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Islam: Chapter Four: Ṡūfism: The Interior Religion of the Community: 3. The Antinomians

Connected to
Studies in Islamic Mysticism: Index: II. Subjects Similar meaning (70%) Studies in Islamic Mysticism: Chapter I. Abú Sa‘íd Ibn Abi ’l-Khayr: Introduction Similar meaning (69%) Studies in Islamic Mysticism: Chapter I. Abú Sa‘íd Ibn Abi ’l-Khayr: Part I Similar meaning (68%) Islam: Chapter Five: Kalām: The Statements of the Theologians: 5. Al-Ghazālī Similar meaning (65%)
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This is a scholarly survey excerpt — likely from an academic anthology or history of Islamic thought — tracing the development of Sufi mysticism from Khurasani antinomianism through its most systematic philosophical expression. The text introduces the Khurasani Sufi tradition as deliberately hostile to orthodox religious law, separating faith from works and entertaining theosophical ideas rejected by mainstream Islam, with the poet-mystic Abu Sa'id ibn Abi Khayr presented as an early exemplar who embraced human divinization, celebrated God through feasting and dance, and pioneered the distinctively Persian poetic mode of mixing the mundane and the divine. The central figure treated at length is the Andalusian theosopher Ibn al-Arabi, whose complete monism — the claim that not only is there no god but God, but there is literally nothing but God — is presented as the logical terminus of Sufi pantheistic temptation, with the text arguing his imagery and symbolism demonstrably influenced Dante, Spanish Catholic mystics such as St. John of the Cross, and likely Spinoza, even as those inheritors remained innocent of his actual pantheism. A notably distinctive claim runs throughout: that this antinomian, pantheistic Sufism is philosophically coherent and historically significant, but that it systematically erodes moral earnestness, because if everything is God then evil is illusion and law becomes meaningless bondage. The text includes substantial primary sources — quatrains, prose sayings, and Ibn al-Arabi's dense cosmological passage on Adam as the "polish of the mirror" of divine self-knowledge — positioning them as evidence for the tradition's genuine theological sophistication rather than mere heterodox excess.

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