About al-Insān al-Kāmil, Bāb 33 -- Umm al-Kitāb (The Mother of the Book)
al-Insan al-Kamil ("The Universal Man," or the Perfect Human) is the masterwork of Abd al-Karim al-Jili (1366-1424), the great systematizer of the Akbarian school of Ibn al-Arabi. Across sixty-three chapters (abwab) it ascends from the bare divine Essence, through the Names, attributes, scriptures, and cosmic realities, to the figure of the Perfect Human, the microcosm in whom the whole of reality is gathered. Hekhal's edition is the first complete Arabic-and-English parallel rendering of the work, produced with controlled-vocabulary editorial discipline and provisional pending a credentialed Arabic reviewer.
This chapter treats the Mother of the Book (umm al-kitab), the archetypal scripture in the divine knowledge from which all revealed books derive. This page is the Targum apparatus edition, carrying the controlled-vocabulary translation and its full provenance.
al-Insān al-Kāmil, Bāb 33 -- Umm al-Kitāb (The Mother of the Book)
al-Insān al-Kāmil, Bāb 33 (fī Umm al-Kitāb)
الإنسان الكامل · في أم الكتاب
canonicalearly 15th c. (author d. c. 1408-1428 CE)ArabicʿAbd al-Karīm al-Jīlī (b. 767 AH / 1365 CE; d. c. 826-832 AH / 1422-1428 CE)tr. Hekhal Targum Project (machine-assisted, provisional)
The metaphysical preamble to al-Jīlī’s chapters on the revealed Books (34-38). Where the later chapters place the Qurʾān, Furqān, Torah, Psalms, and Gospel on a single ladder of self-disclosure, this chapter names what stands above the whole ladder: Umm al-Kitāb, “the Mother of the Book,” which al-Jīlī reads not as a scripture but as the quiddity of the inmost of the Essence (māhiyyat kunh al-dhāt) — the unconditioned source of which neither existence nor nonexistence, neither truth nor creation, can be predicated. The governing image is the inkwell: the Mother of the Book is the single dark Point from which the divine attributes spread, as every letter is drawn from the one dot of ink; “the Book” it mothers is Absolute Existence, written as sūras, verses, words, and letters. The chapter closes in a developed letter-mysticism (the undotted letters as the Eternal, the dotted as the contingent; the alif and the five essential perfections; the nine letters and the Perfect Human).
Genuine first-public-domain-English. Prepared at a heightened-accuracy bar: a two-witness collation caught and corrected two corruptions in the digital source (a “knowledge” for “nonexistence,” and a “state” for “inkwell”), each confirmed against the print-OCR witness and the chapter’s own internal logic; the three Qurʾānic citations are verified verbatim. Full scoping: hekhal-targum/docs/JILI-INSAN-AL-KAMIL-SCOPING.md.
أمُّ الكتابِ فكُنهُه في ذاتِه * هي نقطةٌ منها انتشاءُ صفاتِه
هي كالدواةِ لأحرفٍ تبدو على * ورقِ الوجودِ بحكمِ ترتيباتِه
فالمهملاتُ من الحروفِ إشارةٌ * فيما تعلّق بالقديمِ بذاتِه
والمعجماتُ عبارةٌ عن حادثٍ * من أنه طار على نقطاتِه
ومتى تركّبتِ الحروفُ فإنها * كَلِمٌ فتلكم محضُ مخلوقاتِه
The Mother of the Book — His inmost, in His Essence — / is a Point, from which the spreading-forth of His attributes comes.
It is like the inkwell for letters that appear upon / the paper of existence, by the rule of its orderings.
So the undotted among the letters are an allusion / to that which pertains to the Eternal in His essence;
and the dotted are an expression of an originated thing — / in that it took flight upon its points.
And whenever the letters are composed, they are / words; and those are nothing but His sheer creatures.
Provisional draft (pending scholarly review)
اعلم أن أمَّ الكتاب هي عبارةٌ عن ماهية كُنه الذات، المعبَّر عنها من بعض وجوهها بماهيات الحقائق، التي لا يُطلق عليها اسمٌ ولا نعتٌ ولا وصفٌ ولا وجودٌ ولا عدمٌ ولا حقٌّ ولا خلقٌ. والكتابُ هو الوجود المطلق الذي لا عدمَ فيه. وكانت ماهيةُ الكُنه أمَّ الكتاب، لأن الوجود مندرجٌ فيها اندراجَ الحروف في الدواة، فلا يُطلق على الدواة باسمٍ من أسماء الحروف، سواء كانت الحروف مهملةً أو معجمةً.
