The Heart of Islamic Philosophy: The Quest for Self-Knowledge in the Teachings of Afdal al-Din Kashani

William C. Chittick

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Published online: 01 November 2003 Published in print: 08 November 2001 Online ISBN:
9780199834075 Print ISBN: 9780195139136

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CHAPTER

2 The Worldview of Islamic Philosophy 

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Abstract
Despite the opinions of those who would de ne the Islamic tradition in narrow terms, most of the
Muslim practitioners of Hellenistic philosophy found it perfectly compatible with their religion. They
looked upon the rst principle of Islamic faith – tawhîd or the assertion of divine unity – as a universal
truth that underlies every sound understanding of the nature of things. Those who want to grasp their
outlook, however, need to put aside the scientism that governs modern thought and to look upon the
universe as they saw it. They established their perspective rst by conceptualizing the qualities that
infuse the universe and the soul, but their purpose in doing so was to conform themselves to the First
Real by perfecting their understanding and their character. They integrated the intellectual disciplines
into one grand vision rooted in wujûd, a term that is commonly translated as “existence” but is
explained correctly by Bâbâ Afdal to mean both “being” (bûd) and “ nding” or “perception” (yâft).
Drawing from both the understanding and the experience of wujûd, the philosophers engaged with
both ontology and epistemology and drew appropriate conclusions for psychology (the knowledge of
soul and intellect), cosmology (the descent of apparent reality from the First Real and its reintegration
into its source), and ethics (the diversity of human souls and the normative principles that guide
people to the actualization of virtue).

Keywords: Arabic, cosmology, epistemology, ethics, Greek, intellect, intelligence, Islam, ontology,
philosophy, spiritual psychology
Subject: Islamic Philosophy, History of Islam, Islam
Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

Philosophy's relation to the Islamic tradition has often been debated in modern studies. A good number of
the experts consider the relation tenuous, and others disagree. The di erence of opinion has much to do
with di ering understandings of the key terms of the debate. No one seems to have doubted that at least
some of the philosophers are in fact doing “philosophy” in the Greek tradition. The questions arise because
of the label “Islamic” or “Muslim” and disagreements on the nature of Islam. Some scholars have held that
 philosophy and Islam have little to do with each other, and others maintain that philosophy plays an
important and even essential role in the Islamic tradition. Typically, those who hold that Islam and
philosophy are incompatible have a rather narrow de nition of what constitutes Islamic belief and practice,
while those who see no essential con ict de ne their terms much more broadly.

1
When considering this discussion, which comes up quickly in most general works on Islamic philosophy,
we need to remember that, by and large, the Western experts have been trained in the history of Greek and

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Western philosophy, not in Islamic thought, which means that they have understood philosophy's role
largely in Western terms. They have also tended to have a modern preconception about the mutual hostility
between religion and philosophy. For many modern scholars, after all, religion is beneath the dignity of the
intellectual, whereas true philosophy represents a grand quest for truth on the part of those too enlightened
to fall for religious dogma. Some of the well‐known experts have told us that the philosophers had to hide
their true beliefs in “esoteric” formulations and bow to the rhetorical needs of their times, because their
teachings went against the grain of the religious tradition. In this view, it is irrelevant that, on the surface at
least, most philosophers considered philosophy a legitimate way to understand and practice Islam and that
p. 30 they saw no contradiction between Islamic faith and the philosophical quest. Such statements in the texts
are considered window‐dressing to fend o the criticisms of benighted dogmatists.

There is, of course, a great deal of evidence to show that philosophy was not compatible with the religious
sentiments of a large body of Muslims, but there is also evidence that many of the philosophers considered
themselves sincere followers of the Koran and the Prophet. Many of those who attacked philosophy, such as
the enormously in uential Ghazālī, were themselves highly sophisticated advocates of philosophical
thinking. Their objection was not to the training of the mind that philosophers underwent, but to certain
speci c conclusions many philosophers reached, conclusions that they considered not only hostile to the
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teachings of Islam, but also unwarranted by the philosophical evidence.

One needs to remember that the theologians and jurists who attacked the philosophers often attacked their
theological and juridical opponents with the same vehemence. Islam's intellectual territory was always
hotly contested by several schools of thought, and the philosophers appear less as a unique school than as
one of the contending factions. As for the philosophers' need to toe the rhetorical line, this varied from time
to time and place to place, but it was largely a matter of adhering to the political correctness of the day. My
own sense of Islamic history is that at many times and places, indeed, in by far the majority of times and
places, the philosophers could say and write anything they wanted, because no one really cared, given that
the vast majority of people had no interest in such erudite issues. The situation then was not much di erent
than the situation now; there was both a pressure not to question sacred cows publicly, and an abysmal
ignorance on the part of most people about what the quest for wisdom might demand.

Philosophical Issues in the Islamic Tradition

To grasp why many Muslim intellectuals over the centuries have considered philosophy an integral part of
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the Islamic tradition, we need to have some understanding of what this tradition entails. Like other
religions, Islam addresses three basic levels of human existence: practice, understanding, and virtue; or
body, mind, and heart; or, to use the well‐known Koranic triad, islām (submission), īmān (faith), and iḥsān
(doing what is beautiful). These concerns are patently obvious to anyone who has studied the Koran or the
Hadith (the sayings of the Prophet), and Muslims have always considered the “search for knowledge” that
the Prophet made incumbent on the faithful to pertain to all three of these domains.

Islamic practice is rooted in the Sunnah or model of the Prophet, who demonstrated how the Koran could be
applied to everyday life. Islamic understanding is rooted in investigating the objects of faith that are
identi ed by the Koran—God, the angels, the scriptures, the prophets, the Last Day, and the “measuring
 out” (qadar) of good and evil. Islamic virtue is grounded in the attempt to nd God present at all times and
in all places, just as the Prophet found him present. Practice pertains to the domain of the body,
understanding to the mind or “intelligence” or “intellect” or “reason” (ʿaql), and virtue to the heart (qalb),
where one is able to experience the reality of God without any intermediary.

p. 31 The domain of practice came to be institutionalized in the Sharia (Islamic law), whose experts, commonly
called the “ulama” (ʿ ulamāʿ)—the “knowers” or “scholars”—were trained in the science of jurisprudence

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( qh). The domain of understanding developed into three basic approaches to knowledge, which can be
called “Kalam” (dogmatic theology), “theoretical Su sm,” and “philosophy” (falsafa). The domain of
virtue, the most inward of these domains, stayed for the most part hidden, but nonetheless it took on the
broadest variety of manifestations. To it belong personal piety, devotion to God, love, sincerity,
“godwariness” (taqwā), and many other human qualities bound up with the interior life. The major
institutional manifestation of this third domain is Su sm, but it also shows itself in many other realms of
Islamic culture and civilization, including the general Muslim love for beauty (and therefore art on all levels,
from clothing to music to architecture) and the extreme concern to observe the adab or “courtesy” of every
situation.

The word adab, for which we have no adequate English equivalent, refers to proper and beautiful
deportment and correct behavior, both physical and verbal. It denotes a broad domain that includes all the
little courtesies and politenesses, observance of propriety and good manners, elegant handling of social
situations, accomplishment in belles lettres and poetry recital, skill in calligraphy and music, care to
observe one's social and professional duties, and perfect harmony between outward behavior and inward
attitude. I stress its importance because it plays a signi cant role in Bābā Afḍal's exposition of the nature of
4
virtue and the quest for human perfection.

The domain of submission and practice that is governed by the Sharia concerns every Muslim, because this
domain de nes a Muslim qua Muslim. The rst and primary practice is the “witnessing” (Shahadah, from
Arabic shahāda), the verbal attestation that there is no god but God and that Muḥammad is his messenger.
The rest of Islamic practice and faith follows upon this, and many theologians have argued that uttering the
Shahadah is the only thing really essential in being a Muslim.

The second domain, that of faith and understanding, addresses what it is that Muslims are bearing witness
to. When they say, “There is no god but God,” what does this mean? Who or what is God? No one can have
faith in God without a concept of “God,” though it is perfectly possible to observe the rules of the Sharia
without faith—for reasons of social solidarity, prudence, or hypocrisy, for example.

The third domain, that of virtue and the interior life, pertains to deepening of practice and faith so that
these permeate the soul and lead to the perception of God's reality and presence in all things. Hence the
Prophet's famous de nition of iḥsān (“doing what is beautiful”): “It is that you serve God as if you see Him,
for if you do not see Him, He sees you.”

It should be obvious that anyone with a mind will not be willing to accept that “There is no god but God”
without having a clear idea of what God is. The sentence must make sense. The three schools of thought that
have addressed the issues of faith—Kalam, theoretical Su sm, and philosophy—were concerned to make
sense of this and many other Koranic statements.

The objects of faith came to be discussed under three basic rubrics, known as the “three principles” of the
religion—asserting unity (tawḥīd), prophecy (nubuwwa), and the “return” to God (maʿād). Muslim
p. 32 intellectuals who investigated and explained these issues can be classi ed more or less according to the
point of view they adopted. The terms Kalam, theoretical Su sm, and philosophy simply indicate in a rough
sort of way three basic perspectives. In earlier Islamic history, it is usually clear which perspective an author
is advocating, but in later texts, the perspectives tend to be more and more mixed. Already in Ghazālī, we
 have a thinker who cannot be classi ed according to this scheme, because he writes works from each point
of view, and he sometimes mixes the perspectives.

More than anything else, the three intellectual perspectives di er in their methodology and goals, not in
their objects of investigation. All three schools of thought wanted to understand God, prophecy, and the
return to God. But both the dogmatic theologians and the philosophers considered ʿaql (intellect, reason) as
the primary means whereby one achieves this understanding. The theologians insisted that the Koran must

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be the rst point of reference, and their goals were more or less “apologetic”; their stance was to defend the
truth of the Koranic accounts. For their part, the philosophers did not consider it necessary to refer to the
Koran, since, they maintained, intellect alone is su cient to achieve the nal goal, which, in short, is
“wisdom,” or knowledge of things as they are combined with practice that accords with the knowledge. As
for the Su thinkers, they considered the Koran the primary source of knowledge, but they held that rational
investigation was not adequate to achieve a full understanding of the Koran, because such investigation
could only be a purely human e ort. People should rather devote themselves to God, who would personally
undertake to teach the meaning of the Koran to his devotees if and when they reached su cient worthiness
to understand—according to God's will and grace, not the devotees' e orts. God's own teaching was called
by various names, such as “unveiling” (kashf), “true knowledge” or “gnosis” (maʿrifa), and “witnessing”
(mushāhada).

The philosophers may not have agreed with the formulations and stances of the dogmatic theologians and
the Su s, but they did not disagree that the three principles of faith designate important issues that must be
grasped if we are to make sense of the world and ourselves. They did not accept tawḥīd simply on the basis of
belief. Rather, they undertook to demonstrate the fundamental unity of reality using a variety of arguments.
Discussion of tawḥīd is bound up with the explication of how the world is related to the “First” (al‐awwal) or
the “Author” (al‐bāriʿ)—Koranic divine names that are typical philosophical designations for God. Study of
the world, then, or “cosmology,” becomes part of the quest to grasp tawḥīd. So also, one must know who it
is that knows and how it is that the knower can know, so “epistemology” is also an essential dimension of
all philosophical investigation. Moreover, to prove anything at all one must have a set of guidelines for the
rational process, and this is the role of “logic.”

Any re ective thinker must ask how it is humanly possible to know the First, which is typically understood
to be an order of reality totally di erent from that of things. The religious tradition speaks of prophets, who
are the necessary vehicles for providing knowledge of God's reality and the guides to achieving the
ful llment of human life. For the theologians, faith in prophecy was a starting point for their position. But
the philosophers considered the necessity of prophets a legitimate issue for debate, and the conclusions
reached by some of them were harshly criticized by theologians and Su s.

p. 33 Whatever position the philosophers took on prophecy, they never avoided the issue. After all, the questions
it raises are utterly essential to any conception of the validity and usefulness of knowledge: What is it that
human beings should strive to know? Can they come to know what they should and must know on their own,
or do they need to be instructed? If they need to be instructed, what is it that establishes the competence and
authority of the teacher? Is it true that, in the acquisition of real knowledge, people must have recourse,
directly or indirectly, to those designated human beings whom the religious tradition calls “prophets”? If it
is true, why is it true? What are the special characteristics of prophetic knowledge that make it inaccessible
to human intelligence functioning on its own?

Finally, the third principle of Islamic faith—the return to God—is even more basic to the philosophical
quest. The philosophers often discuss it under the heading, “The Origin and the Return” (al‐mabdaʿwa'l‐
maʿād), since talk of our return demands talk of our origin, that is, how we got here in the rst place. While
investigating human nature's relation to the cosmos, the philosophers addressed all the issues connected
with death and resurrection, a domain that is sometimes called the “compulsory return.” In doing so, they
 strove to understand how the world is connected to the First and how it undergoes various stages of
unfolding—what we might call its “devolution” and subsequent “evolution.” In their view, the very nature
of the Origin leads to a Return by a corresponding trajectory.

Ultimately, all the philosophical concerns hover around the issue that is sometimes called the “voluntary
return.” People will be returning to the First Origin whether they want to or not. The philosophers held that
people should strive to return by a route that allows for the full development of the potentialities of human

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nature. This alone could bring about the happiness and wholeness of the “self” or “soul” (nafs) in both this
world and the next. They undertook voluminous investigations of the nature of the soul and related issues,
such as self‐knowledge, freedom of choice, and the achievement of human “perfection” (kamāl) or
“completion” (tamām). For most of them, philosophy was the way to ensure a proper and congenial
homecoming to the First. Here they commonly employed the Koranic term “felicity” (saʿ āda), which is the
standard expression in the Koran and Islamic texts in general for the happiness of paradise.

Historians of philosophy have sometimes obscured what was at issue in discussions of the voluntary return
by translating the word saʿ āda as “eudaemonia,” thereby suggesting that the concept was borrowed from
the Greeks and would have been strange to ordinary Muslims. Certainly the arguments and the technical
vocabulary of the philosophers would have been strange to ordinary Muslims, just as the analogous
Christian arguments in the premodern world would have been strange to ordinary Christians, and just as
contemporary philosophical discussions are strange to most people today. Nonetheless, the notion of an
ultimate happiness that is contrasted with an ultimate misery or wretchedness is utterly basic to Islamic
thinking, philosophical or not. It is precisely this that determines the urgency of both the religious and the
philosophical quest, not social or political considerations. When “All is perishing but the face of God,” as
the Koran puts it, the a airs of this world have little ultimate signi cance. The philosophers never forgot
p. 34 that philosophy is preparation for death. Certainly the a airs of this world need to be taken care of, but
always with full awareness of the body's disappearance and the soul's subsistence. Any rational person
would want to act in keeping with his or her own ultimate good, which is to say that activity must focus on
the important things, which are those that have a positive e ect on the soul's becoming and its nal
destination.

