Asian and African Area Studies, 7 (2): 145-157, 2008

Ibn al ‘Arabī, Hick and Religious Pluralism
Mehmet Sait Reçber*Abstract
In this paper, I analyze and give a critical examination of some basic issues of religious
pluralism by reference to the mystical philosophy of Muhyi al-Din Ibn al ‘Arabī, whothought that various religious beliefs are to be considered as an outcome of different
forms of the divine manifestation. In so doing, in order to show the relevance of Ibn al‘Arabī’s thought to the contemporary debate of religious pluralism—in the philosophyof religion in particular—I first give a brief description of John Hick’s religious pluralism. Then I examine Ibn al ‘Arabī’s thinking on the issue and attempt to display thephilosophical as well as theological problems it raises. I conclude that Ibn al ‘Arabī’s
approach fails to address the problems facing religious pluralism inasmuch as it falls
into the trap of a relativism which trivializes philosophical and religious truths-claims
and also the ontological commitment of the traditional religious beliefs.

Although the diversity of religious beliefs has always been a subject of philosophical and religious
concern, it will be no exaggeration to say that it is only in the recent couple of decades that theissue has been so lively debated. The diversity of religions is a fact, but this needs to be carefully
distinguished from that the idea of religious pluralism which is advanced as a theoretical explanation
for such a phenomenon. The question of the diversity of religious beliefs should be evident: eachreligion puts forward a different set of religious truth-claims ranging from the nature of God to thehuman salvation. There is, to start with, a significant difference between the theistic religions such
as Judaism, Christianity, Islam and the non-theistic religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism. The
most common feature of the theistic religions is their agreement on the personal nature of God, aconviction which is not shared by the non-theistic religions. However, there are further differences
within the theistic as well as non-theistic religions themselves. Thus, for instance, the doctrines ofthe divine trinity and incarnation, which are essential to the Christian faith, are in sharp contrast to
Islamic concept of deity, which forcefully underlines the absolute unity (oneness) and transcendence
of God.

* Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Ankara University
Accepted April 17, 2007

145

Asian and African Area Studies, 7 (2)Now, it may seem as a natural disposition to wonder how all these religions can equally be trueor justified in their truth-claims. Is there a shared ground behind this diversity? In other words,
to what extent is the contention that “all religions refer to the same Being or God” justified? Apartfrom the naturalistic and, arguably, reductionist explanations for the diversity of religious beliefs,
there have been different religious approaches at this point. These attitudes are often characterized
as exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism. Religious exclusivism argues for the truth of just one
religion to the exclusion of the others; only the religion can gain warrant or truth and the rest ofreligions therefore are unwarranted or simply false. The salvation can thus be attained only throughthe faith and practice of one particular religion. Religious inclusivism, on the other hand, stands forthe idea that although the religious truth is ultimately restricted to one religion, the followers of theother religious traditions can somewhat be included in the salvation. And finally, religious pluralism
holds that all religious traditions are somewhat equally warranted inasmuch as each of them reflects
at least a partial truth with regard to the ultimate religious Reality or Truth. Hence they all canjustifiably lead to salvation [Quinn and Meeker 2000: 3].
Given that faith involves propositional truth-claims one might rightly think that an exclusivist
attitude is somewhat inevitable. The truth of any religious belief that p will make any proposition
that contradicts with p false. As Ward points out, “To believe a proposition is to think that it is true.
To think that it is true is to affirm that reality is as it is described by that proposition. … Thus anaffirmation by its nature excludes some possible state of affairs; namely, one which would render
the proposition false. If an assertion excludes nothing, it affirms nothing” [1990: 110]. A realist
concept of truth thus seems to be essential to the traditional understanding of religious belief.1) Truth
therefore matters for one’s faith.
The exclusivist standpoint has often been criticized, by the pluralists in particular, to be an arrogant attitude reflecting a self-appreciated superiority to other faiths. John Hick, who is the leading
defender of religious pluralism in the contemporary philosophy of religion, thinks that an exclusivist
view of religious belief is unjustified and therefore he instead proposes an improvement througha revision or transformation in all major religious traditions [1989: 2]. It is however a question
whether a pluralistic view can do justice to the nature of religious belief, apart from the philosophicaland theological questions which it seems to have generated. In the greater part of this paper, I shallconduct a critical examination of the credentials of the religious pluralism by a particular reference
to the mystical thought of Muhyi al-Din Ibn al ‘Arabī (1164-1240). Before this, however, in order

1) A pluralist such as Hick [1993: 3] too seems to have agreed to this fact.

