Dr Seyyed Mostafa Mohaghegh Damad

Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

Earth was bestowed upon mankind in a pure and pristine condition and sworn not to abuse and destroy this God given gift. Nonetheless, today we observe a savage abuse of its natural resources, total destruction of spaces of certain inhabitants in different parts of the world, extermination of certain species, and ultimately ruining the earth, water and the space altogether to un irreplaceable degree.

Fortunately today, the environmentalists and experts are not the only one recognizing the enormity of the problem. There is a kind of rising public awareness and worldwide outrage in many parts of the world, against irresponsible behavior of certain countries and international establishments being the major cause of these destructions.

The reality is that the root cause of the crisis in the modern time should be sought in man’s view and interpretation of his natural environment. In another word, the main problem is in man’s epistemology and worldview.

In our opinion, the true alternative and the solution lie in return to the perception of religions towards nature and environment.

Keywords: Environment, destruction of species, inhabitants, and natural resources, religious guidance(teachings), nature, spiritual conception of nature, scientific approach, culture of protection of nature.

Introduction

Enjoining the soundness and protection of the natural environment constituted one of the most principle teachings in the history of divine religions. Faithful’s believed that on the eve of creation the Lord had pledged man not to bring corruption and ruin to the earth for which he had forsaken the Heaven. Man was sworn not to betray this trust, i.e. this pristine and pure earth. He was forewarned sufficiently against the dire repercussions of not upholding this trust. Yet, the fact is that humanity attention to this matter and the insidious calamity that has befallen it, seems to an entirely modern issue. Natural environment crisis is the main issue that preoccupies modern humanity. Ferocious and cruel approach towards nature in recent centuries which stemmed from expansionist motives [and has led to] relentless exploitation of raw materials, sea pollution because of the bitter phenomena of oil spills, slash and burn of jungles, global warming and thinning of the ozone layer, has finally roused man from the stupor of dereliction. The innocent ululation of the birds because of sumptuous hunting, the extinction of forests, and the stillness of the flying birds, the death of beautiful and colourful fish and whales, has opened the eyes and ears of the human beings so much that they are dedicating themselves to this task [ environmental protection].  It has moved his hard heart and made him to consider and find solutions the repercussions of this untenable style of living and consequence of this dominating and monopolistic way of life which seemingly considers any other life-form on the face of the earth as being insignificant.

Religious leaders fell

Many centuries came to pass in human life. The call of divine messengers and religious leaders fell on the deaf ears of aggressor and domineering human being. They failed turn his squandering eyes, nor tamed his cruel heart, while he continued to satiate his instincts like animals, seeking pleasures, joys and exploitations. Just as the holy Quran draws the picture of humanity at the time of Its Revelation:

“…They have hearts wherewith they understand not, eyes wherewith they see not, and ears wherewith they hear not. They are like cattle,….”[1]

Man finally was caught in the painful infliction resulting from his own misdeeds; the horrible perversion that he fomented himself, had made his life miserable.

Corruption has appeared in the land and the sea on account of that which man’s hands have wrought…[2]

Now it seems as if humanity is going through the first moments of wakefulness at the dawn of alertness, rubbing his drowsy eyes. The very eyes that had been closed in the deep slumber of heedlessness in the darkness of centuries.

Fortunately today, the environment scientists and experts are not the only one recognizing the enormity of the situation. There is a kind of rising public reaction and popular protest in all inhabited parts of the planet earth. This is a promising tiding; for I believe that as long as this important issue is understood by all, and the jeopardy threatening humanity is not publicly discernible; the cries of a handful of people in form of “Green parties” would not reach anywhere and will not result in the ultimate solution, i.e. a popular mobilization of humanity; otherwise the issue shall remain buried within the conference proceedings and academic papers. In solving the problem, what is of paramount importance on which everything else depend, is to have the masses of humanity understand the problem. Then all that remains is to find the root causes and to point out on the furtive secret that conforms and complies with he sound, natural and pure disposition of human being; so that a proper solution and a logical strategy could be devised.

Our time is replete with cautionary saviours in form of individuals or groups. Green parties have significant presence everywhere. Thousands of articles and books are being written and numerous screenplays and films are being made. Yet the sheer enormity and gravity of the situation is such as if all these efforts are of no efficacy, and serve only as placebo for such an illness. What is the mystery behind this?

It seems that the riddle of the failure lies in ignoring the causes and pursuing the results. Should we not confront the issue in a fundamental way, and reach its roots, every efforts made is like giving placebo to a patient suffering from festering infectious cyst within himself. His condition is best illustrated by an Iranian poet:

Alaji Nama Kaz Delam Khoon Nayayad, Sereshk az rokham pak kardan Che Hasel?

Find me a cure for no blood comes forth from my heart, What is the use of cleaning tears from my face?

A major portion of the efforts exerted by the environmental activists is merely in form of environmental engineering. As if instead of solving the problem, they are wiping the statement of the problem. One group claims that if we could completely transform our means of transportation and eliminate fossil fuel as a source of energy, the problem would be totally solved. Another group also states that there are parts of the earth that are still untouched and man must abandon the polluted areas and move into virgin and sound areas to be free of corruption and pollution.

While appreciating all the efforts exerted towards better care from the inhabited earth using more rational means of production, transportation and similar matters, and acknowledging fact that there should be a constant drive, effort and thought given towards achieving more useful and appropriate alternate forms of technologies and lauding the works done in this respect, we believe that in spite of their scientific and scientific prominence these accomplishments alone do not hold the key to the final solution to the problem and release from the crisis. The question still remains that why the living habitat of humanity has become so unsightly and unpleasant? Why the situation has reached a point that a group of men, now that they have polluted a part of planet earth, wish to leave that place and go somewhere else so that once again they afflict that place with the same adversity? What is the primary solution? Could an alternative be conceived that could reconcile man with his natural environment, so that he would refrain from merciless exploitation and infringement, and live peacefully embracing nature, clean and pure air and listen to the refreshing murmurs of doves, birds and fish?

The root cause of the crisis in the modern time

The reality is that the root cause of the crisis in the modern time should be sought in man’s view and interpretation of his natural environment. In another word, the main problem is in man’s epistemology and worldview.

We hold the view that fanatical scientism, or in another words, rigid and inflexible scientific view lacking any spiritual support and interpretation and description of the world through the narrow portal of empirical science which itself is  the major gift and achievement of industrial development in recent centuries, is the main factor of destruction, pollution and ruin of humanity’s natural environment. In the modern lexicon, Science has replaced “Faith” and worship of earlier human beings.

It was French scientist, August Conte who first stated that the course of human knowledge has three stages: 1) Divine or Godly, 2) Philosophical or Dialectic, and 3) Scientific. At the divine stage, human being attributed all the affairs to will of God and supernatural. At the philosophical stage, human mind became capable of experimentation and abstraction and thus attributed the natural affairs to the powers that were unseen but their effects were visible. At this stage man sought actual cause or final cause for natural events. In the third stage or the scientific or investigative stage, imagination and rationality become function of observation and experience: something is valid when it could be sensed and observed. Conte believed that humanity has passed through the first two stages and has now reached the third stage. No longer would man fruitlessly clamor for things that are of no use for him, and would only deal with matters that would benefit life and would be of use. In the later days of his life, August Conte tasted the yen for tenderness, and upon the basis of his philosophical convictions established a creed called Religion de l’Humanite[3], and built a house of worship and established a series of rites of worship. He maintained that nowadays no creed would be acceptable and followed unless the scientists of the age accept it; and that  the scientists have passed through the divine and metaphysical stage, and any creed that they could accept on the basis of conviction and faith inevitably must conform with empirical science. In another words, science is the future religion of human being. Conte then added that modern science could only accept and worship a unified being, and that being is humanity which is above all things and persons, in which all individuals, both past and future, are a member and have strove towards progress and prosperity of the human kind. This entity must be worshiped. August Conte called it le Grand Etre[4]  and appointed himself as Le Grande Pretre[5] of this creed. Of course under religion of humanity, supplication does not mean worship, rather it means nurturing and nursing.[6]

At any rate, he stated decisively that the future religion of human being should adapt itself to science. His prediction was not so off mark, for in recent centuries, science has become the great icon and the absolute object of veneration for human beings. No, not even an object of veneration, but an exclusionist god that was intolerant of any rival and partner. A lifeless, soulless icon who cut down without hearing any conceptions of meaning, spirituality and soul who did not bow before it in utter submission. Spirituality, ethics, philosophy whether natural or metaphysical, would have had no place unless they were given the seal of approval by science.

The modern science is not a peculiar method of knowledge about nature

The modern science is not a peculiar method of knowledge about nature, but rather a thorough and encompassing philosophy that reduces all realities to the material level of functions and phenomena, and under no condition it is willing to acknowledge

The existence of so-called unscientific viewpoints. Whereas other views derived from seasoned doctrines, while not denying the legitimacy of science as a limited matter confined and encompassed by the material dimension of realities, maintain constantly the existence of a web of inner relationships, that links the material nature to the realm of the divine, and the outward appearances of the objects visible to an inner reality. Exclusive confinement of the realities of the universe  to their material scope by modern science caused scholars, especially in the West, to ignore paying attention to the more inner causes and means of environmental crisis most of the time.

Humanity sought refuge in science in order to escape from hardships in order to attain a better and more comfortable life; but the very science that came to interpret the  world surrounding man devoid of form of life, spirit and meaning, made man to make his world more constrictive and painful under the shadow of ignorance and neglect of inner and spiritual concepts of the natural world. According to Quran: And Whoever turns away from my reminder, for him is surely a straitened life…”[7].  Science that was supposed to be man’s companion and sympathizer, became his nemesis and according to Saadi, a poet from Shiraz:

Shod Gholami ke Ab-e Jouy Arad; Ab-e Jouy Amad o Gholam Bebord

A servant went to fetch water from the stream; The water of the stream took the servant away

For the urbanite man,  modern science has made the realm of nature into an object devoid of meaning. It has secularized the cosmos and made it asunder from the Divine splendor. It is not a mirror whose beauties reflect the beauty of righteousness. Moreover, the natural cosmos, lacks any kind of unity and oneness with human being, man considers himself apart from nature and is estranged to it, a stranger that lacks any kind of sanctity. If there is any sanctity, the modern man maintains it solely for himself. Thus modern man does not look compassionately to nature, he simply has a material, exploitative and applied view. [Nature] is not his beloved nor he loves it, it is not seen as his life companion to whom he feels responsible while enjoying its company. Rather to the modern man, [nature] has become like a lady of the night being there merely to be taken sexual advantage of, to whom he does not feel any responsibility or duty. The outcome of such notion was that like a woman of the night, the nature has gradually fallen into decay, as if spending its final days. It has become so old and impaired that it had fallen from man’s grace and could no longer be of a service in his dominion.

It should be noted here, that in fact through its interpretation of nature, modern science has helped to unlock the secret and the mystery buried within the nature and character of man. By nature, human being is  an entity set to dominate and control all that is outside him. Accordingly, he wants to dominate and transgress upon nature. Many western philosophers, and even few Islamic philosophers, are of the opinion that man is unlike what the ancient Greeks said Human is civilized by nature, but rather he is an aggressor by nature and exploiter by nature.

A seventeenth century, English Philosopher named Hobbes[8] was convinced that man is by nature always at war and that he maintains the right of preservation only for his own[9].

He said: “By nature man is selfish and egotistical. He is motivated by selfish desires that need to be satiated and fulfilled. In its natural state, man’s life is an arena, ugly, horrid, cruel, savage and short.”

Allameh Tabatabaei believes

Among present day Islamic philosophers, Allameh Seyyed Muhammad Hussein Tabatabaie believes: ´Man has a relationship with his own faculties and parts. This relationship was brought into existence and is real. Hands, feet, eye and other parts of his body are undeniably controlled and used by him. Man has the very same relationship with nature outside his being; essentially considering all external objects and even other human beings for his own, i.e. he considers them as his tools. He looks at all external matters, whether inanimate, animals and even plants with a view towards their employment [or application].”  [Allameh] believes that  man is by nature, created as an aggressor and exploiter, and that ethics is a secondary tenet for him. In another words, man is not civilized by nature, rather he is civilized by consequence and exhibition, and that Aristotle quotation that man is by nature is civilized, really meant that it is secondary nature and not primary nature.

Desanctifying the nature

Briefly, human bring is naturally disposed to engage nature and overcome it as much as it is within his power and to employ it towards his goals and enjoyments. Modern science has totally theorized this concept for him by desanctifying the nature. There remains no longer any meaning within the high mountain ranges, boundless oceans and the heavens for man to obtain. It seems rather that their majesty and grandeur annoys his dominating and arrogant disposition. By scaling and conquering them, he wanted to deprive them of their natural majesty and make them lay prostrate at his feet. No longer the spiritual experience of flight towards the kingdom of heavens as illustrated in Dante’s “Divine Comedy” for Christianity and nightly flights to heaven as in the Ascent of the Holy Prophet of Islam, is the aspiration of modern man. Conquest of the mountain peaks, flying in spacecraft and travelling to the planets in the solar system, has made him proud. He sang the hymn of victory over nature and celebrated over the destroyed ruins. So successful was modern science in its attempt at desanctifying nature, that regrettably even the religious persons too lost their divine and sublime feeling towards nature and its importance.

Eliade wrote: ” The cosmic praise and the mystery of nature’s participation as in Christian Drama, has become unattainable for the Christians living in a modern city. Religious experience is no longer available to the existence. In the final analysis, this experience is totally private and personal. Salvation is an issue concerning only man and his god. At most, man might recognize that he is responsible not only in relation to God, but also before history. However, in this (Man-God-History) associations there remains no place for the universe and the creatures within. From this perspective, even to a true Christian, it appears that the world is no longer felt as the work of God.”[10]

The confess

We must confess the fact that there is a striking neglect observed about this among custodians of religions in general, including Christian philosophers especially Protestants. For the majority of the important trends in philosophy of religion in recent centuries had dealt with the subject of man and history and had focussed on the issue of salvation and emancipation of man as a separate and single entity. For instance what is seen in the works of the famous contemporary theosopher, P. Tilich, is merely apprehension about human being as an individual separate and disconnected from the world, before god.  Works by Barth and Bruner suggest as if an Iron Curtain has been laid around the natural world. They believe that nature cannot teach man anything about God, and therefore is of no theosophical or spiritual gain. R. Bultman’s works have generally ignored the importance of the spiritual and divine dimension of nature, and had brought it to the level of a synthesized construct introduced for sustained life of progressive man.

Unfortunately the western churches, religious institutes, and the Islamic seminaries in Muslim countries, did not show much reaction before recent decades. In spite of the existing resources  originating from the depth of Christianity and Islam, they did not embark on compiling separate books entitled Environmental Divinity [or theology] so that to direct  man towards the spiritual aspect of the natural world around him.

Silence of religious centers and lack of serious scholarly works had developed the situation to the point that in the recent twentieth century writings, the learning and teachings of divine religions, instead of demanding have taken the debtor status, and are being reprimanded as an accused party. For some of the scholars who are preoccupied with the environmental crisis have produced works in which it seems as if they wish to have the Unitarian religions shoulder a major portion of the culpability for the ruin of nature and environmental pollution instead of pinning it on the internal developments within the western civilization that had started from medieval ages, Renaissance and seventeenth century.

For instance Arnold Toynbee, the great English historian and philosopher of twentieth century, has expressed unique and controversial hypotheses about Philosophy of history, and periodic rise and fall of civilizations. He believes that the Unitarian religions have unwarrantedly came to spoil man more than he deserves. Just because they have taught him  that God has created the world for him, that everything belongs to you, that all the mountains, seas and plains have been created for man’s better life and his use, and that he can do whatever he desires. This way of thought had led him to unbridled exploitation.[11]

Such thinkers ignore the fact that the unitary religion of Islam, which belongs to the very same succession of the unitary and Abrahamic religions of Christianity and Judaism, has never lost its mindfulness towards the sacred character of nature. Later on, we would point out that how Quranic quotations express the sanctity of nature. We shall also see how the Christianity and Judaism in East, unlike what we see later in West, had never taught [nor promulgated] the attitude and view point for dominating nature and laying it to waste. This is pure allegation. The teachings of unitary religions are not the cause of this crisis, but rather they are the only way out and solution for the crisis and dilemma that have come to grip man in modern times.

The later decades of twentieth century

At any rate in the later decades of twentieth century, amid the joy and rapture of conquering and commanding the nature, Man has awakened from the intoxication from the feeling of pride and victory of nature, and has recognized that what has been devastated here had been the value of victor, i.e. humanity. Fortunately at least the unanimous majority of thinkers in today world believe that the very essence of the existence of man is threatened and instead of man deciding the merit of science and technology, man’s own constructs have been transformed into the criteria for establishing his value and authority; it is now time for him to revise the [his] general view of the world. According to Schoen: “ It is no longer human reason that determines what is man? What is reason? What is Truth. Rather it is the machine that determines these subjects using physics, chemistry and biology. Under these conditions, man’s mind and thoughts is more than ever dependent upon the ‘space’ that has been created and established by his knowledge, and then after it is the very science and machines that in turn create man”[12].

Yet, in spite of the mindfulness and alertness of world scientific centers which is fortunate, regrettably the note of protest does not go beyond the limited confines of environmental supporters and authorities who have understood the depth of tragedy, and the general conscience of human community is not alerted. Whereas the ultimate solution, requires unanimous efforts and dedication of humanity. The environmental crisis would not subside as long as the feeling of kindness and compassion towards the outer world has not replaced the sense of domination and arrogance in the depth and every corner of the hearts of all humanity living on planet earth.

Our opinion

In our opinion, the true alternative and the solution at this junction, is return towards the perception of religions. More than past, today man has much readiness to accept teachings of religions. That is to say, inasmuch as his understanding and intelligence has grown, he would better understand and accept the religious concepts; this is especially so given the fact that the modern man has experienced the ineffectualness of atheistic perceptions and removal of spirituality from his natural environment, and he had tasted their bitter outcomes. Contemporary man, is repentant of his sin and penitent before Lord and has recoursed to God and seeks forgiveness for past transgressions. This is a critical and invaluable opportunity for religious institutions and clerics to have the religion recounted and presented in a way appropriate with the march of time, so as to embrace with kindness the modern man who has confessed to his sin. To bring back sanctity to nature by citing original religious sources and scriptures. Certainly should man look at the world around him through religious beliefs, no such ravage would ever take place.

What we mean by religion, in its widest and universal sense, includes all the beliefs and worldviews that have been studied and investigated under this subject. Thus our view here is not solely confined to religion as defined as “Submission of man before a superior force” that would inevitably lead to the Lord and the unitary religions [ the great formal religions of the world]. Official religion is a collection of principle precepts and deeds that is undertaken with an aim of linking man to a sublime power particular to a society or a community. Our intent in the present discussion, however, is linked to all tenets, words and deeds that are directly or indirectly effective with respect to preservation and safeguarding of environment. In another words, religion in this contexts applies to any system of beliefs that imparts meaning to the world, transforms man’s view, and calls for application of conscience and ethics, i.e. an inner strength and a manner of physical way of life based on enjoining good and abstaining from evil. A worldview coupled with spirituality and uprightness, is the original core of all beliefs that we mean by religion in the widest sense of the word.

The proof is the fact that all religions play this role in this general sense, and this is not something particular only to the Abrahamic religions. When we look up the Hindu tradition, we would meet a nature metaphysical belief about nature.  It is thus that  we see the growth and blossoming of many sciences within the embrace of Hinduism, some of which have come to influence the west, through Islam. In the Hindu tradition, our attention is drawn to Vedantic belief of Atman or Maya. A belief where in the existence, is considered not as an absolute reality, but rather as a veil that has covered the transcendental self[13]. This view is very similar to the theory of Names and Attributes in the Islamic Gnosticism. In Islamic Gnosticism, the world and whatever it holds, are manifestation of the Names and Attributes of the Righteous which we would deal with later on.

Eastern Religions

In Eastern Religions, especially in Taoism and in the Confucian doctrine, we observe a form of devotion towards nature and understanding its metaphysical significance, which is of utmost importance. The same respectful attitude towards nature, coupled with a strong sense of symbolism and a form of awareness about the clarity and focus of universe and its transparency from the standpoint of metaphysical truths, can also be found in Japan. Shintoism strongly reinforces this perception. Thus in Far Eastern art, most notably in Taoist and Zen traditions, drawings of natural landscapes are true portraits [of nature]. They do not cause a sensual delight in the spectator, but rather convey the benefaction, compassion and beauty and serve as means of union and oneness with transcendental truth[14]. This is the very essence that a Muslim gnostic, Saadi Shirazi expresses:

Tang Cheshman Nazar be miveh konnand; Ma Tamashagar Bostanim

Narrow-sighted Niggards look at the fruit, [while] we behold the orchard

Within divine religions, should we examine the history of Christianity in the light of eastern metaphysical and cosmological principle, we could succeed in discovering a tradition for studying nature that could serve as a record for evaluating Christianity’s new theosophy towards nature.

In Old Testament, there are certain references made to nature’s participation within the religious view of life.  In the Book of Joshua, there is mention of Lord  vow to maintain peace with animals and plants. Or when Noah is commanded to preserve all animals, whether hallowed or not, regardless of their gain to human being[15]. In the same manner, the untouched nature or desert is visualized as a place of trial and punishment, as well as a refuge for contemplation, or even a reflection of paradise. This very tradition of contemplative view of nature, lives later on in Judaism in the “Kabala” and “Hasidim” schools of thought.

In the New Testament, the death and assignation of Jesus ( ع ) is accompanied with the wiltering and blossoming of nature that bespeak of Jesus cosmic quality. Saint Paul , too, believes that all creations partake in the redemption of sin.

In West, due to the concern about polytheism and idolatory, and in reaction to them, the original church gradually distanced itself from the surrounding world and was completely severed from it. Even words such as paradise and desert, in their positive sense, were recognized solely with Church and later monastries as separate and distinct institutions[16]. Whereas, in the Eastern Church, reflection in nature was still approved and become more pivotal. Nature was included as a support for spiritual life and the belief was formed that all nature partake in deliverence and salvation, and that the world would be revived and restored on the second coming of Jesus.

For the author, Origen[17] and Irnaus, the early fathers of the Greek Orthodox Church who created “Divinity of Nature”, are of high importance. They did not restricted the term Logos, or the Word or Expression of Allah, to man and religion only, but also have used it for the whole nature and all creatures.

In his book, Hexaemeron[18], Saint Basil[19] who was a follower of Origen, has written:  “ When you think about grass or a herb yielding seed…that seed is the word that would come to occupy your whole mind.”[20].

This view is in complete compliance with the Islamic perception. In the Majestic Quran, the whole universe and its every components, are Kalimatullah [Word of Allah], just as Jesus and [the Holy] Quran that was revealed to Prophet are word of Allah.

And if all the trees in the earth were pen, and the sea which seven more seas added to it (were inks), the word of Allah would not be exhausted. Surely Allah is Mighty, Wise.[21]

When the angels said: O Mary, surely Allah gives good news with a word from Him (of one) whose name is Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary…[22]

Gradually as Christianity expanded into eastern europe, new groups embraced it who had a deep insight about the spiritual value of nature devoid of any signs of Mediterranean polytheism. A perfect example, were the Celts, who had a strong cognizance and awareness about balance and harmony of man and nature. The Celtic monks were always seeking Divine epiphany, and went on quests hoping to discover the harmony of Lord’s Creation[23]. They sought Lord in the mysterious cosmos. Pilgrimage, quest and visiting creation and nature have been repeatedly mentioned in Quranic monotheism. Please take note the following verses:

Say [O Messenger]: Travel in the earth and see how He makes the first creation…[24]

And We made between them and the towns which we had blessed, (other) towns easy to be seen, and We apportioned the journey therein; Travel through them nights and days, secure.[25]

In any case in the ninth century, an Irish thinker named Johannes Scotus Erigena[26] wrote a commentary on the Holy Bible in which he tried to establish a intimate link among Lord, Cosmos and human being. In this respect, he strongly defied some of the theologians and philosophers who due to lack of precise understanding of metaphysical and cosmological concepts of nature were inclined to accuse any such speculation as pantheism, naturalism and polytheism. Erigena thus stated “The Cosmos has a transcendental origin, and all creatures are from the Lord, but created through Jesus”.[27]

Finally in the person of  [Saint] Francis of Assisi[28] we behold the most fantastic, respective attitude towards nature within the framework of a Christian saintly life. His life among the birds and animals he addressed is a firm example of this Christian conviction that human being cannot relate to nature through consecration. In his Canticle of the Sun and his many other canticles, he displays a deep penetrating insight free of any human gainfulness. In his conversation with animals. He displays the inner connection and sincerity that a saint attains by connecting with the divine essence that has breathed into the nature[29].  Dante’s Divine Comedy teaches the fact that human being must really trek throughout the universe so that he would recognize that the force that surrounds all beings is:” Love and kindness that moves the sun and stars”[30]. While this way of thinking, that observing nature based on post-medieval teachings, was confronted with fluctuations and challenges, yet it continued until the end of nineteenth century. People like John Ray still searched the nature for signs and indications of the Lord. In his work, Our Farbenlehre, Goethes[31] dealt with the existing symmetry in nature and calls people to seek out recovering a perception of this pure and eternal nature.

Quran viewpoint

Following Christianity and Judaism, it is time to take a view at Islamic learnings. The Majestic Quran has a very interesting and penetrating view of Nature. It does not allow man lay prostrate before Nature as his lord because of its greatness and magnificence, nor does it consider nature as an entity without any sanctity, meaning or essence. Quran presents the natural manifestations as Lord’s creations, and directs man that instead of worshiping [these manifestations] to worship their Creator:

And of His signs are the night and the day and the sun and the moon. Adore nor the sun nor the moon, but adore Allah who created them,…[32]

Although the living beings in nature, in Quran view, are created by the Lord, but [nature] itself is not a soul-less and lifeless entity; it is living. Human being could become intimate with nature, talk with it and express love for it. Due to their manner of relationship to the Lord, Quran views the beings in nature as sacred. Their sanctity and essence is inseparable.

From Quran viewpoint, all parts of nature always are glorifying the Truth. They all pray before god and conduct supplication:

Whatever is in the heavens and whatever is in the earth glorifies  Allah, the Ruler, the Holy, the Mighty, The Wise.[33]

It is interesting to note that according to Quran, Glorification [of Lord] by creatures, could be understood, perceived and recognized by the human being. In a verse revealed to Messenger of Allah (   ), it announces:

Seest thou nor that Allah is He, Whom do glorify all those who are in the heavens and the earth and the birds with wings outspread? Each one knows its prayer and its glorification. And Allah is Knower of what they do.[34]

As you notice, the above verse expects human beings to discern the glorification and invocations made by all the beings of the world, even the birds in the sky.

In the lives of Muslim sages, it is a simple feat to hear the sound of invocations of nature. Saadi says:

Last night a bird was singing a dirge, that robbed me of reason, patience, stamina and conscious;

Unless hearing my chant, one of [my] true friends said:

I could not believe that the sound of a bird could make one so senseless,

I answered: I would have not been human to remain silent while the bird glorified [The Lord].

According to Sadrul-Motu’alehin Shirazi, every being is understanding to the extent of its essence, thus all beings in nature have understanding and awareness inasmuch as they are entitled to:

All beings, even the solids, while seemingly inanimate, are in reality alive, aware and glorify the Truth. They gaze upon the majesty and magnificence of Truth; having total awareness about their Creator and Maker. The Magnificent Quran points out to the very same thing when it says that …And there is not a single thing but glorifies Him with His praise, but you do not understand their glorification.[35]

Sadra has not interpreted the passage [you do not understand] in an active form, rather he considered it passive, thus suggesting that the beings themselves are not aware of their glorification although they are consciously glorifying. As providing further reasoning, he adds:

Meaning that because this manner of knowldege, that is knowledge about knowledge [which the Islamic philosophy calls compound knowledge] is particular to beings that are purely abstract who transcend physical.[36]

According to Quran, all parts of nature share salvation and deliverence with human beings, and therefore, just like him, entities in nature, whether animate or inanimate,  would  gather in the Day of Gathering, or Day of Ressurection.  About animal Quran Says:

And when the wild animals are gathered together.[37] The earthly beings gather along with humans, and every thing is eloquent and articulate.

When the earth is shaken with her shaking, and the earth brings forth her burdens, and man says: What has befallen her? On that day she will tell her news, as if thy Lord had revealed to her.[38]

In Islamic learnings, the link between man and nature in deliverance and salvation, [as well as] corruption and annihilation is so intertwined that human beings devotion or negligence towards God, observance or disobedience and violation of divine precepts, directly affect nature. That is to say, that, as a part of the manifestation of Truth, nature is kind and compassionate towards upright and devout human beings, but would be contemptuous and uncompromising against wrongdoing and cruel human beings. The Glorious Quran mentions that:

And if people of the town had believed and kept their duty, we would certainly have opened for them blessings from the heavens and the earth.[39]

In another verse, it quotes Noah appealing to those who sin:

…Ask forgiveness of your Lord; surely He is ever forgiving; He will send down upon you rain, pouring in abundance.[40]

In the Hadith or accounts dealing with religious leaders, the wrath of nature has been recognized as the very wrath of the Lord against the deeds and actions of human beings.

When the rulers tell lies to people, no rain shall fall.[41]

The Glorious Quran presents account of past group of people who because of committing sin and transgressing from divine precepts, were subjected to Divine punishment through wrath of nature. The people of Noah (Aad) and people of Lot (Thumud)[42], each had been annihilated through natural punishments.

In Islamic learnings, all beings in the world are sign and indications of the Lord, or within an Islamic Mysticism, the are all the names and attributes of the Lord. What is meant here by Names and Attributes, is that the Lord manifests in natural entities and all nature is a demonstration if Truth. Wherever human being looks, he would see the Lord. The Holy Quran says:

And Allah’s is the east and the West, so whither you turn thither is Allah’s purpose.[43]

A portent-based view of Nature, would bestow it such sanctity that would make it totally immune against any transgression committed in course of scientific explorations.

Along with this perception, there is the conception of Divine Vice-gerency that has been quoted in Quran that is explicit in presenting human being as the Vice-Gerent of the Lord:

And when thy Lord said to angels, I am going to place a ruler in the earth…[44]

In the conversation between Lord and the Angel in the beginning of the genesis, the angels were worried about the annihilation and defilement of earth, and discussed this with the Lord. But Lord indicated to Ilm or Knowledge when responding to them.

They [angels] said: Wilt Thou place in it such as make mischief in it… ?[45]

In reply to them, Lord says:

Surely I know What you know not.[46]

That is  you shall discover the secret of this later. The Lord announces:

And He taught Adam all the names, then presented them to the angels; He said: Tell Me the names of those if you are right. They said: Glory be to Thee! We have no knowledge but that which thou has taught us. Surely Thou are Knowing, the Wise. He said: O Adam, inform them of their names. So when he informed them of their names, He said: Did I not say to you that I know what is unseen in the heavens and the earth? And I know what you manifest and what you hide.[47]

From this conversation it appears that upon seeing the knowledge and science of Adam, the angels were convinced and attested that such a being merits divine vice-gerency and as a sign of humbleness they bowed to him. What kind of  a science is this knowledge and science? Could the very science that has in recent centuries devastated the environment and ruined earth, be the demonstration of the knowledge taught by the Lord? Indeed not. The science taught by the Lord, is a sacred knowledge that sees the world as a revelation of the Lord and the reflection of the Essence of Truth. The best rendition of this that of Quran where it mentions that He had taught man the His Names and Attributes, i.e. the world. To know world, is to know the Lord, and to transgress upon world, is to transgress and violate the Truth. Attar [a Persian poet] says:

When we sent out Adam

We bequeathed Our Splendor on the Desert

A devout human being will use the gifts of nature towards evolvement and development, for the Lord has announced:

The Lord created you from the earth and called for you to prosper on it

A devout person would not take any step other than thriving the earth, otherwise who would be known as a profligate. According to the Holy Quran squandering and profligacy, are suggested by Satan, and those who execute such deeds, are Satan’s brethrens:

Surely the squanderers are the devil’s brethren. And the devil is ever ungrateful to his Lord.[48]

Conclusion and recommendation

Briefly in the past centuries, by distancing itself from the spiritual perception of nature, modern science had given man an insight, that caused his dominating and transgressing ego to bring  about such a intimidating ruin and crisis while he confronted nature to satiate his inner desires. Unfortunately, the theologians and philosophers are most often responsible, and even contributed, to the issue of secularization of nature. Since by not focussing and making efforts towards writing works in the field of environmental theology and presenting it to the literary scene of their time, the left the field open for the total secularization of nature by Industrial Revolution and endless application of modern science. Many theologian and religious thinkers completely laid aside the issue of nature and pursued man’s salvation with utter disregard to the rest of  Lord’s creation. Under the present circumstances, due to this hard-hearted indifference to the right of nature and other living beings, the continued existence of Homo sapients on planet earth has become a hazardous issue.

The time has now come for all those who are truly concerned with the human condition and seek an alternative solution to this crisis, to once again recourse to the long and historical traditions of religions; to teach the study and exploring of nature using religious texts and sources within metaphysical teachings; to attest that it is only through the revival of a spiritual and divine conception and cognition about nature that [humanity] can neutralize the ruination of nature caused by application of modern science. It is through such revival that we could be assured that the future humanity would embark on making earth prosperous and flourishing instead of unbridled and merciless exploitation of nature’s blessings and defilement of earth.

Moreover, not only the religious values, but also the cultural beliefs of people living in a region could be generally used as a rules and guidelines grown from within people in course of centuries following careful study, modification, reform and extension. Such rules could be better accepted and taken up.  They could lead to practical answers in environmental preservation and achieving a sustainable development  not only in one region or in a country, but also throughout the world given necessary promotion and extension.

In other words, as one of the practical and tangible strategies in dialogue of civilizations, the universalization of religious values and teaching and expansion of cultural beliefs, could encompass practical blueprints towards protection and development of environment throughout this diverse and vast world.

The existing practical methods in religious convictions and cultural beliefs include the knowledge that one could contemplate the beliefs  expanded and proven in course of history, towards preservation of environment and finally the sustainable development.  It is thus possible to draft solutions and act on them so that along with other methodologies, these could really, and without being imposed by an outside agency or any governing body, reach their destined goals. By their nature, these solutions would become the hallmark of existing practical methods, especially in developing societies that have an ancient culture and history that are more dependent on religious culture and principles.

Thus the author wishes to make the following suggestions to the present scholars:

Now that human thinkers are concerned about the depth of the catastrophe and  disaster that has befallen the human environment, and worried about the future life of humanity and confess to the role of public beliefs and convictions in resolving this crisis,  the cultural figures and religious clergy now shoulder a heavy responsibility. It is now time for this group of people to seriously and sincerely endeavor on this issue, and  make reintroduction of genuine cultures, and teachings and traditions of religions towards educating the public in dealing with nature, as their main preoccupation in the present era. Resolving of environmental crisis demands general mobilization of humanity. The only way to achieve this sacred goal, is the guidelines offered by men of culture and religious authorities.

I propose that an association having scholars and authorities of various religions of the world as its member, be formed for protecting the environment. Its secretariat should constantly work for coordination and convening of scientific conferences and meetings.

The manner of introducing the traditions of religions to the present generation for a immaculate and spiritually better life, calls for a relatively deep study, since using the old methods, could not answer the present era and would be ineffective. There should be an exchange of experience among religious figures, in order to update the methods and use tools suitable for the new situation. The proposed association could attain this goal through bilateral talks and discussions.

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Dr. Seyed G Safavi

London Academy of Iranian Studies, London, UK

Abstract:

This article discusses Mystical aspects of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh the greatest Persian and world epical poem. The focus is placed on the parallels between power, wisdom and knowledge, the interaction between the illuminated spirit and intellect , the speech in praise of intellect, the flame that purifies the heart, Tawhid and Unity of Being, humble call to and the benediction of the Creator of the Good, parabolic and Mysterious aspects and Ferdowsi’s point of view on Shi’ism.

Keywords: Ferdowsi, Shahnameh, Iran, Mysticism, power, wisdom, knowledge, intellect, purified the heart, Unity of Being, Mysterious, Shiism.

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Number 6, 2011

To download the electronic version of the journal click here

The Journal of Islamic Perspective is a peer reviewed publication of the Center for Humanities and Sociological Studies, affiliated to the London Academy of Iranian Studies (LAIS) and aims to create a dialogue between intellectuals, thinkers and writers from the IslamicWorld and academics, intellectuals, thinkers and writers from other parts of the Globe. Issues in the context of Culture, Islamic Thoughts & Civilizations, and other relevant areas of social sciences, humanities and cultural studies are of interest and we hope to create a global platform to deepen and develop these issues in the frame of a Critical Perspective. Our motto is homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto. Contributions to Islamic Perspective do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial board or the Center for Humanities and Sociological Studies.

Contents

Interview

Interview on Bioethics

    Seyed Mustafa Mohaghegh-Damad    13

Articles

The Effects of Modernity on Muslim Perception of Man: Man’s Identity and Human Relationship

    Jelili Adegboyega Adebiyi  25

The Debate on The Exploition of Religion in Turkish Politics

   Ejder Okumuş    52

Law, Social Obligation, and Ijtihäd

    Mohd Mumtaz Ali   71

Study of the National Albanian Poet ‘Naim Frasheri’

    Ali Akbar Ziaee 95

An Alternative Perspective on Asian Identity

    Seema Arif    126

An Islamic-Based Evaluation of Dominant Western Models of Teacher Education

    Saheed Ahmad Rufai  148

The Arab World and the Globalization of Islamic Revivalism

    Mahmoud Dhaouadi   187



A Study of the Problem of Poverty of Theorization in Iranian Sociology

    Mohamed Tavakol   207



Book Reviews

Wilber, K. (2000). Integral Psychology: Consciousness, Spirit, Psychology, Therapy

   John Herlihy   233

Marable, M. (2011). Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention

   Dustin Byrd 245

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Dr. Abdul Rahim Afaki

University of Karachi, Pakistan

Abstract

This paper seeks to describe the contemporary state of the Qur’ānic hermeneutics focusing the alternate theories concerning the structure of the Qur’ānic text. It restricts to identifying only two such theories: the view that the Qur’ān is a thematically coherent structure wherein all the elements are integrally related to each other to shape the whole text as a unity, and the view that the Qur’ānic text is an atomic collection of verses having fragmented meanings. In amīduddin Farāhī is the major proponentcontemporary Qur’ānic hermeneutics, H īduddīn Khan is that of the latter. The hermeneuticof the former whereas Wah route, which this paper follows, to this dichotomy of underpinnings is defined īduddīn Khan’s remarks on the notion ofby a critical analysis of Wah m al-Qur’ānNaz justifying his view that the Qur’ān is a collection of fragmented meanings rather than a coherent structure. The presentation of the argument in this essay is not neutral in acquainting these theoretical alternates in that it is not free from hypothesizing something in construing the argumentation. It rather tends to justify the notion of thematic coherence by criticizing the view that the Qur’ān is a bundle of discretely arranged verses. 

Introduction

Literature concerning Qur’anic hermeneutics tends to fall into two sorts: that which attempts an exploration grounded upon the view that the Qur’anic text is a bundle of discrete verses placed together incoherently, and that which may not attempt this at all rather encourage the shoots of intellectual speculation in order to establish the view that the Qur’an is a coherent whole. Wahīduddīn Khan’s exegesis titled Tadhkīr al-Qur’ān (Reminiscence of the Qur’ān) is an exponent of the former view while Farāhī’s notion of Nazm al-Qur’ān (thematic coherence of the Qur’ān) is to represent the latter. This paper critically undertakes Khan’s remarks on Farāhī’s notion of Nazm, the view that the whole structure of the Qur’ān is thematically coherent, which is to say, all of the verses of a sūrah of the Qur’ān are integrally related to each other to give rise to the major theme of the sūrah and again all of the sūrahs are interconnected with each other to constitute the major theme(s) of the Qur’ān as an organic whole. Taking side of those who find the Qur’an as a bundle of discrete verses, Khan opines that the Nazm is not a structured phenomenon objectively found in the Qur’ān, it is instead an ‘excogitative presumption’ being grounded upon one’s ‘subjective reasoning.’ 

My whole argument comprises of two parts. Part One deals with the background of this debate between two distinct approaches towards the Qur’anic text focusing Farahi’s notion of Nazm whereas Part Two critically analyzes Khan’s remarks on Farahi’s hermeneutical approach to the Qur’an.

1. I.      The Qur’an: A Coherent Structure or an Atomistic Collection of Verses?

 Qur’ānic hermeneutics has always been revolving around the specific discourse of the divine revelation. All of the remaining issues of human life-form are understood or interpreted cognizing the role of the Qur’ān as pivotal in human discourse. The working life-model of this essentiality of the divine and the human is the Prophet Muhammad himself whereas the materialization of the divine-human essentiality in life-discourse is conditioned by Arabic language. So the whole development of Qur’ānic hermeneutics has been the triadic complex of the divine revelation, the human life-form and the language. The orientation of the pre-Islamic (al-jāhilī) tradition was set linguistically and the main contributors to that culture were the poets and the orators. Owing to the linguistic orientation of the pagan culture, the Qur’ān was revealed to the Prophet in the language shared between him and his original public as the Qur’ān says:

“Verily this is heedfully revealed from the Lord of the worlds. The Trustworthy Spirit came down with it, in the perspicuous Arabic language (bi lisān ‘Arabī mubīn), to thy heart so that thou mayest be from amongst the cautioners (al-mundhirīn). …Had we revealed it to any of the non-Arabs, and had he recited it to them, they wouldn’t have believed in it.”[1] 

Arabic language shared between the Prophet and his original addressees would be a precondition for all understanding and interpretation of the Qur’ān construed either by the Prophet, his companions, their successors, or any other individual or group belonging to any stage throughout the history of Muslims. Through the instruments of historical or traditional linguistic signs, the Prophet had not only to deliver the divine meanings to the mortals but he also had to make them understand those divine neologisms. The interpretation of the divine neologisms in terms of the historical signs and symbols of the language led the Prophet to the exegetical objectivism.[2] He was divinely determined to not only deliver the word of Allāh to his addressees but to make them understand it through an appropriate interpretation of it as the Qur’ān says:

“And we have sent down unto thee the reminiscence (al-dhikr) so that thou mayest explain clearly to the people what is sent for them and that they may give thought.”[3]

Owing to the twofold givenness of the traditional linguistic symbols and their divine neologisms that determined the role of the Prophet as an absolutely objectivist interpreter of the Qur’ān, one may understand why the tradition of Qur’ān exegesis started to take shape with the rise of tafsīr bi’l-mā’thūr (traditionist exegesis) grounded upon the reports or āthār concerning the hermeneutic acts and sayings of the Prophet, his companions and their successors. The main proponent of such type of Qur’ān exegesis is ’Abū Ja‘far Muhammad ibn Jarīr at-Tabarī (d. 922/310). His methodology of interpreting the Qur’ān does not owe to the tradition in the sense of a socio-cultural-historical continuum rooted in the Prophetic-hermeneutic life-praxis (the Sunnah) rightly guided by the Qur’ān and further developed and transmitted by the companions to the next generation on the plane of Arabic language. Tabarī, being an exponent of traditionist exegesis, overlooks all of these characteristics of the Qur’ān-tradition relationship, and the problem lies in his conception of the Qur’an. He conceives of the Qur’ān as an atomistic collection of verses, which is to say, he takes the Qur’ān to be a container of discretely placed verses. Owing to this view of the Qur’ān, he, being an exegete, relies on the exegetical remnants (āthār) or reports concerning the meaning of a verse handed down to him by one or few individuals of the previous generation to form a chain of such one-to-one exchanges of remnants which ends at the Prophet. These exegetical remnants always lead one to understanding each verse in isolation.[4] Khan’s so called fragmentary style of interpretation (shadhrātī andāz-e-tashrīh) of the Qur’ān, which is the focal point of this paper, reminds one of Tabarī’s conception of the Qur’ān. In the last section of this paper, I will discuss his views in details. Let us here turn to another option of how to conceive of the Qur’ānic text, which is to say, how to take the Qur’ān as a thematically coherent structure.

The emergence of the Farāhīan School in the twentieth century Qur’ānic hermeneutics has brought a unique novelty both in theoretical underpinnings and applicatory methods concerning the interpretation of the Qur’ānic text. The theoretical foundation of this school is Farāhī’s underpinnings regarding his view of the Qur’ān as a thematically coherent organic whole while the applicatory superstructure of the school is erected by Farāhī’s disciple Amīn Ahsan Islāhī who expounds a complete Qur’ān exegesis, Tadabbur-e-Qur’ān on the Farāhīan lines. Their interpretation of the Qur’ān is grounded upon the preconditions of the cognition of thematic coherence of the Qur’ān and the mastery of linguistic orientation of Arab culture particularly of the pre-Islamic life-world of the Arabs. The former condition enables one to understand the whole of the divine discourse in the perspective of hermeneutical circle while the latter makes one necessitate the divine guidance for the human discourse on the plane of language. That is to say, the former makes it sure that the Qur’ānic verses are to be understood in the perspective of the integral relationship of the verses to the whole discourse and vice versa, which minimizes the possibility of impositions of one’s subjectively prejudged meanings upon the divine text. And the latter helps one interpret the divinely revealed meanings in terms of the linguistic signs and symbols intersubjectively practiced through the tradition and objectively documented in terms of literary forms and cultural life-world. Interpretation of a text for Farāhī is not an additional account which an interpreter may construe himslef regarding the meaning of the text to be understood. Instead, interpretation is an intellectual attempt which leads one to the one-to-one coincidence between the real meaning of the text and its interpretation. Farāhī further elaborates his conception of appropriate interpretation by demarcating interpretation both from misinterpretation or distortion (tahrīf) and elaboration (tafsīl). ‘Interpretation,’ says Farāhī, ‘is the construing of text to mean what it bears transcriptionally or intellectually.’ On the contrary, ‘misinterpretation is the construing of text to what it does not bear’ while elaboration is the description of details of it which are not mentioned inclusively.[5] The mold of hermeneutic attempt from the interpretation to the misinterpretation is a divergence from the objectivist derivation of the meaning from text to the subjectivist imposition of meaning upon the text. The subjectivist motive regarding the mold of meaning through the process of misinterpretation gives rise to the multiplicity of meaning. For, if every individual justifiably misinterprets the clear meaning of the Qur’ānic text in order that it may approve his own subjective belief, it will be inevitable to sanction the multiplicity of meaning of a single text. But Farāhī, rejecting the subjectivist motive of attaining multiple meanings of a text, brings forward the notion of singular meaning (ma‘nā wāhid) in correspondence with singular text. Regarding the singularity-multiplicity difference of meaning of the Qur’anic text, Farāhī cites the example of Rāzī’s interpretation of a Qur’ānic verse leading one to the multiplicity of meaning reducing the Qur’ān to a dubious Book (kitāb^an mutashābih^an). In the verse 1 of Sūrat al-Nasr: Idhā jā’a nasr Allāh wa ’l-fath (When there comes the Help of Allāh, and the Victory), the word fath, according to Rāzī as Farāhī mentions, ‘refers to the Conquest of Mecca, the Conquest of Tā’if, the Conquest of Khaybar, the Conquest in general, the Conquest of knowledge, the Conquest of reason…’ This is the dubiousness of the matter that one is not getting certain about the meaning of a single word rather one has got several connotations in correspondence with the word. Farāhī calls it an intellectual disease and the only remedy for the disease, that is, the multiplicity of meaning, is ‘the adherence to the Qur’ān’ by adjusting all remnants and opinions to the standard of the Book of Allāh. This standardization remains unlikely unless we do believe that ‘the Qur’ān involves nothing but a singular interpretation (al- Qur’ān la yahtamil illā tā’wīl^an wāhid^an).’ Moreover, Farāhī’s notion of singular interpretation renders the Qur’ān something ‘absolute in meaning (qat‘i ’l-dalālah)’ rather than ‘dubious in meaning (maznūn al-dalālah)’ as Rāzī thought of it.[6] Islāhī fully agrees with Farāhī on the issue of the singular meaning of Qur’ānic text, though he relates this issue to the notion of Nazm (coherence). According to Islāhī, when an interpreter understands a part of the Qur’ān in the perspective of coherence, ‘he cannot adopt anything except one single opinion regarding its meaning.’ If one cuts off a part of the Qur’ān from all of its contextual relationships, which is to say, if one sees a part of the Qur’ānic text in isolation, ‘it will be easier for one to impose several meanings’ on that part of the text rather than to construe one singular meaning. Islāhī believes that the imposition of multiple meanings on the singular text has caused Muslims a huge ‘collective (ijtimā‘ī) and political (sīyāsī)’ drawback in terms of the emergence of multiple sociopolitical-religious groups in the Islamic society. Every group is to have its own specific interpretation of a particular part of the Qur’ān taken in isolation, which makes the Qur’ān have a tendency of bearing several meanings at the same time. But for Islāhī, the Qur’ān, owing to its coherence and context, cannot afford to have more than one meaning. In this regard, one needs not to deliberate to draw one singular meaning out of many rather one must be ‘helpless to adopt one singular meaning, as one cannot justifiably draw multiple meanings after having reflected on the Qur’ānic text in the context of coherence.’[7] The coherence is an essential feature of every expression and the Qur’an is no exception. Coherence is an additional reality (zā’id haqīqat) in the expression as a whole, which is lost if one acquaints with the particular parts of the whole in isolation.[8] He criticizes those scholars who deny the finding of coherence in the Qur’ān and substantiate their view by certain ahādīth engineered in their favour.[9] The Farāhīan-Islāhīan notion of coherence of the Qur’ān states that the whole structure of the Qur’ān is thematic and that thematic structure is absolutely coherent. That is to say, all of the verses of a sūrah of the Qur’ān are integrally related to each other to give rise to the major theme of the sūrah and again all of the sūrahs are interconnected with each other to constitute the major theme(s) of the Qur’ān. This thematic coherence makes the whole sūrah ‘a perfect unity’ (kāmil^an wāhid^an) and establishes the whole text of ‘the Qur’ān as a unit-word (Kalām^an Wāhid^an).’[10]  The thematic coherence of sūrah lies in its specific major theme called ‘Amūd (pillar) which dynamically affects the entirety of the sūrah. That is to say, one can never find the pillar  in the elementary order of the verses rather it is a living spirit (rūh) of the sūrah that manifests intrinsically in the kalām as an explanation (sharh) and detail (tafsīl) and as an out put (intāj) and justification (ta‘līl) of the sūrah as a whole. And the only way to decipher the pillar is to reflect (Tadabbur) deeply on the sūrah in its totality.[11]  As the verses are integrally related to each other to give rise to the pillar of a sūrah, all of the sūrahs are interconnected to constitute the coherent structure of the Qur’ān as an organic whole. As there is a  specific ‘Amūd of a sūrah which thematically binds all of its verses to make it a unit likewise the whole text of the Qur’an has a comprehensive theme (Jāme‘ ‘Amūd) which interconnects all of the sūrahs to make it a thematic unit.[12]

1. II.              Khan’s Remarks on the Notion of Qur’anic Coherence

As regards the notion of thematic coherence of the Qur’an, the exegetes mostly remain apathetic yet there may be found certain incredulous reservations and unconvincing allegations against the notion. The major exemplar of such allegations it is that the coherence is not a structured phenomenon objectively found in the Qur’ānic discourse, it is instead a ‘devisal’ or ‘excogitative presumption (istinbātī qarīnah)’ being grounded upon the ‘subjective reasoning’ rather than the Qur’ānic text. Wahīduddīn Khan, an eminent Indian scholar in his book, Mutāla‘a-e-Qur’ān (Study of the Qur’ān) writes:

“…Some people believe that ‘the coherence of discourse (nazm-e-kalām)’ is the key to understand the Qur’ān. But this [view] is not appropriate, as it is based upon the personal or subjective reasoning (dhātī soach). There is no single verse in the Qur’ān which may testify that the nazm-e-kalām is the key to understand the Qur’ān … It may be taken at most as a devisal or excogitative presumption rather than a textual method. In order to take that view as [an appropriate] method [of understanding the Qur’ān], one is required to have some textual evidence from the Qur’ān rather than one’s subjective devisal.”[13]

Owing to the theoretical and applicatory development of the notion of thematic coherence of the Qur’ān as discussed above, it is hardly justifiable, in my view, to consider the notion as a subjective devisal instead of an objective design. As regards Khan’s adversarial viewpoint to the notion, his reader finds himself a little confused, and the facets of his confusion are more than one.

