Page Text: Current Status
Volume 1 (Books 1 & 2, 696 pp) was published in hardback by Pir Press in March 2019. Volume 2 (Books 3 & 4, 748 pp), Volume 3 (Books 5 & 6, 548 pp), and Volume 4 (Books 7 & 8, 552 pp) are also now available.
Sample chapters from the published volumes, which contain the same typesetting as the hardback volumes.
TO BUY VOLUMES OF THE TRANSLATION
Published volumes of The Openings Revealed in Makkah can be purchased from Pir Press [/] .
There is not in all possible worlds
any more wondrously original than this world.
Ibn al-ʿArabī
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This subsection is dedicated to the Futuhat Translation Project. The Project is independent of the Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society, but is of great importance and of immediate interest to the Society and its members. The Society is glad to host these pages, which are maintained by the Project.
The Openings Revealed in Makkah (al-Futūḥāt al-Makkīyah) was handwritten in a second edition by Ibn al-ʿArabī a few years before he died in 1260. Sitting with a dozen or so people, he spoke and read from notes to himself while the writing proceeded, in different houses, over a period of three years. The audience checked the folios, and one, Umm Dalāl, was given authority not only to transmit (copy) the work but also to teach it. It is widely recognized in Islamic and Sufi studies as the greatest work of the “greatest master” (shaykh al-akbar) and has had an enormous influence in the Arab-speaking world for centuries.
The Translator
Dr. Eric Winkel was first “cast onto the path”, as Ibn al-ʿArabī would say, by Ralph Austen’s Sufis of Andalusia. He had been reading Michel Foucault and discovering how to look at the marginal people on various ships of fools in order to understand better what was going on in the mainstream. When he encountered the strange and wondrous people populating Ibn al-ʿArabī’s Andalusia, he knew that he had found answers to his questions. At 17 years of age, he proceeded to delve into Ibn al-ʿArabī’s works as much as he could.
When writing his dissertation, Dr. Winkel had to skip over Ibn al-ʿArabī—he felt that he just did not have an adequate grip on what the shaykh al-akbar was saying. Over the following years, he had the great good fortune to be able to study with Arabic experts, one on one. General language classes would not have worked; he was interested in the nuances of medieval Arabic and in reading the ʿarabī language of the Futūḥāt.
Newcomers to the works of Ibn al-ʿArabī may not appreciate just how important and nourishing the MIAS web site was in the early days—and still is. Although intellectual and academic standards were and are always met, Dr. Winkel felt that the site was clearly created by, and for, seekers like himself. He is immensely grateful to all who have contributed to it and helped foster a deeper understanding of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s teaching.
While holding the position of Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Islamic Studies, Dr. Winkel explored connections between Islam and the “new sciences”. He then produced two articles for the Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society laying the groundwork for this connection between Ibn al-ʿArabī’s vision and new directions in physics and mathematics: