Insight Editions · No. 119
History of Islamic Philosophy
Henry Corbin · Translated by Liadain Sherrard and Philip Sherrard
Henry Corbin traces Islamic philosophy from Qur'anic hermeneutics and early Shiite thought through Averroes, Sufism, Illuminationism, and later Iranian philosophical traditions.
A study guide to History of Islamic Philosophy by Henry Corbin, translated by Liadain Sherrard and Philip Sherrard. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
Overview
It covers the foreword, the first part (from the origins to the death of Averroes) and the second part (from Averroes to the present), ending with Corbin's "Perspective". The notes in the scan are used only where they explain the text. The bibliography and index are not included in the scan and are left out. French quotations are given as printed, each followed by an editor's translation.
Argument Map
Figure 2.
Chapter 1. Foreword and the Sources of Philosophical Meditation in Islam
Corbin opens with a manifesto disguised as housekeeping. Before a single thinker is named, he redefines the field: this is Islamic philosophy, not Arabic philosophy; it did not end with Averroes; and in Islam the history of philosophy cannot be separated from the history of spirituality [p 11 to 15]. Chapter I then names the two springs that fed it: the spiritual exegesis of the Qur'an and the great translation movement [p 21 to 47].
The Foreword: Four Corrections
1. Islamic, not Arabic. Arabic is the language of the Revelation and of the Prayer, but today "Arab" names an ethnic, national and political concept that coincides neither with the religious concept of Islam nor with its frontiers; Arab or arabised peoples are a minority of the Muslim world [p 11]. A purely linguistic definition fails too: Nasir-e Khosraw (eleventh century) and Afzaloddin Kashani (thirteenth) wrote entirely in Persian, and from Avicenna and Sohravardi to Mir Damad and Hadi Sabzavari many wrote in both languages [p 12]. Descartes and Kant wrote some treatises in Latin without becoming "Latin" philosophers. Corbin therefore calls Islamic the philosophy whose growth is tied to the religious and spiritual fact of Islam, a philosophy which shows that Islam is not adequately expressed by canon law (fiqh) alone [p 12 to 13].
2. Averroes is not the end. The old textbook scheme kept only the names known to Latin scholasticism. Corbin is blunt: «Il est radicalement faux que celle-ci ait été close avec la mort d'Averroës (1198)» (editor's translation: "It is radically false that it was closed with the death of Averroes (1198)") [p 13]. In the West Averroism swamped Latin Avicennism; in Iran Averroism passed unnoticed, and Ghazali's critique was never thought to have ended the tradition Avicenna began [p 13].
3. Do not look for our word "philosophy". Falsafa and faylasuf do not map onto our concepts. The sharp split between philosophy and theology dates from Western scholasticism and presupposes a secularisation that could not arise in Islam, since Islam never knew the phenomenon of the Church [p 13 to 14]. Hikmat is sophia; hikmat ilahiya is literally theosophia; metaphysics treats the Ilahiyat, the Divinalia. Muslim historians believed the Greek sages too drew from the "Niche of the lights of prophecy" [p 14]. Where philosophical research (tahqiq) was at home in Islam was in reflection on prophecy and revelation, so it takes the form of a prophetic philosophy, which is why Shi'ism comes first in the book [p 14].
4. Mysticism belongs inside. Philosophy cannot be told without Sufism, whose speculative theosophy has roots in Shi'ite esotericism; Sohravardi and the Ishraqiyun joined philosophical research to personal spiritual realisation [p 15]. European periodisation (Antiquity, Middle Ages, Modern) applies only by verbal artifice; types of thought persist from the origins to today [p 15 to 16].
| Period | Span | Signature |
|---|---|---|
| First | Origins to the death of Averroes (595/1198) | Something ends in western Islam; with Sohravardi and Ibn 'Arabi something begins in the East that lasts to our day |
| Second | Three centuries before the Safavid renaissance | The "metaphysics of Sufism": schools of Ibn 'Arabi and Najm Kobra; Sufism rejoins Twelver Shi'ism and reformed Ismailism after Alamut falls to the Mongols (1256) |
| Third | Sixteenth century to the present | The Safavid renaissance in Iran, continuing through the Qajar period |
Table 1. Corbin's own periodisation, chosen to fit the thinkers rather than an imported scheme [p 16 to 17]. The foreword is signed Tehran, November 1962, with thanks to Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Osman Yahya [p 17 to 18].
The Book and the Hermeneutic Situation
Islamic philosophy is the work of a "people of the Book" (Ahl al-Kitab), whose religion rests on a book come down from Heaven. Jews, Christians and Muslims share one problem: to understand the true sense of that Book [p 21]. And the way of understanding depends on the way of being of the one who understands; conversely, the believer's whole inner conduct flows from how he understands. The lived situation is a hermeneutic situation, where true meaning dawns and makes existence true at the same stroke [p 21 to 22]. The key term is haqiqat: the true sense of revelation, which, being the truth, is its essence and hence its spiritual sense [p 22].
No Church, no magisterium. Islam has no clergy holding the means of grace, no dogmatic magisterium, no pontiff, no Council [p 23]. Christianity, Corbin argues, replaced prophetic inspiration with a dogmatic magisterium as early as the second century (the repression of Montanism) and, centred on the Incarnation as an event in history, came to identify the true sense of Scripture with the historical, literal sense. Hence the confusion of symbol and allegory. His sharpest line: «L'allégorie est inoffensive; le sens spirituel peut être révolutionnaire» (editor's translation: "Allegory is harmless; the spiritual sense can be revolutionary") [p 23]. Spiritual hermeneutics survived on the margins of the Churches, with Boehme and Swedenborg, who read Genesis as Shi'ites and the school of Ibn 'Arabi read the Qur'an: as a stack of universes symbolising with one another [p 24].
Metahistory, not history. Islamic religious consciousness centres on a fact of metahistory: the divine question put to pre-existent human spirits, "Am I not your Lord?" (Qur'an 7/171). The joyful reply sealed a pact, and the prophets came period after period to recall it; their sequence is the "cycle of prophecy" [p 24]. What the prophets said yields the letter, the shari'at. The question is whether to stop there or to seek the haqiqat. Nasir-e Khosraw puts it in lines Corbin treats as a charter: positive religion is the exoteric aspect of the Idea, the Idea the esoteric aspect of positive religion; «La religion positive est le symbole (mithâl); l'Idée est le symbolisé (mamthûl)» (editor's translation: "Positive religion is the symbol (mithal); the Idea is the symbolised (mamthul)"); the exoteric fluctuates with the cycles, the esoteric is a divine Energy not subject to becoming [p 24 to 25].
The haqiqat cannot be defined by a magisterium, but it needs Guides. Prophecy is closed: how does religious history continue after the "Seal of the prophets"? That question and its answer are Shi'ism, a prophetology that widens into an imamology [p 25]. Without safeguarding the hidden sense, Corbin warns, Islam would undergo what happened in Christendom, where theological systems were secularised into social and political ideologies and theological messianism into social messianism [p 25].
Vertical time. Without a "historical consciousness" to confront, Islamic thought moves between procession from the Origin (mabda') and return to it (ma'ad): forms are thought in space rather than time; the past is not behind us but "under our feet" [p 25 to 26]. The drama is not one the philosophers opened: it starts the day after the Prophet's death, which explains why philosophy flowered again in a Shi'ite milieu in sixteenth-century Safavid Iran [p 26]. Averroism, by isolating itself from prophetic philosophy, was a dead end, an episode unknown to eastern Islam [p 27].
The Imams' Rules of Reading
The sixth Imam, Ja'far Sadiq (d. 148/765), says the Book holds four things: the stated expression ('ibarat) for the common believers, the allusion (isharat) for the elite, the subtle meanings (lata'if) for the Friends of God, and the high spiritual truths (haqa'iq) for the prophets [p 27]. The first Imam, 'Ali ibn Abi Talib (d. 40/661), names the four senses exoteric, esoteric, limit (hadd) and divine project (moftala') [p 27 to 28]. The number echoes the Latin four senses, but the senses are graded to a spiritual hierarchy of readers, not to a doctrine of history [p 28].
Ibn 'Abbas, standing on Mount 'Arafat, said that if he commented on verse 65/12 as he had heard the Prophet comment it, his hearers would stone him [p 28]. The Imam's initiatory role (ta'lim) is not an ecclesiastical magisterium: the Imam is inspired, and his teaching concerns the esoteric; the full revelation of all esoteric meaning will come with the parousia of the twelfth, hidden Imam [p 29].
A Literature of Inner Commentary
Ruzbehan Baqli of Shiraz (d. 606/1209) placed the Imams' texts at the head of his great mystical commentary; Rashidoddin Maybodi (d. 520/1126) composed a monumental Persian commentary joining tafsir and ta'wil; 'Abdorrazzaq Kashani wrote the Ta'wilat for Ibn 'Arabi's school [p 29 to 30]. An anonymous treatise (dated 731/1331) maps the seven esoteric senses onto seven spiritual degrees, and Semnani (d. 736/1336) organises his own commentary on that basis [p 30]. Avicenna wrote a Tafsir of verses; his reading of sura 113 turns "the Lord of the daybreak" into the one who splits the darkness of non-being with the light of being, the Necessary Being [p 30 to 31]. Molla Sadra's Shi'ite commentary on a few suras runs to some seven hundred folio pages [p 31].
| Degree (Ja'far Kashfi) | Pivot | Matching school |
|---|---|---|
| Tafsir, literal exegesis | Canonical Islamic sciences | Peripatetics |
| Ta'wil, leading back to the archetype | Spiritual direction and divine inspiration | "Stoics" (hikmat al-Rawaq), science from behind the Veil |
| Tafhim, "making understand" | Understanding by God; inspiration of which God is subject, object and end | The "oriental" science of Sohravardi and Molla Sadra |
Table 2. Early nineteenth-century Shi'ite theosopher Ja'far Kashfi ranks schools of philosophy by degrees of understanding scripture [p 31 to 32].
Created or uncreated? For the mystic theosopher, the Mu'tazilite controversy over whether the Qur'an is created (imposed by the caliph Ma'mun in 833, reversed under Motawakkil about fifteen years later) is a badly posed problem: the two terms do not aim at the same plane of reality [p 32 to 33]. Facing modern historical criticism, the 'irfani philosopher declines to explain the Prophet by his milieu; he asks how the Prophet is tied not to "his time" but to the eternal Source of his message. Semnani distinguishes the time of the outer world (zaman afaqi), quantitative and homogeneous, from the inner time of the soul (zaman anfosi), purely qualitative: some events are real without being events of empirical history [p 33 to 34]. Time becomes space [p 34].
Ta'wil: The Grammar of Return
Tanzil is the letter of revelation brought down by the Angel; ta'wil is to lead it back to its origin. Behind exegesis stands the Guide; behind exegesis stands an exodus, a "going out of Egypt" from metaphor and the servitude of the letter, from the Occident of appearance to the Orient of the hidden idea [p 35]. For Ismaili gnosis, ta'wil is inseparable from a spiritual new birth: the exegesis of texts goes with the exegesis of the soul; even Jabir's alchemy (hide the apparent, manifest the hidden) is a case of it [p 35].
Figure 8. The three couples Corbin asks readers to remember in Arabic, all in the relation of symbol to symbolised [p 36].
Symbol is not allegory. Allegory dresses up generalities that could be known and said otherwise. A symbol is the only possible expression of what it symbolises; it is never deciphered once for all; symbolic perception makes the data of the senses transparent, and without that transparency one cannot pass from one plane to another [p 36]. Ta'wil engages the imaginative consciousness, whose noetic value the Ishraqiyun, Molla Sadra above all, would defend [p 36 to 37]. It is an initial apperception, as irreducible as a sound or a colour, which is why so many Iranian readers hear a mystical sense in Hafez [p 37].
The Translations
The second source is the assimilation by Islam of the cultures before it, east and west, in a grand circuit: Islam receives the Greek heritage, genuine and pseudepigraphic, and passes it to the West in the twelfth century through the Toledo translators [p 38]. Corbin compares its scale to the Chinese translation of the Mahayana canon. He distinguishes two centres [p 38].
The Syrians. The "school of the Persians" at Edessa was closed by Zeno in 489 for Nestorian leanings; its masters founded a school at Nisibis. Khosraw Anushravan (521 to 579) founded Gonde-Shahpour, largely staffed by Syrians; in 529 Justinian closed the school of Athens and seven Neoplatonists took refuge in Iran [p 39]. Sergius of Rash 'Ayna (d. 536) translated much of Galen and Aristotle's logic [p 39]. Baghdad was founded in 148/765; in 217/832 al-Ma'mun founded the House of Wisdom (Bayt al-hikma) under Yahya ibn Masuyeh, succeeded by Honayn ibn Ishaq (194/809 to 260/873), the most famous translator, working mostly from Syriac into Arabic [p 40]. The whole technical vocabulary of Arabic philosophy took shape in the third/ninth century, and Corbin warns that clinging to a Greek dictionary to read later thinkers who knew no Greek leads to errors, because words then lived their own life [p 40 to 41]. Qosta ibn Luqa (about 820 to about 912) and the Sabaeans of Harran, above all Thabit ibn Qorra (826 to 904), complete the picture [p 41 to 42].
The pseudepigrapha. The so-called Theology of Aristotle, actually a paraphrase of Plotinus's last three Enneads, underlies Islamic Neoplatonism and explains the urge to reconcile Aristotle and Plato; Avicenna already doubted its attribution [p 42 to 43]. Its "ecstatic confession" (Enneads IV, 8, 1) was read as the type of the Prophet's heavenly ascent; Sohravardi ascribed it to Plato himself [p 43]. The Liber de causis, really drawn from Proclus, and the Liber de Pomo had similar fortunes [p 43].
The Iranians of the north-east. Following Julius Ruska, Corbin insists the Syrians were not the only channel. Persian scholars at the Abbasid court shaped astronomy and astrology; Iranian technical terms such as nushader (ammonia) point to Greco-oriental centres in Iran as the bridge to Jabir's alchemy [p 44]. Ibn Moqaffa' translated from Pahlavi; Mohammad ibn Musa Khwarezmi, father of so-called "Arab" algebra (about 820), was as far from being an Arab as Khiva is from Mecca [p 44 to 45]. The Barmakids, whose ancestor held the hereditary office of chief priest of the Buddhist temple of Nawbahar at Balkh, carried Iranian influence to the head of the caliphate (752 to 804) [p 45]. These sciences belonged to a worldview the Great Church sought to destroy; further east its grip weakened [p 45 to 46].
An Ismaili reading of the "hadith of the tomb" gives Corbin his definition of philosophy's role: «elle est la tombe où il faut que meure la théologie pour ressusciter en une theosophia, sagesse divine (hikmat ilâhîya), une gnose ('irfân)» (editor's translation: "it is the tomb where theology must die in order to rise again as a theosophia, divine wisdom (hikmat ilahiya), a gnosis ('irfan)") [p 47]. Gnosis survived because Islam had no Councils; what the gnostics knew was fidelity to the "men of God", the Imams [p 47].
Chapter 2. Shi'ism and Prophetic Philosophy: Twelver Shi'ism
This is the chapter Corbin says no general history of Islamic philosophy had written. His claim: Shi'ism is the esotericism of Islam, and from the Imams' own teaching came a "prophetic philosophy" with its own theology, prophetology, anthropology and theory of knowledge, none of which can be derived from the Greeks or from Sunni Kalam [p 48 to 55]. He follows the Imams' texts through their commentators, chiefly Molla Sadra, Mir Damad and Haydar Amoli [p 66].
Preliminary Observations
Orientalists had explained Shi'ism by politics and society. Corbin replies that piling up outer circumstances never yields the original religious phenomenon (Urphaenomen), as irreducible as the perception of a sound or colour; the first and last explanation of Shi'ism is Shi'ite consciousness itself, its concern to reach the true sense of revelation on which the truth of human existence depends [p 48 to 50]. Ismaili works such as those of Abu Ya'qub Sejestani predate Avicenna; the dialectic of tawhid (double negativity) and the problems of prophetology arose without a Greek model [p 50 to 51].
A prophetic philosophy is one that will not be enclosed by the historical past, by a letter fixed in dogma, or by the horizon of rational logic. Shi'ite thought waits not for a new law but for the full manifestation of all the hidden senses of revelation, typified by the awaited parousia of the hidden Imam. After the closed cycle of prophecy comes a new cycle, the cycle of walayat; such a philosophy is essentially eschatological [p 51]. Its two lines of force are the batin (the esoteric) and the walayat [p 51].
The hidden sense cannot be built with syllogisms nor defended like Kalam, «car on ne réfute pas les symboles» (editor's translation: "for one does not refute symbols") [p 52]. It is transmitted only as a knowledge that is spiritual inheritance ('ilm irthi), held in the massive corpus of the Imams' teaching (26 tomes in 14 folio volumes in Majlisi's edition). Each Imam was in turn the "Keeper of the Book" (Qayyim al-Qor'an) [p 52]. Corbin blames those Shi'ites who ignored this teaching and reduced Shi'ism to a fifth legal rite beside the four Sunni rites [p 52 to 53].
