Waḥdat al-wujūd

Waḥdat al-wujūd, “the oneness of being” or “of existence”, is the name later given to the metaphysics of Ibn ʿArabī and his followers. Ibn ʿArabī himself did not use the phrase as a formula; it was popularized by his commentators, beginning with Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī, and by his critics.

The teaching holds that being, in the true sense, belongs to God alone. The world has no being of its own: its things are the manifestations of God’s names and attributes, the forms in which the one reality discloses itself, and they exist only as long as God gives them being. The world is thus neither God nor other than God, “He and not He”, in a phrase the school uses.

The teaching was immensely influential in Persian, Turkish and Indian Sufism, and in the philosophy of Mullā Ṣadrā. It was also bitterly attacked, above all by Ibn Taymiyya, as a denial of the distinction between Creator and creature, and in India Aḥmad Sirhindī answered it with the “oneness of witnessing”, waḥdat al-shuhūd: the oneness is in the mystic’s experience, not in being itself.