Similarly, the statements of those who followed their lead—appropriating their notions and recasting them in the language of “unveiling,” “direct witnessing,” “realization,” and “gnosis,” such as Ibn ʿArabi and his likes, and all who trod this path like Ibn Sabʿīn and others—amount in truth to nothing but negating the Maker. According to them, nothing exists beyond the celestial spheres; were the heavens and the earth to vanish, nothing at all would remain.

Al-Tilmisānī, who knew their doctrine best and carried it to its furthest conclusion, openly declared as much. For that reason he plunged into unbridled permissiveness and depravity, refusing to deem illicit any obscenity, abomination, disbelief, sin, or transgression. Speaking of his own teacher Ibn ʿArabi and their associate al-Qūnawī, he would say: “One is a philosopher spiritualized”—meaning Ibn ʿArabi—“and the other a spiritualist philosophized”—meaning al-Qūnawī. “I alone,” he boasted, “have refined the doctrine of realization.” And he spoke the truth with respect to their intent, for the “realization” they seek—in reality the negation and denial of the Maker and the claim that nothing exists beyond the cosmos—was articulated by none of them as thoroughly as by al-Tilmisānī.

A trustworthy man who later abandoned them once their secrets became clear to him told me that he read Ibn ʿArabi’s Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam to al-Tilmisānī. “I said to him,” he related, “‘These words contradict the Qur’an.’ He answered, ‘The entire Qur’an is shirk; true tawḥīd lies elsewhere.’”