Intimately connected with discussion of the soul's return is the domain of “ethics,” akhlāq in Arabic. The
Arabic word is the plural of khuluq, which can perhaps best be translated as “character” or, in the plural,
“character traits.” This word derives from the same root as khalq, which means “creation,” and which, in
the usual unvowelled Arabic script, is written exactly the same as khuluq. The very use of this word shows
that “ethics” has to do with the soul's created nature. It follows that understanding the nature of proper
behavior is inseparable from understanding the reality and purpose of creation. In other words, ethics is not
simply a moral issue, but a cosmological and ontological one as well.

Islamic ethical teachings have much in common with the ethical teachings of other traditions, no doubt, but
the philosophic (and also Su ) rationale for these teachings reaches back to the underlying nature of reality
itself. The praiseworthy character traits that must be achieved have nothing “conventional” or “arti cial”
about them—though practical instructions and legal rulings certainly do have an eye on convention—
because these traits were not invented by human beings. Rather, they pertain to the nature of things. Here
human freedom is the wild card, which means that character traits will be shaped by individual choices. It is
these choices that the philosophers want to direct toward the summum bonum, which they often call the
“Sheer Good” (al‐khayr al‐maḥḍ)—a common philosophical name of God.
 Quality and Quantity

For modern readers, the premodern mind is especially di cult to penetrate. This is largely because over the
past two centuries, scienti c thinking has become totally dominant, and along with it the idea that the only
valid knowledge is that which comes by way of the empirical and experimental sciences. It has not been
uncommon for contemporary scholars to hold that medieval metaphysics and logic may have something to

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teach us, but that medieval cosmology was an imaginative construction having no connection with scienti c
laws or the real world, and hence of little interest to us moderns. This helps explain why historians of
Islamic thought have paid scant attention to cosmology and psychology, while they have devoted a great
deal of energy to those aspects of the philosophical enterprise that possess what we recognize today as a
“scienti c” avor, especially mathematics and astronomy.

If in the recent past the aims and goals of much of the scholarship in the history of Islamic philosophy have
been determined by the truth claims of science, this does not mean that scholars now investigating the
history of ideas necessarily accept the exclusive authority of the scienti c worldview. This is not the place to
enter into the ongoing debates about the epistemological status of empirical science, but it should be clear
to anyone with some knowledge of the contemporary scene that the earlier belief in its inerrancy and
p. 35 exclusive possession of the truth has largely been abandoned. However, the type of thinking that has
been promulgated by “scientism”—that is, the belief that science alone can o er real and rational
explanations for things—permeates most of the modern disciplines and lters down into the furthest
reaches of education and popular culture. Even if many professional philosophers have long since seen
through the claims of scientism, it remains a major stumbling block for modern readers who want to grasp
5
the nature of premodern world views in general, and Islamic philosophy and cosmology in particular.

Scientism is a stumbling block because it has established the opinions that determine the worldview of the
vast majority of people. The idea that science alone o ers true and reliable knowledge is so deeply
entrenched in popular culture that it is di cult to dispute the conclusions of Rustum Roy, a distinguished
physicist and a critic of the endemic scientism of modern culture. As he is fond of pointing out, science has
now become our “theology” and technology our “religion,” and there are few people in the intellectual
6
establishment who risk incurring the anathema that is pronounced on heretics.

There are many ways to conceptualize the manner in which scientistic thinking stands in the way of
grasping the goals and purposes of the world's wisdom traditions. One way that I have found especially
useful is that outlined by the contemporary Su philosopher René Guénon in his prescient book, written in
1945, The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times. A parallel understanding often surfaces in the well‐
known philosophical novel by Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Both authors speak in
detail about the contrast between “quality” and “quantity,” though their viewpoints are far from identical.
In order to clarify the peculiarities of premodern thought that are omnipresent in Islamic thinking, it may
be useful to investigate the relationship between these two concepts in Islamic terms.

Pure and absolute quality is the ultimate, unitary Reality that gives rise to all qualities and all quantity. It is,
in short the unadulterated light of Being, or the Essence of God. This Absolute Quality can only be
conceptualized in terms of speci c, relative qualities, which are commonly called the “divine attributes,” or
the “divine names.” Quantity is born from the fact that Absolute Quality in its utter undi erentiation can be
understood in terms of many speci c qualities, such as necessity, rstness, knowledge, will, power, and
creativity. In religious terms, the one God has “ninety‐nine” names, and these are the root of the quantity
and multiplicity that appear in creation.

When the First gives rise to the universe, it does so in terms of its qualities. The universe itself is the place of
plurality, di erentiation, and dispersion. The more we study and analyze the universe, the more we see the
multiplicity that allows us to discuss discrete and distinct things. By and large, the modern scienti c
 disciplines have sought explanation on the quantitative side of things, and thus mathematics is the key
discipline. The “quantitative side of things” is the appearance of things as discrete individuals that can be
further subdivided and analyzed. The drive of modern physics to nd the ultimate particles is a good
example of this perspective taken to an extreme. In contrast, the “qualitative side of things” represents
everything that allows phenomena to be conceptualized in terms of the qualities that derive from Pure
Quality, especially the eminently human qualities such as awareness, compassion, wisdom, and justice.

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p. 36 Investigating the quantitative side of things is perfectly legitimate, of course, and the modern scienti c
disciplines illustrate how practical such investigation can be. It is illegitimate only to claim that this alone is
real knowledge and that the elucidation of the qualitative side to reality tells us nothing of signi cance. This
is precisely “scientism”—to hold that real knowledge comes from empirical science alone. This way of
thinking, though attacked by many intellectual currents in the modern world, still permeates modern
education, and it has left us with a legacy of an almost compulsory quanti cation. As a result, people tend to
see the world around them and their own selves only in terms of discreteness and rei cation. They look at
things, and they cannot see them as anything but things—never as signs or markers or pointers or symbols.
From grade school they are taught to believe that things are real in themselves, and that this reality can be
expressed only scienti cally, which means mathematically and quantitatively. If some qualities, such as
colors, can be expressed in numbers, they are real, but those qualities that cannot be expressed
quantitatively—and most cannot—are unreal.

Given that the scientistic worldview sees reality in quantitative terms, the further away from quanti cation
we move, the less real our discussion appears. This means that the qualities and characteristics of our
humanity that even today have a certain primacy—such as love, generosity, compassion, justice, and their
opposites—are taken out of the realm of real things and placed on the side of the subjective and, ultimately,
the indi erent. What is considered real is, on the one hand, what the scientists say is real, and on the other,
raw power, which is the domination of quantity and accumulation over everything that pertains to the
qualitative domain. The end result has been the dehumanization of the scienti c and technological realms,
not to mention those realms that are built on the scientism that purports to extend science into all human
life. This is especially obvious in the modern academy, where the social sciences contend for respectability
through quanti cation, and where so much of the theorizing in the humanities has been reduced to issues of
political, social, and psychological power.

It is a basic perception of Islamic thinking that reality lies in “quality,” that is, at the opposite end of the
scale from what can be grasped through quantitative investigation. The further we move from the domain of
pure quantity and the more we ascend beyond the possibility of quanti cation in the direction of the One
Quality, the more we are dealing with real issues. In other words, the more we turn away from the
dispersion, multiplicity, and discreteness of the quantitative realm, the more we can focus on the
coherence, unity, intelligibility, and inherent luminosity of the qualitative realm. As a result, we are moving
in the direction of the rst principle of Islamic thought, tawḥīd, which is the assertion of reality's unity. In
discussing tawḥīd, we are talking about how the realities that ll the universe are related to the One. In other
words, to grasp tawḥīd is to nd the reverberations of the One both in the cosmos and in the soul, and these
reverberations are seen precisely in the harmony, coherence, and pattern established by real qualities.

If the Islamic view of things understands reality to lie on the qualitative side of the scale, the scientistic
worldview sees reality as immersed in the quantitative domain. For the Islamic philosophers, this is to be
p. 37 entranced by the images and obscurations and to be unaware that reality is to be sought in the intelligible
luminosity of the One Real. As the outstanding historian of the Platonic tradition, A. H. Armstrong, writes,

Our consciousnesses are nowadays pretty rmly settled on the bottom of the lake, down among the
broken lights and shadows and re ections. We cannot be as sure as the ancients of our ability to
raise our heads above water into the light of the eternal. . . . One reason for this lack of con dence is
 that the brilliant and technically admirable developments of philosophical discourse in modern
times have made it very much less likely than even Plotinus thought that the path of discursive
reason will lead us to awareness of rather than disbelief in an objective eternal reality quite outside
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and independent of the dreams and images of the lake, or the psychê.

The Islamic philosophical disciplines all focus on pulling things together, nding the grand patterns that
unify, searching out the source of the broken lights and re ections, lifting the head above the water, and

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seeing the objective eternal reality outside the images it throws. The quest is to perceive the light of the
Supreme Good that is re ected and refracted in the world. Real knowledge comes from grasping the
relationships and connections that are established by the luminous rays of that God who is “the Light of the
heavens and the earth” (Koran 24:35). The way to nd these relationships and connections is to see
multiplicity as coming forth from the eternal qualities, which are the realities rooted in the First Real (al‐ḥ
aqq al‐awwal). The goal is always to nd a qualitative coherence with roots in unity. Quanti cation can play
no more than a secondary role. Even in the ancillary sciences such as astronomy, where quanti cation is a
necessary aid, the objective is to understand the coherence and unity of the grand celestial patterns that
appear to the eye, not to analyze the things qua things.

Generally speaking, modern science has no use for any quality that cannot be quanti ed, which may help
explain the contempt with which many hard‐nosed scientists look upon the social and psychological
sciences. They sense that quanti cation is being applied where it does not belong. It follows that the vast
majority of the issues that were important to the Muslim philosophers in their attempt to grasp the reality
of the natural world seem irrelevant to scientists and, with even more reason, to scientism. Since the
modern zeitgeist is infused with scientistic thinking, the philosophical arguments upon which cosmology
was based seem subjective and imaginary, or strangely abstract and irrelevant to what is actually happening
in the real world in which we live.

The Islamic philosophers would respond to the scientistic objections by pointing out that the issue is an
ancient one: how do we know what is real? What could ever lead us to think that quanti cation provides us
with explications of the “real” world? Certainly, quanti cation has its uses, and modern technology is living
proof of this. But are the uses to which quanti cation has been put the proper ends of human endeavor? Are
they any proof that “reality” has been grasped? What, after all, is a human being? If we do not know what is
p. 38 real, if we do not know what it means to be human, and if we do not know the purpose of life, how can we
conclude that we are putting things to their proper use?

In one passage Bābā Afḍal explains why he has not entered into any detailed discussion of individual things.
His rationale is simply that reality does not lie on the side of quanti cation, but rather in the direction of the
universal principles and fundamental qualities. To focus on the individual things turns people away from
the real issues that face them in their own becoming. Only by turning back toward the One Origin can they
hope to achieve their true human status.

There was no reason to talk in more detail, with more and longer explanation, because tracking
down and bringing forward the individuals of the particular world and the temporal and locational
state of each keeps people distracted from universal existents and meanings. If there is
assiduousness and constancy in re ecting upon this, the goers and lookers will become heedless of
the nal goal of going and looking. They will make the particular bodies and the states of the
individuals the focus of their seeing and insight and envisage them as the settling place of their
seeing. (Muṣannafāt 237; HIP 239)

For Bābā Afḍal speci cally and Islamic philosophy generally, understanding the human situation and
grasping the value of knowledge depends upon “the nal goal of going and looking.” In contrast, the
modern disciplines see the real issue to lie in “the particular bodies and the states of the individuals.” But if
 we do not know the nal goal, how can we understand the bodies and states in any more than a contingent
and arbitrary way? The nal goal has to be stated before the appropriateness of activity can be judged. In
most modern thought, the dilemma of needing a goal to make meaningful judgment yields the practical
solution of asserting that all goals are individual and without ultimate meaning. The result is the
omnipresent relativism that lters into every domain of thought and culture. In contrast, Islamic
philosophy never lost sight of the fact that “absolute relativism” is a contradiction in terms. There always
remains an absolute point of reference that allows for secondary and relative goals to be given their proper

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place. This absolute point of reference is the One Real, from which all things come forth.

Bābā Afḍal maintains that understanding the nal goal of human endeavor depends on self‐knowledge. But
the self cannot be investigated in the quantitative terms of the modern disciplines. One might reply that
various schools of psychology do investigate the self. However, the more they attempt to do so, the less their
pretensions to be “scienti c” are taken seriously in the academy. By and large, those who do dare to
mention concerns such as “self‐knowledge” are quickly relegated to the domain of pop psychology and New
Age u . No one can deny that many contemporary thinkers have been deeply concerned that the modern
perspective of “knowledge for control” or “instrumental rationality” has opened a yawning chasm that
prevents appreciation of the premodern and traditional viewpoint, that of “knowledge for understanding”
or “wisdom.” But this concern rarely lters down to the cultural and educational institutions that function
to indoctrinate society into the current worldview.

p. 39
Basic Qualities

The Muslim philosophers think that to speak about phenomena in quantitative terms is to put the cart
before the horse. The patterns that we perceive everywhere demand unifying principles behind the patterns,
and these in turn must be tied together by higher principles and ultimately by the supreme principle. On the
level of principles, the only role for numbers is to illustrate the gradual unfolding and di erentiation of
qualities. Many of the philosophers showed great interest in the Pythagorean tradition precisely because of
their appreciation for numbers as a means to express the underlying order and hierarchy of reality. In
chapter 3 we will see a few examples of the utilization of numerical reasoning for these sorts of ends by the
Ikhwān al‐Ṣafāʿ, and so also in Bābā Afḍal's Book of the Everlasting.

The foundational qualities or principles that are closest to absolute unity are the grand realities discussed in
Islamic philosophical and theological thinking, though the language used to name these realities diverges
widely according to the perspective. Kalam and theoretical Su sm speak of foundational qualities largely in
terms of the divine attributes established by the Koran. Thus we have attributes such as mercy, compassion,
knowledge, life, power, desire, speech, justice, forgiveness, vengeance, gentleness, severity, pardon, wrath,
and so on, all of which are derived from Koranic names of God.

The early philosophers tried to avoid the religiously tinged language and preferred instead words and
expressions that have a “rational” rather than a “revelational” sound to them. Nonetheless, many of their
basic investigations of primary qualities employ terms that are also Koranic divine attributes. After all, the
Koran is liberal in ascribing names to God, and the philosophers had no choice but to express themselves in
the language that the Koran itself had xed and established. Even when the philosophers chose designations
for God not found in the Koran, there are few important Arabic roots that the Koran does not employ, and
the use of any term derived from any of these roots has a resonance for those who have memorized and
recited the book from childhood—and this includes most educated Muslims, and many of the uneducated.