Walayat. The word means friendship and protection. The Awliya Allah are the Friends of God, strictly the prophets and Imams, to whom inspiration reveals divine secrets; by answering with his own devotion, the adept reaches self-knowledge and shares their walayat. It joins knowledge (ma'rifat) and love (mahabbat), a knowledge that saves: under this aspect Shi'ism is the gnosis of Islam [p 53 to 54]. The texts repeat: «La walâyat est l'ésotérique de la prophétie (bâtin al-nobowwat)» (editor's translation: "Walayat is the esoteric of prophecy (batin al-nobowwat)") [p 53]. Corbin refuses "sainthood" as a translation, to avoid importing Western canonical meanings [p 54 to 55].
| Balance of zahir and batin | Result |
|---|---|
| Balance kept between shari'at and haqiqat, prophecy and Imamate | Twelver Shi'ism, and to a degree Fatimid Ismailism |
| Batin prevails until it effaces zahir; Imamate takes precedence over prophecy | Reformed Ismailism of Alamut (ultra-Shi'ism in its extreme form) |
| Zahir without batin | A literalism that mutilates integral Islam by rejecting the inheritance passed from Prophet to Imams |
Table 3. Where the branches part company: everything depends on how the outer and inner are held together [p 54].
Shi'ism and Sufism. Sufism is the interiorisation of the Qur'anic revelation and the attempt to relive the Prophet's night of ascent; on the face of it, Shi'ism and Sufism should be two names for one thing [p 55]. There were Shi'ite Sufis from the start: in Kufa a Shi'ite named 'Abdak was the first to be called a Sufi. Yet some Imams condemned the Sufis severely [p 55 to 56]. Corbin's hypothesis, following Tor Andrae: in Sunni Sufism, prophetology took over themes properly founded by imamology, which was eliminated with whatever might offend Sunni feeling; the Pole (Qotb) and the walayat cannot deny their Shi'ite origins [p 56]. So many pages of Ibn 'Arabi read as if written by a Shi'ite, though in him walayat is cut off from its supports [p 56]. A separate type also grew: Shi'ite spirituals such as Haydar Amoli, Mir Damad and Molla Sadra, who used Sufi vocabulary but belonged to no order, joining inner ascesis to rigorous philosophical training [p 57]. The struggle of minority Shi'ism, with the philosophers and Sufis, for spiritual Islam against a literalist religion of the Law runs through the whole history; its stake is to keep the spiritual safe from socialisation [p 57 to 58].
Periods and Sources
| Period | Span | Markers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Imams and their disciples, to the Great Occultation (329/940) | Hisham ibn al-Hakam; Kolayni's twenty years gathering traditions in Baghdad, the oldest methodical Shi'ite corpus |
| 2 | To Nasiroddin Tusi (d. 672/1273) | The great Sommes: Ibn Babuyeh (Shaykh Saduq, d. 381/991, some 300 works), Shaykh Mofid (d. 413/1022), Mohammad b. Hasan Tusi (d. 460/1067); Sharif Razi compiles the Nahj al-Balagha |
| 3 | Tusi to the Safavid renaissance | Convergence of Ibn 'Arabi's school and Najm Kobra's disciples fleeing the Mongols; Sa'doddin Hamuyeh, Semnani, Haydar Amoli |
| 4 | Safavid renaissance to the present | School of Isfahan: Mir Damad (1041/1631), Molla Sadra (1050/1640); later the Shaykhi school after Shaykh Ahmad Ahsa'i (d. 1241/1826) |
Table 4. The four periods of Twelver thought; the fourth is "a phenomenon without parallel elsewhere in Islam", where philosophy is thought closed since Averroes [p 60 to 64].
The Nahj al-Balagha, the Logia of the first Imam, is after the Qur'an and the Prophet's hadith the most important book for Shi'ite thought. It shaped technical Arabic terms independently of the Greek translations, and later thinkers drew a whole metaphysics from it [p 64 to 65]. On doubts about authenticity, Corbin's method is phenomenological: whoever held the pen, it is the Imam who speaks [p 65]. Two rules follow: do not judge the chains of transmission from outside; take the traditions whole, as Shi'ite consciousness shows itself its object, and follow the Shi'ite authors who commented them [p 66].
Esotericism
Verse 33/72 founds the theme De dignitate hominis: God offered the deposit of His secrets to Heavens, Earth and mountains; all refused; man accepted, "violent and unknowing". For Shi'ite exegetes this deposit is the walayat, and man's "violence" is praise, an act of sublime folly [p 66 to 67]. While man, symbolised by Adam, does not know there is anything other than God, he can carry it; once he yields to that awareness he betrays it, by handing it to the unworthy or by denying it and reducing all to the letter [p 67]. Hence the discipline of the arcane (taqiyeh). Ja'far's formula is famous: «Notre cause est un secret (sirr) dans un secret, le secret de quelque chose qui reste voilé, un secret que seul un autre secret peut enseigner» (editor's translation: "Our cause is a secret (sirr) within a secret, the secret of something that remains veiled, a secret that only another secret can teach") [p 67 to 68].
Affirming the esoteric does not abolish the shari'at. It means that deprived of the spiritual reality, positive religion is opacity and servitude, a catalogue of dogmas or a catechism instead of staying open to new and unforeseeable meanings [p 68]. The first Imam divides people into three: the divine sage (the Prophet and Imams), the minority who open themselves to the doctrine of salvation, and the mass that stays closed, "the foam rolled by the torrent" [p 68 to 69].
Prophetology
The Imams' teaching is the oldest source of Islamic prophetology [p 69]. It runs parallel to the Avicennan doctrine of intellect. A hadith of Ja'far names five Spirits in man, topped by the Spirit of faith and the Holy Spirit: all five are actual only in prophets and Imams, four in true believers, three in others. The philosophers likewise grade five states of intellect up to the intellectus sanctus [p 70]. For Biruni natural law is the law of the jungle, overcome only by a divine Law spoken by a prophet; Corbin notes that this pessimism of Biruni and Avicenna nearly reproduces the Imams' words as given by Kolayni [p 70].
But the stake is spiritual destiny, not sociology. Shi'ism denies that God can be seen in this world or the next, and develops a knowledge by the heart (ma'rifat qalbiya) [p 70 to 71]. It parts from the Ash'arites, whose rejection of any hierarchy of mediating causes ruined the basis of prophecy, and from the radical Mu'tazilite dilemma (if prophecy agrees with reason it is superfluous; if not, reject it), which could not foresee the level where the dilemma evaporates [p 71]. The mediator is the Hojjat, God's proof and guarantor, whose presence must be continuous even if invisible [p 71].
This Form in its pre-eternal glory is the true Adam, Homo maximus, First Intelligence, Supreme Pen, Pole of Poles, the eternal Muhammadan Reality (Haqiqat mohammadiya), holder of the eternal prophecy [p 72]. It is a bi-unity: its exoteric dimension appeared finally in the Prophet Mohammad; its esoteric dimension, the walayat, in 'Ali ibn Abi Talib. Hence the paired sayings: the Prophet was a prophet "while Adam was between water and clay", and 'Ali a walI at that same moment; "'Ali and I are one and the same Light" [p 72 to 73]. Decisive is the hadith that 'Ali was sent secretly with every prophet and openly with Mohammad: the Muhammadan Imamate, as the esotericism of Islam, is ipso facto the esotericism of all earlier prophetic religions [p 73 to 74].
Prophecy and walayat each come absolute and particular. The Prophet seals prophecy; the first Imam seals absolute walayat; the Mahdi seals the Muhammadan walayat [p 74]. What closed with Mohammad is legislative prophecy (nobowwat al-tashri'); prophecy as a spiritual state continues under the name walayat: «le nom a changé, la chose demeure» (editor's translation: "the name has changed, the thing remains") [p 75]. The great legislating prophets are six (or seven with David): Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Mohammad [p 75].
Figure 14. The three concentric circles. The order of precedence among qualities is the reverse of the order among persons [p 76].
Here the branches divide. Twelvers hold that in the one person of the Prophet the walayat has pre-eminence as source, yet the prophet-envoy has precedence because he holds all three. Alamut drew the strict conclusion: since walayat ranks above prophecy and the esoteric above the exoteric, the Imam has precedence over the prophet and the esoteric is independent of the exoteric [p 77]. The Twelver balance is stated as a rule: every exoteric not resting on an esoteric is infidelity (kofr); every esoteric that does not keep the exoteric is libertinism [p 77].
Imamology
After the Prophet a "Keeper of the Book" is needed, since the text alone has hidden senses and apparent contradictions; the true sense is not built by dialectic but needs a man who is both spiritual heir and inspired [p 78]. Molla Sadra states the premise: what has no cause cannot be known from anything else; God is known only by God, not from creatures (as in Kalam) nor from contingent being (as with the falasifa) [p 78 to 79]. 'Ali testifies that the Prophet dictated each verse to him with its tafsir and ta'wil and then laid a hand on his chest praying that his heart be filled [p 79]. The Imam is to the community what the heart is to the body, which lets imamology turn into mystical experience: Molla Sadra speaks of «cette réalité célestielle (malakûtî) qui est l'Imamat dans l'homme» (editor's translation: "that celestial reality (malakuti) which is the Imamate in man") [p 79 to 80].
Theophany, not incarnation. Imamology faced the same problems as Christology but always inclined to solutions official Christianity rejected, closer to gnosis. The Imams are divine epiphanies on the model of a mirror: the image shown in the mirror is not incarnate in the mirror's substance. As Names of God they guard against both anthropomorphism (tashbih) and agnosticism (ta'til) [p 81]. They pre-exist as a pleroma of light; the "Sermon of the Great Declaration" (Khotbat al-Bayan), attributed to 'Ali, has an eternal Imam say "I am the Face of God, I am the mirror of God" in seventy such affirmations [p 82 to 83]. Self-knowledge thus means knowing one's Imam; to die without knowing one's Imam is to die unconscious [p 83]. Physical descent never sufficed to make an Imam: investiture (nass) and impeccability ('ismat) are required, and earthly kinship is the sign, not the ground, of their unity with the Prophet [p 84].
| No. | Imam (date of death as printed) | No. | Imam |
|---|---|---|---|
| I | 'Ali, Commander of the Faithful (40/661) | VII | Musa al-Kazim (183/799) |
| II | al-Hasan al-Mojtaba (49/669) | VIII | 'Ali Reza (203/818) |
| III | al-Hosayn, prince of martyrs (61/680) | IX | Mohammad Javad al-Taqi (220/835) |
| IV | 'Ali Zaynol-'Abidin (95/714) | X | 'Ali al-Naqi (254/868) |
| V | Mohammad Baqir (115/733) | XI | al-Hasan al-'Askari (260/874) |
| VI | Ja'far al-Sadiq (148/765) | XII | Mohammad al-Mahdi, al-Qa'im, al-Hojjat |
Table 5. The Twelve as they appear on the plane of history [p 84].
When walayat was cut off from imamology, the four founders of the Sunni legal rites came to pass for the heirs of the Prophet. Corbin sees here, at its source, a phenomenon of secularisation and socialisation: the bipolarity of shari'at and haqiqat broke, the legal religion hardened, and philosophers and mystics were put in a false position [p 84 to 85].
Gnoseology: How the Angel Teaches
The Imams classify prophets by the mediation of the Angel [p 86].
| Category | Perception of the Angel | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Nabi for himself alone | Personal, "intransitive" message | |
| Nabi with visions | Hears the Angel in dream, does not see him awake; sent to no one | Lot |
| Nabi morsal (sent) | Sees or hears the Angel awake; sent to a group; teaching prophecy | Jonah |
| Great Envoys | Mission (risalat) to bring a new shari'at | Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Jesus, Mohammad |
Table 6. The Imams' four categories. Risalat comes only to a Nabi whose prophecy has matured, as prophecy comes only to one whose walayat is complete [p 86 to 87].
The first two kinds are simply the Awliya. Before Islam they were called prophets; since Islam they are called Awliya. Gnoseologically, the old Nabis and the Imams are the same case: they hear the Angel (they are mohaddathun, "those to whom the Angels speak") [p 87 to 88]. This founds the continuing "esoteric prophecy" (nobowwat batiniya) [p 88]. Wahy (divine communication) implies seeing the Angel awake; ilham is inspiration; kashf is mystical unveiling [p 88].
Molla Sadra makes all true knowledge an epiphany in the heart, the subtle organ of light. Knowledge may come from the shari'at or be a spiritual science; this may be innate (first principles) or acquired, and if acquired, either by effort and inference (the philosophers) or by sudden projection into the heart (ilham), whether without seeing its cause (the Imams) or seeing it (prophetic wahy) [p 89 to 90]. Outer sight has eye, faculty, perception and sun; inner sight has heart, intellect, knowledge and the Angel-Intelligence, called the Pen because it stands between God and heart as the pen between writer and paper [p 90]. No passage from sensible to suprasensible needs justifying; they are two planes of one process [p 90].
This prophetic gnoseology requires a third faculty between sense perception and pure intellection: the imaginative consciousness and its world, the mundus imaginalis ('alam al-mithal), treated as a purely psycho-spiritual faculty independent of the perishable body [p 92]. The Imams' prophetology thus implies the triad of worlds (sensible, imaginal, intelligible) matching body, soul and spirit [p 92]. Even ordinary perception sees not the form in outer matter but a form that "symbolises with" it in imaginative consciousness; a form produced from within by contemplation of the suprasensible cannot err [p 92 to 93]. The heart has five senses of its own; from this comes the hadith qodsi, in which God speaks in the first person, whose authority only this gnoseology can ground [p 94].
Inherited versus acquired knowledge. Haydar Amoli contrasts official sciences acquired from outside with true knowledge received by spiritual inheritance, and gathers witnesses, Avicenna included, to show that speculative dialectic does not reach self-knowledge: we know properties of things, not their essence [p 94 to 95]. His real target is those who reduce thought in Islam to fiqh, especially Shi'ites. Knowledge by wahy is closed; the way of ilham and kashf stays open [p 95 to 96]. On the hadith "I saw my Lord in the most beautiful of forms", the eighth Imam 'Ali Reza answers that Mohammad saw the form of his own soul, the eternal Muhammadan Reality: every vision of God is a vision of His human Form [p 96].
Hierohistory and Metahistory
Corbin coins hierohistory for the cycles of prophecy and walayat: events perceived not by empirical observation but by suprasensible perception. They are real, but they happen in metahistory (the Day of the Covenant) or show through worldly events as their invisible side [p 98 to 99]. Prophets and Imams are perceived as such only on this plane [p 99]. What first "descended" into the Prophet's heart were the spiritual realities of the Qur'an, before the words; of earlier prophets one says a light came from their Book, of the last that he was himself a light and a Book was with him [p 99 to 100].
Without anteriority "in Heaven" and without an eschatology, «il est absurde de parler d'un 'sens de l'histoire'» (editor's translation: "it is absurd to speak of a 'meaning of history'") [p 101]. The believer's life is played out between two limits beyond chronology: the Covenant in the pre-existence of souls, and the parousia of the hidden Imam [p 102]. The dilemma: either religious consciousness fixes on a closed prophetic past and reads the Book as a moral and social code, or that past remains to come because the Book hides a spiritual sense [p 102 to 103]. The fifth and sixth Imams forestall historicism and legalism alike: if a verse died with those it concerned, nothing would remain of the Qur'an; the Qur'an is alive and runs its course as long as Heaven and Earth last [p 103].
Prophecy is pictured as a circle of points from the earthly Adam through 124,000 prophets, 313 envoys and the great prophets to Jesus, closed by Mohammad, the Seal [p 104]. Haydar Amoli's diagrams set the cycle of walayat as a circle inside it: a cycle of interiorisation that prepares not a new law but the coming of the Qa'im, the Imam of the Resurrection [p 104 to 105]. Each great prophet had twelve Imams; the twelve of Christ are not exactly the apostles but those who carried the message to the last prophet [p 106]. The walayat runs from Seth to the twelfth Imam [p 106].
The Hidden Imam and Eschatology
The eleventh Imam, Hasan 'Askari, held near-prisoner at Samarra, died aged 28 in 260/873; the same day his son, aged about five, disappeared [p 109]. The minor Occultation lasted seventy years with four representatives; the last, 'Ali Samarri, was told to name no successor, and his final words (330/942) were: «Désormais l'affaire n'appartient plus qu'à Dieu» (editor's translation: "From now on the matter belongs to God alone") [p 109]. Historical criticism will not find its way here; this is hierohistory to be read phenomenologically [p 109]. The Imam's last message warned against any imposture claiming to end the waiting [p 110].
The Shaykhi school worked out a phenomenology of the ghaybat: to see the Imam in the celestial earth of Hurqalya is to see him where he truly is, with the organ such a world requires [p 110]. And the key inversion: it is men who have veiled the Imam from themselves, by paralysing the organs of theophanic perception. The parousia is not an event that might erupt one fine day; it comes about day by day in the consciousness of the faithful [p 110 to 111]. So esotericism breaks the immobility often blamed on legal Islam [p 111].
