Ibn Arabi

Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī

Life, earliest works, manuscript witnesses, major ideas, controversies, and modern scholarship

In Brief

Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī (560–638/1165–1240) was an Andalusi Muslim scholar, Sufi teacher, jurist, poet, and prolific writer. He moved from Murcia and Seville through the Maghrib to Mecca, Iraq, Anatolia, and Syria. His writings combine Qurʾan, hadith, law, theology, cosmology, spiritual practice, poetry, and visionary testimony. His later readers called him al-Shaykh al-Akbar, “the Greatest Master.” His intellectual legacy was carried above all by Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī and then reshaped in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Urdu, Malay, and Chinese traditions.

At a Glance

Item	Source-critical summary
Full name	Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad Ibn al-ʿArabī al-Ṭāʾī al-Ḥātimī
Born	17 Ramaḍān 560 / July 27–28, 1165, Murcia, al-Andalus; the Hijrī date is secure, while modern calendar conversions differ by a day
Died	22 Rabīʿ II 638, Damascus; near-contemporary witnesses support the Hijrī date. Modern conversions range from November 8 to 10, 1240; a later 28 Rabīʿ II tradition produces November 16 in some references
Best-known titles	al-Shaykh al-Akbar; Muḥyī al-Dīn, “Reviver of the Religion”
Principal works	al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya; Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam; Tarjumān al-ashwāq; hundreds of shorter books and epistles
Main transmitter	Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī (d. 673/1274), pupil and principal intellectual heir; later biographers report a step-relationship, but the underlying marriage is difficult to establish
Core vocabulary	tawḥīd, wujūd, tajallī, divine names, barzakh, khayāl, taḥqīq, walāya, the complete human being

Orientation: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; Encyclopaedia Iranica; TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi.

A Note on Evidence

This study uses three evidence levels. Documented means a date, place, or relationship is supported by an authorial colophon, an audition or authorization note, a securely dated manuscript, or converging historical evidence. Author-reported means Ibn ʿArabī narrates it in his own writings; this is direct evidence for what he remembered or claimed, but not always independent confirmation of an external event. Later tradition means a report first becomes visible in biographies, shrine narratives, or polemical literature written after his lifetime. Visionary experiences are reported as experiences, not converted into ordinary public events.

The Available Evidence

Ibn ʿArabī left an unusually large autobiographical archive. al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya contains memories of teachers, family, journeys, dreams, meetings, and moments of composition. Rūḥ al-quds and the material later translated as Sufis of Andalusia portray western Muslim saints. His Fihrist lists his own books; his Ijāza records teachers, transmitted works, and books he authorized. Colophons and audition notes add harder chronological anchors. Yet these materials were written for spiritual and pedagogical purposes, not as a neutral modern autobiography. They tell us much, but they also stage memory through Qurʾanic types, prophetic inheritance, dreams, and claims of unveiling.

The modern biographical breakthrough was Claude Addas’s Ibn ʿArabī ou la quête du soufre rouge, translated as Quest for the Red Sulphur. Addas correlated scattered notices in Ibn ʿArabī’s writings with dated manuscripts and Arabic and Persian historical literature. Her reconstruction remains foundational and can be supplemented by Stephen Hirtenstein, William Chittick, Mahmud Erol Kılıç, and continuing manuscript research. The publisher’s description summarizes the book’s method: it rests on Ibn ʿArabī’s own writings and a wide multilingual secondary archive.

A responsible biography must take visions seriously while distinguishing them from externally witnessed events. Ibn ʿArabī regarded visions as sources of knowledge, and they shaped his writing. His famous meeting with Ibn Rushd (Averroes), for example, is known from Ibn ʿArabī’s later report in the Futūḥāt. It is historically plausible and culturally revealing, but it is not independently documented. Likewise, saying that Jesus “converted” him is misleading: the report concerns a Christic spiritual guidance within an already Muslim life, not conversion from another religion.

1. Names and the Andalusi Setting

Name, Lineage, and Honorifics

His own autographs and the writings of his immediate circle use Ibn al-ʿArabī, with the definite article. Later writers often dropped it—Ibn ʿArabī—to distinguish him from the earlier Mālikī judge Abū Bakr Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 543/1148). Modern scholarship uses both forms. His fuller lineage, al-Ṭāʾī al-Ḥātimī, connects his family to the Arab tribe of Ṭayyiʾ and to the celebrated figure Ḥātim al-Ṭāʾī. “Muḥyī al-Dīn” and “al-Shaykh al-Akbar” are honorifics that signal his later reputation; they should not be treated as neutral contemporary job titles. Iranica is especially useful on the autograph form of his name.

Al-Andalus Under the Almohads

Ibn ʿArabī was born into a politically mobile frontier society. Murcia had been ruled by Ibn Mardanīsh, whose power collapsed before the Almohads. The standard reconstruction places the family’s move to Seville around 568/1172–73, after the Almohad takeover; a notice transmitted by Ibn al-Najjār instead says 578. By 578 Ibn ʿArabī was demonstrably studying in Seville. His father, ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad, had ties to administration and learned society, but his exact office is unknown. Later accounts sometimes turn this into a grand aristocratic biography; the safer conclusion is that the family was socially connected enough to give the young Muḥammad access to courtly, scholarly, and urban networks.

Seville brought together Qurʾanic learning, hadith transmission, Mālikī legal culture, Arabic letters, medicine, philosophy, and Sufi practice. Ibn ʿArabī learned Qurʾanic recitation and hadith from numerous teachers and read standard works with authorization. His later writing shows wide command of law, theology, grammar, cosmology, and earlier Sufi sayings. He was not simply a private ecstatic who later acquired vocabulary for his experiences; he became a learned transmitter as well as a visionary teacher. At the same time, his manner of integrating the disciplines was unlike the usual genre-by-genre production of jurists or theologians.

2. Life: From Murcia to Damascus

Childhood, Education, and Spiritual Turn

Muḥammad was born in Murcia on the night of 17 Ramaḍān 560, a date converted in modern references as July 27 or 28, 1165; July 28 is conventional. Ibn al-Najjār preserves the exact Hijrī date from information supplied by Ibn ʿArabī. The record of his adolescence is largely retrospective. He acquired the education expected of a cultivated Muslim in his setting and entered court or military service. A valuable report by Ibn al-Shaʿʿār, who interviewed him in 635/1237, preserves Ibn ʿArabī’s explanation that he saw an Almohad prince prostrating humbly in Córdoba’s mosque, abandoned soldiering, gave his possessions to his father, and followed the Path. The notice itself dates his withdrawal from the army to 580/1184; only the narrower assignment to Ṣafar 580 is a modern reconstruction based on the ruler’s itinerary. This early external witness carries more historical weight than the later wine-cup conversion story.

