Biography of Ibn Arabi | इब्न अरबी | ابن عربی کی سوانح عمری اور ان کے مزار کی تاریخ

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Biography of Ibn Arabi and the history of his shrine

Dekhti Aankhooon aur sountay kaanoon ko Asslamoalaikum, sisters, brothers friends and elders, in informative series videos of Islamic ascolars, sufisaints, cultural heritages, islamic philosophys, islamic mysticisms and historical figures. today we are describing biography of Ibn Arabi and the history of his shrine.

Ibn Arabi was an Andalusi Arab scholar, Sufi mystic, poet, and philosopher, extremely influential within Islamic thought. Out of the 850 works attributed to him, some 700 are authentic while over 400 are still extant. His cosmological teachings became the dominant worldview in many parts of the Muslim world.

His traditional titular is Mu?yiddin After he died, and specifically among practitioners of Sufism, he was renowned by the honorific title Shaykh al-Akbar, in turn, was the name from which the "Akbarian" school of Sufism derived its name, making him known as Doctor Maximus (The Greatest Teacher) in medieval Europe. Ibn Arabi is considered a saint by some scholars and Muslim communities.

Ibn 'Arabi is known for being the first person to explicitly delineate the concept of "wahdat al-wujud" ("Unity of Being"), a monist doctrine which claimed that all things in the universe are manifestations of a singular "reality". Ibn 'Arabi equated this "reality" with the entity he described as "the Absolute Being" ("al-wujud al-mutlaq").

Ibn ?Arabi was born in Murcia, Al-Andalus on the 17th of Ramadan 560 AH (28 July 1165 AD), or other sources suggested 27th of Ramadan 560 AH (5 August 1165 AD). His first name is Muhammad, but later called 'Abu 'Abdullah (mean: the father of Abdullah)—according to classical Arabic tradition—after he had a son. In some of his works, Ibn ‘Arabî referred to himself with fuller versions of his name as Abû ‘Abdullah Muhammad ibn ‘Alî ibn al-‘Arabi al-Tai al-Hatimi, where the last three names indicating his noble Arab lineage. And indeed, Hatim al-Tayi was well known as a poet of pre-Islamic Arabia from the South Arabian tribe of Tayyi (now Yemen).

Ibn Arabi was of Arab descent. Some sources suggest that he came from a mixed background, whose father was an Arab descended from emigrants to Al-Andalus in the early years of the Arab conquest of Iberia, while his mother was presumably of Berber descent. In his Futuhat al-Makkiyah, he writes of a deceased maternal uncle, a prince of Tlemcen who abandoned wealth for an ascetic life after encountering a Sufi mystic. His paternal ancestry came from Yemen and belongs to one of the oldest Arab strains in Andalusia, they having probably migrated during the second wave of the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula.

His father, ‘Ali ibn Muhammad, served in the Army of Ibn Mardan?sh, the ruler of Murcia. When Murcia fell to the Almohad Caliphate in 1172, Ibn Mardanish did not survive the defeat and was killed in battle, leading to his father pledging allegiance to the Almohad Caliph Abu Ya’qub Yusuf I. At that time Ibn ?Arab? was only 7 years old, and his family relocated from Murcia to Seville to serve the new ruler.

Ibn Arabi had three wives. He married Maryam, a woman from an influential family, when he was still a young adult and lived in Andalusia. Maryam also shared his aspiration to follow the Sufi path, as quoted by Austin in Sufis of Andalusia:

"My saintly wife, Maryam bint Muhammad binti Abdun, said, ‘I have seen in my sleep someone whom I have never seen in the flesh, but who appears to me in my moments of (spiritual) ecstasy. He ask me whether I was aspiring to the Way, to which I replied that I was, but that I did not know by what means to arrive at it. He then told me that I would come to it through five things: trust, certainty, patience, resolution and veracity.’ Thus she offered her vision to me (for my consideration) and I told her that was indeed the method of the Folk (Sufis). I myself have never seen one with that degree of mystical experience."

When Ibn Arabi stayed in Anatolia for several years, according to various Arabic and Persian sources, he married the widow of Majduuddin and took charge of the education of his young son, Sadruddin al-Qunawi. Ibn Arabi also mentioned his third wife in his writings, the mother of his son Imaduddin, to whom he bequeathed the first copy of Futuhat al-Makkiyah.

Ibn Arabi grew up at the ruling court and received military training. As he confessed in al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya, he preferred playing in military camp with his friends rather than reading a book. However, it was when he was a teenager that he experienced his first vision (fana); and later he wrote of this experience as "the differentiation of the universal reality comprised by that look".

His father, on noticing a change in him, had mentioned this to philosopher and judge, Ibn Rushd (Averroes), who asked to meet Ibn Arabi. Ibn Arabi said that from this first meeting, he had learned to perceive a distinction between formal knowledge of rational thought and the unveiling insights into the nature of things. He then adopted Sufism and dedicated his life to the spiritual path. When he later moved to Fez, in Morocco, Mohammed ibn Qasim al-Tamimi became his spiritual mentor. In 1200 he took leave from one of his most important teachers, Shaykh Abu Ya'qub Yusuf ibn Yakhlaf al-Kumi, then living in the town of Sale.

Ibn Arabi left Andalusia for the first time at age 36 and arrived at Tunis in 1193.[contradictory] After a year in Tunisia, he returned to Andalusia in 1194. His father died soon after Ibn Arabi arrived at Seville. When his mother died some months later he left Andalusia for the second time and travelled with his two sisters to Fez, Morocco in 1195. He returned to Córdoba, Andalusia in 1198, and left Andalusia crossing from Gibraltar for the last time in 1200. While there, he received a vision instructing him to journey east. After visiting some places in the Maghreb, he left Tunisia in 1201 and arrived for the Hajj in 1202. He lived in Mecca for three years, and there began writing his work Futuhat al-Makkiyya, The Meccan Illuminations—only part of which has been translated into English by various scholars such as Eric Winkel.

In the year 1206, Ibn Arabi visited Jerusalem, Mecca and Egypt. It was his first time that he passed through Syria, visiting Aleppo and Damascus.

Later in 1207 he returned to Mecca where he continued to study and write, spending his time with his friend Abu Shuja bin Rustem and family, including Nizam.

The next four to five years of Ibn Arabi's life were spent in these lands and he also kept travelling and holding the reading sessions of his works in his own presence.

Opening pages of the Konya manuscript of the Meccan Revelations, handwritten by Ibn Arabi.

After leaving Andalusia for the last time at the age of 33 (1198 AD) and wandering in the Islamic world for about 25 years, at the age of 58 Ibn Arabi chose Damascus as his final home and dedicated his life for teaching and writing. In this city, he composed Fusus Al-Hikam in 1229 and finalized two manuscripts of Futuht al-Makkiyya in 1231 and 1234.

Ibn Arabi died on 22 Rabi‘ al-Thani 638 AH (16 November 1240) at the age of 75. He was buried in the Banu Zaki cemetery, family cemetery of the nobles of Damascus, on Qasiyun Hill, Salihiyya, Damascus,

With this, we seek your permission until tomorrow, tomorrow we will describe the biography of Taj ad-Din Abu’l-Fadl Ahmad and the history of his maqbara. Allah Hafiz.
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