Landolt • Stages of God-Cognition and the Praise of Folly According to Najm-i Razi

STAGES OF GOD-COGNITION AND THE PRAISE OF FOLLY

According to Najm-i RazI

1. Know thyself...

Islamic mysticism recognizes itself in the Koran as well as in a certain number of extra-Koranic tradition which, as guiding statements, are usually attributed to the Prophet Muhammad or in some other way naturalized as part of Islamic tradition. Such extra-Koranic wisdom includes the Gnostic sentence He who knows himself knows his Lord, which is known in Arabic as man (arafa nafsahu faqad arafa rabbahu. A very similar sentence has been found in the writings of Clement of Alexandria (d. 215 A D );1 and this in turn calls into play an even older model, the famous oracular saying of Delphi, Know thyself.... Thus we read in the opening pages of the Rawshanai-nama, a mystical poem traditionally ascribed to the 1 lth-century Isma111 poet Nasir-i Khusraw:

Thus spake [the wise]:Go, know thyself!

Know both the way of unbelief and of religion, of good and bad!

For this way youll find the way to God;

This is certain evidence for you.

1. See especially F. Rosenthal (1970), pp. 137ff., 185f.

302 Recherches en spiritualite iranienne

Once you have known your self truly,

You will also attain gnosis of the Real ( irfan-i Haqq).

(Nasir-i Khusraw 1348 h.s., p. 511, lines 6-10. Cf. also ibid. p. 528, lines 7ff.)

As with most oracular sayings, our Gnostic sentence can be interpreted in various ways. In its Arabic form, the difficulty is compounded by the fact that the Arabic term used for se lf, nafs, can also mean souf, and souF designated - in the classical Sufi use of the word - not in the first place that which leads to God but on the contrary the compulsive souf, the seat of evil, or the flesh if you like. However, even if we leave the compulsive soul and the like out of the picture for the time being, our Gnostic sentence has led to so many contradictory interpretations that one could write a whole book on this subject alone, as an Iranian scholar has pointedly noted (J. HumaI, note to Mahmud-i Kashani n.d. [intro, dated 132 h .s./l365 h.q.], p. 92).

An interpretation that at first seems innocuous postulates that things are recognized through their contrary. Without night I cannot know the day. By tasting the bitter, I learn to appreciate the sweet. Through the imperfect I can gain an idea of the perfect. The classical 9th-century mystic TirmidhI is said to have put it this way: He who does not know what it means to be a servant of God, has even less an idea of lordship (Hujwlrl 1336/1965, p. 178).2 The much later Kubrawi Sufi Simnani (1261-1336) commented on our Arabic sentence in a similar vein: He who recognizes himself as being weak, deficient, imperfect and needy knows his lord as powerful, sublime, perfect and self-sufficient, or He who recognized himself as contingent being knows his lord as the necessary being; he who recognized himself as multiple knows his lord as one; he who recognizes himself as tarnished with the faults of forgetfulness and ignorance knows his lord as sublime and perfect; he who recognizes himself as serf, knows his lord as Lord. (Ala al-Dawla al-Simnanl 1362 h.s./1404 h.q. [1983/84 AD], pp. 478f).

This kind of God-cognition through self-cognition seems, at first sight, to have little to do with what is commonly known as mysticism. The terms and images used here to highlight the contrast between humans as the utterly imperfect and God as the Perfect hardly convey an idea of the God-

2. For the importance of the notion of servanthood in Tirmidhls own writings, see B. Radtke and J. OKane (1996) index s. vv. abd, abid, ubuda, ubudiyya, servitude.

Stages o f God-cognition and the Praise o f Folly. 303

intoxicated enthusiasm of the mystics. They are marked by the strict rules of a religion in which man, a feeble serf, faces an absolute king. Yet, it was precisely on this sense of the absolute dependence o f Gods bondsmen that the Islamic mystics relationship to God was based. They did not consider themselves Gods children. Going even beyond the merely devout feeling of the serf lying in the dust at the feet of his master, they rather intensified the sense of nothingness to such a degree that it was transposed onto the plane of absolute non-being and being, or annihilation i f ana) and subsistence (haqa ), respectively. This is the point made by one of the 1 lth-century authorities of Sufism, Hujwlri, who noted in his widely used Sufi manual, The Unveiling o f the Veiled: It happens that cognition of Being in the absolutely Real (God) produces despair about ones own being. Once the serf has recognized the master, he sees his whole existence in the bonds of his power... Hence states the Prophet: He who knows himself knows his Lord, meaning, whoever knows himself inannihilation i f and ) knows God in subsistence {baqd) (Hujwlri 1336/1965, p. 353).3

It probably lies in the nature of the matter that this intensification of the feeling of nothingness vis-a-vis an absolute Being leads to a point where it seems to turn into its exact opposite. A little before Hujwlri, the equally authoritative theoretician of Sufism, Qushayri, made a distinction between an annihilation which concerns the attributes and one which concerns the essence, (Qushayri 1379/1959, p. 40, lines 16-17),4 thereby hinting at what Najmuddln-i Kubra (1145-1221) was later to state explicitly:

The more your being disappears [is annihilated], the more you don His being. First, the attributes of your being disappear, the blameworthy along with the praiseworthy. Therewith you don the attributes of His being, including the attributes of grandeur [or Majesty, jalal] and of grace [or Beauty, jamdl]. Thereupon, your essence disappears, so His being covers [you]. At this moment there is no being but His being.

(F. Meier (ed.) 1957, Arabic text para 141; German intro pp. 82-87)

The same passage from opposition to unity already seems to have been achieved, on the cognitive plane, by Junayd, the leading master of the 9th-century Baghdad Sufis. When he was asked about the nature of the knowledge of God, he at first explained it by saying: The coming-about of your own un-knowing and the being-there of His knowing! But when he

3. Also cf. p. 247.4. Section on fa n d and baqa, in fine.


was pressed to say more, he exclaimed: He is the one who knows and he is the one who is known! (Al-KalabadhI 1380/1960, p. 66).

Another classical Sufi statement that can similarly convey an idea of non- dualistic consciousness is this: I knew God through God and I knew what is other-than-God through the light of God.5

Thus the reduction of man to the level of feeble serf, really, to nothing, is counter-balanced - often for the very same mystics - with a heightening or broadening of his being to the point where he becomes the All, the very image of God. The celebrated 9th-century Khurasanl mystic, Bayazld-i BastamI, whose paradoxical utterings can give an impression of extreme self-denial and extreme self-elevation at the same time, is also credited with a saying prefiguring the concept of the Perfect Man (al-insan al-kamil al- tamm), (Nicholson 1921, p. 77) which would eventually become one of the doctrinal keystones of Sufism, especially wiht the great Ibn Arab! (1165- 1240). Najm-i RazI, of whom we shall be shortly speaking, has expressed this idea in a Persian quatrain that makes the point in such a succinct way that it has become, so to speak, the common good of persian myticism; it is, in fact, often quoted anonymously and also ascribed to others. Addressing the human being, the poet states:

O thou copy of the script divine!

