Necessary Existence and Necessary Mercy

[Full title: Necessary Existence and Necessary Mercy: Ibn ‘Arabī’s Reformulation of Ibn Sīnā’s Ontological Proof]

[Find the meaning and references behind the names: Al-Din, Arabi, Stand, Ali, Gulf, Bertolacci, Mubarak, Doi, Class, Abdullah, Own, Greek, Reham, Makes, Basel, Adamson, Lala, Canon, Life, Ismail, Manchester, Enough, Fields, Goes, Burhan, Cure, Final, Deals, Shy, Cina, Show, Works, Fortunate, Rel, Time, Shifa, Janssens, Mcginnis, Mercy, August, Data, Under, Oliva, Alwazzan, Far, Born, Era, Sina, July, Open, Governor, Din, Reason, Mirela, Due, Rather, Ibn, Strong, Flow, None, Ones]

Citation: Lala, Ismail, and Reham Alwazzan. 2023. Necessary Existence and Necessary Mercy: Ibn ‘Arabi’s Reformulation of Ibn Sina’s Ontological Proof Religions 14: 1016 https://doi.org/10.3390/ rel 14081016 Academic Editor: Mirela Oliva Received: 2 July 2023 Revised: 28 July 2023 Accepted: 5 August 2023 Published: 8 August 2023 Copyright: © 2023 by the authors Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommonsorg/licenses/by/ 4.0/) religions Article Necessary Existence and Necessary Mercy: Ibn ‘Arabi’s Reformulation of Ibn Sina’s Ontological Proof Ismail Lala 1, * and Reham Alwazzan 2 1 Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Gulf University for Science & Technology, Mubarak Al-Abdullah 32093, Kuwait 2 School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester, Manchester M 13 9 PT, UK; rehamalwzzan@postgradmanchesterac.uk * Correspondence: lala.i@gustedu.kw Abstract: Ab u ‘Ali ibn Sina (d. 428/1027) is regarded as the most influential philosopher in Islamic intellectual history. Of his numerous contributions, none has garnered more attention than his ontological proof for the existence of God, known as ‘the Demonstration of the Truthful’ ( Burhan al-siddiqin ). In this proof, Ibn Sina argues that only one being can be ‘necessarily existent’ ( wajib al-wuj ud ). He goes on to say that all the attributes of God mentioned in the Qur’an are derived from this primary attribute of necessity. The influential mystic, Muhyi al-Din ibn ‘Arabi (d. 638/1240), is clearly influenced by this proof, but he reformulates it to suggest that the primary attribute of God is mercy rather than existence. However, this is not the type of mercy that entails forgiveness or the bestowal of favors; rather, it is a necessary mercy that brings everything into existence. All of God’s other attributes flow from this primary one of necessary mercy in the same way as all of God’s attributes flow from His necessary existence for Ibn Sina Keywords: philosophy; mysticism; Ibn Sina; Ibn ‘Arabi; necessary existence; mercy 1. Introduction We are fortunate enough to have a biography of Ibn Sina written by his student, Ab u ‘Ubayd al-Juzjani (d. 462/1070) ( Gutas 2014 ). The inevitable hagiographical elements notwithstanding, this biography provides a detailed account of Ibn Sina’s life. Born in Afshana in around 370 AH/980 CE, or, most probably, slightly before that ( Gutas 1987–1988 , pp. 334–36), to a Samanid governor who was himself interested in philosophy ( McGinnis 2010 , pp. 17–18), Ibn Sina had gained considerable mastery in Greek philosophy by the time he was eighteen ( Gutas 2014 , p. 6). He led somewhat of a nomadic existence due to the regional political turmoil that marred his era ( Gutas 2014 , pp. 8–9). Despite this, however, he was incredibly prolific and is widely regarded as the greatest philosopher in Islamic intellectual history ( Adamson 2013 a , p. I; Janssens 2018 , pp. 1–14). He made contributions to numerous fields and was far from shy about flaunting his achievements, as Al-Juzjani’s biography makes abundantly clear ( Gutas 2014 ). Of all his enviable contributions to myriad sciences, the ones he made in medicine, documented in his Canon of Medicine ( Qan un fi’l-tibb ), and in philosophy, dispersed through numerous works, especially The Cure ( Al-Shifa’ ), stand out as especially significant ( Bertolacci 2017–2018 , p. 265). Ibn Sina draws heavily on Aristotelian philosophy to expound his own philosophical Weltanschauung ( Bertolacci 2006 ), but it is the fourth and final section of The Cure that deals with metaphysics ( ilahiyyat ) in which the originality of his philosophical outlook is truly articulated. It is for this reason that Ibn Sina regarded this section as his ‘crowning achievement’ in philosophy ( McGinnis 2010 , p. 149) Perhaps the most popular of Ibn Sina’s contributions is what is known as ‘the Demonstration of the Truthful’ ( Burhan al-siddiqin ) ( Adamson 2016 , p. 126). Ibn Sina asserts that God is at the summit of the existential hierarchy because His existence is unlike anything Religions 2023 , 14 , 1016. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel 14081016 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions

[Find the meaning and references behind the names: De Cillis, Just, Murcia, Man, Quite, Divine, Sufi, Seville, Xii, Western, Mecca, Path, Conception, Married, Essence, Excellent, Tunisia, Development, Adda, Claude, High, Age, Dagli, Dhat, Else, Given, Spain, Case, Kind, Study, Addas, Morrissey, Rahmat, Good, Need, Austin, Syria]

Religions 2023 , 14 , 1016 2 of 12 else. This is because God is necessary in essence ( wajib bi’l-dhat ), as opposed to all other entities since He is independent of all things for His existence. All other things have a different modality of existence in which they are, ultimately, contingent on God. Ibn Sina goes on to prove that God is the only entity that can have this modality of existence ( Bäck 1992 , pp. 217–55) The reason God is independent of all things, argues Ibn Sina, is that His essence assures His existence. He, therefore, does not need anything else to bring Him into existence. This is because Ibn Sina believes that essence ( dhat ) and existence ( wuj ud ) are separate 1 Since God is the only entity in which this is the case, all other things need something to bring them into existence because this task is not performed by their essence, or, in Ibn Sina’s parlance, all other things need preponderation ( tarjih ) to exist ( Lizzini 2003 , pp. 11–38) So it is only God who is ‘necessarily existent’ ( wajib al-wuj ud ). Yet Ibn Sina does not stop there. As God’s necessary existence is His primary attribute, Ibn Sina believes that all His other attributes, like simplicity and oneness, derive from this one ( Ibn Sina 1998 , p. 29; Inati 2014 , pp. 119–30; Adamson 2016 , p. 131; McGinnis 2022 , pp. 98–101). The mystical theorist, Muhyi al-Din ibn ‘Arabi (d. 638/1240), is evidently quite taken with this proof, but disagrees that God’s primary attribute is necessary existence So ubiquitous is Ibn ‘Arabi in the Western imagination that he may be viewed as Ibn Sina’s successor, if not in thought then certainly in influence ( Addas 1993 ; Knysh 1999 ; Dagli 2016 ). Further, there are a number of similarities between Ibn Sina’s life and that of Ibn ‘Arabi: both came from affluent backgrounds and had fathers who had governmental posts, both traveled extensively and lived in numerous places, and there are detailed biographies for both. Claude Addas provides an excellent biography of Ibn ‘Arabi in which the physical stages of the Sufi’s life are delineated alongside his spiritual stages of development ( Addas 1993 ). Born in 560 AH/1165 CE in Murcia, Spain, to a man who was politically influential, Ibn ‘Arabi, like Ibn Sina, had a good education. After completing his studies, he became the secretary to the governor of Seville and married a high-born woman ( Austin 1980 , pp. 1–2) However, at the age of twenty, he renounced his comfortable life and embarked on the Sufi path ( Ghurab 1983 ). He traveled through Tunisia, Egypt, Mecca, Anatolia, Iraq, and finally settled in Syria, where he passed away in 634 AH/1240 at the age of 75. Unlike his predecessor, who was known for his extravagant lifestyle, Ibn ‘Arabi was a Sufi known for his renunciation ( Chittick 1992 , pp. xii–xiii; De Cillis 2014 , p. 169) Even though Ibn ‘Arabi attributes all his mystical insights to a form of spiritual unveiling, or kashf , that is afforded to the spiritual elite among humankind ( Morrissey 2020 , pp. 763–94), it is evident that his conception of divine mercy draws heavily on Ibn Sina’s proof of God’s necessary existence. Indeed, it may be viewed as a reformulation of necessary existence in conformance with Ibn ‘Arabi’s emphasis on divine mercy ( Nettler 1978 ; Nettler 2003 ; Hirtenstein 1999 ). This is because Ibn ‘Arabi’s notion of God’s necessary mercy, or the ‘mercy that is freely given’ ( rahmat al-imtinan ) ( Ibn ‘Arabi 2002 , pp. 191–96), which he also refers to as ‘the mercy of existence’ ( rahmat al-wujud ) ( Ibn ‘Arabi 1999 ), holds the same status of being the primary attribute of God as necessary existence does for Ibn Sina Ibn ‘Arabi thus bifurcates divine mercy into the emotive kind of mercy that is restricted and only bestowed in accordance with praiseworthy actions, or the ‘mercy that is compelled [by actions]’ ( rahmat al-wujub ), and the mercy of existence ( rahmat al-wujud ) that is given to all entities by God. All entities that exist are thus recipients of this type of mercy purely by the fact that they exist ( Nettler 1978 , pp. 219–29). It is because all existing things have received this mercy, just by existing, that this is God’s most universally applied attribute and, argues Ibn ‘Arabi, most primary ( Ibn ‘Arabi 2002 , p. 191). In the same way as his predecessor, Ibn ‘Arabi believes that all of God’s other attributes proceed from this primary attribute, which is not necessary existence as it is for Ibn Sina, but necessary mercy In this study, how Ibn Sina’s conception of necessary existence is redeployed by Ibn ‘Arabi as necessary mercy is explored. The way in which this is achieved is to (1) interrogate what necessary existence actually means for Ibn Sina and how he contrasts this

[Find the meaning and references behind the names: Top, Every, Illa, Human, Level, Mayer, Menn, Present, Insan, Beyond, Senses, Lah, Ayyan, Ishq, Wad, Zayd, Mean, Amr, Impossible, Ayn, Goodness, Still, Quality, Hiss, Common]

Religions 2023 , 14 , 1016 3 of 12 modality of existence with other modalities of existence, and then (2) to present how Ibn Sina extracts God’s other attributes from this primary attribute of necessary existence. After this, the same methodology is employed for Ibn ‘Arabi, so (1) the modalities of existence as a result of necessary mercy in the philosophical outlook of Ibn ‘Arabi are scrutinized, then (2) how Ibn ‘Arabi extracts all of God’s other attributes from the primary attribute of necessary mercy is investigated. The first order of business, then, is to elucidate the different modalities of existence in the ontology of Ibn Sina 2. Modalities of Existence in Ibn Sina’s Ontology Ibn Sina begins his disquisition on the modalities of existence by dismissing the common but false perception that existence is restricted to that which is sensible ( mahsus ) He explains that, contrary to what most people think, they already implicitly accept the existence of things that are ‘not grasped by the senses’ ( ma la yanaluh al-hiss ). In order to elaborate, he adduces the case of ‘Amr and Zayd, who are both given the appellation ‘human being’ ( insan ), but all people agree that ‘humanness’ is not something that is amenable to the senses since it has no position ( wad.‘ ), space ( ayn ), specific quantity ( miqdar mu‘ayyan ), or specific quality ( kayf mu‘ayyan ) ( Ibn Sina 1993 , pp. 7–8). This means that there are things that all of us acknowledge are beyond sensory recognition ( Ibn Sina 1993 , p. 9) If it is the case that there exist things beyond the physical world, then we must delineate what modalities of existence they have, says Ibn Sina. He thus moves to partition existence into two primary categories: necessary ( wajib ) and possible ( mumkin ). He writes, If every being is considered in terms of its essence ( dhat ), and not in terms of other things, then its existence is either necessary in itself ( yajib lah u al-wuj ud fi nafsih ), or it is not. If [its existence] is necessary, then it is the truth in itself, and it is necessarily existent ( wajib al-wuj ud ) in itself, and it is completely independent ( qayy um ). ( Ibn Sina 1993 , p. 19) The first category of existence is thus the type of existence in which something is ‘necessary in itself’. Ibn Sina describes this modality of existence as ‘necessarily existent’ because ‘it is completely independent’ of anything else since its very essence guarantees its existence, and it therefore does not need to depend on anything else for its existence. Ibn Sina, through careful argumentation, proves that only God can have this sort of existence ( Mayer 2001 , pp. 18–20) In his Risala fi’l-‘ishq , Ibn Sina asserts that only God can have necessary existence by drawing on the argument from gradation from Platonic and Neoplatonic sources which impose a hierarchical structure on existence in terms of goodness. According to this argument, since all things occupy a certain level of goodness, there must be something perched at the top of goodness ( Menn 1992 , pp. 543–73; Wippel 2000 , p. 469). Ibn Sina explains that God is this highest Good, and because He is the highest and absolute Good, His goodness could not have been caused by anything else because that would mean that that entity was a higher good since it was the cause of God’s goodness ( Ibn Sina 1899 , pp. 1–27) 2 Thus, God is the absolute Good and is necessarily existent. As for all other things, Ibn Sina writes, If it is not necessary, then it is [still] not permissible to say that it is impossible in itself after it was deemed to be existent. However, if in terms of its essence a condition is attached to it, like saying that its cause does not exist, [only] then does it become impossible ( mumtani‘ ). Or [conversely], if its cause does exist, then it becomes necessary ( wajib ). ( Ibn Sina 1993 , p. 19) If something is not necessarily existent, says Ibn Sina, the immediate assumption cannot be that it is impossible. This is because it may yet exist due to a cause ( ‘illa ) that is attached to its essence, even though the essence itself does not ensure its existence. Therefore, if such a condition is found to be attached to the essence, then the entity becomes ‘necessary’ and it exists. In other words, if the cause ensures existence because the essence is not doing it

