First time poster here.
There is an issue in the Fusus al-Hikam that I haven't seen addressed directly.
The al-insan al-kamil tradition, the Perfect Human who comprehensively realises all the divine names of Allah within a single individual, is typically read as following from Ibn Arabi's account of Adam in the opening chapter of the Fusus. Adam as the polished mirror of all the divine names, the comprehensive locus, the being through whom God sees Himself as He cannot through the angels.
The tradition then reads forward from this: if Adam demonstrated the comprehensive capacity for all the names, the human vocation is to realise as many of them as possible individually, with the most spiritually advanced person approximating the most complete realisation.
But...the problem is that the Qur'an's own account of Adam doesn't support this. Surah Ta-Ha (20:115-122), for example, narrates the fall in detail, and what it describes is incompatible with a being who had comprehensively realised all the divine names because Adam is deceived.
Wa-'asa adamu rabbahu fa-ghawa,"Adam disobeyed his Lord and was led astray" (20:121). He wanted the tree of immortality and an undecaying kingdom (20:120). And God's response after the fall is not to restore him to a state of comprehensive gnosis, it is this: "then his Lord chose him, turned toward him, and guided him" (20:122).
These three facts seem incompatible with the Perfect Human reading because a being who had comprehensively realised Al-Khabir (the Totally Aware) would not have been deceived by Iblis. A being who had comprehensively realised Al-Hakim (the Wise) and Al-Haqq (the Truth) would have seen through a lie, among other similar names. A being who possessed everything would not have desired the tree at all, cf. Al-Qayyum (the Self-Existing), because the tree represents what is lacking, and the Perfect Human, by definition, lacks nothing.
My reading: the teaching of all the names to Adam was a species endowment for all humanity, not an individual curriculum. The names were inscribed in humanity collectively, distributed across the full diversity of human configurations, each person carrying a particular subset most naturally, not exhausted in Adam as an individual.
Any thoughts on this reading? Critiques? New directions?