Around 580/1184, when he was about nineteen, he entered sustained spiritual discipline. “Conversion” is common in older European writing, but spiritual turn, awakening, or entry into the Sufi path is more accurate. Ibn ʿArabī remembered early retreats, intense recitation, ascetic practice, and openings that arrived before he possessed a formal Sufi vocabulary. Some dramatic anecdotes—an illness, a banquet, a sudden voice—belong to later narrative elaboration. The date 580 is firmer than any single conversion story.

His first named guide was Abū al-ʿAbbās al-ʿUraybī of al-ʿUlyā, a relatively unlettered teacher whose directness Ibn ʿArabī prized. Abū Yaʿqūb Yūsuf al-Kūmī gave more systematic guidance. Women were not incidental to this network. Fāṭima bint Ibn al-Muthannā, an elderly Seville ascetic whom he served, was remembered as a spiritual mother; Shams Umm al-Fuqarāʾ was another authoritative woman in his western formation. Their presence matters because Ibn ʿArabī later argued that women may attain every spiritual office available to men, even though his corpus also retains assumptions of medieval gender hierarchy. Saʿdiyya Shaikh’s study of gender and intimacy offers a sustained analysis of that tension.

The Meeting with Averroes

The best-known episode of his youth is his meeting with Ibn Rushd. In Ibn ʿArabī’s account, his father arranged an interview because the philosopher had heard of the young man’s opening. Asked whether mystical unveiling agrees with rational investigation, Ibn ʿArabī replied “yes and no,” presenting realization as something that can confirm reason yet also exceed its conceptual limits. The scene should not be made into a simple battle between “Islamic mysticism” and “Greek rationalism.” Ibn Rushd was also a jurist and Muslim intellectual, and Ibn ʿArabī would later use philosophical vocabulary when it served his purpose. The episode is better read as an author-reported meditation on two modes of knowing.

Travel in al-Andalus and the Maghrib

During the 1180s and 1190s he visited towns across al-Andalus and North Africa, meeting ascetics, jurists, hadith scholars, and Sufi teachers. Around 589–590/1193–94 he visited Tunis and formed a lasting connection with ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Mahdawī. On returning west he completed Mashāhid al-asrār in 590/1194, a sequence of visionary contemplations. His father and mother died in close succession around this period; as the only son, he assumed responsibility for his sisters Umm Saʿd and Umm ʿAlāʾ and later arranged their marriages in Fez. al-Tadbīrāt al-ilāhiyya, probably begun slightly earlier at Morón and later revised, maps governance of a polity onto governance of the human microcosm.

Fez became a major station. In 594/1198 Ibn ʿArabī reported a vision associated with the Muhammadan inheritance and composed Kitāb al-Isrāʾ, his rhymed account of a spiritual night journey and ascent. In Ramaḍān 595/July 1199 at Almería he wrote Mawāqiʿ al-nujūm in eleven sessions. Around the same time he wrote ʿAnqāʾ mughrib, an allusive book on the seal of sainthood and the Mahdi. These early works already contain, in concentrated form, the structures of prophecy, sainthood, imagination, and the complete human being that appear in his later writings.

He revered Abū Madyan (d. 594/1198), the most influential Maghribi Sufi of the period, but the claim that they met physically is not supported by Ibn ʿArabī’s own testimony. He describes a spiritual relation instead. Claude Addas’s study of Abū Madyan and Ibn ʿArabī corrects the frequent biographical mistake.

Departure for the East

In 596–597/1200–1201 Ibn ʿArabī left al-Andalus permanently. He passed through Marrakesh and Tunis, where he spent time with al-Mahdawī and drafted Inshāʾ al-dawāʾir, an early cosmological treatise. He then traveled through Egypt and Palestine, visiting Jerusalem and Hebron, and reached Mecca in 598/1202. The exact routing and month-by-month sequence must be reconstructed from notices written at different times, so modern chronologies sometimes differ by a year. This pilgrimage began the eastern half of his life.

Mecca, 598–601/1202–1204

In Mecca, study, pilgrimage, authorship, and visionary reflection converged. Ibn ʿArabī entered the learned household of Abū Shujāʿ Ẓāhir ibn Rustam al-Iṣfahānī, studied with Ẓāhir’s learned sister Fakhr al-Nisāʾ, and met his daughter Niẓām, whose learning and beauty became the literary occasion for poems later gathered as Tarjumān al-ashwāq. Niẓām was not Ibn ʿArabī’s wife. Treating her as either a merely earthly beloved or a fictional allegory misses the poetics: a historical person and a theophanic form can operate together in Ibn ʿArabī’s imagination.

Near the Kaʿba he reported meeting a mysterious youth who embodied the book’s contents and instructed him to read what was inscribed within him. This vision supplied the first openings of al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya in 598/1202; sustained composition began in 599/1202–03. During this Meccan period Ibn ʿArabī also wrote Rūḥ al-quds, Mishkāt al-anwār (a collection of 101 divine sayings), Ḥilyat al-abdāl, and other works. He studied and taught hadith, read earlier Sufi texts, performed ritual worship, and assembled a growing circle of companions. “Inspired” in his account did not mean effortless dictation without scholarship: the text’s language presupposes decades of learning and was revised over many years.

Iraq and Anatolia

In 601/1204 he traveled with a pilgrimage caravan to Baghdad and then to Mosul, where he remained for about a year and wrote al-Tanazzulāt al-Mawṣiliyya on the inner meanings of worship. By 602/1205–06 he was moving through Upper Mesopotamia toward Malatya and Konya. Majd al-Dīn Isḥāq, connected to the Seljuk court, became an important companion. His son Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī would become Ibn ʿArabī’s principal pupil and the most important mediator of his thought. Later biographers report that Ibn ʿArabī married Majd al-Dīn’s widow and became Qūnawī’s stepfather, but the marriage is difficult to establish from first-generation evidence. Manuscript descriptions and certificates securely attest a close relationship of guardianship, pedagogy, and familial language; they do not by themselves prove the legal marriage. See Jane Clark’s manuscript-based study of Qūnawī.

