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This work will, we are convinced, reach two groups in the present culture and affect them profoundly. One, the personal seeker who wishes to learn the true science of the Sufis and not a Zionist-orchestrated fantasy of sufic-dancing devoid of either method or system and two, those scientists who are searching for an underlying framework which allows them to view the multiplicity of existence, the realms of form, while recognizing that reality is One. Mention should also be made of Ibn al-Arabi s place in the Muslim world today. It is a recognizable sign of the times and an indication of how deeply politics is embedded in the groves of academic that the modern Arab is brought up programmed to denounce Ibn al-Arabi by emotive dismissal while in almost every case not having read one of his vast opus which includes over three hundred volumes. I have never met any intellectual opposition to Ibn al-Arabi s system. I have encountered inadequate philosophical assessments which attempt to reduce his dynamic over-view to a flat two-dimensional Aristotelian grid, and I have encountered vituperative and often irrational attacks which dominant flavor Ibn was antipathy rather than disagreement. Hostility is never a sound basis for either argument or illumination of a subject Lastly, it is our hope that by the publication of this work in English the Muslim community will cease repeating the slogans they took from the western propagandists that Ibn al-Arabi was a monist who denied the otherness of the object. His teaching is nowhere naive as it is nowhere pantheist. Individual statements of his out of context can appear quite staggering but they must be seen within their setting. Sometimes that setting is a series of deliberate contradictions. Sometimes it is made in a series of negations to drive the intellect to a point where definition collapses. The intention then is never anarchic but specific. It is the intention of the Greatest Master to awaken in the intellect of the seeker that state of bewilderment from which there IS no exit for there is no dilemma to get out of, as there is no one to get out of it. But already we have abolished the object? No. the reader must make the journey and find out for himself or herself. from the Introduction by Shaykh Abdal Qadir as-Sufi
207 pages
