09/24/2026
I replied: “The door of repentance is open.”
He said: “The repentance is accepted.”
— Shaykh al-Akbar to Shaykh Abu l-ʿAbbas رحمته الله عليه
Shaykh al-Akbar Ibn ʿArabi is one of those great saints and scholars whose works are not easy to approach on one’s own. To truly enter into his writings, one needs teachers, guidance, and the permission to study his work within a tradition that understands the depth of what he wrote. Yet he is also one of those remarkable personalities whom one has to know and love — so many in the West and around the world have come to love and read about him.
People in places like Germany deeply love the Shaykh and gather every month to read about him or his works, then sit together and contemplate his words for hours. I find something deeply beautiful in this — that centuries after his passing, people in places far from his native Andalusia still gather around his words, trying to understand what he was trying to convey.
One cannot simply approach the major works of the Shaykh رحمه الله without preparation, but books like this are an excellent opportunity to learn about his life, his journey, and his work.
This book is a landmark in the study of Shaykh al-Akbar Ibn ʿArabi. Written by Claude Addas, it is a deeply analytical study based on Ibn ʿArabi’s own writings, together with a vast body of secondary literature in both Arabic and Persian. Addas traces, on the one hand, the physical journey that carried Ibn ʿArabi from his native Andalusia to Damascus, and, on the other, the much deeper “Night Journey” that carried him through the paths of asceticism and prayer toward the ultimate stage of revelation in his mystical quest.
It is, in many ways, a journey within a journey: from the outward roads of the world to the inward roads of the soul — through repentance, seeking, prayer, love, and finally toward that unveiling which cannot be understood merely by reading about it.
