Journal of Islamic Philosophy

Kierkegaard raises many issues in his account of the near sacri­fice of Isaac by his father. Responding to and critiquing Hegelian and Kantian depictions of Abraham, Kierkegaard moves to elevate Abraham into a position as a knight of faith. The Sunnī perception of the incident in the exegetical tradition is far more ethically unequivocal than that of the Latin philosophical tradi­tion. The ubiquitous Sufi theorist, Ibn ʿArabī, however, in a single act of interpretive ingenuity, managed to extirpate the central root of contention raised by the philosophers when he alleges that Abraham was only ever commanded to sacrifice a ram. Despite his abiding commitment to spiritual unveiling (kashf) and his insistence on the personal nature of God, Ibn ʿArabī advo­cates the employment of a Kantian criterion of universal ratio­nality to adjudicate between literal and metaphorical dreams.