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- Article No. 09

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

            Philipp Valentini
            Independent Scholar

               August 24, 2026

                 |  doi.org/10.17613/qfctz-z5x08

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## Table of Contents

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.

[![CC BY 4.0]](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) © 2026 the author(s). This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) license. Authors retain copyright.

          Keywords:

            ibn-arabi

            ibrahim-niasse

            tijaniyya

            sufism

            wahdat-al-wujud

            west-african-islam

            tafsir

            emanation

            spiritual-paternity

            senegal

            islamic-metaphysics

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