ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Jīlī is one of the greatest metaphysicians of Islam — and one of the least known to the general public. If Ibn ʿArabī, in the 13th century, charted the whole continent of the doctrine of the oneness of Being, it was al-Jīlī who, a century and a half later, drew its clearest map. His great book, the Insān al-Kāmil, remained for six centuries the manual through which the Muslim world learned to think the Perfect Man — the being in whom God contemplates Himself.
A man of Zabīd
His life is poorly documented — the fate of many spiritual men who preferred self-effacement. He was born in 1366. His surname, al-Jīlī, points to the region of Gīlān, on the Caspian Sea, from which his family came; but he lived, studied and died far from there, in Yemen, in the learned city of Zabīd, then one of the great centres of Sufism and of Shāfiʿī law.
In Zabīd he became the disciple of the sheikh Sharaf al-Dīn al-Jabartī — a master of the Akbarian lineage, that is, of the school that claims descent from Ibn ʿArabī (al-Shaykh al-Akbar, "the greatest master"). It was there, within this affiliation, that his whole thought was formed. He travelled: he is known to have been in Mecca and in India, where he met Sufis of the subcontinent. He died around 1424, still relatively young, in his fifties.
What does "Perfect Man" mean?
The word can mislead. The Insān al-Kāmil · الإِنْسَان الكَامِل is not a "perfect" man in the moral sense — someone who makes no mistakes. Kāmil means complete, accomplished, total. The Perfect Man is the human being arrived at his fullness: the one in whom human nature realises at last that for which it was created.
And that for which it was created, says al-Jīlī after Ibn ʿArabī, is immense. God — the hidden Essence, the nameless Absolute — willed to be known. A famous saying expresses it: "I was a hidden Treasure, and I loved to be known: I created the world so as to be known." The whole world is that mirror in which God beholds Himself. But a mirror is clear only at one point. That point is the Perfect Man: the creature in whom the reflection becomes distinct, where God sees Himself fully.
The Perfect Man is the mirror in which God sees Himself. Al-Jīlī's doctrine, after the Insān al-Kāmil
This Perfect Man is, in his principle, a single reality — one and the same across the ages: the Muhammadan Reality (al-ḥaqīqa al-muḥammadiyya), which was manifested in the first of the prophets as in the last, and which continues to appear, in varying degrees, in the saints. Every human being is in seed a Perfect Man; few become one in act.
The degrees of the descent
Al-Jīlī's great contribution was to have ordered the metaphysics of Ibn ʿArabī — often abundant, difficult — into a limpid ladder. He describes the real as a descent (tanazzul): from the pure Absolute down to the sensible world, Being passes through degrees.
At the highest — if one may speak of height — there is the Essence (al-Dhāt), the Absolute insofar as it escapes all determination: nothing can be said of it, not even that it "exists," for it is beyond existence and non-existence. Then comes the degree of Oneness, where the Essence knows Itself; then the degree where the divine Names and Attributes appear; then the archetypes of all things; then at last the world — spirits, souls, bodies. At each degree, the same single Being veils itself a little more, grows denser, without ever ceasing to be the single Being.
This is why al-Jīlī can say: there is, in all of reality, only one existence — that of God — which unfolds in degrees, from the subtlest to the densest. The world is not "other" than God; nor is it God; it is His manifestation — as the wave is neither other than the ocean nor the whole ocean.
His work
Al-Jīlī wrote a great deal — some twenty treatises survive —, but it was a single book that made him immortal.
Around this central book, two further treatises complete his work:
Al-Kahf wa-l-raqīm — The Cave and the Inscription
An esoteric commentary on the mysterious letters that open certain chapters of the Quran, and on the chapter of the Cave. Al-Jīlī unfolds here his "science of letters" — the spiritual reading of the Arabic alphabet as the very structure of the cosmos.
Marātib al-wujūd — The Degrees of Being
A short, dense treatise that sets out, in an almost schematic form, the hierarchy of the degrees of existence — from the pure Absolute to the sensible world. It is the clearest summary of his cosmology: a stairway of the soul.
To these books are added a long commentary on Ibn ʿArabī's Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya and several treatises on the divine Names. The whole work tends towards one thing: to make thinkable what the way makes one live.
Why he still matters
Al-Jīlī is the great clarifier. Without him, the metaphysics of Ibn ʿArabī would have remained the preserve of a handful of initiates able to face the thousands of pages of the Futūḥāt. With him, it becomes a transmissible teaching. The doctrine of the Perfect Man, as he formulated it, watered six centuries of spirituality — down to the traditional thinkers of the 20th century, who owe to him a part of their vocabulary.
For the reader of today, his lesson is simple and dizzying: the human being is not an accident in an indifferent universe. He is the chosen place where the invisible makes itself visible — provided he becomes, himself, a mirror pure enough.