Insight Editions · No. 132
In Search of the Lost Heart
Explorations in Islamic Thought
William C. Chittick · Edited by Mohammed Rustom, Atif Khalil, and Kazuyo Murata
William C. Chittick examines Islamic thought through essays on Sufism, Ibn al-ʿArabī, philosophy, spiritual practice, and contemporary questions of war, ecology, and education.
A study guide to In Search of the Lost Heart by William C. Chittick, edited by Mohammed Rustom, Atif Khalil, and Kazuyo Murata. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
Overview
Chittick, edited by Mohammed Rustom, Atif Khalil and Kazuyo Murata, into a study guide. The book gathers twenty-six essays written between 1975 and 2011, framed by the editors' introduction.
Argument Map
From the oneness of God through practice, vision and reason to the human image, and from there to the questions of the present.
What the book is
Chittick spent a career reading Arabic and Persian texts that most modern accounts of Islam leave out: Sufi poetry, the school of Ibn al-'Arabi, and the philosophers who joined reason to self-knowledge. These essays come from journals, encyclopedias and conference volumes, and they range from narrow manuscript studies (a Chishti handbook from Bijapur) to broad statements on war, ecology and education. What holds them together is a single conviction stated in the title essay: learning is the search for the lost heart, the recovery of a human nature made in the divine form, and every branch of the tradition (law, theology, Sufism, philosophy) is judged by how well it serves that search.
Three ideas return in nearly every essay:
- Tawhid has two faces. God is incomparable and similar, far and near; the cosmos is God's signs. Majesty and wrath separate; beauty and mercy gather, and mercy takes precedence.
- The circle of Origin and Return. Everything descends from the One and returns to it. Humans alone can make the return voluntarily, by knowledge and practice.
- Realization over imitation. Knowledge worth having transforms the knower. Facts without understanding of who we are amount to "systematic ignorance".
| Part | Chapters | Focus | Source words | Covered in |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Editors' Introduction | Front | The author and the aim of the volume | about 1,600 | Introduction |
| I. Sufism and the Islamic Tradition | 1-7 | Three dimensions, prayer, tears, pluralism, Shams, love | about 29,000 | Two parts |
| II. Ibn al-'Arabi and His Influence | 8-16 | Terms, influence, knowledge, Qunawi, Farghani, Jami, Indian Sufism | about 59,000 | Three parts |
| III. Islamic Philosophy | 17-22 | Reason, soul, perception, eschatology, life, the goal of wisdom | about 32,000 | Two parts |
| IV. Contemporary Issues | 23-26 | War and peace, environment, religions, education | about 23,000 | One part |
Chapter Map
| Chapter | Core claim |
|---|---|
| 1. Islam in three dimensions | Islam, iman, ihsan: works, faith and perfection are layers of one religion |
| 2. Bodily gestures of the salat | The prayer's movements map ascent, annihilation and return |
| 3. Weeping | Tears are read as a sign of the soul's state, from regret to longing |
| 4. A Shadhili presence in Shi'ism | A Sunni Sufi prayer passed into Shi'ite devotion |
| 5. Pluralistic vision of Persian poetry | Unity in the kernel, difference in the husk |
| 6. The real Shams-i Tabrizi | Rumi's teacher insisted on following the Prophet |
| 7. The Koran as the lover's mirror | We see in scripture what we love |
| 8. The term wahdat al-wujud | "Oneness of Being" became a label largely through critics |
| 9. Ibn al-'Arabi and Rumi | Parallels do not prove influence |
| 10. Benefit of knowledge | Useful knowledge serves the soul's final happiness |
| 11. Qunawi and the circle of ascent | Descent and return form one circle; trusts are given back |
| 12. Farghani on oneness and manyness | Love unites, knowledge discerns; both are needed |
| 13. Jami on the Perfect Man | Only through man does God see unity in multiplicity |
| 14. Khwaja Khurd | Radical oneness held together with full practice |
| 15. Soul and spirit debate | The quarrel of faculties ends in "all of this had been I" |
| 16. A Chishti handbook | Correlated vocabularies guide practice |
| 17. Rumi and reason | Partial intellect is a wooden leg; universal intellect is not |
| 18. Baba Afdal | The soul is potential finding; intellect is the self found |
| 19. Mulla Sadra on perception | Perception is presence; the soul becomes what it knows |
| 20. Eschatology | After death we meet our own attributes; mercy precedes wrath |
| 21. The circle of life | All is alive; death intensifies awareness |
| 22. The goal of philosophy | What goes up must have come down; know yourself |
| 23. War and peace | No peace but God; the greater struggle is inward |
| 24. Harmony with the cosmos | God is our environment; servant before vicegerent |
| 25. Stray camels in China | Mercy's precedence grounds inclusivism |
| 26. In search of the lost heart | Learning is recovering human nature, as Chinese Muslims saw |
How the essays connect
The book can be read in any order, but the editors' arrangement builds a sequence. Part I shows the tradition as lived: the three dimensions of religion, the prayer, tears, poetry and Shams. Part II gives its fullest theoretical form in the school of Ibn al-'Arabi and its spread to India. Part III shows that the philosophers, using different words, reached the same picture: being is finding, and the soul's task is to know itself. Part IV turns this picture on modern questions and concludes that each of them (violence, ecological ruin, religious conflict, education without meaning) is at root the problem of the lost heart.
The Editors' Introduction: Who Chittick Is and Why These Essays
The three editors, Mohammed Rustom, Atif Khalil and Kazuyo Murata, open with a short portrait of the author and a statement of purpose: to gather scattered articles (1975 to 2011) into a single book that explores "the underlying worldview of Islam".
A scholar formed in Tehran
William C. Chittick was born in Milford, Connecticut, in 1943. A year at the American University of Beirut in 1964 and 1965 brought him to Sufism, and a public lecture by Seyyed Hossein Nasr turned curiosity into vocation. He went to Tehran in 1966 and took a doctorate in Persian language and literature under Nasr in 1974. He taught at Aryamehr Technical University, joined the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy in 1978, and left with his wife Sachiko Murata shortly before the 1979 revolution. Since 1983 both have taught at Stony Brook.
In Tehran he studied with or worked beside Jalal al-Din Ashtiyani, Henry Corbin, Toshihiko Izutsu, Furuzanfar, Huma'i, Mehdi Mohaghegh and 'Allama Tabataba'i. The editors credit that contact for his command of classical Arabic and Persian and of philosophical, theological and mystical texts, and they praise "a rare ability to explain some of the most difficult ideas in a remarkably lucid manner". His books have appeared in some fourteen languages; Me and Rumi won Iran's World Prize for the Book of the Year in 2005.
| Book | Year | Contribution named by the editors |
|---|---|---|
| The Sufi Doctrine of Rumi | 1974; 2005 | Corrective to misreadings of Rumi |
| The Sufi Path of Love | 1983 | Best exposition of Rumi's worldview |
| The Sufi Path of Knowledge | 1989 | Ibn al-'Arabi's metaphysics and practice |
| The Self-Disclosure of God | 1998 | Ibn al-'Arabi's cosmology |
| The Heart of Islamic Philosophy | 2001 | Baba Afdal and philosophy in Persian |
| The Sage Learning of Liu Zhi (with Murata and Tu Weiming) | 2009 | Neo-Confucian thought meets Sufism |
What the Tehran years fixed in his method
The editors stress that Chittick's long stay under Nasr and beside Ashtiyani, Corbin, Izutsu, Furuzanfar, Huma'i, Mohaghegh and Tabataba'i was not a tour of names. It fixed a habit of reading: Arabic and Persian texts held together, philosophy and Sufism treated as one conversation, and difficult ideas restated without stripping their technical spine. The festschrift held for him in Iran marks that the Persian-speaking scholarly world treats him as an insider to its own tradition, not only as a Western expositor.
His later books map the same habit across figures. The Heart of Islamic Philosophy shows how Baba Afdal shaped Persian to carry practical philosophy to readers without scholastic Arabic. The Sufi Path of Love and The Sufi Doctrine of Rumi correct popular misreadings of Rumi's religion. The Sufi Path of Knowledge and The Self-Disclosure of God do for Ibn al-'Arabi what those books do for Rumi. The China book with Murata and Tu Weiming extends the same method into Neo-Confucian vocabulary. The essays gathered here are the shorter form of that lifelong practice.
How the book is built
Much of Chittick's most useful work sat in journals, festschrifts and encyclopedias. The editors chose pieces not already in his books or online, edited them to flow as one book, and sorted them into four parts:
- Sufism and the Islamic Tradition: theory and practice, law, theology, scripture and pluralism.
- Ibn al-'Arabi and His Influence: the reach of his school, ending with three studies of seventeenth-century Indian followers.
- Islamic Philosophy: ontology, psychology, cosmology and eschatology, showing where philosophy and theoretical Sufism agree.
- Reflections on Contemporary Issues: ecology, exclusivism and peace, "the least-known aspect" of his writing.
Why scattered essays needed one spine
Much of Chittick's sharpest writing sat in journals, festschrifts and encyclopedias where few general readers would find it. The editors' job was selection and sequencing, not rewriting his voice. Pieces already absorbed into his major books or freely online were left out so this volume would add, not repeat. The four-part spine (practice and tradition; Ibn al-'Arabi's school; philosophy; contemporary issues) lets a reader who knows only one of those domains see how Chittick's questions recur: what the heart knows, how mercy precedes wrath, and what it means to realize rather than imitate.
Why the introduction matters
The editors' short portrait does more than introduce an author. It explains why these essays, written over almost four decades for very different audiences, can be read as one book. Chittick's training joined philology with a living teaching tradition, and his essays move constantly between the two: a manuscript problem in one chapter, a question about the meaning of human life in the next. Readers who come for the scholarship will find that the scholarship always points toward a question about the reader; readers who come for the questions will find them anchored in texts. Keeping both in view is the best way to approach what follows.
Part I. Sufism and the Islamic Tradition (1): Dimensions, Gestures, Tears
The first three essays build a frame for everything that follows. Islam has three dimensions, works, faith and perfection; the ritual prayer embodies all three in the body; and weeping shows how the soul feels its distance from God and its hope of return.
1. Islam in three dimensions
Modern talk of "Islam" is shaped by journalists and ideologies. Chittick wants a definition faithful to premodern Muslim authors yet clear to a modern reader. He finds it in the Hadith of Gabriel, where the Prophet divides "the religion" into islam (submission), iman (faith) and ihsan (virtue), which he renders works, faith and perfection.
Submission in four senses
| Sense of islam | Scope | Koranic sign |
|---|---|---|
| Cosmic | Every creature is controlled by God | "To Him submits everything in the heavens and the earth" (3:83) |
| Prophetic | Free submission to any revealed message | Abraham, Joseph, Noah and Jesus' apostles are called Muslims |
| Historical | The religion revealed through Muhammad | "I have approved Islam for you as a religion" (5:3) |
| Practical | Outward works, as distinct from inner faith | "Say: 'We have submitted;' for faith has not yet entered your hearts" (49:14) |
In the fourth sense islam is the Five Pillars and the domain of jurisprudence. Ghazali sets its limit: the jurist "pays no attention to anything but the tongue. As for the heart, that is outside the jurist's authority." Even the Shahadah, as a pillar, is a work; how one understands it belongs elsewhere.
Faith (iman) comes from a root meaning to be secure and tranquil, so faith is a step toward certainty, not a guess. Its objects, God, angels, scriptures, messengers, the Last Day and the measuring out of good and evil, were later systematized as the three principles: tawhid, prophecy and the Return. Muslim scholars treated these "as objective realities to be found in the nature of things", not as optional beliefs. Three schools study them, distinguished by what knowledge they trust:
| School | Main source of knowledge | Attitude to reason |
|---|---|---|
| Philosophy | Reason ('aql) | Sufficient to understand things |
| Kalam | Revelation read rationally | Close to the philosophers in practice |
| Theoretical Sufism | Revelation plus unveiling (kashf), tasting, insight | Reason has clearly defined limits |
Perfection (ihsan) comes from a root for beauty and goodness. The Prophet defined it as worshipping God "as if you see Him, because if you do not see Him, He nonetheless sees you." Divergence grows as one moves inward: works can be seen, faith concerns the invisible, and perfection is the most disputed of all.
The Hadith of Gabriel as three nested dimensions.
Faith is knowledge plus commitment
The heart (qalb) is the seat of faith, intelligence and every good quality. Kalam definitions join knowing, voicing and acting: Ghazali defines faith as "recognizing the truth [of something] in the heart, voicing [that truth] with the tongue, and acting [on its basis] with the limbs." Hence faith includes works, but works do not imply faith.
The opposite, kufr, means "to cover over" what one knows; it pairs in the Koran with ingratitude. Following Wilfred Cantwell Smith, faith (tasdiq) is "the ability to trust, and to act in terms of, what one knows to be true." In Islam faith "stands above knowledge, not below it." The English habit of treating faith as opinion blinds modern readers to why philosophers, too, had "faith": they knew wujud to be real and tried to live by it.
Ihsan, ikhlas, taqwa
The Koran uses ihsan and muhsin more than seventy times, and God's own names are "the most beautiful" (al-asma' al-husna). From "There is no god but God" follow "There is no good but the divine good" and finally "There is nothing truly real but the Real." Perfection means assuming the character traits of God, actualizing the divine form in which Adam was made.
| Aspect of perfection | Difficulty | Who is called |
|---|---|---|
| To act as God would act | Easiest: exactly describable | Everyone (Shariah) |
| To know | Harder: depends on capacity | Seekers of knowledge |
| To be as God would be | Hardest: total transformation | Few; Sufism's main concern |
Ikhlas (sincerity) means freeing religion from admixture; it is the antonym of shirk and the inner side of tawhid. Sura 112 is called both the Sura of Tawhid and of Ikhlas. Taqwa, which Chittick renders "God-wariness", unites fear and self-protection. The God-wary are never criticized in the Koran, while Muslims and believers sometimes are, and "The noblest of you in God's eyes is the one among you who has the most taqwa" (49:13). Chittick lists eight translations of that verse and prefers his own because it keeps the orientation to God and avoids the sentimental tone of "piety".
Felicity, unveiling and priorities
Salvation is sa'ada, "felicity", against "wretchedness". Sufis warn that worshipping for paradise is a hidden shirk. The highest felicity is the encounter with and vision of God; the theologians put it after death, while Sufis say it can begin now, and that God discloses Himself according to each receptacle's preparedness. The "god of belief" never equals God in Himself, yet God-wariness can transmute faith into unveiling. Hence 'Ali's saying, "I would not worship a God whom I do not see."
Sufis put "first things first". The Prophet sought refuge "from a knowledge that has no benefit"; beneficial knowledge leads to nearness (qurb). Ghazali divides knowledge into the science of practice (mu'amala, works with God in view), required of all, and the science of unveiling, "a light that becomes manifest within the heart when the heart is cleansed". Qushayri's aphorism captures the gap: "The gnostic is above what he says, but the possessor of learning is below what he says."
