Ibn Arabi

Ibn 'Arabī was born in al-Andalus in July 1165, a Sunni Muslim Arab who moved through scholarship, poetry, and Sufi practice until he arrived at something harder to categorize. He was the first to explicitly map out wahdat al-wujūd, a monist metaphysics claiming the universe as expressions of one reality he called the Absolute. The framework spread. His cosmological teachings became dominant across much of the Muslim world, and of the 850 works attributed to him, 700 are considered authentic — 400 still survive. He died in November 1240. Sufis began calling him Shaykh al-Akbar, the Greatest Sh…