Abstract
This article seeks to compare two of the most significant mystical corpora of Judaism and Islam, Zoharic literature and the oeuvre of Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn al-ʿArabī (1165–1240) respectively. Following a few pioneering studies on relations between Jewish and Islamic mysticism in the medieval Iberian Peninsula from recent years, this article intends to contribute further to the understanding of such relations. It compares one motif or concept shared by both corpora, that of the spiritual garment, according to which the different realms of creation are divine “garments” that cover the Godhead or veil the primordial divine light. It suggests that the similarities between Zoharic literature and Ibn al-ʿArabī’s writings can be explained by their shared roots, which can be traced to the tradition of Arabic Neoplatonism. Some possible Neoplatonic sources for the similarity between the two corpora are also discussed.
1 Introduction
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Judaism and Islam in the Iberian Peninsula witnessed a blossoming of mystical writing.1 Shortly after its appearance in southern France at the end of the twelfth century, Kabbalah moved southward to northern Spain, the Christian part of the Iberian Peninsula, where most of the Jewish population of the Iberian Peninsula of that time was centered. Centers of Kabbalah were established in Catalonia, of which the most notable were in Girona and Barcelona. After that, additional centers were established in Castile, where medieval Kabbalistic writing reached its peak with the gradual composition of the Zohar, a vast corpus of Kabbalistic literature written mainly in Aramaic and partly in Hebrew. In Spain the main streams of Kabbalah developed, chief among which were the theosophic-theurgic stream and the ecstatic-prophetic stream.2
This was also a flourishing period for mystical writing among the Muslims of the southern Iberian Peninsula. The most prominent of these authors were Ibn Barrajān (d. 1141), Ibn Qasī (d. 1151), and Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 1240), among others. A trailblazer in this field was Ibn Masarra (d. 931), with whom the Andalusī tradition of Islamic mysticism begins.3 The mysticism reflected in the works of these authors is different than that which appears in most writings of classical Sufism of the eastern part of the Islamic world (al-mashriq), written until the appearance of Ibn al-ʿArabī. As a broad generalization, we might say that classical Sufism focused on the psychological, ethical, and spiritual realms of the individual. Andalusī mysticism, on the other hand, focused, similarly to Kabbalah, mainly on theosophical issues, that is, on the nature of the divine and its relationship with creation. Andalusī mysticism derived, more so than classical eastern Sufism, from Neoplatonic philosophy.4 A major channel mediating this philosophy was the famous Epistles of the Brethren of Purity (Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ) – a corpus of epistles attributed to a group of anonymous scholars, probably of the tenth century – and related writings.5
Early research dealing with the beginnings of Kabbalah, with a few exceptions, has ignored the possibility of historical connections between these two phenomena, namely the Kabbalah in the northern part of the Iberian Peninsula and the Andalusī Islamic mysticism of authors, such as Ibn al-ʿArabī, in the south. Rather, researchers have tended to look for connections between medieval Kabbalah and its immediate Christian surroundings. This has been changing during the last few decades, as pioneering studies on the links between Kabbalah and Islamic mysticism are being published.6 These studies have shown that alongside research on the connections between Kabbalah and Christianity, it is important to investigate the relations between Kabbalah and Andalusī Islamic mysticism. My assumption is that Kabbalistic writings, such as the Zoharic corpus, and the works of Ibn al-ʿArabī share a common prehistory, most centrally, the common background of Arabic Neoplatonic thought. This shared heritage is presumably mainly due to a long period of development of Neoplatonic thought among the Muslims and Jews of al-Andalus, philosophers and mystics alike. Among the Muslims, one should note figures such as Ibn Masarra, Ibn al-Sīd al-Baṭalyawsī (d. 1127), and Ibn al-ʿArabī. Among the Jews, important writers who wrote in Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew and were influenced to varying degrees by Arabic Neoplatonism are Solomon Ibn Gabirol (d. circa 1058), Judah Halevi (d. 1141), Abraham bar Ḥiyya (d. circa 1136), Abraham Ibn Ezra (d. 1164), as well as the anonymous author of the treatise Maʿāni al-Nafs (twelfth century). It is widely agreed that these writings were greatly influenced by the Arabic Neoplatonic heritage, primarily via the above-mentioned Epistles of the Brethren of Purity and related writings, which also left their mark on Islamic mysticism in al-Andalus.7
Given this historical context, this article is devoted to an examination of the relationship between the oeuvre of Ibn al-ʿArabī and Zoharic literature, through an analysis of a motif shared by both, that of the spiritual garment. As for Ibn al-ʿArabī, I will examine several works from his vast corpus of writings, focusing especially on his magnum opus, the Meccan Revelations (al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya), which contains most of his major teachings and which incorporates several of his earlier writings.8 As for the Zoharic corpus, its authorship remains a rather unsolved riddle within Kabbalah research. Likewise, the exact literary and structural boundaries of different parts of that corpus are highly debated. For the purpose of this article, I will examine the main strata of the Zohar, i.e., elements that are thought to have been written in the last few decades of the thirteenth century (the most important of which is known as the Body of the Zohar or Zohar on the Torah). Later parts of Zoharic literature, which are dated to the beginning of the fourteenth century, such as Tiqqunei ha-Zohar (Rectifications of the Zohar) and Raʿaya Mehemna (The Faithful Shepherd), will not be discussed.9
The motif or theme of the spiritual garment encompasses a wide range of depictions of different layers and realms of existence as “garments” in various contexts, such as God’s self-disclosure by means of creation, the coming into being of the world and its ontological structure, the manifestation of angels in the material realm, and the eschatology of the soul. In this article, I will focus, for reasons of brevity, on the first area mentioned above, that of cosmogony and cosmology.10 I intend to highlight the similarity between the motif in both corpora and suggest possible historical explanations for the resemblance. The spiritual garment motif in medieval Kabbalistic writings has been discussed by Kabbalah researchers, but little attention has been given to its resemblance to similar themes in Islamic Andalusī mysticism, especially in the works of Ibn al-ʿArabī.11 Scholars have focused mainly on the appearance of the garment-motif within the realm of Kabbalah and raised a few suggestions for its possible origin outside Kabbalah or Judaism in general.12 The theme of the spiritual garment in medieval Kabbalah, and especially in the Zohar, was described in detail in a few works as a cosmic principle encompassing fields such as cosmogony, cosmology and ontology, prophetic revelation, hermeneutics, human psychology and eschatology of the soul, angelology, and more.13 As I intend to show in this article, a few elements of this Kabbalistic motif were shared by Ibn al-ʿArabī. Its appearance in his writings has not been dealt with in modern scholarship, and this paper aims to shed some light on its usage by and meaning for Ibn al-ʿArabī.14
2 Divine Creation between Concealment and Manifestation
Themes related to cosmogony, the creation of the worlds or their emanation, are discussed in detail in the writings of Ibn al-ʿArabī and in Zoharic literature. These discussions are rich and multifaceted and in what follows I will focus on one central aspect of them, namely, the description of creation and emanation in terms of garments or screens being cast, thereby enabling created beings to come into existence. The basic imagery behind this idea is that of light: the Godhead is depicted as a source of eternal light so bright that it must be dimmed and covered for anything other than it to exist. The garments that cover the light thus enable the existence of all other beings apart from God. These garments are themselves depicted as luminous to varying degrees, and thereby serve a dual and somewhat contradictory function. They facilitate, on the one hand, God’s self-manifestation in and through the act of creation, and, on the other hand, allow His concealment so as to make it possible for the created beings to appear.
This imagery might have found its origins already in the classical Neoplatonic tradition. In the Enneads, Plotinus (d. 270) depicts the emanated beings descending from the One, or the absolute Good, as covered in garments. Reaching the absolute Good involves taking off the garments of emanation.15 This idea was passed on to Arabic Neoplatonic writings through translations from the Greek or Syriac, such as the well-known work Theology of Aristotle – a ninth-century Arabic translation and adaptation of parts of Plotinus’s Enneads, which was erroneously attributed to Aristotle – and related works. In one such work, it is stated: “the absolute Good (al-khayr al-maḥḍ) is the first that emanates goodness on things (al-ashyāʾ) and clothes them with goodness, as the sun clothes the bodies with light with which they shine.”16 The emanating essence is depicted here not only as pure goodness but as sunlight, the ultimate source of light in the universe, and the garments themselves are perhaps seen as sharing in the primordial, divine light. As mentioned above, both the Zohar and Ibn al-ʿArabī seem to have adopted this imagery, and likewise to have advocated some of the ontological and cosmogonical beliefs related to it. They both uphold the idea of the emanation of various hierarchical realms out of the essential oneness of the Godhead, and they both make a clear distinction between the hidden divine essence and emanated, created beings. They differ, however, in the specifics of the depiction of the order of emanation. While Ibn al-ʿArabī tend to use a paradigm ultimately based on the classical Neoplatonic hierarchy of intellect-soul-nature, the Zohar relies on the Kabbalistic paradigm of the ten sefirot – the ten divine emanated powers that are most frequently depicted in the shape of a tree or body.17
The Zoharic teachings on creation, the emergence of being out of naught, and the initial stages of the emanation of the worlds are a difficult topic that has been studied at length in academic scholarship.18 Some of the most important Zoharic material dealing with this subject were assembled at the opening of the book of Genesis in the printed editions of the Zohar, but the subject is returned to repeatedly throughout Zoharic literature.19 In the Zoharic section Midrash Ruth ha-Neʾelam (The Hidden Midrash on the Book of Ruth), for instance, the act of creation is described as God’s act of clothing the divine light in another light, which is called “the light of His garment” (or levusho).20 Likewise, in the section printed under the name Haqdamat ha-Zohar (Introduction to the Zohar), a similar description appears, and the divine act of casting a garment of light is said to repeat itself in each rung in the process of the emanation of the worlds (or perhaps of the sefirot).21 It should be noted that the Zohar on the Torah refer to the sefirot in a few places as divine attributes (middot). The Hebrew word used here, middot, could also mean “garments,” and in the context of these descriptions, this double entendre seems to have been intentional.22 Thus, the sefirot are presented as garments of light that cover each other in a consecutive and hierarchical manner. Considering this, we should take notice of another description, taken from the Zohar on the Torah on Bereshit (Genesis):
The Blessed Holy One had to create everything in the world, arraying the world. All consists of a kernel (moḥa) within, with several shells (kelipin) covering the kernel.23 The entire world is like this, above and below, from the head of the mystery of the primordial point24 (nequda ʿilaʾa) to the end of all rungs, all is “this a garment (levusha) for that, that [a garment] for this,” so that one is a shell of another, which itself is the shell of another. The primordial point is inner radiance. There is no way to gauge its translucency, tenuity, or purity until an expanse25 (peshitu) is expanded from it. The expansion of that point became a palace (heikhal), in which the point was clothed – a radiance unknowable, so intense its lucency. This palace, a garment for the concealed point, is a radiance beyond measure, yet not as tenuous or translucent as the primordial point, hidden and treasured. That palace expanded an expanse, primordial light. That expansion of primordial light is a garment for the palace, which is a tenuous, translucent radiance, deeper within. From here on, this expands into this, this is clothed in this, so that this is a garment for this, and this for this. This, the kernel; this, the shell. Although a garment, it becomes the kernel of another layer. Everything is fashioned the same way below, so that a human in this world manifests this image: kernel and shell, spirit and body. All for the array of the world.26
The creation of the world is described here in a Neoplatonic fashion: light emanates from the Godhead and descends through the emanated rungs. The descent is a process of moving from the unknowable to the knowable, from unbearable shining light to more bearable and dimmer light. Every rung is seen as an expansion of the rung above it and therefore as a palace containing it as its dwelling. While the upper rung is seen as a simple point, the one below it is seen as a more complex and detailed structure. The upper rung is a kernel, and the lower rung is its shell or garment. The human being is seen as reflecting this process, as he, too, is formed in this dual manner, a spirit and a body parallel to kernel and shell.
