4.2.3  Names of the Single Monad

As we mentioned above, this Single Monad is the Universal Intellect itself and also the Pen. It also has different names or descriptions as Ibn al-Arabi summarized in one of his books: “al-Durrat al-Bayda” (“The White Pearl”) in which he discussed many names and descriptions of the First Intellect and the title of the book itself is one interesting variant. He also spent much of the first chapter of his book “al-Tadbirat al-Ilahiyya“ (“Divine Policies for Restoring the Human Kingdom”) on explaining the different names and properties of this Universal Intellect that is the true Caliph. There is, however, some confusion between the Greatest Element that we shall talk about in section 2.5, and the Single Monad; sometimes it is not very clear for some of these many variant names whether they are really for the Single Monad or the Greatest Element.

One of these names is “the real through whom creation takes place”, that is the most perfect image of the Real, as divine name of Allah, the Creator of the worlds. That is why he is also called “the Perfect Human Being”. This name actually describes the Greatest Element rather than the Single Monad, because the latter is compound while the Greatest Element is the most elementary “block” in the world as we shall see shortly. Everything in the Creation at the end is rooted in the real, just as the leaves, and the fruits, of a tree are rooted in the stalk. The leaves were also “determined” in the seed that gave this tree even before it was planted. So the Single Monad is like the seed for the tree of the cosmos, while the real-through-whom-creation-takes-place, or the Greatest Element, is what makes up the seed down to the cells, atoms and subatomic particles inside it.

Therefore, in reality, there is only this entity that is the essence of the Perfect Human Being, and the world is the different states of this single entity. So this single entity is the Single Monad, and the essences, or the monads, of the world are different reflections of it.

Another important name of the Single Monad is the Universal Spirit, and Ibn al-Arabi shows that he deserves this name because he sweeps through all the states of the world: cycling through the capacious orbs of the knowledge of his Creator, through the states of the cosmos to give out to them what Allah entrusted him, and through his knowing himself by his need to his Lord and his Creator. So since he exhausted all these three cycles, he is thus called “Universal”, meaning “Total”, Spirit because there is no fourth cycle other than those to go through.

Yet another interesting name of this Single Monad is “Everything”! This name is interesting because Ibn al-Arabi says that “in everything there is everything, even if we don’t recognize that”. This is on the one hand another expression of his Single Monad theory because it renders into: “the Single Monad is in everything”. But also it might mean that the internal structure of the Single Monad is as complicated as the world itself because it means: “in everything, even the Single Monad, there is everything, even the world!” This last statement is plausible since both the Single Monad, that is the Perfect Human Being, and the world are both created on the divine Image. This reminds us in mathematics with fractals such as Mandelbrot set, Julia set and Sierpinski triangle, where the structure keeps repeating itself on any larger or smaller scale. This might in answering the question about the structure of the moment and whether it is divided into sub-moments. The moment could be indeed identical to the day where the Sun rises, moves gradually in the sky and then sets to rise again in the next day; as the Single Monad might be identical with the world, the moment might be identical with the day. It just depends on the scale we are using; if we were inside the Single Monad we might see creations such as the Sun, planets and the stars, but because we are outside we see it as a point. Similarly, if we suppose we go outside the Universe, we shall see it as a point; that is as the Single Monad, indivisible but compound. This is also similar in modern cosmology to the black hole, which occupies a single point in our space but itself is considered a complete world.