A Mine Worked by Later Sufis Rather Than Read Cover to Cover

Given its scale, the Futuhat has rarely functioned the way the shorter Fusus al-Hikam does, as a text students read through in sequence; instead later Sufi scholars have more often mined it for specific chapters or passages relevant to a given question, treating it as a vast reference work of Ibn Arabi's thought rather than a book with a single argument to be followed start to finish.

Chittick's scholarship on Ibn Arabi draws heavily and repeatedly on the Futuhat precisely because so much of the technical vocabulary and doctrinal detail that the Fusus only gestures toward is worked out at far greater length here, making the two texts complementary rather than duplicate expressions of the same material. The Futuhat also preserves a great deal of autobiographical and historical detail found nowhere else in Ibn Arabi's corpus, descriptions of specific teachers, visionary encounters and travels, which has made it an important source for modern biographical scholarship on Ibn Arabi's life even independent of its theological content. Its sheer length has meant that complete translations into European languages remain a long term, still partial scholarly project even in the present day. Later commentators frequently cross reference the two works side by side.