Wahdat al-Wujud (وحدة الوجود) — Unity of Being

Wahdat al-Wujud (وحدة الوجود) — the Unity of Being — is the metaphysical doctrine most associated with Ibn Arabi's school, though he himself never used the precise phrase. It holds that there is only one true wujud (existence/being), which is al-Haqq, and that all apparent multiplicity is the tajalli (self-disclosure) of that single Reality in an infinity of forms. William Chittick in The Sufi Path of Knowledge clarifies that this is not pantheism: the world does not share God's being but rather has no being of its own apart from God's. Ibn Arabi writes in the Fusus al-Hikam that the cosmos is 'His shadow' — real insofar as it is illuminated by al-Haqq, unreal insofar as it claims independent existence.

Cross-Tradition Resonances