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Thinking about trying a course before signing up? To get a taste of this course, please email us education.uk@ibnarabisociety.org

This course is an introduction to the multi-layered meanings of Ibn Arabi’s spiritual openings. We will have the opportunity to explore a selection of passages from Ibn Arabi’s Meccan Openings.

1. Identify the multi-layered meanings of spiritual openings in Ibn Arabi’s work.

2. Develop a familiarity with Ibn Arabi’s key concepts.

3. Discuss the significance of the reader’s interpretation in achieving a better understanding of Ibn Arabi’s spiritual world.

Upon completion of this course, you can achieve any of the possible outcomes below:

There are of course several ways of reading and interpreting Ibn Arabi’s texts. What we propose in this course is a hermeneutic model of interpretation. Drawing on the theory of Paul Ricœur, the hermeneutic model adopted in this course is based on two stages.

The first stage consists in explaining the textual meanings of Ibn Arabi’s spiritual openings.

The second stage consists in exploring the “world-propositions” that Ibn Arabi’s inner openings project into his readers (Ricoeur 1976: 87).

This approach places emphasis on the active and interpretive engagement between the world of the text, the reader’s world and Ibn Arabi’s spiritual world. 

This course combines lecture instructions with group discussions and individual readings. Instructional strategies include mini-lectures, textual analysis, guided individual reflection and discussion.

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