Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi was fifteen or sixteen years old when his father took him to visit Ibn Rushd. Ibn Rushd was then in his fifties, at the height of his career as a jurist and philosopher in Cordoba. He had heard from Ibn Arabi's father that the boy was showing unusual spiritual states, that he had entered khalwa (spiritual retreat), and that he had emerged from it having received direct knowledge. Ibn Rushd wanted to test what this meant.
Ibn Arabi describes the meeting himself in Al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya. It is one of the most quoted passages in his work.
He was brought into Ibn Rushd's house. Ibn Rushd rose to greet him. He walked forward and embraced the boy. Then he asked one question. He said: what?
Ibn Arabi understood the question. Ibn Rushd was asking: what have you seen? What have you learned in this direct way that I have only learned by reason?
Ibn Arabi answered: yes.
Ibn Rushd was pleased. He understood the yes as a confirmation. But then Ibn Arabi said: no.
Ibn Rushd was confused. The yes and the no together were a puzzle.
Ibn Arabi said: yes and no. Between the yes and the no, souls fly from their bodies, and heads come off their necks.
Ibn Rushd turned pale. He saw what the boy was saying. He was saying: the answer to your question is not one word. It is a whole state that includes both affirmation and negation. To describe it is to lose it. The moment reason tries to grasp it, the head comes off the neck. The moment the soul tries to speak it, the soul leaves the body.
Ibn Rushd sat down. He said to Ibn Arabi's father, later: this boy has confirmed for me by direct experience what I have been trying to prove all my life by reason.
Ibn Arabi wrote in the Futuhat: I said the words to him. His color changed. He sat back. He knew what I meant. And I saw in him then that this method he had chosen, of reasoning by philosophy, had brought him to the same door I had entered by another road. But he was standing on one side of the door, and I was already on the other.
They never met again. Ibn Rushd continued his commentaries on Aristotle. He died in Marrakesh in 1198 CE, when Ibn Arabi was thirty-three. Ibn Arabi was there. He describes attending the funeral procession as the body of Ibn Rushd was brought back to Cordoba by camel. The books Ibn Rushd had written filled one side of the load. His body filled the other side. Ibn Arabi looked at the balance and asked himself: is the imam heavier than his books, or are the books heavier than the imam?
He wrote: I said to myself, on one side is the body, on the other side is the work, and the two are equal in their weight, and the two are less than a mustard seed against the truth they served.
Ibn Arabi went on to write al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya, five hundred and fifty chapters begun at the Kaaba in 1202 CE and continued until his death in Damascus in 1240 CE. He also wrote the Fusus al-Hikam, twenty-seven chapters on the divine wisdom transmitted through twenty-seven prophets, from Adam to Muhammad ﷺ. The Fusus, he said, had been placed in his hand by the Prophet ﷺ himself in a vision in Damascus in 1229 CE. The Prophet ﷺ said to him: take this book and bring it out for people to benefit from it.
Inside the Futuhat, he wrote in extraordinary detail on ilm al-huruf, the science of the letters. He treated the twenty-eight Arabic letters as the ontological principles by which reality is composed. Every letter carries a station. Every station is a face of the divine. Every human being carries a signature in the letters of his or her name that says which face they have been given to reflect. The name is not a label. The name is a structure of divine principles that begins to shape the bearer from the moment it is given.
This is the tradition from which AsrNaam works. Every name page on the site is a reading through this tradition. Ibn Arabi is the source, and he is buried in Damascus, on the western slope of Mount Qasyun, above the city that once welcomed him from Andalus.
What the story teaches. Two ages of Islamic thought met that day in Cordoba, in the person of Ibn Rushd and the person of Ibn Arabi. Ibn Rushd represented the outgoing age of Islamic philosophy, the tradition that had begun with al-Kindi four centuries earlier and had produced the great commentaries on Aristotle. Ibn Arabi represented the incoming age of Islamic metaphysics, in which direct spiritual experience became the ground of knowledge and philosophy was no longer the primary method. The two ages exchanged a bow across the room. Ibn Rushd, the older man, acknowledged that the young man had reached, by his own path, the same conclusions Ibn Rushd had reached by his. And the young man acknowledged that the older man's work had made his own path possible. This is what a serious tradition looks like when it changes: not with hostility, but with recognition, and then with a hand-off.