For roughly two decades Ibn ʿArabī circulated among Mecca, Baghdad, Aleppo, Malatya, Sivas, and Konya. His itinerary followed pilgrimage routes, scholarly networks, Seljuk and Ayyubid courts, and circles of spiritual companionship. In 611/1214–15 he gathered the Tarjumān poems and, after some hearers objected to their erotic language, wrote an authorial commentary identifying spiritual referents. In 612/1215 he addressed a forceful letter to the Seljuk sultan ʿIzz al-Dīn Kaykāʾūs concerning Christian subjects and Frankish power. That letter complicates any modern picture of Ibn ʿArabī as a simple advocate of equal religions detached from medieval Islamic law and politics.

By 615/1218 he was based for a time in Malatya. His son Saʿd al-Dīn Muḥammad was probably born during the Anatolian years; another son, ʿImād al-Dīn Muḥammad, is connected with the Meccan family of Sharīf Yūnus. Details of wives and children are scattered and do not permit a seamless domestic biography. Family, pupils, and traveling companions helped copy, hear, authorize, and preserve his books.

Damascus, 620–638/1223–1240

Ibn ʿArabī settled in Damascus in 620/1223. Ayyubid Damascus offered political protection, major hadith institutions, libraries, and a dense scholarly public. He taught in the house of the Banū Zakī and continued to write, revise, and authorize texts. His circle included Qūnawī, Badr al-Ḥabashī, Ibn Sawdakīn, and other readers whose handwriting and audition notices now provide some of the strongest evidence for his corpus.

Ibn ʿArabī dated to the end of Muḥarram 627/November 1229 the dream in which, he said, the Prophet gave him Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam and ordered him to transmit it. The text existed by Qūnawī’s reading and collation in 630/1233. Its twenty-seven chapters present prophetic figures as bearers of distinct wisdoms. The book is short beside the Futūḥāt, but its compressed language generated more than a hundred commentaries and much of the later controversy surrounding his name.

The first recension of the Futūḥāt was completed in Ṣafar 629/December 1231. From 632/1234 he rewrote it, adding, deleting, and recasting material. He finished the second recension on 24 Rabīʿ I 636/November 4, 1238. Thirty-six of the 37 authorial volumes survive in his own hand; the missing ninth volume is represented by a later defective replacement. This is rare material evidence for the final form of a major medieval Islamic work. Shortly before his death, students were still reading his books before him.

He died in Damascus on the night of 22 Rabīʿ II 638 and was buried the following day in the Banū Zakī cemetery on the slopes of Mount Qāsiyūn. The Hijrī date is supported by near-contemporary al-Mundhirī and by Abū Shāma, who attended the funeral. Modern conversions of 22 Rabīʿ II vary from November 8 to 10, 1240. A later tradition gives 28 Rabīʿ II, which produces November 16 in some references. Sultan Selim I sponsored a mosque-shrine complex at the grave after the Ottoman conquest of Damascus in 922/1516. Stories that a cryptic prophecy led Selim to “rediscover” the tomb are later Ottoman legitimation narratives, not secure thirteenth-century history.

3. Chronology: A Source-Graded Reference

Date	Place	Event	Evidence note
560 / 1165	Murcia	Birth on 17 Ramaḍān	Documented in early biographical and authorial tradition; modern conversion falls on July 27 or 28
c. 568 or 578	Seville	Family probably relocates; Ibn ʿArabī certainly studies there by 578	568 is a contextual reconstruction; Ibn al-Najjār’s direct notice gives 578, and Ibn ʿArabī’s recollection secures his Seville study by that year
c. 580 / 1184	Seville	Sustained spiritual discipline begins	Ibn al-Shaʿʿār’s interview dates his departure from the army to 580; Ṣafar is a modern reconstruction; later conversion stories are embellished
late 570s–580s	Córdoba	Meeting with Ibn Rushd	Author-reported in the Futūḥāt; no independent witness
590 / 1194	Andalusia	Completes Mashāhid al-asrār after Tunis visit	Dated composition; secure work
594 / 1198	Fez	Visionary ascent; Kitāb al-Isrāʾ	Author-reported experience; early author-attested manuscript survives
595 / July 1199	Almería	Writes Mawāqiʿ al-nujūm	Dated composition; lifetime Qūnawī copy survives
c. 595 / 1199	Possibly Almería	Composes ʿAnqāʾ mughrib	Exact place remains debated; a 597/1201 Fez witness contains authorial writing
596–597 / 1200–01	Maghrib	Leaves al-Andalus permanently; Tunis; Inshāʾ al-dawāʾir	Reconstructed from colophons and later notices
598–599 / 1202–03	Mecca	Pilgrimage; Futūḥāt openings then composition; Meccan works	Multiple authorial notices and early witnesses
601–602 / 1204–06	Baghdad, Mosul	Studies, teaches, writes Tanazzulāt	Authorial colophons and travel notices
602 onward / 1206 onward	Anatolia	Malatya, Konya, Seljuk networks; Qūnawī	Strong manuscript and historical context; family details less complete
611 / 1214–15	Mecca/Aleppo	Collects Tarjumān; writes commentary	Authorial prefaces and transmission certificates
620 / 1223	Damascus	Settles permanently	Converging historical and manuscript evidence
627–630 / 1229–33	Damascus	Originating Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam dream; text exists by 630	Author-reported dream at the end of Muḥarram 627; Qūnawī copy read, collated, and authorized in 630/1233
629 / 1231	Damascus	Completes first Futūḥāt recension	Authorial colophon; original now lost
632–636 / 1234–38	Damascus	Writes revised Futūḥāt recension; completes it November 4, 1238	Thirty-six of 37 authorial volumes survive; MS 1853 is a later defective replacement for lost volume 9
22 Rabīʿ II 638	Damascus	Death and burial; modern conversion November 8–10, 1240	Near-contemporary witnesses support 22 Rabīʿ II; a later 28 Rabīʿ II report produces November 16 in some references

Biographical control: Addas, Quest for the Red Sulphur; Iranica; TDV biography; Anqa western chronology.

