Ibn ʿArabī

Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī was born in 1165 in Murcia, in al-Andalus, Muslim Spain, and grew up in Seville. He describes an illumination in his youth, and tells of meeting the philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes), who asked him whether what is reached by unveiling agrees with what is reached by reason, and was answered “yes and no”. He spent his early years with the Sufi masters of Andalusia and North Africa, among them two women he honoured as his teachers.

In 1201 he left the West for good. In Mecca he began his vast Meccan Openings (al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya), and wrote the love poems of The Interpreter of Desires, with his own commentary on their spiritual meaning. He travelled through Egypt, Anatolia, Iraq and Syria, and settled in Damascus, where he wrote The Bezels of Wisdom (Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam) around 1229 and died in 1240.

His followers called him al-Shaykh al-Akbar, “the Greatest Master”. His thought, systematized by his stepson Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī, shaped Sufism from Morocco to Indonesia; his critics, above all Ibn Taymiyya, regarded it as heresy.

His writings are vast: the Futūḥāt alone fills thousands of pages, and hundreds of shorter works are attributed to him. He wrote that much of it came to him by unveiling rather than by reflection. Modern scholars, among them Henry Corbin, Toshihiko Izutsu, Michel Chodkiewicz and William Chittick, have made him one of the most studied figures in the Islamic tradition.