“This is an erudite book by one of the foremost historians of Ibn `Arabî’s life and teachings. The author provides copious documentation that Ibn `Arabî’s views on the central role of Muhammad in Islamic spirituality were shared by a wide range of theologians, jurists, and Sufis from the beginning of the religion down to modern times.”

…Claude Addas’s The House of the Prophet: Devotion to Muhammad in Islamic Mysticism is a masterful historical survey of the centuries of theological arguments centered around the metaphysical “Reality of Muhammad” and the “Family of Muhammad.” Those influential interpretations served to defend a vast range of personal and public devotional practices (such as intercessory prayers, the birthday and Mi’raj of the Prophet, or Sunni understandings of the “people”/Family of Muhammad). Eventually they also helped to explain the widespread devotional practices surrounding the “Friends of God” (awliya’), such as the visitation of tomb-shrines, related annual festivals, and serving as intermediaries in our personal interactions with the spiritual world. Her focus on the key intellectual figures in these theological disputes (both ‘ulama’ and Sufi scholars, from the Maghreb to India) always comes back to the deepest, most complete development of these conceptions in the 13th-century works of the “Greatest Shaykh,” Ibn ‘Arabi, along with their influential elaboration by his 14th-century follower ‘Abd al-Karim al-Jili…. This magisterial study of the centuries-long, slowly unfolding intellectual backdrop to those omnipresent spiritual practices and beliefs offers a progressive historical “mirror” reflecting the creative spread of all these popular practices and institutions (including, but far surpassing what people now call Sufism).