Ibn Sab'in as a scholar whose reputation had reached even the Sicilian court. Ar-Rashid passed them on; Ibn Sab'in accepted the commission with a smile—this is the Muslim account—and triumphantly and contemptuously expounded the difficulties of the Christian monarch and student. In his replies he certainly displays a very complete and exact knowledge of the Aristotelian and neo-Platonic systems, and is far less a blind follower of Aristotle than is Ibn Rushd. But his schoolmasterly tone is most unpleasant, and we discover in the end that all this is a mere preliminary discipline, leading in itself to agnosticism and a recognition that there is nothing but vanity in this world, and that only in the Vision of the Sufi can certainty and peace be found. So we have again the circle through which al-Ghazzali went. As distinguished from Ibn Rushd, the prophet, with Ibn Sab'in, takes higher rank than the sage. Beyond the current division of the soul into the vegetative, the animal and the reasonable, he adds two others, derived from the reasonable, the soul of wisdom and the soul of prophecy. The first of these is the soul of the philosopher, and the other of the prophet; and the last is the highest. Of the reasonable soul upward, he predicates immortality.

His position otherwise must have been practically the same as that of Ibn Arabi. Like him he was a Zahirite in law and a mystic in theology. "God is the reality of existing things," he taught, and it is evident that he belonged to the school of pantheism in which God is all, and separate things are emanations from him. In life we have flashes of recognition

of the heavenly realities, but only at death—which is our true birth—do we reach union with the eternal, or, to speak technically, with the Active Intellect.

Apparently it was quite possible for him to hold these views in public so long as the Muwahhids were strong enough to protect him. But their empire was rapidly falling to pieces and the time of freedom had passed. An attack on him at Tunis, where the Hafsids now ruled, drove him to the East about 643, and there he took refuge at—of all places—Mecca. The refuge seems to have been secure. He lived there more than twenty years amid a circle of disciples, among whom was the Sharif himself, and died about 667. There is a poorly authenticated story that he died by suicide. The man himself, with so many of his time and kind, must remain a puzzle to us. For all his haughty pride of learning, it is noted of him that his first disciples were from among the poor. His contemporaries described him as "a Sufi after the manner of the philosophers." The last vestige of the Muwahhid empire passed away in the year of his death.