[Find the meaning and references behind the names: Four, Druart, Square, Circle, Rule, Rules, Thom, Next, Lack, Sure, Push, Black, End, Mental]

Religions 2023 , 14 , 1016 4 of 12 itself, then the thing becomes necessary. However, this is clearly not the type of necessary existence that God has. Instead, it is a necessary existence due to the existence of the cause, or necessary through another, but it is contingent in terms of itself because its existence is contingent on the cause (God). This, then, is the next modality of existence: necessary in terms of another, or contingent in terms of itself But it could be, says Ibn Sina, that a condition is not attached to the essence; now, the essence has nothing to bring it into existence and it is thus ‘impossible’, that is to say, it does not exist. However, this is only due to a lack of a condition to attach to the essence, not because the essence in itself is not amenable to existing, as Ibn Sina elaborates, If no condition ( shart ) is attached to its essence—neither of the cause existing nor not existing—then there remains a third option for its essence: possibility ( imkan ), so in terms of its essence, the thing is neither necessary nor impossible. Therefore, every existent being is either necessary in itself, or possibly existent in itself. ( Ibn Sina 1993 , p. 19) Every thing that exists is ‘either necessary in itself’, if its essence ensures its existence, as is the case for God, or it is ‘possibly existent it itself’ if it does not. This means that it could exist, but the cause to push it into existence is lacking, not because there is anything intrinsically present in its essence that precludes existence. This is why it is ‘neither necessary nor impossible’ because the essence does not guarantee its existence, so it is not necessary, but neither does it rule out its existence, so it is not impossible. It is significant that Ibn Sina says this about all things that exist because even things that do not have the cause to push them into existence, and therefore do not have a sensible existence in the world, still enjoy mental existence because their essence does not preclude existence If it is the case that some things do not exist because there is a want of the cause to push them into sensible existence, then there must be others that do not exist on account of their essence. In other words, there must be those things that do not exist, not because there is no cause, but because the essence itself rules out its existence. And sure enough, that is the case, says Ibn Sina ( Ibn Sina 1993 , p. 20). This means that we end up with four modalities of existence in Ibn Sina’s ontology: 1 Necessary existence ( wajib al-wuj ud ). This is when something exists due to its very essence, which means it is not dependent on anything for its existence; it is a modality of existence that is reserved for God 2 Possible existence ( imkan ). This is when the essence does not guarantee existence, which means that the being is dependent on a cause to push it into existence. If the cause is present, then the being becomes necessary through another, or contingent in itself. All things that exist in the sensible world, like humans, animals, plants, and physical objects, have this modality of existence 3 Impossible ( mustahil ) existence due to another ( Ibn Sina 1993 ). This is the impossibility of existence in the sensible world due to a lack of cause. Things of this type are contingently impossible and have essences that could accept existence if there was a cause. Therefore, they have mental existence, like a centaur, a pegasus, a minotaur, etc 4 Impossible in itself. This is when something does not exist in the physical world or the mental world because its essence itself rules out its existence, such as a square circle This modality of existence is diametrically opposed to necessary existence because in necessary existence, the essence guarantees a thing’s existence, whereas in this type of existence, the essence precludes a thing’s existence ( Ibn Sina 1985 , pp. 547–49; Black 1997 , pp. 425–53; Thom 2008 , pp. 361–76; Druart 2012 , pp. 51–74) After positing that God has necessary existence—a modality of existence that is distinct from all other things—Ibn Sina begins to extract all of God’s other qualities from His primary attribute of necessity ( Ibn Sina 1993 , pp. 21–240; McGinnis 2010 , pp. 168–72; Adamson 2013 b , p. 219).

[Find the meaning and references behind the names: Asma, Usuf, Husna, Nasir, Wood, Kull, Bed, Al-Kindi, Prior, Kindi, Fut, Matter, Ahad, Usi, Part, Shay, Asl, Harris, Point, Faithful, Magnum, Wahid, Kamm, Names, Ala, Parts, Noble, General, Line]

Religions 2023 , 14 , 1016 5 of 12 3. Necessary Existence as the Source of All Other Divine Attributes for Ibn Sina Ibn Sina is clear that God’s primary attribute is His necessity ( McGinnis 2010 , pp. 168– 70). If that is the case, reasons Ibn Sina, then all the divine Names mentioned in the Qur’an, such as The Merciful or The Compeller ( Harris 1989 ), inasmuch as they are descriptions of God’s qualities ( Stade 1970 ), must derive from this one. Case in point are the divine Names Al-Wahid and Al-Ahad (The One). Ibn Sina agrees with his predecessor, Ab u Y usuf al-Kindi (d. 259/873?), that implicit in God’s Names for The One is His simplicity ( Ahiwani 1948 , pp. 105–7). He writes, If the essence ( dhat ) of the Necessary Existent ( wajib al-wuj ud ) were composed of two things ( shay’ayn ), or many things that came together, it would be made necessary through them. One of these things, or all of them, would be prior to the Necessary Existent, and it would be a component ( muqawwim ) of it/them. Thus, the Necessary Existent is indivisible ( la yunqasam ), both conceptually ( fi’l-ma‘na ) and quantitatively ( fi’l-kamm ). ( Ibn Sina 1993 , pp. 44–45) An inevitable corollary of necessary existence is indivisibility, asserts Ibn Sina. This is because were the Necessary Existent composed of parts, those parts would be ontologically prior to the Necessary Existent (even if they were not necessarily temporally prior), and His existence would be contingent on those parts, which would violate His necessary existence The faithful commentator of Ibn Sina, Nasir al-Din al-T. usi (d. 672/1274) ( Adamson and Noble 2022 ), adds that Ibn Sina ‘rejects composition ( tarkib ) and division ( inqisam ) of the Necessary Existent in every way’ ( ‘ala wajh al-kull ) ( Ibn Sina 1993 , p. 44). This is due to an entailment of composition being to be made up of multiple parts or elements, or because something is constructed from . . . a primary part ( juz’ asl ), which is prior to the composed thing, such as the wood of a bed, and another part ( juz’ akhar ) is attached to it so that the composed thing is made due to its attachment, like the form of the bed. ( Ibn Sina 1993 , p. 44) It is not just an amalgamation of different parts that constitutes composition, says T. usi, but also the composition of one part, like wood that a bed is made from, which is attached to a certain form, that is, the form of the bed. In this latter case, even though there is only one thing that the bed is made from, i.e., wood, the form of the bed is still dependent on the wood for its existence. Ibn Sina, therefore, not only rejects composition that entails multiple parts for the Necessary Existent, but also composition that entails a hylomorphic combination of matter and form ( Ibn Sina 1993 , p. 45) The upshot of this, says Ibn Sina, is that because God is necessarily existent, He cannot be (1) more than one, or (2) divisible. Hence, Ibn Sina proves the divine NameThe One from God’s necessary existence. In the same way, Ibn Sina demonstrates that all of God’s most beautiful Names ( Al-Asma’ al-husna ) from the Qur’an (Qur’an 7:180) are derived from His necessary existence. Ibn ‘Arabi seems to be impressed with this line of argumentation, but he believes that God’s primary attribute is not His necessary existence but rather His necessary mercy. Prior to discussing this, however, it behooves one to familiarize oneself with the modalities of existence according to Ibn ‘Arabi so that the way in which God’s necessary mercy brings forth these modalities can become clear 4. Modalities of Existence in Ibn ‘Arabi’s Ontology There is a general correspondence between the modalities of existence Ibn Sina delineates and those of Ibn ‘Arabi. Both also agree that only God has necessary existence. Ibn ‘Arabi writes in his magnum opus, The Meccan Revelations ( Al-Fut uhat al-makkiyya ), in language redolent of his predecessor, that God is the only ‘being necessary of Himself’ ( Ibn ‘Arabi 1999 , vol. 6, p. 317). He also agrees with Ibn Sina that the physical world is only one of the modalities of existence and that there exist other beings that do not have physical existence because God did not preponderate them to exist in the phenomenal world. Ibn ‘Arabi classifies all these as contingent in the same way as Ibn Sina because in themselves

[Find the meaning and references behind the names: Angels, Wisdom, Work, Jami, Mirror, Long, Worlds, Perfect, Heavenly, Sells, Comes, Favor, Original, Rizvi, Kanz, Balance, See, Knowledge, Corbin, Self, Pre, Treasure]

