Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi: Ibn Arabi's Student, Rumi's Friend

Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi (c. 1207-1274) grew up in Ibn Arabi’s house and knew his teaching better than any other student. What he did can be put in a sentence: he took the thought that Ibn Arabi had written in an allusive and scattered style, gathered it, and turned it into an orderly philosophical language. People who read Ibn Arabi today mostly read him through the order that Qunawi built. In Konya he was Rumi’s neighbor and friend, and it was he who led Rumi’s funeral prayer. This article tells his life first, then what he did, and at the end his two main teachings.

His Life

Qunawi was born around 1207 in Malatya. His father, Majd al-Din Ishaq, was a respected scholar and a close friend of Ibn Arabi. When the father died, Ibn Arabi married the widow, and so the young Sadr al-Din became the stepson and the student of the greatest Sufi thinker of his age. Where other students attended a teacher’s lessons for a few years, Qunawi lived in Ibn Arabi’s house for decades, traveled with him through Syria and the Hijaz, and watched books like the Futuhat al-Makkiyya and the Fusus al-Hikam being written. In the meantime he kept up his studies in hadith and fiqh, which is to say he set Sufi metaphysics on a solid footing in the Sunni sciences.

When Ibn Arabi died in Damascus in 1240, Qunawi settled in Konya, the Seljuk capital, and there he became Rumi’s neighbor. They went to each other’s lessons, and their students mixed. When Rumi died on 17 December 1273, it was Qunawi who led the funeral prayer; leading the funeral prayer of a great saint was not a task given to just anyone in those days, so it can be taken as the measure of the respect the people of Konya had for him. Qunawi himself died less than a year later, in 1274. Both of them lie in Konya today.

What He Did

So what exactly made Qunawi important? Ibn Arabi had written in a style that was allusive, layered, and hard to summarize, and he did this on purpose, because he believed the truths he was describing would not fit into flat philosophical sentences. The trouble was that the intellectual world of the thirteenth century was dominated by the philosophical tradition of Ibn Sina, and if Ibn Arabi’s thought was going to be taken seriously in that world, someone had to translate it into a language philosophers recognized. Qunawi gave his life to this. He did not simplify his master; he found the logic underneath what Ibn Arabi had said with a verse of the Quran and a few symbols, and wrote it out as premises and conclusions. It was the kind of work al-Ghazali had done centuries earlier when he carried Sufi insights into the language of kalam.

His books are the product of that work. Miftah al-Ghayb (The Key to the Unseen) is his main work, and it explains in an orderly way the relationship between the oneness of God and the multiplicity of creation. I’jaz al-Bayan is a commentary on Surat al-Fatiha; in Qunawi’s view the hardest questions of metaphysics are already inside the Quran. Al-Fukuk is his commentary on Ibn Arabi’s difficult book, the Fusus, and for centuries it was the first reference for anyone reading it.

It should be added that Qunawi corresponded with Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, the great philosopher of his age. They wrote to each other about the nature of existence, the relationship between the necessary and the possible, and God’s knowledge. To my mind this correspondence is the most illuminating thing to know about Qunawi; here was a Sufi master debating the most accomplished philosopher of the day in the philosopher’s own language and on equal terms. The assumption that Sufism is a matter of feeling, far from reason, falls apart in these letters.

Being Is One, and Creator and Creation Remain Distinct

The teaching most often attached to Qunawi’s name is wahdat al-wujud, the oneness of being. The phrase is easily misunderstood, so let us go by an image that is often used. The rays of the sun are not the sun itself, yet they have no existence apart from the sun; they are real, but their reality is borrowed. The created world is like this. It exists, but it takes its existence from God, not from itself.

In Qunawi’s view the only thing that exists in the true sense is God (he calls this the Necessary Being, wajib al-wujud), and everything else is what has been brought into being because it was possible for it to be. The relationship between them is not sameness but dependence. So to say that being is one is to say that there is no reality standing on its own apart from God; Creator and creation do not blend into each other. That God is other than everything (tanzih) and that creation carries the traces of His self-disclosure (tashbih) are true at the same time, and Qunawi does not sacrifice either one to the other.

The Human Being Is a Mirror

Qunawi also put in order the idea of the insan al-kamil, the complete human being, which Ibn Arabi had set out. In his view the human being is a passage (barzakh) between the divine world and the created world, and through the heart a mirror able to reflect the names of God. This may look like an abstract idea, but it bears directly on practice. The stages of the soul describe the polishing of this mirror step by step; through dhikr, reflection, and the training of character the heart comes to reflect the divine light without distorting it. The complete human being is not a superhuman being, but a servant who has brought out to the full the capacity God placed in every person. The prophets, above all Muhammad (peace be upon him), are the examples of this.

After Him

Qunawi’s students carried the teaching he had put in order. Mu’ayyid al-Din al-Jandi wrote a commentary on the Fusus, Sa’id al-Din al-Farghani read the poetry of Ibn al-Farid through Qunawi’s framework, and this line became the common language of Sufi philosophy from Anatolia to India. Scholars today call it the Akbarian school. The Mevlevi order, founded after Rumi’s death, is known for its poetry and its sema, but the philosophical training inside the order rested largely on Qunawi’s system.

If you ever find yourself in Konya, visit both tombs. Rumi’s is always crowded, Qunawi’s is quieter, and the two are a short walk apart. These two men were just as close to each other in life; they were neighbors, they went to each other’s lessons, and one of them led the other’s funeral prayer (and since Qunawi’s tomb is the quiet one, it is also the better place to sit and think for a while).

Sources

• Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi, Miftah al-Ghayb (c. 1260)
• Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi, I’jaz al-Bayan fi Ta’wil Umm al-Qur’an (c. 1255)
• Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi, al-Fukuk (c. 1250)
• Ibn Arabi, Fusus al-Hikam (c. 1229)
• Ibn Arabi, al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya (c. 1231-1238)
• Nasir al-Din al-Tusi and Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi, al-Murasalat (c. 1260)
• Mu’ayyid al-Din al-Jandi, Sharh Fusus al-Hikam (c. 1290)
• Sa’id al-Din al-Farghani, Muntaha al-Madarik (c. 1280)
• Ekrem Demirli, Sadreddin Konevi’de Bilgi ve Varlık (2005)
• Richard Todd, The Sufi Doctrine of Man: The Metaphysical Anthropology of Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi (2014)