real being in respect of existence the very entity of the existents and the Creator being the created, were among the statements later Hanbali and other critics, Ibn Taymiyya foremost, quoted and condemned. The reception is documented as a long controversy over the Fuṣūṣ.

✓ Alexander D. Knysh, Ibn ʿArabi in the Later Islamic Tradition: The Making of a Polemical Image in Medieval Islam (1999)

Inshāʾ al-dawāʾir→al-Ghazālī: 'There is nothing in possibility more wondrous than what is' (laysa fī al-imkān abdaʿ mimmā kān)Lineagefirm

Ibn ʿArabī quotes al-Ghazālī's dictum twice (passages 42 and 62) and grounds it in the name the Generous. He argues that a more wondrous world withheld would make the Giver miserly (passage 88).

✓ Eric L. Ormsby, Theodicy in Islamic Thought: The Dispute over al-Ghazālī's "Best of All Possible Worlds" (1984)

al-Ṣalāt al-fayḍiyya→Ashʿarī kalām: the renewal of accidents in each instantContrastprobable

Ashʿarī theologians held that accidents are recreated at each instant while the atoms bearing them persist. The prayer says the forms never disclose themselves twice in the same way, which carries renewal through the whole of what appears, a point on which the Akbarian school held that the theologians stopped halfway.

al-Maqālīd al-malakūtiyya→The Muʿtazila: God 'knowing by His essence' without an attribute of knowledgeContrastfirm

The tenth key attacks those who call God hearing, seeing and knowing 'by essence' while denying Him hearing, sight and knowledge, a position of the Muʿtazilite theologians. Al-Sijistānī replies that their names still bring in the attributes they meant to deny.

✓ Harry Austryn Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Kalam (1976)

Faṣṣ Shīth→Sethian Gnostics: Seth as the bearer of a divine seedResonance, not influencesuggestive

Some late antique Gnostic groups made Seth, whom Eve in Genesis 4:25 calls another seed appointed by God, the ancestor of a spiritual race carrying hidden knowledge, while Ibn ʿArabī makes Seth, 'the grant of God', the holder of the key to the gifts and the model for the last-born child. The likeness is thematic, and no transmission is claimed.

Risālat al-Ṭayr→The Hymn of the Pearl (Acts of Thomas)Resonance, not influenceprobable

A prince sent to Egypt forgets his mission among its people until a letter from home reminds him who he is. Ibn Sīnā's bird forgets 'the form of its condition' in the cage and is reminded by the sight of other birds flying.

al-Ghurba al-gharbiyya→The Hymn of the Pearl, in the Acts of ThomasResonance, not influencefirm

A king's son sent from the East into Egypt forgets his origin until a letter from his father, carried by a bird-like messenger, wakes him and calls him home; the father's letter brought by the hoopoe plays the same part here. Nothing documents that Suhrawardī knew the hymn.

al-ʿAyniyya→The 'Hymn of the Pearl' in the Acts of ThomasResonance, not influenceprobable

A prince is sent down from his father's kingdom into Egypt, forgets his origin, and is woken by a letter that flies to him like an eagle. Forgetting in exile and a return that recovers what was lost appear in both texts, and in Suhrawardī's hoopoe with its letter.

Republic VI–VII→The Hymn of the Pearl: the prince who forgets and falls asleep in EgyptResonance, not influencesuggestive

The prince eats the Egyptians' food, forgets that he is a king's son and sleeps until a letter wakes him; like Plato's prisoners, he takes the place of his captivity for the whole of reality until something from outside turns him round.

Phaedrus→The Hymn of the Pearl, in the Acts of ThomasResonance, not influenceprobable

The prince forgets that he is a son of kings until a letter wakes his memory, and on his return he meets his robe as a mirror of himself. Plato's soul likewise forgets its heavenly vision and is woken by an image of beauty, so both tell of salvation as remembering.

Ennead I.6→The Hymn of the Pearl: the shining robe put on at the returnContrastfirm

Both have the soul strip off a soiled garment from the lower world. In Plotinus the ascent ends in nakedness, as at the mysteries, while the prince of the Hymn is clothed again in a robe that is a mirror of himself.

Faṣṣ Nūḥ→Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, Masnavī, Book II: Moses and the shepherdResonance, not influenceprobable

Rūmī's God rebukes Moses for scolding a shepherd whose crude image of Him was still worship accepted, a story close to the teaching that the Real has a face in every object of worship, told without reference to this chapter.

