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Nor did he depart from the highest level of discourse, or repeat himself in different works. The later Sufi tradition called him al-Shaykh al-Akbar , the Greatest Master, a title that was understood to mean that no one else has been or will be able to unpack the multi-layered significance of the sources of the Islamic tradition with such detail and profundity.

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The early Orientalists, with one or two exceptions, paid little attention to him because he had no discernable influence in Europe. Not until books by Henry Corbin and Toshihiko Izutsu was he recognized as an extraordinarily broad-ranging and highly original thinker with much to contribute to the world of philosophy. More recently, scholars have begun to look at this work which will fill an estimated 15, pages in its modern edition , but relatively little of it has been translated into Western languages and what has been translated is still in need of further explanation, interpretation, and contextualization in the history of philosophy for a stab at the last, see Ebstein The most serious attempt to fit him into the history of Western philosophy argues that his notion of barzakh see section 3.

What follows is an outline of some of the topics he addresses.

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He was born in Murcia in to the family of a minor official and received the standard education of a literatus, without any special attention to religious topics. Shortly thereafter, in about , his father took him to meet his friend Averroes. In he left the Muslim West to perform the pilgrimage to Mecca and did not return. He traveled extensively in Iraq and Anatolia, finally settling down in Damascus in , where he trained disciples and wrote prolifically until his death in November Among his several hundred books and treatises, Ringstones and Openings are the most famous.

Ringstones became the standard text to transmit his teachings and, during the next six centuries, was the object of more than a hundred commentaries. From earliest times, Muslim philosophers recognized that haqq —truth, reality, rightness—was basic to the quest for wisdom and the happiness of the soul. For him it is the guiding principle of all knowledge and activity and the highest goal to which a human soul can aspire.