Caner Dagli - in Beginning A New System of Islamic Philosophy

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Blackwell Publishering Ltd Oxford, UK MUWO The MuslimWorld 1478-1913 2004 Hartford Seminary 2004 94 11000

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

A New System of Islamic Philosophy The MuslimWorld Volume 94 2004

On Beginning a New
System of Islamic
Philosophy

Caner Dagli

Princeton University
Princeton, New Jersey

T

he past two decades have seen many valuable studies and translations
of the Islamic philosophical, mystical, and theological tradition.
The English reader now has access to the writings of such seminal
thinkers as Ghazz

a

l

i

(d. 1111), Avicenna (d. 1037), Ibn al-

Arab

i

(d. 1240),
Suhraward

i

(d. 1191), and Mull

a

S

adr

a

(d. 1640), only to name some of the
most well known. The work of rendering their writings into English and
explaining their meaning continues at an ever accelerated pace and provides
the Western intellectual audience with tools to understand some of the most
profound dimensions of the Islamic tradition. Besides providing access to
scholars who have no working knowledge of Arabic, Persian, or other Islamic
languages, these translations and studies serve as research aids for those
who understand the original language but who are lost in the technical
vocabulary and specialized concepts one must master in order to grasp
what a given philosopher or mystical thinker is truly saying. This is especially
true in the case of an author such as Ibn al-

Arab

i

, whose inuence and
importance is wide-ranging but whose work cannot generally be read
without considerable preparation, even for people who have a thorough
mastery of Arabic. This is why the work of scholars such as William
Chittick, who has translated hundreds upon hundreds of pages of Ibn
al-

Arab

i

and has provided English readers and scholars with some of the
best possible tools for learning how to read Ibn al-

Arab

i

, is so valuable.

1

At its best, philosophical translation not only gives us the ability to study
thinkers of another language and time, but will also allow us to actually
engage in the

act

of philosophy and make of ourselves an additional audience,
however unforeseen, of the author whose intention it was for his work to
be understood and digested, not simply classied into historical periods
and currents.
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2004

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For translations and studies of Islamic philosophical and mystical thought,
there are generally two kinds of audiences, one mainly interested in the history
of ideas and the other primarily concerned with the ideas themselves and
who concern themselves with the historical context inasmuch as it casts light
on the ideas themselves. Now, although there has been increased interest
as of late in Islamic philosophy

as

philosophy, this has been largely on the part
of specialists of Islamic philosophers themselves, which is to say that we
have not come to the point yet where the Western philosopher or religious
thinker will typically consult the works of Ibn al-

Arab

i

or Mull

a

S

adr

a

as a
relevant and engaging set of philosophical ideas, as they still do with Kant and
Descartes. This is due in part to the relative youth of the project of making
texts available in Western languages. Specialists are still wrangling with the
meaning and rendering of the specialized vocabulary of Islamic philosophy,
and the number of those who are well-qualied to produce and fairly judge
good-quality works of translation is still relatively small.
I write this essay from the point of view of someone who places much
value in the translation of an explanation of the great tradition of Islamic
philosophy, but here I wish to explore the possibility of taking this desire to
engage this great tradition one step further. I would like begin by looking back
to see the historical relationship of various currents of Islamic philosophy to
one another. More than once within the Islamic philosophical tradition, the
previous system or body of philosophy has been taken as the starting point for
a new system with an identity of its own, but which often retains intact many
of the concepts and technical terms of the rst system. This continuity of
terminology and concepts need not be taken, however, to mean that the latter
tradition is not original and authentic on its own. For example, much of the
original impetus to engage in philosophy in the Islamic world (and here
I am referring to philosophy and not to

kal

a

m

or theology) resulted from
the translation of the Greek philosophers. It was largely on the basis of the
translation of Plato and Aristotle that thinkers such as Kind

i

(d. 866), Far

a

b

i

(d. 950), and Ibn S

i

n

a

began the Peripatetic tradition in Arabic, and indeed
established the

lingua franca

of Arabic philosophy. In their concepts and
manner of exposition they were indeed heavily dependent on the form and
content of the translated Greek works. As sources of authority, the connection
was quite quickly lost, however, and the authoritative texts of the Peripatetic
tradition in Islamic philosophy became the works of Ibn S

i

n

a

and later
authorities such as N

as

ir al-D

i

n T

usi

(d. 1274), not the Arabic Aristotle. As John
Walbridge points out, The earliest Arabic translations of Greek philosophical
and scientic texts were littered with transliterated terms, but these largely
disappeared from the later translations and from all but the earliest
independent Islamic philosophical texts.

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This reects the fact that these
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thinkers began to philosophize within the context of their own intellectual
milieu and as determined by the character of the Arabic language. They were
starting from within Islamic civilization and from within a worldview and
culture quite different from the Greece of Plato and Aristotle. The former
was basically monotheistic, Semitic, and multicultural, while the latter was
a polytheistic Indo-European enclave. One could point to the absence of a
copula in Arabic, which ties so heavily into Greek metaphysics of being, as
one of the simple facts of language that would demand that the ideas and
insights expressed in Arabic are quite different from the same points made in
the Greek. The Arabic Peripatetic tradition began with the building blocks of
Aristotle but became an independent tradition with concepts of its own. If we
insist on thinking that the philosophers were Greek manqu, then we can
happily ignore their odd oversights and go back to the Greek originals, which
is obviously what they had in mind . . . They did not know Greek, and they
wanted to express real ideas in terms their contemporaries could grapple with.
What Aristotle may have meant by x which is now become y in Arabic and
z in Persian is for the most part irrelevant to them, though they always held
Aristotle in the highest esteem as The First Teacher. What they wanted to do
was to explain the nature of things to interested parties, not to recover the
ideas of long-dead Greeks. They were happy to use Aristotelian tools, but they
could not have cared less that what they were trying to say did not coincide
with what Aristotle was trying to say. Even Ibn Rushd (Averroes), who tried
much harder than others to recover Aristotles real intentions, was simply using
Aristotle as his own alter ego. This, after all, is what those who appropriate the
traditions of the past do with them. They may indeed learn a great deal from
the traditions, but, ultimately, when it comes to explaining what they have
learned, it is precisely

what they have learned

that is being explained.

3

Now, this describes the relationship of the Greek Peripatetic systems of
Aristotle to the Arabic Peripatetic system of Avicenna, T

u

s

i

, or Averroes. A
similar point can also be made about the relationship of Greek thought to the
Persian philosopher Af

d

al al-D

i

n K

a

sh

a

n

i

or B

a

ba Af

d

al (d. 121314), who
until recently was not very well-known in Western scholarship. B

