Stephen Hirtenstein is a co-founder of Anqa Publishing, and served as editor of the Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabi Society from its inception in 1982 up to 2024.
After reading History at King's College, Cambridge, he began his studies of the works of Ibn 'Arabi at the Beshara School of Intensive Esoteric Education which ran 6-month courses at Sherborne House in Gloucestershire and at Chisholme House in Scotland. After a teaching career and raising a family in Oxford, he turned to writing, running courses and giving talks on Ibn ʿArabi's thought at conferences and venues across the world. In 1998 he founded Anqa Publishing to provide a way of publishing books by and on Ibn 'Arabi and making them more widely available. He also currently works as a senior editor on the Encyclopaedia Islamica project for the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London, and currently lives in Worcestershire.
In 2001, under the auspices of the Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi Society, he began exploring the surviving manuscripts of Ibn 'Arabi's works in library collections in Türkiye and elsewhere. This initial project of cataloguing and digitising has given rise to the recently established Muhyiddin Archive Project (MAP), which aims to provide a new and detailed description of the verified corpus of works by Ibn ʿArabi. Building on the legacy of Osman Yahia and others, this represents the next stage of a long-term effort to preserve, catalogue and make available the living manuscript heritage of Ibn ʿArabi.
In addition to having led tours in the footsteps of Ibn ʿArabi in Spain and Anatolia, he has been concentrating in recent years on translation (especially works by Ibn 'Arabi and Abdullah Bosnevi into English).