Firstly, Khan, on the one hand, rejects the possibility of finding the coherence objectively in the Qur’ān, and on the other hand, he fails to interpret the Qur’ān as a bundle of absolutely discrete verses. Although he is not convinced of finding the coherence in the Qur’ān as a principle of interpretation, he admits the presence of a ‘deep order (gehrī tartīb)’ between the verses and sūrahs of the Qur’ān. Yet the common style of the Qur’ānic discourse, in his view, it is that it ‘reminds’ of some particular subject matter in terms of a ‘paragraph.’ That is to say, he perceives the Qur’ān as a ‘reminiscence’ (tadhkīr) in character comprising of various paragraphs dealing with particular subject matter. Drawing upon this view, he explores his method of interpreting the Qur’ān which he calls ‘the fragmentary style of interpretation (shadhrātī andāz-e-tashrīh) of the Qur’ān. In this style of interpretation, a piece of the Qur’ān consisting of unfixed number of verses is taken as a whole description of a particular theme (madmūn). He translates that piece in Urdu and in footnote he puts details of that piece as per exegetical requirement.[14] It implies that he does not reject the theme based integral relationship between the verses but this thematic integrality of the verses is highly tentative in the sense that the thematic interplay and combination of the verses, which he calls paragraph, may vary from two verses to a whole sūrah comprising of up to thirty verses (e.g. Sūrat al-Fajr). Sūrat al-Fajr is not the only sūrah which he takes as a thematic whole but rather he considers the last thirty-two sūrahs of the Qur’ān (from Sūrat al-Infitār (82) to Sūrat al-Nās (114) with an exception of Sūrat al-Mutaffifīn (83)) as the thematic paragraphs wherein the verses are integrally related to each other through certain theme(s). So Khan’s view of the Qur’ān as a bundle of thematic paragraphs, which gives rise to his fragmentary style of interpretation as a method of Qur’ān exegesis, is neither an absolute rejection of the Farāhīan notion of thematic coherence of the Qur’ān nor a firm acceptance of the atomistic view of the Qur’ān as expounded by Tabarī etc.

Secondly, Khan’s notion of shadhrah (particle or fragment) has not been definitely conceived rather it seems to have got had blurred boundaries. Khan perceives shadhrah as a thematically coherent paragraph consisting of various numbers of verses from two to thirty. That is to say, it is not the length of the paragraph which makes it a thematic unit, it is instead the theme concerned which binds the verses together within the indefinite (length wise) boundaries of the shadhrah. If Khan can take Sūrat al-Fajr consisting of thirty verses as a thematic whole wherein the verses are integrally related to each other to give rise to some theme, then why is it not justifiable for Farāhī and Islāhī to interpret Sūrat al-Baqarah comprising of 286 verses as a thematic unit on the same ground of the principle of mutual integrality of the verses? The only difference between the two interpretations it is that the former is a reconstruction of a chapter through the integrality of the verses in terms of a thematically coherent paragraph owing to its small length whereas the latter is also a reconstruction of a chapter through the same integrality but at three different levels of thematic coherence owing to the big length of the chapter. That is to say, both hermeneutical approaches are based upon the verse-to-verse thematic integrality but with a huge difference in their construction as a whole. As regards Khan’s hermeneutical approach to the thematically coherent shadhrah, there is only one facet of the integral relationship between the parts of the Qur’ān which is the verse-to-verse integrality. In case of the Farāhīan-Islāhīan hermeneutical approach to the Qur’ān, one may find a multiplicity of thematic integralities between the various kinds of parts of the Qur’ānic discourse like verse-to-verse, shadhrah-to-shadhrah, sūrah-to-sūrah, group-of-sūrahs-to-group-of-sūrahs etc. For instance, in case of Islāhī’s interpretation of Sūrat al-Baqarah, at the first level, two hundred and eighty-six verses of the sūrah are established as parts integrally related to one another in different numbers (with the exception of verse 177 and verse 188 which are taken as thematic units in themselves) to give rise to the division of the sūrah into thirty-two minor shadhrahs (to use Khan’s term) each with its own minor theme. At the second level, the thematic integrality further expands to unite the minor shadharhs together in different numbers to constitute only six major shadhrahs having their own specific themes.[15] At the third and final level, the six major shadhrahs of Sūrat al-Baqarah are established to be integrally related parts of an organic whole through a major theme.[16] One may say that Islāhī treats Sūrat al-Baqarah as a long shadhrah coherent through a major theme being comprised of various sub-shadhrahs each with its own sub-theme while Khan takes Sūrat al-Fajr as a single paragraph wherein all of the thirty-two verses are integrally related to each other to give rise to a specific theme of the sūrah. But in both the cases the sūrahs are taken as a single statement. The way Islāhī interprets Sūrat al-Baqarah is his general method of Qur’ān exegesis, and his whole thematic-structural scheme of the Qur’ān, though being an applied form of Farāhī’s notion of coherence, is a consolidated objectivist hermeneutic reconstruction of the Qur’ānic text. This objectivist hermeneutic reconstruction of the Qur’ān is not simply to materialize the thematic coherence of the Book. Instead, this applied form of the thematic coherence is to aptly be called the hierarchical-thematic coherence of the Qur’ān. That is to say, Islāhī’s applicatory materialization of Farāhī’s notion of thematic coherence of the Qur’ān is methodically hierarchical, as there are several facets of thematic integrality between the various parts of the Qur’ānic whole ascending from the microscopic to the macroscopic level or the vice versa. The minutest part of the Qur’ānic structure is a single word, and the microscopic form of thematic integrality is the word-to-word relationship which gives rise to the first-order thematic unit, the verse of the Qur’ān. The second-order thematic unit is the minor paragraph based upon the verse-to-verse thematic integrality wherein two or more verses are interconnected with each other through a common thread of some theme. The word-to-word and the verse-to-verse thematic integralities further ascend to the minor-paragraph-to-minor-paragraph integrality giving rise to the third-order thematic unit, the major paragraph having again a specific theme. The hierarchical order of thematic integrality further rises to the major-paragraph-to-major-paragraph relationship to constitute a whole sūrah as a first-order macroscopic thematic unit as compared to a verse as a first-order microscopic thematic unit. Starting from sūrah-to-sūrah integral relationship, the hierarchical-thematic order further ascends at the macroscopic level to shape seven different thematic groups of 114 sūrahs of the Qur’ān. Moreover, these seven groups of sūrahs are thematically-integrally related to each other in order to constitute the Qur’ān as an organic thematic whole.[17]

Thirdly and very interestingly, Khan asks for ‘some textual evidence from the Qur’ān’ in order to establish the notion of coherence as a key principle for the interpretation of the Qur’ān. But he himself does not give any reference to a single verse of the Qur’ān in order to justify his so called fragmentary style of interpretation of the Qur’ān. Khan’s claim that the notion of coherence can be justifiable only if it is clearly described in a verse of the Qur’ān that there is a thematic coherence between the verses of the Qur’ān which makes it an organic whole seems to have not been deeply reflected upon. Besides Khan’s own attempt of treating the Qur’ān in terms of shadhrahs without any reference to the Qur’ānic verse seriously increases the requirement of an in-depth review of his thought regarding the thematic coherence. The structure of the Qur’ān is objectively given with a division at two different levels. At macroscopic level, it is divided into 114 sūrahs and at microscopic level, each of the sūrahs is subdivided into different numbers of verses varies from 3 to 286. At the first glance, this division seems to be random in terms of length, but under the cover of this length-wise-randomness there conceals a theme-wise-coherence. This theme-wise-coherence of the Qur’ān is the identification of the Farāhīan-Islāhīan Qur’ānic hermeneutics which we have briefly discussed above. They have interpreted the Qur’ān in terms of its various minor themes which are bound together through some major theme(s) to make the Qur’ān ultimately a thematic unit. Now Khan should not stay at the claim of requiring an evidence of a single verse describing the presence of Nazm in the Qur’ān, he should instead go through Farāhī’s theoretical underpinning as well as Islāhī’s applicatory construing in order to justifiably accept or reject the notion of coherence.

Fourthly and most importantly, Khan believes that the notion of thematic coherence of the Qur’ān is a subjective devisal rather than an objective design. Khan’s view seems to be a reminiscent of David Hume (1711-1776)’s notion that parts-whole relationship is an ‘arbitrary’ work of human mind rather than being an objective reality. In Part IX of Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume, rejecting the objectivity of relations, says:

“…the uniting of these parts into a whole, like the uniting of several distinct countries into one kingdom, or several distinct members into one body, is performed merely by an arbitrary act of the mind, and has no influence on the nature of things.”[18]

Khan seems to follow Hume’s lines while denying the coherent order of the Qur’anic verses and sūrahs,    in the face of his denial of thematic coherence of the Qur’ān Khan admits that there is a deep order[19] between the verses and the sūrahs of the Qur’ān. By ‘deep order’ if he means the theme-wise-coherence concealed under the length-wise-random-structure of the Qur’ān then it is the same what Farāhī and Islāhī call Nazm al-Qur’ān. If that deep order is an objective design, then why he considers the thematic coherence as a subjective devisal. Unfortunately, he does neither explain his claim of considering coherence of the Qur’ān as a subjective devisal nor he elaborates his idea of deep order between the verses and the sūrahs, and so he makes his reader get confused regarding his claims concerning the issue of coherence.  

Conclusion

The notion of thematic coherence of the Qur’ān is not a new issue in the world of Qur’ānic sciences, for long before Farāhī and Islāhī certain Muslim scholars[20] have dealt with it in various ways. However, the way Farāhī and Islāhī have redefined this issue is highly original and hugely productive.[21] But the alternative view namely the concept of the Qur’an as an atomistic collection of verses has also been very popular among the traditionalist Qur’an exegetes. Although the traditionalist Qur’an exegetes mostly remain apathetic towards the Qur’an’s being a coherent structure, Wahīduddīn Khan is unique in that he simply rejects the idea of finding any coherence in the divine text. This paper concludes that his objection on and rejection of the idea of thematic coherence of the Qur’an remain incredulous, confusing and unsatisfactory due to the lack of due process of establishing his views argumentatively and the over simplification of his description.   

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Abdul Rahim Afaki

University of Karachi, Pakistan

Abstract

This paper reviews Martin Heidegger’s two major writings on hermeneutic phenomenology and time and defines his perspectives on the hermeneutic turn of metaphysics. Heidegger first draws a sharp distinction between what he conceives of hermeneutics and phenomenology, and then underpins to amalgamate them to expound the notion of hermeneutic phenomenology. His argument that he construes in his magnum opus, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) appears hostile to all attempts made to define the notion of Being throughout the history of Western metaphysics, Heidegger actually asserts that this notion needs to be defined with a new methodology that is of phenomenology. He believes that in defining Being through the phenomenological method one finds it inevitable to conceive of Being qua time. And the overall project of defining Being qua time takes a triadic paradigm of ontical-ontological-hermeneutical approach to the issue concerned.    

This paper focuses the complexity of Heidegger’s notion of hermeneutic phenomenology   in the nexus of the ontical-ontological-hermeneutical triad concerning the conception of sein (Being). Heidegger takes Being as phenomenon, as something that shows itself as it is in itself. Yet Being is always the Being of some entity, it is therefore necessary to choose the most appropriate entity to attain this task. The most appropriate entity in this regard is Dasein, the human self which can take the question of Being as an issue for it. It is the way of Dasein, the ontologico-ontically preferred entity, that Being shows itself as it is in itself, and this indirect showing of Being as it is appeals to the hermeneutic process of making Being aptly known to the human understanding. In order to establish the triadic complex of ontical-ontological-hermeneutical approach to the question of Being and its meaning, I have developed my argument in two parts.

The first part begins with how Heidegger, rejecting all of the traditional presuppositions regarding the concept of Being, restates the question of Being with new metaphysical foundations in the paradigm of hermeneutic phenomenology. In all of the traditional presuppositions, Being is taken to be an object like other entities, which is to say, it shows the what of every object. According to Heidegger, Being is to show “the how” rather “the what” of all entities. In this phenomenological inquiry into the question of Being, Being is not an entity rather it ‘determines entities as entities, that on the basis of which [woraufhin] entities are already understood.’ In this process that which is interrogated (ein Befragtes) is not Being rather entities. Since there is infinite number of entities in the world therefore in order to make the inquiry viable one has to give priority to one specific entity. And this entity is Dasein, the inquirer himself, as for him the question of Being is an issue. Dasein is prior an entity both ontologically and ontically; ontologically, as it is ontologically interrogated in the process of discerning the meaning of Being; and ontically, as it is an entity itself which has the determinate character of existence. Dasein is also ontico-ontologically prior in the sense that on the ground of understanding of its own, the Being of all other entities will be discerned. The most important aspect of this method inquiring into the question of Being it is that Heidegger takes both Being and Dasein as time or temporality. He does not take time as an entity or its character, that is, as something to be concerned with “the what” of the world rather he takes time as something to be concerned with “the how” of the world. This is the same way as he conceives Being.

The second part focuses the complexity of the ontical-ontological-hermeneutical triad of the Heideggerian approach to Being through the method of phenomenology. It describes how the etymological nature of the words phenomenon and logos determine their composite namely phenomenology to be open to the process of interpretation. He takes Being as phenomenon, and since Being as phenomenon is to be discerned through the way of Dasein therefore logos becomes such a discourse that it can make Being show itself to human understanding through the interpretation of Dasein.

I.          THE RISE OF HEIDEGGER’S HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENLOGY 

I.1.      The Question of Being and the Conception of Phenomenology

Deviating from the traditional approaches toward the concept of Being, Heidegger lays new metaphysical foundation in order to develop his unique version of phenomenology. Owing to the problematic of considering the ‘inquiry into Being’ as ‘unnecessary,’ Heidegger, in the first step of the development of phenomenology, focuses on ‘the necessity for explicitly restating the question of Being.’ In the process of this restating, he rejects three traditional presuppositions attached with the concept of Being namely (i) Being is the most universal concept, (ii) Being is indefinable, and (iii) Being is the most self-evident concept.[1]

The old way of conceiving was concerned with the genus-species relationship, that is, an entity was supposed to be defined or conceived as a species related to a class or genus to be generalized as such through the process of abstraction. In this regard, in Heidegger’s view, the concept of Being was not taken by the ancient and the medieval ontologists as a generalized or universalized genus to which every entity is related to be defined. Instead, it has been taken as something that transcends the genus-species relationship in the sense that no entity is conceived as species of it, which is to say, it is something transcendental-universal in the sense that ‘[t]he universality of Being ‘transcends’ any universality of genus.’[2] The transcendental-universality of Being is the characteristic which, according to Heidegger, makes it ‘the darkest’ rather than ‘the clearest’ of all concepts, and so it needs to be further discussed to be more clarified. Owing to its ‘supreme universality’ one can deduce that Being is indefinable, that is, one cannot define Being as an entity being ‘derived from higher concepts by definition, nor can it be presented through lower ones.’[3] Heidegger does not accept the indefinability of Being rejecting the method of definition as given in traditional logic. In the face of it, he intends to explore a new method, which may be termed as the phenomenological method, in order to conceive Being appropriately. This is the main purpose of his project of Sein und Zeit (Being and Time). In the process of restructuring the question of Being, the third presupposition concerned with the concept of Being, which Heidegger rejects, is its being self-evident. If one ‘comports’ oneself toward something or even toward oneself or, in other words, if one makes an assertion of something or of oneself after an average intelligibility like “The sky is blue”, “I am handsome” etc., one takes the ‘isness’ for granted. In this taking of ‘isness’ of entities for granted is, in Heidegger’s view, ‘an enigma a priori’ which makes it justifiable to restructure the question of Being (isness) in order to make man free from this enigmatic situation wherein he thinks that he is living in an understanding of Being but ‘the meaning of Being is still veiled in darkness.’[4]

Thanks to the perplexing nature of the concept of Being through the attachment of the three presuppositions as discussed above, Heidegger tends to formulate the question of the meaning of Being as the most fundamental question in a transparent way. Heidegger designs the structure of the question of Being as an ‘inquiry’ which, according to him, ‘is a seeking (Suchen).’ Attaining the transparency of the structure of the question of Being, Heidegger finds three constitutive factors of this inquiry as seeking namely ‘that which is asked about (sein Gefragtes)’, ‘that which is interrogated (ein Befragtes)’, and that which is to be found out by the asking (das Erfragte).’[5] When one inquires into Being, what one seeks, according to Heidegger, ‘is not something entirely unfamiliar’ to one rather an ‘average understanding of Being.’ This average understanding is vague in nature through which one cannot grasp Being at all in the first stance but out of it ‘arise both the explicit question of the meaning of Being and the tendency that leads one towards its conception.’  In this regard, the average understanding is to guide ‘beforehand’ the inquiry into Being as a kind of seeking. In this seeking, what is asked about is Being-‘that which determines entities as entities, that on the basis of which [woraufhin] entities are already understood.’[6] So in the question of the meaning of Being, what is asked about is Being but what is interrogated is not Being rather entities, provided ‘[t]he Being of entities is not itself an entity.’ As the number of entities in the world is infinite, one may find it unlikely to interrogate all of the entities, and so one should limit one’s interrogation to make it viable. Working out the question of Being as a transparent inquiry, one should, in Heidegger’s view, give priority to one particular entity in order that the meaning of Being is to be discerned. This prior entity is the inquirer himself who asks the question as his own mode of Being. Heidegger denotes that entity by the term “Dasein” ‘which each of us is himself and which includes inquiring as one of the possibilities of its Being.’[7] The third constitutive factor of the structure of the question of Being is its meaning, the goal of the inquiry that the Dasein intends to attain as a result of its seeking. That is to say, what is to be found out by the asking lies in what is asked about to be discerned by the Dasein (that which is interrogated) as a goal of the inquiry.

Adhering to the question of Being, Heidegger expounds the priority of Dasein, as a particular entity which is interrogated in order to attain the meaning of Being, over all other entities in three different ways namely ‘ontical,’ ‘ontological’ and ‘the ontico-ontological.’[8] The understanding of the threefold nomenclature of the priority of Dasein over other entities depends on how Heidegger demarcates ontical from ontological. The nature of inquiry will be ontological if one inquires into the question of ‘to be’ or Being or isness, and it will be ontical if one inquires into an entity rather than its Being.[9] Dasein is an entity and it is ontically (i.e. on the ground of being an entity) distinct from other entities ‘by the fact, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it.’ But as we have seen above the nature of inquiry is ontological if one inquires into the issue of Being, which implies that ‘Dasein is ontically distinctive in that it is ontological.’ Here Dasein’s ‘Being-ontological’ means that Dasein takes its Being as an issue for itself, it does not mean that Dasein is to develop a theoretical inquiry which aims at working out a study ‘explicitly devoted to the meaning of entities.’ In this regard, what Heidegger has in his mind ‘in speaking of Dasein’s “Being-ontological” is to be designated as something “pre-ontological” which simply signifies that Dasein is being such a way that it has an understanding of Being.[10]  

The difference between ontical and ontological leads Heidegger further to the distinction between ‘existentiell’ and ‘existential.’  Heidegger defines existence (Existenz) as ‘[t]hat kind of Being towards which Dasein can comport itself in one way or another, and always does comport itself somehow.’ This comporting of Dasein becomes the ground of its understanding of its own, which is to say, ‘Dasein always understands itself in terms of its existence-in terms of a possibility of itself: to be itself or not itself.’ Dasein’s understanding of itself or its self-awareness which it attains that way, and which is its ‘ontical affair,’ is what Heidegger calls ‘existentiell’.[11] Unlike the ontical self-awareness of Dasein, the understanding of the ontological structure of its existence ‘aims at the analysis (Auseinanderlegung) of what constitutes existence.’ This analysis ‘has the character of an understanding which is not existentiell, but rather existential.’ By ‘existentiality’ Heidegger means:

“the state of Being that is constitutive for those entities that exist. But in the idea of such a constitutive state of Being, the idea of Being is already included. And thus even the possibility of carrying through the analytic of Dasein depends on working out beforehand the question about the meaning of Being in general.”[12]     

The essential character of Being, in Heidegger’s view, which belongs to Dasein is ‘Being in a world.’ Owing to the essential character of ‘Being in a world’ of every entity to be investigated, Dasein is to understand Being pertaining ‘with equal primordiality’ both to the understanding of world, and to the understanding of Being of the entities to be investigated within the confinement of the world. So whenever an inquiry or study is to take place relating to a particular type of entities, whether Dasein itself or some other entity, it is grounded upon ‘Dasein’s own ontical structure, in which a pre-ontological understanding of Being is comprised as a definite characteristic’ provided the essentiality of Being is Being in a world. ‘Therefore fundamental ontology, from which alone all other ontologies can take their rise, must be sought in the existential analytic of Dasein.’ To sum up the issue concerning the threefold priority of Dasein and the question of Being, Heidegger says:

“The first priority is an ontical one: Dasein is an entity whose Being has the determinate character of existence. The second priority is an ontological one: Dasein is in itself ‘ontological’, because existence is thus determinative for it. But with equal primordiality Dasein also possesses-as constitutive for its understanding of existence-an understanding of the Being of all entities of a character other than its own. Dasein has therefore a third priority as providing the ontico-ontological condition for the possibility of any ontologies. Thus Dasein has turned out to be, more than any other entity, the one which must first be interrogated ontologically.”[13]

I.2.      Ontical Nearness and Ontological Distance of Dasein

After having established the structure of the question of Being as well as the priority of the question and Dasein, Heidegger now turns to the method of his inquiry in order to attain the meaning of Being. In the first step, Heidegger explains how Dasein is closest to us ontically but farthest ontologically. Dasein is ontically closest to us in the sense that we are ourselves, each of us, what it is. On account of the essentiality of Dasein’s Being in relation to its world, ‘the entity towards which it comports itself proximally and in a way which is essentially constant’, Dasein understands its own Being. When Dasein tends to interpret itself ontologically, it reflects back to its understanding of the world which has already been attained by itself in its own understanding of Being. That is to say, the ontological interpretation of Dasein is attained in terms of its understanding of the world, which makes it get ‘ontologically farthest’, but since it understands the very world in terms of its own understanding of Being therefore pre-ontologically Dasein ‘is surely not a stranger.’ So Dasein is closest to itself ontically, not a stranger pre-ontologically, and farthest ontologically.[14]   

According to Heidegger, there are many ways at Dasein’s disposal through which it can get itself ontologically interpreted, which is to say,

“Dasein’s ways of behaviour, its capacities, powers, possibilities, and vicissitudes, have been studied with varying extent in philosophical psychology, in anthropology, ethics, and ‘political science’, in poetry, biography, and the writing of history, each in a different fashion.”[15]    

Each of such interpretations of Dasein has to be carried through with a primordial existentiality comparable to whatever existentiell primordiality it may have possessed. So in dealing with the question of Being, the first requirement is the existential analytic of Dasein. In this regard, Heidegger turns to Dasein’s ‘average everydayness’ as a plane of its existential analytic, as on that plane ‘it can show itself in itself and from itself [an ihm selbst von ihm selbst her].’ Heidegger also mentions the limits of everydayness as a perspective in which the Being of Dasein is brought out explaining that the bringing out of its Being is to occur ‘in a preparatory fashion’ which cannot provide ‘a complete ontology of Dasein.’[16] That is to say, the existential analytic of Dasein on the plane of its everydayness is a provisional analytic in that ‘[i]t merely brings out the Being’ of Dasein without interpreting its meaning, but it is also ‘a preparatory procedure’ in the sense that it gets Dasein the horizon for the most primordial way of interpreting its Being. After having arrived at that horizon, ‘this preparatory analytic of Dasein will have to be repeated on a higher and authentically ontological basis.’ It shows that the meaning of the Being of Dasein is attained at a relatively higher level which is ontological rather than pre-ontological. The structures of Dasein, which have already been exhibited provisionally on the plane of everydayness, ‘must be interpreted over again’ on ontological basis ‘as modes of temporality’[17]  

I.3.      To Be is to Be Temporal

Heidegger equates temporality with the meaning of the Being of Dasein. In this regard, time is attempted to ‘be brought to light-and genuinely conceived-as the horizon for all understanding of Being and for any way of interpreting it.’ In order to make us understand time ‘as the horizon for the understanding of Being’, Heidegger explains how this notion of time or temporality is to be taken as the source from which both the traditional conception of time and the ordinary way of understanding time have sprung. The ordinary way of understanding time is characterized by taking something as temporal which ‘always means simply being [seiend] ‘in time’.’[18] Within this horizon of the ordinary way of its understanding, time has acquired its self-evident function ‘as an ontological- or rather an ontical-criterion for naively discriminating various realms of entities.’ The entities may be taken as ‘temporal’ entities like natural processes and historical happenings as well as ‘non-temporal’ entities like spatial and numerical relationships. Philosophically speaking, the temporal entities are also distinguished from ‘the supra-temporal’ eternal, and the cleavage between the two is attempted to be bridged. Unlike these philosophical underpinnings regarding the various realms of entities where time always remains unquestionable, Heidegger raises the fundamental question-‘how time has come to have this distinctive ontological function, or with what right anything like time functions as such a criterion.’[19]  

Heidegger attempts to conceive Being in terms of time, and his treatment of the question of the meaning of Being enables one ‘to show that the central problematic of all ontology is rooted in the phenomenon of time.’ In order to make Being visible in its ‘temporal’ character, Heidegger suggests to make ‘the various modes and derivatives’ of Being ‘intelligible in their respective modifications and derivations by taking time into consideration.’ In the process of conceiving Being in terms of time, ‘‘temporal’ can no longer mean simply ‘being in time’, ‘[e]ven the ‘non-temporal’ and the ‘supra-temporal’ are ‘temporal’ with regard to their Being.’[20] Heidegger calls this process ‘“Temporal” determinateness’ through ‘which Being and its modes and characteristics have their meaning determined primordially in terms of time’. Being-time relationship, as Heidegger expounds it, can become more transparent if one focuses it in terms of Dasein-time relationship.

In his treatise, Der Begriff der Zeit (The Concept of Time), Heidegger shows how Dasein is to be taken as time or temporality. Drawing from his day’s development of research in the field of physics particularly Einstein’s relativity theory, he focuses ‘the destructive side’ of the notion that ‘[t]here is no absolute time, and no absolute simultaneity either’, i.e., time is nothing, it instead ‘persists merely as a consequence of the events taking place in it.’[21] The fundamental problem with this physicist conception of time it is that it takes time as something measurable leading it to be necessarily ‘uniform’ and ‘homogenous.’               

Out of this uniformity, Heidegger draws the arbitrariness of time in terms of ‘now’. That is to say, time is to be measured in terms of two different ‘now-points’, ‘one is earlier and the other later.’[22] This arbitrariness of now-point shows that if one is to come across an event with a clock, it does not indicate how-much is the duration of the event rather it ‘makes the event explicit…with respect to its unfolding in the now.’[23] He then questions taking the experience of now as experience of I am. So the question of now-I am equality points the Heideggerian inquiry into time ‘in the direction of Dasein…the entity that we each ourselves are, which each of us finds in the fundamental assertion: I am.’[24] Dasein’s determining itself as “I am” is as fundamental as its being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-sein) or its being-with-others having the same world there with others. This character of Dasein ‘has a distinctive ontological determination’ to be concerned with language. ‘The fundamental way of the Dasein’ to be in the world as having world shared with others is ‘speaking’ a language. ‘It is predominantly in speaking that man’s being-in-the-world takes place.’[25] Dasein’s engagement in the dialogic process with others is not only an involvement in the discourse ‘about its way of dealing with its world’ but it is also a process of ‘self-interpretation of Dasein…which maintains itself in this dialogue.’[26] That is to say, ‘in all speaking about the world there lies Dasein’s speaking out itself about itself’, and ‘so all concernful dealing is a concern for the Being of Dasein.’ The important aspect of Dasein’s being with others in the world is that ‘the Dasein of Others [is] not able to substitute’ rather ‘the sole appropriate way of having Dasein’ is to say: ‘I never am the Other.’[27] Thereby Dasein, owing to the possibility of its own rather than the Other’s death, cognizes ‘the most extreme possibility of itself, which it can seize and appropriate as standing before it.’ Its interpretation with respect to its death is the most certain and authentic self-interpretation of Dasein, as its death is ‘the indeterminate certainty of its ownmost possibility of being at an end.’ Drawing from the concept of death as the most extreme possibility of Dasein, Heidegger extends the delineation of the Dasein-time relationship. Heidegger thinks of having one’s own death as ‘Dasein’s running ahead to its past, to an extreme possibility of itself that stands before it in certainty and utter indeterminacy.’[28]  

The most significant aspect of Heidegger’s concept of past it is that he conceives it in terms of ‘how’-‘what’ distinction. The past is not a ‘what’, for Heidegger, but a ‘how’ in the sense that ‘the past is not some occurrence, not some incident in my Dasein’ rather ‘it uncovers my Dasein as suddenly no longer there; suddenly I am no longer there alongside such and such things, alongside such and such people, alongside these vanities, these tricks, this chattering.’ This past is…indeed the authentic ‘how’ of my Dasein…to which I can run ahead as mine.’[29] Dasein’s running ahead to ‘the past as authentic ‘how’ also uncovers everydayness in its ‘how’, as this ‘running ahead to the past is Dasein’s running up against its most extreme possibility’, and that’s how ‘[t]his is Dasein’s coming back to its everydayness which it still is.’ Dasein’s maintaining ‘itself in this running ahead’ guarantees the authenticity of its existence as being temporal, as Heidegger owes to the notion of running ahead in order to relate past, present and future together. ‘In running ahead, ‘Dasein is its future, in such a way that in this being futural it comes back to its past and present.’[30] Dasein’s running ahead that way is ‘not in time’ but ‘is time itself’. Dasein’s running ahead is its coming back to everydayness in which ‘Dasein is that Being that one is. And Dasein, accordingly, is the time in which one is with one another: one’s’ time. So ‘[w]hat Dasein says about time it speaks out of everydayness’ which, ‘as that particular temporality which flees in the face of futuricity, can only be understood when confronted with the authentic time of the futural being of the past.’ This is the way past is ‘experienced as authentic historicity…something to which one can return again and again.’[31] Drawing form this repeating character of past as authentic historicity in its ‘how’, Heidegger finds the first principle of hermeneutics. He says:

“The possibility of access to history is grounded in the possibility according to which any specific present understands how to be futural. This is the first principle of all hermeneutics. It says something about the Being of Dasein, which is historicity itself.”[32]

The significance of Heidegger’s conception of Being in terms of time is its concern with how- rather than what-nature of temporality that may have compelled him to seek such a method of investigation that too characterizes the how rather than ‘the what of the objects of philosophical research.’ Phenomenology is such a method. He does not borrow the conception of phenomenology as it is from his predecessors instead he develops his own version of it which, on the one hand, ‘comprehensively…determines the principles on which a science is to be conducted’, and on the other hand, it is ‘primordially…rooted in the way we come to terms with the things in themselves.’[33] The uniqueness of Heidegger’s contribution to the development of this conception of phenomenology is the hermeneutic turn he has given to the conception.

III.       BEING, UNDERSTANDING AND INTERPRETATION: THE ONTICAL-ONTOLOGICAL-HERMENEUTICAL TRIAD

Drawing from the etymology of two Greek terms φαινόμενον (phenomenon) and λόγος (logos), Heidegger explores the meaning of the conception of phenomenology. The word φαινόμενον is, according to him, ‘derived from the verb φαίνεσθαι[34] which means ‘to show itself’. So ‘the expression ‘phenomenon’, according to him, ‘signifies that which shows itself in itself, the manifest.’ Now the question is what is that which shows itself in itself? Whether is it an entity[35]or other than that? Heidegger explains this demarcating the ordinary conception of phenomenon from the phenomenological conception of phenomenon. The former is the Kantian sense of phenomenon wherein ‘that which shows itself in itself’ is taken to be ‘those entities which are accessible through the empirical intuition.’[36] Grounding upon the Kantian sense of phenomenon having ordinary signification, Heidegger develops the phenomenological conception of phenomenon. The phenomenon which is ordinarily understood is ‘that which already shows itself in the appearance’ prior to the understanding and its showing itself is unthematic, but it can ‘be brought thematically to show itself; and what thus shows itself in itself (the ‘forms of intuition’) will be the “phenomena” of phenomenology.

In order to further understand the concept of phenomenon as Heidegger expounds it, one should go through the discussion concerning the distinguishing of phenomenon both from semblance and appearance. Depending upon the various modes of reaching at it, there are many possibilities for an entity to show itself from itself. One of such possibilities is semblance in which something shows ‘itself as something which in itself it is not.’[37] It is also a sense in which the Greeks used to refer to the term φαινόμενον. In case of phenomenon as semblance, some entity looks like something which it is not in itself. But one should not confuse this sense with the notion of ‘appearance’, as Heidegger conceives it as different both from phenomenon and semblance. The appearance of something is much like ‘the symptoms of a disease’. The symptom of a disease, in its appearing, does show the disease rather than itself. In this showing, the disease is one which does not show itself in itself rather it always needs the symptom to show itself, and this is what Heidegger considers ‘the announcing-itself by something which does not show itself.’ ‘Appearing is’, therefore, ‘a not-showing-itself.’[38] Now one can differentiate between the three notions namely phenomenon, semblance and appearance. Phenomenon is the showing itself in itself, semblance is the showing itself as something which it is not, whereas appearance is simply a not-showing-itself rather the announcing-itself by something else. In the next step of the development of his argument, Heidegger complements the notion of phenomenon with that of logos in order that the concept of phenomenology may take shape as a notion different from that already expounded by his predecessors.

Three Greek terms namely λόγος, άπόφανσις and λεγόμενον are the key words to understand the Heideggerian conception of logos. Overlooking the various interpretations of the word λόγος, like “reason”, “judgment”, “concept”, “definition”, “ground”, or “relationship” etc., Heidegger focuses ‘the basic signification of λόγος’, which according to him is “discourse.”[39] Referring to Aristotle’s explication of the term λόγος, he relates it to another Greek word, άποφαίνεσθαι. Discourse as άπόφανσις ‘lets something be seen’, which is to say, it makes manifest what is being said by someone, ‘and thus makes this accessible to the other party.’ Appealing to the various interpretations of λόγος like reason, ground and relationship, Heidegger further expounds it in relation to another Greek word, λεγόμενον. Λόγος, as letting something be seen, lets entities be perceived showing its signification as reason (Vernunft).[40] Moreover, λόγος is not only to let something be seen but it is also used with the signification of ‘λεγόμενον (that which is exhibited, as such)’ which, ‘as present-at-hand, already lies at the bottom [zum Grunde] of any procedure of addressing oneself to it or discussing it.’ So ‘λόγος qua λεγόμενον means the ground.’ Finally, λόγος acquires the signification of relationship when λόγος as λεγόμενον signifies ‘that which, as something to which one addresses oneself, becomes visible in its relation to something in its relatedness.’[41]

The composite words like sociology, biology, theology etc. show that when the term “logos” is attached with some word representing some specific thing, it makes that thing an object of study and so the composite words are to represent certain fields of study. That is to say, sociology is a discipline in which we study about society as in case of biology and theology we study about life and God respectively. These disciplines designate the object of their study and the subject-matter regarding the same. Instead of the how- they focus the what-nature of their study. Phenomenology, according to Heidegger, is not such a composite word to represent such a field of study. It is not the science of phenomenon in the sense that one can attempt, under the heading of phenomenology, to study phenomenon as its definite subject-matter. Instead phenomenology is an investigation of the how-nature of things, namely it is an ‘exhibiting’ of things as they are it themselves. For Heidegger it is a science which:

“…merely informs us of the “how” with which what is to be treated in this science gets exhibited and handled. To have a science ‘of’ phenomena means to grasp its objects in such a way that everything about them which is up for discussion must be treated by exhibiting it directly and demonstrating it directly….The signification of “phenomenon”, as conceived both formally and in the ordinary manner, is such that any exhibiting of an entity as it shows itself in itself, may be called “phenomenology” with formal justification.”[42]

The theme of phenomenology is Being, ‘its meaning, its modification and derivatives.’ So regarding its subject-matter, ‘phenomenology is the science of the Being of entities-ontology.’[43] In that sense phenomenology is a highly generalized discipline as it takes Being as its subject-matter, and Being, in its showing-itself, is neither a semblance nor an appearance. It is rather “phenomenon” of phenomenology qua ontology. In order to explicitly cognize ontology, one has to ‘necessarily’ focus, according to Heidegger, ‘a fundamental ontology.’[44] As Being is always ‘the Being of some entity’ the fundamental ontology takes ‘as its theme that entity which is ontologico-ontically distinctive, Dasein.’ Here Heidegger complementarily attaches the notion of έρμηνεύειν (hermeneun) with the concept of phenomenology. Dasein as an ontologico-ontically distinctive entity has itself ‘the basic structures of Being’, but in order to make those structures ‘known to Dasein’s understanding of Being’, it needs to interpret. The interpretation is extended ‘by uncovering the meaning of Being and the basic structures of Dasein in general’ in order that one ‘may exhibit the horizon for any further ontological study of those entities which do not have the character of Dasein.’ Heidegger also incorporates the concept of transcendence in the notion of hermeneutic-phenomenology. Being, not being a ‘class or genus of entities’, ‘pertains to every entity.’[45] Owing to this universality of Being, it lies along with its structures ‘beyond every entity and every possible character which an entity may possess.’ In that sense of being beyond all, ‘Being is the transcendens.’  Further, ‘[e]very disclosure of Being as the transcendens is transcendental knowledge.’[46] That’s how Heidegger conceives philosophy as a ‘universal phenomenological ontology’ whose primary step is ‘the hermeneutic of Dasein.’ He says:

“Ontology and phenomenology are not two distinct philosophical disciplines among others. These terms characterize philosophy itself with regard to its object and its way of treating that object. Philosophy is universal phenomenological ontology, and takes its departure from the hermeneutic of Dasein, which, as an analytic of existence, has made fast the guiding-line for all philosophical inquiry at the point where it arises and to which it returns.”[47]  

At this point, a brief look at Heidegger’s notion of interpretation in relation to understanding will be of use in order to aptly grasp his concept of phenomenological hermeneutics or hermeneutic phenomenology. He does not grasp understanding as one of the modes of cognition, instead, understanding is for him a ‘mode of Being.’ Understanding is a mode through which the Being of Dasein ‘discloses in itself what its Being is capable of’ in the entirety of Being-in-the-world as an essential basic state of its Being.[48] That is to say, understanding is the intelligibility of the whole mode of Being-in-the-world in which the Being of Dasein not only understands itself but the world as well. Understanding is the disclosure of possibilities of Being of Dasein in the world to guarantee ‘the full disclosedness of Being-in-the-world throughout all the constitutive items which are essential to it.’[49] Here arises the notion of interpretation, as expounded by Heidegger, as directly related to the development of understanding. Understanding is a projection of the Being of Dasein upon possibilities whereby understanding develops itself. This development of understanding is called interpretation (Austegung) by Heidegger. So interpretation is not, as traditionally conceived, an additional account of something which has already been understood rather it is ‘the working out of possibilities projected in understanding.’Having the fore-structure of understanding in background interpretation is to work out something as something-in-itself in a web of relations established in the totality of world.[50] This sort of interpretation is worked out at three levels namely (1) fore-having (Vorhabe), (2) fore-sight (Vorsicht) and (3) fore-conception (Vorgriff). The Vorhabe is the level of the appropriation of understanding in which the interpretation is grounded in ‘something we have in advance’, the grasp of totality of involvements in the whole situation. After this phase of appropriation if something is still unveiled then there arises one more ‘act of appropriation’ called Vorsicht. In this level, we see in advance the appropriate way in which things can appear ‘under the guidance of a point of view which fixes that with regard to which what is understood is to be interpreted’. Whatever is held in our Vorhabe and Vorsicht ‘becomes conceptualizable through the interpretation’ in the third level of appropriation called Vorgriff (fore-conception). In this level, ‘the way in which entity we are interpreting is conceived in advance’. So interpretation ‘is never a presuppositionless apprehending of something [as something] presented to us’, rather it is always ‘founded essentially upon fore-having, fore-sight and fore-conception.’[51]  

This understanding-interpretation relationship having the notion of being-in-the-world in background is circular in the sense that all interpretations require the fore-structure of understanding and again all understanding is developed or projected through interpretation. This is what Heidegger calls the ‘circle of understanding’ denying any possibility of its being vicious. According to him, every being as being-in-the-world has a ‘circular structure’ ontologically, if being is itself an issue for it. The circle of understanding or hermeneutic circle ‘is not an orbit in which any random kind of knowledge may move; it is the expression of the existential fore-structure of Dasein itself.’[52] That is to say, it involves ‘the structure of meaning’ as the circular relationship between understanding and interpretation which is rooted in ‘the existential constitution of Dasein’ as being-in-the-world. That is why Heidegger denies any possibility of reducing this hermeneutical circle to

“the level of a vicious circle, or even of a circle which is merely tolerated. In the circle is hidden a positive possibility of the most primordial kind of meaning. To be sure, we genuinely can hold of this possibility only when, in our interpretation, we have understood that our first, last and constant task is never to allow any fore-having, fore-sight and fore-conception to be presented to us by fancies and popular conceptions, but rather to make the scientific theme secure by working and then fore-structures in terms of the things themselves.”[53]

CONCLUSION

Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology is ‘simple’ in the sense that it deals with Being as phenomenon but at the same time complex, as it amalgamates Being with understanding and interpretation. Overlooking the complex nature of Heidegger’s philosophy, if one takes hermeneutic phenomenology as phenomenology of Being with a concern of interpretation, one may simply find it contradictory. Phenomenology is concerned with the cognition of reality as it shows itself to human intuition. If one cognizes reality phenomenologically, then it will be irrelevant to interpret the same, as one has already cognized reality as it is. If one needs to interpret reality after even having cognized it as it is, then it means that the cognition was lacking something which is to be compensated through interpretation. In any case, both phenomenological experience and interpretation cannot be put together to be complementary to each other. But one can avoid this problem of complementarity between phenomenology and hermeneutics if one takes it as the complex structure of hermeneutic phenomenology as Heidegger expounds it. Phenomenology is ontology whose theme is Being, its meaning and modification etc. But Being is always the Being of some entity, and it is to be shown not by itself rather by some entity. The most prior of entities, ontically, ontologically and ontico-ontologically, is Dasein. Without an entity like Dasein, Being remains implicit and so it is interpreted to be explicitly understood by the help of Dasein. That’s how interpretation becomes complementary to phenomenological description in the triadic structure of Dasein being ontologico-ontically prior in phenomenological research and hermeneutically explicit in understanding.

NOTES

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Contents

The Structure and Semiotics of the Second Book of Rumi’s Mathnawi as a Whole

Mahvash Alavi [5-28]

Ethics in the Protection of Environment

Seyyed Mostafa Mohaghegh Damad [29-54]

Mulla ‘Ali Nuri as an Exponent of Mulla Sadra’s Teachings

Janis Eshots [55-68]

A Comparative Study of ‘Faith’ from Kierkegaard’s and Rumi’s Perspective

Masoumeh Bahram [69-92]

Fundamentality of Existence

Aziz Daftari [93-118]

Mulla Sadra and the Unity and Multiplicity of Existence

Karim Aghili [119-146]

Avicenna on Matter, Matter’s Disobedience and Evil: Reconciling Metaphysical Stances and Quranic Perspective

Maria De Cillis [147-168]

Some Reflections upon Islamophobia as the ‘Totally Other’

Seyed Javad Miri [169-184]

Religion and Artificial Intelligence

Alireza Ghaeminia [185-200]

Suhrawardi and Mohaghegh Dawani on the Intuitive Knowledge of Soul

Ebrahim Rezaie [201-222]

Transcendence Model of Intellectual Evolution

Seema Arif [223-252]

Foundations and Development of Absurdism in Western Thought: Reflections from Perennialist Perspective

Bilal Ahmad Dar [253-278]

Religious Studies and the Question of Transcendence

Muhammad Maroof Shah [279-306]

Relationship of Theoretical and Practical Rationality in the Philosophy of Kant and Mulla Sadra and Some of its Consequences

Sima Mohammadpour Dehkordi [307-320]

Mysticism of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh: An International Epic, Mystical and Sagacious Persian Masterpiece

Seyed G Safavi [321-332]

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London Academy of Iranian Studies

Abstract

This paper examines the philosophical views of Mulla Sadra and Descartes on ‘Soul’, in five main axis. The Five axis include the following: 1. Exposition of Mulla Sadra’s philosophical view concerning the soul; 2. Exposition of Descartes view on the soul; 3. Examining points of similarity and difference between the opinions of Mulla Sadra and Descartes; 4. The distinct strength of Mulla Sadra’s theory; 5. The Criticism of Descartes’ theory.

The foundation of Mulla Sadra’s theory is ‘the corporeality of contingency and the spirituality of subsistence in relation to the soul’ and the foundation of Descartes’ theory is ‘the real distinction between the substance of the soul and body’. The new theory of Mulla Sadra in regards to the soul led to the presentation of a philosophical proof for proving physical resurrection, and the dualism of Descartes led to the collapse of his philosophical system.

Introduction

The topic of ‘knowledge of the soul’ has been amongst the most complex philosophical topics throughout the history of philosophy and human thought, such that Averroes (1126-1198) considered the proposition of a definition and limit for soul to be impossible. Mulla Sadra (1596-1650) the Muslim Iranian philosopher who is the founder of al-Hikmah al-Muta’aliyah (transcendent philosophy) and René Descartes (1596-1650) the French philosopher who is the founder of modern western philosophy, by establishing new philosophical systems in the Islamic and western world in regards to the soul, offered new theories which have had significant consequences. Thus, a comparative analysis of the opinions of these two philosophers in regards to the important topic of soul is of importance.

The analytical structure of this article is as follows: 1. Exposition of Mulla Sadra’s philosophical view concerning the soul; 2. Exposition of Descartes’ view on the soul; 3. Examining points of similarity and difference between the opinions of Mulla Sadra and Descartes; 4. The distinct strength of Mulla Sadra’s theory; 5. The Criticism of Descartes’ theory.

‘Soul’ from Mulla Sadra’s philosophical perspective

Besides his philosophical views on soul Mulla Sadra has also examined topics related to the soul from the perspective of the Holy Qur’an, theology and prophetic narrations, thus, using the term ‘philosophical’ in the subheading of this section is to clarify that this article only deals with the philosophical arguments of Mulla Sadra which are related to the themes that are also covered by Descartes.

In the view of philosophers, soul is a substance which is essentially independent, which in action requires matter, is attached to bodies and has a governing connection with the body. In the opinion of Aristotle, ‘the soul is the first of a natural, organized body potentially possessing life’[i]. In contrast to other philosophers who consider the human soul to be static, Mulla Sadra considers it to be gradational.

The importance and innovation of Mulla Sadra’s theory on the soul, is in how the soul appears. His famous sentence in this regards is ‘the soul is corporeal in its origination but spiritual in its subsistence’[ii], because the human soul for origination and manifestation requires matter and uses the potentialities of the body. The soul is considered to be an organ of the body and this is a reason for the argument that an existence separate to that of the body is not required for the soul. Mulla Sadra by using his “principle of transubstantial motion” which is amongst his important philosophical innovations, has proven that it is possible for a material phenomena which has the potential to become abstract, to slowly gain an immaterial form with the help of transubstantial motion, and finally he concluded that the matter of the soul, is the same as the matter of the body, and that the soul is a physical reality which desires to ascend to the spiritual world (malakut).

The soul passes the following stages in its journey of perfection: the soul in the foetal period is in the stage of the vegetative soul. In the beginning of birth it is animal by actuality and human by potentiality, and with the condition of living a life of thinking and contemplation, at around the age of forty s/he becomes a human in actuality. The soul concurrently with being a unified essence, has both the faculty of audition and that of vision, and besides being capable of thought it has a sensual faculty. Mulla Sadra considers the evolutionary journey of the soul to be harmonious with and alongside the process of the general universal motion, a motion which begins from matter, but reaches a stage which is transcendent from matter and ends at the abstract.

Mulla Sadra in his following books deals with different topics related to the soul: ‘Arshiyah, Masha’ir, Mabda’ wa Ma’ad, Shawahid al-Robubiyyah, Asfar and Hashiyeh bar Hikmat al-Ishraq-e Suhrewardi. These topics include the following: how the soul is made, the relation between the soul and the body, the substance of the soul, the degrees of the soul, the evolutionary journey of the soul, the immateriality of the soul and the subsistence of the soul amongst others.

