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The Honesty of the Perplexed:
Derrida and Ibn ‘Arabi
on “Bewilderment”
Ian Almond
Ian Almond teaches English literature at Bosphorus University (Bogazici Üniversitesi), Istanbul,
Turkey.
1 “Zidn2 fiyaka tah2raan.”
Journal of the American Academy of Religion September 2002, Vol. 70, No. 3, pp. 515–537.
© 2002 The American Academy of Religion
In this article, I consider the positive manner in which both Ibn ‘Arabi and
Derrida approach the idea of perplexity (in Arabic, hayrah)—for Ibn ‘Arabi,
it is a prelude towards an encounter with the Real. If rational constructs
are an obstacle toward our understanding of Allah—and if bewilderment
means the disabling of our rational faculties—then bewilderment is no
longer a sign of spiritual failure and disarray, but rather a possibility of truer
knowledge about God. In this respect, I consider for comparison what
Derrida already has written about the tout autre—how we only truly glimpse
the Other when we are confused. For both deconstructive and Sufi alterities,
the basic point remains the same: When we are confused, we see things that
we miss when we think we know what we are doing. We see the difference
of difference.
I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack
of integrity.
—Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
O Lord, increase my perplexity concerning Thee!
—Fusus al-Hikem (Afifi: 73; Austin 1980: 79)1
BEWILDERMENT takes place when we realize that our rational facul-
ties are not enough to understand what is happening. That something has
taken place in a language our rational faculties do not speak. In a sense,
bewilderment takes place because of our rationality, because we insist on
516 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
clinging to something that is blinding us to the “actual situation.” What
is to be examined in this study is a certain desire for bewilderment in both
deconstructive and Sufi thought, a certain perception of bewilderment as
a more honest possibility of truth. Words such as perplexity and bewil-
derment enable us to glimpse a similar vein of thought in both Derrida
and the Sufi mystical thinker Ibn ‘Arabi (1165–1240)—that is, a similar
affirmation of confusion as a difficult, courageous, and desirable state.
For those unfamiliar with the Spanish Arab thirteenth-century thinker,
Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi (commonly known as the shaykh al-akhbar or “The
Great Shaykh”) constitutes a pivotal figure in the history of Islamic thought.
Although his work, a complex and highly original distillation of Neo-
platonic thought and early Islamic spirituality, is made up of over several
hundred titles, the voluminous Meccan Openings ( Futuhat al-Makkiyah) and
the much shorter and more esoteric Bezels of Wisdom (Fusus al-Hikam) are
the two texts most frequently cited and translated. Often seen as an Is-
lamic Meister Eckhart,2 the scale of Ibn ‘Arabi’s influence upon the Mus-
lim world of the centuries following his death really is closer to that of
Aquinas—indeed, scholars such as Asin Palacios even have extended the
Shaykh’s influence as far as Dante, an idea the Turkish novelist Orhan
Pamuk has satirized in his novel The Black Book. However, the fact re-
mains that, like Meister Eckhart, Ibn ‘Arabi’s reservations concerning
rational thought and reason (‘aql) in attempting to speak about the Un-
speakable do carry with them some implications that, for readers of con-
temporary theory, will sound surprisingly familiar.
Neither Ibn ‘Arabi nor Derrida seems to be afraid of bewilderment—
or, for that matter, bewildering. Whether it is the constantly “exploding
semantic horizons” of the disseminating text (Derrida 1987a: 45), or the
guidance that means being “guided to bewilderment” (Afifi: 200; Austin
1980: 254),3 the “acceptance of incoherent incoherence” (Derrida 1967:
224; see Bass: 151)4 or the God who is everywhere and nowhere, both
Derrida and Ibn ‘Arabi part with a philosophical and Koranic tradition
that sees confusion synonymous with error, failure, untruth, and sin.
In the West, confusion almost always has been seen as the “problem”
of philosophy. Wittgenstein sums this idea up the best: “The philosopher
goes wild, screaming helplessly, until he gets to the heart of his confusion”
2 A surprising number of western studies or translations of Ibn ‘Arabi make some kind of refer-
ence to the German preacher Meister Eckhart (1260–1327). The strength and conviction behind
such references vary—while some simply mention Eckhart in passing, others (such as R. W. Aus-
tin) speak of “striking resemblances,” and Richard Netton goes so far as to call Ibn ‘Arabi “the
Meister Eckhart of the Islamic Tradition” (293).
3 “Illa al-hayrah.”
4 “Acceptation . . . de l’incohérence incoherent.”
Almond: The Honesty of the Perplexed 517
(Kenny: 271). Whether it is Spinoza’s desire to understand the nature of
human actions or Descartes’s project to overcome the anxiety of his own
skepticism, a fear of confusion and doubt always has been the driving force
behind most philosophical projects. Equally negative is the word in Is-
lamic thought, where confusion is used to describe any state of mental or
spiritual regression, an inability to understand the will of God—or the
consequence of a reluctance to do so. It is the kind of confusion ‘Ay al-
Qudat Hamadani felt before finally reading Al-Ghazali: “My heart was a
tumultuous sea with no shores, in it was drowned all the ends and all the
beginnings” (Nasr and Leaman: 390). Ibn Tamiyah, in his Muqaddimat
al-tafsir, insists the Prophet was sent to explain clearly (tubayyin) every-
thing we need to know (Nasr and Leaman: 115). Given such a premise,
confusion in Islam can only ever be negative, falling upon those who can-
not or will not understand. Therefore, God may well be the Guide (al-
hadi) for the righteous, but He also is the Misguider (al-mudill) of the
wicked, dispersing and confounding those who reject His counsel and
follow evil. The fact that Ibn ‘Arabi can take such a standard Koranic (not
to mention biblical) motif such as “confusion” and imbue it with a posi-
tive meaning—to the point of making bewilderment a gift from God—
not only attests to the Shaykh’s daring originality but also indicates how
far Ibn ‘Arabi is prepared radically to reinterpret familiar sections of the
Koran such as the Surah on Noah (Nuh)—reinterpretations that, as we
shall see, will call into question some of the familiar claims for an “ortho-
dox” and “traditionalist” Ibn ‘Arabi, centrally located in the mainstream
of Islamic thought.5
DECONSTRUCTION—UNTYING KNOTS,
THWARTING SYSTEMS
There is something implicitly negative about the word deconstruction,
even though elsewhere Derrida has suggested “de-structuration” (trans-
lating Heidegger’s Destruktion) as more accurately conveying the sense
of the term (Midgley: 16). The variety of images Derrida supplies to de-
scribe the effects of différance and dissemination is bewildering in itself:
différance is anarchic, it “instigates the subversion of every kingdom”
(1982: 22), it “escapes . . . and disorganizes structure” (1987a: 84), it
“disembeds” the text, “unsews” it (1987a: 85), “explodes the semantic
horizon” of its subject (1987a: 45)—terms that illustrate the paradoxical
5 Probably the main proponent of this has been Mahmoud al-Ghorab, who sees Ibn ‘Arabi not
only as a traditionalist (salafi) but also as a “Muhammedan mirror of the utmost clarity, symmetry
and straightness” (see Hirtenstein and Tiernan: 224).
