The Bezels of Wisdom by Ibn Arabi: The Prophets as Facets of the Divine

The Book

The Fusus al-Hikam (Bezels of Wisdom) was composed in 1229, eleven years before Ibn Arabi's death. He claimed the book was given to him complete by the Prophet Muhammad in a vision in Damascus, and that he acted merely as the scribe of a divinely dictated text. Whether one accepts this claim literally or reads it as the convention of inspired authorship, the result is a work of extraordinary density and depth.

The Fusus consists of 27 chapters, each devoted to a prophet from the Quranic and Biblical traditions. Each prophet's name is paired with a specific type of wisdom: Adam with divine wisdom (hikma ilahiyya), Seth with breath-wisdom (hikma nafsiyya), Noah with transcendent wisdom (hikma subbuhiyya), and so on through Muhammad with singular wisdom (hikma fardiyya).

The book is not a work of theology in the conventional sense. It does not argue for propositions or defend doctrines. It describes: it presents a vision of reality in which God, the cosmos, and the human being are related through a network of correspondences, manifestations, and reflections that constitute the single reality called wujud (being/existence). Reading the Fusus is less like reading a philosophical treatise and more like looking through a kaleidoscope: every turn reveals a new pattern, but the pieces are always the same.

Who Was Ibn Arabi?

Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi (1165-1240) was born in Murcia, in Muslim Spain (al-Andalus), and is considered by many the greatest metaphysical thinker the Islamic world has produced. His followers call him al-Sheikh al-Akbar (the Greatest Sheikh). His critics have called him worse.

Ibn Arabi was prodigiously productive: his complete works run to over 400 volumes, including the massive al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya (The Meccan Revelations), a multi-volume encyclopedia of Islamic mysticism that is to Sufi metaphysics what Aquinas's Summa is to Christian theology. He traveled extensively (Spain, North Africa, Mecca, Baghdad, Anatolia), attracting students and controversy in equal measure, and settled in Damascus, where he died in 1240.

His central contribution is a comprehensive metaphysical system that explains the relationship between God, the cosmos, and the human being through the concepts of wahdat al-wujud (the unity of being), the Perfect Human (al-insan al-kamil), the creative imagination (khayal), and the divine self-disclosure (tajalli). These concepts have shaped Sufi thought from his time to the present and have influenced thinkers outside the Islamic world, including Henry Corbin, Toshihiko Izutsu, and William Chittick.

The Bezel Metaphor

A bezel is the metal setting that holds a gemstone in a ring. The gemstone (the divine wisdom) is one; the settings (the prophets) are many. Each bezel displays the same light from a different angle, just as each prophet reveals the same divine reality through a different personality, a different teaching, and a different historical context.

The metaphor is precise. The prophet is not the wisdom itself (that is God's alone). The prophet is the setting that makes the wisdom visible, the form through which the formless divine light becomes perceptible to human consciousness. Without the bezel, the gemstone has no form. Without the prophet, the divine wisdom has no expression. But the gemstone (the divine reality) exists independently of any particular setting, and the prophets are multiple because the divine reality has multiple aspects that no single setting can display.

This is Ibn Arabi's theology of revelation in its most concentrated form: every prophet is a legitimate manifestation of the divine, and the differences between prophets are differences of emphasis, not of substance. The light is one; the lamps are many.

Wahdat al-Wujud: The Unity of Being

Ibn Arabi's central metaphysical principle is wahdat al-wujud: the unity of being. There is only one reality, and that reality is God (al-Haqq, "the Real"). Everything that appears to exist separately (the world, human beings, animals, plants, stones) is not a separate being but a manifestation (tajalli, "self-disclosure") of the one divine reality.

This is not pantheism (the identification of God with the world). Ibn Arabi is clear: God is not the world. The world is a manifestation of God, which is a different relationship. The sun is not its rays; but the rays are nothing without the sun. The ocean is not its waves; but the waves are nothing without the ocean. The world is real as manifestation; it is illusory as independent existence.

Wahdat al-wujud parallels several other metaphysical traditions:

• The Neoplatonic doctrine of emanation (the One generates reality through successive levels of manifestation)
• The Vedantic teaching of Brahman (the one reality underlying all appearances)
• The Hermetic principle of the One (from which all things proceed through adaptation)
• The Kabbalistic Ain Soph (the limitless divine that manifests through the Sephiroth)

Whether these parallels reflect historical influence or independent convergence is debated. What is clear is that Ibn Arabi articulated the principle with a precision and comprehensiveness that the other traditions rarely match.

The Perfect Human (al-Insan al-Kamil)

The concept of the Perfect Human is one of Ibn Arabi's most influential contributions. The Perfect Human is the being who reflects all the divine attributes completely: not merely some attributes (as other beings do) but all of them, in perfect balance and proportion.

Each prophet reflects specific divine attributes. Adam reflects the attribute of divine vicegerency (khilafa). Abraham reflects the attribute of divine friendship (khulla). Moses reflects the attribute of divine speech (kalam). Jesus reflects the attribute of divine breath (ruh). Muhammad, as the Seal of the Prophets, reflects all the attributes in their totality.

