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Blackwell Publishering LtdOxford, UKMUWOThe Muslim World1478-1913© 2004 Hartford Seminary20049411000

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

A New System of Islamic PhilosophyThe Muslim World • Volume 94 • 2004

On Beginning a New System of Islamic Philosophy

Caner Dagli

Princeton University Princeton, New Jersey

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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 influence 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.

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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 classified into historical periods and currents.

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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-qualified 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 first 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

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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

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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 scientific 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 reflects 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 manqué, 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 Aristotle’s 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.”

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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. 1213–14), 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 Afdal’s students and readers were educated Persians who did not have a

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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 Afdal’s 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 Akbarian6 tradition begun by Ibn al-‘Arabi and the “transcendent philosophy” (al-hikmat al-muta“aliyah) 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, finding,

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or presence) is another one of those notoriously difficult 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 ta“ayyun (self-identification or auto-determination).8 What is significant is that both of these languages or systems understand each other without necessitating a kind of one-to-one correspondence between the concepts. Sufi 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 other’s 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 briefly 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 God’s 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 God’s 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 identification 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-muta“aliyah, 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

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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 infinite 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-identification (ta“ayyun) 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 first, 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 briefly 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

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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 Sadra’s 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 Sadra’s basic metaphysical framework, based on the oneness (wahdah), principiality (asalah), and gradation or polyvocality (tashkik)16 of wujud.

Matter and ExtensionSpace and time can be seen as two modes of extension, and extension

by definition 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 object’s situation. Separation is a mode of confinement, in the sense that a given entity is restricted to the ‘when’ and the ‘where’ in which it finds 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

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extension, be it spatial or temporal, consists precisely of separation, limitation, and relationality.

All of the forms17 (suwar, sing. surah) that are present in space and time originate in the Intellect (al-“aql ) or Spirit and ultimately find 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 defined 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 unification 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 defined as pure potential, the potential for a thing to become something. Motion (harakah) is defined as the passage of something from this state of potency or potentiality (quwwah) to a state of act or activity (fi“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 definition 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

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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 ( fa“il ) 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 final 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 infinite 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

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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 significance or meaning in the context in which we find 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 Masha“ir, “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 finds 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 Sadra’s writings, which do not refer to pure potentiality.

Continuity and DiscontinuitySeparation 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

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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 (God’s 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 Sadra’s philosophy.23

It is first 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 God’s knowledge, as Sadra so

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eloquently explains in the Masha“ir 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, Sadra’s elegant and powerful definition 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 difficult 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 difficult 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 knowledge24 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 animal’s body, obey their fi†rah, or primordial norm. Man alone, possessing a “transcendent will,” is able to go against his fi†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 fly apart upon

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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 fi†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 field as a whole, not only as a succession of parts. Now, it could be argued that man’s 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 field 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, reflects 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. One’s 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

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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 WorldMan 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 (a“rad ) 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,

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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 floor together as a single substance, and proceed in this way until the entire world was seen as a single substance qualified by innumerable accidents. Any object we delineate as substance in this way allows of this definition only provisionally; it cannot be considered a substance in an absolute fashion because one’s criteria for judging its boundaries can always be shown to be a matter of preference.25

This is so because the first 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 first case, the substance is easily definable; 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 finds its origin in God.

The Divine Subject and ObjectIn 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

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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. God’s 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 qualified by accidents in the world by virtue of the fact that the Essence is qualified 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

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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 NatureAs 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

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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 finds 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 soul’s 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

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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 BeautyIn 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 first 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,

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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 infinite 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 flee 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-defined 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 thinker’s 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 Sadra’s 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 briefly 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 Qur’an 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 firm basis for

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plunging into the world of Ibn al-‘Arabi, and one of Sadra’s 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 final word in Ibn al-‘Arabi’s 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-‘Arabi’s ‘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. Sadra’s 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 Sadra’s ‘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

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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 physics31 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 falsified 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 refined 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 filled 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

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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.

Endnotes1. See especially his Sufi 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), 17–18.4. Ibid., 13–14.5. For the essay at hand, one cannot but mention the book The Principles of

Epistemology in Islamic Philosophy by Mehdi Ha’iri 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-‘Arabi’s 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, 510–23.

7. This was the philosophical language bequeathed by such figures 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

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for later Islamic philosophers to explain their own thought without using the Avicennian Peripatetic language. This is true even of such towering figures such as Suhrawardi and Mulla Sadra, much of whose writings are ‘Peripatetic’ in their language if not in their philosophical conclusions. For example F. Rahman’s book on Sadra (The Philosophy of Mulla Sadra, Albany, NY, 1976) shows quite clearly how connected Sadra’s 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 first 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 Sufism and later Islamic philosophy, especially as far as the study of wujud was concerned. It was he who first 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 scientific 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-muntabi “ah).” Dawud al-Qaysari, Matla“khusus al-kilam f i ma“ani fusus al-hikam, ed. Muhammad Hasan al-Sa ‘ idi Iran 1995, 26–27. 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. Sadra’s system is known more specifically as al-hikmat al-muta“aliyah. This is a term whose usage goes back at least as far as Dawud al-Qaysari, who uses this term in his Risalah fi “ilm al-tasawwuf (See al-Rasa”il l-Dawud al-Qaysari ), edited by Mehmet Bayraktar (Kayseri, 1997), 116.

12. It needs to be emphasized again that this is an artificial 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

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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 Sufis 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 classified 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 first comes out from the first 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 Sufism [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 Sufic ‘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 Sufic 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-‘Arabi’s 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 specifically towards explaining Ibn al-‘Arabi’s 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-defined. 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,

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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), 63–64.) It is in the same line that I believe the word polyvocality can get at everything enshrined in the philosophical use of tashkik in Sadra’s 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 first case, it can refer to the definition of a thing, while in the second case, it is opposed to the spirit or ‘meaning’ (ma“na) 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, 76–77.20. Earlier it was mentioned that the concept of wujud is not indispensable to Ibn

al-‘Arabi’s 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 Sadra’s 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 ma“na, common to Sufism 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 Sufism, 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 definition 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 Sufi 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 Ash‘arite 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 Qur’anic exegesis, being the first Islamic philosopher to do so. See Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Sadr al-Din Shirazi and His Transcendent Theosophy (Tehra, 1997), 123–135 and Tafsir al-Qur ”an al-Karim, ed. Muhammad Khwajawi (Qum, 1990). However, “Sadra’s exclusive devotion to [the] metaphysical, outwardly theoretical aspect of religion, together with his almost complete

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silence concerning particular ritual or legal prescriptions and the accepted structure of legal interpretation of the Qur’an and Tradition, are crucial aspects of his writing that together lend themselves to a variety of interpretations. They pose difficulties 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 significance of the pillars of Islam (prayer, fasting, pilgrimage, alms) to fill 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 Qur’anic 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 Sadra’s point of view.

28. Morris writes, “[Ibn al-Arabi’s] 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-‘Arabi’s 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 Influences,” 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 flows organically from the most inward dimensions of the religion. In speaking of the virtues of studying Ibn al-‘Arabi today, James Morris writes, “With Suhrawardi’s “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 flexibility 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 ‘Arabi’s 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 Sadra’s Epistemology and the Philosophy of Physics,” Transcendent Philosophy, Vol. 1: 2 (2000).