a

ba Af

d

al
was roughly a contemporary of Suhraward

i

and Ibn

Arabi, and thus lived
at a time when the technical terminology and conceptual themes of Arabic
Islamic philosophy were already established and in use. Rather than write
philosophical treatises in Arabic, he wrote his main works in the Persian that
convey the philosophical ideas in harmony with the genius of the Persian
language and without feeling obligated to rely on any Arabic source (or Greek
for that matter) as a benchmark, even though many of his ideas were very
much the same as those philosophers who wrote in Arabic. For the most part,
Baba Afdals students and readers were educated Persians who did not have a
Tnr Mtsii Worir Voitr 94 J:t:r 2004
4
high level of Arabic and were basically beginners when it came to philosophy.
He used eloquent Persian to awaken a certain awareness in his readers, but
more than that, he saw certain intrinsic advantages in the use of Persian, saying
of a book he had translated from Arabic and Persian, its meanings became
more apparent and more unambiguous in the clothing of Persian speech.
4
Another pertinent example is that of Suhrawardi, who wrote both in
Persian and Arabic, though his Persian works consist mainly of visionary
recitals or philosophical fantasy, as Chittick describes them. Philosophical
works such as Hikmat al-ishraq (The Wisdom of Illumination) are in Arabic
and are often written in the Peripatetic style even though Suhrawardi uses
these Peripatetic concepts and themes precisely to disagree with Avicenna
and his school on many important questions. Although he possessed the
mastery of the existing philosophical tradition of his time, and incorporated
important parts of it into his own writings, Suhrawardi crafted a highly original
and self-sustaining account of the nature of reality, based upon the
metaphysics of light as opposed to a metaphysics of being or existence.
5
Today, those of us who are interested in Islamic philosophy and mysticism
as philosophy and mysticism are in the situation not unlike the one to which
Baba Afdal addressed himself. He knew and understood the ideas in the
Arabic but his chosen audience, the primarily Persian-speaking intellectuals,
did not. Baba Afdal could have and did in fact translate Arabic works into
Persian, but he did not stop there. He went a step further by speaking about
the nature of things in the way that in its form was not derivative of any other
system of thought. One could only speak of derivation in the sense that Baba
Afdals learning and his study of Greek and Arabic philosophy obviously had
much to do with his understanding of things. His philosophy was not an
example of the art of translation, but rather of the art of pedagogy and a knack
for capturing ideas in his chosen language.
Now, if someone like Baba Afdal were living today and his mother tongue
were English instead of Persian, what might he have done? In order to explore
one possible answer to this question, I would like to examine how the same
metaphysical vision can express itself in different ways, and here I will be
discussing the Akbarian
6
tradition begun by Ibn al-Arabi and the transcendent
philosophy (al-hikmat al-mutaaliyah) of Sadr al-Din Shirazi, also known as
Mulla Sadra. Although Ibn al-Arabi has been strongly associated with the
phrase wahdat al-wujud, the concept of wujud is in fact not indispensable to
his metaphysics. Indeed, the Shaykh al-Akbar is able to give us his complete
metaphysical account without resorting to the concept of wujud at all. For
example, ayn is a mother-concept which is the basis of a metaphysical
language which is different from though intimately related to the language that
has wujud as its mother-concept. Ayn, like wujud (existence, being, nding,
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or presence) is another one of those notoriously difcult words to translate,
and has been rendered as entity, essence, and identity. Now, one can describe
the nature of reality in terms of wujud and mahiyyah,
7
but one can also
describe it in terms of ayn (identity) and tajalli (self-disclosure) or taayyun
(self-identication or auto-determination).
8
What is signicant is that both
of these languages or systems understand each other without necessitating a
kind of one-to-one correspondence between the concepts. Su metaphysicians
(urafa ) such as Sadr al-din Qunawi and Dawud al-Qaysari and Islamic
philosophers or theosophers (hukama )
9
such as Mulla Sadra are
philosophically close cousins, and often refer easily to each others concepts,
though this should not be taken to mean that the corresponding concepts
always have the same range of meaning.
10
Roughly speaking, these urafa employ a mode of metaphysical
expression that hinges around ayn (identity) and tajalli (self-disclosure),
while the hukama use a system that centers on the concepts of wujud
(existence) and mahiyyah/dhat (quiddity, essence).
11
I would like to examine
them briey by using the example of the problem of oneness and multiplicity.
For the urafa, every object of our experience is an identity (ayn), but this
means that there are several broad categories of identities. The objects
in the world of space and time are referred to as outward identities (ayn
kharijiyyah). But since a thing can only be outward in relation to something
that is inward, there must also be an inward identity, most frequently referred
to as an immutable identity (ayn thabitah). The immutable identity is the
identity as it is in Gods knowledge, while the outward identity is the identity
as we experience it in the realm of space and time. Between the two poles
of inwardness in God and outwardness in the world are many levels of
inwardness and outwardness for any given identity, sometimes spoken of in
terms of various degrees of self-disclosure. What is crucial is that the outward
identity and the immutable identity are the same thing, which is to say that
they are identical. Thus, a particular human being can be seen as an identity,
outward in the realm of space and time but immutable in Gods knowledge,
and these are not actually separate things. There is a point of view from which
we make the distinction, and another from which this distinction is seen as
unreal. Moreover, the identication is even more profound, because ultimately
there is only the one Identity. Everything is identical with God from one point
of view, while from another point of view there are many identities by virtue
of God disclosing (tajalli ) His own Identity. This is one way of treating the
question of oneness and multiplicity, or sameness and difference.
For the hukama or practitioners of al-hikmat al-mutaaliyah, every object
of experience is a particular instance of existence or is an existent (mawjud).
There are several broad categories of existent things, which is to say several
6
kinds of existence, ranked in terms of dependence and independence, or in
terms of strength and weakness. From one point of view for the hukama,
there is only one existence (wujud), but from another point of view, this one
existence has many modes and levels which we are aware of through their
essences or quiddities. These essences are wholly derivative from existence
itself, which is to say that they are meant to describe the innite ways in which
existence is what it is without for all that truly becoming many. Through
shifting perspectives, the hukama are able to differentiate between existents
and their essences while asserting that existence is undivided and indivisible.
The oneness of existence (wahdat al-wujud) and the dependence of essences
is the main way in which the hukama address the issue of oneness and
multiplicity.
In coming to grips with the oneness and manyness of things, both systems
assert that there is a way in which things are different from one another and
another non-contradictory way in which there really is no difference. The
urafa do not need to speak of oneness (wahdah) at all (although they often
do), but can use a discourse of identity (ayn) and the self-disclosure (tajalli )
or self-identication (taayyun) of identity, a system of concepts which holds
together on its own. The hukama solve the same metaphysical problems
(in the same spirit) with a discourse of existence, the modes of existence,
and essence.
12
Now, generally speaking, Islamic metaphysics in the school of wahdat
al-wujud has dealt with metaphysics by speaking of ultimate reality as the
Supreme Object.
13
It deals extensively with things as subjects, of course, but
the starting point is an objective account that speaks of things out there rst,
and then in its further development and consummation gives us insight into
the nature of the subject. What I explore here is the possibility of a new Islamic
metaphysical system which starts off and bases itself on the self or the Self,
and deals with the content of metaphysics through seeing reality as a single
living Self from one point of view and as many living selves from another.
This would correspond in the wujud system to the oneness of existence on
the one hand and its multiplicity through essences on the other. In this case,
one would start with the pole of subject and unfold a metaphysics whose
consummation would give us insight into the nature of the object through
knowing the nature of the subject. It would be a question of approaching the
same mountain, but from the other side.
I began this essay by briey comparing irfan and hikmah on the question
of oneness and multiplicity, the purpose of which was to point out that one
can discuss metaphysics using two different conceptual hierarchies which
nevertheless share the same spirit and are transparent to one another. What
follows below is a discussion of the metaphysics of Mulla Sadra spoken of, not
7
only in the language of wujud, but through the language of self
14
and selfhood,
of life and consciousness. By considering the nature and experience of space
and time in the philosophy of Mulla Sadra, I explore what a system based
on a subjective starting point might look like in the bosom of the Islamic
metaphysical tradition.
15
By beginning with our very sense of self, much
light can be shed on Sadras doctrines concerning time and space and their
implications for the self who journeys through the spatio-temporal realm. The
concepts of natural law, substance and accident, continuity and discontinuity,
and subject and object are all addressed in order to see how they are all
intimately connected to the idea and experience of self. This is done in the
context of Sadras basic metaphysical framework, based on the oneness
(wahdah), principiality (asalah), and gradation or polyvocality (tashkik)
16