Figure 17. Shi'ite hierohistory between its two metahistorical limits [p 98 to 106].
The coming of the Imam will manifest the hidden sense of all revelations: the triumph of ta'wil, through which humanity finds its unity, so that during the occultation esotericism holds the secret of the only true ecumenism [p 111]. Sa'doddin Hamuyeh said the hidden Imam will not appear before people can understand the secrets of tawhid "even from the straps of his sandals" [p 111]. Hence the ethic of the javanmard, the spiritual knight, a pessimism whose very despair affirms hope [p 112]. Because the divine presence is incognito, it can never become an object and defies all socialisation of the spiritual; the mystical hierarchies known to Sufism (Nojaba, Noqaba, Awtad, Abdal) presuppose the Shi'ite idea of walayat and form a pure Ecclesia spiritualis known to God alone [p 112 to 113].
Kamal Kashani and Haydar Amoli identify the twelfth Imam with the Paraclete announced in John's Gospel [p 113]. Corbin sees a striking convergence with the Western Paracletic current from the Joachimites of the thirteenth century onward, a fact that "could have great consequences" if it ceased to go unnoticed [p 113 to 114]. Shi'ite eschatology is dominated by the Qa'im and his companions, as Zoroastrian eschatology by the Saoshyant and his [p 113]. The awaited Imam brings no new Book but reveals the hidden sense of all, being himself the Perfect Man: a full anthropological revelation, the divine secret man took on in verse 33/72, for the divine mystery and the human mystery are one [p 114].
Chapter 3. Ismailism: The Gnosis of the Seven
A few decades earlier, Corbin says, this chapter could hardly have been written, so buried was Ismailism under a "black novel" [p 115]. Working from texts recovered largely through W. Ivanow and the Ismaili Society, he presents Ismaili thought as gnosis in its purest Islamic form: a negative theology of the Principle, a drama in Heaven that explains time, and a philosophy of resurrection [p 115 to 154].
Periods and Sources
The split came at the death of Ja'far Sadiq (148/765): his eldest son Isma'il had died before him. Behind the question of persons lay the perception of a transcendent structure the Imams exemplify [p 115]. Isma'il's circle drew radical conclusions from Shi'ite gnosis: divine epiphany in the Imam, an inner reality for every outer thing, and stress on spiritual resurrection (Qiyamat) over observance of the Law [p 115 to 116].
The oldest text, Omm al-Kitab (The Archetype of the Book), in archaic Persian, is a dialogue between the fifth Imam and three disciples. It contains a reminiscence of the Infancy Gospels, the mystical science of letters (jafr), Manichaean traces, and the "seven combats of Salman" against the Adversary. Salman refuses divinity for himself, and the refusal makes him transparent to a divinity that can be worshipped only through him [p 116]. Here Corbin finds the secret of esoteric tawhid: deprived of theophanic figures, monotheism contradicts itself and perishes in a metaphysical idolatry that does not know itself [p 117].
After an obscure period of three hidden Imams, the Fatimid dynasty arose in Cairo (296/909) with 'Obaydallah al-Mahdi [p 117]. Systematic works then appear fully formed, mostly by Iranians: Abu Hatim Razi (d. 322/933), Abu Ya'qub Sejestani (tenth century), Hamidoddin Kermani (d. about 408/1017), Mo'ayyad Shirazi (d. 470/1077) and Nasir-e Khosraw, writing wholly in Persian [p 118]. At al-Mostansir's death (487/1094) the community split into the eastern branch (Persia, centred on Alamut; today the Khojas, under the Aga Khan) and the western branch (Egypt and Yemen; today the Bohras), whose Yemeni philosophy, long kept under strict secrecy, culminated in Idris 'Imadoddin (d. 872/1468) [p 118 to 120].
The Dialectic of Tawhid
Like the ancient Gnostics, Ismailis use only negative names for the Principle: the Originator, the Mystery of Mysteries, "the one the boldness of thoughts cannot reach". The Principle is Super-being: it is not; it makes be [p 122]. Hence a sharp critique of the Avicennans: what they say of the Necessary Being must be shifted to be true, since their metaphysics begins by granting itself being. Before being there is being put in the imperative, the originating KN (Esto!); beyond the One is the Unifier who makes every monad a monad [p 122].
Tawhid must avoid ta'til (agnosticism) and tashbih (assimilating the Manifested to its manifestation), hence the double negation: the Principle is not-being and not not-being; each negation is true only if itself negated [p 122 to 123]. A twelfth-century Yemeni defines tawhid as knowing the celestial and terrestrial hodud (degrees) and recognising each as unique in its rank [p 123]. The key word is hadd, limit: the shirk that pluralises the divine is also the disintegration of the human monad, which fails to become a true unity for lack of knowing the limit that places it in being [p 123].
The First Intelligence is the first to perform tawhid, in the two moments of the profession of faith. La ilaha, "no god", is absolute negation; illa'l-Lah, "except God", an absolute affirmation following from no premise. Between them runs the ridge path between the two abysses [p 125]. Because it denies divinity to itself and refers it beyond, the First Intelligence is invested with the supreme Name; it is the Deus revelatus, the only divine ipseity we can know, and even that knowledge is an unknowing [p 125 to 126]. Ismaili thinkers derive ilah from a root meaning to be struck with stupor and sadness, like a traveller in the desert, and read in olhaniya (divinity) al-haniya, the state of one who sighs with longing: divinity "essentifies" itself only in the First Angel's sorrow at not reaching it [p 126 to 127]. At every rank there is always another limit beyond, which sets the whole Da'wat in continual ascent [p 127].
The Drama in Heaven and the Birth of Time
Figure 22. The Ismaili drama in Heaven: from refusal in the Pleroma to the redemption of time through cycles [p 125 to 138].
The Da'wat (Convocation) began "in Heaven" with the First Intelligence's call to all the Forms of light [p 128]. The Second assented; the Third, the spiritual Adam and angel-archetype of humanity, refused the limit before him, thinking he could reach the Principle without it, and to flee idolatry set himself up as absolute and fell into the worst metaphysical idolatry [p 128]. When he tore himself free, casting Iblis's shadow into the lower world, he found himself "overtaken": from third he had become tenth. Seven Intelligences, the "Seven Cherubim", emanated in the interval to help him back [p 129]. Corbin's phrase: «le temps est 'l'éternité retardée'» (editor's translation: "time is 'eternity delayed'") [p 129]. Hence seven periods in the cycle of prophecy and seven Imams in each: the number seven ciphers the delay of eternity [p 129]. Corbin compares Zervanite theosophy, where Darkness arises from a doubt in Zervan's thought [p 129].
Most of the Forms in the Angel-Adam's own pleroma rejected his call and darkened. To save them he became demiurge of the physical cosmos, which exists as the instrument of their deliverance [p 130]. He holds the rank the Avicennans give the Active Intelligence, but here as the centre of a drama that is the prologue to our humanity. Their panic attempts to escape produced the three dimensions of space; each planet ruled a millennium until the first earthly human grew from the Earth like a plant [p 130 to 131].
Cyclic Time, Hierohistory and Hierarchies
The first earthly Adam, the pananthropos, appeared in Ceylon with twenty-seven companions, distinguished from other humans "as the red hyacinth among stones" [p 131]. His was a cycle of epiphany (dawr al-kashf), a paradisal era when people perceived spiritual realities directly, not under the veil of symbols [p 132]. He founded the permanent esoteric hierarchy, then rose to succeed the Tenth Angel, who rose a rank. Cycles of epiphany and occultation alternate until the Resurrection of Resurrections; some sayings put the Grand Cycle at 360,000 times 360,000 years [p 132].
The Qur'anic Adam story, read by ta'wil, begins after catastrophes: the discipline of the arcane was restored, a shari'at instituted, and humanity "left paradise"; thereafter only the "paradise in potential", the esoteric sodality, remains [p 133]. Adam is the young Imam invested by his father Honayd, last Imam of the preceding cycle; Iblis, a dignitary of that cycle, moved Adam's generosity to reveal the knowledge of resurrection prematurely, a betrayal reserved for the last Imam of our cycle [p 133].
| Grade (terrestrial) | Function | Celestial homologue |
|---|---|---|
| Natiq | Prophet who speaks a shari'at, the exoteric letter | I Intelligence |
| Wasi / Asas | Heir and foundation of the Imamate; ta'wil | II Intelligence, Universal Soul |
| Imam | Keeps esoteric and exoteric connected through heptads | III Intelligence, spiritual Adam |
| Bab, Hojjat, three grades of Da'i, two Ma'dhun | Threshold, Proof, summoners, licentiates | The other seven Intelligences |
Table 7. The ten grades in Hamid Kermani's scheme, a triad and a heptad, each grade the "limit" of the one below [p 134 to 135].
Each period opens with a Natiq and a Wasi and closes with the Qa'im, who raises the next prophet. The six periods pair Adam with Seth, Noah with Shem, Abraham with Ishmael, Moses with Aaron, Jesus with Simon, Mohammad with 'Ali; the seventh Natiq, the Imam of Resurrection, brings no new law but reveals the hidden sense of all [p 135 to 136].
Imamology and Eschatology
The Imam's body is not flesh: it forms from the purified "ethereal bodies" of faithful adepts, which descend as celestial dew on water or fruit consumed by the Imam and his wife, becoming a body "white and subtle as camphor". Not a phantasm but a caro spiritualis, so no "hypostatic union of two natures" arises [p 136 to 137]. His divinity is the Temple of Light: when a new adept pledges with right intention, a point of light joins his soul without merging with it; by thought and deed it may grow into a Form of light that, at death, rises with its companions in a pact of mystical chivalry to form the Temple which is the Imamate [p 137 to 138]. Cosmogony and soteriology are two aspects of one process; the cosmos is the organ by which the celestial Adam regains his rank [p 138]. Sejestani saw in the four arms of the Cross and the four words of the profession of faith one secret: the Imam's parousia at the end of the Night of Destiny, which is the night of humanity in this cycle [p 139].
Reformed Ismailism of Alamut
Corbin dismantles the "black novel": Crusaders and Marco Polo, then von Hammer-Purgstall's Geschichte der Assassinen (1818) and de Sacy's etymology from hashshashin; orientalists became accomplices of Abbasid anti-Ismaili propaganda [p 140]. Because the Da'wat calls itself the "paradise in potential", hostile propaganda invented the "orgies" in the "gardens of Alamut" [p 140 to 141]. The rest was anti-Turkish resistance in tragic conditions [p 141]. The Nizari line followed Nizar after al-Mostansir's death; Hasan Sabbah (d. 518/1124) organised the Persian strongholds [p 141].
Haydar Amoli states the difference without polemic: Twelver gnosis keeps zahir and batin together; for Ismaili gnosis the exoteric is a shell to be broken once for all, and for the adept who acts by the spiritual sense the obligations of the shari'at are abolished. Since walayat is the source of prophecy, the person of the Imam takes precedence over the Prophet [p 144]. What Twelvers place at the end of an eschatological perspective, Alamut performs "in the present" as an anticipation of eschatology that is an insurrection of the Spirit against all servitudes [p 145].
The Imam is the "man of God", the Face of God, the Perfect Man: "Whoever has not understood who, in his time, was the Perfect Man will remain a stranger" [p 145]. Since only the human being has language, it is through Man that things find their way back to their Origin [p 146]. The eternal Imam speaks in all such sayings: «La lumière qui émane de la lampe, n'est pas la lampe elle-même; mais s'il n'y avait pas cette lumière, comment saurait-on ce qu'est la lampe» (editor's translation: "The light that streams from the lamp is not the lamp itself; but if there were not this light, how would one know what the lamp is") [p 147]. Knowledge of God, of the Imam and of oneself are one liberating gnosis [p 148].
| Way of knowing the Imam | Who has it |
|---|---|
| His physical form | Even animals |
| His official name and genealogy | Even adversaries |
| Recognition of his Imamate | All members of the Da'wat |
| His Essence in the eternal reality of its attributes | The Hojjat, his purely spiritual descendant, on the model of Salman |
Table 8. The four ways of knowing the Imam in the Persian Alamut texts, matched by four kinds of descent from him [p 148].
With the Hojjat promoted, the hierarchy is interiorised into degrees of conformity with the Imam; the couple Imam and Hojjat replaces Prophet and Imam, and the Natiq drops to third rank, echoing the pre-Fatimid order of the letters 'ayn ('Ali), sin (Salman), mim (Mohammad) [p 149 to 150]. For Twelvers the Prophet's mission was high noon; for Ismailis the night of esotericism began with Adam himself. The six "days" of legislative prophecy are the night of religion, the moon of the Hojjat standing in for the sun of the Imam until the seventh day, the Day of Resurrection [p 149 to 150]. Each prophet sought the Hojjat of his time, as Moses met Khezr: paradise for Adam, the ark for Noah, the Burning Bush for Moses, Maryam for Jesus, Salman for Mohammad [p 150].
Ismailism and Sufism
If Sunni Sufism separated from Shi'ism by transferring the Imam's attributes to the Prophet alone, making walayat "an imamology without an Imam", then Alamut merely restored the older order [p 152]. An anonymous Ismaili commentary on Shabestari sets two mountains, of intelligence and of love; the pilgrim finds his own person is the Sinai on whose summit the eternal Imam appears as the olive tree. The intellect guides to the secret and then steps aside, as Virgil before Beatrice [p 152 to 153]. The Imam and Hojjat become the inner dialogue of Beloved and Friend; in the presence of the Soul of the soul, the "Moses of one's being" vanishes, and Hallaj's "I am the Truth" gains a Shi'ite resonance: imamology spares it the trap of transcendental monism [p 153]. Being the unfolding of hidden meaning, this prophetic philosophy is eschatological and so stays open to the future. With Sunni Kalam, Corbin warns, we enter quite another climate [p 153 to 154].
Chapter 4. Kalam and the Sciences of Nature
Two chapters of the book sit side by side here. The first follows Sunni scholastic theology (Kalam) from the Mu'tazilites to al-Ash'ari and his school. The second turns to the hermetic, alchemical, linguistic and astronomical sciences. Corbin reads both with one question in mind: does a given way of thinking leave room for ta'wil, the passage from the literal to the hidden, or does it close that door? [p 155 to 218].
What Kalam Is
Kalam means speech; the motakallim is the one who speaks. Over time the word came to mean theology itself, and in the end a theology committed to atomism [p 155]. Corbin defines it as a pure rational dialectic working on theological concepts, with no room for mystical gnosis ('irfan) or for the "science of the heart" first taught by the Shi'ite Imams. Al-Farabi, Averroes and Molla Sadra all agree that the theologians were above all apologists: they defended inherited articles of faith rather than seeking a truth that could be demonstrated [p 155]. Every religious community needs such work, and there was a Shi'ite Kalam too. But the Imams had warned their disciples against relying on it alone, because mystical theosophy works by interpretation more than by argument [p 156].
The Mu'tazilites
The Mu'tazilites took shape in Basra in the first half of the second Islamic century, spread quickly through the educated elite, and for a time their doctrine was the official teaching of Sunni Islam in Baghdad [p 156]. The story usually told about their name is that Wasil ibn 'Ata' (d. 131/748) broke with his master Hasan Basri (d. 110/728) over the grave sinner, and Hasan exclaimed that Wasil had "separated" from them [p 157]. A Shi'ite version traces the name to the Companions who stood aside from 'Ali's wars [p 157].
Corbin rejects the view that politics, or a label pinned on them by opponents, explains the school. They carried the name with pride. The Qur'an uses the same word, i'tizal, for the Seven Sleepers, who withdrew from an unfaithful community to keep their worship pure. They "separated" to protect the purity of tawhid, divine justice and human freedom [p 158]. Who leads the community was never only a social question either: it raises the whole problem of whether the Imam's function is metaphysical [p 158 to 159]. Other pressures also shaped them. Nyberg thought their fight against Iranian dualist sects in Kufa and Basra decisive. Their denial of divine attributes may also be read as a response to the Trinity, and their created Qur'an as a response to the Incarnation: an uncreated Word appearing in time as Arabic speech looked to them too much like a Word made flesh [p 159 to 160].
| Mu'tazilite thesis | Content | Consequence Corbin notes |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Tawhid | God is unlike anything; no body, place, time or created attribute | A static unity: denial of attributes, created Qur'an, no vision of God hereafter |
| 2. Justice ('adl) | Divine justice requires human freedom and responsibility | The Divine Will (Mashi'a) is read as eternal knowledge and design, which does not compel acts |
| 3. Promise and threat | Reward and punishment follow from justice and freedom | Grace recedes; justice dominates |
| 4. Intermediate position | The grave sinner is neither believer nor unbeliever | The thesis behind Wasil's "separation" |
| 5. Moral command | Justice is a communal task as well as a personal one | Social ethics grounded in theology |
Table 9. The five theses every Mu'tazilite had to hold [p 161 to 164].
