Volume 4 . Number 4. December  2003

Transcendent Philosophy

An International Journal for Comparative Philosophy and Mysticism

Articles

Winnicott's World: The Mystical Foundations of Reality
Tony Lynch

The Presence of Worship in Ibn Arabi’s Ontology and Theology
Laith Al-Saud

A Study of AB¬HªMID AL-GHAZZªLI’s Life and Epistemology
Michael Mumisa 

Spiritual Walayah or Love in the Mathnavi Mawlawi: A Shi‘ite View
Sharam Pazouki

Book Reviews

The Cult of Saints among Muslims and Jews in Medieval Syria
Josef W. Meri

Islam et la raison
Averroès. L’

On the Boundaries of Theological Tolerance in Islam

Sherman A. Jackson

Revelation, Intellectual Intuition and Reason in the Philosophy of Mulla Sadra

Zailan Moris

Winnicott's World: The Mystical Foundations of Reality

Dr. Tony Lynch, University of New England, Australia

O beloved Pan and all other gods of this place, grant that I may be made beautiful within, and that all outer things may be in amnity with that inner life.[1]

‑Plato, Phaedrus.

ABSTRACT

The depth psychology of Donald Winnicott marks a radical change—even if unadmitted—from Freudianism.  Winnicott rejects the rationalist and individualist presuppositions of Freudianism, and reinterprets naturalism in a way that makes room for mysticism and mystical communication.  Winnicott argues that the basic challenge of human development is not (the pursuit of) id-satisfaction, but feeling real.  He offers a genealogical account of the emergence of our sense of the real which necessarily takes a mystical caste: for our sense of the real, he contends, rests on a paradoxical dichotomy according to which it is true both that the object is created, and that it is there to be found. 

Introduction

The discipline of psychoanalysis is a modern discipline, both historically and largely in subject-matter.  I know that psychoanalytic theory, to the despair of many philosophers, typically assumes the uniformity of human nature so the general relevance of its findings.  I don't think this is useless but I do think that in our case psychoanalysis is the inside story.  This pun is offered as partial justification for my approach.  For I begin with some remarks situating the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott's[2] distinctiveness by considering his position on the modern shibboleths of Naturalism, Rationalism, and Individualism.  Indeed the pun goes deeper, for these shibboleths structure Freud's psychoanalytic work, and while Winnicott claimed to work inside the Freudian tradition, his psychoanalytic theory involves a radical reinterpretation of the first, and a rejection of the second and third.  Understanding this reinterpretation and rejection 'from the inside' leads us to the unique and paradoxical account Winnicott gives of the real or, as it might better be called, the realist spirit.

If there is a specifically philosophical point to the paper, it lies with the realist spirit.  Why do we talk, think, wonder, argue, about what is real and what is not?  I do not mean, why do we argue about the reality or otherwise of particular entities within the world (is that a mirage? are there unicorns? are we in recession? etc.)  That much is usually obvious.  I mean rather why do we sometimes argue about, as it were, whether or not there is a world of a certain type or kind, such as we might take to be revealed in the various modalities of experience, the empirical, the religious, the moral, the aesthetic, and so forth?  What hangs on such questions, for something certainly does.  To be told that that which one takes oneself to be asserting of the world does not, in fact, contact it at all, even if only to get things wrong; that such apparent claims are simply unsuited to assessment in terms of their truth or otherwise; is to feel both that what one has said has been somehow debunked, downgraded, treated as less important than it is, and that, in an important sense, one's very person, one's being as a being in the world, has been slighted.  This is what gives philosophical dispute its sting.  But why is this?  Why may we feel hurt in such circumstances?  Why is it that the concept of the real, and applying it rightly, obsesses us in this way?  It is not, in the contemplative mood, whether realism is 'true' or not that is important, not, at least, at this point, but why we bother talking and thinking this way at all.  This is a question for practical reason, so no purely theoretical reflection reaches it.  It is not that sort of problem.

It is the interest of Winnicott's ideas that he suggests that our concern with the real is equally a concern for establishing and sustaining the conditions of a genuinely personal existence.  More than this, the connection Winnicott makes between the real and personal existence enables us make a new sense of certain theological themes concerning the connections between reality and omnipotence, omnipotence and creativity, and omnipotence and dependence.  As we shall see, there is an important sense in which the Winnicottian account of the real fits into that familiar tradition which reacts to the 'death' of a transcendent God by giving to the living human individual the powers and tasks that used to be His.  But whereas those such as Sartre centrally focus on the question of (the creation of) moral value, for Winnicott there is a fundamental sense in which we are required (or condemned) to create the world itself, ourselves included.  Thus while Winnicott’s account helps us see what is at stake in debates about the real - in a sense to be revealed, it is our personal existence ‑ he throws too a novel light on the very structure of such philosophical debates.  For Winnicott’s account of the origins and value of our concern with the real involves the conjunction of two claims normally thought exclusive.  So Winnicott will argue that it is a condition of realistic experience that the external object is both created (a product of the subject’s ‘omnipotence’), and found (outside and conditioning the subject’s experience).  As we might say, Winnicott shows us the way in which the fundamental claims of metaphysical realism and metaphysical idealism are both required to be true if we are to inhabit a life in the world, and so in a position to find ourselves faced with the pressures of philosophical inquiry.

Naturalism

I begin with the idea—a canon of the Enlightenment Project—that a systematic account of human experience, so of our psychological life, must be formulable in entirely naturalistic terms.  Now I have nothing against such a project—on the contrary, it is essential in a post-theistic age—the difficulty is that it lacks, as yet, definitional maturity.  Naturalism remains an essentially re-active movement, trapped within the oppositional circumstances of its birth.  No naturalist today knows what certainly and genuinely counts as natural; or rather no-one knows independently of an ontological affirmation of that specification delivered by the theory they presently favour.  But this does not mean there is no independent constraint on naturalistic theories, so that there is no traffic between them.  Unity, if only unity in argument, is defined by means of exclusion.  As there is no agreement on what is natural, it is required there be agreement on what is unnatural, so unacceptable.

To give that rejected in contemporary naturalism a single name, good as any and better than some, call it the mystical.[3]  A way of thinking counts as mystical in this sense if its reflective self-understanding involves both of the following.[4]  First it makes a licit epistemological distinction between mere 'knowing', and, as it were, 'knowing with one's soul', and second, focusing now on the relevant objects of knowledge, it upholds an ontological distinction between that which is publicly knowable, and that which, of its nature, cannot be known that way, but essentially depends on personal recognition.

The internal tie mysticism posits between a form of knowledge and the purely personal and private does not mean that we lack all words for such inner and private experiences—though sometimes it feels this way[5]—it is rather that something important in these words lies in being able sincerely to say them, and in finding in oneself the person who can say them.  These are words that come from deep inside.  And while such words are the words of an essential privacy, I do not think Wittgenstein's objections to a purely private language apply.  Wittgenstein's private language argument invokes an agent who is actively concerned to avoid the realm of public intelligibility embodied in a commitment to, or the use of, “ordinary language”; their language is, in principle, utterly opaque to anyone else. As he writes:

But could we also imagine a language in which a person could write down or give vocal expression to his inner experiences—his feelings, moods, and the rest—for his private use?—Well, can't he do so in our ordinary language?—But this is not what I mean.  The individual words of his language refer to what can only be known to the person speaking; to his immediate private sensations.  So another person cannot understand the language.[6]

This is a person who would seem to be consumed by the desire not to express or communicate anything of themselves, and it is the point of the private language argument that this desire means having nothing to express or to communicate.  The desire to flee the public world entirely, turns out to be the desire for one's complete disappearance.  But this is not at all how it is with mystical communication.  It may be that the subject is trying to express to others how it is, or was, for them to be inserted into a life and the world, and that this is crucially a first-personal matter, but still the person who speaks in a mystical idiom wishes to be understood, and—an essential part of the same impulse—wishes to understand themselves.  What is special about this want, and about mystical efforts at communication, is that it is connected with the idea of position.  Only those able to position themselves in the right way to what is said, so able to appreciate what is involved in the need to say this, can properly appreciate what is going on; and this positioning is itself essentially a practical matter, a matter of finding it necessary to express how it is with oneself and the world, by sincerely saying or thinking these things.  It is for this reason that mystical talk enters the public realm with the epistemological demand of 'participation' or the testimony of 'personal experience', for here knowledge is a matter of acquaintance.[7]

For the mystic one can only come to know that which, in a real sense, one already knows, and this is captured by the epistemic demand for right positioning.  It implies too that this kind of knowledge, this kind of truth, is different in character from that concerned with the purely public manifestations of the world.  It is not a question of 'Objective Truth'—that cannot even begin to express the privacy of our lives—but rather, as Kierkegaard said, of 'Subjective Truth'.  According to him, subjective truth is:

An objective uncertainty held fast in an appropriation-process of the most passionate inwardness…  [This] is the truth, the highest truth attainable for an existing individual.[8]

If we understand this 'objective uncertainty' not as a matter of some unbelievable empirical claim, but rather as a claim that cannot be, without depletion and distortion, expressed in the terms of a bluff publicity, then Kierkegaard is illuminating.  The important point is that this 'passionate inwardness' is not a matter of just sticking to a view come hell or high-water.  Obstinacy is not the existential criterion of subjective, or mystical, truth.  It is only those things which are an authentic part of ones 'existing individuality', which are so much a part of oneself that an obstinate holding on to is impossible and unnecessary, which can (and must) be held with this passion.  In mystical epistemologies such as Kierkegaard's those things we hold as true are crucially a matter at the same time of, as it were, being true to ourselves.  Truth becomes a matter of truthfulness rather than a merely objective property which attaches to (say) the propositions of natural science.  Following Marcel, Winnicott marks the difference by speaking of the difference between belief that, which is the propositional fare of the natural, and belief in, which is the adverbial mark of the mystical.[9]  For Winnicott, as we shall see, our sense of objective truth depends upon the achievement of a certain kind of mystical belief in the world.  A belief which is also and equally a mystical belief in our own existence, for it is necessary that we may believe in (and have beliefs about) the world if it is to appear before us at all.

                It is characteristic of mystical communication that it has a somewhat carefree—though not irresponsible—attitude to the demands of the public and impersonal, and so to orthodox logic and the generally recognised standards of public meaning, and this goes along with it being a language of the private in the way, Kierkegaard and, say, St. John of the Cross, write in a personal and private idiom.  This is why the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus wishes it would exist in silence—he wanted, as he said to Paul Engels, to put a stop all this claptrap, all this gassing about important things.  But, as his life came to show him, mere reason, aimed at discovering and illuminating 'the propositions of natural science'[10] cannot expunge the need to express, so express in the medium of our language, the privacy of our life and experience as we live and move among others.  (And if one wants to see this interpretative dependence of the private voice and public language, there is no finer example than his Philosophical Investigations.[11])  But still for the analytic puritan of the Tractatus, the desire for silence is understandable.  For when such communication is pursued in the spirit of mere knowing, it rapidly disintegrates into paradox and a mess of contradictions, though just because of this much mystical thought takes precisely this form (I think particularly of Hamaan), the very mysteriousness of its thoughts to public reason seemingly a crucial component of their validity.

It is a mistake inimical to self-understanding to begin our inquiry with an a priori repudiation of particular ways of life and experience.  In approaching any sort of psychological (and philosophical) inquiry we do well in the beginning to take the idea of the mystical seriously.  But how should we approach the mystical?  It is clear that traditional philosophical epistemology understood as concerned with delineating the conditions of public intelligibility is unsuited to understanding it.  But there is an alternative to the silence, and meaninglessness, of solipsism.  We might look at the mystical in terms of practical reason.  Why do we need, sometimes, to engage in mystical communication?  Why this need to communicate how things go with one which equally, through its flouting of the public, expresses a need not to be found?  Call this Winnicottian formulation of the nature of mystical expression—a need to communicate how things go with one which equally expresses a need not to be found—the psychoanalytic response to the early Wittgenstein's philosophical demand for the silence of the mystical.[12]

It is a response that marks Winnicott's distance from the reactive formulation of contemporary naturalism.  Our naturalist relies on exclusion to define their position against its competitors, and the means of exclusion presupposes that the world, that what is real, is in principle transparent to us.  However strange and however shocking psychological life might turn out to be on first sight, it is both desirable and possible to lay it out for public scrutiny and understanding.  Even if that life is not the product of reasoned reflection, still reasoned reflection can encompass it in theory and expert practice.  Descriptions of life, say, which appeal to a purely personal reality more real than the world about, which, indeed feels unreal and hollow, and whose communicative efforts appal or threaten one, or descriptions of moral experience which appeal to the idea of an Absolute Good utterly outside the reach of the world of contingency and death, or simply utterances like Winnicott's late prayer, 'Oh God, may I be alive when I die!',[13] are not, to the naturalist's eye, valid descriptions of genuinely mystical experiences, but diagnostic metaphors awaiting reformulation in the deflationist language of an impersonal, public, intelligibility.

Much contemporary naturalism repudiates, I think represses, these ways of description, and so the licitness of those experiences and ways of life in which they have their part.  When it confronts them its best figures are polite, but they bring with them what Paul Ricoeur has called the hermeneutic of suspicion.  What is presented is subject to authoritative translation by a knowing and debunking intelligence.  So, for instance, Freud will only discuss the nature of religion as illusion and its future as the future of an illusion.  This hostility to the mystical is inherent in the intelligence of Rationalism, and it is this intelligence that inspires and sustains the traditional naturalist project.  Thus we should understand Winnicott's defence of the mystical not as a defence of the metaphysician's category of the 'supernatural', but as part of an attempt to disengage naturalism from the effects of the rationalist assumption.

Rationalism

Descartes, in his Discourse on Method, gives succinct expression to the rationalist faith:

...there can be nothing so distant, that one does not reach it eventually, or so hidden that one cannot discover it...[14]

For the rationalist everything is thinkable, and if everything is thinkable then, for the self-conscious mind, the rights of interrogation are unlimited.  Nothing and nobody can hope to elude forever the cold inquiring eye of reason.  The unspoken presupposition in this is not only that everything in the internal and external world is such that it can be bought under the auspices, so the control, of public reason, but that this publicity and this control is essentially benign.  To Winnicott's anti-rationalist eye the communication publicity demands, and especially the suspicious and knowing communication of the expert in inner reality, may well constitute a violation, an exploitative intrusion, an irresponsible playing with, what lies deep in another.  His is the response of a romantic individualist (and none the worse for that), and in his eyes rationalism's commitment to public reason amounts to a demand for the compliant surrender of its subject-matter.  Whatever happens that subject-matter is not to be allowed a spontaneity with which to forever elude the grasp of generalising theory.  The object must be willing to expose and conform itself to reason, and for Winnicott it activates his fear of being found, of, as he says, 'being infinitely exploited'.[15]  It accounts too for his otherwise puzzling, un-Freudian, ambivalence about psychoanalysis.

We can understand, the hatred people have of psychoanalysis which has penetrated a long way into the human personality, and which provides a threat to the human individual in his need to be secretly isolated.[16]

Even more pointedly he will describe it as 'a hallmark of madness when an adult puts too powerful a claim on the credulity of others.'[17]

This ambivalence and this diagnosis of rationalism as a form of madness, of, we might say, the madness of a sanity which cannot exist without the signs of public compliance, can only be fully understood in the context of Winnicott's idiosyncratic theory of the self, and I shall go into some of its details later.  In particular I look at his concept of the True Self, for it is the idea of the True Self that bears Winnicott's uniqueness.  With it he opposes the exclusion of the mystical from the world, and specifically from psychological theory, and with it he articulates his fear of the compliance rationalism demands of its objects.  It is the True Self which resists and, as long as it exists, must resist, the demands of an insistent publicity.

Individualism

                The third idea important for an approach to Winnicott's distinctiveness is individualism.  By individualism I do not just mean the evaluative stance according to which to be an individual is supremely valuable—something Winnicott has no problem with, but insists on—nor, subsequently, a guiding concern with what goes into becoming an individual.  I mean, and before all this, the view that the category of the individual is an explanatory primitive, so that the developmental story is that of a centre of cognitive or affective being, progressing from primordial conflict to a negotiated accommodation with the world.

            In this way of looking at things the individual appears as an explanatory monad.  True, he or she may have a history, even a developmental history which involves the articulation of differential psychic structures, but that history begins as the history of a being loosed upon, or 'thrown' into, the world.  We may say that Freud's innovation in this area was to conceive of the individual in this ontogenic sense not only as something essentially non-cognitive but also deeply unknown to itself.[18]  But the individual remains as a unit of instinctual forces, driven by frustration and the need to master it into more complex forms of individuality.