Religions 2023 , 14 , 1016 6 of 12 they have the possibility to exist or not since their essence is amenable to both possibilities ( Ibn ‘Arabi 1999 , vol. 6, p. 317). Ibn Sina writes, That which has possibility ( imkan ) does not exist due to its essence ( dhat ), for its existence is not more apt for it than its nonexistence because it is simply possible Thus, if one of these states [existence or nonexistence] becomes more appropriate for it, it is due to the presence or absence of something. Therefore, the existence of every possible thing is due to another. ( Ibn Sina 1993 , p. 20) Ibn Sina explains that after taking out the essence as a cause for the existence of something, as long as the essence is not self-contradictory like a square circle, the entity may or may not exist—both possibilities are equally plausible because ‘its existence is not more apt for it than its nonexistence’. This means that if it exists in the sensible world, there has to be something that has swung the balance in favor of phenomenal existence, as opposed to only its existence in the pre-phenomenal world, and this thing is God. Ibn Sina explains that the pre-phenomenal realms include the purely spiritual world of the angels ( Ibn Sina 1998 , p. 435), which Ibn ‘Arabi classifies as the world of determinations of the angels ( Corbin 1997 ). Then comes the world of the souls for Ibn Sina, which Ibn ‘Arabi also calls the world of the souls, or the determination of the souls ( Corbin 1997 , p. 225) And finally, Ibn Sina speaks of the world of the heavenly bodies, which corresponds to Ibn ‘Arabi’s world of the exemplars or mithal , before the appearance of the sensible world ( Corbin 1997 , p. 225) This means that, for both thinkers, besides the necessary existence of God, there exist four contingent modalities of existence. The three before the sensible world do not have materiality since they have not been preponderated to exist in the sensible world, but all of them are contingent on God for their existence ( Ibn ‘Arabi 1999 , vol. 6, p. 317). Even though Ibn ‘Arabi was equivocal in delineating these modalities of contingent existence, thinkers of his school systematized these realms into five ‘divine presences ( hadarat )’ of existence, as they are all contingent on the divine ( Chittick 1982 ). Ibn ‘Arabi argues that all these realms, or all modalities of contingent existence, are not only dependent on God, as Ibn Sina asserts, but are actually manifestations of God. He explains in the opening passage of his most popular work, The Ringstones of Wisdom ( Fusus al-hikam ), that the reason for the existence of all the contingent worlds is the divine ‘yearning’ to be known ( Ibn ‘Arabi 2002 , pp. 48–49) because God described Himself as a ‘hidden treasure’ ( kanz makhfiyy ) that wanted to be discovered ( Ibn ‘Arabi 1999 , vol. 3, p. 260) The reason this results in the existence of all the realms of contingent existence, asserts Ibn ‘Arabi, is that ‘seeing something itself in itself ( nafsah bi nafsih ) is not like seeing it in something else ( fi amr akhar ) that becomes like a mirror for it’ ( Ibn ‘Arabi 2002 , p. 48). One of the most renowned later expositors of Ibn ‘Arabi’s mystical worldview, N ur al-Din al-Jami (d. 898/1492), who was, nevertheless, highly original in his methodology and observations ( Rizvi 2006 ), explains that this does not mean God was lacking any knowledge about himself because God knew Himself without the emergence of all the levels of contingent existence, so His knowledge of Himself was not ontologically or temporally posterior to the existence of contingent beings. However, the existence of contingent beings, and particularly humans, furnished God with ‘a dissimilar vision’ ( ru’ya mughayara ) so that He could see Himself in something different, not as He is in His essence ( Jami 2009 , p. 52) He goes on to explain that the simile of a mirror is fitting because the reflection one sees in the mirror is oneself insofar as its source is the one reflected, yet seeing a reflection is not seeing the self as it truly is in itself ( Jami 2009 , p. 52; Sells 1988 , pp. 121–49). God, thus, did not lack any knowledge of Himself that seeing Himself reflected in the realms of contingent existence perfected; He is perfect in terms of His essence ( dhatiyyan ) and in terms of His divine Names ( ismiyyan ), but He nevertheless desired to see His divine Names manifested in the realms of contingent existence ( Jami 2009 , p. 52). All the realms of contingent existence, therefore, are loci of manifestation of God’s divine Names The conduit for this ‘yearning’ to see the divine Names to be fulfilled, says Ibn ‘Arabi, is the divine attribute of necessary mercy, or ‘mercy of existence’ ( rahmat al-wujud ) which

[Find the meaning and references behind the names: Nafas, Natural, Kamal, Rank, Turn, Merit, Rest, Sense, Non, Lower, Nine, Rahim, Allah, Able, Rahman]

Religions 2023 , 14 , 1016 7 of 12 brings forth all the realms of contingent existence in which God is able to ‘see’ Himself in a ‘dissimilar vision’. He juxtaposes this form of mercy that, by definition, is all-pervasive, since all realms of contingent existence that exist are, by the very fact that they exist, recipients of this type of mercy, to emotive mercy that is restricted to the phenomenal realm, and only to those that merit it ( Izutsu 1983 , pp. 121–22; Ibn ‘Arabi 2002 , pp. 151–60). This means that, since all contingent realms of existence are nothing but the manifestation of God’s divine Names, all His divine Names are derived from God’s necessary mercy in the same way as they are derived from God’s necessary existence for Ibn Sina. The next section shows how necessary mercy brings about the manifestation of all of God’s other Names 5. Necessary Mercy as the Source of All Other Divine Attributes for Ibn ‘Arabi Ibn Sina argues that an ineluctable entailment of God’s necessary existence is the emergence of the ninety-nine divine Names mentioned in the Qur’an, like The Compassionate ( Al-Rahman ), as stated above. For Ibn ‘Arabi, however, the divine Name, The Compassionate ( Al-Rahman ) is not an entailment of His necessary existence but rather the source of all the other divine Names, like The Merciful ( Al-Rahim ), and others ( Izutsu 1983 ). This is on account of the primary motivation for the emergence of the realms of contingent existence being God’s ‘yearning’ to ‘see’ Himself in another form ( Ibn ‘Arabi 2002 , pp. 48–49). It is this ‘yearning’ that brings about the mercy that God has, which, in turn, leads to the realms of contingency existing Since God is overflowing with this type of mercy, there was an effusion from Him that brought about the existence of all the realms of contingent existence ( Izutsu 1983 , p. 116; Ibn ‘Arabi 2002 , p. 49). In this sense, it is true that all the realms of existence are contingent on God as they are for Ibn Sina, yet their existence is not an entailment of God’s necessary existence as it is for Ibn Sina, since He could have existed on His own without the existence of anything else according to Ibn ‘Arabi. Nevertheless, Ibn ‘Arabi argues that God’s necessary mercy precipitated the realms of contingent existence as a manifestation of His divine Names in a form that was not Him ( Ibn ‘Arabi 1999 , vol. 3, p. 260; Ibn ‘Arabi 2002 , pp. 48–49). It is in this way that necessary existence for Ibn Sina can be thought of as being equivalent to necessary mercy for Ibn ‘Arabi because they are the respective sources of the realms of contingent existence Ibn ‘Arabi asserts that the divine Names of God, like The Merciful and The Avenger, postulate the existence of contingent beings through whom and on whom these Names can be manifested ( Ibn ‘Arabi 1983 , p. 5). There can be no manifestation of God’s mercy or His revenge if there are no contingent being in whom and for whom this mercy and revenge is manifested. Ibn ‘Arabi makes his point in the following way: The world is manifested through the breath ( nafas ) of The Compassionate ( Al- Rahman ). God released the divine Names from [the torture] they were going through because they could not manifest themselves. ( Ibn ‘Arabi 2002 , p. 145) It is only through the divine Name, Al-Rahman , which is the Name Ibn ‘Arabi employs to refer to God’s necessary mercy ( Izutsu 1983 , pp. 116–40), that all the other divine Names were relieved from the constraint of non-existence that they were suffering from. It is for this reason, observes Toshihiko Izutsu, that God’s Name Al-Rahman contains all the other divine Names ( Izutsu 1983 , pp. 116–40). Izutsu writes, There is a difference of ranks among the Divine Names, and that a higher Name virtually contains in itself all the Names of lower ranks. If such is the case, then it is natural for us to suppose that there must be in this hierarchy the highest, i.e., the most comprehensive, Name that contains all the rest of the Names. And in fact, according to Ibn ‘Arabi, there actually is such a Name: . . Rahman . ( Izutsu 1983 , p. 116) 3 The Name Al-Rahman is thus the most comprehensive of the divine Names since it contains all the others in it. Ibn ‘Arabi says as much when he states that the two Names, Allah and Al-Rahman , have the rank of ‘encompassment’ ( ihata ) and ‘perfection’ ( kamal )

[Find the meaning and references behind the names: Rustom, Jandi, Act, Key, Akim, Bad, Prophet, Moral, Sifa, Sulayman, Daw, Khayr, Qua]

Religions 2023 , 14 , 1016 8 of 12 which none of the other Names have ( H . akim 1981 , p. 528) Al-Rahman is, therefore, the only one of the divine Names that is employed by Ibn ‘Arabi as a synonym of the Name Allah, as Su‘ad H . akim correctly observes ( H . akim 1981 , p. 528). This is because it denotes God’s most comprehensive attribute, which is the mercy that envelops all things, in the same way as the Name Allah refers to the all-encompassing essence of God Ibn ‘Arabi says that the type of mercy that is bestowed through the divine Name Al-Rahman is necessary mercy, which he also calls ‘the mercy that is freely given’ ( rahmat al-imtinan ) since it is not ‘earned’ in any way ( Ibn ‘Arabi 2002 , p. 151). The existence of this type of all-pervasive mercy is intimated in the Qur’an itself, argues Ibn ‘Arabi, because God proclaims, ‘ My mercy envelops all things ’ (Qur’an, 7:156). This proclamation means that there can be no contingent being that is not touched by this form of mercy ( Ibn ‘Arabi 1999 , vol 2, p. 239). It cannot refer, therefore, to emotive mercy, which is restricted and only bestowed on some contingent beings. If the divine declaration is true—as it must—then all things are recipients of divine mercy since there is no exception in the declaration. Ibn ‘Arabi proves that all things are indeed recipients of divine mercy and we know this because they exist Their very existence is a testament to their acceptance of divine mercy ( Nettler 1978 ; Izutsu 1983 , pp. 116–40). The all-pervasiveness that is the defining feature of this kind of mercy is the reason, according to most commentators of the Fusus , that Ibn ‘Arabi associates it with Prophet Sulayman because he was freely given all-pervading sovereignty ( Qashani 1892 , p. 190; Qaysari 1955 , p. 910; Jandi 2007 , p. 443; Jami 2009 , p. 360; Q unawi 2013 , p. 86) In the chapter of Sulayman, Ibn ‘Arabi clearly differentiates between the two types of mercy: The mercy that is freely given ( rahmat al-imtinan ) and the mercy that is compelled [by human actions] ( rahmat al-wujub ). These [two types of mercy proceed from the Names] The Compassionate ( Al-Rahman ) and The Merciful ( Al-Rahim ) [respectively]. Therefore, God gives freely through the Name The Compassionate and He is compelled through the Name The Merciful, but the compulsion is from what He gives freely, therefore, The Merciful is contained within The Compassionate ( Ibn ‘Arabi 2002 , p. 151) The divine Name The Merciful being contained within the Name The Compassionate is a clear indication that emotive mercy only becomes operational once there exist entities upon whom the emotive mercy of God can act, which is only made possible by the Name The Compassionate. Izutsu explains this point in the following way: Mercy in this sense is nothing but bestowing upon everything existence qua existence. And this is done by the Absolute’s manifesting itself in the creaturely forms. This ontological act has in itself nothing to do with moral judgments. In other words, it does not matter essentially whether a thing as an object of the Mercy be good ( khayr ) or bad ( sharr ). Things assume these and other evaluational properties only after having been given existence by the act of the universal Mercy. ( Izutsu 1983 , p. 123) Daw ud al-Qaysari (d. 751/1350), who was ‘a key figure in disseminating the teachings of the school of Ibn ‘Arabi in Anatolia’ ( Rustom 2005 , p. 53), elaborates that in this passage, Ibn ‘Arabi distinguishes between the mercy that emanates from God’s essence ( dhat ) and the mercy that is the result of His attribute ( sifa ). The mercy that is due to His essence is ontologically prior to and the cause of the mercy that is then differentiated into the mercy of His attribute. It is the mercy of God’s essence that Ibn ‘Arabi refers to by the mercy that comes from the Name Al-Rahman , which then becomes differentiated into the mercy of His Name Al-Rahim ( Qaysari 1955 , pp. 910–12) The reason the essence bestows this mercy of existentiation that allows the emergence of the universe is that God wanted to ‘see’ Himself in something else. It is this fundamental Name, Al-Rahman , that ‘breathed out’ existence so that all the other Names could be manifested in existence, as Ibn ‘Arabi explains:

[Find the meaning and references behind the names: Sands, Rahima, Sick, Abu, Nasab, Cosmos, Udi, Sakran, Morris, Lan, Athar, Awwal, Ill, Anger, Alam, Sakira, Batin, Ghadban, Last, Ahir, Marida, Qasim, Akhir]

