One Reality, Self-Disclosed

Wahdat al-wujud, the unity of being, holds that there is only one true reality in existence, and that everything a person ordinarily takes to be a separate created thing is in fact that one reality disclosing itself in a particular form, rather than an independently existing object standing genuinely apart from it. The doctrine is associated above all with the Andalusian mystic Ibn al-Arabi, whose vast work the Futuhat al-Makkiyya works the idea out at very great length across many volumes, though the exact phrase wahdat al-wujud does not itself appear as a fixed technical term until his later commentators went on to systematize his sprawling writing into a coherent school of thought after his death. Ibn al-Arabi's own defenders insist the doctrine is properly a claim about the underlying structure of existence itself, that being belongs in the fullest sense only to God and that created things have no independent being of their own apart from that ongoing divine disclosure, and emphatically not a claim that the creature simply is the creator in any ordinary, straightforward sense of personal identity. Ibn al-Arabi himself never organized the teaching into a formal school during his own lifetime, and much of what later became known as the doctrine of wahdat al-wujud took its final, systematized shape only through the work of his stepson and principal interpreter, Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi, in the generation immediately following his death.