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Ibn al-Arabi on Religious Pluralism

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Ibn al-Arabi on Religious PluralismB

eware of being bound up by a particular religion and rejecting all others as unbelief! If you do that you will fail to obtain a great benefit. Nay, you will fail to obtain the true knowledge of the reality. Try to make yourself a (kind of) Prime Matter for all forms of religious belief. God is wider and greater than to be confined to a particular religion to the exclusion of others. Ibn al-Arabi says: ‘To whichever direction you turn, there surely is the Face of God’. God does not specify (in this verse) a particular place in which the Face of God is to be found.

Ibn al-Arabi said: ‘There is the Face of God.’ The ‘face’ of a thing means its real essence. So God has admonished by this verse the hearts of the ‘knowers’ so that they might not be distracted by non-essential matters in the present world from being constantly conscious of this kind of thing.

Muhyi al-Din Ibn al-Arabi (as cited in Toshihiko Izutsu, Sufism and Taoism: A Comparative Study of Key Philosophical Concepts, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983, 254.)

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