To take an example of a philosophical discussion of foundational qualities, let us look at the third book of
Avicenna's Dānish‐nāma‐yiʿlāʿ, which deals with the basic attributes of existence, that is, ilāhiyyāt, literally
8
“the divine things,” or, as it is often loosely translated, “metaphysics.” After a general introduction on the
 concept and reality of “existence” and a review of basic terminology needed to discuss existent things—
such as substance and accident, quality and quantity, universal and particular, one and many, priority and
posteriority, cause and e ect, nite and in nite, possible and necessary—Avicenna turns to the major topic
of the work, which is the Necessary in Existence, that is, God. Then he proceeds to analyze seven attributes
that must be ascribed to any reality whose existence is necessary: unity, eternity, knowledge, desire, power,
wisdom, and generosity. Finally he directs his attention to the soul's felicity and to the qualities that are
found in the cosmos. Notice that six of these seven attributes are explicitly attributed to God by the Koran

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p. 40 and the seventh by the Hadith literature, even if most of the surrounding discussion—the preliminary
issues, the manner of discussing these attributes, and the subsequent psychological and cosmological issues
9
—are shaped by the philosophical tradition, rooted in works based on Greek originals.

Avicenna and other philosophers considered these divine qualities the most basic realities in the universe,
because they are closest to what is necessary in existence, that is, the Origin of the cosmos, the First, the
Author, or, in one word, God. The only knowledge that gives us true insight into the real nature of things is
understanding how the qualities of the underlying Reality permeate the universe. The further we move from
God's unity toward the world's multiplicity and quantity, the more dispersed, ephemeral, and unreal the
qualities become. Talk of “evil” only comes into play at the level of dispersion and incoherence. It is not
without signi cance that Avicenna ends the just‐cited book with a four‐page section called, “Making clear
the cause of the de ciencies and evils that occur in what undergoes generation and corruption.” His basic
10
point is made in one short sentence: “The root of evil is not to be.” And it should be obvious that “what
undergoes generation and corruption”—that is, everything that appears and then disappears, no matter
how long it may take—is precisely the object studied by all modern disciplines and, in Avicenna's terms, the
least real of all domains and the most mixed with evil, because it is the furthest removed from the Necessary
in Existence and the nearest to nonexistence.

The fact that philosophical discussion pertains to a qualitative domain is especially obvious in ethics. None
of the human qualities discussed in Greek or Islamic ethics can be quanti ed. For some of the Greeks and
many of the Muslims, virtues such as justice, courage, continence, and wisdom are among the foundational
qualities of reality itself. They partake of the unity of the ultimate reality, and they can only be fully grasped
and actualized to the extent that a human being conforms to the nature of things. But since ethical traits
stand at the opposite extreme from the constantly changing, altering, decaying, and disappearing stu of
our own sense experience, they are totally averse to quanti cation. Hence, from a modern point of view,
morality can never be “scienti c,” which is to say that ethics cannot be taken seriously. If the realists and
experts are not concerned about ethics, why should anyone else be concerned?

Only the dissolution of societal equilibrium pushes the scientistically minded to recognize that morality has
a certain useful role to play—it keeps the rabble in check. This acknowledgment goes back to a utilitarian,
instrumental point of view. It does not seem to occur to modern ethicists, or even to those philosophers who
still take ethics seriously, that the human qualities that are the basis of “ethical” activity are far more real
and far more rooted in the underlying nature of things than any of the objects studied in the modern
sciences, whether these be quarks or genes, because the objects studied by modern science simply throw
light on how the scientists conceptualize the mechanisms of the realm of generation and corruption. The
result of this undeniably useful and utilitarian conceptualization is the ever greater ability to manipulate the
world for ends that always remain within the domain of generation and corruption itself. In contrast, ethics
in the true sense of the term belongs to the realm of the divine attributes that never change, and the
actualization of these attributes within the human soul serves to deliver the soul from the domain of
generation and corruption into the qualitative realm that underlies all things.

p. 41 In short, the Muslim philosophers have never been interested in things per se, and often they were not even
talking about things in any sense that we would recognize, despite the fact that they employ words that
appear to refer to things. In fact, they were talking about the qualities and characteristics that appear in
 things. As a result, qualities that are utterly unscienti c and “unreal”—such as generosity—can enter into
the heart of cosmology. This is why Avicenna, for example, can discuss love as a cosmological principle (in
11
his well‐known treatise, Fīḥaqīqat al‐ʿishq, “On the reality of love,” and elsewhere).

Ontology: Being and Finding

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The Muslim philosophers often say that their subject matter is wujūd, that is, “existence” or “being.” Their
approach di ers from that of other scholars because it addresses existence per se, without regard to
anything else. Every other discipline investigates things that exist in some mode or another. Other scholars
simply assume that their objects of study exist, then investigate them as existing things. They do not ask
what it means for things to exist, and they cannot ask this question inasmuch as they are specialists in their
own disciplines. If they do ask the question, they have entered the realm of philosophical re ection. Thus
zoologists study animals, and they are certainly interested in other sorts of existent things, such as minerals
and plants, but it is no concern of theirs to understand what it means for these things to “exist.” As
zoologists they cannot ask how these things partake of or manifest the qualities of existence per se, as
represented most perfectly by the Necessary in Existence. Linguists study language, which has modes of
existence in the mind, on the tongue, and on paper. They are interested in the interrelationship of these
existential modalities, no doubt, but they do not and cannot, as linguists, address the ultimate rooting of
language in existence itself.

In short, philosophy was considered the one science that could have an overview of all the sciences, because
it studies the one thing that is presupposed by every other discipline. Nothing can be discussed and studied
unless it exists—even nonexistence must have a mode of existence for it to be mentioned. Philosophy's
overarching scope helps to explain why so many of the medieval philosophers were polymaths. To know
philosophy thoroughly they had to know everything, because everything exists in one mode or another.

The philosophers often classi ed the sciences by ranking them according to the object of their study. The
“higher” the object of study, the more elevated and eminent the science. Hence biology is more eminent
than mineralogy, because living things are higher than and include in themselves inanimate things.
Theology, which investigates God as existent, is higher than psychology, which investigates the nature of
the soul. From this perspective, philosophy is the highest of all sciences, because it investigates the
underlying reality of absolutely everything, God included, and hence it gains an overview of everything that
may or may not exist or that does in fact exist.

As pointed out earlier, Bābā Afḍal does not concern himself with investigating the Necessary in Existence or
any of the divine attributes in divinis. In particular, he pays almost no attention to the aforementioned
12
p. 42 branch of philosophy known as “divine things” (ilāhiyyāt) or the study of “Lordship” (rubūbiyya).
Hence he has nothing to say about the First in itself. He does not ascribe “existence” to God, thus
sidestepping one of the most vital of philosophical issues throughout Islamic history: if God exists and the
13
world exists, what exactly does this word exist mean?

When Bābā Afḍal does mention God outside the context of set Arabic phrases, he typically uses the Persian
word khudā (“God”) or the Arabic ḥaqq (“the Real”), and occasionally Persian īzad (“God” with overtones of
ancient Persia). In discussing existence and its levels, he situates God outside the scheme by referring to
him as the “Essence” (dhāt), the “Ipseity” (huwiyyat), and the “Reality” (ḥaqīqat). “Existence” is then
God's e ulgent light. Historians of philosophy would quickly insert here that his perspective is that of
Neoplatonic emanationism. But even if we want to le him away in this speci c cubbyhole, we can still ask
how exactly he goes about explaining the nature of things. What is the logic of his “emanationism”? Does it
help us make sense of the writings of other philosophers? More importantly, does it help us make sense of
 our own perception of the universe, either directly, or by way of the arguments that we need to o er if we
want to prove him wrong? These questions deserve to be answered.

In discussing existence itself, Bābā Afḍal uses two basic terms as synonyms—Arabic wujūd and Persian
hastī. I translate them respectively as “existence” and “being,” partly to indicate that he is employing two
di erent words, but also because existence and being in English have the same sort of linguistic relationship
that wujūd and hastī have in Persian. Both existence and wujūd are loan words with philosophical and learned

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14
connotations, while being and hastī are gerunds derived from the basic “to be” verb of the language.

In Arabic, the word wujūd gradually came to be the preferred technical term to discuss existence, although
early on other terms such as anniyya (or inniyya), “thatit‐is‐ness,” and huwiyya, “he‐ness” or “ipseity,”
were also used. The literal meaning of the term wujūd is “ nding” or “foundness.” It is a verbal noun from
wajada, “it found.” The passive form, wujida, “it was found,” is commonly used to mean, “it was there,”
i.e., it existed. The word wujūd has maintained its literal sense in Arabic, and even in philosophical contexts
it may have much more to do with nding than with existing.

The fact that the word wujūd rather than any other term came to be preferred for existence/being certainly
has something to do with its literal meaning. The terms anniyya and huwiyya make no sense in everyday
15
Arabic, because they are coined terms known only to scholars. wujūd is used in everyday speech, and the
verbal form is used more than a hundred times in the Koran. Everyone knows what it means, at least in the
ordinary senses of the word. So, this term came to be employed at least partly because of its familiarity and
commonplaceness—just as existing things are familiar and commonplace. Another reason is that it does not
have the limiting quality of “that‐it‐is‐ness” or “ipseity.” These terms do not allow existence to be anything
more than “to be” or “to be there.” wujūd suggests that there is more to existing than just being there. If a
word can be applied to everything that exists, it should imply something of the richness of what existing can
mean. Use of the word suggests that “to be”—divinely and also humanly—is not only to be there, but also
“to nd.” Just as the First Being nds all things, so also do humans nd by their very being.

p. 43 These re ections on the use of the term wujūd are not simply speculations on my part. They are borne out by
a good deal of evidence. The piece of evidence most relevant here is the manner in which Bābā Afḍal explains
the meaning of the term. Remember rst that in his way of looking at things, existence pertains to the
cosmos, that is, to everything other than God, not to God himself. The cosmos “is there” and everything
within the cosmos is also there. But things in the cosmos are not all there in the same way. In order to
illustrate that the word wujūd has di erent meanings depending on which sorts of things we apply it to,
Bābā Afḍal points out that it has two basic senses—“to be” (būdan) and “to nd” (yāftan). If we want to
understand how the word applies to something, we need to situate the thing in relation to these two
meanings.

Bābā Afḍal constantly employs the Persian verb yāftan, “to nd.” On occasion he adds the intensifying
pre x, dar, which gives the word the literal sense of something like “to nd out,” but which I usually
translate as “to grasp” and occasionally as “to perceive.” Sometimes he seems to be using the word yāftan
as a synonym for Arabic wujūd, and sometimes for Arabic idrāk, which means to grasp, to overtake, and in
technical contexts, “to perceive.” The connections between existence, nding, and perceiving are already
clear in the word wujūd, which can mean any of these. It follows that when Bābā Afḍal talks about the
“found” (yāfta), he means both the “existent” (mawjūd) and the “perceived” (mudrak). As for the “ nder”
(yābanda)—that which nds the object that is found—it must be something that exists, but there is more to
its existence than simply existing, because it also nds. Thus, to say that something is “found” is simply to
say that it is there, but when we speak of a “ nder,” we know that the nder must be found before it can
nd.
 Toward the beginning of The Book of the Road's End, Bābā Afḍal divides existence into these two levels—“to
be” and “to nd.” Then he subdivides the levels according to potentiality and actuality.

If we look at the world around us, we see that existent things can be ranked in degrees. “Potential being” is
like a tree in a seed, or a table in a tree. “Actual being” is the tree itself, or the table itself. Being in these two
senses can be observed everywhere, but it does not begin to exhaust what wujūd may imply. Hence we move
on to wujūd as nding.

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“Potential nding” belongs to the soul, which has the capacity to nd, know, and be aware of the things and
itself. “Actual nding” belongs to the intellect, which is the human soul that has turned its resources to the
task of knowing self and others and has reached the fullness of its own selfhood. For such a soul, nothing
exists but actualized nding. It has found self and, along with self, all objects of the self's knowledge, which
are the things of the universe. Thus self is aware of all things as present in self, and nothing escapes its
purview.

The move from potential nding to actual nding entails an ascent to a higher level, just like the move from
the potential being of a seed to the actual being of a tree. At the higher stage of nding, the soul is called
“intellect.” This is the philosophers' “Agent Intellect,” which they consider to be the furthest limit of
human aspiration, the utter ful llment of human felicity, and the nal goal of creation. As Philip Merlan
points out in discussing the beginning of Aristotle's Metaphysics, “Omniscience—this is the ultimate goal of
p. 44 man's search.” He continues by remarking that the tendency of modern readers to take such statements
as hyperbole misses the seriousness and import of the ancient philosophical quest. “There is a kind of
knowledge which is in some way all‐comprehensive. God possesses it—man should try to acquire it. Only
16
when he succeeds, his longing to know will be satis ed. Man desires and is able to divinize himself.” Even
the word divinization appears only slightly excessive in the Islamic context, since one can claim that it
corresponds with Arabic taʿalluh, “being like unto Allah” or “deiformity,” a word that is often used to
explain the nal goal of the philosophical quest. Mullā Ṣadrā's best known title is Ṣadr al‐Mutaʿallihīn,
which can be translated as “the forefront of the divinized ones,” or “the leader of the deiform.”

Notice that in Bābā Afḍal's description of the levels of existence, nding is proof of being found, which is to
say that awareness is proof of existence. If this sounds like Descartes's cogito, so do various other
17
statements of the early Muslim philosophers. What is interesting, however, is not the similarity of the
idea, but the conclusions that are drawn from the premise, the results that rise up from the philosophical
perspective. Bābā Afḍal's basic conclusion is that knowing is being, truly to know oneself is truly to be, and
truly to be is to be forever.

The picture of human nature that arises from this explanation of the word wujūd is this: Humans were given
the potentiality to know themselves so that they might bring this potentiality into actuality. The nal goal
of human life is to make our potential knowing—which is already an actual existence—into an actual
knowing, in which case we will know what always and actually is, and this is nothing but God's eternal
radiance, a radiance that is precisely human intelligence. To know actual existence fully and totally is to be
identical with actual existence fully and totally and to be fully aware and conscious of self. At this level one
can speak of the “uni cation of the intellecter, the intelligible, and intellect.” Once achieved, this being‐
cum‐awareness can never be lost, which is to say that the actuality of existing and knowing will never return
to potentiality, any more than a tree will shrink back to being a seed.

