Mirror metaphor

Ibn' Arabi used the metaphor of the  mirror in order to articulate the non duality of the human and real. Ibn' Arabi states that "When the real had brought into being the world entire.... the world was like an unpolished mirror" (Sells 72) and "what was required was the polishing of this mirror... and Adam was the very polishing of this mirror" (Sells 73) Ibn' Arabi believed that all prophets could be seen as polishing a mirror and every time the mirror was polished followers of the Qur'an began to forget about the mirror entirely and just see the reflection and the mirror as one thing, which is God. This makes sense because once again Muslims believe that God is not a single entity or any entity really that can be defined by simple humanistic terms. So the fact that God is seen as both the reflection and mirror itself make perfect sense. However what Ibn' Arabi hints at is that the dirt on the mirror is sin or distance from God, and that while the mirror is dirty we can never fully appreciate God. I personally think that Ibn' Arabi's metaphor is wrong.

If the world can be seen as the dirt on the mirror and only when we wipe away the trivialities of the world do we truly appreciate God, then what is the point of the world? The world was supposedly a gift from Allah himself, given to the father of humankind and the first prophet Adam and put here to be cherished until the day of judgment. If we completely wipe away our vision of the world from the mirror we will no longer be able to appreciate what God has given us. We will see the beauty of God and we will see the divinity of his power, however we will not see his greatest gift. The world was given to us to cherish and wiping away all view of it simply shades our view from the awesomeness of God' power. Even if the dirt on the mirror was viewed as simply sin we should not try to eliminate all sin, because without sin there would be no temptation, or evil and without these things one can never understand true happiness or the divinity of God for keeping us from these evils. No the prophets' goal is not to further illuminate God's power for us, but to remind us simply that the entire world was made for us, the least we can do is clean up after ourselves. The only way this metaphor would work is if standing behind us was a homeless man or a slave and when the prophets cleaned the mirror it was to show us that there is suffering and tragedy in the world and it is our duty to extinguish it if we can.

The world is a gift, a flawed one, but a damn good one. We should not waste our time ignoring the world in search of God's power, it is all around us in a tree, in a river, in the clouds. God knows this and placed the prophets here as a sort of maintenance, I believe the exact words in the Qur'an were "Hey! Stop F&@$*%# it up". The prophets remind us of the goodness of God but also that the world must be appreciated, including all its inhabitants, because after all it was the greatest christmas present that little boy Adam ever got, we're just lucky he's still letting us borrow it.