O thou mirror of the royal beauty!

Naught in the world lies outside of thee;

Ask of thyself thine every desire, thou art it!

(Najm-i RazI 13 52/1973A, p. 3/English translation by H. Algar 1982, p. 28)

In view of this optimal broadening of the image of man one may wonder what has happened with the sense for human imperfection. Najm-i RazI, as we shall see later, can give us an interesting answer to this question. To

5. According to Hujwlri (1336/1956), p. 344, this is a saying o f All, whereas SulamI (1960), p. 64, ascribes it to Bayazld-i BastamI. The light of God could refer to the Prophet Muhammad, as is suggested by the variants found in Sarraj (1914), p. 104, where a similar saying is attributed to Dhu al-Nun al-Misrl, and in Shiite tradition (Kulaynl, Usui min al- Kdfi, Book Tawhid, Chapter 3).


prepare for this answer, we shall first present his theory of mystical cognition.

2. Najm-i RazFs theory of mytical cognition

Najm-i RazI, properly Najmuddln-i RazI,6 known also by his sobriquet of Daya (the wetnurse), belongs to a distinguished circle of mystical thinkers who enmerged from the school of Najmuddln-i Kubra. The above- mentioned SimnanI, about three generations his junior, also belonged to this school. RazI, born probably in 1177 or 1178 in the city of Ray (hence his surname RazI), spent some critical years in Khurasan and Khwarazm, where he came in touch with Kubra and some of his immediate disciples. Among the latter, Majduddln-i Baghdadi (from Baghdadak, a village in Khwarazm) seems to have played a decisive role as his teacher of Sufism. As well, this teacher, rather than Kubra himself, may have impressed on RazI the model of a certain Sufi involvement in worldly matters, for he was indeed for some time an influential figure at the court of the Khwarazmshah; he died, however, under somewhat unclear circumstances, most likely in 1209.7 In the tumultuous years 1220-21 we find RazI on the flight before the rampaging Mongols. Like many other Iranians of those days, such as the family of the famous RumI, he emigrated to Rum or Anatolia, which seemed to him to be the last refuge of the Islamic faith. This was to be the site of his Persian masterpiece, Mirsad al- ibad min al- m abda ila al-ma-ad (The Path o f Gods Bondsmen from Origin to Return), a work written in the first place for dervishes, though also a princely code of conduct and a spiritual counsel for practitioners of the most diverse professions. The original dervish version of this book, issued in 1221 in the Anatolian town of Qaysariyya [modern Kayseri], was soon followed by a royal version or second recension, which was dedicated to the Seljuk sultan Alauddln Keyqubad I, and completed in the town of Slwas on 31 July 1223. Still another version of basically the same book appears to have been issued only a few years later under another title, Asadis Symbol in the Psalms o f David (Marmuzat-i Asadi dar mazmurat-i

6. On him, see Mohammad-Amln RIahl, article Daya, Najm-al Din Abu Bakr Abdallah, in Encyclopaedia Iranica.

7. For this date (i.e. 606AH), which is indicated by RazI himself, see W. Shpall, A Note on Najm al-DIn al-RazI and the Bahr al-haqd iq , Folia Orientalia 22 (1981-84), pp. 69-80. Concerning the circumstances of Baghdadis death, see my review of H. Algar, The Path in JAOS 107,4 (1987) pp. 803-05.


D aw udif and was dedicated to a local rival of the sultan, Alauddln Shah Dawud b. Bahramshah. Addressing himself in this way to princes of this world, RazI was making an attempt to alert them to the inner meaning of the kingship they embodied in fact - th e Islamic prince being the Shadow of God - and thus to know themselves as kings in a mystical or esoteric sense. Whether these spiritual counseling efforts met ready ears in the Anatolian court circles may, however, be doubted. RazI probably did not stay in Anatolia for very long, as he appears to have spent the last three decades of his life in Baghdad, where he died in 1256 and was buried in the Sufi cemetery.

Given that virtually nothing is known of Razls activities as a Sufi master, no direct disciples of his being on record, his fame as a Sufi rests almost entirely on his writings, particularly The Path. Indeed this work became, despite its outspoken Sunni outlook, one of the most popular works of Persian Sufism that was being read and studied all over the Eastern part of the Islamic world including Shiite Iran. It seems that RazI himself had a sense of its importance, for he wrote towards the end of his life still another version of it, this time in Arabic, thereby ensuring that, as he put it, the Arabs may no longer be deprived of its benefits. This Arabic version is titled Guiding Lights fo r the Travelers to God and Stations o f Those Carried Away through God (Manarat al-sd inn ila Allah wa-maqdmat al-ta irm bi- Allah).

One of the distinguishing virtues of the Path may be seen in the fact that the theme of god-cognition is discussed in it in a systematic and clear way. In dealing with this theme, the author does not beat around the bush but goes straight to the heart of the matter. He distinguishes three different basic forms of knowing or cognition (m arifat)9, all of which he establishes as valid if unequal forms of god-cognition: first, that of reason or the intellect (ma rifat-i aqlT); second, what amounts to a kind of intllectual vision; and third, what is best rendered as experience - although the terms used by the author to designate the latter two are somewhat unusual, as we shall see in a moment.

The first fundamental form, the rational, is accessible to all beings endowed with reason, even the unbelieving. It permits to recognize the

8. Edited by M. R. Shafi1 Kadkani with an English introduction by H. Landolt, Tehran (1352/1973).

9. The tripartite cognition corresponds more or less to the concept o f three stages of presence ihudur) or certitude (yaqln) in classical Sufism; see, e.g., Qushayris Risala (p. 43, lines 6ff. and p. 47, lines 19ff.)


existence of God by inference of the cause from the effect, the creator from the creation or, in more philosophical terms, the necessary from the merely possible or contingent. There is effectively little difference between this form of philosophical god-cognition and the rational approach cherished by the dialectical theologians. Nonetheless, the latter, i.e., the Sunnite-Asharite theologians, are singled out in one version of The Path - th e above- mentioned Asadis Symbol (Najm-i RazI 1352/1973B, intro pp. 13f.) as enjoying a somewhat higher status (maqdm) than the philosophers; for in addition to Gods existence, they also know Gods attributes through Scripture.

