QUOTE : The term for this concept is wahadat al-wujud, or the Unity of Being, first coined by one of the greatest philosophical minds in history, Muhyiddin ibn al-Arabi (1165–1240 C.E.). Seeking to provide a firm philosophical basis for the Sufi conception of the divine, Ibn al-Arabi began by addressing the fundamental flaw in the doctrine of tawhid: If, in the beginning, there was nothing but God, how could God have created anything, unless God created it from himself? And if God did make creation from himself, wouldn’t that violate the oneness and unity of God by dividing God between Creator and creation? Ibn al-Arabi’s solution to this problem was to confirm what Sufis like Shams and Bayazid had been saying all along: If God is indivisible, then nothing can come into existence that isn’t also God. At the very least, Creator and creation must share the exact same eternal, indistinguishable, inseparable essence, meaning everything that exists in the universe exists only insofar as it shares in the existence of God. Therefore, God must be, in essence, the sum total of all existence.10