The Ringstones of Wisdom (Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam)

Ibn 'Arabī's most studied and most controversial work, which he says the Prophet Muhammad gave him in a vision in Damascus in 1229. Its twenty-seven chapters each set a 'ringstone' of wisdom in the name of a prophet, from Adam to Muhammad, with each prophet embodying a particular aspect of the divine names. Its central theme is God's self-disclosure in the world: creation as the manifestation of divine names that seek to be known, the human being as the place where those names are gathered, and Adam, in the first chapter, as the polishing of the mirror in which they are seen. It reinterprets familiar stories in startling ways, reading Noah's preaching, for instance, as a lesson in joining God's transcendence with God's immanence. Later readers associated the book with the doctrine called the oneness of being, a term Ibn 'Arabī himself never used.

It is the central text of philosophical Sufism, and centuries of commentary, praise and condemnation have made it a touchstone for debates about God, the world and the self in Islamic thought.