4. Works and Manuscripts: Composition Dates and Surviving Witnesses

The Size and Authentication of the Corpus

The familiar numbers—850 attributed works, 700 surviving, 400 or 450 authentic—derive from older cataloging and are often repeated as settled fact. They are not. Ibn ʿArabī’s own Fihrist names roughly 250 titles; his later Ijāza names about 290. Osman Yahia cataloged 846 numbered entries, but those include variant titles, extracts, duplicates, misattributions, and lost reports. The Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society’s ongoing Manuscript Archive Project classifies works by material and textual evidence rather than accepting every attribution. MIAS reports, accessed August 29, 2026, digital copies of more than 2,500 manuscript texts or witnesses and 56 manuscripts wholly or partly in Ibn ʿArabī’s hand or bearing his signature. The page separately reports more than 1,000 codices and 3,000 manuscript items inspected. The careful formulation is therefore: hundreds of works are attributed to him; a substantial core is secure, and authentication remains work by work.

Early Works: Composition and Survival

“Oldest work” can mean two different things: an early date of composition, or the earliest surviving physical witness. The original copy of an early book may be lost while a later certified copy survives; conversely, a lifetime manuscript may preserve a work composed years earlier. The table keeps those questions separate.

Work	Composition	Why it matters	Text / edition links
al-Tadbīrāt al-ilāhiyya	Probably before 590/1194; revised later	Governance of the human microcosm	Anqa work guide • Nyberg’s 1919 Arabic edition
Mashāhid al-asrār	590/1194; surviving copies postdate composition, and the early transmission and revision history remains difficult to reconstruct	Fourteen visionary contemplations; dedicated to al-Mahdawī’s circle	Anqa work guide • Mashāhid al-asrār Arabic reading copy • Beneito–Twinch translation
Kitāb al-Isrāʾ	594/1198	Rhymed spiritual night journey and ascent	Anqa work guide • Arabic reading copy • al-Ḥakīm critical-edition record
Mawāqiʿ al-nujūm	Ramaḍān 595 / July 1199	Ninefold map of spiritual aid, guidance, and sainthood	Anqa work guide • University of Toronto/Fisher reading scan • Denis Gril’s study
ʿAnqāʾ mughrib	c. 595 / 1199, possibly Almería	Seal of sainthood, Muhammadan inheritance, Mahdi	Anqa work guide • ʿAnqāʾ mughrib Arabic scan • Elmore study
Inshāʾ al-dawāʾir	598/1201, Tunis	Circles of being, divine knowledge, and the ‘Third Thing’	Anqa work guide • Nyberg’s 1919 Arabic edition

Access warning: Internet Archive links above are reading copies or catalog records, not necessarily the best critical texts. For textual research, begin with the MIAS 2019 catalog report and check the edition history.

Lifetime and Authorial Manuscript Witnesses

Text	Shelfmark	What survives	Correct description
ʿAnqāʾ mughrib	Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Or. oct. 3266	Copied at Fez in 597/1201 by an unidentified Maghribī copyist; fols. 44a and 45b are in Ibn ʿArabī’s hand	Earliest known dated manuscript witness in the present survey; Qalamos catalog record
Rūḥ al-quds	Istanbul University Rare Books A 79	Majd al-Dīn Isḥāq’s copy, designated as Badr al-Ḥabashī’s riwāya; first recorded audition in Dhū al-Qaʿda 600/1204	Author-signed lifetime transmission copy, not an Ibn ʿArabī holograph
Ḥilyat al-abdāl	Konya, Yusuf Ağa 4868	Unsigned witness dated 602/1205–06; the handwriting has been assigned both to Ibn ʿArabī and to an unidentified Maghribī scribe	The hand is disputed; the 2019 MIAS catalog records its earliest authentication as type C, so it is not an uncontested holograph
Mashāhid al-asrār	Manisa 1183/5, fols. 47a–83a	Copied 651/1253 by Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Anṣārī, a participant in Futūḥāt readings and member of the immediate transmission circle	Earliest currently identified surviving physical copy of Mashāhid; the early transmission and revision history remains difficult to reconstruct
Mawāqiʿ al-nujūm	Konya, Yusuf Ağa 5001	Undated copy in Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī’s hand, with a samāʿ at fol. 155a	Lifetime attribution is strong, but a narrower date within Qūnawī’s study period is inferred rather than supplied by a colophon
Kitāb al-Isrāʾ	Istanbul, Beyazıt/Veliyüddin 1628	Copied from the authorial original by Ibrāhīm al-Qurṭubī; read in Ibn ʿArabī’s Damascus house and authenticated by him in 633/1235–36	MIAS Verified A author-attested witness; earlier reported exemplars are lost
al-Futūḥāt, second recension	TIEM, former Evkaf Müzesi, 1845–1852 and 1854–1881	Written 632–636/1234–38 and completed 24 Rabīʿ I 636/November 4, 1238; 36 of 37 authorial volumes survive	TIEM MS 1853 is a later defective replacement for lost volume 9
Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam	TIEM/Evkaf 1933	Qūnawī copy from the lost original; reading and collation completed 27 Jumādā I 630/March 11, 1233; Ibn ʿArabī’s authorization dated 1 Jumādā II 630/March 15, 1233	Qūnawī holograph copy plus Ibn ʿArabī’s autograph authorization—not an Ibn ʿArabī holograph

Manuscript basis: Clark and Hirtenstein, ‘Establishing Ibn Arabi’s Heritage’; MIAS 2019 catalog report; survey of Futūḥāt editions.

The Two Principal Late Works

al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya is a 560-chapter synthesis rather than a linear philosophical system. It moves through cosmology, ritual law, Qurʾanic exegesis, hadith, spiritual stations, saints, dreams, letters, time, prayer, pilgrimage, love, and autobiographical memory. Ibn ʿArabī completed a first recension in 629/1231 and a substantially revised authorial copy in 636/1238. The standard 1329/1911 Cairo printing aimed at the second recension; modern editors must still work through holographs, first-recension witnesses, and later hybrid copies. See the TDV work article and MIAS edition survey. An unofficial searchable scan of the twelve-volume 2010/2013 al-Manṣūb edition is available at Internet Archive.

Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam is much shorter and much denser. Because it became the chief commentary text, it can distort the picture when read as if it were Ibn ʿArabī’s whole thought. Marco Aurelio Golfetto’s 2024 critical edition uses the earliest extant witness, copied by Qūnawī, collated with the lost original, read before Ibn ʿArabī, and authorized by him. It includes a facsimile and is the latest critical edition based directly on that witness: Brill critical edition and facsimile.