146REÇBER: Ibn al ‘Arabī, Hick and Religious Pluralism

to see the relevance of Ibn al ‘Arabī’s thought to the contemporary debate, I shall provide a brief
account of Hick’s religious pluralism.
Hick’s religious pluralism seems to have an epistemological motivation to the extent that hepropounds the pluralistic hypothesis as an explanatory answer to various forms of religious experience. Considering varieties of religious experience as instantiated in different religious traditions,the pluralistic hypothesis is meant to provide an explanation by postulating a common reference
for them. Each type of religious experience is considered to be a response to the Real. However,the Real in itself, as the Ultimate Reality, is beyond all experiential categories. In developing his
pluralistic hypothesis, Hick starts with the observation that the world is religiously ambiguous andthis, in his view, makes a naturalistic as well as a religious interpretation of religious experienceequally possible. Following a middle route between a naturalistic and a religious interpretation ofreligious experience, Hick argues for “the third possibility that the great post-axial faiths constitutedifferent ways of experiencing, conceiving and living in relation to the ultimate divine Reality whichtranscends all our varied visions of it” [1989: 235-236]. What makes the post-axial religious traditions (such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism) particularly distinctive, on thisaccount, is the fact that they all aim at a radical transformation of the human reality from being selfcentered to the Reality or Divine-centered. In all these traditions, in Hick’s view, there is an attempt
to free the human life from a self-centered state by associating it to a further fact, called it God,
Reality or Truth [Hick 1988: 2].
What seems to have led Hick to think that all these diverse religious experiences should beconsidered in the same boat is his meta-epistemological intuition that all human experience is actively
processed by the epistemic make-up of their subjects. At this point, Hick makes a reference to the
Muslim Sufi thinker Junaid’s idea that “the colour of the water is the same as that of its container” andalso to the similar observation of St Thomas Aquinas that “things known are in the knower according
to the mode of the knower” [1989: 240-241]. From this, Hick concludes that all the forms of religious
experience are inevitably shaped by the noetic structure of the subjects who are in turn influenced by
the “religio-cultural systems [in which] … the Real is thought and experienced…”[1989: 241]. At the
bedrock of Hick’s thought is the Kantian meta-epistemological intuition that the human mind, throughits categories and concepts, regulates our sensory experience or perception. This, along with the Kantianlines, leads Hick to make a distinction of noumena and phenomena in grounding religious experience:
the Real in itself is postulated as the noumenal ground of the religious experiential phenomena. Unlike
the Kantian categories that are ‘universal and invariable,’ the categories of religious experience, Hickargues, are ‘culture-relative.’ Even so, various phenomenal experiences of the Real are considered to be147

Asian and African Area Studies, 7 (2)empirically genuine or the authentic manifestations of the Real [1989: 241-244].2) Thus Hick maintains:…our human religious experience, variously shaped as it is by our sets of religious concepts, is acognitive response to the universal presence of the ultimate divine Reality that, in itself, exceeds
human conceptuality. This Reality is however manifested to us in ways formed by a variety ofhuman concepts, as the range of the divine personae and metaphysical impersonae witnessed toin the history of religions. Each major tradition, built around its own distinctive way of thinkingand-experiencing the Real, has developed its own answers to the perennial questions of our origin
and destiny, constituting more or less comprehensive and coherent cosmologies and eschatologies.
These are human creations which have, by their association with living streams of religious experience, become invested with a sacred authority. However they cannot all be wholly true; quitepossibly none is wholly true: perhaps all are partly true [1988: 63-64].