The second, or visionary, basic form of god-cognition involves a quite different approach. RazI calls it literally, speculative cognition (m arifat-i nazarf)\ but this term, contrary to its usual meaning, does not refer here to the formal speculations of the just mentioned theologians, but to speculating in a much more fundamental way. The one who is speculating in this way looks at the world as speculum or Mirror, as it were: beholding Gods attributes in every atom of the world, he recognizes the world as totally endowed with divine qualities. It would appear, therefore, that RazI assigns to this second stage of god-cognition the view known as wahdat al-wujud - roughly, something approaching a form of pantheism or panentheism.

However, it should be noted that the world in this context comprises not only the objective world of nature, but also the domain of supra-sensory phenomena. The subtle organs of perception necessary for this vision are seen as supplementing reason on a higher level. They grow in a human being only in the course of a maturation process, which is induced by the mystical praxis of religion.

The real or true cognition (m arifat-i haqlqi), then, corresponds to the completion of this maturation process, whereby the visionary cognition is replaced by the experiential, as the third fundamental form of god-cognition. RazI calls this the cognition through witnessing (m afifat-i shuhudl), the term he employs for the unmediated experience: that of the moth throwing itself into the flame. This evidently corresponds to what is sometimes termed wahdat al-shuhud.1G

It seems quite obvious that the difference is greater between rational cognition, on the one hand, and the visionary and experiential, on the other,

10. Razls tripartite scheme, then, amounts to saying that wahdat al-wujud is an advanced but not the highest stage, a claim which was later vigorously made by SimnanI (cf. Der Islam 50, 1, (1973) pp. 29-81.)


than that between the latter two, which both belong after all to the domain of the mystic. We shall come back to the distinction between the second and third forms of cognition below. At this point let us first take up the question of how RazI arrived at putting rational cognition on a par with the two forms of mystical cognition, even if only as, say, a prior stage to them. Is it not really the direct opposite to them?

As a matter of fact, while Islamic mysticism may be said to be more rational on the whole than other mystical traditions, the insufficiency of human reason has been consistently emphasized by Sufis. Even a Sufi such as Razls younger contemporary, Sadruddln-i Qunawi (Konyavi, 1210- 1274), who unlike our author shows much sympathy for the philosopher, still accepts the validity of reason only in a limited sense, as an instrument to be supplemented by higher organs of perception or cognition (Qunawi 1995, Ar. Text pp. 165f./German p. 29)." This, in fact, is precisely the view held by RazI as well, as we shall see in more detail later. However, in a particular treatise known as the Treatise on Love and Reason, (Risala-yi ishq u a q lf2 where Love stands, of course, for the way of the mystics, he expounds on the natural opposition between love and reason in such a way that the two appear to be as radically incompatible as fire and water - or so it seems at first sight.

In particular, Razls target here is the famous philosophical postulate of the unity of intellect, of the subject and the object of intellection, and the claim that the intellect in its perfection comprises everything in existence. Not unlike Ghazall before him, he only cites the philosophers to beat them with their own weapons. Thus, he accepts their definition of the human intellect as the organ capable of perceiving the quiddity (mdhiyat) or essence of things for the sole purpose of demonstrating that this essence is not identical with the reality of the thing itself: it is only an image that was abstracted from the real object, not the object itself in its concrete reality (haqiqat). For example, the intellectual perception of the quiddity of an orange detects nothing of its color, smell or taste. If then, the intellect has to

11. Also see my review in BSOAS 61, 2 (1998) pp. 332-334. Qunawi may well have known RazI, even if the meeting in Anatolia reported by Jam! (1370 h.s.), p. 437, seems

'doubtful.12. Whether this treatise is a work o f youth, as I assumed in the original German version, is

uncertain. The oldest extant MS, copied in 704 AH in Sabzawar in the Madrasa Alaiyya (see Risdla text (1966) pp. 99f., intro pp. 10ff), was probably ordered by Ala al-Dawla al-Simnani: we happen to know that the latter spent some time in 705/1306 in a place called Rahatabad-i Khusrawjird-i Bayhaq (cf. Landolt, (ed.) Tehran (1351/1972), Persian text p. 102, intro pp. 18f. and 48f).


resort to the help of special organs to grasp even the things of this world, he argues, how could it, out of its own perfection, grasp what lies beyond it in its reality (Najm-i Razi 1345/1966, pp. 68-74).

Of course, Razi does not use this argument - which he might well have taken from Suhrawardis criticism of Peripatetic theory of knowledge13 - to say that a real grasp of the thing in itself is impossible. What he infers from his critique of the power of reason is simply this: that only its very opposite, that is, love, is capable of grasping the thing as it really is. His argumentation here relies almost entirely on poetic images. Thus, reason is personified as the teacher of arrogance (,khwajagi-amuz), in contrast to which love is the sorrow which is a kingdom-burner (padishahi-suz). Like water, reason draws everthing down under, intensifying existence in the material world, that is, in the wrong direction, while the fire of love is the bestower of annihilation (fanabakhsh), striving ever upward to the center of celestial unity (ibid., pp. 6 Iff; cf. p. 54).

Now this poetic imagery should not, of course, be misunderstood as a kind of romantic demonisation of the mind as the antagonist per se. Razi was not a romantic but a religious thinker standing firmly in the medieval intellectual tradition. He suggests on the contrary that perfect love and perfect reason are a united pair within the figure of the Prophet Muhammad; for within this perennial figure, the fire of divine love has indeed ignited the pure spirit-oil of reason in such a way that the lamp really bums and there is light upon light, as indicated in the Koranic Light Verse (24:35) (ibid., pp. 76ff.; cf. p. 36). Moreover, like his philosophical opponents, our religious thinker cannot do without the idea of a universal intellect ( aql-i hull), which he discusses at some length in the cosmological sections of the Path (Najm-i Razi 1973A, pp. 46ff., 5 If., 56ff.; cf. p. 21 OF). There is no place to dwell extensively on this here; but we must mention the point characteristic for our author, and which does set him apart from the purely philosophical tradition: the Universal Intellect, which is the foundation of the order of the world, of the inward (or angelic) aspect of nature (malakut), does not serve as the highest hypostasis; it constitutes only the substructure of the Spirit of Life (riih) itself. This Life-Spirit and the Universal Intellect are related to each other like Adam and Eve, or Love and Reason in the case

13. On this criticism, see especially Hossein Ziai, Knowledge and Illumination: A Study o f Suhrawardis Hikmat al-Ishraq, Atlanta 1990, pp. 118ff, and 140ff. Note, however, that Razi may well have borrowed Suhrawardis arguments without accepting his philosophy of ishraq. Being an admirer o f the Sufi Abu Hafs Umar al-Suhrawardl (d. 632/1234), whose generally anti-philosophical views he shared, he was hardly a friend of the ishraqi philosopher Suhrawardi (d. 587/1191).


of Muhammad: while they are at the origin of the opposition between love and reason in mankind; fire and water in nature, they really belong together like light above light. Indeed, before the splitting of the primordial substance (jawhar) into the opposing elements of fire and water, they circulated through the worlds as cosmic light-rays entwined on top of each other. Only after the splitting apart the opposites pulled away from each other: fire moving always upward, water downward. Interestingly, however, even after the splitting, according to Razi, some part of the water in the form of steam joins the fire in its thrust towards the origin above. Thus, only the water not warmed by fire, in other words, profane reason, stays below. Once warmed, reason too has the possibility of ascending to higher regions.

