Gratitude and the Law of Attraction in Ibn ʿArabī and the Sufis.

Recent years have witnessed the growth of what has been called the 'Gratitude Industry'. Occupying a niche within the broader wellness economy, its hallmark has been the commercialization of practices of thankfulness with promises of better health, personal fulfillment, and happiness. The effects of the spread of this industry have also become visible in New Age spirituality, where a wide range of online personalities now speak of gratitude and the 'law of attraction', or the power of gratitude to 'manifest' into the world everything one might pine for or desire. Yet contemporary reflections on the subject in popular culture, idiosyncratically drawn from both the 'New Thought' movement of the 19th century and premodern mystical and esoteric currents within the various religions of the world, form little more than a cornucopia of diverse perspectives, devoid of internal coherence or a unifying principle. The paper delineates how major thinkers in the mystical tradition of Islam, most notably Ibn ʿArabī, understood the creative, transformative, and cosmogenic powers of shukr or thankfulness to operate, with special attention to its gravitational features, and to the role that 'correspondence' or munāsaba (=sympatheia in Greek philosophy) plays in the relation between thankfulness and the gift. In broader terms, the analysis centers around the rules that govern the consequences of thankfulness and ingratitude in human life. In the course of our examination, we shall see that a defining feature of Sufi meditations on the subject is the recognition that God's dissemination and withholding of blessings - material and spiritual - is determined not by an entirely unintelligible and fideistic will, but by laws and customs which, although invisible, animate both the natural and supernatural orders of existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]