Given the sharp distinction between the Real in itself and the Real as experienced and conceptualized by the religious traditions in various ways, on this account, it follows that no tradition is able
to make substantial claims about the nature of the Real inasmuch as none of the human experiential
categories or concepts really applies to the Real an sich.
In developing his religious pluralism, Hick often makes references to the mystical interpretationsof the religious traditions (more significantly in the case of theistic religions) rather than to theirmainstream understanding. In the case of Islamic tradition, it is true that there are some mysticalinterpretations which can be considered in the context of a pluralistic religious thought.3) Now it
seems to me that, in Islamic thought, it is in the mystical thought of Ibn al ‘Arabī where one can findthe dynamics for a pluralistic account of religious beliefs.
Although the conceptual scheme of Ibn al ‘Arabī’s metaphysics has a significant resemblance to
Hick’s account of religious pluralism, nonetheless there are some important methodological differences between them. Similarly, Ibn al ‘Arabī uses the term of ‘the Real (al-Haqq)’ 4) to denote God
2) As Hick himself notices [1989: 243], it is important to note that Kant’s own religious epistemology is entirely
unrelated to Hick’s. For, Kant simply postulates the existence of God in the context of the metaphysics of morality
and excludes His existence from the domain any possible experience.
3) For a typical approach on these grounds see Nasr [1972: 123-151]; and for a comparative study of Hick and Nasr
on the issue of religious pluralism see Aslan [1998].
4) The Arabic term of ‘al-Haqq,’ which can be rendered as ‘the Real’ or ‘the Truth’ in English, is at the same time one of
Divine names in Islam. Unlike Hick’s view of the Real, which is neither personal nor impersonal in character; Ibn al‘Arabī’s considerations about al-Haqq seem to suggest that he operates within a theistic framework. It will therefore becorrect to think that Ibn al ‘Arabī conceives the al-Haqq with personal properties. For an assessment of the concept of‘al-Haqq’ in Islam and its relation to ‘the Real’ as used by Hick, see Reçber [2005: 3-10]; and also see Hick [2005: 11-14].

148REÇBER: Ibn al ‘Arabī, Hick and Religious Pluralismor the Ultimate being and likewise he makes an ontological distinction between the Real in himself
and his different manifestations. His primary target however is not to give a pluralistic account ofreligious belief. It is rather to provide an explanation for the whole phenomena where the plurality(as well as the pluralism) of religious beliefs is just one of the implications of his vast metaphysicalsystem. Although the epistemological views of Ibn al ‘Arabī might have its significant share fordeveloping a religious pluralism, his ontological intuitions seem to have priority to the extent thatthey lie at the bedrock of his epistemological pluralism.
Al-Junaid’s statement that “the colour of the water is the same as that of its container” likewise
seems to have a considerable impact on Ibn al ‘Arabī’s ideas concerning the nature of religious belief[Ibn al ‘Arabī 1982: 225-226]. But, how are we to understand such a statement? A first approximation would be to think that a religious belief is somehow determined by the intellectual nature orcapacity of the believer. Given that there can be non-human belief-holders whose intellectual makeup and capacity is significantly different (since, it is not clear that the only possible belief-holders
are humans), then the nature and scope of their beliefs will be different from ours. In this case, thestructure of our minds (just like the Kantian view) will determine the nature and limits of all possible
beliefs (hence knowledge) held by us. Nonetheless such a conceptual relativism seems to be rather
trivial if taken as an argument for religious pluralism. Had this been the case, it would have beendifficult to conceive how the diversity of religious beliefs could have come into existence, since thestructure of the human mind would have imposed the same set of beliefs on each believer. If so, suchan interpretation of al-Junaid’s statement cannot fulfill the task required for grounding religious
pluralism insofar as it will fail to explain the diversity of faiths exemplified by various religious
traditions. Nor is this what the religious pluralist seems to have in mind.
Another way of understanding al-Junaid’s statement would be, as Hick proposes, to think it interms of a conceptual/epistemic relativism of “religio-cultural systems” in which the Real is variously
experienced and conceptualized. Although such an approach might not be ultimately incompatible
with Ibn al ‘Arabī’s account of religious diversity, nevertheless he seems to have defended a strong
form of relativism which explains not only the differences that manifest at the level of religious
traditions but also those exemplified at the individual-level. For Ibn al ‘Arabī, as William C. Chittick
points out, “No two people have exactly the same belief, because no two people are exactly thesame” [1989: 336].
The basic reason for the diversity of religious belief at the individual level, for Ibn al ‘Arabī, isthat the divine manifestation (tajallī) comes in infinitely many different forms and grades. The heart,which he takes to be the intellectual faculty receptive of the divine manifestation, has a variable149

