0.2.2 - Number of books attributed to the elder sheikh

As a main source, Yahya relied directly on Awwad's edition of the Index and Abdul-Rahman Badawi's edition of the Leave, as well as the research published by Brockelmann in his "History of Arab Literature", "Kashf al-Dhunūn: The Unveiling of Dissonances" by Haji Khalifa, among others. As a result, he mentions in his classification of the books of Sheikh Muhyiddin Ibn al-Arabi about 1,395 titles, of which 539 are duplicates. After removing the duplicates, the number remains 846 books, but many of these books are apocryphal and do not really belong to Sheikh Muhyiddin; they may have been attributed to him for various reasons, such as their contents may be similar to the sheikh's style in his books, and perhaps some of these books are in fact written by some of his disciples who have been influenced by his science and his style, or perhaps by some other Sufis. There are also many other books, in various spiritual subjects, which are falsely attributed to Sheikh Muhyiddin for the purpose of promoting them and spreading them among the readers, which has affected the sheikh's standing and made some people misunderstand him and underestimate his knowledge.

Therefore, the books confirmed by Sheikh Muhyiddin are most likely mentioned in the Index and the Leave or in his other well-known books. This amounts to about 350 works, of which we now have only 110 works, either in manuscript or print editions, while the rest, about 240, are still missing. Although these statistics, which were completed by Yahya, are inaccurate because of the existence of some overlapping and repeated titles, they give a good idea of Sheikh Muhyiddin's books away from the exaggeration that can be found in some references, such as the anonymous manuscript on which Awwad relied for his edition of the Index, which states that one of the enthusiasts counted about 4,000 books attributed to Sheikh Muhyiddin, while others said that some copies of the Index or the Leave contain more than 500 titles, as we will see in detail in the corresponding sections below.