Know that the Mother of the Book is an expression for the quiddity of the inmost of the Essence (māhiyyat kunh al-dhāt) — expressed, from some of its aspects, as the quiddities of the realities — upon which is predicated neither name, nor epithet, nor description, nor existence, nor nonexistence, nor truth, nor creation. And the Book is Absolute Existence, in which there is no nonexistence. The quiddity of the inmost was the Mother of the Book because existence is enfolded within it as the letters are enfolded in the inkwell: the inkwell is not named by any of the names of the letters, whether the letters be undotted or dotted.
Provisional draft (pending scholarly review)
فكذلك ماهيةُ الكُنه لا يُطلق عليها اسمُ الوجود ولا اسمُ العدم، لأنها غيرُ معقولة، والحكمُ على غير المعقول بأمرٍ محال؛ فلا يقال بأنها حقٌّ ولا خلقٌ ولا غيرٌ ولا عينٌ، ولكنها عبارةٌ عن ماهيةٍ لا تنحصر بعبارةٍ إلا ولها ضدُّ تلك العبارة من كل وجه. وهي الألوهيةُ باعتبار، ومن وجهٍ هي محلُّ الأشياء ومصدرُ الوجود. والوجودُ فيها بالعقل كوجود النخلة في النواة، ولكن الشهودَ يعطي الوجودَ منها بالفعل لا بالقوّة. وهذا أمرٌ ذوقيٌّ شهوديٌّ كشفيٌّ لا يدركه العقلُ من حيث نظرُه.
Likewise the quiddity of the inmost: neither the name “existence” nor the name “nonexistence” is predicated of it, because it is not intelligible — and to rule upon the non-intelligible by any determination is impossible. So it is not said to be truth or creation, otherness or identity; rather it is an expression for a quiddity that no expression confines without its also bearing the opposite of that expression from every aspect. It is Divinity in one consideration; and from [another] aspect it is the locus of things and the wellspring of existence. For the intellect, existence is in it [only] potentially, as the date-palm exists in the date-stone; but witnessing (shuhūd) gives existence from it in act, not in potency. This is a matter of tasting, witnessing, and unveiling, which the intellect does not grasp by way of its [discursive] regard.
Provisional draft (pending scholarly review)
فالكتابُ الذي أنزله الحقُّ سبحانه على لسان نبيه صلى الله عليه وسلم هو عبارةٌ عن أحكام الوجود المطلق، فمعرفةُ الوجود المطلق هي علمُ الكتاب. وقد أشار الحقُّ إلى ذلك في قوله: «وكلَّ شيءٍ أحصيناه في إمامٍ مبين»، وقوله: «ولا رطبٍ ولا يابسٍ إلا في كتابٍ مبين»، وقوله: «وكلَّ شيءٍ فصّلناه تفصيلا». اعلم أن الكتاب سُوَرٌ وآياتٌ وكلماتٌ وحروفٌ: فالسُّوَرُ عبارةٌ عن الصور الذاتية وهي تجليات الكمال، والآياتُ عبارةٌ عن حقائق الجمع، والكلماتُ عبارةٌ عن حقائق المخلوقات العينية، والحروفُ فالمنقوطُ منها عبارةٌ عن الأعيان الثابتة في العلم الإلهي.
So the Book that the Real (glory be His) sent down upon the tongue of His prophet (may God bless him and grant him peace) is an expression for the rulings of Absolute Existence; and the knowledge of Absolute Existence is the knowledge of the Book. The Real pointed to this in His sayings: “and everything We have enumerated in a clear register” (36:12); “nor any moist thing nor dry but it is in a clear book” (6:59); “and everything We have set out in full detail” (17:12). Know that the Book is sūras, verses, words, and letters: the sūras are an expression for the essential forms, the self-disclosures of perfection; the verses, for the realities of gathering; the words, for the realities of the entified creatures; and the letters — the dotted among them are an expression for the fixed entities (al-aʿyān al-thābita) in the divine knowledge.
Provisional draft (pending scholarly review)
والمهملُ منها على نوعين: (النوع الأول) مهملٌ تتعلق به الحروفُ ولا يتعلق هو بها، وهي خمسةٌ: الألف والدال والراء والواو واللام. الألفُ إشارةٌ إلى مقتضياتٍ كمالية وهي خمسة: الذات والحياة والعلم والقدرة والإرادة. (والنوع الثاني) مهملٌ تتعلق به الحروفُ ويتعلق هو بها، وهي تسعةٌ، فالإشارةُ بها إلى الإنسان الكامل لجمعه بين الخمسة الإلهية والأربعة الخلقية، وهي العناصر الأربعة مع ما تولّد منها؛ وكانت أحرفُ الإنسان الكامل غير منقوطةٍ لأنه خلقه على صورته.