Why did later Sufis, above all Ibn al-'Arabi, write so much more about faith's contents? Chittick cites Bushanji: "Today Sufism is a name without a reality, whereas before it was a reality without a name." As the lived reality faded, explanation had to grow.
How each science holds God
Chittick sharpens the contrast between the specialists by asking how each keeps God in view.
| Specialists | How God appears | Typical name for God |
|---|---|---|
| Jurists | Soon left behind in the details of the Shariah | The Lawgiver |
| Kalam theologians | An object of "cold analysis", kept at arm's length; largely an "It" | The incomparable God |
| Philosophers | Approached in an "objective" and "academic" register | Necessary Being, First Principle |
| Sufis | Ever-absent and ever-present, and so "eminently desirable and lovable" | The Koranic names of beauty |
This, he suggests, explains the "stylistic lightness" of Sufi writing and why most great poets of Islamic civilization came from the Sufi tradition. The Sufis also put first things first (al-ahamm fa'l-ahamm). The Prophet sought refuge "from a knowledge that has no benefit", and Ghazali defines beneficial knowledge as what "increases your fear of God, your ability to see your own faults, and your knowledge of how to serve your Lord". Sciences aimed elsewhere belong, in Marshall Hodgson's term, to "Islamdom" rather than Islam, though Chittick stresses that he speaks "in relatives, not absolutes".
Ghazali's distinction between works ('amal) and practice (mu'amala) makes the same point from another side. Practice is interaction: a work that keeps God in view. The jurist must rule a prayer valid "even if the person is negligent throughout", calculating his market accounts; the science of practice deepens works, and the science of unveiling deepens faith. Unveiling is suprarational, not irrational, and Qushayri's aphorism draws the line: "The gnostic is above what he says, but the possessor of learning is below what he says."
Why perfection is more contested than faith
Chittick notes that works produce specialists of law, faith produces theologians and philosophers, and perfection produces Sufis and also philosophers who investigate the same dimension. Debate thickens as one moves inward: more is at stake, and less can be settled by outward conformity alone. Most Muslim thinkers hold that people will be differentiated by how far they live up to perfection in works and faith; paradise and hell each have levels. The Hadith of Gabriel therefore is not a slogan but a map of scholarly labor and of human destiny.
The practical priority the chapter leaves is clear. Without works there is no form; without faith there is no meaning for the form; without the search for perfection the first two harden into custom or ideology. Premodern authors Chittick reads assumed that map. Modern talk about "Islam" that collapses the three into politics or identity loses the map before the argument begins.
2. The bodily gestures of the salat
Writers on the "mysteries of the acts of worship" explain the recited words far more than the movements, partly because the body assimilates the wisdom of the gestures. The Prophet called the prayer the "centerpole" of the religion. Chittick reads it through the microcosm: body (dark, dense, dispersed), spirit (God's breath, luminous, one), and between them the soul, an isthmus (barzakh) where light meets darkness.
The prayer has the same three levels. Its spirit is presence of the heart; its body is the gestures; its soul is the recited verses that bridge the two. "The salat is the mi'raj of the believer": a ladder for climbing and for coming back down.
| Position | Level of the person | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Standing | Spirit | Accepting the human charge; sharing the name "the Ever-Standing" |
| Bowing | Soul, the isthmus | Rejecting "I am better than He"; hearing, sight and bones "have humbled themselves before You" |
| Prostration | Body, clay | Returning to one's origin; annihilation (fana') in God's light |
| Sitting | Whole person | Return from the ascent; servanthood joined with messengerhood; subsistence |
Satan's motto, "I am better than he" (38:76), explains prostration: refusing it says "I am better than He." Ibn al-'Arabi notes that in prostration the servant seeks his origin, clay, and in standing the root of his qualities, spirit. The closing sitting, with blessings on Muhammad "Your servant and Your messenger", is the return from the mi'raj: "there subsists only the face of your Lord" (55:26-27).
- The body is not left behind: the Prophet's ascent was bodily, and the resurrection is bodily.
- The prayer encodes the whole spiritual path: ascent, annihilation, return.
- Words in prayer act as the soul linking attention to movement.
3. Weeping in Islam and the Sufi tradition
The Koran praises those who fall "on their faces weeping" at its recitation (17:107-109) and "eyes overflow with tears because of the truth that they recognize" (5:83).
Prophetic models
The Prophet wept praying "my community, my community", at his mother's grave, and at the death of his son Ibrahim: "The eye sheds tears and the heart grieves, and we only say what pleases our Lord." Shown a mother who would never throw her child into the fire, he bowed his head and wept. Abu Bakr "had no control over his eyes when he would recite the Koran", yet Maybudi also has him say, "I was like that until hearts became hardened", meaning firmness in knowledge. Chittick notes that, despite some Orientalists, there is no evidence for a group called "the weepers".
Laughter as the partner of tears
"It is He who makes to laugh and makes to weep" (53:43). On the mi'raj Adam laughs looking right and weeps looking left. "Were you to know what I know, you would laugh little and weep much." Yet the hadith ascribe laughter to the Prophet far more than weeping, and God Himself laughs: "We will lack no good from a Lord who laughs." On the Day of Resurrection He discloses Himself "laughing".
| Divine | Creaturely |
|---|---|
| The Living, never dies | Mixtures of life and death |
| He who Laughs, never weeps | Mixtures of laughter and tears |
| Light of the heavens and earth | Darknesses and light |
Classifications of tears
| Author | Scheme |
|---|---|
| Ibn 'Ata' | Recognition, joy, regret, fear, burning (separation from the Beloved) |
| Kharraz, in Sarraj | Eighteen kinds in three groups: from God, toward God, over God |
| Ruzbihan Baqli | Five of 1,001 stations: weeping, its drying up, from the Real for the Real, in laughter, in ecstasy |
| Ghazali | Let fear rule until death approaches, then hope, since "love is linked to hope" |
| Ibn al-'Arabi | Prophets weep from God-wariness, carrying lordship outwardly while servants inwardly |
Abu Yazid said, "I laughed for a time, I wept for a time, and now I neither laugh nor weep", which Ibn al-'Arabi reads as "the station of no station". Laughter in prayer, he rules, invalidates it only for the heedless; for one receiving God's self-disclosure in the verses it is a fit response. He met only one constant laugher, 'Ali al-Salawi, and one constant weeper, Yusuf al-Mughawir, in Seville in 1190.
Maybudi's commentary
Maybudi's Persian Kashf al-asrar moves from translation to opinions to "allusions" in prose that foreshadows Persian poetry. For him weeping is "the state of the beginners": the repenter fears punishment, the worshipper the outcome, the knower the eternal decree; for the stable it is a defect. When Shibli wept in Junayd's house, Junayd told his wife to cover herself, "for Shibli has come back from absence to awareness."
- Works, faith and perfection are layers of one whole; integration is the goal.
- Faith in Islam is cognitive commitment, closer to certainty than to opinion.
- Ritual and emotion are read as maps of the soul's movement toward and away from God.
Looking back: chapters 1 to 3
The first three essays move from the whole of religion to one ritual and then to one emotion. The order is instructive. Chapter 1 sets out the three layers of works, faith and perfection; chapter 2 shows a single act of works, the prayer, already containing the whole path; chapter 3 shows an inward state, weeping, being read as carefully as a legal ruling. The common lesson is that in this tradition nothing is merely outward or merely inward. Gestures carry meanings, and feelings have a grammar.
Part I. Sufism and the Islamic Tradition (2): Borrowed Prayers, Pluralism, Shams and the Lover's Koran
Four essays move from a textual puzzle to a vision of scripture. A Sunni Sufi's litany turns up inside a Shi'ite Imam's prayer; Persian poets sing the unity of religions without becoming modern liberals; the real Shams of Tabriz turns out to be a strict "follower" of the Prophet; and the Koran becomes a mirror that shows each reader what he loves.
4. A Shadhili presence in Shi'ite Islam
The Du'a' al-'Arafa of the third Imam, Husayn ibn 'Ali, is recited by pious Shi'ites every year on the day of 'Arafa and quoted by Mulla Sadra, Fayd Kashani and Sabziwari. Its Arabic runs about thirty pages, but the style changes suddenly in the last three or four: from the synthetic manner of prophetic sayings to an analytic, gnostic register. A contemporary Shi'ite sage told Chittick the Imam must have recited the end only for select disciples.
The great hadith compiler 'Allama Majlisi had already doubted it. The last folio is missing from al-Kaf'ami, from Ibn Ta'us's Misbah al-za'ir and from old manuscripts of the Iqbal; its sentences "are in keeping with the taste of the Sufis", so it was probably "composed by one of the Sufi shaykhs".
The result is a quiet irony: Shi'ism adopted as its own the spirituality of a great Sunni shaykh. A devout Shi'ite would answer that Husayn, himself a link in the Shadhili chain, inspired Ibn 'Ata' Allah anyway.
5. The pluralistic vision of Persian Sufi poetry
The essay opens with Hatif Isfahani (d. 1198/1783), a minor poet whose five-stanza strophic poem ends each stanza with the refrain: "He is one and there is nothing but He, / He alone, no god but He." To show why he fits a long tradition, Chittick first defines Sufism by a common image.
The walnut
Chapter 5's walnut: the husk protects; the kernel lives.
Sufism is the kernel; ritual, law and social teaching the husk. "Without the kernel, the husk is hollow and worthless, and without the husk, the kernel cannot develop." Relative to God, spirits and bodies are both husks; relative to us, the spiritual is the kernel and God the kernel of the kernel, Rumi's "life of life". Only humans, made in the full image, embrace both, so only they can reach the centre and put things in their places.
Two hands, one love
God has "two hands": mercy and wrath, beauty and majesty, immanence and transcendence. The poets sing them as roses and thorns, spring and autumn, union and separation. Beyond the polarities is love ('ishq), which alone reunites the contraries and does so by transforming the soul, not by theory. Love welcomes thorns as well as roses: "seek pain, seek pain, pain, pain!"
But the poles are unequal. "My mercy takes precedence over My wrath": mercy belongs to God's unitary Self, wrath arises only among distinctions. Yet prudence advises acting as if this were not so, since "we cannot know how long it will take for mercy to show its full effects."
Hatif's second stanza stages the argument. In a church the lover rebukes a Christian "heart-thief": how can you call the One "Father, Son, and Holy Ghost"? She answers that the Beloved threw His light into three mirrors, and silk does not become three if called by three names. Then "the church bell rang out in song, / 'He is one, and there is nothing but He.'" Rumi had said it earlier: "It is from the viewpoint ... that disagreements arise among Muslim, Zoroastrian, and Jew."
6. The real Shams-i Tabrizi
Shams (disappeared 643/1246) turned Rumi into a poet. Nasr called him "a divinely sent spiritual influence" who "exteriorized" Rumi's inner states. Popular Western accounts make him a wild antinomian. The best source, the Maqalat, a seven-hundred-page set of scattered notes taken by several listeners, appeared in a good edition by Muhammad 'Ali Muwahhid only in 1990. It shows many people present, not a private pair.
Certainty of rank
Shams had no doubt about his station. Schimmel spoke of his "immense spiritual pride". He knew how it sounded: "My words all come by way of greatness. They all appear as pretension." Samples: "My existence is an alchemy"; "When the top shaykhs ... reach me, they have to start practicing all over"; "If God were to greet me ten times, I wouldn't answer."
Learned, and a strict follower
He was not unlearned. He taught in a Koran school and spoke of jurisprudence; asked whether he was "a jurist or a fakir", a friend replied, "Both." He would "rather sit with jurists than with these dervishes. At least the jurists have taken trouble." Most shaykhs were "highwaymen of Muhammad's religion", mice in the house; God keeps cats.
Following means more than the ritual: "Following Muhammad is that he went on the mi'raj; you also should go in his tracks." The hadith "An hour's meditation is better than sixty years of worship" refers to sincere presence, but "The salat can be made up for, but there is no making up for [lack of] presence."
| Target of Shams's scorn | Why | Representative line |
|---|---|---|
| Madrasa careerists | Learning for "worldly mouthfuls" | "This rope is for people to come out of the well, not ... from this well into that well." |
| Fakhr al-Din al-Razi | Set his own view beside the Prophet's | "Muhammad Tazi says this, and Muhammad Razi says that" |
| Sufi treatise writers | No taste | Not one report from Muhammad for "a hundred thousand treatises by Qushayri" |
| Ignorant dervishes | Proud of knowing nothing | Defends Razi against Sayf Zangani |
| Hypocrites in prayer | Hold the idol "under your arm" | "God is greater" is "for sacrificing the soul" |
| Petitioners | Make God their butler | "O king, lift up that pot and bring it here!" |
The questions that matter: "Who am I? What substance am I? Why have I come? Where am I going?" The whole path is two commands of 47:19: know there is no god but He, and ask forgiveness, which negates "this existence, because it is newly arrived". His last word to a man who said "God is one": "He indeed is. He is eternal Being. What's it to you? For you are not."
7. The Koran as the lover's mirror
Western observers rarely link love with Islam itself. Chittick argues love for God is as central to Islam as to Christianity: the whole practice of following the Sunnah rests on "If you love God, follow me, and God will love you" (3:31). God created the world from love, and humans alone can love Him freely. Rumi: "Choice is the salt of worship." Hence "There is no compulsion in the religion" (2:256): coerced love is not love. The culmination is the hadith in which God becomes "the hearing with which he hears".
Why "mirror"
Jurists find law in the Koran, theologians God-talk, linguists grammar. Shams said each verse is "a love letter" to the wayfarers, and "The flaw is that people don't look at God with the gaze of love." Ibn al-'Arabi: everyone worships the god of belief; even those who deny gods have a point of reference.
The Shahadah as method
"There is no god but God" is fact and also methodology: every thought about God must be negated, for "Our God is always tentative." Shams: "It is God who is God. Whatever is created is not God, whether it's Muhammad or other than Muhammad." For lovers it means nothing is worthy of love but God; lesser things are loved as His face.
The hadith "Your love for a thing makes you blind and deaf" can be read as a fact about all love. If one's god is physics or history, one is blind to metaphysics; this is obvious "especially life in the academy". Every interpreter is a lover, and every lover sees scripture as his own mirror. Lovers of the God of tawhid are blind to any negative attribute in Him and credit good to God, evil to themselves.
Love is not automatically good: it depends on the god of belief, which is why love is never divorced from knowledge. Ghazali: the heart's illness is failure in its proper act, knowing and loving God; "if a man were to know all things but not to know God, it would be as if he knew nothing ... all hearts are ill, except as God wills."
Maybudi reads lovingly
| Verse | Maybudi's lover's reading |
|---|---|
| 2:2 "This is the writing" | God wrote mercy against Himself, and wrote faith in hearts: "I wrote your description in the Tablet ... I wrote My description in your heart. Would I have shown it to an enemy?" The knower's stone heart becomes "an exalted book". |
| 2:148 "Everyone has a direction" | Stage two: each has a kiblah by decree. Stage three: "lift up your eyes from anything less than Me, even if it be the highest paradise." God threw wealth, rank, spouse, knowledge, asceticism into people as false kiblahs; Abu Yazid found no crowd at His gate. |
| 2:5 "upon guidance ... prosper" | For them "what for others is reports ... is seeing eye-to-eye". The heart is a rusted mirror; polish brings unveiling, and the spirit "looking eye-to-eye". |
- Texts migrate across sectarian lines; spirituality is more porous than polemic.