of wujud.
Matter and Extension
Space and time can be seen as two modes of extension, and extension
by denition entails separation and disjunction. Anything present at one point
in an extension, whether this extension is spatial or temporal, cannot be
present simultaneously at some other point in the extension without violating
the extension and collapsing it into a dimensionless unity. Furthermore,
separation and disjunction entail relationality. The fact of two entities existing
in the same extension necessarily means that the two have some kind of
relationship with one another. In space, any given object has a relationship
with every other object, which is to say we can relate things by above,
below, and so forth. Moreover, every part of that object, by virtue of the
extension of space, has a relationship with every other part of that object.
In time, every event or group of events at a given moment has a relationship
with all other events at other moments, past and future, by virtue of the
extension which time is. That entities should be found relative to one
another in this particular way, in one place and not another, accounts for
the reality of spatial extension. The same holds true for time. That entities
should follow upon one another and be found in relation to one another in
this mode of extension is the very reality of time. One can thus conceptually
reduce the reality of extension to that of relationality and separation, static
in the case of space, dynamic in the case of time. Now, relationality and
separation demand modes of limitation. If a certain object can only exist at
a certain point in space or time, that is a limitation inherent to that objects
situation. Separation is a mode of connement, in the sense that a given entity
is restricted to the when and the where in which it nds itself; insofar as it
is a spatio-temporal object, it cannot be in every place or every time without
negating the very essence of space and time. The essence or quiddity of
8
extension, be it spatial or temporal, consists precisely of separation, limitation,
and relationality.
All of the forms
17
(suwar, sing. surah) that are present in space and time
originate in the Intellect (al-aql ) or Spirit and ultimately nd their origin in
God. In the Intellect, these forms are not limited by separation and succession
in the manner of space and time. They are all present in a state that Eckhart
referred to as fused but not confused. To explain, let us recall that the objects
in space and time possess forms, form being dened as that by which a thing
is what it is. Some of these forms can be co-extensive, such as the forms of
woodness and sphericalness in a wooden sphere. The two forms are fused but
not confused, since it is the same object that is wooden and spherical and the
two forms exist in extension yet do not exist in a state of succession in relation
to each other. Not every such unication is possible, however, and it is this
state of separation and hence relationality that characterizes the realm of
space and time. In the Intellect, the forms are not next to each other, nor
are they before or after each other. They are fully what they are, fully
present to one another, without this presence bringing about any mixing
or denaturing. In a world where spheres are never wooden and wooden
things never spherical, a wooden sphere would represent a kind of fusion
without confusion. This is a limited analogy to the difference between the
forms as found in the Intellect and these forms when they are found in the
world.
Sadra points to the presence of matter (maddah) as a part of the
explanation of the separation and limiting relationships between forms where
there originally were none. In space and time, forms have been joined to
matter and have become compounded (murakkab) of matter and form. Matter
in this sense is dened as pure potential, the potential for a thing to become
something. Motion (harakah) is dened as the passage of something from this
state of potency or potentiality (quwwah) to a state of act or activity ( l ).
Nature (abi ah), to which we shall turn later, is that by which motion takes
place. Form is the pole of compounded entities (i.e., compounded of matter
and form) which can be known, while matter accounts for the ambiguity
and unknowability of things. Indeed, matter is essentially unknowable, for
if it were knowable it would be what it is and would hence be a form. By
denition it would cease to be matter, which is not form but pure potentiality.
Common examples are used to describe the relationship between form and
matter, such as a chair and the block of wood from which it is carved. The
block of wood is the matter for the form of the chair, since there was
potentially a chair within that block of wood. However, the wood itself has a
form, its woodness, in the same way the chair has chairness. In any such
example, the matter is perforce a matter,
18
for any physical material has its own
9
form. Such examples are meant to bring us, through a chain of extended
analogy, to the concept of pure potency without form.
It has been mentioned that motion is the actualization of potential. From
a state of potentiality, a thing passes into a state of act. Motion is a purely
relational (idafi ) and conceptual (dhihni ) thing; it refers to no concrete entity
outside of the mind. One might say it has no substance. It is a description of
the relationship between forms in the context of temporal extension. Now,
if motion is purely and simply the relationship between potency and act, it
remains to be seen what the act is and from what potency it originates. Clearly,
the act is the presence of some form, whatever be its mode of existence. The
potential residing within things is attributed to their pole of matter, but matter
is not a thing such that anything could originate from it or such that it could
change. To invoke matter as the potential thus does not truly answer the
question as to where this potency actually resides.
This notional (i tibari ) status of matter, and indeed of form as well, is
further reinforced by the division of the four causes between wujud and
quiddity, where agent ( fail ) and purpose ( ghayah) are the two causes of
wujud and form and matter the two causes of quiddity.
19
This division is the
same as other divisions of wujud, i.e., into priority and posteriority, cause and
effect, necessary and contingent, which do not change the fact that the object
of these ascriptions is none other than the one reality of wujud. They are
abstracted (muntaza ) from this one reality. It must be remembered that in
dividing the four causes between wujud and quiddity, one is referring to
wujud insofar as it can be an attribution of some quiddity. That is to say,
agent and purpose are the two causes of the concept of wujud as it concerns
a quiddity, because in speaking of the four causes of agent, purpose, form,
and matter, one has already taken the starting point of a quiddity to which
wujud has already been attributed. This allows one to discuss quiddities but
is a provisional reversal of the actual state of affairs. While it is possible to
speak about wujud as being an attribute of quiddity in the mind, it is only so
because quiddities themselves are abstracted from the reality, not concept, of
wujud. It is only in the domain of space and time that the four causes are four
in number, because in the realm of the Intellect there is no matter and the
formal cause is identical with the nal cause or purpose. That means there is
no potentiality and the for what is the what.
Ultimately, it must be that this potency from which a thing passes into act
is the innite possibility and power of God, for every form present in space
and time originates from the Divine. Prime matter or pure potentiality is not a
thing like other things but can be seen as a representation of a state of affairs,
namely that God has the power to manifest things in the domain of space and
time, the domain of separation and disjunction. The forms in the Intellect are
10
uncoupled (mujarrad ) from matter, and hence do not undergo any restriction,
separation, or relativization. All are present in and act in a state where they
are perfectly unveiled to one another. The notion of prime matter or pure
potentiality represents the fact that forms also exist in a realm where they
do undergo restriction and relationality the realm of spatial and temporal
extension or succession.
20
Thus, what we fail to know of a thing is not the thing as such, but its
relationship to other forms in succession, be it spatial or temporal. Any given
form is not fully present to all other forms, being restricted from one another
in space and time. It is this separation that accounts for the unknowabilty
of things and events in themselves in the world. We call things ambiguous
because we fail to comprehend their full signicance or meaning in the
context in which we nd them. Matter remains forever unknown because it is
not a thing to be known: it is the fact of forms encountering one another, as
it were, from an ontological distance. They enter into a domain where they are
veiled from one another, whereas in the Intellect, they are totally unveiled. In
a sense, that which we fail to know is the form or meaning that determines
the nature of this separation and succession. Sadra says in the Mashair,
Knowledge is none other than the presence of wujud without veil.
21
Matter
can be seen as the veil that prevents this presence, and hence knowledge,
from taking place. When the forms emanate from the Intellect, they leave the
state of fusion without confusion and this ontological distance begins to
develop between them. They enter into a state of succession and repetition,
both in a mode that is dynamic (time) and one that is static (space). This
process of forms coming out from the Intellect and moving away from one
another accounts for the conditions of space-time, of separation, relation,
repetition, and succession. In terms of understanding matter as pure potential,
this ultimately refers to the state of a self or subject that is not yet fully itself,
