Ibn Arabi
- Lived
- 1165 - 1240 CE
Who was Ibn Arabi? The Andalusian Sufi metaphysician whose Al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya laid down the whole of what he called the science of the letters. Every Ilm ul Huroof reading on AsrNaam draws on his lineage.
The Andalusian Sufi metaphysician whose Al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya laid down the whole of what he called the science of the letters. Every Ilm ul Huroof reading on AsrNaam draws on his lineage.
Life
Muhyiddin Muhammad ibn Ali ibn Muhammad al-Ta'i al-Hatimi al-Andalusi al-Arabi was born in Murcia, Andalus, in 1165 CE. He met Ibn Rushd as a young man in Cordoba, an encounter he described in his Futuhat as the meeting of two ages, the outgoing age of philosophy and the incoming age of direct spiritual knowledge.
He spent his youth traveling in Al-Andalus and North Africa, then made hajj in 1202 CE, and never returned to Andalus. He wandered through the Middle East for the rest of his life, teaching in Mecca, Cairo, Konya, Aleppo, and Damascus.
His two great works are Al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya (The Meccan Openings), which he began at the Kaaba in 1202 CE and continued to expand for the next thirty-eight years, and Fusus al-Hikam (The Bezels of Wisdom), a compact metaphysical text he presented as having been transmitted to him directly by the Prophet ﷺ in a vision in Damascus in 1229.
The Futuhat runs to some 550 chapters in the standard printing. It contains hundreds of pages on ilm al-huruf, the science of the letters, which he treats as ontological principles from which reality is assembled. This is the direct source that AsrNaam draws from.
He died in Damascus in November 1240 CE. His tomb, on the western slope of Mount Qasyun, remains a major pilgrimage site.
Stories
Each story is drawn from the classical Islamic sources.