                For Winnicott individualism is a subtler matter.  While it is still basic: every normal human baby, Winnicott insists, has an innate nisus, a primary developmental capacity, to become an individual which, if frustrated, ruins a life, this begins as potential, not a standing actuality.  Such potential requires a certain environmental provision if it is to develop adequately, or at all.  Indeed the dependence of the infant is such in the beginning that the story of its individuality begins with a relationship in which the emerging self at first exists only as gathered together and held by the mother.  The individual arises from a condition of absolute environmental dependence, and in this condition talk of monads is senseless.  Thus the famous, or notorious, words:

There is no such thing as an infant, meaning, of course, that whenever one finds an infant one finds maternal care, and without maternal care there would be no infant[19]

On one side there is the absolutely dependent infant, on the other the mother in the grip of what Winnicott calls her 'primary maternal preoccupation', deeply attuned to her infant's requirements (and so herself dependent and vulnerable[20]).  The individual emerges slowly from an environment of total maternal care.  If things go well the stage of absolute dependence becomes one of relative dependence.  There is  'a disentanglement of maternal care from something which we then call the infant.'[21], and all things being equal from here there is a move towards full independence.  But it is always a movement towards independence, for in its absolute realisation (as for Wittgentein’s aspirant private language speaker) independence defeats itself in its withdrawal from the world:

Independence is never absolute, the healthy individual does not become isolated, but becomes related to the environment in such a way that the individual and the environment can be said to be interdependent.[22]

                This where Winnicott's intriguing notions of the Transitional Object  and Transitional Space enter.  Transitional objects are at the same time of both the inner and outer worlds; they are our own, inner and personal, and they are the world's too, outside and public.  This duality of existence creates a transitional space, a meeting place of public and private, which constitutes the intermediate area of lived, mystical, experience which exists between the isolating madness of a withdrawal into utter subjectivity and the soul emptying futility of a withdrawal into total objectivity.  For Winnicott the 'realist spirit' is not a matter of aspiring to the detached impartiality of the God's Eye View, nor is the appropriate sort of fantasy or illusion its enemy.  To constitute a world is, as Plato taught, to relate 'inner' and 'outer' reality and the challenge, and the challenge transitional space is forever called upon to surmount, is that these remain always at a certain distance.

                This interweaving of subjective and objective gives Winnicott's answer as to what goes into our real-making.  For Winnicott it is only by insisting on the eternal interdependence of Inside and Outside, Me and Not-Me, Objective and Subjective, that we can we hope to provide a coherent account of our sense of the real.  It is a striking result of this that our idea of the real becomes an idea of the mystical in my sense.  For what counts as real for us turns out to depend, at least in part, on our inner world; on personal patterns of illusion and fantasy which cannot become merely public phenomena without being damaged and lost.

Interlude

                I have argued that Winnicott's psychoanalytic theory is distinguished from its naturalistic rivals by its hostility to the unrestrained publicity rationalism insists on, and a corresponding willingness to allow, and on the most fundamental level, for mystical experience and communication.  I have also argued that while Winnicott is concerned with the individual even to the degree of tying the real to certain expression or style of individual fantasy, he does this in the context of rejecting Freud's monadic explanatory account for one in which the individual gradually emerges from a state of absolute environmental dependence.  At base human beings are not, as Freud thought, ambivalent animals attempting to construct an always precarious sexual identity in an essentially alien environment, but dependent animals who from an original condition of helplessness, and if things go well, may fulfil their developmental potential and come to inhabit a life which has meaning for them.  The value of life, as Winnicott reports his clients, lies in feeling real, not primarily in id-satisfaction.

                These elements come together in Winnicott in a way which is endlessly intriguing.  To take just one instance, his account of the emergence of the individual promises to make psychological and ontogenic sense of the Platonic thesis of the priority of the Good, and sense too to the further Platonic claim that this Good can only be fully conceived in a mystical or transcendent way.  In the Winnicottian account the ontological priority of the Good becomes the claim that the world must present itself first, and forever in underlying fantasy, as favourably disposed towards the agent, while its mystical aspect follows from this ontogenic priority and its embedding in individual fantasy.  At bottom Reality is Good Reality‑is the Good, the True, the Beautiful.  But where Plato embeds this insight into an account which savagely opposes appearance and reality to the sorrow of the former, for Winnicott reality emerges from a world of personal omnipotence, so a world of appearance entire to itself, free from the limiting friction of anything outside, though also, and at the same time, entirely dependent on the provisions of that outside.

                This complexity brings Winnicott into contact with a more Kantian tradition.  For as Winnicott defends the real by setting it, from the point of view of the emergent subject, within a prior and sustaining sphere of individual omnipotence, his mysticism becomes the proposal that experience of the real presupposes the truth‑developmental, psychological, and, without going beyond his revisionist reading of naturalism, “metaphysical”‑of something that deserves to be called a Transcendental Subjectivism.  It is transcendental because it delineates “the conditions of the possibility” of realistic experience, of experience of our own and the (external) worlds existence.  And it is a subjectivism because it is cast in terms of the emergence of the individual as an individual for themselves and in the world; though it is certainly not a variant of the monadic individualism which, in Freudian accounts, tends towards an incredible and, I say, offensive empirical solipsism.  The epistemic implications of such a transcendental subjectivism is that the subject, their nature and mode of existence, cannot be finally understood in those terms we use to describe what is—already—real.  The language of the already real is that which already lives with the friction of interdependence from which emerges the object-world, and it is the province of Rationalism, but here we are trying to talk about what makes it possible for the object-world to be present to us at all.[23]

            It seems right then to see Winnicott's transcendental subjectivism as a variation on Kant's transcendental idealism, and as one which is, in Strawson’s words “domesticated” in that involves reference to ourselves as (in Winnicott’s extended sense) “natural selves”.[24]  Thus we do not literally create the world as out of nothing—there is the world-in-itself (but not merely as a theoretical postulate, a Ding an Sich, for we begin our lives in a condition of absolute environmental dependence)—and for the sake of our developing individuality it is crucial that the world is there to receive our communications.  We must be able and permitted to make sense of our condition, so to find ourselves and the world.  In the idiom of practical reason, these requirements constitute the conditions of the possibility of humanity, of life and experience.

                For Winnicott the psychoanalyst the idiom of practical reason seems more fundamental than those of theoretical reason, and rightly so, for things have to get underway, either way.  Our sense of the real emerges not as an a priori demand of pure, even pure practical, reason, but in our coming to ourselves, and to the world, and there—naturally—finding it important to pursue a life and to value the real.  Interest and value, so meaning itself in all its varied clothes, depend on our ability to find ourselves in the world.  And this finding is not a matter of our 'spreading' our mind   on to the world, like jam on toast, for there is no mind independent of that 'spreading', nor any toast.  It is a matter rather of finding the world as our world.  So Winnicott will write:

The object must be found in order to be created.  This has to be accepted as a paradox.[25]

                While this paradox does not involve us in the absurdities of crude empirical idealism, it does contain the thought that as for what it is we find in the world, and so what it means to us to be in a world, that, crucially, is a matter of what we bring to it.  What matters to us is realistic experience, and so a philosophy of the real, and whatever else it must do, must explore the conditions of this experience.  Without it, after all, there would not be a question of realism.  And where Kant gives us an impersonal psychology of the a priori, with all its attendant mysteries, Winnicott gives us a naturalistic account in developmental psychology, and an account which leads him into sharp contradiction with Freud.

The Real (ist)

                In much philosophical literature the realist is someone who insists that the external world is fully independent of us; more particularly of our epistemic states and procedures. 

The objects the realist posits exist and have their character fixed independently of the dispositions of participants in the relevant discourse to assert and believe things about them.  Thus the epistemic states of the participants have no causal influence on the existence or character of those objects, nor are the objects non-causally dependent—say, dependent in a supervenient way—on such epistemic states.  In short, the entities posited in the discourse enjoy a substantial kind of objectivity.[26]

It follows that that about which we must live, think, and move, depends in no way for its existence and character on the merely human.  Ontology is distinct from, and prior to, epistemology, and thus, in a deep sense, the real is something fundamentally alien to humanity.

            Winnicott does not oppose this conception of the real.  While he rejects its explanatory imperialism, he insists not merely that it is vital to science, but that it is crucial for our sense of empirical reality, and so our own empirical nature.  By embracing the Kantian insight he does not reject the truth captured in empirical realism, but explains it.  His contribution is to show how the empirical understanding of the world depends in the beginning and indeed forever in fantasy, on our taking that world as not merely made for us, which is bad enough from the point of view of the secular realist, but made by us, and so something it is in our power to destroy.  If the philosophical realist insists that the world of objects must be discovered, and not created (let alone to be destroyed), Winnicott shows how the very idea of the real involves the latter.  What lies at the heart of our sense of a real world is only that which is in our power.  In traditional theology God out of his omnipotence created the world in which we must live, in Winnicott's alternative the infant, in the right circumstances, creates the world out of his omnipotence, and there he must live.

The Real and Home

                 It is natural after reading Winnicott to connect up the idea of the real with the idea of home, in particular of being at home, and so being at home, and this is a crucial connection for him.  The self that feels real and which he calls the 'True Self'  is the self at home with itself.  And the point holds for external objects; indeed, it is the same point approached from another direction.  It is only when we are at home in the environment that we can allow ourselves to recognise and appreciate its independent existence.  At home we can comprehend the truth of realism, and so prepare ourselves for its inevitable frustrations.  At heart (or hearth) the realist spirit is a domestic prerogative.  But if the realist spirit in its continuing beginning is always at home with itself, why is it that in philosophy it is perpetually threatened with exile?

            If we ask why philosophy involves a dialogue with reality-denying scepticism, then a crucial part of the answer is simply that realism lives in the realist spirit, and  that spirit continues to move (in) us.  The divisions, the boundaries, between the Real and the Unreal, Appearance and Reality, Subject and Object, Inner and Outer, Me and Not-Me, Private and Public, are central to experience, and only through them do we constitute and sustain our identity in the world.  The puzzle of philosophy is that they are not, as they matter to us, liable to a merely sceptical dissolution.  This is what Hume is discovering when he notes, and responds with an ironical detachment, to the way scepticism seems to him philosophically irrefutable, but disappears and without trace when he closes the study door behind him and sets out to play backgammon with his friends.  This image, with its domestic flavour, is pleasantly apt.  It is when he is at home in the world and with others, that things seem irrefutably real.  Winnicott (leaving aside some difficulties with time) could have helped him understand this.

                To understand the ontogenesis of that domestic spirit which is realism Winnicott is forced to go deeper and further back in his developmental psychology than Freud.  In the usual psychoanalytic stories theory begins with the infant as a bearer of instinctual demands which she brings to an already existing world; a world which, existing in itself, possesses for the subject a fearfully inscrutable power.  I mean here a world which already exists for her, more accurately, against her, a transcendent world, with nothing immanent in it.  Thus Freud loads up a monad with various instinctual drives and sets it adrift in a world of independent objects, leading to the view that frustration not only mediates our sense of the real but, at the very deepest level, constitutes it, so that it is the nature of reality to frustrate, and this is something we know to our (now sceptical and superstitious) bones.  It means too, to the delight of rationalist generalisers, that our particular relationship to the world and its objects is essentially unimportant.  As our real concern is with instinct and its satisfaction, substitute objects may do just as well.

            To Winnicott's way of seeing things, the Freudian world mirrors the Hobbesian State of Nature.  In the latter state nothing is permanent.  No-one (not even oneself) is reliably trustworthy, and everyone and anyone may be the agent of our annihilation.  Equally while the Freudian world will not, one hopes, invariably frustrate us as if it were positively malicious (though this is not an unnatural line of thought), its implacable hostility lies in the way it both refuses any intimate or essential connection with us—everything is substitutable, nothing is permanent—and insists on its right always to frustrate any purpose we may have.  In both worlds we are in that 'State of Nature' Hobbes characterised as a State of War, where the capacity to relax is a deadly danger, and reliability always a desperate illusion. In such circumstances, Hobbes says, life is not worth living, but nasty, brutish and short, in the Freudian object-world it is, at the very least, pretty nasty.  In a such a world our existence is rendered conditional on the favour of objects which  systematically refuse to make personal contact with us.  This is a world which refuses to let us find anything of ourselves in it and confronts us as an alien territory.  This alienness is not an example of mystical transcendence, but a reflection of our total vulnerability.  The fear, as in the State of Nature, is of annihilation, not the Freudian bagatelle of (mere) frustrated desire.

            In part Winnicott objects to the bleak Freudian vista on humanitarian grounds just as many people quite rightly object to Hobbes.  But beneath this is the idea that the Freudian beginning really makes no sense of our sense of the real at all (and so no sense of our concern with realism), just as Hobbes' brutes would have lacked all idea of a social contract.  In criticising the Freudian account Winnicott's key point is that a rather sophisticated level of integration on the part of the subject is simply assumed.  Those drives with which the infant confronts the world are supposed to be forces to which it is already committed.  And being committed it has no choice but to leap into a frustrating involvement with the object-world.  But a self that can commit itself to that which delivers at best a profoundly ambivalent relationship to things has already come a long way.  To see how far consider for a moment what it is to make demands of the world: what it is to have, and using the term for any affective orientation to the world, a desire.

Desire and Reality

                In philosophy it is common to characterise the psychological state of desiring by talking of its 'direction of fit' with the world.  This is a metaphor, but it is not mysterious: whereas the psychological state of believing is one in which our aim is to fit our thought to the world, in desiring our aim is to make the world conform to our demands.  In desiring, rather than our being obedient to the world as belief requires, it is as if we are laying claim to the worlds obedience (at the very least, we claim the possibility of rational agency).  We require of it, and require of it as prospective agents, that it be, or become, a certain way, and if it refuses us here then naturally we are frustrated.  This, it would seem, is Freud's idea.  But how is it we feel able to level a claim to the worlds obedience?  How is it that we see the world as a venue for purposive action, and so ourselves as agents?  After all, it remains that we just do confront a world of independent objects.

            As with any claim to obedience, desiring expresses both a confidence in ourselves as agents of command, and, equally, a certain confidence in the obedience of the  world.  Desire reflects, and is conditional on, a certain ontological security, a security with the world, and, at the same time and nowhere else, a security with oneself.  One claims the obedience essential to agency only when sustained by a faith, however despairing it may have become, that one will be heard and what is needed given in return.  If this faith goes missing, or never appears in the first place, there is not a frustrated desire: there is no desire, and here at least, no desiring subject.  Take this faith away on a wide enough front and by annihilating their world you annihilate a person.

The capacity to make demands of the world, Winnicott argues, means being able to see our desires as sources of possibility for us.  Only this way can we make sense of their being there for us, so available for (potential) frustration.  The primordial promise of desire is not the disillusionment of frustration as the world denies us contact, but, and necessarily, the world's enrichment of the self.  In desire is expressed the fundamental belief that allowing ourselves to feel and act a certain way will bring us good, so also that the world will understand us and meet us a whole lot closer than half way.  Of course the world is not made for us, and this is what we must learn.  The paradox is that to learn this we must begin with and forever carry the opposite faith.  Only if it is our world is it (able to be) not ours.  We understand this paradox, this mystical insertion in, and creation of, the world, even if we do not explain it away, when we think of things in developmental terms.

The Genealogy of Realistic Experience

The desiring individual, ready to lay demands on, so to recognise, the world, arises in and from an initial situation of absolute environmental dependence.  (One can think of this as the brutal truth of metaphysical realism.)  This beginning in absolute dependence means that development is conditional on a properly adaptive environmental provision.

Without someone specifically orientated to his needs, the infant cannot find a working relationship to external reality.[27]

This someone—the 'good-enough mother'—must be at the same time acutely attuned to the infants needs, and benevolent and reliable in dealing with them.

            At the beginning the infant is in a position of 'primary unintegration' (this should be compared with Rousseau's picture of man in the state of nature), a bundle of disconnected feelings whose id-demands are as yet not only something it is not yet committed to, but which strike it like a hit or a clap of thunder, as yet neither inside nor outside, and needing to be contained in the infant if they are not to activate the terrifying defence of disintegration.[28]  Rather than potentially annihilative intrusions which threaten what he calls the infants 'going-on-being'—that is, its capacity to hold and so live through its experiences, so for it to have a life and to live it—they must be taken into the infant and become owned as its desires.  'The rider', says Winnicott, in an image like, but importantly different from Plato's, (for there are two actors, not three; and it is a matter of riding not driving) 'must ride the horse, not be run away with.'[29]  And for this to happen the infants unintegrated id-demands must be (re)presented to it, at the right time and in the right way.

