Ibn al-ʿArabī’s Kitāb Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam wa-Khuṣūṣ al-Kalim

For decades, students of Ibn al-ʿArabī relied on the edition and commentary on the Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam published in 1946 by the Egyptian intellectual Abūʾl-Aʿlā ʿAfīfī (1897–1966), who had written his doctoral dissertation on the Sufi at Cambridge which was published in 1939 as The Mystical Philosophy of Muhyi al-Din Ibn ʿArabi. For commentaries to understand the text further, one needed to use the old Būlāq editions of the Kāshānī and Qayṣarī, usually available in cheap offset printings produced in Mīdan al-Azhar in Cairo and elsewhere. When modern academic interest in Ibn al-ʿArabī and his thought emerged from the 1960s and after, the focus tended to be the much larger corpus of al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyyah, using the old Būlāq edition again. Now, as focus turns back to the Fuṣūṣ, new critical editions have appeared in the last decade or so (there is no need to mention popular editions like Kayālī’s for Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyyah – he also edited a number of the commentaries which are equally useless in comparison to older lithograph editions).