Risālat al-Ṭayr→ʿAṭṭār, The Conference of the Birds (Manṭiq al-ṭayr), by way of the Epistle of the Birds attributed to al-GhazālīLineageprobable

The Epistle of the Birds that circulated under al-Ghazālī's name recasts Ibn Sīnā's flight of birds to a King as a Sufi allegory, and ʿAṭṭār's poem of the birds crossing seven valleys to the Sīmurgh stands in this line of bird-journeys to a sovereign.

✓ Henry Corbin, Avicenna and the Visionary Recital (1960)

al-Ghurba al-gharbiyya→Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār, The Conference of the BirdsResonance, not influenceprobable

A hoopoe leads the travellers across a perilous way, and at the end the seekers find their own likeness in what they sought, much as the exile learns that the fish at the mountain are his brothers from one father.

Risāla fī al-ʿishq→Ibn al-Fāriḍ, The Wine Ode: the wine drunk before the vine was createdResonance, not influenceprobable

Ibn al-Fāriḍ's wine exists before all created things and through it things subsist while it veils itself. Ibn Sīnā's Good, through its self-disclosure, causes all existence and is veiled only by the weakness of those who receive it. One speaks as a poet and the other as a philosopher.

al-Khamriyya→Ḥāfiẓ, Dīvān: the wine and the tavernResonance, not influenceprobable

Ḥāfiẓ's ghazals also keep tavern, cup-bearer and wine in a register that readers take as both worldly and mystical. Both poets scorn the pious critic who calls the wine a sin (compare verse 33).

al-ʿAyniyya→Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, Masnavī, opening 'Song of the Reed'Resonance, not influenceprobable

Rūmī's reed flute, cut from its reed-bed, laments its separation and longs to return to its origin, making the soul's exile heard as a voice of mourning as the Ode's dove does. No borrowing is claimed.

Risālat al-Ṭayr→Franz Kafka, Zürau aphorisms: 'A cage went in search of a bird'Contrastfirm

In Kafka's aphorism the cage is the agent that goes looking for its bird. In Ibn Sīnā the birds go willingly into the net for food and company and then come to rest content in their cages.

Ḥayy (Ibn Ṭufayl)→Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719), and Rousseau, Émile (1762)Resonance, not influencesuggestive

Island solitude and an education drawn from things and their uses recur in these works; a direct debt to Ibn Ṭufayl has been suggested for both and has not been demonstrated, so the likeness is shown as resonance.

Hayākil al-nūr→Dante, Paradiso: heavens moved by love and ranked by lightResonance, not influencesuggestive

Dante's heavens turn out of love for what is above them and grow brighter as they near God. Suhrawardī's spheres likewise move for a beloved light and are overwhelmed by the rays of the Self-Subsistent. Both inherit Aristotelian cosmology, and no contact between them is claimed.

al-Ḥikam→Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (La Pesanteur et la grâce): attention, emptiness and decreationResonance, not influencesuggestive

Weil writes that grace fills only the empty places and that the self must consent to be undone; aphorism 206 says the lights depart from a heart stuffed with created forms, and 'Empty your heart of the others, and He will fill it'. A resemblance, without influence.

al-Khamriyya→Edward FitzGerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859)Contrastprobable

In FitzGerald's quatrains wine is a solace against time and the grave. Ibn al-Fāriḍ's wine precedes time, outlasts the decayed bone (verse 35), and turns Time into an obedient slave (verse 39).

al-Khamriyya→Charles Baudelaire, 'Enivrez-vous' (Le Spleen de Paris)Resonance, not influencesuggestive

Baudelaire urges one always to be drunk, on wine, poetry or virtue, to escape the burden of Time. The ode's claim that there is no life for one who lives sober (verse 40) is an unrelated echo.

al-Fātiḥa→Martin Buber, I and Thou (Ich und Du), 1923Resonance, not influenceprobable

The Fātiḥa speaks of God in the third person for four verses and then turns to address God as 'Thee' in verse 5, a turn the Arabic rhetoricians call iltifāt. Buber describes the shift from speaking about to speaking to as the move into relation with the eternal Thou.

Faṣṣ Isḥāq→Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (1843)Contrastprobable

Kierkegaard honours Abraham's literal obedience as the paradox of faith beyond ethics. Ibn ʿArabī treats the same literal reading as a lapse in knowledge, which God corrected with the ram.

