Twenty Seven Chapters, Each Keyed to a Prophet

The Fusus al-Hikam, usually translated The Bezels of Wisdom, is organized into twenty seven short chapters, each built around a specific prophet recognized in the Quran, from Adam to Muhammad, and each chapter draws out a particular facet of divine wisdom that Ibn Arabi associates with that prophet's spiritual character. Ibn Arabi describes the book's origin as visionary rather than composed in the ordinary sense, recounting that the Prophet Muhammad appeared to him in Damascus in 1229 and handed him the text already complete, instructing him to share it, a framing that positions the work as received rather than authored in the way his other writings were.

Chittick's study of Ibn Arabi's metaphysics stresses that the doctrine later commentators labelled wahdat al wujud, the oneness of being, is a summary term coined after Ibn Arabi rather than a phrase he used himself, and that the Fusus develops the underlying ideas through dense, often paradoxical statements about the relationship between the divine names and the created world rather than through the systematic vocabulary later tradition built around it. Ibn Arabi wrote a great deal else besides the Fusus, yet later tradition singled out this comparatively short text as the definitive summary of his teaching, assigning it a concentrated authority the much larger Futuhat never quite displaced in ordinary study circles.