Farghani on Wahdat al-Wujud in the Four Journeys

Saʿīd b. Aḥmad Farghānī (d. 699/1300) was one of the foremost students of Ṣadr al-Dīn Qūnawī, Ibn ʿArabī’s stepson and primary propagator. He was the author of the first commentary, in two versions, on Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s famous 760-verse qasida, The Poem of the Way. The first version was written in Persian, based on lectures delivered by Qūnawī, and the second in Arabic, with extensive additions and revisions. In the introduction to the Arabic, he provided relatively systematic expositions of many technical terms that were soon to become commonplace among scholars, among which was waḥdat al-wujūd, which had barely been mentioned before him. He also seems to be the first author to describe in detail the four journeys (al-asfār al-arbaʿa), an expression that is famously the short title of Mullā Ṣadrā’s magnum opus. In Farghānī’s understanding, waḥdat al-wujūd cannot be understood apart from the four journey

For the past several centuries in Islamic languages and for decades in the Western secondary literature, waḥdat al-wujūd has been a well-known term, typically understood as a specific doctrine founded by Ibn ʿArabī and supported or critiqued by later scholars. In fact Ibn ʿArabī had no such doctrine, given that he never used the expression. Moreover, everyone who has used the expres- sion, whether supporter or critic, has had some specific or vague meaning in mind, and these meanings have rarely coincided