The undotted letters are of two kinds. The first: those to which [other] letters attach while it attaches to none — and they are five: alif, dāl, rāʾ, wāw, lām. The alif is an allusion to the perfective requisites, which are five: the Essence, Life, Knowledge, Power, and Will — for there is no way to the existence of those four named except through the Essence, and no way to the perfection of the Essence except through them. The second kind: those to which letters attach and which themselves attach to others — and they are nine: an allusion to the Perfect Human, for his gathering of the five divine [requisites] and the four created, namely the four elements together with what is born of them. The letters of the Perfect Human were undotted, because He created him upon His form.
Provisional draft (pending scholarly review)
واعلم أن الحروف ليست بكلماتٍ لأن الأعيان الثابتة لم تدخل تحت كلمة «كن» إلا عند الإيجاد العيني؛ فهي حقٌّ لا خلقٌ، لأن الخلق عبارةٌ عما دخل تحت كلمة «كن». وليست الأعيانُ الثابتةُ في العلم حادثةً، لكنها مُلحقةٌ بالحدوث إلحاقاً حكمياً، فهي بهذا الاعتبار قديمةٌ. واللوحُ عبارةٌ عما اقتضى التعيينَ في الوجود على الترتيب الحكمي لا على المقتضى الإلهي غير المنحصر؛ والكتابُ كلٌّ عامٌّ، واللوحُ جزئيٌّ خاصٌّ. والله يقول الحق وهو يهدي السبيل.
And know that the letters are not words, because the fixed entities did not enter under the word “Be!” (kun) except at entified existification — so they are truth, not creation, since creation is an expression for what entered under the word “Be!” The fixed entities in [divine] knowledge are not originated; rather they are appended to origination by a juridical appending, and by this consideration they are eternal. And the Tablet (lawḥ) is an expression for what required entification in existence upon the juridical arrangement, not upon the unrestricted divine requisite; so the Book is a universal whole, and the Tablet a particular specific. And God speaks the truth, and He guides the way.
Provisional draft (pending scholarly review)
An orientation
This edition sets the verbatim original-language text beside a fresh English rendering and a critical apparatus: a running commentary on the passage, notes on the controlled vocabulary and the rendering chosen for each term, and cross-references to the lexicon and to related sections. It is a provisional scholarly draft, released openly for correction and not yet reviewed by a credentialed editor.
⁂
Apparatus
Umm al-Kitāb: the quiddity, not a scripture
al-Jīlī’s “Mother of the Book” is the quiddity of the inmost of the Essence (māhiyyat kunh al-dhāt) — the unconditioned source of which neither name nor attribute nor existence nor nonexistence nor truth nor creation can be predicated, because it is “not intelligible” and to determine the non-intelligible is impossible. It is “Divinity in one consideration, and the locus of things and the wellspring of existence in another.” This is to be distinguished from the Qurʾānic umm al-kitāb in its standard senses (the decisive verses, 3:7; the heavenly archetype of revelation, 13:39 / 43:4); al-Jīlī cites 13:39 to license his usage, but his referent is the metaphysical kunh, not the heavenly scripture. Qurʾān 3:7; 13:39; 43:4 on the Qurʾānic umm al-kitāb (canonical)
The inkwell ontology and the doctrine of letters
The chapter’s governing image is graphic: the Mother of the Book is the nuqṭa (the dot of ink), the divine attributes “spread” from it as letters from the dot, existence is the paper, and composed letters are “words” = creatures. The undotted (muhmal) letters figure the Eternal (no added point = no accident); the dotted (muʿjam) figure the originated (“flown upon its points”). The five self-standing undotted letters (alif, dāl, rāʾ, wāw, lām) figure the Essence and its inseparable perfections; the nine connecting undotted letters figure the Perfect Human (5 divine + 4 created). al-Jīlī refers the full mechanics (letter from alif, alif from point) to his own treatise al-Kahf wa-l-Raqīm fī sharḥ Bism Allāh al-Raḥmān al-Raḥīm. al-Jīlī, al-Kahf wa-l-Raqīm fī sharḥ Bism Allāh al-Raḥmān al-Raḥīm (training-memory; pending verification)
Fixed entities: letters that are truth, not creation
The chapter’s metaphysical payoff: the aʿyān thābita (fixed entities) are “letters,” not “words” — they have not entered under the creative imperative “Be!” (kun, Qurʾān 36:82). So they are ḥaqq (real-in-God, “truth”), not khalq (creation); “appended to origination” only by a juridical appending (ilḥāq ḥukmī), and so, in a second consideration, eternal. This is the Akbarian doctrine of the immutable entities in divine knowledge — the eternal intelligible objects of God’s self-knowledge that become “creation” only at their entified existification. al-Jīlī cross-refers his own chapter on Beginningless Eternity (al-Qidam, Bāb 30). Ibn ʿArabī, Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam, on the aʿyān thābita (training-memory; pending verification)
Book and Tablet; accuracy note on the source
The chapter ends by distinguishing the Book (Absolute Existence, “a universal whole”) from the Tablet (the Preserved Tablet, “a particular specific” — the subject of Bāb 48): the Book holds the unrestricted divine requisite, the Tablet only what is entified “upon the juridical arrangement.” Heightened-accuracy note: the digital witness (ibnalarabi.com) carried two corruptions corrected here against the print-OCR witness and internal logic — ʿilm (“knowledge”) for ʿadam (“nonexistence”) in the opening list of negations, and al-dawla (“the state”) for al-dawāt (“the inkwell”) in the central simile. Both corrections are forced by the chapter’s own restatements (the wujūd / ʿadam pair; the recurring inkwell). The three Qurʾānic citations (36:12, 6:59, 17:12) are verified verbatim and al-Jīlī’s loci are all correct.
