A human who has become a polished mirror for the divine, not merely a contemplative one.
Sufi metaphysics has long asked what a fully realised human being would actually look like, someone who has not just glimpsed the divine but actualised it within themselves. The most influential answer is al-insan al-kamil, the Perfect Man (also translated Complete or Universal Man), a concept most associated with the 13th-century mystic Ibn Arabi (1165-1240).
For Ibn Arabi, the Perfect Man occupies a specific metaphysical position: a barzakh, an isthmus standing between the absolute reality of God and the contingent world of creation. His central image is the mirror. The Perfect Man is the universe polished so it can reflect the divine attributes back to God and out to creation at once, uniting opposing divine qualities, majesty and beauty, wrath and mercy, that appear scattered and fragmented everywhere else in existence. In this framing, the Perfect Man is less a call to action than a description of a completed spiritual state, historically embodied above all by the Prophet Muhammad and, in different Sufi lineages, by the saints who follow him.
Muhammad Iqbal took the term and reworked it into something more active. In Asrar-i-Khudi and later in his 1930 lectures, Iqbal’s Perfect Man, he also used the phrase mard-e-momin, “man of faith”, is the endpoint of a fully strengthened khudi (self), not a contemplative ideal reached through mystical absorption but an agent who has mastered his own inner world well enough to act on the outer one. Where Ibn Arabi’s Perfect Man mirrors the divine, Iqbal’s Perfect Man exercises it, most explicitly through khilafat, the Qur’anic mandate of humanity as God’s steward on Earth. Critics noted the resemblance to Nietzsche’s superman, since Iqbal was reading Nietzsche while developing the idea, but Iqbal drew a hard line between the two: his Perfect Man discovers the sources of moral law within himself rather than placing himself above the law altogether, remaining answerable to it rather than exempt from it.
Source: William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-‘Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination (State University of New York Press, 1989); Muhammad Iqbal, Asrar-i-Khudi (1915) and The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1930).