Asian and African Area Studies, 7 (2)(flexible) character in accordance with the divine manifestation: “Provided that the Real varies in his
manifestation of the forms, then necessarily the heart becomes wide and narrow according to theform in which the divine manifestation takes place” [Ibn al ‘Arabī 1982: 120]. On the face of it, thiscan be taken to the effect that the Real manifests himself in the heart of a believer in proportion to
her capacity or disposition. Given that the believers naturally have various degrees of dispositions
or capabilities with regard to forming beliefs, the diversity of religious beliefs will then be inevitable.
Necessarily each believer will form a different idea or conception of God.
What is the ontological ground for the prior dispositions in receiving various degrees of thedivine manifestations and hence for forming various religious beliefs? It is at this point where Ibn
al ‘Arabī’s thought reveals its distinctive character. It is not the case that the Real manifests himself
to the believer according to his predisposition; on the contrary, the believer is manifested to the Realthrough the form in which the Real manifests himself to him [Ibn al ‘Arabī 1982: 120]. The metaphysical background of this line of thought has a rather complex dialectical structure. The idea that,in Corbin’s words, the “Divine Being ... yearn[s] to be revealed in beings who manifest Him to Himself insofar as He manifests Himself to them” [1969: 184] is rather essential for understanding thestructure of Ibn al ‘Arabī’s metaphysical thought. Therefore it seems correct to think with Corbin
that, on Ibn al ‘Arabī’s account, “It is not the heart that gives its “color” to the Form it receives, buton the contrary, the gnostic’s heart “is colored” in every instant by the color, that is, the modalityof the Form in which the Divine Being is epiphanized to him” [Corbin 1969: 196]. Therefore thediversity of religious beliefs is not something simply grounded in the epistemic imperfection of thebelievers; that is, it is not something merely stemming from the epistemic subjects’ being fallible intheir attempt to recognize the Real. Religious diversity has its deeper ontological roots which findtheir possibility in the very nature of the divine manifestation.
It may be correct to think that Ibn al ‘Arabī’s view of belief-forming-activities presupposes an
epistemic (conceptual) relativity but, given his further ontological considerations, one has to thinkthat it is God himself who causes this diversity via his manifestation in different forms which, inturn, gives different predispositions to different believers in forming various beliefs. In order toexplain how God can be responsible for the very predisposition or receptivity of the heart of thebelievers, Ibn al ‘Arabī argues that there are two different types of the divine manifestation: thenoumenal (ghayb) manifestation and the phenomenal (shahādah) manifestation.

The former

manifestation is the divine self-manifestation that provides the heart with the predisposition it has; itis only after the occurrence of this manifestation that the latter (the phenomenal) manifestation cantake place. God, in the phenomenal level, manifests himself to the heart of the believer in terms of a150REÇBER: Ibn al ‘Arabī, Hick and Religious Pluralism

