Images of Akbarian Prostration: An Academic Organon of Ibn al-'Arabi Ritual Studies

Abstract

This dissertation investigates and experiments with various theoretical tools for the study of ritual prostration in the thought of the Andalusian mystic Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 1240), known as al-Shaykh al-Akbar. After conceptually locating this project via a literature review and a discussion of methodology in the Introduction, chapter two explores Ibn al-ʿArabī’s logic of prostration to the Kaʿba. Thenceforth, chapters three and four delve into historical and ontological dimensions of Akbarian prostration respectively, in reference to al-Shaykh al-Akbar. The logical, historical, and ontological moments of prostration explored in this dissertation’s chapters are further divided into clarificatory sections. The Escheresque/Deluezian/Kafkaesque analytic horizons this dissertation follows aim at the construction of an academically rigorous Akbarian panopticon of prostration. The fifth concluding chapter integrates the results from prior chapters by applying an Akbarian ritual framework to an iconographic image of Muslim prostration. By binding Ibn al-ʿArabī’s high mysticism to the common Muslim practice of ritual prostration towards the Kaʿba, we will demonstrate how the universal dimensions of his teachings are inseparable from his particularistic adherence to a mystical version of Sunnī Islam. The non-linear methodological directions followed in this dissertation can offer a way out of the ongoing schism in the research on Ibn al-ʿArabī, which oscillates between the two poles of the Shaykh’s bilateral universalism and exclusivism.