The casting of a garment is pictured here as a relative act. Every rung in the emanation of the worlds is clothed in the rung beneath it, but at the same time functions as a garment for the rung above it. The garments are lights, and paradoxically the casting of an additional garment does not add light but dims it and darkens it. This description appears in various passages in the Zohar on the Torah.27 The explanation for the blurring of the light that is given in one of these passages is that this blurring enables the existence of the worlds, since they cannot tolerate the intensity of the original divine light.28 The casting of a garment may be linked to another well-known image in the Zohar, that of the nut (egoz) and its shell (qelippa). According to this image, the relation between each light to the light below it (i.e., its garment) is like that of the inner part of the nut to its shell.29 The images are connected in that the shell of the nut is identified with the realm of evil, and the blurring of the light in the process of the casting of garments means ever growing darkness. Hence, the distancing from the pure light means distancing from pure goodness. Conversely, this distancing occurs alongside a bond that is maintained between the different rungs. Every rung is a garment in relation to the rung above it and as such it dims it and darkens it, but because the garment fits that which is concealed within it, it also resembles it. The human being is included in this picture. He is distant from God because of his material body and his dwelling in the lower realms, but at the same time, his spirit maintains the resemblance to God. The relation between the spirit and the body is described as that of the nut to its shell.
Thus, the image of garments also reflects the continuity and resemblance between the rungs. This continuity is neatly expressed in a passage from the Zohar on the Torah on tractate Aḥarei Mot, where the ten sefirot are described as one and the same garment with which God covers Himself and which is inseparable from Him:
Come and see: the blessed Holy One generated ten crowns (kitrin), holy diadems above, with which He is crowned and clothed. He is they, and they are He, like a flame bound to burning coal, inseparable.30 Corresponding to [these ten holy crowns] are ten unholy crowns below, adhering to the filth of a fingernail of one holy crown called ḥokhma (wisdom); so they are called ḥokhmot (wisdoms).31
The sefirot are God’s inseparable crowns or diadems. The emanating light binds them to the original sealed light from which they emanated. However, already in the first act of emanation, that of the second sefira, ḥokhma (wisdom), there is an element of detachment, and so the realm of evil is established as a necessary appendix to the process of emanation. It seems that every level in the emanation is comprised of two parts: one higher and divine, which God “wears” as a garment, and a second lower side, which functions as a negative image of the divine garments. The second part is identified with evil, filth, and the qelippa of each rung in the emanation.32 Although the process of emanation reflects a decrease in the intensity of divine light, the rungs of the sefirot are tied to each other because the light flowing through them is essentially the same original divine light. This duality is expressed through the motif of the garment.
In its basic features, the description of creation as casting a garment on the primordial divine light ha its origins in Midrashic sources, the Rabbinic exegetical literature of late antiquity. For instance, in the treatises Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer and Bereshit Rabba the heavens are pictured as created from the light of God’s garment (or levusho). In Zoharic literature, an additional, philosophical aspect can be observed as well. For instance, it seems that the dualistic relation of light-garment, kernel-shell, and point-palace reflects the relation between matter and form in Neoplatonic thought, particularly as it was formulated in the so-called pseudo-Empedoclian tradition, as it developed in the Iberian Peninsula.33 In a certain sense, the garment is the form covering the primal matter (here, the divine light), and it reflects its individuation and its becoming specific and concrete. As explained above, the dualistic relation is relative; every created or emanated beings is a matter for one thing and a form for another.34 This relativity seems to match the order of the emanation of the worlds: the forms of one world or one sefira are the matter for the world or sefira beneath them, and so on.
This notion of matter and form is reflected in another passage in the opening of the Zohar on tractate Bereshit, where tohu wa-vohu (Genesis 1:1, commonly translated as “formlessness and emptiness”) from which the world was created are understood to be primordial matter and form.35 There it is said that everything has a garment beside the tohu. The interpretation of tohu wa-bohu as matter and form is derived from the writings of Jewish-Arabic thinkers such as Abraham bar Ḥiyya and Abraham Ibn Ezra, and it is quoted in Sefer ha-Bahir and in various medieval Kabbalistic writings, such as Nachmanides’s Torah commentary.36 This interpretation likewise seems to reflect the Neoplatonic, pseudo-Empedoclian tradition mentioned above, and certain Neoplatonists in the Iberian Peninsula, like Ibn Gabirol, held that the duality of form and matter exists in every realm of creation.37 According to the pseudo-Empedoclian tradition, prime matter and form are found as a Divine hypostasis above the universal intellect, yet reappear in the various levels or rungs of the universe. Such a perception, which views matter positively as the Divine essence of being, is rather different than the Aristotelian outlook according to which form is the defining and essential aspect of matter.
The motif of garments plays an important role in Ibn al-ʿArabī’s cosmogony as well. He, too, describe the creation and emanation of the worlds as an act in which God clothes Himself in light, an act by which God manifests and discloses Himself, and, conversely, an act through which the divine light is continuously dimmed. The discussions that Ibn al-ʿArabī dedicates to this subject are often connected to his concept of the veil (ḥijāb), for which he dedicated an entire treatise called The Book of Veils (Kitāb al-Ḥujub).38 The conventional praises to God at the opening of the treatise contain some hints as to what the treatise discusses at length:
Praise to Allāh who has veiled us (ḥajabana) by His self from Himself, out of zealousness lest His essence be known in any way. He appeared (badā) as light and hid Himself (istatara) from eyes through His light. He became manifest (ẓahara) and veiled Himself (iḥtajaba) from the inner vision (baṣāʾir) through His manifestation. So, light was submerged in light and manifestation became hidden (baṭana) in manifestation. Every gaze of the eye falls on Him and everything comes out only from Him and everyone who heads towards [some place] reaches only Him. Oh, wise [men]! Where are [Allāh’s] absence and veil!?39
God’s self-disclosure in the world occurs by covering His light with another light, which enables the existence of the created beings and conceals God’s essence so that it will not be known. Paradoxically, this concealing light is itself a part of the divine light and hence the veil too participates in God’s divinity. God’s self-disclosure occurs by concealing His ipseity, but the concealing element is part of the act of divine revelation. This duality of concealment and manifestation can also be understood in light of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s concept of “the specific face” (al-wajh al-khāṣṣ). According to Ibn al-ʿArabī, every created being has two aspects, or faces: one is the specific face that turns to God (al-Ḥaqq; the truth) and to pure being (wujūd), while the other face of every being points to its created element (commonly called sabab).40 Ibn al-ʿArabī connects this concept and the idea of light and veils and says that the specific face is light and self-disclosure, and the other face turning to creation is a veil representing darkness.41 It seems therefore that the divine light dwells in the entire creation and serves as the wajh khāṣṣ of all beings, connecting them directly to their divine source, but at the same time the veils restrict this light to definite outlines, i.e., the created elements or causes (al-asbāb), which define the manner in which the beings appear. Seemingly, these created elements conceal the light, but they also enable its appearance and manifestation. Ibn al-ʿArabī describes the asbāb in their capacity as veils of lights as made of beamless lights that shine into themselves and do not penetrate other realms. One can look at them because they do not radiate so brightly as to turn one blind.42 This tension between concealment and manifestation resembles the Zoharic notions, according to which the repeated clothing in lights along the emanation of the worlds increases darkness, but at the same time the sefirot are still attached to the higher divine light, which keeps flowing onto them.
Ibn al-ʿArabī’s concept of veils has its origins in ḥadīth literature – the corpus of Islamic literature devoted to the sayings attributed to Muhammad – and in eastern Ṣūfī works. According to a canonical ḥadīth, “His (i.e., God’s) veil is light and if He were to remove it the glory of his face43 would burn everything of His creation as far as His gaze reaches.”44 According to this tradition, it is separation by a veil that enables the created beings to bear the divine light. Both the phrasing of this ḥadīth and the idea reflected in itare found in various places in Ibn al-ʿArabī’s writings.45 A variation of this ḥadīth, mentioning seventy veils, is interpreted at length in the famous work by al-Ghazālī (d. 1111), Mishkāt al-Anwār (The Niche of Lights), and it seems that Ibn al-ʿArabī drew from him and perhaps from other Ṣūfi sources.46 However, the Neoplatonic framework of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s thought, and especially his cosmology, sets his discussions apart from the Sufism of the eastern Islamic world.47
Closely related to the idea of self-disclosure through veils is the term ḥullat al-wujūd (garment of existence), which appears in Ibn al-ʿArabī’s works and which belongs to the semantic field of garments. Ibn al-ʿArabī uses this term to describe the bringing into existence of the entities fixed in God’s thought (al-aʿyān al-thābita). The fixed entities are the eternal objects of God’s thought that are brought into existence by casting the “garment of existence” over them. We shall take note of the following words from Ibn al-ʿArabī’s discussion of the concept of love in chapter 178 of the Futūḥāt:
Every entity (ʿayn) was absent of its own but known to [to Allāh], as He was wishing it to be brought into existence. So, he created (aḥdatha) existence for it, or rather created existence in it, or rather covered it with the garment of existence (ḥullat al-wujūd). So it was, and then another, and then another, continuously and consecutively, from the first existent that is dependent on Allāh’s precedence (awaliyyat al-ḥaqq). There is no last existent, but only on-going existence among individual [beings] (ashkhāṣ).48
Creation, as an act of divine love and God’s will to be known, is described as the donning of existence for the fixed entities which were known to God in their primordial state in His mind. In this context, Ibn al-ʿArabī sees existence as a covering drawn over an entity. Quite interestingly, the fixed entities are not separated from God, but rather are the objects of His thought and therefore are part of Him. Moreover, God is perceived by Ibn al-ʿArabī, following the likes of Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna, d. 1037) and al-Ghazālī, as pure existence or pure light.49 Therefore, covering God’s objects of thought in garments of existence or light is an act of divine self-disclosure in which God manifests himself within the cosmos.
The fixed entities are arranged in hierarchical order according to their proximity to God. This order is not detailed in this passage from the Futūḥāt but has probably to do with the Neoplatonic cosmological paradigms adopted by Ibn al-ʿArabī elsewhere.50 As opposed to the Zohar, here the garments of the various entities or cosmological realms do not seem to be impacted by their hierarchy. The different rungs in the cosmological paradigms do not clothe each other in consecutive order, but rather they are all clothed in the same ḥullat al-wujūd. This difference, although noticeable, is marginal, and the general similarity is clear. As in the Zohar, in Ibn al-ʿArabī’s writings we find an image of the emanation of the worlds as a darkening of the light, and here too the reason given is that this darkening enables created beings to bear the divine light and maintain their existence.51 As in Ibn al-ʿArabī’s writings, Zoharic literature also sees the act of creation as a manifestation of God through casting luminous garments of primordial light on Himself.
