Common threads · 6 books
Enter Ibn Arabi's demanding account of imagination, scripture, and existence. Read selected original passages between interpreters who make different choices about how to explain them.
A little guidance for each book, and where it might take you next.
William C. Chittick
Begin with Chittick's account of imagination and religious diversity. Ask what an imaginal world means within this particular intellectual tradition.
Next: The Sufi Path of Knowledge
William C. Chittick
Read the sections on knowledge and imagination before trying the whole volume. Keep track of the terms that shift meaning across contexts.
Next: The Bezels of Wisdom
Ibn al-Arabi
Read selected prophetic chapters with the introduction close by. Compare their compressed language with Chittick's fuller explanations. The 1980 date identifies an English edition or translated collection, not the original text's composition.
Next: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi
Henry Corbin
Read Corbin as an interpreter with a distinctive approach. Ask where his account illuminates the texts and where it moves beyond them. The 1969 date is for the English translation of Corbin's study.
Next: An Ocean without Shore
Michel Chodkiewicz
Follow the connections between scripture and Ibn Arabi's larger work. Ask what a thematic selection can miss about a book's overall design.
Next: The Self-Disclosure of God
William C. Chittick
End with a more demanding account of cosmology. Revisit the early questions about diversity and imagination with this wider structure in view.
Finished this reading path? Mark the moment, then find your next good book.
More paths featuring William C. Chittick
Self-knowledge, poetry, religious life, and the stories people tell to wake one another up. A path that keeps Sufi writing connected to its Islamic setting.
More Common threads paths
A reading route made on ReadPath.
More paths featuring William C. Chittick
Birds, flashes of insight, a visionary diary, and Rumi's many afterlives. Read Persian Sufi poetry as religious writing without losing its strangeness or pleasure.