In a similar classi cation of existence found in The Rungs of Perfection (Muṣannafāt 21; HIP 252–53), Bābā
Afḍal looks at things in terms of apparentness (paydāʿī) and concealedness (pūshīdagī). He divides the things
into four levels: possible (mumkin), existent or found (mawjūd), nder (yābanda), and the one who is aware
of self through self (ānka az khwud bi khwud āgah buwad). The possible thing is hidden both from itself and
from the world, as the animal is hidden in the egg, or the shirt in cloth. The existent thing is apparent to the
 nders, but not to itself, like every sort of inanimate object. The nders nd the existent and apparent
things, but they do not nd the nder of the existent things. They are represented by all the degrees of soul,
from plant, to animal, to human. Finally, the nder of self looks back and sees the self gazing upon self,
thus achieving the uni cation of self and self's object. “This is the rank of the existence of the intellect.”

In another classi cation, upon which Bābā Afḍal bases the structure of The Book of Displays (Muṣannafāt 153;
HIP 238), he divides the found things into four basic sorts: deed (karda), doer (kunanda), known (dānista),

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and knower (dānā). The deeds are all things in the corporeal world, or the bodies of everything that has a
body. The doers are the souls and spirits that animate the bodies and perform activities. The known things
p. 45 are the disengaged realities (ḥaqāʿiq‐i mujarrad), that is, all things in‐asmuch as they exist eternally in
knowledge without corporeal actuality, or everything known to intellect. Finally, the knower is the soul
inasmuch as it is identical with intelligence. The fully actualized knower has achieved “joining” (paywand)
or “conjunction” (ittiṣāl) with the First Intellect, which is both the origin and goal of all existence. As Merlan
remarks in discussing conjunction as a philosophical issue from Aristotle onward, “The full conjunctio is the
18
moment in which man becomes omniscient.”

In his frequent discussions of the gradations of existence, Bābā Afḍal cites examples from the outside and
inside worlds. The ascending qualities that we perceive when we compare minerals, plants, animals, and
humans represent the external unfolding of the movement from the utter potentiality of matter (mādda) to
the full actuality of the form (ṣūra) that is disengaged from matter. Each higher level contains in itself all
lower levels. Plants have the qualities and perfections of minerals, plus speci cally vegetal attributes such
as growth. Animals have the mineral and plant qualities, plus speci cally animal attributes, such as
“appetite” (shahwa) and “wrath” (ghaḍab)—terms that were translated into Latin by the words that have
given us “concupiscence” and “irascibility.” Each higher level perfects and completes the lower level, which
is to say that each one actualizes a previous potential. The human soul or self is the actuality of all the
animal perfections. It in turn may gradually be transformed until it becomes intellect, which is the full
actuality of knowing, or the knower that knows all things in itself and, by knowing them, encompasses and
possesses them as its own.

Psychology: Soul and Intellect

What is important for the Muslim philosophers is the qualities that appear in the things, not the things
themselves. The qualities give each thing its own “speci city” (khāṣṣiyya), that is, the attributes and
characteristics that set it apart from other things. Whether or not a thing is there, its speci city is always
real, because the speci city is a unity of qualities that derive from the Necessary in Existence, the Eternal
Real. One of the philosopher's tasks is to know the thing's reality (ḥaqīqa), that is, the thing as it is in itself,
which is the unity of its individual speci cities. Whether or not the thing that has these speci cities exists in
the external world is secondary to this discussion. In other words, rst we establish a thing's quiddity
(māhiyya)—its “what‐it‐is‐ness” or “whatness”—then we can ask about the status of its existence.

One can say that the philosophical concern with qualities and speci cities, rather than with quanti able
things, means that the cosmological thinking of philosophers like Bābā Afḍal is not “scienti c,” but rather
logical, psychological, and epistemological. In other words, the philosophers focus not on things as found in
the external, physical realm, but on the things as known. It is true that they constantly speak of “things”
(ashyāʿ), but this is because this is the least speci c word that one can employ, and hence it can refer to
anything and everything, including all the invisible and spiritual things that have no reality whatsoever in
scientistic thinking. The philosophers o er what appears to be a graphic description of the things of the
p. 46 universe, but this is much more “mythic” than “scienti c,” because the described things are not discrete
objects, but rather—much like the “gods” in more primal worldviews—bundles of known qualities. The
 philosophers are not chie y concerned with the sensory appearance of the universe, nor with its unfolding
over time, but rather with the interrelation of attributes and speci cities that can be perceived with the
senses and situated in relation to other phenomena with the rational mind.

It follows that Islamic cosmology is not discussing the cosmos per se, but rather the human self and the
nature of our awareness of what we call the “cosmos.” (To think, by the way, that Stephen Hawking and the
other heroes of scienti c cosmology are discussing anything but their own understanding is hardly a

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re ective move on our part.) The philosophers knew very well that any description of the cosmos goes back
to the structure of the human psyche and thought. Bābā Afḍal for one reminds us repeatedly that what we
understand of the world is nothing but our own understanding. Perception and nding are not situated “out
there,” but “in here.” As he writes in one passage, “Nothing can be reached through the meaning of speech
but the meaning of self” (Muṣannafāt 694; HIP 138).

Descriptions of the cosmos are descriptions of our own perception and understanding, not of the cosmos. If
we nd the “thing‐in‐itself,” which can be a more or less adequate translation of Arabic ḥaqīqa (“reality”)
or māhiyya (“quiddity”), we are not nding it “out there,” but rather “in here.” If the reality that we nd
does in fact correspond with what is outside our awareness, this is precisely because the world out there and
the world in here derive from common principles and common roots. By no means does this position lead to
some form of solipsism or idealism in which the subject alone would be real, nor does it lead to Kantian
agnosticism. The philosophers maintain that everything that exists in any manner whatsoever is real and
knowable. The discussion has to do with the degrees and modalities of knowledge and reality.

The philosophers are searching for a knowledge of things that cannot be doubted, what Bābā Afḍal calls
“certainty” (yaqīn). The only knowledge that truly allows for escape from doubts is knowledge without any
intermediary—not even the intermediary of the soul, the imagination, or the senses. This sort of knowledge
is located in intelligence alone, and every intermediary adds to the doubt and unreliability. As Bābā Afḍal
puts it, “ ‘Certainty’ is theōria's return from other than self and arrival at self. This is why certainty is not
nulli ed, and certainty cannot be left behind. But before it reaches self, theōria is agitated and muddled. This
is called ‘doubt’” (Muṣannafāt 237; HIP 239).

Practically everything we know we know through intermediaries, and the more the intermediaries, the less
likely that the knowledge is true. If the senses qualify as “instruments,” all the more so do the
paraphernalia of modern research (not to mention the paraphernalia of the modern media). By nature, the
paraphernalia interfere with the perception and even the phenomena, and this was well enough known long
before Heisenberg threw his monkey wrench into modern physics (though perhaps not by physicists). Some
seek refuge from doubt and uncertainty in common acceptance and expert opinion, but the experts typically
think that most of their own colleagues do not know what they are talking about, even if they try to
maintain a uni ed front for the sake of professional standing. In short, the least reliable knowledge is
p. 47 knowledge by hearsay, and upon it we build our world. One should not blame the philosophers for
striving to reach beyond hearsay, opinion, instruments, and sense perception to seize on what can be known
for sure.

The philosophers do not think that their investigations of the reality of the cosmos and the soul would be
obscure to any rational, re ective person. From their perspective, we need no instrument other than a
re ective soul and functioning senses to grasp the true nature of the cosmos and the self. The senses
provide us with adequate input to allow us to trace our way back to the root of all things. The fact that most
of the possible data actually escapes our senses is irrelevant to the issue—in any case, most of the data will
always escape us, no matter what instruments we use and no matter how big our computers (even if we
accept the hypothesis that data received through the added intermediary of instruments has the same status
as data received through sense perception). The question is simply whether or not sense perception provides
a su cient basis upon which to begin the task of returning to the Root of all roots, the First of all rsts, the
 Author, the Real. The philosophers answer in the a rmative, as do all re ective Muslims—though, in
contrast to some of the philosophers, the latter would insist that people also need the help of the divinely
revealed books.

In short, the philosophers hold that everything necessary for attaining the nal goal of human life is, in
principle, given to every human being. If we want to understand the true nature of the cosmos, it is
su cient to have functioning senses, a rational mind, and the desire to understand. Then we can undertake

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the quest. The basic givens needed for the search are known to any thinking person. Introspection will lead
anyone to see levels of perception and awareness within self, and these levels of awareness re ect the
structure of the outside world.

Both the inside and the outside come from the same Origin, and both follow the same route in getting here.
It is this that allows us to perceive and grasp what is outside ourselves. But it must be remembered that we
ourselves will never be able to go “outside” ourselves. To criticize medieval cosmology because it fails to
provide us with “objective” knowledge is a red herring. All knowledge pertains by de nition to the subject,
whether or not it is empirically veri able in the sensory domain. Indeed, there is no way to translate
“objective” and “subjective” back into the premodern Islamic languages (and probably not into any other
premodern languages either).

The usual way of discussing the internal levels of the soul is to describe the di erentiations among the
things that we perceive in the outside world. The discussion depends upon a simple observation of things
without any intermediary other than our own senses and cognitive faculties. It is clear to everyone that
stones are di erent from owers, and owers di erent from turtles. We all know that these three belong to
di erent realms of the outside world, realms that in Islamic thought are often called the “progeny”
(muwalladāt)—the three kingdoms of minerals, plants, and animals. The fact that the exact dividing lines
between the realms may be obscure was recognized and simply taken as a natural consequence of the fact
that these are our own conceptualizations of the world. The world will not necessarily bend to our needs
simply because we want to make sense of it, especially not in all the minute and evanescent details of the
realm of generation and corruption. The three kingdoms are called “progeny” because they are born or
p. 48 “progenerated” (tawallud) from the marriage of heaven and earth, which are the high domain and the
low domain, or the spiritual realm and the bodily realm, or the invisible world and the visible world. The
progeny are di erentiated by the qualities that become manifest through the activity or lack of it that we are
able to observe with our senses.

It is here that the discussion turns to the faculties or powers or internal characteristics of the progeny. Each
domain has a set of invisible attributes that may or may not become fully actualized in any given individual.
But the traces of the attributes and qualities are there to be witnessed. On the mineral level, the basic quality
is “nature” (ṭabīʿa), which is an invisible power that keeps the inanimate things in their own speci c
attributes and characteristics, until they are acted upon by forces outside themselves. When inanimate
things are acted upon by other things, such as plants and animals, they may then be assimilated into a
higher power that allows for activity within the thing's self (nafs). Nature may be called a power, but it is not
a “self” in this sense, because inanimate things show no trace of awareness and nding.

Only in plants can we begin speaking of “self.” The term employed, nafs, is usually translated in
philosophical texts as “soul,” but in Arabic the word is the re exive pronoun, corresponding exactly with
English self. Thus we have the plant, animal, and human selves, or souls. This soul is also called a “spirit”
19
(rūḥ), that is, an invisible, life‐giving force that allows things to move and function.

In both plants and animals, we observe many characteristics in addition to those possessed by inanimate
things. Each of these characteristics is called a quwwa, which is commonly translated in this context as
“faculty” or “power,” but which I prefer to translate here as “potency.” A potency is a power or ability
 possessed by a nafs, a soul or self. It is the name given to a speci c characteristic of a soul, and indeed, the
soul itself is often called a potency, as is the intellect.

This word quwwa is one of the more di cult terms to deal with if we want to preserve consistency in
translating philosophical texts. It is usually rendered in several ways according to its three basic senses—
strength (or power), faculty, and potentiality. However, it is not at all clear that the authors of the texts saw
any real di erences among these meanings, even if the dictionaries and glossaries did specify them. Rather,

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the philosophers seem to have considered quwwa a single reality whose exact characteristics vary according
to the situation. In the sense of “strength,” quwwa is a divine attribute, for God is the Strong (al‐qawī), and
it is also a human and animal attribute, in which case it is contrasted with “weakness” (ḍaʿf). As “faculty,”
quwwa is a power of the soul, whether the soul dwells at the plant, animal, or human level. Thus we have the
faculties of growth, nourishment, reproduction, hearing, sight, smell, memory, re ection, intellect, and so
on. As “potentiality,” quwwa is contrasted with “actuality,” and the philosophers—following the
Aristotelian tradition—constantly discuss how things move from potentiality to actuality.

In previous works I have followed the usual practice of translating the term quwwa according to context,
whether as strength, potentiality, or faculty. However, the more I study the philosophical writings, the more
I am convinced that the clear demarcation among the English meanings is simply not present in the one
Arabic term. The authors used a word that they thought had the same basic meaning in every context,
p. 49 though its implications and connotations might di er. In the present book, I use the English word
potency to translate quwwa for all three meanings. Although it is not common to say that smell and touch are
the soul's “potencies” rather than its “faculties,” the meaning is clear enough, especially with forewarning.

When used in place of faculty, the word potency has the advantage of suggesting something that is obvious
in the original Arabic but not clear in the standard translation: Although the faculty is there, it is not
necessarily being put to use, nor is it necessarily actualized in any real sense. We have the potency of sight,
but our eyes may be closed, and in any case we do not actually see everything that we might possibly see.
Moreover, each of us actualizes this potency in di erent degrees and di erent ways. An artist “sees” a tree
in a far di erent way than a botanist. In short, every “faculty” is a potentiality whose degree of actuality can
be investigated and discussed. The soul itself is a “potency” because it can be more than it is. If the intellect
is also a potency, this is because all human beings have the faculty of intelligence to some degree, but this is
not to say that they have come anywhere near to actualizing its full perfection.

I have also attempted to maintain a certain consistency in translating the word ʿl, the complement of
quwwa in the sense of potentiality. Although ʿl contrasted with quwwa is normally translated as
“actuality,” and otherwise as “activity” or “act,” I preserve it as “act” throughout. I make an exception to
this rule for the phrase bi‐ ʿl, “actually,” which is contrasted with bi‐quwwa, “potentially.” Thus, although
it is usually said that things move from potentiality to actuality, in these texts one will read about
movement from potency to act. With this translation, it will not be possible to forget that fāʿil, the active
participle of ʿl, needs to be translated as “actor” or “active.” The intensive form of this active participle,
faʿʿ āl, is normally translated, following the Latin, as “agent” or “active.” To distinguish it from fāʿil
(“active” or “actor”), I translate it as “agent” throughout. Nonetheless, “fully actual” often does a better
job of getting across the sense of the Arabic. Thus al‐ʿaql al‐faʿʿāl, the Agent Intellect, can perhaps best be
understood as the “fully actual intellect.”

When people begin to employ their power of re ection ( kr) and thought (andīsha) to investigate the world
around them, they see that inanimate things have no nafs, which is to say that the qualities that they ascribe
to inanimate things are there without the need for any internal power to bring them into view. On the plant
level, a number of internal potencies and powers immediately make themselves apparent, the most obvious
being growth and nourishment. If these powers are not present, the plant is withered and dead, which is to
say that it has no more potencies than an inanimate thing. Animals have many more potencies, and human
 beings are distinguished from animals by potencies such as speech and rational thought that are not found
in any of the other progeny.

