Ibn Arabi wrote an immense amount, the Meccan Revelations alone runs to thousands of pages, and the Bezels of Wisdom, which he said the Prophet handed him in a dream in 1229, is the compressed statement of his metaphysics, organised as twenty-seven chapters each attached to a prophet.
The doctrine he is known for is wahdat al-wujud, the oneness of being: that there is only one reality, that everything other than God is a manifestation of the divine names rather than an independent existence, and that the cosmos is God's self-disclosure to Himself. It is worth knowing that the phrase itself is not his. It was applied to his thought by later followers and, more insistently, by later opponents, and William Chittick and others have argued that the label flattens a body of writing which is far more paradoxical and less systematic than a slogan suggests.
He is called al-Shaykh al-Akbar, the Greatest Master, and he is also among the most fiercely contested figures in Islamic intellectual history. Ibn Taymiyya attacked him as a monist and effectively a heretic, and the argument over whether his teaching is compatible with orthodox Islam has continued for seven hundred years without resolution, he remains banned or denounced in some quarters and revered in others. Two further ideas of his have travelled particularly far: the Perfect Human, the realised person as the mirror in which God contemplates Himself, and the imaginal world, a real intermediate realm between spirit and matter in which visions genuinely occur, an idea that Henry Corbin brought into twentieth-century Western thought.