The Self-Disclosure of God | Principles of Ibn al-`Arabi’s Cosmology | William C. Chittick

Ibn al-‘Arabi is still known as “the Great Sheik” among the surviving Sufi orders. Born in Muslim Spain, he has become famous in the West as the greatest mystical thinker of Islamic civilization. He was a great philosopher, theologian, and poet.

Explicates the cosmology of Ibn al-‘Arabi, the greatest mystical thinker of Islamic civilization .The Self-Disclosure of God offers the most detailed presentation to date in any Western language of the basic teachings of Islam’s greatest mystical philosopher and theologian. It represents a major step forward in making available to the Western reading public the enormous riches of Islamic teachings in the fields of cosmology, mystical philosophy, theology, and spirituality .The Self-Disclosure of God continues the author’s investigations of the world view of Ibn al-Arabi, the greatest theoretician of Sufism and the “seal of the Muhammadan saints.” The book is divided into three parts, dealing with the relation between God and the cosmos, the structure of the cosmos, and the nature of the human soul. A long introduction orients the reader and discusses a few of the difficulties faced by Ibn al-Arabi’s interpreters. Like Chittick’s earlier work, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, this book is based primarily on Ibn al-Arabi’s monumental work, al-Futuhat al-makkiyya “The Meccan Openings.” More than one hundred complete chapters and subsections are translated, not to mention shorter passages that help put the longer discussions in context. There are detailed indices of sources, Koranic verses and hadiths. The book’s index of technical terminology will be an indispensable reference for all those wishing to delve more deeply into the use of language in Islamic thought in general and Sufism in particular.

The Self-Disclosure of God: Principles of Ibn Al-‘Arabi’s Cosmology by GERHARD BOWERING

The Self-Disclosure of God: Principles of Ibn Al-Arabi’s Cosmology. By
WILLIAM C. CHITTICK. Albany: STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, 1998. Pp. x1 + 483.

This important volume of selected translations from “The Meccan Revelations” (al-Futuhat al-makkiya, 4 vols. [Cairo 1911; rpt. Dar Sadir, Beirut n.d.]), the monumental work of Ibn al-Arabi (d. 638/1240), increases the significant corpus of Chittick’s
translations from the works of the great Sufi Shaykh, which the author began with his highly acclaimed, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1989). The translated passages are divided into three chapters, “God and the Cosmos” (3-163), “The Order of the Worlds” (167-265), and “The Structure of the Microcosm” (269-370). The work includes a short section of helpful notes (389-408), excellent indices of sources, [qur.sup.[contains]]anicverses, hadith statements, proper names and Arabic words (413-53), as well as a superbly detailed index of technical terms (455-82) that cites both the Arabic terms and their English renderings. There are two appendices, the first d iscussing Ibn al-Arabi’s views on certain Sufis (371-86) and the second (387-88) listing the major technical terms whose English renderings have been modified and refined by the author subsequent to his earlier works of translation.
Together with Chittick’s Sufi Path of Knowledge, the present volume makes the highly complicated thought and sophisticated language of Ibn [al.sup.[subset]]Arabi accessible to the English reader in a most accurate and scholarly fashion. With matchless precision, Chittick has established an English nomenclature for the terminology coined by Ibn [al.sup.[subset]]Arabi that promises to perdure for many decades to come. By dissecting Ibn al-Arabi’s frequently lengthy Arabic sentences into manageable units of English prose, Chittick has imposed a measure of clarity on Ibn al-Arabi’s intricate style that is “reader friendly” without distorting the text. He has rearranged Ibn al-Arabi’s actual order of chapters by presenting the translations within the framework of three major chapters on Ibn al-Arabi. Arabi’s cosmology. This rearrangement introduces the reader to a somewhat more logical sequence of Ibn al-Arabi’s thought than that achieved by the original work itself. Chittick’s standardized nomenclature, supported by the index of technical terms, also makes it possible for him to refrain in large measure from inserting Arabic terms into the English translation. His way of citing [qur.sup.[contains]]anic verses in italics and without quotations marks leaves the text looking clean and uncluttered. In sum, the labor that Chittick has devoted for two decades to translating Ibn al-Arabi has produced a superbly readable and standardized way of rendering the wide-ranging thought of one of the most difficult writers of Arabic and one of the most influential thinkers of Islam.