The concept of the dual light emanation as well as the image of the secondary warming of water by fire make it evident that reason and love in Razls thought are not after all as irresolvable contraries as would appear on first view. Indeed, we can already gain the idea of the way it works out, how, despite his apparent contempt for reason, Razi can nevertheless recognize it as the lowest step on a scale which ends in pure mysticism at the top. Both the lower and the upper end of this scale, in fact, represent a certain kind of perfection, a twofold potential for perfection (kamaliyat) innate in mankind, which our author discusses at some length in the Treatise on Love and Reason (Najm-i Razi 1345/1966, pp. 42-48).

According to this model, the human being is, first, the perfect recipient of emanation from the Intellect (iqabul-i fayz-i aql) because within man as end- product of the creation process all the other forms of creation are present. As such, he is the perfectly balanced structure (kamal-i taswiya) alluded to in the Koran (38:72), the microcosm containing the inner aspect {malakut) of the entire creation. Even though perfect, however, this potentiality, which Razi identifies with mans natural, rational potential for cognition, represents only an indirect link to the prime source of emanation since it is conditioned by the entire creation process preceding its coming-about.

In contrast to this, the second kind of potential for perfection, the mystical one, represents a timeless, immediate emanation {fayz-i blwasita). Like the rational one, this mystical kind of perfection too corresponds to a predisposition of man, but unlike the former, it is not the result of any natural creation process but is due to a secret that is hidden, according to our Muslim mystic, in the Koranic images of the molding of Adams body with Gods two hands and of the direct infusion of the divine life-spirit. Instead of perfection, therefore, we should perhaps rather use words such as

Stages o f God-cognition and the Praise o f Folly.. 311

wholeness or completeness in this case, for this concept clearly involves the existence of man as body and soul taken as a whole. As we shall see later, this concept is one of the cornerstones of Razis mystical doctrine, in which hierarchical emanation theory is tied in an original way with belief in a creation act willed out of love.

Obviously this idea of the human being also implies the claim of mysticism to lead man beyond merely intellectual perfection towards his true self, to hatch him, as our author likes to put it. Philosophers and theologians who practice intellectual perfection in such a way that the spiritual and angelic prevail over the animal in them, may be counted among those called in the Koran the Companions of the Right (ashab al- maymana) and can serve as sites of manifestation of divine grace (lutj), counter to the Companions of the Left (ashab al-mash ama), in whom the animal and demonic prevail over the spiritual and the angelic, whereby they serve as sites of manifestation of divine wrath (cjahr). There exists, however, according to the Koranic imagery (56:8-11) which is brought to play here, yet a third group, known as the Outstrippers (al-sabiqun) or Those Brought Nigh (al-muqarrabun). To this third group belong only those few, the elect, the prophets and the great mystics (awliya ) who are by essence beyond all duality, indeed beyond their own dual nature as a body and a soul {ibid., pp. 50-61, 66f., 8 If). It is their task to hatch the SImurghs egg and to make sure, through appropriate care, that the birds can grow towards their true goal {ibid., pp. 83-99). Razi evidently counted himself to this third group, as may be seen from one of his quatrains, in which he alludes to his sobriquet of Daya, or wetnurse:

Whatever youve seen of us is only our shadow;

Beyond both worlds we stand, my boy.

Our substance comes in our work

not in our selves.Im the wetnurse of others,

and He that of me.{Ibid., pp. 86f.)14

14. Variant in Mirsad (1973A) p. 80.


It is by no means incidental to Razls elaboration of his theory of mystical upbringing that time and again he uses images out of the domain of organic life, of gardening. After all, his entire spiritual pedagogy is based on the decisive assumption that humankind is established to attain wholeness or completeness on the basis of its body-and-soul ground-plan. The same dynamic principle makes it also possible to say that humankind is fundamentally higher that Gods intimate angels themselves.15 Indeed, for Razi, the angels are purely static representatives of intellectual or celestial perfection. In this very perfection they are, according to rank, bound to their designated station (maqam m alum , Kor. 37:164). They cannot grow beyond it. Man, on the contrary, is capable of ascending (itaraqqi), as recipient of emanation from the Intellect, so that the intellect of every one can develop, through spiritual breeding (tarbiyat), from potential to act, possibly reach anothers intellect, or even go beyond. So, perfect capability [of attaining all] the levels of the Intellect belongs to man; for he possesses the instruments needed for this spiritual breeding (parwarish-i an), including the outer senses, the inner faculties, and other organs of perception such as the heart, the inner consciousness [or secret, sirr], and the spirit, all of which he has to perfection (ibid., p. 46).16

At this point it becomes clear how Razls idea of the human effectively differs from that of the philosophers. What distinguishes human beings, according to our mystic, enabling them to grow above solely rational knowledge in contrast to the angels, is precisely what the philosophers in general rate as inferior to it, namely, concrete perception of the realm of the particulars. This positive valuation of the concrete world, expressly inclusive of the outward senses, also appears to involve a certain turning away from the strongly spiritualist trend of Kubras mysticism and more towards Ibn Arabis view that vision of God is impossible without vision of the world.

A similar view is mirrored in Razis cosmology. Our author goes as far as to deny perfect god-cognition to the original spirit, which enjoyed cognition of only universals before the creation of the world. He bases this on the famous tradition according to which God himself stated that he created the world because he had been a hidden treasure wanting to be known (Kuntu

15. A view often held in Islam. Cf. A. J. Wensinck, The Muslim Creed, London 1965, pp. 200Ff.

16. The inner [or psychic] faculties (quwdyi bdtin, also called quwd-yi basharl by Razi) include, for example, the imaginative faculty, etc., constituting the inner senses o f Peripatetic philosophical psychology. As for the other organs o f perception, they are also inner senses but do not belong to the same category according to Razi: they are, rather, the truly mystical perceptive organs (see below).


kanzan makhfiyyan...). So, on the one hand, the spirit lost its immediate vicinity to God when it came down into the world of bodies and the seventy thousand veils of light and darkness appeared as a result; but paradoxically, this very alienation, this acquaintance with the veils brought the spirit closer to its true destination, that is, perfect cognition of God. To put it in a nutshell, only the sowing of the seed of the spirit in the earth of the body can lead to the growing of those perceptive organs which the angels lack. This means that the step from merely rational god-cognition towards the vision of all atoms of all worlds as a manifestation of the divine Attributes, or the emergence of mystical ma rifat-i nazarl in a given individual, is only made possible thanks to the descent of the spirit to the bodily world (Najm-i Razi 1973A, pp. 101-114; 117f.).17

One has to add, though, that this transplanation of the spirit into the body is only the necessary prerequisite for this developement to happen; it does not by itself guarantee its realization or completion. What is decisive is the care and growth of the truly mystical organ, the heart. But it remains true that, according to Razi, it does not matter whether vision (mushahadat) happens in the inner or the outer world once the heart is pure or clear. Such a heart may equally mirror suprasensory visions within itself with the aid of imagination, or behold the reflection of divine radiation in the physical world with the help of outer perception. Once the mirror of the heart is perfectly clear, the mystic can see God in all things, whether he looks into or outside himself.