أم الكتاب (umm al-kitāb) → the Mother of the Book
Active senses: mother-of-the-book-as-quiddity, mother-of-the-book-Qurʾānic. Selected: the Mother of the Book (the quiddity of the inmost Essence). Rationale: in Bāb 33 = māhiyyat kunh al-dhāt, prior to existence/nonexistence, distinct from “the Book” (Absolute Existence) it mothers. Distinguish from the Qurʾānic umm al-kitāb (3:7 / 13:39 / 43:4). Forbidden: the source book, the original scripture, the matrix of the book.
مهمل (muhmal) → the undotted letters
Active senses: undotted-letters. Selected: the undotted letters. Rationale: the letters bearing no diacritical point, read as an allusion to the Eternal / self-subsistent (no added point = no accident). Two classes (5 self-standing; 9 connecting = the Perfect Human). Forbidden: the neglected letters, the unpointed, the meaningless letters (“neglected” is muhmal’s literal lexical sense but misleads here).
معجم (muʿjam) → the dotted letters
Active senses: dotted-letters. Selected: the dotted letters. Rationale: the letters distinguished by added points, read as an expression of the originated/contingent (“flown upon its points”); pinned to the fixed entities. Forbidden: the pointed, the foreign letters, the diacriticized.
الأعيان الثابتة (al-aʿyān al-thābita) → the fixed entities
Active senses: fixed-entity, immutable-essence. Selected: fixed entities (carried from the corpus glossary). Rationale: the eternal archetypes-in-divine-knowledge; here, the “dotted letters” that are ḥaqq not khalq, eternal until entified under “Be!” Forbidden: archetypes, ideas, forms (they collapse the distinction from Platonic/Aristotelian forms).
No public-domain predecessor exists
As with the rest of the al-Jīlī corpus rendered here, the Comparison surface is empty of a predecessor — a genuine first-public-domain-English. Neither Nicholson 1921 (PD; thematic) nor Burckhardt’s Universal Man (copyrighted; opening quarter only) renders Bāb 33. Full landscape in hekhal-targum/docs/JILI-INSAN-AL-KAMIL-SCOPING.md.
Fidelity: HIGH, two-witness, prepared at a heightened-accuracy bar (two digital-source corruptions corrected; Qurʾānic citations canonically verified). Caveat: “no complete English exists” is well-attested but not exhaustively verified; the lām-alif hadith and the cross-references to al-Jīlī’s own works are training-memory pending print verification.
Kabbalah: the point, the letters, and the unsayable source
al-Jīlī’s inkwell ontology — a single Point (nuqṭa) from which the divine attributes spread as letters, the cosmos written in letters that are the fixed entities — is a striking structural parallel to the Kabbalistic doctrine of creation through the twenty-two letters (Sefer Yetzirah) and the primordial Point (nequdah) from which emanation begins (the Zoharic reading of the yod / the first contraction). The “Mother of the Book” as the quiddity beyond existence and nonexistence rhymes with Ein Sof, the Infinite of which no predicate is affirmed; the descent Book → sūras → verses → words → letters parallels the graded disclosure of Torah. Cross-tradition relation: shared-letter-cosmogony and shared-apophatic-source.