- Unity in the kernel, difference in the husk: a model for holding conviction and openness together.
- The wildest Sufi of legend insisted on the Prophet's practice.
- We see what we love; method begins by negating our images of God.
Looking back: Part I as a whole
Part I gives the lived texture of the tradition before Part II gives its theory. Four themes stand out. First, integration: works, faith and perfection are layers of one religion, and the Sufis were its specialists in the third layer, not a separate sect. Second, porousness: a Sunni master's intimate prayers ended up inside a Shi'ite devotional text, and the Persian poets could praise every religion in the kernel while holding to their own in the husk. Third, discipline: Shams, the most unruly figure in the Persian imagination, turns out to have preached "following" the Prophet above all. Fourth, love as a way of reading: the Koran mirrors whoever reads it, so the reader must purify the mirror. Each of these themes will reappear in theoretical dress in Part II and in philosophical dress in Part III.
Part II. Ibn al-'Arabi and His Influence (1): A Term, a Poet, a Knowledge
The second part traces Ibn al-'Arabi's legacy. It opens by showing that the slogan most tied to him, "the Oneness of Being", was never his term; it asks whether he "influenced" Rumi; and it sets out his teaching on which knowledge is worth having.
8. A history of the term wahdat al-wujud
Few Sufi terms are as famous as wahdat al-wujud, the "Oneness of Being". It is pinned to Ibn al-'Arabi and sometimes to Sufis who lived long before him. Chittick's thesis is simple and surprising: Ibn al-'Arabi never used the expression, and its rise as a label owes most to his opponents.
Before the term
The ideas are old. 'Ali already gave four meanings for "God is One". Ma'ruf al-Karkhi re-expressed the Shahadah as "There is nothing in wujud but God." Ansari's highest tawhid is "the absorption of that which never was into That which ever is", and "What is tawhid? God, and nothing else. The rest is folly." Ghazali wrote the same sentence in the Mishkat and, to show it was not esoteric, in the Ihya'.
Ibn al-'Arabi: He/not He
Ibn al-'Arabi wrote for readers trained in every science and often meant the jurists by "common people". James Morris notes that epithets like "incoherent", "pantheist", "madman" are reactions to the difficulty of his synthesis, not reasoned verdicts. He says wujud is one ("The entity of wujud is one, but its properties are diverse"), but his point lies in endless reformulation meant to reshape the reader's imagination, not in a formula. "If people want a simple statement, they should be satisfied with 'There is no god but God.'" He is "a visionary, not a philosopher", recording God's self-disclosures.
Wujud, from the root "to find", means both being found and finding. Hence "the people of unveiling and finding", and the later contest of wahdat al-wujud against wahdat al-shuhud distorts him whichever side one puts him on. In its objective sense wujud belongs truly to God and only metaphorically to creatures, as the sun lends light.
He balances tanzih (incomparability) and tashbih (similarity). God is the Nonmanifest and the Manifest, "the One/Many". The neatest formula is He/not He (huwa la huwa): a thing is identical with wujud in that it exists, other than it in that it is itself. Opponents hear only "The cosmos is He", echoing the Persian refrain "All is He". The perfect human has "two eyes": one sees God "Independent of the worlds", the other "His wujud permeating all things".
How the term grew
From passing phrase to battle cry to school label.
| Figure | Use of the term | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Sadr al-Din Qunawi | Twice, not technical | Most philosophical disciple; corresponded with Tusi; "sheer wujud" whose multiplicity is God's "tasks" |
| Mu'ayyid al-Din Jandi | Not even in passing | His Fusus commentary founded the tradition |
| Sa'id al-Din Farghani | About thirty times in Persian | Oneness of Being is the lowest of three stages, then Manyness of Knowledge, then both with "two eyes"; often dropped from his Arabic version |
| Ibn Sab'in | Technical: "the root" | Answered Frederick II's Sicilian Questions; "Allah alone" |
| Awhad al-Din Balyani | Ecstatic | Wrote the Risalat al-ahadiyya long credited to Ibn al-'Arabi (Chodkiewicz); "He" without "not He" |
| Hammuya and Nasafi | Doctrinal label | "The existent is God"; Nasafi sorted the "people of oneness" into groups |
| Ibn Taymiyya | Titles of two treatises | Equates it with ittihad, hulul, ta'til: denial of God, prophets and Last Day |
Ibn Taymiyya read only one side: "the necessary wujud ... is the same as the possible wujud". He wanted a simple answer; Ibn al-'Arabi held that the highest understanding is bewilderment (hayra) before a reality that defies either/or. Because he attacked it so often, Ibn Taymiyya "probably deserves more credit than anyone else" for making the term central, likely taking it from Ibn Sab'in. Qaysari, writing in detail on oneness and wujud, gets no closer than "oneness of the Necessary Being". By Jami, the school accepted the label as praise.
Chittick gives Ibn Taymiyya an ironic credit: by attacking the term by name, even in the titles of his treatises, he "probably deserves more credit than anyone else for making it a center of contention". His contemporaries in the school, 'Abd al-Razzaq Kashani and Dawud Qaysari, rarely if ever used it; Qaysari, in a whole treatise on oneness and being, gets no closer than "the Oneness of the Necessary Being". Ibn Taymiyya probably took the phrase from Ibn Sab'in. Later followers then adopted the critics' word as a badge: by Jami's time, the "supporters of the Oneness of Being" meant the main line of the school.
Orientalists complicated things further. Many treated a label as understanding, calling Ibn al-'Arabi a pantheist and moving on, rather than admitting a sage, theologian and jurist "of the first order" whose synthesis needs years of training. Western scholarship, Chittick argues, simply reproduced the Muslim split into camps for and against, with "objective" language concealing preferences.
Seven meanings
| # | Stance | Meaning of wahdat al-wujud |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Neutral | A school going back to Ibn al-'Arabi |
| 2 | Supporters (Qunawi, Farghani) | A statement about reality, always paired with manyness |
| 3 | Supporters (Ibn Sab'in, Nasafi, later tradition) | A sufficient statement of the nature of things |
| 4 | Supporters (later Sufism) | A synonym for tawhid in Sufi form, applicable to earlier Sufis |
| 5 | Opponents (Ibn Taymiyya; "pantheism" labels) | Identity of God and world; unbelief |
| 6 | Qualified (Sirhindi) | Valid but below wahdat al-shuhud, which guards transcendence |
| 7 | Orientalists (Massignon, Anawati, Gardet) | "Static existential monism" against "dynamic testimonial monism" |
Why "wujud is one" is not a slogan
Chittick warns that any short label for Ibn al-'Arabi's teaching (pantheism, panentheism, existential monism) loses what the texts actually do. The Shaykh explains the oneness of wujud in hundreds of contexts, each time adding a nuance that disappears when a reader "comes to the point." His point is not a single formula. The later term wahdat al-wujud, used by supporters and detractors, hangs on divergent readings of that oneness. Ali already gave four meanings for "God is one"; "wujud is one" cannot be simpler.
The He/not He formula is Chittick's portable hinge for this chapter and for later school texts. Creation is He in one respect and not He in another. Critics who hear only "He" charge identity with the world; readers who hear only "not He" miss the intimacy the Shaykh insists on. Keeping both halves in view is the method the rest of Part II assumes.
9. The question of Ibn al-'Arabi's "influence" on Rumi
R. A. Nicholson, the great Western authority on the Mathnawi, held that Rumi followed Ibn al-'Arabi, and the claim has been repeated for a century. Chittick first asks why we care. For both masters, meaning (ma'na) is the root and form (sura) the branch; both insist their teachings came from no human being. "Having seen the form, you are unaware of the meaning. / If you are wise, pick out the pearl from the shell!" "But our business as scholars is to trade in shells, not pearls." Influence can only be shown at the level of form: shared technical terms and images.
No formal evidence
Rumi uses almost none of Ibn al-'Arabi's distinctive terms, which do appear in his contemporary 'Iraqi and later in Shabistari and Maghribi. One cannot say Rumi was too great a poet to need the vocabulary yet not too great to borrow from Sana'i and 'Attar; nor blame language, since Rumi wrote hundreds of Arabic verses that echo 'Attar, not Ibn al-'Arabi.
| Ibn al-'Arabi | Rumi | |
|---|---|---|
| Lineage | Andalusia, North Africa, Egypt | Persian Sufism: Ansari, Sana'i, Ahmad Ghazali, Sam'ani, 'Attar, Baha' Walad, Shams |
| Centre | Knowledge, sober and intellectual | Love, mostly intoxicated |
| Audience | Ulama trained in every science | Anyone with Persian and "a modicum of spiritual taste" |
| Language | Technical, Koranic, dense | Colloquial, images from daily life |
"One can imagine Ibn al-'Arabi without love, despite Corbin, but one cannot imagine Rumi without love."
Nicholson's cases
Nicholson leaned on Turkish commentaries written in Ibn al-'Arabi's idiom and lacked Baha' Walad's Ma'arif and Shams's Maqalat. Chittick takes his main claims one by one:
| Mathnawi verse | Nicholson's claim | Chittick's reply |
|---|---|---|
| 1:606-610, being and not-being | Ideas from Ibn al-'Arabi, "disguised (as usual)" | Why disguise? The theme is in the Koran's "Be!" and in Baha' Walad, Shams, 'Attar, Ghazali, Sam'ani |
| 1:1112, hidden Reason, waves | "Pantheistic monism" heard from Qunawi | No one identifies Intellect with the Essence; "Universal Intellect" is Sana'i's term; the ocean and foam image is Baha' Walad's |
| 1:1133, opposites | Plotinus plus Ibn al-'Arabi, "characteristically" | sudur probably means "breasts", not emanation; no evidence offered |
| 1:1736, kings and slaves | Correlatives as aspects of one reality | Koranic and universal; Rumi speaks from love |
| 1:3338, "Shaykh of the Religion" | Perhaps Qunawi | It is Shams, as the Maqalat shows |
Reductio: Ibn al-'Arabi "influenced" 'Attar
To show how cheap such parallels are, Chittick "proves" that 'Attar, who died before the Fusus (1230) and final Futuhat (1238) were written, followed Ibn al-'Arabi. He glosses an 'Attar qasida line by line with Futuhat quotations: the veiled face in the bazaar (people are "veiled from the Real through the Real"); everything other than You "a mirage and a display"; unificationism and incarnationism are unbelief, for "this is oneness, but it has come in repetition" (1 x 1 = 1); the One Maker of a thousand thousand works; the ocean's waves; eighteen thousand worlds from "self-breathing" (the Breath of the All-Merciful); and the Sought become Seeker. The fit is perfect, and therefore proves nothing.
10. Ibn al-'Arabi on the benefit of knowledge
For Ibn al-'Arabi there is no goal beyond knowledge: "There is no level more eminent than the level of knowledge"; God told the Prophet to seek increase only in knowledge (20:114). Prefers 'ilm to ma'rifa because the Koran ascribes 'ilm to God. Knowledge is "the perception of the essence of the sought object as it is in itself". But the Prophet sought refuge "from a knowledge that has no benefit". Which knowledge benefits?
What travels with you
| Kind of knowledge | Measure | Analogy |
|---|---|---|
| Rulings of the Shariah | "In the measure of need"; useless after death, when obligation ends | Food: take moderately |
| Medicine, geometry, other worldly sciences | Imperative need only; otherwise "a diversion" | Tools left in their own world |
| God and the homesteads of resurrection | No limit | Preparation for "the day of differentiation" |
Why only God-knowledge counts
- Anthropological: made in God's form and taught all the names, the soul has a beginning but no end, so its knowledge can have no limit.
- Cosmological: 'alam (cosmos) is a 'alama (mark) giving 'ilm. Seen as signs, the world is knowledge of God; seen apart from Him, "ignorance dressed up as knowledge".
- Agnostic: the possible is "an ocean that has no shore save its two sides", Necessity and impossibility. "It is impossible for anything other than God to gain knowledge of the cosmos." "The thing knows nothing but itself."
- Taqlid: all creaturely knowledge follows some outside authority, teachers, books, senses; "let us follow God's authority, especially in knowledge of Him." Even the messengers say, "We have no knowledge" (5:109).
Tahqiq: realization
The standpoint that grants each perspective its validity without being bound by any is "the station of no station", also called tahqiq, realization. From the root of haqiqa (reality) and haqq (true, real, right, due; a name of God), it means in Persian today "research" and in Egyptian Arabic "interrogation".
Creation hangs between the Real and the null; realization answers "what?" and "why?".
The Koran never pairs khalq with batil: "We did not create the heavens, the earth ... as batil" (38:27). Creation's status is always ambiguous, yet we must ask "what are we?" and "why are we here?" The hadith of the haqqs gives the rule: "Your soul has a haqq against you, your Lord has a haqq against you, your guest ... your spouse ...; so give to each that has a haqq its haqq." "Tahqiq means knowing the haqiqa of God and things and acting according to their haqq." The soul comes first in the list, since without self-knowledge one cannot tell which rights bear on one. The scale to measure rights comes only through the prophets.
- Labels like "Oneness of Being" often come from critics; read who uses a term and why.
- Influence claims need formal evidence; parallels alone prove little.
- Knowledge is judged by what it does for the knower's final end; realization joins knowing what a thing is with giving it its due.
Looking back: chapters 8 to 10
These three essays are lessons in reading. Chapter 8 warns against labels: a phrase that sums up a school for later readers may have been marginal for its founders and loaded by its enemies. Chapter 9 warns that shared sources, not influence, may explain similar ideas. Chapter 10 then asks what any of this reading is for, and answers with Ibn al-'Arabi that knowledge benefits only when it goes with us beyond death.
Part II. Ibn al-'Arabi and His Influence (2): Qunawi, Farghani, Jami
Three essays follow the school through its systematizers. Qunawi gives an Islamic version of the Neoplatonic descent and return of the soul; Farghani works out how One becomes many; Jami states the doctrine of the Perfect Man in polished Persian.
11. Qunawi, Neoplatonism and the circle of ascent
Sadr al-Din Qunawi's writings present "a thoroughly Islamic version of that universal metaphysics" that Neoplatonism expresses so well: negative theology, the One, the degrees of being, and the soul's descent and return, read through "Surely we belong to God, and to Him we return" (2:156) and "As He originated you, so you will return" (7:29).
Learned or seen?
Qunawi never cites the Theology of Aristotle (a paraphrase of Plotinus) and did not own it. A life of Shariah, dhikr, vigils and Hadith study meant Sufis like him "could only think in Islamic terms". Their teachings come from unveiling, which they then express in their own religious language. Qunawi "has not 'learned' these things from Neoplatonists", but in Plotinus he would find confirmation, and would call him what Arabic texts called him, "the Greek Shaykh".