Now while this kind of vision, the equivalent of ma rifat-i n a z a r l ,may convey an impression of some sort of pantheism or panentheism, it should nevertheless be recalled, as was indicated earlier, that it constitutes by itself only the threshold of the real or highest form of god-cognition, the m arifat-i shuhudl. Just as the spirit, mythologically speaking, must be planted in the realm of the body, through which it comes to view things, it must return to its origin. The veils must be lifted, so that the unity of the viewer with the viewed may be realized; or more precisely: that one may attain what our mystic sometimes calls the vision of the Viewed through the eyes of the Viewed - a paradoxical formula reminiscent of the intoxicated language of his older contemporary Ruzbihan-i Baqll (d. 1212) (Najm-i Razi

17. Cf. p. 267. Before its descent, the Spirit had knowledge o f (danist) Gods Unity, but it knew (shinakht) it yet not.

18. That mushahadat or vision in this context is the equivalent o f ma'rifat-i nazarl, i.e. the second stage o f god-cognition, is evident from a comparison of Razi (1973A), pp. 305 and 118. Also compare Razi (1973B), paras 47-49.


(1973A), pp. 305f.; Razi (1973B), para 50).19 More often, however, to point to the characteristic difference of the higher ma rifat-i shuhudl, Razi tends to omit the term vision {mushahadat) altogether, replacing it with unveiling (,mukdshafat)20 and reaching for other supravisual senses of the heart. Amongst the five senses of the heart with which, if they are sound, one can perceive the totality of the suprasensory world { dlam-i ghayb), the hearts palate is the one designated for the taste of love, faith and mystical cognition (7rfdrif (Najm-i Razi (1973A), pp. 192f.; Razi (1973B), para 65).

According to Kubra, the difference between the visionary and the experiential lies in the former coming about through the opening up of the inward sight (baslra), while the experiential, defined as a state of being inwardly touched by something met, refers to a real transformation of being {tabdll al-wujud) and of the spirit. This total transformation appears to be the final stage of a process which includes at some earlier stage a transformation of the five senses into other senses reaching into the suprasensory realm. Kubra does not say precisely what these other senses are; he only hints at an answer to this question by comparing them to the powers of imagination, those servants of reason that are active in our dreams (Meier 1957, paras 41-43/German intro pp. 97ff). By doing so, he implicitly admits their identity with the so-called faculties of the soul of Peripatetic school-psychology. Razi, on the contrary, makes a clear distinction between those faculties of the philosophical tradition, which he usually calls the human faculties (quwa-yi basharT), and the inner perceptive organs {mudrikat-i batinl), which are the above-mentioned mystical senses o f the. heart. Unlike the human faculties, these mystical organs are properly derived from the Sufi tradition: they belong to a scale of subtle substances {lata if) serving traditionally as a link between the material and the spiritual, between the human and the divine, such as the heart {qalb or dil), the spirit (ruh), and the secret or inner consciousness (sirr). However, in adopting this Sufi tradition, Razi modifies and expands it in a significant way by placing intellect ( aql) instead of the traditional Tower soul (,nafs) at its bottom level, by putting the spirit above the secret, and by adding another type o f secret consciousness, the arcane {khafi), at the top, so that the gamut extends in ascending order over the following five subtle

19. For Ruzbihan, see H. Corbin, En Islam iranien: Aspects spirituels et philosophiques, vol. in, Paris 1972, pp. 77ff. and 127ff.

20. This deviates from more generally used terminology, where mushahada takes precedence over mukdshafa. See Qushayri (1379/1959), p. 43; Abu Hafs al-Suhrawardl (1966), p. 529; Mahmud-i KashanI, Misbdh (n.d), p. 131.


substances: intellect, heart, secret, spirit, arcane (Razi 1973A, pp. 55, 117, 121, 200, 311-315 and Razi 1973B, para 45). Again one can see here that intellect is not excluded from the realm of the mystical but it occupies only the place traditionally assigned in Sufism to the lower soul.

Obviously, this fivefold structure of subtle substances or senses of the heart parallels the five external senses in some way. In fact, our author is quite explicit in establishing a parallel between the physical sense of touch and the intellect considered as one among the five senses of the heart. He writes: Just as the tactile sense is present in every limb of the body, enabling the body with all its parts to benefit from whatever is accessible to the tactile sense, the same applies to the intellect with regard to the heart, so the heart in its totality is enabled, thanks to intellect, to benefit from all intelligibles. In a similar way, the heart qua subtle substance, the secret and the spirit can function as sight, hearing and olfactory senses of the heart, respectively, while the arcane, of course, plays the role of the palate (Razi 1973A, p. 193; 1973B, para 65).21

In the light of the foregoing descriptions, it is more than evident that the arcane, or palate of the heart, is the true organ of m afifa t-i shuhudl, the direct mystical experience. What is fundamentally meant by this experiencing or tasting of cognition can, however, be fully understood only when we return with Razi to the Koranic Niche of lights (24:35) and imagine the arcane as the wick in the burning oil-lamp. Indeed, he explains, when God kneaded the clay of Adams body, that is, the dark niche, he also put into it the glass, the lamp, and the wick - respectively, the heart, the secret, and the arcane. Then He poured the oil, that is, spirit of His spirit, into that glass.

Now the Koranic verse referred to reads, the oil wellnigh would shine, even if no fire touched it . This mean, according to our author, that the spirit-oil has in itself an extraordinary Tight-potentiality (;nuranlyat) due to which the glowing glass (the heart) is perfectly capable of illuminating the inner recesses of the niche, namely, as intellect. What is thus illuminated in the inner recesses of the niche is, however, only what is called the human faculties {quwa-yi bashari, i.e., the faculties of the soul according to the philosophical tradition as indicated above), while the light-rays shining out through the latticework of the niche are known as the outer senses.

