The Opening
الفاتحة
The Quran · sūra 1
The first sūra, seven verses: every word with its grammar, root and recitation.
7 verses · ~5 min · audio · published translation
Library
48 texts, 122,165 words of Arabic, each readable word by word: tap any word for its grammar, its root and how it has been read. Each edited text has an about page: where it comes from and how it was established.
New to these texts? Follow a reading plan: the tradition's own order, a sitting at a time.
Difficulty
What the dots mean
Lexical difficulty, from the words themselves: how many roots fall outside the 1,000 most frequent in the Quran, how long the words are, and how much of the vowelling had to be supplied by AI. It says how unfamiliar the vocabulary is, not how deep the ideas are.
48 texts
Scripture
The Quran, word by word with its grammar.
Ibn ʿArabī: Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam
The Ringstones of Wisdom, chapter by chapter, with the classical commentaries.
The Ringstone of Adam
فص حكمة إلهية في كلمة آدمية
Ibn ʿArabī · 560–638/1165–1240
Why the Real willed to see Itself: the human being as the polished mirror of the world.
20 passages · ~25 min · audio · commentaries · 4 Quran quotations
The Ringstone of Seth
فص حكمة نفثية في كلمة شيثية
Ibn ʿArabī · 560–638/1165–1240
Divine gifts and the seal of the saints: what is given, and to whom.
30 passages · ~25 min · audio · commentaries · 5 Quran quotations
The Ringstone of Noah
فص حكمة سبوحية في كلمة نوحية
Ibn ʿArabī · 560–638/1165–1240
Transcendence and immanence: Noah's call, and why his people would not hear it.
21 passages · ~20 min · audio · commentaries · 63 Quran quotations
The Ringstone of Enoch
فص حكمة قدوسية في كلمة إدريسية
Ibn ʿArabī · 560–638/1165–1240
Height of place and height of rank: who is the High, when nothing is there but He.
14 passages · ~15 min · commentaries · 14 Quran quotations
The Ringstone of Abraham
فص حكمة مهيمية في كلمة إبراهيمية
Ibn ʿArabī · 560–638/1165–1240
Why the Friend is called the Friend: the Real pervading the creature, and the creature pervading the Real.
11 passages · ~10 min · commentaries · 9 Quran quotations
The Ringstone of Isaac
فص حكمة حقية في كلمة إسحاقية
Ibn ʿArabī · 560–638/1165–1240
Abraham's dream of the sacrifice: the imagination, its interpretation, and what the knower creates by aspiration.
17 passages · ~15 min · commentaries · 5 Quran quotations
The Ringstone of Jesus
فص حكمة نبوية في كلمة عيسوية
Ibn ʿArabī · 560–638/1165–1240
Jesus as spirit and word, from Mary's water and Gabriel's breath: reviving the dead, and why 'God is the Messiah' is a restriction.
35 passages · ~30 min · commentaries · 55 Quran quotations
Ibn ʿArabī: other works
The Meccan Openings, the Book of Circles, and his portraits of his teachers.
The Meccan Openings
الفتوحات المكية
Ibn ʿArabī · 560–638/1165–1240
The introduction and chapter 1: his meeting with the youth at the Kaʿba, checked line by line against the Konya autograph.
112 passages · ~70 min · audio · 24 Quran quotations
The Book of Circles
إنشاء الدوائر
Ibn ʿArabī · 560–638/1165–1240
His treatise on existence drawn in circles, complete, with all 857 of Nyberg's apparatus notes.
90 passages · ~65 min · audio · 18 Quran quotations
The Spirit of Holiness
روح القدس
Ibn ʿArabī · 560–638/1165–1240
His portraits of the saints who taught him in al-Andalus and the Maghrib, with Fāṭima of Seville, each on the atlas.
99 passages · ~65 min · audio · 10 Quran quotations
Prayers
Litanies and prayers of Ibn ʿArabī and Suhrawardī.
The Litanies of Sunday
أوراد الأسبوع: ليلة الأحد ويومه
Ibn ʿArabī · 560–638/1165–1240
The opening prayer of his weekly litanies, and the prayers for Sunday eve and Sunday.
21 passages · ~15 min · audio · 16 Quran quotations
The Prayer of the Highest Circuit
حزب الدور الأعلى
Ibn ʿArabī (attributed) · 560–638/1165–1240
The litany of protection, recited by his followers ever since.