Qunawi held that early Greek sages taught from "openings" won by retreat and discipline and spoke in rhetoric, not demonstration; after "Aristotle" the Peripatetics turned to dialectic. He refuses disputation in his Koran commentary, citing "No people went astray after guidance without arriving at disputation", and writes "remarks and allusions" for the realizers.
The circle of being
God, unknowable in His Essence, is known through names and attributes; the names "Light", "Creator" and above all "Lover" demand creation: "I loved to be known, so I created the world."
| Five Divine Presences | Status | In the human |
|---|---|---|
| 1. God's knowledge (fixed entities) | Uncreated | Fixed entity, the "divine mystery" |
| 2. World of spirits | Created | Spirit, rational soul |
| 3. World of images (isthmus) | Created | Animal soul |
| 4. Corporeal world | Created | Body |
| 5. Perfect Man | Created and uncreated | Comprehends all four |
Each level is a shadow of the one above. The command descends from the Reality of Realities (the First Entification), through the One Emanation ("None issues from the One but One"), the Breath of the All-Merciful or Cloud, the First Intellect (Pen) and Universal Soul (Tablet), the world of imagination, the Throne, Footstool, spheres, elements and three kingdoms, reaches its lowest point in man, then rises through the barzakh, resurrection, hell and paradise, and the "Dune of Vision" back to its origin.
Qunawi's circle: the command descends to man and returns to its source.
The point at the centre
Man's uncreated reality is God named Allah, the all-comprehensive name; hence "God created Adam in His own form" and the "human/divine reality". Every creature shows some of its perfections; each human shows the whole in form, but only Perfect Men realize it consciously. Others are dominated by one particular name and leave equilibrium (i'tidal) and centrality.
Two ascents
Qunawi received the key "mystery" in 630 or 631/1233-34, in his twenties. The apparent descent of the soul into the body is really an ascent of composition ('uruj al-tarkib): the "thing whose existence is desired" passes from Pen and Tablet down through the presences, gaining composition and darkness, until it is entified in the womb. Then comes the ascent of decomposition (mi'raj al-tahlil): the gnostic gives back at each sphere what he took there, obeying "God commands you to deliver trusts back to their owners" (4:58), until only the divine mystery, the "specific face", remains. "All things are perishing except His face" (28:88).
Qunawi even traces the Perfect Man's path through a single perfect plant eaten by his parents, and the setbacks of others, whose matter is lost and returns repeatedly to plant and animal levels, gaining colourings that dim their remembrance.
| Kind of soul | Relation to acquired qualities | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Strong solicitude, balanced | Qualities like passing accidents | The "attracted": Prophet, his family, saints, without heavy ascetic labour |
| 2. Ruled by the name "Lord" | Qualities like established attributes | Perfect Man or intermediate, only after great effort |
| 3. No colouring of solicitude | Qualities rooted and unbalanced | The veiled and wretched |
"We restored him to the lowest of the low" (95:5) describes one who travelled half the circle; "a wage unfailing" (95:6) those who complete it. "So the command is a circle, and the journey is circular, not linear." Completing it opens "a second, divine cycle", the first degree of sanctity.
The soul and Jonah's fish
Answering Tusi, Qunawi says the Peripatetics cannot grasp the soul by speculation. Its perfections run from the Agent Intellect ("Isma'il") to the Universal Soul, the First Intellect and absorption in God, when "realness dominates over createdness". In one Neoplatonic-sounding passage, souls born of the supernal intellects think they can govern bodies without attachment, grow attached, see their poverty, turn to God by the direct way with no intermediary, and are given governance without attachment, able to rule many forms at once.
The key concept behind this passage is preparedness (isti'dad): how far a receptacle can receive the perfections of the divine names. Spirit, whose first attribute is life ("Living" heads the "Seven Leaders" among the names, followed by Knowing, Desiring, Powerful, Speaking, Generous and Just), shows itself only to the measure of the vessel made ready for it. As the scattered elements are gathered into equilibrium, they receive spirit first in its vegetal, then its animal mode, and finally in the human form, where it can appear relatively completely. The soul before attachment resembles the angels who protested at Adam's creation: limited because it has not yet actualized the all-comprehensiveness of the human state. "Surely I know what you know not" (2:30). The descent into the body is therefore not a fall to be regretted but the condition for a knowledge the spirits themselves lack, a theme that returns in Sadra's insistence, in chapter 21, that embodiment alone makes the soul's full unfolding possible.
12. Farghani on oneness and manyness
Historians like to split Islam into tidy pairs: Sufis against jurists, Tariqah against Shariah, inner against outer. Chittick proposes spectrums instead of dichotomies: on each issue, authors fall somewhere between red and violet, and their places shift from issue to issue. This avoids both the myth of a monolithic Islam and the anthropologist's "series of local Islams". Masters like Ibn al-'Arabi saw themselves in the middle: they accept differences but deny them absoluteness.
Polarity, not dichotomy
Farghani sets the Oneness of Being (wahdat al-wujud) against the Manyness of Knowledge (kathrat al-'ilm). At the level of the unknown Essence they are identical; as soon as God knows Himself, a subject and object appear, and so the distinct names. "Every reality demands its polar opposite ... just as mention of yin implies yang."
| Being | Knowledge | |
|---|---|---|
| Oneness | True | Relative |
| Manyness | Relative (through the names) | True (many objects) |
| Modality | Necessity | Possibility |
| Divine names | Mercy, beauty, bounty, gentleness | Wrath, majesty, justice, severity |
| Cosmos | High world: angels, spirits | Low world: minerals, plants, animals |
| Humans | Prophets and friends of God | Unbelievers |
| Soul (Koranic) | Soul at peace | Soul that commands to evil |
| Human faculty | Love: unites, erases distinction | Knowledge: discerns, grounds the Shariah |
Humans sit in the middle: the faithful balance necessity and possibility, as the blaming soul sits between the other two. Since the One precedes the many, mercy precedes wrath; to exist is to share in the Breath of the All-Merciful, while every lack of existence relates to wrath, never absolutely.
Two faces of every thing
Each creature has a face toward Being (balance, light, receptivity to mercy and guidance) and a face toward itself (dispersion, darkness, veiling). Neither is simply good or bad: the task is to keep them in equilibrium, as they are balanced in God, one in Being and many in names.
| Too much oneness | Too much manyness |
|---|---|
| Love dissolves discernment; the majdhub "spiritual mad men"; antinomians who say "for me there is no more command and prohibition"; the bi-shar' movements | Knowledge only separates; "a cold literalism that kills the spirit of love"; absolute distance between God and world; "philosophy and Kalam" whose veils are "thicker and denser than all other veils" |
Ecstatic utterances lean toward oneness; later commentaries on them restore balance through knowledge. Attacks on
wahdat al-wujudalways read it as negating the world of wisdom.
Chittick adds that the whole discussion could be recast as "exoteric" against "esoteric" Islam, but he resists the pair because it imposes outside categories. Farghani's poles do better: each is defined by its relation to the other, "neither pole can ever be empty of the other side", and so real authors spread across a spectrum. Excessive oneness ends in antinomianism, excessive manyness in literalism and rationalism, and "the vast majority of Sufis who wrote theoretical works attempted to establish a balance" between love and knowledge, oneness and manyness, mercy and wrath. The essay thus gives the reader a tool used silently in the rest of the book: ask where on the spectrum an author stands on this issue, rather than which camp he belongs to.
13. Jami on the Perfect Man
The Perfect Man is the first self-disclosure of the Essence, origin of the descending arc, and the goal of the ascending arc: prototype and exemplar. Chittick treats the first aspect, using only Jami's Persian Naqd al-nusus. Jami (fifteenth century) is "not an original thinker": his gift is to sum up two hundred years of the school in clear and beautiful Persian, which made him hugely popular in India and spread the school there.
The all-comprehensive name
The cosmos is the self-disclosure of God's names. The name Allah contains all the others: "any heart that knows it knows all the names", but no other name gives knowledge of Allah. Adam was taught "the names, all of them" (2:31), so he is the first locus of Allah and the first prophet. Iblis refused to bow to one made "with My two hands" (38:75): beauty and majesty; everything else shows one hand only.
| Level | Name | Relation of the names | Mirrored in |
|---|---|---|---|
| First Entification | Exclusive Unity (ahadiyya) | Each name equals every other | The Perfect Man, directly |
| Second entification | Inclusive Unity (wahidiyya) | Each name a distinct reality | The cosmos, in detail |
Man's state is jam'iyya, all-comprehensiveness, pictured as a cross: the vertical axis spans the levels (First and second entification, spirits, images, bodies; the sixth is the Perfect Man), the horizontal spans each level in full. The Seven Leaders, Living, Knowing, Desiring, Powerful, Speaking, Hearing, Seeing, are present wherever existence is, but actual all together only in a constitution near equilibrium, as in man.
The Hidden Treasure
"I was a Hidden Treasure and I loved to be known, so I created the world." In the Essence the attributes are undistinguished jewels behind a locked door. Infinity requires that no mode of existence be denied to the Absolute, not even finite existence, so God wants a particularized knowledge of Himself. But in the cosmos multiplicity hides unity. Hence God wanted a single locus uniting both: "the all-comprehensive engendered being", the Perfect Man.
Vicegerent and pillar
Man is vicegerent of the name Allah, so responsible for all creation. By rank, "Man is the great world and the world is the small man." Ibn al-'Arabi: man is "the dividing line between the shadow and the sun", an isthmus with lordship (receiving from God) and servanthood (delivering to creatures). Qunawi: the Perfect Man is "the pillar of the heavens and the earth"; when he leaves, the order of the world ends.
- Qunawi frames the human journey as a circle: descent is already ascent, and return gives back each borrowed trust.
- Farghani's polarity replaces either/or with balance: love unites, knowledge discerns; both are needed.
- The Perfect Man is the point where God sees unity within multiplicity, and so the steward of creation.
Looking back: chapters 11 to 13
Qunawi, Farghani and Jami represent three generations of the school, and the essays show its central ideas taking systematic shape. Qunawi gives the circle: everything descends from the One and ascends again, with the human being as the point where the circle closes. Farghani gives the balance: the Oneness of Being must be completed by the Manyness of Knowledge, so that unity never erases difference. Jami gives the purpose: the Perfect Man, in whom God sees unity within multiplicity, is the reason the circle exists at all. Together they supply the anthropology that the rest of the book uses, from the eschatology of chapter 20 to the vicegerent of chapters 24 and 26.
Part II. Ibn al-'Arabi and His Influence (3): The School in India
The last three essays of Part II bring the school to seventeenth-century India: the son of Sirhindi's own master defending the Oneness of Being, a debate between soul and spirit, and a Chishti handbook from Bijapur.
14. Two treatises by Khwaja Khurd
Under Akbar and Jahangir it was hard to write Sufi theory without the vocabulary of Ibn al-'Arabi's school. Ahmad Sirhindi is the best known Indian Sufi of the time, but Chittick suspects his "importance" owes much to twentieth-century political and nationalist uses; judged by criteria internal to Sufism, others may matter more. Indian Sufi writings remain unstudied because British, Muslim and Hindu historiographies (as Carl Ernst shows) pursued social and political agendas and rarely read the texts.
Khwaja Khurd ('Abd Allah, b. 1010/1601) was the son of Baqi Billah, who planted the Naqshbandi order in India and died at forty when the boy was two. Baqi Billah's disciple Sirhindi helped raise him, yet the son upheld wahdat al-wujud over Sirhindi's wahdat al-shuhud. In his Arabic Fawa'ih he writes: "A group has supposed that tawhid is in shuhud, not wujud, but they have not reached the reality of the station." He calls Husam al-Din Ahmad "my shaykh in reality" and lists Sirhindi more coolly.
The Treatise on the Gnostic
A chain of paradoxes: the gnostic "does all good works, without any desire", "mixes with everyone, without becoming attached", "sees Him in all, without calling any of them God". His practical summary: "Remember God without making God your idol. Forget yourself without becoming heedless of yourself. Put the Shariah into practice without considering any individual desire." It ends: "Know that Muhammad is the Real and that the Real is Muhammad."
The Light of Oneness (begun 12 May 1643)
Every section opens "O Sayyid!", addressing the reader as a would-be master: "If you want mastery, become one and be one."
| Theme | Khwaja Khurd's teaching |
|---|---|
| Oneness and manyness | "Oneness is the inner dimension of manyness, while manyness is the outer dimension of Oneness." |
| Why the Law | Prophets were taken from manyness to Oneness and sent back to teach the road: Shariah (acts) and Tariqah (refining character). Rulings based on duality lead to Oneness, which hints that manyness is Oneness. |
| Intention | Pray "for the sake of my own reality ... finding my own reality, since I have lost it". |
| Ethics | Blameworthy traits rest on alienation and duality; praiseworthy ones on acquaintance and unity. |
| Method | "Being a dervish is to correct the imagination": the veil is imagination, so lift it by imagining Oneness night and day. |
| Images | Cross-eyed sight, a spinning point seen as a circle, rain seen as lines; 'Attar's thirty birds who are the Simurgh |
| Relations of cosmos and Real | "from", "to", "in", "with", "is identical", "is not"; like water and snow, gold and ornaments |
| Alif Lam Mim (2:1) | Unity (ahadiyya) became knowledge ('ilm), and knowledge the cosmos ('alam) |
| Daily rule | Sleep as a return to nonmanifestation; night prayer with Sura Ya Sin; little food, little speech; retreat; reward evil with good |
Two further lines show the treatise's method. On sectarian quarrel: "Each sect quarrels and debates with the other sects, except for the People of Oneness, for they are one with everyone, even though no one is one with them." On imagination as the veil: duality is like a cross-eyed person seeing one as two, a spinning point seen as a circle, or falling drops seen as lines. Quoting an unnamed gnostic, "Being a dervish is to correct the imagination", Khwaja Khurd concludes that the veil, being imaginal, "must be lifted through imagination": the seeker should dwell "night and day" in imagining Oneness. Grief and dispersion of thought "all derive from duality"; ease follows when duality leaves the gaze.
15. A debate between the soul and the spirit
'Abd al-Jalil Ilahabadi, probably the Chishti shaykh 'Abd al-Jalil Laknawi (d. 1043/1633-34), wrote short Persian visionary dialogues; Chittick found one in New Delhi in 1988 in which Ibn al-'Arabi answers objections to the Futuhat. Here he studies Ruh wa-nafs, "The Spirit and the Soul", for its spiritual psychology. The author almost certainly knew Jami's Naqd, which he paraphrases.
Sufi terms for the unseen human (soul, spirit, heart, intellect, mystery) are not separate entities but names of one reality by its attributes. Naming them lets the traveller picture and work with his own tendencies in "the ocean of the soul". Behind the treatise lies the Indian debate over "popularized wahdat al-wujud", the "religion of 'All is He'", used to excuse neglect of the Shariah. Sirhindi, Chittick notes, attacked this popular position, not Ibn al-'Arabi's own texts, which he had hardly studied.