The connection between the images of the garment and the veil is explicitly expressed by Ibn al-ʿArabī elsewhere. In one passage, he refers to the divine garment as a veil. He wrote, “[God’s] greatness that the minds wear is a garment (ridāʾ) veiling them (yaḥjubuhā) from the perception of God (al-ḥaqq) during revelation (al-tajallī).”52 Ibn al-ʿArabī emphasize that the duality between self-disclosure and concealment has an epistemological aspect; the garment represents God’s self-disclosure but also the human being’s incapacity to reach His ipseity. This description is consistent with Ibn al-ʿArabī’s tendency to avoid a clear distinction between epistemology and ontology.53 It seems, therefore, that according to Ibn al-ʿArabī the divine garment, as a veil, is both the ontological barrier between God and the cosmos and the epistemological barrier preventing the mind from fully perceiving God’s essence.
In both corpora, the notions discussed here – especially as expressed in images of garmenting, manifestation and concealment, light, and darkness – seem to have derived from the Neoplatonic tradition, specifically as it was formulated in Arabic sources. Another early expression of such imagery can be found in Ibn Sīnā’s Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, which was translated into Hebrew during the medieval period and was also adapted by Abraham Ibn Ezra, testifying to its circulation in al-Andalus.54 According to Ibn Sīnā, “[God’s] beauty is the veil of His beauty, His appearance is the reason for His concealment … as the sun … [whose] light is the veil of its light.”55 The duality of God’s manifestation and concealment and similar Neoplatonic notions were possibly passed on to Jewish and Muslim Andalusī thinkers such as Ibn al-ʿArabī and, through the Judeo-Arabic works of tenth to twelfth-century Jewish thinkers, to medieval Kabbalists. Among these works, one may mention those by Solomon Ibn Gabirol, who derived his Neoplatonism from Arabic writings such as the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity. In his treatise Fons Vitae, he described emanated beings as garments cast on the lights of the beings that had emanated before them.56 The term for these garments in the translation of Shem-Tov Ibn Falaquera, composed in the thirteenth century, is levush, similar to the Zoharic terminology. We cannot know, however, whether or not the term in the original Judeo-Arabic was ḥulla or a different term, because the original version is lost.57 Another source from Judeo-Arabic literature that is worthy of mention here, a source that mediated certain Arabic Neoplatonic ideas into Jewish thought, is Judah Halevi’s (d. 1141) Kuzari. In a discussion about prophecy in this book, he mentions two types of light that a prophet reaches with his special prophetic vision – intelligible light (al-nūr al-maʿqūl) and sensual light (al-nūr al-maḥsūs) – and that he terms “precious garments” (ḥulal).58 This is the term used by Ibn al-ʿArabī to describe the garment of existence (ḥullat al-wujūd), and as we have seen above, God’s existence, which is given to the fixed entities as a garment, is associated with light. Two Kabbalists who were probably connected to the circle of the Zohar, Baḥya ben Asher (second half of the thirteenth century) and Joseph Gikatilla (d. circa 1325), identify the light of God’s garment mentioned in Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer with the world of the angels and the ten intellects and with the concept of form. Gikatilla even called the light of the garment the “light of the intellect (or ha-sekhel),” and this might have been influenced by Halevi’s al-nūr al-maʿqūl.59 It seems possible that the Kuzari, which was known to Kabbalists in the thirteenth century, reflect ideas and terminology from Neoplatonic sources to which Ibn al-ʿArabī might have been exposed. In the works of Moses de León (d. circa 1305), whose connection to the writing of the Zohar is well established in academic research, we find Halevi’s terms of intelligible light and sensual light as well, but with no mention of garments.60 Not only terms of light and garment alone, but also the concept of veils in Islamic mysticism, mainly in its formulations prior to Ibn al-ʿArabī, seem to have been known in Jewish medieval literature.61 There is also an apparent connection between this concept and the motif of garments in Zoharic literature. The dialectic image of manifestation and concealment in both corpora might be traced back to Ibn Sīnā.62
3 Divine Names and Attributes
Both in the writings of Ibn al-ʿArabī and in Zoharic literature, the whole of creation (in Ibn al-ʿArabī) and the ten sefirot (in the Zohar) are perceived as loci for divine self-manifestation. The created beings, or the sefirot, are entities that are separate from God but at the same time they are His self-disclosure and therefore are an inseparable part of Him, as in the relationship of the outer and inner parts of a single organism. This is reflected in descriptions of garments in both corpora, where God is depicted as clothed in His traits – His names and attributes – and through them He reveals Himself in the cosmos and acts within it. As with the theme of garments of light dealt with previously, the duality of manifestation and concealment is relevant to God’s names too. They conceal God’s essence, but at the same time manifest and express it in creation.
According to Ibn al-ʿArabī, the entire cosmos is an object of the manifestation of God’s names. Every created being at any given moment is a manifestation of one divine name that reflects one specific aspect of the divine traits. This can be seen in the following passage by Ibn al-ʿArabī, from chapter 558 in the Futūḥāt:
And then He explained that He has the most beautiful names (al-asmāʾ al-ḥusnā);63 He specified for us those of them that He wished and commanded us to invoke Him with them, although the names of all things in the world belong to Him. Every name in the world is beautiful through this relation. That is why one says, “all of Allāh’s acts are beautiful”64 and “no one acts aside from Allāh.”65 That is the decree (ḥukm) of all the names with which the entire world was named. [This is] especially [true] if we accept the opinion according to which a name is identical to that which is signified by it, because we have explained that there is no existence beside Allāh. [It is true] even if we say that a name is not identical to that which is signified by it, because the name [nevertheless] points to the existence of Allāh; and so, in any case, there is nothing but Allāh …
“We have indeed made whatever is on earth (al-arḍ) as an adornment (zīna) for it” (Quran 18:7). In contemplation (fī al-iʿtibār),66 the “earth” is nothing but that which is designated by “creation” (al-khalq), while its “adornment” is nothing but that which is designated by Allāh (al-ḥaqq). By Allāh [the earth] has become adorned and by Allāh it has transcended and taken off the garments of plentitude (malābis al-ʿadad),67 appearing in the attribute of “the One” (ṣifat al-aḥad).68
Through a subtle refutation of popular kalām (Islamic scholasticism) perceptions of divine names and attributes, and of human and divine action, Ibn al-ʿArabī claim that every created being is a divine name. The refutation is made by reducing two contradictory kalām perceptions ad absurdum, thus forming a syllogism as follows: all divine acts are beautiful; only God acts; therefore, all acts are beautiful.69 Ibn al-ʿArabī then goes on to interpret a few verses in the Quran describing vegetation, animals, and more as God’s adornment of the universe, and he identifies this adornment with al-asmāʾ al-ḥusnā, the divine names. According to Ibn al-ʿArabī, mystical reflection on the cosmos teaches that the “earth” mentioned in the Quranic verse, i.e., creation, serves as the substrate for the divine “adornment,” i.e., God’s names which are His manifestation in the universe.70 Every name presumably points to a distinct created being, but also reflects a specific divine self-disclosure in the cosmos. Therefore, the divine and created realms are not really separate. The passage ends with a description of these names as garments of plentitude, thus identifying the names with the phenomenal world of plurality, in contrast to the unity of God’s essence. However, created beings may ascend from the phenomenal world and attain divine unity by taking off the garments of plurality, i.e., the many names.
The word used here for garment is malbas, which could be understood as “garment” or “locus of garmenting.” This term is connected to a set of similar terms having to do with the coming of the fixed entities out of God’s reflection into existence and the manifestation of the divine names in them. Such terms are “locus” (maḥall), “place of manifestation” (maẓhar), “place of [ontological] revelation” (majlā), and “form” (ṣūra).71 The phenomenal world is composed of forms covering the fixed entities and then removed from them, according to Ibn al-ʿArabī’s concept of “the new creation” (al-khalq al-jadīd). As he puts it, “the [fixed] entities are [always] prepared for having [the forms] removed from them and being donned with them; in every breath [of God], the world is in a new creation in terms of the form.”72 To these terms we should, therefore, add the names and attributes. God clothes the fixed entities in His names, which are His garments, and so the creation comes into being. The creation itself is made from different divine names, and, as such, creation is a self-disclosure of God. This process of divine manifestation through the names is identical to the process of creation through casting the garment of existence (ḥullat al-wujūd) over the fixed entities (al-aʿyān al-thābita). Thus, the coming into existence of a fixed entity means that it is covered with a divine name, which manifests itself within it, and this is equivalent to its donning with a “garment of existence.”
An important issue dealt with by Ibn al-ʿArabī in the passage from chapter 558 in the Futūḥāt is the dissonance between the oneness of God and the plurality of the phenomena in the universe. According to Ibn al-ʿArabī, God is a pure being, and in the sense that the many created entities participate in His being, they likewise participate in His oneness. Therefore, what seems like plurality is encompassed in the oneness of God.73 The passage quoted above addresses this by making a distinction between the many names in the cosmos and the attribute “the One.” In many other places, Ibn al-ʿArabī refers to this unity by means of the name Allāh, which he saw as the all-encompassing name (al-ism al-jāmiʿ), the name that includes all other divine names. In its all- encompassing nature (jamʿiyya), this name represents God’s unity, because in it the phenomenal world appears in its entirety as one united divine self-disclosure.74
Similar descriptions are found in Zoharic literature. We have seen previously that, according to the Zohar, God is clothed in the sefirot in a manner which combines manifestation and concealment at the same time. We have also seen that the sefirot are perceived as divine traits. As such, they represent the divine names and attributes in creation. Zoharic literature seems to have identified God’s names with the the system of the sefirot.75 We shall consider the following passage from the Zoharic tract The Old Man of [the Torah portion of] Laws (Sabba de-Mishpatim):
Come and see: all names (shemahan) and epithets (kinuyan) of the names of the blessed Holy One expand in their ways, all clothed (mitlabshin) in one another, branching into ways and paths – except for the unique name, most favored of all, which He bestowed upon the unique people, most favored of all nations, namely Yod He Vav He, as is written: “For YHVH’s share is His people,”76 and similarly: “You, cleaving to YHVH”77 – [i.e. cleaving] to this very name more than any other name. One name among His other names expands and branches in various ways and paths; it is called Elohim. He bestowed this name, and it was distributed to those below in this world. This name was apportioned to attendants and appointees who guide the other nations.78
According to the Zohar, the names and attributes represent the plurality of created phenomena. The plentitude comes into being through the mutual clothing of the names and their “branching into ways and paths.” A dominant name among these, which could be seen as the prototype for the names of plurality, is the name Elohim. This name, which serves in the Bible as a general, impersonal name for God or other divinities, is commonly connected in the Zohar to gevura (“fortitude” or “judgment”), the fifth sefira which represents harsh divine judgment. The name YHVH on the other hand, is God’s personal name, designating His unity and identified with the sixth sefira, tifʾeret (“magnificence” or “glory”), in the center of the sefirotic tree. This sefira is seen as unifying between the right side, that of benevolence and mercy, and the left side, that of harsh judgment and severity, of the sefirotic system. It is sometimes even described as encompassing the entirety of all the lower sefirot. The difference between these two names of God, Elohim and YHVH, is pictured in this passage in a sectarian-exclusive manner. The nation of Israel is connected to God’s private name, which points to the divine unity, whereas other nations are connected to an impersonal name of God that designates plurality.
The names and attributes in this passage are said to be clothed in one another, and this repeated act of garmenting establishes the world of many beings. As with Ibn al-ʿArabī, here too the names express the plentitude of the phenomenal world.79 Ibn al-ʿArabī’s distinction between the many names, representing individuation and multitude, and the name Allāh (the attribute “the One”), representing the oneness of God, can also be found in the passage quoted above from the Zohar. In the latter, there appears to be an eminent distinction between the name Elohim, representing the many names, and the tetragrammaton, representing God’s oneness or the unity of the sefirot. The similarity between Ibn al-ʿArabī and Zoharic literature can be summarized as follows: the names of God are an expression of divine self-manifestation and are, therefore, seen as divine garments. There is a distinction between the names related to the numerous phenomena, on the one hand, and the private name of God, on the other. Notwithstanding its link with the plentitude of creation, the private name of God points at God’s unity.