Mishkāt al-anwār→Martin Heidegger: the clearing (Lichtung) in which beings show themselvesResonance, not influencesuggestive

Heidegger's clearing is the open in which things appear and which is itself overlooked; al-Ghazālī's light, which makes things manifest and is missed because it never departs, has a similar structure, with the difference that for al-Ghazālī the light is God.

al-Risāla al-Qushayriyya→Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: the moment (Øieblikket) as the meeting of time and eternityResonance, not influencesuggestive

Al-Qushayrī's waqt is the present in which the Real's decree meets the servant, and he must surrender to it without dwelling on what has slipped away. Kierkegaard's moment is also a point where the eternal touches time and calls for decision. The two arise from different theologies and share only this focus on the present instant.

Republic VI–VII→Martin Heidegger, Plato's Doctrine of TruthLineagefirm

Heidegger reads the cave allegory closely, arguing that here truth as unconcealment (alētheia) begins to give way to truth as correctness of seeing under the idea.

✓ Martin Heidegger, Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit (1947)

Faṣṣ Shīth→Sayyid Ḥaydar Āmulī, Shiʿi commentary on the Fuṣūṣ and the question of who the Seal isLineageprobable

The fourteenth-century Shiʿi thinker Ḥaydar Āmulī read the Fuṣūṣ closely and accepted the doctrine of a seal of sainthood, but assigned the seals of universal and particular sainthood to ʿAlī and to the awaited Mahdī. His reworking of this chapter's teaching is part of its documented reception.

✓ Henry Corbin, En Islam iranien: aspects spirituels et philosophiques (1972)

Mishkāt al-anwār→Ismaili esoteric exegesis (taʾwīl) and the BāṭinīsContrastprobable

al-Ghazālī reads Moses's sandals as a symbol and still insists that Moses took off real sandals, rejecting any reading that lets the inward sense cancel the outward law, which he charges the Bāṭinīs with doing.

✓ Farhad Daftary, The Ismāʿīlīs: Their History and Doctrines (1990)

Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ→Abū Yaʿqūb al-Sijistānī, Kitāb al-Maqālīd: the one of numbers and the One beyond numberContrastfirm

The Brethren compare the Creator to the one that comes before two and grounds the number series; al-Sijistānī, working with the same Intellect and Soul, insists that the one of the numbers belongs at the level of Intellect and that God stands beyond it, beyond even the negation of attributes.

Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ→Nāṣir-i Khusraw, Rawshanāʾī-nāma: the Universal Intellect and Soul, the nine spheres, the elements and the three kingdomsResonance, not influenceprobable

The Persian poem descends as Epistle 32 does, from God beyond attributes through the Universal Intellect and Soul to the spheres, the four elements and the minerals, plants and animals, with the human being as their summary. Nāṣir-i Khusraw writes as an Ismaili missionary of the next century; whether he read the Epistles is not documented here, and the Brethren's own affiliation is contested (text record §0).

al-Maqālīd al-malakūtiyya→Nāṣir-i Khusraw, Persian Ismaili philosophical worksLineagefirm

Nāṣir-i Khusraw, writing in Persian in the next century, took over al-Sijistānī's Neoplatonic Ismaili scheme and his teaching on God beyond attribute and its denial.

✓ Paul E. Walker, Early Philosophical Shiism: The Ismaili Neoplatonism of Abū Yaʿqūb al-Sijistānī (1993) · Farhad Daftary, The Ismāʿīlīs: Their History and Doctrines (1990)

Faṣṣ ʿĪsā→The Jesus Prayer of the hesychasts: one short plea for mercy repeated without ceasingResonance, not influenceprobable

The Prophet repeats one verse through a whole night in quest of an answer, and the hesychasts repeat one plea for mercy; both treat a single short prayer, said again and again, as a way of standing before God.