518 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
etymology of confusion, with its simultaneous sense of convergence and
divergence. Confusion is a word that literally means “melting together” but
that we often use in the opposite sense, to describe a situation in which many
things are happening at the same time. Différance at once confuses and
makes things simpler. It breaks down complexities, undoes complications,
and dismantles structures into their various components. At the same time
it makes a text difficult to read, disabling its primary sense in order to free
a plethora of secondary ones, robbing the text of its semantic rudder so that
it no longer can be said to sail in any particular direction.
This emphasis on différance as something that undoes/unsews/disrupts
the text obviously makes use of the origins of the word text (from the Latin
textus, cloth). The text is a cloth that différance forever threatens to undo.
“Dissemination endlessly opens up a snag [accroc] in writing that can no
longer be mended” (Derrida 1972: 26).6 No work can escape this stitch,
this inherent, ever-present possibility of its complete undoing. It is inter-
esting to note that the Arabic term Ibn ‘Arabi frequently uses for “belief”
(i’tiqãd, ‘aqida) has as its root meaning the tying of a knot or to tie some-
thing firmly (Chittick 1989: 335). Thus, when Ibn ‘Arabi says how “every
group has believed something about God,” what he means is that “every
group has tied a certain knot about God” (Chittick 1989: 336; Yahia:
I.266.15). The bewildering unthinkability of God unties every knot con-
cerning Him, just as the unthinkable movement of différance undoes every
text.
Despite the variety of metaphors Derrida offers for différance and dis-
semination, it should not be forgotten that Derrida, far from confusing
the text, simply is showing how the text is already confused in itself. Decon-
struction is a revelatory operation, not a stimulatory one. The “essential
drifting of the text” (Derrida 1982: 317) precedes any theoretical inter-
vention—texts are always already drifting. If deconstruction brings an-
archy to the text, it is only by showing how these unruly elements always
have been seething and brooding underneath a calm façade of unity and
coherence. Confusion and instability are the a priori condition of every
text, regardless of whether it has been analyzed or not. In the same way,
for Ibn ‘Arabi the essentially bewildering nature of God precedes every
attempt, be it Asharite or Mutazilite, to talk meaningfully about Him—
“God is the root of every diversity (khilaf) in beliefs within the cosmos”
(Chittick 1989: 338; Yahia: III.465.25). In both Derrida and Ibn ‘Arabi,
confusion and perplexity seem to precede and underlie every attempt to
form a system—a belief that inevitably imbues the desire for confusion
with an element of honesty and courage (not to mention Nietzschean “in-
6 “La dissémination ouvre, sans fin, cet accroc de l’écriture qui ne se laisse plus recoudre.”
Almond: The Honesty of the Perplexed 519
tegrity”), the desire to glimpse a “truer,” more confused state of affairs
and not succumb to the temptation of the system. In Derrida’s case, this
reappraisal of confusion is most clearly seen in his 1985 essay, “Des Tours
de Babel.”
DERRIDA ON BABEL
Derrida’s essay, being itself an analysis of Benjamin’s famous essay on
translation “The Task of the Translator,” displays its title with an obvious
irony, quite apart from the ambiguity of “Des Tours” (Some tricks? Some
towers? Some detours?). Derrida’s essay on translation has to begin with
Genesis 11:1–9, the destruction of the tower of Babel that is simultaneously
the birth of the translator, the ethnoclastic event that makes translation
possible. What is most immediately striking about “Des Tours” is the way
in which Derrida reinterprets the episode of Babel using his own terms,
retelling the Old Testament story like a medieval typologist, this time not
Christianizing but poststructuralizing the chapter from Genesis to trans-
form it into a deconstructive parable. Genesis 11:1–9 is no longer just a
story about the pride of man thwarted by the omnipotence of God: it is
also a tale about an unfinished structure, a monocultural and monolin-
gual project (the Shemites) with universalist intentions being thwarted
not by thunder or earthquakes but by language itself.
“Now the whole world had one language and a common speech” (Gen-
esis 11:1). The Babel episode, although purporting to be a biblical explana-
tion for the multiplicity of tongues, also marks the beginning of confusion
for man in the Bible. It marks the beginning of a fragmentation of cultures,
a dispersal of different tongues, and the deliberate introduction of a nefari-
ous (and divinely delivered) multiplicity into the totalizing project of the
Shemites. Not surprisingly, Derrida discerns clear parallels to deconstruction
in all of this:
In seeking to “make a name for themselves,” to found at the same time a
universal tongue and a unique genealogy, the Shemites want to bring the
world to reason [mettre à la raison le monde], and this reason can signify
simultaneously a colonial violence (since they would thus universalize
their idiom) and a peaceful transparency of the human community [une
transparence pacifique de la communauté humaine]. (Kamuf: 253; see also
Derrida 1987b: 210)
The Shemites, no longer simply tower builders, have become system
builders. They have become believers in universal truths, metaphysical
construction engineers, trying to build a structure that would both sym-
bolize and disseminate their supremacy—not only over other peoples
520 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
(“colonial violence”) but also over language. The Shemites want to take
over the deistic function of eponymy and “make a name for themselves”—
subdue and control language, decide what they may and may not be called,
and control which signifieds get allotted to which signifiers. Apart from
injecting something strangely biblical into Derrida’s own deconstruction
of western metaphysics (Is Derrida a modern Jeremiah, railing against the
Babelian pretensions of structuralism and phenomenology, science, and
sociology?), the passage emphasizes how the pride of the Shemites blinds
them to the futility of their project. For this is precisely what Babel—to
Derrida—represents: “an incompletion [inachèvement], the impossibil-
ity of finishing, of totalizing . . . of completing something on the order of
system . . . and architectonics” (Kamuf: 244; see also Derrida 1987b: 203).
Derrida has spent a life exploring this impossibility of ever putting a stop
to meaning, of ever making a text say one thing, coherently and consis-
tently, and nothing else. Thus, the futility of the Shemites’ project also is
the futility of Husserl’s, whose Cartesian project sought to “return to the
things themselves” and seek out “the foundation of objectivity” (Derrida
1967: 159); the futility of Foucault’s L’histoire de la folie, which believes it
can talk in a rational-analytical way about madness without ever succumb-
ing to the rational/insane dualism it purports to critique; the futility of
Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, whose aim of reestablishing a “nonviolent”
relationship with the wholly Other is revealed by Derrida to be nothing
more than a “dream”—the “dream of a purely heterological thought” (“le
rêve d’une pensée purement hétérologique” [Derrida 1967: 151]). In all
these instances, the Shemites’ mistaken conviction that their structure
actually can get the better of language is replicated.