Corbin's judgement on the first thesis is sharp. This unity is static rather than dynamic. It stays on the plane of unconditioned being and never reaches the conditioned [p 161]. Its consequences were serious, but they forced the community to become aware of its basic religious values [p 161 to 162]. On freedom the Mu'tazilites quote the Qur'an: whoever does good does it for himself, whoever does evil does it against himself. And how could there be obligations at all if the human being were not master of his acts? [p 162 to 163]. Here, Corbin notes, they agree with the Shi'ites [p 162].
Al-Ash'ari: The Middle Way and Its Limit
Abu'l-Hasan al-Ash'ari was born in Basra in 260/873 and studied under the Mu'tazilite master al-Jobba'i until he was forty. Then he shut himself away for two weeks, came out into the Great Mosque of Basra at the hour of prayer, and publicly renounced the created Qur'an, the denial of the vision of God and the stripping away of attributes [p 165]. Corbin explains the turn both from within and from without. Al-Ash'ari was troubled by a deity that had become a pure abstraction, and by a community split between Mu'tazilite speculation and a literalism that had hardened in reaction [p 166]. He claimed some ninety works. Two survive that matter most: the Maqalat al-Islamiyin, possibly the first history of dogmas in Islam, and the Ibana, a strict statement of Sunni doctrine. He died in Baghdad in 324/935 [p 166 to 167].
He wanted to reconcile the Sunni schools. They agreed on principles and differed only in application, so "every mojtahid is right" [p 167 to 168]. He did not scorn rational proof, as the literalists did, but he refused to make reason the absolute judge. If it were, it would replace faith rather than support it. And the Qur'an makes faith in the ghayb (the unseen) essential, which by definition lies beyond proof [p 168].
Corbin's verdict is double. Al-Ash'ari's motives were spiritual rather than speculative: he wanted a God worth adoring and loving [p 171 to 172]. But his great effort ends by leaving faith and reason face to face with nothing between them [p 170]. Whether this is success or a failure for lack of metaphysical framework, he sought, in good faith, "the mysterious junction between the eternal and the ephemeral" [p 172].
The Ash'arite School
The school formed in the master's lifetime and was attacked on every side. Mu'tazilites called it opportunist and syncretic. Hanbalites asked why it did not simply go back to the text. In Samarkand, the followers of al-Matoridi (d. 333/944) called it a reform that stopped halfway [p 173 to 174]. Under the Shi'ite Buyids it lost ground. Under the Seljuqs it came back, backed by the vizier Nizam al-Molk (d. 485/1093), whose colleges in Baghdad and Nishapur made it the official doctrine of the 'Abbasid empire [p 174 to 175]. Corbin notes that Ghazali's attack on the "Batinis" and on the philosophers was also aimed at the Fatimid power in Cairo [p 175]. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Ibn Taymiya and Ibn al-Qayyim challenged it in the name of the literal text. Even so, Ash'arism has remained dominant in Sunni Islam up to the present [p 175].
Its leading names include al-Baqillani (d. 403/1013), whose Tamhid was the first real system; the Imam al-Haramayn al-Jowayni (d. 478/1085), whose Irshad is its finished form; Ghazali, Shahrastani (d. 548/1153), Fakhroddin Razi (d. 606/1210), Iji, Gorgani and Sanusi [p 175 to 176]. Corbin explains its success by two answers it gave to problems of a specifically "exoteric" consciousness: atomism, and the relation of reason to faith [p 176].
Figure 30. Three accounts of how God relates to the world, and the Ash'arite argument for continuous creation [p 176 to 181].
Atomism and the Pathos of the Middle Way
The Ash'arites rejected emanation because it seemed to merge principle and manifestation and to deny divine freedom. They rejected Mu'tazilite causality as determinism, and would not accept the Mu'tazilite claim that wisdom grounds causality, since divine wisdom is as unconditioned as divine power [p 177 to 178]. Their argument runs like this. If matter could be divided, it would hold the cause of its own determination within itself, and no principle would be needed. If it is made of indivisible atoms, something transcendent must specify it. Since every combination of atoms is accidental, and accidents never stop changing, matter and accident must be created anew at every instant; the universe is held together from moment to moment by the divine Hand [p 178 to 179].
On reason and faith the school again sought the middle. Those for whom reason is everything and those for whom it is nothing end up at the same place: reason and faith separated. The Mu'tazilite exiles faith because the mature individual no longer needs it. The literalist exiles reason, even though the Qur'an keeps calling people to reflect [p 179 to 180]. Corbin finds something "pathetic" in the fight. By facing both opponents, Ash'arism stayed on their ground, where the ascending perspectives of ta'wil, the passage from zahir to batin, could not open [p 180]. To solve the created-or-uncreated dilemma it would have needed a whole prophetology, with layered notions of time and event. Shi'ite authors had already observed that atomism and the denial of intermediate causes made a prophetology impossible [p 180 to 181]. That Sunni consciousness recognised itself in Ash'arism is, for Corbin, the clearest sign that philosophy might never feel "at home" there. Al-Ash'ari was born in the year the Minor Occultation began (260/873) and died a few years before Kolayni, who worked in Baghdad for twenty years. The two names stand for the very different futures awaiting philosophy in Shi'ite and Sunni Islam [p 181].
Hermes Enters Through the Shi'ite Door
Hermes came into Islam through the Sabians of Harran and through Manichaean prophetology, and was identified with Idris and Enoch [p 182]. Corbin argues that it is no surprise the first Muslims to "hermetise" were Shi'ites. Their prophetology already had a place for a prophet (nabi) who brings no new law but organises the first cities and teaches the crafts. Their theory of knowledge allowed for direct inspiration (ilham) of the kind shared by the Imams and the Friends of God [p 182]. So Hermetic philosophy could call itself a "wisdom from the divine presence", a prophetic philosophy. Sunni writers such as Shahrastani condemned it: an ascent of the spirit to Heaven would make the descent of the revealing Angel unnecessary [p 184]. Through the Shi'ite door, Hermetism was received in Islam before Aristotle's syllogistic and metaphysics [p 184].
Al-Kindi said a Muslim philosopher could not have put divine transcendence better than Hermes did to his son [p 184]. Traces run through Dhu'l-Nun Misri (d. 245/859) into Sufism, and the Islamic Neoplatonists Sohravardi and Ibn Sab'in claimed a chain of initiation going back to Hermes [p 185]. Following Massignon, Corbin lists the marks of Hermetic thinking. It holds that a God beyond syllogism can be reached by prayer and asceticism. It holds that time is cyclical. Its physics affirms "l'unité de l'univers" (the unity of the universe), and with it a science of correspondences. And it prefers the individual case to the general law [p 185 to 186]. This last trait links it to Stoic logic, to a Shi'ite science of individual causes, and even to Molla Sadra's metaphysics of existence [p 186].
Jabir and the Science of the Balance
The corpus of some three thousand treatises attributed to Jabir ibn Hayyan, disciple of the sixth Imam, has been dated very differently: by Berthelot, by Holmyard, by Ruska, and by Paul Kraus, who placed it in the ninth and tenth centuries and gave it several authors [p 187 to 188]. Corbin prefers to ask what the tradition explains rather than to follow a hypercriticism "trampling ground that keeps giving way" [p 189]. He finds no decisive reason to reject Jaldaki's biography of a Jabir who followed the sixth and eighth Imams and died at Tus in 200/804 [p 189].
Kraus called the theory of the Balance (mizan) the most rigorous medieval attempt at a quantitative natural science. Corbin warns that "quantitative" can mislead [p 189 to 190]. There are Balances for the Intelligence, the Soul, the spheres and the three kingdoms, and the Balance of letters is the most perfect of all. Its aim is to find, in each body, the ratio between what is manifest and what is hidden [p 190]. To measure a thing's heat or dryness is to measure the intensity of the World Soul's desire in coming down into matter. The alchemical operation is ta'wil applied to matter: the phases of a real operation on a real substance correspond to the phases of the Soul's return to itself. It is not just an allegory [p 190]. Jabir's measurements make no sense in a modern laboratory. They anticipate an "energetics of the soul" rather than quantitative science [p 191].
In the Book of the Glorious, the letters 'ayn (the Imam), mim (the Prophet) and sin (Salman) are weighed against each other. The sin is the Stranger, the orphan, the one adopted by the Imam who shows the Imam's light to all strangers like himself [p 191 to 192]. Jabir tells his reader that to understand the book is to be as Jabir: "God knows that you are he." Jabir is more than his historical person; whoever wrote under his name had to take up the deeds of an archetype [p 192 to 193]. The line runs from Toghra'i (executed 515/1121), Buni (d. 622/1225) and Jaldaki down to Shah Ni'matollah Wali and the Shaykhi doctrine of the resurrection body [p 193].
The Brethren of Purity and Rhazes
The Ikhwan al-Safa' of Basra, "the Brethren with pure hearts", are dated to the tenth century in the form we have them. Corbin calls them an Ismaili society of thinkers, not just Shi'ite sympathisers [p 193 to 194]. Copies of their encyclopedia were left in mosques to wake those capable of it to something above the literal Law, which is good medicine only for weak souls. "Reconciling" religion and philosophy is the wrong frame: there are levels of meaning matched to the capacities of souls [p 194]. The encyclopedia has 51 treatises (17 on physics, 17 x 3 = 51) and makes the Balance a metaphysical principle tied to 'adl and to the Imam of the Resurrection [p 195 to 196]. Members rose through four grades by age: 15, 30, 40 and 50 [p 196]. The true 52nd treatise, the Risalat al-jami'a, is attributed to the second hidden Imam. In 554/1150 the caliph al-Mostanjid ordered every copy burned, along with Avicenna's works [p 196 to 197].
Rhazes (Mohammad ibn Zakariya Razi, born about 250/864 at Ray, died 313/925 or 320/932) was a physician famous in the Latin West. His philosophy survives mostly in quotations by his Ismaili opponents, from Abu Hatim Razi to Nasir-e Khosraw [p 197 to 198]. He taught five eternal principles: Demiurge, Soul, Matter, Space and Time. He distinguished absolute time from measured time, a distinction Corbin compares to Zervanite Iran [p 199 to 200]. In Rhazes' myth, the Soul longs to enter matter, becomes its captive, and is woken by the Intelligence sent to show it that this world is not its home. So philosophers have a mission [p 201]. The Ismailis replied that Nature is the mirror of the Soul (speculum Animae), not evil, and that only prophets, not philosophers, can wake sleeping souls [p 201 to 202].
Language, Light and the Spheres
Sibawayh (d. 169/786), an Iranian, completed Arabic grammar [p 205]. Basra treated language as a mirror of reason and threw out forms it could not justify. Kufa, then the home of Shi'ite ferment, took the tradition as its source, made every attested form a norm, and hated general laws [p 205 to 207]. In Islam, though, more was at stake: law and the reading of the Qur'an. That Basra won is a sign of something much larger than grammar [p 207]. Jabir's Balance of letters held that language comes from an intention of the World Soul, not from convention. It led on to Ibn Jinni's "greater etymology" (d. 392/1001), which gives one meaning to all the permutations of a root [p 207 to 210].
Biruni (born 362/973, died 421/1030) went to India with Mahmud of Ghazna and wrote an unrivalled book on its religions [p 211 to 212]. From fossils he reasoned that catastrophes recur, and he arrived at a cyclical history, much like the Ismaili one, in which each age decays until a new prophet comes [p 213]. Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen, d. 430/1038) gave the spheres physical reality and accepted a ninth sphere. This brought him into conflict with strict Aristotelians. In 1192, a disciple of Maimonides watched a pious jurist throw his astronomy into the flames [p 214 to 216]. His Optics fed the Latin metaphysics of light, from Grosseteste to Roger Bacon, in a way Corbin compares to Sohravardi: the laws of optics read as symbols of a hierarchy of illuminations [p 216 to 217].
Chapter 5. The Hellenizing Philosophers
The falasifa are the thinkers some historians wanted to make the whole of Islamic philosophy. Corbin calls that limitation an abuse. Their Aristotle came to them through the so-called Theology of Aristotle and the Book of the Pure Good, so even the "Peripatetics" (Mashsha'un) of Islam were Neoplatonists to some degree, and in Iran that inspiration flowed into Sohravardi, Ibn 'Arabi and the school of Isfahan [p 219 to 220]. To dismiss the result as "syncretism" is, he says, to discredit it cheaply or to hide an unadmitted dogmatism [p 220].
Al-Kindi: Two Sciences in Harmony
Abu Yusof al-Kindi, "the philosopher of the Arabs", was born at Kufa about 185/796. He enjoyed the favour of the caliphs al-Ma'mun and al-Mo'tasim, fell from grace with his Mu'tazilite friends under al-Motawakkil, and died alone in Baghdad about 260/873 [p 220 to 221]. He was not a translator himself. He employed Christian translators and reworked their Arabic; the Theology of Aristotle was translated for him [p 221]. Of more than 260 titles, about thirty treatises were found in Istanbul [p 221]. He wrote on metaphysics, astrology, music, the five Platonic solids and pharmacology [p 222].
Al-Kindi was close to the Mu'tazilites but not one of them. He was guided by a sense of basic agreement between philosophical enquiry and prophetic revelation. He distinguished a human science (logic, the quadrivium, philosophy) from a divine science given only to prophets, and held that the two are in harmony, not in conflict [p 222]. He accepted creation from nothing as an act of God and allowed the emanation of the Intelligences only after the First Intelligence had been made to depend on the divine will. Corbin notes that this matches the Ismaili scheme exactly [p 223]. From Alexander of Aphrodisias he took the fourfold division of the intellect that later thinkers would argue over [p 223]. Cardano counted him among the twelve most influential minds in history [p 224]. His pupil Sarakhshi (d. 286/899) passed on the Arabic names for the Stoics, the men of the porch, of the colonnade and of the tents. Corbin uses this to show how much Stoic thought ran through the anti-Peripatetic currents [p 224 to 225].
Al-Farabi: The Prophet-Imam of the Perfect City
Al-Farabi was born near Farab in Transoxiana in 259/872. He studied in Baghdad and moved in 330/941 to Aleppo under the Shi'ite Hamdanid Sayfoddawleh. He died at Damascus in 339/950 [p 225 to 226]. They called him the "Second Master", after Aristotle. He lived simply in Sufi dress and was a fine musician; his book on music may be the most important musical theory of the Middle Ages [p 226]. Corbin, following Iranian opinion, thinks he was Shi'ite. He rejects Paul Kraus's view that al-Farabi was anti-mystical. Mysticism does not require fusion (ittihad): conjunction without identity (ittisal), which Avicenna and Sohravardi also prefer, is a mystical experience too [p 227 to 228].
Corbin picks out three doctrines. First, the real distinction between essence and existence: existence is an accident of essence. Avicenna and Sohravardi built a metaphysics of essences on it, until Molla Sadra reversed the order in the sixteenth century. From the same distinction comes the pair of the Necessary Being and the possible being made necessary by another [p 228 to 229]. Second, the procession of Intelligences under the rule that from the One only one can proceed. Each Intelligence contemplates three times and so gives rise to a new Intelligence, Soul and Heaven, down to the Tenth, the Active Intelligence. Does this threaten monotheism? Only its exoteric form, which esoteric thinkers say falls into the very idolatry it flees [p 229 to 230]. Al-Farabi's simile became famous: «L'Intelligence agente est pour l'intellect possible de l'homme ce que le soleil est pour l'œil, lequel reste vision en puissance, tant qu'il est dans les ténèbres» (editor's translation: "The Active Intelligence is to man's possible intellect what the sun is to the eye, which remains vision in potency as long as it is in darkness") [p 230]. His "acquired intellect" is the highest human state, receiving forms by illumination without the senses [p 230 to 231].
Third, prophecy. The "Perfect City" covers the whole inhabited earth and is no political programme. Corbin prefers to call it prophetic philosophy [p 231]. The leader is prophet and Imam at once. His "laws" (nawamis) are not a shari'a in the strict sense, and Plato's philosopher-king becomes an Imam [p 232]. Plato's sage comes down from contemplation to govern. Al-Farabi's sage must unite with the spiritual beings and lead the citizens there, so the city resembles the "saints of the last days" of Shi'ite eschatology [p 232 to 233].
After death, the citizens of the city join those who went before them, each with its like, and the delight of the first increases without end, close to the Ismaili Temple of Light [p 234]. In Baghdad al-Farabi's heirs talked their way into a merely verbal philosophy. His true successor was Avicenna [p 235]. Between the two stands al-'Amiri of Nishapur (d. 381/991). Tawhidi reports him saying that every sensible thing is a shadow of the intelligible. Through him a Neo-Empedoclean doctrine of the divine names reached Iran [p 235 to 237].
Avicenna and the Angel
Avicenna (Ibn Sina) was born near Bukhara in Safar 370/August 980. He healed the Samanid prince at seventeen. He read Aristotle's Metaphysics forty times without understanding it, until a treatise by al-Farabi made "the scales fall from his eyes" [p 238]. He never left the Iranian world. He wrote the Recital of Hayy ibn Yaqzan in prison. The twenty volumes of his Kitab al-Insaf were lost when Isfahan was sacked in 421/1030 [p 238 to 239]. (The scan lacks pp. 240 to 241.)