First Principle: The soul being Gradational

The human soul, from the beginning of its creation to its telos has various ranks, and in this path passes different existential stages. As such, the soul is not static, rather it is dynamic, alive and gradational. The soul in its initial attachment to the body is referred to as ‘corporeal substance’; after that it gains power from stage to stage and is transformed into the different forms of its creation until it no longer needs the body and can subside on its own. The soul after leaving the body, by separation from the material world and journeying towards the eternal world, returns to its Lord. On the basis of this journey and principle, ‘the soul is corporeal in its origination but spiritual in its subsistence’[iii]. On this basis when it is first manifested in the material world it is a physical power, after that it transforms into the sensual soul, and by passing the different degrees of sensuality it reaches a stage where it is capable of creating different forms within its essence, and in this stage it is referred to as ‘Mofakkirah’ i.e. it has the ability to think. After this the soul retains what it discovers within itself, and this ability is referred to as ‘dhakirah’ i.e. ability to remember. By ascending from this rank, the soul reaches the rank of intellection and comprehending the universalities of the world, after this it reaches the rank of the ‘practical intellect’ (‘aql al-‘amali) and ‘speculative intellect’ (‘aql al-nadhari). The ranks of the speculative intellect are: ‘the intellect of potentiality’ (‘aql bi al-quwwah), ‘intellect of actuality’ (‘aql bi al-fi’l) and the ‘active intellect’ (‘aql fa’al). The body and the soul constantly transform until they reach the top of their rank and reach the supreme origin[iv].

Second principle: the actualization of the active intellect in the human soul

The active intellect has two existences: ‘non-relational existence’ and ‘relational existence’. The relational existence of the active intellect is the existence of the active intellect within the human essence and for the human being. Thus, the perfection and completion of the human being is the existence of the active intellect for her/him and her/his connection and union with the active intellect. The theory of predicating existence of the active intellect for the soul, and considering the active intellect to be the last stage of perfection for the soul; further, it is that the soul in the beginning of creation and the initial periods of its origination is moving towards the perfection of the natural physical body and the origin of some of the vegetative and animal acts, and is a potential thing. Afterwards, by moving in the direction of acquiring power over realities and acquiring knowledge and wisdom and categorizing and organizing issues and ordering the policies related to the laws of life, it becomes an intellectual being and possesses the rank and stage of the ‘intellect of actuality’. The soul on the path of reaching actuality from potentiality, is in need of the aid and attention of a being superior to itself , and as it itself does not possess an innate intellect or intellectual perfection, it is in need of another being which possesses both. There is an end to this chain of need; it ends at a divine light which is connected to a being named ‘the active intellect’ that is perfect, actual , active and governing of souls and is devoid of imperfection and lack, and which leads the soul from the boundary of potentiality to actuality. As such the soul by uniting with this actual perfect being attains ‘actual intellect’, and understands everything by its intellect in their actuality.[v]

Third Principle: the external and internal faculties of the soul

Other than the five external faculties, the soul has five internal faculties which are the principles of the external faculties. The external faculties become inactive as a result of unconsciousness and death, however the internal faculties do not become inactive, for the soul of the human being has collective unity which is the ray of the light of ‘the true unity of reality’.

Fourth Principle: the soul and the body are not two things

The philosophers before Mulla Sadra were of the opinion that the soul being the soul is due to it being an addition to the body and this theory is supplementary to the theory that the body and the soul are two things, and one is added to the other. In their opinion the relationship between the soul and the body, is like that of an entity controlling another entity. However, in Mulla Sadra’s opinion the soul and the body are not two separate things initially, the soul is referred to as the soul for it is exactly like the essence of its substance and is not attributed to anything (i.e. it is not separate from the body to be later on added to it), but rather initially it is considered as a stage amongst the stages of the body. Once the soul becomes transformed and gains perfection by intellect and knowledge it becomes separated from the body. Thus, it is only when the soul becomes pure intellect, independent in its own essence it leaves the body and becomes self-subsistent, no longer in need of the body.[vi]

Fifth Principle: human beings initially fall under a single definition of species, but in the second stage have different essences

Human beings are united in terms of their species in this world and under a single definition of the species composed of the proximate genus (Jins qarib) and the proximate difference (Fasl-e qarib), where by this genus and difference are taken from the bodily matter and the form of the soul. However, human souls in the initial stage after a unity in species, move towards a change of essence and become different species falling under four genera. The souls in the beginning of existence and the initial stage of actuality, are forms of perfection for the sensible material body, and at the same time are also spiritual matter, which either becomes accompanied by an intellective form and by its aid moves from the stage of potentiality to that of actuality or accompanies delusional satanic, animal, brutal and bestial forms, and on the day of resurrection is resurrected in that form. However, this resurrection occurs in the other world otherwise it would be transmigration and not resurrection. This is while transmigration is an impossible matter whereas bodily resurrection is a real matter which cannot be escaped or avoided. In the end the human being will be transformed in the form of an angel, Satan, or a four legged or brutal animal. If knowledge and God-consciousness (taqwa) dominate the human soul, it appears as an angel, while if deceit, trickery and compounded ignorance overcome his soul, it becomes Satan, and by the dominance of the effects of lust on it, turns into a four-legged animal and if it is dominated by anger it will become a brutal beast. As such the actuality of each thing is based on its form and not its matter. In that world the matter of the human being (regardless of colour or race) is of no importance, rather the foundation of resurrection is the form and actuality of the human being. As such the human being is resurrected in Resurrection based on the moralities and positive counterparts which dominates its soul.[vii]

Sixth principle: the transformation of the soul based on transubstantial motion

The transformation of the stages of the soul according to transubstantial motion is of the important innovations of Mulla Sadra. By criticising the opinions of past philosophers concerning the static nature of the soul, in the book ‘Arshiyah he clarifies the problems of past philosophers and answers them. He says, that if they say that it is of the certainties of philosophy that one object cannot at the same time be the form of one object and the substance for the form of another, unless the form is removed, and afterwards the substance becomes something else, and based on this hypothesis it cannot be said that the essence of human soul becomes manifest in the form an internal soul, in answer to them it is said: the correctness of this statement is based on the presupposition that in a world one state of being occurs, or the object under discussion is an absolute abstract object which is unchangeable. However, the soul by its dependence upon the body is capable of becoming powerful and at the same time as being the material form of this world, it is a substance for the form of the other world, or that this very soul is capable of becoming like the lowest form of animals in this material world through bad deeds, and yet be a substance prepared for accepting the form of the other world. Thus, although the corporeal form is in actuality the form of the body, it can potentially be substance for the intellectual form.

Mulla Sadra through his proofs proves that the universal natures all undergo transubstantial motion and in this world transform from one form to another. Thus, in this regards it is not necessary to accept the opinion of past philosophers who due to considering bodies and essences to be static did not discover transubstantial motion.

The human soul undergoes a revolution sooner that other beings. In general the body, soul and intellect become varied in different natural stages. In the beginning of creation the soul occupies the greatest degree of the sensual world and the beginning of the spiritual world. The soul is ‘the great gate of Allah’, for with its aid one can reach the world of angels and also every characteristic of hell can be seen in it. The soul is a barrier between this world and the other world, for it is both the form of the forces of this world and also the material of all the forms of the other world. The soul ‘is the meeting place of corporeality and spirituality’. The soul as the ultimate of spiritualities and bodies is testament that the soul in the first stage is of the bodily and spiritual realities, and not solely bodily[viii].

Seventh principle combining the contingency and the subsistence of the soul

A criticism put forward by Khawjah Nisar al-DinTusi is that how is possible to combine the contingency of the soul and its subsistence, for whatever proof is presented for contingency, will also act as a proof for the transiency of the soul and whichever proof is set forth for the subsistence of the soul is also a proof for its eternality and as such a negation of its contingency.

Mulla Sadra argues that the soul in contrast to pure abstracts and also to bodies, is not limited to one world, but rather is possessing of different modalities of being. On the one hand it possesses an abstract and intellectual modality and on the other it exists in the natural world on the basis of which it is contingent, and the contingency of the this specific modality of the modalities of the world, is based on the condition of the body. The soul enters the abstract world in its evolutionary journey; by entering the abstract world, and through this transformation, it dies in the natural world and is resurrected in the abstract world. It is evident that in this stage of the soul’s being, there is no need for the body and material conditions. Thus, the annihilation of the body, does not in anyway harm the intellectual, but rather results in the destruction on the state of attachment and the natural being of the soul, and this state is transient and after the annihilation of the body is destroyed. However besides this state, the soul acquires an abstract being and because of that state is subsistent[ix].

Descartes theory:

Descartes’ theory in regards to the soul has come to be known as Cartesian dualism, for he believed in the substantial distinction between the soul and the body. In this section Descartes’ theory in regards to the ‘distinction of soul and body’, ‘spiritual substance’ and the eternality of the soul  will be analysed.

The distinction of the soul and the body

According to Descartes’ theory the soul is not material for its substance is thought; further, it does not possess the material characteristics which the body is comprised of. In the introduction to Meditations Descartes says: the distinction between the body and the soul is based on the reducibility of the body and the irreducibility of the soul. For the body can only be considered in a reducible form whereas the soul cannot be considered other than as irreducible, in the sense that one cannot imagine half of the soul. The soul and the body are two distinct entities which have actual distinction, which is the highest form of distinction between entities. By His power god has created substance of the soul and the body distinct from each other.[x]

Descartes considers ‘thought’ to be the essential characteristic of the soul and considers extension to be the essential characteristic of the body.[xi] He says that the presence of the soul in the body is not like that of the ship captain in the ship, rather the soul is united with the whole of the body. The soul at the same time as having essential distinction from the body, in action, is united with it.[xii] My body, as I clearly see it, is a substance, however it is a material substance just as my spirit is a thinking substance. Thus that which is referred to as “I” has two distinct parts: the “body” or the machine that works and the “soul” or engineer that thinks.[xiii]

In principle 8 of the principles of philosophy Descartes writes:

In this way we discover the distinction between soul and body, or between a thinking thing and physical thing.

This is the best way to discover the nature of the mind and its distinction from the body. Since we are supposing that everything which is distinct from us is non-existent, if we examine what we are we see that no extension shape or local motion, or anything similar which should be attributed to the body pertains or our nature apart from thought alone. Therefore, thought is known prior to and more certainly than anything physical because we have already perceived our thought while we are still doubting other things.

The substance of the soul and its existential independence from the body

The foundation of Descartes’ argument for the abstractness of the soul is ‘cogito ergo sum’. In the ‘second meditation’ Descartes aims to acquire truth through methodical doubt, and comes to reason that in the process of doubt he can come to doubt everything except himself. He says that his “I” cannot be doubted, for it is that which is doubting in the first place, and that even the doubt of the deceitful Satan cannot make his “I” seem doubtful. For if he has been deceived he must be, and as such he is. With this reasoning Descartes aims to prove the existence of the thinking self. In the second meditation Descartes argues that actions such as eating and movement belong to the body and not the “I”, whereas thinking belongs to the ‘I” and cannot be removed from the “I”. He further argues that the perception of the wax (body) not by the senses or imagination but by the intellect alone, is reason for the existence of the soul as an independent substance from the body. For the wax has been perceived without the aid of the physical senses.[xiv]

The immortality and subsistence of the soul

Descartes is of the opinion that the soul is immortal and subsistent. However like Plato he does not consider the eternality of the soul to be because of the simplicity of the soul, rather he considers that the soul is subsistent because it is a substance. He is of the opinion that all substances, be they physical or spiritual, are subsistent.

Commonalities and differences between Mulla Sadra and Descartes

In this section the commonalities and differences between the two philosophers will be discussed.

The commonalities between Descartes and Mulla Sadra

Mulla Sadra and Descartes have a common opinion in regards to a number of important philosophical principles in regards to the soul, although they have used different principles and arguments in order to prove these principles. These principles are: 1. The soul being substance; 2. The soul being abstract and spiritual; 3. Eternality of the soul; 4. The soul at the same time as being connected and united with the body, is a distinct reality from it.

The differences between Descartes’ and Mulla Sadra

The difference of Descartes and Mulla Sadra in relation to the soul are: 1. Descartes considers the soul to be ‘spirituality of contingency and spirituality of subsistence’; whereas Mulla Sadra considers it to be ‘corporeality of contingency and spirituality of subsistence’; 2. Descartes considers the soul to be static, whereas Mulla Sadra considers it to be dynamic. 3. Descartes considers the soul to have only one stage, whereas Mulla Sadra considers it to be gradational: ‘the soul before nature’, ‘the soul in nature’ and ‘the soul after leaving matter’. 4. The foundations of proving the eternality of the soul, differs in the opinion of Descartes and Mulla Sadra. Descartes considers the eternality of the soul to be due to it being a substance, and as such even material substances are eternal in his philosophy. However, Mulla Sadra considers the eternality of the soul to be due to abstractness of the soul and its relation to the world of intellects, which is the absolute abstract of the contingent being which is dependent on the absolute simple abstract existence 5. According to Descartes the soul and the body are two discreet entities where one is added to the other. Whereas in Mulla Sadra’s opinion it is not so, but rather soul is referred to as soul because it is exactly like the essence of its substance and is not an addition to anything; in the beginning it is considered as one of the stages of the body and afterwards it gains perfection and acquires wisdom and knowledge and becomes abstract. 6. Descartes considers the relation between the body and the soul through epiphysis which is of the major weaknesses of his philosophical system. However, Mulla Sadra explains the relation between the body and the soul through ‘the gradational nature of existence’, the gradation of the soul’ and ‘the transubstantial motion’.

The distinct strength of Mulla Sadra theory of the soul

Based on the theory of ‘the corporeality of contingency and the spirituality of subsistence’ of the soul, Mulla Sadra has proven bodily resurrection by a philosophical instead of a theological method. In Mulla Sadra’s philosophical system, the soul arises from the material foundation and through transubstantial motion passes the stages of abstractness one after the other and becomes more complete, and the time of natural death, is the time of the perfection of the soul and its complete lack of need for the body. After the separation of the soul from the body, the faculty of imagination (which is abstract) is strengthened and creates the metaphorical body, however, this does not hinder the reality of the material or after-life body, because for the human being the body is matter, and matter here is considered in terms of genus and not simply in terms of the physical but also comprises for example bodies of light, as such the term body can also be applied to the metaphorical body. The philosophical principles of Mulla Sadra’s proof for bodily resurrection are: ‘the supreme reality of existence’, ‘reality of particularity and existence’, ‘the gradation of being’, ‘transubstantial motion’, abstractness of imagination’. However, Descartes’ philosophy is incapable of rationally proving bodily resurrection.

Descartes’ mechanical philosophy

The problem in explaining the relation between the body and the soul in Descartes’ philosophy is a result of his Mechanical and plurality oriented philosophy which on the one hand does not see the dynamism present in the natural world on the basis of transubstantial motion, and on the other hand is not capable of seeing that the existential unity of being, including in terms of the human being, is not above its multiplicity and as such explains the relations between substances and being with the direct mechanic role of God. In general, Descartes’ philosophy is amongst ‘static philosophies’ whereas that of Mulla Sadra, Leibniz and Hegel are of the ‘dynamic systems of philosophy’.

The relation of the body and the soul

The statement that the relation of the body and the soul is accidental and that there is no necessary relation between the two is false. Like Aristotle, Descartes has described the soul as the “first perfection” for the instrumental natural body, and it is impossible for such a composition to arise from two things which have no causal relation. The relation between soul and body is a necessary relation. This relation is not like the relation of the coincidence of opposites, and is not like the relation of two effects of one cause which have no direct relation with each other. Also the relation of the body and the soul, is not the relation of the absolute cause with its effect, rather it is the relation of two entities which are necessary for each other, whereby each from a distinct aspect require the other, and they are dependent on each other in being. The body requires a connection to the soul in order to be actualised.  And although the soul in terms of reality and intellectual being does not require the body, however for generation it needs a capable body, so that it comes to exist in it and belongs to it.[xv] Hence, Mulla Sadra considers the soul to be material and not abstract in the beginning of its manifestation in the body (the corporeality of contingency and the spirituality of subsistence), as such no problem occurs in the relation between a material and an abstract entity.

Cartesian Dualism

Descartes’ philosophy of machine (body) and engineer (soul) is a dualistic philosophical instrument which separates the world into two separate beings, namely the body and soul. In modern western philosophy Cartesian dualism has had contradictory outcomes, which are a result of the problems within Descartes philosophical system. Three modern philosophical currents in the west have opposed Descartes views: 1. Materialists who have rejected the spiritual substance of Descartes philosophy by relying on his opinions on animals (whose life he had considered to be mechanic), and have also explained the human being in mechanical terms; 2. The Idealist current which by relying on the independent spiritual substance of Descartes, have considered matter as a form of soul and have denied material substance; 3. The phenomenological current which by denying both the material spiritual substance of Descartes have stressed on phenomenon, which has none of the characteristics of Descartes’ substances.

Conclusion:

Both Descartes and Mulla Sadra began a new theory; however their theories led to two contradictory conclusions in the history of philosophy. The strivings of Malebranche, Spinoza and Leibniz, who are associated with Cartesianism, in order to solve the contradictions in Descartes’ philosophical system including the issue of the soul, resulted in the collapse of the Cartesian system and the appearance of the schools of Materialism, Idealism and phenomenology in the west. Whereas the strength of the philosophical system of Mulla Sadra, which withstood the criticisms of theologians, not only did not collapse after him, but rather was enriched and expanded by philosophers after him such as, Mulla Hadi Sabzawari, Mulla Ali Nuri, Mulla Abdullah Zonuzi and Mirza Mehdi Ashtiyani, and in the twentieth century the New Sadrean philosophy appeared. New Sadrean philosophy is a dynamic and current philosophical system which has been formed in the current era and is engaged in answering new philosophical issues and is forming a new arrangement and organisation of Islamic philosophy. The most distinguished characters of this school are Allamah Muhammad Hussain Tabatabai, Ayatullah Muhammad Baqir Al-Sader, Ayatullah Murtadha Muttahari, Ayatullah Seyyed Muhammad Hussain Beheshi, Imam Mussa Sader, Allamah Muhammad Taqi Ja’fari, Dr. Mehdi Ha’ri Yazdi, Ayatullah Jawadi Amuli, Dr Mehdi Mohaqeq, Ayatullah Seyed Mohammad Khamenei and Professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr.

Bibliography

Aristotle, The Complete works of Aristotle, The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Barnes,    Jonathan, Princeton, 1995.

Descartes, Rene, Mediations and other Metaphysical Writings, Penguin, London, 2003.

Mulla Sadra, Asfar, Qum, 1379.

-       Shawahed al- Rububiyah, ed. Ashtyani, Seyed Jala al-Din, Tehran, 1360.

-       Arshiyah, ed. Ahani, Gholamhussein, Tehran, 1361.

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Gustav Richter (1906-39)¹

Abstract

In this lecture, Richter refers to Goethe’s Westoestlicher Diwan in trying to decipher the personality of Rumi. In classical Orientalist language, Richter traces the social and historical forces which would have influenced Rumi’s life and work, his relationship with his father and with Shams-i-Tabriz. Finally, Richter attempts to find a method by which means the full significance of Rumi’s contribution to Persian literature can be assessed.

Who is brave enough in his lifetime to search for rare and less well-known subjects, might be following the hint of a strong personality (whom he unconsciously wishes to meet in a far off region of his mind) or the attitude of his more beautiful self (that wishes to create the pure and free expression of itself with the unsaid and unseen). We intend to look at the Persian poet and mystic Djalal al-Din Rumi – his works and his character. How many questions and expectations could be linked to this name, which is not known to everyone in Occident? I guess they will be of a more general as well as of a more special nature and thus urge us into a lively discussion. They also fill us with pleasure, since they attracted us whenever we were dealing with the Master of our Nation. So we can read the following about our subject in Goethe’s West-oestlicher Diwan.²

The treatment of a character so full of life asks for real effort, but Goethe gave us more than a superficial reason to attempt it. With Goethe, those almost invisible and unheard of characters can come up to us and we will joyfully welcome them. The gardens of the Orient will take us in, while not to estrange us from our own country.

In Goethe’s Divan all groups of the oriental history are colorfully mixed up – as if in preparation for a game about to start. It is indeed the whole Orient, which is opening up in front of our eyes. And then again in the multitude of all its forms and relations, which invite for a special evaluation. In the multitude the will for the whole! History and art as one. Could this history have been written without poetry? We will answer this question with an analogy, which we will find in the life and work of this Persian singer whose name precedes this lecture.

If we try to put all the historical dates of the life of Djalal al-Din Rumi into an appropriate context, we will find that his life was in many ways quite typical for the development of an oriental genius. At the hand of his father Muhammad Ibn Husain al-Hatibi with the honorific title Baha al-Din Walad, he crossed the Middle East at an early age already. In the year 1212 AD he had to leave his hometown Balkh (in Afghanistan) being no more than five years old. Reliable sources tell us that Baha Al-Din’s popularity caused the ruling Lord Charizmshah to be jealous of him. The close relationship with the Sultan or maybe courtly intrigues besides the interest of the people might have made his situation difficult enough. They went on the pilgrimage to Mecca, never to return. Via Nishapur, they firstly came to Bagdad, which at that time had not ceased to be the biggest town of the Islamic world.

Some decades before, the building activities of the Abbasids had enriched the town with many monuments and treasures, that can still be seen today. The political influence of the ruling dynasty was not as strong anymore. That it had survived at all was due to the fact that the different ethnic, social and religious contradictions had not surpassed the natural limits of a common cultural will. This will had grown since the 8^th century, the beginning of the Abbasid rule (when the Arabic world-Reich- became Islamic) to an extent that it was in need of an authoritarian representation on the outside. The natural mid-position in Mesopotamia had called for this piece of earth and with it this town to become the intersection of far-reaching oriental forces of life, which could lead to valuable mixtures and considerable spiritual wealth. Although they might also just disperse like rays from a center, so that clever statesman-like authority would be needed to keep them from disintegrating. The more this protection became weakened, the more the spiritual productivity of this metropolis declined and the number of radical voices grew.

The Shi’a, originally a religious-political opposition from the times of the first caliphs, were increasingly pushed out of political life into the religious sphere. Instead, secret societies, fed especially by Persian blood, grew stronger, enriched by some extra in-put as it was known since the time of the pre-Islamic Gnosis. At the famous Nizamija in Bagdad (university founded at the mid 11^th century) orthodox Islam was being taught, although, as in other places no longer as Mohammed’s true teachings. The young Djalal al-Din could probably only gain some superficial impression once he arrived in the town. His religious impulse, formed by his intelligent and pious father, was strengthened most once he came to Mecca. Baha al-Din now took the road to Malatia, where he stayed for four years and moved then further to Larindah. Here he spent seven years, devoted to the education of his son. Then both of them were invited by the Seljuq Prince of Rum, Allah al-Din Kaikubad, to his residence at Konia, the old Iconium in Asia Minor. Here Baha al-Din died in 1231 AD, a recognized and famous man. With the exception of a short stay in Aleppo and Damascus, Djalal al-Din remained in Konia until his death in 1273 AD. Never did this town reach the same level of spiritual importance again.

Art and science were flourishing under the protection of the Seljuq Sultans. These Sultans themselves – in a strange game of past and present – lived by a large and consciously preserved Iranian legacy, which was neither based on their blood nor the soil of their realm. Their princely names they borrowed from the old Persian legends of the heroes. Their court-life and building program followed Eastern patterns. The means offered by nature were rich and beautiful. Medieval travelers mention the healthy climate of the town, its wealth in water, the rich vegetation. On these healthy grounds arose the clear forms of the towers and walls enriched by decorations of narrow-winding Qur’anic verses, pillars with cupolas, minarets and arches of mosques and madrasas. The colors were shining through the unique fayence and tile mosaics. Whatever was spared by the storms of the following centuries modern ignorance has pulled down little by little. Only great ruins point us to the past.

We called Rumi’s life to a certain degree typical. This is appropriate if we look at courtly approval and disapproval as decisive influences on the form of spiritual education. The echo of social dependence resounds deeply in the soul of the Oriental. This overwhelming power could cause spiritual powers to penetrate into the whole of the Orient. At the same time it almost found its opposite in the thirst of knowledge of untamable glowing souls who lived absorbed in themselves, mysteriously carefree about the sorrows of the coming day. They were able to keep a secret second account of the household of their individual soul’s life. Like the distinction between today and tomorrow, the handling of here and there was understood. The restless never-ending wandering, an insistent counter-reaction to the despotic gestures which caused the public to kneel down and rise again. Freedom that creates culture? In this case a split term.

Far in the East lies the homeland of Rumi, his youth brings him to the South of Arabia and in the North-West of the Asian continent, he – who had seen Persia only as a child -composes the most beautiful songs of the Persian tongue. But let us also remember the lively encouragements that destiny granted him since his early days. Besides the attentive leadership of the father, history tells us also about the philosopher Burhan al-Din Tirmidi as the first teacher of Rumi. The personal relationship with the wise master always reaches for the hidden treasures of a pure oriental soul. Quickly the flames are flaming in the hands of the discoverer, one does not quite know how, the wonderful glow of revelation that dazzles the eyes and consumes flesh and blood. With joy and eagerness his pupil began the study of sciences which in its extent conformed with the various needs of the time. After the death of the teacher, the caring hand of the father was more needed than ever. And once again destiny granted him the chance to look up to a master and friend who was to determine the last and most important change in Rumi’s spiritual life. It was the mystic Shams-i-Tabrizi, under whose name Rumi was later to write his works.³ This periodical rise up to the highest experience of Islamic-oriental spirituality under the employment of greatest tension of unrest and pleasure, self-being and ethereal surrender to the great role-model in such a fundamental way cannot be called anything other than typical.