Two forms appear
In meditation 'Abd al-Jalil sees a dark form and a luminous one. The soul (nafs) governs the universe and follows Iblis, locus of the name Misguider; the spirit (ruh), in which creatures find "rest" (rawh), follows Muhammad, locus of Allah and of the Guide. Because both are loci of divine names, the conflict cannot be purely dualistic: Allah is "the coincidence of all opposites".
| Soul | Spirit | |
|---|---|---|
| Character | Clever, crafty, shifts ground | Stable, somewhat stolid |
| Guide | Iblis, "the great lover" who would bow to none but God | Muhammad, bearer of the Trust |
| Claim | Absolute oneness erases distinction; the Shariah is a veil for the stupid; follow your inner light; later, matter needs no first principle | That "oneness" is one level of wujud; Essence and attributes must both be affirmed; the attributes demand the cosmos, and so the Law |
| Mode | Lordship, self-affirmation, imagination, similarity | Servanthood, self-effacement, reason, incomparability |
| Danger | "Soul-vulture" stays with the bones | "Spirit-nightingale" loves the garden's fruit, not the Beloved's face |
Chittick observes that in the present "New Age" the soul's case seems to have won, since the spirit insists on the Shariah as "the sine qua non" of understanding unity.
The mystery judges
Unable to agree, they appeal to the mystery (sirr), in the sevenfold scheme body, soul, spirit, heart, mystery, hidden, most hidden. It tells the soul that it has seen Oneness "in the station of nature", like a frog that thinks its puddle is the ocean, and can only advance by annihilation. It tells the spirit it sees Oneness through reason and has not abandoned itself to love. Both lordship and servanthood are real in the servant. 'Abd al-Jalil admits, "I do not know which point of view God will take into account tomorrow", so caution says: be servants here, and wait to be lords hereafter.
Chapter 15: soul and spirit unite as the heart, which the mystery carries toward final union.
The birth of the heart and final union
Told to become one, soul and spirit produce the heart (qalb), which "fluctuates" (taqallub) between them. For Ibn al-'Arabi reason sees incomparability ("Nothing is like Him", 42:11), imagination sees similarity; the heart combines both by turns and never denies the Real in either mode. The mystery draws the heart into itself and, strengthened, rises. At the hidden light the spirit's luminosity dissolves it, and the soul's I-ness makes it identical: "Glory be to me! How tremendous is my rank!" Seeing the ocean it repents and says "There is no god but God"; at the most hidden it claims "I am the most hidden", until the voice of the He-ness says, "and within the most hidden am I." All dry up: "Whose is the kingdom today? God's, the One, the Overwhelming!" (40:16).
16. A Chishti handbook from Bijapur
Richard Eaton showed how Sufism flourished in Bijapur in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The leading Chishti family descended from Shah Miranji Shams al-'Ushshaq (d. 904/1499), sent by a dream of the Prophet to find Kamal al-Din Biyabani; then his son Burhan al-Din Janam (d. 1005/1597); then Shaykh Mahmud Khwush-Dahan (d. 1026/1617), whose Persian Ma'rifat al-suluk ("The Gnosis of Wayfaring") became "the summary work of all Bijapuri Chishti teachings".
Why a synthesis
By then seekers met a bewildering mass of schemes from Ghazali, 'Ayn al-Qudat, Rumi, Ibn al-'Arabi and the orders. "There is no single 'Sufi doctrine' accepted by all the Sufi teachers, other than the basic creed of Islam." Sufi theory is always a means to practice and is modified to fit circumstances. Shaykh Mahmud correlates the vocabularies in one diagram.
The circle of the One of Existence
The book of about 150 pages is summed up in a circle of eight sectors with five levels each, forty in all; the fifth, central level is one reality under eight names.
| Sector | Levels 1 to 4 (outer to inner) | Level 5 (centre) |
|---|---|---|
| Existence | Necessary, possible, impossible, gnostic of existence | The One of Existence |
| Paths | Shariah, Tariqah, Haqiqah, ma'rifa | Tawhid |
| Remembrance | From voiced dhikr inward | Hidden dhikr |
| Subtle centres | Soul, heart, spirit, mystery | Light |
| Way stations | Nasut, malakut, jabarut, lahut | Nearness (qurb) |
| Places | Air, limpidness, place of no place, no place | Beyond the Beyond |
| Degrees | Visible, images, inclusive unity, oneness | Exclusive Unity |
| Letters | Four groups of seven, from ya' to alif | The point; lam-alif, "no", nonentification |
Four rectangular tables, one per outer level, add more correlations: the archangel of each level; four levels each of spirit (plant, animal, rational, holy), heart (lump of flesh, repenting, healthy, witnessing) and soul (commanding, blaming, at peace, inspired); four degrees of tawhid (words, acts, states, essence); a "martyrdom" at each level; and twenty-nine "occupations", short Arabic prayers keyed to letters and bodily members, such as "Teach us the Koran, O God!" for hearing. Paired terms mark progress: knower to gnostic, watchfulness to annihilation, disengagement to solitude, witnessing to state, lover to arriver.
The order of dependence runs both ways: the body depends on the flowing spirit, it on the impossible, it on the gnostic, it on the One, which depends on Itself; and the One manifests downward through each. All four existences are hidden in every plant, mineral and animal but appear only in humans. "In every existence there is a path to God by which it can reach God." The whole is the meaning of "He who knows himself knows his Lord."
- Indian Sufis kept Ibn al-'Arabi's balance: radical oneness with strict practice.
- Inner faculties are named so they can be worked with; the heart is the faculty that holds reason and imagination together.
- Systematic handbooks correlate vocabularies to guide practice, not to settle theory.
Looking back: Part II as a whole
Part II traces Ibn al-'Arabi's school from a contested label, through its Anatolian and Persian systematizers, to its Indian afterlife. Three conclusions stand out. The school was more careful than its reputation: "Oneness of Being" was always paired with manyness, and "He/not He" with bewilderment. It was practical: from Qunawi's return of trusts to Khwaja Khurd's insistence on the Shariah, metaphysics served the path. And it was adaptable: in India it took the form of treatises, allegories and handbooks that correlated its terms with local practice. Part III will show that the philosophers, starting from Greek categories, arrived at a closely similar picture of the human being.
Part III. Islamic Philosophy (1): Reason, Soul and Perception
The third part shows how philosophy and theoretical Sufism agree on the shape of reality. Rumi turns out to defend intellect while mocking reasoners; Baba Afdal teaches that the soul is the knower that must come to know itself; Mulla Sadra explains perception as the soul creating forms within itself.
17. Rumi and the wooden leg of reason
The "Rumi boom" in North America rests on American poets who reworked Nicholson's and Arberry's scholarly versions, often without Persian or knowledge of Rumi's tradition. Chittick finds most of these renderings "inaccurate and inept": sparks of fire, but lame. "The leg of the reasoners is wooden; / a wooden leg is awfully unsteady." The translators' leg is unsteadier still, because they ignore the very worldview the reasoners built.
The leg, not the worldview
Rumi criticizes the reasoners' leg: analysis and proof cannot carry anyone to the goal of human life. He does not deny the goal, which the Hellenizing philosophers shared: the highest perfection possible to humans. He calls Avicenna "a donkey on ice"; only love climbs the icy mountain. Schimmel disputed Chittick's view that Rumi treats intellect as a necessary asset; Chittick answers that the many verses on intelligence cannot become dead letters, and that Rumi's insistence shows how central intellectual understanding was to his hearers.
| Partial intellect ('aql-i juzwi) | Universal Intellect ('aql-i kulli) | |
|---|---|---|
| Nature | Angelic light dimmed by ego | The noonday sun, embodied in Gabriel |
| Mentor | Iblis, the self-reliant | Prophets and saints |
| Knowledge | Rational: cleverness, a hindrance | Visionary: "only knowledge directly from Him takes you to Him" |
| Image | "a vulture ... bound up with carrion-eating" | "like Gabriel's wing ... to the shadow of the Lote Tree" |
There is "no individualistic, do-it-yourself spirituality in Rumi's universe": the Koran is the map and the Sunnah the journey. The light of intelligence grows in degrees, spark, candle, lamp, star, moon, noon sun. In the Fihi ma fihi, humans are like a donkey with an angel's wing stuck to its tail, that "perhaps the donkey ... may itself become an angel."
Against the compartmentalized heart
Modern readers keep Rumi's love and drop his metaphysics, cosmology and psychology as medieval window-dressing, while holding their own systematic worldview "profoundly antagonistic" to his. Rumi would reply that the heart has no partitions: "You cannot love what you do not know." Knowledge of God rests on true knowledge of world and self.
When Rumi says "all their sciences come to life" in his presence, because "The root of all these sciences is Up Yonder", he means the transmitted and intellectual learning of his day, rooted in revelation to all peoples, not "the science ... from ... The New York Times". Our knowledge is the apple, and we are its worms. Thought is not derived from the body; the world is an epiphenomenon of the Universal Intellect.
18. Baba Afdal's psychology
Afdal al-Din Kashani (d. probably 606/1210), contemporary of Suhrawardi, Averroes and Ibn al-'Arabi, taught in the village of Maraq near Kashan. Chittick counts his philosophical Persian "the most concise and beautiful in the language of philosophy". He wrote in Persian because he taught dedicated non-specialists, busy in active life, who came to his village; six long letters to them survive. So he "gets to the point rather quickly".
For them philosophy was, in Pierre Hadot's phrase, a "spiritual exercise". Wisdom (hikma) is knowledge of things as they truly are plus fitting action, and the one knowledge on which all depends is knowledge of oneself. Its fruit is to recognize the soul's immortality already in this life.
The argument from hunger
Asked by a student how the soul can survive the body, he wrote Security from the Soul's Nullification in the Refuge of Intelligence. Humans, unlike animals, hunger for knowledge and are never sated by it; the body fills, decays and dies, but the soul is life itself: "What is dead by nature comes to life through the anima, so how can what is alive by nature come to die?" Seek water from the spring, not from sal ammoniac: "No knower and no one aware is closer to you than your own intelligent anima."
| Element | What it is | Why it is distinct |
|---|---|---|
| Body | Woven of bones, tendons, veins, flesh | Remains a body with or without life |
| Soul | That through which the body lives | The body is not always alive, so the soul is not the body |
| Intelligence | That which knows body and soul separately | Else all bodies, or all animals, would be intelligent |
Intelligence has no opposite, so nothing can destroy it; refuge from perishing lies in living "in the measure of intelligence".
The big picture behind the argument
Moderns find this unconvincing because scientism makes life and awareness epiphenomena of matter. The premodern intuition is the reverse: "The body is an epiphenomenon of life and awareness." In the Neoplatonic scheme light flows from the One, dims into the inanimate world, then turns back through mineral, plant, animal and human, intensifying life and awareness; from the human stage the knowing subject is responsible for its own becoming.
Being and finding
Baba Afdal unpacks wujud in Persian as hasti (being) and yaft (finding, perceiving). Finding is more real: everything that finds exists, not everything that exists finds.
Baba Afdal's ladder of wujud: awareness makes existence real.
The soul (nafs, which he renders khwud, "self") is potential finding: answer to "What is the soul?" is "You yourself". When it finds itself in act, "it is not the soul. Rather, it is the 'intellect'." Unusually, he applies wujud only to what is other than God; the highest wujud is realized human intelligence, the "radiance of the Ipseity", while the Ultimate lies beyond being. "The universe is a tree whose produce and fruit is man ... intelligence is a tree whose fruit is the encounter with God." Hence "Whatever has existence from itself is secure from annihilation."
19. Mulla Sadra on perception
For Muslim philosophers perception (idrak) means any obtaining of knowledge, by animals or by God, from sensation to intellectual vision. In Mulla Sadra's psychology-centred philosophy it explains both the nature of existence and the goal of life. In the Asfar he lists it first among some thirty terms for knowing: "Idrak is encounter and arrival. ... As for bodily encounter, it is not really an encounter."
Key terms
| Term | Sadra's sense |
|---|---|
| Quwwa | Both "faculty" and "potentiality": better "potency"; the soul is one great potency |
| Shu'ur (awareness) | "a shaky perception" that does not fix the thing's whatness; never said of God |
| Form (sura) | The intelligible whatness; only forms, never matter, are perceived |
| Dhihn (mind) | "The soul's potency to acquire forms of knowledge that have not yet been attained" |
| Tajarrud | "Disengagement", not "abstraction": freedom from matter and intensified existence and consciousness |
| Wujud dhihni | "Mental existence", a shadow of external existence on which no traces are ordered |
Levels of perception, levels of world
Sadra: three modes of perception mirror three worlds; below lies matter, time and motion, barely knowable.
The levels differ by disengagement from three conditions of sense perception: presence of matter, concealment by accidents, particularity. Imagination drops the first; sense intuition the first two; intellect all three. Imagination and sense intuition both belong to the middle domain, so there are really three levels, matching three worlds. "Reducing perception to sensation follows the elimination of the imaginal and spiritual domains." 'Alam (world) shares a root with 'ilm: a world is "that by means of which one knows".
Perception as presence
"Perception is the existence of the perceptible for the perceiver", or "the perceptible's being found by the perceiver". Sadra often substitutes presence (hudur) and witnessing. To perceive more directly is to exist more fully; to see the unseen, one must strengthen perception until it becomes present in the self.
The more perfect it becomes, the more it gathers things and the simpler it grows, "because the truly simple thing is all things". Disengagement is not peeling off extras while the soul stays still: "the perceiver and the perceptible become disengaged together."
Nor does it reject the body. Soul and body "exist through one existence", like root and branch; as the soul perfects, the body becomes subtler until "they become one thing without difference". The corpse left behind is like hair, horns or a house: built for use, but not pervaded by life.
Mental existence and the levels of the world
Sadra's "formal existence" has three divisions: complete (intelligible forms and disengaged intellects), sufficient (souls, the world of imagination) and deficient (sensory forms that "endure through matter"). Below them lies bodily matter, renewed at every instant and "immersed in nonexistence", known only by name; time and movement are his examples. A form perceived by the soul enjoys "mental" or "shadow" existence, real but weak, on which the "traces" of the external thing (heat from fire, for instance) are not ordered. As the soul grows, what it perceives grows in intensity, until at true intellection "the intellect that perceives is identical in existence and consciousness with the forms" it perceives. Chittick's conclusion: the goal is to see things "as they really are", wherever they stand among the levels, no longer through "the dark glass of sense perception and imagination".
- Reason is a guide to the edge of creation; love carries beyond it; neither replaces the other.
- Self-knowledge is the root science: finding oneself is the fullest being.
- Perception is presence and making; levels of knowing match levels of world.
