These penetrating metaphysical and spiritual teachings cross the divides of culture and time, providing unexpectedly modern insight.

Investigating Sufi-inspired spirituality in the modern world, this interdisciplinary text combines cultural study with solid data to provide a comprehensive look at how the teachings of Ibn 'Arabi have been adopted and adapted by Muslims and non-Muslims. At the heart of this movement is the Beshara School in Scotland, founded in the 1960s, and now a center of international scholarship. Using the school as a case study, the discussion describes its emergence and evolution, its approach to spiritual education, the origins of its spiritual teacher, its major teachings and practices, and its projection of Ibn 'Arabi. Both rigorous and very timely, this effort points to areas of cultural exchange between East and West and highlights commonalities in the various historical changes both societies have undergone.

The influence of Ibn 'Arabi, the 12th century Andalusian mystic philosopher extended beyond the Muslim world from Spain, to China, to Indonesia.The study investigates how the Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi Society has evolved into an international organisation with increasing influence in both the West and the Muslim world.

This book is the first comprehensive attempt to explain Ibn ‘Arabî’s distinctive view of time and its role in the process of creating the cosmos and its relation with the Creator. By comparing this original view with modern theories of physics and cosmology, Mohamed Haj Yousef constructs a new cosmological model that may deepen and extend our understanding of the world, while potentially solving some of the drawbacks in the current models such as the historical Zeno's paradoxes of motion and the recent Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox (EPR) that underlines the discrepancies between Quantum Mechanics and Relativity.

Exploring how the medieval mystic Ibn 'Arabi has been read as an inclusive universalist through the interpretative field of Perennial Philosophy, this book shows how his metaphysics is inseparably intertwined with Islamic supersessionism. Ibn 'Arabi's universalist reception is thus traced to lineages of Eurocentrism, revealing how Perennialism is itself exclusionary.

This volume presents the seminal treatise of the important Spanish Muslim mystic, Ibn al-‘Arabī, on Islamic sainthood The Book of the Fabulous Gryphon. In highly allusive, symbolic language, the Shaykh al-Akbar reveals his manifesto of the revolutionary significance of sainthood in the person of its timely epitome, the Seal of the saints. The first part of the book consists of a critical introduction dealing with the biographical, historical and bibliographical background to the Fabulous Gryphon, along with a thorough examination of its concepts, themes and structure. The complete, annotated translation of the Gryphon is followed by further original translations of related texts by Ibn al-‘Arabī. Apart from the Fusūs al-ḥikam, no comparable treatise by this leading figure of Islamic spirituality has ever been presented in its entirety in any western language.

Ibn Arabi is the only scholar who was able to formulate a unique cosmological model that is capable of explaining our observations as well as many phenomena in physics and cosmology, and even solve some perplexing modern and historical riddles in science and philosophy such as the EPR paradox and Zeno paradoxes of motion. Moreover, the Single Monad Model explains for the first time in history the importance of the “week” as a basic unit of space and time together. This prodigious theory is based on the notion of the intertwining days where Ibn Arabi shows that at every instance of time there is indeed one full week of creation that takes place in the globe. Since its publication in 2008, this book has triggered an overwhelming response, and I hope this expanded edition will help promote further Ibn Arabi's wisdom that is still buried in his multitudes of books and treatises.Ibn 'Arabî is one of the most prominent figures in Islamic history, especially in relation to Sufism and Islamic philosophy and theology. In this book, we want to explore his cosmology and in particular his view of time in that cosmological context, comparing his approaches to the relevant conclusions and principles of modern physics whenever possible. We shall see that Ibn 'Arabî had a unique and comprehensive view of time which has never been discussed by any other philosopher or scientist, before or even after Ibn 'Arabî. In the final two chapters, we shall discuss some of the ways his novel view of time and cosmology may be used to build a complete model of the cosmos that may deepen and extend our understanding of the world, while potentially solving some of the drawbacks and paradoxes in the current cosmological models of modern physics. As we discuss in the opening chapter, there is no doubt that time is one of the most important issues in physics, cosmology, philosophy and theology, and hundreds of books and articles have been published in these fields. However, none of these studies have fully developed Ibn 'Arabî's unique view of time in its cosmological dimensions, although his conception of time is indeed central to understanding, for example, his controversial theory of the 'oneness of being'. One possible reason for this relative neglect is the difficult symbolic language he usually used. Also, he didn't discuss this subject at length in any single place in his extant works--not even in chapters 59, 291 and 390 of the Futûhât whose titles relate directly to time--so we must piece together his overall cosmological understanding of time from his scattered treatments in many works and different contexts within his magnum opus, the Futûhât, and other books. Therefore this book may be considered the first comprehensive attempt to set forth all the relevant dimensions of time in Ibn 'Arabî's wider cosmology and cosmogony. To start with, Ibn 'Arabî considers time to be a product of our human 'imagination', without any real, separately existing entity. Nevertheless, he still considers it to be one of the four main constituents of existence. We need this imagined conception of 'time' to chronologically arrange events and what for us are the practically defining motions of the celestial orbs and other physical objects, but for Ibn 'Arabî, real existence is attributable only to the actually existing thing that moves, not to motion nor to time (nor space) in which this motion is observed. Thus Ibn 'Arabî distinguishes between two kinds of time: natural and para-natural, and he explains that they both originate from the two forces of the soul: the active force and the intellective force, respectively. Then he explains that this imaginary time is cyclical, circular, relative, discrete and inhomogeneous. Ibn 'Arabî also gives a precise definition--drawing on the specific usage of the Qur'an and earlier Arab conceptions of time--of the day, daytime and night, showing how these definitions are related to the relative motions of the celestial orbs (including the earth), where every orb has its own 'day', and those days are normally measured by our normal observable day that we count on the earth.

Analyzing the intersection between Sufism and philosophy, this volume is a sweeping examination of the mystical philosophy of Muḥyī-l-Dīn Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 637/1240), one of the most influential and original thinkers of the Islamic world. This book systematically covers Ibn al-ʿArabī’s ontology, theology, epistemology, teleology, spiritual anthropology and eschatology. While philosophy uses deductive reasoning to discover the fundamental nature of existence and Sufism relies on spiritual experience, it was not until the school of Ibn al-ʿArabī that philosophy and Sufism converged into a single framework by elaborating spiritual doctrines in precise philosophical language. Contextualizing the historical development of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s school, the work draws from the earliest commentators of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s oeuvre, Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī (d. 673/1274), ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Kāshānī (d. ca. 730/1330) and Dawūd al-Qayṣarī (d. 751/1350), but also draws from the medieval heirs of his doctrines Sayyid Ḥaydar Āmulī (d. 787/1385), the pivotal intellectual and mystical figure of Persia who recast philosophical Sufism within the framework of Twelver Shīʿism and ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī (d. 898/1492), the key figure in the dissemination of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s ideas in the Persianate world as well as the Ottoman Empire, India, China and East Asia via Central Asia. Lucidly written and comprehensive in scope, with careful treatments of the key authors, Philosophical Sufism is a highly accessible introductory text for students and researchers interested in Islam, philosophy, religion and the Middle East.