15 passages · ~10 min · audio · 39 Quran quotations
The Prayer of Effusion
الصلاة الفيضية
Ibn ʿArabī (attributed) · 560–638/1165–1240
The great prayer upon the Prophet, as the effusion of all that exists.
13 passages · ~10 min · audio · 10 Quran quotations
The Sanctification of the Sun
تقديس الشمس
Suhrawardī · 549–587/1154–1191
His prayer to Hūrakhsh, the sun, with the daily sanctification of the Highest.
12 passages · ~10 min · audio
Visionary recitals
Ibn Sīnā, Suhrawardī and Ibn Ṭufayl: the soul's journey told as a tale.
The Recital of Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān
رسالة حي بن يقظان
Ibn Sīnā · 370–428/980–1037
The sage who is 'Alive, son of Awake' shows the soul the way out of the world, with Ibn Zayla's commentary.
22 passages · ~25 min · audio · commentaries · 2 Quran quotations
The Recital of the Bird
رسالة الطير
Ibn Sīnā · 370–428/980–1037
Birds caught in the net, their escape, and the journey over eight mountains to the King.
15 passages · ~15 min · audio · 1 Quran quotation
The Occidental Exile
قصة الغربة الغربية
Suhrawardī · 549–587/1154–1191
Captives in the city of the West, the hoopoe's letter, and the climb to the Sinai of the soul.
46 passages · ~15 min · audio · 30 Quran quotations
The Tale of Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān
حي بن يقظان
Ibn Ṭufayl · d. 581/1185
The child raised by a gazelle who reasons his way to God: part one, to the burial of the gazelle.
85 passages · ~60 min · audio · 7 Quran quotations
Philosophical treatises
Philosophical prose of the falsafa, ishrāqī and Ghazālian lines on being, light, love and the intellects: al-Ghazālī's Niche of Lights, Suhrawardī's Temples of Light, Ibn Sīnā's Treatise on Love, and the Brethren of Purity on the animals' case and the order of being.
The Niche of Lights
مشكاة الأنوار
al-Ghazālī · 450–505/1058–1111
The Light Verse expounded: parts I–II, on why God alone is light in the true sense.
126 passages · ~85 min · audio · 47 Quran quotations
The Temples of Light
هياكل النور
Suhrawardī · 549–587/1154–1191
A short treatise in seven temples: body, soul, the lights and their return.
32 passages · ~40 min · audio · 8 Quran quotations
The Treatise on Love
رسالة في العشق
Ibn Sīnā · 370–428/980–1037
The whole treatise in seven chapters: love runs through every being, from prime matter and the plants to the lover of beautiful faces and the divine souls, and the Good loves itself.
39 passages · ~50 min · published translation
Epistles of the Brethren of Purity
رسائل إخوان الصفاء
Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ (the Brethren of Purity) · 4th/10th century
Two parts, one page each: the animals' case against man before the king of the jinn (Epistle 22), and the ninefold order of being from the Creator to the creatures (Epistle 32) with their definition of philosophy as becoming like God (Epistle 13).
74 passages · ~95 min · 49 Quran quotations
Sufi handbooks
The manuals that set out the Sufi path in its own words, in prose and in verse: al-Qushayrī's Epistle on the terms, the stations and the states; Ibn ʿAṭāʾ Allāh's Aphorisms, the Shādhilī path in 263 maxims with its letters and intimate prayers; Shabistarī's Rose-Garden of Mystery, fifteen questions answered in Persian couplets.
The Epistle on Sufism
الرسالة القشيرية
al-Qushayrī · 376–465/986–1072
A first selection: the chapter on the Sufis' terms (waqt, ḥāl, maqām … kashf, mushāhada, sirr), and the chapters on insight and on knowledge of God.
120 passages · ~130 min · 32 Quran quotations
The Aphorisms
الحكم العطائية
Ibn ʿAṭāʾ Allāh al-Iskandarī · d. 709/1309
The whole Ḥikam: 263 aphorisms of the Shādhilī path on works and hope, tajrīd and the means, giving up self-direction, the inrushes and the states, contraction and expansion, light and inner sight, servanthood and need; the four letters; and the intimate prayers (munājāt), with Ibn ʿAbbād's commentary beside each.