The passage from Sabba de-Mishpatim here cited goes on to describe the tetragrammaton as a “precious garment” (levush yekar).80 In many places in the Zoharic corpus, this term designates the cosmogonic garments of light discussed above.81 We have seen that one of the common terms in Ibn al-ʿArabī’s works for such garments is ḥullat al-wujūd. The word ḥulla also refers to esteemed and lofty clothing. We have also seen that Ibn al-ʿArabī sees God’s names as divine adornment in the world. Thus, the precious or lofty status of these garments, the divine names, is emphasized in both corpora.
Before moving on to the final section, one final aspect regarding the garments of the divine names should be addressed. As shown above, Ibn al-ʿArabī’s conception of divine names and attributes was rooted in philosophical and scholastic or theological notions.82 One should also bear in mind that it derive from mystical theories regarding creation and divine speech as well. According to such theories, the worlds are created and emanate from one another as God breathes and articulates words, through the combination of letters. Thus, the letters of the alphabet are the building blocks of creation, and the divine names, in their capacity as divine manifestations, are different combinations of letters. This twofold background or origin of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s conception of the divine names – informed by both the philosophical-theological and mystical traditions – is characteristic of medieval Kabbalah as well.83 Hence the importance of letter speculations in the Zohar; broadly speaking, not only divine names, but also letters – for instance, the letters of the tetragrammaton – are ontologically linked to the paradigm of the sefirot.84 The combination of a Neoplatonic cosmological framework and letter mysticism is typical of both Islamic and Jewish Iberian mysticism from the tenth century onwards, and may, therefore, explain how it came to be that both Ibn al-ʿArabī and the Zoharic author(s) gave such central roles to the divine names and to the alphabetical letters in their Neoplatonic-based cosmologies.85
4 The Clothing of the Chosen One(s) in the Divine Garments
Another aspect of the garments-motif is the belief in the ability of certain individuals or groups to wear the divine garments, especially during mystical ascensions. Naturally, discussions regarding human perfection refer as well to such acts; the wearing of the divine garment by a righteous human being or chosen group is seen as expressing their similitude to the divine and, therefore, reflects their high spiritual status. Such descriptions of perfect human beings or groups wearing divine garments appear both in Zoharic literature and in Ibn al-ʿArabī’s writings. The latter mentions this especially when he discusses the idea of the perfect man (al-insān al-kāmil). This term refers to the prophets and their heirs, God’s friends (al-awliyāʾ), the mystics who have embodied the perfect human being throughout history.86
The following passage is from chapter seventy-three in the Futūḥāt. In it Ibn al-ʿArabī interprets the famous ḥadīth qudsī (a prophetic tradition that purports to quote God Himself), “pride is my [upper] garment (ridāʾī) and greatness is my [lower] garment (izārī). Whoever contends with me (nāzaʿani)87 regarding either one of them, I will throw him into hell,”88 writing:
[The upper garment] is the perfect servant who was created according to the [divine] form (ʿalā al-ṣūra),89 which encompasses all the possible and divine essences (li-l-ḥaqāʾiq al-imkāniyya wa-l-ilāhiyya).90 He is the most perfect locus of manifestation (maẓhar) …
He is the servant worthy of being named “vicegerent” (khalīfa) and “representative” (nāʾib); he has a perfect effect (athar) among all possible beings;91 he has complete will (mashīʾa); and he is the most perfect manifestation …
[Allāh] named him the “[upper] garment” because [this word] is derived from radā, that is annihilation, because he is annihilated in God (al-ḥaqq) in such a total way that he does not appear as an existent entity, though the divine reception of effects (al-infiʿālāt al-ilāhiyya) does appear through him. He does not find in himself any essence with which he could relate to himself the reception of any of those effects, and he thus becomes God (ḥaqqan) in his entirety. That [is the meaning] of Muhammad’s saying “make me light,”92 namely, [so that] everything appears in me and I do not appear through anything. On the other hand, God might be annihilated in [in the perfect human being] so that nothing in his existence will be related to God … To this we have referred in our poem: “I am the garment, I am the secret in which appeared / the darkness of [created] being, as I turned it into light.” The wearer [of the garment] is He who is annihilated in this garment. Therefore, consider who the wearer is? Then determine that He is annihilated in it, and so you will understand the essence of what we mentioned. Every wearer [of a garment] is veiled by his garment from the perception of the eyes. [God] said: “eyes cannot perceive Him,”93 because the garment veils the eyes from [perceiving] Him, so that He perceives them but they do not perceive Him. The eyes perceive the garment, and the garment is that in which the wearer is annihilated in His manifestation (bi-ẓuhūrihi).94
The garment is the perfect man, who is seen as encompassing in his essence the entire cosmos. He also reflects God’s form, i.e., His names, and brings all of them into existence. The perfect man personifies the garment of existence (ḥullat al-wujūd) mentioned above, because he is the form combining all other forms. As such, his garment of existence is the entirety of forms clothing the fixed entities.
The derivation of the name ridāʾ is explained by Ibn al-ʿArabī as connected to the mystical death, i.e., annihilation in God. The perfect man reaches such status by being identified with the garment of existence and the entirety of the divine names, so that all names are reflected in him, but he reflects nothing of his own. Ibn al-ʿArabī goes one step further and explains the effect that the perfect man has on the human perception of God, given his role as the divine cosmic garment. God, being the one wearing the garment, is hidden from man’s eyes but is Himself annihilated, so to speak, in His garment, the perfect human being. The believer cannot perceive God, but he can perceive the perfect man, in whom God is reflected.95 In this way, Ibn al-ʿArabī implies that gazing at the perfect man is the only way man can perceive God in the entirety of His divine names and ultimate unity, that is to say in His revealed outer side, while the inner side of God, i.e., His essence (dhāt), is presumably beyond the reach of human perception. This is comparable to the essence of God in Kabbalistic writings such as the Zohar (commonly referred to as ein-sof, “infinity”), which is theoretically imperceptible to human perception as well.
Reflecting all forms means reflecting all the divine names, and therefore, it means wearing the name Allāh, God’s private name that encompasses all names. Indeed, Ibn al-ʿArabī perceives the perfect human being as manifesting all the divine names in their entirety, both the benevolent-merciful ones and the harsh-severe. In the Zoharic passage from Sabba de-Mishpatim discussed previously, the nation of Israel is connected to the name YHVH, God’s private name that expresses His unity and compassion alike. God leads His chosen nation with His private name of compassion and unity, while other nations are led by the name Elohim, God’s general name that reflects His [harsh] judgment and the realm of the multitude of names and phenomena. Immediately following the passage quoted above, there is a detailed description of the casting of the name YHVH as a precious garment (levush yekar) on the soul of a Jew when it wants to enter the body, so that the soul is protected from the forces of evil through the divine name.96
A similar description is found in the Zohar on the tractate Yitro, regarding the fourth and fifth sefirot of ḥesed (benevolence), characterized by immense giving, and gevura, characterized by restriction and at times by harsh judgment, which are located at the right and left sides of the sefirotic tree respectively. There it is said that these sefirot are manifested only when they are engraved in the sefira of tifʾeret, which is located between them and is identified here with the nation of Israel. Tifʾeret is seen as the mediation between those two sefirot, and this mediation makes it possible for the nation of Israel to remain cleaved to God even when the harsh judgment of gevura is ruling. This kind of mediation is typical of the description of the sefirot in medieval Kabbalah as dynamic powers that interact with each other in various ways, among which is the sexual union of masculine and feminine elements within the sefirot. The passage continues as follows:
Because [the ḥesed and gevura] are engraved in Him (tifʾeret), as is written: “For He has clothed me with garments of salvation (yeshaʿ)” (Isaiah 61:10). What are garments of salvation? Colors engraved to gaze upon Him, as is said, “They gazed (yishʿu) to YHVH” (2 Samuel 22:42)97 Yeshaʿ is gazing. Whoever wishes to gaze upon me should gaze upon my colors.98 How so? As is written, “He has wrapped me in a robe of righteousness (meʿil ṣedaqa)” (Isaiah 61:10), real righteousness, in whom colors are engraved.99
Tifʾeret, which is the sefira identified with the name YHVH, combines the sefirot ḥesed and gevura, and perhaps the entire tree of sefirot. The sefirot are seen here as colors, or different ways of perceiving God. The purest perception of God is achieved by gazing at His purest manifestation, the one that includes all other divine manifestations. This pure and all-inclusive manifestation, i.e., tifʾeret, is not only identified with God’s private name, but is also seen as His garment and is intimately linked with the nation of Israel. This is very similar to Ibn al-ʿArabī’s concept of the perfect man, who is identified with God’s “[upper] garment” of pride. In chapter seventy-three in the Futūḥāt we have also seen that according to Ibn al-ʿArabī, though the full perception of God is impossible, perception of His outer and revealed side can be reached through gazing at His garment, the perfect man. Such is the case here as well. Gazing at the name YHVH – identified with the nation of Israel and the divine garment – means gazing at God.