In his universe nothing possible is contingent. Whatever exists has been made necessary by its cause, so creation cannot be a free act at a moment in pre-eternity. Creation is God's thought thinking itself, and that self-knowledge is the First Intelligence [p 242]. Each Intelligence contemplates its Principle, its being made necessary by it, and its own pure possibility, and so produces the next Intelligence, a celestial Soul and the body of a Heaven. Cosmology becomes "a phenomenology of angelic consciousness." The celestial Souls have pure imagination without senses, and their unquenched longing for love moves the heavens. Averroes would reject this theory [p 242 to 243].
The Tenth Intelligence can no longer produce a single Intelligence. From it come the many human souls and, from its shadow side, sublunary matter. All knowledge is an illumination from this Angel; the human intellect does not abstract the intelligible from the sensible. The human intellect is an angel in potency. In its highest state it is the "holy intellect", the summit of prophecy [p 243 to 244]. Against Themistius and Aquinas, Avicenna made the Active Intelligence separate from the soul without making it God. Corbin calls this the gnostic originality of these philosophers: the human being is tied directly to a being of the Pleroma [p 244].
Figure 37. Avicenna's triadic procession: cosmology as angelic self-contemplation [p 242 to 244].
His "Oriental philosophy" survives only in fragments. Five of six references to it in his notes on the Theology concern life after death [p 244]. The three Recitals, Hayy ibn Yaqzan, the Bird and Salaman and Absal, tell of a journey to a mystic Orient. They are symbols, not allegories: "the symbol is cipher and silence; it says and does not say", and it opens as each consciousness makes it the cipher of its own transformation [p 244 to 245]. It was this Angel that alarmed the Latin West and ended "Latin Avicennism", because a direct link to a being of the Pleroma did not incline the philosopher to bow to any earthly Magisterium [p 245 to 246]. In the East, Averroism was unknown, and Avicenna's real heir was Sohravardi, who took up the Oriental project with the "Oriental sources" Avicenna lacked. Through him it led to the school of Isfahan and to commentators like Sayyed Ahmad 'Alawi [p 246 to 247].
| Figure | Dates in the book | Distinctive move |
|---|---|---|
| Ibn Maskuyeh (Miskawaih) | d. 421/1030 | Ethics (Tahdhib al-akhlaq); Javidan Kharad, an "eternal wisdom" of Persians, Arabs, Indians [p 247 to 248] |
| Ibn Fatik | fifth/eleventh c. | Anthology of sayings of ancient sages, later translated into Spanish, Latin and French [p 249] |
| Ibn Hindu | d. 420/1029 | Florilegium of Greek spiritual sentences [p 249] |
| Abu'l-Barakat al-Baghdadi | d. shortly after 560/1164 | A separate guiding Intelligence for each soul or family of souls [p 250 to 253] |
Table 10. Later figures of the Hellenizing current.
Abu'l-Barakat: An Angel for Each Soul
A Jewish convert, nicknamed "unique in his time", Abu'l-Barakat thought politics contrary to the very idea of a philosopher [p 250]. He held that the ancient sages taught orally and later wrote in cipher, so the history of philosophy is a history of decay. He claimed to have read "the book of being" itself, and Pines translated the title of his Mo'tabar as "the book of what is established by personal reflection" [p 250 to 251]. Souls fall into spiritual families that are distinct species, so one Active Intelligence cannot perfect them all. The one who causes a soul to exist differs from the one who perfects it, as a teacher differs from a father [p 251 to 252]. Each soul or group of kindred souls has a spiritual friend and guide: the Hermetic "Perfect Nature", "the Angel" in religious language [p 252]. Every individual thus has a transcendent intellect of his own, a dimension above every collective norm and authority; that is why Corbin calls him "revolutionary." He was writing long after Ghazali's death, which already argues against the idea that Ghazali ended philosophy [p 253].
Ghazali's Critique and Its Real Weight
Ghazali was born near Tus in 450/1059, studied under al-Jowayni and was appointed to the Nizamiya in Baghdad in 484/1091 [p 253 to 254]. The Latin West read his Intentions of the Philosophers without its preface and conclusion, and took him for a fellow philosopher of Avicenna [p 254]. In 488/1095 a crisis about certainty made him leave his chair and his family for ten years of wandering in Sufi dress. He died at Tus on 19 December 1111 (505), aged 52 [p 255]. His definition of true knowledge, in which the thing known is fully unveiled and no doubt remains, is "excellent positive philosophy" that any Ishraqi would accept. The reverse is not true: his hostility to the philosophers is startling in so lofty a soul [p 256].
His polemics were aimed at the Ismailis, the Christians, the "libertines" and the philosophers. Corbin finds it surprising that a man so convinced that logic cannot reach truth relied on it so much [p 256 to 257]. Against the Ismailis, written for the caliph al-Mostazhir, Ghazali fought with dialectic a way of thinking that is hermeneutic. He missed ta'wil, inherited knowledge, and the Imam as guide to spiritual birth. A Yemeni Ismaili reply of 1,500 pages, by 'Ali ibn Mohammad ibn al-Walid (d. 612/1215), still waits to be compared with it [p 257 to 258].
So it is "ridiculous" to say that Ghazali dealt philosophy a blow from which the East never recovered [p 254 to 255]. What shaped Iran was Sohravardi's restoration, after which one could not be fully a philosopher without being a Sufi, or the reverse [p 262].
Chapter 6. Sufism and Sohravardi's Philosophy of Light
Corbin treats Sufism as "a resounding protest" by spiritual Islam against reducing Islam to a religion of law and letter, organised around the triad of shari'a (the letter of revelation), tariqa (the way) and haqiqa (spiritual truth realised in the person) [p 264]. Then he turns to Sohravardi, who joined philosophy and Sufism so closely that after him they could no longer be separated [p 263 to 305].
The Shi'ite Question in Sufism
The usual etymology takes "Sufi" from suf, wool, after the white woollen mantle (khirqa). Biruni already suggested the Greek sophos [p 263]. The prototype of Sufi experience is the Prophet's mi'raj, his ecstatic ascent [p 264]. Corbin then raises a question he says cannot be avoided. Sufism seems to grow naturally out of the "prophetic philosophy" of Shi'ism, yet most Sufis have been Sunni, and many Shi'ite spirituals keep their distance from Sufism while using its vocabulary and metaphysics [p 264 to 265].
He gathers several clues. The first to be called "Sufis" seem to have been a Shi'ite circle in Kufa: 'Abdak (d. 210/825) is named as the first Sufi in Baghdad, and he was a contemporary of the eighth Imam, who spoke harshly of Sufism [p 265 to 266]. Sunni Sufism kept walaya but dropped imamology, which gave "an imamology without an Imam", as paradoxical as a Christology without Christ [p 266]. Yet most Sufi orders trace their lineage back to an Imam. Corbin argues that the less "historical" those chains are, the more clearly they show a deliberate wish to descend from the Imams [p 266 to 267]. Shi'ite critics objected mainly to the institution: the convent, the habit, and a shaykh who tends to replace the hidden Imam [p 267]. Shi'ism is already a tariqa in itself, a "virtually" initiatory milieu [p 267]. Alongside organised orders, there are unnamed personal initiations, and there are the Owaysis, named after Oways al-Qarani, who knew the Prophet without ever meeting him. Owaysis receive everything from an invisible personal guide, and they are "innumerable" in Shi'ism [p 268]. The Sunni Qotb (the mystical Pole) is a transfer of the Imam [p 269].
| Master | Dates in the book | What Corbin draws out |
|---|---|---|
| Abu Yazid Bastami | d. about 234 or 261/874 | Grandson of a Zoroastrian; no writings; ecstatic paradoxes (shatahat); the gradation of I, You and He [p 269 to 271] |
| Jonayd | d. 297/909 | "Master of the group"; holds the Law and the Truth in tension against the antinomians; tawhid lived rather than proved [p 272 to 273] |
| Hakim Tirmidhi | third/ninth c. | General and particular walaya; walaya above prophecy; a structure that "loses balance" once the Imam is removed [p 274 to 276] |
| Hallaj | 244/857 to 309/922 | Union through love; broke the discipline of the arcane by preaching in public [p 276 to 278] |
| Ahmad Ghazali | d. 520/1126 | Pure love; Sawanih; "Iblis damned through love" [p 279 to 282] |
| 'Ayn al-Qozat Hamadani | executed 525/1131, aged 33 | Jurist, mystic, mathematician; Tamhidat [p 282 to 283] |
| Sana'i | d. about 545/1150 | Founded the Persian didactic Sufi poem; a journey through the cosmos led by the Intelligence [p 283] |
Table 11. Masters of early Sufism in Corbin's selection.
Bastami, Jonayd, Tirmidhi
Bastami's shatahat carry "the idea of a shock that overturns" [p 270]. In one recital he sees his Lord with the eye of certainty, and his own light fades under His light. When he asks who He is, the answer is "Neither I nor other than I" [p 271]. The divine and the human unite and become reciprocal in a transcendent act of adoration and love [p 271]. Jonayd, an Iranian from Nehavand, opposed those Sufis who thought that reaching the Truth abolished the Law. Corbin notes that this is exactly where Twelvers and Ismailis part ways, so the problem did not start with Sufism and cannot be explained by Sufism alone [p 273]. Tirmidhi's general walaya, open to every Muslim who recites the profession of faith, is to Corbin's eyes a "laicisation" of a Shi'ite concept. His thesis that walaya is permanent and above time-bound prophecy "teaches nothing new" to someone who knows Shi'ite prophetology [p 274 to 276].
Hallaj and the Two Platonisms
Hallaj was born in Fars in 244/857 and was a grandson of a Zoroastrian. He studied with Sahl Tostari and received the mantle from Jonayd, then broke with the Baghdad masters, threw off the Sufi habit and preached to the people from Khuzistan to the borders of China [p 276 to 277]. He taught that every being's final goal is union with God through love. Jurists called it pantheism, politicians called it agitation, and Sufis and Shi'ites alike faulted him for divulging secrets to people not ready for them [p 277 to 278]. He was imprisoned for eight years and seven months, and executed on 24 Dhu'l-Qa'da 309/27 March 922 [p 278].
Ahmad Ghazali, the theologian's brother, wrote the Sawanih, a breviary of love in compact Persian [p 281]. In it the moth feeds on the light of the flame from afar, but once it arrives, «ce n'est plus à lui de progresser vers la flamme, c'est la flamme qui progresse en lui» (editor's translation: "it is no longer for it to advance toward the flame; it is the flame that advances in it") [p 282]. Iblis, cursed, swears by God's glory: what he loves is a majesty no one can be worthy of. This gives the theme of "Iblis damned through love" [p 282]. His disciple 'Ayn al-Qozat, executed at thirty-three, foreshadows Sohravardi's fate [p 282].
Sohravardi: Restoring the Wisdom of Ancient Persia
Shihaboddin Yahya Sohravardi was born in 549/1155 at Sohravard in ancient Media. He studied at Maragheh and Isfahan and was welcomed by Seljuq princes in Anatolia. He died mysteriously in the citadel of Aleppo on 29 July 1191, at 36, a victim of Saladin's vindictiveness, which even the friendship of Saladin's son could not overcome [p 285 to 286]. He died seven years before Averroes. Western historians took the end of Averroism for the end of Islamic philosophy, just as Sohravardi was opening a new road in Iran [p 285].
His Hikmat al-Ishraq ("Oriental Theosophy") was meant as a resurrection of the wisdom of ancient Persia, with Hermes, Plato and Zoroaster as its great figures. The joining of Plato and Zoroaster that the West would see in Gemistos Plethon was already a feature of Iranian philosophy in the twelfth century [p 286]. Sohravardi knew Avicenna's "Oriental" project and held that it was bound to fail, because Avicenna did not know the "Oriental source" itself: the theosophy of the ancient Persian sages, "quite different from the Magi" [p 287 to 288]. His forty-nine works include a Peripatetic trilogy, used as a preparation and as a way of clearing the road, the Ishraq itself, Persian initiatory recitals, and a book of hours addressed to the beings of light [p 288 to 289]. The book was a youthful vision in which the closed universe of ten Intelligences broke open into a multitude of lights, the Xvarnah or Light of Glory proclaimed by Zarathustra [p 289 to 290].
In a dream, Sohravardi meets an Aristotle who is plainly a Platonist and tells him: «Eveille-toi à toi-même» (editor's translation: "Awaken to yourself") [p 291]. Knowledge then appears not as abstraction or as representation through a form, but as presential knowledge ('ilm hodhuri). The soul, being light, makes itself present to itself and so makes its object present. The truth of all objective knowledge is led back to the knowing subject's consciousness of itself [p 291 to 292]. Aristotle adds that the philosophers of Islam did not reach one thousandth of Plato's level, and that Bastami and Sahl Tostari are "the philosophers in the true sense" [p 292].
The Hierarchy of Lights
From the Light of Lights comes Bahman, the first Archangel, through a "victorial" force (qahr). The two stand as first Beloved and first Lover. Every degree of being is then arranged in pairs: dominion and love, illumination and contemplation, independence and need. These "dimensions" go beyond the two-dimensional (necessary and possible) space of Avicenna's Intelligences, and the lights multiply without number [p 293]. In the West astronomy would empty the sky of angels; here angelology pushed astronomy past its classical bounds [p 293 to 294].
Figure 44. Sohravardi's orders of light. The boundary of the spiritual world is no longer the sphere of the Moon but the Heaven of the Fixed Stars [p 294 to 297].
The barzakh, body as screen, is pure Darkness. It is not even light in potency, so nothing positive can be explained from it. Every species is an "icon" of its Angel, a theurgy the Angel works in the night of matter. This gives Sohravardi his critique of potency, matter and substantial form. His metaphysics remains one of essences, in which existence is only a way of considering a thing [p 295 to 296]. The worlds are four: Jabarut (pure Intelligences), Malakut (souls), Molk (spheres and elements), and the mundus imaginalis ('alam al-mithal). The last is the world of "suspended" Forms that appear in "epiphanic places" as an image appears in a mirror. It holds the mystical cities of Jabalqa, Jabarsa and Hurqalya [p 296 to 297].
The Western Exile and the Pole
The recitals take place in that intermediate world. The Recital of the Western Exile makes the gnostic aware that the world of the barzakh is an "Occident" opposed to the Orient of Lights. Without the intermediate world, the imaginative decays into the imaginary, and the recitals become mere novels [p 298 to 299]. Molla Sadra describes Ishraqi spirituality as itself a barzakh between the Sufis' purification and the philosophers' knowledge. For Sohravardi, mystical experience without philosophy goes astray, and philosophy that does not lead to spiritual realisation "is pure vanity" [p 299]. The theosophos excels at both. Hence the adage: Ishraqi theosophy is to philosophy what Sufism is to Kalam [p 300]. Sohravardi traced one line of "eternal leaven" from the Greek sages through Dhu'l-Nun and Tostari, and another from the Persian sages through Bastami, Hallaj and Kharraqani [p 300]. He never belonged to any Sufi order [p 300].
If Islam is only its legal religion, this effort is an "insurrection". If integral Islam means Law, Way and Truth together, Sohravardi stands at its summit, in a "pre-established harmony" with Shi'ism [p 300 to 301]. At the top of his hierarchy stands the Qotb, the Pole, without whom the world could not go on, even unknown and incognito. In Shi'ite terms this is the hidden Imam [p 301]. At his trial in Aleppo the charge was that he held God could create a prophet at any time, even now. Corbin reads this as at least crypto-Shi'ism, and so Sohravardi lived the "Western exile" to its end [p 302].
His followers, the Ishraqiyun, continue to this day. Shahrazuri wrote commentaries, a History of the Philosophers and the encyclopedia of the Divine Tree (completed 680/1281). Ibn Kammuna and Qotboddin Shirazi (694/1295) came after him [p 302 to 303]. Sohravardi pictured a community "of this Book" led by a "Keeper of the Book" (Qayyim bi'l-Kitab), a Shi'ite title of the Imam [p 303]. The line runs through Ibn Abi Jomhur, Dawwani and Ghiyathoddin Mansur, to Mir Damad, who wrote under the pen name "Ishraq", and to Molla Sadra's lectures. In Akbar's India, Zoroastrians of Azar Kayvan's circle recognised their own heritage in Sohravardi [p 304 to 305]. Today, Corbin writes, one is rarely an Ishraqi without belonging in some degree to the school of Molla Sadra [p 305].
Chapter 7. Andalusia and the Parting of the Ways
At the western edge of Islam the cultural climate changes, yet the same lines of force are still at work. Corbin chooses a few great names: the esoteric school of Ibn Masarra, Ibn Hazm the Platonist and zahiri, three philosophers who sought the Active Intelligence (Ibn Bajja, Ibn al-Sid, Ibn Tofayl), and finally Averroes. He closes the first half of the book with a "Transition" that explains why the end of Averroism in the West was not the end of philosophy in Islam [p 306 to 348].
