Stain Your Prayer Rug with Wine 215attributes of God. He does not become God, as fana is so often misun-
derstood by Sunni and Shi‘ite Muslims; rather, the Sufi is drowned in
God, so that Creator and creation become one. This concept of
Divine Unity is most keenly expressed by the great mystic and scholar
Ibn al-Arabi (1165–1240), who reformulated the traditional Muslim
profession from “There is no god but God” to “There is no Being
other than the Being of God; there is no Reality other than the Reality
of God.”
In Ibn al-Arabi’s school of thought—a school so influential to the
development of Sufism that this entire chapter could be devoted to
it—humanity and the cosmos, as two separate but intimately con-
nected constructions of the Universal Spirit, are like two mirrors
reflecting one another. By employing ta’wil, Ibn al-Arabi reinter-
preted the Quran’s statement that God created humanity “from a sin-
gle soul” (4:1) to mean that the universe itself is “as a single being.”
For al-Arabi, human beings are thus “an abridgment of the great cos-
mic book,” and those few individuals who have “fully realized [their]
essential oneness with the Divine Being,” to quote Reynold Nichol-
son, are transformed into what al-Arabi terms “the Perfect Man” (also
called “the Universal Man”).
The Perfect Man is he for whom individuality is merely an exter-
nal form, but whose inward reality conforms to the universe itself.
Heis “the copy of God,” in the words of al-Arabi’s greatest disciple,
Abdul Karim al-Jili: he is the one in whom the divine attributes are
perfectly reflected; the medium through which God is made manifest.
Although Sufism considers all prophets and messengers, as well
as the Imams and the Pirs, to be representatives of the Perfect Man,
for Sufis the paradigm of this unique being is none other than the
Prophet Muhammad himself. All Muslims look to the example of
the Prophet (the Imitatio Muhammadi, if you will) to guide them on the
straight path to God. But for the Sufi, Muhammad is more than just
the “beautiful model” that the Quran calls him (33:21). Muhammad is
the primordial light: the first of God’s creations.
The concept of “the light of Muhammad” (nur Muhammad )
reveals Sufism’s deep Gnostic influences. In short, the Sufis under-
stand Muhammad in the same way that many Christian Gnostics
understood Jesus: as the eternal logos. Thus, Muhammad is, like Jesus