Ibn 'arabi Society

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 is a Short courses tutor in the Department for Continuing Education, University of Oxford. His publications include The Unlimited Mercifier – The spiritual life and thought of Ibn 'Arabi (1999), The Seven Days of the Heart Prayers for the nights and days of the week – Ibn 'Arabi's Awrad al-usbu (2000), Divine Sayings – 101 Hadith Qudsi – The Mishkat al-Anwar of Ibn 'Arabi (2004), and most recently The Alchemy

Pablo Beneito is currently Professor of the Translation and Interpretation Department in the Faculty of Letters at the University of Murcia. He has published editions and translations of several works of Ibn 'Arabi including Mashahid al-Asrar - Las contemplaciones de los misterios (with S. Hakim), which was translated into English as Contemplation of the Holy Mysteries together with Cecilia Twinch. He edited and translated into Spanish the Kashf al-ma'na - El secreto de los nombres de Dios, which has also appeared in French. In collaboration with Stephen Hirtenstein he edited and translated Ibn 'Arabi's Awrad al-usbu (Wird) - The Seven Days of the Heart. He is the editor of El Azufre Rojo (Red Sulfur: Journal of Studies on Ibn 'Arabi, which first appeared in 2014). He is a founder member and President of Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi Society-Latina (MIAS- Latina), established in 2011

Eric Winkel is working full-time on a translation of the entire al-Futuhat al-Makkiyah (The Openings Revealed in Makkah) based on the 2011 critical edition of Dr. Abd al-Aziz al-Mansoub, published in the Yemen. While at the Institute of Advanced Islamic Studies, in Malaysia, he combined his interest in mathematics and classical Islamic thought to explore the 'new sciences', finding 'unlocking keys' for some of the most obscure concepts in Ibn 'Arabi's work. In 2019 the Pir Press published Volume 1 of the translation (Books 1 and 2). Chapter One of the Futuhat translation can be downloaded in PDF form from the Futuhat Project website http://thefutuhat.com/

Jane Clark is a Senior Research Fellow of the Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi Society, and has workedparticularly on the Society's Archiving Project as well 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, Temenos Academy) and abroad (including Egypt, Australia, USA), and in research and translation of the akbarian heritage. She has a particular interest in the correlation of Ibn 'Arabī's thought with contemporary issues; she was a co-founder of The Journal of Consciousness Studies, and is currently editor of Beshara Magazine. She organises the MIAS Young Writers Award.

James Morris (Boston College) has taught and published widely on Islamic and religious studies over the past 40 years at the Universities of Exeter, Princeton, Oberlin, and the Institute of Ismaili Studies in Paris and London, serving recently as visiting professor in Istanbul, Paris, and Jogjakarta. He has lived and studied in regions from Morocco to Indonesia, and he lectures and leads workshops in many countries on Islamic philosophy and theology, Sufism, the Islamic humanities (poetry, music, and visual arts), the Qur'an and hadith, and esoteric Shiism. Recently he has led interfaith study-abroad programs centering on sacred sites, pilgrimage, sainthood, and related arts and architecture in Turkey and France. His forthcoming books include Openings: From the Qur'an to the Islamic Humanities; Approaching Ibn 'Arabi: Foundations, Contexts, Interpretations; Ostad Elahi's "Demonstration of the Truth"; and "Servants of the All-Merciful": Ibn 'Arabi on Spiritual Practice and Realization.

Angela Jaffray (PhD Harvard University) is an independent scholar, specializing in the translation of and commentary on the short works of Ibn 'Arabi. Her translation of Ibn 'Arabi's al-Ittihad al-kawni (The Universal Tree and the Four Birds) was published by Anqa Publications in 2007 and her article “Watered with One Water: Ibn 'Arabi on the One and the Many” appeared in the Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi Society in 2008. Her most recent translation and commentary of Ibn 'Arabi's Isfar 'an nata'ij al-asfar (The Secrets of Voyaging), was published by Anqa Publications in 2015, reprinted in 2016. She divides her time between Jerusalem and Chicago.