            This is done at first through 'good enough mothering'.  Through her empathic adaptation to her infant the good enough mother is able to make sense of its id-forces for it.  As it were, she collects them together and, through her reliable and understanding benevolence, gives them back to the infant in a way that does not exceed its capacity to contain them.  Winnicott calls the mother under this aspect the environment-mother, and to begin with and always in fantasy she is at the primitive heart of our sense of the real.  With her we are truly at home.  Here, if we want, we may exercise our right to make demands, secure in their provision.  Or we may make no demands and relax, for when we are absolutely safe we can afford to be alone with ourselves and to renew contact with our personal life.  Only with a sustaining belief in a benign environment can we start to feel real, and feeling real ourselves, are we ready for the external world.

            The adaptiveness of the mother gives the infant the opportunity to develop a primary or properly basic belief in the real, and this belief is both the condition and the refutation of scepticism.  If we look at the refutation from the point of view of the infant, the reason is again a paradox; for what is in fact a state of absolute environmental dependence, of complete vulnerability, is experienced by the infant as its rightful omnipotence.  In truth it is not really God's omnipotence, for there is nothing especially knowing about it.  It arises rather from a magical lack of friction between the infants id-fantasy and its realisation in the object-world; an absence of ontological slippage between the desire and the presentation of its object.  Thus Winnicott imagines that when the infant is hungry he fantasises a satisfying breast, at which point the real breast is made available by the mother.  Through the mother's empathic identification with the desire of her infant he can believe, when he is hungry, that he has made what he has, in fact, found.  But this essential moment of illusion requires the overlap of two inner worlds:

I think of this process, as if two lines came from opposite directions, liable to come near each other.  If they overlap there is a moment of illusion—a bit of the experience which the infant can take as either his hallucination or a thing belonging to external reality.[30]

This necessity for a foundational and frictionless experience of transitivity between the creative omnipotence of the subject and objective reality is the reason Winnicott insists that first contact with external reality happens in a moment of illusion.

At the start simple contact with external or shared reality has to be made by the infants hallucinating and the world's presenting, with moments of illusion for the infant in which the two are taken by him to be identical, which they never in fact are.[31]

Fantasy, indeed the essentially religious fantasy of creative omnipotence, is, it seems, the route to the real.  If we wish, as at times we all do, to talk impersonally, to construct a public world in which we reveal only that which everyone might know, then there is nothing to be said against it.  But we should not forget that even this world can lose its reality, can lose its meaning, if it is not continually (re)created in those fantasies of self/object identity on which the realistic spirit depends.

Populating Reality

                If the possibility of our sense of the real originates in the fantasy of creative omnipotence as it is (from our point of view, invisibly) held and protected by the environment-mother, our sense of those particular opaque and resistant objects which populate the real world arises through the fantasy of the omnipotent destruction of the object-mother, with the breast the first target of this natural aggression.  Here is where, considering things from the point of view of the emerging individual, transcendental subjectivism comes together with empirical realism.  Winnicott presents the connection in a jokey dialogue:

The subject says to the object: 'I destroyed you', and the object is there to receive the communication.  From now on the subject says: 'Hello object!' 'I destroyed you. 'I love you.  You have value for me because of your survival of my destruction of you.  While I am loving you I am all the time destroying you in (unconscious) fantasy.[32]

To understand this mock dialogue it helps to introduce with its Winnicottian name something we have been obliquely dealing with all along.  This is the idea of the True Self.[33]

                The True Self appears in a number of ways in Winnicott's thought, but the crucial point here is that the True Self is not to be distinguished from the infant's initial right to omnipotence.  This omnipotence, for Winnicott, is a manifestation of the infants aliveness, and it finds its first expression in the infants spontaneous gestures and sensory hallucinations (in Sartrean language the True Self is the infants pour moi).  The True Self, Winnicott says, is 'essentially not reactive to external stimuli, but primary'.  He sometimes calls it our primary creativity, and it is at the basis of our capacity to feel real (and, in the full story, at the basis of our capacity for meaningful experience of any kind, moral, aesthetic, political and religious).  It is this capacity for internally generated spontaneity (as it were, for imagination, rather than mere fantasy) which the good-enough mother protects and nurtures in the period of absolute dependence.  And it is this spontaneity which has the potential to make objects real to us.  The problem Winnicott sets himself is to see how this primary creativity makes contact with external objects without undermining the formative confidence the infant has in his power to act in the world.  If this is lost then creativity is given over to the reactive imperatives of compliance, then at best independence becomes the sort of collusive unreality Rousseau stigmatises as amour propre, at worst it becomes an active disintegration as creativity tries, hopelessly, to sustain itself by turning on itself.[34]

            Winnicott describes the transition from primary omnipotence to the object-world as between two ways of relating to objects.  In the first way the object is within our omnipotence and offers no ontological resistance, in the second way it is placed outside omnipotent control, so available to be found and used.  Successfully managing the move from the first to the second way of contacting the world is described by Winnicott as, 'the most difficult thing, perhaps, in human development'.  And for it to happen both object and subject must co-operate.  This co-operation involves the object in surviving and without retaliation, the full blast of the infants primary omnipotence.  We might call this non-retaliatory survival the primordial acknowledgment of the object-world.  If the object allows itself to be destroyed the infants omnipotence is not compromised, and if it retaliates, if it determinedly rejects the infants claim on it, then it undermines the infants formative confidence in the world and forces it into a reality-denying and precocious compliance.[35]  

            This necessity for a precocious compliance if the individual is to survive is the origin of what Winnicott calls the False Self, a notion that may be usefully compared with Rousseau's idea of the self structured by amour propre.  I shall not have much to say about the False Self, though much could be said.  The False Self 'results in a feeling unreal or a sense of futility'; and the basic idea seems to be that in the conditions of full environmental compliance the individual cannot, and cannot afford, to think of themselves as set apart from the world which, in turn, is set apart from them.  Under pressure to live and develop in an hostile world the individual is forced in their vulnerability to a reactive identification with that hostility, undermining the conditions of a genuine interdependence.  Those objects, on the other hand, which are resilient and in a non-retaliatory way, allow the infant the illusion that he has placed them outside the limits of his omnipotence.  He has loosed them from his control in somewhat the way God must be imagined to have loosed Adam and Eve from his control.  This illusion—and we have always hoped the same of God—allows the child to keep the objects alive as part of their personal life at the same time as recognising their independent existence.  These resilient and non-retaliatory objects are what Winnicott calls Transitional Objects, and they are the bridge between the subjective and the objective.

Sooner or later in an infant's development there comes a tendency on the part of the infant to weave other-than-me objects into the personal pattern.[36]

                Being woven into the personal pattern, these objects, while observable by others, do not, and cannot, have the same significance for them.  They have meaning, and meaning as external objects, only through the necessarily personal fantasy of omnipotent destruction.  This is why Winnicott insists that  'Fantasy is more primary than reality, and the enrichment of fantasy with the world's riches depends on the experience of illusion.'[37]

The primordial example of a transitional object is, of course, the mother as object-mother, in particular the breast, but he also explains the notion in terms of that particular toy or object the infant claims for itself and which is indispensable for it.  Think of Linus and his blanket.  This object cannot be imposed on the infant and though it may have been given him cannot be given to him as a Transitional Object but only as something he may choose to turn into one.  This teddy-bear, or blanket, or whatever, is a public object, but still entirely the infants, to be loved and destroyed by him, and to survive all this without retaliation.

The Threat of Eviction

                To this point we have described how the realist spirit arises and comes to a populated reality.  What we have not done is show how philosophical concerns with the real arise from this, nor to this stage, could we have done this.  For the realistic spirit is, as we have seen, a domestic prerogative, and to describe it is to describe it at home with itself.  But that very description shows us too how it might come about that the realist spirit never manages to achieve a genuine domesticity, so that the real is always on the verge of abandoning us.  As Winnicott's writes in his one explicit discussion of 'The Philosophy of "Real"'.

            I would put it this way.  Some babies are fortunate enough to have a mother whose initial active adaptation to their infant's need was good enough..  This enables them to have the illusion of actually finding what was created (hallucinated).  Eventually, after a capacity for relationships has been established, such babies can take the next step towards recognition of the essential aloneness of the human being.  Eventually such a baby grows up to say 'I know that there is no direct contact  between external reality and myself, only an illusion of contact, a midway phenomenon that works very well for me when I am not tired.  I couldn't care less that there is a philosophical problem involved.'

                Babies with slightly less fortunate experiences are really bothered by the idea of there being no direct contact with external reality.  A sense of threat of loss of capacity for relationships hangs over them all the time.  For them the philosophical problem becomes and remains a vital one, a matter of life and death, of feeding or starvation, of love or isolation.[38]

            Winnicott does not deny that there are 'philosophical problems' with realism—how could there not be when everything arises from a paradox?—but like Wittgenstein he thinks that the pursuit of such problems as problems reflects a kind of pathology of existence in which both self and world manifest an obsessive distrust of each other, endangering the reality of both.  Like Wittgenstein he understands philosophical concerns with realism not as primary—the realist spirit is primary, and without its paradoxical being no philosophical concerns exist—but as secondary elaborations of an underlying ontological insecurity. 

Notes

 A Study of AB¬HªMID AL-GHAZZªLI’s Life and Epistemology

Michael Mumisa¸CSIC, The University of Birmingham

ABSTRACT

The problem of knowledge has been a pre-occupation of philosophers throughout history. It is, as Ackerman puts it, “one of the most basic problems of philosophy”.[1] Questions such as: Is the world as people perceive it the basic reality, or do people perceive only appearances (or phenomena) that conceal basic reality? What are the limits of human knowledge? What are the boundaries between reason and knowledge, on the one hand, and what some thinkers call the illusions deriving from metaphysics? What are the sources of human knowledge, in other words, what constitute human knowledge, are questions which have been the pre-occupation of epistemology from Plato to al-Ghazz¡l¢, Kant and beyond. Rationalists (Plato, and Descartes) have argued that ideas of reason intrinsic to the mind are the only source of knowledge. In opposition to this view, empiricists (Locke and Hume) argue that the sense experience is the primary source of our ideas, and hence of knowledge. Existentialism (Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Jaspers, Marcel, and Sartre) oppose rationalist and empiricist doctrines that assume that the universe is a determined, ordered system intelligible to the contemplative observer who can discover the natural laws that govern all being and the role of reason as the power guiding human activity. In this paper, I shall trace the evolution of al-Ghazz¡l¢’s epistemological thought, from its ‘infantility’ and total subjection to authority (taq¢d), to his encounter with Empiricism and Neo-Platonism, and later, his final subscription to Sufi dogma. This paper is based on Arabic as well as English sources. Although my primary sources are al-Ghazz¡l¢’s own writings, I have also relied on other sources I felt were relevant to the topic.

Al- Ghazz¡l¢’s Life

Mu¦ammad b. Mu¦ammad b. A¦mad Ab£ µ¡mid al-±£si al-Ghazz¡l¢, commonly known as Algazel in the West was born in 1058 C.E./450 A.H. (three years after the establishment of the Seljuq rule in Baghdad) at ±abar¡n, one of the towns of ±£si, now in ruins in the neighbourhood of modern Meshed in Khuras¡n.

Al-Ghazz¡l¢ was not the first scholar of distinction in his family, there had been another Ab£ µ¡mid al-Ghazz¡l¢ (d. 1043/435), his grand-uncle, who was a theologian and jurisconsult of great repute. His own father was a pious dervish who according to al-Subk¢ would not eat anything but what he could earn with his own hands and spent as much time as he could in the company of sages.[2]

Al-Ghazz¡l¢ undertook his elementary education in his hometown under the guidance of the Sh¡fi‘¢ scholar Shaikh A¦mad b. Mu¦ammad al-R¡³k¡n¢ who taught him the Sh¡fi‘¢ system of jurisprudence. He then moved to Jurj¡n at the south-east corner of the Caspian Sea where he completed a course under one of Jurj¡n’s most eminent scholars, Im¡m Ab£ Na¥r al-Ism¡‘¢l¢. After his return from Jurj¡n he stayed for a while in ±£si and studied under Y£suf al-Nasaj. At the age of about twenty he proceeded to the Ni³¡miyyah University of Nishapur (about fifty miles from ±us) to study under Ab£ al-Ma‘¡l¢ al-Juwain¢, known as Im¡m al-µaramain, who was considered the most distinguished Ash‘arite theologian of the day, only fourth to Ab£ al-µasan al-Ash‘ar¢ himself in the apostolic succession of the Ash‘arite scholars. Al-Ghazz¡l¢ gave early proof of academic brilliance and also of a tendency towards philosophising and showed a gift for polemics in his debates with other students. At this stage, he had a very critical mind and possessed great independence of thought. It was during his studentship at the Ni³¡miyyah University that he became impatient with dogmatic teaching and freed himself from the bondage of authority (taql¢d) and showed signs of scepticism.

During his stay at Nishapur, he became a disciple of Ab£ al-Fa±l b. Mu¦ammad b. ‘Al¢ al-Farmadh¢ al-±£s¢, a pupil of al-Ghazz¡l¢’s uncle and of al-Qushair¢ (d. 465/1074). Al-Ghazz¡l¢  learnt more about the theory and practice of Sufism from al-Farmadh¢ but could not feel settled in his mind. On the one hand, he felt philosophically dissatisfied with the speculative systems of the scholastic theologians and could not accept anything on authority, while on the other, the Sufistic practices failed to make any definite impression on him for he had not at that time received any definite results. There is no doubt, however, that the increasing attraction of Sufistic teaching, with its insistence upon inner knowledge, added to al-Ghazz¡l¢’s critical dissatisfaction with scholasticism.

Al-Farmadh¢ died in 477/1084, and Im¡m al-µaramain in 478/1085. Al-Ghazz¡l¢ was then in his twenty-eighth year and his fame had already spread in the Muslim world. He betook himself to the Court of Ni³¡m al-Mulk, the great vizier of the Seljuk sovereign Malikshah (r. 465/1072-485/1092) and joined his retinue of canonists and theologians. Ni³¡m al-Mulk was so impressed by al-Ghazz¡l¢  that he appointed him to the Chair of Theology in the Ni³¡miyyah University (established 458-60/1065-67) at Baghdad in 484/1091. He was then only thirty-four and this was the most coveted of all the honours in the then Muslim world and one which had not been conferred on anyone at so early an age. For four years he was a popular professor at the University with over three hundred students as an audience. He was at the same time reading philosophy and became a veritable challenge to the philosophies of Aristotle and Plotinus, and to their Muslim representatives before him, al-F¡r¡bi and Ibn S¢na. The main trends of the religious and philosophical thought of al-Ghazz¡l¢, however, became close to the temper of the modern mind. The champions of the modern movement of religious empiricism on the one hand, and that of logical positivism on the other, paradoxical though it may seem, would find equal comfort in his works.

Al-Ghazz¡l¢’s study of philosophy deeply affected all that he did afterwards, and indeed the whole subsequent course of Islamic theology.[3] His old doubts and scepticism began to assail him once again and he became highly critical of the very subjects he taught. He felt keenly the hollowness of the meticulous spinning of the canon-lawyers. The systems of the scholastic theologians (Mutakallim¢n) had no intellectual certainty, for they depended entirely on the acceptance of their initial dogmatic assumption on authority. He denounced their over-emphasis on the doctrinal, and argued that it led to a faulty representation of religion by reducing it to a catechism of dogmas. He equated the disputes of the scholastics to Christological debates and considered them as mere dialectical logomachines which had no real relation to religious life. Al-Ghazz¡l¢ turned once again to the study of philosophy, this time as diligently and as comprehensively as he could, but found, like Kant, that it was impossible to build theology on reason alone. The Ultimate, the Supreme Truth, could not be reached through it. He became keenly aware of the theological limitation of reason and fell into a state of scepticism and lost peace of mind. He realised that if he could consecrate himself to the Sufistic way of life through spiritual renunciation, sustained asceticism, and prolonged deep meditation, he could receive the light he sought. But this meant giving up his brilliant academic career. It would therefore be very difficult for him to give up his position as professor at Ni³¡miyyah, but he was an earnest seeker after truth. He remained in the throes of severe moral conflict and in a spiritual travail for about six months beginning in Rajab 488/July 1095 until he collapsed physically and mentally when his appetite and digestion failed and he lost his power of speech. This made it easy to retire from professorship. He then left Baghdad in November 1095/Dh£ al-Qa‘dah 488, ostensibly on a pilgrimage to Makkah; actually he went into seclusion to practise the ascetic and religious discipline of the Sufis. He gave away all his fortune except some “trust funds” to maintain his family and proceeded to Syria.

