Wahdat al-wujūd
The Unity of Being
Wahdat al-wujūd (Arabic: وحدة الوجود "unity of existence, oneness of being") is a doctrine in the field of Islamic philosophy and mysticism, according to which the monotheistic God is identical with existence (wujūd) and this one existence is that through which all existing things (mawjūdāt) exist. This doctrine, which in recent research is characterized as ontological monism, is attributed to the Andalusian Sufi Ibn Arabi (d. 1240) but was essentially developed by the philosophically oriented interpreters of his works. In the Early Modern Period, it gained great popularity among Sufis. Some Muslim scholars such as Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1329), ʿAbd al-Qādir Badā'ūnī (d. 1597/98) and Ahmad Sirhindi (d. 1624), however, regarded wahdat al-wujūd as a pantheistic heresy in contradiction to Islam and criticized it for leading its followers to antinomianist views. In reality, however, many advocates of wahdat al-wujūd emphasized that this teaching did not provide any justification for transgressing Sharia. The Egyptian scholar Murtada al-Zabidi (d.
The public source identifies “Wahdat al-wujūd” as the Unity of Being. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Wahdat, al-wujūd and Unity.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wahdat al-wujūd” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.