A noticeable difference between Zoharic literature and Ibn al-ʿArabī on this issue is that according to Ibn al-ʿArabī, the entity identified with the garment is a chosen individual, the perfect man, who is a prophet or a walī, while in Zoharic literature it is the chosen people, i.e., the Jews. This communal-sectarian element is emphasized after the cited passage from the Zohar on the tractate Yitro, where the Zohar goes on to say that the unity of the sefirot, engraved in tifʾeret, will be reached with the future redemption of the nation of Israel from the sorrows of the exile. This difference is not unequivocal. The chosen individual in Ibn al-ʿArabī’s writings belongs necessarily to the Islamic umma or nation, which is obviously a God-chosen nation, or at least the perfect man is seen as deriving from the metaphysical source of the prophet of Islam, i.e., the Muhammadian truth (al-ḥaqīqa al-muḥammadiyya).100 At the same time, the Zohar attributes a central role in sacred human history – including in the history of Israel – to perfect or righteous individuals, such as Enoch, Moses, and others, who belong to the people of Israel.101
The distinction made in the Zohar between the divine names YHVH and Elohim, in the context discussed here, is almost certainly derived from Judah Halevi’s Kuzari. According to Halevi, the first name is the private name of God ultimately or fully known to His chosen servants alone. It was revealed to Adam because of his perfection, and from him it was bequeathed to his chosen heirs, and from them it was passed to the nation of Israel. In all these figures dwells the divine order (al-ʾamr al-ilāhī), which distinguishes them from other peoples or nations. Halevi perceives the name Elohim, on the other hand, as a less intimate and more general divine name. It reflects God’s attributes and is connected to the gentiles.102 The Kuzari even emphasizes the point made in the last Zoharic segment quoted above. According to the Kuzari, the tetragrammaton reflects perfectly the divine eminence (kavod) in such a way that a human being can gaze on it and not be blinded by divine light.103 The inheritance of the name YHVH from individuals (Adam and a line of prophets) to a certain community or group (the nation of Israel) in the Kuzari might explain the constant shift from individual to communal-sectarian perfection in the Zohar. In this context, the Shīʿite notion of divine election, the influence of which on the Kuzari has been described at length, might explain the similarity between Ibn al-ʿArabī and the Zohar.104 Ibn al-ʿArabī, like Judah Halevi, was deeply engaged with the Shīʿite and specifically the Ismāʿīlī traditions.105 Unsurprisingly, as in the Kuzari, the concept of al-ʾamr al-ilāhī figures prominently in Ibn al-ʿArabī’s oeuvre as well, and it too is closely linked to the idea of divine election. Therefore, it seems that notions of human perfection and divine election in the thought of both Ibn al-ʿArabī and Judah Halevi should be understood against the background of the Shīʿite impact on Iberian mysticism. The Shīʿa developed a sectarian-exclusive interpretation of the idea of the chosen community, according to which the Shīʿi community alone was chosen by God and elected to be sent to the world on a divine mission. This notion might have been able to provide the structural basis that enabled Halevi to express notions of human perfection in such a sectarian-exclusive manner. The Zohar, in turn, inherited Halevi’s teachings on the chosen status of the nation of Israel, and it seems that certain sectarian-exclusive aspects of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s teachings can likewise be attributed to his engagement with the Shīʿite tradition.106
5 Conclusions
The image of the spiritual garment seems to exemplify neatly the shared heritage of Ibn al-ʿArabī and the Zoharic corpus. The image and the worldview that it reflects may be characterized as follows. Firstly, the creation of the world is seen as an act of God’s self-disclosure, achieved by covering the primordial divine light (in the Zohar) or the entities fixed in God’s thought (in Ibn al-ʿArabī’s writings) with a luminous garment or veil, which prevents the created beings from reaching the divine light and being annihilated by it, but simultaneously lets the divine manifest and reveal itself. The duality of manifestation and concealment in these descriptions is shared by Ibn al-ʿArabī and the writers of the Zohar. Secondly, God’s names and attributes, which are manifestations of God’s traits and are identified with the created beings (in Ibn al-ʿArabī’s writings) or with the sefirot (in the Zohar), are likewise seen as divine garments. In both corpora there is a distinction between the many names and attributes of God and the one name encompassing the rest and thus reflecting most adequately God’s unity and His garment of manifestation. This name is Allāh, according to Ibn al-ʿArabī, and the Hebrew tetragrammaton, according to the Zohar. The discussions about God’s names in both corpora are rooted in philosophical-theological discourse about divine names and divine versus human action as well as in mystical speculations about divine speech and letters. Thirdly, the divine names of unity, being God’s perfect garment, are identified in both corpora with a chosen and perfect being or group, whose form encompasses all forms in the universe, or, in the case of the Zohar, represents the unity of the sefirot. This figure is the al-insān al-kāmil in Ibn al-ʿArabī’s writings, i.e., a prophet of Islam or an heir of the prophets, and the nation of Israel and its righteous leaders, according to the Zohar. A created being cannot gaze directly at God, but he can gaze at God’s divine garment, embodied in the perfect man or nation. Gazing at the garment that reflects the purest and most complete divine manifestation is the most man can perceive of the Godhead.
Alongside the above-mentioned similarities, the comparison between Ibn al-ʿArabī and the Zohar surfaces many differences. For instance, the cosmological schemes in the two corpora are different, the Kabbalistic decimal scheme of sefirot in the Zohar versus a Neoplatonic paradigm based on the classical triad of universal intellect – universal soul – nature in Ibn al-ʿArabī’s corpus. The notions of divine election are likewise slightly different, as in the Zohar the sectarian-exclusive character of human perfection is more prominent. Despite these differences, the similarities between the two corpora are striking, and according to my hypothesis should be understood as deriving from the Arabic Neoplatonic heritage both corpora share and the Andalusī mystical traditions to which they belonged in general. Arabic Neoplatonic ideas were first introduced to al-Andalus via the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity and related writings. Such ideas circulated between the tenth and twelfth centuries among Jewish and Muslim thinkers such as Ibn Masarra Ibn Gabirol and al-Baṭalyawsī, and reached their culmination or crystallization in the oeuvre of Andalusī Jewish and Muslim mystics of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Neoplatonic ideas were transmitted to medieval Kabbalah, and especially to the Zohar, through Hebrew translations of Judeo-Arabic and Arabic works, such as those of Ibn Gabirol and al-Baṭalyawsī, the anonymous Maʿāni al-Nafs, or works partially influenced by Neoplatonism as Judah Halevi’s Kuzari.107
I proposed to examine the motif of garments in the works of Ibn al-ʿArabī and in Zoharic literature in light of this shared heritage. Assuming a shared Neoplatonic history is one possible way to explain the similarities between the corpora, and this article is an attempt in that direction. The particular similarities related to the garment-motif in the Zohar and in Ibn al-ʿArabī’s oeuvre seem to go further than basic ideas or terminology, as both corpora also share similar conceptions of emanation and divine manifestation, divine names, and human perfection. I have mentioned in passing a number of possible sources that may have helped to shape the Andalusī heritage from which Ibn al-ʿArabī and the author(s) of the Zohar may have drawn, whether Judeo-Arabic or Arabic, such as the Kuzari, Ibn Gabirol, Abraham bar Ḥiyya, and al-Ghazālī. Further and more intensive research into the shared writings that inspired Ibn al-ʿArabī and the author(s) of the Zohar, especially the Judeo-Arabic link that presumably exposed Neoplatonic ideas to medieval Kabbalah, will surely produce more findings. Moreover, it could be useful to examine older sources that could have influenced the shaping of the garment-motif in Islamic mysticism, such as Syriac Christian sources or traditions and writings of the so-called heretical (ghulāt) Shīʿite sects.108
Acknowledgements
This article is based on an MA thesis, written under the supervision of Dr. Michael Ebstein and Prof. Avishai Bar-Asher, as part of a research conducted by them and funded by the Israel Science Foundation. I would like to express my gratitude to them for their support in writing this paper. I would also like to thank the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities for their generous support of my research.
I’ll be employing the term “mysticism” in this article, despite the theoretical problems that it raises. For criticism regarding the use of the term “mysticism” see Leigh Eric Schmidt, “The Making of Modern ‘Mysticism,’” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 71, no. 2 (2003): 273–302; Steven Katz, ed., Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Bernard McGinn, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism, vol. I, The Foundations of Mysticism (New York: Crossroad, 1991); Louis Bouyer, “Mysticism: an Essay on the History of the Word” in Understanding Mysticism, ed., Richard Woods (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980), 42–55; Boaz Huss, Mystifying Kabbalah: Academic Scholarship, National Theology, and New Age Spirituality, Oxford Studies in Western Esotericism (New York, Oxford University Press: 2020), 1–34.
On these streams, see Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), ix–xx.
For these writers, see mainly Michael Ebstein, Mysticism and Philosophy in al-Andalus: Ibn Masarra, Ibn al-ʿArabī and the Ismāʿīlī Tradition, Islamic History and Civilization 103 (Leiden: Brill, 2014); Yousef Casewit, The Mystics of al-Andalus: Ibn Barrajān and Islamic Thought in the Twelfth Century, Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). On Ibn Masarra, see Sarah Stroumsa and Sarah Sviri, “The Beginnings of Mystical Philosophy in al-Andalus: Ibn Masarra and his Epistle on Contemplation,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 36 (2009): 201–253; Godefroid De Callataÿ, “Philosophy and Bāṭinism: Ibn Masarra’s Risālat Al I‘Tibār and the Rasāʾil Ikhwān Al-Ṣafā,’” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 41 (2014): 261–312; On Ibn Qasī, see Michael Ebstein, “Was Ibn Qasī a Sufi?,” Studia Islamica 110 (2015): 196–232. On Ibn al-ʿArabī see William Chittick, The Self-Disclosure of God: Principles of Ibn al-Arabi’s Cosmology, SUNY Series in Islam (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998); William Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989); Michel Chodkiewicz, Seal of the Saints, trans. Liadain Sherrard (Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1993); Claude Addas, Quest for the Red Sulphur: The Life of Ibn Arabi, trans. Peter Kingsley (Cambridge: The Islamic Texts Society, 1993).
On the intricacies of terms such as “Neoplatonism,” “Neoplatonic tradition,” etc., and the difficulty of their usage in Islamic mysticism, see Michael Ebstein, “Emanation (Fayḍ) in Classical Islamic Mysticism,” in Sufi Cosmology, ed. Christian Lange and Alexander Knysh, Handbook of Oriental Studies: Section 1 The Near and Middle East 154, no. 2 (Leiden: Brill, 2023), 299–300.
For the Brethren of Purity, see Yves Marquet, “Ikhwān al-Safaʾ,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd Edition., 12 vols., ed. Peri Bearman et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1960–2005), 3: 1071–1076, and further references there. Their encyclopedic Epistles of the Brethren of Purity, and especially the concluding epistle (al-risāla al-jāmiʿa), had an enormous impact on Jewish thinkers who wrote in Judeo-Arabic. See Ehud Krinis, “Al-Risāla al-Jāmiʾaʾ and Its Judeo-Arabic Manuscript,” in Islam: Identité et Altérité: Hommage à Guy Monnot, ed. Mohammad Ali Amir- Moezzi, bibliothèque de l’école pratique des hautes études – sciences religieuses 165 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 311–329. For the influence of the Brethren’s Epistles on Andalusian thought in general, see Godefroid De Callataÿ, “Magia en al-Andalus: Rasāʾil Ijwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rutbat al-Ḥakīm y Gāyat al-Ḥakīm (Picatrix),” Al-Qantara, 34, no. 2 (2013): 297–344; Godefroid De Callataÿ, “From Ibn Masarra to Ibn ʿArabī: References and Subtle Allusions to the Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ in the Literature of al Andalus,” in “Labor limae: atti in onore di Carmela Baffioni,” ed. Antonella Straface, Carlo De Angelo, and Andrea Manzo, special issue, Studi Magrebini n.s. 12 (2014): 217–267; Godefroid De Callataÿ, “Again on Maslama Ibn Qāsim al-Qurṭubī, the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ and Ibn Khaldūn: New Evidence from Two Manuscripts of Rutbat al-Ḥakīm,” Al-Qanṭara 37, no. 2 (2016): 329–72; Ayala Eliyahu, “Ibn al-Sīd al-Baṭalyawsī and his Place in Medieval Muslim and Jewish Thought” [Hebrew] (PhD diss., The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2010); Casewit, Mystics, 36–37, 65–66, 79–81, 173–174, 249–250; Ebstein, “Was Ibn Qasī a Ṣūfī?,” 196–232; Ebstein, Mysticism and Philosophy, pp. 7–8.
