Ibn Arabi and the Doctrine of the Unity of Being

Muhyi al-Din ibn Arabi (1165–1240) was born in Murcia, in Muslim Andalusia, and raised in Seville before undertaking extensive travels across the Islamic world — to Fez, Cairo, Mecca, Baghdad, and Anatolia — before settling in Damascus, where he died in 1240 and where his tomb still stands. Traditional biography credits him with a decisive early mystical experience of conversion in Seville, and with a formative meeting in Mecca around 1201 that inspired the composition of his vast prose summa, al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya (The Meccan Revelations, begun c. 1202 and repeatedly revised until near his death), a work running to many volumes in modern editions and covering cosmology, metaphysics, Quranic exegesis, and spiritual practice in encyclopedic detail. His other central text, the shorter and more systematically organized Fusus al-Hikam (The Bezels of Wisdom, composed in 1229), presents twenty-seven chapters, each associated with a prophet from the Islamic tradition, through whom Ibn Arabi expounds particular facets of his metaphysics; he reports having received the work directly from the Prophet Muhammad in a vision.