Religions 2023 , 14 , 1016 9 of 12 The ‘breath’ ( nafas ) is ascribed to The Compassionate ( Al-Rahman ) because He had mercy on the divine relations ( al-nasab al-ilahiyya ) through it by bringing forth the forms of the cosmos ( suwar al-‘alam ), which we have said is the manifest aspect ( z.ahir ) of God since He is The Manifest ( Al-Z . ahir ), and He is their hidden aspect ( batin ) since He is The Hidden ( Al-Batin ). He is The First ( Al-Awwal ) since He existed when they did not, and He is The Last ( Al- ¯ Akhir ) since He is their essence when they are manifested. ( Ibn ‘Arabi 2002 , p. 112) Ibn ‘Arabi uses Q 57:3, which declares that ‘ He [God] is The First and The Last, The Manifest and The Hidden ’, as a paradigmatic example of how the Name The Compassionate brings about all the other Names. It is the ‘breath’ that comes from The Compassionate that existentiates the cosmos and relieves all the other Names from the ‘torture’ ( karb ) of non-existence from which they were suffering ( Ibn ‘Arabi 2002 , p. 112). Elsewhere in the Fusus , he is even more unequivocal about this: The cosmos ( ‘alam ) is manifested in the breath of The Compassionate ( al-nafas al-Rahman ) by which God relieved ( naffas ) the divine Names ( al-asma’ al-ilahiyya ) from what they were experiencing due to not manifesting their traces ( athar ). ( Ibn ‘Arabi 2002 , p. 145) The breath of The Compassionate ( al-nafas al-Rahman ) brought about the existence of the cosmos which enabled the divine Names—what Ibn ‘Arabi describes as ‘the divine relations’ ( al-nasab al-ilahiyya ) in the previous passage—to become manifest and relieve them from the ‘torture’ ( karb ) of non-manifestation. This makes the Name The Compassionate the fundamental Name because all the other divine Names are manifested through this Name Ibn ‘Arabi is explicit that the Name The Compassionate is primary because God described Himself as ‘the Breath of The Compassionate’, and it is unavoidable that each thing described by an attribute follows all the entailments of that attribute ( Ibn ‘Arabi 2002 , p. 143). This means it is inevitable that God, insofar as He described Himself as a breath, adopts the attributes of a breath that brings about existence, according to Jami ( Jami 2009 , p. 342). Qaysari adds that ‘the breath of The Compassionate’ is the ‘manifestation of existence’ ( al-tajalli al-wuj udi ) of all contingent beings, whether they exist in the sensible realm or in the pre-sensible ones ( Qaysari 1955 , p. 877). All realms of contingent existence, then, are due to the breath of The Compassionate, which is based on the divine Name, The Compassionate. It is the source of all the other divine Names and realms of contingent existence in the same way that God’s necessary existence is the source of all the divine Names and realms of contingent existence for Ibn Sina Ibn ‘Arabi demonstrates his fidelity to lexical semantics when he designates Al-Rahman as the source of necessary mercy that is all-pervasive, and Al-Rahim as the source of emotive mercy that is restricted to the righteous ( Morris 1987 ; Sands 2006 , p. 41). The highly influential Mu’tazilite linguist and exegete, Abu’l-Qasim al-Zamakhshari (d. 538/1144) ( Ayazi 2009 ), writes in his magisterial commentary, Al-Rahman is the fa‘lan form of the verb ‘to have mercy’ ( rahima ), in the same way as ‘anger’ ( ghadban ) and ‘intoxicated’ ( sakran ) are derived from the verbs ‘to be angry’ ( ghadiba ) and ‘to be intoxicated ( sakira ) [respectively]. Likewise, Al-Rahim is a fa‘il form of it, just as ‘sick’ ( marid ) and ‘ill’ ( saqim ) are derived from the verbs ‘to be sick’ ( marida ) and ‘to be ill’ ( saqima ) [respectively]. However, Al-Rahman has exaggeration ( mubalagha ) that Al-Rahim does not. This is why they say, ‘[He is] compassionate in the world and the hereafter, and merciful in the world’ And they also say, ‘the addition in construction leads to an addition in meaning. ( Zamakhshari 1987 , vol. 1, p. 6) Zamakhshari gives two reasons that Al-Rahman is linguistically more forceful than Al- Rahim : (1) the fa‘lan form is a more exaggerated form than the fa‘il form, and (2) there is an ‘addition in the construction’ of the fa‘lan form that the fa‘il form does not have. In other words, Rahman has more letters than Rahim , as it has five letters as opposed to four for its counterpart. This ‘addition in construction’ leads to an addition in the forcefulness of the

[Find the meaning and references behind the names: Range, New, Todd, Read, Sadr, Place, Stern, Author, Gustav, Principal]

Religions 2023 , 14 , 1016 10 of 12 term. This is the reason, Zamakhshari says, that the Name Al-Rahman applies to the world and the hereafter, whereas the Name Al-Rahim is restricted to this world While Ibn ‘Arabi does not agree on the explanation, he agrees that Al-Rahman is more forceful than Al-Rahim . Instead of viewing one as pertaining to the world and the other to the world and the hereafter, Ibn ‘Arabi explains that one is the source of the other. Further, this expansion in denotation allows Ibn ‘Arabi to delineate more than one type of mercy, whereas Zamakhshari’s explanation refers to the same type of mercy, but suggests that one is more potent because it applies in a place where the other does not. Instead, Ibn ‘Arabi combines different semantic fields in order to expand the denotations of the focal word ( Izutsu 1998 , pp. 18–26). This is an extension of the semantic range of a term, according to Gustav Stern, which allows an alteration in the signification of the term. In addition, Ibn ‘Arabi’s inclusion of necessary mercy in the conventional denotation of emotive mercy means that the notion of mercy is understood in a different way. Stern explains that this is the second way in which the meaning is changed because the known referent is now comprehended in a new way ( Stern 1931 , p. 163). Ibn ‘Arabi’s concept of necessary mercy, therefore, is a different proposition to emotive mercy: one that is all-pervading with all the divine Names deriving from it in the same way as all the divine Names are derived from necessary existence for Ibn Sina The significance of this reformulation cannot be underestimated. By making necessary mercy God’s primary attribute, Ibn ‘Arabi articulates that it is the principal characteristic of the divine essence. It is for this reason that only the divine Name Al-Rahman , from among all the Names, is used as a synonym by Ibn ‘Arabi for God’s primary Name, Allah, which is the one that refers most specifically to His essence ( dhat ) ( H . akim 1981 , p. 528) Indeed, Ibn ‘Arabi’s foremost disciple, Sadr al-Din al-Q unawi (d. 673/1274) ( Todd 2014 , p. 1), the first to compose an annotation to the Fusus , associates necessary mercy with the essence of God, as opposed to emotive mercy and all of God’s other traits, which are simply manifestations of his most beautiful Names ( Q unawi 2013 , p. 86). In carrying out this reformulation, therefore, Ibn ‘Arabi differentiates necessary mercy from all of God’s other attributes because it is the cause of them, and because none of the other attributes could possibly be manifested without the primary attribute of necessary mercy that brings forth the loci on which all other Names depend for manifestation 6. Conclusions Ibn Sina asserts that the primary attribute of God is His necessary existence. God’s ninety-nine most beautiful Names mentioned in the Qur’an are derived from this primary attribute. This means that God is Al-Wahid and Al-Ahad , and all the other Names because He is necessarily existent. Ibn ‘Arabi agrees with Ibn Sina that God has a primary attribute, but he believes that this primary attribute is God’s necessary mercy. Ibn ‘Arabi argues that because all things in the different realms of reality are manifestations of God’s Names in the modality of contingency, the impetus for the presence of all contingent existence is God’s primary quality. This impetus, says Ibn ‘Arabi, is divine mercy. However, this is not to be confused with emotive mercy that is itself dependent on this primary, existentiating mercy in the same way as all of God’s other attributes are. In order to circumvent the confusion precipitated by these two very different kinds of mercy, Ibn ‘Arabi associates necessary mercy that allows the emergence of all the most beautiful Names with the Name Al-Rahman , and he associates emotive mercy that is given in response to deeds with the Name Al-Rahim . In this way, then, Ibn ‘Arabi reformulates Ibn Sina’s primary divine attribute of necessary existence into necessary mercy to accommodate the emphasis on divine mercy in his ontology Author Contributions: Conceptualization, RA.; methodology, RA.; formal analysis, I.L.; investigation, I.L.; writing—original draft preparation, I.L. and RA.; writing—review and editing, I.L.; funding acquisition, I.L. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

[Find the meaning and references behind the names: Saint, Muhammad, Al-Ghazali, Empire, Ways, Ahmad, Maria, Sebastian, Code, Press, Cambridge, Pir, Deborah, Sum, Kit, Kingsley, Summa, Islam, Date, Sachiko, Dar, Thomas, Amos, British, Datta, Peer, Steven, Ghazali, Anton, Brill, Ila, York, Kutub, Muslim, Moriarty, Quest, Jabbour, Mahmoud, Ihya, Hackett, Basic, Book, William, Murtada, Henry, London, Tasim, Kitab, Century, Arab, Mih, Angles, Allen, Murata, Heritage, State, Sulla, Faith, Routledge, Ralph, Culture, Red, Kal, Shif, Joseph, Phoenix, Irshad, Boston, Genu, Company, Oxford, Free, Albany, Caner, Cairo, Peter, Anne, Min, Right, House, Dimitri, Islami, Michael]