Once again we look at Rumi’s life. Face to face with the tensions of the small circle destiny provided greatest disturbances in a far-reaching historical context. His hometown, Balkh, lay in the midst of great political contradictions. The lasting change of dynasties, the persistent and uncompromising pressure of the Eastern peoples, the mainly unequal interplay of the most different streams of life, never allowed the Iranian lands to calm down again after the break-down of the Sassanian empire. After the victorious approach of the Islamic Arabs, the promising cultural and political bodies of East Asia were to be tied to a center that was lying out-side their own territory. The shimmering cloth of the Islamic empire was first woven from Syria and later from Mesopotamia. But before the last knot had been affixed, the whole structure was torn apart already by the weight of all the single movements which were nourished from the outside as well as the inside. Whether good or bad, love of life has torn this shroud hastily enough. The East had its share in it – and how it had been working against it! But the whole event remains tragic for us. The East was neither unified inside itself nor happy in its opposition. A half-national renaissance, building on the lost Persia, became linked up with semi-important political courts.

In all the confusion of this confrontation Ghazna wins special recognition sometime in the 11^th century under the leadership of its wise and happy Amir Mahmood. Those days were also happy for Balkh. Quickly the power of the Ghaznavids declined after Mahmood’s death and Balkh became the bone of contention of new dynasties. At the beginning of the 13^th century it seemed the town was yet again flourishing under the Protectorate of the victorious Charizmshahe. At the same time Rumi was born, a symbol of hope. But doesn’t it seem that when the father and the son left the town its lucky star came down as well? Just ten years later the East was hit by the greatest catastrophe: the Mongols broke into the Persian residences and brought these lands a history whose sad effects are well-known to us. Most important is the impetus for all this. The deep-seated opposition of West and East within the Islamic Empire had reached its peak. Charizmshahe had the idea of confronting the Caliph in Bagdad with a Shi’a counter-Caliph. In this struggle for life of the Islamic idea, Bagdad thought of a device, that not even the devil could have surpassed: one had to stir up the Mongols against the enemy. With this the magic spell was spoken, the magic spell that gave the pressing and threatening powers of the Far East goal and force. The Mongols fulfilled their act of destruction thoroughly. After a few decades Hulagu was ruling in Bagdad.

Thus we can see at once the main forces of the Orient confronting each other. How dark this valley lies before us and we still hear of its worldly sorrows until today. Destiny has united them (the main forces) in a heroic rhythm. The concentrated human will and its utopia were faced by superhuman – driven movements of the life of the peoples. And into the middle of this, an astonishing symbol of this confrontation was planted. Our poet takes his way from the East. The unrest of the coming events leave him unharmed on the outside but effect his inner contemplation. From the down-fall of his exterior world he saves the noble treasures of the oriental spirit into the dome of his inner visions. The deadly peace of the Islamic Mongols is being drowned by the relieving song of the living peace. And also the worldly expression is not forgotten. In the West-Islamic territory Rumi finds a peaceful and unharmed homeland. Its history likewise includes an East-Western wave in the 11^th century when the Turkish tribes, the Seljuqs came. But this process was successfully exploited by the Islamic East-Asian powers. The wave can thus only be compared to the Mongol invasion in its contradiction to it. The Seljuq-dynasty in Konia was, at the time when Rumi came, an oasis of the Orient. In despite of dynastic quarrels, Konia remained all his lifetime in the same position. The confrontations with the Mongols had probably also here effects. But they only gave proof to the high degree (in comparison to the neighbors) of political and social reason, which was to give this country power and dignity.

Great and thoughtful seem these historical contradictions. They express themselves in a monument that only takes part in the history as a symbol. Yet, it was much more than a symbol. The true faces of history are probably quite different from those which appear as a result of logical reconstructions. The true history is past processes. They are even more historical the quieter they came and employed their own laws. They have to pass quickly so as to give the pressing forces of nature another martyr. Historical is that Alexander whom Hamlet was addressing. Hence history does not get into conflict with time. History is life passed, the apotheosis of eternal oblivion. That what cannot be seen anymore because it did not have a contract with the future. Everything contemporary and natural, the things of the day! Thus such a history cannot leave traces of time-surpassing peculiarities. Willingly and self-content, history obeys the manager of the higher order. But against its inner wills it always releases creators and witnesses, who are not content with silent admiration. They call for the supra-history. With vigor they escape the stream of life and force their moment into a form. Certainly life will step over them and beyond them but coming time will see the heroic ruins of this effort. Thus one should not speak of history but supra-history or meta-history. Since everything we know well, are the unhistorical efforts of the past, not to go on but to stay. The temple of Paestum and the Acropolis or the ruins of Ekbatana –aren’t they much more than history? The same holds true for this other Alexander, whose appearance has delighted so many hours of scientific work. Never-ending is the row of such unforgotten figures and things, which float, like the spirit over the waters, over the plains of history. Because of them history seems vivid, tangible to us.

This simple fact has far-reaching consequences, because we do not intend to express old terms in new expressions. We would not be interested in challenging the common notion of history as it has come down to us if it wasn’t for its insistence on materialistic interpretation. The deepest understanding for this issue came from the German Romantics. It has relived the trembling tensions of creation. The German Romantics answered the icy coldness of rationalism with a decisive turn to the natural side of the being of man. The laws of human life can only be derived from projections of processes i.e.: history- the vital, tangible, lasting, contradictory, fighting creation of humanity. When during the last century the effort to understand arts historically was being exerted, they were probably in need of a hint that would point them to such a supra-historical constellation of the scientific material. Instead its interpretation was exposed to mechanical derivations and extended to endless causalities of smaller and smallest facts. As if history could ever become contemporary. Whatever reaches from the past into our time, our reason can only be used to reflect upon itself and the immediate entirety of our life. The researcher connects his intellectual visions to a unity, which he has to justify with his consciousness and his social mission. He is only allowed to consider the small things as long as he can be certain of the higher and highest relations. Thus a carefully interpreted term for history could help the self-attitude of scientific work. And here we find again Goethe’s Divan in front of us, ready for everyone who wants to consider its method.

It does indeed sound a little ironic, that we need to go all the way to the Orient to make such impulses among us Germans effective again. But we can counter such arguments, because the new forms of unity the researcher is now able to produce with his hands, to see with his visionary eyes give new evidence of his productive pleasure in creation. Also the results are needed for the common requirements of education of our time. In this framework the knowledge and understanding gained by the studies of the Orient are more suitable to the interests of his surroundings than a mere materialistic approach. The understanding of processes and their categorization in the best-researched and highest relationships of reason are the basic laws of movement for a scientist of the arts. In addition to this hint of the sovereignty of the recognizing will, let us also answer with the word of national science. The laws of room and blood of a well-established cultural unit will thus (when this kind of scientific work has been reunited with the divine drive of the creator) be able to distinguish the spirit in the world of knowledge.

In regard to the destruction that is occurring, everything that will help to regain a national vision will be useful for human society. That is why it should be hoped that many German scientists might be given the West-Oestlicher Divan. Because it is not only an account of factual events but an independent historical-poetical vision, which like the sun in spring will melt the crust of ice on the historian’s winterish mistake. He will see the historical expressions of life brought into an historical unity, a unity that lives in his immediate present. He will see that the scientific judgment is true because it is also beautiful. In its present the Divan thus becomes the proof for the form of creation and knowledge, which characterizes all historical legacy. This legacy cannot come about without the categories of a personal and self-determined life. Most of this legacy, that we know, is in literary form – a composition created by the refined will of its creator. That is why all efforts to find the true and real facts lead only to relative results. The individual movements of the literary creation cannot be thought further. Every collector will admit to this. Whoever is aiming higher, will find in the science of literature an elastic tool for history. Since he is now looking into the faces of other figures. He is reading from their lips. And if he is wise he will not pull down the last veil that hampers him from seeing the final truth. He probably could not bear it. How carefully the one who wants to see has to take care of himself. With distance and respect he has to approach literature like a painting. If you look at a painting too closely you will only see meaningless strokes and dots. But we are only looking for our own purposes. With a poetic and reasonable mind Goethe has looked at the Orient. Thus the Divan can be interpreted in two ways for we Germans: firstly as an example of an epistemology, which will lead to exemplary freedom. Secondly as an immortal piece of art which answers the questions of life with poetry. The one who will take this book into the canon of his Oriental studies will certainly find the right attitude towards the literatures of the Orient. He will slowly realize the importance of the studies of literature for in the treasures of the Persian literature he will find a reflection of his own spirit.

Rumi has lead us on the way of his own life into the present of our own generation; this art he will quickly explain to us on the grounds of the literary traditions of Central Asia. Rumi’s heritage stands in an obvious connection with a certain literary heritage. It is firstly related to the two names of Sana’i and Ferid-al-Din Attar ^4. The biographers like to quote Rumi saying, “Attar is spirit and Sana’i its two eyes. I followed Attar and Sana’i.” If you know Rumi’s poetry it is easy to believe this. Sana’i died in the middle of the 12^th century ⁵ and is considered the first important mystic-didactic poet among the Persians. Attar continued along the same way. But the literary-historical relations are much deeper than that. Let us confine ourselves to some remarks about the Persian literary history.

The dependence of Rumi on those role-models is certain, especially for his epic-didactic literature about which we will talk in the following. It is different for his divan, which has to be considered separately from other works. Although it is obviously also connected to something else. People tended to organize Persian literature according to historical periods or leading personalities. A well-known work of that kind is the very clear and tasteful canon as we have seen it in Goethe’s Divan. But a profound discourse on Persian literature demands a different principle of order. The beginning of the neo-Persian literature, which has been written under the influence of Islam is not known to us in great detail. From the 9^th and 10^th centuries we know some pieces of a rather balanced character with highly developed forms of expression. The poets have already taken on the Arabic meter, thus disciplining the rhythmic and linguistic niceties of the Persian tongue. One tended to list these poets in the correct timeframe as followers of specific amirs, who supported the arts. History gives a list of names, which are connected to this courtly art. They allow us only to establish an outer characterization. They do not tell us much about their share in the inner development of Persian literature. But exactly this issue calls for investigation. The specific peculiarities of these monuments remain dubious. Their evaluation is hampered because the poets are floating around their own works in an intangible fog. Specific personalities can only be associated once a specific literary term is being mentioned. If it occurs now that the influence of the personality of the creator goes beyond his literary work and participates in different literary traits, this personality cannot provide the ground for a scientific order of the history of literature.

For the Persian history of literature such doubts are quite appropriate. Not only the early period shows this disproportion, but it is also reflected in mid and later periods if not to say in all Middle Eastern art of the word. New methods have to be sought for, which present the Persian literary monuments in all their intensity and changeability. We are dealing with a history of literary equivalents. A good idea of such ‘self-history’ is given by the Persians in the distinguished forms of their poetry. How these distinctions are to work in specific cases remains unclear, and could probably be established if we were to analyze the monuments. We know the Shahname by Firdausi, which (although it is one of the oldest monuments of neo-Persian poetry) leads us already to the peak of epic poetics. At the same time, lyric art shows also already the different kinds of abilities of the Persians, which in their relationship to each other and to later developments have not been studied sufficiently by the Occident. Also everything that has been termed romantic or didactic needs further investigation. If you look for example at the canon mentioned above, which can be found in Hammer’s Persian Literature ⁶ , you will find Firdausi ⁷ as the noblest representative of epos, Enweri of the qasid, Nizami of the romantic, Rumi of the mystic, Sadi of the ethic, Hafis of the lyric. But terms like epos, mystic and ethic are not on the same literary-scientific level. They can only be understood separately in different subjects. Von Hammer had used this method to give a first great overview over Persian literature. His geniality lies in the fact that he thought of different types of human spirits to describe this history. Through his loose usage of terms he actually provided the starting points for an analytical work. And we are not talking yet about all those shimmering treasures that he revealed and Goethe thankfully employed. In this loose usage of terms first hints are hidden, which help a critical orientation. They have been hidden so far and only now through new discoveries they become visible again. Such a hint is, for example, the categorization of Rumi as the greatest mystic. Now the question arises whether the term mystic can actually be used in the literary field.

The history of the Orient confirms that Rumi was a member of the mystic movement (as a religious-historical term). When Rumi, after the death of his father, came to stay in Damascus for a while, he got to know Ibn al-Arabi (d.1249) and his pupils, some of whom were to become famous afterwards, too. He also met with Shams al-Tabrizi there first. If we take the dates, to consider Rumi a mystic, we should likewise be allowed to expect his participation in the laws of the inner movement. The system of Ibn al-Arabi can be called the universalism of Oriental mysticism. Inside this system all extreme attempts of the spirit have been connected, which the speculative and contemplative desire for salvation of the Muslims created and developed in previous times ⁸ . The prehistory of this system leads into a wide garden with many strange and colorful blossoms.

The exceptional tendency of the East Asian people to overstress personal religiousness, which slowly loses the relationship with anything surrounding it, has produced its own ecstatic language. This language became as public as the language which was used by the Gnostic, and pseudo-Islamic speculation. The writers copied these forms of expression into their texts and popularized the mystic quickly. Thus they met with the literary tendencies of religious literature of edification, which without the extreme forms had already reached a certain degree of literalisation of religious ideas. This deep does the mystic penetrate into the Islamic Eastern Asian spirit, likewise into the history of its literary form of expression. The play of colors of fantastic terminology, reflected by the ancient Gnostic ideas, had found a strange new form of continuation. Certain expressions of terminology became re-interpreted as stylistic expressions in the Neo-Persian lyric. Examples will not be given at this point. But modern research confirms what has been said here. The more general often intricate methods of the history of religion, of linguistic and literary comparisons as well as the cultural history of the Middle East have led to a unified demand for an interpretation of the mystic history in view of its own literature. It is obvious that we cannot understand any historical phenomena without having knowledge of the primary literature. But here it becomes also clear that it is only with the help of literary analyses that we will truly understand the Islamic-mystic form of life. Other approaches will not help us at all actually. They have only brought us so far as to the point where we recognize that a remarkable spiritual ability of the Orient depends innately on its cultural form of expression.

If we thus use the term of mystical-Persian literature, we mean a religious literary genre, which can be distinguished from other genres. Changeability and the ability of creating tension of this literature depend to a high degree on the form. A mystical ghazel is probably different from mystical-epic poetry, but how? If we say that the religious content is dependent upon on literary principles of form, we have to ask to what extend we can actually speak of the mystical as a separate literary style. Maybe the forms are already revealed in the non-mystical genres of literary movements, which are based on an immediate spiritual background which forces the religious will of creation to something related -but out-side the religious sphere. Hafis would be a good example for this. Since the evidence for all of this is only of fragmentary nature we cannot take this assumption for certain. It is thus a task to analyze and judge the Persian works historically in their own style.

The term style is here to be understood in a wider sense: as the form of the monument, which allows for the definition of its being and character. Knowledge about the personality of the poets, which came from non-literary sources, would not hamper such task. No, it would be easier to explain the intricacy of the personality of the Orient, the parallelism of the literary ways of expression in which we find one and the same person- in these over-strong and over-personal literary laws of formation. Also it would be possible to recognize the special share of each poet in each case and thus draw more specific conclusions about his personality. Thus we should have a certain literary term in the end which would allow us to have a specific idea about the personality of Rumi on one hand and about Rumi’s works based on an analyses of style and contents, which would allow for comparisons with other works on the other hand. Thus Rumi’s share in the development of Persian literature would become evident on the basis of a productive and correct judgment.

Research of this kind is promising, because it takes the historical context into account as well. The relationship between literature and history can even be better explained if we look at the mission of mystic literature in its surrounding world. Rumi’s mystical ghazels were meant to be for the personal meditation of the people of the order. They had an indirect liturgical meaning for a close, religious society. From early on, mystical concentration is related in Islam to a life in an order. Rumi founded a special order in Konia, the Mewlewis, which existed until the year 1925 and vanished with the oncoming of the new Turkish era ⁹. An impressive tradition came thus to an end: it had been the custom that the abbot was a descendent of Rumi. In this visible living on of the master, the younger generation could be inspired again and again. They experienced their mission especially in this dancing form of meditation that we find so incredible and mysterious. Usually they were accompanied by a characteristic and melancholic music of the flute. Naturally, Rumi’s works were considered holy literature. Thus his following served, above all, the purpose of poetry. This phenomenon has to be kept in mind for stylistic analyses, i.e., the relation of need, which the mystical art of the word has with society – the direct or indirect consideration of the audience, that the poet is addressing and to whom he speaks in special tones or voices to further his goals. This sociological task of the research of style has already been employed for the poetry of the Occident. It promises in this case to lead to important and singular results, too. The literary-religious meditation is pressing towards the society and cannot be understood by historical analyses without considering the social background. We remember the almost mysterious importance, which the image of the friend and the master as such, has reached in neo-Persian literature. This thought of style is closely and necessarily related to a well-established social tradition. It also helped Rumi to find his words.

The friendship between him and Shams-i-Tabrizi was of the deepest kind. Tabrizi came to Konia in the year 1244/5, when our poet was already enjoying his name as an important theologian. The mystical preaching of Tabrizi gave Rumi’s life a new meaning and content. Tabrizi became his teacher. History tells us many stories about this friendship. But also without these legends, the mystical esoteric in Rumi’s poetry gives a clear idea about the close relationship of their souls. It doesn’t matter that we do not know much about Tabrizi as a historical figure. The mystical inspiration of the pupil by the master is indeed a consistent vademecum of every teaching relationship in the history of the Islamic mystic. As teacher of Tabrizi we often hear about Rukn al-din Sindshasi. He was the one to send his student to Rumi. Even if this does not hold true, it gives some idea about tradition in mystical context. Mystics continue this chain even back to Muhammad and Ali. The end of Shams-al-Din is as surprising as his coming. In the masses of the street he suddenly disappeared with the oldest son of Rumi. Whether he was killed by an angry crowd, possibly for his offensive arrogance ¹⁰, or whether it was just an accident, no-one knows. For what is important in terms of sociological analyses is this: these two figures, Rumi and Tabrizi, demonstrate the common goals of their relationship in an artistic expression, to further an intimate social purpose. This becomes even more effective once one person involves another person in this process, thus they eliminate their personal value of being for a more general appearance that can be typified.

But with these general hints we don’t want to talk about the results already. The aim was to put the different subjects involved while dealing with Rumi into proper perspective.

Notes:

1- This is a translation of Gustav Richter, Persiens Mystiker Dschelál-eddin Rumi: Eine Stildeutung in drel Vortraegen, Breslau: Frankes Verlag uind Druckerei, Otto Borgmeyer 1933, chapter 1. His German translations have been replaced by English equivalents. All the footnotes are the work of the editor as the original has no references.

2- See Shaykh Abdal-Qadir al-Murabit’s Fatwa on Goethe, which brings to light certain proofs of Goethe’s acceptance of Islam. (Diwan Press, London: 2001)

3- The taking of Shams-i-Tabriz’s name came from Rumi’s intense, spiritual love for this mystic, to the extent that he perceived no division between them. See also Reynold A. Nicholson, Selected Poems from the “Divan-i Shams-i Tabriz” (1898; reprinted., Cambridge, 1961)

4- Rumi’s contemporaries, Ibnu’l-Farīd (d. 1235) and ‘Attār (d.1229) wrotes moving verses about emotion, wonder, love and the ‘sheer incomprehension attendant upon the mystical experience’ (Fakhry, Majid. A History of Islamic Philosophy, 2^nd ed., Columbia University Press, New York: 1983, p.255)

5- Abū’l-Majd Majdūd Sanā’i (d. 1131) attacked rationalistic philosophy as a way of coming to know Allah. See Annemarie Schimmel’s Mystical Dimensions of Islam, (The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill: 1975) pps 18-19

6- Hammer-Purgstall, Joseph von. Geschichte der schönen Redekünste Persiens. (Vienna: 1818)

7- Qusta ibn Lūqā al-Firdaus (d. 900) “excelled in philosophy, geometry, and astronomy… The list of his philosophical writings includes The Sayings of the Philosophers, The Difference between Soul and Spirit and A Treatise on the Atom” (Fakhry, Majid. A History of Islamic Philosophy, 2^nd ed., Columbia University Press, New York: 1983, p.15)

8- See Affīfī, ‘Abū’l-‘Alā’. The Mystical Philosophy of Muhyid’Din Ibnu’l-‘Arabi (Cambridge: 1938)

9-”The activities of the Mevlevi dervishes in Turkey, along with those of other orders, were banned by Atatürk in 1925.” (Schimmel, Annemarie. Mystical Dimensions of Islam, p.185)

10- “The sources describe Shams as an overpowering person of strange behaviour who shocked people by his remarks and his harsh words.” (Schimmel, Annemarie. Mystical Dimensions of Islam, p.313)

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University of Leeds

Abstract

This paper analyses and compares the ideas of Kierkegaard and Rumi on faith and love. After outlining the very divergent historical contexts in which these two thinkers set forth their ideas, the study then identifies and explains the main and additional secondary keywords related to the concepts of faith and love. This includes the three stages of existentialism, as differently expressed by Kierkegaard and Rumi. The similarity in their thinking is described, as is also the dissimilarity in their lives, contexts and modes of contemplation. Finally, both the ideas are evaluated. The conclusion is that faith and love are concepts not amenable to scientific analysis, and the ideas of these scholars are for all people in all ages.

Introduction

Kierkegaard and Rumi have provided the world with profoundly beautiful insights into the nature of God and of our human life. Not only do they enjoy the capability of pleasantly comprehending Almighty God, but they also know very well how much pain we suffer in this world. They do try to alleviate humanity’s sufferings and add to its joy by getting help from the geometry of their thoughts and knowledge. In a word, I firmly believe that Kierkegaard and Rumi want to deliver a well-known message to the people of our time, and it is for this reason that they link themselves to our minds, feelings and emotions and stand for us in this age of bewilderment and consternation that we face. They suggest that one can derive courage in order to live daringly, grant a new significance to life, cope with its hardships and spend it calmly and pleasantly, on the condition that one would be able to enjoy faith and love within oneself. Indeed, Kierkegaard (1813-1855), who was the founder of existentialist philosophy and a reviver of Christian theology, and Rumi (1207-1273), who was the greatest mystical poet of Iran, were able to provide a special vision of faith.

Faith is one of the most important subjects in theology and the philosophy of religion. Although it is an ancient subject, it is a vital element of theology. Undoubtedly, a comparative study can be used as a beam of light to illuminate a deeper understanding of faith from the perspectives of Kierkegaard and Rumi. There is, therefore, no need to emphasize the importance of conducting analytical assessments of the subject. It is, however, necessary to explain that I myself am so enraptured by Kierkegaard’s and Rumi’s remarks about God, faith, and the love of God that, in the course of doing the research, I have felt God with all my heart. It is a feeling that renders me incapable of explaining it or finding ways to rationalize and find logical reasons for it. The only feeling that can be explained is the permanent sense that, if I did not have God, it would be impossible for me to understand the meanings of those most beautiful words: love, sympathy, piety, and spiritual beauty and self-possession.

My seminal question in this paper is whether the concepts of ‘faith’ and ‘love’ have a joint meaning as viewed by Kierkegaard and Rumi in spite of many differences that they may have. The main objective of this research is to undertake a comparative study based on views expressed by Kierkegaard and Rumi about concepts such as faith and love, because these two terms constitute the core of the meditations these two scholars carry. The methods that can be used and relied on to document Kierkegaard’s and Rumi’s views are content analysis and comparative study.

Historical background related to Kierkegaard

Søren Kierkegaard was born in Copenhagen on 15^th of May 1813. Kierkegaard studied theology and philosophy at the University of Copenhagen. He was the founder of existentialist philosophy. It seems that the most important movement in modern philosophy was existentialism. In fact, it came into existence at the beginning of the nineteenth century and it was a German language-based philosophy. It is especially true that it is not a school of philosophy; rather, it is an intellectual movement in philosophy which includes various schools of thoughts. Although this philosophical movement served to strengthen some other disciplines such as psychology and theology and heavily influenced the contemporary Western European philosophical movement, ‘it is quite natural that Søren Kierkegaard should be influenced by the philosophy of his day’ (Thomte, 1948: 7). It also gradually extended its area of influence into British and American philosophy.

Kierkegaard questioned the teaching of the Danish church and argued that there was no relationship between the real Christian life and that of the official church hierarchy, seeing the latter as an example of how duties had become tools for personal gains. It can be seen that if duties are not undertaken for God, this is something worse than unbelief. He also accused the church of forgetting the spirit of Jesus Christ. On the other hand, he opposed Hegel’s philosophy, which I will discuss in the relationship between faith, love and reason.

There are other philosophers who opposed Hegel’s philosophy and one of them is Schelling, who argued that this philosophy does not consider the existence and individuality as separate existences, but rather they exist as networks of a whole system of meaning. Jaspers also followed Kierkegaard and believed that in Hegel’s philosophy every secret has been eliminated and everything has become known.

It is important to recognise that Kierkegaard’s published work amounts to several books, including Alternative, Fear and Trembling, and Repetition.

Historical background related to Rumi

Rumi was born on 30^th of September 1207 in Balkh. His father named him Jalal al-Din, which means “The Splendour of the Faith”. When he was twelve years old, the news of the atrocities of Mongol armies who were now approaching Balkh forced his family to emigrate from Khurasan and to embark on a desperate journey which finally took them to Konya in the present-day Turkey. His father, Baha al-Din, or “The Glory of the Faith”, was a learned theologian and preacher, who soon obtained a high position among the city’s scholars and was called “the King of the Scholars”. When Baha al-Din died in 1231, Rumi took over his role as the Sheikh. In 1244 he met a mysterious dervish, Shamsoddin-e Tabrizi (the “Sun of Religion” from Tabriz).

