Ibn Arabi

Ibn Arabi lived from July 1165 to November 1240 and was a Sunni Muslim Arab scholar, Sufi mystic, poet and philosopher from al-Andalus who exercised notable influence within Sufi metaphysics and Islamic thought generally; of the 850 works attributed to him, only 700 are considered authentic and only 400 survive, and his cosmological teachings became a dominant intellectual framework across many regions of the Muslim world. His traditional title was Muhyiddin, meaning the Reviver of Religion, and after his death practitioners of Sufism began referring to him by the honorific Shaykh al-Akbar, the Greatest Shaykh, from which the term Akbarism derives; he is considered a wali, or saint, by some scholars and Muslim communities. Ibn Arabi is known as the first person to explicitly delineate the concept of wahdat al-wujud, the unity of existence, a monist doctrine holding that all things in the universe are manifestations of a single reality, which he equated with an entity he called the Absolute, al-wujud al-mutlaq, the Absolute Existence.