The Meccan Revelations

A vast compendium of Sufi teaching in 560 chapters, begun by Ibn ʿArabī in Mecca in 1202 and rewritten by him in a second version completed in 1238. He presents it as knowledge opened to him through spiritual unveiling rather than reasoning. It ranges over the inner meaning of ritual, the stations and states of the spiritual path, the divine names, cosmology, the nature of imagination, and the places where the seen and unseen worlds meet. Recurring themes include the view that existence belongs truly to God alone and that all things are His self-disclosures, an idea later summed up as 'the oneness of being', a phrase Ibn ʿArabī himself did not use; the perfect human being, who reflects all the divine names; and his teaching on sainthood, including the seal of the saints. Because of its size, most readers know it through selections.

It is the largest source for Ibn ʿArabī, the most influential mystical philosopher in Islam, whose ideas on being, imagination and the perfect human run through later Sufism and Persian philosophy.