Ibn Arabi's life had the shape of a slow migration through the Islamic world: born in Murcia in 1165, formed in Seville, travelling east through North Africa to Mecca in 1202, and settling finally in Damascus, where he died in 1240 and where his tomb still stands. The journey matters because his two great books are tied to its stations.
In Mecca, circumambulating the Kaaba, he reports the encounters that opened al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya, the Meccan Openings, a work of several thousand pages ranging over cosmology, ritual, exegesis and autobiography, which he revised across decades. In Damascus, near the end, he wrote the short Fusus al-Hikam, the Bezels of Wisdom, which he said was handed to him by the Prophet in a vision: twenty seven chapters, each setting a facet of divine wisdom in the figure of one prophet. Among his working ideas, the imaginal realm, the barzakh where meanings take sensible form and visions are real events, and the doctrine of the perfect human as the mirror in which the Real knows itself, proved endlessly generative. He founded no order and named no successor, yet an Akbarian school formed around his books, from his stepson Sadr al-Din Qunawi through commentators across Iran, Anatolia, India and the Malay world, and the argument over him, saint to some and heretic to others, has never closed.