Looking back: chapters 17 to 19
Rumi, Baba Afdal and Mulla Sadra could hardly be more different in style: a poet, a Persian essayist writing letters to students, and a systematic philosopher. Yet they agree on three points. Reason has two senses, and the higher sense is not opposed to love or vision. The self is the key to everything, because to know is to become: Baba Afdal's soul that finds itself becomes intellect, and Sadra's soul "becomes all things". And knowing is a kind of being: the more one perceives, the more one exists. These agreements prepare the eschatology of chapter 20, where what one has become determines what one meets after death.
Part III. Islamic Philosophy (2): Return, Life and the Goal of Wisdom
Three essays complete the philosophical part: a long survey of Islamic eschatology, a dialogue with phenomenology about life and death, and a statement of why philosophy is the quest for self-knowledge.
20. Eschatology in Islamic thought
The longest essay in the book (about 11,400 words) surveys al-ma'ad, the "Return", always paired with al-mabda', the "Origin": "As He originated you, so you will return" (7:29). Chittick's opening claim is wide: because everything that brings a person to perfection belongs to the Return, jurisprudence, ethics, the Sufi stations and even politics are branches of eschatology. "It is difficult to study anything Islamic without touching upon them."
The creed in outline
He comments on the creed of Najm al-Din Nasafi (d. 537/1142), illustrating each article from Koran and Hadith.
| Article | Key text or saying |
|---|---|
| Grave | Questioning by Munkar and Nakir; "The grave is one of the plots of the Garden or one of the pits of the Fire" |
| Resurrection | Ghazali lists over a hundred names, from the Day of Regret to the Day they shall not speak |
| Weighing, Book | Not a mustard seed's weight is lost; "Your soul suffices you this day as an accounter" (17:14) |
| Questioning | Ibn 'Abbas: not "Did you?" but "Why did you?"; Ja'far: God asks about what He entrusted, not what He decreed |
| Pond, Path | The Kawthar; a bridge "thinner than a hair and sharper than a sword", crossed like lightning or dangling |
| Garden, Fire | Both created now and lasting; detailed Koranic delights and torments |
| Hour | Dajjal, the Beast, Gog and Magog, Jesus, the Mahdi, the sun rising in the west |
Many took this at face value; 'Izz al-Din Kashani still warned against interpreting it "with his weak intellect". But Ghazali had already answered: corporeal details are known by tradition, yet their spiritual realities are "a branch of the knowledge of the spirit's reality", open to insight. And the reality of death depends on knowing the spirit, "which is your own self".
Origin and Return: the circle
Made "upon His own form", man reflects the name Allah and gathers the realities of the cosmos in summary. Existence is pictured as a circle: descent from the Principle through angels, intermediate beings and the elements to the embryo at the lowest point; then ascent, as the human actualizes each point until the Perfect Man stands at the centre, equidistant from all names. Najm al-Din Razi gives five stages (nonexistence in God's knowledge, the world of spirits, union with the body, separation, return to the body), each disclosing other names, from Creator to Slayer and Reviver.
Only those whose hearts embrace all the names recognize God in every form at the resurrection; "He who delimits God ... denies Him in everything other than his own delimitation." For Sadra the soul is "the junction of the two seas", a seed that is mortal in act and intellect in potency. Death, "transferal from one abode to another", comes when the soul has grown independent; and strengthened existence means more intense perception of pain for the wretched as well.
The body and the barzakh
The soul always governs a body, "in this world, in the barzakh, or wherever" (Ibn al-'Arabi). Sadra proves bodily resurrection from the definition of man (who must manifest even the name "Outward") and holds the resurrection body identical with this one because bodies are defined by form, not matter. The barzakh, immaterial yet shaped, "gives meanings corporeal shape and makes sensory objects into subtle realities". There are two: a descending one linking spirit to body, and an ascending one, the "grave", which grows from deeds like fruit. After death man lives in an imaginal body produced by himself, "more strongly substantial ... than material forms". "People are asleep, but when they die, they wake up."
Mercy and wrath
Felicity in the body's company is justice ('adala), kin to equilibrium (i'tidal): perfect balance among opposing traits. Ghazali's image is that inside man's skin are "a pig, a dog, a devil, and a wise man"; the sage must rule. "Assume the character traits of Allah" means actualizing every name: theomorphism (ta'alluh).
Ghazali's four natures and the centre of equilibrium: the Garden is realizing one's form, the Fire is separation from it.
"My mercy takes precedence over My wrath": mercy is the attribute of the Essence, wrath arises only in relation to creatures (Jili). All paths lead to God, but to different names. Niffari: "Unveiling is the Garden of the Garden, veiling the Fire of the Fire." The same divine self-disclosure blesses and chastises; as Ibn al-'Arabi says, the sun that warms one man torments another. Since names of mercy outnumber names of wrath and "Forgiving" appears about a hundred times, many held hell cannot last as torment: chastisement ('adhab) will turn sweet ('adhb).
Dreams, the lesser and greater resurrection
Ghazali's lesser resurrection maps the Hour onto individual death (earth to body, mountains to bones, sun to heart, stars to senses). Baba Tahir: "this world is the next world" for Sufis, whose Scale is the heart. Jili reads the signs of the Hour as stages of the traveler: Dajjal against Jesus is ego against spirit; the Mahdi is the one "possessor of equilibrium".
At the greater resurrection the barzakh, a womb, gives birth; bodies become subtler (fire and air predominate, Razi); "the body is only a mount" (Ghazali); inward becomes outward, and people rise in the form of the trait that ruled them. Sadra makes souls diverge into four genera; the authors insist this is not transmigration. Avicenna suggested that some souls will see what their imaginations were trained to expect, and teased Christians who imagined heaven angelic and joyless. Ghazali's three spiritual fires are separation, shame, and loss of the vision of God. The vision at the Dune of White Musk ranks people by knowledge, not works; Bastami warns that those who enter the market of forms never again visit God.
- Najm al-Din Razi: the same elements, but in this world earth and water predominate and in the next fire and air; "when the form is subtle and luminous, it no longer interferes with the spirit."
- Qunawi: in this world the inward is unlimited and the outward fixed; in paradise "the property of nondelimitation will pertain to the outward dimension, while the property of delimitation will belong to the inward."
- Sadra: identical in form with the earthly body, because a body is defined by form, not matter; the corpse is only the discarded husk.
Ghazali had also drawn a practical lesson from Ja'far's saying on the Questioning: God will ask about "that which He entrusted to them, not that which He decreed for them." Responsibility attaches to freedom, not to destiny, a point the book returns to in the two commands of chapter 26.
The Koran's descriptions as language for all
Many Sufis agreed with Avicenna that the Koranic images need not be read literally. Sultan Walad compares them to telling a child that a woman's lips are like sugar: "what is the relationship between lips and sugar? There is no resemblance at all." The Garden is described in houris, castles and rivers so that it can be understood, though "they are transitory, while it is eternal." Yet Ghazali, speaking as a theologian, insists on both bodily and spiritual delights. The poets supply the psychology. Sana'i: "Your heaven and hell are within yourself: look inside! / See furnaces in your liver, Gardens in your heart." Rumi: "You are your thought, brother, / the rest of you is bones and fiber. / If you think of roses, you are a Rosegarden; / if you think of thorns, you are fuel for the Furnace." Paradise has eight levels and a hundred degrees, and one hadith speaks of "a Garden in which are no houris, castles, milk, or honey; our Lord discloses Himself, laughing."
Creed, scales and the book of deeds
The chapter's creed outline is not ornamental. Origin and Return form a circle: everything comes from God and goes back, and the human being is the traveler who can know that fact. The Scales guarantee that no soul is wronged even by a mustard seed's weight. The Book given in the right or left hand makes the day's reckoning personal: "Read your book! Your soul suffices you this day as an accounter against you" (17:14). Questioning about what people were doing closes the sequence. Chittick's point is that these images are language for all, not only for specialists, and that philosophy and Sufism both climb the same circle when they speak of return.
21. The circle of life
Chittick sets Islamic thought beside the phenomenology of Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, for whom life is the ultimate point of reference. Much of her picture would be familiar to Muslim philosophers, yet they would find her silence "rather deafening" on three points: the real nature of the ultimate reference, the supra-human dimension of human creativity, and the role of death in fulfilling life.
The Islamic starting point is not the world as it appears to a generic "us", since most people are forgetful, but the world as it appears to those who have heard the reminder and remembered. Philosophers and Sufis alike speak "not as theoreticians but as physicians of the soul"; Avicenna named his summa The Healing. Being human makes one receptive to the divine form, not possessed of it: "only when it is bestowed is he in God's form" (Ibn al-'Arabi).
Everything is alive
Real life belongs only to the Real; all other life comes with its opposite. Hence the triad Alive, Life-Giver, Death-Giver. Every divine attribute presupposes life, so the cosmos, which derives from those attributes, must be alive: "what you consider to be inanimate is in fact alive." Death is "the separation of a living, governing thing from a living, governed thing ... merely dismissal from rulership." Lines between living and dead "always have something of the arbitrary about them"; discerning them is discerning the intensity of wujud, Sadra's tashkik. Life is another name for the mercy that embraces all things, and creation is the Breath of the All-Merciful, in which each creature is a word.
The circle is not a past event but an ever-present flight from and return to the Centre.
Traversing the circle
In descent, life stays invisible; at the lowest point, matter, which Sadra calls utterly mean yet the means by which "wujud goes back and returns to perfection", the flow reverses. Life shows itself in minerals, plants and animals, then culminates in the human form, the only vehicle for all its possibilities, where it turns fully inward. Humans look alike on the surface; their real diversity is unseen, and it overflows into arts and cultures. Humans are a novum: active partners, moving "from practice to contemplation".
22. The goal of philosophy
The philosophical life is summed up in "Know yourself". Those who learn things that throw no light on self-understanding "are simply wasting their time." To know wujud qua wujud is to know self qua self, since absolute being is absolute knowledge: the unification of intellecter, intellect and intellected (Sadra), Baba Afdal's "radiance of the Ipseity".
What goes up must have come down
Everyone knows innately that they have "come up" (from womb, childhood, ignorance) and can go higher; education and progress all rest on this. Premodern thought adds a second intuition: "Whatever does not fall from heaven does not rise from earth." Our aspiration proves that something of the "up" already came down to us.
| Premodern myths | Modern myths of evolution and progress | |
|---|---|---|
| Shape | Descent from on high, then return; alpha and omega one | Ascent without prior descent; we are the current omega |
| Guarantee | None: ascent must be striven for; one can drift further away | Impersonal laws push us upward |
| Rationale | Perception of qualities beyond quantity; things as "diaphanous screens" for God's signs | Qualities explained away by reduction to genes, conditioning, particles |
Baba Afdal: the longing to encompass both worlds cannot come from bodily individuals, since not all have it and no individual can encompass another; "it arises from the soul that is radiant with the divine light." Origin and Return are the two movements demanded by tawhid: God as First and Last.
Freedom, virtue and the climb
The compulsory return has carried us from egg through mineral, plant and animal stages to the human; now we are free to continue or to stay, even to develop animal traits "to a degree undreamed of by any non-human animal". Becoming fully intelligent needs discipline like becoming a pianist. The soul has two perfections, theoretical and practical, and neither is reached alone: intelligence cannot be perfected without the virtues of love, compassion, justice and forgiveness.
He rebukes "a certain breed of historian" who treats Muslim borrowing from the Greeks as unreflective collecting. Modern cosmologies "stop short at the surface of reality"; Islamic cosmology concerns depths inseparable from the self. "Theories that purport to provide knowledge divorced from the knowing subject are simply systematic ignorance": useful for power, useless for wisdom.
- Eschatology frames everything: law, ethics and politics serve the Return.
- After death we meet our own attributes; heaven and hell grow from character.
- Mercy precedes wrath; equilibrium is the Garden, dispersion the Fire.
- The whole cosmos is alive; death intensifies consciousness.
Looking back: Part III as a whole
Part III shows Islamic philosophy as Chittick understands it: not a set of abstract arguments borrowed from the Greeks, but a therapy aimed at self-knowledge, using Greek tools for that purpose. Its picture can be summed up in four steps. Being is also finding, so reality is graded by awareness. The human soul is pure potency, able to become anything. What it becomes in this life it meets in the next, in an imaginal world more real than this one. And the whole process is a circle in which life descends, turns at matter, and returns inward through the human heart. The final essay states the moral: knowledge that does not serve this return is "systematic ignorance".
Part IV. Contemporary Issues: War, Nature, Religions, Learning
Four essays bring the tradition to bear on modern questions: war and peace, the environment, the encounter of Islam and China, and the loss of the heart in modern education.
23. The metaphysical roots of war and peace
Religion "does not acknowledge any principles higher than its own, not even the survival of the human race"; asked to help with peace, "it will do so in its own way or not at all." So before asking Muslims for cures, we must hear their diagnosis. Chittick discusses Islam in its founding texts, not what Muslims today think or do.
God is Peace; the world is relative war
Al-Salam, Peace, is a divine name (59:23), a "negative" name of incomparability: God is free of all defect and conflict. Read through the Shahadah: "There is no peace but God." Everything else, being other than God, is relative war and relative peace; its harmony is a sign of God's absolute peace. Conflict is not simply evil, because it can make up an equilibrium we cannot see.
Its roots lie in the divine names. The paired names (Life-Giver and Death-Giver, Exalter and Abaser) must show their properties unequally, or creation would cancel out. The archetype of peace is the unity of the Self; the archetype of war as a positive reality is the multiplicity of names, like colours of one light.
| Horizontal opposition | Vertical opposition | |
|---|---|---|
| Example | Life-Giver / Death-Giver; lions and lambs | Mercy / wrath |
| Distance from God | Both sides equally near: complementary, yin and yang | Mercy nearer; wrath leads to the circumference |
| Command | Creative "Be!": cannot be disobeyed | Religious command "worship none but Him": can be disobeyed |
| Who | All creatures; even angels dispute | Humans and jinn, who are free |
Chittick's image: God is the centre of an infinite circle, chaos its edge.
Corruption and wholesomeness
Only humans can work corruption (fasad); in all fifty Koranic uses, actual corruption comes from human hands (30:41). Its root is shirk, and most often the false god is caprice (hawa): "Have you seen him who has taken his caprice to be his god?" (45:23). Its opposite is salah, wholesomeness, with salihat (wholesome deeds) and sulh, the usual word for peace between nations, literally setting things right. Islam shares a root with salam: submission brings peace with God (salam) and with creatures (sulh).
The Koran's own pattern reinforces the point. The phrase "those who have faith and do wholesome deeds" occurs fifty-three times, and salah with its adjective more than one hundred and twenty times, against fifty uses of corruption. "To Him good words go up, and the wholesome deed, He uplifts it" (35:10). Vertical movement toward God is the only remedy for vertical conflict; "turning toward God", repentance, is named as corruption's cure, and tawhid put into practice is its form. Disobedience harms not only the disobedient but the whole of creation in their care: when people move toward the circumference, "they call it down upon those whom they are supposed to protect, namely the creatures of the natural world", which leads directly into chapter 24.
