The Charge of Collapsing the Difference

The doctrine drew sustained and serious opposition across Islamic intellectual history precisely on the point its defenders tried hardest to protect from misreading. Critics, including prominent jurists and theologians writing in the centuries after Ibn al-Arabi's death, argued that whatever fine technical distinction his defenders drew, the doctrine in ordinary practice collapses the difference between creator and creation that Islamic theology treats as absolutely foundational, effectively reducing the created world's real otherness from God to a mere passing appearance. Some later Sufi thinkers, most notably within the Naqshbandi order, proposed wahdat al-shuhud, the unity of witnessing, as a deliberate corrective response: the more modest claim that unity is only how a mystic subjectively experiences God in the particular moment of contemplation, not an objective description of how existence itself is actually structured at large. That the corrective reply came from within Sufism itself, and not only from critics entirely outside the mystical tradition, shows the dispute over Ibn al-Arabi's doctrine as an argument conducted as much inside the mystical tradition as against it from without. The term itself, wahdat al-shuhud, was popularized above all through the sixteenth and seventeenth century Indian Naqshbandi reformer Ahmad Sirhindi, whose own writings framed the corrective explicitly as a defense of God's transcendence against what he read as a dangerous blurring of the line between creator and creation.