Abstract

This study is a comparative analysis of Jewish and Islamic mysticism through a focus on the Bahir—an early Kabbalist text—and Ibn al-Arabi, a major figure of Islamic mysticism. Roughly contemporary to one another (12th-13th centuries) and emerging in relative proximity (Southern France and Southern Spain), these two systems of thought share remarkable similarities, which this study explores and analyzes through the lens of the following question. How did the authors of the Bahir and Ibn al-Arabi negotiate the tensions that arose between traditional concepts of divine transcendence and their own mystical conceptions of divine immanence? The authors of the Bahir and Ibn al-Arabi both belonged to monotheist traditions that emphasized the transcendence of the divine; however, both systems of thought also posited a cosmogony that included a concept of divine immanence. This study shows that the resemblance between these two thought systems is not limited to the structure of their cosmogonic systems, but extends to the way in which each resolved this tension.