Course on Ibn ꜤArabī's *Bezels of Wisdom* (fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam) starting in April
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A week after Ramadan, on a Saturday my time (which would be the 19th of April here in Australia), I will begin the course on Ibn ꜤArabī's *Bezels of Wisdom* (fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam). I have looked around platforms and Zoom appears to be the only viable and doable platform to pull this off properly. However, Zoom is charging like a bleeding bull and I would not be able to afford it on my own. So I thought long and hard about it, and I settled on charging $56 USD (United States dollars) per person for the whole course. The reason for the number is because it will take us 56 sessions to cover this text properly, devoting each session to half a chapter. There is a preamble and 27 overall chapters to the *Bezels of Wisdom* (fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam) which gives us 28 x 2 = 56.
If you are interested, you can use PayPal to reserve your place with that payment above. The account associated with it is hurakhsh@gmail.com . If PayPal is a problem, we can talk also about direct debit.
I will be using both Ralph Austin and Caner Dagli's English translations, and I will be refering to the critical edition of the Arabic text by SH Ahmad. Mohammad Khajavi's Persian translation is also linked below for any Iranians wanting to join in.
As it gets closer to the first session, like a week before the start of the first one, those who have enrolled for this online course will get an email with general instructions on the first reading to prepare for, which will be the preamble, as well as the link for the Zoom room. I also wish this course to be an interactive one rather than just me talking about the text, so I definitely want people's perspectives and insights on what they have been reading rather than me just monologuing about it. One reason for this is that, unless absolutely necessary when
we get stumped, I want this seminar to move away from the established
and largely ossified commentary tradition on this text and offer our own
understanding and commentaries on the fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam instead. So what
Qaysari, Jandi or Kashani may have said about a particular passage of
the Bezels of Wisdom will be secondary and maybe even irrelevant to
how we come to understand and interact with this text today.
Once again, the Pdfs of the texts are linked below.
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Ralph Austin's translation of the fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam https://drive.google.com/file/d/19QHtURucKvS2UinHOztvOht111NiY1jn/view?usp=drive_link
Caner Dagli's translation of the fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BDvNFwZ6FqtdOVklrdrIUHli8C9rbDGz/view?usp=drive_link
SN Aḥmad's 2013 critical edition of the Arabic text of the fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam https://drive.google.com/file/d/10Ng-3Ji8gYmNCICEDVzVmDF2IUVzcpaP/view?usp=drive_link
Mohammad Khajavi's Persian translation of the fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1usomqDRoH5C_Wc4q3NSd_U3poclyUy_y/view?usp=drive_link