Religions 2023 , 14 , 1016 11 of 12 Funding: This project was supported by the Gulf University for Science and Technology under the project code ISG—Case 14 Data Availability Statement: No new data were created or analyzed in this study. Data sharing is not applicable to this article Conflicts of Interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest Notes 1 Ren é Decartes employs a similar ontological proof for God’s existence when he writes, ‘existence can no more be separated from the essence of God than we can separate from the essence of a triangle that the sum of its three angles adds up to two right angles’ ( Decartes 2008 , p. 66) 2 This proof was employed and refined by Thomas Aquinas in his magnum opus, the Summa Theologiae , as one of the five ways of proving the existence of God through a posteriori argumentation ( Aquinas 1997 , pp. 18–24). Aquinas attributed not only absolute goodness to the entity at the summit of the hierarchy, but also causation. Therefore, the entity that enjoyed the maximal position of any genus was also the cause of all the things in that genus. Based on this, he asserted that ‘there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God’ ( Cahn 2009 , p. 61) 3 It is noteworthy that Izutsu translates Rahman as The Merciful, but we have translated it as The Compassionate and translated the Name that refers to the mercy of God in the more traditional and restricted sense as The Merciful ( Al-Rahim ). This is consistent with more recent works that touch on the difference between the two types of divine mercy, referred to by the divine Names, Al-Rahman and Al-Rahim . See, for instance, the treatment of the subject by Sachiko Murata ( Murata 1992 , p. 55) References Adamson, Peter. 2013 a. Interpreting Avicenna. In Interpreting Avicenna: Critical Essays . Edited by Peter Adamson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. i–ii Adamson, Peter. 2013 b. From the Necessary Existent to God. In Interpreting Avicenna: Critical Essays . Edited by Peter Adamson Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 170–89 Adamson, Peter. 2016 Philosophy in the Islamic World: A History of Philosophy without Any Gaps . Oxford: Oxford University Press Adamson, Peter, and Michael-Sebastian Noble. 2022. Intuition in the Avicennan tradition British Journal for the History of Philosophy 31: 657–74. [ CrossRef ] Addas, Claude. 1993 Quest for the Red Sulphur: The Life of Ibn ‘Arabi . Translated by Peter Kingsley. Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society Ahiwani, Ahmad, ed. 1948 Kitab al-Kindi ila al-mu‘tasim bi Allah . Cairo: Dar Ihya’ al-Kutub al-‘Arabiyya Aquinas, Thomas. 1997 Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Volume 1 . Edited by Anton Pegis. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company Austin, Ralph. 1980 Ibn al-‘Arabi: The Bezels of Wisdom . Mahwah: Paulist Press Ayazi, Muhammad ‘Ali. 2009 Al-Mufassir un: H . ayatuhum wa manhajuhum . Tehran: Wizarat al-Thaqafa wa’l-Irshad al-Islami Bäck, Allen. 1992. Avienna’s Conception of the Modalities Vivarium 30: 217–55. [ CrossRef ] Bertolacci, Amos. 2006 The Reception of Aristotle’s Metaphysics in Avicenna’s Kitab al-Shifa’: A Milestone of Western Metaphysical Thought Leiden and Boston: Brill Bertolacci, Amos. 2017–2018. Avicenna’s Kitab al-Šifa Religions 2023 , 14 , x FOR PEER REVIEW 11 of 12 Data Availability Statement: No new data were created or analyzed in this study. Data sharing is not applicable to this article. Con fl icts of Interest: The authors declare no con fl ict of interest. Notes 1 René Decartes employs a similar ontological proof for God’s existence when he writes, ‘existence can no more be separated from the essence of God than we can separate from the essence of a triangle that the sum of its three angles adds up to two right angles’ (Decartes 2008, p. 66). 2 This proof was employed and refined by Thomas Aquinas in his magnum opus, the Summa Theologiae , as one of the five ways of proving the existence of God through a posteriori argumentation (Aquinas 1997, pp. 18–24). Aquinas attributed not only absolute goodness to the entity at the summit of the hierarchy, but also causation. Therefore, the entity that enjoyed the maximal position of any genus was also the cause of all the things in that genus. Based on this, he asserted that ‘there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God’ (Cahn 2009, p. 61). 3 It is noteworthy that Izutsu translates Ra ḥ m ā n as The Merciful, but we have translated it as The Compassionate and translated the Name that refers to the mercy of God in the more traditional and restricted sense as The Merciful ( Al-Ra ḥ ī m ). This is consistent with more recent works that touch on the difference between the two types of divine mercy, referred to by the divine Names, Al-Ra ḥ m ā n and Al-Ra ḥ ī m . See, for instance, the treatment of the subject by Sachiko Murata (Murata 1992, p. 55). References (Adamson 2013 a) Adamson, Peter. 2013 a. Interpreting Avicenna. In Interpreting Avicenna: Critical Essays . Edited by Peter Adamson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. i–ii. (Adamson 2013 b) Adamson, Peter. 2013 b. From the Necessary Existent to God. In Interpreting Avicenna: Critical Essays . Edited by Peter Adamson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 170–89. (Adamson 2016) Adamson, Peter. 2016. Philosophy in the Islamic World: A History of Philosophy without Any Gaps . Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Adamson and Noble 2022) Adamson, Peter, and Michael-Sebastian Noble. 2022. Intuition in the Avicennan tradition. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 31: 657–74. https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2022.2065662 (Addas 1993) Addas, Claude. 1993. Quest for the Red Sulphur: The Life of Ibn ‘Arab ī . Translated by Peter Kingsley. Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society. (Ahiwānī 1948) Ahiwānī , Aḥmad, ed. 1948. Kit ā b al-Kind ī il ā al-mu‘ta ṣ im bi All ā h . Cairo: Dār Iḥyā ’ al-Kutub al-‘Arabiyya. (Aquinas 1997) Aquinas, Thomas. 1997. Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Volume 1 . Edited by Anton Pegis. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. (Austin 1980) Austin, Ralph. 1980. Ibn al-‘Arab ī : The Bezels of Wisdom . Mahwah: Paulist Press. (Ayāzī 2009) Ayāzī , Muḥammad ‘Alī . 2009. Al-Mufassir ū n: Ḥ ay ā tuhum wa manhajuhum . Tehran: Wizārat al-Thaqāfa wa’l-Irshād al-Islāmī . (Bäck 1992) Bäck, Allen. 1992. Avienna’s Conception of the Modalities. Vivarium 30: 217–55. (Bertolacci 2006) Bertolacci, Amos. 2006. The Reception of Aristotle’s Metaphysics in Avicenna’s Kit ā b al-Shif ā ’: A Milestone of Western Metaphysical Thought . Leiden and Boston: Brill. (Bertolacci 2017–2018) Bertolacci, Amos. 2017–2018. Avicenna’s Kitāb al-Šifā ʾ (Book of the Cure/Healing): The Manuscripts Preserved in Turkey and Their Significance. In The Reception of the Classical Arabic Philosophy in the Ottoman Empire . Edited by Jawdath Jabbour. Beirut: Mélanges de l’Université Saint-Joseph, pp. 265–304. (Black 1997) Black, Deborah. 1997. Avicenna on the Ontological and Epistemic Status of Fictional Beings. Documenti e Studi Sulla Tradizione Filosofica Medievale 8: 425–53. (Cahn 2009) Cahn, Steven. 2009. Exploring Philosophy of Religion: An Introductory Anthology . New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Chittick 1982) Chittick, William. 1982. The Five Divine Presences: From al-Qūnawī to al-Qaysarī . The Muslim World 72: 107–28. (Chittick 1992) Chittick, William. 1992. Faith and Practice of Islam: Three Thirteenth Century Sufi Texts . Albany: State University of New York Press. (Corbin 1997) Corbin, Henry. 1997. Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the S ū fism of Ibn ʿ Arab ī . Princeton: Princeton University Press. (Dagli 2016) Dagli, Caner. 2016. Ibn al-‘Arab ī and Islamic Intellectual Culture: From Mysticism to Philosophy . London and New York: Routledge. (Decartes 2008) Decartes, René. 2008. Meditations on First Philosophy. In Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies . Edited by Michael Moriarty. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (De Cillis 2014) De Cillis, Maria. 2014. Free Will and Predestination in Islamic Thought: Theoretical Compromises in the Works of Avicenna, al-Gh ā z ā l ī and Ibn ‘Arab ī . London and New York: Routledge. (Druart 2012) Druart, Thérèse-Anne. 2012. Avicennan Troubles: The Mysteries of the Heptagonal House and the Phoenix. Topicos 42: 51–74. (Ghurāb 1983) Ghurāb, Maḥmoud. 1983 . Ibn ‘Arab ī : Tarjum ā t ḥ ay ā tih min kal ā mih . Damascus: Dār al-Murtaḍā . (Gutas 1987–1988) Gutas, Dimitri. 1987–1988. Avicenna’s Madhhab with an Appendix on the Question of his Date of Birth. Quaderni di Studi Arabi 5/6: 323-36. (Book of the Cure/Healing): The Manuscripts Preserved in Turkey and Their Significance. In The Reception of the Classical Arabic Philosophy in the Ottoman Empire . Edited by Jawdath Jabbour. Beirut: M é langes de l’Universit é Saint-Joseph, pp. 265–304 Black, Deborah. 1997. Avicenna on the Ontological and Epistemic Status of Fictional Beings Documenti e Studi Sulla Tradizione Filosofica Medievale 8: 425–53 Cahn, Steven. 2009 Exploring Philosophy of Religion: An Introductory Anthology . New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press Chittick, William. 1982. The Five Divine Presences: From al-Q unawi to al-Qaysari The Muslim World 72: 107–28. [ CrossRef ] Chittick, William. 1992 Faith and Practice of Islam: Three Thirteenth Century Sufi Texts . Albany: State University of New York Press Corbin, Henry. 1997 Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the S ufism of Ibn Religions 2023 , 14 , x FOR PEER REVIEW 11 of 12 Data Availability Statement: No new data were created or analyzed in this study. Data sharing is not applicable to this article. Con fl icts of Interest: The authors declare no con fl ict of interest. Notes 1 René Decartes employs a similar ontological proof for God’s existence when he writes, ‘existence can no more be separated from the essence of God than we can separate from the essence of a triangle that the sum of its three angles adds up to two right angles’ (Decartes 2008, p. 66). 2 This proof was employed and refined by Thomas Aquinas in his magnum opus, the Summa Theologiae , as one of the five ways of proving the existence of God through a posteriori argumentation (Aquinas 1997, pp. 18–24). Aquinas attributed not only absolute goodness to the entity at the summit of the hierarchy, but also causation. Therefore, the entity that enjoyed the maximal position of any genus was also the cause of all the things in that genus. Based on this, he asserted that ‘there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God’ (Cahn 2009, p. 61). 3 It is noteworthy that Izutsu translates Ra ḥ m ā n as The Merciful, but we have translated it as The Compassionate and translated the Name that refers to the mercy of God in the more traditional and restricted sense as The Merciful ( Al-Ra ḥ ī m ). This is consistent with more recent works that touch on the difference between the two types of divine mercy, referred to by the divine Names, Al-Ra ḥ m ā n and Al-Ra ḥ ī m . See, for instance, the treatment of the subject by Sachiko Murata (Murata 1992, p. 55). References (Adamson 2013 a) Adamson, Peter. 2013 a. Interpreting Avicenna. In Interpreting Avicenna: Critical Essays . Edited by Peter Adamson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. i–ii. (Adamson 2013 b) Adamson, Peter. 2013 b. From the Necessary Existent to God. In Interpreting Avicenna: Critical Essays . Edited by Peter Adamson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 170–89. (Adamson 2016) Adamson, Peter. 2016. Philosophy in the Islamic World: A History of Philosophy without Any Gaps . Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Adamson and Noble 2022) Adamson, Peter, and Michael-Sebastian Noble. 2022. Intuition in the Avicennan tradition. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 31: 657–74. https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2022.2065662 (Addas 1993) Addas, Claude. 1993. Quest for the Red Sulphur: The Life of Ibn ‘Arab ī . Translated by Peter Kingsley. Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society. (Ahiwānī 1948) Ahiwānī , Aḥmad, ed. 1948. Kit ā b al-Kind ī il ā al-mu‘ta ṣ im bi All ā h . Cairo: Dār Iḥyā ’ al-Kutub al-‘Arabiyya. (Aquinas 1997) Aquinas, Thomas. 1997. Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Volume 1 . Edited by Anton Pegis. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. (Austin 1980) Austin, Ralph. 1980. Ibn al-‘Arab ī : The Bezels of Wisdom . Mahwah: Paulist Press. (Ayāzī 2009) Ayāzī , Muḥammad ‘Alī . 2009. Al-Mufassir ū n: Ḥ ay ā tuhum wa manhajuhum . Tehran: Wizārat al-Thaqāfa wa’l-Irshād al-Islāmī . (Bäck 1992) Bäck, Allen. 1992. Avienna’s Conception of the Modalities. Vivarium 30: 217–55. (Bertolacci 2006) Bertolacci, Amos. 2006. The Reception of Aristotle’s Metaphysics in Avicenna’s Kit ā b al-Shif ā ’: A Milestone of Western Metaphysical Thought . Leiden and Boston: Brill. (Bertolacci 2017–2018) Bertolacci, Amos. 2017–2018. Avicenna’s Kitāb al-Šifā ʾ (Book of the Cure/Healing): The Manuscripts Preserved in Turkey and Their Significance. In The Reception of the Classical Arabic Philosophy in the Ottoman Empire . Edited by Jawdath Jabbour. Beirut: Mélanges de l’Université Saint-Joseph, pp. 265–304. (Black 1997) Black, Deborah. 1997. Avicenna on the Ontological and Epistemic Status of Fictional Beings. Documenti e Studi Sulla Tradizione Filosofica Medievale 8: 425–53. (Cahn 2009) Cahn, Steven. 2009. Exploring Philosophy of Religion: An Introductory Anthology . New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Chittick 1982) Chittick, William. 1982. The Five Divine Presences: From al-Qūnawī to al-Qaysarī . The Muslim World 72: 107–28. (Chittick 1992) Chittick, William. 1992. Faith and Practice of Islam: Three Thirteenth Century Sufi Texts . Albany: State University of New York Press. (Corbin 1997) Corbin, Henry. 1997. Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the S ū fism of Ibn ʿ Arab ī . Princeton: Princeton University Press. (Dagli 2016) Dagli, Caner. 2016. Ibn al-‘Arab ī and Islamic Intellectual Culture: From Mysticism to Philosophy . London and New York: Routledge. (Decartes 2008) Decartes, René. 2008. Meditations on First Philosophy. In Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies . Edited by Michael Moriarty. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (De Cillis 2014) De Cillis, Maria. 2014. Free Will and Predestination in Islamic Thought: Theoretical Compromises in the Works of Avicenna, al-Gh ā z ā l ī and Ibn ‘Arab ī . London and New York: Routledge. (Druart 2012) Druart, Thérèse-Anne. 2012. Avicennan Troubles: The Mysteries of the Heptagonal House and the Phoenix. Topicos 42: 51–74. (Ghurāb 1983) Ghurāb, Maḥmoud. 1983 . Ibn ‘Arab ī : Tarjum ā t ḥ ay ā tih min kal ā mih . Damascus: Dār al-Murtaḍā . (Gutas 1987–1988) Gutas, Dimitri. 1987–1988. Avicenna’s Madhhab with an Appendix on the Question of his Date of Birth. Quaderni di Studi Arabi 5/6: 323-36. Arabi . Princeton: Princeton University Press Dagli, Caner. 2016 Ibn al-‘Arabi and Islamic Intellectual Culture: From Mysticism to Philosophy . London and New York: Routledge Decartes, Ren é . 2008. Meditations on First Philosophy. In Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies Edited by Michael Moriarty. Oxford: Oxford University Press De Cillis, Maria. 2014 Free Will and Predestination in Islamic Thought: Theoretical Compromises in the Works of Avicenna, al-Ghazali and Ibn ‘Arabi . London and New York: Routledge Druart, Th é r è se-Anne. 2012. Avicennan Troubles: The Mysteries of the Heptagonal House and the Phoenix Topicos 42: 51–74 [ CrossRef ] Ghurab, Mahmoud. 1983 Ibn ‘Arabi: Tarjumat hayatih min kalamih . Damascus: Dar al-Murtada Gutas, Dimitri. 1987–1988. Avicenna’s Madhhab with an Appendix on the Question of his Date of Birth Quaderni di Studi Arabi 5/6: 323–36 Gutas, Dimitri. 2014 Orientations of Avicenna’s Philosophy: Essays on His Life, Method, Heritage . London: Routledge.