What is even more interesting than this contemporary allegorizing of
biblical pride is the way Derrida sees God as a synonym for deconstruction.
It is “from a proper name of God . . . that tongues are scattered, confounded
or multiplied” (Kamuf: 249; see also Derrida 1987b: 207).7 God is the arch-
deconstructor of the story—it is He who confounds the sign system of
the Shemites by fissuring it, fracturing it, and causing it to double and triple
until the Shemites no longer know who they are or what it is they were
planning to do. For all this humbling, abasing, and confounding, how-
ever, Derrida’s God is not simply an agent of deconstruction but also a
God who deconstructs Himself: “And the proper name of God (given by
God) is divided enough in the tongue, already, to signify also, confusedly,
‘confusion.’ And the war that He declares has first raged within his name
[a debord fait rage au-dedans de son nom]: divided, bifid, ambivalent,
polysemic: God deconstructs. Himself” (1987b: 207).
7 “Depuis un nom propre de Dieu . . . les langues se dispersent, se confondent ou se multiplient.”
Almond: The Honesty of the Perplexed 521
It is a point Derrida has made several times: Not even God escapes
différance. Or, in more secular terms, even the deconstructive critic must
fall prey to the same semantic instabilities she or he has detected in oth-
ers. The pat distinction between deconstructor and deconstructed is dis-
solved. For Derrida, no-one or -thing, neither God nor Allah, neither
Husserl’s brackets nor Heidegger’s Sein nor Lévi-Strauss’s bricoleur, can
escape the “metaphysical complicity” of language (Derrida 1967: 281). As
soon as we begin to deconstruct, we already have deconstructed ourselves.
When God delivers confusion and chaos upon the designs of the Shemites,
He actually is inflicting Himself on them.
Just as God precedes history, confusion precedes order. Or, as Derrida
might say, confusion inhabits order, pervades order, gives meaning to order.
In Derrida’s version of Genesis, no calm, transcendental deity deconstructs
the tower—rather, one version of confusion gives birth to another. That is
why “Des Tours de Babel” is so important for our own argument—it is one
of the few places in the Derridean oeuvre where Derrida actually joins Ibn
‘Arabi in using confusion as a divine name. What Derrida does in “Des
Tours” is call into question the simplicity of God, criticize the standard and
fairly simplistic images of deity we have, remind us of the confusing and
overwhelming complexity of the thought of God. It is a theme Derrida has
certainly touched on elsewhere—twenty years earlier, in his essay on Jabès
(in many ways the most Kabbalistic of Derrida’s essays) Derrida is com-
paring the “God” we can know with the “God” we cannot:
If God opens the question in God, if he is the very opening of the Question
[s’il est l’ouverture même de la Question], there can be no simplicity of God.
And, thus, that which was unthinkable for the classical rationalists here
becomes the obvious itself. Proceeding within the duplicity of his own
questionability, God does not act in the simplest ways; he is not truthful,
he is not sincere [il n’est pas vérace, il n’est pas sincère]. (1967: 68)
Like Ibn ‘Arabi, Derrida is asking us to increase our perplexity concern-
ing God. The “simplicity” of God—the belief that God acts and works in
essentially clear, meaningful ways—is opposed to the distinctly unclassical
complexity and confusion of God. Derrida’s rejection of such “simplic-
ity” replicates, to some extent, Ibn ‘Arabi’s frequent Koranic reminder that
God is like “no thing” that we can know.
All of which leads to the question: what exactly is Derrida saying in
“Des Tours” about confusion? Is it desirable or undesirable? Is it the birth
of something new and positive—or an ineluctable fate that terminates
every project we undertake?
Confusion, first and foremost, appears to be a punishment delivered
in particular upon those who want to get rid of their own confusion. The
522 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
Shemites are guilty of this cardinal sin: “Come, let us build ourselves a
city and a tower . . . / Let us make ourselves a name, / that we not be scat-
tered over the face of all the earth” (Kamuf: 248).8 Seeing the world not
as a place to affirm but rather to control, the Shemites are unhappy with
their wandering, nameless status—and it is precisely this proud dissatis-
faction with their nomadic condition that provokes their punishment.
There is something faintly paradoxical here—“True homelessness and
confusion will only be inflicted on those who do not desire it,” as if learn-
ing to love one’s perplexity is the only way ever to be free of it.
Part of the Shemites’ sin, it would appear, lies in the Shemites’ refusal
not just to wander but also to accept the multiplicity of language. The only
truly “proper” (propre) name is that of “YHWH”; the Shemites, troubled
by the fact that their name may take on different meanings for different
people, yearn for a similar unambiguity. In this sense, the tower of Babel
is (in the words of Richard Rorty) “an attempt to avoid relatedness . . . to
speak a word which has meaning even though it has no place in a social
practice” (Guignon: 352). The Shemites’ sin is the desire for meaning it-
self; pure, unambiguous, repeatable meaning, not to be at the mercy of
contexts or adrift in alien situations. Of course, the Shemites fail in this—
and Derrida’s conviction of the “impossibility of finishing” such towers
only reflects the more general impossibility of any proper name (even that
of YHWH) ever to mean one thing and one thing only.
Second, Derrida’s essay seems to oppose confusion to violence—at
least to a certain kind of violence, a “colonial violence.” The Shemites’
desire to “universalize their idiom” (Kamuf: 253), of making the whole
world speak their tongue and subscribe to their culture, ultimately belongs
to what Derrida earlier had called (paraphrasing Levinas) a thought of “the
One and the Same”—in other words, a metaphysics that is “the origin . . .
of all oppression in the world” (Derrida 1967: 83).9 God’s gesture, there-
fore, becomes “multicultural” in the most ironic sense of the term—the
bewildering of the Shemites foils their imperialist intentions, confound-
ing their architects and scattering their armies, and disempowering them
physically as well as semantically. Confusion, here, means the loss of all
the reasons why one would want to control and subdue somebody, the
difficulty in forcing someone to conform to one logos when a multiplicity
of them abound. If rational metaphysics is “the origin . . . of all oppres-
sion,” and if confusion is precisely that which disables the will to meta-
physicize, then it is not surprising to see how Derrida can discover pacific
8 “Allons, bâtissons une ville et une tour. . . . Faisons—nous un nom / que nous ne soyions
dispersés sur la face de toute la terre.”
9 “Origine . . . de toute oppression dans le monde.”
Almond: The Honesty of the Perplexed 523
overtones in the idea of bewilderment. Confusion, far from being that
which foils justice or creates a breeding ground for injustice, actually be-
comes a disabler of tyranny, a dismantler of the violent totality, a para-
lyzing wrench thrown into the dictator’s machine.
