How the biography reconstructs chronology

I have made every effort to arrange the sections of this book in the chronological order of events in the life of the Greatest Master, Muhyiddin Ibn al-Arabi. Yet this can never be done with complete precision, because we lack sufficient sources and depend almost entirely on dates mentioned by the Master, may God be pleased with him. He often relates events without a date and sometimes without specifying the place or country. Nevertheless, the dates he supplies are sufficient to give an accurate sequence of the principal events of his life. We do not doubt the dates of his major journeys and movements between Andalusia, the Maghreb, the East—Egypt, Mecca and Syria—and Anatolia. This is the basis on which we divided the book into the chapters mentioned above. But the ordering of events within each region where he stayed can never reach complete precision. Approximation is therefore unavoidable, relying on conjecture that may be right or wrong.