Ibn 'arabi Society

Ibn Arabi’s Creative Imagination: Crossing Borders to Discover the Meaning of Being Human. Collaborative presentation between Language Acts and Worldmaking and the Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society. This event, originally an online seminar via Zoom, explores how Ibn Arabi’s creative imagination crosses philosophical, poetic, linguistic and artistic borders, and how his ideas continue to inspire contemporary poetry, film, and artistic expression to this day. Chair Dr David Torollo : Lecturer in Medieval & Early Modern Spanish Studies, King's College London. Catherine Boyle: Professor of Latin American Cultural Studies and Director of Centre for Language Acts and Worldmaking. Cecilia Twinch: Senior Research Fellow of the Ibn Arabi Society, Oxford.

Yousef is Chair of Islamic Studies at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He received his Ph.D. in Islamic Studies from Yale University in 2014. He was formerly a Humanities Research Fellow at New York University, Abu Dhabi, where he completed his award-winning book, The Mystics of al-Andalus. He is currently completing an Arabic edition and full English translation of  ‘Afif al-Din al-Tilimsani's (d. 1291) commentary on the divine names for the Library of Arabic Literature, NYU Press. Born in Egypt and raised in Morocco, Yousef has traveled throughout the Islamic world, and has studied with Muslim scholars in Morocco, Syria, and Mauritania.

Hina Khalid has completed an MPhil in Theology at the University of Cambridge. Her work has previously examined the theological discourse of the Muslim mystic and philosopher ‘Ibn Arabi, in dialogue with selected aspects of the Buddhist philosophical tradition. Her current research centres on Sufism in the subcontinent, and the distinctive and multi-faceted patterns of Islamic practices as they have been shaped by indigenous cultural and religious forces therein.

Todd Lawson is Associate Professor, University of Toronto, Dept. of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations. He has published widely on Quran commentary (tafsir), the Quran as literature, Sufism, Shi’i Islam and the Babi and Bahai traditions. His book Jesus in Islamic thought, The Crucifixion and the Quran was published in 2009 (Oneworld), his Gnostic Apocalypse and Islam in 2011 (Routledge). This and other of his publications are listed at www.toddlawson.ca

Stephen Hirtenstein has been editor of the Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society since its inception in 1982, and is a co-founder of Anqa Publishing. He read History at King’s College, Cambridge, and then studied at the Beshara School of Intensive Esoteric Education in Gloucestershire and Scotland. After a teaching career, he began writing and giving talks on Ibn Arabi’s thought at conferences across the world. In addition to lecturing and writing, he organises and leads tours "in the footsteps of Ibn Arabi". He currently works as a Senior Editor for the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London, and lives near Oxford.

Dunja Rašić (PhD Free University Berlin) is a lecturer at the University of Belgrade. Her academic interests include philosophy of language, Akbarian cosmology and the philosophical and theological thought of the early Islamic Middle Ages. She is currently working on several book projects, including The Devil Within: Jinn Doppelgangers, Mages and the Sages and a critical edition and translation of al-Bosnevī’s commentary on pseudo-Ibn ʿArabī’s al-Qaṣīda al- tāʾiyya.

Luca Patrizi is part of the University of Turin, Italy, and research fellow at Exeter University, UK.

Carlos Berbil is the Alexander von Humboldt Kolleg for Islamicate Intellectual History at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn.

Cyrus Ali Zargar is Al-Ghazali Distinguished Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Central Florida. His first book, Sufi Aesthetics: Beauty, Love, and the Human Form in Ibn ʿArabi and ʿIraqi, was published in 2011 by the University of South Carolina Press. His most recent book, The Polished Mirror: Storytelling and the Pursuit of Virtue in Islamic Philosophy and Sufism, was published in 2017 by Oneworld Press. Zargar’s research interests focus on the literature of medieval Sufism in Arabic and Persian. This includes metaphysical, aesthetic, and ethical intersections between Sufism and Islamic philosophy, as well as Sufi ethical treatises, the writings of Ibn Arabi and early adherents to his worldview, Sufism in contemporary cinema, and satire in medieval and modern literature. He is the author of articles in The Muslim World, The Journal of Arabic Literature, and Encyclopædia Iranica. Currently, he is completing a manuscript on the corpus of the 13th-century Persian poet, Farid al-Din Attar, and t

Gracia Lopez Anguita obtained her degree in Arabic Philosophy at the University of Cordoba. In 2005 she joined the Department of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Seville, where she is currently Assistant Professor. Among other publications, her book Ibn 'Arabi y su epoca was published in 2018.

Alexander Knysh is professor of Islamic Studies and former chair (1998–2004) of the Department of Near Eastern Studies, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He obtained his doctoral degree from the Institute for Oriental Studies (Leningrad Branch) of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1986. Since 1991 he has lived and worked in the United States of America and England. His research interests include Islamic mysticism and Islamic theological thought in historical perspective as well as Islam and Islamic movements in local contexts (especially Yemen and the Northern Caucasus). He has numerous publications on these subjects, including Ibn 'Arabi in the Later Islamic Tradition: The Making of a Polemical Image in Medieval Islam (1998).