Derrida, in typical fashion, questions this idea as soon as he expresses
it. The Babelian project “can signify simultaneously a colonial violence
. . . and a peaceful transparency of the community” (Kamuf: 253). The
divine abolition of a single tongue may well foil the aims of a “linguistic
imperialism,” but it also removes a form of communication. A difficult
question briefly makes its appearance: Is Genesis 11:1–9 about the thwart-
ing of an empire or the destruction of a community? Is the removal of
one bigger, “colonial violence” only the beginning of a number of smaller,
interethnic ones? It is a surprisingly generous phrase, given Derrida’s
antipathy toward words like community (in which he sees “as many threats
as promises” [Coward and Foshay: 292]), not to mention the famous
crossing of swords with Habermas and his communicative reason. The
common idiom, however colonially imposed, would at least reduce the
possibility of misunderstanding within the community—expressions,
actions, gestures, would all be relatively “transparent.” The language game
of the Shemites would be colonially singular, and its rules transparently
(albeit incontestably) clear. Even though Derrida seems to be saying, in
“Des Tours,” that God’s deconstruction of the tower is an example of what
Derrida has elsewhere termed “just deconstruction” (Midgley: 34), the
possible “peaceful transparency” of the Shemites’ community does inject
a note of ambivalence into the essay.
If the Derrida of “Des Tours” appears to be reluctant to come out and
declare confusion to be a truly pacific state—that is, declaring bewilder-
ment to be the only way of nonviolently receiving the Other—we should
not be surprised. As we already have seen in Of Grammatology, when using
words like violence and colonial Derrida often is careful not to replicate
Lévi-Strauss’s error and fall into the trap of a tyrant/victim, wicked/in-
nocent dualism. Even though Derrida believes no order or community
to be free of a certain violence, this does not mean anarchy is some form
of blissful utopia. The most we can say about Derrida’s attitude toward
confusion is that, when we are confused or bewildered, we are less likely
to impose a single, reductive image onto the Other—just as Ibn ‘Arabi’s
perfect gnostic, when in a state of complete hayrah or perplexity, is no
longer willing or able to fix any image onto the Real.
Third, Derrida’s words on Babel underline one consistent feature of
his varied and diverse corpus: a delight in multiplicity at the expense of
unity. For Derrida the divergent is infinitely preferable to the convergent,
the fragments are more interesting than the whole, the Many is prefer-
524 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
able to the One. Bewilderment is to be encouraged, not resisted. The alle-
gations of anarchy that have been leveled at Derrida, although exagger-
ated in tone and mistaken in motive, are correct to some degree: they
concern a thinker who is as interested in dissolution as he is in design.
The “dissemination” of the Shemites (“YHWH disperses them from here
over the face of all the earth / They cease to build the city” [Kamuf: 248;
see also Derrida 1972: 206–207]),10 a working metaphor for the decon-
struction of every would-be system, is the very kind of confusion Derrida
seeks to affirm. This profoundly anti-Neoplatonic strain in Derrida’s
writing, rather than seeking an impossible return to the One, affirms the
dissolution of the One into the Many—if only because there never was a
“pure,” “unchanging” One to begin with:
The quasi-“meaning” of dissemination is the impossible return to the
rejoined, readjusted unity of meaning. . . . But is dissemination then the
loss of that kind of truth, the negative prohibition of all access to such a
signified? Far from presupposing that a virgin substance [une substance
vierge] thus precedes or oversees it, dispersing or withholding itself within
a negative second moment, dissemination affirms the always already di-
vided generation of meaning [la dissémination affirme la génération tou-
jours déjà divisée du sens]. (Derrida 1972: 300)
This denial of any original “oneness” or “wholeness” (“virgin substance”)
that might have preceded the multiple probably constitutes the most seri-
ous difference between Ibn ‘Arabi and Derrida, whose attitudes toward ra-
tionality and bewilderment otherwise encounter so many points of similarity.
It is a passage that reveals Derrida to be the most un-Neoplatonic of think-
ers, surprising when one considers some of the favorites in the Derridean
canon (e.g., Benjamin and Blanchot). Instead of the One, an emptiness lies
at the heart of dissemination, a place where “there is no longer any depth of
meaning” (Derrida 1972: 350). The “actual situation” for Derrida is an end-
lessly proliferating myriad of substitutions, without beginning or end, cen-
ter or periphery, in the midst of which the unenlightened forever attempt
to build their theories, structures, and truths unaware that their metaphysi-
cal towers rest upon interminably shifting sands.
IBN ‘ARABI ON THE FLOOD
Were He to come out of a thing, it would cease to be. And were He to be
within a thing, it would cease to be.
—Futuhat, II.661.10
10 “YHWH les disperse de lá sur la face de toute la terre. / Il cesset de bâtir la ville.”
Almond: The Honesty of the Perplexed 525
Near the beginning of his book on Ibn ‘Arabi, William Chittick writes:
“To find God is to fall into bewilderment” (1989: 3). No sentence sums
up more accurately the Sufi’s attitude toward confusion. Throughout both
the Futuhat and the Fusus, Ibn ‘Arabi uses a variety of metaphors for be-
wilderment: it is, we are told, a station, a gift, a divine name, a tool, a
knowledge and ultimately, one suspects, an “actual situation” that under-
lies everything we think we know. “To realise that one cannot know [God]
is to know” says Abu Bakr (Afifi: 62; Austin 1980: 65),11 a Socratic dis-
claimer Ibn ‘Arabi never tires of quoting, and in a sense Ibn ‘Arabi’s radi-
cally positive view of bewilderment stems directly from this equally radical
unthinkability of God.
Therefore, when Ibn ‘Arabi quotes the hadith “O Lord, increase my
perplexity concerning You” (as he frequently does),12 what he really is
asking is, “O Lord, confuse and confound the simplistic limitations I have
attempted to cage You within.” Bewilderment becomes the best way the
believer has of escaping the metaphysical trap of his own perspectiveness—
not, in this case, by the proffering of some extralinguistic knowledge (a
secret name or sign) but, rather, by presenting and confusing the believer
with a multiplicity of different Gods, some orthodox, some heretical, some
intimately immanent, others aloof and transcendental. In the alarming,
disconcerting contiguity of this myriad of different images, one can truly
begin to understand how “the actual situation of the Divinity does not
become delimited or restricted and remains unknown” (Chittick 1989:
348; Yahia: II.211.29). For Ibn ‘Arabi, a profusion of different beliefs is
testimony to God’s utter unthinkability.
This idea of understanding what God is through a confusion of con-
trasting images has a fairly long genealogy, one that goes back at least to
the first negative theologians of the early Church; it shows the apophatic
possibilities of Ibn ‘Arabi as a negative theologian, one who becomes in-
creasingly relevant to Derrida’s own critique of the via negativa.
