Ibn Arabi

Ibn Arabi wrote an immense amount, the Meccan Revelations alone runs to thousands of pages, and the Bezels of Wisdom, which he said the Prophet handed him in a dream in 1229, is the compressed statement of his metaphysics, organised as twenty-seven chapters each attached to a prophet.

The doctrine he is known for is wahdat al-wujud, the oneness of being: that there is only one reality, that everything other than God is a manifestation of the divine names rather than an independent existence, and that the cosmos is God's self-disclosure to Himself. It is worth knowing that the phrase itself is not his. It was applied to his thought by later followers and, more insistently, by later opponents, and William Chittick and others have argued that the label flattens a body of writing which is far more paradoxical and less systematic than a slogan suggests.

He is called al-Shaykh al-Akbar, the Greatest Master, and he is also among the most fiercely contested figures in Islamic intellectual history. Ibn Taymiyya attacked him as a monist and effectively a heretic, and the argument over whether his teaching is compatible with orthodox Islam has continued for seven hundred years without resolution, he remains banned or denounced in some quarters and revered in others. Two further ideas of his have travelled particularly far: the Perfect Human, the realised person as the mirror in which God contemplates Himself, and the imaginal world, a real intermediate realm between spirit and matter in which visions genuinely occur, an idea that Henry Corbin brought into twentieth-century Western thought.

Ibn Arabi's life had the shape of a slow migration through the Islamic world: born in Murcia in 1165, formed in Seville, travelling east through North Africa to Mecca in 1202, and settling finally in Damascus, where he died in 1240 and where his tomb still stands. The journey matters because his two great books are tied to its stations.

In Mecca, circumambulating the Kaaba, he reports the encounters that opened al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya, the Meccan Openings, a work of several thousand pages ranging over cosmology, ritual, exegesis and autobiography, which he revised across decades. In Damascus, near the end, he wrote the short Fusus al-Hikam, the Bezels of Wisdom, which he said was handed to him by the Prophet in a vision: twenty seven chapters, each setting a facet of divine wisdom in the figure of one prophet. Among his working ideas, the imaginal realm, the barzakh where meanings take sensible form and visions are real events, and the doctrine of the perfect human as the mirror in which the Real knows itself, proved endlessly generative. He founded no order and named no successor, yet an Akbarian school formed around his books, from his stepson Sadr al-Din Qunawi through commentators across Iran, Anatolia, India and the Malay world, and the argument over him, saint to some and heretic to others, has never closed.