A Sufi Conception of Order: Ibn ʿArabī’s Discourse on Governance

Abstract

This article outlines, through a reading of Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī’s Tadbīrāt al-ilāhiyya fī iṣlāḥ al-mamlaka al-insāniyya (Divine governance in the improvement of the kingdom of the self), a Sufi conception of order that encompasses a discourse on political governance and cuts across the realms of the cosmos, the self, and the polity. It explores the isomorphic relation and mutual ‘folding’ linking the governance of the worldly realm with that of the soul. In contrast to Montesquieu’s scheme of the ‘countervailing passions’, governance at both levels is built on the Sufi notion of ‘struggle against the self (jihād al-nafs)’ and on a theory of the human being as a microcosm. Within Ibn ʿArabī’s system, the political order is not an autonomous domain with its own rationality as developed by early modern European theorists of reason of state. A single rationality guides the governance of the microcosm and the macrocosm.