Every higher level embraces all the qualities and potencies of the level or levels below it, and each is
distinguished from the lower levels by what it adds to them. Thus all three progeny belong to the realm of
“nature,” which rules over their inanimate parts. Then plants add certain potencies to nature, animals more
potencies, and human beings add speci cally human powers to all these potencies.

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Typically, the discussion of increasing levels of potency is carried out in terms of “soul” (nafs) or “spirit”
(rūḥ). Thus we have the plant, animal, and human souls or spirits. Each level is described in terms of the
p. 50 potencies it carries. Each higher level has the potencies of the lower levels. A plant has a vegetal soul, an
animal has both vegetal and animal souls, and a human being has in addition the human soul. This is not to
say that animals have two souls and human beings three in some quantitative, rei able sense. It simply
means that the animal soul has the potencies of the plant along with those of the animal, and the human
soul possesses the potencies of the animal soul.

In ourselves, then, we nd what we observe in the outside world. This is the gist of the famous correlation
between “microcosm” or human being and “macrocosm” or universe. The argument is philosophical, and
those who discuss it are asking their readers to re ect upon themselves and see within themselves every
quality and potency that they discern outside themselves. If “heaven and earth are within you,” this should
not be understood in some quantitative, concrete sense. The issue is rather the qualities and characteristics
that we ascribe to heaven and earth. We can ascribe potencies and characteristics only because our
intelligence embraces their reality, so they belong to us. Only intelligence can recognize intelligence, and by
recognizing it, it can recognize everything that it embraces, which is all that is intelligible, that is, the whole
of reality.

If the animals are within us, this is because we possess all the animal potencies and attributes, and therefore
we know the animal qualities and can actualize them as our own—as when people act like dogs, pigs,
snakes, or asses. It is precisely their potencies that animals actualize through their activity, and it is
precisely these same animal potencies that human beings actualize through the acts that they share with
animals, such as eating, drinking, and mating, or when they act like beasts instead of humans.

The human soul is de ned by speci c potencies not found in the other progeny. This soul is often called the
“rational soul” (nafs nāṭiqa), a term that I prefer to translate, more in keeping with the sense of the Arabic,
as “rationally speaking soul.” Bābā Afḍal and Avicenna, among others, render this expression into Persian
as nafs‐i gūyā or nafs‐i gūyanda, “talking soul.” What gives the human soul this characteristic is its relation
with intellect or intelligence, which allows for the articulation of awareness in speech.

The human soul is potential intellect, whereas the Agent Intellect is actualized intellect. This means that the
human speci city—that which makes human beings human—can only be understood in terms of the
human entelechy, or the perfection and completion that we are able to actualize through what lies within
our own potency and possibility. We can put our soul to work toward its own proper aim and nal goal and,
if we do this successfully, we will become truly human by achieving awareness and knowledge of the
principle of all awareness and knowledge, which is nothing but the enduring intellect, the eternal radiance
of God.

Bābā Afḍal's understanding of how the levels of existence are related to soul and intellect is epitomized in
one of his short essays:

The “existent” is either aware or not. What is not aware is the rank of the body and the level of
nature.
 What is “aware” has either particular awareness, or universal awareness. What has particular,
p. 51 sensory awareness is the rank of nature and the level of the soul. What has universal, intelligible
awareness is the rank of the soul and the level of the intellect.

When the body reaches the level of nature, nature the level of soul, and soul the level of intellect,
then the bodily, concealed existence disappears. It is joined to and appears with the spiritual, clear
existence. And peace be upon those who follow the guidance [20:47]. (Muṣannafāt 638)

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One of the domains where we have been totally conditioned to dismiss premodern ways of looking at things
as “unscienti c” is biology. Bābā Afḍal's frequent references to the various levels of soul often touch on
issues that would be discussed nowadays in botanical and zoological terms, especially when he talks about
the characteristics of plants and animals. In reading such passages, we need to remember that the purpose
is to point to various qualities and characteristics in the world around us that manifest the potencies of soul.
These potencies are found in living things in di erent degrees, and they are present in all human beings,
since the human soul brings together all the potencies of the lower realms. We should put on hold
everything that we have learned from biology classes or the science pages of the New York Times and instead
we should try to see the world in the qualitative terms in which it is being described to us.

In The Book of the Everlasting, Bābā Afḍal interprets many Koranic verses in terms of imagery drawn from
the animal realm. In order to do so, he divides animals into four basic sorts. If I had been working from an
Arabic text, I probably would have translated the Arabic terms as “human beings, beasts, birds, and
reptiles,” and readers would understand these words according to modern scienti c classi cations of living
things. However, Bābā Afḍal translates these words into Persian in a way that reminds us that he does not
have in mind the classi cations of the past two centuries or so, in which a tremendous quanti cation has
taken place at the expense of our ability to see the animals as they used to be presented in myths and fables
—as living beings with divine attributes. Thus Bābā Afḍal speaks of the four types of animals as humans,
four‐footed things (i.e., quadrupeds), yers, and crawlers. These nonscienti c, literal translations allow us
to keep in mind that Bābā Afḍal and many other philosophers had no interest in di erentiating sparrows
from bats and dragon ies, or lizards from scorpions and centipedes. Rather, they are pointing to certain
sorts of attributes and qualities that appear in certain living things, and the phylum or family to which the
thing belongs makes no di erence. The issue is rst the qualities as found in the outside world, and then
how these qualities are also found in human beings. They are asking what we can learn about ourselves by
observing the world around us with the help of our innate intelligence.

Cosmology: Origin and Return

Bābā Afḍal discusses both psychology and ontology in terms of a progression of existence and awareness
that culminates in the perfection of intelligence and being, which, in their full actualization, are identical. In
each case, there is a clear unfolding from the lowest, inanimate level, to the highest, self‐aware level, which
p. 52 is the fully actualized intellect. Given that both the study of the soul and the study of existence focus on
the ascent to actuality, we also need a discussion of how things came to exist in a state of potentiality in the
rst place. A preliminary, theological type of answer would say that God created things the way they are, so
he put them there in the stage of potency.

The philosophers, however, were never satis ed with simple‐minded catechisms. In their terms, one might
say that the Necessary in Existence brings about the existence of the world of possible things because of
what is demanded by its seven essential attributes: unity, eternity, knowledge, desire, power, wisdom, and
generosity. However, things do not appear in their present form all at once, a point that is obvious to
everyone. When the First puts them where they are, it does so gradually. In putting them there, it brings
 them from somewhere. Since at its level there is nothing other than the Necessary in Existence, they can
20
have no other source than the Necessary itself. The Necessary brought them into existence in stages, and
there is a de nite order and arrangement to these stages. Once the order has been established, it provides a
broad outline of the route whereby things go back to where they came from.

As already noted, the discussion of coming and going is commonly named al‐mabdaʿwa'l‐maʿ ād, “the Origin
and the Return,” a frequent title of chapters and books. It needs to be kept in mind that the second term, maʿ

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ād, is the most common designation for the third principle of Islamic faith—the Return to God, or
“eschatology” in a broad sense. As noted, the Return is investigated both inasmuch as it is compulsory for
all human beings and inasmuch as it is voluntary.

In discussing the Return, the philosophers set out to demonstrate logically something that coincides with a
basic human intuition. People know innately that they have “come up” and can go up further. An adult has
come up from childhood, a child from the womb, and a knowing person from ignorance. People can assist
their upward climb by their own e orts. They can climb up through their aptitudes and talents, and they can
set their goals as high as their aspirations reach. All concepts of education, learning, improvement,
progress, evolution, and directed development are based on this fundamental understanding that things can
be changed in an “upward” direction. The idea is so central to human life that people rarely re ect upon it,
but simply take it for granted. Muslims and followers of other traditions are no di erent. It is self‐evident
that there is, or there can be, an upward movement. In the Western monotheisms, among others, the
upward orientation is established in terms of the celestial realms of the cosmos and in terms of paradise, the
happy domain after death. Refusal to undertake the upward movement is correlated with the lower reaches
of existence and with hell.

The philosophers address the upward, returning movement in terms of both ontology and psychology, but
they discuss the downward, originating movement mainly in terms of cosmology. The question is this:
Where did this world come from and how do we happen to be here? In answering the question, the
philosophers elaborate upon an intuition that is as basic to premodern humanity as the perception of
upward movement. This is that nothing can go up that has not come down in the rst place. As Bābā Afḍal
puts it in passing, “Whatever does not fall from heaven does not rise from earth” (Muṣannafāt 325; HIP
206).

p. 53 We are now down. The proof is that we aspire to higher things, and we often achieve them. But if we are
“down,” our aspiration must correspond to something within us that knows what it means to be “up.” True
knowledge of upness presupposes real awareness of what upness is, and that in turn means that something
of the up must have come down to us.

Mythic formulations of the upness that preceded our present condition are practically universal. The
scientistic notions of evolution and progress may be the only examples of myths that speak of the upward
movement without acknowledging the primal descent. In the modern myths, we situate ourselves at the top
and look back at the bottom. The alpha is one thing, far behind and below us, and we are the omega, or at
least the current omega. In the premodern myths, people saw themselves as situated on a trajectory that
began on high, with God or the gods. Then human beings came to be low, and now they are in the process of
going back in the direction from which they came. The alpha and the omega are ultimately one.

Some versions of the modern myth suggest that the process has its own necessity—we have been forced up
because of the impersonal laws of nature, and we will keep on going up as we evolve further. Most versions
of the premodern myths o er no guarantee of an ascent, not at least in any meaningful future. If there is to
be an ascent, people must strive to achieve it. We can as easily move further away from the Origin as we can
move closer to it. We can be left in dispersion and multiplicity inde nitely, becoming as it were the last
blades of grass that the bodhisattvas will deliver. Even versions of the premodern myths that speak of an
 inevitable return to the personal and loving God, as does the Islamic, insist that human beings must exert
their own e orts if they are to return by a route that will leave them happy with the journey. If they are not
ready for the climb, they will go back under constraint, and they will su er because of the lack of congruity
and harmony with what they meet on the way and at the destination. Bābā Afḍal explains su ering in the
afterlife along these lines.

The underlying rationale for the premodern myths is the perception of invisible qualities in the self and

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behind the things that appear to the senses, that is, the understanding that there is more to existence than
meets the eye—not simply quantitatively, but even more so qualitatively; not simply in terms of physical
inaccessibility, but also in terms of spiritual distance. The myths acknowledge a realm of superior, luminous
things that we can glimpse through the beauty and goodness that we nd in ourselves and in the world. We
have to reach up for it to have it, and those who reach with sincerity, love, and devotion achieve it more fully
than those who go through the motions perfunctorily, not to speak of those who make no attempt. In short,
the world is perceived as bathed in supernal qualities, and a whole and healthy human soul is understood as
one that is drawn in the direction of those qualities, which are the source of all awareness and everything
that is good, beautiful, desirable, and lovable.

The rationale for the modern myths seems to be the inability to see anything beyond quantity. All so‐called
qualities, if real in any way, are explained away in reductionist, quantitative terms. By inde nite division
and analysis—by taking things back to genes or social conditioning or atomic particles—we can explain
p. 54 away all the echoes of the divine that were seen by “primitive” and “backward” peoples. In our privileged
position at the peak of the evolutionary upsurge, we alone nally understand the truth behind the cosmos,
or we alone understand that the cosmos is absurd. Holy Mother Science has allowed us to see clearly that
premodern cultures were laboring under primitive illusions and living in self‐serving dreams, inventing
myths to act as psychological crutches. We do not re ect on the psychological crutches provided to us by the
myths of science and superiority.

To us as moderns it appears obvious that there is no “qualitative” di erence between human beings and
other life forms, because all so‐called di erences can be reduced to biological and evolutionary common
denominators. But, since we all know that you cannot add rocks together and get plants, then heap plants
one on top of another and get animals, we posit an impersonal divinity known as “Chance” that puts all
these together through an omnipotence known as “Time” to yield at the peak of its creative powers our
marvelous, all‐knowing and all‐reducing egos.

In short, perception of quality allows people to see things as diaphanous screens within which the gods are
dancing, but inability to see anything but quantity breeds a sort of thinking that understands only in terms
of accumulation or reduction to the least common denominator.

For Islamic thinking in general, knowing the qualitative domain toward which we are aspiring demands
knowing the qualitative domain from which we have descended. Those who want to have beauty and love
aspire to it because they have a sense of what it means, and that sense drinks from the same well as beauty
itself. But in order to nd the goal, one has to know the route by which knowledge of the goal and aspiration
toward it have reached us in the rst place. Bābā Afḍal explains this in one of his letters:

You must also know that searching out and exploring things and investigating the origin and
return of the self do not arise from bodily individuals. If searching and yearning for the meanings
and the road of reality arose from human individuals inasmuch as they are individuals, this
wanting would be found in every particular individual, but such is not the case. This is because the
wish to encompass both worlds is tting for someone for whom it is possible to encompass them.
But it is impossible for any particular individual in respect of individuality to encompass another
 individual, especially both worlds. Hence this wish does not arise from the individual. Rather, it
arises from the soul that is radiant with the divine light. (Muṣannafāt 688; HIP 150–51)

The philosophers investigated the Origin in order to understand the Return, the two basic movements
demanded by tawḥīd. Asserting that the ultimate reality is one demands recognition that it is both rst
(awwal) and last (ākhir), both alpha and omega. Everything comes from the Real and returns to it. In order
to discover how we will return to the First, we need to discover how we came to be separated from the First.

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To do so, we need to grasp the true nature of our potencies, including the senses and intelligence. We also
need to ask if the compulsory return that is driving us toward death is su cient for the achievement of true
humanity, or if—what seems much more likely if not self‐evident—we need to employ our cognitive and
practical powers to achieve that humanity, just as we employ them to achieve everything else that we
achieve.

p. 55 It is often forgotten that Islamic philosophy is not just theorizing or, let us say, premodern gropings at
scienti c questions—gropings that helped give rise to the scienti c and objective approach to things that
has been perfected in modern times. This evolutionary understanding of the role of Islamic thought in world
history, popular in the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, has largely been abandoned by
specialists, but it still shapes the general perception of Islamic thinking in relation to the history of science
and philosophy. Such an approach immediately assumes that the Muslim philosophers' own goals were
naive and immature, which is to say that we moderns are intelligent, sophisticated, and superior.

Alternatively, scholars may employ the presupposition of philosophical and scienti c progress to show that,
in fact, the philosophers were moderns before their time, but they were forced to hide their enlightened
awareness beneath the obfuscations of the religious majority. To think this way is again to pat oneself on
the back, but, more important, it is to ignore the basic issues, which are philosophical. What were the
philosophers trying to say? Did they or did they not assert tawḥīd? Did they or did they not apply their
philosophical approach to certain practical issues that have an immediate relevance to human becoming
and to the achievement of an ultimate, otherworldly, felicity?