form already manifested [Ibn al ‘Arabī 1982: 120]. Thus, one might think, in making the distinction
between the noumenal and phenomenal divine manifestations, Ibn al ‘Arabī was actually trying toprovide a meta-epistemological explanation for the diversity of religious beliefs.
From an epistemological viewpoint, it will be correct to think that the formation of a conceptof God depends on the pre-dispositional capacity of the believer. The formation of various conceptsof the Real is a matter of certain belief-forming capacities which are answerable to the fact that theReal manifests himself to the hearts of the believers in line with their pre-determined dispositions.
The Real as believed by a believer is in fact nothing but an object of belief.5) Given that a conceptof God thus conceived is something which the believer in a sense creates in his heart (mind), it will
not be wrong to think that, according to Ibn al ‘Arabī, “People create the objects of their own belief
by imposing conceptual limitations upon the wujūd” [Chittick 1994: 151]. The truth of the matter,
however, is that all these conceptual limitations are caused or determined by nothing other than the
divine manifestation. The truth of any belief is therefore explained by reference to an all-embracing
being (wujūd) which is identical with the Real. In Chittick’s words, “God assumes the form of every
belief because the belief itself is nothing but the self-disclosure of wujūd” [1994: 151].
Since it is God who manifests himself in the hearts of believers in different ways—which isthe very ground of the phenomenon of religious diversity—Ibn al ‘Arabī suggests us not to put any
restriction on religious beliefs:

Then the Real in the belief is the one the heart surrounds his form, it is that which is manifested
for it [i.e., the heart] and hence it knows him. The eye does not see but the Real of the belief. And
the diversity of beliefs is no secret: Whoever delimits him disbelieves him in [those beliefs] otherthan the one which he delimits, and confirms him when manifested in the way he delimits him.
And whoever frees him from delimitation does not deny but affirms him in every form in which hetransforms... [Ibn al ‘Arabī 1982: 121].

This line of thought can be reinforced by the semantic consideration that the very root (‘a.q.d.)of the word used for belief (i’tiqad) in Arabic has a connotation of putting certain limitations interms of knitting, knotting etc., on something. Thus a particular religious belief expresses a limitation on the Real who is in fact unlimited [see Chittick 1994: 138].
5) In fact, according to Ibn al ‘Arabī, the deity to whom the believer is committed and the one he glorifies is the God
as an object of his belief. Interestingly enough, Ibn al ‘Arabī seems to maintain that the believer in fact, in so doing,
glorifies himself. See [Ibn al ‘Arabī 1982: 225-226].

151

Asian and African Area Studies, 7 (2)Clearly, Ibn al ‘Arabī seems to have attached a negative sense to a religious belief expressing alimitation on the Real. Or, at least, he thought any such belief is pre-mature or somehow imperfecteven though he also, somewhat paradoxically, found it necessary that there be different exclusive
beliefs for the relevant manifold divine manifestations to take place. Such an ontological intuition
seems to have led him to embrace all different and even contradictory beliefs formed about the Real,which are considered as partly true or authentic. Thus considering the identification between ‘God’[the Real] and the wujūd [Being or Existence] in Ibn al ‘Arabī’s ontology, Chittick writes:

If a belief did not correspond to reality in some way, it would not exist. Each belief represents the
subjective side of an existential state. The fact that someone holds a belief proves that the belief
coincides in some manner in the way things are, whether or not the believer’s mind establishesa real contact with what lies outside of itself. Hence we can reach a preliminary conclusion thatall beliefs are true, no matter what their content. There can be no error in existence, because
everything that exists is demanded by the Real, which is wujūd [Chittick 1994: 139].

Note that, on this account, no particular evidence is provided for thinking that each belief ispartly true because it has some partial correspondence to wujūd or the Real save the assumption
already made for the supposed ontologically unity. For, in Chittick’s words, “[t]he idea that there areno errors and that all beliefs are true rises up logically from wahdat al-wujūd. Each existent thing
represents a particular self-disclosure of non-delimited wujūd” [Chittick 1994: 140]. But is there any
further reason for thinking that every religious belief is or can be true apart from the assumptions
made for an ontological unity of Being (wahdat al-wujūd)? Epistemological considerations certainly
matter here: how do we know that all these religious beliefs are partly true or even related to the Realin one way or another? Why not instead think that they are simply false conceptions of the Real?
What criterion do we have for thinking that no particular belief can be overwhelmingly true of theReal save the pluralist one?
It seems that, for Ibn al ‘Arabī, only the gnostic (‘arif) can have a privileged epistemic access tothe fact that various religious beliefs are simply infinite different forms in which God manifests ortransforms himself. There are no bounds to the gnostic’s knowledge at this point because it shouldhave an epistemic parallelism to the infinite forms of the divine manifestation [Ibn al ‘Arabī 1982:
120]. Given such a parallelism the gnostic’s knowledge needs to be open-ended if it is to have acorrespondence to the divine manifestational forms that are infinite: the gnostic is in a position toconsider any religious belief as still another form of the divine manifestation.
152REÇBER: Ibn al ‘Arabī, Hick and Religious Pluralism

