Insight Editions · No. 159
Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul
The Pertinence of Islamic Cosmology in the Modern World
William C. Chittick
William C. Chittick argues that Islamic intellectual tradition links knowledge of the cosmos with knowledge of the soul, contrasting spiritual realization with modern scientific thought.
A study guide to Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul by William C. Chittick. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
Overview
William C. Chittick spent forty years translating Rumi, Ibn al-Arabi, Qunawi, Kashani and Mulla Sadra and, as he says, letting them "do the talking". In Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul (Oneworld, 2007) he speaks for himself. Seven essays, most first given as lectures, ask one question: does the Islamic intellectual tradition still have anything to say to a world run on modern science? His answer is yes, and the case rests on a single distinction between two ways of knowing.
The book is short and argumentative. It is not a history of Islamic science, and it does not survey cosmological doctrines. It is a diagnosis. Modern people, Muslims included, have swapped one kind of knowledge for another without noticing, and Chittick wants to show what was lost. Transmitted knowledge is what you learn from others: language, law, history, and, he insists, nearly all of modern science as most people hold it. Intellectual knowledge is what you can only find in yourself, as you find that two plus two equals four. The old masters called the first taqlid (imitation) and the second tahqiq (realization). Everything else in the book follows from that pairing.
Argument Map
Chapter Map
| Edition part | Book chapter | Pages | Core move |
|---|---|---|---|
| Part 1 | Introduction; 1. A Vanishing Heritage | vii-21 | Two kinds of knowledge; the gods of modernity |
| Part 2 | 2. Intellectual Knowledge | 23-38 | Four domains, ten findings, a visitor from the past |
| Part 3 | 3. The Rehabilitation of Thought | 39-57 | Wisdom versus science; takthir without tawhid |
| Part 4 | 4. Beyond Ideology | 59-74 | Dogma, absoluteness, the two eyes of the heart |
| Part 5 | 5. The Unseen Men | 75-108 | Nasr, naming, a living universe, the hidden hierarchy |
| Part 6 | 6. The Anthropocosmic Vision | 109-132 | Why modern science did not arise in Islam; the soul |
| Part 7 | 7. The Search for Meaning | 133-149 | Subject and object; the standpoint of no standpoint |
Page numbers follow the book's contents page. The index in this copy uses a different pagination and should not be trusted for page references.
Ten Ideas to Carry Away
- There are two kinds of knowledge, and they need different methods: imitation suits the transmitted kind, realization the intellectual kind.
- Most modern science, for most people, is transmitted knowledge. It rests on consensus and on trust in experts.
- Modernity is takthir, "making many": a world of countless gods, some of them hiding behind harmless words like development and information.
- Compound ignorance is not knowing that you do not know, and it is the first thing to cure.
- The old sciences had different goals. Calling them failed precursors of modern science misreads them.
- Multiplicity is not the enemy. Takthir is legitimate when it serves tawhid, the assertion of unity.
- Reason and imagination are two eyes. Ibn al-Arabi asks the heart to use both, or fall into atheism on one side and idolatry on the other.
- Names have consequences. How a culture names the world decides how it treats the world.
- Cosmos and soul are one organism with two faces. Studying one without the other distorts both.
- The self cannot be defined, and its freedom from every fixed standpoint is the goal of the whole tradition.
Reading Paths
Part 1. A Vanishing Heritage
The Introduction and Chapter One set the terms. Chittick defines two ways of knowing, explains why one of them is disappearing, and names the forces that replace it: a crowd of modern "gods" served by experts who play the role once played by the ulama.
The Author's Starting Point
Chittick began studying Islamic thought forty years before the Introduction, which is dated Stony Brook University, September 2005. A junior year at the American University of Beirut drew him in, and he learned Arabic and Persian because there was no other way past a superficial acquaintance. For most of his career he translated. Here he applies the material to new questions, chiefly the place of science in the modern mind.
He is blunt about the state of his subject. The intellectual approach he describes "has been moribund for over a century." Traditional schools that asked students to give their lives to knowledge and virtue have almost vanished, replaced by "theological" schools that, in his phrase, "churn out zealots and ideologues." The first four chapters deal with obstacles to recovery; the last three present the teachings themselves. All but Chapter Five began as lectures, and the first three were addressed to Muslim audiences, which explains their sharper Islamic vocabulary.
