Revered as the Greatest Master, Condemned as a Heretic

Few texts in Islamic intellectual history have provoked reactions as sharply divided as the Fusus al-Hikam. Many Sufi orders and later scholars gave Ibn Arabi the honorific al-Shaykh al-Akbar, the greatest master, and treated the Fusus as second in authority only to the Quran and hadith within the theoretical Sufi tradition, producing commentary upon commentary across the following centuries in Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish and beyond. Other jurists and theologians, reading the same passages, concluded that the book taught a heretical collapse of the distinction between God and creation, and Ibn Arabi's orthodoxy was formally attacked more than once in the centuries after his death, with some authorities calling for his works to be burned.

Chittick and other modern scholars argue that much of this controversy rests on reading Ibn Arabi's deliberately paradoxical language too literally, missing the careful distinctions he draws even while pushing his readers toward direct, non conceptual insight, but the dispute itself became a permanent feature of how the text has been transmitted, so that reading the Fusus today usually means encountering it already framed by one side or the other of a five hundred year old argument about whether it is orthodox at all.