Ibn Arabi

Ibn Arabi (full name Muhyi al-Din Muhammad ibn 'Ali ibn al-'Arabi) was a Sufi thinker and writer born in Murcia, in Muslim Spain (al-Andalus), in 560 AH / 1165 CE, and raised in Seville. Sufism is the mystical, inward dimension of Islam; Ibn Arabi became one of its most ambitious and influential theorists. After years of study and travel across Spain and North Africa, he left the West around 1200 and never returned, performing the pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca in 1202, where he began his vast masterwork al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya ("The Meccan Openings"). His travels carried him through Egypt, Iraq and Anatolia before he settled in Damascus around 1223. There he completed his most studied book, Fusus al-hikam ("Bezels of Wisdom"), in 1229, and died in 1240, buried at Mount Qasioun.

Later tradition gave him the honorific "the Greatest Master" (al-Shaykh al-Akbar). He is often described as the founder of the doctrine of wahdat al-wujud, the "oneness of being" — though many specialists note he never actually used that phrase, which his followers, especially his stepson Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi, developed later. His writings have been venerated by many Sufis and sharply criticized by some jurists and theologians, who questioned whether his ideas were compatible with orthodox belief. Whether he is "saint" or "heretic" remains a contested question, held differently by different schools, rather than a settled fact.