Al-Ghazzali’s Life in Damascus

The discussion on al-Ghazz¡l¢’s stay in Damascus is very problematic, and probably the most difficult area in al-Ghazz¡l¢’s biography, despite the large number of existing books written on his life in Arabic as well as European languages. Perhaps the reason for this problem is that many writers tend to repeat al-Ghazz¡l¢’s account of his stay in Syria without subjecting his narration to a test of historical research. It is true, as Watt maintains, that the fullness of our knowledge of al-Ghazz¡l¢ is due to the fact that he left us an autobiographical work, al-Munqi± min al-±all¡l (Deliverance from Error),[4] but it must also be cautioned that not being a historian, his treatment of his life in it was schematic rather than chronological, and lacked the methodology of history. Any attempt, therefore, at writing his biography while quoting from al-Munqi±, should not go without critical study and historical research. Until Dr ±aybawi, former Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of London, wrote his book, al-Quds al-Shar¢f f¢ t¡rikh al-‘arab wa al-isl¡m, no attempt had been made to deal with al-Ghazz¡l¢’s stay in Damascus.

Al-Ghazz¡l¢ writes in his biography that he left Baghd¡d on a trip to Syria, and that for two years he remained in strict retirement in one of the minarets of the mosque of the Umayyads in Damascus, undergoing the most rigorous ascetic discipline and performing religious exercises. He then moved to Jerusalem for another period of meditation in the mosque of ‘Umar and the Dome of the Rock and then went on pilgrimage to Makkah and Madina. This was followed by a long period of retreat in mosques at different places and wandering in deserts. Afterwards he returned to his native town, ±£s, to visit his family.[5]

When al-Ghazz¡l¢ says that he stayed in Syria for “two years”, it is not immediately clear whether this refers to his whole period of stay, before and after his pilgrimage, or not. It becomes more confusing when, while writing about his return from his hometown, he says that he stayed in Syria after ten years. Does this refer to his seclusion after his return or to the duration he stayed in Syria since leaving teaching? Many recounts and reports have been recorded about the period of his stay in Syria, but the problem with these narrations is that they contradict each other. Im¡m Subk¢ reports from one of al-Ghazz¡l¢’s biographers, Khat¢b Nai¥¡r ‘Abd al-Gh¡fir al-F¡ris¢, who claims that he stayed in Syria for approximately ten years.[6] A similar report can be found in T¡rikh al-Dimashq quoted by Subk¢ from Ibn ‘As¡kir.[7] The problem with the two reports, however, is that while the first has been reported from a contemporary of al-Ghazz¡l¢, it has been recorded by an author who lived two centuries after al-Ghazz¡l¢ and yet he does not mention his sources or chain of transmission. The second report is from a man who was closer to al-Ghazz¡l¢’s era than Subk¢ but it also contradicts the report by a more reliable contemporary of al-Ghazz¡l¢, that of Ab£ Bakr b. al-‘Arab¢, who claim that he met and listened to al-Ghazz¡l¢ while he was in Baghd¡d in the month of Jum¡d al-th¡n¢ (490 A.H.).[8] These traditions again contradict Ibn Ath¢r’s report who, when writing of the incidences of the year 488 A.H., claims that it was during this year that al-Ghazz¡l¢ went to Syria and wrote his magnum opus the I¦y¡’ ‘ul£m al-d¢n. When we take all these reports into consideration, it follows that al-Ghazz¡l¢ left Baghdad for Syria in Dh£l Qa‘dah (488 A.H.) and returned before the month of Jum¡d al-th¡n¢ (490 A.H.). His encounter with the ¦¡dith scholar, Shaikh al-Fat¦, therefore, was just for a few months in 489 A.H.

Al-Ghazz¡l¢’s Concept of Knowledge

Definition of Knowledge

In a work on Avicennian (Ibn S¢n¡) philosophy, knowledge is adjudged incapable of definition, because knowledge “is a condition of the soul which he who is alive finds in his soul at the beginning without any equivocation…Knowledge can dispense with a definition, for whoever recognises a thing is able to recognise its being cognisant of that thing without logical proof and speculation. Knowledge that one knows a thing, stands for knowledge of one’s essence having the attribute of knowledge. Now, knowledge of the attribution of a complete process (itti¥¡f amr t¡mm) calls for the knowledge of each of the two things, that is the object (mawq£f) and the attribute (¥ifah). If the knowledge of the reality of knowledge were acquired, it would be absurd to assume that our knowing a thing could be known without speculation and deductive reasoning. As this is not so, it is established that the knowledge of the reality of knowledge dispenses with acquisition.”[9]

In Islamic epistemological thought, however, the term used for knowledge in Arabic is ‘ilm, which as Rosenthal justifiably pointed out, has a much wider connotation than its synonyms in English and other Western languages. “Knowledge” falls short of expressing all the aspects of ‘ilm. Knowledge in the Western world means information about something divine or corporeal, while ‘ilm is an all-embracing term covering theory, action and education. Rosenthal, highlighting the importance of this term in Muslim civilisation and Islam, writes:

In fact there is no concept that has been operative as a determinant of the Muslim civilisation in all its aspects to the same extent as ‘ilm. This holds good even for the most powerful among the terms of Muslim religious life such as, for instance, taw¦¢d, “recognition of the oneness of God”, ad-d¢n, “the true religion”, and many others that are used constantly and emphatically. None of them equals ‘ilm in depth of the meaning and wide incidence of use. There is no branch of Muslim intellectual life, of Muslim religious and political life, and of the daily life of the average Muslim that remains untouched by the all-pervasive attitude toward “knowledge” as something of supreme value for Muslim being. ‘Ilm is Islam even if the theologians have been hesitant to accept the technical correctness of this equation. The very fact of their passionate discussion attests to its fundamental importance for Islam.[10]

There exists a difference of opinion among the Arabic lexicographers with regard to the definition of ‘ilm. Knowledge has been defined as cognition (ma‘rifah) but the majority of Arabic linguists refuse to accept this definition arguing that there exists a vast difference between ma‘rifah and ‘ilm. To prove their position they argue that, had there been no difference between the two words, it would have then been permissible to describe Allah as ‘ªlim as well as ‘ªrif. Islamic theology, while it allows calling Allah ‘ªlim, prohibits using the attribute ‘ªrif for Him. This, they argue, indicates that there is a difference in meaning between the two words.

According to al-µa¥an b. Mu¦ammad, the famous Arabic lexicographer well-known as al-R¡ghib al-Isfah¡ni, knowledge is the perception of a thing as it is or “of a thing in its reality” (bi ¦aqiqatihi). He goes on to explain the difference between ‘ilm and ma‘rifah saying that ma‘rifah is the knowledge acquired after a process of thinking (taffakur) and pondering (tadabbur). It is for this reason, he writes, the Arabs say, “Allah ya‘lamu kadh¡” (Allah knows such and such) and not “Allah ya‘rifu kadh¡”  since Allah’s knowledge is not acquired through thinking (tafakkur) and pondering (tadabbur).[11]

In his famous book on legal theory al-Musta¥f¡, al-Ghazzali explains that it may be argued hypothetically that knowledge is cognition (ma‘rifah) “because every knowledge is belief, and every belief is cognition. Cognition is a wider term.”[12] This conception of knowledge, philosophical in origin, was basically a Mu‘tazilite doctrine and was refuted by the orthodox argument that Allah could not be thought of as believing. Al-¯¡b£ni states flatly that it is an assault upon the concept of Allah’s knowledge, since it requires Him to believe.[13] The implications and pitfalls of this concept, “belief”, are reviewed in detail from the Mu‘tazilite perspective in ‘Abd al-Jabb¡r’s Mughni.

Al-Ghazz¡l¢ and Authority (Taql¢d)

The late Dr Windelband, former Professor of Philosophy in the University of Strasbourg, wrote in his book, A History of Philosophy, that the appeal to authority often made its appearance in the Greek and Hellenic Philosophy in the sense of a confirmation and strengthening of an author’s own views, but not as a decisive and conclusive argument. The jurare in verba magistri, he maintains, was usual enough among the subordinate members of the school, but the heads of schools, and in general the men who engaged in independent research, maintained an attitude towards the teachings of the former time that was much more one of criticism than of unconditional subjection; and though in the schools, chiefly the academic and Peripatetic, the inclination to preserve and maintain the teaching of the founder as an unassailable treasure was fostered by the custom of commenting upon his works, yet in all the conflict as to the criteria of truth the principle had never been brought forward that something must be believed because this or that great man said it. Even though admiration of Socrates, in which all the following were at one, did not itself lead to his being regarded as the valid authority for definite philosophical doctrines,[14] the belief in authority in the later period grew out of the felt need of salvation and help. Another psychological root of this belief was the enhanced importance of personality. This shows itself in the great men of the past, as found in Philo and in all lines of Platonism, and not less in the unconditional trust of the disciples in their masters, which, especially in later Neo-Platonism, degenerated to exaggerated veneration of the heads of schools.[15]

The history of authority in Occidental thought is very similar to that in Oriental thought, Muslim thought in particular. Sh¡h Wal¢ All¡h al-Dehlawi writes in his treatise al-In¥¡f:

Know that the people in the first century (the first generation of Muslims) and the second century were not united upon the following of a single madhhab (a school of thought or a person’s opinion).[16]

In his magnum opus, µujjatull¡h al-B¡lighah, he writes:

Ab£ ±¡lib al-M¡lik¢ says in Q£t al-qul£b: These books (of fiqh) and collections (of fatw¡ or religious rulings) are a novelty and so is to speak according to the madhhab of one person, taking his sayings, quoting him in every affair, and to gain knowledge of fiqh (jurisprudence) only according to his madhhab. This was not the practice of the first and second generations, they were not united upon pure taql¢d (blind following) of madhhabs and upon learning only one school of thought. Rather, the people were of two levels: the scholars and the common people. The common people used to follow one who had Knowledge of the shar¢‘ah in the matters of agreement about which there is no difference among the Muslims, or among the majority of mujtahid¢n. They would learn how to perform ablution, prayers and how to discharge their regular charity and so on from their fathers or from their local scholars and act upon it. If anything unusual occurred, they would seek the ruling of any jurist they found without specifying any madhhab. Ibn Hamm¡m says at the end of al-Ta¦r¢r: They would at one time ask one muft¢ and then at another time a different one, not sticking to a single jurist.[17]

On pages 154-155, he goes on to quote Ibn µazm’s famous ruling:

Blind following, therefore, is ¦ar¡m (unlawful) and it is not permissible to take the saying of anyone without proof except for that of Allah’s Messenger, upon whom be peace.[18]

According to Ibn Khald£n (1332-1407) taql¢d or authority in Islam is of a later origin and he writes in his Prolegomena:

When it was feared that (ijtih¡d) would be attributed to those who were not befitting and to those whose opinion was not to be relied upon, they stated that it was something that people were now incapable of. Instead they turned them to blind-following and warned from accepting from more than one Im¡m since that, they argued, would be to make a game of it. So nothing remained except for the madhhabs to be passed on and for each blind follower to stick to his own madhhab, after its principles had been settled and its ascription affirmed by narration, such that there is no means of attaining fiqh today except through their way and any claiming ijtih¡d today has his claim rejected and is not followed, and the people of Islam today blindly follow these four Im¡ms.[19]

Al-Ghazz¡l¢’s initial knowledge was based on authoritative instruction (taql¢d) but later showed signs of scepticism when he could not accept anything on authority. Like many other scholars before and after him, he came to a realisation that taql¢d could not be regarded as knowledge, and that this unconditional subjection to the teachings of the Imams was, in actual fact, some form of ignorance.[20] In several passages in his I¦y¡’, he attacks blind following (taql¢d). While explaining the concept of ijtih¡d muq¡rib li-l-yaq¢n he writes:

Such a state is described as a belief approaching certainty, which is similar to the belief of the common folk in all legal matters (shar‘iyy¡t), i.e. they accept as fact that which is simply hearsay. Thus, every group is certain of the authenticity of its own system (madhhab) and the infallibility of its own Im¡m, or leader. Should any one member of these groups be reminded of the possibility that his Im¡m might be mistaken he would resent it very much and refuse to admit it.[21]

On page 94 he further explains the position of classical scholars on taql¢d:

With this in mind Ibn ‘Abb¡s said, “There is no one except the Prophet whose knowledge is not sometimes followed and sometimes rejected.” Thus although Ibn ‘Abb¡s had received his knowledge of jurisprudence from Zayd b. Th¡bit and had studied the Qur’an at the feet of ‘Ubay b. Ka‘b, he later contradicted both in jurisprudence and Qur’anic readings (qir¡’¡t), respectively. One of the predecessors (salaf) said, “Whatever is handed down to us on the authority of the Apostle of Allah we accept willingly, but what we receive on the authority of the Companions we may accept and we may reject. It is, however, a different story when we consider what we receive from the followers (al-t¡bi‘¢n), because they were men like ourselves (hum rij¡l wa na¦nu rij¡l).[22]

In al-Munqi± he explains how from his youth he strove to have a thorough and genuine understanding of all the madhhabs and various Muslim sects with which he encountered. He began to wonder how the beliefs acquired from parents and teachers through taql¢d or blind-following could be tested for their truth or whether they could be called knowledge.

The thirst for knowledge was innate in me from an early age: it was like a second nature implanted in me by God…No sooner had I emerged from my boyhood than I had already broken the fetters of tradition and authority and freed myself from hereditary beliefs…The diversity in beliefs and religions and the variety of doctrines in the sects which divide men are like a vast ocean strewn with shipwrecks…Each sect believes itself to be exclusively in possession of truth and of salvation…From the period of adolescence I have again and again plunged myself into this vast ocean…Struck with the contradictions which I encountered in endeavouring to disentangle the truth and falsity of these opinions, I was led to make the following reflection: The search for truth being the aim which I propose to myself, I ought in the first place to ascertain as to what are the foundations of certitude. I said to myself, I am seeking knowledge of what things really are, so I must know what knowledge is. I saw that certain knowledge must exclude all doubt and the possibility of error, indeed even the supposition of this.[23]

When he proceeded to enquire into the validity of knowledge, he was led to conclude that the only knowledge which tallies with this form is empirical knowledge and the knowledge of self evident propositions:

When I examined my knowledge, I found that none of it was certain except matters of sense-perception and necessary principles of thought.[24]

When reading this statement, one often wonders if at this stage al-Ghazz¡l¢ was sceptical about revelation as a source of knowledge, whether he became so sceptical that he even doubted the metaphysical aspect of shar¢‘ah knowledge in which he had been schooled, since this form of knowledge is not empirical. We have to remember that according to al-F¡r¡bi’s view (based on a Qur’anic verse), there is no knowledge in the mind at birth, and we knew nothing when we were born.[25] This influenced al-Ghazz¡l¢ here, and then Thomas Aquinas and, through them, later influenced Western realists. Here we would like to compare al-F¡r¡bi, Ghazz¡l¢ and Thomas Aquinas for the role of the senses and mind in relation to the source and creation of information.

Empirical and Rational Knowledge

Al-F¡r¡bi

Al-F¡r¡bi’s accepts sense as a source of true knowledge. To him, man’s first knowledge is perception. Perception comes after sensation. In his work, al-Mad¢nah al-F¡±ilah, he argues that because of the inherent weakness of our mental powers we cannot comprehend God completely. According to him, every idea comes from sense-experience: “There is nothing in the intellect that has not first been in the senses.” The mind is like a smooth tablet on which nothing is written and it is the senses that do all the writing on it. The senses are five: sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. Each of these has a proper sensible thing for its object. In every sensation the sense receives the form or species of sensible things without the matter, just as wax receives the form of a seal without any of the matter of it.[26]

The sensations we have once experienced, he maintains, are not utterly dead. They can reappear in the form of images. The power by which we revive a past sensible experience without the aid of any physical stimulus is called imagination (al-mutakhayyilah) while the power by which we combine and divide images is called the cogitative (al-muffakkarah). If we were limited merely to the experience of our actual sensations, we would have only the present and with it there would be no intellectual life at all. But fortunately we are endowed with the power of calling back a former experience and this is called memory (al-¦¡fi³ah or al-dh¡kirah).[27]

Thomas Aquinas

Thomas of Aquinas, a representative of religious realism, who lived in the 13^th century, developed a theory of knowledge parallel with his metaphysical conceptions. We can explain his theory of knowledge by showing that he was influenced by Aristotle and al-F¡r¡bi. God is “Pure Reason”, thus the universe is also “Pure reason”. It follows that we can understand the truth of objects by using reason, as suggested by Aristotle and al-F¡r¡bi. To obtain information about the external world, however, we have to use our senses.

