“In our view there are two kinds of fanāʾ: if, after fanāʾ, a witness (shāhid) remains, that is true fanāʾ. If no witness remains, we call it the ‘sleep of the heart,’ like someone asleep who does not dream.”
“The Shaykh reminds us that fanāʾ is relative. It means passing away from certain lower modes of consciousness while, at the same time, finding baqāʾ through a higher mode. A higher wakefulness replaces what has been relinquished. In other words, fanāʾ is understood in relation to the baqāʾ that accompanies it. What abides is the self-disclosure (tajallī) of the Real (al-Ḥaqq); what passes away is the unreal (bāṭil), namely the person’s limited self-awareness (nafs). … Without perceiving what you have passed away from, you cannot say, ‘I have undergone fanāʾ from this or that.’”
Selections and interpretations of Ibn al-ʿArabi from William Chittick’s Imaginal Worlds: Ibn al-ʿArabi and the Problem of Religious Diversity.