The Andalusian mystic called "the Greatest Master," whose vast writings on the unity of being made him the most influential — and most debated — theorist of Islamic mysticism.
Life
Born in Murcia in 1165, Ibn Arabi traveled across the Islamic world — Andalusia, North Africa, Mecca, Anatolia — as a Sufi teacher and prolific author, settling finally in Damascus, where he died in 1240. His Meccan Revelations (al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya) and Bezels of Wisdom (Fusus al-Hikam) are monuments of mystical thought.
Struggles & Trials
His was the inner struggle of the mystic and the outer one of a controversial teacher whose difficult, daring ideas drew both devoted disciples and fierce opponents across the centuries.
Teachings & Character
Ibn Arabi is associated with the doctrine later termed wahdat al-wujud ("the unity of being") — that all existence is a manifestation of the one divine reality — and with a rich symbolic cosmology, the "perfect human," and the imaginal realm, expressed in dense, poetic prose.
Campaigns & Conflicts
A mystic and scholar, Ibn Arabi took no part in war; his life was one of travel, teaching, and voluminous writing across the Muslim world.
Contested & Debated
His orthodoxy is one of the great debates of Islam: revered by many Sufis as the supreme expositor of divine reality, he has been condemned by others (notably Ibn Taymiyyah and later literalists) as a pantheist or heretic. Both the veneration and the condemnation are long-standing; the perspectives are presented without verdict.
Legacy
Ibn Arabi shaped the entire later tradition of Islamic mysticism and philosophy, from Persia to the Ottoman lands to Southeast Asia; his ideas remain central to Sufi thought and a live subject of both devotion and controversy in the Muslim world.