Perhaps the sixth-century Dionysius offers the most famous example
in negative theology of how different constructions concerning God, once
dismantled, actually can convey a better sense of God’s ineffability. In
certain moments of The Mystical Theology and The Celestial Hierarchy, he
makes the remarkable assertion that to call God drunk or hungover is more
suitable than calling God good or wise, for “incongruous dissimilarities”
11 “Al-‘ajz ‘an dark al-idrak idrak.”
12 Afifi: 73; Austin 1980: 79: “Zidn2 fiyaka tah2raan.” Interestingly, an untraceable saying by all
accounts—one almost suspects it came from Ibn ‘Arabi himself. One also cannot help thinking
here of Eckhart’s “I pray God to rid me of God” [Her umbe sô bite ich got, daz er mich ledic mache
gotes].
526 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
make us more aware of God’s unreachable otherness than equally finite
adjectives, such as almighty and all-knowing (Pseudo-Dionysius: 58). For
the Areopagite, to call God at the same time “Almighty” and a “worm,”
“wise” and “drunk,” is more accurately to address what one critic has called
the “language-defeating reality of God” (Turner: 278). Dionysius self-
consciously employs contradictory constructions of the divine Other to
convey a more realistic sense of God’s utter unthinkability. Constructing
and disassembling the various inventions of God that affirmative theol-
ogy supplies presents an interesting apophatic strategy. Dionysius offers
an attempt to understand the imageless not through the abandonment of
images but, rather, through the contiguity of conflicting ones.
Although Ibn ‘Arabi goes to some lengths to show how “knowledge
of God is bewilderment, and knowledge of creation is bewilderment”
(Chittick 1989: 380; Yahia: IV.279.26), there certainly are moments in both
the Futuhat and the Fusus where this idea of perplexity as a mystical end
station on the believer’s journey is called into question. “Bewilderment,”
far from being an essential state of things, occasionally is portrayed by the
Shaykh in a different light—more as a temporary and inconvenient pre-
lude to enlightenment (‘arif) rather than any kind of knowledge in itself.
In the middle of a discussion on the “transcendent reality,” that is, at the
same time, “the relative creature” (Austin 1980: 87), Ibn ‘Arabi writes how
“he who truly understands what we are discussing here is not confused”—
which means that he who is confused has not truly understood. Thus
comprehension, not confusion, is the last thing to be experienced before
an encounter with the divine. This belief that the desire for knowledge of
God ends, epistemologically, in a moment of calm rather than turbulence
is underlined further by the ending to the chapter on Lot:
The Mystery is now clear to you
And the matter is well explained.
For that which is odd
Is enshrined within the even. (Afifi: 131; Austin 1980: 162)13
The dilemma emerges: Which vocabulary has the last word in Ibn ‘Arabi,
one that sees God as a holy, primordial, difference-dissolving state of
confusion? Or one that leads the believer not to but through a confusion,
toward an ineffable Something—the “mystery” (sirr) that Ibn ‘Arabi so
often refers to? Is God Perplexity itself or, rather, a Something that lies
on the other side of all our bewilderment?
If the Fusus appears to give two different responses to this question—
the chapters on Noah and Muhammad suggesting the former, the sections
13 “Faqad nan laka al-sir waqad at]h≈aha al-amr / waqad adraj fiyah2 shara’a al-za fiya huwa al-watr.”
Almond: The Honesty of the Perplexed 527
on Enoch and Hud the latter—some help comes from a later commentator
of Ibn ‘Arabi, the fifteenth-century ‘Abd al-Rahman Jâmî.14 Essentially,
Jâmî discerns three kinds of bewilderment in the closing chapter of the
Fusus. The first kind is the “bewilderment of the beginners” (Chittick 1982:
91). This, Jâmî says, is a “common” bewilderment, which most believers
feel—the anxiety of those who seek meaning but have no belief or direc-
tion in which to travel. This first state of confusion usually is removed by
“the determination of a quest” (91). For the “most part” of the people,
this leads to tranquility—some, however, experience the second stage of
bewilderment as they look around and see the believers who have “split
up into numerous factions” about them, “so [the believer] becomes be-
wildered and does not know which of the beliefs is the most correct in real-
ity.” The removal of this bewilderment takes place when “no desire remains
in [the believer] for the divine presence from a particular aspect or point of
view” (92). Once this abandonment of -isms and perspectives takes place,
we move onto the third stage—which belongs to what Jâmî calls “the people
of the final bewilderment” (93). Significantly, this is a station that even
“the greatest spiritual luminaries” do not exceed—“rather they ascend
in it for ever and ever.” Writing almost 200 years after the Fusus, Jâmî
sees his predecessor’s bewilderment as no temporary bridge to a final,
clarifying solution but, rather, a strange land beyond God where true
gnostics wander in all directions of their own accord. “So they enter the
Trackless Desert in His contemplation, and their bewilderment is from
Him, through Him and in Him” (93).
‘Abd al-Rahman Jâmî’s comments bring to light three important as-
pects of the Shaykh’s “bewilderment”—aspects that, we shall see, will re-
flect on our comparison with Derrida. First of all, there are different kinds
of confusion, different types of bewilderment to be encountered by the
believer. In some cases, attempting to overcome confusion is seen to be
spiritually necessary; in others, it is futile and foolish. Second, Jâmî rightly
(and uncritically) discerns in Ibn ‘Arabi a certain elitism—confusion is
not for everyone. Apart from those rare spirits who are able to persist in
perpetual bewilderment, the greater part of the faithful (Jâmî calls them
the “people of the stopping places” [ahl al-mawaqif] [Chuttick 1982: 92])
stop short of the “final bewilderment” and take shelter in a niche of clar-
ity. One almost discerns a hierarchy of perplexity here, made possible not
14 Sometime after writing the Fusus al-Hikam, Ibn ‘Arabi produced a second work that essen-
tially summarizes and expounds on the main themes of the Fusus. Because of the importance of
the Fusus, this secondary work (called the Naqsh al-Fusus—the Pattern of the Fusus) also received
some attention in the commentary tradition—including, among others, Jâmî’s own Naqd al-nusûs
fi sharh naqsh al-fusûs (Selected Texts in Commenting on the Naqsh al-fusus), written in 1459. The
translation is by William G. Chittick.
528 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
by knowledge but, rather, by nonknowledge. Those at the bottom are
the ones with the clearest ideas, whereas those near the top are the most
confused, the ones who have come closest to the secret of God’s mind-
numbing unthinkability. Third, the “final bewilderment,” which Jâmî
refers to makes us wonder if, in Ibn ‘Arabi’s oeuvre, the true goal is not
so much confusion but a certain attitude toward confusion; whether true
hayrah is not so much a state but, rather, the calm acceptance of a situa-
tion, perhaps even the celebration of such a moment. Of course, how close
such a “celebration” would come toward the “Nietzschean . . . joyous
affirmation of the play of the world” (“l’affirmation nietzschéenne . . .
joyeuse du jeu du monde” [Derrida 1967: 427]), which we read in those
famous closing passages of Derrida’s “Structure, Sign and Play,” remains
to be seen.
