The Metaphysical Free Will of Sufi: Fate (qaḍāʾ) and Destiny (qadar) in Ibn Arabi

ENWith the rise of Sufi thought in the modern world, the paraphrased ideas of Andalusian mystic Ibn Arabi (1165–1240) often emerge as romanticized fundamental truths of life. The fictional sayings like “The destiny of a person is determined by their efforts” implicate the existence of free will in changing one’s destiny, which was quite under question (as God is Omniscient) in the tradition of Classical Islamic thought while arguing on the issue of divine predestination (qaḍāʾ wa l-qadar). Relying on Ibn Arabi’s works Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya (“Meccan Revelations”, 1203–1240), Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam (“The Bezels of Wisdom”, 1229) and his basic concepts: the Unity of Existence, the immutable entities, the Perfect Man, the creative and obligating/prescriptive commands that construct the understanding of Ibn Arabi’s qaḍāʾ and qadar, I will try to show that though invented and not found in any actual writings of Shaykh al-Akbar, such sayings partly correspond to the view of fate, destiny and free will proposed by the thinker and presumably could be compared to that of compatibilists, but in an exclusively metaphysical way. Keywords: Sufism, Ibn Arabi, Sufi metaphysics, Free Will, Fate and Destiny, the Perfect Man, Secret of Destiny. [From the publication]