who has not fully received its wujud from God in the temporal moment in
which it nds itself. (We shall return to this latter point when discussing
substantial motion.) It is these conditions for which matter is the overarching
concept. This does not destroy its usefulness as a concept, nor is it meant to
address the other uses of the word matter in Sadras writings, which do not
refer to pure potentiality.
Continuity and Discontinuity
Separation and succession can also be spoken of in terms of discontinuity
or disjunction. Different entities in space and time suffer from discontinuity
from the very existence of extension, being separated from each other to
varying degrees in space as well as time. Yet it is also true that entities
distributed through space and time interact and overcome their state of
11
separation, falling into a comprehensible order and exhibiting predictable
relationships of cause and effect. Now, we commonly operate under the
assumption that the laws of space and time account for the continuity of the
world and the absence of total chaos. The concept of natural law is meant
to provide us with an explanation for continuity and order, but rarely is a
satisfactory explanation given as to why these laws are what they are,
where they come from, or why they always operate. As commonly
understood, they are in fact nothing more than generalizations of observed
behavior. They are not explanatory, but descriptive. The modern
conception of the physical world starts from the idea of brute, lifeless
matter.
22
We can examine this assumption in light of our own experience
of self and show it to be an arbitrary starting point. Our most immediate and
central experience is our own consciousness and our own life. The subject
our very self lives, knows, and wills. Regardless of the mental framework
or worldview we construct in our imagination, the person who posits the
world to be lifeless matter does so as a living, conscious subject. That he
should assign primary reality or principiality (asalah) to an idea outside of
himself does not change the fact that it is he that does so, and the he or
the I that does so cannot escape his own consciousness, life, and will.
A fundamental inversion is at work here: life and consciousness arise from
that which is without life and consciousness, a conclusion that itself begins
from a living consciousness and ends at the primacy of dumb, lifeless matter.
Consciousness and life are seen as epiphenomena of the activity lifeless
remember of matter. In our own experience, however, our very life
precedes any notion of lifelessness, and so too does our consciousness
necessarily precede the idea of blind matter. In a sense, one can only choose
the assumption that the objects of the world are without life by denying the
chooser, because there is no common measure between our living self as we
know it and the notion of life as a particular kind of molecular activity. The
relationship between the two can never be more than one of association. In
fact, the physical world can be seen as a phenomenon of the Act of Life (Gods
own Life), instead of life being seen as a phenomenon of the activity of matter.
This reversal of an inversion hinges on the distinction between the concept of
life we acquire from outside and the reality of life which we experience by
virtue of living. It is a question of passing from the concept of a thing to its
reality, as one is so often called upon to do in the study of Sadras
philosophy.
23
It is rst and foremost God is the Living, and all things live through the
Life of God. God knows all things, and all things know through the Knowledge
of God. There are many knowing subjects and known objects, and as many
acts of knowledge. Yet all knowledge is truly Gods knowledge, as Sadra so
12
eloquently explains in the Mashair and in other works, knowledge being the
presence of wujud without veil. Starting from this universal conception of
knowledge, we can say that whenever some entity (i.e., an individual instance
of wujud) is present to another in the world without veil, it knows or
perceives it insofar as that other entity is present to it, perceiving or knowing
it in a way commensurate to its own level of wujud. This statement is perforce
made from the standpoint of multiplicity, because from the point of view
of God, there are no veils. If knowledge is thought of as a monolithic,
homogeneous reality, this assertion will seem absurd. It is necessary to
conceive of knowledge as gradated (mushakkak), truly one yet possessing
diverse levels and modes. As we shall see, Sadras elegant and powerful
denition of knowledge as presence without veil which ultimately amounts
to union (ittihad) between the knower, knowledge, and the known opens
a door to understanding the nature of entities as they interact in space and
time.
If we can conceive of minerals possessing consciousness and life
commensurate with their mode of wujud, it is then not difcult to also
conceive of them possessing a will. This will is not like ours, of course, but
neither is it completely different, because in reality all acts of will are the Will
of God. Moreover, it is not difcult to conceive of them as possessing a power
to carry out this will, as we do. Again, this will be a will commensurate with
the level or mode of the being in question, and in the end can only be the
Power of God. That these qualities should be co-extensive stems from the
oneness of wujud.
This answers the question as to why the entities of the world behave as
they do. The objects of the world are not blind and lifeless at all. They are alive
and able to perceive and act. Moreover, it would be impossible for the aspect
of knowledge present in the objects of the world to reside in the physical
aspect of those objects. As we shall see in the case of man, any act of
perception is an act of integration, and the perceiving subject must somehow
transcend the extension whose disparate parts it integrates in an act of
consciousness. However basic or simple something is, it must have an aspect
of intelligence or knowledge
24
by virtue of which it remains what it is and acts
in accordance with its nature. One could say that a rock knows to act like a
rock, and this low-level knowledge still transcends the rock qua physical
object. All things, from animals down to minerals, and the minerals that go into
making up the animals body, obey their rah, or primordial norm. Man
alone, possessing a transcendent will, is able to go against his rah. The
physical laws can be seen as a description of the conscious behavior of all the
entities in wujud, behaving in accordance with the nature given to them by
God. All that which goes into making up a rock knows to y apart upon
13
coming into the presence of a swinging hammer. The wujud of the rock and
that of the hammer perceive one another and consciously act. Because they
do not deviate from their rah, the entities of physical wujud behave in the
same way every time. Naturally, they have only the faintest form of such
consciousness, will, and power; at the mineral level the repetition of forms is
at a maximum while personal identity is at a minimum. Still, physical objects
possess these qualities to a certain degree by virtue of being wujud, of being
real. Ultimately it is God who knows Himself and acts in each and every
physical event, no matter the mode of the manifestation of wujud. The
outward harmony of the world is a manifestation of the Wisdom and Nature
of God, a conscious unfolding of the Divine Harmony and Beauty. Thus, we
begin with the Life and Consciousness of God and end with the physical laws,
instead of beginning with pre-existent physical laws and lifeless matter to
somehow arrive at life and consciousness.
This discussion of natural law began from the question of bridging the
gaps or discontinuities created by separation and succession. From the point
of view of man, continuity in space and in time is made possible through the
powers or faculties of his soul. In space, man is able to perceive a given
sensory eld as a whole, not only as a succession of parts. Now, it could
be argued that mans faculty of vision functions as a sequence of discreet
reactions which taken together account for our faculty of sight. This does not
account, however, for the very experience of spatial or static wholeness. A
machine, for example, may be able to store a large eld of perception. A large
image can be focused into a small area, or quantized into binary code.
However, in every case the activity proceeds bit by bit, and only mimics
wholeness through organizing these bits of information at a high rate of speed.
A mirror, to use another example, reects a whole image, but qua mirror it
does so as a succession of parts. Even if at the physical level our faculty
of sight is somehow quantized, this does not explain the experience of
wholeness itself. The continuity or wholeness is part of our consciousness,
which transcends the physical realm. This wholeness could not be accounted
for by the physical realm only, because objects are separated from one another
insofar as they are physical. One cannot bridge extension from within that
extension. The act of integration must come from beyond the extension. It is
through the powers of the soul, which transcends the physical realm, that one
can perceive a wholeness in space without the passage of time.
The soul also forms a continuity out of time. Ones memory can fail to
various degrees, but never does one experience duration less instants that
form no discernible continuum. Through its ability to store the forms it
perceives and to retrieve them, the soul forms a continuity between the past
moment and the present one. In addition to its memory, the soul has an
14
imaginal faculty of creating forms within itself, which allows it to have a
relationship with the future moment as well as with other moments. Without
this faculty, the present moment would forever collapse into the past; in a
sense, there would be continuity only in one temporal direction. It is the
totality of these faculties that accounts for the continuity of our experience of
time past, present, and future. The most obvious manifestation of this
