Ibn al-Arabi was born in Murcia in 1165 and died in Damascus in 1240. Between these dates he studied, travelled and wrote across the western and eastern Islamic lands. A chronological approach connects particular works with places and periods rather than treating the writings as one undifferentiated system. Historians also distinguish firmly dated events from later biographical traditions.
How to study this subject
Biographical traditions combine the author’s own testimony, observations by people close to him, and later accounts shaped by literary and devotional conventions. A chronology is therefore an interpretation of evidence, not a seamless eyewitness record. Dates and itineraries should be labeled according to confidence and source type.
For a working timeline, record the event, its Hijri date when available, any Gregorian conversion, the cited source, and a confidence level. When biographies conflict, keep the disagreement visible instead of silently choosing the more attractive story. Maps, manuscript colophons and references within the works can be valuable, but none should be treated as a complete travel diary.
Read dates together with the kind of evidence that supports them: autobiographical references, contemporaneous witnesses and retrospective biographies. The calendar conventions of medieval sources do not always map neatly onto a modern day-by-day timeline.
Primary sources and further reading
These are contextual reading links, not exact passage-level citations.