About

The Ibn Arabi Seminar is a weekly meeting of several scholars from the Boston area working carefully through selected works of Ibn Arabi. The seminar contains a range of scholars from graduate students to professors and each brings a distinct perspective to the reading of Ibn Arabi from their own areas of expertise. These meetings are led by Professor James Morris and we are currently working through chapter 178 of the Futuhat al-Makkiyya, which can be found on the home page. If you would like to join our mailing list, please send an email to us at ibn.arabi.seminar@gmail.com

Ibn ‘Arabî (h560/1165AD – h638/1240AD) is known as the Greatest Master – al-Shaykh al-Akbar. He wrote prolifically, and while some of his works have been translated into western languages, much of the estimated 15,000 pages of the Futuhat remains untranslated and understudied. His work touches on all of the Islamic Sciences, but currently in this seminar we are concerned most with chapter 178 questions about Love and its many forms.

His writings on Love are particularly interesting and difficult. In them, one finds philosophy, poetry, and theology mixed together with the singular purpose of coming to understand what Love truly is and how we might find our way from lesser to greater forms of the same. This project is complicated by the fact that Arabic has such a rich lexicon for describing love, and upward of 60 words for this single thing we call in English, “love.” Such fine distinctions as Arabic contains allows it to trace the contours of such a complicated idea as Love in ways that English approaches with difficulty. So, in this seminar, we do much more than simply translate the Arabic of Ibn Arabi, for there is no simple translation for many of his writings. Instead, we come together every week to share our understanding of his work, and discuss what continues to elude us.