I first read William Chittick's
Imaginal Worlds about 15 years ago. It is an ambitious work, insofar as it attempts to provide a succinct summation of Ibn 'Arabi's (d. 1240 C.E.) life's work: a "theory of everything (and no-thing)." Having just read the book a second time, I was surprised to discover how much I'd retained. I think this may be due, in part, to the fact that Chittick constructed this volume from a collection of essays that he had written on other occasions but re-worked into chapters. As a consequence, the book is somewhat repetitive. Given the subject matter, the repetition is helpful for, without it, the effort to comprehend the Shaykh al-Akbar's visionary system would likely issue only in bewilderment.
That said, it is difficult to say more about such a book and such a subject. Ibn 'Arabi was clearly a genius of world-class stature. If you accept his premises, it is almost impossible to avoid his conclusions. In order to accept his premises, however, you must also take on faith propositions that violate the Aristotelian law of non-contradiction--re-styling them, in Kierkegaardian fashion, as "paradoxes"--and demonstrating, yet again, that the religious imagination is the human "faculty" that never loses patience with
aporia.
