ID	4
Author	Aḥmed Bīcān (d. after 1466)
Work Title	Ḳitābu’l-Muntehā ale’l-Fuṣūṣ (“The Book of Utmost Point of the Bezels”)
Alternative Titles	El-Muntehā (The Utmost Point)
Manuscripts	More than 15 mss. in various libraries (see Ahmed Bîcan, El-Münteha. Fusûsu’l- Hikem Üzerine Bir Çalışma, Ayşe Beyazıt (ed.), Istanbul: İnsan, 2011, 57-58)
Editions	editor: Ayşe Beyazıt; title: El-Münteha. Fusûsu’l- Hikem Üzerine Bir Çalışma; publisher: İnsan; date: 2011. [Based on a copy of the initial version (1453), copied in 1595]
Date	1453-1466
Content Summary	Aḥmed Bīcān’s spiritual manual written in the year of Constantinople’s conquest (revised in 1466) is a translation and reinterpretation of his brother Meḥmed’s Arabic commentary on Ibn ʿArabī’s Fuṣūṣ. Its second version expands the initial one by extrapolating novel pious and mystical topics with a heightened eschatological intensity and a lengthy dedication to the reigning sultan. Bīcāns’ reinterpretation of Fuṣūṣ constitutes a departure from the mainstream scholarly Akbarian understanding. These are rather re-rendering of ʿArabī’s sometimes indecipherable comments on vita prophetae to lay readers. The first two sections are in line with the mystical reinterpretation of vita prophetae proper in the manner of Ibn ʿArabī (added to which the lives of Four Guided Caliphs and some prominent Sufi masters). With the third section comes up the idea of the Universe as the mirror of the act of Creation and thence, the idea of Cosmology. The fourth section is a small dictionary of major mystical terms based el-Kāşānī’s (d. 1335), Iṣṭilāḥāt; the fifth is an abridged translation of Herevī’s Menāzil which is about the cursus in the sufi path. The sixth section is about the mysteries of Islamic obligations (farīże) and similar to many mystical orthopraxy manuals produced in the 15th century Asia Minor prepared more or less in Bayramī manner. The seventh section is a compilation prepared in the spirit of mystical pearls of wisdom. The last one is dedicated to eschatology and the end of the World with a somewhat apocalypticist overtones.
Bibliography	Ahmed Bîcân, El-Münteha. Fusûsu’l- Hikem Üzerine Bir Çalışma, Ayşe Beyazıt (ed.), Istanbul: İnsan, 2011; Carlos Grenier, “The Yazıcıoğlus and the Spiritual Vernacular of the Early Ottoman Frontier”, Unpublished Ph. D. Dissertation, 2017; Laban Kaptein, Apocalypse and the Antichrist Dajjal in Islam: Ahmed Bijan’s Eschatology Revisted. Asch: privately published, 2011; Aynur Koçak, Ahmet Bicanʼin eserleri uzerine bir inceleme. Istanbul: Üçdal Neşriyat, 2003. viii-categories literature; marvels; Sufism; natural sciences ix-tags: cosmology ; eschatology
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