Explaining Art in Ibn ʿArabī's Thought Based on the Theory of the Heart and the Comprehensive Manifestation of the Human Being.

Although the issue of art—not in its contemporary form—was neither raised for Ibn ʿArabī nor centrally positioned within his thought, it is nevertheless possible to derive coherent foundations in this regard from his ontological and anthropological discussions, and to view the issues of today's art world from a new horizon. Issues such as what art means or what benefits are attached to it, although not explicitly addressed in Ibn ʿArabī's works and lacking an independent discussion in the voluminous writings of the Shaykh al-Akbar, can nonetheless be discerned through a reading oriented toward the present and future of his theoretical principles and their logical extension, thus grasping the main lines of his view on these matters. In this article, we intend to employ the theory of manifestation (tajallī) and the world of contingency being a locus of manifestation (maẓhar) for the Divine Truth, to explain the nature of art and its attendant benefits, and to clarify to some extent the fundamental outlines of Muḥyī al-Dīn's perspective on art. Accordingly, we shall first examine the three different aspects of the human being within the theory of manifestation, and then, by elucidating basic anthropological concepts in Ibn ʿArabī—such as the station of the heart (maqām al-qalb) and the existential comprehensiveness of the human being—we shall demonstrate the imaginal station of art as a comprehensive locus of manifestation.