Jihad rightly understood
"Holy war" is a poor translation: the word was used for nearly any war of a Muslim king, while the ulama often judged such wars illegitimate under strict Shariah rules. Literally jihad is "struggle". Returning from Tabuk, the Prophet said, "We have returned from the lesser struggle to the greater struggle." 'Ali names three kinds: hand, tongue, heart. The inner struggle binds always, the outer depends on circumstance. Ghazali hardly uses jihad in the Ihya but discusses mujahada, its exact synonym, at length.
24. Harmony with the cosmos
Muslim thinkers join international environmental efforts, but "few of them ... pay attention to the root cause of the problems as delineated by their own tradition." The "environment" as a concept arose with modern science; Muslim lands suffer environmental problems not by living their ideals but because Western problems came with Western technology.
God as the environment
The Koranic match for "environment" is muhit, "that which surrounds", from ihata. Most such verses speak of God, who "surrounds all things" (4:126); al-Muhit, the Environer, is a divine name used seven times. "God is our environment." Cosmology pictures the world inside the Footstool, inside the Throne. Our immediate setting is described in paired terms: dunya, "that which is near", against akhira, the next world (time); and earth against heaven (space). Both pairs point to the cosmos, which can be understood only in relation to the Surrounder. Since humans alone upset the balance, an Islamic environmental ethic must begin from Islam's teaching on God, man and cosmos.
| Concept | Koranic basis | Bearing on the environment |
|---|---|---|
| Signs (ayat) | The bees "follow the ways of your Lord" (16:68) | Natural and supernatural are inseparable; nothing is a mere object |
| Trust and names | 33:72; Adam taught all the names | Humans know things through their relation to God; microcosm |
| Subjection (taskhir) | "God has subjected to you all that is in the earth" (22:65) | Power over creation, and so power to destroy it |
| Servanthood | "I created jinn and mankind only to serve Me" (51:56) | Only a servant of God can be a true vicegerent |
Humans alone may refuse to bow (22:18), and that capacity is itself a sign: only a divine image could deny God. The outward cosmos mirrors the inward state of human consciousness; "the 'illness' of one side ... can only be a sign of the illness of the other side," and responsibility lies with the active partner.
25. Stray camels in China
Instead of a historical survey, Chittick asks a theological question: what resources does Islam have for understanding other religions? He argues for inclusivism ("perhaps pluralism is the better term"): Islam can see religious diversity as legitimate, necessary and providential. He declines to exclude the exclusivists, "because, by excluding the exclusivists, I would join them", but finds their view "of no interest". And he insists on starting from first principles, not from agendas set by politicians and media.
Tawhid is universal
The Koran says every community received a messenger and every message was tawhid; so early Muslims felt free to learn from Greek, Iranian and Indian heritages. Two sayings sum it up: "Seek knowledge, even unto China" and "Wisdom is the believer's stray camel; wherever he finds it, he has the most right to it." But first Muslims must inspect their own herds: those who know the diversity of Islamic camels will recognize theirs under Chinese blankets; those who think there is one Islam and all others deviant will not.
Qur'an and furqan
| Qur'an ("gathering") | Furqan ("discernment") | |
|---|---|---|
| Shahadah half | "No god but God": universal | "Muhammad is the messenger of God": particular |
| Theology | Similarity (tashbih), names of beauty and mercy | Incomparability (tanzih), names of majesty and wrath |
| Rooted in | Being, which is one | Knowledge, which distinguishes |
| Favoured by | Many Sufis | Kalam and jurisprudence |
| Tends to | Inclusivism | Exclusivism |
Tawhid already implies both: "No god but God" separates the Real from every false god (and a "god" is whatever one serves, caprice included); yet the unreal is only relatively unreal, so everything shows traces of the Real, signs to be understood. Incomparability and similarity are "the two eyes" for seeing God: far and near at once.
The two eyes map onto the religious sciences. Kalam and jurisprudence stress furqan: the difference between God and world, right and wrong, and so the rights of God over His creation. Many Sufis stress qur'an: God's presence in the world and in the servant, to be found "here and now". Once differentiation is primary, it is easy to conclude that there is one correct way and every other way is false; Islamic history, Chittick notes, "is full of polemics among various schools of thought". The same habit, turned outward, produces exclusivism toward other religions.
Human ambiguity and the precedence of mercy
Other things are what they are; "human beings are what they are, but they can and should be otherwise." People live predominantly in furqan, distant and forgetful; guidance asks them to surrender freely and so actualize the similarity latent in them. Furqan exists for the sake of qur'an: knowledge differentiates, but Being, which precedes knowledge, unites, and the Return gathers everything back.
26. In search of the lost heart
The title essay comes from Chittick's work with Sachiko Murata (since 1996) on Chinese-speaking Muslims of the seventeenth century, who wove Islamic and Confucian teaching into "an almost seamless garment". He begins with Mencius (d. 289 BCE): "The way of learning is nothing other than to seek for the lost heart."
Learning and information
"Learning" (xue) means gaining understanding, not facts. We have unprecedented access to information, yet modern education points us to careers and normalcy and "cannot tell us why we should care". Its old name for becoming human was the Great Learning (daxue), which today, ironically, means "university".
The heart (xin) is not the seat of feeling opposed to the rational mind. In traditional usage it is intuitive, unifying intelligence, the point of contact of divine and human; rational analysis belongs only to its outer engagements. Wang Yangming calls it "spiritual clarity". Mencius laments that people chase lost chickens and dogs but not their lost heart, which is ren, humaneness: "Ren is man's heart, and righteousness his road."
Three principles in Chinese dress
| Islamic principle | How Chinese Muslims expressed it |
|---|---|
| Tawhid | Accepted the impersonal Supreme Principle; "There is none powerful but God" means all power is a sign. No Deism, "no gaps in the divine omnipresence" |
| Prophecy | Prophets called "sages" (sheng); Lu Jiuyuan: sages everywhere "share this heart, they share this principle" |
| Return | Found weakest in Chinese texts; the most influential translation was not the Koran but Razi's Mirsad al-'ibad |
| Divine Spirit | "Mandate of Heaven" (tianming) |
| Descending and ascending arcs | "Former Heaven" (xiantian) and "Latter Heaven" (houtian) |
| Shariah and Tariqah | "Propriety" (li) and the Way (dao) |
Chittick names believers who think the Big Bang or evolution sufficient to explain the world as unwitting Deists; Islam knows no clockwork universe.
Adam, the names and two commands
Vicegerency answers "Why do we exist?". God taught Adam "the names, all of them": not encyclopedias but understanding, the Great Learning that gives every small learning its place. Bees know flowers, frogs know bugs; Adam knows everything, including God. That knowledge grounds his freedom. His slip was forgetting, quickly repented: "His father's tradition is once" (Shams-i Tabrizi).
Love, propriety and the original heart
Most Sufis see the voluntary return as the path of love, with its protocols: "If you love God, follow me, and God will love you" (3:31). God loves everyone, even those in hell, but that does not mean they are with Him. When God loves a servant He becomes "his hearing through which he hears, his sight through which he sees". Confucius: "Discipline yourself by observing propriety." The lost heart is fitra, the divine form breathed into Adam. Learning is the reversal of the flow, from outside to inside; it becomes binding at puberty, and "Knowledge without practice is a tree without fruit."
Confucius's stages (Analects 2:4) as Chittick reads them: puberty, prophetic maturity at forty, and finally the two commands made one.
At fifty the seeker knows the creative command too; at seventy "there is no longer any distinction to be drawn between the prescriptive command and the creative command", and God has become his hearing and sight. The Great Learning closes the book: from the Son of Heaven to the commoners, cultivating the personal life is the root, and "There is never a case when the root is in disorder and yet the branches are in order."
Adam's forgetting and the habit of return
Adam was the first vicegerent, prophet and sage, and also the first "sinner": he approached the tree, but the Koran gives his excuse, "He forgot" (20:115), for "Man was created weak" (4:28). Asked why, Adam and Eve at once recognized the mistake, asked forgiveness and were forgiven; "That was the end of their forgetfulness." Hence Shams's rebuke to a seeker who kept slipping: "His father's tradition is once." Chittick reads the story not as original sin but as the pattern of every return: forgetting, recognition, turning back. Freedom is what makes the pattern possible. No one denies it "without living in contradiction", and it was Adam's sense of responsibility that drove him to seek forgiveness. Learning, in this light, is the repeated recovery of what is forgotten, and the Prophet's own prayer, "My Lord, increase me in knowledge" (20:114), shows that the recovery never ends: "If the greatest of the sages had to pray for increase in knowledge, what about the rest of us?"
- Peace in the world follows peace with God; jihad is first the greater, inner struggle.
- God is our environment; ecological disorder mirrors inner disorder.
- Mercy's precedence grounds inclusivism: wisdom is the believer's stray camel.
- Education that ignores the heart produces information without understanding.
Why the title essay names a modern loss
Chittick's charge against modern schooling is precise. We have unprecedented access to information and little sense of what it is for. Premodern learning aimed at understanding the big questions: why we exist, what a human being is for. In Chinese terms that aim was the Great Learning (daxue), a word that now names the university. The irony is deliberate. Career fitness and conventional normalcy are not answers to those questions; they are what remains when the questions are dropped.
The lost heart of the title is the organ that can know God and therefore know what knowledge is for. Recovering it does not mean rejecting skill; it means subordinating skill to the human task the Chinese Muslims framed as becoming fully human, and that Ibn al-'Arabi and Rumi framed as realizing the divine form in Adam. The rest of the essay translates that task into Confucian vocabulary without leaving the Islamic map.
Looking back: Part IV as a whole
The four contemporary essays share a single argument. Each refuses to treat a modern problem "on its own level". War is traced to the soul's war with God; ecological disorder to the failure of servanthood; exclusivism to an overemphasis on discernment over gathering; the emptiness of modern learning to the loss of the heart. The diagnosis is sweeping but consistent: every outward order depends on an inward root.
Synthesis
Twenty-six essays, one picture. This part gathers what the book teaches as a whole, the frameworks it offers, where it is open to challenge, the people who fill it, and where it touches present-day work.
Key Takeaways
- Religion has three layers. Works (islam), faith (iman) and perfection (ihsan) belong together; law, theology and Sufism each tend one layer, and trouble begins when one claims to be the whole (ch 1).
- Faith is knowledge, not opinion. Chittick reads iman as cognitive commitment, closer to certainty than to belief in the weak modern sense (ch 1).
- The body is part of the path. The prayer's standing, bowing, prostration and sitting map the soul's journey; ascent and resurrection are bodily (ch 2, 20).
- (ch 3).
- Spirituality crosses sectarian lines. A Sunni Sufi text could become Shi'ite devotion; polemic is less porous than prayer (ch 4).
- Kernel and husk. The poets were pluralist in the kernel, the domain of intoxication, and exclusivist in the husk, the domain of sobriety. Neither cancels the other (ch 5).
- Ecstasy does not excuse practice. Shams, the wildest Sufi of legend, pressed "following" the Prophet above all (ch 6).
- We see what we love. Scripture is a mirror; method begins by negating our images of God (ch 7).
- Watch who coined a label. "Oneness of Being" became a slogan largely through critics; read terms in their users' hands (ch 8).
- Parallels are not influence. Claims that Ibn al-'Arabi shaped Rumi need formal evidence (ch 9).
- Knowledge is judged by its fruit. Useful knowledge serves the soul's final happiness; realization joins knowing a thing with giving it its due (ch 10).
- Descent is already ascent. Qunawi's circle makes the human journey one movement in which every borrowed trust is returned (ch 11).
- Love and knowledge are partners. Farghani: love unites, knowledge discerns; balance replaces either/or (ch 12).
- Man is the eye of unity in multiplicity. "Only through man does God gaze upon unity in multiplicity" (ch 13).
- Oneness and law together. Khwaja Khurd and the Indian school kept radical oneness with strict Shariah and ethics (ch 14, 16).
- The faculties are one self. The soul-spirit debate ends: "all of this had been I" (ch 15).
- Reason has two senses. Partial intellect is a wooden leg; universal intellect is the guide to the edge of creation, and love carries beyond (ch 17).
- To be is to find. Baba Afdal: the soul is potential finding, intellect the self found; whatever exists from itself is secure from annihilation (ch 18).
- Perception is presence and making. Sadra: the soul is a maker of forms, and becomes what it knows; levels of perception match levels of world (ch 19).
- Eschatology frames everything. Law, ethics and politics are branches of the Return (ch 20).
- We meet ourselves after death. "Man finds nothing but his own attributes"; heaven and hell grow from character (ch 20).
- Mercy precedes wrath. Mercy is the divine nature; wrath is a relation to some creatures. Chastisement may turn sweet (ch 20, 23, 25).
- Everything is alive. Death is dismissal from rulership, and afterwards consciousness intensifies (ch 21).
- What goes up must have come down. Aspiration proves a prior descent; modern myths of progress deny it (ch 22).
- Knowledge divorced from the knower is "systematic ignorance". Useful for power, useless for wisdom (ch 22).
- There is no peace but God. Peace with God requires war on caprice; the greater struggle is inward (ch 23).
- God is our environment. Ecological disorder mirrors inward disorder; only a servant can be a true vicegerent (ch 24).
- Wisdom is the believer's stray camel. The precedence of mercy grounds inclusivism; Muslims must first know the diversity of their own herds (ch 25).
- Two commands. The creative command cannot be disobeyed; the prescriptive can, and following it is the voluntary return (ch 26).
- Learning is recovering the lost heart. The Great Learning is becoming human; information without understanding misses the point (ch 26).
Reading the Parts Together
| Theme | Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Human being | Worshipper whose body prays | Perfect Man, mirror of all names | Soul as potency that becomes intellect | Vicegerent and servant |
| Knowledge | Faith as certainty | Realization; useful knowledge | Being as finding; self-knowledge | Great Learning against information |
| Diversity | Kernel and husk | Oneness and manyness | Levels of world | Qur'an and furqan |
| Death | Bodily resurrection | Return of trusts | Barzakh, imaginal body | Return voluntary or compulsory |
| Method | Read rituals as maps | Read terms in context | Read philosophy as therapy | Begin from first principles |
The book's single model: the heart, made by one command and addressed by another, chooses its direction on the circle.
Five Threads Through the Book
1. The heart as the organ of knowing
The title essay names the heart, but the heart is present from the first chapter. In Part I it is the seat of ihsan, worship "as if you see Him", and the place where tears begin. In Part II it becomes the "receptacle for every form", the faculty that the Indian handbooks place above reason and imagination because it holds both. In Part III the philosophers call the same capacity intellect in act, the self that finds itself; Sadra's soul "becomes all things" and Baba Afdal's "radiance of the Ipseity" is its full light. Part IV restores the older word and the Chinese one, xin, and insists it is not the seat of feeling opposed to thinking. Across all four parts the heart is intuitive, unifying intelligence; rational analysis is one of its outer functions. Reading the book with this in mind clears up a modern confusion that Chittick returns to often: the choice between "head" and "heart" is a false one, because the tradition never divided them that way.