The claim is often made that the philosophical issues are determined by historical circumstances and must
be investigated historically. But this claim is itself a philosophical position, and if it is true, then there are no
exceptions, and the claim must be investigated historically. If we do not allow that it is possible to ask
questions that transcend historical conditioning, we are stuck with an endless succession of motives and
hidden agendas, with each new theory to be exposed in its own turn. Our hermeneutics of suspicion will
show that philosophical thinking is nothing but historical determinism, historical determinism nothing but
psychological conditioning, psychological conditioning nothing but economic strati cation, economic
strati cation nothing but gender politics, gender politics nothing but sociobiology, and so on in an endless
samsara of reductionism that knows no nirvana save tenure and promotion. What is certainly true is that
whatever religious, historical, social, psychological, economic, biological, and physical necessities there
may have been in premodern times, there are no fewer in modern times. Once we claim that people in
former times were historically conditioned and therefore had nothing important to say, then we might as
well give up talking.

If we come back to philosophical issues as they are posed in the texts, we see that the Muslim philosophers
considered the study of the human soul indispensable in the quest for wisdom and that they looked for the
roots of the soul in the First. They considered ethics an important science, because ethics is nothing if not
the investigation of how the soul achieves balance within itself and harmony with the First in keeping with
the manner in which it emerged from the First at the origin. The soul's appearance in the world is
compulsory in the sense that none of us were asked if we wanted to come. Or, in the light of a certain
Neoplatonic approach, human freedom was already manifest in the choice of the soul to come into this
world. Whether or not we chose to come, we have come, and now we must go back to where we came from.
 We have su cient freedom to make some choices, and that freedom must be put to good use if there is to be
any possibility of achieving ultimate happiness.

p. 56 According to the philosophers, human beings in their present situation are in the process of going up, which
is to say that they are moving from the pure potency of the egg toward the pure actuality of the disengaged
intellect. Because of the compulsory return that has brought them to adulthood, they have gathered
together the stages of inanimate nature, the plant soul, and the animal soul, so they possess the potencies of

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all these stages. They now stand at the level of the human soul, so they have the freedom to direct their own
ascent. No one is forcing them to make the choice to continue the upward movement. If they prefer to do so,
they can stay where they are and go about actualizing the animal characteristics to a degree undreamed of
by any non‐human animal. If they want, they can try to ful ll their potencies of appetite and wrath—or, as
the medievals would say, “concupiscence and irascibility,” and as we moderns would more likely say, “lust
and ambition.” The world, after all, is a vast arena of beckoning opportunities.

Unquestionably, human beings possess the potency of intelligence. To deny this in any sort of meaningful
way would be to contradict oneself. Given that people have the potency, they can employ it as they see t.
But this is not to say that their use of it is indi erent or that all will necessarily be for the good. Just as they
need discipline and guidance to become pianists or basketball players, so also they need discipline and
guidance to become fully intelligent, which is to say, fully human, since intelligence alone is their uniquely
human characteristic. And the only way to become intelligent in the full sense of the term is to bring the
soul's potency into actuality, that is, to reach the stage of the intellect in act.

This is not to suggest that intelligence is the only human characteristic. Rather, it is the highest human trait
and the pinnacle of human possibility, because—in Bābā Afḍal's terms—the fullness of intelligence is
identical with the fullness of being. It perhaps needs to be stressed, however, that the soul has two
perfections, the theoretical and the practical, and both need to be actualized. Practical perfection demands
the realization of ethical and moral being, or the actualization of all the virtues (faḍāʿil). Neither theoretical
nor practical perfection can be achieved totally in isolation. The nal perfection of intelligence cannot be
reached without perfecting all the soul's aptitudes, and most of these are named by the names of the virtues
—generosity, compassion, justice, forgiveness. Ethical activity and beautiful character traits are inseparable
from striving for human status.

In order to move from potential intellect to actual intellect, people need to know what they are striving for.
They must make the decision to undertake the quest. As Bābā Afḍal puts it in a short essay,

The wayfarers have three incontestable needs: One is an elevated aspiration, second a potent mind,
and third an appropriate desire. If there is no high aspiration, they will not be able to see a station
higher than they. If there is no capable mind, they will not dare to allow the high station to pass
into the heart. If there is no appropriate desire, they will not be able to arrive at that which their
high aspiration has caused to pass into their potent mind. Incontestably, these three have been
designated. (Muṣannafāt 644)

For the religious tradition in general, knowledge of the nal goal toward which people should aspire is
p. 57 provided by the Koran and the Hadith, and knowledge of the praxis that allows the goal to be achieved is
provided by the Sunnah and the Sharia, that is, the exemplary model established by the Prophet and the
legal teachings that codify praxis into do's and don'ts. But for the philosophers, knowledge of the nal goal
and of the praxis necessary to achieve it require thought and self‐re ection ( kr, tafakkur). To the extent
that people put the potency of their own intelligence to work by coming to understand the nature of things,
they will actualize this potency and gradually move from potential intellect to actual intellect.
 Philosophical discussions of the Return focus on the two basic ways of going back to the First—the road that
people will be compelled to follow and the road that they are free to follow if they choose to do so.
Discussions of the Origin center on how they arrived at their starting place. If they can go up to intelligence,
then they must have come down from intelligence. If they can go up to intelligence by ascending through
the stages of soul, then they must have come down to this world by descending through the stages of soul.
The Return is the mirror image of the Origin. In later texts, Origin and Return are often discussed as the two
arcs of a circle, the “descending arc” (qaws nuzūlī) and the “ascending arc” (qaws ṣuʿūdī). This discussion is

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basic to theoretical Su sm, though the terminology is often di erent from that found in philosophy and
varies from school to school.

The descending route of the Origin is well known. The basic outline is the same as that already present in the
Arabic Plotinus: intellect, soul, heavenly spheres, four elements. Bābā Afḍal sticks to this simplest of
schemes, though some of the philosophers had developed it into several degrees, as did Fārābī and
Avicenna, who spoke not of one intellect and one soul, but of ten intellects and ten souls, corresponding to
the nine spheres and the sublunary realm. Among Su s, Ibn al‐ʿArabī spoke of twenty‐one stages from the
First Intellect down to earth (that is, the lowest of the four elements), at which point, the movement turns
21
back upward.

One should not be thrown o track by the language of these discussions and think that, for example, the
philosophers are reifying the concepts of intellect and soul, much as people today reify the concept of God;
or that they are describing the planets and celestial spheres with anything like the concerns of modern
astronomy. Discussion of intellect and soul has to do with what we can retrace in our own selves, and
discussion of the spheres has to do with what we can discern with the naked eye. By studying the heavens,
the philosophers want to know what we can learn about things that are “up” by looking in that direction.
The upness of the physical domain is an analogue of the upness of the spiritual domain, which is to say that
what is “up” in terms of our sense perception is a marker of realities that are “up” in respect to our
intelligence and understanding. If we look up in the outside world, we see the planets and stars, and if we
look up in the inside world, we see soul and intelligence. The key is looking, gazing, thinking, re ecting,
pondering, meditating, contemplating.

The religious tradition provides an explicit reading of the heavens in terms of a spiritual ascent in the
accounts of the Prophet's miʿrāj, his climb up through the heavens and beyond to the presence of God. This
mythic ascent is of primary importance for Islam's origins, given that it marks the fruition and ful llment
of the Koran's descent. The Koran came down so that those who take it to heart may go up. As the Prophet is
p. 58 said to have remarked, “The daily prayer [ṣalāt] is the miʿrāj of the believer,” which is to say that Islamic
praxis, of which the daily prayer is the central and most essential act, is the road by which one ascends back
to the Origin. Avicenna wrote a treatise analyzing the miʿrāj as a philosophical journey, and Ibn al‐ʿArabī has
a long section in which he contrasts what, from his point of view, the philosophers achieve through the
22
re ective miʿrāj and what the followers of the prophets achieve through the spiritual miʿrāj.

In the accounts of the miʿrāj, each of the seven planets that the Prophet visited can be understood as a
sphere of spiritual in uence populated by one or more prophets and hosts of angels. To reach God, the
Prophet needed to pass through each of the spheres, thus actualizing the spiritual potency designated by
each prophet and angel. Ultimately he reached God himself. In Bābā Afḍal's reading, the miʿrāj describes the
way to perfection, and the nal meeting with God represents the soul's coming to encompass all things,
such that it no longer ts into any genus or species. In The Rungs of Perfection he writes as follows about the
nal stage of the philosophical journey:

It is self that is present with self. The self is the self's seen, seer, and seeing. Through this
predominant seeing, it makes everything below self the same as self. . . . This is the utmost end and
the nal goal of all utmost ends and nal goals. . . . The saying of the companion of the stations of
 the miʿrāj—upon whom be blessings and peace!—when he put behind him the degrees of the going
and reached his nal goal, coming near to the Origin of the existents, means this state: “I do not
enumerate laudation of Thee; Thou art as Thou hast lauded Thyself.” It is as if he wants to say, “It
is not I who have known You that I might praise You. You are the knower, the recognizor, and the
praiser of self as You should be recognized and praised.” (Muṣannafāt 37–38; HIP 262–63)

In short, discussion of the heavens pertains to the investigation of the qualities and characteristics that are

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“higher” than we are in our corporeal—though not our intellective—nature. Inasmuch as the heavens
pertain to the Origin, they represent descending stages through which the self, in coming down from
intellect and entering the womb, becomes more and more distinct from other selves and more and more
immersed in multiplicity. Inasmuch as the heavens pertain to the Return, they represent stages that the self
must pass through in order to actualize its potential, harmonize its diverse powers, unify its multiple
aptitudes, and rejoin the intellect from which it arose.

The philosophers were able to read this sort of signi cance into what they saw of the celestial spheres
because they were re ecting upon themselves. They saw that they themselves, beginning in the womb, had
risen up from mineral, to plant, to animal, to human, and that they were now striving to rise up to the
fullness of self‐knowledge, the intellect that knows itself and all things. In their view, the way to achieve a
truly useful knowledge of the celestial spheres—that is, useful in the quest to become human—is to
investigate how the heavens display the qualities and characteristics of our intellective nature. It is of course
true that everything in the universe displays such qualities and characteristics; this is how Muslim thinkers
p. 59 understand the repeated Koranic reference to the “signs” (āyāt) in the heavens, the earth, and the soul.
But the heavens are higher on the scale, because they are up. They are closer to the unity and simplicity of
the First, which is why some philosophers maintained that they are incorruptible, that is, that they do not
pertain to the corporeal realm, the world of generation and corruption. Hence, to study the heavens is to
study realities that bring together many other realities and embrace and encompass the evanescent world
below. The heavens re ect much more directly than the sublunary realm the nature of the intelligent self,
which is incorruptible and everlasting.

When reading historical surveys of Islamic philosophy, one is sometimes left with the impression that the
(First) Intellect and the (Universal) Soul—that is, the initial stages of descent from the Origin—were
concepts lifted from Neoplatonic sources without much re ection on the part of those who did the lifting.
The two can appear as rather odd suppositions that have nothing to do with the real world, though it is
understandable, we may be led to believe, that the unimaginative Muslims, relying as usual on the Greeks,
should borrow this notion as an easy and ostensibly “rational” explanation for the origin of the universe.
But there is no reason to think that these ideas were adopted without critical assimilation. Philosophy is
nothing if not the sober consideration of what we can actually know, the sifting of supposition and opinion
from real knowledge. It is a certain breed of historian that has seen philosophy as the unre ective reception
of ideas from the past as if they were precious artifacts.

A similar point can be made about those who have read the Koranic accounts of paradise and hell as crude
anthropomorphisms that appeal to the basest instincts of primitive bedouins. The fact that we ourselves
may read the accounts this way says more about us than the ancient Arabs. Myth happens to be the richest
and most direct manner of expressing the inexpressible, as all cultures recognize. Myth speaks of the rst
truths in a graphic, concrete language, without the constraints of philosophical, theological, or scienti c
abstractions. Precisely because of the richness and polymorphism of its imagery and symbolism, it provides
an inexhaustible source of inspiration.

The only strange thing here is that many historians would like to imagine that the interpretations of the
myths are nothing but afterthoughts, rationalizations that allow the more thoughtful members of society to
make sense of the beliefs of the common folk. There is some truth in this idea, but to take it as the only
 explanation presupposes a progressive reading of history, a “from the bottom up” theory of development
that is congenial to modern thinking and therefore plausible to us, but that makes no sense to the tradition.

Revelation is precisely knowledge that comes from the top down. The myths have come down, which
explains why intelligence rises up to them with such alacrity and makes such sense of them—and why it
cannot do without them, even if it must manufacture its own. The interpretations are already implicit in the
myth, because the myth is closer to pure intelligence than are the explanations. This is part of what Fārābī

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was getting at in his discussions of the active imagination that is bestowed upon the prophets, allowing
23
them to express the truths of the intellective world in the garment of concrete language, accessible to all.

If we are to make any sense of the First Intellect and the Universal Soul as the dual progenitors of the
p. 60 cosmos, we have to re ect upon what the philosophers were trying to say. We cannot reify these terms
and talk about them as if they represent some sort of primitive “animism”—a notion that is itself the
product of modern evolutionary thinking—that posits a few invisible forces beyond the visible universe
marked by the spheres. The discussion is not just about what is “out there,” but also about what is “in
here.”

As human beings, we know innately that all things have been born from the Universal Soul, because our own
souls embrace nature along with the plant, animal, and human potencies. We know that the First Intellect is
the all‐embracing origin, because it is precisely our own intelligence that knows all this, arranges all this,
becomes all this, and embraces all this. If our microcosmic intelligence is able to conceive of the whole
world, it can do so only because it is already, at some level of itself, an intelligence that conceives of the
whole universe. What goes up must have come down.

If we are able to conceive of the whole of existence and achieve a unity of vision by moving up through its
levels, the world itself must have been conceived in a unity of vision before it came to be di erentiated. Only
a primary unity of realities can explain why the universe is such a seamless whole, so much like a grand,
living organism. The arguments and proofs that are o ered to make these points pertain precisely to our
own experience of self‐consciousness and our own awareness of the natural world.

A useful way to conceptualize the Origin and Return is to think of them as complementary movements
demanded by tawḥīd. The Origin is centrifugal, the Return centripetal. The presence of both movements
keeps the universe in balance. Things move out from the First Real just as light appears from the sun, and
they return to the One just as objects perceived by the senses pass by way of the mind into self‐awareness.