Two Ways of Knowing
Transmitted knowledge has to be passed down; the only way to learn it is from someone else. Intellectual knowledge cannot be handed over, though teachers can point the way; you find it within yourself, by training the mind or, as the texts often say, "polishing the heart." Mathematics is the standard illustration. Nobody says two plus two equals four because the authorities say so.
The pairing is not a ranking of religion against reason. Both kinds are essential to any religion. The intellectual masters held that imitating others in intellectual matters is the status of a beginner, while imitating the Qur'an and the Prophet in transmitted matters is the right path. Trouble begins only when one kind is mistaken for the other.
The ulama themselves concede the point when they say that faith based on imitation is unacceptable to God. Someone who believes only because his parents told him to would, by the same logic, disbelieve if told to.
Why People Must Think
Why bother with the intellectual tradition at all? The Muslim answer, Chittick says, is that people must think because they are thinking beings, and the Qur'an repeatedly commands them to use their intelligence. But God does not tell them what to think, since that would make hearsay compulsory in intellectual matters and defeat the purpose of having minds. Anyone with the capacity to reflect on God, the universe and the soul has the duty to do so.
The goal of Islam, in his summary, is to bring people into harmony with the way things actually are. Everyone returns to God in any case; the question is how. The one principle all schools agree on is tawhid, "asserting the unity of God", expressed in the first half of the Shahadah: "There is no god but God." Differences arise over consequences, and those depend on which divine names one dwells on: lawgiver, wrathful, merciful, beautiful.
The Current Situation
Chittick declines to retell the familiar story of decline. He assumes it and asks what the tradition still offers. The obstacle is that modern scholarship treats intellectual knowledge as one more kind of transmitted knowledge, a store of historical information. He recalls a Tehran professor who said of his young colleagues that "they know everything one can possibly know about a text, except what it says."
Even the argument that science reveals God's wonders gets short shrift. One does not need physics to see the signs of God in nature; the Prophet called that kind of understanding the "religion of old women", and it needs no training.
The Gods of Modernity
Chittick's sharpest coinage is takthir, the literal opposite of tawhid. Tawhid means making things one; takthir means making things many. He avoids the word shirk (associating others with God) because it is too emotionally charged. Modern life has no single centre or goal, and a god, in his definition, is whatever gives meaning and orientation to life. Modernity has many.
Some of these gods are obvious: freedom, equality, evolution, progress, science, medicine, nationalism, democracy. The most dangerous are hardest to recognize. Here he leans on Uwe Poerksen's Plastic Words, subtitled The Tyranny of a Modular Language.
| Feature of a "plastic word" | Chittick's theological reading |
|---|---|
| No definition, many connotations, an aura of goodness | A god whose name cannot be questioned |
| Sounds scientific, so carries authority | Borrows the prestige of the god Science |
| Turns something vague into a limitless ideal | Awakens endless needs; people feel "poor and needy" toward it |
| Only experts can say how to reach the ideal | Experts become ulama; their pronouncements, fatwas; their consensus, ijma |
| Makes older words look backward | Worship of the new gods becomes a mark of enlightenment |
His examples include care, communication, consumption, development, education, information, standard of living, management, planning, production, resource, service, system and welfare. Poerksen counts at least thirty shared traits; the key one is that they have no definition. Poerksen calls them tyrants, and Chittick notes that "tyrant" translates the divine name jabbar, which becomes a vice when creatures claim it.
The striking claim is about Muslims. Most Muslim thinkers, he says, do not question these gods; "they debate over the best way to serve them." Many believe Islam can adopt the technology and expertise of the West while escaping its social breakdown. He thinks attempts to impose an Islamic order through the modern state show the opposite: such a society can become another version of modern totalitarianism.
The Rejection of Tradition
The only dogma accepted everywhere in the modern world, Chittick argues, is the rejection of tradition. Descartes, Rousseau, Marx and Freud served different gods but agreed the old ones were useless. God is qadim, eternal; the modern gods must be new, and one of them is called Originality. Fashion "mujtahids" issue new rulings every year.
Muslims who reject their own intellectual history while keeping the Qur'an and Sunnah are, in his view, selective imitators: "If Einstein said it, it must be true," but if al-Ghazali or Mulla Sadra said it, it cannot be, because it is not scientific.
Part 2. Intellectual Knowledge
Chapter Two fills in the content of the intellectual tradition: what it tried to know, the ten points on which its masters agreed, and how one of them would react if he could visit us.