[Find the meaning and references behind the names: Mohammed, America, Fitzroy, Change, Richard, Plato, Shahid, Catholic, Hassan, Beauty, North, Israel, Asrar, Nous, Anic, Rabia, Tony, Olga, Hikma, Zahra, Abd, John, Shams, Koran, Nashir, Fus, Tanzil, Stephen, Sajjad, Mar, Alexander, Fatiha, Ronald, February, Sharika, Stratford, Grace, Ashi, Jules, Robert, Paul, Najat, Razzaq, Street, Kristin, Terri, Simple, Dandara, Indiana, English, Jal, Ideas, Logic, Tao, Berkeley, Tafsir, Fuk, Ayer, Tahiri, Jon, Ilmi, Sam, Unity, Khalifa, Toby, Washington, James, Early, Jam, Property, Bahr, Tusi, Naw, Springer, Bali]

Religions 2023 , 14 , 1016 12 of 12 H . akim, Su‘ad, ed. 1981 Al-Mu‘jam al-sufi/Al-Hikma fi hudud al-kalimat . Beirut: Dandara Harris, Rabia Terri. 1989. On Majesty and Beauty: The Kit â b Al-Jal â l Wa-l Jam â l of Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society 8: 5–32. Available online: http://www.sufi.ir/books/download/english/ibn-arabi-en/jalalwajamal-enpdf (accessed on 2 February 2023) Hirtenstein, Stephen. 1999 The Unlimited Mercifier: The Spiritual Life and Thought of Ibn ‘Arabi . Oxford: Anqa Publishing Ibn ‘Arabi, Muhyi al-Din. 1983 Al-H . ubb wa’l-mahabba al-ilahiyya . Damascus Ibn ‘Arabi, Muhyi al-Din. 1999 Al-Fut uhat al-makkiyya . Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiyya Ibn ‘Arabi, Muhyi al-Din. 2002 Fusus. al-hikam . Beirut: Dar al-Kitab al-‘Arabi Ibn Sina, Ab u ‘Ali. 1899 Risala fi’l-‘ishq . Leiden: E. J. Brill Ibn Sina, Ab u ‘Ali. 1985 Kitab al-najat min al-gharaq fi bahr al-dalalat . Tehran: Daneshgha Ibn Sina, Ab u ‘Ali. 1993 Al-Isharat wa’l-tanbihat ma‘ sharh. Nasir al-Din al-Tusi . Beirut: Mu’assasat al-Ghaman Ibn Sina, Ab u ‘Ali. 1998 Al-Ilahiyyat min kitab al-shifa’ . Qom: Maktaba ¯ Ayatollah Mar‘ashi Inati, Shams. 2014 Ibn Sina’s Remarks and Admonitions: Physics and Metaphysics . New York: Columbia University Press Izutsu, Toshihiko. 1983 Sufism and Taoism . Berkeley and London: University of California Press Izutsu, Toshihiko. 1998 God and Man and the Koran . North Stratford: Ayer Company Publishers Jami, N ur al-Din ‘Abd al-Rahman, ed. 2009 Sharh. al-Jami ‘ala fusus. al-hikam . Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiyya Jandi, Mu’ayyid al-Din, ed. 2007 Sharh. Mu’ayyid al-Din al-Jandi ‘ala fusus. al-hikam . Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiyya Janssens, Jules. 2018 Ibn Sina and His Influence on the Arabic and Latin World . London: Routledge Knysh, Alexander. 1999 Ibn Religions 2023 , 14 , x FOR PEER REVIEW 11 of 12 Data Availability Statement: No new data were created or analyzed in this study. Data sharing is not applicable to this article. Con fl icts of Interest: The authors declare no con fl ict of interest. Notes 1 René Decartes employs a similar ontological proof for God’s existence when he writes, ‘existence can no more be separated from the essence of God than we can separate from the essence of a triangle that the sum of its three angles adds up to two right angles’ (Decartes 2008, p. 66). 2 This proof was employed and refined by Thomas Aquinas in his magnum opus, the Summa Theologiae , as one of the five ways of proving the existence of God through a posteriori argumentation (Aquinas 1997, pp. 18–24). Aquinas attributed not only absolute goodness to the entity at the summit of the hierarchy, but also causation. Therefore, the entity that enjoyed the maximal position of any genus was also the cause of all the things in that genus. Based on this, he asserted that ‘there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God’ (Cahn 2009, p. 61). 3 It is noteworthy that Izutsu translates Ra ḥ m ā n as The Merciful, but we have translated it as The Compassionate and translated the Name that refers to the mercy of God in the more traditional and restricted sense as The Merciful ( Al-Ra ḥ ī m ). This is consistent with more recent works that touch on the difference between the two types of divine mercy, referred to by the divine Names, Al-Ra ḥ m ā n and Al-Ra ḥ ī m . See, for instance, the treatment of the subject by Sachiko Murata (Murata 1992, p. 55). References (Adamson 2013 a) Adamson, Peter. 2013 a. Interpreting Avicenna. In Interpreting Avicenna: Critical Essays . Edited by Peter Adamson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. i–ii. (Adamson 2013 b) Adamson, Peter. 2013 b. From the Necessary Existent to God. In Interpreting Avicenna: Critical Essays . Edited by Peter Adamson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 170–89. (Adamson 2016) Adamson, Peter. 2016. Philosophy in the Islamic World: A History of Philosophy without Any Gaps . Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Adamson and Noble 2022) Adamson, Peter, and Michael-Sebastian Noble. 2022. Intuition in the Avicennan tradition. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 31: 657–74. https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2022.2065662 (Addas 1993) Addas, Claude. 1993. Quest for the Red Sulphur: The Life of Ibn ‘Arab ī . Translated by Peter Kingsley. Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society. (Ahiwānī 1948) Ahiwānī , Aḥmad, ed. 1948. Kit ā b al-Kind ī il ā al-mu‘ta ṣ im bi All ā h . Cairo: Dār Iḥyā ’ al-Kutub al-‘Arabiyya. (Aquinas 1997) Aquinas, Thomas. 1997. Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Volume 1 . Edited by Anton Pegis. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. (Austin 1980) Austin, Ralph. 1980. Ibn al-‘Arab ī : The Bezels of Wisdom . Mahwah: Paulist Press. (Ayāzī 2009) Ayāzī , Muḥammad ‘Alī . 2009. Al-Mufassir ū n: Ḥ ay ā tuhum wa manhajuhum . Tehran: Wizārat al-Thaqāfa wa’l-Irshād al-Islāmī . (Bäck 1992) Bäck, Allen. 1992. Avienna’s Conception of the Modalities. Vivarium 30: 217–55. (Bertolacci 2006) Bertolacci, Amos. 2006. The Reception of Aristotle’s Metaphysics in Avicenna’s Kit ā b al-Shif ā ’: A Milestone of Western Metaphysical Thought . Leiden and Boston: Brill. (Bertolacci 2017–2018) Bertolacci, Amos. 2017–2018. Avicenna’s Kitāb al-Šifā ʾ (Book of the Cure/Healing): The Manuscripts Preserved in Turkey and Their Significance. In The Reception of the Classical Arabic Philosophy in the Ottoman Empire . Edited by Jawdath Jabbour. Beirut: Mélanges de l’Université Saint-Joseph, pp. 265–304. (Black 1997) Black, Deborah. 1997. Avicenna on the Ontological and Epistemic Status of Fictional Beings. Documenti e Studi Sulla Tradizione Filosofica Medievale 8: 425–53. (Cahn 2009) Cahn, Steven. 2009. Exploring Philosophy of Religion: An Introductory Anthology . New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Chittick 1982) Chittick, William. 1982. The Five Divine Presences: From al-Qūnawī to al-Qaysarī . The Muslim World 72: 107–28. (Chittick 1992) Chittick, William. 1992. Faith and Practice of Islam: Three Thirteenth Century Sufi Texts . Albany: State University of New York Press. (Corbin 1997) Corbin, Henry. 1997. Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the S ū fism of Ibn ʿ Arab ī . Princeton: Princeton University Press. (Dagli 2016) Dagli, Caner. 2016. Ibn al-‘Arab ī and Islamic Intellectual Culture: From Mysticism to Philosophy . London and New York: Routledge. (Decartes 2008) Decartes, René. 2008. Meditations on First Philosophy. In Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies . Edited by Michael Moriarty. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (De Cillis 2014) De Cillis, Maria. 2014. Free Will and Predestination in Islamic Thought: Theoretical Compromises in the Works of Avicenna, al-Gh ā z ā l ī and Ibn ‘Arab ī . London and New York: Routledge. (Druart 2012) Druart, Thérèse-Anne. 2012. Avicennan Troubles: The Mysteries of the Heptagonal House and the Phoenix. Topicos 42: 51–74. (Ghurāb 1983) Ghurāb, Maḥmoud. 1983 . Ibn ‘Arab ī : Tarjum ā t ḥ ay ā tih min kal ā mih . Damascus: D ā r al-Murta ḍ ā . (Gutas 1987–1988) Gutas, Dimitri. 1987–1988. Avicenna’s Madhhab with an Appendix on the Question of his Date of Birth. Quaderni di Studi Arabi 5/6: 323-36. Arabi in the Later Islamic Tradition . Albany: State University of New York Press Lizzini, Olga. 2003 Wuj ud-Mawj ud /Existence-Existent in Avicenna: A Key Ontological Notion of Arabic Philosophy Quaestio 3: 11–38 [ CrossRef ] Mayer, Toby. 2001. Avicenna’s Burhan al-Siddiqin Journal of Islamic Studies 12: 18–39. [ CrossRef ] McGinnis, Jon. 2010 Avicenna . Oxford: Oxford University Press McGinnis, Jon. 2022. Simple is as simple does: Platinga and Ghazali on divine simplicity Religious Studies 58: 97–109. [ CrossRef ] Menn, Stephen. 1992. Aristotle and Plato on God as Nous and as the Good The Review of Metaphysics 45: 543–73 Morris, James. 1987. Ibn ‘Arabi and his Interpreters’, part II-B Journal of the American Oriental Society 107: 101–19. Available online: www.ibnarabisociety.org.uk/articlespdf/hi_interpreters 3.pdf (accessed on 7 February 2023). [ CrossRef ] Morrissey, Fitzroy. 2020. The Origins of the Fus. us.: Early Explanations of Ibn ‘Arabi’s “Vision” of the Prophet The Maghreb Review 45: 763–94. [ CrossRef ] Murata, Sachiko. 1992 The Tao of Islam: A Sourcebook on Gender Relationships in Islamic Thought . Albany: State University of New York Press Nettler, Ronald. 1978. Ibn Religions 2023 , 14 , x FOR PEER REVIEW 11 of 12 Data Availability Statement: No new data were created or analyzed in this study. Data sharing is not applicable to this article. Con fl icts of Interest: The authors declare no con fl ict of interest. Notes 1 René Decartes employs a similar ontological proof for God’s existence when he writes, ‘existence can no more be separated from the essence of God than we can separate from the essence of a triangle that the sum of its three angles adds up to two right angles’ (Decartes 2008, p. 66). 2 This proof was employed and refined by Thomas Aquinas in his magnum opus, the Summa Theologiae , as one of the five ways of proving the existence of God through a posteriori argumentation (Aquinas 1997, pp. 18–24). Aquinas attributed not only absolute goodness to the entity at the summit of the hierarchy, but also causation. Therefore, the entity that enjoyed the maximal position of any genus was also the cause of all the things in that genus. Based on this, he asserted that ‘there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God’ (Cahn 2009, p. 61). 3 It is noteworthy that Izutsu translates Ra ḥ m ā n as The Merciful, but we have translated it as The Compassionate and translated the Name that refers to the mercy of God in the more traditional and restricted sense as The Merciful ( Al-Ra ḥ ī m ). This is consistent with more recent works that touch on the difference between the two types of divine mercy, referred to by the divine Names, Al-Ra ḥ m ā n and Al-Ra ḥ ī m . See, for instance, the treatment of the subject by Sachiko Murata (Murata 1992, p. 55). References (Adamson 2013 a) Adamson, Peter. 2013 a. Interpreting Avicenna. In Interpreting Avicenna: Critical Essays . Edited by Peter Adamson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. i–ii. (Adamson 2013 b) Adamson, Peter. 2013 b. From the Necessary Existent to God. In Interpreting Avicenna: Critical Essays . Edited by Peter Adamson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 170–89. (Adamson 2016) Adamson, Peter. 