Ibn Masarra and the School of Almeria
Ibn Masarra was born in 269/883. His father had frequented Mu'tazilite and esoteric circles in the East [p 308]. By seventeen he already had disciples and withdrew with them to a hermitage in the Sierra of Cordoba. Suspected of teaching "a certain ancient sage called Empedocles", he went into exile in the East and came back under 'Abd al-Rahman III. From then on he taught his doctrine in symbols, and only to a few. He died in his hermitage on 20 October 931 (319) [p 308 to 309]. Asin Palacios reconstructed his system from the doxographers and from quotations in Ibn 'Arabi [p 309].
Islam's Empedocles is a hierophant, "the first of the five greatest Greek philosophers", with the character of a Sufi [p 309 to 310]. His central doctrine is the emanation of five substances: primordial Matter (an intelligible matter, not the body), Intelligence, Soul, Nature, second Matter. Compared with Plotinus, the One has been removed from the scheme and replaced by the First Element [p 310]. Corbin makes three remarks. Raising the Principle above the scheme agrees with the Ismaili Principle beyond being and non-being. Empedocles' Love and Strife become mahabba and qahr, love and dominion, the same pair Sohravardi uses, so "strife" changes into sovereignty. And intelligible matter passed to Ibn Gabirol, to Ibn 'Arabi's five senses of "matter" (from the Essence of essences and the Breath of the Merciful down to artificial matter), and on to the "spiritual matter" of Molla Sadra's eschatology [p 311 to 312].
The Masarrians formed a secret hierarchy headed by an Imam. After a schism the school disappeared as an organisation, but under the Almoravids Almeria became the capital of Spanish Sufism. Ibn al-'Arif wrote a rule based on Masarrian theosophy, and Ibn Barrajan spread it [p 312 to 313]. Ibn Qasi organised a militia called the Muridin in the Algarve and ruled there as Imam for ten years, with traits that recall Ismailism. He died in 546/1151. Fourteen years later Ibn 'Arabi was born, and he would write a commentary on Ibn Qasi's only surviving work [p 313].
Ibn Hazm: The Literalist Who Saw Through Appearances
Ibn Hazm was born in Cordoba in 383/994, the son of a vizier. He was loyal to the Umayyads, was taken prisoner, and served as vizier for two months in 1023 before final exile. He then gave himself to scholarship and died in 454/1063 [p 313 to 315]. He wrote The Ring of the Dove at Xativa. It is a book of love and a personal diary, which tells of a youthful love he had kept secret [p 314]. Following Ibn Dawud, he recalls Plato's myth of the sphere split in two. Love is the reunion of souls whose impulses began in their pre-existence, "an interfusion of souls". Its usual cause, in a clear echo of the Phaedrus, is an outward beauty in which the soul finds something of its own nature [p 315 to 316].
His Kitab al-fisal is the first treatise of comparative religion in any language. It sorts attitudes from atheist and sceptic to believer: personal or impersonal deity, monotheist or polytheist, with or without a revealed Book, text kept intact or altered. The test of a religion is tawhid plus a revelation preserved word for word, because the text is the very threshold to the divine mystery [p 317 to 318].
Ibn Bajja: The Rule of the Solitary
Ibn Bajja (Avempace) was born in Saragossa. He fled when Alfonso I took the city in 512/1118, and he is said to have been poisoned by envious physicians in Fez in 533/1138 [p 319]. Like al-Farabi he played the lute, and he joined the Andalusian campaign against Ptolemy's epicycles that led to al-Bitruji [p 320 to 321]. He found Ghazali's mysticism too easy: only speculative effort leads to knowledge of oneself and of the Active Intelligence. Even so, his favourite words, "solitary" and "stranger", belong to mystical gnosis. Two Andalusian paths open here: Ibn Masarra's, which Ibn 'Arabi took up, and Ibn Bajja's, which Averroes took up [p 321 to 322].
The Rule of the Solitary is unfinished and breaks off at chapter sixteen. A "rule" is a set of actions ordered to an end, which only a human being can carry out, and the solitary's rule must be an image of the perfect state [p 322]. That state comes from no coup. It comes from reforming each individual. "It is the solitaries alone who make the solidary": a city of those united with the Active Intelligence would need neither doctors nor judges. Until then they remain "strangers" in their families and societies, citizens of ideal republics their daring anticipates [p 322 to 323]. The word gharib runs from the old Gnosis through the Imams to Sohravardi's Western Exile: in Islam, philosophy is hard to separate from gnosis [p 323].
Ibn al-Sid of Badajoz (444/1052 to 521/1127) had long been taken for a grammarian. In his Book of Circles religion and philosophy teach the same truth by different methods, which is what happens, Corbin notes, when esotericism is set aside and the two are left face to face [p 326 to 328]. Three circles of ten (Intelligences, Souls and material beings) end in the Active Intelligence, the Universal Soul and Man. Being moves in a circle "whose point of return to its principle is in the form of Man" [p 328].
Ibn Tofayl: Two Islands
Ibn Tofayl was born at Guadix and was vizier and physician to the Almohad Abu Ya'qub Yusof. He introduced Averroes at court and died in 580/1185 [p 329]. Averroes criticised him for holding that a well-trained imagination can receive the intelligibles [p 329]. His Hayy ibn Yaqzan takes its characters' names from Avicenna's recitals, but here Hayy stands for Ibn Bajja's solitary carried to the limit, not for the Angel. Salaman is the practical intellect and Absal the contemplative one [p 330 to 331].
On one island a society lives under an outward Law. Salaman adapts and governs. Absal cannot, and he leaves for the island opposite, which he thinks empty [p 331 to 332]. There Hayy, born spontaneously or washed ashore and raised by a gazelle, has risen through seven-year stages from physics to the necessity of the Demiurge, to knowing his own essence, and on to the vision of universal theophany [p 332 to 333]. At forty-nine Absal meets him and finds that everything religion taught him, Hayy already knows in a purer form; religion is the symbol of a truth inaccessible except through that veil [p 333]. They go to the inhabited island to teach, meet coldness and then hostility, and go back, knowing that perfection belongs to the few who are strong enough to renounce [p 333 to 334].
Corbin warns against reading it as a Robinson Crusoe story. It is the philosopher's spiritual autobiography. Its last lesson seems to be that the philosopher can understand the religious man, but the merely religious man cannot understand the philosopher [p 334]. Is the conflict hopeless, then? That is the usual Averroist reading. But it covers only a small part of the field, and the rest must be looked for in Shi'ism and prophetic philosophy [p 334 to 335].
Averroes
Averroes was born in Cordoba in 520/1126 into a family of chief judges. He was qadi of Seville and then of Cordoba and physician to the Almohads [p 335 to 336]. In 1195 he fell into disgrace and was confined at Lucena, insulted by theologians and the crowd. He died in Morocco on 10 December 1198 (595) [p 336]. His aim was to restore the authentic Aristotle, in long, middle and short commentaries ("che 'l gran comento feo"), together with the Tahafot al-tahafot against Ghazali. Much of his work survives thanks to Jewish scholars, since the Almohads hunted down philosophy [p 336 to 338].
Corbin refuses both the "free thinker" of Renan and the "Qur'anic apologist". Averroes held, as all esotericists do, that the revealed text has an outer and an inner sense, and that revealing the inner sense to the weak would be a disaster. But it is one truth on different levels. The "double truth" was the work of Latin political Averroism, not of Averroes; to confuse the two is to know nothing about ta'wil [p 338 to 339].
| Question | Avicenna | Averroes |
|---|---|---|
| Celestial Souls (Animae caelestes) | Real; pure imagination; ground of the Malakut | Only a metaphor for the desire that moves each sphere [p 340 to 341] |
| Origin of the world | Emanation, ruled by "from the One only one" | No creation and no succession; final causality in an eternal beginning [p 341] |
| Forms | Given by the Active Intelligence (Dator formarum) | Potential within matter itself [p 341 to 342] |
| Individuation | By form (as later in Molla Sadra) | By matter; immortality is only that of the species [p 342 to 343] |
| Union with the Intelligence | Guarantees personal self-awareness | The Intelligence perceives itself; the passive intellect is effaced, like Moses' mountain [p 343] |
Table 12. Where Averroes departs from Avicenna.
What does removing the celestial Souls cost? The Malakut was the world of autonomous Images that makes visions, resurrection and the many senses of revelation true. Without it, ta'wil may decay into mere technique, and the mystic journey to the Orient with Hayy becomes impossible [p 340, 342].
Transition: Two Destinies
Avicennism tended to bear fruit in mystical life: briefly in the West, and in Iran down to the present. Latin Averroism led to the political Averroism of John of Jandun and Marsilius of Padua [p 344]. Aquinas gave each person an agent intellect that was not separate, and so broke the direct link between the individual and the divine world. Once that link was broken, the authority of the Church replaced Hayy ibn Yaqzan's personal norm, and the socialised norm became what the spirit rebelled against. In time it could turn from monotheism to monism, "from divine Incarnation to social Incarnation" [p 344 to 345]. Islam has no dogmatic Magisterium and so could not pass one on to a secular successor. Its spiritual people freed themselves from legalism not by anything like political Averroism but by the way of ta'wil [p 345].
In the Islamic East, philosophy never went through the metaphysical secularisation that split theology from philosophy, and its ideal is vertical perfection rather than a social ethic [p 345 to 346]. The deaths of Sohravardi (587/1191) and Averroes (595/1198), with Ibn 'Arabi already on the scene, mark the dividing line. On one side lie Alexandrism and political Averroism in the Christian West. On the other lies the theosophy of Light in Iran. Seen from there, the Ghazali-Averroes conflict is not as decisive as the conflict between Kant and Aristotle; Sohravardi stands beyond it [p 346 to 347].
Chapter 8. After Averroes: The Map and the Sunni Thinkers
The second half of the book covers eight centuries, from the death of Averroes to the present, as a single period. Corbin admits this looks paradoxical. His reason is that our scheme of Antiquity, Middle Ages and modern times has no counterpart in the time of the Hegira; matching calendars is a practical convenience, not real contemporaneity [p 350]. He opens with a map of the families of thought, then treats the Sunni thinkers: philosophers, theologians of Kalam, opponents of philosophy and encyclopedists [p 350 to 390].
Why Averroes Is Not the End
Averroes' funeral was long taken for the funeral of Islamic philosophy. That is true of "Arab Peripateticism", but it misses what began at the same moment with Sohravardi (d. 587/1191) and Ibn 'Arabi (d. 638/1240) [p 350 to 352]. With them the face-off between Kalam theologians and Hellenizing philosophers comes to an end. The current that starts with Ibn 'Arabi differs from both as much as they differ from each other, and it is "properly Islamic" [p 352]. The stage moves for good from Andalusia to Iran. Corbin warns against dividing it too finely: the gap between Haydar Amoli in the fourteenth century and Mir Damad in the sixteenth is not that between a Latin scholastic and a Renaissance thinker. Think rather of "a school of Chartres that went on and grew richer down to our own day" [p 353]. Its historian, moreover, works largely from manuscripts and lithographs, rather like a historian of German philosophy from Kant to Heidegger who had to edit the texts himself [p 353].
Only traditional philosophy is covered. "Modernism", shaped by Western philosophies imperfectly absorbed, is a separate chapter. Corbin hopes that the renewal of the "Oriental" tradition will come from Orientals "in the metaphysical sense", in the East and in the West together, and he dismisses the pseudo-esotericisms of the West as the sorry counterpart of pseudo-Westernised thought in the East [p 354].
Corbin compares this current with the forgotten "Hegelian right". The difference is that Islamic theosophy follows a Qur'anic, Arian-type Christology. The first theophany, the Muhammadan Reality or First Intelligence, is the highest of creatures, not a consubstantial second person, and it is being "in the imperative" [p 358 to 359]. From this follows a different view of history. One can build a philosophy of history on an Incarnation that enters history; theophanies, as visionary events, call instead for a "historiosophy", which perceives events at the level of the Malakut and allows no agnosticism, while a philosophy of history can end up secularising the Absolute Spirit [p 359 to 360]. "Speculative" comes from speculum: the inner human being is the mirror in which God shows himself, by epiphany and not incarnation, and so "the speculative is the esoteric" [p 360]. Philosophy ('aql) and tradition (naql) are completed by kashf, the vision of what appears in the mirror [p 361]. The plan follows from this: Sunni thought, the metaphysics of Sufism, and Shi'ite thought from Nasiroddin Tusi to the school of Isfahan and after [p 362 to 363].
Sunni Philosophers
| Thinker | Dates in the book | Contribution Corbin notes |
|---|---|---|
| Athiroddin Abhari | d. about 663/1264 | Textbooks (Isaghuji, Hidayat al-hikma, with commentary by Molla Sadra); his Kashf al-haqa'iq copies Sohravardi's eschatology [p 364] |
| Ibn Sab'in | 614/1217 to 669/1270 | Answered Frederick II's Sicilian Questions; his school claimed descent from Hermes; died in Mecca "from desire to be united with God" [p 366 to 367] |
| Katibi Qazvini | d. 675/1276 | Worked at the Maragheh observatory; Shamsiya on logic; leaned towards Shi'ism [p 368] |
| Rashidoddin Fazlollah | about 645/1247 to 718/1318 | Universal history (Jami' al-tawarikh); unpublished philosophical and mystical works; executed [p 368 to 370] |
| Qotboddin Razi | d. 766/1364 | Mohakamat, arbitrating between Fakhr Razi's and Tusi's commentaries on Avicenna [p 370] |
Table 13. Sunni philosophers after Averroes.
Ibn Sab'in's portraits of al-Farabi, Avicenna, Ghazali and Averroes are, Corbin says, the first attempt at a psychological interpretation in Islamic philosophy [p 367]. Frederick II's questions belong to his dream of an imperial theology centred on the Perfect Man [p 367].
Theologians of Kalam
Fakhroddin Razi (543/1149 to 606/1209) travelled and argued from Khwarazm to India. He was an Ash'arite yet opposed atomism, and he knew al-Farabi, Avicenna and Abu'l-Barakat well [p 371]. His ontology stays a metaphysics of essence, with existence added from outside, and his huge work culminates in an eight-volume Qur'an commentary [p 371 to 373]. Arnaldez called his project a reconciliation "between philosopher and believer" rather than between reason and faith. Corbin's judgement is that he had only the resources of discursive Kalam, without the transforming union with the Active Intelligence as Holy Spirit, and that he did not even suspect the metaphysical concept of the Imam: "a typical motakallim" [p 373].
Iji (about 700/1300 to 756/1355), a judge in Shiraz who died in prison, composed the Mawaqif, an encyclopedia of Kalam in six "stations" [p 374]. Corbin doubts that any motakallim had the constructive power of a true summa. Left to itself, Kalam ran into the sand of madrasa scholasticism. The living thought was elsewhere, in Semnani and Haydar Amoli, and Shi'ite metaphysicians would later master Kalam as a fruitful introduction [p 375]. He also defends the commentary genre: holding to a text was the most direct way to express one's own thought, not a sign of incapacity [p 375]. Taftazani (722/1322 to 792/1390) held that God and man share in human acts in a real sense, not a metaphorical one, closer to Matoridi than to Ash'ari. A debate staged before Tamerlane ended his friendship with Gorgani [p 376 to 377]. Gorgani (740/1339 to 816/1413) wrote the Ta'rifat, the seed of a dictionary of philosophical terms that is still needed [p 377]. Whether he was Sunni or Shi'ite is unclear, an example of how the "discipline of the arcane" makes allegiances hard to settle [p 378].
Opponents and Encyclopedists
Corbin treats the opponents of philosophy as a negative image of its history. Modern agnosticism, which forbids any philosophical statement to point to a real beyond, and the agnosticism of pious believers who see "rationalism" everywhere end up in agreement in practice. The metaphysician cannot persuade either: "it is not a matter of argument but of aptitude". He can only bear witness and pass on the torch [p 379 to 380]. Ibn Taymiya (661/1263 to 728/1328) deserves vigilance because of his heirs, the Wahhabis and the Salafis. His Refutation of the Logicians and his Minhaj al-Sunna against 'Allameh Helli show the Sunni and Shi'ite conceptions in contrast, though only at the level of Kalam [p 380 to 381].
Corbin reads the encyclopedists as a phenomenologist who wants "to save the phenomena": the point is to recover the Imago mundi through which the facts were seen, not the facts themselves, which are always "outdated" [p 382]. Zakariya Qazvini (d. 682/1283) wrote the Marvels of Creation, a cosmography running from the nine spheres and the angels down to minerals, the theory of the intellects and fantastic animals. His manuscripts show the active Imagination at work in the miniaturists [p 382 to 384]. Shamsoddin Amoli's Nafa'is al-fonun describes 125 sciences [p 384 to 385].
Shamsoddin Amoli's Nafa'is al-fonun lists about 125 sciences and was written when Tabriz under the Mongols was a crossroads of scholars. Corbin reads it as a map of how a fourteenth-century mind still ordered the knowable world, including medicine and Avicenna's Canon, under one encyclopedic sky [p 384 to 385]. The same phenomenological care applies to Qazvini's cosmography: miniatures of angels and fantastic animals are not decoration but evidence of the active Imagination at work [p 382 to 384].
