Customer Reviews

Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi (Bollingen Series 91)

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I was so taken with the "Creative Imagination in The Sufism of Ibn Arabi" that I was ready to buy a copy of "Alone with the Alone". Thank goodness amazon let's you "look inside", turn's out it's a re-titling of the same book.
Fantastic by any name.
I am someone immersed in non-dual Eastern traditions, yet I am also guided in my life by a sense of devotion and the experience of grace felt as presence: mysteriously "other" yet non-separate.
I deeply appreciated the vision in this book which unifies all the opposites. Profound in it's honoring of Love as what we are and clearly describing how this so, it also maintains a clear recognition of the un-manifest source which that love reveals and in which that love arises: it's a breathtaking picture. It melts divisions while honoring them.

The language may be dense at times, but it's worth the effort.

If this book was not available to the world of spiritual idealism we would be much worse off than we are now.
As an exercise in thoroughly intelligent and exacting design creating an intellectually nuanced masterpiece for me and also without doubt all of us I would entertain the not idea but elongationary notion that it is probably the finest book even written on the non-compliant Ibn Arabi.
The essential factor which possibly most miss is that the core of this extraordinary work is governed by Ibn Arabi's Sophia, whom he knew as the beautiful young Nizam. This young and lovely apparitional yet living young woman gave him her soul or quality of Sakti which governed Ibn Arabi's life to his native embellishment of Sufi Perfect Master, the same as Avatar Meher Baba, or in Sufi terminology Qtub-e-Irshid known as God-Realization.
Henry Corbin is a genius of the highest order and to further follow his directive we should learn more of the cosmological order of sustainable prototypicality in such works as 'God Speaks' by Avatar Meher Baba.
Corbin is an essential factor for all would be Sufi dialectics and will without doubt enrich the Sufi world immeasurably with his preponderant knowledge of essential and beautiful soul stirring imagery as is in this wondrous work of his.
Peter Rowan

Corbin, the late French Islamicist initially influened by existentialist thought, should be credited for rendering Ibn Arabi more difficult than the Muslim sufi himself -- this by itself is quite an achievement: the obscurity of an Arabic theosopher compounded by the obscurity of a French philosopher. Only in the academy!!!