By the same token, for Ibn al ‘Arabī, one should not exclude any object of worship but consider
each as the manifesting-place for the worship of the Real. Someone who worships, say, a stone, ora tree, or an animal or a star attributes a property of ‘divinity’ to it [Affīfī 1979: 148]. The gnostic,
being well-aware of this fact, perfectly observes that they do not worship these beings (as such) but
the divine manifestation (the divine presence) in them, whereas the ignorant is oblivious of such afact [Ibn al ‘Arabī 1982: 195-196]. Ibn al ‘Arabī thus seems to have thought that just any kind ofreligious belief, from a simple form of idolatry to the intellectually most sophisticated religions, leads
to God when considered from the right angle. That is, when they are considered as different forms
or aspects of the divine manifestation [Affīfī 1979: 148]. Thus, as Affīfī observes, “Ibnul ‘Arabī does
not reject polytheism provided that the worshippers of images and idols fully realise that there is reality behind the “forms” as mere mejālī (theatres) or wujūh (aspects) or manifestations of this Reality”[1979: 149]. But, then, what exactly is the faith of the gnostic?
From what has been said so far, one can easily conclude that the faith of Ibn al ‘Arabī’s gnostic
is a pluralist or rather, a ‘holistic’ one. Since the gnostic knows that all these different beliefs are
the outcome of various divine manifestations he takes them to be proper or authentic beliefs inGod. Although Ibn al ‘Arabī’s thought thus embraces all different beliefs formed about God, one
can rightly expect him to be, at least implicitly, critical of each of these religious beliefs if held
independently. This must be so because none of the descriptions given by a particular religious belief
is sufficient to refer to the Real but the one which embraces them all. Considering that only a deity
who is thus conceived in a holistic manner can be the Real as a causal power Ibn al ‘Arabī unites allthese different religious beliefs in his understanding [Ibn al ‘Arabī 1982: 122]. Thus he says,

People have formed different beliefs about God,And I behold all that they believe [quoted in Affīfī 1979: 151].

The basic reason why such a holistic view of religious belief should be true needs to be soughtin Ibn al ‘Arabī’s concept of the Real: the Real is infinite and therefore no restrictive formulation
given in a particular belief can be exhaustively true of him. Although it always remains true thatany deity determined by a particular belief is a restricted one, the Absolute Deity can never be thus
circumscribed as he is identical with all things and still with himself. And it would be nonsensical to
say that a thing comprises itself or that it can be comprised by itself [Ibn al ‘Arabī 1982: 225-226].
Now, one can reasonably agree with Ibn al ‘Arabī on the question of the divine infinity to theextent that no particular set of propositions comprised by a given religious belief can exhaust every
153

