 Ibn ‘Arabî referred to himself with fuller versions of his name, such as Abû ‘Abdallâh Muhammad ibn ‘Alî ibn al-‘Arabî al-Tâ’î al-Hâtimî (the last three names indicating his noble Arab lineage). He was born in Murcia in 1165 to the family of a minor official and received the standard education of a literatus, without any special attention to religious topics. In his early teens he underwent a visionary conversion “at the hands of Jesus” (albeit the Jesus of the Koran), and this resulted in an “opening” (futûh) of his soul toward the divine realm. Shortly thereafter, in about 1180, his father took him to meet his friend Averroes. Ibn ‘Arabî recounts an elliptical conversation in which he explained to the philosopher the limits of rational perception. Corbin has taken this event as a symbolic parting of ways between Islam and the West: with the help of Latin Averroism, Western thinkers were soon to pursue an exclusively rationalistic path leading “to the conflict between theology and philosophy, between faith and knowledge, between symbol and history” (Corbin 1969, 13). In contrast, Muslim intellectuals tended rather to ignore Averroes, though Avicenna, Suhrawardî, and other philosophers continued to be read, annotated, and improved upon. At the same time, no one could fail to notice Ibn ‘Arabî’s challenge to merely rational understanding, and many Muslim philosophers followed paths that undertook the harmonization of reason, mystical intuition, and revelation.