The MIAS Blog: News and Views about Ibn Arabi

Critical Edition of Ibn ‘Arabi’s Diwān

Diwān Ibn al-ʿArabī : al-maʿārif al-ilāhiyya wa-l-laṭāʾif al-rūḥāniyya, Critical edition of the text, edited by ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Sulṭān al-Manṣūb, published by Ninawa, Damascus, Syria; in five hardback volumes (2676 pages), 2021.

A critical edition of the Diwān of Ibn ‘Arabi, his own collection of his poetry, edited by ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Sulṭān al-Manṣūb, has been announced by Ninawa publishing house in Damascus. It is in five volumes, a total of 2,676 pages.

This is wonderfully good news for two reasons. First, till now, available versions of Ibn ‘Arabi’s Diwān have been reproductions of  one of the earliest works by him to appear in print (1855), containing just a fraction of the total work, something that only began to become clear to modern scholars in the past 30 years.

Second, the critical edition of the text has been accomplished by ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Sulṭān al-Manṣūb, who already provided for the world the first critical edition of al-Futūḥāt al-Makkīyah, originally published in the Yemen in 2010 (12 volumes). This immense contribution was followed by critical editions of K. al-ʿAbādila, K. al-Tajalliyāt and Tāj al-Rasāʾil along with 19 shorter works (published by al-Qudus, Cairo, 2018).

The Dīwān contains 31,000 couplets of poetry, and perhaps 4,000 lines of text.

In the preface to the Dīwān Ibn ‘Arabī explains:

The reason which has led me to utter (talaffuz) poetry is that I saw in a dream an angel who was bringing me a piece of white light; as if it were a piece of the sun’s light. “What is that?”, I asked. “It is sura al-shu’arā‘” (the sura of the Poets) was the reply. I swallowed it, and felt a hair (sha’ra) stretching from my chest up to my throat, and then into my mouth. It was an animal with a head, a tongue, eyes, and lips. It stretched forth until its head reached the two horizons, that of the East and that of the West. After that, it shrank back and returned to my chest; at that moment I realized that my words would reach the East and the West. When I came back to myself, I uttered verses that came forth from no reflection and no intellectual process whatsoever. Since that time, this inspiration has never ceased; and it is because of this sublime contemplation that I have collected all the poetry that I can remember. But there is much more that I have forgotten! Everything that this collection contains is thus, thanks be to God, nothing other than [the fruit of] divine projection, a holy and spiritual inspiration, a splendid, celestial heritage.
Quoted from The Ship of Stone by Claude Addas

This is the publisher’s web page for the Dīwān: https://www.ninawa.org/book_details.php?bid=607.  No price for the Dīwān is shown there yet.

We believe the publisher’s main distribution agent in Egypt is Madbouly Publishing House. The publisher is also participating in the Cairo International Book Fair 2021 (Hall 3 – A09) which runs from the 30th June to the 15th July. It might be an opportunity to obtain copies of the Dīwān directly.