Rūḥ al-quds→The Sayings of the Desert Fathers (Apophthegmata Patrum)Resonance, not influenceprobable

Both are collections of short accounts of named holy men and women: their austerities, their few words to a disciple, their foresight, and their contests with worldly clergy or scholars. The likeness lies in form and in the ideal of the elder, with no transmission claimed.

al-Dawr al-aʿlā→Hesychasm and the Philokalia: hēsychia, stillness of the heartResonance, not influenceprobable

The sakīna sent down on the heart and the Orthodox monks' hēsychia both name a quiet of the heart reached through the repeated calling of a divine name. This is a resonance of practice and image, and no influence is claimed.

al-Risāla al-Qushayriyya→Evagrius Ponticus and John Cassian on discerning thoughts (logismoi)Resonance, not influenceprobable

Al-Junayd's rules for telling the self's insistent demands from Satan's shifting whispers have counterparts in the desert monks' close watch over thoughts and their sources. Both are disciplines for sorting what arises in the heart; no line of transmission is claimed here.

al-Maqālīd al-malakūtiyya→Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Mystical Theology: the cause beyond every assertion and every denialResonance, not influenceprobable

Dionysius ends his short treatise by placing the cause of all beyond both affirmation and negation, which closely resembles al-Sijistānī's double negation. Both work within late Neoplatonism, but no reading of Dionysius by al-Sijistānī is claimed.

al-Fātiḥa→Ibn Ājurrūm, the Ājurrūmiyya: the direct object and the detached pronounResonance, not influenceprobable

The grammar's chapter on the direct object lists the detached object pronoun of the iyyā- series. In verse 5 that pronoun, iyyāka, is placed before its verb, which readers of the verse take to mean 'Thee alone'. The link is a shared grammatical category and makes no claim about the history of either text.

Rūḥ al-quds→The Ājurrūmiyya and the learning of the schoolsContrastprobable

The school path builds knowledge through fixed definitions and rules taught to boys, of the kind Abū al-Ḥasan taught at Carmona before he turned to the jurists. Ibn ʿArabī places the Way's knowledge in states, service and unveiling received from God, and he criticises those who dispute about terms they have never lived.

al-Maqālīd al-malakūtiyya→Ibn Ājurrūm, the Ājurrūmiyya: the chapter on «lā» that negates the genusResonance, not influencefirm

The grammarians treat the «lā» of the testimony as the particle that negates a whole genus, and al-Sijistānī makes the same particle and its relative laysa ('lā ays', no being) carry a whole metaphysics of negation.

al-Ājurrūmiyya→Sībawayh, al-Kitāb, and the Basran and Kufan grammariansLineagefirm

The Ājurrūmiyya compresses into a primer the theory of the governor (ʿāmil) and the case system worked out by Sībawayh and his successors; its use of khafḍ for the genitive follows Kufan terminology.

✓ Kees Versteegh, The Arabic Linguistic Tradition (1997) · M. G. Carter, Sibawayhi (2004)

Faṣṣ Ādam→Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (1807): spirit coming to know itself through its otherResonance, not influenceprobable

In both, the absolute reaches a knowledge of itself only by passing through what appears as other than itself. Hegel places this in history, while Ibn ʿArabī places it in an eternal self-disclosure that has no before and after.

Faṣṣ Ibrāhīm→G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: 'without the world God is not God'Resonance, not influenceprobable

Hegel says that God must posit a world and is not God apart from it, close in wording to 'we made Him a god'. Ibn ʿArabī keeps an Essence untouched by any relation, which Hegel's dialectic does not, so the likeness is partial and involves no influence.

Faṣṣ Ibrāhīm→Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (1841): God as the projection of the human essenceContrastprobable

Both say that knowledge of God runs through knowledge of the human being, and Ibn ʿArabī can even write that 'we have made Him a god'. For Feuerbach this exhausts God, while for Ibn ʿArabī it concerns only God as god, and the Real still gives existence while the creature has none of its own.

Ennead I.6→Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment: disinterested pleasure in the beautifulContrastprobable

Kant separates the judgement of beauty from desire and from any knowledge of what the object is. Plotinus makes beauty the presence of real being and the beginning of a love that seeks union.

Faṣṣ Isḥāq→Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817): primary and secondary imaginationResonance, not influencesuggestive

Coleridge sets the ordinary imagination beside a primary imagination that repeats in the finite mind the eternal act of creation; Ibn ʿArabī sets the image everyone makes by estimation beside the knower's himma that brings forms into being outside himself. The resemblance is one of structure only.

al-Ghurba al-gharbiyya→Novalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen: 'Where are we going? Always home.'Resonance, not influencesuggestive

Novalis's novel treats all wandering as a homeward journey driven by longing; the tale's 'longing upon longing' for the homeland, stirred by lightning from the East, gives the same shape to desire.

al-ʿAyniyya→William Wordsworth, 'Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood' (1807)Resonance, not influencesuggestive

Wordsworth's soul comes from elsewhere 'trailing clouds of glory' and gradually forgets its home as the 'shades of the prison-house' close in. Like Ibn Sīnā's ode, it pairs the soul's descent with forgetting and with the body as a prison.