2016. Philosophy in the Islamic World: A History of Philosophy without Any Gaps . Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Adamson and Noble 2022) Adamson, Peter, and Michael-Sebastian Noble. 2022. Intuition in the Avicennan tradition. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 31: 657–74. https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2022.2065662 (Addas 1993) Addas, Claude. 1993. Quest for the Red Sulphur: The Life of Ibn ‘Arab ī . Translated by Peter Kingsley. Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society. (Ahiwānī 1948) Ahiwānī , Aḥmad, ed. 1948. Kit ā b al-Kind ī il ā al-mu‘ta ṣ im bi All ā h . Cairo: Dār Iḥyā ’ al-Kutub al-‘Arabiyya. (Aquinas 1997) Aquinas, Thomas. 1997. Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Volume 1 . Edited by Anton Pegis. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. (Austin 1980) Austin, Ralph. 1980. Ibn al-‘Arab ī : The Bezels of Wisdom . Mahwah: Paulist Press. (Ayāzī 2009) Ayāzī , Muḥammad ‘Alī . 2009. Al-Mufassir ū n: Ḥ ay ā tuhum wa manhajuhum . Tehran: Wizārat al-Thaqāfa wa’l-Irshād al-Islāmī . (Bäck 1992) Bäck, Allen. 1992. Avienna’s Conception of the Modalities. Vivarium 30: 217–55. (Bertolacci 2006) Bertolacci, Amos. 2006. The Reception of Aristotle’s Metaphysics in Avicenna’s Kit ā b al-Shif ā ’: A Milestone of Western Metaphysical Thought . Leiden and Boston: Brill. (Bertolacci 2017–2018) Bertolacci, Amos. 2017–2018. Avicenna’s Kitāb al-Šifā ʾ (Book of the Cure/Healing): The Manuscripts Preserved in Turkey and Their Significance. In The Reception of the Classical Arabic Philosophy in the Ottoman Empire . Edited by Jawdath Jabbour. Beirut: Mélanges de l’Université Saint-Joseph, pp. 265–304. (Black 1997) Black, Deborah. 1997. Avicenna on the Ontological and Epistemic Status of Fictional Beings. Documenti e Studi Sulla Tradizione Filosofica Medievale 8: 425–53. (Cahn 2009) Cahn, Steven. 2009. Exploring Philosophy of Religion: An Introductory Anthology . New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Chittick 1982) Chittick, William. 1982. The Five Divine Presences: From al-Q ū naw ī to al-Qaysarī . The Muslim World 72: 107–28. (Chittick 1992) Chittick, William. 1992. Faith and Practice of Islam: Three Thirteenth Century Sufi Texts . Albany: State University of New York Press. (Corbin 1997) Corbin, Henry. 1997. Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the S ū fism of Ibn ʿ Arab ī . Princeton: Princeton University Press. (Dagli 2016) Dagli, Caner. 2016. Ibn al-‘Arab ī and Islamic Intellectual Culture: From Mysticism to Philosophy . London and New York: Routledge. (Decartes 2008) Decartes, René. 2008. Meditations on First Philosophy. In Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies . Edited by Michael Moriarty. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (De Cillis 2014) De Cillis, Maria. 2014. Free Will and Predestination in Islamic Thought: Theoretical Compromises in the Works of Avicenna, al-Gh ā z ā l ī and Ibn ‘Arab ī . London and New York: Routledge. (Druart 2012) Druart, Thérèse-Anne. 2012. Avicennan Troubles: The Mysteries of the Heptagonal House and the Phoenix. Topicos 42: 51–74. (Ghurāb 1983) Ghurāb, Maḥmoud. 1983 . Ibn ‘Arab ī : Tarjum ā t ḥ ay ā tih min kal ā mih . Damascus: Dār al-Murtaḍā . (Gutas 1987–1988) Gutas, Dimitri. 1987–1988. Avicenna’s Madhhab with an Appendix on the Question of his Date of Birth. Quaderni di Studi Arabi 5/6: 323-36. Arabi’s Conception of Allah’s Mercy Israel Oriental Studies 7: 219–29 Nettler, Ronald. 2003 Sufi Metaphysics and Qur’anic Prophets . Cambridge: The Islamic Texts Society Qashani, ‘Abd al-Razzaq. 1892 Sharh. ‘Abd al-Razzaq al-Qashani ‘ala Fusus. al-hikam . Edited by Bali Khalifa al-S. ufiyawi. Cairo: Al-Matba Religions 2023 , 14 , x FOR PEER REVIEW 11 of 12 Data Availability Statement: No new data were created or analyzed in this study. Data sharing is not applicable to this article. Con fl icts of Interest: The authors declare no con fl ict of interest. Notes 1 René Decartes employs a similar ontological proof for God’s existence when he writes, ‘existence can no more be separated from the essence of God than we can separate from the essence of a triangle that the sum of its three angles adds up to two right angles’ (Decartes 2008, p. 66). 2 This proof was employed and refined by Thomas Aquinas in his magnum opus, the Summa Theologiae , as one of the five ways of proving the existence of God through a posteriori argumentation (Aquinas 1997, pp. 18–24). Aquinas attributed not only absolute goodness to the entity at the summit of the hierarchy, but also causation. Therefore, the entity that enjoyed the maximal position of any genus was also the cause of all the things in that genus. Based on this, he asserted that ‘there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God’ (Cahn 2009, p. 61). 3 It is noteworthy that Izutsu translates Ra ḥ m ā n as The Merciful, but we have translated it as The Compassionate and translated the Name that refers to the mercy of God in the more traditional and restricted sense as The Merciful ( Al-Ra ḥ ī m ). This is consistent with more recent works that touch on the difference between the two types of divine mercy, referred to by the divine Names, Al-Ra ḥ m ā n and Al-Ra ḥ ī m . See, for instance, the treatment of the subject by Sachiko Murata (Murata 1992, p. 55). References (Adamson 2013 a) Adamson, Peter. 2013 a. Interpreting Avicenna. In Interpreting Avicenna: Critical Essays . Edited by Peter Adamson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. i–ii. (Adamson 2013 b) Adamson, Peter. 2013 b. From the Necessary Existent to God. In Interpreting Avicenna: Critical Essays . Edited by Peter Adamson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 170–89. (Adamson 2016) Adamson, Peter. 2016. Philosophy in the Islamic World: A History of Philosophy without Any Gaps . Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Adamson and Noble 2022) Adamson, Peter, and Michael-Sebastian Noble. 2022. Intuition in the Avicennan tradition. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 31: 657–74. https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2022.2065662 (Addas 1993) Addas, Claude. 1993. Quest for the Red Sulphur: The Life of Ibn ‘Arab ī . Translated by Peter Kingsley. Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society. (Ahiwānī 1948) Ahiwānī , Aḥmad, ed. 1948. Kit ā b al-Kind ī il ā al-mu‘ta ṣ im bi All ā h . Cairo: Dār Iḥyā ’ al-Kutub al-‘Arabiyya. (Aquinas 1997) Aquinas, Thomas. 1997. Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Volume 1 . Edited by Anton Pegis. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. (Austin 1980) Austin, Ralph. 1980. Ibn al-‘Arab ī : The Bezels of Wisdom . Mahwah: Paulist Press. (Ayāzī 2009) Ayāzī , Muḥammad ‘Alī . 2009. Al-Mufassir ū n: Ḥ ay ā tuhum wa manhajuhum . Tehran: Wizārat al-Thaqāfa wa’l-Irshād al-Islāmī . (Bäck 1992) Bäck, Allen. 1992. Avienna’s Conception of the Modalities. Vivarium 30: 217–55. (Bertolacci 2006) Bertolacci, Amos. 2006. The Reception of Aristotle’s Metaphysics in Avicenna’s Kit ā b al-Shif ā ’: A Milestone of Western Metaphysical Thought . Leiden and Boston: Brill. (Bertolacci 2017–2018) Bertolacci, Amos. 2017–2018. Avicenna’s Kitāb al-Šifā ʾ (Book of the Cure/Healing): The Manuscripts Preserved in Turkey and Their Significance. In The Reception of the Classical Arabic Philosophy in the Ottoman Empire . Edited by Jawdath Jabbour. Beirut: Mélanges de l’Université Saint-Joseph, pp. 265–304. (Black 1997) Black, Deborah. 1997. Avicenna on the Ontological and Epistemic Status of Fictional Beings. Documenti e Studi Sulla Tradizione Filosofica Medievale 8: 425–53. (Cahn 2009) Cahn, Steven. 2009. Exploring Philosophy of Religion: An Introductory Anthology . New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Chittick 1982) Chittick, William. 1982. The Five Divine Presences: From al-Qūnawī to al-Qaysarī . The Muslim World 72: 107–28. (Chittick 1992) Chittick, William. 1992. Faith and Practice of Islam: Three Thirteenth Century Sufi Texts . Albany: State University of New York Press. (Corbin 1997) Corbin, Henry. 1997. Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the S ū fism of Ibn ʿ Arab ī . Princeton: Princeton University Press. (Dagli 2016) Dagli, Caner. 2016. Ibn al-‘Arab ī and Islamic Intellectual Culture: From Mysticism to Philosophy . London and New York: Routledge. (Decartes 2008) Decartes, René. 2008. Meditations on First Philosophy. In Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies . Edited by Michael Moriarty. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (De Cillis 2014) De Cillis, Maria. 2014. Free Will and Predestination in Islamic Thought: Theoretical Compromises in the Works of Avicenna, al-Gh ā z ā l ī and Ibn ‘Arab ī . London and New York: Routledge. (Druart 2012) Druart, Thérèse-Anne. 2012. Avicennan Troubles: The Mysteries of the Heptagonal House and the Phoenix. Topicos 42: 51–74. (Ghurāb 1983) Ghurāb, Maḥmoud. 1983 . Ibn ‘Arab ī : Tarjum ā t ḥ ay ā tih min kal ā mih . Damascus: Dār al-Murtaḍā . (Gutas 1987–1988) Gutas, Dimitri. 1987–1988. Avicenna’s Madhhab with an Appendix on the Question of his Date of Birth. Quaderni di Studi Arabi 5/6: 323-36. a al-Z.ahira Qaysari, Daw ud, ed. 1955 Sharh. Fusus. al-hikam . Tehran: Sharika Intisharat ‘Ilmi wa Farhangi Q unawi, sadr al-Din, ed. 2013 Al-Fuk uk fi asrar Mustanadat H . ikam al-Fus. us . Beirut: Kitab Nashir un Rizvi, Sajjad. 2006. The Existential Breath of al-rahman and the Munificent Grace of al-rahim: The Tafsir S urat al-Fatiha of Jami and the School of Ibn Religions 2023 , 14 , x FOR PEER REVIEW 11 of 12 Data Availability Statement: No new data were created or analyzed in this study. Data sharing is not applicable to this article. Con fl icts of Interest: The authors declare no con fl ict of interest. Notes 1 René Decartes employs a similar ontological proof for God’s existence when he writes, ‘existence can no more be separated from the essence of God than we can separate from the essence of a triangle that the sum of its three angles adds up to two right angles’ (Decartes 2008, p. 66). 2 This proof was employed and refined by Thomas Aquinas in his magnum opus, the Summa Theologiae , as one of the five ways of proving the existence of God through a posteriori argumentation (Aquinas 1997, pp. 18–24). Aquinas attributed not only absolute goodness to the entity at the summit of the hierarchy, but also causation. Therefore, the entity that enjoyed the maximal position of any genus was also the cause of all the things in that genus. Based on this, he asserted that ‘there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God’ (Cahn 2009, p. 61). 3 It is noteworthy that Izutsu translates Ra ḥ m ā n as The Merciful, but we have translated it as The Compassionate and translated the Name that refers to the mercy of God in the more traditional and restricted sense as The Merciful ( Al-Ra ḥ ī m ). This is consistent with more recent works that touch on the difference between the two types of divine mercy, referred to by the divine Names, Al-Ra ḥ m ā n and Al-Ra ḥ ī m . See, for instance, the treatment of the subject by Sachiko Murata (Murata 1992, p. 55). References (Adamson 2013 a) Adamson, Peter. 