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0.2.1 - The Classification of Osman Yahya

The study presented by Osman Yahya for his PhD, at the University of Sorbonne in 1958, under the supervision of the Orientalist Prof. Louis Massignon and Prof. Robert Brunschwig, provides the best general statistic of the Ibn al-Arabi's books up to that date. In this study, Yahia explored the history and classification of the writings of Sheikh Muhyiddin. This study was published in 1964, in French, by the French Institute of Oriental Studies in Damascus, under the title "Histoire et Classification de l'Oeuvre d'Ibn ʿArabi". Subsequently, Sheikh Ahmed Mohammed al-Ťayeb, former president of Al-Azhar University and the current Sheikh of Al-Azhar, translated the book into Arabic and published it in Cairo in 2001. In this study, the author examined some 1,590 titles, indicating what was authentic, what was apocryphal, or what titles whose authenticity could not be verified, and also indicating the works which are original titles from those which are summaries, commentaries or simply having title variations from other originals.

Osman Yahia's classification was based on various sources, which were divided into direct and indirect. The direct sources are the books of Sheikh Muhyiddin himself; the most important of which are the above-mentioned Index and Leave, as well as various references in his other confirmed books. As for the indirect sources, these are the preceding researches and articles published in this regard, the most important of which was presented by the German Semiticist and Orientalist Carl Brockelmann, Kūrkīs ʿAwwād, Ťāhir Rifʿat, Muhammad al-Safāīhī al-Tûnusī, and others, in addition to his painstaking research in manuscripts vaults where he examined a large number of libraries and their manuscripts indices and added critical notes to each related title denoting its subject and numbers in the various library cabinets in the East and West, adding also any important auditions and other certificates or statements that can be found therein, and the date of its classification and the date of its copying. Hence, this was really a keen and outstanding work.

However, a careful review of this great research shows that the researcher has often relied on library catalogs, or book cards, without consulting the actual manuscripts, the issue which he himself criticized Brockelmann, at a time when he should have been extremely precise since his research is devoted for the classification and history of Sheikh Muhyiddin's books, while Brockelmann was conducting a comprehensive survey of The Islamic heritage as a whole. That's why this hard work came out full of mistakes and repeated titles. In addition, the direct sources on which Yahia relied, namely the "Index" and "Leave", were not properly edited, and often did not distinguish between the original titles and those added by the transcribers at the end of the original text, as we will explain in the following sections.

Based on these observations, and despite the great effort it took to do this hard work by Osman Yahya, it contained many mistakes that can be avoided. During the following decades, some studies have emerged that corrected many of these mistakes, most notably those carried out by the Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society in Oxford (MIAS), through a major project aimed at collecting and classifying the manuscripts related to the writings of Sheikh Muhyiddin and some of his close disciples, but these papers, published in the society's journal as well as other scientific journals, are still fragmented and not collected in a single book that identifies sheikh Muhyiddin's books and determines what is authentic and what is apocryphal.