5. Major Ideas

A Method of Realization

Ibn ʿArabī’s characteristic word is taḥqīq, realization: knowing the truth or rightful claim (ḥaqq) of a thing and acting accordingly. Knowledge is not merely a correct proposition stored in the mind. It should transform the knower so that reason, imagination, ethical conduct, bodily worship, and spiritual perception each receive their due. This is why his writing can be rigorous without resembling a scholastic textbook. It moves readers among multiple standpoints and repeatedly refuses to let one formula replace lived discernment. William Chittick’s revised Stanford Encyclopedia entry offers a concise account of taḥqīq.

Revelation, Qurʾan, and Prophetic Inheritance

The Qurʾan is not decoration around a prior metaphysical theory. Its wording, sounds, stories, legal commands, divine names, and shifts of address generate Ibn ʿArabī’s thinking. Hadith supplies a second constant language, especially reports about divine love, creation in the divine form, dreams, sainthood, and worship. He often presents the saints as heirs to prophets: not new law-bearing prophets, but recipients of particular modes of prophetic knowledge. Full realization, in his view, requires following the Prophet Muḥammad rather than leaving revealed form behind.

His hermeneutics is expansive but not arbitrary. A verse may disclose new meanings because divine speech is inexhaustible, yet a new meaning should not cancel the wording or the legal sense. Michel Chodkiewicz’s An Ocean Without Shore and Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd’s Arabic Falsafat al-taʾwīl remain essential, from different intellectual positions, for understanding this scriptural architecture.

God, Existence, and the Divine Names

Only God possesses existence in and through God’s own reality. Created things have no independent self-subsistence; they receive existence at every instant. Yet Ibn ʿArabī does not simply identify God with the sum of the world. A creature is a divine sign and self-disclosure in one respect, and other than God in its limitation, contingency, and non-self-subsistence. His compact formula is often rendered “He/not He”: identity and difference must be thought together.

The divine names—Merciful, Knowing, Just, Living, Creator, and so on—are relations through which the unknowable divine essence becomes knowable in effects. Each thing manifests a particular configuration of names; no finite thing exhausts God. This produces both unity and irreducible plurality. Theology fails when transcendence (tanzīh) excludes every similarity, or when similarity (tashbīh) erases transcendence. The complete knower holds both.

Waḥdat al-Wujūd: A Later and Contested Label

The label can still be useful if precisely defined: all existence depends on the one real existence of God, while the many things remain distinct as determined objects of divine knowledge and as contingent disclosures. It is misleading when it means crude pantheism, the claim that every object is simply God without qualification. Caner Dagli shows how Qūnawī, Jandī, Farghānī, and later readers turned a fluid Ibn ʿArabian vocabulary into more systematic philosophical language. Chittick’s SEP discussion summarizes the term’s contested history.

Self-Disclosure, Fixed Entities, and Perpetual Creation

Creation is tajallī, divine self-disclosure. God’s knowledge contains the immutable or “fixed” entities (al-aʿyān al-thābita), the knowable realities of possible things. They are not independent eternal beings beside God. They are the objects and determinations of divine knowledge. When existence is bestowed, each entity receives according to its preparedness. Since no self-disclosure repeats exactly, the cosmos is renewed at every instant. Stability is a pattern perceived across perpetual re-creation.

This account explains moral and existential difference without positing a second source of being. It also produces difficult questions about freedom, predestination, suffering, and responsibility. Ibn ʿArabī holds together divine determination and the creature’s own preparedness; modern readers should resist reducing that tension to either absolute fatalism or modern individual autonomy.

Imagination and the Barzakh

Khayāl is often translated as imagination, but it does not mean mere fantasy. An image joins two sides without becoming reducible to either: a mirror image is both tied to the object and located in the mirror; a dream is both experienced and in need of interpretation. Barzakh means an isthmus or interval that simultaneously joins and separates. The cosmos, the soul, dreams, revelation in sensory forms, and posthumous embodiment can all be understood through this logic.

Reason distinguishes and guards against contradiction. Imagination perceives how one reality appears through many forms. Ibn ʿArabī compares them to two eyes of the heart. Either eye alone produces distortion: undisciplined images become illusion, while reason without imaginal perception mistakes conceptual limits for the limits of reality. Henry Corbin made this theme famous, but Chittick, Salman Bashier, and more recent manuscript-based work place it within a wider Qurʾanic and intellectual setting.

The Complete Human Being

The human being can gather all divine names in a way no single nonhuman creature does. The complete human being (al-insān al-kāmil) mirrors the comprehensive name Allāh and acts as a barzakh between divine names and the cosmos. This is a vocation, not a claim that ordinary human ego is divine. Adam’s knowledge of the names, prophetic character, servanthood, and vicegerency supply the scriptural pattern. Muḥammad is the fullest historical and spiritual model; other prophets disclose distinct wisdoms.

Later Akbarian writers made “the Perfect Human” a more fixed technical doctrine than Ibn ʿArabī always does. Qūnawī systematized levels of manifestation; al-Jīlī produced a famous independent book on the complete human being. Distinguishing Ibn ʿArabī’s flexible usages from later school formulas is a recurring task of modern scholarship.

Prophecy, Sainthood, and the Seal

Legislative prophecy ends with Muḥammad, but walāya—friendship with God or sainthood—continues as the inner inheritance of prophecy. Saints inherit from particular prophets without receiving a new scripture or law. Ibn ʿArabī’s claims concerning the “seal of Muhammadan sainthood” place his own spiritual authority within this architecture and became a major source of both devotion and objection. Jesus has a distinct role as the seal of universal sainthood, while the Muhammadan seal concerns a specific comprehensive inheritance. Michel Chodkiewicz’s The Seal of the Saints remains a central monograph.

Law and Ritual

Ibn ʿArabī wrote at length on purification, prayer, almsgiving, fasting, pilgrimage, legal method, and concrete disputes. His legal sections alone would fill several volumes. He often declined blind adherence to one school and reasoned in a way close to Ẓāhirī attention to the revealed wording. Scholars still debate whether “Ẓāhirī” should name his formal school affiliation. He restricted analogy when it generated obligations not clearly spoken by God, yet he could accept a wide range of inherited juristic opinions because each preserved a possible relation to revelation.

Outward practice and inward meaning are mutually necessary. A ritual form without presence becomes hollow; an inward claim that abandons the form loses its prophetic measure. Eric Winkel’s three studies in Ibn ʿArabī’s fiqh and Chodkiewicz’s book are sound starting points.

