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ISLAM
Nevertheless, Ibn ‘Arabī is the central figure in the intellectual and doctrinal exposition of Islamic metaphysics and gnosis. Over the centuries, and especially during the second half of Islamic history, this dimension of Islamic religious thought has been of great importance. It has been, in fact, a dominant element in Islamic religious thought in such lands as the Ottoman territories, Persia, Muslim India, and even the Malay world, where the greatest Sufi thinker and writer of that area, Hamzah Fansūrī, was the inheritor and exposi. . tor of Ibn ‘Arabian teachings. This dimension of Islamic religious thought, singularly neglected by Western scholarship until recently, is at last receiving the attention it deserves in the West. Furthermore, it remains an important aspect of Islamic intellectual life even today. Metaphysics is the major field dealt with by this type of Islamic religious thought, but also included are cosmology, eschatology, psychology, and what one might call traditional anthropology. Treatises of the authors mentioned and numerous others deal primarily with the nature of Reality, which they considered to be One. Most of them were followers of the school of the “transcendent unity of being” (wah. dat alwujūd), which claims that there cannot ultimately be but one Being and one Reality, multiplicity constituting the many “mirrors of nothingness” in which that one Reality is reflected. However, a number of Sufi metaphysicians, such as ‘Alā’ al-Dawlah Simnānī and Sirhindī, did not accept this formulation and spoke of the “unity of consciousness” (wah. dat alshuhūd) while preserving a clear distinction between the Being of the Creator and the being of the created. The school of gnosis also