This paper investigates the meaning, background, and later interpretation of a digression on the nature of universals in the first chapter of Ibn Arabi’s “Fusus al-Hikam.” The chapter as a whole deals with God’s reason for the creation of the universe and the role of human beings in it. The digression, identified as a return to the topic of the chapter, immediately follows a section on the difference between humans and angels. The problem of universals is fundamental in philosophy, with the key question being whether they exist independently of the mind—realism—or are simply mental constructs—nominalism. It was a central debate in medieval European philosophy and was taken up in earnest in Islamic philosophy a century or so after Ibn Arabi. What is striking and incongruous is that Ibn Arabi is addressing this issue in uncharacteristically philosophical terms and touches on the key philosophical issue involved: the reality of the universal as separate from its instances. The passage raises several issues. First, what exactly is Ibn Arabi saying? The passage is not particularly clear, nor is its relation to its context, which is God’s teaching Adam the names of things. Second, although Ibn Arabi’s knowledge is remarkably broad, he seems to have known little of philosophy or philosophical logic and to have had no interest in knowing more, so where does this come from? Third, what do the commentators make of this passage? Among them were men who did know a great about philosophy, so how do they understand it? To return to Ibn Arabi’s own system, obviously it has something to do with the names and attributes of God and to Ibn Arabi’s famous a’yan thabita, “fixed essences.” Apart from the text itself, the sources will be earlier and later Islamic philosophical texts on natural universals, the commentaries of Qunawi, Qaysari, and Kashani, and parallel European primary and secondary sources on the problem of universals.

Kalam arguments about the nature of God remain relevant to modern philosophy of religion. In particular, the question of how to reconcile tawhid, the doctrine of the total unity of God, with Qur’anic references to God’s attributes and the features of a personal God forced Muslim theologians and philosophers to deal with difficult questions about how these aspects of a theistic God might be reconciled. The doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) has been defended by many theist philosophers such as Augustine, al-Farabi, Avicenna, Anselm, and Aquinas. DDS holds that God is free of essence-existence composition. He neither has parts nor internal structure. His attributes such as omnipotence, omnibenevolence, or omniscience cannot be distinct. Though this leads to some difficulties, I will discuss a particular problem, the problem of the incompatibility between divine simplicity and freedom. DDS leads to two difficulties with respect to freedom. First, if God is simple and thus has no internal structure, he seems to have a necessary intention in his any creative action, as was held by, for example, Avicenna. This is incompatible with the notion of libertarian freedom because according to this theory, God is supposed to choose what to actualize among different alternatives. If he is not able to do otherwise (actualizing a different possible world or not actualizing any world at all), he cannot be considered free. Second, if God necessarily creates this universe and his will is absolute about everything including human actions, there is no human freedom. I argue that a theist will have to pay a heavy price if she wants to argue for the compatibility of divine simplicity and freedom. I claim that the first problem can be solved if we show that divine freedom does not need to be a libertarian freedom. This, I think, is implausible for many theists because the view that God could have created another world instead of this world is at the core of classical theism. I also argue that we can save humanly freedom only if we deny that God has a will about any particular human action. This would be also implausible for many theists because it denies God’s direct continuous creation, sustaining, or answering prayers.

One objection against the theory of kasb comes from the Mutazilite scholars: God’s justice implies that God cannot commit injustice. But, if He creates bad acts as the defenders of the theory of kasb put forward, he commits injustice by creating evils that humans commit. Since God cannot commit injustice, He cannot create evil acts. Therefore, it should be man who creates his own bad acts. This paper concerns with this objection. After a brief historical background, I start with a comparison of creating evil and permitting evil. I argue that there is no difference between creating evil and permitting evil with respect to the problem of evil because evil cannot be attributed to God in terms of the responsibility in both situations. My response is on the same line with the idea of some Ottoman Ma’turidite thinkers and a contemporary philosopher Alvin Plantinga. I reply to a possible objection according to which creating evil and permitting evil are not the same because in the first case God is directly responsible for bringing about the evil while in the latter, He is indirectly responsible for it. I reply that they are still equal to each other with respect to the problem of evil as long as evil can be attributed to human beings with respect to their intention because it is God who is the ultimate originator of evil either by creating or permitting evil. More recently, Alvin Plantinga responded to this Mu’tazilian type of argument in a paper where he defends occasionalism. He argues that there is no difference between direct and indirect creation of evil. Matthew Shea and C. P. Ragland responded to him by pointing out the difference between them depending on the doctrine of doing and allowing. Lastly, I reply to their argument by arguing that we cannot apply this distinction to divine acts. Therefore, it is my aim to show that if permitting evil is not injustice as most of the theists and Mu’tazilite scholars agree, creating evil is also not injustice because ultimately there is no difference between direct and indirect creation.

