Ibn Arabi

Al-Sheikh al-Akbar, "the Greatest Master" — an Andalusian, born in Murcia a generation after Ibn Gabirol's Zaragoza fell silent, who wrote several hundred works and built the most complete metaphysical architecture Sufism ever produced: the divine Names as the structure through which the Absolute knows itself, the Five Presences as its graded worlds, the Perfect Human as its mirror. He is the Sufi the Kabbalah most resembles — same century as the Zohar, same Iberian soil, same instinct that God's unknowable essence must be approached through a structured array of divine aspects. No document connects him to the kabbalists of Gerona or Castile; the resemblance is the more remarkable for it.