Chapter 9. The Metaphysics of Sufism
Sufism is not a philosophy. It has even given the sharpest critique of philosophy, wherever philosophy means a limiting rationalism. Yet it holds a whole metaphysics, "speculative mysticism", and an Ibn 'Arabi can no more be left out of a history of Islamic philosophy than a Meister Eckhart from a history of German philosophy [p 391]. What separates it from the earlier thinkers is the gap between knowing the properties of fire and being the fire. Its models of the universe are never theory cut off from inner life: metaphysics and mystical anthropology go together [p 391 to 392].
Corbin adds two cautions. The Ishraqiyun stand to Peripatetic philosophy as the Sufis stand to Kalam, but an Ishraqi is not simply a Sufi. And since the Safavid period many Shi'ite spirituals have preferred the words 'irfan and 'orafa to tasawwof, so "Sufism" does not cover the whole of mysticism in Islam. There are no watertight walls: Ibn 'Arabi's influence is felt everywhere from the thirteenth century on [p 392].
Ruzbehan and 'Attar
Ruzbehan Baqli (522/1128 to 606/1209) of Shiraz preserved the only surviving copy of a work by Hallaj. He refused an asceticism that sets human love against divine love: they are two forms of one love, and what changes is not the object but the subject [p 393]. In his Jasmine of the Faithful in Love, Majnun at the height of his love becomes "the mirror of God", and God, through the lover's eyes, contemplates His own eternal face in the beloved [p 393]. Behind this stands the inspired hadith of the "hidden Treasure" that longed to be known [p 393 to 394]. God's jealousy of a witness outside Himself is the first Veil. Sending the creature back to contemplate itself is the second. The trial is overcome when the mystic discovers that his self-knowledge is the very gaze with which God contemplates Himself; then the veil becomes a mirror [p 394]. At fifty-five Ruzbehan wrote a diary of his visions, "perhaps unique" in mystical literature, built on the ambiguity (iltibas) of the human image, which both "is" and "is not". He thinks in a dialectic of images, and anyone soaked in his work understands why Hafez is read as a mystical Bible [p 394 to 395].
Farid 'Attar of Nishapur (born 513/1120; date of death uncertain) has a work in which one can follow an inner development, ending in a Shi'ite period in old age [p 395 to 396]. In the Mosibat-Nameh, forty stations correspond to forty days of retreat. The pilgrim asks the archangels, the Throne, the Pen, the elements, the animals, Satan and the prophets for a remedy, and is told at last: «Ce que tu as cherché est en toi. Tu es toi-même l'obstacle qui t'en sépare» (editor's translation: "What you have sought is within you. You yourself are the obstacle that separates you from it") [p 397]. Until then he travelled toward God; from now on he travels "in" God [p 398]. 'Attar's images of the Temple of the Magi and the wine of the Magi carry a Mazdean vocabulary that Westerners have tended to play down, unlike the Iranian masters who commented on it [p 398].
'Omar Sohravardi and Spiritual Chivalry
'Omar Sohravardi (539/1145 to 632/1234), not to be confused with the Shaykh al-Ishraq, was co-founder of the Sohravardiya order. He wrote against the falasifa and composed the 'Awarif al-ma'arif, a standard handbook [p 399 to 400]. He also wrote on fotowwat (Persian javanmardi), "spiritual youth", the form that the relation between esotericism and social life took in Islam: at once chivalry and craft fellowship, which turned the gestures of every trade into liturgical acts. One entered by a vow given in words, by receiving the sword, or by sharing the ritual Cup [p 400]. The caliph al-Nasir dreamed of a pan-Islamic fotowwat, but the Mongols ruined the plan. Fotowwat itself survived and cannot be separated from Shi'ite walaya, the pact of the "Friends of God". Translating walaya as "sainthood" spoils everything: what would a "transmissible" sainthood mean? [p 401 to 402].
Corbin stresses that fotowwat is the form esotericism took when it met social reality in Islam. The fata is not a youth by age but by spiritual juvenility. Treatises on chivalry therefore belong inside a history of philosophy, because they show how initiation structured guilds, militias and brotherhoods without collapsing into mere sociology [p 399 to 401].
Ibn 'Arabi
Corbin rejects the view that Ibn 'Arabi marks the end of the golden age of Sufism. With him begins the golden age of mystical theosophy, which carries philosophy, Kalam and early asceticism along in "a speculative metaphysics and a visionary power without precedent" [p 402 to 403]. He was born in Murcia on 28 July 1165 (569), talked with Averroes at seventeen, and was shaped by the school of Almeria, which held Ismaili and Shi'ite teaching. When the school of Isfahan took him up, it was "a grand return to origins" [p 403]. He went East and died in Damascus on 16 November 1240 (638) [p 403].
The inventory by Osman Yahia lists 856 works, 550 of them surviving in 2,917 manuscripts. The Fotuhat runs to about 3,000 pages, and the Fosus al-hikam, presented as inspired by the Prophet, has 150 known commentaries, about 130 of them by Iranians [p 407]. "How could one write a complete history of Islamic philosophy before all these texts have been read?" [p 408]. Sadroddin Qonyawi, Ibn 'Arabi's disciple and stepson, links him with Rumi, Hamuyeh and Tusi [p 408].
Najmoddin Kobra and the Physiology of Light
As Ibn 'Arabi moved East, the Mongol invasion pushed the Sufism of Central Asia West, and the meeting of the two schools was decisive. Corbin compares it with Byzantine scholars arriving in Italy, two and a half centuries earlier, while refusing any talk of a "Mongol Renaissance" [p 409]. Najmoddin Kobra (born 540/1146) refused Genghis Khan's offer of safety and died defending Khwarazm in 618/1221 [p 409 to 410]. He was the first master to study the coloured photisms seen "with eyes closed", reading their shades as signs of spiritual state. This is a "visionary apperception" with its own controls to tell it apart from hallucination [p 410]. «Apprends, ô mon ami, que l'objet de la recherche, c'est Dieu, et que le sujet qui cherche c'est une lumière qui vient de lui» (editor's translation: "Learn, my friend, that the object of the quest is God, and that the subject who seeks is a light that comes from Him") [p 410 to 411]. Where the flame rising from the earthly person meets a blaze descending from Heaven, the "heavenly witness" appears [p 411]. His school includes Rumi's father, Hamuyeh, Najmoddin Daya Razi, and 'Aziz Nasafi, whose cyclical theory the Ismailis claim [p 411 to 412].
| Subtle centre (ascending) | Prophet of your being | Colour |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Adam | smoky grey |
| 2 | ... | blue |
| 3 | ... | red |
| 4 | ... | white |
| 5 | ... | yellow |
| 6 | ... | black light |
| 7 | Mohammad | emerald green |
Table 14. Semnani's seven subtle centres. Corbin gives the colours in ascending order from Adam to Mohammad but does not name the prophets of the intermediate centres on this page [p 413].
'Alaoddawleh Semnani (659/1261 to 736/1336) was a page at the Mongol court until a crisis at twenty-four [p 412]. He finished Daya Razi's commentary on the Qur'an, "a masterpiece of radical interiority". As Schiller would speak of "the stars of your destiny" within you, Semnani speaks of "the prophets of your being": each prophet stands for a subtle centre, and prophetology must be read at those levels of "inner history" [p 413]. Sayyed 'Ali Hamadani (714/1314 to 786/1385) spread Shi'ite Sufism in Kashmir. His three forms of being are absolute Light, absolute Darkness, and the visible day between them, "the visible form of God" [p 414 to 415].
Najm Kobra's attention to coloured photisms makes Central Asian Sufism a laboratory for a physiology of light. The colours are not outer sense-data; they index the mystic's degree. Later Kobrawi masters, including Semnani, turn that intuition into a full map of subtle centres. Corbin's point is methodological: visionary colour is evidence for metaphysics, not a private ornament [p 409 to 413].
Sayyed 'Ali Hamadani sketches a triad of manifestation: absolute Light (too intense to see), absolute Darkness (being at its antipole), and the mixed Day in which light and dark dilute into the visible form of God. Corbin flags the opening as a promise still waiting on the edition of Hamadani's works [p 414 to 415].
Rumi, Shabestari, Gili and After
Jalaloddin Rumi was born in Balkh on 30 September 1207 (604) and died in Konya on 17 December 1273 (672) [p 415 to 416]. Stories of meeting 'Attar and Ibn 'Arabi may be doubtful as history, but they express a real spiritual lineage [p 416]. Shams of Tabriz disappeared and became his inner guide, the shaykh al-ghayb, which is to Sufis what the hidden Imam is to Shi'ites [p 417]. The Mathnawi, "the Persian Qur'an", opens with the lament of the reed [p 418]. Its attacks on philosophers target dialecticians without a sense of the suprasensible, without imaginative vision, "technocrats" as we would say. Sohravardi had made almost the same charges. "There can be an agnostic philosophy; there cannot be an agnostic metaphysics", and Sabzavari later wrote an Ishraqi commentary on the Mathnawi [p 418 to 419].
Mahmud Shabestari (687/1288 to 720/1320) wrote the Rose Garden of Mystery, under a thousand couplets that answer seventeen questions. Its commentators include Imamis and Ismailis. Lahiji's commentary is a summa of Sufi metaphysics [p 419 to 421]. Lahiji always wore black, and his "black light", which posits Light and Darkness together from the start, goes beyond the old quarrel over whether essence or existence comes first [p 421 to 422]. 'Abdol-Karim Gili (d. about 805/1403) wrote The Perfect Man, a mirror of divine powers in which the Absolute becomes conscious of itself: "we ourselves are the Attributes by which we describe God". The Imams had said, "We are the Names" [p 422 to 423]. His work is "a narrative metaphysics" of the Stranger returning to the city of Khezr [p 424].
Ni'matollah Wali (730/1329 to 834/1431), "king of the dervishes", founded the order to which most Iranian Shi'ite tariqas belong [p 424 to 425]. Fazlollah Astarabadi's Horufis (executed 804/1401) put the Word at the top of being, and their teaching passed to the Bektashis [p 426 to 427]. Jami (817/1414 to 898/1492) versified the Hermetic Salaman and Absal [p 427 to 428]. Kashefi (d. 910/1504) traced fotowwat from Seth, "the first Sufi", and from Abraham, who set chivalry apart from Sufism. Its cycle runs from Abraham as initiator, to the first Imam as pole, to the twelfth Imam as seal, an esoteric ecumenism of all three Abrahamic branches [p 428 to 429]. Nabulusi (d. 1143/1731) explained wahdat al-wojud as one existence belonging to the Necessary of itself and to creatures through it [p 430].
By the end of the Safavid period Iranian Sufism had decayed, and Molla Sadra wrote against ignorant libertines [p 431 to 432]. The Ni'matollahi revival came from India with Ma'sum 'Ali-Shah in about 1776 to 1779. Nur 'Ali-Shah, a fascinating figure who died at about forty in 1212/1797, began the Paradise of Union, which his successors continued [p 432 to 433]. The line runs through Safi 'Ali-Shah and Gonabad to Dr Javad Nurbakhsh, whose Tehran khanqah had grown into a Sufi university [p 434 to 435]. The Zahabis, the other branch of the Kobrawiya, trace their descent to the eighth Imam [p 435 to 436].
Chapter 10. Shi'ite Thought from Tusi to the Present
The last chapter follows the Shi'ite line from Nasiroddin Tusi to Corbin's own Iranian colleagues. One feature runs through it: in Shi'ism a single thinker usually combines the skills of the theologian (motakallim), the philosopher and the mystical theosopher, and the first reason for this, Corbin says, lies in the teaching of the Imams themselves [p 437 to 499].
Nasiroddin Tusi and Shi'ite Kalam
Khwajeh Nasir was born at Tus on 18 February 1201 (597) and died in Baghdad on 26 January 1274 (672). He wrote some eighty works [p 437]. As a young man he served the Ismaili princes and wrote Ismaili treatises at Alamut. He came through the Mongol conquest of 654/1256 skilfully, became Hulagu's adviser, protected the Twelvers during the sack of Baghdad, and persuaded the khan to build the observatory at Maragheh [p 437 to 438]. His commentary on Avicenna's Isharat, which defends Avicenna against Fakhr Razi, was judged four centuries later to be the best work of Avicennism. "If Iranian Avicennism, unlike the Latin Avicennism that died too soon, has lasted to our day, Nasir Tusi was its first artisan" [p 438]. His Tajrid and Qawa'id set Shi'ite doctrine in order and attracted some seventy commentaries. His work culminates in a short treatise of Shi'ite Sufism, the Awsaf al-ashraf [p 438].
Around him stood Maytham Bahrani (d. 678/1279), who commented on the Nahj al-balagha in the manner of the "theomonist gnostics" [p 439], and 'Allameh Helli (648/1250 to 726/1326). Helli's answers at Oljaytu's debates helped make Shi'ism the official religion of Persia. Ibn Taymiya attacked one of his treatises. He questioned the rule "from the One only one" and anticipated Molla Sadra's substantial motion. His example made philosophy "at home" in Shi'ism and protected it from the doctors of the exoteric Law [p 440 to 441]. His line leads to the three "martyrs": the First Martyr, executed at Damascus in 786/1384; the Second, at Istanbul in 966/1558; and the Third, Nurollah Shoshtari, executed under Jahangir in 1019/1610 for his reply to a Sunni polemic [p 441 to 442]. Afzaloddin Kashani, a Persian-only philosopher-poet, translated a Hermetic treatise. Haydar Amoli counted him among those who came back to "the way of the men of God" [p 443 to 444].
Ismailis, Ishraqis and Alchemy
After 487/1094 the Musta'lians, who became the Bohras, kept the Fatimid manuscripts. The Nizaris of Alamut, now the Khojas under the Aga Khan, survived "under the mantle of Sufism" [p 444 to 445]. «Resurrectio non est factum historicum, sed mysterium liturgicum» (editor's translation: "The Resurrection is not a historical fact but a liturgical mystery") [p 445]. The philosopher's tragedy: the liberal Khojas would publish but have no manuscripts, while the Bohras have the manuscripts and keep them secret. Only a few dozen of the roughly 770 titles Ivanow listed are available [p 445]. Ismailism, once at the forefront of metaphysical daring, has fallen silent. Corbin notes that young Ismailis seem to want to change this [p 448].
The Ishraqi current, "the Platonists of Persia", runs from Shahrazuri, who saw himself as the "Keeper of the Book", through Ibn Kammuna and Qotboddin Shirazi (634/1237 to 710/1311) to Dawwani, Wadud Tabrizi and a Persian version made in India in 1600 [p 448 to 451]. In Akbar's India, the circle of the Zoroastrian high priest Azar Kayvan produced an Ishraqi Zoroastrian literature, the Dasatir among it. It disappoints anyone looking for early Zoroastrianism but is "moving" as a reply to Sohravardi's project [p 451 to 452]. Aydamor Jaldaki (d. between 750/1349 and 762/1360) bound alchemy to Twelver prophetic theosophy, as Jabir had bound it to Ismaili gnosis.
Integrating Ibn 'Arabi
Shi'ite thinkers found their own heritage in Ibn 'Arabi without accepting all of it [p 455]. The Torkeh family of Isfahan wrote on absolute being and translated Shahrastani, a work that cost the translator his life in 850/1447 [p 455 to 456]. Rajab Borsi's Orients of Lights gathered the gnostic sermons of the Imams [p 456 to 457]. The decisive figure is Haydar Amoli (born 720/1320), who joined Shi'ism and Sufi metaphysics as Sohravardi had joined ancient Persia and Islamic philosophy [p 457].
At Shiraz, Sadroddin Dashtaki (828/1424 to 903/1497) and his son Ghiyathoddin Mansur held debates with Dawwani. Ghiyathoddin's commentary on Sohravardi's Temples of Light foreshadows Molla Sadra [p 459 to 460]. Dehdar practised jafr and wrote that "the metaphysical reality of man is the metaphysical reality of Mohammad" [p 461].
The School of Isfahan
Under Shah 'Abbas I, Isfahan became the centre of Iranian spiritual culture [p 462]. With Shi'ism out of hiding, huge works drew on the Imams' hadith, around the themes of time, event, the intermediate world, active Imagination and substantial motion. It forms a structure "closer to the great philosophical systems of the West at the start of the nineteenth century than to anything Ibn Khaldun proposed" [p 462]. The usual labels of Peripatetic and Platonist do not fit well. Mir Damad (d. 1040/1631), the master of generations and classed as a Peripatetic, left ecstatic confessions and chose the pen name Ishraq [p 463]. To escape the choice between a world from eternity and a world begun in time, he proposed "eternal coming-to-be" (hoduth dahri), an ever-new event [p 463 to 464]. His pupils included Sayyed Ahmad 'Alawi, Ashkevari, who compared the twelfth Imam with the Zoroastrian Saoshyant, and Molla Shamsa Gilani, who remained faithful to the metaphysics of essence [p 464 to 465]. Mir Fendereski (d. 1050/1640) took part in translating Sanskrit texts into Persian and wrote a classification of human activities that culminates in "prophetic philosophy" [p 466].
