Customer Reviews

Mysteries of Purity: Ibn Al-Arabi's Asrar Al-Taharah

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An accurate translation of a chapter from Ibn al-'Arabi's Futuhat al-Makkiyya with extensive introductory comments situating the author's own analysis within the larger field of scholarly Western Akbarian studies.

Highly recommended especially for students of Islam, sufism, comparative mysticism, or hermeneutics.

Eric Winkel has presented for the very first time in Western scholarship an extensive picture of Ibn Arabi's jurisprudence. The work deals with a particular legal issue, namely tahara (ritual purity), and shows how the Shaikh al-Akbar extrapolates legal rulings.

MYSTERIES is an excellent contribution to a growing corpus of literature that deals with Ibn Arabi's fiqh -- a field that had been glossed over in initial Orientalist studies of the Andalusian mystic because of the old-school misconception that Law occupied a marginal role in the Shaikh's worldview simply because he was a Sufi. Winkel's study, along with Michel Chodkiewicz's groundbreaking OCEAN WITHOUT SHORE will help dispell that myth.

Certainly an interesting book about the mystical interpretation of taharah, purification. Ibn Al-Arabi in this first book explains the mystical concepts or rather mystical interpretations of the purification ritual. For every rule he describes what each school required and than puts forward his position and defends it both in inner and outer meaning. I found the explanations on comperative part of the rituals a littel weak and short. I believe for comperative studies and to get better understanding of the reasonings behind each school of thoughts, Ibn Rushd's book to be a better source. For the student of mystism certainly this is a must read book.