Therefore, while admitting the extraordinary power of this self-sufficient Tight-potentiality coming out as intellect, Razi places the emphasis on the

21. The equivalents for sirr and ruh are designated somewhat differently in Razi (1973A), pp. 312F.

316 Recherches en spiritucilite iranienne

word wellnight in the verse under discussion. As long as the oil is not, in fact, touched by fire, it is only an improper or non-authentic (majazi) glow that obtains. One is reminded here of the cold water, Razls metaphor for the intellect of the philosophers and dialectical theologians. His point is that neither the pure spirit-oil (the angelic world, malakut) nor the niche with the glass though without lamp, oil and wick (the carnal world, mulk) can by themselves make the true Light shine forth. Man in his wholeness is needed for the hidden treasure to appear; the entirety of the lightniche, in which the lamp is lit by the fire of divine light. But only the wick and the oil can really tell the tale of this theophany (tajalli), when they both let go their being (badhl-i wujud = fa n a ) to experience the savor of burning. It is the wick which makes the love-play between fire and oil possible, whereby the oil exchanges its non-authentic being for true Being (wujud-i haqlql = baqa) and the heretofore hidden fire-potential (;nariyat) becomes manifest as real (Razi 1973A, pp. 120-125; 1973B, paras 55-60).

3. The praise of folly

Najm-i Razls image of man presented above needs further elaboration. Given the human beings potential for becoming a perfect knower of God, less on the basis of his rational capability than due to his integration of all contradictions, it is reasonable to expect that this relative devaluation of the luminous side will be counterbalanced on the other side with a certain revaluation of the shadow.

This is precisely what happens in the case of our author. As we shall see, Razi does not shrink from applying the consequences of his holistic thinking to his theory of the soul (nafs), so that one cannot help being reminded of basic insights of modem depth psychology when reading this medieval Muslim mystic. His interpretation of the sentence He who knows him self..., now understood as He who knows his soul..., amounts, in short, to a recognition of the dynamic value of the non-rational, dark side of the soul.

Underlying this theory of the soul is a well-known Koranic verse that is frequently quoted by the mystics, perhaps because more than any other it can suggest an idea of that mystere which, to quote a word from Henry Corbin, is at the same time mystere de Dieu and mystere de VHomme (Corbin 1971, pp. 94-110, esp. 97).

Literally it says: we [God] offered the pledge (al-amdna) to the heavens, the earth and the mountains, but they refused to bear it and shrank from it.


But man has born it. Indeed he has been arrogant (zalum) and foolish (jahul) (33:72).

The specific place assigned to man in his Koranic verse has always puzzled interpreters. Modern religionists, suggesting that the mysterious pledge may mean life itself, have paralleled the theme with a neo-Sudanese creation myth in which the creator-god Soko first asked the stones if they wanted to have children and then die, like humans.

No!, they answered, so that thereafter they existed forever but remained sterile, in contrast to humans who are mortal but procreative.22

However, to explain why man is called arrogant and foolish in this context, a closer point of association could perhaps be found to start with in the myth of the prohibited tree of knowledge or cognition. Moreover, this association can be supported by an ancient exegetic tradition according to which no more time passed between mans acceptance of the pledge and his loss of paradise than between the Islamic noon and afternoon prayers (Tradition from Mujahid, cited in Maybudi 1339 h.s./1380 h.q., VIII, p. 94).

For our mystic, in any case, it is perfectly clear that the pledge is none other than the burden of cognition [or gnosis] (bar-i amanat-i ma'rifat); and he establishes a direct link between the acceptance of this burden by man and the arrogance and folly for which he is - apparently - being blamed. Here, Razi offers an interpretation which seems to be truly his own. He shows himself to be once again a master in the artful preparation of his unique mixture of emanation philosophy, creation account, and above all, a good dose of poetic imagery, a pinch of which we have already received.

Right on the first pages of his principal work our author draws up a rather particular theory of emanation (Razi, 1973A, pp. 37ff). He likens the emanation process to the six-times boiling down of a single mass of sugar. This process is carried out by God himself in such a way that what is left at the end is not fire and water but fire and earth, constituting, as one is quickly aware, nothing else than precisely arrogance and folly.

In this imagery, the first degree of emanation is represented by the as yet unboiled, white [or colorless] raw sugar (qand-i sapid), the sugar straight from the cane as it were, that is, as God produced it out of the light-ray of absolute Unity (ahadiyat). This first emanation is, of course, the pure spirit of Muhammad. From this white raw sugar God created, one after the other, six different categories of spirits (arwah) that correspond to the six decoction phases of the sugar. These existed before the creation of the corporeal world.

22. Cf. R. Paret (1993), p. 402.


Razi classifies these six categories of spirits under two different general rubrics, so that we actually have two parallel waves of emanation from the second to the seventh stage. Under the first rubric, there are: 1. the spirits of the prophets, 2. those of the great mystics (awliyd), 3. those of the believers, 4. those of the sinners ( asiyan), 5. those o f the hypocrites (munajiqan), 6. those of the unbelievers (kafiran). Under the second: 1. the spirits of humans collectively, 2. those of the angels, 3. those of the jinn, and4. through 6. those of other categories of demons and devils (shayatln, mar ad a and abalisa).

On a lower level, the spirit of animals and plants was created from the remains of the last decoctions of demons and devils spirits, while the elements of the material world were made out of the remaining murky sugar dregs.

Now, the fundamental idea Razi wishes to convey is that the darkness and turbidity of the sugar are generated not only in the material world. On the contrary, they are already programmed as part and parcel (ta biya) of the white raw sugar and become only increasingly present with each phase of the boiling process. The first two decoctions produce a still relatively pale sugar (nabat-i sapid and shikar-i sapid)', the third and fourth provide a reddish substance {shikar-i surkh and tabarzad), while the fifth and sixth result in a dark or black sugar {qawalib-i siyah and qutara). However, in every case the substance contains both light and dark elements, though one may not always be able to detect this. Each of the six kinds of sugar has its own perfection and its proper place in the process; each has its specific function and none can take the place of any other, as our mystic emphasizes. That there be no doubt about what he means, he solemnly declares:

Here now, a subtle mystery is being unveiled, of the subtlest nature, which no one has mentioned up to now. The matter is this that the darkness and turbidity that were present in the [original] sugar {qand) were programmed in such a way that darkness became the carrier of heat, turbidity that of density, and wherever in the various kinds of sugar [the six phases of boiling down] one finds more darkness and turbidity, there is correspondingly greater heat and density. Thus, shikar is one degree warmer and denser than nabat [i.e. the first phase], and the same applies analogically to the other kinds {ibid., p. 40).

Heat, of course, is the quality of fire, and one of fires characteristics is that it is rebellious or arrogant, pushing upward. That is why Iblls - the Devil, refusing to prostrate before Adam, created of c la y - arrogantly declared: I am better than him! (Koran 7:11-12); for he is created of fire.