Faṣṣ ʿĪsā→Stoic pneuma, the warm breath that pervades and holds together all bodiesResonance, not influenceprobable

The Stoics made a hot breath the bond and life of the cosmos; Ibn ʿArabī's divine Breath likewise pervades all things and is described by heat, cold, moisture and dryness, though his Breath belongs to the divine names.

al-Dawr al-aʿlā→Epictetus, Discourses and Handbook: the tyrant can touch only what is not oursContrastprobable

For Epictetus no tyrant can harm a person whose will is set only on what is in his power, so no rescue from the ruler is needed. The litany asks God to turn back the ruler and the wrongdoer by force, while also locating the heart's safety in the remembrance of God (Q 13:28).

al-Ḥikam→Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius: what is up to us, and assent to providenceResonance, not influenceprobable

The Stoic sage ceases to want events other than they are and accepts the order of providence; the Ḥikam asks the servant to rest from planning what Another has undertaken (4). The Stoic rests in his own judgement, while Ibn ʿAṭāʾ Allāh grounds the rest in need of a personal Lord.

✓ Pierre Hadot, La Citadelle intérieure: introduction aux Pensées de Marc Aurèle (1992)

Faṣṣ ʿĪsā→The Golem legend and the Sefer Yetzirah: clay animated through letters and divine namesResonance, not influenceprobable

Al-Sāmirī's calf lows once the dust of Gabriel's track is cast into it, and Jesus's clay bird lives by God's leave; in Jewish tradition a figure of clay is animated through the letters of the divine name. In each case the form decides what voice the received life takes.

✓ Gershom Scholem, Zur Kabbala und ihrer Symbolik (English: On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, 1965) (1960)

Rūḥ al-quds→Hasidic tales of the rebbes, as collected in Martin Buber, Tales of the HasidimResonance, not influenceprobable

Hasidic tales, like these portraits, tell of masters who read a visitor's thoughts, act at a distance through prayer, and are recognised by the humble while learned men doubt them. The resemblance is one of genre and religious type.

al-Maqālīd al-malakūtiyya→Kabbalah: Ein Sof, the Infinite of which nothing can be saidResonance, not influencesuggestive

The Kabbalists place an unnamable Infinite above the emanated sefirot, much as al-Sijistānī places the Originator above the Command, Intellect and Soul. The structures are similar, and no influence is claimed.

Inshāʾ al-dawāʾir→Alexius Meinong, Über Gegenstandstheorie (1904): objects that have no beingResonance, not influencesuggestive

Meinong held that thought can have objects that do not exist, and Russell answered him by analysing such objects away. Ibn ʿArabī sorts the non-existents and asks how knowledge can attach to them. His answer is that it attaches only through an existent likeness or opposite, and sheer negation is neither known nor unknown (passages 22 to 31), which comes closer to Russell's side of the debate.

Ennead VI.9→Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), 6.522 and 7: what shows itself and cannot be saidResonance, not influencesuggestive

Chapters 4 and 10 hold that the vision cannot be reported, and that words serve as a ladder toward it; the Tractatus ends with the inexpressible that shows itself and a ladder to be thrown away. Wittgenstein draws on none of this; the likeness is in the shape of the limit.

al-Ājurrūmiyya→Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations §§371, 373: 'Essence is expressed by grammar' and 'Theology as grammar'Resonance, not influencesuggestive

Wittgenstein suggests that grammar shows what kind of thing anything is, which is close to the way later Sufi and Akbarian readers treated the categories of this primer as a map of being; the primer itself makes no such claim.

Risāla fī al-ʿishq→Troubadours and courtly love: the lover ennobled by restrained desireResonance, not influencesuggestive

Ibn Sīnā's refined young men of chivalry (fityān) are praised for loving beautiful faces while keeping the animal faculty subdued, a love that raises the lover. The troubadours also praise a love made noble by restraint. Whether this is a case of influence is disputed, and nothing here establishes it.

Tarjumān al-ashwāq→Dante Alighieri, Vita Nuova (c. 1293)Resonance, not influenceprobable

Dante, like Ibn ʿArabī, gathered love poems written for a real woman and added his own prose explaining them, and in both the beloved leads toward the divine. Arguments for Islamic influence on Dante concern other works and are contested, so this is resemblance only.