Michele Petrone is a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Universite catholique de Louvain

Rim Feriani is Educational Director at The Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society, UK. She had previously lectured in Arabic language at King’s College, London and taught Arabic language and cultural studies in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Westminster, London. Prior to her lecturing position, Rim worked as Director of Languages securing a governmental funding for improving the profile of languages at De Le Salle School and Language College. Additionally, from 2014 to 2016, Rim headed the Arabic department at the British School Al Khubairat, in Abu Dhabi.

Gregory Vandamme is a PhD candidate (FNRS-FRESH) working on classical Sufism, with a particular interest in the works of Ibn 'Arabi and his school. His research pays attention on transmission and transformation of doctrines from Early Sufism to Akbarian thought. He is a Doctoral Researcher at the University of Louvain, Belgium

Dr Samer Akkach is Associate Professor of Architecture and Founding Director of the Centre for Asian and Middle Eastern Architecture (CAMEA) at the University of Adelaide, Australia. He was born and educated in Damascus before moving to Australia to complete his PhD at Sydney University. As an intellectual historian, Samer has devoted over twenty years to the study of Ibn 'Arabi's mystical thought and intellectual legacy, and especially to their later revival by Abd al-Ghana al-Nabulusi. His book Cosmology and Architecture in Premodern Islam: an Architectural Reading of Mystical Ideas (SUNY 2005), traces the influence of Ibn 'Arabi's thought on the spatial sensibility of premodern Muslim architects. His further titles Abd al-Ghan al-Nabulusi: Islam and the Enlightenment (Oneworld 2007) and Letters of a Sufi Scholar: The Correspondence of Abd al-Ghana al-Nabulusi (Brill 2010) examine the intellectual contributions of this influential and prolific Sufi master who considered Ibn 'Arabi to be his spiritual master

Paolo Urizzi is the director of Perennia Verba, Italy. The interest in Perennial Wisdom has led him to deepen the metaphysical doctrines of Vedanta and Sufism, and his research has focused in particular on the notion of the "Seal of Saints".

At Haverford College (BA), then the University of Pennsylvania (MA), then the University of South Carolina (PhD), Eric Winkel undertook eclectic studies, mostly religion at first, focusing on spiritual matters, then later including political science, and numerous languages to enable study of religious and spiritual texts (Sanskrit, Greek, Coptic, Tamil, Arabic, others, besides French and German). His book "Mysteries of Purity, Ibn al-'Arabî's asrar al-taharah" (Notre Dame, 1995) was Chapter 68 of the Futuhat al-Makkiyya. While Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Islamic Studies in Malaysia, he explored how the concepts of the "new sciences" opened obscure and difficult passages of the Futuhat. Having studied Ibn Arabi's Futuhat al-Makkiyya for over twenty-five years, Eric Winkel is now in the midst of an eleven-year project to produce the first complete translation of this work.

Jane Clark is a Senior Research Fellow of the Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society and has worked particularly on the Society's Archiving Project as well as looking after the library. She has been studying Ibn Arabi for more than forty years, and is engaged in teaching courses and lecturing on his thought both in the UK (including Oxford University and Temenos Academy) and abroad (including Egypt, Australia and the USA), and in research and translation of the Akbarian heritage. She has a particular interest in the correlation of Ibn Arabi's thought with contemporary issues. She organises the MIAS Young Writers Award. Jane Clark was a co-founder of The Journal of Consciousness Studies and is currently editor of the Beshara Magazine. She has presented many courses as part of the program of the University of Oxford Department for Continuing Education.

Jane Carroll is a Senior Research Fellow of the Ibn Arabi Society and is Secretary of the Society in the US. She first studied the works of Ibn Arabi at the Beshara School in Scotland in the 1970s while concurrently studying at the Architectural Association in London with a specific interest in traditional geometry and Islamic architecture. She currently has a design practice in Ojai, California.

Pablo Beneito is currently Professor at the Department of Translation and Interpreting in the Faculty of Letters, University of Murcia, Spain. He has been studying the works of Ibn Arabi since he chose to do his doctorate in Arabic philology at the Complutense University of Madrid, after which he spent nine years teaching at the University of Seville in the Department of Arab and Islamic Studies. He has also been a visiting professor at the Sorbonne in Paris (Ecole Pratique des Hauts Etudes), in Kyoto University (ASAFAS) and in Toledo (Escuela de Traductores). As a specialist in Sufi thought, he has given courses throughout the world, and helped organise more than 14 international conferences. He heads MIAS Latina, an independent organisation affiliated to the Ibn Arabi Society, for speakers of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. He has edited and translated (into Spanish) Ibn Arabi's Mashahid al-asrar and Kashf al-ma'na. He is currently working on several of Ibn Arabi's shorter treatises, including Kitab al-Aba