300 passages · ~60 min · commentaries · 24 Quran quotations
The Rose-Garden of Mystery
گلشن راز
Maḥmūd Shabistarī · d. 720/1320 or c. 740/1339–40
The whole poem (717/1317): fifteen questions from Herat on thinking, the self, the traveller and the Perfect Human, unity and multiplicity, “I am the Truth”, the part greater than the whole, and the lovers' language of eye, lip, curl, mole, wine, tavern, idol and girdle, each answered in Persian couplets and read by the poet himself.
1008 couplets · ~205 min · published translation
Ismaili philosophy
The Ismaili philosophers of the tenth–eleventh century, Neoplatonists of the Command and the Intellect: al-Sijistānī and Nāṣir-i Khusraw.
The Keys of the Kingdom
المقاليد الملكوتية
Abū Yaʿqūb al-Sijistānī · d. after 361/971
Fifteen of its seventy keys, on God beyond attribute and beyond its denial (the double negation), the word «lā», the Command, Intellect and Soul, and the return.
96 passages · ~115 min · 34 Quran quotations
The Book of Illumination
روشنائی نامه
Nāṣir-i Khusraw · b. 394/1004, d. after 465/1073
The cosmological core of his Persian masnavī, 184 couplets: God beyond attributes, the Universal Intellect and Soul, the nine spheres, the elements and the three kingdoms, the making of the human being, the senses, and knowing the soul.
184 couplets · ~40 min · published translation
The Dīvān: odes
دیوان ناصر خسرو
Nāṣir-i Khusraw · b. 394/1004, d. after 465/1073
His qaṣīdas, beginning with the ode on speech and the sea of revelation (54 couplets): the letter, tanzīl, is salt like the sea, its interpretation, taʾwīl, the pearl, and the seeker must find the diver. Each couplet opens the printed page it stands on.
54 couplets · ~15 min · published translation
Poetry
Odes of love, wine and the soul, with their commentaries.
The Interpreter of Desires
ترجمان الأشواق
Ibn ʿArabī · 560–638/1165–1240
His love poems I–X, with Nicholson's translation and the poet's own commentary.
64 verses · ~10 min · audio · published translation
The Wine Ode
الخمرية
Ibn al-Fāriḍ · 576–632/1181–1235
The wine drunk before the vine was created: 41 verses, with Nicholson's translation.
41 verses · ~5 min · audio · commentaries · published translation · 1 Quran quotation
The Ode on the Soul
القصيدة العينية
Ibn Sīnā · 370–428/980–1037
Twenty verses on the soul's descent like a dove from the highest place, and its longing to return.
20 verses · ~5 min · audio
The Conference of the Birds
منطق الطیر
Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār · d. c. 618/1221
A first selection in Persian verse: the hoopoe's call to the birds and the Sīmurgh's feather, the seven valleys, and the thirty birds (sī murgh) who see the Sīmurgh in the mirror and find it is themselves.
282 couplets · ~60 min · published translation
Plato and Plotinus (Greek)
The Greek root of the tradition, word by word, with its readers through the ages.
Diotima's Speech
Συμπόσιον
Plato · c. 428–348 BCE
Symposium 201d–212c: Love as a daimōn between mortal and immortal, birth in beauty, and the ascent to the beautiful itself.
55 sections · ~65 min · commentaries · published translation
On the Good, or the One
Περὶ τἀγαθοῦ ἢ τοῦ ἑνός
Plotinus · c. 204/5–270 CE
Ennead VI.9: all things are by the One; the soul's return inward, the centre and the circle, and the vision beyond intellect, with its echoes in the Arabic tradition.
11 chapters · ~80 min · commentaries · published translation
The Sun, the Line and the Cave
Πολιτεία
Plato · c. 428–348 BCE
Republic VI 507a–511e and VII 514a–521b: the Good as the sun of the intelligible, the divided line, the prisoners in the cave, and education as the turning of the soul's eye.
60 sections · ~65 min · published translation
Alcibiades I: Know Yourself
Ἀλκιβιάδης α
Plato · c. 428–348 BCE
The whole Alcibiades I, 103a–135e (whether Plato wrote it is disputed): Socrates' approach to the young Alcibiades, his double ignorance, what the self is that we are told to know, the soul as the user of the body, and the eye that sees itself only in another eye; with 133c8–17, absent from the medieval manuscripts, marked, and the ancient commentaries of Proclus and Olympiodorus beside the text.