Love, Beauty, Women, and Embodiment

Divine love is a cause of manifestation: the hidden wishes to be known, and love seeks the presence of the beloved. Human love can disclose divine beauty because forms are sites of self-disclosure, not obstacles that must always be discarded. Erotic poetry can therefore be at once sensuous, biographical, cosmological, and devotional. The Tarjumān controversy shows how readily readers separate levels that Ibn ʿArabī asks them to hold together.

His statements about women are similarly double-edged. He explicitly allows women to attain the highest spiritual stations and received formation from women saints. He also writes within premodern assumptions about sexual differentiation and household hierarchy. Modern scholarship should neither turn him into a contemporary egalitarian nor ignore resources in his work that challenge male spiritual monopoly. Saʿdiyya Shaikh, Cyrus Ali Zargar, and Denis McAuley provide sustained analyses of gender, embodiment, beauty, and poetry.

Religious Diversity within a Muhammadan Framework

Ibn ʿArabī teaches that every act of worship is directed toward a divine self-disclosure, even when the worshipper confines God to an inadequate belief. The realized heart can recognize divine signs in forms that dogmatic certainty excludes, and divine mercy and knowledge exceed every creature’s enclosure. These themes explain why poems about a heart receptive to many forms have become emblems of interreligious openness.

But it does not follow that he taught a modern theory in which all religions are normatively identical. His legal and prophetic framework remains explicitly Qurʾanic and Muhammadan, and some passages treat earlier laws as superseded. Gregory Lipton’s revisionist study forcefully criticizes perennialist universalism; other interpreters judge his political framing too strong. The evidence supports a tension: a wide metaphysical recognition of divine disclosure and mercy operates inside a specific commitment to Islam and Muḥammad’s law.

6. Transmission, Controversy, Global Reception, and Modern Scholarship

Qūnawī and the Formation of a School

Ibn ʿArabī did not found a Sufi order called the Akbariyya. “Akbarian” names an intellectual and spiritual current that crossed many orders and scholarly institutions. Its pivotal figure was Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī. He preserved books, heard texts from the author, wrote concise works in a more systematic idiom, and trained students who connected Ibn ʿArabī’s insights with Avicennan philosophy, theology, and Persian Sufi literature.

Muʾayyid al-Dīn al-Jandī produced the first full line-by-line commentary on the Fuṣūṣ; Saʿīd al-Dīn al-Farghānī developed influential accounts of manifestation and the Muhammadan reality; Fakhr al-Dīn ʿIrāqī turned the school’s language toward Persian love mysticism. Later figures included ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Qāshānī, Dāwūd al-Qayṣarī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, Ḥaydar Āmulī, ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Jīlī, and Mullā Ṣadrā. The pathways are networks of reading and commentary, not a single chain of doctrinal repetition. There is no good evidence that Rūmī directly borrowed from Ibn ʿArabī, even though Rūmī and Qūnawī lived in Konya and later traditions often read them together.

Ottoman, Arab, Persianate, South Asian, and Chinese Afterlives

Dāwūd al-Qayṣarī, commentator on the Fuṣūṣ, became the first head teacher of the early Ottoman madrasa at İznik. Mullā Fanārī and later Ottoman scholars brought Akbarian metaphysics into theology, commentary, and institutional teaching. Sultan Selim I’s patronage of Ibn ʿArabī’s Damascus tomb made the shaykh part of Ottoman sacred geography, while jurists continued to disagree about his language. Arabic defenders such as al-Suyūṭī and ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Shaʿrānī explained difficult passages; ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī and Emir ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jazāʾirī carried his thought into later centuries.

In Persianate cultures, commentaries and poetic adaptations fed Safavid philosophy, Mughal discussion, and Sufi curricula in South Asia. In the Malay-Indonesian world, writers such as Ḥamza Fanṣūrī adapted concepts associated with the school, producing later debates in Aceh. Chinese Muslim scholars of the Han Kitab rendered ideas mediated through Persian Akbarian texts into a Neo-Confucian vocabulary; Liu Zhi is the best-known example. Michel Chodkiewicz’s study of diffusion and Sachiko Murata’s study of Liu Zhi show the scale and transformation of the legacy.

Criticism and Defense

Opposition focused particularly on compressed statements in the Fuṣūṣ, claims about sainthood and inspiration, the relation of God and the cosmos, and the danger that initiatic language might be taught without qualification. Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328) became the most consequential early critic and helped attach waḥdat al-wujūd to Ibn ʿArabī as a condemnatory label. Later critics included al-Biqāʿī; defenders included al-Suyūṭī, al-Shaʿrānī, and Ibn Kamāl. These camps were never perfectly stable. Some scholars valued parts of the corpus while rejecting others; some defended the author but warned unprepared readers to remain silent.

Alexander Knysh’s Ibn ʿArabi in the Later Islamic Tradition remains the standard history of the polemical image. The controversy was not only a timeless choice between “orthodox” and “mystical” Islam. It involved institutional authority, methods of validating knowledge, textual corruption and attribution, styles of language, local scholarly politics, and the social control of esoteric teaching.

Modern Scholarship

European-language study began unevenly. Miguel Asín Palacios drew attention to Andalusi connections but often worked through Christianizing comparisons. Abū al-ʿAlā ʿAfīfī’s Arabic edition of the Fuṣūṣ and English study gave modern readers a philosophical map. Henry Corbin foregrounded creative imagination; Toshihiko Izutsu offered a powerful semantic comparison of the Fuṣūṣ and Daoist thought. Both were formative, but both centered a small part of the corpus.

From the 1980s onward, Chittick’s large-scale translations from the Futūḥāt, Addas’s biography, Chodkiewicz’s work on Qurʾan and sainthood, and manuscript research changed the field. Current scholarship is more plural: intellectual context (Ebstein), later systematization (Dagli), polemics (Knysh), gender (Shaikh), poetics (McAuley), aesthetics (Zargar), law, hadith, global reception, and critical editions. The 2024 Golfetto Fuṣūṣ and the ongoing MIAS Manuscript Archive Project are especially important because interpretation depends on establishing what text is actually Ibn ʿArabī’s.