Ibn ‘Arabi’s treatment of the seventy-first surah of the Koran on Noah
(Nuh) is a good example of how the Shaykh bewilders the reader, by of-
fering interpretations of well-known passages from the Koran that are
almost the exact opposite of what they appear to mean. The hermeneu-
tics of the Fusus are a lesson in perplexity in themselves: villains and ty-
rants are treated sympathetically, heroes are shown to be ignorant or
misguided, condemnatory verses are reinterpreted as praise, idolaters are
shown to be enlightened. As we shall see in a later chapter, Ibn ‘Arabi’s
conviction that “the Reality of God lies in all things” is translated perfectly
into his Koranic commentary; the intention of God’s Holy Text lies in all
possible readings, even in the most contradictory and outrageous ones.
For now, we merely are interested in what Ibn ‘Arabi’s chapter on Noah
in the Fusus says about bewilderment—and, ultimately, how this com-
pares to Derrida’s own thoughts on confusion.
In a way, Ibn ‘Arabi’s retelling of the story of Noah follows Derrida’s
version of Babel, insofar as both writers deal with a divinely delivered
catastrophe—and both writers choose to redescribe this punishment as
more of a blessing than a chastisement, more of a development or an
advancement than a termination. The Koranic account of the flood does
not differ greatly from that of the biblical version with regards to the ul-
timate significance of the event—in response to the rising corruption and
sinfulness of man, God resolves to wipe out the unbelievers with a divine
deluge, saving only Noah and those around him from the waters because
of their righteousness. The Koran differs only insofar as it shows, in some
detail, the despair of Noah as he attempts (in vain) to persuade his people
to leave their idols and repent, and his request to God that none of the
proud unbelievers should be spared.
In order to understand the Shaykh’s radical rereading of this surah,
one has to remember his persistent emphasis on God as being simulta-
Almond: The Honesty of the Perplexed 529
neously immanent and transcendent. In his attempt to reach the unbe-
lievers Noah, far from being praised as a solitary bastion of righteousness
in a decadent world, is criticized only for emphasizing the transcendent
without mentioning the immanent: “Had Noah uttered this kind of say-
ing, they would have responded to him” (Afifi: 70; Austin 1980: 76).15 Even
more notoriously, Ibn ‘Arabi interprets the final drowning of the unbe-
lievers not as just punishment on the sinful but as the drowning of saints
in the shoreless oceans of Allah: “they drowned in the seas of knowledge
of God, which is what is meant by perplexity” (Afifi: 73; Austin 1980: 79).16
The stubborn idolaters, with their bewildering abundance of idols (Wadd,
Suwan, Yaghuth, Ya’uq, Nasr 71:23), suddenly became the purveyors of a
spiritual hayrah—one that eludes Noah, a figure still clinging to a one-
sided view of a transcendent God.
Ibn ‘Arabi’s version of Noah is important because it tells us a number
of things about the Shaykh’s attitude toward bewilderment; first and fore-
most, multiplicity is seen not as a problem but as a means toward the
solution. The perplexity necessary toward spiritual advancement can be
provided only by multiplicity—in this case, the multiplicity of idols that
“cause confusion” among Noah’s people. Only confusion can bring us
nearer to God. One object of worship is not sufficient—it deludes the
ignorant with an illusion of clarity, desists from complicating the thought
of God, makes the believer think the holy is exclusive to the statue or
painting she or he is worshiping. As soon as a multiplicity of idols appears,
the locus of the holy—and thereby the nature of the Holy itself—is called
into question. Distraction here becomes an antimetaphysical tool, one
used to lever and prize the intellect out of a certain niche and into a freer
understanding of things. The perplexity the believer experiences at this
multiplication of possibilities provokes a sincerer inquiry into the nature
of God, one that will lead (the Shaykh believes) to the all-important real-
ization that al-haqq is present everywhere and in everything.
Here, especially, one sees how important a role infinity plays at the
heart of both Derrida’s and Ibn ‘Arabi’s thought. The forms of the Real,
like the possible meanings of the deconstructive text, are infinite in num-
ber: There is no end to the “bottomless chessboard” (échiquier sans fond)
on which différance is put into play (Derrida 1982: 22), any more than
there is any bottom to the infinite oceans of God (“God possesses rela-
tionships, faces and realities without limit” [Chittick 1989: 156; Yahia:
II.671.5]). The confusion that the infinity of the Real/the Derridean text
provides is seen by both Derrida and Ibn ‘Arabi to be perfectly desirable,
15 “Falau ana nuh yat2 bimithal haza al-aya lafzan ajabu.”
16 “Fag≈h≈ariqu f2 bihari al-‘alam bi Allah wa huwa al-hayrah.”
530 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
even if they do lead in radically different directions. For Derrida, the be-
wilderingly infinite possibilities of the text lead to one conclusion: that
the text is semantically vacuous, a sheet of symbols bereft of depth. Ibn
‘Arabi, however, viewing the perplexing variety of people’s beliefs, does
not come to the conclusion that there is no God but, rather, that there is
“Something that cannot be known” that both embodies and is embodied
by all of these infinite manifestations.
A second point to be made is that Noah’s evangelical failure to save
the unbelievers from the flood stems from his refusal to present God as a
divine perplexity: “Noah summoned his people by night, in that he ap-
pealed to their intellects and spirits, which are unseen, and by day, in that
he appealed to the external senses. But he did not unite the two as in the
verse There is none like Him (42:11)” (Afifi: 70–71; Austin 1980: 76).17
Noah literally refuses to con-fuse the idea of God by presenting Him as a
simultaneous conjunction of opposites (immanent and transcendent).
This monologic attachment to a simplistic understanding of God, essen-
tially this distaste for confusion on Noah’s part, causes the unbelievers to
“recoil” and prevents them from climbing onto the boat. It is an unflat-
tering portrayal of Noah for Ibn ‘Arabi to present—one that seems to class
Noah with the proponents of the Kalam and the other philosophers who
fetter (‘iqal) themselves to a single image of God. Perhaps to recover some
shred of orthodoxy, Ibn ‘Arabi contrasts this implicit ignorance of Noah
with the keener wisdom of the Prophet Muhammad, who (in the Shaykh’s
opinion) clearly understood something about God that Noah did not:
In the verse There is none like Him, similarity is at once implied and denied.