Even though the truth has been conveyed to humans by revelation from God, He has also provided men with the intellect to seek the truth. Aquinas gives second place to intellect after revelation.[28] He further maintains that sense is a power and is naturally changed by the exterior sensible, wherefore the exterior cause of such change is what is directly perceived by the sense. According to the diversity of that exterior cause the sensitive powers are diversified. Now, change is of two kinds, one natural and the other spiritual. Natural change takes place in the form of the changer being received, according to its natural existence into the thing changed. Whereas spiritual change takes place in the form of the changer being received according to a spiritual mood of existence, into the thing changed, as the form of colour is received into the pupil which does not thereby become coloured. Now, for the operation of senses, a spiritual change is required, whereby an intention of the sensible form is effected in the sensible organ.[29]

For the retention and preservation of these sensible forms, the fantasy or imagination is appointed, which are the same, for fantasy or imagination is as it were the storehouse of forms received through the senses. Furthermore, for the apprehension of intentions which are not received through the senses, the estimative power is appointed; and for the preservation thereof, the memorative power, which is a storehouse of suchlike intentions.[30]

Al-Ghazz¡l¢

Al-Ghazz¡l¢ explains how the five sensory organs function and which characteristics of objects they perceive:

In the creation man was formed empty of knowledge and simple, knowing nothing of God’s worlds. His worlds are many…Man only comes to know about them through the use of his senses. Each of those senses is created so that man perceives himself and one of those worlds of the universe. By worlds, we mean the different variety of beings.[31]

Foreshadowing Bacon, he claims that knowledge can only be through induction, and uses Qur’anic verses to support his case. Knowledge, he said, cannot be obtained by deduction, only by induction. Thus, discarding the Aristotelian method of deduction, he laid the foundation of modern science that the Western world has seen since the 17^th century.

          According to al-Ghazz¡l¢, “there can be thought of God’s person, but the power and grandeur of the Creator can only be conceived by thinking about the created.”[32] Induction knowledge, he claims, comes from the Qur’anic: verse 190 of ªl ‘imr¡n, which asks us to study “the creation of the earth and skies, and night and day as they follow one another.”

          These are particulars and through a study of them the generalisation can be made that God is the Creator of all. Al-Ghazz¡l¢ notes in his book, I¦y¡’, that each of the senses alone is insufficient; only with the combination of all five organs can a complete sense form in the mind. This complete sense (al-¦iss) forms in the fore of the mind and cannot reach conclusions. Here al-Ghazz¡l¢ introduces the intellect. The complete sense uses each of the five as “spies”, collects the information brought by them and turns it over to the intellect. In the final analysis, knowledge issues from the intellect, and at this point, just as al-Ghazz¡l¢’s thinking differs from Locke[33] with the notion of complete sense, it also diverges from other Muslim thinkers.

          Al-Ghazz¡l¢ does not stop at placing sensory information at the basis of knowledge, but also accepts experience as one of the sources of knowledge. In other words, there is the natural intellect and there is the later, accumulated intellect. The accumulated intellect is gained through experience, it is born of experience.[34] We may conclude that al-Ghazz¡l¢, like other realists, sees the role of the mind in the acquisition of knowledge about an object. On the other hand, al-Ghazz¡l¢, though not as much as Locke, tries to prove with Qur’anic verses that observation is another source of knowledge:

His heart did not deny what he saw.[35]

As this, we show the secrets of the earth and the skies.[36]

Eyes cannot be blind, but hearts in the chests are.[37]

Using the above verses, al-Ghazz¡l¢ argues that observation is necessary to understand the divine order of the universe; but also says that there are two kinds of eyes: the eye as the organ of vision, and the eye of the heart. Thus, the sense provided by observation is rooted in two separate sources: the eye in the head, and the eye of the heart. The observation of objects is achieved by the eye in the head, then the eye of the heart confirms it. However, all metaphysical issues can be observed and understood only through the eye of the heart.[38] Al-Ghazz¡l¢, therefore, did not doubt the metaphysical aspect of shar¢‘ah knowledge, and as he later discovered, empirical knowledge alone was not reliable. Like Descartes (1596-1650), the French thinker who is generally regarded as the founder of modern philosophy, he denied that the senses alone could be a source of knowledge. The data given by the sense-experience could be contradicted and convicted of falsity in an indisputable manner by the verdict of reason:

It further occurred to me, however, that my present trust in sense-perception and necessary truths was perhaps no better founded than my previous trust in propositions accepted from parents and teachers. So I earnestly set about making myself doubt sense-perception and necessary truths. With regard to sense-perception I noticed that the sense of sight tells me that the shadow cast by the gnomon of a sundial is motionless; but later observation and reflection shows that it moves, and that it does so not by jerks but by a constant steady motion. This sense also tells me that the sun is the size of a coin, but astronomical evidences prove that it is larger than the earth. Thus sense makes certain judgements, and then reason comes and judges that they are false.[39]

Al-Ghazz¡l¢’s faith in sense-perception having been shaken, he turned to the scrutiny of what he called the necessary principles, but doubted these too. The truth of mathematical axioms and laws of logic, he argued, could not be absolutely guaranteed. His senses had sometimes deceived him, why should not his reason? His doubt with regard to sense-data made him very hesitant to accept the infallibility of reason:

Perhaps beyond rational apprehension there will be another judge; when he appears he will show that reason is false. The fact that this supra-rational apprehension has not yet appeared, does not mean that it is impossible…While asleep you assume your dreams to be indisputably true; but once awake you recognise them for what they really are, baseless chimeras. How then are you sure of the real existence of all that you believe in your waking through sense or reason? In relation to your present state they may appear real but is it not possible that you should enter upon another state which will bear the same relation to your present state as the latter does to your condition when asleep? With awakening into that new state you might recognise that all your rational suppositions are no more than mere chimeras.[40]

Al-Ghazz¡l¢ then suggests that this state may be death itself and that this life may be a dream in relation to the life to come. He finally comes to believe that it may be the state which the Sufis call ecstasy, in which they claim, when absorbed in themselves with the sense perception suspended, they see things which are not in accordance with rational principles.[41]

Scepticism

One cannot invalidate the point that al-Ghazz¡l¢’s scepticism was preceded by some study of philosophy and that this aspect of his epistemology might have been strongly influenced by Socrates and Plato’s method that suggest a sceptical stance. Socrates is said to have claimed that he knew either nothing or very little (e.g. Memo 80.86). In Plato’s works this claim is loosely associated with the portrayal of Socrates as practising a procedure of elenchus, “scrutiny” (often translated as “refutation”).

          The first aspect of al-Ghazz¡l¢’s epistemology shares important preoccupation with epistemology since Descartes. First, as indicated, al-Ghazz¡l¢ is portrayed as finding reason to reject most claims to knowledge. Next, his early investigations are launched from a first-person standpoint: one must ask whether one’s own judgements are justified, and try to find justification that will seem compelling to oneself. In this way he adopts a standpoint similar to that of what are now called “internalist” epistemological views. Third, it is often said to be important to make statements on the basis of only what one believes, and not to rely on hearsay or other’s beliefs. In addition, although al-Ghazz¡l¢ does not explicitly introduce the notion of “doubt”, he emphasises the instability of most beliefs, the fact that they can often be easily dislodged by other kinds of persuasion.

          Though al-Ghazz¡l¢ was the most eminent among Muslim philosophers to travel the path of scepticism to attain the ultimate truth, there were others, particularly the Mu‘tazilites, like Nazzam, al-J¡¦i³, Ab£ H¡shim al-Jubba’i, al-B¡qill¡ni and others who advocated scepticism in order to arrive at a certain religious faith. Scepticism is a philosophy that has three different meanings: denial of all knowledge, agnosticism and a method to approach certainty. Most Muslim philosophers sought the goal of certainty. Scepticism in the general sense of the impossibility of knowledge is not compatible with Islamic teachings. It is acceptable only when it leads from uncertainty to certainty. The sceptical method has two aspects, rejection of all absolute knowledge and acceptance of the path to overcome uncertainty. Muslim philosophers have followed the second path, because there has been emphasis on rejecting blind faith (taql¢d). Shaikh al-Muf¢d (an eminent Sh¢‘ite scholar) has maintained that there was a very narrow margin between faith and disbelief insofar as the believer imitated certain theologians. In his view, an imitator (muqallid) was on the verge of unbelief (kufr). Apart from Shaikh al-Muf¢d and other Sh¢‘ite scholars, a number of classical orthodox scholars, and as we have discussed in the previous pages, even those considered to be conservative, regarded emulation or imitation as religiously unauthorised and harmful. Jal¡l al-D¢n al-Su³¢ held that taql¢d (authority) was forbidden by both the salaf and the khalaf (early and later generations of scholars). He cited as evidence al-Sh¡fi‘¢’s opposition to taql¢d.

Al-Fan¡’ and al-Kashf (Annihilation and Unveiling)

The literal meaning of the word kashf is unveiling, but in Sufi terminology it means to expose the heart to metaphysical illumination or “revelation” unattainable by reason. There is supposed to be yet a higher stage beyond kashf which is called al-tajall¢, or Divine manifestation: the “appearance” of God to man. It is the ultimate end to which the Sufi looks forward. He tolerates khalwa, seclusion and succumbs to the will of his Shaikh precisely to become one of the people of kashf. Al-fan¡’ or annihilation, in Sufi doctrine, means extinction in the Divine.[42]

Some scholars maintain that the doctrines of kashf and fan¡’ originated in Hindu philosophy while others claim that it first appeared in Greek thought. According to Professor Windelband, the development of these doctrines in Hellenistic philosophy took a direction entirely different from that which it took in other thoughts. Here the scientific movement lacked the living connection with the Church community and therefore the support of a historical authority; here, therefore, revelation (kashf), which was demanded as a supplement for the natural faculties of knowledge, was to be sought in an immediate illumination of the individual by the Divine. On this account al-kashf was held to be a supra-rational apprehension of divine truth, an apprehension which the individual man comes to possess in immediate contact with the Divine. It was only a few who attained to this position (whom the Sufis will call the khaww¡¥). This conception of revelation was later called in the Western literature, the mystic conception, and to this extent some scholars believe that Neo-Platonism is the source of all later mysticism.[43] Sufis, however do not accept that Neo-Platonism is the source of Sufism. For them the Qur’an and the teaching of Prophet Muhammad are the sources of spiritual knowledge and the spiritual grace (barakah) flows directly from the Prophet, to whom all the spiritual paths (silsilah or ³ar¢qah) must be linked.

The origins of mystic conception are again to be sought with Plato. He had already taught that all man’s virtue can arise and continue only through the working of the divine Logos within us, and that knowledge of God consists only in the renunciation of the self, in giving up individuality, and becoming merged in the divine Primordial Being.[44] Knowledge of the Supreme Being is unity of life with him through immediate contact. In other words, the mind that wishes to behold God must itself become God.[45] In this state the soul’s relation is entirely passive and receptive; it has to renounce all self-activity, all its own thought, and all reflection upon itself. Even the reason must be silent in order that the perception of God may come upon man. In this state of ecstasy the divine spirit, according to Plato, dwells in man. Hence in this state, he is a foreteller and miracle worker.[46] Sufi concepts are not quite the same.

Ecstasy, which al-Ghazz¡l¢ and other Sufis call ¦¡l, is a state which transcends all the self-consciousness of the individual, as its object transcends all particular determinateness. It is sinking into the divine experience that is worth an entire loss of self-consciousness. How is this state to be attained? According to Proclus, one has to put off all his sensuous nature and all of one’s own will; he has to turn back from the multitude of individual relations to his pure, simple, essential nature; and the ways to this are love, truth and faith; but it is only in the last, which transcends all reason, that the soul is annihilated in God.[47] Thus the theory of inspiration diverged, in Christianity and Neo-Platonism, into two wholly different forms. In the former, divine revelation was fixed as historical authority; in the latter, it was the process in which the individual man, freed from all eternal relations, sank into the divine original Ground. The former was for the Middle Ages the source of Scholasticism; the latter, that of Mysticism. Sufism consists in love of God and freeing oneself from passions and desires following the sunnah of the Prophet.[48] Al-Ghazz¡l¢ did not allow Sufism to descend into a kind of mysticism which does not operate within the framework of shar¢‘ah. In fact, through his scholarly works as well as his own spiritual practice he established shar¢‘ah as the guiding principle of Sufism.

According to al-Ghazz¡l¢, since the human soul is by nature limited solely to the impressions of the senses, it is therefore, of its own power, absolutely incapable of acquiring metaphysical knowledge, knowledge of the Transcendent, life after death or of any vocation or destiny of its own that transcends this life. Just for this reason it needs revelation (kashf), and finds its salvation only through faith in this. And, like Tertullian and Arnobius, he asserts that the content of revelation is not only above reason, but also in a certain sense contrary to reason, insofar as by reason man’s natural knowing activity is to be understood. A true learned man must devote the greatest part of his attention to esoteric knowledge, the observation (mur¡qabah) of the heart, the path of the hereafter and how to journey thereon, as well as to an abiding faith in finding that path through self mortification (muj¡hadah) and observation. For self-mortification leads to contemplation (mush¡hadah), and through the intricate details of the sciences of the heart fountains of wisdom will gush forth. Books and formal education, he writes, are of little help because the wisdom which passes all understanding is only achieved through self-mortification, observation and watching, coming before God in solitude and bringing the heart before His presence through pure reflection and sole devotion to him. This the key to illumination (ilh¡m) and the foundation of revelation (kashf). On page 97 of I¦y¡’ he writes:

Those whose hearts have been sanctified have the secret of heaven made known to them either by inspiration which dawns upon them from where they know not, or by actual vision al-ru’yah al-¥¡diqah (in their sleep), or in their wakefulness, which unfolds to them the mysteries through the contemplation of types, just as in sleep. This is the highest rank, and is one of the high ranks of prophecy.[49]

There are two points against the Sufi interpretation of Kashf and tajall¢. First, conceiving metaphysics by illumination is impossible. The fact is that whatever exists can be conceived only within the realm of reason. Once man loses reason, he loses ability to conceive of anything of its reality, and turns to hallucination. Secondly, any claim that the Divine essence can appear, whether in existence or beyond it, whether materially or transcendentally, is a flagrant lie according to orthodoxy. ‘Abdul-Kar¢m al-Jil¢ the closest associate of Ibn ‘Arab¢ and influenced by the doctrine of illumination, went on to claim that he was commanded by God to bring his own book, The Perfect Man, to the people, the theme of which is similar to pantheism. He claimed that the perfect man could represent all the attributes of God, and further asserted that the Prophet was the perfect man. On this premise, he went on to declare, “to me belong sovereignty in both worlds,”[50] a claim that is far worse even than associating partner with God (shirk).

Conclusion

Exercise of the intellect (‘aql ) is of significance in the entire Islamic literature which played an important role in the development of all kinds of knowledge, scientific or otherwise, in the Muslim world. In his Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, Iqbal pointed out that ijtihåd was a dynamic principle in the body of Islam. He claims that much before Francis Bacon, the principles of scientific induction were emphasised by the Qur’ån, which highlights the importance of observation and experimentation in arriving at certain conclusions. It may also be pointed out that Muslim jurists and exegetes made use of the method of linguistic analysis in interpreting the Qur’anic injunctions and the Prophetic tradition. Al- Ghazz¡l¢ was probably the first Muslim philosopher to make use of the linguistic analytical method to clarify certain philosophical issues. There are those who feel that he was more maligned than properly understood by both the orthodox and liberal Muslim interpreters of his philosophy. His method of doubt paved the way, however, for intellectual activities in the Muslim world, but because of historical and social circumstances, it culminated in the stagnation of philosophical and scientific thinking, which later made him a target of criticism by philosophers. One of the problems inherent in his thought was his belief that some types of knowledge were harmful to human beings. Islam actually does not consider any type of knowledge as harmful. However, what in the Qur’anic has been called useless or harmful consists of pseudo sciences or the lore prevalent in the pre-Islamic period. Islam never maintained that only theology was useful and that empirical sciences were useless or harmful. This concept was made common by the semi-literate clerics or by the time servers among them who wanted to keep common Muslims in blind faith so that they would not be able to oppose unjust rulers and resist clerics attached to the courts of tyrants. This attitude resulted in the condemnation of certain sciences which led to the decline of Muslims in politics, economics and technology. It gave birth to movements which considered elementary books of theology as sufficient for a Muslim, and discouraged the assimilation or dissemination of empirical knowledge as leading to the weakening of faith. It is my belief, however, that conflict between faith and science only arises when science has been transformed into a religion; in other words, when it has acquired the status of a sort of positivistic religion, or at least, philosophy, of its own, and has transgressed the true form and definition of modern science. I do know, however, that what is known today as modern science, and because of its close association with Western thought since the Enlightenment, is a science armed with, or immersed in, a completely materialistic world-view. This science has allowed itself to transgress its legitimate boundaries, and whereas it was originally meant to be applied solely to the material world, it has given itself the authority to pass judgement on every conceivable subject. And since it is unable to ascertain either truth or the falsehood of propositions concerning matters within the extrasensory or supernatural realm, it denies the very existence of such worlds. I wish to re-emphasise that the blame for this opposition to, or better to say, denial of the existence of, a world inaccessible to the human sense organs lays far more upon the shoulders of materialistic scientists than upon those of experimental science per se. Undoubtedly, the science practised by such persons, burdened by a particular set of intellectual shortcomings and prejudices, would be entirely antithetical to belief in the existence of a spiritual world and a supernatural divine entity; an entity which, obviously, cannot be subjected to ordinary scientific investigation.