Density, on the other hand, is the quality of earth, which is the fundamental substance of baser genres. Indeed the special characteristic of earth is its commonness and coarseness, whence comes the fact that animals are of grosser type and baser aims, seeking earthen, perishable fodder; for they are of the very earth. From the fire-quality stems all wrong-doing, and from the earth-quality, all ignorance. Drawn to the edge, these qualities are called zaluml and jabull - th e y paradoxically turn out to be precisely that arrogance and folly which together enabled man to accept the burden of cognition.

Fire obviously plays a decisive role in the thought of our Iranian mystic. We already have come to know it as the divine fire of love in his interpretation of the theme of the light niche - the fire igniting the spirit- oil in the lamp, and whose blaze is experienced by the black wick, the arcane substance of man. In the present context, too, Razi underscores its role as the fundamental substance of love, while at the same time pointing to fire as the essence of that power in man which oversteps defined limits, the sinful arrogance personified by Iblis, the Devil. This association is no coincidence; rather, it becomes thoroughly meaningful when we envision the love-fire of the mystic as a kind of passionate insubordination. In fact, Razi clearly stands in the tradition of that Islamic love-mysticism whose prominent representatives such as Ahmad-i Ghazall (the brother of the famous theologian) were accused by more conservative theologians for having attempted to save the honor of the Devil.23 To be sure, one cannot really speak of a true rehabilitation of the Devil in the case of our author. For him, it is only in combination with that other human characteristic which the Devil definitely lacks, namely, folly with its earthen heaviness or density, that the impish arrogance of man is to be valued positively as a precondition for his assuming the burden of cognition. Still, it is remarkable that Iblis, as Adams tempter in paradise, serves indirectly as the instrument of salvation history. When Adam let himself be seduced by Iblis to eat of the tree of eternity (Koran 20:118/120), his only error was that he did it out of the wrong impulse, due to his innocence (az salamat-i dil)\ for this tree, constituting the inner truth of religion (haqlqat-i din), was indeed ultimately meant for man. Now the tree in question was (according to the tradition prevailing in Islam) a wheat-tree; and everyone knows that wheat

23. Cf. H. Ritter (1955), pp. 540ff. Ahmad-i Ghazalis Tajrld j i kalimat al-tawhid does indeed assign a crucial function to the Devil within the citadel La ilaha ilia Allah, as I have tried to show elsewhere (cf Sakralraum und mystischer Raum im Islam, Eranos-Yearbook 44 (1975) pp. 231-265, esp. 256ff.) [here: pp. 327-355],

320 Recherches en spirituality iranienne

cannot be eaten raw, but must first be wrought into bread, being passed from one master-artisan (uslad) to another and dealt with appropriately. Similarly, the wheat of religion, which Adam had eaten raw, had to be passed from one prophet to the next to be skillfully worked, until it emerged as the perfected bread of religion from the oven of love, Muhammad (Razi 1973A, pp. 147- 152).24

To return to the other human characteristic, the earthen heaviness of folly (jahull) that resulted from the turbidity and increased density of the sugar, we have seen that its proper representatives within the creation are the beasts fashioned from earth. However, the particular quality of this weighty element is not only commonness and coarseness, as we have already heard. The sugars turbidity that leads to bodily existence, and of which the angels, being spirits of light, possess but little, is at the same time the dough-base of humility and submission to a higher principle ( ubudlyat), i.e. the basic religious attitude of man towards God. The angels did possess the spiritual clarity to recognize the burden of the pledge, but they lacked the strength to carry it. That is why the heavens refused to bear it and shrank from it, as it is said in the Koranic verse. The animals, on the other hand, would have been strong enough to carry the burden. But since not enough brightness of spirit was left for them in the process, they were simply unable to recognize the dignity of the burden of the pledge. Thus they - or, as it is said, the earth and the mountains - refused to carry this burden too. As a result, another being was necessary, one which encompassed both worlds, a creature that united the lowest and the highest within itself (Razi 1973A, pp. 4 If. Cf. 1973B, paras 55-56).

By directly creating Adam, by molding the clay and infusing the spirit into it, God, being himself in love as it were with Earth, bypassed the regular order of the process of emanation. The spirit as Gods vicegerent (khalifa) was to receive a throne and a house, a treasure-vault wherein all the treasures of the world were kept. Now, there was amongst these treasures an especially precious gem, truly a pearl, hidden in the oyster-shell known as the pledge of cognition. This precious gem, the jewel of love, had previously been reserved by the King for himself, kept secret from even his treasure guards, the angels. But once he had kneaded Adams body over the course of forty mornings - or forty thousand years - and after the clay of the heart, fashioned from the earth of paradise blended with the water of life, had been nurtured 360 times by glances from the sun of his eyes, whereupon treasury and treasure-chest were ready, He placed the pearl in the

24. Concerning the wheat, cf. ThaiabI (1308) pp. 20ff.

Stages' o f God-cognition and the Praise o f Folly. 321

oyster-shell in the chest and appointed Adams spirit (jan-i Adam) guardian of the treasure.

Now that was a situation totally unintelligible to the angels. For them, Adams body was nothing but a piece of clay. Sly old Iblis, on the other hand, did have a notion. Seeking to pursue the matter further, he circled around Adam from all sides, so as to examine him with his one-eyed eyesight. When he saw his open mouth, he said to the angels: Just wait, I am going to solve this problem! I am going to enter through this hole and see what is going on. Having said this, he entered Adam and as he examined him from inside, he discovered a small world, a microcosm: a sample of everything he had seen in the outer world was present within Adam. However, when he sought to push ahead to the heart, he had to turn about. The Kings chamber was locked up tight! Thus say the Sufi masters: Whoever has been rejected by one heart is rejected by all, and one who has been accepted by one heart is accepted by all (Razi 1973A, pp. 66-86).25

Thus the angels learned only half the truth. When they found out that Adams body was made out of all four elements, they cried: Blatant contradictions! Nothing good can come out of this! Full of doubt, they turned to God with the question: What, wilt Thou set therein one who will do corruption there, and shed blood, while we proclaim Thy praise and call Thee Holy? (Koran 2:28/30). With this question, they of course, implied a blame. Thus Adam - indeed God himself in reality - was the first being to incur the blame (malamat) of the devout: he was the first of the wild dervishes (;malamatl, incurrers of blame), preferring love ( ishq ba malamat) to the piety of the never-wrongdoers (zuhd ba saldmat) (ibid. pp. 81 and 71).

Here Razis imagery turns right back to the main theme. The angels stand not only for the rationalist philosophers and theologians, but also for the self- righteous pious, the dry ascetics, while Adam in his earthen folly represents the love-crazed dervish (malamatl, qalandar, rind) - a contrast which has been the subject of countless variations in Persian lyrics. Hafiz has the chaste angels knocking one night on the door of the wine-house to mold Adams clay into a cup and to drink with the poet, the humble earth- dweller, for The heavens could not bear the burden of the pledge;/The lot that had been cast they dealt to crazy me! (Hafiz, n.d., pp. 124f).