Oludamini Ogunnaike is an assistant professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. He teaches courses on African and African Diasporic Religions as well as Islam, Islamic Philosophy, Spirituality, and Art. He holds a PhD in African Studies and the Study of Religion from Harvard University, and spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University's Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies. Professor Ogunnaike's research examines the philosophical dimensions of postcolonial, colonial, and pre-colonial Islamic and indigenous religious traditions of West and North Africa, especially Sufism and Ifa. He is currently working on a book entitled, Sufism and Ifa: Ways of Knowing in Two West African Intellectual Traditions and maintains a digital archive of West African Sufi poetry.

Stefan Sperl is Professor of Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies, School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, at SOAS University of London. He was born in Stuttgart and brought up in Luxembourg. He studied Arabic at Oxford and the American University in Cairo and did his postgraduate research at SOAS, London. In 1978 he joined UNHCR and held several assignments in the Middle East and Geneva. He returned to SOAS 1988. His publications include Mannerism in Arabic Poetry (1989), Qasida Poetry in Islamic Asia and Africa (1996, with Christopher Shackle), as well as numerous articles on Arabic, Islamic and Refugee Studies. In 2005 he embarked on a research project with Ahmed Moustafa which resulted in their joint publication The Cosmic Script: Sacred Geometry and the Science of Arabic Penmanship (2014). It won the Iran World Award for the Book of the Year in 2016. He was co-organiser of the 2017 MIAS symposium 'Ibn Arabi and the Philosophers' at SOAS and in November 2017 organiser of the conference 'Faces of the I

Michael Sells is the professor of Islamic Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. His publications on Arabic poetry, Sufism, and mystical language include Desert Tracings: Six Classic Arabian Odes (1989); Mystical Languages of Unsaying (1994); Stations of Desire: Love Elegies from Ibn ʿArabī and New Poems (2000); Early Islamic Mysticism (1996); and the Cambridge History of Arabic Literature, al-Andalus (2000, which he coedited with Maria Rosa Menocal and Raymond Scheindlin). His essay "Love", which compares differing configurations of the "religion of love" in Arabic love poetry and his translation of the Nuniyya, a poem by the Andalusian poet of courtly love Ibn Zaydun, appear in the same al-Andalus volume. Qur'anic Studies Today, which he coedited with Angelika Neuwirth and to which he contributed an essay on the Moses story in Sura 20, appeared in 2015. He is currently working on a complete bi-lingual edition and translation of Ibn 'Arabi's Tarjuman al-Ashwaq.

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 is a Short courses tutor in the Department for Continuing Education, University of Oxford. His publications include The Unlimited Mercifier – The spiritual life and thought of Ibn 'Arabi (1999), The Seven Days of the Heart Prayers for the nights and days of the week – Ibn 'Arabi's Awrad al-usbu (2000), Divine Sayings – 101 Hadith Qudsi – The Mishkat al-Anwar of Ibn 'Arabi (2004), and most recently The Alchemy

Heba Youssry is currently the Director of Manor House International School in Egypt. She holds a double BA in the fields of Business Administration and Philosophy and a double MA in Arabic Literature and Philosophy all of which were attained from the American University in Cairo. She formerly held the position of Country Director for an NGO called Seeds of Peace, where she worked on establishing communication links between teenagers in countries impacted by the Middle Eastern conflict. Also, she worked as a freelance literary critic for Egypt Independent, an English language newspaper.

Atif Khalil is an Associate Professor at the University of Lethbridge's Department of Religious Studies where he teaches courses on Islamic theology, mysticism, art and world religions. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Repentance and the Return to God in Early Sufism (SUNY, 2018). Last year, he was the Ken'an Rifai Distinguished Professorship of Islamic Studies at the Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies at Peking University in China

Eric Winkel has studied Ibn 'Arabi's Futuhat al-Makkiyah for twenty-five years and is now in the midst of an eleven-year project to produce the first complete translation of this work. While Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Islamic Studies in Malaysia, Dr. Winkel explored how the concepts of the "new sciences" opened obscure and difficult passages of the Futuhat al-Makkiyah

