Shaykh Abu al-Abbas Ahmad al-Ureybi (Seville, after 580/1184)

2.4.3 - Shaykh Abu al-Abbas Ahmad al-Ureybi (Seville, after 580/1184)

Shaykh Abu Abbas Ahmad al-Ureybi was the first shaykh whom Ibn al-Arabi met in the Way of Sufism. He committed himself with him according to the general ethics and rules of the seekers. Al-Ureybi was originally from Loulأ© in Portugal, west of Andalusia, but he had come to Seville especially to educate the seekers and teach them the Way of asceticism and mysticism. He relied on strengthening the relationship of kinship with the people of Allah, in preference to physical kinship:

I was sitting one day in Seville between the hands of our Shaykh in the Way: Abu al-Abbas al-Ureybi, when one person entered and then they started talking about (the Hadith): (Relatives are more eligible for goodness), then the Shaykh quickly added “with relation to Allah”, and it was very cool on my heart!

[Futuhat: I.244, III.532, III.574].

In the Holy Spirit, Shaykh Muhyiddin calls him by the name: Abu Jafar, but in the Futuhat he calls him Abu al-Abbas, but in either case his surname is “al-Ureybi” and not “al-Uryani” as mistakenly stated by R. Austin in the Sufis of Andalusia [p. 63]. The origin of this mistake is some of the manuscripts of Ruh al-Quds, while the correct name is written clearly in Ibn al-Arabi’s own hand in various places in the Meccan Revelations according to the famous Konya manuscript that is now preserved in Evkaf Muzesi in Istanbul under numbers: 1845-1881, as we shall describe in section 6.5.29 of Chapter VI.