Asian and African Area Studies, 7 (2)truth about the divine nature, nevertheless it is still far from being clear why an all-inclusive pluralist
view in the way conceived by Ibn al ‘Arabī should be true.
As seen, there are both inclusivist and pluralist elements in Ibn al ‘Arabī’s thought. It is inclusivist in that it grants a partial truth to any religious belief and it is pluralist as it takes the diversity of
religious beliefs to be ultimately grounded in the divine manifestation. In any case, it excludes noreligious belief. This is because Ibn al ‘Arabī’s approach in essence supervenes on his fundamental
ontological consideration that the divine manifestation occurs in infinite various forms. He also tries
to maintain that such a view of religious belief is compatible with the basic the Islamic tenets. In fact
he finds a parallelism between the gnostic’s all-inclusive belief and the all-embracing character of the
Qur’an: Islamic revelation embraces all previously revealed religions, but not vice versa.6)
Despite the inclusivist elements in Ibn al ‘Arabī’s thought there might be good reasons forthinking that his approach has some similarities to Hick’s religious pluralism. Both views presuppose an epistemological relativism regarding the experience and conceptualizations of the Real.
Nevertheless, Ibn al ‘Arabī’s religious pluralism has a further ontological ground which is explainedby reference to certain possibilities actualized by the Real himself. Ibn al ‘Arabī’s religious pluralism
therefore cannot be explained simply by reference to the epistemological considerations inasmuch
as such an epistemological relativism has its ontological roots in the prior possibilities that areconsequently actualized qua different forms of the divine self-manifestation. Hick’s pluralism, on
the other hand, depends on an epistemological relativism of religious beliefs, where the existence of
the Real is postulated as an explanatory being for the diversity of religious phenomena. For Hick,the plurality of religious beliefs is ultimately grounded in the different human responses to the Realan sich; whereas, for Ibn al ‘Arabī, it is grounded in the very nature of the divine self-manifestation.
Ibn al ‘Arabī’s pluralism therefore is not humanly but divinely originated.
On the other hand, in Hick’s view, the satisfactory conditions for referring to the Real in itself
are determined by the concept of a transformation from self-centredness to the Reality-centredness;while, for Ibn al ‘Arabī, no religious belief may fail to refer to the Real because of its unique ontological ground. One might therefore rightly conclude that, on Ibn al ‘Arabī’s account, all beliefs arenecessarily the Real-centered, even though no belief has the full correspondence to the Real.
Ibn al ‘Arabī’s pluralism also seems to have an inclusivist character in that it rejects no6) In fact, this point can be controversial, but this is beyond our present interest. For further information on thisissue, see Chittick [1994: 145-146]. By the way, it may be interesting to notice a similarity between Ibn al ‘Arabī’s
considerations about all-inclusive nature of Islamic revelation and Hegel’s dialectical argument developed for theidea that Christianity is the absolute religion.

154REÇBER: Ibn al ‘Arabī, Hick and Religious Pluralism

particular religious belief as false. Yet, it is not hard to see that he has an implicit argument to theeffect that the only proper religious belief is the gnostic’s all-inclusive pluralist belief. Prima facie, thegnostic’s faith involves the particular belief that, ‘all diverse religious beliefs are different forms of thedivine manifestation.’ This view depends for its validity on reasoning that from the statement that‘all religious beliefs are partially true’ it does not follow that ‘all religious beliefs are partially false.’
Instead the desired inference is that none of them is wholly true. Unfortunately, in defense of suchview, Ibn al ‘Arabī has little to say other than his ontological assumption for the unity underlying the
manifold forms of the divine manifestation. In the absence of such an assumption, it will be rather
difficult to make a sense of such a religious pluralism.
But, it remains rather difficult to give a proper characterization of a faith that is inclusive ofsimply any religious belief. For, it is hard to conceive how so many different and even contradictory
beliefs can all be true of a ‘whole,’ whose referent is considered to be the Real. Given the conceptual
necessity that the very idea of ‘whole’ presupposes the idea of coherence (and therefore, the law of
non-contradiction), it must be an a priori constraint that there cannot be ‘an incoherent whole’ andtherefore ‘a whole of contradictory beliefs.’
After all, can there be an unrestricted (or an open-ended) belief at all? If it is somehow necessary that a belief involves a propositional content p such that it asserts that p is true of x, then it must
follow that just any belief is restrictive in nature including the belief in the plurality of beliefs. If so,
the idea that there can be a non-restrictive belief which involves no propositional content about theReal seems to face a self-referential incoherence.
One can also question the very ontological ground for Ibn al ‘Arabī’s pluralism. Let alone
the fact that it is hard to conceive how different contradictory properties instantiated by different
religions or believers can all be taken as the different forms of the divine manifestation (i.e., themanifestational properties of the Real), there seems to be no reason for thinking that a belief must
be somehow ‘true’ simply because it enjoys the property of existence. There can be a weak sensein which, one might think, whatever exists has an ontological reality and perhaps an ‘ontologicaltruth,’ but this can hardly be the required sense of ‘truth’ needed in the particular context of areligious belief. For example, following Ibn al ‘Arabī’s reasoning, we might think that if one believes
that ‘the world is square in shape’ or that ‘2+2=5,’ then these beliefs would enjoy a mode of existence(i.e., they would have some ontological truth), yet this can hardly be sufficient for thinking that these
propositions are, as a matter of fact, true. That is to say, one can entertain a false or indeed a necessarily false proposition and, in this case, such a proposition might enjoy a mode of existence, but thiscannot make a change to its truth-value. It therefore seems that one has to make a crucial distinction
155

