Sufism

Wahdat al-Wujud — the Unity of Being

This is the philosophical claim that only one Being truly exists, and everything called "many" is that single Reality showing itself through countless particular forms.

In the opening chapter of the Fusus al-Hikam, devoted to Adam as the first prototype of humanity, Ibn Arabi lays the ground for what his later commentators would call wahdat al-wujud: the claim that Being belongs to God alone, and everything other than God is not a second existence but a locus where that one Being becomes manifest and knowable. Adam is presented not as a creature added to an already-finished cosmos but as the point where divine Reality first sees itself reflected as if in a mirror. Ibn Arabi distinguishes this from simple pantheism: the created world does not become God, it discloses Him, the way a shape in a mirror discloses a face without being that face. This chapter set the terms for centuries of debate in the Islamic world over whether existence is fundamentally one or many.

Ibn Arabi (d. 1240) never used the exact phrase wahdat al-wujud himself; it was coined by his student Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi and later commentators to summarize his teaching.

Fusus al-Hikam