Angela Jaffray is an independent scholar, specializing in the translation of and commentary on the short works of Ibn 'Arabi. Her translation of Ibn 'Arabi's al-Ittiad al-kawni (The Universal Tree and the Four Birds) was published by Anqa Publications in 2007. Her most recent translation and commentary of Ibn 'Arabī's Isfar 'an nata'ij al-asfār (The Secrets of Voyaging), was published by Anqa Publications in 2015

Hany Ibrahim is a PhD candidate and teaching assistant at the University of Calgary. His teaching and research interests include Quranic exegesis, hadith, Sufism, Islamic art and architecture. His academic research is on Ibn 'Arabi and the metaphysics of love in The Meccan Openings. He is currently authoring a book entitled, Hallaj: In the Ocean of Oneness (forthcoming, Fall 2018)

Dr Husam al-Mallak is a Senior Teaching Fellow at SOAS where he lectures on 'Modern Trends in Islam'. He completed his PhD thesis in January 2016, under Dr Cosimo Zene, Dr J.P. Hartung and Dr Nasr Abu Zayd (d. 2010), on how the mystical thought of Ibn al-‘Arabi can be considered as an Islamic overcoming of Nietzschean nihilism. His MA dissertation at Birkbeck was 'Beyond Postmodernism and the Crisis of Truth: Re-Reading Ibn Al-'Arabi’s Qur'anic Hermeneutics' and he has given public lectures on this subject at The Islamic College, the Royal Asiatic Society and the Oriental Institute in Oxford. He has published book reviews in the Journal for Shi'a Islamic Studies and has forthcoming articles in the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies.

Professor Eric Geoffroy is an expert in Islamic thought and spirituality, he teaches Islamic studies at the University of Strasbourg, and other centres. He is specialist of Sufism and also works on issues of spirituality in the modern world (globalization, ecology). He is president of the International Foundation 'Sufi Consciousness'. He is a member of several international research groups, such as Kalam Research and Media (KRM), and acts as scientific advisor and editorial on Islam (Fondapol, The notebooks of Islam, Religions / Adyan ...). He is a columnist in the magazine Ultreia, and writes regularly for 'Le Monde des Religions'. He wrote twenty articles in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2 and 3, and is the author of over a dozen books

Dr. Maria De Cillis is a Research Associate and the Managing Editor of the Shi'i Heritage Series at the Institute of Ismaili Studies, London. She received an MA degree in Islamic Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London in 2004. She continued her PhD studies at the same University, completing it in October 2010. She is the author of 'Free Will and Predestination in Islamic Thought. Theoretical Compromises in the Works of Avicenna, al-Ghazali and Ibn 'Arabi' (London/New York, 2014). She is among the editors of 'L'esoterisme shi'ite, ses racines et ses prolongements / Shi'i Esotericism: Roots and Developments' (Turnhout, 2016), and her ongoing projects include the monograph 'Decree and Salvation: al-Kirmani's Ismaili Perspective' (forthcoming, 2017).

Dr. Salman Bashier is an independent researcher who obtained his doctorate from the University of Utah. His PhD was published in 2004 under the title 'Ibn al-'Arabi's Barzakh: the Concept of the Limit and the Relationship between God and the World'. He was formerly a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and a Polonsky Fellow. He is the author of several articles on Islamic mystical and philosophical thought in English, Hebrew, and Arabic. His book, 'The Story of Islamic Philosophy: Ibn Tufayl, Ibn al-'Arabi, and Others on the Limit between Naturalism and Traditionalism' was published in 2012, and his book (in Arabic) 'A Window On the Unseen: Between Ibn al-'Arabi and Averroes, On Imagination, Conjunction, and Knowledge of the Self' was published in December 2016.

Dr Eric Winkel (Shu'ayb) has studied Ibn 'Arabi for three decades and has spent the last four years dedicated to producing the first translation of the 10,000 page Futuhat al-Makkiyah of Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi. The first two of the six sections have been published as pre-prints for feedback and correction, covering the sixteen journeys (books) in 4,448 pages. The work is based on the critical edition of Abd al-Aziz Sultan Mansoub, in Sana'a, who has generously guided this translator.