Ibn ʿArabī’s Role in Ibrahim Niasse’s Thinking: From the Unity of Being to Muḥammad’s Names-of-the-Father

This article examines the role of Ibn ʿArabī in the thought of the Senegalese Sufi master Ibrāhīm Niasse (1900–1975), primarily through Niasse’s Qurʾanic commentary Fī Riyāḍ al-Tafsīr, his metaphysical treatise Sirr al-Akbar, and an account of a mystical vision from 1932. Rather than approaching Niasse as a straightforward representative of the Akbarian doctrine later known as waḥdat al-wujūd, I argue that Ibn ʿArabī occupies several distinct positions within Niasse’s metaphysical dramaturgy. He provides Niasse with a vocabulary for thinking divine self-manifestation, Muḥammadan servitude, spiritual paternity, and the retrospective disclosure of meanings latent in the Adamic cycle.

Yet Niasse simultaneously displaces the Akbarian emphasis on Being by foregrounding jūd, the generous act of the Real, which he situates beyond the opposition between Being and non-Being and identifies with the Aḥmadian reality from which the Muḥammadan form emanates. The resulting picture complicates genealogies that understand West African speculative Sufism primarily through the reception of waḥdat al-wujūd: Niasse inherits and transforms Akbarian metaphysics into a distinctively Tijāni account of emanation, paternity, and initiatory reintegration.