A Revelation at Mecca, Revised for Nearly Forty Years

Al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya, the Meccan Revelations or Meccan Openings, is by far Ibn Arabi's largest work, begun after a vision he experienced while circling the Kaaba in Mecca around 1202 and continually revised and expanded until close to his death in 1240, so that the text as it survives represents nearly four decades of accumulated writing rather than a single composed book. The standard printed edition runs to thirty seven volumes, and Ibn Arabi organizes it into five hundred and sixty chapters covering an almost encyclopedic range of subject matter, cosmology, the sciences of the letters, the stations of the spiritual path, the meaning of specific Quranic verses and hadith, and detailed accounts of his own visionary experiences woven throughout.

Unlike the tightly compressed Fusus al-Hikam, the Futuhat moves at enormous length and with frequent digression, reflecting decades of ongoing thought rather than a single crystallized statement, which makes it a far less approachable starting point for a new reader even though specialists regard it as the fuller and, in some respects, more foundational expression of Ibn Arabi's system. Ibn Arabi continued adding material to the text even after settling in Damascus for his final years, so no single version can be called final in the way a deliberately completed book might be.