continuity is our experience of sound. A tone or sound can only exist for us
given a duration of time and given our constant perception of that duration.
Without the memory, the relationships between events in time, such as the
vibrations of a reed, would come to nothing and with it our experience of
sound. Without the imagination, this perception would in a sense be wholly
passive and the meaning of sound in the present moment would only exist as
a matter of memory. Our imagination allows us to anticipate the sound and
live the relationship between moments in those moments. That is to say, a
dimension of continuity with the future moment is created because through
our faculty of imagination we are able to bring an integrating power to the
perception.
Substance and Accident in the Self and the World
Man can perceive space and time as more than a succession of parts
because man himself is a whole, both in space and in time and beyond them.
Man not only knows, but also knows himself and knows that he knows. He is
conscious of his own consciousness. In space he knows his soul as a whole
being, not an aggregate of faculties, and in time he is an ever-present witness
to his soul throughout the passage of moments. The self that knows both
changes and has new perceptions while remaining the same self that knows.
The substance of man ( jawhar) is this ever-abiding consciousness and axis
of his faculties. The accidents (arad ) of man qua man are the various
transformations and states that he undergoes as a soul. The continuity or
wholeness that brings together these accidental aspects of the self is the
substantial aspect of the self. The statement, I know myself, is an expression
of the substance-accident relationship in man. The I is always present while
the myself is changing, yet truly, I am myself. It is a single self, viewed as
substance from one point of view and as accident from another.
Starting with the self instead of some object in the world to discuss
substance and accident sheds light on this particular mode of analyzing the
objects of our experience. It is on the basis of the continuity of our self that
we are able to make judgments such as, Zayd the child is the same as Zayd
the adult. We can make such statements because I am the same I that I
was as a child, although in many respects, I am different. Based on an
analogy to ourselves, we discern this continuity in other men. What happens,
15
then, when we come to the other objects of the world? Where do we draw the
line between substance and accident, or between two different substances? In
a white wall, we say that the wall is the substance while the whiteness in an
accident, because the wall does not depend on anything to be a wall while
whiteness requires something that is white. However, one could just as easily
take the wall and oor together as a single substance, and proceed in this way
until the entire world was seen as a single substance qualied by innumerable
accidents. Any object we delineate as substance in this way allows of this
denition only provisionally; it cannot be considered a substance in an
absolute fashion because ones criteria for judging its boundaries can always
be shown to be a matter of preference.
25
This is so because the rst substance-accident relationship we know is of
our selfhood, which is both changing and unchanging. When we try to discern
the same relationship in the world, we ultimately fail because we are viewing
the entities in the world only as objects, as things, which are simply there. The
basis for the substance-accident relationship as we see it in ourselves is the
very nature of our consciousness, a subject that knows and knows itself, being
simultaneously both subject and object. It is impossible to transfer such a
relationship to that which is only object, which is usually how a given
substance is viewed in the world. This is why the boundaries we draw for
substances in the world, if they are seen simply as being there, can only be a
matter of convention, and which is also why they will conceptually always
collapse into a single substance. There is no commensurability between a
substance-accident distinction based upon a self knowing itself and an object
out there which undergoes changes in quality, position, etc . . . In the rst case,
the substance is easily denable; one cannot escape it, for there is nothing
more evident than a constantly changing self, or a constant self that changes.
Objects in the world, if they are only viewed as object, do not possess such a
self-evident boundary of substance. This disparity is resolved through the
doctrine of gradation (tashkik) and is further illuminated by the doctrine of
substantial motion. We will see that the notion of substance can be applied
meaningfully to the individual objects outside of us if it is based on a subject-
object distinction analogous to that upon which our own substantiality and
accidentality are based. More importantly, it must be understood how this
relationship nds its origin in God.
The Divine Subject and Object
In the world, the relationship between substance and accident is an
emanation ( fayd ) or self-disclosure (tajalli ) of the relationship between the
Divine Essence or Self (al-Dhat) and the Divine Names (asma ) and Qualities
(sifat). The distinction between the Essence and Qualities exists because the
16
Essence knows Itself as the Divine Names and Qualities; the Divine Subject
knows the Divine Object, or the Self knows Itself. The Essence is a single
reality, and each of the Divine Qualities is a single reality, but the doctrine
of gradation reminds us that this oneness encompasses multiple levels and
modes. Thus, the relationship between the Essence and the Qualities is itself
gradated, and accounts for the relationship of substance and accident in the
world. Gods act of knowing Himself is emanated or disclosed and becomes
all the subject-object relationships in the world, because wujud is one and
gradated or polyvocal. Now, the Essence as such is not a substance that
undergoes accidents; rather, substances are qualied by accidents in the world
by virtue of the fact that the Essence is qualied by the Divine Qualities. In the
world, qualities are accidents because the subject that receives these accidents
is subject to the conditions of space and time. Beyond space and time, the
question of a self or subject that changes does not arise, because there is no
temporal duration, and in space the relationality, exclusion, and separation
upon which the categories of accidents are based do not exist. The accidents
of the world can be seen as the self-disclosures of the Divine Qualities as
known and experienced by the self-disclosures of the Divine Self in the world.
In a sense, we only know things through their accidents, but those things
know their own accidents the way we know ourselves as object. This is true
from man to mineral. A self as such cannot be an object, and at the highest
level this is why we cannot know as a subject viewing an object the
Divine Essence or Self, because it is Pure Subject and is not an object to be
known.
26
Through disclosing Himself and unfolding His Essence towards
nothingness, possibilities are realized that could not have been realized had
this unfolding or self-disclosure not taken place. However, this unfolding
of things from the Divine Essence accounts for only half of the circle of
manifestation. If we were to consider emanated entities as simply being there,
there would be nothing to save them from the separation and nothingness into
which they have been cast. They would be plunged into an absolute darkness.
All things return to God, but that they should come out from God only to
return to Him is not a purposeless casting out and return, for the arc of ascent
is different than the arc of descent. The arc of descent is the manifestation of
the Divine Names and Qualities in successive levels of separation, limitation,
and veiling. The arc of ascent is the entirety of that single Act of consciousness
(from another point of view many acts of consciousness, since the arc of ascent
is also graded), present in all its levels and modes, bridging the chasms
between things, integrating and unveiling them and thus bringing them back
to God. Every time a perception or an act of consciousness bridges the
separation between things or forms a continuity out of discontinuity, the
17
relationality of these things become known to God and in a sense the
relationality is brought back to unity. What was many is made one (tawhid )
or integrated through the act of consciousness. Any relative act of knowledge
is really an act of God knowing all the diverse possibilities in the interplay of
His Names and Qualities.
Substantial Motion and Nature
As we have already mentioned, the most self-evident relationship of
substance and accident is our own experience of self: a constant subject or self
who is at the same time its own changing object. We can use this experience
or knowledge of self, as we have seen, as a model to understand both change
and permanence in the world, its continuity and its discontinuity. From the
starting point of the self we can gain an understanding of the doctrine of
substantial motion and its power as a concept to explain the meaning and
purpose of change in the realm of time and space.
To speak of change in the substance of a thing is usually problematic
because in the ordinary way of looking at substance, change in the category
of substance introduces change in the one constant element of a thing. Indeed,
if a thing is viewed only as an object, then it is necessarily true that a change
or motion in substance will cause a completely different thing to come into
being, since the continuity has been destroyed. However, if we view the
substance-accident relationship as that of a constant self that undergoes
changes, this problem does not arise. It is crucial to remember that we are
basing this discussion on the actual experience of self, not the concept of self.
The latter is an object of thought, and if it is considered in only this way, one