Because of this Muhammad said that he had been granted knowledge [of
God] integrating all His aspects. Muhammad [unlike Noah] did not sum-
mon his people by night and by day, but by night during the day [an inner
summons implicit in the outer one], and by day during the night [the outer
truth being implicit in the inner]. (Afifi: 71; Austin 1980: 76–77)18
Unlike Noah, the Prophet is keenly aware of the “actual situation”—he
emphasizes neither the zahir nor the batin (esoteric meaning) at the ex-
pense of one another but, rather, blurs the distinction between both.
Unlike Noah, the Prophet is not afraid of the con-fusion of God; this
natural distance between Noah and Muhammad is not measured in terms
17 “Nuh da’a qawmahu ‘laylan’ min haythu ‘uqluhum wa ruha niyatahum fainnaha g≈h≈ayb. ‘wan-
haran’ da’ahum ay]h≈an min haythu zahir surahum wa hissehum wa ma jam’a fi al-da’uwati mithal
‘lays kamithliha shay.’”
18 Austin’s notes are in brackets. “Fafi ‘lays kamithliha shay’ ithbat al-mithal wa naf2hi, wa bihaza
qal ‘an nefsihi sal Allah alayhi wa selam inahi utiya jawa lam’a al-kelim. Fima da’a Muhammad sala
allahi alayhi wa selam qawmahu laylan wa nahaza, bil da’ahum laylan f2 nahar fi layli.”
Almond: The Honesty of the Perplexed 531
of respect or divine favor but, rather, in terms of how close each comes to
accepting perplexity as a condition of the divine.
One of the more interesting metaphors Ibn ‘Arabi uses for such per-
plexity is that of a deluge, evoking the familiar image of God as a shoreless
ocean. It is a metaphor that provides the most scandalous suggestion in
Ibn ‘Arabi’s rereading of the surah; the unbelievers’ refusal to join Noah
and climb on the boat is no tragic mistake but, rather, a spiritually wiser
move, one that saves them from the narrow ontotheology of Noah’s ark
and allows them to drown ecstatically in the wider seas of “the knowledge
of God” (Austin 1980: 79). By refusing to join Noah and heed the call to
his transcendent God, they reject an unenlightened clarity in favor of their
own perplexing truth—and pay for this choice, as Al Hallaj did, with their
lives. Nevertheless, the spiritual stage the unbelievers reach as a result of
their refusal is far higher than that of Noah. Once swept away by the flood,
if they were ever to find land again (as Noah does), it would constitute no
rescue but a spiritual descent: “Were He to deliver them onto the shore
of Nature He would be lowering them from an eminent stage” (Afifi: 73;
Austin 1980: 80).19 For true gnostics, evidently, oceans are preferable to
arks.
In the Futuhat Ibn ‘Arabi performs the same controversial gesture,
taking familiar condemnations of the foolish and the proud in the Koran
and completely inverting their meaning so that they describe those few,
distinct from “the common people” (Chittick 1989: 380), who have dis-
covered true perplexity. For example, the wayward described by the Koran
in verses 2:17, those “who do not see. Deaf, dumb, and blind, they will
never return to the right path,” are interpreted differently by the Shaykh
in the last volume of the Futuhat: “But the elect are ‘in darkness, they do
not see. Deaf, dumb, blind.’ (2:17), they do not understand. Sometimes
they say ‘We are we and He is He,’ sometimes they say ‘He is we and we
are He’” (Chittick 1989: 380, emphasis added). Darkness, incomprehen-
sion, and aimlessness are the gifts of the perplexed—“they will never re-
turn to the right path.” Bewilderment, amongst other things, means loss
of direction. Suddenly, “never returning to the right path” seems to be
indicative of enlightenment, not ignorance. Ibn ‘Arabi infuses the idea of
wandering with a positive sense that would be difficult to reconcile with
orthodox Islam, given the importance of the path (al-sirat al-mustaqim)
and its synonymity with the codes and traditions of the Shariah. In his
chapter on Noah, Ibn ‘Arabi analyzes this difference between the un-
perplexed—who proceed along a given path toward a goal—and the be-
wildered, for whom there is no longer any center to journey toward:
19 “Fala akhrajahum ila al-sayf, sayf al-tabiyat lanazil biham an haza al-darjat al-rafi’at.”
532 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
He who experiences this perplexity is ceaselessly centered on the Pole
[God], while he who follows the “long” path [to a distant God] is always
turning aside from the [Supreme] Goal to search after that which is [eter-
nally] within him, running after imagination as his goal. He has an [imagi-
nary] starting point and [what he supposes to be] a goal and what lies
between them, while for the God-centered man there is no restriction of
beginning or end, possessing [as he does] the most comprehensive exist-
ence and being the recipient of [divine] truths and realities. (Afifi: 73;
Austin 1980: 79)20
Ibn ‘Arabi’s perplexity here is opposed to movement—confusion becomes
a paralyzing condition, it robs the believer of a goal, an object, an aim. As
soon as one discovers that God is (immanently) in oneself, as well as (tran-
scendentally) Somewhere outside, one no longer needs to make a pilgrim-
age, for the shrine is already inside the pilgrim. Hence, the paralysis that
confusion brings to the “God-centered” (perplexed) man is by no means
negative, but simply the rendering unnecessary of an illusory journey to
something one already is.
The final point to be made about Ibn ‘Arabi’s remarks on Noah con-
cerns the social implications of hayrah and its subversive potential. The
chapter on Noah offers one of the few places in the Fusus where the faintly
political possibilities of perplexity—discovering the Real within oneself—
are alluded to, if not fully explored. Modern critics with political agendas
often can be found reinterpreting various medieval mysticisms as revolu-
tionary vocabularies, particularly those that emphasize the divine within the
human. The clearest example of this is probably Ernst Bloch’s Marxist read-
ing of Meister Eckhart in his Atheismus im Christentum. In Ernst Bloch,
Eckhart’s insistence on the unity of God and the soul becomes a subver-
sive, emancipatory gesture that ultimately sees “the treasure in Heaven
[as] the property of man” [die Schätze im Himmel als Eigentum der Mensch]
(Bloch: 95). Thus, for Bloch, Eckhart supplies not just an “aspiring sub-
ject” but also a “blown-open, descending heavenly kingdom” [gesprengter,
niedersteigender Himmel] (287).
All of which does not mean to say a similarly emancipatory reading of
Ibn ‘Arabi should be attempted—the only chains the Shaykh is keen to
break are purely metaphysical. What deserves comment in Ibn ‘Arabi’s
Noah is the way the presence of the perplexed dissolves a certain social
20 Austin’s notes are in brackets. “Falhare lahu al-dar wa al-harakat al-duriyat hal al-qutb falla
yabrah minhu, wa salhab al-tariq al-mustatil maal k≈h≈araja ‘an al-maqsud talaba ma huwa fihi salahab
k≈h≈ayal ilahi ghayat: fallahu min wa illa wa ma bin huma. Wa sahab al-harakat al-duriyat al-abd
ulahu fiyalzamhu ‘man’ wa la ghayat fathakam alayhi ‘ila’ Falaha al-wujud al-atam wa huwa al-muta
juwa ma’a al-kelam wa al-hukum.”