These two mystics started discussing the difference between Mohammad the Prophet and Bayazid Bastami: Mohammad, though a Prophet, called himself ‘his slave’ whereas Bayazid the mystic exclaimed Sobhani ‘How great is my glory’. This topic would be much in keeping with the interest of both. For six months the two mystics were inseparable, so much so that the family and the disciples complained – Rumi neglected his classes, his friends, and everybody, completely lost in the company of Shamsoddin (Schimmel, 1978: 18).

Rumi gave up his public preaching, and his disciples who were deprived of their Master’s insightful teachings were angry. Shams, who knew much about human obsessions and shortcomings, felt that it would be better for him to leave Konya to avoid conflict with Rumi’s friends and disciples who could not understand Rumi’s love and respect for Shams. Shaken and heart-broken, Rumi ordered Sultan Valad, his eldest son, to find him. Sultan Valad managed to find and bring him back, but soon, in 1247, Shams disappeared, for the second time, never to be seen again. In a poem about Rumi’s love for Shams, Sultan Valad, Rumi’s son, “vividly describes the passionate and uncontrollable” love that “overwhelmed his father” at the time:

Never for a moment did he cease from listening to music (Sama), and dancing;

Never did he rest by day or night.

He had been a mufti: he became a poet;

He had been an ascetic: he became intoxicated by love.

‘T was not the wine of the grape: the illumined soul drinks only the wine of

light (Nicholson, 2000: 20).

When Shams left, Rumi selected Salahul-Din Zarkub, one of his most intelligent students, as his companion and deputy; and after Salahul-Din’s death, Husam Chelebi became his companion and deputy, succeeding him as the leader of the Mevlevi Order. Rumi, who had hardly listened to Persian music and poetry before Shams, was so much influenced by Shams that he avidly listened to music and composed poetry, believing that Shams was within him listening and dancing to music and that the mystic songs that he produced were the result of Shams’s continuous conversations with him, or that they were even composed by Shams.

Rumi’s greatest work is the Mathnavi-e Manavi or The Spiritual Couplets in                          six books containing about 25000 rhyming couplets, which he dictated to Husam over the last fifteen years of his life. Jami, a later Iranian mystic poet, called it the Koran in Persian (Arberry, 1961: 11).

His other major works are the Divan-e Shams-e Tabriz (Collected Poetry of Shams-e Tabriz), amounting to some 40000 double lines or more lyric verses, the Ruba’iyat or Quatrains, of which there are about 1600, Fihi ma Fihi and Munaqib el-Arifin. Rumi has influenced many thinkers and poets, not only in the Islamic world but also in the western countries. According to Iqbal:

Maulana Jalal-ud-Din Rumi needs no introduction. For seven hundred years now his verse has inspired millions of men. Jami, the celebrated Persian poet, hailed him as a saint who was not a Prophet but had a book. Hegel considered Rumi as one of the greatest poets and thinkers in world history. The twentieth-century German poet Hans Meinke saw in Rumi ‘The only hope for the dark times we are living in’. The French writer Maurice Barres once confessed, ‘When I experienced Mevlana’s poetry, which is Vibrant with the tone of ecstasy and with melody, I realised the deficiencies of Shakespeare, Goethe and Hugo’ (1983: xvii).

According to Bruijn:

After the death of Jalal al-Din Rumi on December 17 in 1283, Husam Chelebi became the leader of Konya Mowlavi Order and in 1284 when Husamul-Din died, Sultan Valad, Rumi’s son, took his place as head of the Mevlevi order, successfully trying to increase the reputation of the Order and writing Ma’arif (Divine Sciences), similar to Fihi ma Fihi (1997: 111-112).

The additional secondary keywords denoting the concepts of faith and love

Faith and love are the most important keywords for Kierkegaard and Rumi respectively. I would suggest that the concept of love as has been raised by Rumi is equal to that of faith for Kierkegaard, and indeed they only differ in the terms they have used. The keywords ‘faith’ and ‘love’ were chosen because they reveal themselves at the highest level where mankind’s soul begins to soar.

Kierkegaard believes that some people in this stage seek only apparent pleasure and beauty and this is a declining period of life. Ethical life comes next as a second stage: that is to say one’s personality elevates and escapes from the tight cage of pleasure-taking and binds itself to observe and obey some moral principles. For instance, he tells the truth whether it gives him pleasure or otherwise. But the third stage comes when a person reaches to a point of spiritual change that is neither a function of ethical rules nor enslavement to pleasure, but is unquestioningly the function of God’s command. It is wholly devotion and submission. However, such devotion may not carry any experiential evidence or even rational reasons.

One important note is that the word ‘love’ is the most beautiful and significant keyword from Rumi’s perspective. For example, in Chapter 1 of Mathnavi, verses 220-225 describe only the concept of ‘love’ instead of ‘faith’, where the good people sacrifice themselves to Almighty God, and as far as the concept is concerned, the notion of ‘love’ in its entirety as used by Rumi, and that of ‘faith’ as raised and introduced by Kierkegaard follow the same direction. Similarly, if we have not known Kierkegaard, we might assume his book Fear and Trembling is the exact copy of Rumi’s couplets 220-225 as these have been interpreted. This also vividly reflects an exact connection of two scholars to a viewpoint. As Hegel learned about Rumi’s meditation and on the other hand as Kierkegaard has a good command of Hegel’s meditations, it seems that Kierkegaard may have had the same opinions as Rumi had on some occasions. As Tim May argues, things ‘that are similar are more likely to borrow from one another’ (2001: 208).

The following are secondary keywords that have contact with the concepts of faith and love and have been discussed directly or indirectly in this paper:

1. 1. An entire risk or one-sided gambling: In this position mankind puts himself under the care of God completely, only because his soul hears a nice and agreeable voice sung by Almighty God. Kierkegaard and Rumi portray in their works the astonishing adventure of Abraham at a moment when he was about to offer to God his only son, Esmail or Isaac. This shows that Abraham is losing his dearest asset in order to desist from pleasure-taking and has absorbed himself in the Divine commandment. In fact, risking one’s life and submitting to God’s command are part of the same existentialist faith.
2. 2. To be sacrificed and accept death: To be sacrificed and give one’s life as a pledge in Rumi’s works is, I think, the same stage of faith that Kierkegaard reveals in his own works. They both believe that the only spiritual condition under which a man can reach the high status and most excellent experience is that he should humbly sacrifice himself even, rather than his son. The important term “sacrifice” has been portrayed most delicately throughout the second and third books of Mathnavi as well as in the book Fear and Trembling. As both these eminent scholars state, when love and faith take the field the lover or the true believer accepts his death in the presence of his beloved and makes his death as an intermediating means of watching the most bright and beautiful face of his highly-esteemed friend. Love and faith essentially mean escaping from “I and we” and locating in “you and he”.
3. 3. The concept of freedom: Freedom means a complete release from everything except God. Here also Rumi’s introduced love approaches Kierkegaard’s faith, and they become united such that they form a single attitude to a truth with two titles. At this instance, Rumi points to the same personality that Kierkegaard nominates and refers to it as a stage of mundane pleasure that must be necessarily ignored in order to reach a perfect faith. Rumi has the same view on liberty, namely, a release from inside, self- idols, devilish uncleanness, impurities, and thereby reaching the high peak of existence.
4. 4. Being ruined: The concept of being ruined is a keyword with profound significance that has been included in Mathnavi exactly in line with faith as posited by Kierkegaard. It implies that a lover or true believer is ruined in the presence of God until he finds his great treasure (faith and love), and the purpose of being ruined means departing this life, being dissolved into one’s beloved and leaving behind self-estrangement.
5. 5. Madness: This is the same supra-ethical and supra-rational stage which can be described only in terms of faith and love. For example, Abraham’s act, which seems to most people without a faith to be a type of madness, can be interpreted only through an entire love and faith of the type posited by Kierkegaard.
6. 6. Both Kierkegaard and Rumi point to three stages of existentialism, with all human beings finding themselves at one of these stages. The key concepts of these stages include aesthetic, moral and religious stages according to Kierkegaard’s thinking, and nafs-e-Ammara, nafs-e-Lavvama and nafs-e-Motmaenna according to Rumi’s. Although different words are used to denote the key concepts in these three stages by Kierkegaard and Rumi, they are nevertheless united in meaning, and the consequence of their discussions is the fact that what we can do is that we can either remain in the dark or accept that God is able to throw light on our ignorance if we wish.

Kierkegaard’s and Rumi’s ideas about ‘Faith’   and ‘Love’

To explain the concept of faith and love, Kierkegaard and Rumi make a distinction between three stages of being and believe that all human beings are at one of these three stages:

1. 1. The Aesthetic stage in Kierkegaard’s thinking is when the love of joy guides the person’s life.  Life is defined as a search for beauty and joy and the person who lives in this stage lives as animals do. He/she eats to work and works to eat and has physical joys without any responsibility. His/her love is only for transient things and beings. He/she may have reached the age of 40, but is still childish and his/her love of joy is still limited to momentary sensations and defined by his/her own individual desire. Unfortunately, most people are stuck in this stage and the only concepts they know are desire and joy. Here strong willpower is non-present and the individual is not committed to anything but his own personal joy. If we define life by Hegelian scientific laws and Hegelian logic, human beings can never pass this stage. For instance, a physician who smokes is definitely aware of the harmful effects of smoking on the body and knows that he has to stop smoking. Nevertheless, he/she continues smoking because human beings never stop doing things they like to do just as a result of awareness or advice or rational discussions with themselves or others. He would stop smoking only when he comes to believe, to have faith in, the fact that smoking is damaging to his health.

Rumi also defines mankind’s psychological being in terms of three layers of self which need to be transcended before human can achieve selflessness and dissolution in God.

Nafs-e-Ammara is the worship of other men and women, wealth and power. Nafs or Ego, in this state, because of its essentially “beastly” nature, can be compared with various animals, in particular the ass, dog, pig and cow. In other words, Ego is the mother of all idols, forcing mankind to be obsessed with lust, greed and love of power:

Yourself (nafs) is the mother of all idols: the material idol is a snake, but the spiritual idol is a dragon.

‘T is easy to break an idol, very easy; to regard the self as easy to subdue is folly, folly.

From the self at every moment issues an act of deceit; and each of those deceits a hundred Pharaohs and their hosts are drowned.

O son, if you would know the form of the self, read the description of Hell with its seven gates (Ovanessian, 1991: 145).

Nafs-e-Ammara, which always embarks on new quests for lovely joys, superficial beauties and worldly powers, can never be satisfied. Its cravings are similar to the taste of salty fish: the more one eats, the more one desires water. In this situation, the person expects others to obey and worship him as the leader; and to achieve this, he commits atrocities beyond human imagination. Therefore, he/she becomes an instrument in the hand of carnal desires obsessed with wealth and power. Taming the wild animal of Nafs-e-Ammara requires a great amount of perseverance, but eventually it can be tamed by reason at its lower levels and by love of God at its higher levels. This is because reason is not capable of convincing the self when it comes to mankind’s existential problem with being.

What is the remedy for the fire of lust? The light of the Religion: your (the Moslems’) light is the (means of) extinguishing the fire of the infidels.

What kills this fire? The Light of God. Make the light of Abraham your teacher. (Zamani, 2000: 1052 Book No. I).

O son, burst thy chains and be free! How long wilt thou be a bondsman to silver and gold? (Zamani, 2000: 62 Book No. I).

1. 2. The moral stage in Kierkegaard’s thinking: in this stage the person is moral in thought and in practice. He/she is virtuous and, if married, has a real and faithful married life. Here women are not man’s properties and are not just there to tempt and be seduced; they have personalities of different types and try to find their spiritual road to perfection. In this stage, the individual is determined to discharge his/ her responsibilities and, by using his free will, makes moral choices. Thus, his behaviour has general regular patterns and he/she leads a life of positive being alongside other people.

Nafs-e-Lavvama in Rumi’s thinking is comparable to ‘conscience’ in the Koran (chapter 75 verse 2: ‘And I do call to witness the self-reproaching spirit’). This is a higher layer of being in which the person is consciously involved in a conflict against the lower layers of his Nafs and animalism. One begins to analyze oneself and to purify and control one’s desires through reason. However,

Reason can only help him to reach the door of wakefulness. S/he must   respond to the call of self-knowledge, experience it, and hear it from within him/her and not learn about it from knowledge gained in books or from listening to others (Arasteh, 1974: 117).

The Man of God is wise through Truth:

The Man of God is not a scholar from a book (Shah, 1980: 108).

This stage is liberation from instinctive acts and attainment of real self. One of the best ways to tame the Nafs is through constant fasting and ascetic exercises until it becomes an obedient animal. ‘Rumi, even at that early age, like many saintly people, he used to eat only once in three or four days or once during the week’ (Shah, 1989: 6). Another way is little sleep:

The fishes and fowls are confounded by my wakefulness day and night.                 Before this (state of mine) I used to wonder why the vaulted sky does not sleep;

But now the sky itself is amazed at my wretched condition.

Love has cast on me the spell of devotion,

The heart being enthralled by this spell no longer sleeps (Iqbal, 1983: 140).

Nevertheless, apart from reason and intuitive self-knowledge, patience is needed. It prevents one from becoming obsessed with one’s devotions. Even constant fasting and prayer may easily be abused by Nafs to result in pride, which is the anathema of love and spiritual unity.

1. 3. The religious stage in Kierkegaard’s thinking: here the individual achieves faith, which is an enthusiastic energetic movement toward eternal happiness, a movement which is strengthened by will. Its enthusiastic energy can overcome all forms of hesitation and doubt. Thomte points out that ‘faith is achieved when one comes to have immediate consciousness. Faith means the belief in the omniscience of God’ (1948: 11). It is achieved when we think of God as witnessing all our actions and when we consider God’s satisfaction as the criterion of good or bad in everything. Faith is not based on knowledge; it is not an immediate intuition reached before or after deep thought, nor is it a happy feeling which is free of doubt and hesitation. Faith is not a collection of teachings, it is a teacher itself. Faith is a movement, a leap from one realm to another. The result of the leap, however, is not a continuous abiding state; it is, in fact, a very unstable state which is always in conflict with its opposite, which is lack of faith. Consequently, the truth of faith can never be ‘objective’. It is always personal, internal, and as a result ‘subjective’. It can never be described.

Objectivity emphasizes “what” is said; subjectivity emphasizes “how” it is said… objectivity only asks about the forms of thought, subjectivity asks about inwardness. At its maximum this “how” is the passion of infinity and the passion of infinity is itself truth’. In brief, subjectivity is (1) a passionate concern for one’s being, which is threatened by death, relating oneself at all times to this concern; (2) it demands an adherence to anything which the individual finds edifying; (3) it entails an isolation in freedom and an uncertainty of even possessing subjectivity; (4) finally, it is a suffering which is masked from the world (Garelick, 1965: 27).

Kierkegaard believes that any attempt to find reasons or to rationalize the existence of God is blasphemy, because when you try to prove the existence of somebody who is alive and present, you are suggesting that his/her being can be neglected or ignored. God himself warns us against trying to prove his existence. God is so present and obvious that any reason used to show clearly his existence and presence is irrelevant.

To believe and have faith is, on the one hand, acknowledging and moving toward truth and, on the other, taking a dangerous risk. For example, Abraham surrendered to God’s command and decided to sacrifice his son. Such a sacrifice could not be logically or morally justified. In fact, it was completely immoral and illogical. Nevertheless, he decided to do it and as a result become the “father of the faithful”. To sin is to risk one’s faith.  It is sin that leads to estrangement and separation from God. Sin destroys the possibilities of communication with God. Nevertheless, it is the same separation, the same gap that makes faith possible and leads to a possible future reunion.

Kierkegaard believes that man must first reject the objectivity of the aesthetic life where in he is a slave to things. Next he must develop the   responsible inwardness of duty and self-fulfilment, but a still greater subjectivity is found in the life in which exists a passionate tension of concern for eternal blessedness (Arbaugh, 1968:  211).

Furthermore, Kierkegaard says that if man wants to save himself from his deplorable condition and cure his spiritual problems, he should believe in God. He also believes that, once man has reached this stage, he is no longer likely to return to the previous stages of merely aesthetic or merely moral existence.

Nafs-e-Motmaenna in Rumi’s thinking (soul at peace and absorbed in God) is the highest stage of the self. Here the individual is dissolved in his/her Love of God and can travel in Love and find happiness. Love is associated with the experiential dimensions of Sufism, not the theoretical. It must be experienced to be understood. Eventually, the lover is totally immersed in the ocean of Divine love. In this stage, lover and beloved are never without each other, and they act and react through each other. Therefore, longing makes lovers thin and pale.

Love makes the ocean boil like a kettle, and makes the mountains like sand (Nicholson, 1926: 164 Book No. V).

But desire of the lovers makes them lean, (while) the desire of the love ones makes them fair and beauteous (Nicholson, 1926: 248 Book No. III).

Here Rumi directly states that he is God, but as it is explained by Ovanessian:

This is what is signified by the words Anal-Haqq ‘I am God.’ People imagine that it is a presumptuous claim, whereas it is really a presumptuous claim to say Anal-abd ‘I am the slave of God’; and Anal-Haqq ‘I am God’ is an expression of great humility. The man who says Anal-abd ‘I am the slave of God’ affirms two existences, his own and God’s, but he that says Anal-Haqq ‘I am God’ has made himself non-existent and has given himself up and says ‘I am God’, i.g. ‘I am naught, He is all: there is no being but God’s.’ This is the extreme of humility and self-abasement (1991:411).

‘I am God’ actually expresses humility in the sense that it means ‘I am pure and I hold nothing within me except Him’. Rumi believes that there is a mysterious relationship between the lover and the beloved that can never be explained by rational thought. Although reason helps us in correcting our mistakes, it is insufficient for handling our existential problem. Love is fundamentally an experience situated beyond reason and cannot be described in words.

No matter what I say to explain and elucidate

Love, shame overcomes me when I come to love itself (Chittick, 1983: 194).

Although the commentary of the tongue makes (all) clear, yet tongueless love is clearer (Nicholson, 1926: 10 Book No. I).

When it comes to Love, I have to be silent

To describe Love, intellect is like an ass in the morass,

The pen breaks when it is to describe Love (Schimmel, 1982: 101).

The proof of the sun is the sun (himself): if thou require the proof, do not avert thy face from him! (Zamani, 2000: 92 Book NO.I).

In other words,

Love is also like Ibrahim, before whom the lover is willing to be sacrificed like Ishmael. It is the beautiful Yusuf, and it is Jesus with his life-bestowing breath, just as it is Solomon whose magic seal subdues djinns and who understands the language of the birds, the secret words of the heart. Love is David, in whose hand iron becomes pliable and who can soften even an iron heart. But it is also the highest manifestation of the long line of prophets, the Prophet Muhammad, the perfect manifestation of Divine Love: “Love comes like Mustafa in the midst of the infidels (Schimmel, 1992: 187).

In addition, Rumi believes that love is like faith and ‘the rewards of a life of faith and devotion to God are love and inner rapture, and the capacity to receive the light of God’ (Mabey, 2003: 116). To sum up, Rumi’s account of his spiritual journey is simple: ‘Three short phrases tell the story of my life: I was raw, I got cooked, and I burned’ (Lewis, 2000: 404).

The relationship between faith, love and reason (Similarity)

Kierkegaard was very critical of Hegel’s rationalism. This was because Hegel (1770-1831) believed that all realities are parts of a system and whatever is real is rational, and vice versa, based on dialectical relationships .Hegel was not opposed to religious beliefs, but was rather against the interpretation of Christianity that did not work alongside human rationality. Hegel puts emphasis on a religion fully based on human rationality that produces a human personality characterised by morality. He thought that if we commit sins we become distant from God, so philosophy and religion are the bridges that remove such distance or separation.

In response to Hegel’s attempt to rationalise Christianity, Kierkegaard experienced a complete religious reaction, and as the leader of religious existentialism from within the Protestant tradition he provided an existential interpretation of the irrational faith of the Christian world. In his struggle against Hegel’s philosophy, he argues that there are feelings that simply cannot be expressed. ‘Kierkegaard ridicules the idea of proving the existence (Dasein) of God. In fact, it is logically impossible to prove his existence (Dasein). God’s presence is proved by worship and not by intellectual proofs’ (Thomte, 1948: 11).

Kierkegaard opposed Hegel’s rationality, giving priority to desire and arguing that in Hegel’s system individuals have no rights and everything is determined by history. Indeed, while for Hegel rationality is important and the real is rational, Kierkegaard emphasises the feelings that arise from personal desires – and the deeper the feelings, the more inexpressible they are. In addition,

The philosophy of Hegel with its world-historic epochs has reduced Christianity to a triviality, which at any moment might be transcended by another epoch and men had forgotten the significance of existing as human individuals; they had lost themselves in a speculative contemplation of world history (Thomte, 1948: 14).

Rumi often contrasts Universal Reason with Partial Reason and believes that Partial Reason fathers those scholarly studies which are void of inspiration and illumination. Partial Reason can err, whereas Universal Reason is infallible and immune from mistakes. It is also steadfast. Rumi explains that Partial Reason is consequential in resisting the temptations of Nafs-e-Ammara, but this is only when it is connected to Universal Reason. In other words, Partial Reason is incapable of saving our souls and, like Ahriman, can prove to be a devious guide.

When the lover (of God) is fed from (within) himself with pure wine, there reason will remain lost and companionless.

Partial (discursive) reason is a denier of Love, though it may give out that it is a confidant (Nicholson, 1926: 107 Book No. I).

Rumi believes that we cannot prove the existence of God by Partial Reason and logic. He also emphasizes the uselessness of philosophical arguments in the relationship of man to God. Furthermore, he says that ‘logic never gets beyond the finite; philosophy sees double; book-learning fosters self-conceit and obscures the idea of the Truth with clouds of empty words’ (Nicholson, 1914: 69). He symbolically refers to Satan as the first who tried to solve the problem of existence by dispute:

The first person who produced these paltry analogies in the presence of the Lights of God was Iblis.

He said, Beyond doubt fire is superior to earth: I am of fire, and he (Adam) is of dingy earth.

Let us, then, judge by comparing the secondary with its principal: he is of darkness, I of radiant light.

God said, “Nay, but on the contrary there shall be no relationship: asceticism and piety shall be the (sole) avenue to pre-eminence” (Zamani, 2000: 974 Book No. I).

To sum up, Kierkegaard and Rumi both believed that human concepts or affairs are not susceptible to being proved by reasoning. As a result, faith and love cannot be reached through the limited channels of reasoning. In fact, we cannot pass through reason’s channel towards faith. Consequently, there is no relationship between faith and reason. Faith has its own special way which is the love of God.

Dissimilarity

Two thinkers, from two distant parts of the world, from two widely separated centuries, and in spite of their cultural and religious differences, express thoughts and ideas about faith and love of God which are, although expressed in different languages, virtually the same.

Their similarity, however, does not extend to their personal and spiritual lives and the difference can be observed the following aspects:

1. 1. Rumi’s personal and spiritual life and his methods of contemplation were not similar to those of Kierkegaard or any other philosopher, religious teacher, preacher, or even Sufi. He believed that what can be learned from the teachings and sayings of the schools does not open the path to God and that human beings, if wishing to be the wayfarers of God’s path, ought to wash away their papers, set fire to books, avoid schools and Sufi temples and embark on selfless quests within their individual beings, purified of their egotistic selves. He believed that even the asceticism practiced in the Sufi temples, because often tarnished with hypocrisy and exhibitionism, is likely to become a point of pride, a distractive occupation, a truth- covering veil that needs to be removed if one is to get closer to God.

Thus Shams had helped Rumi to transform his being into what Shams himself named “The Third Path” or “The Third Script”; a path, a script which is different from that of philosophers’ and Sufi’s; a script that no one can read and even he himself, now empty of all that made him what he was, can no longer recognize (Zarrinkub, 1998: 156-7).

1. 2. Rumi practised and taught “The True Spiritual Dance” (Sama Raast) which required asceticism, self-discipline, and continuous fasting and was essentially different from the ecstatic dances of Sufis. Every single Sama, wherever it was carried out, signified for him a journey within, a spiritual journey in a roofless temple void of pillars, decorations and luxuries, in whose purified, sacred atmosphere all terrestrial entities became celestial. Sama was so sacred to him that any delay could only be excused if he was involved in prayer or compensated by prayer. It gave him a feeling that was above and beyond love, a condition that could not be expressed. It gave him annihilation and dissolution in the eternal Being.
2. 3. Kierkegaard was a Christian and influenced by philosophers before him. Rumi was a Muslim and influenced by Koranic parables and the sayings and practices of Islamic and mystic saints (Orafa). In the general categories of mystic saints, Rumi belonged to the ecstatic mystics (Orafai-e Atefi Maslak) who are associated with emotion and enthusiasm. His path was, thus, quite different from that of rational mystics (Orafai-e Aghlani) who believe in controlling their emotions, rational contemplation, and logical reasoning. ‘Rumi says, Attar was the spirit, Sana’i the two eyes and I tread in the tracks of Sana’i and Attar’ (Lewisohn, 1999: 171).
3. 4. Unlike Kierkegaard who is a mystic philosopher, Rumi is a poet whose medium of communication is a literary language of high intellectual and stylistic calibre.  In his poetry, he avoids logical arguments and reasoning and makes extensive use of parables and allegories to make issues tangible and approachable for all potential readers. Thus, sophisticated mystic arguments are expressed in terms that make them accessible. In fact, Rumi despises philosophical debates as too lowly and decadent to be incorporated in transcendental mystic representations. He openly scorns philosophy and philosophers regarding mysticism (Erfan) as far above philosophers’ level of understanding and incomprehensible by methods used in philosophy: “The logician’s leg is wooden/ a wooden leg is hardly complying”.
4. 5. Rumi’s understanding of being, unlike Kierkegaard’s, is mystic and not philosophical. Thus, he uses an allegorical approach with symbols, metaphors, similes, and other literary figures, which have always been in use among mystics as the best means of expression. Among these one can mention Light, Love, Drunkenness, Madness, One-Sided Gambling, Annihilation, and Dissolution.