Tarjumān al-ashwāq→The troubadours' 'love from afar' (amor de lonh), e.g. Jaufre RudelResonance, not influencesuggestive

The distant lady who does not answer ('over marble statues there is no commanding') and the lover's self-abasement ('here am I, a pauper') resemble the Occitan lyric of love from afar. Whether Arabic poetry shaped the troubadours is debated, and nothing ties them to Ibn ʿArabī.

✓ María Rosa Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage (1987)

Faṣṣ Idrīs→The Arabic Hermes: Idrīs identified with Hermes TrismegistusLineageprobable

In Islamic tradition the prophet Idrīs, 'raised to a high place', was identified with Hermes, teacher of astronomy and the sciences of the heavens; that identification forms part of the background of a chapter that sets Idrīs's spirituality in the sun's sphere. Suhrawardī, who honoured Hermes as father of the sages, addresses the sun itself as a living light.

✓ Kevin van Bladel, The Arabic Hermes: From Pagan Sage to Prophet of Science (2009)

Taqdīs al-shams→Picatrix (Ghāyat al-ḥakīm): planetary prayers of the Ḥarrānian SabiansResonance, not influenceprobable

The Arabic Picatrix preserves prayers addressed to each planet, the sun included, on its own day. Suhrawardī's Sunday greeting to Hūrakhsh has the same form; his version sets the sun inside a strictly monotheistic ascent to the Necessary Existent.

Taqdīs al-shams→Ancient Persian wisdom: the Mazdean sun and royal light (xwarrah)Lineageprobable

Hūrakhsh is a Persian name for the sun, and Suhrawardī claimed to revive the wisdom of the ancient Persian sages together with that of Plato and Hermes. The 'people of light and illumination' for whom the prayer asks victory are, in his usage, those heirs.

✓ Henry Corbin, En Islam iranien: aspects spirituels et philosophiques, tome II: Sohrawardî et les Platoniciens de Perse (1971)

Hayākil al-nūr→Mazdean xwarrah: the royal and cosmic Glory (Persian khurra)Lineagesuggestive

The word khurra for the Glory that overflows from the Real comes from the Zoroastrian vocabulary of light. How far Suhrawardī drew on actual Zoroastrian sources, and how far he used a literary picture of ancient Persian wisdom, is debated.

✓ Henry Corbin, En Islam iranien: aspects spirituels et philosophiques, tome II: Sohrawardî et les Platoniciens de Perse (1971) · John Walbridge, The Wisdom of the Mystic East: Suhrawardī and Platonic Orientalism (2001)

al-Khamriyya→ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī, commentary on the Wine OdeLineagefirm

The Damascene Sufi al-Nābulusī (d. 1731) wrote a verse-by-verse commentary on this ode that reads the wine as divine love and knowledge. His reading fixed the Sufi interpretation for many later readers.

✓ Émile Dermenghem, L'Éloge du vin (Al Khamriya), poème mystique de Omar Ibn al Faridh, et son commentaire par Abdalghani An Nabolosi (1931)

al-Ājurrūmiyya→Aḥmad Ibn ʿAjība, al-Futūḥāt al-quddūsiyya: a Sufi commentary on the ĀjurrūmiyyaLineageprobable

The Moroccan Sufi Ibn ʿAjība (d. 1809) wrote a commentary reading each rule of this primer as a teaching on the spiritual path, so that raising, lowering and cutting off become states of the soul.

✓ Jean-Louis Michon, Le soufi marocain Aḥmad ibn ʿAjība et son Miʿrāj (1973)

Faṣṣ Nūḥ→The Quranic and exegetical Noah: the prophet of warning, and the Flood as punishmentContrastfirm

In the plain sense of sūra 71 Noah's people are idolaters rightly drowned, while Ibn ʿArabī reads their refusal, their idols and their drowning as praise, knowledge and passing away in God.

Faṣṣ Ibrāhīm→ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Kāshānī and the Fuṣūṣ commentatorsLineagefirm

The commentators synthesised above read this chapter's doctrine of divinity as relation and of the fixed entities as determining what they receive. Izutsu reconstructs Ibn ʿArabī's ontology largely through Kāshānī's commentary on the Fuṣūṣ.

✓ Toshihiko Izutsu, Sufism and Taoism: A Comparative Study of Key Philosophical Concepts (1983)