Almond: The Honesty of the Perplexed 533
hierarchy—and the way Noah’s words (below in italics) present the con-
fusion of the unbelievers as a possible threat to society, one that might
spread if not checked in time:
If you spare them, that is leave them, they will confuse your servants, mean-
ing that they will perplex them and cause them to depart from their
servanthood to [assert] the mysteries of Lordship in themselves, so that
they will consider themselves as Lords after being servants. They will in-
deed be servants become as Lords. (Afifi: 74; Austin 1980: 80)21
If God is the dissolver of differences (“He has no attributes [sifa]” [Chittick
1989: 73]), then everyone carries within them this capacity to dismantle
hierarchy, regardless of their social position. Noah’s fear lies in this perceived
threat of self-discovery; perplexity lifts the servant out of his servanthood,
causes everything to shimmer and change, relocating the Divinity not just
in the hearts of caliphs and kings but even down to the lowest rung of the
social ladder. It is a passage that reminds us of Bloch’s observation—in
Ibn ‘Arabi, true enlightenment turns servants into lords.
Both Derrida’s and Ibn ‘Arabi’s attitudes toward perplexity—their
repeated mistrust of systems and system builders, their consistent por-
trayal of clarity as an illusion based on the ignorance of a certain situa-
tion, their understanding of a certain dynamic force that pervades all
manifestations/texts without ever revealing itself, along with their belief
that the state of perplexity allows one to glimpse an elusive Other that
remains invisible to those who are trying to think it—all these observa-
tions lead us to a number of general points.
Perplexity Is an “Actual Situation”
For both thinkers, confusion is a certain originary state of affairs that
seems to precede God/the text and every attempt to talk about them. For
Ibn ‘Arabi, the true gnostic sees through (without dismissing) the theolo-
gizing and philosophizing of his peers; he understands that “the whole af-
fair [of God] is perplexity” (Austin 1980: 254), a divine flux that lies beneath
every image and concept proffered about the Real. The deconstructive critic
replicates this antedating of meaning with confusion by seeing through the
apparent calm of the text and perceiving an “‘active, moving discord of
different forces’ beneath it” (Derrida 1982: 18),22 always already about to
subvert and undermine any and every interpretation.
21 “‘Inaka tajarhum’ ay tad’ahum wa tatarkum ‘yad≈h≈ulu ‘abadak’ ay yahiruham fi ya k≈h≈arajuhum
min al-‘abudiyat ila ma fihum min asrar al-rabubiyat fiyanzarun anfasahum arbaba.”
22 “Cette discorde ‘active,’ en mouvement, des forces différentes.”
534 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
Perplexity Is an Inevitable Situation
The confusion that both différance and al-haqq perpetrate cannot be
overcome; no theological vocabulary can tie the Real to one form, safe
and constant, just as no hermeneutics can prevent the “essential drift-
ing of the text” (Derrida 1982: 317). The Real moves through a bewilder-
ing variety of manifestations, from zahir to zahir, just as the text moves
through an equally bewildering series of differing interpretations. For both
Derrida and Ibn ‘Arabi, the perplexing effusion of meanings and mani-
festations can be neither controlled nor resisted; bewilderment is a seman-
tic fact of God.
Perplexity Is an Honest, Difficult Situation
The word for khâfir (infidel, unbeliever) comes from the Arabic root
khafara, meaning to hide or conceal. Etymologically, a khâfir is someone
who hides the truth in his or her heart (Austin 1984: 7). For Ibn ‘Arabi,
this would mean refusing to acknowledge the perplexity of the “actual
situation”—that the Real both is and is not the creation, that He is simul-
taneously immanent and transcendent. The secret of the Akhbarian soul—
that it is a part of the Real—is concealed (khafara) thanks to the half-truth
of transcendence (tanzih). “We forbid reflection totally,” writes Ibn ‘Arabi,
“since it makes the possessor heir to deceit and lack of sincerity” (Chittick
1989: 203; Yahia: II.523.2). “Covering” or “concealing” the radical un-
thinkability of God with our own versions of the deity makes our spiri-
tual lives easier for us; if we desire a true encounter with the Real, we have
to be prepared to experience perplexity and not simply seek reassurance
in comfortable, familiar images.
Speaking in an interview (within a strictly Christian context) of a
“deconstructive theology movement,” Derrida has suggested some simi-
lar theological applications of deconstruction—more than anything else,
of “uncovering” a spiritual authenticity:
The point would seem to be to liberate theology from what has been
grafted onto it, to free it from its metaphysico-philosophical super ego,
so as to uncover an authenticity of the “gospel,” of the evangelical mes-
sage. And thus from the perspective of faith, deconstruction can at least
be a very useful technique when Aristotelianism or Thomism are to be
criticized or, even from an institutional perspective, when what needs to
be criticized is a whole theological institution which supposedly has cov-
ered over, dissimulated an authentic Christian message. And [the point
would also seem to be] a real possibility for faith both at the margins and
very close to Scripture, a faith lived in a venturous, dangerous, free way.
(Blond: 262, emphasis added)
Almond: The Honesty of the Perplexed 535
Despite the difference in contexts, Derrida is saying in effect something
remarkably similar to Ibn ‘Arabi: The “metaphysico-philosophical” con-
structions with which various institutions (the Asharites, the Mutazilites)
have tried to simplify and regulate the nature of God over the centuries
have been based on a “covering over” of the true Divinity. Ibn ‘Arabi’s
hayrah, in many ways, provides the Islamic precedent for a “faith lived in
a venturous, dangerous, free way.” A faith free of metaphysics, free of veils,
images and idols.
Perplexity Is a Desirable Situation
For both deconstructive and Sufi alterities, the basic point remains the
same: When we are confused, we see things that we miss when we think
we know what we are doing. We see the difference of difference.
Heidegger often makes a similar point. When something goes wrong—
a broken tool, an unexpected accident, an unfaithful partner—and our
projects break down, we truly see for a moment how our world is struc-
tured and contextualized around us to give it meaning. In this moment
of “breakdown” we glimpse, says Heidegger, the “worldhood of the world”
[die Weltlichkeit der Welt]. The perplexing multiplicity of manifestations
enables the stunned believer to glimpse the “Godness” of God, just as the
continually irrupting images of the Other enables Derrida to glimpse the
otherness of the tout autre. Thus, a common opposition to rational/meta-
physical thought in both Sufism and deconstruction also finds a common
response: If metaphysics blinds/veils us from the actual situation—and if
confusion is that which disables our rationalizing will to a system—then
we will only truly begin to “see” when we learn to desire confusion, not
to flee it.
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