The shadow and the flame: On wajib al-wujood and the whisper of unity

In the ancient city of Bukhara, under the long shadow of minarets and the distant hum of markets, a boy once wandered through books before he wandered through the world.

His name was Ibn Sina. By the age of eighteen, he had read Aristotle and repaired his philosophy, debated scholars twice his age, and cured a Sultan of illness.

But the affliction that would haunt Ibn Sina for the rest of his life—long after the patient was healed—was not of the body, but of the mind. It was the question that has stalked philosophers across time like a persistent shadow: Why is there something rather than nothing?

His answer, though soaked in Greek reasoning and Islamic metaphysics, was elegant in its audacity: there must be something that cannot not exist.

Something whose existence is not dependent on causes, not subject to chance, not delayed by time. This he called Wajib al-Wujood—the Necessary Being. The ground zero of existence. Not the first in a series, but the reason there is a series at all.

To understand this idea, one must begin with the contingent. Everything around us is contingent—trees, cities, stars, you, and me. We might exist, or we might not. There is no logical compulsion for us to be.

We are possible beings. Mumkin al-wujood. But if everything is contingent—if every existence is borrowed—then the whole universe collapses under its own question: who lends existence to the lender? Who is the guarantor when everything else is on lease?

Ibn Sina’s Necessary Being is not simply the top of a chain of causes; it is outside the chain. It is existence by essence.

A being whose what-ness is not separate from it is-ness. It must exist, not because of will or accident or force, but because non-existence is, for it, impossible. From this principle, Ibn Sina proceeds with surgical precision.

The Necessary must be one (for two would imply limitation), it must be eternal (for time implies change), it must be the cause of all (for nothing else holds existence independently). God, then, is not just a being who exists—but existence itself.

This was not theology in the classical sense. It was philosophy at its purest—dispassionate, rigorous, lucid. Avicenna (as he would be known in the Latin West) laid down this architecture not merely to define God, but to define everything else in relation to the Real.

And this distinction—between what is Necessary and what is possible—became the scaffolding upon which later Muslim philosophers would hang their metaphysics.

But philosophy, like the cities it is born in, changes with time. And a few centuries later, in the dusk of Andalusia and the dawn of Damascus, another man would look at this structure not with the eye of logic, but with the eye of love. His name was Ibn Arabi.

Where Ibn Sina distinguished between Necessary and contingent with clarity, Ibn Arabi blurred the line with beauty. He did not deny the idea of a Necessary Being. On the contrary, he affirmed it—but through the language of experience.

To Ibn Arabi, the Necessary Being was not just the origin of all that exists—it is all that exists. Wahdat al-Wujood—the Unity of Being—was the whisper behind the veil. It was not a contradiction of Ibn Sina, but a turning of the prism.

Here is where the nuance lives. Ibn Arabi never claimed that creation is God in some crude pantheistic sense. Rather, that all of creation is a reflection, a manifestation, a shadow of the Real.

The contingent exists only insofar as it is bathed in the light of the Necessary. As shadows depend on a flame, so too does the world depend on God—not just for its origin, but for its moment-to-moment being.

For Ibn Sina, Being was divided into categories: the Necessary, the Possible, and the Impossible. For Ibn Arabi, there were no such compartments—there was only One, and all else flowed from, dissolved into, and returned to that Oneness.

In a passage that still stirs the modern reader, Ibn Arabi wrote: “My heart has become capable of every form: it is a pasture for gazelles and a convent for monks… I follow the religion of Love, wherever its caravan turns, for Love is my religion and my faith.”

This was not relativism. It was the ultimate affirmation that if the Necessary Being is truly what it claims to be—unlimited, infinite, all-encompassing—then nothing can exist outside its embrace.

The flowers, the deserts, the grief of a mother, the joy of a child—these are not other than God, but expressions within God. They are not Him. But neither are they apart.

The critics of Ibn Arabi—and there were many—argued that such an idea collapses the moral and theological order. If everything is a manifestation of the Real, then what of evil? What of distinction between Creator and created? But Ibn Arabi's answer, while elusive, was profound: distinction exists. But so does unity. Like the ocean and its waves, the wave is not the sea, yet it is nothing without it.

In the philosophical imagination of Islam, Wajib al-Wujood and Wahdat al-Wujood are not adversaries; they are two instruments in the same orchestra. The first defines the necessity of the One.

The second reminds us that everything else is not just connected to the One, but sustained by it. If Ibn Sina built the doorway with logic, Ibn Arabi stepped through it with wonder.

Together, they offer a vision of reality that is as intellectually compelling as it is spiritually nourishing. A universe that begins in necessity and ends in unity. A world where the flame that gives rise to all things also dances within them.

Where the whisper of the Real can be heard not just in the pages of logic, but in the turning of leaves, in the silence of dawn, in the heart that remembers.

For those willing to look beyond categories, to sit at the edge of logic and leap into wonder, this is the gift of our tradition: not a choice between philosopher and mystic, but a harmony between them.

Some truths must be proved. Others must be tasted. The rare ones can be both.