Ibn Al-ʿarabĪ(1165–1240)
Muhyī al-Dīn Muhammad ibn ʿAlī, known as Ibn al-ʿArabī (or Ibn ʿArabī, without the definite article), was arguably the most influential philosopher of the second half of Islamic history. Born in Murcia in Muslim Spain in the year 1165, he left the west permanently in 1200, settled in Damascus in 1223, and died there in 1240. He is not normally classified as a philosopher (faylasūf) because he made no attempt to fall into line with the schools of thought that adopted Greek methodologies. Nonetheless, "love of wisdom" was central to his project, and he praised the high aspiration of "the divine Plato" and others who engaged in the philosophical quest. With extraordinary faithfulness to the sources of the Islamic tradition and unprecedented originality, he offered diverse interpretations of the fundamental issues of philosophical and theological thought. He was enormously prolific, yet maintained a consistently high level of discourse without repeating himself. He has typically been classified as a "Sufi" or a "mystic," but this simply means that he supplemented rational investigation with suprarational intuition, not that he avoided philosophical issues. His pervasive influence was not eclipsed until the collapse of Islamic institutions under the pressure of colonialism and modernity.
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