In the First, multiplicity is uni ed by the intense brilliance of being and consciousness. By the time things
appear on the elemental level, the light is obscured and the consciousness dimmed. In the First, all things
are present as “realities,” “quiddities,” or “forms.” In the visible world, the immersion of the forms in
matter conceals them from all but discerning eyes.

The centripetal movement is that of intelligence, which appears rst as a dim reverberation in the soul and
moves back toward its origin by re ecting upon the objects of its awareness. It gains in strength like a re
that gradually begins to blaze. In the movement toward the sheer consciousness of the center, the realities
and forms found in the sensory world are loosened and disengaged from their matter, and slowly they come
to be known by intelligence knowing itself. The movement is one of ever‐increasing awareness and
consciousness, until the knowing self nally knows itself as the only self that knows, the fully actualized
intellect that is nothing but the First Intellect in respect of the Return.

Looking at things as discrete objects keeps intelligence involved in the centrifugal movement. The more
people focus on di erentiation, analysis, control, and manipulation, the more they forget the intelligible
side to things and the more they become involved in the material realm. This is the general thrust of modern
learning, and the net result is rapidly increasing dispersion in all elds of knowledge. The exponential rise
p. 61 of information and data, which would appear to Bābā Afḍal as the last ickerings of the intelligible light
as it becomes almost totally obscured, is perhaps best exempli ed by the “information revolution” brought
about by computers.

Looking at things as manifestations of hidden realities and as descents of intelligible forms ties things back
to the centripetal movement of intelligence seeking its source. Wisdom is found in seeing the coherence of
the whole, in which the centrifugal and centripetal movements are complementary. Ignorance is not

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knowing that everything plays a role in the cosmic drama and that the parts can only be understood in terms
of the whole. To ignore the Center is to be overcome by the centrifugal movement and to dissipate one's
intelligence in the peripherals.

Hierarchy: The Ranks of Human Possibility

Given that the soul contains the possibility of actualizing all the realities known to intellect, given that
intellect at root knows the whole of creation, and given that the soul has relative freedom of choice, it
follows that the soul can become just about anything in the universe. In other words, human individuals can
adopt as their own any of the qualities and characteristics created things display.

The full actualization of the soul's potency is called “intellect,” and this is the entelechy of human beings,
their perfection and their highest good. But in fact, few people actualize the full human potency, and the
result is that almost no one becomes a true sage or what Bābā Afḍal sometimes calls a “complete human
24
being” (mardum‐i tamām). He nds the key characteristic of human “completion” (tamāmī) or
“perfection” (kamāl) to lie in bringing together all things of the universe in self‐awareness and self‐ nding.

Human beings in all their diversity represent the broadest display of attributes and qualities that can be
found in the universe—by which I mean the universe as we know it and actually nd it through our senses,
not the universe that we can speculate about or imagine to exist at the other end of all those light years (and
even that is part of us, for we do the imagining). The manifold qualities and characteristics of this diverse
humanness are often discussed under the heading of ethics, as already mentioned. They are also discussed
in treatises on politics, which consider what might be the nature of a proper society and how it is possible to
govern such a society appropriately. The philosophers often discuss proper social order on the analogy of
the balanced human microcosm, which brings together all the parts of the world in a harmonious whole. In
both the macrocosm and the microcosm, hierarchy reigns, and so also in society—even though none of the
philosophers thought that the existing political structures were anything near the ideal. One important
related discussion, with which Bābā Afḍal often occupies himself, is the division of human beings into types
that play di erent roles in society according to the degree to which they actualize or fail to actualize the
human potencies. By studying the nature of human activities, we can discern the various qualities that we
carry in ourselves, and we can judge how we and others measure up to the ideal of human perfection and
fully actualized intelligence.

Bābā Afḍal maintains, in short, that human beings can be divided in hierarchical terms. The peak of human
p. 62 perfection is achieved by those who join with the Agent Intellect. The potency for intellectual
actualization can itself be divided into two sorts, in keeping with its focus. An intellect that looks toward the
First Real and engages in the re ective task of knowing itself is called a “theoretical intellect” (ʿ aql na ẓarī),
and one that looks toward the activity, practice (ʿ amal), and work (k ār ) that we carry out in the world is
called a “practical intellect” (ʿ aql ʿ amalī).

“Theory” (naẓar) should not be understood in any of its modern meanings. To forestall the natural tendency
to read this word in contemporary terms, I translate the Arabic term as theōria, with the hope of reminding
readers that the original Greek word meant to gaze and to look. English dictionaries do tell us that theory
 meant, archaically, “direct intellectual apprehension,” but even this is not adequate to convey what Bābā
25
Afḍal and, I would maintain, the Muslim philosophers in general had in mind.

Bābā Afḍal clari es his understanding of the word naẓar by the way he translates it into Persian. The fact
that he translates it is already signi cant, given that the word had been used in Persian from early times. In
both Persian and Arabic, it means look, gaze, consideration, theory, speculation, contemplation. But in
Persian there is something abstract about the term, if only because it has no Persian root and tends to be

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used in bookish contexts. Bābā Afḍal translates it as bīnish or “seeing,” which is the verbal noun from dīdan,
the everyday Persian word meaning “to see.” This word has a down‐to‐earth concreteness that few loan
words can have, because it refers to an act designated by the most commonplace of words. If naẓar is
attributed to the mind, a Persian speaker thinks of an abstraction, like we do when we think of “theory” in
English. But if bīnish is attributed to the mind, a Persian speaker is forced to think of the mind as another
kind of eye. When Bābā Afḍal translates the Arabic expression ʿaql naẓarī (“theoretical intellect”) as khirad‐i
bīnā (“seeing intelligence”), the reader has a very di erent feel for what the philosophical enterprise is all
about. It pertains to the real world of seeing, not the abstract world of theorizing, contemplating,
speculating, and supposing.

Bābā Afḍal's use of the term seeing intelligence should itself be enough to indicate that “theorizing” as it is
understood today has little to do with what he is discussing. He stands squarely in the Neoplatonic tradition,
where conceptual thought is a tool to open up an inner faculty of unhindered contemplation. But once the
inner vision is achieved, thinking can only be a pale and imperfect re ection of the reality. As Armstrong
explains, “We can only go beyond thought through thinking. But a psychic [i.e., soulish] life and world
con ned to or totally dominated by discursive reasoning would for Plotinus be as squeezed, cramped and
26
con ned as the life and world of Blake's Urizen.”

For Bābā Afḍal, the theoretical intellect sees things as they are in themselves, because it has actualized the
potency that it received from the First Intellect, which is the principle of the whole universe, embracing
everything in its vision. At the highest stage, the seeing intelligence and the First Intellect have joined
together and become one, for the ascending arc of the circle has come back to the point from which the
descent began.

The seeing intelligence does not “think things out,” as theoreticians certainly do. It simply sees realities
and quiddities as they are. According to Avicenna, the theoretical intellect sees with the light of the Agent
p. 63 Intellect just as the eye sees with the light of the sun. He develops the analogy toward the end of his
discussion of the soul in his major work, al‐Shif āʿ (“The Healing”), and somewhat di erently in the short
summa, al‐Najāt (“The Salvation”).

The human soul may be a potential intellecter and then become an actual intellecter. Everything
that emerges from potency into act emerges only through a cause that is in act and that makes it
emerge. Hence there is a cause that makes our souls emerge from potency to act in regard to the
intelligibles. Given that it is the cause for the bestowal of intellective forms, it is nothing but an
actual intellect that itself possesses the disengaged origins of the intellective forms. Its relation to
our souls is the same as the sun's relation to our eyes. Just as the sun is actually seen by essence
and makes what is not actually seen come to be seen actually, so also is the state of this intellect in
27
our souls.

This [Agent Intellect] is related to our souls, which are the potential intellect, and to the
intelligibles, which are the potential intelligibles, just as the sun is related to our eyes, which are
potentially seeing, and to colors, which are the potentially seen. When the [sun's] trace, which is
the ray, reaches the potentially seen things, they become actually seen, and eyesight becomes
actual seeing. In the same way, a potency is e used from this Agent Intellect upon the imagined
 things, which are potentially intelligible, so as to make them actually intelligible and to make the
potential intellect an actual intellect. So also, the sun by its essence makes to see, and it is a cause
28
of making the potential seer become an actual seer.

When Bābā Afḍal translates “practical intellect” into Persian, he calls it the “working intelligence” (khirad‐i
kārgar). It is the ability to do things in a rational and coherent manner by means of understanding the
material with which one is working and the acts that one performs. It is actualized to di erent degrees by all

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those who perform any sort of rational activity, but the levels of its perfection begin to appear more clearly
in artisans and craftsmen. More important for the Return, the practical intellect allows people to actualize
beautiful character traits by acting correctly toward God and other human beings. “Ethics” is precisely the
domain where people use their practical intellect to perform actions that aid in the full actualization of the
soul.

In short, a primary classi cation of human beings can be made according to the distinction between
theoretical and practical intellect, as will be seen in several passages from Bābā Afḍal's works. One of his
short essays epitomizes the classi cation that he provides in Rungs of Perfection (3.3 and 3.4):

In the rank of the practical intellect, people are in two levels. First is the level of the folk of the
professions, those pro cient in artisanry, and the expert craftsmen and masters. Second is the
level of the ascetics, the folk of worship, and those who yearn for the house of the afterworld.

In the same way, people in the rank of the theoretical intellect are in two levels. First is the level of
the knowers of the mathematical sciences. They are a tribe who are not content with hearsay and
p. 64 who come out from the circle of following authority. Second is the level of the remotest
waystation and the utmost end of all seeking. This is the practice, character, and knowledge that
belonged to the prophets—upon them be peace! (Muṣannafāt 644)

Notice that Bābā Afḍal subdivides each of the two groups according to whether people focus on things of the
sensory world or on things of the intellective world. By “ascetics” (zuhhād) he certainly has in mind many of
those whom historians commonly call “Su s,” and indeed, the point has often been made that early Su sm
stresses an ascetic tendency that was present in the Prophet and some of his followers. The term points to
what I would call “practical Su sm” as opposed to “theoretical Su sm.” Practicing Muslims, whether or
not they are formally a liated with institutionalized Su sm, perform a whole host of religious activities,
and the “ascetics” are those Muslims who do these activities especially well and skillfully, just as
“craftsmen” are those who make things especially well and skillfully. Artisanal expertise has degrees that
become manifest in the beauty of the work of art, and so also ascetic expertise has degrees that become
manifest in the beauty of the soul and of outward acts.

On the theoretical level, Bābā Afḍal again divides people into two sorts. The rst are those who focus on the
“mathematical” (riyāḍī) sciences, which include arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. These sciences were
considered essential for philosophers as a preliminary “training” and “exercise” (riyāḍa) of the re ective
faculty. The mathematical sciences focus on numbers, which have no presence per se in the world of the
sensibles. Understanding the nature of numbers allows people to lift their gaze beyond the sensibles and
begin grasping the intelligibles. The ultimate goal in these sciences was to help the soul disengage (tajarrud)
itself from attachment to and dependence upon forms embedded in matter (mādda), that is, the objects
found in the corporeal world. Then the soul will be ready for the real task, which is to understand the
highest discipline—the knowledge of tawḥīd and the rst things.

According to the just quoted passage, people who develop the seeing intelligence by studying the
mathematical sciences are not satis ed with easy explanations and do not accept things as true because
some cleric or expert has said they are true. They do not belong to the circle of those who “follow authority”
 (taqlīd). This term is often employed in a juridical sense, as when a Muslim believer follows the opinions of
any of the schools of law (madhhab) or a legal expert (muftī, mujtahid), and this is considered necessary and
praiseworthy. In this sense of the word, it is the opposite of ijtihād, the activity of a mujtahid. However, when
the term is used as in this passage to refer to the second domain of religion, which is understanding and
faith, it is the opposite of taḥqīq, “veri cation” or “realization.” For the proponents of the intellectual
schools, especially theoretical Su sm and philosophy, the only real understanding is that which is gained
through veri cation, and to follow authority in one's understanding is to have no understanding at all. It is

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clearly to the circle of the “veri ers” that Bābā Afḍal is ascribing those who study the mathematical
sciences.

Following authority, then, is accepting something as true on the basis of hearsay and simpleminded belief.
Veri cation is to strive to understand for oneself. If veri cation sounds much like what modern‐day
scientists are supposed to do, this helps explain why this term is used nowadays in Persian to designate
p. 65 “(scienti c) research.” But the “research” that Bābā Afḍal means here is a far cry from what most people
—including even the best of scientists outside their elds of expertise—do today or at any time, since in
most things people simply follow the authority of the experts, or the zeitgeist, or the media, or their friends,
or whoever it is that teaches them how and what to think. Nowadays, given the inordinate amount of factual
data that informed individuals are supposed to assimilate, it is impossible not to follow authority in
practically everything that we know—or rather, everything that we think we know. From the point of view
of the proponents of taḥqīq, what we actually know is in e ect nothing, because we know nothing
whatsoever with absolute surety. As Bābā Afḍal points out at the end of his treatise on logic,

We nd the vast majority of people admitting that they do not know any judgment with certainty.
If you ask them about certainty, they will answer, “We nd no certainty in self.” They can provide
no example of a statement of certainty, except for a small group who have passed beyond some of
the levels of possibility in certainty and arrived at preparedness. (Muṣannafāt 578; HIP 307)

The “small group” Bābā Afḍal has in mind seems to be those who achieve the stage of “mathematical
knowledge,” but that is not the highest stage of the theoretical intellect, because those who achieve it do not
thereby have the wherewithal to grasp tawḥīd and the nature of the soul in its ultimate becoming. Hence
Bābā Afḍal places the type of knowledge achieved by the prophets at the highest level, and he clearly
understands this to be the knowledge known by the fully actualized intellect. His position on the superiority
of the prophets, by the way, is no di erent from that of many of the other philosophers. We will see
Avicenna saying the same sort of thing.

Bābā Afḍal elaborates upon this brief discussion of the stages of human perfection in several works, most
fully in The Rungs of Perfection. Given that only those at the highest stage have achieved full perfection, he
explains the di erent sorts of partial perfections as well as the various sorts of imperfection. His basic
terminology is related rst to the levels of soul (vegetal, animal, human) and its diverse potencies, and
second to ethics and character traits. Each praiseworthy character trait represents the actualization of one
potency in equilibrium with others, and each blameworthy character trait represents the failure to actualize
a potency, or a disharmony and disequilibrium among the potencies that have been actualized.

