Ibn Arabi’s imagination

Ibn ʿArabī (1165–1240) was born in Murcia in al-Andalus and died in Damascus. He’s one of the most influential thinkers in Sufism. Near the end of his life he wrote The Bezels of Wisdom, twenty-seven chapters, each on the wisdom of one prophet. The chapter on Joseph, the prophet who read dreams, makes a startling claim. Everything we call “other than God” is imagination (khayāl), and the cosmos is a dream that has to be interpreted.

He builds on the saying al-Ghazālī quoted: “People are asleep, and when they die they wake up.” But he reads it differently. For al-Ghazālī the dream was a threat to certainty. For Ibn ʿArabī it’s a way to read. A dream is made of images that point beyond themselves, and Joseph’s skill was knowing what they meant. The world works the same way. Its things are signs, and the work is to see through them to what they show.

He also doesn’t treat imagination as a lack of reality. He calls it a barzakh, an isthmus: something between pure spirit and dense matter, which shares in both. On his view an image isn’t nothing. It’s real as an image. And the world isn’t built once and left standing. Reading the Qur’an’s phrase about “a new creation” (50:15), he holds that the cosmos is recreated at every instant. It only looks continuous, like a flame or a river.

Put next to the simulation hypothesis, this is close to a rendering engine described from a believer’s side. The world is redrawn at every instant. Its solidity is an appearance. And its meaning lies in what it points to, not in the stuff it’s made of. Like Chalmers eight centuries later, Ibn ʿArabī doesn’t conclude that the world is fake. He concludes that we have to read it properly.