will encounter the same problems as those mentioned above regarding the
boundaries of substance. The experience of self, our very identity, provides a
key to understanding the idea of substantial motion or change. The growth of
a self in no way destroys the presence of that self as the subject of that growth,
stemming from the very nature of what it is to be a self. As a self grows, its
acts of perception, from their lowest to their highest, become more potent.
Its ability to bridge discontinuities in its perception of itself and the objects
of the world and to make oneness out of multiplicity grows stronger. Its
consciousness and awareness intensify. Far from ceasing to exist as a result of
these changes, the self perceives in itself that it is actually becoming more
itself. This change and ever-abiding presence exist in a state of fusion without
confusion. Such a union of contraries, of change and permanence, is
actualized through a self. It is an experience that is not reducible to mental
concepts. One can have a substance that changes because to say substance is
in reality to say self or subject, and the very nature of a self in space and time
(in the case of the human being) is the union of constancy and change, as
18
attested to by our own experience. The accidents remain what they are, except
that now they are seen in all things as being the changes of a constant self that
is witness to these changes.
From here one could say that in space and time it is the nature of the self
to change and abide. Put in another way, it is by virtue of the nature (abi ah)
in or of the self that it is able to undergo motion while abiding through its
changes. Nature is that by which motion or change takes place, not only in
accidents but also in substance. In undergoing change and motion, a self can
become more fully what it is, and this movement towards its true identity is
made possible by the fact that God has endowed this self with a certain nature
that has yet to be fully realized at the point in time wherein it nds itself. It is
through its acts of consciousness, of awareness, of the many levels and modes
of perception, that a self is and becomes what it is. Through more powerful
acts of integration and self-integration, the substance of the self is more of a
self, becoming more itself by virtue of its nature. The nature in a self bridges
the state of potency and the state of actuality. It allows for the emanation
of wujud from God upon a self which, in the realm of space and time, is
becoming more itself. During the journey through space and time it is the
nature of the self, which allows it to become fully itself, but in the case of man
at least the self can become less itself. Nature is thus the nexus between a self
that is not fully itself and its true self. The very reality of nature is change and
renewal because its sole essence is to lead the former to the latter, to join the
changing to the unchanging. That a self should be led to its true self by virtue
of nature is the reality of substantial motion. In the I know myself, there
is the unchanging I and the changing myself, which is one and the same
irreducible reality. The unchanging I is the spirit (or activity) which acts upon
myself so that the whole self will change (yet still be the same self ). The
intellect is able to accomplish change precisely through nature. My spirit
changes me, but it is through my nature that it does so. My nature is the range
of possibilities I have for change. The intellect acts upon the soul to change
it, but it is only from a certain point of view that the intellect and soul are
separate things. From one point of view, to say that the intellect or spirit acts
upon the soul is a way of talking about the souls becoming.
It is nature that allows for the possibility of the actualization of knowledge
in the realm of extension. That some self should not be fully itself and then
grow in its wujud is an irreducible possibility that can only be actualized in
the domain of space and time. In a sense, to know ignorance is an aspect of
knowledge. Moreover, to know the passage from ignorance to knowledge, not
simply as a matter of comparison but as a matter of the experience of the self,
is a mode of wujud that is irreducible to any other, and can only manifest in
its manifestation, if one can express oneself this way. The taste of knowledge
19
from its absence is experienced in a special way in the passage of time,
although this taste can continue in states above time. It is a mode of awareness
made possible by the relationality of extension.
Virtue and Beauty
In the human soul as such, which starts where the animal soul ends, the
Divine Qualities are manifest as the virtues and powers of the human soul.
This is why man is said to be made in the Image of God. It is also said that
the cosmos as a whole is a locus of manifestation for the Divine Names and
Qualities. Man is a little world (al-alam al-saghir or microcosm) and the world
is a great man al-insan al-kabir (or macrocosm), which is quite puzzling at
rst because the soul of man does not bear the slightest resemblance, so it
seems, to the world at large. The world is full of colors, shapes, and sounds,
but the soul appears to be none of these. The apparent disparity is resolved if
we remember that the Qualities, like wujud, are each a single reality gradated
in many levels and modes. The human qualities or virtues, as well as the
powers of the soul, are not realities that belong to the human state alone.
Rather, they are manifestations of the Divine Qualities in the mode of the
substance which man is. The virtues or qualities we commonly limit to the
human state are present everywhere in the world in a more veiled manner, but
just as the consciousness of beings in the world are limited and relative when
compared to the total consciousness (at least potentially) of man, so too are
the qualities manifest in a limited and relative way. This limitation is really an
unfolding which, although necessitating limitation, allows for relative modes
of manifestation wherein the Qualities of God can disclose themselves in all
their fullness. The difference between the world and man is that man is central,
manifesting the Qualities of God in a way that is synthetic and total, while the
world is everything except central and total, manifesting the Qualities in a way
that ever unfolds them in a partial and limited way. The human virtues all have
their counterparts in different domains of manifestation in sound, color,
shape, language, animals, plants, etc . . . All virtues are the virtues of God, who
manifests them both in man and in the world. They are manifest as determined
by the mode of substance or essence that they qualify.
This is why man can know the whole of the world, for everything therein
is an unfolding and limitation of qualities he possesses in himself in a total
way. The foregoing considerations tell us much about the experience of
beauty. The experience of beauty arises when the realities of things present
themselves to our perception or consciousness in such a manner that the
separation and discontinuities are most amenable to being bridged and
integrated. It is the harmony that is the presence of oneness in multiplicity.
This harmony or beauty exists in every domain: color, sound, shape, rhythm,
20
language. That is why the truth is beautiful: the separate ideas are tailor-made,
as it were, for the act of integration through consciousness. Beauty is present
when the virtues appear most fully in the world, remembering that these
qualities are not limited to us but are present everywhere in an innite number
of ways. Space is where the Divine Qualities unfold in color and shape, in the
plastic arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture, while time is where the
Qualities manifest in sound and language, through music and poetry. In all
cases there is a resonance between the world and the soul of man. Each
resonance is an awakening of a part of the self, which is why beauty is what
it is. In experiencing beauty and truth, of which beauty is the splendor, man
is most himself by virtue of what this resonance awakens in him. He has an
innate desire to seek out beauty and ee from ugliness, following his own true
nature to become more himself.
I began this paper by speaking about a system, by which I mean a whole
conceptual hierarchy with a complete and well-dened technical vocabulary
that allows one to deal not only in broad metaphysical strokes but also with
logic, aesthetics, etc . . . all using the same conceptual hierarchy whose terms
and interrelationships are fully known. The philosophy of Mulla Sadra is itself
a prime example of this, though it was created for his own intellectual and
spiritual context. It is my hope that such a system in English would be wholly
independent and would possess an authority that came from its own inner
cohesiveness and explanatory power, not merely from its faithfulness to
previous texts of a different language and cultural world. Such a system
would be completely free from the peculiar problems a translator must address
when explaining another thinkers ideas. The problems in translating
philosophy are especially acute, since consistency is so crucial and often
nearly impossible to achieve (wujud being a classic example of this), and since
so much conceptual weight is bound up in individual words.
So then why bother looking at Sadras philosophy from a subjective
starting point, as I have done at length in this essay? The school of wahdat
al-wujud has certain salient and valuable features as philosophy, among them
the manner in which it addresses the problem of unity and multiplicity, the
distinction between concrete and abstract, and its general theory of knowledge
and spiritual realization, but these insights are explained in different ways, as
was briey discussed earlier. Now, there is much of value in the writings of
Ibn al-Arabi and his school which are not found in the tradition inaugurated
by Mulla Sadra, particularly questions dealing with the inward meaning of
the Quran and Hadith and the practice of the spiritual life in general.
27

