Ibn al-ʿArabī , (born July 28, 1165, Murcia, Valencia—died Nov. 16, 1240, Damascus), Islamic mystic and theologian. Born in Spain, he traveled widely in Spain and North Africa in search of masters of Sufism. In 1198 he began a pilgrimage to the Middle East, visiting Mecca, Egypt, and Anatolia before settling in Damascus in 1223. Famous and honoured as a spiritual master, he spent the rest of his life in contemplation, teaching, and writing. His great work was The Meccan Revelations, a personal encyclopedia covering all the esoteric sciences in Islam and his own inner life. He also wrote one of the most important works in Islamic mystical philosophy, The Bezels of Wisdom (1229).
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Islam Summary
Islam, major world religion promulgated by the Prophet Muhammad in Arabia in the 7th century ce. The Arabic term islām, literally “surrender,” illuminates the fundamental religious idea of Islam—that the believer (called a Muslim, from the active particle of islām) accepts surrender to the will of
poetry Summary
Poetry, literature that evokes a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience or a specific emotional response through language chosen and arranged for its meaning, sound, and rhythm. (Read Britannica’s biography of this author, Howard Nemerov.) Poetry is a vast subject, as old as history and
mysticism Summary
Mysticism, the practice of religious ecstasies (religious experiences during alternate states of consciousness), together with whatever ideologies, ethics, rites, myths, legends, and magic may be related to them. The term mystic is derived from the Greek noun mystes, which originally designated an
encyclopaedia Summary
Encyclopaedia, reference work that contains information on all branches of knowledge or that treats a particular branch of knowledge in a comprehensive manner. For more than 2,000 years encyclopaedias have existed as summaries of extant scholarship in forms comprehensible to their readers. The word