Consensus Is Not Knowledge
If readers remember nothing else, Chittick says, they should remember that intellectual knowledge is reached by tahqiq: knowing things by verifying their truth for oneself. Knowledge based on authorities is imitative, whether the authorities are Moses, Jesus and Muhammad or Darwin, Marx and Einstein.
There is no consensus (ijma) in the intellectual disciplines. The truth of tawhid does not depend on the agreement of the ulama, any more than a mathematical formula could be established by vote. This leads to one of the book's most provocative claims: modern science, because it is built on consensus, is fundamentally a transmitted science. Scientists do not verify most of what they know; they accept it from their own authorities. The great breakthroughs come from flashes of intuition that may resemble the Sufi notion of unveiling (kashf), but most scientists play the role of "clerks, clerics, and workaday mullahs." At best they are scientific mujtahids who apply known laws to new cases.
What the Tradition Tried to Know
The aim was never to gather facts or build a database. It was to refine understanding: for seekers to "train their minds and polish their hearts" until one could know everything that can be known with certainty. Four domains counted as proper fields of realization.
| Domain | Question | Typical names |
|---|---|---|
| Metaphysics | What is the first and final reality? | God, Being, the Necessary, the Real |
| Cosmology | Where does the universe come from and where does it go? | Origin and Return |
| Spiritual psychology | What is a human being and how does one become fully human? | nafs, soul, self |
| Ethics | How should one act toward God, cosmos and others? | virtues, character traits |
The centre of all four was the self. Only the soul can come to know God and the cosmos, and it does so by developing its inner power, called intellect ('aql) or heart (qalb). You cannot know yourself by asking experts. The maxim "He who knows himself knows his Lord", attributed to the Prophet or to Ali, was taken seriously. A soul that fully knows itself becomes an "actual intellect" ('aql bi'l-fi'l), perfect in both vision and virtue.
Avicenna is the philosophical example. In a passage from al-Najat and al-Shifa, he says the perfection of the rational soul is to become "an intellective world" in which the form of everything is represented, until she "turns into an intelligible world, parallel with all the existent world." All four domains appear in that single sentence.
Intellect and the Fitra
The intellect is the soul that has realized its full potential. As potential, it is the fitra, the innate disposition; in Qur'anic terms it is the self of Adam, to whom God "taught all the names" (2:31). The problem is forgetfulness. Until the soul actualizes its fitra, it cannot properly be called an intellect. To the degree it does, it sees things in their roots, as God knows them, rather than "staring at phenomena." Two sides must develop together: the theoretical intellect that knows the realities, and the practical intellect that knows how to act on them.
Ten Basic Findings
Chittick lists ten points on which the premodern masters largely agreed, though they expressed them differently.
| # | Finding | In one line |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tawhid | All reality is unified in its principle and wholly dependent on God, always |
| 2 | Light | God's eternal light is present in creation; in humans it is called intellect, spirit or heart |
| 3 | Hierarchy | The cosmos is an intelligent hierarchy whose levels are all present at once |
| 4 | Two worlds | An invisible world of spirit and awareness, more real than the visible world of body |
| 5 | Human uniqueness | Made in God's image and taught the names, humans contain the whole cosmos in essence |
| 6 | Two movements | Away from the Source and back to it: the Origin and the Return, the descending and ascending arcs |
| 7 | Freedom | Intelligence never leaves its own domain; the self is free of every limit, of everything other than the Real |
| 8 | Awakening | The final goal of religion and all endeavour is to awaken the intellect |
| 9 | We are what we know | The more we understand, the more human we are |
| 10 | Harmony | Theoretical and practical intellect must develop together |
Finding six carries a practical punch. All things return to their Origin by necessity, but humans alone can return voluntarily. That free return is the reason for realization; in Sufi language it is the way to "die before you die."
A Visitor from the Past
To make the contrast vivid, Chittick imagines a Muslim intellectual brought forward by time machine. He names him Ibn Yaqzan, after Ibn Tufayl's philosophical novel Hayy ibn Yaqzan, "Alive, son of Awake", a name for the soul reborn by actualizing the intellect.
• Information without purpose. He would be astonished less by the amount of information than by people's ignorance that it is irrelevant to the goal of life; understanding has shrunk as facts have grown.
• Science as sorcery. Science would look to him much like what his age called "sorcery": both aim to manipulate creation by unusual means for short-sighted ends.