2013 a. Interpreting Avicenna. In Interpreting Avicenna: Critical Essays . Edited by Peter Adamson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. i–ii. (Adamson 2013 b) Adamson, Peter. 2013 b. From the Necessary Existent to God. In Interpreting Avicenna: Critical Essays . Edited by Peter Adamson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 170–89. (Adamson 2016) Adamson, Peter. 2016. Philosophy in the Islamic World: A History of Philosophy without Any Gaps . Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Adamson and Noble 2022) Adamson, Peter, and Michael-Sebastian Noble. 2022. Intuition in the Avicennan tradition. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 31: 657–74. https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2022.2065662 (Addas 1993) Addas, Claude. 1993. Quest for the Red Sulphur: The Life of Ibn ‘Arab ī . Translated by Peter Kingsley. Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society. (Ahiwānī 1948) Ahiwānī , Aḥmad, ed. 1948. Kit ā b al-Kind ī il ā al-mu‘ta ṣ im bi All ā h . Cairo: Dār Iḥyā ’ al-Kutub al-‘Arabiyya. (Aquinas 1997) Aquinas, Thomas. 1997. Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Volume 1 . Edited by Anton Pegis. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. (Austin 1980) Austin, Ralph. 1980. Ibn al-‘Arab ī : The Bezels of Wisdom . Mahwah: Paulist Press. (Ayāzī 2009) Ayāzī , Muḥammad ‘Alī . 2009. Al-Mufassir ū n: Ḥ ay ā tuhum wa manhajuhum . Tehran: Wizārat al-Thaqāfa wa’l-Irshād al-Islāmī . (Bäck 1992) Bäck, Allen. 1992. Avienna’s Conception of the Modalities. Vivarium 30: 217–55. (Bertolacci 2006) Bertolacci, Amos. 2006. The Reception of Aristotle’s Metaphysics in Avicenna’s Kit ā b al-Shif ā ’: A Milestone of Western Metaphysical Thought . Leiden and Boston: Brill. (Bertolacci 2017–2018) Bertolacci, Amos. 2017–2018. Avicenna’s Kitāb al-Šifā ʾ (Book of the Cure/Healing): The Manuscripts Preserved in Turkey and Their Significance. In The Reception of the Classical Arabic Philosophy in the Ottoman Empire . Edited by Jawdath Jabbour. Beirut: Mélanges de l’Université Saint-Joseph, pp. 265–304. (Black 1997) Black, Deborah. 1997. Avicenna on the Ontological and Epistemic Status of Fictional Beings. Documenti e Studi Sulla Tradizione Filosofica Medievale 8: 425–53. (Cahn 2009) Cahn, Steven. 2009. Exploring Philosophy of Religion: An Introductory Anthology . New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Chittick 1982) Chittick, William. 1982. The Five Divine Presences: From al-Qūnawī to al-Qaysarī . The Muslim World 72: 107–28. (Chittick 1992) Chittick, William. 1992. Faith and Practice of Islam: Three Thirteenth Century Sufi Texts . Albany: State University of New York Press. (Corbin 1997) Corbin, Henry. 1997. Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the S ū fism of Ibn ʿ Arab ī . Princeton: Princeton University Press. (Dagli 2016) Dagli, Caner. 2016. Ibn al-‘Arab ī and Islamic Intellectual Culture: From Mysticism to Philosophy . London and New York: Routledge. (Decartes 2008) Decartes, René. 2008. Meditations on First Philosophy. In Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies . Edited by Michael Moriarty. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (De Cillis 2014) De Cillis, Maria. 2014. Free Will and Predestination in Islamic Thought: Theoretical Compromises in the Works of Avicenna, al-Gh ā z ā l ī and Ibn ‘Arab ī . London and New York: Routledge. (Druart 2012) Druart, Thérèse-Anne. 2012. Avicennan Troubles: The Mysteries of the Heptagonal House and the Phoenix. Topicos 42: 51–74. (Ghurāb 1983) Ghurāb, Maḥmoud. 1983 . Ibn ‘Arab ī : Tarjum ā t ḥ ay ā tih min kal ā mih . Damascus: Dār al-Murtaḍā . (Gutas 1987–1988) Gutas, Dimitri. 1987–1988. Avicenna’s Madhhab with an Appendix on the Question of his Date of Birth. Quaderni di Studi Arabi 5/6: 323-36. Arabi Journal of Qur’anic Studies 8: 58–87. [ CrossRef ] Rustom, Mohammed. 2005. Daw ud al-Qaysari: Notes on His Life, Influence and Reflections on the Muhammadan Reality Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society 38: 51–64 Sands, Kristin Zahra. 2006 Sufi Commentaries of the Qur’an in Classical Islam . Abingdon: Routledge Sells, Michael. 1988. ‘Ibn Religions 2023 , 14 , x FOR PEER REVIEW 11 of 12 Data Availability Statement: No new data were created or analyzed in this study. Data sharing is not applicable to this article. Con fl icts of Interest: The authors declare no con fl ict of interest. Notes 1 René Decartes employs a similar ontological proof for God’s existence when he writes, ‘existence can no more be separated from the essence of God than we can separate from the essence of a triangle that the sum of its three angles adds up to two right angles’ (Decartes 2008, p. 66). 2 This proof was employed and refined by Thomas Aquinas in his magnum opus, the Summa Theologiae , as one of the five ways of proving the existence of God through a posteriori argumentation (Aquinas 1997, pp. 18–24). Aquinas attributed not only absolute goodness to the entity at the summit of the hierarchy, but also causation. Therefore, the entity that enjoyed the maximal position of any genus was also the cause of all the things in that genus. Based on this, he asserted that ‘there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God’ (Cahn 2009, p. 61). 3 It is noteworthy that Izutsu translates Ra ḥ m ā n as The Merciful, but we have translated it as The Compassionate and translated the Name that refers to the mercy of God in the more traditional and restricted sense as The Merciful ( Al-Ra ḥ ī m ). This is consistent with more recent works that touch on the difference between the two types of divine mercy, referred to by the divine Names, Al-Ra ḥ m ā n and Al-Ra ḥ ī m . See, for instance, the treatment of the subject by Sachiko Murata (Murata 1992, p. 55). References (Adamson 2013 a) Adamson, Peter. 2013 a. Interpreting Avicenna. In Interpreting Avicenna: Critical Essays . Edited by Peter Adamson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. i–ii. (Adamson 2013 b) Adamson, Peter. 2013 b. From the Necessary Existent to God. In Interpreting Avicenna: Critical Essays . Edited by Peter Adamson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 170–89. (Adamson 2016) Adamson, Peter. 2016. Philosophy in the Islamic World: A History of Philosophy without Any Gaps . Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Adamson and Noble 2022) Adamson, Peter, and Michael-Sebastian Noble. 2022. Intuition in the Avicennan tradition. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 31: 657–74. https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2022.2065662 (Addas 1993) Addas, Claude. 1993. Quest for the Red Sulphur: The Life of Ibn ‘Arab ī . Translated by Peter Kingsley. Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society. (Ahiwānī 1948) Ahiwānī , Aḥmad, ed. 1948. Kit ā b al-Kind ī il ā al-mu‘ta ṣ im bi All ā h . Cairo: Dār Iḥyā ’ al-Kutub al-‘Arabiyya. (Aquinas 1997) Aquinas, Thomas. 1997. Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Volume 1 . Edited by Anton Pegis. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. (Austin 1980) Austin, Ralph. 1980. Ibn al-‘Arab ī : The Bezels of Wisdom . Mahwah: Paulist Press. (Ayāzī 2009) Ayāzī , Muḥammad ‘Alī . 2009. Al-Mufassir ū n: Ḥ ay ā tuhum wa manhajuhum . Tehran: Wizārat al-Thaqāfa wa’l-Irshād al-Islāmī . (Bäck 1992) Bäck, Allen. 1992. Avienna’s Conception of the Modalities. Vivarium 30: 217–55. (Bertolacci 2006) Bertolacci, Amos. 2006. The Reception of Aristotle’s Metaphysics in Avicenna’s Kit ā b al-Shif ā ’: A Milestone of Western Metaphysical Thought . Leiden and Boston: Brill. (Bertolacci 2017–2018) Bertolacci, Amos. 2017–2018. Avicenna’s Kitāb al-Šifā ʾ (Book of the Cure/Healing): The Manuscripts Preserved in Turkey and Their Significance. In The Reception of the Classical Arabic Philosophy in the Ottoman Empire . Edited by Jawdath Jabbour. Beirut: Mélanges de l’Université Saint-Joseph, pp. 265–304. (Black 1997) Black, Deborah. 1997. Avicenna on the Ontological and Epistemic Status of Fictional Beings. Documenti e Studi Sulla Tradizione Filosofica Medievale 8: 425–53. (Cahn 2009) Cahn, Steven. 2009. Exploring Philosophy of Religion: An Introductory Anthology . New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Chittick 1982) Chittick, William. 1982. The Five Divine Presences: From al-Qūnawī to al-Qaysarī . The Muslim World 72: 107–28. (Chittick 1992) Chittick, William. 1992. Faith and Practice of Islam: Three Thirteenth Century Sufi Texts . Albany: State University of New York Press. (Corbin 1997) Corbin, Henry. 1997. Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the S ū fism of Ibn ʿ Arab ī . Princeton: Princeton University Press. (Dagli 2016) Dagli, Caner. 2016. Ibn al-‘Arab ī and Islamic Intellectual Culture: From Mysticism to Philosophy . London and New York: Routledge. (Decartes 2008) Decartes, René. 2008. Meditations on First Philosophy. In Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies . Edited by Michael Moriarty. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (De Cillis 2014) De Cillis, Maria. 2014. Free Will and Predestination in Islamic Thought: Theoretical Compromises in the Works of Avicenna, al-Gh ā z ā l ī and Ibn ‘Arab ī . London and New York: Routledge. (Druart 2012) Druart, Thérèse-Anne. 2012. Avicennan Troubles: The Mysteries of the Heptagonal House and the Phoenix. Topicos 42: 51–74. (Ghurāb 1983) Ghurāb, Maḥmoud. 1983 . Ibn ‘Arab ī : Tarjum ā t ḥ ay ā tih min kal ā mih . Damascus: Dār al-Murtaḍā . (Gutas 1987–1988) Gutas, Dimitri. 1987–1988. Avicenna’s Madhhab with an Appendix on the Question of his Date of Birth. Quaderni di Studi Arabi 5/6: 323-36. Arabi’s Polished Mirror: Perspective Shift and Meaning Event’ Studia Islamica 67: 121–49. [ CrossRef ] Stade, Robert. 1970 Ninety-Nine Names of God in Islam . Ibadan: Daystar Press Stern, Gustav. 1931 Meaning and Change of Meaning: With Special Reference to the English Language . Bloomington: Indiana University Press Thom, Paul. 2008. Logic and metaphysics in Avicenna’s modal syllogistic. In The Unity of Science in the Arabic Tradition: Science, Logic, Epistemology and their Interactions . Edited by Shahid Rahman, Tony Street and Hassan Tahiri. New York: Springer, pp. 361–76 Todd, Richard. 2014 The Sufi Doctrine of Man: Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi’s Metaphysical Anthropology . Leiden: Brill Wippel, John. 2000 The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Uncreated Being . Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press Zamakhshari, Abu’l-Qasim, ed. 1987 Al-Kashshaf ‘an haqa’iq Ghawamid. al-Tanzil . Beirut: Dar al-Kitab al-‘Arabi Disclaimer/Publisher’s Note: The statements, opinions and data contained in all publications are solely those of the individual author(s) and contributor(s) and not of MDPI and/or the editor(s). MDPI and/or the editor(s) disclaim responsibility for any injury to people or property resulting from any ideas, methods, instructions or products referred to in the content.