0.2 - Introduction: The Sun That Never Sets

“In addition to Muhammad, may Allah have peace and mercy upon him, I have accompanied some of the messengers and benefited from them, including: Ibrahim Al-Khalil, upon whom I read the Qur’an upon him, and Jesus, on whose hands I have repented, and Moses who gave me the science of revelation and clarification, and the science of the revolution of the day and the night, so when I had that, the night was gone and the day remained, hence it is now all daytime, and the Sun did never set or rise again for me. This revelation was a sign from Allah that I will have no share in misfortune in the Hereafter.”

The Greatest Master Muhyiddin Ibn Al-Arabi (the Meccan Revelations, vol. 1, p. 57)

This study aims to identify the works that can be confirmed to the Sultan of Knowers and the Seal of the Muhammadan Saints, Our Master Sheikh Muhyiddin Ibn al-Arabi, al-Ĥātimi al-Ťāi, the Yemenite, the Andalusian, and then the Damascene. And also identify the books that have not been proven to be authentic, and those that have been wrongly attributed to him. This will be established through the critical study of the two treatises of the "Fihrist", or the "Index of Works", written by the Sheikh to one of his companions, before 627 AH / 1230 AD, and the "Ijazah", which is a Leave or Certificate that he wrote to the Triumphant King: al-Malik al-Muẓaffar, son of the Ayyubid King Al-ʿAādil, in Damascus, in 632 AH. In addition to the titles that he himself mentioned in the folds of his other famous books. In addition to all this, we also add the titles mentioned by his close students and followers of the first generations, who played a major role in the spreading of the Akbarian school, as we mentioned in Volume II, especially his stepson and close disciple Sheikh Abu al-Maʿāli Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi.

To complete this work correctly, it is necessary to study as many historical manuscripts of these treatises as possible, i.e. the Index and the Leave, as well as all previous editions and studies, and other related sources. For further documentation, we will affix to this study the full text of the hearings and certificates granted by Sheikh Muhyiddin to his stepson Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi, in which he mentions about forty books he read on his sheikh, or he read them on him, although most of those works were originally mentioned in the previous sources, but they add further assurances about the validity of the attribution of these books to their author Sheikh Muhyiddin, especially the book of Fusus al-Hikam: the Bezels of Wisdom, which may be questioned by some researchers and criticized due to the complexity of its topics and the audacity of its thesis.

In addition to the historical manuscripts of the Index and the Leave, and the previous editions of these two main sources, this study also draws on the vital research carried out by Osman Ismail Yahya, published in Damascus, in French, in 1964, and translated into Arabic by Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb in 1991, and published in Cairo in 2001. After this critical study was carried some decades ago, new studies have been published, and some new manuscripts have been revealed, especially after the development of digitizing and publishing techniques. However, these new finding are still scattered, and their results have not been collected in any book.

0.2.1- The Classification of Osman Yahya

0.2.2- Number of books attributed to the elder sheikh

0.2.3- Summary of the Results of the Critical Edition of the Index and the Leave

0.2.4- The Six Sources of works titles

0.2.5- The Results of the Archive Project by MIAS in Oxford

0.2.6- The Classification Method of the List of Books