Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī — named by his disciples al-Shaykh al-Akbar · الشَّيْخ الأَكْبَر, “the greatest Master” — is one of the most powerful metaphysicians in the history of humanity, and probably the most controversial Sufi thinker. His immense work — more than four hundred treatises are attributed to him — has, for eight centuries, never ceased to arouse both veneration and suspicion. It has fertilised the whole mystical thought of Islam, and continues, today, to be a living hearth for those who dare to approach it.
A child of al-Andalus
He was born in Murcia, in Muslim Andalusia, in 1165 (560 H.). It was a century in which the Iberian peninsula was still an intense intellectual hearth: Jews, Christians and Muslims crossed paths there, read one another, debated. Ibn ʿArabī grew up in Seville, where his family settled. He received the classical education of the son of a good family — law, theology, ḥadīth, poetry.
But already, in adolescence, something set him apart. Around the age of fifteen or sixteen, he met — a remarkable fact, attested by himself — the great philosopher Averroes (Ibn Rushd), then at the height of his fame. The old scholar, having heard of the young man's spiritual gifts, wished to see him. The meeting was short but striking. Averroes asked him: “Have you found through unveiling and inspiration what we find through reflection?” Ibn ʿArabī replied: “Yes and no. Between the yes and the no, spirits take flight and heads are severed from bodies.” Averroes, it is said, turned pale.
This inaugural scene says everything already: Ibn ʿArabī does not deny the value of discursive thought, but he affirms that another knowledge exists — tasted, unveiled, direct — which rational philosophy cannot attain. His whole work will flow from this conviction.
The initiatic journey
At the age of thirty-six, in 1201, Ibn ʿArabī received the order — through a vision — to leave Andalusia for the East. He began a long journey that would lead him, by stages, to Tunis, to Mecca, to Baghdad, to Mosul, to Anatolia, and finally to Damascus, where he would settle for his last years.
The stay in Mecca, from 1202, was decisive. During the circumambulations around the Kaʿba, revelations flowed. He met a young Persian girl, Niẓām — the daughter of a scholar — whose beauty and spiritual depth inspired his collection of poems The Interpreter of Ardent Desires. It was also in Mecca that he began the composition of his monumental work, the Meccan Illuminations.
The cathedral-work
Al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya — The Meccan Illuminations
560 chapters. A spiritual, metaphysical, cosmological, anthropological encyclopaedia. Ibn ʿArabī treats there of prayer, of the divine Names, of sainthood, of spiritual imagination, of the mystical stations, of the imaginal world — in short, of all that unveiled knowledge made him see. A work begun in Mecca in 1202, completed in Damascus in 1238.
Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam — The Bezels of Wisdom
A late work, brief in volume but of an extreme metaphysical density. Twenty-seven chapters, each devoted to a biblical-Quranic prophet (Adam, Noah, Idrīs, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muḥammad…), considered as the “bezel” of a particular divine wisdom. For most commentators, it is the highest and most dangerous of his works — the one that drew against Ibn ʿArabī the most violent attacks.
Tarjumān al-Ashwāq — The Interpreter of Ardent Desires
A collection of love poems composed after his meeting with Niẓām in Mecca. Suspected by the jurists of being pure erotic poetry, Ibn ʿArabī had to write a commentary upon it to show the spiritual meaning of each of its verses.
In all, more than four hundred treatises are attributed to him — though not all are authenticated. His work is an ocean. One enters it by a thousand doors, one loses oneself in it, one emerges from it transformed. No Sufi thinker has written so much, nor with such systematic depth.
The unity of Being — waḥdat al-wujūd
The doctrine for which Ibn ʿArabī is best known — though he does not himself use this formula, which we owe to his successors — is that of waḥdat al-wujūd · وَحْدَة الوُجُود, the unity of Being.
The central idea: God alone is, in the full sense of the word “being.” Creatures do not possess a being that would belong to them — they hold their existence from the incessant theophany by which God reveals Himself in forms. At every instant, the world is re-created. Nothing subsists by itself; all is manifestation of one unique Reality that unfolds in infinite forms.
