Ibn Arabi · Chapter 5 · a closer look
Mercy First
نَفَسُ الرَّحْمٰنِ
Mercy came first. Everything else came after.
A closer look, inside Chapter 5 · The Breath of the Merciful. Start there for the painted concepts; this page goes further.
One long breath out
The whole world, breathed out in one warm breath.
- The big idea
- Everything is breathed out in relief and tenderness. Mercy is older than anything you have done.
- What’s hard to get
- Mercy here is not a reward for being good. It is the first condition of things, like the womb its name comes from.
- Common misconception
- That mercy means nothing hard happens. Hard things happen. Mercy is the bigger room they happen in.
- Why it matters
- When your inner critic begins its speech, you can remember what came first. It was not the critic.
The one idea
Hold your breath for five seconds. Now let it go. Feel that loosening in the chest, the small mercy of air: that is the picture.
Ibn Arabi says the world comes out of the نفس الرحمن nafas al-Raḥmān, the Breath of the Merciful. In Arabic, nafas, breath, shares a root with tanfīs, relief. The hidden treasure was a breath held; the world is its release, every star and sparrow carried out on one long sigh.
And raḥma, mercy, grows from the word for womb. This is not the mercy of a judge who lets you off. It is the mercy of the place where you were carried, warm and dark, before you had done anything at all, right or wrong.
سَبَقَتْ رَحْمَتِي غَضَبِي
“My mercy outruns My anger.”
A saying in which the Real speaks, quoted often in Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam · in plain words
The first thing Adam heard
He tells it this way. When Adam first came alive, he sneezed, and the first words ever spoken to a human being were these: “May your Lord have mercy on you, Adam.” Then: “For this I created you.”
Before a single instruction, before any warning, there was mercy. Ibn Arabi reads that as the whole point, not a detail at the edge of the story.
Mercy runs ahead
Anger is real. Mercy is swifter, and wider.
- The big idea
- Mercy is wider than anger and arrives before it. He goes so far as to say that anger itself exists by mercy.
- What’s hard to get
- Anger is not false. It is real, and it is smaller: a narrow stream inside a wide river.
- Common misconception
- That mercy makes you a pushover. Mercy can still close a door.
- Why it matters
- After a quarrel with someone you love, you can let mercy have the last word in your own head.
Try it now
Breathe in for four, out for six, five times over. Then bring to mind one thing you are hard on yourself about, and breathe out on it once more, slowly. You are borrowing the shape of the world: relief comes first.
Go deeper
4 short sections. Open any one; each stands on its own.
two mercies drift together; the knot between them softens. Breathe in as they part, out as they meet.
1Two mercies, one hard thing between1 min
Ibn Arabi reads Adam's story as a sandwich. Mercy reached Adam first, before the tree. Then came the hard consequence. Then mercy again. And two mercies, he says, are like twins: they lean toward each other until the hard thing between them simply disappears.
"So there came two mercies with anger between them … and the anger vanished between them." (Fut. I.112, ch. 5)
He adds a tip for hard days: when things close in, think of the chapter "Did We not open your chest?", where hardship is held between two eases, and be glad (Fut. I.112, ch. 5; paraphrase). Whatever is pressing on you sits between two mercies, the one before and the one after.
2Read the opening prayer slowly1 min
The first chapter of the Qur'an, al-Fātiḥa, is said many times a day. Ibn Arabi points to its order. Before anyone is described as having "earned anger", the Real is named twice for mercy: al-Raḥmān, al-Raḥīm.
"He put mercy first … and put His anger last." (Fut. I.112, ch. 5)
For him this is not a coincidence of style. It shows the order of existence itself: mercy "at the very first opening of being" (في أول افتتاح الوجود). If you are someone who reads the worst-case line of every email first, this is a small retraining. Read for the first word, and notice that the first word was mercy.
3Mercy runs through everything1 min
In the Fuṣūṣ, in the chapter of Zakariyyā, he gives one of his most musical lines. Mercy, he says, isn't a thing that visits now and then. It flows:
"The mercy of the Real runs through all that comes to be, and flows through every self and every thing." (Fus. 177, Zakariyyā)
The two verbs are water words. سارية sāriya is something that travels through, like sap in a tree or a current at night. جارية jāriya is running, like a stream. Mercy is not a reward at the end of your life. It is the current you are already standing in.
4Your wish to exist was answered1 min
Ibn Arabi pictures every possible thing as asking, in its own silent way, to come into being. Mercy is the yes to that asking. By mercy the Real accepted each thing's wish to exist and brought it out (Fus. 177, Zakariyyā; paraphrase). Even the divine Names, he says, are among the "things" that mercy holds.
So mercy reaches you before you did anything right or wrong. It was there before your first breath, as the answer to a wish you can't remember making. Even anger, he says, exists only by mercy: "the existence of anger is from the mercy of the Real" (وجود الغضب من رحمة الله, Fus. 177). Nothing, not even the hard thing, is outside it.
His later readers, starting with his student Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī, kept "the Breath of the Merciful" as their name for the very stuff the world is made of.
Key words
This page is a closer look inside Chapter 5.
Back to Chapter 5: The Breath of the Merciful →Course homeSources
- Ibn ʿArabī, Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam; trans. R. W. J. Austin, The Bezels of Wisdom (1980) (the chapters of Shuʿayb, Jesus and Zechariah)
- Ibn ʿArabī, al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, ch. 198 (on the Breath) and ch. 5 (Adam)
- William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge (1989), ch. 8
- Mohammed Rustom, The Triumph of Mercy (2012)
- Ibn ʿArabī, al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, ch. 5 (I.112)
- Ibn ʿArabī, Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam, ed. Afifi, Zakariyyā (p. 177)
- The Qur'an 7:156; 94:1–6
- William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge (1989)