162 sections · ~175 min · commentaries · published translation
The Winged Soul
Φαῖδρος
Plato · c. 428–348 BCE
Phaedrus 246a–257b: the soul as a winged charioteer, the vision of the place beyond the heavens, beauty that shines through sight, and the wings that grow again in love.
57 sections · ~65 min · published translation
On Beauty
Περὶ τοῦ καλοῦ
Plotinus · c. 204/5–270 CE
Ennead I.6, Plotinus' first treatise: beauty as form mastering matter, the soul made beautiful by purification, and the inner eye that must become sunlike to see.
9 chapters · ~55 min · published translation
Syriac
The sister language: the Hymn of the Pearl, root by root beside its Arabic cousins.
The Hymn of the Pearl
ܡܕܪܫܐ ܕܝܗܘܕܐ ܬܐܡܐ
Anonymous, in the Acts of Thomas · probably 3rd century CE
A prince sent from the East to fetch a pearl from Egypt forgets, is woken by a letter that flies like an eagle, and returns to his robe of glory: the soul's descent and return, beside Suhrawardī's Occidental Exile.
105 verses · ~20 min · published translation
Chinese: the Han Kitab
Ibn ʿArabī's school in classical Chinese: Liu Zhi and Wang Daiyu, with Jāmī's Persian source, term by term.
Liu Zhi 劉智 · c. 1670–after 1724
The five chapters of the Root Classic (1704), with Liu Zhi's own citations of Jāmī and Ma Lianyuan's Arabic line by line, and the five books of diagrams explained: the great world, the small world, the heart and the way back, and the three Ones, with a later commentator's notes.
81 chapters and diagrams · ~475 min
Wang Daiyu 王岱輿 · c. 1584–c. 1658
The whole book: Lord and servant, the Confucian Great Learning rebuilt on the Real One, then the Real One, the Numerical One and the Embodied One, each witnessed three ways, and a conclusion against emptiness and non-being.
31 sections · ~105 min
Flashes of Light
لوایح
ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī · 817–898/1414–1492
Jāmī's Persian treatise on the One Being, which Liu Zhi turned into Chinese as the Zhenjing zhaowei: Whinfield's English, flash by flash, with the places Liu Zhi cites it.
30 flashes · ~55 min · published translation
Grammar
The classical grammar books, from the first primer to the thousand-verse poem.
The Ājurrūmiyya
الآجرومية
Ibn Ājurrūm · d. 723/1323
The classical first book of grammar, chapter by chapter, with each term opened onto its root.
25 chapters · ~20 min · audio
Qaṭr al-nadā
قطر الندى وبل الصدى
Ibn Hishām · d. 761/1360
The second step after the Ājurrūmiyya: the whole of syntax in brief, the full text with every word open to tap.
25 sections · ~45 min
The Alfiyya
الألفية
Ibn Mālik · d. 672/1274
Grammar in a thousand verses of rajaz, the poem students memorised, with Ibn ʿAqīl's commentary in Arabic under each verse.
78 chapters · ~100 min · commentaries
Shudhūr al-dhahab
شذور الذهب
Ibn Hishām · d. 761/1360
Ibn Hishām's middle primer, between the Qaṭr and the Mughnī: the Arabic text by section, with an index.
18 sections · ~45 min
Hermes Trismegistus (Greek)
The Hermetic treatises, word by word in Greek: the Poimandres, with its public-domain translations.
Poimandres
Ποιμάνδρης
Hermes Trismegistus (attributed) · anonymous, probably 2nd–3rd century CE
Corpus Hermeticum I, the whole treatise: Mind appears as Poimandres and shows the seer the light and the dark water, the Word, the seven governors, the Man who falls in love with his own form reflected in Nature, the ascent through the spheres, and the hymn 'Holy is God'.
32 sections · ~40 min · published translation
New in the library
- 28 September 202685 scholars' findings on Diotima's speech (Symposium 201d–212c)from Angela Hobbs, Martha C. Nussbaum, R. E. Allen, Pierre Grimes and 6 more · summaries by AI, with page citations
- 28 September 202655 scholars' findings on Faṣṣ Ādam (Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam, chapter 1)from William C. Chittick, Suʿād al-Ḥakīm, Itzchak Weismann, Claude Addas and 6 more · summaries by AI, with page citations