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FOREWORD
In that sense, this study provides a more demanding, Islamic parallel to such recent popular works such as F. Capra’s Tao of Physics. While the prolific Andalusian Sufi writer Ibn ‘Arabî (1165-1240) is most widely known today as a mystic and spiritual teacher, his voluminous writings—and particularly his immense magnum opus, the Meccan Illuminations, which is the primary source for this study—constantly refer to the insights, theories, and cosmological schemas of earlier Muslim philosophers and scientists, such as Avicenna and the popular spiritual treatises of the “Brethren of Purity” (Ikhwân al-Safâ’).
Despite the initial unfamiliarity (for non-specialists) of some of Ibn ‘Arabî’s Qur’anic symbolism and technical terminology here, his approach to conceiving and intellectually explaining the mysterious relationship between the divine Source and its infinite manifestations clearly mirrors Plato’s classical dialectical enumeration of the alternative ontological hypothesis outlined in his Parmenides.
PREFACE
To start with, Ibn ‘Arabî considers time to be a product of our human ‘imagination’, without any real, separately existing entity. Nevertheless, he still considers it to be one of the four main constituents of existence. We need this imagined conception of ‘time’ to chronologically arrange events and what for us are the practically defining motions of the celestial orbs and other physical objects, but for Ibn ‘Arabî, real existence is attributable only to the actually existing thing that moves, not to motion nor to time (nor space) in which this motion is observed. Thus Ibn ‘Arabî distinguishes between two kinds of time: natural and para-natural, and he explains that they both originate from the two forces of the soul: the active force and the intellective force, respectively. Then he explains that this imaginary time is cyclical, circular, relative, discrete and inhomogeneous.
CHAPTER I Cosmology and Time
Cosmology is the science that studies the universe, the cosmos. Cosmos is a word used in earlier Greek metaphysical thought that means ‘harmony’ or ‘order’, as opposed to Chaos. In one Greek theory of creation, Chaos is the formless matter from which the cosmos, or harmonious order, was created
More than a century later, in 1924, Hubble was able to measure distances to some stars (based on the ‘redshift’),[3] and he showed that some bright dots that we see in the sky are actually other galaxies like ours, although they look so small because they are very far away (Hartmann 1990: 373-5).
Our galaxy, like most other galaxies, is a collection of about 200 billion stars plus thousands of clusters and nebulae that form together a disc of more than 100,000 light years in diameter, and that is about 15,000 light years thick. The nearest galaxy to us lies in the Andromeda constellation, and it is about 2.9 million light-years away.
It is now also well established that everything in the world is moving: nearby stars have proper motion, because they are pulled towards the centre of the galaxy, and galaxies are moving away from us, because the universe is expanding. On the other hand, and despite these various motions, the universe doesn’t have a centre or edges. It is hard to imagine, but the universe is contained or curved around itself so that if you fly straight in one direction and keep moving in a straight line you will one day, if you could live long enough, come back from the opposite direction to the same point (supposing no gravitational fluctuations), just as it would happen to a person travelling around the earth.
AI Summary
The Single Monad Model of the Cosmos by Mohamed Haj Yousef presents key insights from the Sufism tradition. The 10 passages above capture the essential teachings.
Core Themes:
- [To be expanded]
Key Passages: Highlights 1, 3, and 10 are particularly representative.
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