Ibn Arabi

Born in Murcia in Muslim Spain, Ibn Arabi traveled the length of the Islamic world and left a body of mystical philosophy of overwhelming scale and subtlety. His central vision, later called the Unity of Being, holds that there is nothing in existence but God; the world is the way the divine names make themselves visible, the One contemplating itself through countless forms. The heart of the realized knower, he wrote, can take the shape of every belief, for love is his religion wherever its caravan turns. The Meccan Revelations and the Bezels of Wisdom shaped Sufi thought for every century after him.