It is not very easy to trace back the influence of Shaykh Muhyiddin outside the Islamic world, primarily since many medieval and early modern European intellectuals were much reluctant in citing the sources from which they drew their philosophical doctrines, especially when they extensively depended on the preceding Muslim scholars. However, early in the previous century, the Roman Catholic priest Miguel Asin Palacios (1871-1944) showed that the celebrated Italian poet and philosopher, Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), born twenty five years after Ibn al-Arabi, had unmistakably drawn on his works to produce his monumental epic poem “La commedia”, which played an instrumental role in shaping the literary tradition in European culture.

Nevertheless, orientalists began to formally study the works of the Greatest Master only in the recent decades, as we shall describe further in section 3.4, although sometimes also erroneously designating him as a “Spanish mystic” or a Sufi of “Spanish origin”!

Some writers have even proclaimed that he “was Spanish in origin and was educated in the Spanish tradition.” as we can read in the Encyclopedia Britannica's “Guide to Islam” citep[p. 54]smith2017islamic. Other authors, such as Stephen Schwartz, in “The Other Islam: Sufism and the Road to Global Harmony”, suggested that Sufism is an Islamic appropriation of Christian mystical traditions, asserting that Ibn al-Arabi's “Spanish Sufism inaugurated a truly European Islam”, which became a model for later moderate Muslims, as he claims citep[p.63]schwartz2008other!