His heirs included Mohsen Fayz (d. 1091/1680), who wrote over 120 works and rewrote Ghazali's Ihya' for Shi'ites; 'Abdorrazzaq Lahiji, an inwardly divided man; and Tonkaboni [p 470 to 472]. Against Sadra, Rajab 'Ali Tabrizi (d. 1080/1669) held that "being" is purely equivocal between the Necessary and creatures. Only negative theology applies, and theomonism is excluded. Without knowing it, he met Ismaili gnosis and anticipated the Shaykhis [p 472 to 473]. His pupil Qazi Sa'id Qommi (1043/1633 to 1103/1691) read the cube of the Ka'ba as the temple of the twelve Imams and the twelve Veils of light as twelve worlds. He gave each being its own quantum of time, dense in the sensible world, subtle in the intermediate world, supra-subtle among the Intelligences, so that a spiritual individual can hold past and future in its present [p 473 to 475].
| Period | Centre | Representative figures in the book |
|---|---|---|
| 13th to 14th c. | Maragheh, Hilla | Nasir Tusi, Maytham Bahrani, 'Allameh Helli |
| 14th to 15th c. | Iraq, Ahsa, Isfahan | Haydar Amoli, Ibn Abi Jomhur, the Torkeh family |
| 15th to 16th c. | Shiraz | Dawwani, Sadroddin Dashtaki, Ghiyathoddin Mansur |
| 17th c. | Isfahan | Mir Damad, Fendereski, Molla Sadra, Rajab 'Ali Tabrizi, Qazi Sa'id Qommi |
| 18th c. | Isfahan after 1722 | Sadiq Ardestani, Khwaju'i, Bidabadi, Molla 'Ali Nuri |
| 19th to 20th c. | Tehran, Kerman, Sabzavar, Mashhad | Zonuzi, the Shaykhis, Ja'far Kashfi, Hadi Sabzavari, Ashtiyani |
Table 15. Centres of Shi'ite philosophy in Corbin's account [p 437 to 496].
Mir Damad, "the Third Teacher" after Aristotle and al-Farabi in the school's own honorific, made Isfahan a capital of metaphysical daring under the Safavids. Corbin reads his iqra' of eternal creation and his angelology as the hinge between Avicenna, Ishraq and the later Sadrian turn. Around him gathered thinkers who refused to let falsafa, kalam and 'irfan stay in separate rooms [p 456 to 462].
After Isfahan
The Afghan siege of Isfahan ended on 21 October 1722 (1135) "after cruelties without name". The centre moved to Tehran under the Qajars, while Molla Sadra's influence grew [p 476]. Corbin groups four families. First, those close to the catastrophe: Ardestani, who argued for the immateriality of imagination; Nayrizi, who held that "the logic of the gnostics is in truth the logic of metaphysics"; and Khwaju'i, who wrote against "imaginary time". Second, Bidabadi and his pupils. Third, Molla 'Ali Nuri. Fourth, the school of Tehran, founded when 'Abdollah Zonuzi was sent to the Madrasa Khan Marvi. Its line runs on to 'Allameh Tabataba'i at Qom [p 476 to 481].
Shaykh Ahmad Ahsa'i (1166/1753 to 1241/1826) never meant to found a school. He claimed only to be faithful to the Imams, who were his only masters through visionary meetings [p 481 to 482]. His successors moved the centre to Kerman, which holds about a thousand titles [p 482 to 483]. The Shaykhi position lies between the critical Osulis and the "fundamentalist" Akhbaris, closer to the latter, who judge a hadith by its content [p 483 to 484]. Being is set "in the imperative". Hylomorphism is reversed: matter is light, the father; form is mercy, the mother, and the "imaginal form" individuates [p 484 to 485]. The body of resurrection is a double body of flesh and a double subtle body, which correspond to Proclus' double vehicle and are described through the phases of alchemy [p 485]. The "Fourth Pillar" teaches that the esoteric hierarchy is necessarily hidden while the Imam is hidden: anyone who publicly claims investiture from him is by that very claim an impostor. Corbin adds that the claim that Shaykh Ahmad was "excommunicated" is false and imports a Roman concept [p 485 to 487]. Ja'far Kashfi (d. 1267/1850) sets out the Intelligence turning toward creatures (prophecy, letter) and back to its Principle (walaya, ta'wil). The Imam's work at the end parallels that of the Zoroastrian Saoshyant [p 487 to 489].
Hadi Sabzavari (1212/1797 to 1295/1878 or 1289) was to Naser al-Din Shah's reign what Molla Sadra had been to Shah 'Abbas's: the faithful interpreter who made Sadra "the master of thought" for Iranian philosophers [p 489 to 490]. His Sharh-e Manzumeh is still the basic textbook, and he commented on Rumi's Mathnawi as an Ishraqi metaphysician, not as a rationaliser [p 491 to 492]. One of his pupils, Kazem Khorasani, held that no one who lacks philosophy can understand the Imams' traditions [p 494]. Corbin ends with Mashhad and with Jalaloddin Ashtiyani, "a Molla Sadra redivivus", with whom he had begun an anthology of Iranian philosophers in five volumes: "not a balance sheet but a starting point" [p 494 to 496].
Sabzavari's Sharh-e Manzumeh became the basic textbook of the Qajar period because it gave Sadra's metaphysics a teachable spine without flattening it into madrasa Kalam. Corbin underlines the freedom of expression under Naser al-Din Shah compared with Safavid caution: the same theosophy could now be stated more openly. Pupils such as Kazem Khorasani held that the Imams' traditions remain opaque without philosophy, reversing the old charge that philosophy threatens the Law [p 489 to 494].
Perspective
This family of thinkers calls for no conclusion, because traditional philosophy, especially in its Shi'ite form, is not closed [p 497]. The dangers come from both sides. In the East there are hasty reformist syntheses that have absorbed neither the tradition nor the West. Among intellectuals, Westernisation and technology have pulled up spiritual roots. The traditional masters, meanwhile, know little of the West's spiritual traditions [p 497 to 498]. The real question is whether philosophy is just the expression of the social state of an age, to be scattered by ideologies, or whether it keeps a metaphysics shaped by its own object, the spiritual worlds [p 498].
Synthesis
What to keep from Corbin's history: the claims that reorganise the field, the frameworks he uses again and again, where to read him with care, the people who matter and how his ideas carry over to present-day work.
Key Takeaways
- Islamic philosophy is not Greek thought in Arabic dress. Its living source is meditation on a revealed Book, and so it is a "prophetic philosophy".
- The key act is ta'wil, leading the letter back to its origin. Every text and every being has an outer and an inner side, and understanding means passing from one to the other.
- Shi'ism is where this hermeneutic took form. The Imam is the guide to the hidden sense, and the cycle of walaya follows the closed cycle of prophecy.
- Ismaili gnosis was the most daring early metaphysics, with its God beyond being, its drama of the Third Angel and its liturgical idea of resurrection.
- Kalam is not the whole of Islamic thought. Corbin treats the theologians' dialectic as the exoteric level that philosophy and theosophy go beyond.
- The sciences (alchemy, Jabir's "science of the Balance", medicine) were spiritual disciplines as well as technical ones. Alchemy, in the book, is "the sister of prophecy", not an early form of chemistry.
- The Hellenizers (Kindi, Farabi, Avicenna) built the Neoplatonic framework of Intelligences. Avicenna's "Oriental" side points beyond Peripatetic philosophy.
- Ghazali did not end philosophy. He ended one kind of it in one part of the Islamic world.
- Sufism adds lived experience to doctrine: love, the visionary journey and the spiritual chivalry (fotowwat) that links Shi'ism and Sufism.
- Sohravardi revived the theosophy of ancient Persia as a philosophy of Light, and established the reality of the imaginal world.
- Averroes' death in 1198 is not an endpoint. In the same years Sohravardi died and Ibn 'Arabi was already at work, and the East took a different road from the Latin West.
- Ibn 'Arabi's theophanic metaphysics was taken up by Shi'ite thinkers. Haydar Amoli made it his own while rejecting Jesus as the seal of universal walaya.
- Sunni thought after Averroes includes logic, Kalam and polemic (Fakhr Razi, Ibn Taymiya) as well as Ibn Khaldun, whom Corbin does not treat as the lone peak.
- Sufi metaphysics produced psychologies of light. Najm Kobra and Semnani's coloured photisms map the subtle centres of the person.
- Nasir Tusi kept Avicennism alive in Iran, where it never died out as it did in the Latin world.
- The school of Isfahan forms a system closer to early nineteenth-century Western metaphysics than to Ibn Khaldun.
- Molla Sadra's revolution puts existence before essence. Being comes in degrees of intensity, and substantial motion makes him the philosopher of metamorphoses.
- Active Imagination is spiritual and survives the body, so each soul creates its own paradise or hell.
- Time has degrees too: Mir Damad's "eternal coming-to-be" and Qazi Sa'id's personal quantum of time.
- Dissent is part of the tradition. Rajab 'Ali Tabrizi argued that being is equivocal, against Sadra.
- Shi'ite historiosophy is Paracletic. The awaited Imam is linked to John's Paraclete and the Zoroastrian Saoshyant, and Corbin compares this with Joachim of Fiore.
- The tradition is not closed. Sabzavari, the schools of Tehran and Mashhad and Ashtiyani carry it into the twentieth century.
- Corbin's diagnosis for the present: hasty reformist syntheses and uprooted Westernised elites on one side, and traditional masters cut off from the West on the other.
- His remedy: reciprocity among the three Abrahamic branches, and the reminder that "a tradition lives only as a perpetual rebirth".
Frameworks at a Glance
| Framework | Where | Use |
|---|---|---|
| Zahir / batin (letter and hidden sense) | Ch 1-3 | Read any text or being on two levels |
| Ta'wil (leading back to the origin) | Ch 1-3, 10 | Interpretation as ascent, not allegory |
| Prophecy and walaya cycles | Ch 2, 10 | Periodise sacred history; ground the Imam's role |
| Ismaili cosmic drama (Third Angel) | Ch 3 | Time as the delay of a fallen Angel's return |
| Science of the Balance | Ch 4 | Alchemy as matching outer and inner measures |
| Hierarchy of Intelligences | Ch 5 | Emanation and the Active Intelligence as Angel |
| Light and darkness (Ishraq) | Ch 6 | Being as degrees of light; knowledge by presence |
| Three worlds (sense, imaginal, intellect) | Ch 6, 9, 10 | Locate visions and subtle bodies as real |
| Subtle centres and colours | Ch 9 | Map spiritual growth inside the person |
| Primacy of existence, substantial motion | Ch 10 | Explain change and becoming after death |
| Degrees of time | Ch 10 | Dense, subtle and supra-subtle time |
| Hidden hierarchy (Fourth Pillar) | Ch 10 | Authority without public claim |
Table 16. Recurring frameworks in the book and what each is for.
A closer look
- A partisan map. Corbin openly gives Shi'ism and Iran the central role. Sunni thought after Averroes gets a short chapter, and North African and Ottoman philosophy are barely mentioned. Read him as a strong thesis, not a neutral survey.
- Esotericism as the measure. The book judges thinkers by how far they open onto the hidden sense. Rationalist strands such as Razi the physician, the Mu'tazilites and Averroes come out as limits rather than achievements in their own right.
- Comparisons with the West. Parallels with Joachim of Fiore, Schelling, the Cambridge Platonists and Oetinger illuminate, but they can make Islamic thinkers look like anticipations of Western ones.
- State of the sources. Corbin keeps stressing that many works are unedited or locked away (the Bohra manuscripts). Many of his judgements were provisional when he wrote them.
- Historical setting. The closing praise of Pahlavi universities and his "Perspective" belong to Iran before 1979. Readers today must set them against later events the book could not see.
- These are noted in the chapters where they occur.
Who's Who
| Figure | Role in the book |
|---|---|
| Ja'far al-Sadiq (d. 148/765) | Sixth Imam; source of Shi'ite esoteric teaching |
| Kindi (b. c. 185/796) | "Philosopher of the Arabs"; first Hellenizer |
| Hallaj (244/857 to 309/922) | Martyr of mystical love and union |
| Razi (b. c. 250/864) | Physician and radical philosopher |
| Ash'ari (b. 260/873) | Founder of Sunni Kalam orthodoxy |
| Farabi (b. 259/872) | "Second Master"; prophet and philosopher-ruler |
| Ibn Masarra (b. 269/883) | Founder of Andalusian esoteric philosophy |
| Avicenna (b. 370/980) | System of Intelligences; the "Oriental" philosophy |
| Ghazali (b. 450/1059) | Critic of the philosophers and Sufi |
| Sohravardi (549/1155 to 587/1191) | Shaykh al-Ishraq; philosophy of Light |
| Ibn 'Arabi (b. 560/1165) | Doctor maximus of theophanic metaphysics |
| Averroes (d. 595/1198) | The supposed endpoint Corbin rejects |
| Rumi (1207 to 1273) | Poet of the Mathnawi; mystical love |
| Nasir Tusi (1201 to 1274) | Restorer of Avicennism; Shi'ite Kalam |
| 'Allameh Helli (648/1250 to 726/1326) | Made philosophy "at home" in Shi'ism |
| Semnani (659/1261 to 736/1336) | Subtle centres and coloured lights |
| Haydar Amoli (b. 720/1320) | Joined Shi'ism and Ibn 'Arabi; critic of his Jesus doctrine |
| Ibn Khaldun (732/1332 to 808/1406) | Not, for Corbin, the lone summit |
| Mir Damad (d. 1040/1631) | Master of Isfahan; eternal coming-to-be |
| Molla Sadra (979/1571 to 1050/1640) | Primacy of existence; substantial motion |
| Rajab 'Ali Tabrizi (d. 1080/1669) | Equivocity of being; anti-Sadrian |
| Qazi Sa'id Qommi (1043/1633 to 1103/1691) | Personal time; Ka'ba as Imamate |
| Shaykh Ahmad Ahsa'i (1166/1753 to 1241/1826) | Source of the Shaykhi school |
| Hadi Sabzavari (1212/1797 to 1295/1878) | "Sage of Sabzavar"; interpreter of Sadra |
| Jalaloddin Ashtiyani | "Molla Sadra redivivus"; Corbin's partner on the anthology |
Table 17. Key figures, with dates only as the book prints them.
Glossary of Key Terms
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Akhbari / Osuli | Shi'ite schools: the Akhbaris accept the corpus of traditions and judge each by its content; the Osulis apply outside critical criteria |
| 'alam al-mithal | The imaginal world, between the intellect and the senses; the place of visions and subtle bodies |
| 'aql | Intelligence; the first hypostasis and, for Kashfi, the Muhammadan Spirit |
| batin / zahir | The hidden, inner sense and the outer, literal sense |
| barzakh | Intermediate world or isthmus; another name for the imaginal world |
| da'i / da'wa | Ismaili missionary and the summons or organisation he serves |
| fotowwat | Spiritual chivalry linking Shi'ism, Sufism and alchemy |
| ghaybat | Occultation of the twelfth Imam, which conceals the whole esoteric hierarchy |
| hadith / akhbar | Traditions of the Prophet and the Imams |
| hikmat | Wisdom; theosophy; philosophy as a spiritual discipline |
| hoduth dahri | Mir Damad's "eternal coming-to-be", between the eternal and the temporal |
| Imam | In Shi'ism, the guide to the hidden sense and the bearer of walaya |
| 'irfan | Mystical gnosis |
| Ishraq | "Rising light"; Sohravardi's Oriental theosophy |
| jafr | Science of letters and numbers (arithmosophy) |
| jasad / jism | Shaykhi terms for the double body of flesh and the double subtle body |
| Kalam / motakallim | Dialectical theology and its practitioner; the exoteric level |
| khirqa | The Sufi mantle, a sign of initiation; also cover for Ismaili survival |
| Malakut | The spiritual world beyond the physical |
| Mashsha'un | "Peripatetics"; Corbin notes the label rarely fits pure cases |
| mizan | Balance; Jabir's and Jaldaki's science of the Balance in alchemy |
| nobowwat / risalat | Prophetic state and prophetic mission |
| Paraclete | The Spirit promised in John's Gospel, identified with the hidden Imam |
| Qa'im | The Imam of the Resurrection |
| shahid | Martyr, witness; title of the three Shi'ite martyrs |
| Shaykhism | School of Shaykh Ahmad Ahsa'i, centred at Kerman |
| tanzih | Negative theology: knowing God by denial of attributes |
| tawhid | Divine unity; exoteric (one God) or esoteric (only God is) |
| ta'wil | Spiritual hermeneutic: leading a thing back to its origin |
| theomonism | Corbin's term for the transcendent unity of being (wahdat al-wojud) |
| walaya | Divine friendship; the esoteric side of prophecy, proper to the Imams |
| wojud / mahiya | Existence and quiddity (essence); Sadra gives existence primacy |
| wojud dhihni | Mental existence |
Table 18.
About this book
History of Islamic Philosophy by Henry Corbin, 1964. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
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