It is now well understood that during the first few centuries following the Arab conquest of Central Asia the interaction of Muslims and Buddhists was imbued with respect, curiosity, and a likely zeal for, among other things, scholastic collaboration. One of the more self-evident cases in which Buddhist and Islamic scholars likely collaborated concerns the formation of the Islamic doctrine of occasionalism, which arose after the ‘Abbāsid Revolution and bears a remarkable resemblance to the Buddhist doctrine of momentariness. Recent scholarship already suggests that the early Islamic doctrines of atomism were originally inspired by Central Asian Buddhist philosophers in Khurāsān (esp. at scholastic centers such as Balkh) and by the Barmakid viziers in the new ‘Abbāsid court rather than by the transmission of Greek philosophy as long theorized though ultimately untenable. Much attention has been given to the atomism and occasionalism of al-Ash‘arī (874-936), but to date there has been much less scholarship on the ontology of al-Māturīdī of Samarkand (853-944) and the intriguing possibility that al-Māturīdī likewise promoted a form of occasionalism. Whether or not al-Māturīdī’s ontology included a strict atomism as the later Māturīdī theologian Abū l-Mu‘īn al-Nasafī (d. 1114) ascribes to him, the occasionalism of both al-Ash‘arī and al-Māturīdī, including the ontological commitments of each form of occasionalism, can be shown to have developed directly from the core Buddhist doctrine of momentariness and its own atomistic underpinnings. Furthermore, a brief outline of the geographical distribution of competing Buddhist theories of momentariness will elucidate the differences found in the Ash‘arī and Māturīdī ontologies, which developed to a significant degree independently of each other according to regional Buddhist scholastic influences: al-Ash‘arī in Baṣra and Baghdād benefited from the Central Asian scholarship handed down from the Barmakid viziers a century earlier, while al-Māturīdī’s lineage in Transoxiana and northeast Khurāsān benefited from the persistence of Buddhist scholarship there. As such, differences between the two ontologies can be accounted for by the intellectual history of Buddhism and early Islamic Theology while also reinforcing our present understanding of the persistence of Buddhist scholastic thought in Central Asia and the ‘Abbāsid capital. In this presentation, I will briefly summarize the early intellectual history of Buddhist and Muslim scholastic collaboration in Central Asia and then focus on the soteriological goals of al-Māturīdī’s integration of early-medieval Buddhist conceptions of momentariness into his ontology, which was arguably occasionalist.

This paper is concerned with how Ibn ‘Arabi believes one can understanding the self through different ways of reading signs. The faculty that helps achieve this goal is imagination, khiyal. The term “divine Signs” has many meanings, depending on the particular level and perspective within which Ibn ‘Arabī is discussing it. From the metaphysical perspective that Ibn ‘Arabī often adopts, the sign is a kind of reflection reflecting its object more or less clearly. The Signs and verses of God (āyāt) are found in the Qur’an, but the Qur’an itself emphasizes that they are also found in the outside world (macrocosm) and within ourselves (microcosm). According to Qur’an, as we have seen, all things are “signs” of God. They refer to God and point to Him. Indeed, according to Ibn Arabī, the root of the word ‘alam (“world” or cosmos) is ‘alāma (a guidepost or sign for travelers). Thus he often interpreted the divine Signs as being of two kinds, namely the Signs on the “horizons” and Signs in the soul (al-āyāt al-anfusiyya). The meanings of the Signs shown “within their souls” are normally sought through those spiritual disciplines of contemplation, purification, service, and devotion that were emphasized by Sufis. These are increasingly subtle theophanies that eventually move beyond familiar forms of sensation, thought and imagination, to a pure, ineffable experience of the creative Presence of the Real, here and in higher domains of existence. Ibn ‘Arabī also employs the term dalīl as a synonym for the Qur’anic term āyāt (divine Signs), meaning that everything in the world and within us is a guide, directive, pointer, indication, signifier, evidence, proof, and denotation of God. Given these references to the three-fold dimension of these divine Signs, there is a fundamental human hermeneutical challenge to decipher these Signs across all these domains. There is a parallelism between these Signs (āyāt) or “Words” as the constituents of (a) revealed scripture; (b) all the levels of manifest creation (the Signs “on the horizons”); (3) the many inner dimensions of the human soul (the Signs “in their souls”); and (4) the realm of those timeless sacred divine-human “intermediaries”(the divine Friends/prophets/messengers (awliyā’, anbiyā’, and rusul). This essay will mainly focus to Ibn ‘ Arabi's prolific work, Fusus al-Hikam with some reference to Futuhat al-Makkiyya.