Notes:

 Spiritual Walayah or Love in the Mathnavi Mawlawi: A Shi‘ite View

Sharam Pazouki, Inst. for Humanities & Cultural Studies, Iran

Abstract

In its true meaning, walayah means love, a believer is a lover and faith is love. The main topic of the Mathnavi is love. In this poem, Mawlawi speaks of the nature of love, the way to it, its master and perils. Among the three approaches to religion, that is, narrative, rational and heartfelt, he chooses the last because it is the way of faith and love, or walayah. He considers ‘Ali to be the source or wali for this way after the Prophet. Thus the Mathnavi is also a book of walayah, and Mawlawi is a Shi‘ite, not in the current sense of the jurists or dialectical theologians, but in its true meaning, that is, belief in the continuing spirituality and walayah of the Prophet in the person of ‘Ali, and belief that after the Prophet there is always a living guide (wali) on the way of love.

There are three main approaches to Islam found among classical Muslim authors: narration, reason and the heart. Among various Muslim scholars, it is only the Sufis who have followed the way of the heart. According to this way, God is not only the divine legislator, to Whom one prays with fear of hell and yearning to enter paradise, but He is the Beloved.[1] The way of the heart is the way of love, in which the wayfarer purifies his heart until he gains union with God. In addition to this, the Sufis believe that in every period of time there is a divine spiritual guide or wali, and that it is only through him that one can find the way to God. So, after the death of the Prophet, one cannot confine himself to the Qur’an and traditions, but should obey the spiritual successors of the Prophet, the awliya. The cycle of prophecy has been completed with the Prophet of Islam, but the cycle of walayah never ends, and the way to God is always thereby open. Consequently, the way of the heart is also the way of walayah, and walayah and love are two aspects of one truth.

The word walayah stems from the root wly whose original meaning is to place something near to another so that there is no distance between them. So, walayah denotes physical or spiritual nearness, such as the nearness of the lover to his beloved. The words wali, mawla and mawlawi (the famous title used for Rumi), are all from this root. It is one of the most frequently used roots found in the Qur’an and Shi‘ite narrations, and it is also a key concept in Sufism, although it became more widespread through the influence of Ibn ‘Arabi and his followers.[2] As we shall see later, walayah is the reality of Sufism and the inner aspect of Islam.

As a term in Sufism and in Shi‘ism, walayah means the immediacy of God to the wali, by virtue of which revelation or inspiration takes place. Regarding the spiritual quality of this nearness, Mawlawi says:

Thou dost not see this, that the nearness of the awliya (to God) hath a hundred miracles and pomps and powers.[3]

Walayah is an eternal truth present in all the divinely revealed religions. Each of the prophets from Adam to Muhammad was first a wali before becoming a prophet, and walayah continues even though the cycle of prophecy has ended. As Mawlawi describes it, although the rose garden of prophecy has fallen into ruin, we should smell its quintessence in the perfume of walayah.[4]

Since walayah is something heartfelt and refers to the divine aspect of the wali, it is hidden and a mystery. Not all people have an eye to recognize the wali, so, not all can see him. Mawlawi says:

Even now there exists a Solomon,

but we are blinded by exulting in our far­sightedness (hyperopia).[5]

The wali is the shadow of God on earth. Mawlawi says that the shadow mentioned in the verse of the Qur’an, “How God extended the shadow” is the form of the awliya, which guides to the light of the divine sun.[6]

The wali is the perfect man of the age and the intermediary of grace from God to man. His acceptance is the acceptance of God. Mawlawi says:

If he (the wali) rejects anyone, he does it for His sake;

and if he (the wali) accepts anyone, he is the authority.

Without him, God does not bestow bounty on anyone...[7]

The wali is the prophet of his age. Mawlawi says:

Do not break with the prophet of your days

do not rely on your own skill and preference.[8]

The awliya revive men through the life­giving breath of walayah:

Heark! For the awliya are the reviving angels (Israfils) of the (present) time:

from them to the dead comes life and freshness.[9]

Sufis compare walayah to the grafting of the bitter existence of man to the divine tree in order for it to produce sweet fruit. Mawlawi says:

Either take up the axe and strike like a man—like ‘Ali,

destroy this gate of Khaybar—

Or unite these thorns with the rosebush:

unite the light of the friend (of God) with the fire (your soul),

In order that this light may extinguish your fire,

(and that) union with Him may make your thorns roses.[10]

This grafting is the swearing of allegiance (bay‘at) to ‘Ali, by which the divine trust enters the heart of man:

The Mary of the heart will not conceive the breath of the Messiah Until the divine trust comes from one hidden place (i.e., the heart of the wali) to another (the heart of the novice).[11]

Companionship with God is companionship with the awliya:

Whoever wishes to sit with God, let him sit in the presence of the awliya.

If you are broken off (divided) from the presence of the awliya, you have perished.[12]

Of course, since there are false claimants to guidance who invite people on their own without permission, Mawlawi says:

Since there is many a devil who hath the face of Adam,

It is not well to give your hand to every hand (to perform bay‘at)[13]

It is this spiritual permission that is called khirqah (the patched cloak) in the language of the Sufis. When they say that a shaykh has been dressed in the khirqah by another shaykh, it means that he has been given this spiritual permission.

In the Mathnawi, obedience to the wali, also called the pir or guiding shaykh, is considered obligatory. The Prophet teaches this point to ‘Ali before anyone else, in the same manner as Khidr taught it to Moses. This is why in the Mathnawi, the Prophet advises ‘Ali that obedience to the guide is the nearest way to God.[14]

O ‘Ali! Above all devotional acts in the Way (of God), do thou choose the shadow (protection) of the servant of God.[15]

When the Pir has accepted thee, take heed, surrender theyself (to him):

go, like Moses, under the authority of Khidr.[16]                            

According to Mawlawi, nothing kills the carnal soul but the shadow of the wali.[17]

Mawlawi even considers the wali to be the way itself,[18] because he believes that the way to gain perfection is through connection with the wali:

If thou gain access to that king, thou wilt become a king.[19]

Walayah brings about love. In a famous hadith God says:

My servant comes near to Me continually through supererogatory worship until I love him. When I love him, I become his ear through which he hears, his eyes through which he sees, his tongue by which he speaks, his hands by which he moves, and his feet by which he walks.”[20]

Thus, the wali who has achieved the ultimate proximity to God and has been annihilated in Him becomes a lover. Love is the goal of every wayfarer. Mawlawi says that he is unable to explain it:

Whatsoever I say in exposition and explanation of love, when I come to love (itself) I am ashamed of that (explanation).[21]

It is only love that purifies man:

He (alone) whose garment is rent by a (mighty) love is purged of covetousness and all defect.[22]

According to the root meaning of the word walayah, there is no distance that remains between the lover and his beloved.

But my (whole) being is full of Layla (the Beloved): this shell is filled with the qualities of that Pearl.[23]

The love of God is through the love for the wali because he is one with God or is annihilated in God. If Mawlawi fell in love with Shams Tabrizi, it was because Shams was one of the awliya who attracted Mawlawi:

Who is the beloved? Know well, it is the people of the heart, who like day and night, are recoiling from the world.[24]

Mawlawi has learned love from the awliya. He does not find it among the great Sunni jurists:

In that quarter where love was increasing (my) pain, Bu Hanifa and Shafi‘I gave no instruction.[25]

He is not seeking love in the books of narrations.

Without the two Sahihs and narrations and narrators; nay, (they behold him) in the place where they drink the Water of Life.[26]

He knows that they know nothing about love:

Love is nothing but a divine fortune and grace

It is nothing but openness of heart and guidance

Bu Hanifa did not teach love

Shafi‘i has narrated nothing about it

Malik knows nothing about the secret of love

Hanbal does not comprehend it.[27]

Mawlawí considers judicial discretion (ijtihàd) and juridical analogy (qiyàs) as practiced by the scholars of Islamic law to be contrary to the explicit statement (nass) of the Prophet:

In a case where he does not find an explicit statement, there he will produce an example from analogy.

Know for sure that the explicit statement is the revelation of the Holy Spirit and that the analogy made by personal reasoning is subordinate to this.[28]

The words of the walí are the criterion in religion and not the standards of human reasoning:

Know that beside the breath (words) of the qutb (i.e., walí) of the time ransmitted knowledge is like performing the ritual ablution with sand when there is water.[29]

Likewise, according to the way of the heart that we find in Mawlawí, the secret of walàyah is not to be found among the mutakallimín (rational theologians), not even the great ones like Fakhr­i Ràzí:

If reasoning could discern the way Fakhr­i Razí would be an adept in religious mysteries.[30]

Generally, since the mutakallimín seek to understand the mysteries of religion through the corporeal senses, and deny the inner senses of the spirit, they are not on the path described by Mawlawí. For example, regarding the debate between the Mu‘tazilites and Ash‘arites about the problem of the vision of God with the corporeal eye, he criticizes both groups and claims that God can only be seen with the eye of the spirit, or the eye of the heart.

The doctrine of the Mu‘tazilites is seeing by the eye of sense, whereas the Sunnite (orthodox) doctrine is seeing by the intellect (spirit) when unified with Him,

Those in thrall to sense­perception are Mu‘tazilites, (though) from misguidedness they represent themselves as Sunnites (orthodox).[31]

There are three noteworthy points about these couplets. First, when Mawlawí speaks of Sunnites, he is not indicating the Sunní/Shí‘í dichotomy, as we shall see later. Here Sunnite means those who uphold the sunnah of the Prophet. Second, when he speaks of seeing by the intellect, he does not mean the discursive intellect (aql juzí), but the spirit or heart (aql kullí). Third, the point made is one that is also affirmed by a number of well­known Shi‘ite narrations. For example, it is reported that the sixth Imam related that in response to a Jewish scholar who asked, “Do you see your Lord when you worship Him?” Imam ‘Ali said, “Woe unto you! I do not worship a Lord I do not see.” The Jewish scholar asked, “How do you see Him?” Imam ‘Ali said, “Woe unto you! God is not seen with the eyes, but the hearts see Him with the reality of faith.”[32]

Philosophers who rely on their own reasonings are also off the path of Mawlawí:

The philosopher killed (exhausted) himself with thinking:

Let him run on (in vain), for his back is turned towards the treasure.

Let him run on: the more he runs, the more remote does he become from the object of his heart’s desire.[33]

Philosophers never gain certainty in religion.[34] They are always entangled in the intelligibles (ma‘qulat).[35] They do not pay attention to the kernel which is walayah:

The philosopher is in bondage to things perceived by the intellect; (but) the pure (wali) is he that rides as a prince on the Intellect of intellect.

The Intellect of intellect is your kernel, (while) your intellect is (only) the husk: the belly of animals is ever seeking husks.[36]

In like manner, the philosopher is ignorant of the spiritual senses of the awliya.[37] He should know that it is only through servitude to God that one can know the truth:

The discovery (of the mystery) thereof is not (given) by the meddlesome intellect: do service (to God), in order that it may become clear to you.([38])

All of the non­spiritual sciences, that Mawlawi calls conjectural sciences, are the subject of various opinions and tendencies; to the contrary, since the awliya see by the eye of the heart there is no difference in their views.[39] Although the awliya are different in their corporeal bodies, they are the same since they are all a single light.

The souls of wolves and dogs are separate, every one; the souls of the Lions of God are united.[40]

In every age there is a single perfect wali of God who is commissioned by God to guide people. He is the guided one (mahdi) and the guide (hadi):

Therefore in every epoch a wali arises: the probation (of the people) lasts until the Resurrection.[41]

He is the Mahdi (the guided one) and the Hadi (the guide), O seeker of the way: he is both hidden and seated before your face.[42]

Since no one else but God and the prior wali knows the spiritual position of the succeeding wali, therefore, the former can appoint the latter. We cannot know him by our understanding.

‘Ties only the wali (himself) that makes the wali known and makes whoever he will its beneficiary.

No one can recognize him by reasoning; perhaps he pretends to be mad.[43]

He is the pious one of his time whose permission to guide has been given by God through the previous wali.

Amongst the righteous there is one (who is) the most righteous; on his decree (is inscribed) by the Sultan’s (God’s) hand a seal of approval.[44]

Walayah differs from caliphate. It is possible for people to engage in chosing the caliph by giving him their vote, but only God appoints the wali. God appointed ‘Ali to be the spiritual successor and wali after the Prophet. The issue of whether ‘Ali succeeded the Prophet as caliph is an historical matter, not a doctrinal one. What is important is believing that after the Prophet, walayah continued in ‘Ali. After acknowledging the historical reality of the designation of ‘Ali by the Prophet at Ghadir Khumm, Mawlawi says:

For this reason the Prophet, who laboured with the utmost zeal, applied the name mawla to himself and to ‘Ali.

He said, my cousin ‘Ali is the mawla and friend of every one of whom I am the mawla and friend. [45]

In order to remove any doubt that a theologian might have about whether mawla merely signifies friendship, Mawlawi emphasizes that the mawla is the guide and divine beloved through whose walayah one may be freed from the bonds of the world:

Who is mawla? He who sets you free and removes the fetters of slavery from your feet.

Since prophethood is the guide to freedom, freedom is bestowed on true believers by the prophets.[46]

Since he considers the appointment of the wali to be a great divine grace, he continues:

Rejoice, O community of true believers; show yourselves to be free as the cypress and the lily.[47]

In order to show that for ‘Ali, as he himself has said,[48] the caliphate has less value than his old worn out shoes, Mawlawi says:

He who mortifies his body in this fashion, how should he covet the Princedom and the Caliphate?[49]

If he speaks of the caliphate it is only to show the true way of governing.

He strives after power and authority outwardly to show to rulers the right way of ruling, to give another spirit to the rule, to give fruit to the palm­tree of the caliphate.[50]

To those who find fault with ‘Ali for killing people in jihad, Mawlawi responds that his work was like a gardener who cuts diseased branches from trees so that they may be preserved and give fruit:

That heart­ravisher (‘Ali) cut off hundreds of thousands of heads, in order that the heads of the world’s people might win security.[51]

Mawlawi says that ‘Ali and the other awliya are the ones who guide people in this world and the next.

For God’s sake—you, O noble ones (awliya), are those who give succor in this world and the next.[52]

Since he considers the reality of religion to be walayah, which belongs to the heart and to mystery, and since ‘Ali is the vessel of this mystery after the Prophet, Mawlawi says:

Reveal the mystery, O ‘Ali, thou who art approved (by God),

O thou who art goodly ease after evil fate![53]

In his Sufi way, Mawlawi is the disciple of the walayah of ‘Ali, and as a disciple understands the grace of the presence of ‘Ali in his heart. Thus, immediately following the previous couplet he says:

Either do thou declare that which thy intellect hath found,

Or I will tell that which hath shown forth on me.

From thee it shone forth on me: how shouldst thou hide it?

You sprinkle light like the moon, without language.

Without speaking, the moon guides,

When it speaks, it is light on light.[54]

Mawlawi says that ‘Ali is his ancestry and origin:

Thou hast been my ancestry and origin,

Thou hast been the radiance of the candle of my religion.[55]

After ‘Ali, walayah continued through the other Shi‘ite Imams. They appointed shaykhs for the guidance of the people. These shaykhs were the first Sufi shaykhs, and they became the initiators of the Sufi orders. This is why almost all of them trace the chain of permission for guidance directly to Imam ‘Ali, or to the other Imams, especially Ja‘far Sadiq and Imam Rida and from them to ‘Ali.[56] In this way, all of these orders establish ‘Ali as the gate to the city of divine knowledge, that is, walayah, in accordance with the famous hadith attributed to the Prophet, “I am the city of knowledge and ‘Ali is its gate.” With regard to this hadith, Mawlawi says:

Since thou (‘Ali) art the gate to the city of Knowledge,

Since thou art the beams of the sun of clemency,

Be open, O Gate, to him that seeks the gate,

So that by means of thee, the husks may reach the core.

