 Despite the significance of the above figures, none of them reached the eminence of the greatest master of gnostic and philosophical Sufism, Shaykh Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn ‘Arabī (1165–1240 CE) often referred to Shaykh al-Akbar (The Great Master). Ibn ‘Arabī, whose encyclopedic works, The Bezels of Wisdom (Fuṣūṣ al-ḥakam) and Meccean Victories (Futuḥāt al-Makkiyah), provide us with one of the most complex mystical paradigms in the Islamic mystical genre. Often referred to as the “Doctrine of the Unity of Being” (wahdat al-wūjūd), Ibn ‘Arabī’s philosophical mysticism offers a vast synthesis of gnostic and Sufi ideas as well as a type of philosophical discourse which, for the first time, formulates the Sufi doctrine. With Ibn ‘Arabī, we see a monumental effort to comment on a full array of metaphysical, cosmological, and psychological aspects of Gnosticism, thereby providing a vision of reality whose attainment requires the practice of the Sufi path. Ibn ‘Arabī’s philosophico-mystical edifice is a process of spiritual hermeneutics (ta’wīl) which relies on the language of symbolism to guide a novice from the exterior (ẓāhir) to the interior (bāṭin). For Ibn ‘Arabī, the entire cosmos represents signs (ayāt) which lend themselves to symbolic exegesis, a process whose pinnacle is the Universal Man (al-insān al-kāmil). Ibn ‘Arabī, whose doctrine of the Unity of Being (waḥdat al-wūjūd) has been interpreted by many to be pantheism, was nevertheless careful to argue that even though God dwells in things, but the world “is not” in God. For Ibn ‘Arabī, humans are microcosms and the universe is the macrocosm; the Universal Man is the one who realizes all of his inherent potentialities, including the Divine breath which was blown into man by God in the beginning of creation as the Qur’an says. For Ibn ‘Arabī, it is the spiritual realization of God within the soul that leads to union with God (see Nasr 1964; Chittick 1989 and 2007).