Ibn 'Arabi and Modern Thought

This is the first book to provide an exchange between the teachings of one of the world's great mystical teachers and modern Western intellectual thought. It analyses the underlying conception of knowledge that permeates the metaphysics of Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi (1165-1240), and compares it with the paradigmatic assumptions about knowledge that have permeated much of twentieth-century theoretical culture. In these global times it is curious that the works of Ibn 'Arabi which have had such profound influence upon the Islamic world, should be so little known and little discussed in the Western theoretical architecture of the 21st century. Ibn 'Arabi's remarks on causality, time, contingency, necessity, epistemology, ontology, ethics and aesthetics alone would entice even the most wary of modernity's intellectual authorities. This book deals with the findings of some of these authorities - modern philosophy, social science and psychology - in an open discourse between the ancient and the modern, the traditional and the scientific, the industrial and the personal. It is an invitation to reconsider some of the central tenets of modernity in the light of Ibn 'Arabi's writings on the Unity of Existence.