Be open unto everlasting, O Gate of Mercy,

O Entrance hall to None is like unto Him.[57]

Mawlawi considers ‘Ali to be the measure of the words and deeds of one who is on the way to God:

You have been the balance, having the character of the One,

You have been the needle of every balance.[58]

The conclusion we would like to draw from this is that the most important principle shared by both Shi‘ism and Sufism is the question of Imamate or walayah, and that the wali is the divine mediator and guide through whom God saves humanity. The point that should be taken into consideration here is that, contrary to what is commonly asserted, Shi‘ism originally is not a political movement against the caliphs or a jurisprudential school, alongside the Sunnite schools of jurisprudence, or a school of kalam with an affinity to the Mu‘tazilites. Shi‘ism is a heartfelt way based on the concept of walayah, and the differences in jurisprudence, politics and theology are secondary issues aside from this main core.[59] Thus, in true Shi‘ism, one believes that God is known not by one’s own reasoning and speculations, nor by narrations handed down through others, but by submission to the wali and wayfaring on the path of love.

Thus we see that in his Mathnawi, Mawlawi speaks favorably about all the first four caliphs, but his tone of speaking differs completely when he comes to ‘Ali,[60] because he recognizes him as being the wali after the Prophet. Sometimes he praises ‘Ali by the tongue of others, even his enemies, such as his assassin, Ibn Muljam, and sometimes Mawlawi himself praises ‘Ali in the language in which the novice speaks with his master. He speaks with ‘Ali as if he were speaking with Shams­e Tabrizi, the enraptured conversation of the lover with his beloved. He speaks of the face of ‘Ali as a lover would, he says that it is a face… to which the face of the moon bows low in the place of worship.[61]

Sometimes he asks ‘Ali for grace as one who is weak and needy before him. He gives the best titles to ‘Ali, such as, ‘the pride and honor of every prophet and wali’ and ‘the lion of God.’ He seems to consider ‘Ali to have a spiritual stature that none of the previous three caliphs had. The places in which he mentions ‘Ali are generally places where he discusses walayah.

Mawlawi, like almost all the Sufi shaykhs, is Shi‘i in that he believes in walayah and recognizes ‘Ali to be the wali after the Prophet. However, he is not Rafidi, in that he does not curse the first three caliphs. He is also Sunni in the literal sense of the word. Mawlawi defines a Sunni as one who is a true follower of Islamic tradition, sunnah, who is a man of vision, not one bound to sensual perceptions and his own opinions:

Anyone who remains in bondage to sense perception is a Mu‘tazilite,

Though he may say he is a Sunnite, ‘tis from ignorance.

Anyone who has escaped from (the bondage of) sense perception is a Sunnite,

The man endowed with (spiritual) vision is following the eye of intellect.[62]

Mawlawi’s Mathnawi, which begins and ends with an explanation of love, is a book of love. It is also a book of walayah: Mawlawi ended the first book of the Mathnawi, with which he had intended to finish the work, with the remembrance of ‘Ali, and he ends the completed work with his mention as well.

Notes

 Book Reviews

The Cult of Saints among Muslims and Jews in Medieval Syria

Josef W. Meri

Oxford Oriental Monographs, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 327, cloth £50

Sainthood raises religion to its highest pitch of intensity. In sainthood is to be found a concentrated dose of the essence of the religious phenomenon, an existential proof, as it were, of the transformative power of religion. To say sainthood is to say religion realized—hic et nunc. It is therefore not at all surprising that there should be, in all religions, and to varying degrees, what has been referred to as the ‘cult’ of saints, that is, a reverential orientation towards those individuals who do not simply exemplify but also embody the most noble ideals and principles of their religion. Indeed, a religion deprived of saints can hardly be called a religion, for it is the presence of saints—personages whose holiness elicits both admiration and veneration—that proves the spiritual efficacy of the religion, and also imparts to its ideals a power of attraction, a tangible radiance and an intimate immediacy that religion can hardly do without. The presence of saints is one of the most important means by which religion is transformed from being a theoretical possibility to a lived reality, one which is both concrete and accessible. Without this sacred heart, pulsating with radiance and attraction—and its outward complement, the perpetual flow of pilgrims to and from the holy shrines—religion soon becomes sapped of its spiritual energy; and a religion deprived of spirituality becomes a religion susceptible to ideology—and thus politics and violence, proving true the Biblical adage, ‘the letter killeth but the spirit giveth life.’

Josef Meri sets the scene for his important work on the cult of saints in medieval Syria by contrasting the traditional assimilation of sainthood with the modern misappropriation of the sacred; the descent, that is, from the spirit to the letter, a ‘letter’ that has become disfigured by the explosive energies unleashed by false absolutes. Little is more terribly symbolic of this desacralisation than the 1994 massacre of Muslims at prayer in Hebron, a place held sacred by Muslims, Jews and Christians for centuries due to its association with the patriarch Abraham. Worse still, the deranged gunman was heralded as a martyr-warrior by some of his religious brethren, attempting thus to institute a new kind of ‘cult of saints’—one in which violence is sanctified and glorified within a nationalistic ideology masquerading as a religious ideal. ‘Pilgrims no longer go to Hebron and Nablus to venerate the Patriarchs. The militancy of blindly nationalistic ideologues, who fervently believe that God has favored them to reclaim the Land, has led to the desacralization and politicization of holy places … Muslims and Jews have a shared past, which includes shared holy persons and holy places. Never before in the history of Muslim-Jewish relations did such conflict over holy places occur.’ (p. 3) Meri continues with this theme, alerting us to the dangers of reading the present into the past: ‘It is all too easy to fall victim to understanding the medieval Near East through the eyes of the modern political observer for whom nationalism and modern political ideologies and considerations impose themselves upon a period of history long before the advent of the nation state and national ideologies.’ He reminds us that, in contrast to the modern period, medieval Muslims and Jews venerated the same holy persons at shrines throughout the Near East: ‘Muslim and Jewish keepers served together at shrines in Iraq … Muslims suggested to Jewish travellers that they visit holy places in Galilee and elsewhere. In Damascus, Muslims, Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians visited the tomb of a medieval Muslim saint to make supplication there. Such scenes are lamentably unthinkable today.’ (p. 3)

Although the immediate focus of this work is highly specific—a particular phenomenon in a particular time and place—its implications, like the phenomenon of sainthood itself, transcend time and space, imparting profound lessons to our troubled times, and especially in regard to contemporary Muslim-Jewish relations. The author’s primary concern in this work is not, however, political; it is historical, anthropological and phenomenological. He examines these aspects of the cult of saints with impeccable objectivity and admirable clarity, employing to the full his impressive mastery of the primary sources, in Arabic, Hebrew and Judaeo-Arabic. And in its very avoidance of politics lies one of the book’s key messages to us in the present context: when the focus of believers is on that which is really sacred in their traditions, they are drawn ever closer together by the sacred, and their differences on the contingent plane of politics and even that of religious affiliation are mitigated if not totally eclipsed. This is not to pretend that in the medieval period there were no acts of violence between individuals of different religions—or even within the same religion, as between Shi‘is and Sunnis: ‘One devotee’s understanding of who was a saint was not always another’s. This … sometimes engendered acts of violence.’ (p. 10) However, one can assert with confidence that such acts were exceptional, and only infrequently disturbed the flow of peaceful relations that obtained—in contrast to the present day, where violence is rapidly becoming the norm, and peaceful coexistence the exception.

It may not be the central aim of the author, but for this reviewer the most striking aspect of this book is the success with which it—albeit implicitly—debunks the pernicious myth that is bandied about in our times: the myth that Muslims and Jews have always been at each other’s throats, fighting over the land that is sacred to both religions. The sacred is thus equated not with a force for unification and harmony but with bigotry and division. Meri does not go to any great pains to refute this error in his book, for the evidence he presents speaks for itself. In detached, scholarly fashion, he presents and evaluates the evidence that history provides; and the empirical data clearly indicate that medieval Greater Syria—comprising what is today Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan as well as Syria proper—was predominantly characterised by inter-religious harmony, so much so that the phrase The Cult of Saints, in the singular, but applicable both to Muslims and Jews (and also Christians), is completely justifiable. Meri does not gloss over the very real differences between the Muslims and Jews in their approach to saints, relics, veneration, pilgrimage and so on. Indeed, his meticulous attention to detail is one of the strongest features of this work in academic terms. Nonetheless, it is clear from this book that there really was a dimension of popular spiritual culture which united the believers of different faiths in a common quest for the sacred, expressed most frequently in pilgrimage to the shrines of the saints and prophets. For many, this might mean nothing more than a desire for intercession, and the resolution of problems on a very material plane; but for others it implied much more: an orientation towards the Infinite vehicled by the finite; an aspiration to realize within oneself the baraka that was palpable at shrines, holy places and saints; an opening to the Transcendent that is rendered in some mysterious fashion less inaccessible through those individuals effaced within It.

Pilgrimage to the shrines of saints should be seen therefore not only as an outer journey in space, undertaken in conformity to cultural convention, but also an inner journey, embarked upon in response to spiritual attraction, and, as such, transcends the boundaries not only of one’s conventional world but also of one’s formal affiliations. ‘Pilgrimage rites involve the surrender of one’s idiosyncrasies, material world, and sense of affiliation.’ (p. 6) It is thus that one finds so many examples of Muslims and Jews coming together to venerate holy personages, whether they be formally designated as ‘Muslim’, ‘Jewish’ or ‘Christian’; such labels lose their salience in the boundless realm of the sacred: baraka is baraka, wherever it is found. It is therefore not at all surprising to read that Muslims were drawn to Saydanāyā, the village outside Damascus, where a famous icon of the Virgin made this place one of the most important pilgrimage sites for Christians in Syria. ‘Burchard of Strasbourg, whom the emperor Frederick I sent in 1175 as his envoy to Saladin, observed that Christians and Muslims visited Saydanāyā on the feasts of the Assumption and the Nativity of the Virgin in order to seek baraka and make votive offerings.’ (p. 211)

The book is divided into five chapters: ‘Sacred Topography’; ‘The Friends of God’; ‘Experiencing the Holy: Sacred Ritual and Pilgrimage’; ‘Jewish Pilgrimage’; and ‘Pilgrimage Places’. As stated by the author in his introduction, ‘This study does not deal extensively with the intellectual tradition of Islamic and Jewish mysticism’ (p. 4). Thus, one should not read this book expecting any extensive philosophical discourse on the meaning of sanctity or the mystical assimilations of rites and of pilgrimage; rather, the chief merits of this work reside in the wealth of historical material presented, the careful and original use of primary sources, and the illuminating juxtaposition of Jewish and Muslim approaches to the phenomenal expressions of sacred. Meri is to be congratulated on having made an important and original contribution to our knowledge of the nature of the cult of saints in medieval Syria, in particular, and to our appreciation of the centrality of the role of pilgrimage in traditional piety, in general. Despite all their differences of doctrine and practice, we see clearly from this work that ‘Jews, Muslims and Christians shared sacred places and undertook sacred journeys together.’ (p. 287) And we are made acutely aware, conversely, that the present sad state of affairs in lands sacred to the Abrahamic faiths is not in any sense ‘normal’, but is a deviation from the norm, from the ‘straight path’ that leads to the sacred—that path upon which the religions are united, for if God is one, the sacred is likewise one: baraka is baraka.

Reza Shah-Kazemi

Institute of Ismaili Studies, London

***
 

Islam et la raison

Averroès. L’

traduction par Marc Geoffroy, présenté par Alain de Libera, Paris: GF Flammarion 2000, pp. 218 + tables, paper, € 6.37

Averroes studies are undergoing a major revival, boosted by the renewed interest (or one might even say recognition at last) in the Arab world in the thought of the Andalusian philosopher, commentator and jurist. The quest for rationalism in the face of the ‘threat of Islamism and fundamentalism’ has turned our attention once again to the faithful Aristotelian. Academic studies of his philosophy and especially of his commentaries on the Aristotelian corpus continue with translation and analyses of them as well as a regular international colloquium for Averroes studies, which last met in Cologne in 1996. Yet Averroes remains the victim of a paradox: in the West, he was recognised as a rational Aristotelian and in the East as a jurist, but the two facets of his intellectual production taken together were never fully recognised anyway.

In some ways, the present work under review rehashes an old theme, that of the relationship between Islam and rationality, between reason and revelation that is analysed in a couple of Averroes’ ‘juristic’ works, Kashf ‘an man¡hij al-adilla (Unveiling the Methods of Demonstration of the Beliefs of the Community) and Fa¥l al-maq¡l (The Decisive Discourse). The latter work has been rendered into English many times, including twice in the past couple of years.[1] Appending these two translations are extracts from Averroes’ refutation of al-Ghaz¡l¢’s Tah¡fut al-fal¡sifa (Incoherence of the Philosophers) on two related questions that are tackled in the Decisive Discourse, one on the metaphysics of the proof for the existence of God, and the other from the physics on the physical resurrection of the body. The translations are fluent and philosophically acute and would be of great benefit to students without any Arabic. The texts are superbly complemented by insightful annotation and appended with an excellent and up-to-date bibliography.

But the thrust of this work is far more radical and in step with currents attempt at coming to grips with the ‘Islamic’ in Islamic philosophy. Just as Yahya Michot has quite magisterially shown the importance of Avicenna’s thought as a systematic philosophical attempt at making sense of an Islamic metaphysics/ epistemology/ psychology, here de Libera and Geoffroy show us the ‘Islamic’ credentials of Averroes not by stressing his juridical method and achievements but his philosophical engagement. The text is introduced thematically by Alain de Libera, an eminent expert on medieval thought. He presents Averroes as an engaged philosopher-theologian-jurist. These texts are expressions of his commitments located within an Almohad ideology of the confluence of faith and power. This revolutionary Averroes is thus a critical Muslim thinker, a subtle theologian and not some enlightenment free-thinker (pace Urvoy and others). The Decisive Discourse within this perspective becomes a radical juristic defence designed not only to justify philosophy but also to assert its centrality to any theology and denigrate the ‘semi-intellectual’ attempts at rational theology associated with Ash‘ar¢ and Mu‘tazil¢ kal¡m. It is also associated with the Almohad strategy, following their ‘mahd¢’ Ibn Tumart of ridding Andalus of Ash‘ar¢ theological methodology. Averroes thus sets out to demonstrate the weakness of such quasi-rational arguments and prove the superiority of the philosophical method for an audience of non-philosophers. Such a reorientation of our thinking about a familiar text is fresh and interesting. Instead of a worn apologetic that is rather passive, the Decisive Discourse becomes a proselytising, active and engaged manifesto for a method of inquiring about the divine. While one might dispute their thesis, at least the translator and introducer have raised some interesting observations. The success of this work is that it forces one to rethink Averroes and consider him once again as an Islamic thinker and not just as some crusty Aristotelian. The cultural context of Islamic intellectual history requires that such re-examinations are undertaken and that we appreciate the rootedness of thought in the classical and medieval periods. 

Sajjad Rizvi

University of Bristol

***

 

On the Boundaries of Theological Tolerance in Islam : Ab£ °¡mid al-Ghaz¡l¢’s Fay¥al al-Tafriqa Bayna al-Isl¡m wa al-Zandaqa

Sherman A. Jackson

Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2002 (Studies in Islamic Philosophy I, General Editor: S. Nomanul Haq). Pp. xv + 156. Cloth. Pak. Rs. 295.00/£11.99. ISBN: 0-19-579791-4.

An English translation of Fay¥al al-Tafriqa by the famous theologian Ab£ °¡mid al-Ghaz¡l¢ (d. 1111) first appeared in Richard J. McCarthy’s al-Munqidh min al-¤al¡l: Freedom and Fulfillment (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980). A recent German translation with a concise introduction has been published by Frank Griffel with the subtitle Über Rechtglaübigkeit und religiöse Toleranz (Zürich: Spur, 1998). As the title of the work suggests, and as Griffel has already pointed out, this very short work by Ghaz¡l¢ addresses the problem of mutual intolerance that exists between the different Muslim theological schools. According to Ghaz¡l¢ this intolerance invariably results in ubiquitous, but unjustified, charges of ‘unbelief’ (kufr) being branded about between the adherents of different schools of thought. In his Fay¥al, Ghaz¡l¢ sets out a solution to this problem by proposing a set of criteria, which if followed, would allow for competing theologies in Islam to coexist harmoniously. Ghaz¡l¢ informs his reader that so long as a person sincerely holds fast to the three fundamental principles that ‘There is no god but God, and Muhammad is His Messenger’ and belief in the Last Day (Jackson, pp. 92, 114), this person becomes a fully-fledged member of the Muslim community, entitled to all the protection and privileges such membership affords. Over and above these three elements the only point of dispute that might then arise between Muslims would be over the interpretation of sayings or teachings attributed to the Prophet. As far as Ghaz¡l¢ is concerned, the categorical charge of ‘unbelief’ (kufr) should only be levelled against those who hold, implicitly or explicitly, the Prophet to have perpetrated lies or to have intended to mislead in teaching such beliefs. Ghaz¡l¢ hastens to add that charges of kufr are often made inadvertently and unnecessarily by some Muslims against others simply because these former only allow for one possible interpretation of a given Prophetic statement. As Ghaz¡l¢ explains, theological intransigence would cease to be a problem if people were made aware of the fact that the truth of a given statement may be established as the acknowledgement of ‘the existence of its referent’, and that existence (wuj£d) itself may be perceived on five separate levels, one absolute and four figurative: (Jackson’s translations, p. 50) ontological (dh¡t¢), sensory (¦iss¢), conceptual (khay¡l¢), noetic (‘aql¢) and analogous (shabah¢). Ghaz¡l¢ is saying, in other words, that literal interpretation is not the only possible interpretation; believing in the non-literal meaning of a Prophetic statement does not mean a rejection of the truth of the statement, nor indeed, the truthfulness of the Prophet. Let us use an example given by Ghaz¡l¢ in the Fay¥al.