A clear and simple example of a division of human types based on ethical considerations is o ered by Bābā
Afḍal in Four Headings from the Alchemy of Felicity, his abridgment of Ghazālī's work. Most of what Bābā
Afḍal says in his own original compositions on the topic can be read as elaborations of Ghazālī's position.
However, this does not mean that he was necessarily inspired by Ghazālī, since many detailed versions of
the discussion can be found in earlier texts. The Ikhwān al‐Ṣafāʿ, for example, were especially fond of this
type of reasoning.
 An Anthropocosmic Vision

In concluding this chapter, let me again try to suggest what lies at the heart of the philosophical tradition
p. 66 that is epitomized by Bābā Afḍal. Certainly, the goal is to know oneself in terms of the First Real, the
Absolute Being that brought the universe into existence, and then to act in accordance with what this
knowledge demands. This is precisely “wisdom,” which embraces the theoretical and practical sides of the

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human self. But what sets this vision apart from modern thought and puts it squarely at the center of a
human project whose permutations can be seen in all the great premodern civilizations is the focus on what
might best be called “anthropocosmism,” to use the evocative expression that Tu Weiming employs to
describe the Confucian worldview.

The Islamic philosophical tradition can only understand human beings in terms of the unity of the human
world and the natural world. There is no place in this tradition to drive a wedge between humans and the
cosmos. In the nal analysis the natural world is the externalization of the human substance, and the
human soul is the internalization of the realm of nature. Human beings and the whole universe are
intimately intertwined, facing each other like two mirrors. The quest for wisdom can only succeed if the
natural world is recognized as equivalent to one's own self, just as one must see the whole human race as
the external manifestation of the potencies and possibilities of the human soul.

Islamic philosophy never developed and utilized all the “scienti c” insights of its great masters that have so
often been studied by Western historians of science. Many of these historians, and even more so the
modern‐day Muslims who have followed in their footsteps, have lamented the “decadence” that prevented
Islam from pursuing the “progressive” course of the early philosopher‐scientists. They all tell us that once
the works of the Muslim scholars were translated into Latin, they were instrumental in the development of
philosophy and science in the West, which in turn led to the Enlightenment and the scienti c revolution. But
the claim that the Muslims failed to capitalize on the insights of the early thinkers need not be taken as a
shortcoming on their part. After all, this is simply to say that the Islamic intellectual tradition remained true
to itself. It held and continued to hold that human beings and the world must never be driven apart, as they
are by the Cartesian method, for example. There could be no justi cation for the objecti cation of the
natural world, for considering it as an “object” without divinely ordained rights. For Muslim intellectuals
down through the eighteenth century, the cosmos remained sacred and inseparable from the human self.
Any transgression of the natural world would be a betrayal of human nature, and to “rape the earth” in the
modern manner could only be a rape of the human soul and a surrender of any claim to human status.

The Enlightenment project of instrumental rationality depended for its success on the bifurcation of the
human and the cosmic, for only then could the world be seen as a great collection of inanimate objects that
humans were free to manipulate and control as they wish. The net result has been a whole culture that sees
itself as alien to the natural realm and drives people to search ever more desperately for unspoiled nature.
The existential angst of so many modern intellectuals, who nd themselves beleaguered by a hostile
universe, is utterly inconceivable in the Islamic intellectual tradition, for which the universe is nothing if
not a nurturing womb.

It is not without signi cance that the philosophical tradition has been largely moribund in most of the
Islamic world for at least the past century, just as theoretical Su sm—which developed a parallel
p. 67 anthropocosmic vision—is the least prevalent of the many forms of Su sm in modern times. In place of
these traditions, Muslim intellectuals, who are now most commonly trained as doctors and engineers, have
adopted modern ideologies. Those who have clung to their own traditions have for the most part specialized
in Sharia (Islamic law), which has nothing to say about God, the cosmos, or the human soul. And a large
number of those who have tried to revive an Islamic intellectual tradition that would not simply be a
warmed‐over Western ideology have done so by appealing to Kalam, which does indeed discuss the divine
 attributes, but which asserts a radical transcendence that precludes any sort of anthropocosmic vision.
Hence Kalam leaves the door open to treat the universe as an object to be manipulated. It is intuitively
recognized as the one theological methodology that can be interpreted such that it allows Muslims to
abandon most of their intellectual tradition and adopt science and ideology in its place.

The vast majority of modern‐day Muslim intellectuals, like most of their counterparts in the West, have
considered science and technology absolutely desirable for the sake of human progress and happiness. No

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questions are raised about the utter alienation from the world and God that scientistic thinking inevitably
brings down upon a culture, the attening of intellectual horizons that takes for granted a human‐
centeredness without God or a living cosmos. Few have seen that scientistic thinking is largely responsible
for the negation of any human possibility beyond the mundane in the name of an “inevitable” development
—one that has no justi cation other than that it must be brought about because it can be brought about. It is
hardly necessary to begin naming names, since the whole project of modern society, East and West, to the
extent that it is called upon to justify itself, still clings to the prevailing myths of evolution and progress.

Fortunately, however, there is much to be hopeful about in the modern world, not least the fact that more
and more people are recognizing that something important has been lost. The recognition of loss is the
p. 68 necessary precondition for gain.

Notes

1. Especially helpful here is the chapter “How to Read Islamic Philosophy” in Oliver Leaman's, Introduction to Medieval
Islamic Philosophy. See also Netton's introduction to Allāh Transcendent and Morewedge's introduction to Essays in Islamic
Philosophy, Theology, and Mysticism (Oneonta: Department of Philosophy, 1995).
2. Ghazālı̄ 's philosophical skill is completely apparent in his famous attack on the philosophers, which, as its translator
remarks, “makes its case through closely argued criticisms that are ultimately philosophical.” Al‐Ghazālı̄ , The Incoherence
of the Philosophers, translated by Michael E. Marmura (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1997), xvi.
3. For a detailed discussion of the nature of the Islamic tradition and philosophy's role in it, see Sachiko Murata and William
C. Chittick, The Vision of Islam (St. Paul: Paragon House, 1994), esp. chapter 6.
4. It has been suggested that the best term for what “education” implied in Islamic society is taʿ dı̄b, “conveying courtesy,”
since Islamic education involved not only the transferal of knowledge (taʿ lı̄m), but also the inculcation of the proper and
appropriate activity (adab) that true knowledge demands. The connotation of beauty in the term adab is implicit in the
use of its derivative adabiyyāt to mean “literature.” The importance of beauty is also reflected in the central role that
poetry played both in Islamic literature and in the training of the cultivated soul. It should be kept in mind too that Sufis
went as far as to say al‐taṣawwuf kulluhuādāb—“Sufism, all of it, is acts of courtesy.” For a detailed investigation of the
implications of adab for Bābā Afḍal's contemporary Ibn al‐ʿArabı̄ , see my Sufi Path of Knowledge, esp. 174–79.
5. Moreover, simply to reject scientism will not help if a coherent, alternative view of the universe cannot be o ered in its
stead, or, what is worse, if political ideology replaces scientistic belief. Here it is worth considering the thesis of Christos C.
Evangeliou, who argues cogently that the destiny of philosophy, once it fell into the hands of the non‐Greeks, was to serve
alien masters. He sums up his thesis in the first page of his study: “The acquired bad habits of European ʻphilosophy,ʼ that
is, its docile service of alien authorities, appear to have been transferred from medieval theology to modern scientific
technology since the seventeenth century, and to Marxist political ideology since the nineteenth” (The Hellenic Philosophy:
Between Europe, Asia and Africa [Binghamton: Institute of Global Cultural Studies, 1997], 1). In passing references,
Evangeliou puts Islamic philosophy in the same category as medieval Christian philosophy, and there are many reasons
for doing so. But a more nuanced approach would bring out the stark di erence between the theological principles
underlying the Christian and Islamic traditions, as well as the fact that Islam never had any authoritarian institution like
the Church. The Christian doctrines of incarnation and the trinity raise all sorts of theological mysteries and conundrums
that the Muslim philosophers did not have to deal with. Their only theological axiom was tawḥı̄d—the unity of reality—but
neither they nor other reflective Muslims thought that this had anything to do with the mysterious, and they saw Plato
and Aristotle as its firm supporters. For Islamic philosophy, tawḥı̄d is a principle that is self‐evident to a healthy
intelligence. The philosophers set out to demonstrate it not because it was unclear to them, but because a healthy
intelligence is not the human norm. Moreover, the Muslim philosophers have hardly been “docile” toward the religious
 authorities, or else they would not have been the objects of repeated polemical attacks by the jurists and theologians over
the centuries.
6. See for example Rustum Roy, “The Twilight of Science—Last of the ʻGodsʼ,” in Futures 29/6 (1997), 471–82.
7. Armstrong, Hellenic and Christian Studies, 6:178.
8. Morewedge's translation of this work as The Metaphysica of Avicenna has a useful discussion of the historical background.
9. Netton o ers a di erent and less Koranic sounding list of ten important divine attributes in Avicenna's teachings (Allāh
Transcendent, 155–62), but six of the ten are still Koranic divine names.
10. Avicenna, Ilāhiyyāt‐i dānishnāma‐yi ʿalāʿı̄, 164; Morewedge, Metaphysica, 108.

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11. See Netton's chapter on Avicenna, “Ibn Sı̄ nā's Necessary and Beloved Deity,” in Allāh Transcendent, esp. 175–76.
12. The term Lordship (rubbarubiyya) designates the attribute of the Lord (rabb), a name that specifies God inasmuch as He
nurtures, protects, and has authority over created things, which are His “servants” (ʿ abd). The term was commonly used
to specify the topic of philosophical texts concerned with theological issues. The Arabic translation of the Theology of
Aristotle gives in its very title the expression qawl ʿ alāal‐rubbarubiyya, “a talk about Lordship,” as a gloss on the Greek
loan word uthbarulbarujiyā, “theology.” Historians of philosophy have translated rubbarubiyya in various ways, such as
“divinity” and “sovereignty.”
13. It is not quite true to say that Bābā Afḍal does not ascribe existence to God, but he certainly does not ascribe it in a way
that would allow for philosophical reflection upon what it means. Thus he says, for example, “There is nothing to be
discussed concerning [His] Being and Ipseity” (Muṣannafāt 652; HIP 146).
14. The word hastı̄ is a verbal noun that derives from the verb hastan, one of the forms of the “to be” verb in Persian. Like
another form of the “to be” verb, the hypothetical astan, hastan is cognate with English “is.” The third form of the “to be”
verb, bbarudan, is cognate with English “be.” Hastı̄ is constructed from hast, which is both a verbal noun with more or less
the same meaning as hastı̄ and the third person singular form of the verb, meaning “he/she/it is.” I underline the is in the
sentence because of the strong connotation of “being there” in the hastan form of the “to be” verb, in contrast to the astan
form, which is simply a copula. Thus hast is a complete sentence: “It is.” But ast is incomplete: “It is . . . ,” and we want to
know “what” it is. To complete the sentence, we need an adjective or a noun. In short, hastı̄ or “being” is a verbal noun
derived from hast, and it has the literal sense of “is‐ness” or “to‐be‐ness” or “to‐be‐there‐ness.” Bābā Afḍal uses it as a
synonym both for wujbarud, “existence,” and, especially in the plural, for mawjbarud, “existent.” He also uses the terms
hast and bbarud (a gerund from the other form of the “to be” verb) in the same meaning as hastı̄.
15. As for kawn and its derivatives, it is limited by the fact that the Koranic context makes it pertain only to creation, not to
God himself. For most thinkers, the word's limited connotations do not allow it to designate the concept of being per se.
16. Merlan, Monopsychism, 22.
17. Take, for example, the position of Avicenna, as explained by Fakhry, History, 161.
18. Merlan, Monopsychism, 22. Much of Merlan's book addresses theories and debates about the nature of conjunction. The
issue comes up quickly in any investigation of the views of the Muslim philosophers. For a recent scholarly study that
deals with it in some detail, see H. A. Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, on Intellect (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1992).
19. The Persian language complicates the issue, because we have three more terms that can be used more or less
interchangeably with the two Arabic words. One is the already mentioned jān or “anima,” which Bābā Afḍal uses as a
rough synonym for nafs. Usually, however, jān refers to the nafs on the animal level or higher; thus jānwar, “having a jān,”
means “animal,” as does the standard Arabic term, ḥayawān, which means more literally “living.” The second Persian term
is rawān, which Bābā Afḍal uses much less frequently than any of these other terms and which I translate as “lifebreath.”
The third and most commonly used term is khwud, which, like nafs in Arabic, is the basic reflexive pronoun, meaning
“self.” Thus, when Bābā Afḍal wants to explain what he means by nafs or “soul,” he says it means khwud.
20. “Creation from nothing” is a theological axiom of sorts, but there is no agreement as to what it means, so it was dealt with
in a variety of ways, some of them mutually contradictory. A er all, there are three extremely important terms here
begging to be defined—creation, not, and thing—all of which are central to theological and philosophical thinking. In Allāh
Transcendent, Netton makes the Koranic “Creator paradigm” a basic issue in his study of philosophic positions, but he
does not do justice to the theological problems raised by claiming that the Koranic God creates ex nihilo. What exactly
does ex nihilo mean? What terminology did the Muslim theologians employ to express the idea? How do they agree and
disagree among themselves?
21. For the schemes of the two philosophers, see Netton, Allāh Transcendent, 116,165. For that of Ibn al‐ʿArabı̄ , see Chittick,
Self‐Disclosure, xxviii–xxxii.
22. For a study and translation of Avicenna's treatise, see Peter Heath, Allegory and Philosophy in Avicenna (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992). For some of Ibn al‐ʿArabı̄ 's discussions, see James Morris, “The Spiritual
Ascension: Ibn ʿArabı̄ and the Miʿrāj,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 107 (1987): 629–52; 108 (1988): 63–77. For a
 survey of some of the philosophical uses to which the miʿ rāj accounts were put, see Altmann, “The Ladder of Ascension,”
in his Studies, 41–72.
23. See Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, 58–63.
24. The expression is of course reminiscent of the term “perfect human being” (alinsān al‐kāmil), made famous by Ibn al‐
ʿArabı̄ , though there is no reason to suspect any direct historical link between the two concepts. On the religious side, the
idea of achieving human perfection (using the term kamāl) goes back to the hadith literature, and the philosophers
frequently discussed it.
25. Sometimes naẓar is translated as “contemplation,” and that may indeed suggest something closer to what the word

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implies. It is also translated as “speculation,” which would be good if the word still had its archaic meaning of “mental
vision,” but not in its modern meanings of prolonged analysis and theorizing and its connotations of supposition and even
fantasy.
26. Armstrong, Hellenic and Christian Studies, 6:164.
27. G. C. Anawati and Saʿid Zayed, eds., al‐Shifāʿ: al‐Ṭabı̄ʿiyyāt 6—al‐Nafs (Cairo: al‐Hayʿat al‐Miṣriyyat al‐ʿAmma li'l‐Kitāb,
1975), 208.
28. M. Ṣabrı̄ al‐Kurdı̄ , ed., al‐Najāt, (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al‐Saʿāda, 1938), 193.