See Ariel Bension, The Zohar in Moslem and Christian Spain (London: Routledge, 1932); Shlomo Pines, “Shīʿite Terms and Conceptions in Judah Halevi’s Kuzari,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 2 (1980): 165–251; Moshe Idel, “The Sefirot above the Sefirot,” [Hebrew] Tarbiz 51 (1982) 270–277; Amos Goldreich, “The Theology of the ‘Iyyun’ Circle and a Possible Source of the Term ‘Aḥdut Shava,’” [Hebrew] Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 6 (1987): 141–156; Elliot Wolfson, “Letter Symbolism and Merkavah Imagery in the Zohar,” in Alei Shefer: Studies in the Literature of Jewish Thought Presented to Rabbi Dr. Alexander Safran, ed. Moshe Hallamish (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 1990), 195–236; Elliot Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 224–233; Sarah O. Heller-Wilensky, “The ‘First Created Being’ in Early Kabbalah: Philosophical and Ismailian Sources,” [Hebrew] Binah 3 (1994): 65–77; Michael Ebstein and Tzahi Weiss, “A Drama in Heaven: ‘Emanation on the Left’ in Kabbalah and a Parallel Cosmogonic Myth in Ismāʿīlī Literature,” History of Religions 55, no. 2 (2015): 148–171; Ehud Krinis, “Cyclical Time in the Ismāʿīlī Circle of Ikhwān al-ṣafāʾ (Tenth Century) and in Early Jewish Kabbalists Circles (Thirteenth and Fourteenth centuries),” Studia Islamica 111 (2016): 20–108; Avishai Bar-Asher, “The Soul Bird: Ornithomancy and Theory of the Soul in the Homilies of Zohar Pericope Balak,” [Hebrew] in The Zoharic Story, ed. Jonatan Benarroch, Yehuda Liebes, and Melila Hellner-Eshed, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 2017), 1: 354–392; Avishai Bar-Asher, Journeys of the Soul: Concepts and Imageries of Paradise in Medieval Kabbalah [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2019); Ronald Kiener, “From ‘Baal ha-Zohar’ to Prophet to Ecstatic: The Vicissitudes of Abulafia in Contemporary Scholarship,” in “Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism”: 50 Years After, ed. Peter Schäfer and Joseph Dan (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1993); Ronald Kiener, “Ibn al-ʾArabí and the Qabbalah: A Study of Thirteenth-Century Iberian Mysticism,” Studies in Mystical Literature 2 (1982) 26–52; Harvey. J. Hames, “A Seal within a Seal: The Imprint of Ṣūfism in Abraham Abulafia’s Teachings,” Medieval Encounters 12 (2006): 153–172; Haviva Pedaya, Vision and Speech: Models of Revelatory Experience in Jewish Mysticism, [Hebrew] Sources and Studies in the Literature of Jewish Mysticism 8 (Los Angeles: Cherub, 2002) 171–200; Tanja Werthmann, “Forms of Platonic Eros in the Zohar: Metamorphoses of Ancient Greek Metaphysics in 13th Century Kabbalah” (PhD diss., The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2018); Tanja Werthmann, “‘Spirit to Spirit’: The Imagery of the Kiss in the ‘Zohar’ and Its Possible Sources,” Harvard Theological Review 111, no. 4 (2018): 586–609; Tanja Werthmann, “Prime Matter as Wisdom in Geronese Kabbalah: Philosophical Precedents to the Elevated Ontological Status of the Hypostatic Female,” Journal of Religion 101, no. 2 (2021): 223–258. Most of the scholarly effort in the field of the relationship between Islamic and Jewish mysticism has traditionally been devoted to the influence of classical Sufism on the phenomenon called “Jewish Sufism,” and especially to the circle of the Jewish Egyptian Pietists. The most important scholar in this field is Paul B. Fenton, of whose numerous writings the following are just a few: Paul B. Fenton, Philosophie et exégèse dans le Jardin de la métaphore de Moïse Ibn ʾEzra, philosophe et poète andalou du XIIe siècle, Études sur le judaïsme médiéval 19 (Leiden: Brill, 1996); Paul B. Fenton, The Treatise of the Pool (al-Maqāla al-Ḥawḍiyya) of ʿObadyāh b. Abraham b. Moses Maimonides (London: Octagon, 1981); Paul B. Fenton, “A Mystical Commentary on the Song of Songs in the Hand of David Maimonides II,” in Esoteric and Exoteric Aspects in Judeo-Arabic Culture, ed. Benjamin Hary and Haggai Ben-Shammai (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 19–53; Paul B. Fenton, “A Mystical Treatise on Perfection, Providence and Prophecy from the Jewish Sufi Circle,” in The Jews of Medieval Islam: Community, Societ, and Identity: Proceedings of an International Conference Held by the Institute of Jewish Studies, University College London 1992, ed. Daniel Frank, Études sur le judaïsme médiéval 16 (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 301–344; Paul B. Fenton, “Some Judaeo-Arabic fragments by Rabbi Abraham he-Hasid, the Jewish Sufi,” JSS 26, no. 1 (1981): 47–72; Paul B. Fenton, “Abraham Maimonides (1186–1237): Founding a Mystical Dynasty,” in Jewish Mystical Leaders and Leadership in the 13th Century, ed. Moshe Idel et al. (Northvale: Jason Aronson, 1998). See also Elisha Russ-Fishbane, Judaism, Sufism, and the Pietists of Medieval Egypt: A Study of Abraham Maimonides and His Times, Oxford Studies in the Abrahamic Religions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Alexander Altmann, Studies in Religious Philosophy and Mysticism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969).
See the references above in n. 6. On Arabic Neoplatonism among Muslims and Jews in al-Andalus, see Sarah Stroumsa, Andalus and Sefarad: On Philosophy and its History in Islamic Spain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 102–123.
For a full catalogue of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s works and an examination of their authenticity, see Osman Yahia, Histoire et Classification de l’Oeuvre d’Ibn ʾArabi: Étude Critique, Institut français de Damas 53 (Damascus: Institut français de Damas, 1964); Jane Clark and Stephen Hirtenstein, “Establishing Ibn ʿArabī’s Heritage: First findings from the MIAS Archiving Project,” JMIAS 52 (2012) 1–32; Stephen Hirtenstein, “In the Master’s Hand: A Preliminary Study of Ibn ʿArabī’s Holographs and Autographs,” JMIAS 60 (2016): 65–106.
For research on the textual and literary structure of the Zohar, see Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 3rd rev. ed. (New York: Schocken, 1961), 159–163; Tishby, The Wisdom of the Zohar, 1: 1–12; Ronit Meroz, Spiritual Biography of Rabbi Simeon bar Yochay: An Analysis of the Zohar’s Textual Components [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2018), 19–41. For a study of the history of academic research on this topic and on the question of the Zohar’s authorship, see Daniel Abrams, Kabbalistic Manuscripts and Textual Theory: Methodologies of Textual Scholarship and Editorial Practice in the Study of Jewish Mysticism, 2nd rev. ed. (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2014), 264–428.
Eschatology of the soul is an especially fertile context for comparison of the motif of garments between Kabbalah and Andalusī mysticism, and I intend to devote a separate article to it. Meanwhile, see Yinon Kahan, “The Spiritual Garment in Medieval Islamic Mysticism and Kabbalah: A Comparative Study of the Zoharic Literature and the Writings of Muḥyi al-Din Ibn al-ʿArabi (1165–1240),” [Hebrew] (MA diss., The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2021), 65–85.
For a significant analysis of this resemblance see Wolfson, Language, 224–233.
For such speculations, see especially Gerschom Scholem, “The Paradisic Garb of Souls and the Origin of the Concept of ‘Haluka de-Rabbanan,’” [Hebrew] Tarbiz 24, no. 3 (1955): 290–306; David Zvi Baneth, “‘Haluqa de-Rabbanan,’ ‘Hibbur Yafeh min ha-yeshuʾah’ and a Mohammedan Tradition,” [Hebrew] Tarbiz 25, no. 3 (1956): 331–336. Baneth suggested an Islamic influence but confined his discussion to the field of Ḥadīth literature and did not discuss Islamic mysticism.
See Asi Farber-Ginat, “The Concept of the Merkabah in Thirteenth-Century Jewish Esotericism – ‘Sod ha-Egoz’ and its Development,” [Hebrew] (PhD diss., The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1986), 307–309, 320–323, 468–479; Asi Farber-Ginat, “‘The Shell Precedes the Fruit’ – On the Question of the Origin of Metaphysical Evil in Early Kabbalistic Thought,” [Hebrew] in Myth and Judaism, ed. Haviva Pedaya, Eshel Beʾer Sheva 4 (Beersheba: Ben Gurion University Press, 1996), 118–142 (127 and n. 59); Dorit Cohen-Alloro, The Secret of the Garment in the Zohar [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Press, 1987). For additional research into the motif in the Zohar, see Scholem, “The Paradisic Garb of Souls”; Gershom Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead: Basic Concepts in the Kabbalah (New York: Schocken, 1991), 251–273 (especially 262–266); Isaiah Tishby, The Wisdom of the Zohar: Anthology of Texts, ed. Fischel Lachower, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 2: 771–772; Oded Yisraeli, Interpretation of Secrets and the Secret of Interpretation, [Hebrew] Sources and Studies in the Literature of Jewish Mysticism 17 (Los Angeles: Cherub, 2005), 63–65, 136–139, 208–213; Oded Yisraeli, Temple Portals, trans. Liat Keren, Studia Judaica 88 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 67–86; Bar-Asher, Journeys of the Soul, 114–116, 162–166; Yehuda Liebes, Sections of the Zohar Lexicon [Hebrew] (PhD diss., The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1983), 29, 67–68, 172–173, 223; Louis Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, trans. Henrietta Szold, 7 vols. (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1968), 5:103–104; Elliot Ginsburg, The Sabbath in the Classical Kabbalah, SUNY Series in Judaica (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 231–242; Moshe Idel, Angelic World: Apotheosis and Theophany [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Miskal, 2008), 56–59; Avishar Har-Shefi, Malkhin Kadmain: the Myth of the Edomite Kings in the Zoharic Literature [Hebrew] (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2010), 48–59. For the motif in the writings of Nachmanides and his followers, see Scholem, “The Paradisic Garb of Souls”; Elliot Wolfson, “The Secret of the Garment in Nahmanides,” Daʿat 24 (1990): XXV–XLIX; Haviva Pedaya, Nahmanides: Cyclical Time and Holy Text [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2003), 314–349 (especially 336–337). For the motif in later Kabbalah, see Moshe Idel, Absorbing Perfections: Kabbalah and Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 143–145; Avishai Bar-Asher, “Kabbalistic Interpretations of the Secret of the Garment in the 16th Century,” [Hebrew] Daʿat 76 (2013): 191–213; Lawrence Fine, Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos: Isaac Luria and His Kabbalistic Fellowship, Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 308 and n. 16.
William Chittick has written about the veils in Ibn al-ʿArabī’s writings, a motif that has indeed a partial though important connection to the one dealt with in this paper. See Chittick, Cosmology, 104–107,120–166; Chittick, “The Paradox of the Veil,” in Rending the Veil: Concealment and Secrecy in the History of Religions/New York University Annual Conference in Comparative Religions, ed. Elliot Wolfson (New York: Seven Bridges, 1999), 59–85.
See Plotinus, Enneads (1:6.7), trans. Arthur H. Armstrong, 7 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978–1988), 1:253.
See Plotinus Among the Arabs, ed. Abd al-Rahman Badawi (Cairo: al-Nahḍa al-Maṣriyya, 1955), 194.
On Ibn al-ʿArabī’s cosmological paradigms see Chittick, Cosmology, xxix–xxxii, 258–262; Abul Ela Affifi, The Mystical Philosophy of Muhyid Dín-Ibnul ʿArabi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939), 59–65; Ebstein, Mysticism and Philosophy, 95–96. See also Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī Ibn al-ʿArabī, al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, ed. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Sulṭān al-Manṣūb (Yemen: Wizārat al-thaqāfa, al-jumhūriyya al-yamīniyya, 2010), 6:124–374, 3:416–448. For the sefirot in the Zohar and Zoharic cosmology, see Tishby, The Wisdom of the Zohar, 1:269–307; Gershom Scholem, “An Inquiry in the Kabbala of R. Isaac ben Jacob Hacohen, II. The Evolution of the Doctrine of the Worlds in the Early Kabbala (Conclusion),” [Hebrew] Tarbiz 3, no. 1 (1931): 33–66, 62–69; Michal Oron, Window to the Stories of the Zohar: Studies in the Exegetical and Narrative Methods of the Zohar, Sources and Studies in the Literature of Jewish Mysticism 33 [Hebrew] (Los Angeles: Cherub, 2013), 136 n. 11, 143–144.
