The perfect human being

Al-insān al-kāmil, “the perfect” or “complete human being”, is a central idea of the school of Ibn ʿArabī. Of all creatures, the human being alone was created in the image of God, able to reflect all of God’s names together, where every other creature reflects only some. The human being is thus a small world summing up the great one, and the purpose of creation is fulfilled in the human being who realizes this.

For Ibn ʿArabī, the perfect human being is first the reality of the Prophet Muḥammad, and then the prophets and saints who inherit from him. Such a person is the polished mirror in which God sees God, and through whom God sustains the world. The Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam opens with Adam as the polishing of the mirror of the world.

The idea was developed by ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Jīlī in a book of that name around 1400, and spread through Sufism in Persia, Turkey, India and Southeast Asia. It has been compared with the Kabbalistic primordial human being, Adam Kadmon, and with the Christian teaching of the image of God.