Ibn Arabi

Muhammad ibn Ali ibn Arabi al-Hatimi al-Ta'i (560–638 AH / 1165–1240 CE), known as Muhyi al-Din ibn Arabi or Ibn Arabi al-Akbar (the Greatest Sheikh), was the most philosophically sophisticated and theologically controversial figure in the history of Islamic mysticism. He was born in Murcia in al-Andalus and died in Damascus, and in between led an extraordinary intellectual and spiritual life that produced some of the most profound — and most debated — texts in the Islamic tradition.

His major works are al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya (The Meccan Revelations), an encyclopedic multi-volume work on all aspects of Islamic spirituality and metaphysics that he claimed was divinely dictated to him, and Fusus al-Hikam (The Bezels of Wisdom), a shorter but extremely dense work on the spiritual wisdom embodied by each of the twenty-seven prophets mentioned in the Quran.

His doctrine of Wahdat al-Wujud — usually translated as "Unity of Being" — holds that all existence is a manifestation of the one divine reality, such that the apparent multiplicity of creation is, at the level of ultimate reality, the self-disclosure of the One. This doctrine has been interpreted by critics as pantheism (making creation identical with God) and by defenders as a sophisticated monotheism that radically distinguishes divine essence from its manifestations.

His thought has been sharply criticized by Hanbali scholars from Ibn Taymiyya onwards and praised by Sufi orders across the Muslim world. He is not accepted by mainstream Sunni scholars as orthodox. His influence on Islamic philosophy, poetry (particularly on Jalal al-Din Rumi's intellectual framework), and later Sufi orders was enormous. He died in Damascus in 638 AH, buried in the Salihiyya neighborhood where his tomb remains.