Evaluation of Kierkegaard’s and   Rumi’s ideas

The present paper is in agreement with Kierkegaard’s and Rumi’s ideas about faith and love, but it appears that in the early stages of the movement toward faith, seeking help from theoretical reasoning as a source of illumination is inevitable. In fact, at the beginning of our quest to discover and understand God, reasoning and logic can prove to work better than anything else in approaching God. Furthermore, in order to counter rationalism, one needs to be rational and logical in thought.

It also seems to be evident that, at the beginning of the movement toward God, there exists a direct relationship between mankind’s power of reasoning and faith or love, so that human rationality and his logical reasoning direct his/her thoughts toward a better understanding of God and religion. Nevertheless, in the higher stages of faith and love, rationality and logical thinking seem to lose their validity and relevance and there remains no need to rely on them, unlike what Kierkegaard believes to be the case. In the course of history, both oriental and occidental philosophers have made attempts to prove the existence of God by approaching the question through rational research and logical reasoning. Most of them, however, have finally come to conclusions similar to those of Kierkegaard and Rumi, that God’s existence and presence can only be certified by the spiritual eye and by faith.

Conclusion

Description and explanation of main and secondary words as used in this research study were valuable tasks that have been undertaken by using the research findings of past valid commentators; and this appears to be a typical new piece of work. In addition, the tendency to move towards faith in God is rooted in the deepest resources of human being and as a result humanity has always been in quest of a true understanding of his/her God. The resultant thoughts have created systems of beliefs and philosophical systems. One of these philosophical systems is “existentialism”, which has provided the world with a beautiful point of view about God and human life. This philosophical system developed in the first half of the nineteenth century, during a time when the church of Denmark and those of other European countries had distorted religion into a means of self-aggrandisement for their leaders and when Hegel had provided the world with his completely rational and logical interpretation of religion.

In response to what the church had done with religion and to Hegel’s interpretation of religion, Kierkegaard declared that the only way to the true understanding of God was an unalloyed pure faith which does not rely on rational reasons. His ideas, which were somehow similar to those of Schilling and Nietzsche, were supported and augmented by Jaspers and had a significant influence on the contemporary philosophy of being.

Kierkegaard speaks of three existential stages of human being (the aesthetic, the moral, and the religious stages) and considers the religious stage to be the highest form of being human and the closest stage to God. He also states that one can never discover truth by finding objective reasons. Truth has an internal connection with the human core of being, and thus to discover truth, one needs to focus on a thorough introspective search by means of faith. As a result, in his philosophy, truth is given an internal, spiritual aspect. As he has stated, ‘God is not an object but the subject.’ He knew that the method he was recommending for reaching truth is, due to being non-rational, not to be taught and communicated to others. Therefore, he stated that there is no relationship between rational reasoning and faith and that faith cannot be achieved by finding logical reasons for the existence of God.

It seems evident that mankind’s deplorable state and the disastrous collapse of values have resulted in such an immeasurable increase in mankind’s mental and spiritual problems and illnesses that rationality and logic can by no means be the sole source of cure for human. What is needed and seems inevitable to cure this deplorable condition is true faith and a universal attempt to get closer to God. It is predicted that in years to come, an increasing number of people will try to find solutions to their problems by approaching religious thoughts and systems like those of Kierkegaard. This tendency should increase more and more as they discover that their problems and conflicts cannot be solved by recourse to technology and the findings of either human or natural sciences.

Rumi’s spiritual life is usually defined in terms of his transforming encounter with Shams. He was one of the greatest religious teachers of his time, well-versed in different aspects of Islamic thought and law, teaching in Konya. To this religious teacher came a wandering mystic, Shams of Tabriz, who became a godly incarnation for him, miraculously transforming him into a mystic thinker and poet. Rumi’s love for Shams was a spiritual inundation, destroying the obstacles of egotism (Nafs-e-Amareh), logical bickering of Partial Reason (Aghl-e-Jozei), and self-obsession; it was a form of connection with a world in which there was no distinction between me and you. Hence, through music, Sama, and constant prayer and fasting, Rumi made connections with a world overflowing with spiritual ecstasy. He believed that all impediments are easy to overcome, but overcoming obsessions with one’s self is the hard task, and that human beings cannot achieve the status of wayfarer of truth ( Salek-e Rah-e Hagh) until he/she has transcended  selfhood. This is, however, only possible through love of God which makes one capable of transcending the egotistic hunt for sensation and desire and self-centred perception of being in order to reach an assured selflessness and dissolution in God. Once in this state the beloved and the loved, the observed and the observer, are a unified one. Even if apparently separated, their actions and reactions are from the same source of being.

In fact, love is a phenomenon that cannot be interpreted and defined in terms of intensity and extensity. It transcends all descriptions and expressions. As a result, the resort to logical reasoning of Partial Reason prevents human beings from entering a path which ends in dissolution and Partial Reason denies the significance of love. Therefore, Rumi considered a philosophy which deals with the hows and whys of being as being essentially in disparity with love and faith, which necessitate surrender and acceptance.

A great number of scholars consider Rumi’s Mathnavi-e Manavi (Spiritual Couplets), on which Rumi spent the last fourteen years of his life, to be the greatest poetic and mystic masterpiece ever written in the history of mankind.

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Mahvash Alavi

London Academy of Iranian Studies

Abstract

Mathnawi is the masterpiece of Jalal-al-din Rumi, the great Iranian Sufi and poet who composed Mathnawi approximately seven centuries ago. Although Mathnawi has been in existence since then, no-one has realised that it is based on a very precise and detailed structure. In fact, the most important criticism in regards with Mathnawi is its apparent lack of structure and plan.

However, Safavi, as part of his doctorate thesis, in 2002, illustrated the presence of a very complex and sophisticated structure in Book One of Mathnawi. In this paper, the author aims to illustrate the structure and present a synoptic view and interpretation of Book Two of Mathnawi, which has never been attempted before and thus this paper is totally original.

The Mathnawi of Jalal al Din Rumi, dating from the thirteenth century, was written in the form of Persian poetry. The study of Mathnawi raises issues of methodology, and important general matters both in the form and content of texts.

Jalal-al-din Rumi was a Muslim jurist, preacher and a spiritual teacher with a circle of pupils. Then his life was transformed spiritually by two years of close contact with a wandering saint called Shams al-din Tabrizi.  From being a worthy, sober, pious and ascetic ‘ālim (Muslim divine), he became an ecstatic mystic and lover of God (‘ārif and ‘āshiq), one of the world’s finest mystical poets and a whirling dervish.  From him there poured forth a stream of powerful mystical lyrics which were later collected into eight volumes under the title of Divan-e Shams-e Tabriz.  English translations and re-creations from poems extracted from the Divan have recently become a bestseller in America and Madonna has even made a Rumi CD.  But leaving aside the current Rumi-mania in America, in the last quarter of his life, probably from about 1260, Rumi began to write the long work that concerns us here, the Mathnawi.  He probably produced a book of the Mathnawi about every two years, and finished it before his death in 1274.  The Mathnawi consists of six books, each of about four thousand lines of verse. Unlike the mystical raptures and ecstasies of the mystical lyrics in the Divan, the Mathnawi is a more sober work, concerned with the transformation of the spiritual seeker and giving guidance about how to live spiritually in the world.

After Rumi’s death, his son Sultan Walad established the group of disciples into a formal Sufi order called the Mevlevi order in Turkish and the Mawlawiyya order in Arabic and Persian.  This Sufi order became very strong and influential and this had one great advantage for our present purposes because the writings of Rumi were properly and reverentially preserved so that the critical text of the Mathnawi we have today is almost certainly as Rumi wrote it.  Because of the widespread development of the order and the considerable literary and spiritual fame of Rumi, the Mathnawi quickly became widely known and appreciated and was called by one Persian poet, “The Qur’ān in Persian.” It has also become the subject of many commentaries over the seven centuries since it was written.  These commentaries are concerned with three issues. The first is the meanings of individual words and lines; the second is the origins of the many references and stories and anecdotes in the text; the third is the symbolic Sufi interpretation of various passages.  Since, then, we have a safe and reliable text, there are no longer many problems concerning the meanings of words and verses, the sources of the many references and anecdotes have been identified, and the Sufi symbolism of passages have been explored.

Although Mathnawi itself, as a whole, has a title, none of the six books have.  Each book has a short introduction in either Arabic or Persian, followed by a verse preface, and then comes the book itself, some four thousand lines of verse interrupted periodically by headings.  In Book Two which I have studied, there are 111 such headings, dividing the text of the book into 111 marked sections. The length of each section varies, the shortest being three verses and the longest over a hundred verses.  The verses within a section move logically, smoothly and effortlessly from one theme to another.  It is the ordering of the sections which causes a problem.  Often there is no apparent reason why one section should come where it does; the sections at times appear to be almost random in their order.  A story will start in one section; then come two sections of teaching; then a second story begins; then a return to the first story; then more teaching sections; then the second story is continued and so on.  This apparent lack of any rationale for the way sections follow one another has led to accusations of a lack of structure.  The scholarship on the Mathnawi, both from western and eastern scholars, is unanimous that the Mathnawi has no structure. Professor Arberry from Cambridge, for example, writes: “Written sporadically over a long period of time, without any firm framework to keep the discourse on orderly lines, it is at first, and even repeated readings, a disconcertingly diffuse and confused composition.”  This is almost a classic case of Orientalism, since the Orientalist fallacy can be stated that the contemporary western reader is infinitely more sophisticated than the medieval oriental writer.  It never occurs to Arberry to question whether the reason for him considering that the book is badly composed is because he is not reading it correctly.  At least Iranian scholars make a virtue out of the apparent lack of organisation by attributing it to the spontaneous extempore outpouring of a truly inspired and creative poet.

Dr Safavi’s thesis demonstrated that Book One needs to be read synoptically and not sequentially.  He found that the sections were in fact organised into twelve larger units which he called discourses.  It was common for works to be so constructed and each discourse given a title indicating its purport, such as Discourse on the Danger of Pride, for example.  But Rumi did not formally mark the discourses, nor did he give them explanatory titles, but he left it to the reader to do so for himself out of a sense of dissatisfaction and a belief that a poet of the calibre of Rumi would not write a ‘bad’ book.  When the discourses were identified it became apparent that the sections within each discourse were not organised linearly but synoptically using the literary principles of parallelism and chiasmus.

These first nine sections form the first discourse, which is a narrative unity since, apart from Section 3, the other sections all advance the same story.  When, however, the sections are mapped thematically, it becomes clear that, in addition to the sequential narrative order, there is a thematic organisation which is not linear and sequential. In the thematic organisation Section 1 is in parallel with Section 9, Section 2 with Section 8, Section 3 with Section 7 and Section 4 with Section 6, leaving Section 5, by far the longest, which sums up what has gone before, anticipates what is to come, and contains the central message of the discourse, which is of Love, both human and divine.

Parallelism is not a literary doctrine, simply the literary exploitation of correspondence, and since linguistic literary and thematic elements can correspond in many ways, there are many forms of parallelism.  When two sections are in parallel in the Mathnawi the second one can complete, match, contrast with or be analogous to the first one or contain the same theme or even make mention of the same name.  Often the second section will be at a higher level than the first.

The second literary principle Rumi uses is Chiasmus, named after the Greek letter Kai (Chi) because it resembles a cross like a capital X in the English alphabet.  Take the nine-section discourse just described.  We could represent it as A, B, C, D,  E  D*, C*, B*, A*, where the last four section reflect the first four but in reverse order.  Chiasmus is a mirror image.  Rumi does not use the chiasmus scheme exclusively to organise his parallel sections, sometimes for example he might use A, B, C, A*, B*, C* or some other format, but it does predominate.  Rumi frequently exploits the convention that the central message or inner crisis of the discourse should occurs in the very centre of the discourse while the outer resolution occurs at the end.  There are many examples of this usage in the Mathnawi, of which the above discourse is one.

The structuring of a work using parallelism and chiasmus is often called ‘ring-composition’ but I do not use this term myself because in Rumi’s structures there is great variety and the ring does not predominate.  In the Qur’ān it is said:  From God we come and to God we shall return.  This would be an ideal motif for a ring composition, the journey out and the journey back, but, in fact, Rumi spends only the first eighteen verses of the Mathnawi on the journey out from God and the rest of the Mathnawi is devoted to how we can get back.

In Book One, the discourses are easy to identify because they are all, except in one case, narrative unities. In Book two, narrative unity is much less emphatic and thematic unity much more pronounced.  Safavi identified twelve discourses in Book One and I have similarly found there to be twelve discourse in Book Two.  This may not be the case, however in later books.  We can give a synoptic view of the two books below: the number of sections in square brackets.

It is interesting to notice the way Rumi has used the number of sections in each discourse to produce a significant series and symmetry.  The symmetry derives from an important distinction in Islamic culture between odd and even numbers.  In Book One the symmetry is Odd, Even, Odd, Even, Even, Even (centre) Even, Even, Even, Odd, Even, Odd.  In Book Two the symmetry is Even, Odd, Odd, Odd, Even, Even, (centre) Even, Even, Odd, Odd, Odd, Even.  The numerologically significant series is derived from adding together the number of sections in discourses which are in parallel.  This gives for Book One 18, 30, 18, 40, 40, 24. For Book Two the series is 24, 12, 16, 14, 16, 28.  In Book One, the most spiritually significant number for the Mevlevis is 18, but twelve and six are also important; 40 is also spiritually significant in Islamic culture as in other Middle Eastern cultures.  Thus the series in Book One gives three times six, five times six, three times six, forty, forty, four times six.  In Book Two the series is different and requires the two halves to be seen in contrast and similarity: both contain 16, and a number, 24 and 28, and half of that number, 12 and 14.  The numerology requires that the discourses be read in parallel and chiasmically, and that is the significance of the numerological precision, to confirm that the discourses are in fact in parallel and chiasmic.  The numbers may have spiritual resonances but their purpose here is to authenticate for the reader the correctness of taking the synoptic reading.  The verse preface to Book Two has 111 verses.  The purpose of a preface is to foreshadow what is to come.  What is to come is 111 headings and sections.  The number 111 in the preface has no significance other than the authentication of the number of sections, in case a scribe left one out perhaps, but it is, like the rest of the numerology, clear evidence that Rumi planned the Mathnawi very precisely, probably before he composed a single verse, because such precision and symmetry could never have arisen by accident.

Returning to the synoptic views of Book One and Book Two, the diagrams show how the discourses are arranged in parallel and in a chiasmus, thereby focussing on the central two discourses as the major turning point in each book.  Dr Safavi has identified the parallel features between the discourses in parallel for Book One, but Rumi has made it quite clear that this was what he required by putting a Lion story in parallel with another Lion story, and a Caliph story in parallel with another Caliph story.  I have identified the correspondences and parallelisms between the twelve discourses in Book Two and will shortly give you an example, but first I wish to return to the overall organisation of the books.  Each book has twelve discourses that are in parallel and chiasmic, but what is the rationale of each book, what is the sequential story each book tells?  In the first discourse of the Mathnawi, which was discussed before, there was the story of the king and the handmaiden which provided the narrative sequence.  Is there a similar sequentiality at the level of the book?  The answer is yes, but to explain it we need to look at a feature of Islamic spirituality.  In Islam, the spirit within a human being is called the rū¦, which is sent down at God’s command.  The spirit, the rū¦ finds itself in a human body with its appetites and sensuality and in a selfhood with its egoism and ambitions, all of which, the body and the selfhood; Rumi refers to as the nafs. The spirit comes from God and seeks to return, but it is in the prison of the nafs, the body and the selfhood, which is the human spiritual dilemma the Sufi spiritual path seeks to solve.  One major part of the spiritual path is to discipline and transform the nafs through all kinds of ascetic discipline.  Book One has the nafs as its subject and treats the spiritual path through the three different stages of the nafs’ development.  The first stage is the nafs-e ammārah, the selfhood which commands to evil.  This is the selfhood which is in love with the world, which is moved by anger, jealousy, envy, pride, bigotry and hatred, and which seeks to satisfy its appetites and desires.  It is the unreformed selfhood which if indulged will destroy the individual concerned, if not in this life, certainly in the next.  The first four discourses in Book One deal with this kind of selfhood.  The second kind of selfhood is the nafs-e lawwāmah, the selfhood which blames itself.  Discourses 5-8 are concerned with this stage in the development of the nafs, although Discourse 5 itself is about the first meeting of the spiritual traveller (the sālik) with his spiritual teacher (the shaykh).  The last four discourses, 9-12, deal with the final stage of the selfhood’s development, the nafs-e mu§ma’innah, the selfhood at peace with God.  This threefold division of the development of the selfhood has Qurānic authority and provides the rationale of Book One.  That is why the synoptic view above has a space between Discourses 4 and 5 and between 8 and 9.  This rationale provides the context in which each discourse is to be read and understood.

If Book One has the nafs, the selfhood and the body, as its overall subject, Book Two has Iblīs, Satan or the Devil, as its overall subject.  We need to say something about Iblīs.  He was originally an angel.  When God selected Adam as the spirit to go to earth and enter human form, he required the angels to bow down to Adam.  This they all did except for Iblīs who was disobedient.  God cursed him and sent him down in exile to the earth where he makes things as difficult for humans as possible mainly working in and through the nafs, the selfhood.  In fact in Rumi’s usage Iblīs and the nafs are almost indistinguishable.  One of the nafs and Iblīs’ most predominant effects is to prevent us from seeing reality and to hinder the seeker’s spiritual progress at every stage of development.  In order to mitigate the effects of Iblīs, we need to find a Friend of God, a true spiritual teacher or a saint, who will act as a mirror of our own state and as a mirror that will reflect to us the beauty and unity of the spiritual world and of Almighty God, as Rumi was able to do when he was with Shams al-din Tabrizi.  I have found that the sequentiality of Book Two is the same as in Book One; in fact, the two books are intimately connected, although each from its own point of view.  Thus the first four discourses all deal with the different ways Iblīs and the nafs distort our reality and how we live in a topsy-turvy world in which those who know reality are in the mental asylum put there by the real lunatics who live from the nafs.  Discourse 5 in Book One is where the disciple meets the spiritual teacher for the first time and everything goes excellently.  In Book Two Discourse 5 is about a potential disciple who has become extremely attached to a bear and offers to help him spiritually.  The man says no because he thinks the man is jealous of his bear.  Eventually the teacher gives up and goes away.  The man is tired and goes to sleep under a tree.  The bear is very devoted to the man and seeing that flies are buzzing round his head, he picks up a large rock to finish off the flies and brings it down on them as they are settled on the man’s head.  That is the end of the man.

Now we come to the example of the parallelism between sections.  Section 6 and Section 7 are both about the nafs-e lawwāmah, the selfhood which blames itself.  This is the selfhood of a person whose conscience has awakened and who is aware of the sins he has committed and of his spiritual failure.  He is full of remorse and laments, turning to God for forgiveness and for help.  Section 6 is about a Companion of the Prophet Muhammad who had become very ill and helpless.  The Prophet goes to visit him and becomes aware that his illness has to do with his prayer.  The man explains that he had become so aware of all his sins and the dreadful punishments that he would have to suffer in the next world, that he prayed to God that he might suffer the punishment of the next world here in this world, after which he became gravely ill.  The Prophet told him he had been stupid and acted from arrogance because he could never survive such a burden.  He gives the man a more appropriate prayer to say so that he recovers.  The companion was doing well on the spiritual path, full of remorse and lamentation which is required at that stage, when the nafs in the form of arrogance and presumptuousness leads him into asking for something quite beyond his capacity which makes him so ill he no longer can do anything.  Section 7 is about another companion of the Prophet, Mu’āwiya, who at one time was both a companion and a brother-in-law of the Prophet.  He is alone sleeping in his palace – usually symbolic of going into seclusion for self-examination – when he is woken up by Iblīs who tells him it is time for prayer so he must hurry.  He cannot believe that Iblīs would do anything for his good so he is suspicious and there is a dialogue between them in which Iblīs is prevailing over Mu’āwiya until the midpoint of the discourse when Mu’āwiya calls for God’s help against Iblīs.  Thereafter he prevails and finally forces Iblīs to admit that he did it to prevent Mu’āwiya from missing the prayers because then he would have been so full of remorse and lament it would have spiritually been worth a hundred prayers.  Iblīs acted to urge the lesser good but only to prevent an even better outcome.

The parallelism between these two discourses is that they are both concerned with a companion of the Prophet, the other participants being respectively the Prophet and Iblīs.  Both are at the stage of the nafs-e lawwāmah which requires them to experience remorse and to lament.  Both are attacked by the nafs and Iblīs to prevent them from being able to do this: the first by urging the companion to seek something far beyond his capacity, the second to get him to do something far below his capacity to avoid it happening.

The second half of Book Two deal with the gradual awakening of the spiritual senses until the disciple is able to see reality with his own eye of certainty.  But we must move on, fascinating as it is, because Dr Safawi found there was an even higher level of organisation than the levels of the discourse and the book. A preliminary study revealed that Book Six was in parallel with Book One in some significant regards but chiasmically, which strongly suggests that there is a third level of organisation at the level of the work, with the six books as the segments.  This is confirmed by Rumi starting a story in Book Three and finishing it in Book Four, thus providing a hinge at the very centre of the work.  It is like a hinged mirror with Book One in parallel with Book Six, Book Two with Book Five and Book Three with Book Four.  We know, but not from Rumi who never indicates this, that the overall subject of each of the books of the Mathnawī corresponds precisely with one of the six sons in the Ilāhī-nāmeh of Farīd al-Dīn ‘A§§ār. The Mathnawī and the Ilāhī-nāmeh share the same overall plan, presumably as an inter-textual act of homage by Rumi. Book One of the Mathnawī deals with the nafs, the self-hood; Book Two deals with Iblīs, the Devil; Book Three deals with ‘aql, intelligence, intellect; Book Four with ‘ilm, knowledge; Book Five with faqr, poverty, and Book Six with taw¦īd, unity or unicity.  This is the rationale of the work as a whole which provides the general subject and context for each of the books.  My own studies show a similar parallelism between Book Two and Book Five, at least at both the beginning and the end of each book.

This must seem all very complicated, so let’s stand back from the details. Why did Rumi write his work in this way?  He knew that spiritual matters cannot be spoken of openly but must be hidden in some way, so for him the choice of this unexpected genre was inspired.  It permitted him to express in the very design of the work his experience of reality:  that beyond the mundane world of form and appearances there is the real spiritual world which is beautiful, a unity in which all oppositions and contradictions are resolved, and which contains the meaning, purpose and causation of all that exists in the mundane world which is its shadow.   Between these two worlds there is the aspiring Sufi, the spiritual traveller, drawn by the senses and selfhood to the world of appearances, and by the intellect and spirit to the world of the spirit.  To Rumi, God is Lord of Both Worlds, rabb al-‘ālamayn, and both worlds are given their respective structures in the poem:  to the mundane world of appearances and form is given the verbal sequential order with its appearance of planlessness; to the spiritual world is given the rhetorical organization, hidden but over-arching, which informs and connects every part of the first world but which gives the assurance of unity and beauty.  Reality is, in one sense, in the spiritual world, but, in another sense, the mundane world is God’s unveiling, God’s Self-Disclosure, so that too has a claim to reality.  The Mathnawi has then a two-fold structure, the sequential verbal structure and the synoptic rhetorical structure.  It was Rumi’s design that as one read or heard the text of the poem, which cannot help but be sequentially, one would at the same time be aware of the unseen layers of organization which gave it unity and meaning and purpose, which was how he himself experienced living in this world.  This is both how to read synoptically and how to live consciously.

I have followed Dr Seyed G. Safavi’s methodology, applying it to a different book.  Nobody has even attempted to present a synoptic view and interpretation of Book Two before, therefore it is totally original.  It is, moreover, an important contribution to our understanding of the Mathnawi, although we shall only arrive at the full picture when all the books have been analysed in this way

In conclusion, never assume that the organisation of any work is sequential.  What has the author hidden in making the work as it is?   Read it synoptically, treat it as a whole, map it thematically and see if there are patterns emerging.  Always look at what is happening in the middle and whether the beginning is reflected in the ending.  If so, like the Mathnawi, it may be structured by parallelism and chiasmus.  Such works never announce themselves, they need to be interrogated.  Remember that in the seven hundred years that the Mathnawi has been in existence and studied, it is only now we are recognising how it is much richer than we had ever realised.  As Rumi says in Book Two:

How many times shall we say, when the veil is lifted

Things are not as we thought they were.

Bibliography

Nicholson, R A, The Mathnawi of Jalalu’ ddin Rumi, Cambridge, 1990.

Safavi, Seyed, G, ‘LOVE THE WHOLE AND NOT THE PART’

AN INVESTIGATION OF THE RHETORICAL STRUCTURE OF BOOK ONE OF THE MATHNAWI OF JALAL AL-DIN RUMI, SOAS, University of London, 2003.

Safavi, Seyed,G, RUMI’S THOUGHTS, Tehran, 2003.

Alavi, M, Transcendent Philosophy Journal, Volume 4, Number 3, September 2003, www.iranianstudies.org , London.

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