2. Mercy before wrath
The hadith "My mercy takes precedence over My wrath" appears in the eschatology survey, in the essay on war, in the argument for inclusivism and, in another form, in the Indian treatises on oneness. Chittick uses it as a structural principle. Mercy belongs to God's nature; wrath is a relation to creatures who have turned away. So the names of beauty gather and the names of majesty separate, and gathering has the last word. The principle does real work in the book: it explains why hell's torment may turn sweet, why the world's conflict serves an equilibrium we cannot see, why every nation must have received a messenger, and why the heart's choice is not between two equal powers but between moving toward the centre or drifting toward the edge.
3. The circle and the two returns
Qunawi's "circle of ascent", Sadra's descending and ascending arcs, the Neoplatonic emanation in Baba Afdal, the Chinese Muslims' Former and Latter Heaven: the book offers the same diagram many times. Everything comes from the One and goes back. What makes the human case special is that the return has two modes. The compulsory return carries everyone to death and judgement whatever they choose. The voluntary return, by knowledge and practice, lets a person arrive "happy with the journey". Chapter 26 identifies this voluntary return with Mencius's dao of learning; chapter 22 with philosophy; chapter 23 with the greater struggle. The circle is therefore not fatalism. It is a map on which each person must choose a direction.
4. Realization rather than imitation
Throughout the essays Chittick values tahqiq, realization, above taqlid, imitation. Ibn al-'Arabi's knowledge that "benefits" is knowledge that changes the knower and is then put to work (ch 10). Shams's demand to follow the Prophet is not imitation in the weak sense but a discipline through which the follower comes to see for himself (ch 6). Baba Afdal teaches students to seek water from the spring of their own intelligence (ch 18). Ghazali opens the afterlife to "spiritual insight" while keeping its corporeal details for tradition (ch 20). Realization never discards practice; it gives practice its meaning.
5. Diversity held within unity
Kernel and husk (ch 5), oneness and manyness (ch 12), unity in multiplicity (ch 13), levels of world (ch 19), horizontal opposition among the names (ch 23), qur'an and furqan (ch 25): the book is full of ways to keep difference and unity together without letting either swallow the other. Chittick's inclusivism grows from this. Diversity of religions is "necessary and providential" because the one message of tawhid must take many particular forms. But he will not erase the husk: the Shariah, the specific practice of each tradition, is how the kernel is reached.
Chittick's Method in Brief
| Habit | Where it shows | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Let the texts speak at length | Every chapter | Readers meet sources directly, not only summaries |
| Translate key terms by their roots | wujud as finding, muhit as environment, sulh as setting right | Recovers meanings that standard renderings hide |
| Test labels and influence claims | Ch 8, 9 | Guards against reading later polemic into earlier authors |
| Begin from first principles | Ch 23, 25 | Refuses to let current agendas define "Islam" |
| Read philosophy as therapy | Ch 18, 21, 22 | Shows why premodern arguments aimed at transformation |
| Compare across civilizations | Ch 21, 26 | Places Islamic thought beside phenomenology and Confucianism |
Questions for Reflection
- Chapter 1 divides religion into works, faith and perfection. Which of the three does your own field of work tend to neglect, and what follows from that?
- The Persian poets were pluralist in the kernel and exclusivist in the husk (ch 5). Can one hold firm commitments and real openness at the same time? What would that look like in a team or organization?
- Shams insisted that ecstasy never excused abandoning the Prophet's practice (ch 6). What is the equivalent danger for people who believe they have outgrown rules?
- Baba Afdal defines being as finding (ch 18). If awareness is the measure of reality, what does that imply about how you spend your attention?
- Sadra says the soul is a maker of forms, not a wax tablet (ch 19). How does this change the way we think about media, images and habits?
- The eschatology essay claims that after death we meet only our own attributes (ch 20). Read as a psychological claim rather than a doctrine, is it convincing?
- Chapter 22 contrasts myths of progress with myths of descent and return. Which assumptions of your own fit each pattern?
- Chapter 23 distinguishes complementary conflict from conflict that moves away from the centre. Give an example of each from public life.
- Chittick says ecological crisis reflects a crisis in the human self (ch 24). What would an environmental policy built on that premise include?
- In chapter 25, mercy's precedence grounds the claim that saving wisdom exists outside Islam. Are there equivalent arguments in other traditions you know?
- Mencius says people chase lost chickens but not their lost heart (ch 26). What is the "lost heart" in modern education, and could it be recovered inside a university?
- Which single framework from the table above would most change how you work if you took it seriously for a year?
Frameworks and Mental Models
| Framework | Source | What it does | Use it for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Three dimensions (islam, iman, ihsan) | Hadith of Gabriel, ch 1 | Separates action, understanding and intention without dividing them | Checking which layer a dispute is really about |
| Kernel and husk | Persian poets, ch 5 | Holds universal truth and particular form at once | Keeping conviction without contempt |
| Incomparability and similarity | Kalam and Sufism, ch 25 | "Two eyes" for seeing the Real as far and near | Avoiding both cold distance and easy familiarity |
| Circle of descent and ascent | Qunawi, Sadra, ch 11, 21 | Turns history into a return | Seeing growth as recovery, not invention |
| Love and knowledge | Farghani, ch 12 | Unification and discernment as partners | Balancing empathy and judgement |
| Being as finding | Baba Afdal, ch 18 | Ranks things by awareness | Treating attention as the measure of reality |
| Levels of perception and world | Sadra, ch 19 | Sense, imagination, intellect correspond to three worlds | Not reducing knowing to measurement |
| Horizontal and vertical opposition | Ch 23 | Distinguishes complementary tension from movement away from the centre | Telling healthy conflict from corruption |
| Qur'an and furqan | Ch 25 | Gathering and discernment; the first has precedence | Ordering inclusion and judgement |
| Creative and prescriptive command | Ch 26 | Divides what we cannot change from what we choose | Locating responsibility |
| Confucius's stages | Analects 2:4, ch 26 | A lifelong curriculum ending in heart and Heaven agreeing | Thinking of learning across decades |
A closer look
- Harmonizing. Chittick tends to draw widely separated authors into one picture (most visibly in the eschatology survey, ch 20). Real disagreements, for example over the duration of hell or the nature of the resurrection body, are reported but not weighed.
- Polemic against modernity. In chapters 21 to 26 "scientism", "evolution" and "modern education" stand for ideologies more than for the sciences, and scientific objections are not engaged. The critique is pointed but one-sided.
- Ideals, not practice. The essays on war, ecology and religions present principles drawn from texts and say openly that they leave application to others. Readers looking for legal detail or policy will not find it.
- Translation choices. Many of Chittick's renderings ("disengagement" for tajarrud, "sense intuition" for wahm, "wholesome" for salih) are arguments in themselves. They clarify his reading, and readers comparing other translations should note them.
- Sources and attributions. Some texts are uncertain: Shams's Maqalat are notes by several hands (ch 6); one hadith qudsi is introduced as "ostensibly" one (ch 15); the side-by-side Arabic texts that would settle the Shadhili case are not printed (ch 4).
- Repetition. As a collection of independent articles the book restates core ideas (mercy's precedence, the names, the circle) many times. That makes it a good reference but a slow continuous read.
On the other side of the ledger, the collection is unusually careful with sources, quotes them at length, and is honest about its own stance: Chittick calls the inclusivist argument of chapter 25 a theological proposal and refuses to exclude the exclusivists. His own corollary on weeping in chapter 1 is a reminder that he writes from sympathy, not detachment.
Lines Worth Keeping
- "The way of learning is nothing other than to seek for the lost heart." (Mencius, ch 26)
- "Only through man does God gaze upon unity in multiplicity." (Jami, ch 13)
- "What is dead by nature comes to life through the anima, so how can what is alive by nature come to die?" (Baba Afdal, ch 18)
- "When the soul becomes an intellect, it becomes all things." (Sadra, ch 19)
- "Unveiling is the Garden of the Garden, veiling the Fire of the Fire." (Niffari, ch 20)
- "Whatever does not fall from heaven does not rise from earth." (Baba Afdal, ch 22)
- "Wisdom is the believer's stray camel; wherever he finds it, he has the most right to it." (ch 25)
- "There is never a case when the root is in disorder and yet the branches are in order." (The Great Learning, ch 26)
Who's Who
| Person | Dates | Role in the book |
|---|---|---|
| William C. Chittick | b. 1943 | Author; scholar of Ibn al-'Arabi, Rumi and Islamic philosophy |
| Mohammed Rustom, Atif Khalil, Kazuyo Murata | Editors of the volume | |
| Sachiko Murata | Chittick's collaborator on Chinese Muslim texts (ch 26) | |
| Ibn al-'Arabi | d. 638/1240 | Centre of Part II |
| Sadr al-Din Qunawi | d. 673/1274 | Philosophical systematizer of Ibn al-'Arabi's school (ch 11) |
| Sa'id al-Din Farghani | d. 699/1300 | Qunawi's student; oneness and manyness (ch 12) |
| 'Abd al-Rahman Jami | d. 898/1492 | Persian poet and expositor of the Perfect Man (ch 13) |
| Jalal al-Din Rumi | d. 672/1273 | Poet of love; reason's wooden leg (ch 9, 17) |
| Shams-i Tabrizi | disappeared 643/1246 | Rumi's teacher; champion of "following" (ch 6) |
| Khwaja Khurd | b. 1010/1601 | Indian Naqshbandi author of two treatises (ch 14) |
| Baba Afdal Kashani | d. c. 606/1210 | Persian philosopher of self-knowledge (ch 18, 22) |
| Mulla Sadra | d. 1050/1640 | "Transcendent philosophy"; perception and resurrection (ch 19, 20) |
| Avicenna | d. 428/1037 | Philosopher; denied unification of intellect and intelligible (ch 19, 20) |
| Abu Hamid al-Ghazali | d. 505/1111 | Theologian; lesser resurrection, four natures (ch 20, 23) |
| Najm al-Din Razi | d. 654/1256 | Author of The Path of the Servants, read in Chinese (ch 20, 26) |
| 'Aziz al-Din Nasafi | d. before 699/1300 | Sufi of human malleability (ch 20) |
| Sana'i, Sultan Walad, Niffari, Jili, 'Ayn al-Qudat | Various | Voices on the afterlife and the inward Return (ch 20) |
| Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka | Phenomenologist of life, foil in ch 21 | |
| Pierre Hadot | Historian of philosophy as "spiritual exercise" (ch 18) | |
| Confucius, Mencius | d. 479 and 289 BCE | Sages of the Great Learning and the lost heart (ch 26) |
| Wang Yangming, Lu Jiuyuan | d. 1529, 1192 | Neo-Confucians on the heart and the sages (ch 26) |
Glossary of Key Terms
Terms as used in this book, with brief meanings and the chapters where they matter most.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 'adala, i'tidal | Justice and equilibrium; balance among opposing traits, the soul's practical perfection (ch 20) |
| akhira | The next world; correlative of dunya |
| 'alam | World; from the root of 'ilm, "that by means of which one knows" (ch 19) |
| amana (Trust) | What God offered to heaven, earth and mountains and man carried (33:72) |
| barzakh | Isthmus; the imaginal world between death and resurrection, "the junction of the two seas" (ch 20) |
| Breath of the All-Merciful | Ibn al-'Arabi's image of creation as divine life articulated into words (ch 21) |
| creative and prescriptive command | "Be!", which cannot be disobeyed, and the guidance of prophets, which can (ch 23, 26) |
| dao | Way; for Chinese Muslims also the Tariqah (ch 26) |
| daxue | The Great Learning: becoming fully human; now the word for university (ch 26) |
| dhihn | Mind: the soul's potency to acquire forms not yet attained (ch 19) |
| dhikr | Remembrance of God, answering the prophets' reminder |
| disengagement (tajarrud) | Freedom from matter together with intensified existence and awareness; not "abstraction" (ch 19) |
| dunya | This world, "that which is near"; what draws away from God (ch 23, 24) |
| fasad | Corruption of the earth, always the work of human hands (ch 23) |
| fitra | Original human nature, the divine form in Adam; the lost heart (ch 26) |
| furqan | Discernment, separation; one of the Koran's names (ch 25) |
| hasti and yaft | Being and finding: Baba Afdal's Persian unpacking of wujud (ch 18) |
| hawa | Caprice, self-will; the commonest false god (ch 23, 25) |
| hudur | Presence; Sadra's word for perception as existence for the perceiver (ch 19) |
| idrak | Perception in the widest sense: encounter and arrival (ch 19) |
| ihsan | Doing what is beautiful, worship "as if you see Him"; the third dimension (ch 1) |
| iman | Faith as knowing commitment; the second dimension (ch 1) |
| islam | Submission; practice; root shared with salam, peace (ch 1, 23) |
| jihad, mujahada | Struggle; the lesser outward and the greater inward struggle (ch 23) |
| kernel and husk | Universal truth and particular form in the Persian poets (ch 5) |
| khalifa | Vicegerent, God's representative on earth (ch 24, 26) |
| li | Propriety, ritual; for Chinese Muslims the Sunnah (ch 26) |
| al-mabda' and al-ma'ad | The Origin and the Return (ch 20, 22) |
| muhit | The Environer; divine name meaning "He who surrounds" (ch 24) |
| nafs | Soul or self; in Baba Afdal khwud, potential finding (ch 18) |
| Perfect Man | The human who actualizes all the divine names in balance (ch 13, 20) |
| qur'an | Recitation and gathering; the Koran as bringing all wisdom together (ch 25) |
| quwwa | Faculty and potentiality at once: "potency" (ch 19) |
| ren | Humaneness; Mencius's "man's heart" (ch 26) |
| salah, salihat | Wholesomeness, wholesome deeds; opposite of corruption (ch 23) |
| salam | Peace; a divine name (59:23) |
| sense intuition (wahm) | Perceiving a universal meaning in a particular (ch 19) |
| shirk | Associating others with God (ch 23) |
| sulh | Peace between parties; literally setting things right (ch 23) |
| tahqiq and taqlid | Realization and imitation |
| tanzih and tashbih | Incomparability and similarity, the "two eyes" (ch 25) |
| tashkik | Gradation of existence in Sadra (ch 21) |
| taskhir | Subjection of creation to humans (ch 24) |
| tawhid | Asserting God's unity; first principle of Islamic thought |
| tianming | Mandate of Heaven; for Chinese Muslims the First Spirit or creative command (ch 26) |
| unification of intellect and intelligible | Sadra's thesis that knower and known become one (ch 19) |
| wahdat al-wujud | "Oneness of Being"; a label with a contested history (ch 8) |
| wujud | Existence and finding: being that is also awareness |
| wujud dhihni | Mental existence, a shadow of external existence (ch 19) |
| xiantian and houtian | Former and Latter Heaven: descending and ascending arcs (ch 26) |
| xin | Heart: unitary intelligence, the seat of personhood (ch 26) |
About this book
In Search of the Lost Heart: Explorations in Islamic Thought by William C. Chittick, 2012. 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.
Insight Editions · rajeshrmahapatra.com/insight-editions