See, for instance, Tishby, The Wisdom of the Zohar, 1:273–283; 2:549–555; Ephraim Gottlieb, Studies in the Kabbala Literature, ed. Joseph Hacker (Tel Aviv: The Chaim Rosenberg School for Jewish Studies, 1976), 173–182; Oron, Window, 134–151; Ronit Meroz, Headwaters of the Zohar: Analysis and Annotated Critical Edition of Parashat Exodus of the Zohar (Tel Aviv: The Haim Rubin Tel Aviv University Press, 2019), 640–654; Ronit Meroz, Biography, 27–28, 53–75.
See Oron, Window, 135.
See Zohar Ḥadash, 76d, ed. Reuven Margulies, 2nd ed. (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-Rav Kook, 1978). Compare Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer, ed. Eliezer Treitl, (Warsaw: Bi-defus Netanel D. Zisberg, 1874), 6; Bereshit Rabba, ed. Julius Theodor and Hanoch Albeck, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (Jerusalem: Wahrmann, 1965), 1:4, 1:20.
See Zohar, ed. Reuven Margulies, 5th ed., 3 vols. (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-Rav Kook, 1970), 1:2b.
See Zohar 3:7b, 3:209a.
The kernel of everything is here the divine matter, which emanates from the essence of the Godhead and is covered with shells that constrains such matter in definite limits.
Referring here to the second sefira – ḥokhma (wisdom), from which the emanation begins.
Referring here to the third sefira – bina (understanding). It is seen as a palace encompassing and covering the ḥokhma, which is pictured as a point.
Zohar 1:19b–20a. The translation of the Zohar in this paper is based on Daniel Matt’s edition, with a few changes of my own. See The Zohar: Pritzker Edition, ed. Daniel Matt, 12 vols. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004–2017).
See, for instance, Zohar 3:193b, 3:204b.
See, for instance, Zohar 3:204b. See also Cohen-Alloro, The Secret of the Garment, 1213.
For the affinity between the images of the nut and the garment in other contexts, see Zohar Ḥadash 4:b–c (Sitrei Otiot). For the concept of qelippot and “the mystery of the nut” (sod ha-egoz) in the Zohar, see Farber-Ginat, “The Concept of the Merkabah,” 307–309, 320–323, 468–479; Farber-Ginat, “The Shell Precedes the Fruit,” 118–142.
This well-known image is derived from Sefer Yetzira 1:7. Cf. Zohar 1:50b–51a. See also Tishby, The Wisdom of the Zohar, 1:291–292.
Zohar 3:70a.
See likewise Zohar 2:260a. For the concept of evil as reflected here, see Farber-Ginat, “The Shell Precedes the Fruit,” especially 119–126.
For a similar suggestion regarding the thought of Nachmanides, see Pedaya, Nahmanides, 334. On the pseudo-Empedoclian tradition, see Daniel De Smet, Empedocles Arabus: une lecture neoplatonicienne tardive (Brussels: Paleis der Academiën, 1998); Stroumsa, Andalus and Sefarad, 115–120.
For the relativity of form and matter, see, for instance, Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, (Ch. 1:69), trans. Shlomo Pines, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 1:168–169; Maimonides, “Eight Chapters,” (Ch. 1) in Maimonides’ Introductions to the Mishna, [Hebrew] ed. and trans. Yitzhak Shilat, rev. ed. (Jerusalem: Maʿaliot, 1992), 378. See also Pedaya, Nahmanides, 335.
See Zohar 1:16a.
For references to the history of this segment from Abraham bar Ḥiyya onward, see Cohen- Alloro, The Secret of the Garment, 17 n. 1; Meroz, Biography, 65 n. 63; Zohar (Pritzker ed.), 1:118 n. 75.
See Jacques Schlanger, La philosophie de Salomon Ibn Gabirol: étude d’un néoplatonisme, Études sur le judaïsme médiéval 3 (Leiden: Brill, 1968), 260–264; Sarah Pessin, Ibn Gabirol’s Theology of Desire: Matter and Method in Jewish Medieval Neoplatonism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 33. See likewise Farber-Ginat, “The Shell Precedes the Fruit,” 118–142; Pedaya, Nahmanides, 334. Compare Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, 2:17, 3:8. Maimonides emphasizes that form is cast on all created beings and removed from them, and that absence of form means absence of being. This notion is in line with a common idea in Zoharic literature which ascribes to evil, which is absence of being, the absence of a garment. On the pseudo-Empedoclian school of Neoplatonism, see Stroumsa, Andalus and Sefarad, 115–120; Werthmann, “Prime Matter as Wisdom,” 223–258.
An exhaustive discussion on the term ḥijāb in Ibn al-ʿArabī’s thought is beyond the scope of this paper. See Wolfson, Language, 224–233; Chittick, “The Paradox of the Veil” 59–85; Chittick, Cosmology, 104–107, 120–166. On the connection between the term ḥijāb and the concept of form, see Ibn al-ʿArabī, Futūḥāt, 8:320–333.
Ibn al-ʿArabī, “Kitāb al-ḥujub,” in ʿAnqā mughrib fī Khatam al-ʾawliyā wa-shams al-maghrib, kitāb al-Ḥujub, inshā al-dawāʾir and ʿuqlat al-mustawfiz, ed. Assem I. al-Kayyali, 2nd ed. (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2009), 99.
See Chittick, Cosmology, 135–142. The term sabab (pl. asbāb) is derived from philosophical discourse and it originally meant “[secondary] cause.” According to Ibn al-ʿArabī, since the secondary causes are not identical with the first cause, i.e., God, they are identified with creation itself. Therefore, in Ibn al-ʿArabī’s writings, the term means the created beings and the created means that sustain them. See Chittick, Sufi Path, 44–46.
See Ibn al-ʿArabī, Futūḥāt, 1:163. Compare al-Ghazālī, The Niche of Lights, ed. David Buchman (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1998), 17.
See Ibn al-ʿArabī, Futūḥāt, 7:148.
Subuḥāt wajhihi; another possible translation is “brightness.”
Abū ʿAbdallāh Muḥammad ibn Mājah, Sunan Ibn Mājah, ed. Muḥammad F. ʿAbd al-Bāqi, 6 vols. (Cairo: Dār Iḥyāʾ al-Kutub al-ʿArabiyya, 1952), 1:70–71 (1:195–196); Muslim ibn al-Ḥajjāj, Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, ed. Muḥammad F. ʿAbd al-Bāqi, vols. 4 (Cairo: Dār al-Ḥadīth, 1991), 1:161–162 (1:179a).
See, for instance, Ibn al-ʿArabī, Futūḥāt, 11:527.
See further Chittick, “The Paradox of the Veil,” 59–85. On the acquaintance with al-Ghazālī’s work in al-Andalus in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and his influence on Andalusī thinkers, see Casewit, Mystics, 1–10, 42–44, 50–66, 84–90, 150–154, 313; Kenneth Garden, The First Islamic Reviver: Abū Hāmid al-Ghazālī and His Revival of the Religious Sciences (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 69 n. 7.
al-Ghazālī’s Mishkāt al-Anwār itself seems to have been influenced by Arabic Neoplatonism, either from Ibn Sīnā, or possibly, from Ismāʿīlī sources. See Frank Griffel, Al-Ghazālī’s Philosophical Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 247, 253; Frank Griffel, “Al-Ghazālī’s Cosmology in the Veil Section of his Mishkāt al Anwār,” in Avicenna and his Legacy: A Golden Age of Science and Philosophy, ed. Tzvi Langermann, Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages 8 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), 34–35, 44–45; Hermann Landolt, “Ghazālī and ‘Religionswissenschaft’: Some Notes on the Mishkāt al-Anwār,” Asiatische Studien 45 (1991): 19–72; Khalil Andani, “The Merits of the Bāṭiniyya: al-Ghazālī’s Appropriation of Ismaʿili Cosmology,” Journal of Islamic Studies 29, no. 2 (2018): 181–229.
Ibn al-ʿArabī, Futūḥāt, 5:600.
See Chittick, Sufi Path, 6–8.
For such paradigms, see n. 18 above.
See Ibn al-ʿArabī, Futūḥāt, 8:315.
See Ibn al-ʿArabī, Futūḥāt, 4:546. Ridāʾ is literally a garment covering the upper part of the body. The identification between garment and veil is mentioned there a few more times.
See Chittick, Sufi Path, 91.
See Abraham Ibn Ezra, “Hayy ben Meqits,” in An Anthology of Abraham Ibn Ezra’s Poetry, ed. Israel Levin, Shirat tor ha-zahav bi-sefarad [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: The Chaim Rosenberg School for Jewish Studies, 2011), 62–82.
ʿAlī Ibn Sīnā, “Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān,” in Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān by Ibn Sīnā, Ibn Ṭufayl and Suhrawardī, ed. Aḥmad Amīn; 4th ed. (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, 2008), 39. Compare to the Hebrew translation: ʿAlī Ibn Sīnā, “Hayy ben Meqits,” in Kovetz al Yad 2, ed. David J. Kaufmann (Berlin: Mekitze Nirdamim, 1886), 29.
See Avencebrolis (Solomon Ibn Gabirol), Fons Vitae, ed. Clemens Baeumker, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters, Texte und Untersuchungen: vol. 1, n. 2 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1892–1895), 229, 271, 334.
See Solomon Ibn Gabirol, Fons Vitae, [Hebrew] ed. Abraham Tsifroni, trans. Yaakov Blovstein, sifria filosofit (Jerusalem: Sinai, 1926), 267. See also Ibn Gabirol, Fons Vitae, ed. Abraham Tsifroni, 242, 245, 249, 253. On Ibn Gabirol’s impact on medieval Kabbalah, see Gershom Scholem, [Hebrew] “Traces of Gabirol in the Kabbalah,” Meʾassef Sofrey ʾEreṣ Yisraʾel (1940): 160–178; Yehuda Liebes, “Rabbi Solomon Ibn Gabirol’s Use of the ‘Sefer Yeṣira’ and a Commentary on the Poem ‘I Love Thee’” [Hebrew] Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 6, no. 3–4 (1988): 73–123. On the reflection of Ibn Falaquera’s translations in medieval Kabbalah, see Scholem, Major Trends, 203–204, 398 n. 155; Moses de León, Sefer Mishkan ha-Edut, [Hebrew] ed. Avishai Bar-Asher, Sources and Studies in the Literature of Jewish Mysticism 37 (Los Angeles: Cherub, 2014), xv, n. 104; Moshe Idel, “The Magical and Neoplatonic Interpretations of the Kabbalah in the Renaissance,” [Hebrew] Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 4 (1982): 96–97.
See Yehuda Halevi, Kuzari, trans. Hartwig Hirschfeld (London: Routledge, 1905), 77 (1:109).
See Gottlieb, Studies, 20.
See Avishai Bar-Asher, “The Zohar and Its Aramaic: The Dynamic Development of the Aramaic Dialect(s) of the Zoharic Canon,” Leshonenu 83 (2021): 221–287 (269). For the acquaintance with the Kuzari in the early Kabbalah, see Avishai Bar-Asher, “The Kuzari and Early Kabbalah: Between Integration and Interpretation regarding the Secrets of the Sacrificial Rite” Harvard Theological Review 116, n. 2 (2023): 228–253. For the various opinions about the relationship between de León’s writings and Zoharic literature, see mainly Abrams, Kabbalistic Manuscripts, 264–428; Bar-Asher, Journeys of the Soul, 13–24, 464–468.