7. Claims That Require Qualification

Common claim	Better historical formulation
“He invented waḥdat al-wujūd.”	He did not use it as his doctrinal label; later followers and critics made the phrase technical.
“He was simply a pantheist.”	His account joins dependence and disclosure with persistent Creator–creature distinction; crude identity is inadequate.
“All 850 books are authentic.”	Yahia’s numbered catalog includes duplicates, extracts, lost reports, and misattributions; authentication is work by work.
“The Fuṣūṣ manuscript is in Ibn ʿArabī’s hand.”	The earliest extant copy is in Qūnawī’s hand and bears Ibn ʿArabī’s authorization.
“Every volume of the revised Futūḥāt is an autograph.”	Thirty-six of 37 authorial volumes survive; the replacement volume is later and defective.
“He met Abū Madyan.”	His relation was spiritual; the physical meeting belongs to later confusion.
“He and Rūmī belonged to one direct school.”	Qūnawī links their Konya settings, but direct textual influence on Rūmī has not been demonstrated.
“He taught that all religions are the same.”	His metaphysical openness coexists with a specific Muhammadan and legal commitment.
“Selim found the tomb because Ibn ʿArabī predicted it.”	The shrine patronage is historical; the predictive text and discovery story are later Ottoman narratives.
“Visionary origin means no editing or scholarship.”	He grounded works in visions yet studied, transmitted, rewrote, collated, and authorized texts over decades.

8. A Multilingual Reading Path

This sequence moves from biography and primary texts to doctrine and critical debate.

Use	Language	Work	Why read it
Start	English	William C. Chittick, SEP: Ibn ʿArabī	Current concise map of thought and bibliography; revised 2025
Biography	French / English	Claude Addas, Quest for the Red Sulphur	Source-critical life; still foundational
Primary doctrine	English	William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge	Large, indexed selection from the Futūḥāt with analysis
Qurʾan and law	French / English	Michel Chodkiewicz, An Ocean Without Shore	How scripture, law, and spiritual realization interlock
Sainthood	French / English	Michel Chodkiewicz, The Seal of the Saints	Prophecy, walāya, and the seal
Textual foundation	Arabic / English	Marco A. Golfetto, critical Fuṣūṣ with facsimile	Earliest witness, transmission history, and fully vocalized text
Andalusi context	English	Michael Ebstein, Mysticism and Philosophy in al-Andalus	Earlier Andalusi and Ismāʿīlī parallels; intellectual context
Later school	English	Caner Dagli, Ibn al-ʿArabī and Islamic Intellectual Culture	From Ibn ʿArabī to systematic Akbarian philosophy
Polemics	English	Alexander Knysh, Ibn ʿArabi in the Later Islamic Tradition	How the polemical image was made
Gender	English	Saʿdiyya Shaikh, Sufi Narratives of Intimacy	Gender, sexuality, ethics, and spiritual anthropology
Poetry	English	Denis McAuley, Ibn ʿArabī’s Mystical Poetics	Close reading of the Dīwān and its forms
Religions / reception	English	Gregory A. Lipton, Rethinking Ibn ʿArabi	Corrective to modern perennialist universalism; read with reviews
Terminology	Arabic	Suʿād al-Ḥakīm, al-Muʿjam al-ṣūfī	Major lexicon of Ibn ʿArabī’s technical vocabulary
Hermeneutics	Arabic	Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd, Falsafat al-taʾwīl	Modern Arabic study of Qurʾanic interpretation
Persian scholarship	Persian	Muḥsin Jahāngīrī, Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī	Large Persian study of life, teachers, doctrines, and reception
Turkish scholarship	Turkish	Mahmud Erol Kılıç, TDV biography and Şeyh-i Ekber record	Biographical, Ottoman, and conceptual orientation
Spanish critical work	Spanish / Arabic	Pablo Beneito and Suʿād al-Ḥakīm, critical work on Mashāhid	Important for the early corpus; compare the linked English translation

Historical Significance and the Limits of the Evidence

Ibn ʿArabī’s historical importance does not rest on a single slogan. It rests on a sustained project of reading revelation, cosmos, ritual, self, and society as interlocking signs of divine self-disclosure. He combined the learned disciplines of Islam with a sustained claim that knowledge becomes true only when realized in the knower. That claim made him productive for jurists, poets, metaphysicians, Sufi teachers, and philosophers—and threatening to readers who feared that visionary authority or paradoxical language could dissolve the boundaries protecting revelation.

The manuscripts make the person unusually tangible. We possess pages written by him, books copied by companions, records of readings before him, and a monumental late work revised in his own hand. At the same time, the evidence asks for restraint: many details come from his own spiritual autobiography, later admirers shaped shrine legends, critics made polemical labels look like authorial doctrines, and modern interpreters have sometimes remade him in their own image. The most faithful modern biography is therefore neither devotional repetition nor hostile reduction. It is a layered account in which text, transmission, vision, law, travel, friendship, controversy, and continuing interpretation remain visible together.