Christian apophatic and Neoplatonist: the unpredicable One
The quiddity “of which neither existence nor nonexistence is predicated, because it is not intelligible” stands in the same apophatic space as the Plotinian One beyond being and the Pseudo-Dionysian God beyond affirmation and negation — “neither truth nor creation, neither otherness nor identity.” The move past even the existence/nonexistence disjunction is the hyper-apophatic gesture of Mystical Theology V. Cross-tradition relation: shared-hyper-apophatic-source.
Within the al-Jīlī corpus
Bāb 33 is the preamble to the Books: it stands above the Qurʾān / Furqān pair (Bāb 34-35) and the three prior Books (Bāb 36-38); the aʿyān thābita-as-eternal argument refers back to al-Jīlī’s chapter on Beginningless Eternity (Bāb 30), and the Book/Tablet distinction forward to his chapter on the Preserved Tablet (Bāb 48). The “god of belief” frame of the Fass Nūḥ stands behind the whole Akbarian apparatus.
Source-text attestation: HIGH, heightened-accuracy bar. Witness 1: archive.org OCR print edition (lines ~4053-4143). Witness 2: ibnalarabi.com digital matn (kamil.php?id=36, Dr. M. A. Haj Yusuf). Two witness-2 corruptions corrected against witness-1 + internal logic: (1) ʿilm -> ʿadam (nonexistence) in the opening negation-list; (2) al-dawla -> al-dawāt (the inkwell) in the central simile. The three Qurʾānic citations (36:12, 6:59, 17:12) verified verbatim; all al-Jīlī’s loci correct. Both witnesses cached under corpus/source_attestations/jili-insan-al-kamil/.
Audit harness (drift/registry/citation) not run (rank_bm25 unavailable); in-session self-audit per Path B: controlled vocabulary used (muhmal/muʿjam “undotted/dotted”; aʿyān thābita “fixed entities”; kunh “inmost”); the three new lexicon pages referenced with the -proposed suffix; the lām-alif hadith and the al-Jīlī self-cross-references flagged training-memory, the Qurʾānic citations verified. Translation method this pass held to a heightened-accuracy bar: clause-level parsing, particle precision, controlled-vocabulary fidelity, and a back-check of the English against the Arabic.
Status: machine-assisted; not deployed; pending editor sign-off. Three glossary entries staged at v0.9; three Hekhal lexicon pages proposed (not yet authored).
Tradition
islamic-sufism
Language
Arabic
Period
early 15th c. (author d. c. 1408-1428 CE)
Attribution
ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Jīlī (b. 767 AH / 1365 CE; d. c. 826-832 AH / 1422-1428 CE)
The underlying text is in the public domain by age. The original-language text is reproduced verbatim from an openly-licensed digital transcription (credited on the page), and this English rendering and its apparatus are a provisional scholarly draft, released openly for correction and not yet reviewed by a credentialed editor.
Cite this page
Stable URLs are part of the editorial commitment. This address will not change.
ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Jīlī (b. 767 AH / 1365 CE; d. c. 826-832 AH / 1422-1428 CE). "al-Insān al-Kāmil, Bāb 33 -- Umm al-Kitāb (The Mother of the Book)." Hekhal: An Open Reference for Esoteric Tradition. Last modified May 2, 2026. https://hekhal.org/texts/jili-insan-al-kamil-bab-33-umm-al-kitab-targum.
ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Jīlī (b. 767 AH / 1365 CE; d. c. 826-832 AH / 1422-1428 CE). 2026. "al-Insān al-Kāmil, Bāb 33 -- Umm al-Kitāb (The Mother of the Book)." Hekhal: An Open Reference for Esoteric Tradition. https://hekhal.org/texts/jili-insan-al-kamil-bab-33-umm-al-kitab-targum.
ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Jīlī (b. 767 AH / 1365 CE; d. c. 826-832 AH / 1422-1428 CE). "al-Insān al-Kāmil, Bāb 33 -- Umm al-Kitāb (The Mother of the Book)." Hekhal: An Open Reference for Esoteric Tradition, May 2, 2026, hekhal.org/texts/jili-insan-al-kamil-bab-33-umm-al-kitab-targum.
ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Jīlī (b. 767 AH / 1365 CE; d. c. 826-832 AH / 1422-1428 CE). (2026). al-Insān al-Kāmil, Bāb 33 -- Umm al-Kitāb (The Mother of the Book). Hekhal: An Open Reference for Esoteric Tradition. https://hekhal.org/texts/jili-insan-al-kamil-bab-33-umm-al-kitab-targum
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publisher = {{Hekhal: An Open Reference for Esoteric Tradition}},
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Author
ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Jīlī (b. 767 AH / 1365 CE; d. c. 826-832 AH / 1422-1428 CE)
Title
al-Insān al-Kāmil, Bāb 33 -- Umm al-Kitāb (The Mother of the Book)