See, for instance, Maimonides, Eight Chapters, 7.
See Wolfson, Language, 224–233.
That is, God’s names; according to one famous tradition, there are 99 such names.
This is a Muʿtazilite notion. The Muʿtazila, as is well-known, believed in free human will and limited divine actions to good acts only. See, for instance, al-Qāḍi ʿAbd al-Jabbār, al-majmuʿ fī al-muḥīt bi-l-taklīf, ed. Jean J. Houben and Daniel Gimaret, 3 vols., Université Saint-Joseph Institut de Lettres Orientales: Langue Arabe et pensée Islamique 1:12 (Beirut: Dār al-Mashriq, 1965–1999), 1:26; Daniel Gimaret, “Muʿtazila,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd Edition, 7:783–793.
This is a Jahmī-deterministic notion. Jahm ibn Ṣafwān (d. 745–746) held an extreme notion of determinism and claimed that God alone can be the initiator of action, and that actions are ascribed to human beings only metaphorically. See, for instance, Abū al-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī, Maqālāt al-Islāmiyyīn, ed. Muḥammad abd al-Ḥamīd, 2 vols. (Beirut: al-maktaba al-ʿaṣriyyia, 1990), 1:338; William Montgomery Watt, “Ḏj̲ahm b. Ṣafwān,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd Edition, 2: 388.
Another possible translation could be “inner interpretation,” since the term iʿtibār [fī al-bātin] basically means in various places in Ibn al-ʿArabī’s works inner-esoteric exegesis. See, for instance, Ibn al-ʿArabī, Futūḥāt, 2:380, 436, 438, 444, 445; 3: 264, 266. See also Casewit, Mystics, 206–244.
Or, garments of number/counting.
Ibn al-ʿArabī, Futūḥāt, 11:338–339.
It should be noted the “act” and “name” are essentially synonymous in this passage.
Compare Ibn al-ʿArabī, Tarjumān al-Ashwāq, ed. Abd al-Raḥman Mustawi (Beirut: Dār al-Maʿrifa, 2000), 32.
For the connection between the terms “form” and “name,” see Fuṣūṣ, 93; Chittick, Sufi Path, 33–46. On other aspects of the term “name,” see Chittick, Sufi Path, 84; Chittick, “Ibn al-ʿArabi’s ‘Myth of the Names,’” in Philosophies of Being and Mind: Ancient and Medieval, ed. James T. H. Martin (Delmar: Caravan Books, 1992), 207–219.
Ibn al-ʿArabī, Futūḥāt, 7:283. For the concept of “the new creation,” see Chittick, Sufi Path, 96–112. The term “breath” here refers to nafas al-raḥmān (sometimes al-nafas al-raḥmāni), that is, the creative aspect of God, pictured as a divine “breath” that leads to the articulation of divine letters and then words, which are the created beings. See Chittick, Sufi Path, 19, 34.
See Chittick, Cosmology, 170–173.
See Chittick, Sufi Path, 66–67.
This notion seems to be reflected in other works of Moses de León as well. See Avishai Bar-Asher, “From Alphabetical Mysticism to Theosophical Kabbalah: A Rare Witness to an Intermediate Stage of Moses de León’s Thought,” revue des études juives 179, no. 3–4 (2020): 374 with no. 84.
Deuteronomy 32:9.
Deuteronomy 4:4.
Zohar 2:96a.
For more on the theme of the one versus the many in relation to the motif of the garments, see Cohen-Alloro, The Secret of the Garment, 14.
Zohar 2:96b.
See, for instance, Zohar 1:2a; 2:176b, 208b, 229a–b.
See above, p. 25.
For letter speculations, the concept of divine creative language, etc., in Ibn al-ʿArabī’s works, see Ebstein, Mysticism and Philosophy, 77–122; Chittick, Sufi Path, 19; Dunja Rašić, The Written World of God: The Cosmic Script and the Art of Ibn ʿArabī (Oxford: Anqa, 2021). For the Zohar, see, for instance, Yehuda Liebes, Ars Poetica in Sefer Yetsira [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Schocken, 2000), 111–120, 127–140, 268 n. 17; Elliot Wolfson, “The Anthropomorphic and Symbolic Image of the Letters in the Zohar,” Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 8 (1989): 147–181; Oron, Window, 21–38; Charles Mopsik, “Pensée, voix et parole dans le Zohar,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 213, no. 4 (1996): 385–414; Meroz, Biography, 28.
See Avishai Bar-Asher, “From the Vaults of Thebes: Moses de Léon’s Pseudepigraphic Writings on the Letters, Vowel Signs, Theonyms, and Magical Practices and the Origin of Zoharic Fiction,” Kabbalah 51 (2022), 157–248; Wolfson, “Anthropomorphic Imagery,” 147–181; Bar-Asher, “Intermediate Stage,” 374 with no. 84; Bar-Asher, “Letter Symbolism,” 195–236.
See Sarah Stroumsa, “‘Wondrous Paths’: The Ismāʿīlī Context of Saadya’s Commentary on Sefer Yeṣira,” Bochumer Philosophisches Jahrbuch Fur Antike Und Mittelalter 18, no. 1 (2015): 74–90.
On the perfect man in Ibn al-ʿArabī’s oeuvre and in the Akbarian tradition, see Masataka Takeshita, Ibn al-ʿArabi’s Theory of the Perfect Man and Its Place in the History of Islamic Thought, Studia Culturae Islamicae 32 (Tokyo: Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, 1987); Fitzroy Morrissey, Sufism and the Perfect Human: From Ibn ʿArabī to al-Jīlī, Routledge Sufi Series (London: Routledge, 2020), 51–82; Chittick, Sufi Path, 28–30, 294–297; Ebstein, Mysticism and Philosophy, 157–188. See also references to earlier research in Chodkiewicz, Seal of the Saints, 70 n. 36.
That is, whoever attributes these divine attributes to himself.
See Sulaymān ibn al-Ashʿath Abu Dāwūd, Sunan Abu Dāwūd, ed. Muḥammad ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Khālidī, 3 vols. (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1996), 3:61; Ibn Mājah, Sunan, 2:1397–1398; Muḥammad ibn Ismāʿīl al-Bukhāri, al-Adab al-Mufrad, ed. Muḥammad F. ʿAbd al-Bāqi (Cairo: al-Maṭbaʿa al-Salafiyya wa-Maktabatuha, 1955–1956), 145 (30:552). This tradition is widely quoted by Ibn al-ʿArabī. See, for instance, Ibn al-ʿArabī, Futūḥāt, 2:505; 4:41, 329, 546–548; 5:383; 7:172; 10:116, 253; 11:326–327. Here the ḥadīth is mentioned in the framework of the answers that Ibn al-ʿArabī supplies to the 150 questions laid forth by the earlier ninth-century Sufi al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī. On al-Tirmidhī’s questions and Ibn al-ʿArabī’s answers see Sara Sviri, “Questions and Answers: A Literary Dialogue between al-Hakīm al-Tirmidhī and Ibn al-ʿArabī,” in Studies in Honor of Shaul Shaked, ed. Yohanan Friedmann and Etan Kohlberg (Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 2019), 141–157; Sara Sviri, “Mystical Psychology of al-Ḥakim at Tirmidi” (PhD diss.; The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1979); Drei Schriften des Theosophen von Tirmid, ed. Bernd Radtke, Bibliotheca Islamica 35, no. a–b (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1996), 45 n. 43.
This is a reference to the famous ḥadīth according to which man was born in God’s image or “form.” See Ebstein, Mysticism and Philosophy, 165–168; Alexander Altmann, “‘Homo Imago Dei’ in Jewish and Christian Theology,” The Journal of Religion 48, no. 3 (1968): 235–259; Christopher Melchert, “God Created Adam in His Image,” Journal of Qurʾanic Studies 13, no. 1 (2011): 113–124.
The “possible essences” are the essences of the created beings (al-mumkināt), whose existence is seen, in accordance with Ibn Sīnā’s philosophy, as possible (mumkin/imkānī), in contrast to God’s necessary (wājib) existence.
The effects (āthār) are the way God’s names reflect the divine manifestation in the universe or the names’ influences in creation. See Chittick, Sufi Path, 39–41. The perfect human being, reflecting all the divine names, thus serves as a “vicegerent” or “representative” (nāʾib) of God in the universe.
Muslim ibn al-Ḥajjāj, Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, 6:763.
Quran 6:103.
Ibn al-ʿArabī, Futūḥāt, 4:547–548.
See Ibn al-ʿArabī, Futūḥāt, 4:548. Cf. Ibn al-ʿArabī, Futūḥāt, 8:328; 10:264.
See Zohar, 2:96b.
The verb yishʿu in this verse conveys the meaning of gazing, but is similar in sound, albeit not related etymologically, to the previously mentioned noun yeshaʿ which means salvation.
The colors here refer to the different sefirot, as colors often take part in the Zoharic symbolism of the sefirot. Especially frequent is the ascription of the colors white or silver to ḥesed, red or gold to gevura, and green to tifʾeret. See Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, 1:291–292.
Zohar 2:90b. See also Cohen-Alloro, The Secret of the Garment, 13.
On the supreme, chosen status of the Islamic nation in Ibn al-ʿArabī’s thought, see Gregory A. Lipton, Rethinking Ibn ʿArabi (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
See, for instance, Elliot Wolfson, “Light Through Darkness: The Ideal of Human Perfection in the Zohar,” Harvard Theological Review 81, no. 1 (1988): 73–95; Yisraeli, Temple Portals, 78–100. The perfect man is called adam shlim (complete man), or adam ʿIlaʾa (supreme man). See Kiener, “Ibn al-ʾArabí and the Qabbalah,” 26–52.
See Pines, “Shīʿite terms,” 165–251; Ehud Krinis, God’s Chosen People: Judah Halevi’s “Kuzari” and the Shīʿī Imām Doctrine, Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages 7 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), 155–157, 199, 235–236, 294–295.
Judah Halevi, Kuzari, 212 (4:3).
Krinis, God’s Chosen People, 131–139; Pines, “Shīʿite terms,” 165–251.
Ebstein, Mysticism and Philosophy, 61–64; Michael Ebstein, “Human Action, God’s Will: Further Thoughts on the divine command (amr) in the Teachings of Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn al-ʿArabī (560–638/1165–1240),” in Intellectual Interactions in the Islamic World: the Ismaʾili Thread, ed. Orkhan Mir-Kasimov (London: The Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2019), 171–190.
On these aspects, often overlooked in modern scholarship on Ibn al-ʿArabī, see Lipton, Rethinking Ibn ʿArabi, 24–54.
Halevi rejected Neoplatonic cosmology but adopted other aspects of Neoplatonic thought. See Krinis, God’s Chosen People, 124, 129–131.
For the motif in Christian literature, see Sebastian Brock, “Clothing Metaphors as a Means of Theological Expression in Syriac Tradition,” in Typus Symbol Allegorie bei den Östlichen Vätern und ihren Parallelen im Mittelalter, ed. S. Brock, M. Schmidt, C. F. Geyer, Eichstätter Beiträge 4 (Regensburg: Pustet, 1982), 11–40; Alexander Toepel “When did Adam wear the Garments of Light?,” Journal of Jewish Studies 61.1 (2010): 62–71.
