The work he entitled al-Isrāʾ ilā al-Maqām al-Asrī sets forth a “Night Journey” that he portrays as matching the Prophet’s own Night Journey, blessings and peace be upon him. Yet the substance of this claim is of the very sort with which Ibn Sīnā and those who followed him—al-Rāzī, al-Hamadhānī, and others—re-interpreted the Prophet’s Night Journey: a purely intellectual “unveiling.” They did the same with Moses’ conversation with his Lord, insisting that everything addressed to him occurred only within his own self.

On that basis Ibn ʿArabī alleged a Night Journey that unfolded entirely inside his person and imagination; he was both the speaker and the one spoken to. The realm of imagination is a domain comprehended by none but God, yet Ibn ʿArabī maintains that imagination itself is the world of reality and praises it in extravagant terms. Within this imagined world he converses with the elder shaykhs about their doctrine of divine oneness, uttering words that in fact undermine their tawḥīd while claiming that, during that journey, he was the one who taught them true tawḥīd.

All of this is of the same genre as Musaylima’s counterfeit “Qur’an”—indeed, it is even worse—for it is created speech that he concocted within himself. Al-Junayd—may God have mercy on him—spoke with the language of the well-grounded Imams, whereas many Sufis slipped into forms of indwelling (ḥulūl) and union (ittiḥād), as Abū Nuʿaym relates in Ḥilyat al-Awliyāʾ and al-Qushayrī in his Risāla. Al-Junayd therefore made clear that true tawḥīd is attained only by distinguishing between the Eternal and the originated.