• Borrowed knowledge. Scholars take facts from others without verifying them, then build theories on the borrowed facts.
• Polytheism with respectable names. Development and progress would strike him as gods.
• A new priesthood. Doctors, engineers, lawyers, programmers and experts guard their knowledge and compete for wealth and prestige; their cathedrals are Medicine, Technology and Scholarship.
• Lost parenting. Saddest of all, Muslim parents push their children into these priesthoods rather than the search for knowledge of God.
His conclusion is dry: Ibn Yaqzan would be anxious to return to a world that has kept "some sense of proportion."
Part 3. The Rehabilitation of Thought
Chapter Three was the Annual Iqbal Memorial Lecture at the University of the Punjab, Lahore, given on November 10, 2000. Chittick asks whether traditional Islamic thought is more than a historical curiosity and answers that without it, Muslim thinking becomes "warmed-over ideology disguised by a veneer of Islamic rhetoric."
Thought Comes First
By "thought" Chittick means the human ability to be aware of things and to put that awareness into concepts and language. The root of it is consciousness itself, which the philosophers called 'aql, intelligence. In the Islamic picture, thought is more real than the bodily world, which he calls "the apparition of thought." This does not deny the external world; it says the universe is born from the awareness of the divine and spiritual worlds. The Unseen (al-ghayb) is the domain of life and awareness; the Visible (al-shahada) is the domain of death and unawareness.
Humans, placed on earth as God's vicegerents, are essentially thought. Rumi says it plainly:
the rest of you is bones and fiber.
If roses are your thought, you are a rose garden,
if thorns, you are fuel for the furnace.
True thought means seeing things in relation to God, which is simply the meaning of tawhid. Forgetting God was Adam's sin, quickly forgiven because he quickly remembered. Most people do not remember, and the Qur'an describes the result: "They forget God, so God forgets them" (9:67).
The Real Disaster
In the intellectual tradition the sciences were complementary, not separate. Studying the outer world gave insight into the inner one. The title al-mabda' wa'l-ma'ad, "The Origin and the Return", was used for books by both Avicenna and Mulla Sadra, whom Chittick calls arguably the two greatest Muslim philosophers. Over time the Return, the soul's ascent to God, became the main focus. The goal was what Ibn al-Arabi made famous as insan kamil, "a perfect human being."
Tahqiq comes from the same root as haqq: truth, reality, rightness, responsibility, duty. To realize something is to know its truth and to respond to it rightly. That is why Chittick shifts the alarm away from law:
What Premodern Science Was For
The common view is that Islamic cosmology and natural science were early stages of modern science, now mostly proven wrong. Chittick calls this a fallacy: it assumes the old scientists had the same aims as modern ones. They did not. He proposes dropping the word "science" for what they did and recovering hikma, wisdom. The word is a divine attribute, and it implies right action as well as right thought. "In English, it makes perfect sense to say that God is Wise, but not that he is Scientist."
Modern science, by contrast, abandoned any claim to guide right action. Its role is to give more power over creation and leave the wise use of that power to theologians, moralists and politicians.
1. Verify the truth of tawhid for oneself.
2. Practise it in all thought and action.
The result was spiritual transformation, conformity with the divine character traits, sometimes called ta'alluh, "deiformity", or "assuming as one's own the character traits of God."
Because God created both Adam and the universe in his image, soul and cosmos were seen as complementary expressions of one principle. Here, Chittick says, the West parted ways. He quotes Bryan Appleyard's Understanding the Present: "For science made exiles of us all. It took our souls out of our bodies." And later: "The world worked without us."
The Reign of Takthir
Chittick is careful here. Takthir is not false in itself; it is short-sighted and incomplete. It can analyse, divide and classify, but it cannot give a unifying vision or ground any human aspiration in reality. The more it intensifies, the less role humans seem to have in the cosmos.
For the Muslim cosmologists takthir was itself a divine activity, the bringing of the universe into being. So the issue is not whether to accept multiplicity but where it sits. Chittick's formula is exact: the Islamic worldview is takthir in the service of tawhid; the scientific worldview is takthir without tawhid. The fruit of the second is plain in the modern university: ever narrower disciplines, no coherent picture of human nature, sciences unintelligible to all but experts.
Science seeks "precision" by cutting things from their context; only after building that artificial view can one ignore moral principles and claim a right to control creation without wisdom.
