alive—his relationship with his Lord is like that of the deceased with the person washing his body: he can perform no action of his own independently of Allah. For if He, glorified be He, did not give the servant strength to fulfil his obligations, the servant would be unable to do so. Thus, the action belongs to Allah in reality, and to the servant figuratively. The evidence for this is the saying, ‘There is no power nor strength except through Allah, the Most High, the Most Great’—meaning that there is no power to turn away from disobedience, nor strength to obey, except through Allah.

“It is known that the Lord is under no obligation, since no one imposes obligations upon Him, and that the servant fulfils the obligations imposed upon him only through Allah. Religious obligation is real. Upon witnessing this state, the speaker marvelled and became perplexed, while acknowledging religious obligation and that it truly rests upon the servant. No reasonable person should therefore disparage someone whose words he does not understand; rather, the failing lies in his own limited understanding.”

Which of the two is right?

Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah—may Allah sanctify his soul and illuminate his tomb—answered:

Praise be to Allah. This second man’s words are false. He ventures into something of which he has no comprehensive knowledge and whose true nature he does not understand. He neither understands the true nature of Ibn ʿArabī’s statement and the underlying principle from which this poetry and other statements derive, nor accepts what this wording entails and signifies.

Ibn ʿArabī’s underlying principle is that existence is one, and that necessary existence is identical with contingent existence. He also maintains that the nonexistent is a thing, that the entities of nonexistent things are fixed in nonexistence, and that the existence of the Real governs them. Thus, in his view, the existence of everything is identical with the existence of the Real. This has been discussed at length elsewhere.