What is generally missing in Ibn al-Arabi, however, is the kind of powerful
philosophical symmetry and clarity found in Sadra. One of the great virtues of
Sadra is that once his system is understood, one has a rather rm basis for
21
plunging into the world of Ibn al-Arabi, and one of Sadras intellectual
functions (for this author, at least) is to serve as a kind of pedagogue for the
vision of the Shaykh al-Akbar through the philosophical treatment of wujud.
As noted above, wujud is not the nal word in Ibn al-Arabis thought, but
insofar as one understands what Sadra has to say about wujud, one will
understand Ibn al-Arabi in terms of wujud, which is extremely helpful for
situating many of the other aspects of his metaphysics. Sadra is in a sense
the logical and rigorous conclusion one would reach if one began from the
metaphysical vision of Ibn al-Arabi and wished to unfold it in terms of wujud.
I believe this is abundantly clear, especially if one looks at the writings of Ibn
al-Arabis philosophical descendants such as Qunawi, Kashani, and especially
Qaysari. The whole point of this essay is to show that it is possible to conceive
of a sister tradition to wahdat al-wujud in English, one which is not a mere
translation but which takes the fundamental insights of wahdat al-wujud and
recasts them according to the modern conceptual imagination.
28
The system
I am discussing here would be independent but still be a part of the Islamic
universe, and would be an organic outgrowth of it in the same way Ibn
al-Arabi and Sadra are,
29
and would hopefully speak in a language as transparent
and meaningful to the Akbarian and Sadrian languages as those two languages
are to each other. I already discussed the possibility of reframing this
metaphysical vision in terms of the subject instead of the object. Sadras
philosophy is perhaps the best starting point for entry into the philosophical
understanding of the metaphysical vision of wahdat al-wujud, but a subject-
based system will, I believe, open up an understanding and rapport with the
writings of more experiential writers such as Ibn al-Arabi, as well. Practically
speaking, if we are aiming for a system that is transparent and meaningful
to this tradition, then it seems eminently useful to examine and understand
Sadras object-based system in terms of concepts that take the subject as their
pivot. In terms of any greater philosophical project, such an analysis of Sadra
and the doctrine of wahdat al-wujud can only be considered groundwork and
research, but perhaps it shows us that such a project is indeed possible and
worth pursuing.
Elsewhere, I have discussed why this current of Islamic philosophy has
certain structural and historical advantages in relation to other traditional
philosophies which enable it to function well in the modern intellectual milieu,
and why such a proposed system would have the capacity to be universal and
perennial by virtue of, not in spite of, being an organic outgrowth of the
Islamic metaphysical tradition, so I will not discuss those questions here.
30
I
will conclude by mentioning two very good reasons why we should continue
to press forward in our practice and understanding of traditional philosophy.
First, perhaps the most pernicious problem from the Islamic and indeed
22
spiritual point of view is the loss of the sense of the sacred and the sense
of mystery in modern life and thought. Many of the problems we are
now saddled with go hand in hand with a conception of the world which
increasingly sees everything in terms of lifeless action and reaction, from the
world of nature to human consciousness. Life in this conception is basically
an arbitrary category of these actions and reactions. The world is not alive, but
neither is it really dead. Without a sense of the sacred, nothing is truly alive
or dead. Instead of extending lifelessness to subsume life as one of its sub-
categories (that is, as a certain kind of ultra-complex chemical reaction), an
effective metaphysics can powerfully extend life (as we know what it is to
be alive) to all things each in their special way, without thereby descending
into some kind of weak-minded sentimentalism or dogmatism. To mention
an example, an effective integral metaphysics can lead to better ways of
conceiving the so-called mind-body problem in philosophy, as well as
in physics
31
and neurobiology. When it comes to the question of mind in
neurobiology and the ontological states of non-observables in physics, the
metaphysical assumptions are no less crucial than the data themselves. The
collapse of the state vector is still debated by physicists as a matter of
philosophy, since there is no general disagreement about the data. It is still a
notion which thus far is neither proved nor falsied by experiment. Similarly,
despite claims to the contrary, the relationship between the physical brain and
human consciousness is not very well understood at all from the biological
point of view. Modern neuroscience, insofar as it deals with the brain, can
neither prove nor disprove much about the nature of the soul (or the mind,
as most would refer to it in this context.)
Second, no matter how lofty or rened the metaphysics, the days are
probably gone when works written solely with the professional philosopher in
mind are worthwhile. A true philosophy will be a tool to think by, and must
help a human being to think about everything a human being thinks about
art, ethics, love, death, God. A philosophical system can no longer assume a
sacred environment where people would be living in accordance with the
truth in addition to thinking about it. It was just such an environment, a culture
of the sacred lled with the perfume of purposefulness, that a traditional
civilization such as Islam provided, and it is just such an environment which
most of the modern world lacks. A philosophy must not only be an account,
but must contain within itself a sense of the sacred, of inwardness, of mystery.
A philosophy can be logical, rigorous, and comprehensive while still
recognizing its limitations as system of thought, as a tool to think by. The
mistake of modern systems and pseudo-systems is to claim to explain
everything in terms of itself and to disallow anything, which it cannot explain
in so many words. This is precisely the absence of a sense of the sacred and
23
of mystery, both of which are strongly present in the Islamic metaphysical
tradition.
This essay has been written with the assumption that not only does
the Islamic intellectual tradition have much to offer us philosophically and
spiritually, but that it is indeed possible and desirable to begin and systematize
a new way of talking about perennial philosophical and spiritual issues. If we
in the West can form a sister-tradition to the existing and living tradition of
Islamic metaphysics in the East one that is an organic outgrowth and not
mere mimicry and derivation we will be able to not only tap more richly
into that vein but will also come to possess improved conceptual tools with
which to address the unique intellectual and spiritual problems of our own
age. This has been a humble attempt at getting that process started in one
possible direction; no doubt there are others. Only a small cross-section of
philosophical issues has been addressed here; what I propose is no small
venture, but it will be worthwhile if it will allow us to take advantage of the
wisdom of the past without having to recreate our own conceptual and
symbolic imagination from scratch.
Endnotes
1. See especially his Su Path of Knowledge and The Self-Disclosure of God (Albany,
NY, 1989, 1998).
2. John Walbridge, The Leaven of the Ancients: Suhrawardi and the Heritage of the
Greeks (New York, 2000), 15.
3. William Chittick, The Heart of Islamic Philosophy (Oxford, 2001), 1718.
4. Ibid., 1314.
5. For the essay at hand, one cannot but mention the book The Principles of
Epistemology in Islamic Philosophy by Mehdi Hairi Yazdi (Albany, NY, 1992), which deals
extensively with the concept of knowledge by presence, especially as this is understood
by Suhrawardi, and takes great strides in making this and other related ideas understandable
in modern philosophical language. This book can be taken as a model for the analysis and
study of major themes in Islamic philosophy, but as will be seen below, its goals are
somewhat different from those explored in this essay.
6. Here I am thinking more particularly of the tradition that took Ibn al-Arabis
thought in a more philosophical direction, beginning with Sadr al-Din Qunawi (d. 1274) and
continuing with thinkers such as Abd al-Razzaq Kashani (d. 1330), and Dawud al-Qaysari
(d. 1350). See W. Chittick, The School of Ibn al-Arabi. History of Islamic Philosophy.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Oliver Leaman, eds. London, 1996, 51023.
7. This was the philosophical language bequeathed by such gures as Farabi and
Ibn Sina, who framed much of their philosophy in terms of concepts such as wujud (being
or existence), mahiyyah (essence or quiddity), wujub (necessity), imkan (possibility or
contingency), and imtina (impossibility or absurdity). In this respect, they drew heavily on
Greek philosophy, especially Aristotle, although their philosophy developed according to
its own character. One could agree or disagree with Avicenna, but it would be impossible
24
for later Islamic philosophers to explain their own thought without using the Avicennian
Peripatetic language. This is true even of such towering gures such as Suhrawardi and
Mulla Sadra, much of whose writings are Peripatetic in their language if not in their
philosophical conclusions. For example F. Rahmans book on Sadra (The Philosophy of
Mulla Sadra, Albany, NY, 1976) shows quite clearly how connected Sadras exposition is to
the lingua franca established largely by Ibn Sina.
8. [I]bn Arabi . . . expounded the most profound doctrine possible of Being [wujud]
and its manifestations in a manner which is, properly speaking, gnostic and metaphysical
rather than simply philosophical in the usual sense of the word. Ibn Arabi spoke of the
Divine Essence (al-dhat), Names and Qualities, theophany (tajalli ) and the like, and did
not use the language of the Islamic philosophers who dealt with wujud. He expounded a
metaphysics which transcends ontology, which begins with the Principle, standing above
Being, of which Being is the rst determination (ta ayyun). Yet his doctrine of necessity
included the most penetrating exposition of the meaning of wujud as both Being and
existence, even if he viewed the problem from quite another angle than did the
philosophers. . . . [I]bn Arabi had the profoundest effect upon both later Susm and later
Islamic philosophy, especially as far as the study of wujud was concerned. It was he who
rst formulated the doctrine of transcendent unity of being, (wahdat al-wujud) that
crowns nearly all later studies of wujud and represents in a certain sense the summit of
Islamic metaphysical doctrines. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Post-Avicennian Islamic Philosophy
and the Study of Being, in Philosophies of Existence, edited by Parviz Morwedge
(New York, 1982), 338.
9. [hikmah and hakim] are often used as synonyms for the Greek loan words
faylasuf and falsafa . . . The earliest Arabic translations of Greek philosophical and scientic
texts were littered with transliterated terms, but these largely disappeared from the later
translations and from all but the earliest independent Islamic philosophical texts. As early
as the tenth century, Farabi and Amiri used hakim and hikmah for philosopher and
philosophy . . . Faylasuf and falsafa soon acquired a disagreeable connotation of
foreignness and irreligion, which even the philosophers themselves preferred to avoid.
Moreover, hakim and hikmah can also be used in contexts that are not philosophical to
refer to traditional gnomic wisdom, for example. John Walbridge, The Leaven of the
Ancients: Suhrawardi and the Heritage of the Greeks, New York, 2000, xv.
10. What is referred in the terminology of the philosophers as uncoupled intellect
(aql mujarrad) is referred in the terminology of the Folk of God as spirit (ruh), and thus
one calls the First Intellect the Holy Spirit. What the philosophers call uncoupled soul (nafs
mujarrad) the Folk call heart (qalb), since the universals are explicit in this soul, and this
soul witnesses them concretely. When they say soul, they are referring to the imprintable
animal soul (al-nafs al-muntabiah). Dawud al-Qaysari, Matlakhusus al-kilam f i maani
fusus al-hikam, ed. Muhammad Hasan al-Sa idi Iran 1995, 2627. The boundaries between
the terms in such hierarchies are not exactly the same, and moreover there are certain
associations engendered by ruh, for example, which are not engendered by aql and vice