The cost is clearest in ethics. For the tradition, virtues such as wisdom, justice, mercy, compassion, love and forgiveness are demanded by the nature of things, because the world displays the divine attributes and the soul is made in God's image. A method that opens a gulf between truth and ethics "is ignorance, not knowledge."
The Goal of Thought
Modern science seeks ever more precise knowledge for control over environment, body and society. That control then passes to the unruly self, which the texts call "caprice" or "appetite", not to the realized intellect. Governments, he adds, use scientific and bureaucratic power to make their subjects docile.
even if he offers subtle arguments and proofs.
The old quest was also intensely personal. Every seeker had to learn metaphysics and cosmology for himself or herself, which to modern eyes looks like trying to "reinvent the wheel." The metaphor itself betrays the modern assumption that knowledge exists for technical use. Chittick rejects the familiar story that Muslims made discoveries and then failed to follow them up. That story reads modern goals back into a tradition that never had them; its aim was "to discover the truth for oneself." Rehabilitation, he concludes, requires putting the tahqiq of tawhid back at the centre.
Part 4. Beyond Ideology
Chapter Four turns from science to politics. By ideology Chittick means any sociopolitical programme built on analyses of human nature thought to be rational and scientific. He offers three things the intellectual tradition can do about it: break the shell of dogma, assert the absoluteness of the Real, and revive the mythic imagination.
What Counts as Ideology
Ideology, as defined here, grows from the humanist and secular theories of the Enlightenment. It excludes traditional religion but includes the politicized religion lumped together as "fundamentalism", since that too is a variety of modern thought. Ideology frames nearly all modern political thinking, so there is no escaping it; the tradition can only help individuals see past its limits.
Transmission Everywhere
Every culture runs on transmitted knowledge that nobody questions: "Everybody knows that." Even personal experience does not count as intellectual knowledge, since it comes through unreliable senses and is read through the prevailing worldview. What has changed is the number of authorities. Where religion once supplied a few classes of teachers, today scientists, engineers, doctors, psychiatrists, lawyers and Orientalists all claim chains of transmission back to founding fathers. For you and me, all of it is transmitted, and our confidence rests on trust in the book.
Intellectual knowledge, by contrast, is known "at the very root" of one's intelligence, without any intermediary, not even imagination or reasoning. The philosophers called it "noninstrumental" (ghayr ali), because it does not use the soul's instruments. Few reached it, Chittick admits. What mattered was that the quest stayed an ideal and kept seekers oriented to tawhid rather than takthir.
Goal 1: Breaking the Shell of Dogmatism
Dogmatism is the claim that everyone must hold the beliefs of one's own trusted sources, as one interprets them. In Islam the dogmatists were usually jurists and theologians. Today they serve every sort of god: religion, science, democracy, socialism, progress, development.
Chittick gives the jurists their due. They preserved the transmitted knowledge on which religion depends, and any closure they imposed affected only that sphere. The quest for wisdom stayed open in Islamic civilization. In the West, he says, science and secularism largely discredited it, leading to talk of the death of God and of metaphysics.
Complete knowledge, al-Ghazali continues, is for the realities to be unveiled from within the mold, "like a kernel from the shell." The source of the veil is the person who learns the creed and its debating proofs and decides that nothing lies beyond them.
Chittick then turns on the reformers. When modern Muslim thinkers attack taqlid, they attack only the forms they dislike. They ask believers to stop imitating the old authorities and start imitating new ones, "who often seem to be themselves", backed by a new set of jurists now called scientists, psychologists, sociologists and critical theorists. Moderns, meanwhile, accept the consensus of experts about the world but feel free to be "creative" by rebelling against the transmitted knowledge behind law, religion and social order. The tradition did the reverse: it accepted taqlid in social and legal matters and condemned it in matters of understanding.
Goal 2: Asserting Absoluteness
The second goal is to see all things in light of their ultimate point of reference. The method assumes that human intelligence is adequate to the Real and that the Real is one. This did not mean ignoring revelation. It meant refusing to rest on hearsay, which is why theologians accused philosophers of denying the prophets and Sufis of thinking themselves greater than prophets.
| Shahadah | Content | Kind of knowledge | Relation to history |
|---|---|---|---|
| First half: "There is no god but God" | Tawhid | Intellectual | Transcends history |
| Second half: "Muhammad is God's messenger" | Prophecy | Transmitted | Known only through history |
The philosophers treated even the second half as raising intellectual questions: what kind of person is a messenger, and why accept his authority? Their logic was strict. One cannot prove the Qur'an's authority by appealing to the Qur'an. If prophets are necessary, the necessity must lie in human nature and be discoverable without transmission. Once established, transmitted knowledge can be used with full confidence.