The Prophet said, ‘Paradise was presented to me inside this wall’ (p. 97). Now, obviously, the smaller body cannot logically encompass the larger one, and so the Prophet can only have meant that an image of Paradise was transported to the wall in front of him; and since we know that larger objects can be revealed in smaller ones (sc. the sky in a mirror), then we know that what the Prophet said was true, in a figurative sense (sc. the ‘sensory’ category). After a brief explanation of his five levels of ‘existence’, Ghaz¡l¢ proceeds to give examples of figurative interpretation according to each of these categories by choosing a well-known Prophetic tradition or saying and submitting it to his ‘category’ test. One noteworthy section in his treatise is Ghaz¡l¢’s reference to the great traditionalist A¦mad b. °anbal (d. 855). Ghaz¡l¢ purposely singles out Ibn °anbal for mention because he is able to show that even a staunch literalist such as Ibn °anbal had to resort to figurative interpretation in the case of three well-known reports (pp. 101ff). Ghaz¡l¢ is then able to make the definitive statement that, hard as one may try, one simply cannot do without figurative interpretation for the purposes of theological reasoning. The rest of the Fay¥al deals with similar questions of interpretation with reference to Mu‘tazil¢s, Ash‘ar¢s and ends with a diatribe against ‘certain philosophers’ who purport to belong to Islam while denying one of its central tenets, namely, the bodily resurrection. That, in short, is the import of Ghaz¡l¢’s Fay¥al. The matter under review, however, brings us to Jackson’s personal contribution to this work.

Jackson prefaces his translation of Fay¥al with an introduction made up of two parts. In the first part, the author begins with a discussion of the term ‘theology’, explaining that while the original Greek phrase implied a ‘discourse’ (logos) about God (theos), that is, an exercise in reflection not entirely dissimilar from that of philosophy, except that the subject matter (‘God’) is already explicitly defined, the expression ‘theology’ has acquired a very restricted and narrow application. This (mis-)application of the term is largely due to the unchallenged authority, assumed by various ‘defenders’ of the faith, to propound what constitutes ‘correct’ religious belief and what constitutes outright theological deviance, and hence what merits the label ‘unbelief’ (kufr). Jackson follows this introductory statement with a selective survey of orientalist and native opinions on the relationship between history and theology. What Jackson is concerned to show is that while religion in the form of ‘revelation’ may be transcendent, and with that necessarily, the doctrines it enjoins, the intellectual exercise of ‘theology’ can be traced to a historical point in time. Theology as a ‘human construct’ can never really be transcendent, since it is grounded in human thought and human thought is to a large extent shaped by processes that take place during (historical) time. Quite apart from the fact that some will reject such a distinction outright (as Jackson seems to be aware, p. 9), arguing that revelation itself, as the result of a human mental process peculiar to a time and locus, can, indeed must, be historicised (sc. the sceptical-Orientalist approach); the distinction which Jackson attempts to draw is not entirely convincing: why should religious tolerance ensue from theological tolerance? Were the early Muslims, to whom Jackson ascribes little or no theology (p. 9), more tolerant of fellow Muslims than was the case at Ghaz¡l¢’s time? How would Jackson square the fact that three civil wars took place in Islam (before any theological activity supposedly arose) with his proposition that religious intolerance may be remedied if only the theological exercise were approached with an open mind?

Another puzzling aspect of Jackson’s analysis of the problem comes in his discussion of the cultural debt that Islam owes to the late-antique tradition. In anticipation of something he will point to at the end of the introduction, namely the inherent superiority of the Neoplatonic tradition as a mode of reasoning, Jackson states that if Islam’s universalist claims are to be taken seriously, its (traditionalist?) advocates must acknowledge the diversity of the traditions that Islam inherited from Late Antiquity, principally through the newcomers to the religion (p. 16). The notion that Islam was a natural continuation of late-antique traditions of the Middle East has only recently begun to gain acceptance among scholars of the field. Clearly, Jackson wants to demonstrate that the Neoplatonic tradition should be just as central to Islam as it came to be for the Western Classical tradition; this question, however, does not seem to have an obvious relation to the central thesis of the Fay¥al, nor indeed to the idea of intolerance within Islam. The intra-Muslim disagreements were, and continue to be, over issues Islamic in nature and peculiar to the reception of the Qur’¡n and Prophetic ¦ad¢th by the adherents of the faith; Greeks, Arabs and Persians have nothing to do with the issue. Nor can one realistically identify a specific tradition of ‘reasoning’ within Islam, which might be said to have originated with one of these former groups, that deserves more credit because it is (inherently) more tolerant.

The final section of Jackson’s first introduction is devoted to a discussion of Rationalism and Traditionalism in Islam. With frequent reference to Binyamin Abrahamov, Jackson acknowledges that the labels ‘rational’ or ‘traditional’ are not hard and fast categories, and that the blurring of these lines of distinction is almost always the case when it comes to identifying the fundamental epistemologies of the different theological schools. Repeatedly, Jackson is concerned to prove that as ‘human constructs’, both Rationalism and Traditionalism have only succeeded in perpetuating mutual intolerance within Islam. One is then inclined to wonder what human construct in the arena of religious beliefs, besides one’s own enlightenment, has been successful in ensuring an atmosphere of mutual respect and tolerance within a given religious tradition. To be sure, Jackson seems to intimate that the Aristotelian-Neoplatonic tradition of reason is one way out of the problem, if a proper ‘Islamicized’ version of it is applied (pp. 28-29). We know, however, that greater religious minds, such as al-Juwayn¢ (d. 1085), Ghaz¡l¢ himself (d. 1111), and Fakhr al-D¢n al-R¡z¢ (d. 1209) towards the end of their lives became despondent, if not sceptical, about the possibility of ever truly reconciling Islamic tradition with the philosophical endeavour. Indeed, those who in all probability found no contradiction between the two traditions (viz. Ibn S¢n¡ and others before him) were precisely the sort of people that Ghaz¡l¢ considered eligible for the charge of ‘unbelief’. Worse, they masked unbelief (zandaqa), since in their adoption of Neoplatonic reasoning they could not possibly accept traditionalist teachings in Islam; yet all the while, they continued to be identified as Muslims. The second part of Jackson’s introduction sets the historical context for Ghaz¡l¢’s Fay¥al, recapitulating the main aspects of the time, with reference to the theologians to whom Ghaz¡l¢ might have implicitly been responding, and summarises the contents of the treatise. A couple of remarks about Ghaz¡l¢’s work and the question of religious tolerance are in order.

It should be said that the problem of intolerance within Islam cannot be resolved with mere recourse to a set of intellectual criteria for understanding the teachings of the Qur’an and those of the Prophet. The very fact that both of these bodies of knowledge allow for, indeed suggest nothing other than, literal interpretations for many critical issues, be it God’s Throne or the Prophet’s statement that only one of the seventy three Muslim sects will be saved, cannot be tempered by any simple redefining of the epistemology involved. It is all very well for Ghaz¡l¢ to suggest alternative categories of interpretation, categories that would allow for more than one understanding of a particular Divine or Prophetic statement, and hence, for mutual tolerance; but the fact remains that conflicts over dogma are handed down to the average believer only from those authorised, however unofficially, to interpret such sayings.

The author is to be commended for extracting so much from Ghaz¡l¢’s Fay¥al, and undoubtedly, Ghaz¡l¢’s work always merits more than a superficial reading. The source of the problem of takf¢r, however, within the Muslim community is the intransigent nature, with regard to theology, of the leading representatives of the various madh¡hib. Such intransigence is not necessarily a result of any want of intellectual capacity on the part of most religious scholars, although this may often be the case (indeed, outmoded and deteriorating educational systems in most of the Muslim world are a primary cause of intellectual retardation within religion); but surely power, prestige and politics in general have a major role to play in the formation of the specific religious character and inclination of a particular scholar, with the obvious consequences that such formation entails for religious tolerance. Most of the above remark is internal to the tradition itself; but there are also numerous other factors (socio-economic and political) external to the faith that arguably have a direct influence on the degree of mutual tolerance pursued or encouraged within a particular religious tradition.

Intolerance within Islam has risen and abated during different periods of its history. But the fact that conflict over theological issues has remained insurmountable for almost nine centuries since Ghaz¡l¢’s death (d. 1111) cannot be ascribed to the obscurity of the Fay¥al. It remains true that just as dogmatic disagreements have their origin in sophisticated theological arguments between the intellectuals of the various schools of thought, so too the potential resolution of such disagreement must reside within these upper circles of religious affiliations. And while Ghaz¡l¢ makes it seem that he composed this short treatise for the benefit of the educated layman, even though certain arguments are articulated in kal¡m-style reasoning, it is doubtful whether any but the scholar of the highest credentials would be able to vest the author’s criteria for religious tolerance with the minimum semblance of authority, indeed, ‘orthodoxy’; to then expect such a new epistemology to filter down to the remainder of the believing community, assuming that it is sanctioned by the religious elite in the first place, is simply not realistic.

For those not acquainted with it, the Fay¥al, despite its brevity, constitutes yet another impressive and original contribution by Ghaz¡l¢ to the field of Muslim thought. His application of essentially Neoplatonic categories of ‘existence’ (wuj£d) to the interpretation of tradition is remarkable for its simplicity and effectiveness. Jackson offers a most readable translation of a terse, but not inaccessible, text, and his supplementary annotation is indeed helpful (note minor corrigenda: on p. 86, Qur’¡n XI:35 should be VI:35; and on p. 87, VI:III should read VI:111). The contextual parameters, as defined and suggested by Jackson in his introduction, within which the significance of Ghaz¡l¢’s Fay¥al is best appreciated, and its import best applied, must remain the translator’s own. The series editor’s prefatory remark, taking its cue from Jackson’s introduction, that ‘there is no getting away from the contingencies of history; that we all construct our world’ (p. x), although intended as an appeal to religious tolerance, is surely the very reason for the latter’s absence.

Feras Hamza

Institute of Ismaili Studies, London

***

Revelation, Intellectual Intuition and Reason in the Philosophy of Mulla Sadra : An Analysis of al-Hikmah al-‘Arshiyyah,

Zailan Moris
London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003, pp. ix + 229, paper, £18.99.

Mull¡ ¯adr¡ deserves better. A barely revised doctoral dissertation supervised by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Moris’ monograph fails to demonstrate her central contention that there is a harmonisation and synthesis of revelation, reason and intuition in the thought of the Safavid thinker Mull¡ ¯adr¡ Sh¢r¡z¢ (d. 1641). She claims that her purpose is ‘not to undertake a philosophical analysis of the truth claims of revelation, discursive philosophy and gnosis respectively but to examine critically whether Mulla Sadra did in fact successfully synthesize the three truth claims in his philosophy’ (p. 5). This purpose of intent strikes this reviewer as being rather problematic if not contradictory. What does the author mean by a truth claim? How can one evaluate a synthesis without analysing the particular claims of these modes of inquiry? Does the method set out not seem like a rather apologetic attempt at vindicating an intellectual hero in the past? The vitality of the study of Islamic philosophy is contingent upon a critical engagement with its traditions, not merely a discursive rehearsal or taql¢d of views which Mull¡ ¯adr¡ himself would have disapproved.

Moris sets out to pursue her ‘synthesis’ by examine four key doctrines of Mull¡ ¯adr¡ as expressed in his epitome of philosophical theology, al-°ikma al-‘Arshiyyah (translated by James Morris as the Wisdom of the Throne, a work upon which Moris heavily relies). The four doctrines concern the ontology of existence (a¥¡lat wa tashk¢k al-wuj£d), the metaphysics of substance and its motion (al-¦arakah al-jawhariyyah), the epistemology of pure knowledge (specifically the Porphyrian doctrine of itti¦¡d al-‘¡qil wa’l-ma‘q£l), and the doctrine of the soul and its faculty of imagination (al-quwwah al-mutakhayyilah). Moris further problematizes her evaluation of the synthesis by proffering three criteria of judgement each of which would require explanation and qualification: the internal coherence of the synthesis, its conformity with ‘Islamic teachings’ (a rather vague standard), and the influence on later Islamic philosophers. Thus her suggestion is that the ‘success’ of the Sadrian synthesis depends not only upon an evaluation of its content but also in comparison to its Islamic context and its acceptance by later philosophers.

Chapters One and Two set out the epistemological background for the Sadrian synthesis. The ‘Islamic’ imperative to seek knowledge and ‘Islamic metaphysics’ are conflated with the doctrines of the school of Ibn ‘Arab¢ (d. 1240), the famous Andalusian Sufi. The comments on the madrasa system and the philosophical background to Mull¡ ¯adr¡ are far too brief and contentious. The author would have done better if she had examined the madrasa system of his time and the state of philosophical traditions and his reception of them. Such an inquiry is possible and would have been a contribution. Two observations are contentious. Moris repeats the exaggerated contention of her supervisor concerning the so-called Oriental Philosophy of Avicenna. Furthermore, the affirmation that al-Ghaz¡l¢’s critique of discursive philosophy led to a decline in the power of reason and a growing emphasis on intuition not only raises problems for her ‘synthesis’ but also seems like a capitulation to the old myth of al-Ghaz¡l¢ destroying philosophy and accords closely to the biases of ‘Abid al-Jabiri and other contemporary Arab thinkers for whom the ‘Eastern thinkers’ corrupted Islamic thought by their ‘mysticism and obscurantism’.

Chapter Three injects a short chapter on the life and works of Mull¡ ¯adr¡, a standard ‘biography and bibliography’ chapter often required in doctoral dissertations. However, in the book it does not play a particularly useful role. Moris merely repeats various platitudes already uttered by Nasr and others. The chapter is simple uncritical hagiography and does not represent any fresh research. The listing of works includes those widely regarded as spurious and yet Moris seems unaware of this.

The remaining three chapters tackle three overlapping questions: is there a synthesis, how is it achieved and was it successful? On the whole, Moris competently explains the main Sadrian doctrines and shows how they are interdependent. However, merely quoting Qur’anic verses and traditions as well as the works of Sufis does not demonstrate a ‘snythesis’. As for the question of how, Moris merely gives some good examples of argumentation in the work of Mull¡ ¯adr¡. It is quite clear that he had a holistic vision of his inquiry and indeed intertextual and mixed-generic features of his works attest to this. But that does not mean that his actual approach was coherently holistic. The evaluation of the ‘success’ of his synthesis is rather a matter of taste, and Moris gives a bland answer to a bland question.

The work is appended with a rather pointless afterword that reads like an abstract of a thesis. What is it doing there?

There are far too many typographical and stylistic errors to enumerate, which are unfortunately rather on par with the other publications of the Sufi Series. Why is there no transliteration? One mistake ought to be pointed out. The Asf¡r is not edited by the later Mu¦ammad Ri¤¡ Mu³affar; he only contributed an introduction to the text. The actual editors are Ri¤¡ Lu§f¢, Fat¦all¡h Umm¢d and Ibr¡h¢m Am¢n¢. It is also clear from the bibliography that the author has not undertaken any relevant reading and reconsideration since her doctorate was complete, which is a shame because some interesting works have appeared such as two books by Christian Jambet and a few articles by the reviewer and others which may have raised some interesting questions. There is a considerable body of material in this book that is worthy and useful. But the wrongheaded approach to a questionable purpose detracts from it and diverts attention. If Moris had rewritten her dissertation as an introduction to some key ideas in the thought of Mull¡ ¯adr¡, the resulting publication would have been far more welcome.

Sajjad Rizvi

University of Bristol