The real is the Real, the creaturely is the creaturely. The world is at once He and not He. Ibn ʿArabī
This doctrine is not — as it has sometimes been caricatured — a pantheism that would dissolve God into the world. Ibn ʿArabī maintains absolutely the divine transcendence: God is none of the creatures, He infinitely surpasses them. But He is at the same time immanent: no creature exists without Him, and all manifest Him at their degree. It is the coincidence of opposites — tanzīh (transcendence) and tashbīh (similitude) — which discursive thought cannot hold, and which only the heart can grasp.
The divine Names as the architecture of the real
For Ibn ʿArabī, the divine Names — al-Asmāʾ al-Ḥusnā — are not decorative labels. They are the structural knots of reality. Each Name — the Merciful, the Subtle, the Living, the All-Powerful, the Patient, the Forgiver… — requires, in order to manifest itself, a creation in which it may unfold. The world is thus the place of manifestation of the divine Names.
And each human being, in his way, is the bearer of a particular Name, which constitutes his spiritual identity. The path of the Sufi consists in recognising which Name is his own — which divine face he has the vocation to manifest in the world — and in becoming transparent to that Name.
Creative imagination and the imaginal world
Ibn ʿArabī elaborated a profound doctrine of spiritual imagination — not the fantastical imaginary, but an intermediate faculty between the sensible and the intelligible, which sees in forms what surpasses forms. Henry Corbin named this domain the imaginal world (ʿālam al-mithāl) — the world of true visions, of prophetic dreams, of the apparitions of the saints, of the barzakh that separates and links the worlds.
This theme is essential: it allows one to understand why the Sufis do not oppose “faith” to “reason.” They hold a third way — active imagination, the eye of the heart, which sees what neither the senses nor the intellect grasp.
The Perfect Man — al-Insān al-Kāmil
At the summit of his cosmology, Ibn ʿArabī places the figure of the Insān al-Kāmil · الإِنْسَان الكَامِل — the Perfect Man. It is not a matter of an ideally virtuous man. It is the being in whom all the divine Names are manifested in balance — a perfect microcosm of the Whole, an integral mirror of the divine.
For Ibn ʿArabī, the Prophet Muḥammad is the Perfect Man par excellence — not individually, but according to what he calls the Muhammadan Reality (al-Ḥaqīqa al-Muḥammadiyya), the metaphysical principle that is the first creation of God and the model of all existence.
Posterity and the controversies
No work, in Islam, has aroused so many debates. The literalist jurists — Ibn Taymiyya foremost among them — accused Ibn ʿArabī of pantheism, of incarnationism, of having cast doubt on the literal value of the Quran, of having rehabilitated Pharaoh by presenting him as a secret believer. The controversy has never ceased: even today, in certain Muslim countries, his work is regarded with suspicion.
But its spiritual fecundity is immense. His son-in-law and disciple Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī transmitted his teaching to Persia, where it deeply marked Iranian mystical thought — including Shiʿi gnosis (ʿirfān). Through Qūnawī, the work nourished Jāmī, Shabistarī, Mullā Ṣadrā… A whole region of the spirituality of the Muslim East bears his mark.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Ibn ʿArabī was rediscovered in the West — by the perennialists (Schuon, Burckhardt, Lings), by the academics (Corbin, Chodkiewicz, Addas, Chittick), and he is today one of the most translated spiritual writers in the world. The Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabi Society, in Oxford, devotes a continuous work to him.
The burial in Damascus
Ibn ʿArabī died in Damascus in 1240, at the age of seventy-five. He was buried on the slopes of Mount Qāsiyūn. His tomb, long simple, would be enlarged under the Ottomans: the sultan Selim I, after the conquest of Syria in 1517, had a magnificent mosque built above it that still exists. The sanctuary remains an active place of pilgrimage — where the lovers of the work, of every nation and every confession, come to pray beside the Great Master.
My heart has become capable of every form:
a meadow for the gazelles, a cloister for the monk,
a temple for idols, a Kaʿba for the pilgrim,
the Tablets of the Torah, the book of the Quran.
I follow the religion of love: whatever path its caravans take,
love is my religion, and love is my faith. Ibn ʿArabī, Tarjumān al-Ashwāq