25. The pearl placed into Adams heart is traditionally understood to mean Muhammad (cf. Thalabi (1308) pp. 17ff., where it is however assumed that the angels knew this Muhammad-pearl, too).


Razis obvious disdain for the dry ascetics and his sympathy for the wild dervishes are more than literary pose. They are, rather, the direct expression of his mystical thought, a cast of mind that, with its open acceptance of the world, stands in a marked contrast to the radical abnegation of it in early Sufism. It is true that Sufis long before Razi had, as knowers and lovers, distanced themselves from unmitigated asceticism (.zuhd); but the main principle of this asceticism, fighting the compulsive soul (mukhalafat al-nafs), was hardly ever put into question. By contrast, our author seems to draw the consequences of a real change of attitude vis a vis the world and the Tower soul in Sufism. We shall now look in more detail at his teachings on the soul (nafs).

Know that the soul in the terminology of the masters of the Path is a fine steam exuding from the physical heart. The physicians call it the animal spirit. It is the source of all the blameworthy qualities, [the one referred to in the Koran as] inciting to evil (cf. Koran 12:53). As for its site within man, know that it encompasses all the limbs and parts of the body, the way oil is inherent in all the parts of the sesame seed. The soul of the other living creatures bears the same relationship to their bodies in terms of physical reality. However, the human soul has additional qualities that are not found in the souls of animals.

One of these additional qualities is subsistence (baqa *). Indeed, the human soul was given a taste of the realm of subsistence, so that after it has parted from the body, it subsists either in heaven or in hell...unlike the souls of animals, which have no such taste, becoming obliterated once separated from the body.

As for how the human soul acquired that taste of the realm of subsistence, know that subsistence is of two kinds: one is that which has always been and ever shall be, being the subsistence of God; and the second is that which, not having been, has come into existence and then subsists due to Gods letting it subsist (


Let us interrupt Najm-i Razi for a moment at this point. We can see that he has established a striking paradox. On the one hand, the mere animal soul enjoys no subsistence whatsoever, whereas the human soul got a taste of two kinds of subsistence. On the other hand, it is not, as one might expect, due to its relationship to the celestial spirit that the human soul owes its taste of the highest kind of subsistence, of absolute eternity, but due to the mystery of the molding of the body with Gods two hands. In other words, its sublime nobility derives from its lowly origin forged out of the earth.

The precious gem which confers this nobility on the soul can well be identified with that pearl of love which had been consigned to the oyster- shell of cognition in the treasure-chest of the heart - or with the wick of the arcane in the Tamp of the inner consciousness within the glass vessel of the heart - in any case, with the aliquid in anima which quite obviously, according to Razi, antecedes the infusion of the spirit, because it goes back to the molding of the body. Indeed the common clay itself received a special quality through this molding:

Whereas in the molding of Adams clay all the qualities - the satanic, those of the predatory and domestic animals, the plants and the minerals - where effectively there; still, given the special status of this molding as being directly performed by Gods both hands (Koran 38:75/74), every one of these blameworthy qualities received a mother-of-pearl coating of divine qualities, just as by the effect of the suns transmutatory glance raw stone turns into mother-of-pearl for ruby, hyacinth, emerald, turquoise, and agate {ibid., p. 67).

Since five gems are named, we can probably equate them with the five senses of the heart, the subtle organs of mystical cognition which as we have seen earlier are understood to grow towards their proper function under quasi-divine influence.

Our conclusion that the earthen provenance of the human soul is of decisive importance for its mystical potential according to Razi is also borne out by other aspects of what we might call his myth of the soul. Let us take up the story where we interrupted it and look more precisely at what happened after the infusion of the spirit.

Through the coupling of the spirit with the body, the siblings heart and soul were bom, that is to say, what are traditionally in Sufism the sites of praiseworthy and blameworthy attributes, respectively. Now the soul, as daughter of her mother, the body, became the site of all the seven blameworthy and baser qualities, while as daughter of her father, the spirit,


she nevertheless possessed some praiseworthy qualities as well. Her two principal vices are the two main irrational faculties of the soul in the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition, the covetous and the wrathful, which are usually rendered shahwa and ghadab in Arabic. Instead of shahwa, however, our author prefers to call the covetous hawa, the downward puli. This terminology is perfectly consistent with his general outlook. For the downward pull stems from the elements water and earth, while the wrathful, striving upwards, represents the elements air and fire. Hawa and ghadab, then, are the bestial and the satanic in man, the very material of hell, although at the same time they are, as one will already have guessed, also that folly (jahuli) and that arrogance (zalumi) which make humans the sole bearers of the pledge.

Hence the fatal error, says Razi, of those ascetics who are only ascetics and not lovers, believing that they must kill the bad traits of the soul and substitute their opposites. This method might be quite reasonable; but being so, it is fundamentally dualistic and does not really lead to the goal. Indeed, the soul as a whole is there to live; and besides, the dog of the soul gets only greedier when chained!

The philosophers believing that by substituting angelic (meaning rational) qualities for animal ones they can attain perfection fall into the same error. Since they deem reason the highest good, the noble senses of the heart, indeed the intellect in the true sense, remain hidden to them.

This leaves as the only effective method the application of the elixir of religious practice {sharVat). As long as the two principal vices of the soul are not offset by this elixir, man is indeed prone to become either a beast of pray or a beast of lust.

Not surprisingly, then, the mystical pedagogy is founded on the application of this elixir. It is a mysterious process in which the great stages of creation - the descent of the spirit to the bodily world and the return, on Resurrection Day, of a subtle body (qalab-i latif) consisting predominantly of fire and air - are, so to speak, projected upon the individual human being. The winged steed of Muhammad, the Buraq, known from his famous celestial journey, is employed for both the spirits descent ad its retum-trip. It flies downward on the wing of the downward pull - th a t is, of folly (Jahuli). On the wing of the wrathful - th a t is, of arrogance {zalum i)- it flies upward. However through the mystical transformation process, both wings soar upwards: the downward pull turns to love { ishq, mahabbat), and the wrathful to mystical energy (ghayrat, himmat). The Sufis transform the beast of pray into a royal falcon which


returns to the wrist of the king, and the steed of the soul into the Buraq of the spirit. Sensing the call to return, this soul-animal hurls itself like the crazy moth with both wings, folly and arrogance, at the candle of Unity. Thus, Razi concludes, he who knows himself in this sense as a moth, knows God as the candle {ibid., pp. 175-186; 198-201; 405).

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Documents

Landolt • Stages of God-Cognition and the Praise of Folly According to Najm-i Razi