Michel Chodkiewicz was, in the French language, the foremost authority on Ibn ʿArabī — al-Shaykh al-Akbar, "the greatest master" of Sufism. His life has the shape of a fine paradox: a publisher by profession, a scholar by vocation, he did not follow the ordinary academic career, and yet it was he who renewed, in depth, the understanding of Akbarian thought.
A publisher, a scholar
Born in 1929 in Paris, into a family of Polish origin, Chodkiewicz made his career in publishing. For many years he directed Éditions du Seuil, one of the great French publishing houses, of which he became chairman and managing director. His whole professional life was spent in the service of other people's books.
But, in parallel, he pursued a personal research, exacting, with the rigour of a specialist: the study of the texts of Ibn ʿArabī, in the original Arabic. He learned the language, read the manuscripts, compared the sources. This double life was finally recognised: late in life he was elected director of studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, where he taught Sufism. The self-taught man had become a master. He died in 2020.
Against a misunderstanding
To grasp Chodkiewicz's contribution, one must know a tenacious misunderstanding. For a long time, the West read Ibn ʿArabī as a kind of vague, overflowing mystic — a syncretist who had supposedly dissolved all the religions into a great feeling of unity, and who had freed himself from the Muslim Law.
Chodkiewicz demonstrated, text in hand, that this image is false. Far from being an improviser, Ibn ʿArabī is a thinker of extreme coherence, and his whole thought is rooted in the Quran and in the Law (sharīʿa). It is not in spite of the Book and the Law that he rises, it is through them. The Law is not, for him, a threshold that the mystic would cross in order to leave it behind: it is the very form that wisdom takes.
The whole thought of Ibn ʿArabī rests on an absolute fidelity to the Quran. Michel Chodkiewicz
Sainthood and its Seal
His first great book bears on a central and delicate question: sainthood (walāya). What is a saint, in the doctrine of Ibn ʿArabī? How does sainthood relate to prophecy? And what does that mysterious idea of a "Seal of the saints" mean — a being who closes the cycle of sainthood as the Prophet closed the cycle of prophecy?
Chodkiewicz untangled these questions with a remarkable finesse, showing the exact place of the saint in the spiritual economy of Islam: not a rival of the prophet, but his heir; not a man "above" the Law, but the one who lives its deepest meaning.
His work
Two great books fixed Chodkiewicz's contribution to the understanding of Ibn ʿArabī. Each receives here a detailed presentation — key concepts, architecture, how to read it.
Prophethood and sainthood in the doctrine of Ibn ʿArabī. The walāya, the hidden hierarchy of the saints, the three seals — the work that renewed the whole reading of the Shaykh al-Akbar.
Discover the workIbn ʿArabī, the Book and the Law. The decisive thesis: the whole Akbarian work is a reading of the Quran — an immense ocean, but of a single source.
Discover the workTo these two monographs is added a considerable work of editing and translation:
The Meccan Illuminations
Under his direction, a translated and annotated anthology of the Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya — the immense summa of Ibn ʿArabī. Chodkiewicz gathered and coordinated the work of the best specialists, making whole tracts of this world-work accessible at last to the French-speaking reader.
The Meccan Illuminations
Under his direction, a translated and annotated anthology of the Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya — the immense summa of Ibn ʿArabī. Chodkiewicz gathered and coordinated the work of the best specialists, making whole tracts of this world-work accessible at last to the French-speaking reader.
The Spiritual Writings of Emir Abd el-Kader
Chodkiewicz established and presented a translated selection from the Kitāb al-Mawāqif, the great spiritual book of Emir Abd el-Kader — heir of Ibn ʿArabī in the 19th century. A work that links the medieval Akbarian doctrine to its living prolongation.
The exacting conveyor
Chodkiewicz's place, among those who made Sufism known in the West, is a singular one. He is not a man of the perennialist school like Guénon or Schuon; he does not write to propose a way, but to establish a text and understand it exactly. His virtue is precision: to refuse vagueness, to refuse the convenient paraphrase, to return always to what Ibn ʿArabī actually wrote.
It is this exactingness that makes him an irreplaceable conveyor. Thanks to him, the French-speaking reader need no longer be content with a vague idea of Ibn ʿArabī: he can reach his real thought, in its rigour and its depth. Chodkiewicz showed that to love a great text is, first of all, to serve it with an unfailing honesty.