The fixed entities
idea · 2 works · 3 mentions · 5 anchored passages
al-aʻyān al-thābitah · the fixed entities · الاعيان الثابتة · fixed and unmade · their outline · أعيان وأعراض · ثابتة غير مجعولة
in the texts
Kitāb al-Zawrāʼ wa-al-taʻlīqāt ʻalayhi
The realities taken in themselves as independent essences, which have never caught the scent of existence and never become manifest, only their outline appearing in the Real.
Take this, then, as a measure for all the realities, and you will know the meaning of the saying of him who said that the fixed entities (*al-aʻyān al-thābitah*) have never caught the scent of existence, and that they have not become manifest and never will — only their outline becomes manifest.
So the fixed entities, by which I mean those realities in their own selves which the estimative faculty posits, are not existent at all.
he means that the realities, all of them, when they are considered as independent essences distinct from the essence of the cause — as they are in the apprehensions of the veiled — are impossible, whether in existence or in manifestation.
Risālat al-Wāridāt
Al-aʻyān al-thābitah, a term drawn from Sufi metaphysics for the established entities, used here alongside the originated existents as the objects of the reflection that yields knowledge of God, with entities and accidents both affirmed as really existing.
Its obligatoriness is by the revealed Law, and the way to attain it is reflection upon the fixed entities (*al-aʻyān al-thābitah*) and the originated existents.