Asian and African Area Studies, 7 (2)between the existence and truth of a belief.
For these and similar reasons, it seems to me that such a pluralist view cannot do justice to thenature of religious belief. What makes a pluralist view unacceptable from a traditional religious(at least, theistic) point of view is the fact that it makes the truth-claims of all religions rather trivial
by considering them as partial ‘truths.’ But given that it is hard to see how all these contradictory
beliefs can be held together, this may lead one to a non-realist (non-cognitivist) understanding of
religious truth-claims. Whereas, on the traditional understanding, what distinguishes a religion fromthe others; namely what gives a religion its particular character—identity—is its truth claims. But isthere a criterion for deciding the truth or authenticity of a religious belief on the pluralist view?
As we have seen, Hick develops “the Reality-centredness” as criterion but since he leaves thenature of “the Reality” rather unclear, one can hardly draw a sound conclusion from his proposal.
Ibn al ‘Arabī’s account, on the other hand, seems to avoid this problem at the cost of allowing simply
any belief as ‘warranted’ or ‘true.’ This however makes all religious truth-claims trivial by considering them either as the products of the creative mental activity of the human mind or as a part of theinfinite diverse forms of the divine manifestation.
To conclude, it seems to me that a pluralist view of religious belief, apart from certain
philosophical problems which it raises, is also untenable as it fails to meet the traditional religious intuitions. The basic reason for its failure in providing a satisfactory account consists in its relativistic
character which inevitably trivializes the truths-claims and therefore ontological commitments of the
traditional religious beliefs. If pluralism is to do justice to the problem of religious diversity, it seems
to me that it should not fall into the trap of such a relativism. Yet it hard to see how such a pluralist
view might proceed insofar as a realist view is taken to be intrinsic to the truth-claims of religious
beliefs.
References

Affīfī, A. E. 1979. The Mystical Philosophy of Muhyi Din Ibnul Arabī. Lahore: Sh. Ashraf Pub.
Aslan, A. 1998. Religious Pluralism in Christian and Islamic Philosophy: The Thought of John Hick and Seyyed
Hossein Nasr. London: Curzon Press.
Chittick, W. C. 1989. The Sufi Path of Knowledge. Albany: SUNY Press.
＿．1994. Imaginal Worlds: Ibn al ‘Arabī and the Problem of Religious Diversity. Albany: SUNY
Press.
Corbin, H. 1969. Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi, translated by Ralph Manheim. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Hick, J. 1988. Religious Pluralism and Salvation. In P. L. Quinn and K. Meeker eds., The Philosophical Challenge156REÇBER: Ibn al ‘Arabī, Hick and Religious Pluralismof Religious Diversity. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 54-66.
＿．1989. An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent. New Haven: Yale
University Press.
＿．1993. Disputed Questions in Theology and Philosophy of Religion. London: Macmillan.
＿．2005. Response to Dr Reçber, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 16(1): 11-14.
Ibn al ‘Arabī, M. 1982. Fusūs al-Hikam, edited by A. E. Affīfī. Beirut: Dar al-Kitāb al-Arabī.
Nasr, S. H. 1972. Sufi Essays. London: George Allen and Unwin.
Quinn, P. L. and Meeker, K. 2000. Introduction. In P. L. Quinn and K. Meeker eds., The Philosophical Challengeof Religious Diversity. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 1-28.
Reçber, M. S. 2005. Hick, the Real and al-Haqq, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 16(1): 3-10.
Ward, K. 1990. Truth and Diversity of Religion. In P. L. Quinn and K. Meeker eds., The Philosophical Challengeof Religious Diversity. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 109-125.

157