Linked Bibliography

Primary Texts, Catalogs, and Manuscript Resources

Ibn ʿArabī. al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya. Edited by ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Sulṭān Ṭāhir al-Manṣūb. 12 vols. Tarīm: Yemeni Ministry of Culture, 1431/2010. National Library of Israel record. An unofficial mixed 2010/2013 reading scan is available at Internet Archive; quotations should be checked against the page images rather than machine OCR.
Ibn ʿArabī. Ibn al-ʿArabī’s Kitāb Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam wa-Khuṣūṣ al-Kalim: Edition Based on the Earliest Extant Manuscript. Edited by Marco Aurelio Golfetto. Islamic Sources/Maṣādir Islāmiyya 1. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2024. Includes an English introduction and a facsimile of the Qūnawī witness.
Ibn ʿArabī. Mashāhid al-asrār, Arabic reading copy. Cecilia Twinch and Pablo Beneito, trans., Contemplation of the Holy Mysteries, rev. ed. Oxford: Anqa, 2008; first English ed. 2001.
Ibn ʿArabī. al-Tadbīrāt al-ilāhiyya; Inshāʾ al-dawāʾir; and ʿUqlat al-mustawfiz. In H. S. Nyberg, ed., Kleinere Schriften des Ibn al-ʿArabī. Leiden: Brill, 1919.
Ibn ʿArabī. Kitāb al-Isrāʾ ilā al-maqām al-asrā. See Suʿād al-Ḥakīm’s 1988 critical-edition catalog record; A. B. M. Chowdhury’s SOAS thesis edition; and an Arabic reading copy in a collected volume.
Ibn ʿArabī. Mawāqiʿ al-nujūm wa-maṭāliʿ ahillat al-asrār wa-l-ʿulūm. Cairo: Muḥammad ʿAlī Ṣabīḥ, 1965. The catalog record derives from the University of Toronto copy.
Ibn ʿArabī. ʿAnqāʾ mughrib, Arabic reading copy. See Gerald T. Elmore, Islamic Sainthood in the Fullness of Time: Ibn al-ʿArabī’s Book of the Fabulous Gryphon. Leiden, Boston, and Cologne: Brill, 1999.
Ibn ʿArabī. Rūḥ al-quds and al-Durrat al-fākhira. Translated by R. W. J. Austin as Sufis of Andalusia. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1971; current Beshara reprint.
Ibn ʿArabī. Tarjumān al-ashwāq. Translated and edited by Michael Sells as The Translator of Desires: Poems. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021.
Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society. MIAS Archive Report: Catalogue of Ibn ʿArabī’s Works. Version 01/11/19, 2019. Authentication classes and work list.
Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society. Manuscript Archive Project. Dynamic project description and statistics; accessed August 29, 2026.
Jane Clark and Stephen Hirtenstein. “Establishing Ibn ʿArabī’s Heritage: First Findings from the MIAS Archiving Project.” Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabi Society 52 (2012): 1–32.
Julian Cook and Claude Addas. “Six Printed Editions of al-Futūḥāt al-Makkīyah: A Brief Survey.” Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society web resource.
Osman Yahia. Histoire et classification de l’œuvre d’Ibn ʿArabī: étude critique. 2 vols. Damascus: Institut français de Damas, 1964. An Arabic translation scan is also available, but its edition metadata should be confirmed before formal citation.

Biography and Reference Works

Claude Addas. Quest for the Red Sulphur: The Life of Ibn ʿArabī. Translated by Peter Kingsley. Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1993.
Claude Addas. Ibn ʿArabī: The Voyage of No Return. Translated by David Streight. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 2018; first English ed. 2000.
William C. Chittick. “Ibn ʿArabī.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. First published 2008; substantively revised December 5, 2025.
William C. Chittick. “EBN AL-ʿARABĪ, MOḤYĪ-al-DĪN.” Encyclopaedia Iranica.
Mahmud Erol Kılıç. “İBNÜ’l-ARABÎ, Muhyiddin,” sec. 1. TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, 1999.
Mahmud Erol Kılıç. “el-FÜTÛHÂTÜ’l-MEKKİYYE.” TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, 1996.
Stephen Hirtenstein. “Selected Major Works of Ibn ʿArabī.” Web excerpt from The Unlimited Mercifier.
Gerald T. Elmore. “New Evidence on the Early Life of Ibn al-ʿArabī.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 117, no. 2 (1997): 347–49.
Ibn al-Najjār. al-Mustafād min Dhayl Taʾrīkh Baghdād, birth notice. Near-contemporary report based on meeting Ibn ʿArabī; the consulted edition and page should be confirmed for formal citation.
Al-Mundhirī. al-Takmila li-Wafayāt al-Naqala, no. 2972. Near-contemporary death notice giving 22 Rabīʿ II 638; the consulted edition details should be confirmed.
Anqa Publishing. “Ibn ʿArabī in the West, 1165–1200.” Illustrated web chronology based on Stephen Hirtenstein’s research.

Modern Studies

William C. Chittick. The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-ʿArabī’s Metaphysics of Imagination. Albany: SUNY Press, 1989.
William C. Chittick. The Self-Disclosure of God: Principles of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s Cosmology. Albany: SUNY Press, 1998.
Michel Chodkiewicz. An Ocean Without Shore: Ibn Arabi, the Book, and the Law. Translated by David Streight. Albany: SUNY Press, 1993.
Michel Chodkiewicz. The Seal of the Saints: Prophethood and Sainthood in the Doctrine of Ibn ʿArabī. Translated by Liadain Sherrard. Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1993.
Henry Corbin. Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ʿArabī. Translated by Ralph Manheim. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Retitled reissue of the 1969 English translation of the 1958 French original.
Toshihiko Izutsu. Sufism and Taoism: A Comparative Study of Key Philosophical Concepts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984; one-volume Iwanami ed., 1983.
Caner K. Dagli. Ibn al-ʿArabī and Islamic Intellectual Culture: From Mysticism to Philosophy. London and New York: Routledge, 2016.
Michael Ebstein. Mysticism and Philosophy in al-Andalus: Ibn Masarra, Ibn al-ʿArabī and the Ismāʿīlī Tradition. Islamic History and Civilization 103. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014.
Alexander D. Knysh. Ibn ʿArabī in the Later Islamic Tradition: The Making of a Polemical Image in Medieval Islam. Albany: SUNY Press, 1999.
Saʿdiyya Shaikh. Sufi Narratives of Intimacy: Ibn ʿArabī, Gender, and Sexuality. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2012; paperback 2014.
Denis E. McAuley. Ibn ʿArabī’s Mystical Poetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Cyrus Ali Zargar. Sufi Aesthetics: Beauty, Love, and the Human Form in the Writings of Ibn ʿArabī and ʿIrāqī. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2011.
Gregory A. Lipton. Rethinking Ibn ʿArabi. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Gracia López-Anguita. “Ibn ʿArabī’s Metaphysics in the Context of Andalusian Mysticism: Some Akbarian Concepts in the Light of Ibn Masarra and Ibn Barrajān.” Religions 12, no. 1 (2021): article 40.
Suʿād al-Ḥakīm. al-Muʿjam al-ṣūfī: al-ḥikma fī ḥudūd al-kalima. Beirut: Dandara li-l-Ṭibāʿa wa-l-Nashr, 1981.
Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd. Falsafat al-taʾwīl: dirāsa fī taʾwīl al-Qurʾān ʿinda Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī. Beirut: Dār al-Tanwīr, 1983.
Muḥsin Jahāngīrī. Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī: chihra-yi barjasta-yi ʿirfān-i Islāmī. Tehran: University of Tehran, 1359 Sh/1980; corrected and expanded 4th ed., 1375 Sh/1996–97.
Mahmud Erol Kılıç. Şeyh-i Ekber: İbn Arabî Düşüncesine Giriş. Istanbul: Sûfi Kitap, 2009.
Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society. Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabi Society and article archive. Specialist web resource; individual articles should be evaluated by author, evidence, and publication context.