versa. Nevertheless, these languages are able to understand each other and both believe that
they are in fact referring to the same thing.
11. Sadras system is known more specically as al-hikmat al-mutaaliyah. This is a
term whose usage goes back at least as far as Dawud al-Qaysari, who uses this term in his
Risalah ilm al-tasawwuf (See al-Rasail l-Dawud al-Qaysari ), edited by Mehmet
Bayraktar (Kayseri, 1997), 116.
12. It needs to be emphasized again that this is an articial division, in the sense that
in the school of Ibn al-Arabi, the discourse in terms of ayn and wujud very often overlap
and explain each other (as in such terms as existent identity, ayn mawjudah). This overlap
25
and exhange results from the fact that the subject matter is ultimately the same, not from a
necessity that things must ultimately be explained by a certain overarching super-concept
such as wujud. Although wujud can take on the role of that which explains all and is
explained by nothing, it does so ultimately by virtue of what the concept designates,
which can be enshrined in other ideas as well. To take another example of the mutual
understanding between the Sus and the philosophers, The third [level of wujud] is self-
expanding wujud (al-wujud al-munbasit). Its encompassment and self-expansion is not like
the generalness of natural universals, and its particularity is not like that of individuals that
are classied as species and generic natures. Rather, it is as is known by the gnostics
(arifun), who call it the Breath of the Merciful (al-nafas al-Rahmani ). It is what rst
comes out from the rst cause. It is the principle and life of the world, and it is the light
that surges through all the heavens and the earth, each according to its measure. Mulla
Sadra, al-Shawahid al-rububiyyah, ed. Jalal al-Din Ashtiyani (Mashhad, 1967), 70.
13. Frithjof Schuon describes two broad categories of traditional metaphysical
systems, one of which takes as its basis an account based upon an objective understanding
of things, and the other which is based upon a basically subjective understanding of things.
For example, he writes, The demiurgic tendency is conceived in the Vedanta as an
objectivation, and in Susm [referring to the school of wahdat al-wujud ] it is conceived as
an individuation, and so in fact as a subjectivation, God being then, not pure Subject as in
the Hindu perspective, but pure Object, He (Huwa), That which no subjective vision
limits. This divergence lies only in the form, for it goes without saying that the Subject
of the Vedanta is anything but an individual determination and that the Suc Object is
anything but the effect of an ignorance. The Self (Atma) is He, for it is purely objective
in as much as it excludes all individuation and the He (Huwa) is Self and so purely
subjective in the sense that it excludes all objectivation . . . The Suc formula la ana wa la
anta: Huwa (Neither I nor Thou: He) is thus equivalent to the formula of the Upanishads
Tat twam asi (That are thou). Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts, Middlesex, U.K.,
1987 p. 102.
14. In his book Ibn al-Arabi and Modern Thought (Anqa Publishing, Oxford, 2002),
Peter Coates examines the metaphysics of Ibn al-Arabi and devotes time to examining what
he can tell us about the modern study of the self, but his discussion of the self is generally
geared more toward a psychological understanding, whereas my goal is to discuss the self
as an ontological entity and as one pole of reality.
15. The introduction to my forthcoming translation and commentary upon Ibn
al-Arabis Fusus al-hikam (The Ringstones of Wisdom, Chicago, 2003) also contains an
exposition in terms of the self and selfhood, but there the discussion is geared specically
towards explaining Ibn al-Arabis metaphysics of ayn and tajalli.
16. This important concept has been translated in several ways. In his study of Mulla
Sadra, Fazlur Rahman refers to tashkik as the systematic ambiguity of existence, and despite
the merits of this book, such a translation tends to obscure a concept which is quite well-
dened. Seyyed Hossein Nasr has used the term analogical gradation (see for example, his
Sadr al-Din Shirazi and his Transcendent Theosophy, Tehran, 1997, 107), which comes
much closer to expressing the philosophical usage of tashkik. Other possibilities that have
been offered are modalization, modulation, and hierarchicalization. Taking a cue from a
suggestion by Hossein Ziai to refer to tashkik using the word equivocal, I currently employ
the word polyvocal, which is to say that wujud is not said of things in the same way (which
would make it univocal), but rather is said of things in many ways, for tashkik deals with
both the concept and reality of wujud. Referring to his own dissertation, Sajjad Rizvi writes,
Taking my cue from the Aristotelian dictum that being is said in many ways, I focus on
three central senses of being [wujud ] in Islamic philosophy as presented by Sadra, namely,
26
the reality of being, mental being, and the language of being. The central motif of the thesis
is the notion of modulation that each of these senses undergoes. (Approaching the Study
of Mulla Sadra Shirazi, Transcendent Philosophy, vol. 2 (2001), 6364.) It is in the same
line that I believe the word polyvocality can get at everything enshrined in the philosophical
use of tashkik in Sadras thought.
17. Form is a word which in Islamic philosophical vocabulary can refer to essence
(the what of a thing) and also to the condition of being a spatio-temporal object possessing
accidents such as color, shape, and dimensionality. In the rst case, it can refer to the
denition of a thing, while in the second case, it is opposed to the spirit or meaning
(mana) of an object which the form transmits to the percipient.
18. It is debated, for example, whether or not Aristotle ever espoused any notion of
prime matter or if when he spoke of matter he meant some matter or other, such as the
bronze in a bronze statue. According to such a view, the bronze has the potentiality to
receive the form of a statue, but this is not traceable to any sort of prime matter or pure
potentiality.
19. See al-Shawahid al-rububiyyah, 7677.
20. Earlier it was mentioned that the concept of wujud is not indispensable to Ibn
al-Arabis metaphysics, and I am here proposing that the question of prime matter or pure
potentiality can be reframed outside of the mold of hylomorphism. Although space does not
allow, I would argue that for Mulla Sadra, the use of the concept of pure potentiality and
prime matter are similarly not indispensable, and in fact are a result of the fact that Sadra is
a major inheritor of the Peripatetic tradition, and part of Sadras genius is to integrate the
concepts of various strands of thought into his own metaphysical vision. Sadra actually uses
different ways of addressing the relationship between forms. Among them is the conceptual
pair surah and mana, common to Susm and philosophy, which divides up a thing into
formal essences and the formless essences they transmit. (I deal with this question at greater
length in my translation of the Fusus.) Also, the notion of self-expanding existence
(al-wujud al-munbasit) that was mentioned earlier, which corresponds largely to the
Breath of the All-Merciful (nafas al-Rahman) in Susm, sets up a way of dealing with
the existence of the world without having recourse to hylo-morphism.
21. See H. Corbin, Le Livre des penetrations metaphysiques, Tehran-Paris, 1964.
22. Here, matter is used in the modern sense of being the stuff of the physical world,
as opposed to the precise philosophical denition of that which receives the form of
something.
23. For a detailed discussion of this subject, see Toshiko Izutsu, The Concept and
Reality of Existence, Tokyo, 1971.
24. This is what is meant in traditional Islamic cosmology when one says that each
and every object in the universe is moved angels, which in Su metaphysics and Islamic
philosophy are often spoken of as pure spirits and intellects.
25. In the Fusus al-hikam, Ibn al-Arabi in fact discusses the Asharite notion of
substance in order to point out its own shortcomings in relation to his own theory.
According to him, they are correct in saying that the world is a single substance, but
they err in believing that it is something completely separate from God.
26. From another point of view, one can say that the Self is also the Supreme Object
before which there is no subject that can know It.
27. Sadra did write an incomplete though extensive Quranic exegesis, being the
rst Islamic philosopher to do so. See Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Sadr al-Din Shirazi and
His Transcendent Theosophy (Tehra, 1997), 123135 and Tafsir al-Quran al-Karim, ed.
Muhammad Khwajawi (Qum, 1990). However, Sadras exclusive devotion to [the]
metaphysical, outwardly theoretical aspect of religion, together with his almost complete
27
silence concerning particular ritual or legal prescriptions and the accepted structure of legal
interpretation of the Quran and Tradition, are crucial aspects of his writing that together
lend themselves to a variety of interpretations. They pose difculties that no thoughtful
reader could easily ignore. ( J. Morris, The Wisdom of the Throne, Princeton, 1981, 21) Ibn
al-Arabi, by contrast, wrote enough on both the outward form and inward signicance of
the pillars of Islam (prayer, fasting, pilgrimage, alms) to ll several books. Ibn al-Arabi and
his school also go so far as to discuss the nature of the difference between legal schools,
and interpret this difference in light of the possibility of direct unmediated knowledge of a
Quranic verse or a hadith, in a way that supersedes the ordinary chains of transmission.
True understanding, from the traditional point of view of both Sadra and Ibn al-Arabi,
cannot in any case be divorced from a consequential spiritual practice. In the Islamic
context, this demands a meaningful understanding of the outward aspects of religion, i.e.,
the particular acts of worship and codes of conduct which function both as a channel and
as a protection for inward realization. In Sadra, these aspects, as Morris states, are not made
explicit, although I would argue that it is clear that such adherence and understanding
of the practical dimension of faith is assumed from Sadras point of view.
28. Morris writes, [Ibn al-Arabis] communicators if they want to have any effect
at all are immediately forced to work with the symbols actually operative in the lives and
souls of the particular audience and individuals they are addressing . . . In other words, one
cannot begin to communicate Ibn al-Arabis ideas in any serious way without constantly
investigating and then rediscovering what those operative and effective symbols are for the
people with whom one is interacting. Ibn Arabi in the Far West: Visible and Invisible
Inuences, Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society, xxix (2001).
29. Part of the value of Sadra and Ibn al-Arabi is the fact that their intellectual power
ows organically from the most inward dimensions of the religion. In speaking of the virtues
of studying Ibn al-Arabi today, James Morris writes, With Suhrawardis illuminative
wisdom (hikmat al-ishraq) . . . the dimension of philosophic universality is at least as
strongly emphasized but in forms of expression and practice which are radically less
visibly grounded in the concrete details of Islamic revelation, tradition, and spiritual
practice. The obvious, recurrent danger in this case (with Suhrawardi) is that his teaching
can readily become reduced to simply another philosophic system, cut off from the roots
of spiritual practice (and their own indispensable historical and social context) which
Suhrawardi himself never ceases to stress as the essential precondition for grasping his own
approach. Later he says of Ibn al-Arabi, [T]here is simply no other Islamic thinker whose
thought offers anything like the same combination of an acceptance of creativity and
exibility of interpretation combined with concrete, comprehensive faithfulness to the
revealed historical sources of that tradition. J. Morris, . . . Except His Face: The Political
and Aesthetic Dimensions of Ibn Arabis Legacy, Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi
Society, xxiii (1998).
30. On the Possibility of an Islamic Philosophical Tradition in English, in Beacon of
Knowledge, ed. Mohammad Faghfoory, Louisville, KY. (forthcoming)
31. On the subject of examining modern science by means of traditional philosophy
see the pioneering book of Wolfgang Smith, The Quantum Enigma, (Peru, Ill., 1995). For a
discussion of modern physics and Sadrian thought see C. Dagli, Mulla Sadras Epistemology
and the Philosophy of Physics, Transcendent Philosophy, Vol. 1: 2 (2000).

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