Ibn al-  Arabi, the Greatest Master On Knowledge, God, and Sainthood Mukhtar H. Ali The Warburg Institute, School of Advanced Studies, University of London, London, UK Background Ibn al-  Arabi, one of the world’s most revered spiritual teachers, has been accorded the title the Greatest Master (al-Shaykh al-Akbar) across the Islamic world. The name “Ibn al-  Arabi” refers to his pure Arab ancestry from the lineage of legendary Arabian poet, Hatim al-Ta  i. He was born in the Andalusian city of Murcia in southern Spain as Ab ¯ u  Abd-Allah Muh . ammad ibn  Al¯ ı ibn Muh . ammad ibn al-  Arab¯ ı al-H . ¯ atim¯ ı al-T . ¯ a  ¯ ı, in 560 h/1165 ce, but during his lifetime he was given the honorifc title “Muh . y¯ ıd¯ ın,” meaning “reviver of the religion.” He received his education in the traditional Islamic disciplines in the city of Seville, the cultural capital and crossroads between the Islamic world and Europe where he remained for some 30 years before migrating to the East. Though Ibn al-Arabi’s works have commanded the attention of Western scholarship in recent years, there is only a handful of specialized studies and the bulk of his writings remains largely understudied. The reason for this is not only the sheer volume of his writings, namely, some 500 works of which his magnum opus, The Meccan Openings (al-Futuh . ¯ at al-Makkiyya) alone comprises 17 000 pages divided into 560 chapters, but that his writings are the descriptions of his visions, recordings of his spiritual experiences, insights, dreams, and inspirations and cover virtually every sphere of the traditional Islamic sciences. These various forms of spiritual perception speak of the loftiest types of knowledge and metaphysical doctrines concerning the order of creation, the divine planes, wayfaring in God, and contain mystical allusions to the indescribable states of annihilation in God. Of equal importance is his life, which is carefully explored in Claude Addas’s Quest for the Red Sulphur (1993) and forms an inseparable part of understanding his thought. A Companion to World Literature. Edited by Ken Seigneurie. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. DOI: 10.1002/9781118635193.ctwl0067