4.2.6.3  World of Letters

Another important symbolic analogy between the metaphysical macrocosm and more familiar human realities, which again runs throughout the Meccan Revelations, is the “world of letters”. Ibn al-Arabi considers the letters of the Arabic alphabet, given their central place in the culminating divine revelation of the Quran, to constitute in themselves “a real world like us”, since they are servants of Allah, just like ourselves [I.58.13]. He begins his detailed explanation of their symbolic metaphysical and cosmological functions in a long section in the opening chapter of the Meccan Revelations. As he explains there, the Arabic letters also have symbolic hierarchy similar to the spiritual hierarchy of the prophets and the saints, that we have just summarized. Thus they also have Pole, which is the letter alif, the first letter of Arabic alphabet, which also corresponds to the first letter “a” in most other alphabets; two Imams, or Leaders, which are the two other vowel letters waw and yaa; four Pillars, which are the previous three letters: alif, waw, yaa, in addition to nun, that together provide the essential Arabic grammatical indications; and seven Substitutes, which are the same previous four letters, in addition to the three key pronoun markers taa, kaaf and haa [I.78.18]. There are also many other classes and types of letters, but the important facts about the metaphysical relations between the world, the Single Monad and the Greatest Element, as described above, are particularly clearly developed in Ibn al-Arabi’s teaching here regarding the metaphysical dimension of this world of letters. Thus he clearly states that: ‘For the totality of all letters (like all things in the world) may be decomposed into the alif (corresponding to the Pole and the Single Monad) and also composed from it (both as a character and as the sound), while itself can’t be decomposed into (any of) them. However, it too can be decomposed, in our symbolic estimation, into its spiritual principle, which is the (primordial) “Point” (of Greatest Element), although (in the actual fact) the (number) one (and similarly the alif) can’t be (further) decomposed.’ [I.78.23] The sound of alif is in fact the basic sound in any language, so any other sounds or letters are composed of it, but then reformed and manipulated in the larynx and other organs of the voice box, including the vocal cords, which produce the essential phonation. In Arabic, in particular, alif is written as a simple vertical segment, inscribed by the pen starting by a point above the line and then slightly curving downwards. All other letters are also inscribed in similar manners but their curvature takes various more circular and interfering shapes.

However, as Ibn al-Arabi explained, although all letters and sounds are composed of alif, alif itself is not a letter! He explains this in analogy of numbers and the counting system, which is actually another analogy of the Single Monad and its multiplication. All numbers are based on number one, while itself is not a number, because it is not many. One is the source of numbers, and it is present in every number, for example: the two is one plus one, so if you take the one out, the two automatically looses its identity. Likewise, if one is subtracted from 1000, the reality of “thousand” is devoid from what remains, though it converts into the reality of 999, which again is voided as soon as one is subtracted from it, and so on.

This special macroscopic example of the hierarchy of letters is in fact quite relevant to the microscopic world, because a detailed study of the Arabic alphabet, and relatively many other languages, reveals various basic symmetries that resemble in many ways the Standard Model of Elementary Particles, as described in section 5.18 in the previous chapter. This important subject requires further investigation beyond the scope of this book, but for example we notice that in the Arabic alphabet there are twenty-eight letters, Ibn al-Arabi often relates to the mansions of the Moon depicted in Figure 4.7, in addition to four accents that allow each of these letters to pronounced in various manners. These four accents clearly correspond to the four fundamental forces, while many of the other consonants are grouped in pairs in some ways, and trios in other ways, making a total of twenty-four, just like the main twelve fermions which become also twenty-four since each one has an anti-particle partner. Ibn al-Arabi spend many long chapters in the Meccan Revelations and other books on this subject that requires a more dedicated research. We will come back to this subject in chapter VII when we talk about Alchemy and Numerology.