From the time Zoroaster brought the Gathas, the sacred scripture of Zoroastrianism, until today, it has had a philosophical tradition comprising diverse schools and various languages including Avestan and Pahlavi as well as Arabic and Persian.
Persia is home to one of the few civilizations in the world that has had a continuous tradition of philosophical thought lasting more than two and a half millennia. Lipton argues that supersessionist models of exclusivism are buried under contemporary Western constructions of religious authenticity in ways that ironically mirror Ibn `Arabi's medieval absolutism. The contours that surface through this comparative analysis trace the discursive practices that inform Ibn `Arabi's Western reception back to the eighteenth and nineteenth century study of "authentic" religion, where European ethno-racial superiority was wielded against the Semitic Other-both Jewish and Muslim. Lipton juxtaposes Ibn `Arabi's absolutist conception with the later reception of his ideas, exploring how they have been read, appropriated, and universalized within the reigning interpretive field of Perennial Philosophy in the study of Sufism. In Rethinking Ibn `Arabi, Gregory Lipton calls this image into question and throws into relief how Ibn `Arabi's discourse is inseparably intertwined with the absolutist vision of his own religious milieu-that is, the triumphant claim that Islam fulfilled, superseded, and therefore abrogated all previous revealed religions. For more than a century, Western scholars and esotericists have heralded his universalism, arguing that he saw all contemporaneous religions as equally valid. The thirteenth century mystic Ibn `Arabi was the foremost Sufi theorist of the premodern era. Providing an easily accessible translation of one of the greatest mystics of Islam, Ibn al Arabi’ Fusus al-Hikam is essential reading for students, scholars and researchers of Islamic Philosophy, Mysticism and Islamic Mysticism in particular. The translation of these twenty seven chapters is preceded by an introduction that explains the main ideas of Ibn al-Arabi and is accompanied by explanatory notes to the text. Fusus al-hikam examines the singular characteristics of twenty seven prophets of Islam and constitutes the best summary of Ibn al-Arabi's thought. Believing that the world is the self- manifestation of God, he claimed that all religions are equal and that the perfect human being is he who knows all the religious phenomena in the world. Muhyi al-Din Ibn al-Arabi (1165-1240) is deemed the greatest mystic of Islam and his mystical philosophy has attracted the attention of both Muslims and non-Muslims from his time to the present day. Ibn al-Arabi’s Fusus al-Hikam is a translation of one of the most important works written on Islamic Mysticism.
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