Sufism

The world is a shadow of the Real, not the Real itself

The image of a shadow lets Ibn Arabi affirm that the created world is genuinely real and worth attending to, while insisting its being is entirely borrowed rather than self-sufficient.

In the Fusus al-Hikam's first chapter, Ibn Arabi describes creation's relationship to al-Haqq, the Real, through the image of a shadow: a shadow has a genuine, moving shape and is not nothing, yet it has no light or substance of its own, existing only because something else stands between it and a source of light. Applied to the cosmos, the image lets him affirm that created things are real in a limited, dependent sense, worth taking seriously rather than dismissing as illusion, while still insisting their being is entirely borrowed rather than necessary or self-subsistent the way God's Being is. This distinction is what keeps Ibn Arabi's system from collapsing into a simple claim that "everything is God," since a shadow, however real, is never mistaken for the object casting it. The image also implies motion: a shadow shifts as its source shifts, meaning creation is continually dependent, not merely originated once and then left standing on its own.

Fusus al-Hikam