A teenage vision earned Ibn Arabi an interview with Averroes
As a boy at the Seville court, Ibn Arabi preferred army-camp games to books. Then a teenage vision changed him so visibly that his father told the philosopher Averroes, who asked to meet the youth. Ibn Arabi went on to write hundreds of works and became known to Sufis as the Greatest Shaykh.
Born Muhammad in Murcia in July 1165, he had an Arab father whose family came from Yemen and a mother who was probably Berber; one ancestor was the pre-Islamic poet Hatim al-Ta'i. His father served the local ruler Ibn Mardanish, and when the Almohads took Murcia in 1172 the family moved to Seville to serve the new caliph. The boy got military training at court. His meeting with Averroes, he said later, taught him to distinguish rational knowledge from insight unveiled directly, and he committed himself to the Sufi path.
His first wife, Maryam, shared that aim and described her own visions to him. At 28 he left Spain for Tunis, returned, then after his parents' deaths took his two sisters to Fez in 1195. In 1200 he crossed at Gibraltar for the final time, following a vision that told him to go east. He reached Mecca for the pilgrimage in 1202, stayed three years and began his vast Meccan Illuminations. Journeys followed through Baghdad, Mosul, Jerusalem, Egypt, Aleppo and Anatolia, where he married a widow and educated her son, Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi.
After some 25 years of wandering, he settled in Damascus in 1223, aged 58, under the patronage of a family of Shafi'i judges. There he wrote the Fusus al-Hikam in 1229 and completed two manuscripts of the Meccan Illuminations, the second in 1238. He died in November 1240 at 75 and was buried in that family's cemetery on Qasiyun Hill.
He is credited as the first to spell out the unity of existence, the doctrine that everything in the universe expresses one single reality, which he called Absolute Existence. Some 850 works carry his name; about 700 are thought genuine and roughly 400 survive. Sufi orders carried his ideas far beyond scholars, through Persian, Turkish and Urdu writing and poets trained in those orders, and his cosmology became a dominant framework across much of the Muslim world.
Source: Ibn Arabi