The Perfect Human is the microcosm that mirrors the macrocosm: the universe in miniature, the point at which all the divine rays converge. This concept parallels the Hermetic anthropos (the cosmic human who contains all levels of reality), the Kabbalistic Adam Kadmon (the primordial human who contains all the Sephiroth), and Rudolf Steiner's description of the human being as the summary of all cosmic evolution.

Creative Imagination (Khayal)

Ibn Arabi's concept of the creative imagination (khayal, also 'alam al-mithal, the world of images) is one of his most original contributions to metaphysics. The imagination is not fantasy (the production of unreal images by the subjective mind) but a real ontological dimension: the intermediate realm between the purely spiritual (which has no form) and the purely physical (which has no meaning).

The world of imagination is the place where spiritual realities take on visible forms. Angels appear in the imagination as beings of light. Divine attributes appear as colours, sounds, and geometric patterns. The prophetic visions described in scripture (Muhammad's Night Journey, Moses's burning bush, Jacob's ladder) are experiences within the imaginal world: real encounters with real spiritual realities, perceived through the faculty of creative imagination.

This concept was recovered for Western thought by the French scholar Henry Corbin (1903-1978), who coined the term mundus imaginalis (the imaginal world) to distinguish Ibn Arabi's concept from mere imagination. Corbin's work on Ibn Arabi influenced James Hillman's archetypal psychology, Tom Cheetham's writings on the sacred imagination, and the broader field of imaginal studies.

Key Chapters

The 27 chapters vary in difficulty and importance. Key chapters for first-time readers include:

Chapter 1: Adam (Divine Wisdom). Establishes the framework: the human being is the being for whose sake the cosmos was created, because only the human being can reflect all the divine attributes. Adam is the first bezel because he is the archetype of the human: the being in whom God sees Himself.

Chapter 11: Moses (Singular Wisdom). Moses represents the prophet who receives direct divine speech (kalam). Ibn Arabi analyzes the burning bush, the parting of the Red Sea, and the golden calf episode as metaphysical events with precise ontological meanings. The burning bush, for example, is not merely a miracle but a theophany: God manifesting in a form (fire in a tree) that combines the spiritual (fire) and the natural (tree).

Chapter 15: Jesus (Prophetic Wisdom). Jesus represents the divine breath (ruh) that gives life. Ibn Arabi treats Jesus as the prophet of the spirit: the being whose essential nature is pure spirituality, who creates living forms from dead matter (raising the dead), and who represents the feminine dimension of the divine (because he was born without a human father, from the divine breath alone).

Chapter 27: Muhammad (Singular Wisdom). The final chapter, the seal of the bezels as Muhammad is the seal of the prophets. Muhammad represents the totality: the bezel that contains all the other bezels, the wisdom that encompasses all wisdoms. This is why the Fusus was reportedly given to Ibn Arabi by Muhammad in a vision: the one who contains all the wisdoms is the one who transmits the book that describes them.

The Controversy

Ibn Arabi has been the most controversial figure in Islamic intellectual history since his own lifetime. The controversy centres on several issues:

Pantheism? Critics accused Ibn Arabi of identifying God with the world (wahdat al-wujud read as "everything is God"). Defenders respond that Ibn Arabi's position is not pantheism but panentheism (God is in everything) or, more precisely, the denial that anything has independent being apart from God. God is not the world; the world is God's self-disclosure. The distinction matters theologically.

Prophetic hierarchy? Ibn Arabi's arrangement of prophets in the Fusus does not follow the conventional Islamic hierarchy. He treats each prophet as embodying a unique and irreducible wisdom, and his analyses sometimes interpret prophetic stories in ways that diverge from orthodox commentary. This has been read as either profound insight or heretical innovation, depending on the reader's commitments.

Difficulty? The Fusus is extraordinarily dense. Sentences that appear simple often contain multiple layers of meaning that require extensive commentary to unpack. Some critics have argued that the difficulty is deliberate obscurantism; defenders argue it is the inevitable result of trying to express in language realities that exceed language's capacity.

The controversy has never been resolved. Ibn Arabi remains simultaneously the most revered and the most condemned figure in Sufi history. His influence on subsequent Islamic thought (theology, philosophy, poetry, art) has been immeasurable, regardless of whether that influence is viewed as a blessing or a curse.

Who Should Read It

Advanced students of Sufism who have already read introductory works (Ghazali's Alchemy of Happiness, Attar's Conference of the Birds) and want the most challenging and rewarding text in the tradition. The Fusus is not an introduction; it is the summit.

Philosophers and metaphysicians interested in one of the most rigorous and comprehensive accounts of the relationship between the One and the Many ever produced. Ibn Arabi's system rivals Plotinus, Shankara, and Hegel in scope and precision.

Students of comparative mysticism who want to see how the same metaphysical insights (unity of being, the cosmic human, the imaginal world) are expressed in Islamic vocabulary. The parallels with Hermeticism, Kabbalah, Vedanta, and Neoplatonism are striking and illuminating.

Where to Buy

Buy The Bezels of Wisdom (Routledge Sufi Series) on Amazon

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