Seen from the intellectual side, there is no conflict between the two kinds of knowledge. Seen from the transmitted side, there often is: reject intellectual knowledge and one is left clinging to the shell. Modern society regards intellectual knowledge as absurd, so it hunts feverishly for reliable transmitted knowledge, which helps explain the aura around scientific discoveries. Among Muslims, Islamist movements replace the old transcendent hope of salvation with "impossible dreams of a perfect society." Chittick cites Muhammad Arkoun's point that Islam has become a cover for activities inspired by the very Western model it claims to reject.
Goal 3: The Mythic Imagination
The Enlightenment made instrumental reason supreme by denying that myth and symbol carry knowledge. On the Islamic side, jurisprudence and Kalam also downplayed the symbolic content of scripture. Sufis, and to a lesser degree philosophers, did not; they read the Qur'an's signs as a way to open the soul to the Real's presence in all things. Today, Chittick says, scientism has taken over the role of myth and serves as "the de facto theology for the civil religion of modernity."
The guide here is Ibn al-Arabi, whom Chittick calls the enormously influential thirteenth-century jurist, theologian, philosopher and Sufi. The Real necessarily appears in pairs to creatures: creator and destroyer, merciful and wrathful, absent and present. Humans, made in God's image, can grasp both sides. Ibn al-Arabi calls the faculty that sees God as distant "reason" ('aql), the faculty that sees him as near "imagination" (khayal), and the synthesizing awareness "the heart" (qalb).
Reason alone eventually rejects the prophets' largely human and mythic language, makes "the hypothesis of God" unnecessary, and ends in agnosticism and atheism; Chittick sees this path in mainstream Western thought. Imagination alone sees things not merely as signs but as the actual presence of the Real, and so divinizes the world. The heart must use reason to avoid turning relative things into absolutes and imagination to see every creature as a "face" (wajh) of God. Only that double vision lets people respect the rights of God, other people and the natural world.
Secular and scientific fundamentalism: atheism and agnosticism; nothing beyond the world at all.
Both, Chittick argues, come from failing to see the divine face wherever one looks.
Self-Understanding
The chapter ends where the book always ends: with the self. To act rightly in the world we must know what the world means to us; for that we must know our nature; for that we must know the self that knows. The knowing self can be known only as subject, never as object. The unity of knower and known is "the ultimate insight" of tawhid. Until scientists and scholars accept that the soul cannot know the truth "by standing on someone else's shoulders", dogmatism and ideological conflict will continue.
Part 5. The Unseen Men
Chapter Five, the only one not written as a lecture, is a reflection on Seyyed Hossein Nasr. It moves from a joke about a hidden power structure to the book's fullest account of naming, the living universe and the relation between cosmos and soul.
A Joke with Mythic Truth
Some thirty years earlier, Chittick heard about a lecture by Nasr. In the question period the Orientalist Gustave von Grunebaum remarked that the talk presupposed a power structure: what was it? Nasr answered, eyes sparkling, with two words: rijal al-ghayb, the Men of the Unseen. The joke, Chittick says, holds "mythic truth" and explains the voice of authority in Nasr's writing.
In Sufi lore the Men of the Unseen live consciously in the spiritual world while governing the visible one as God's representatives. God created the universe, in the words of a hadith, "in order to be known", and these hidden friends of God (wali, usually rendered "saint") know him best. God says, in a report from the Prophet: "My friends are under My cloak." They may be male or female.
Some say the Men of Number total 124,000, matching the number of prophets from Adam to Muhammad. Among them one manifests the perfections of the angel Seraphiel, three those of Michael, five of Gabriel, seven of Abraham, forty of Noah and three hundred of Adam. Outwardly the Pole may be an unremarkable person; inwardly "He holds the reins of affairs in his hands." A second group, unfixed in number, serves as circumstances require.
Nasr and His Critics
Nasr writes about the loss of the traditional worldview and the havoc scientific theories have wrought on the Muslim mind. Muslims divide into a shrinking traditional group and a growing group led by engineers, doctors and professionals trained on the Western model. The two do not speak the same language. So preachers urge the young to study engineering by quoting "Seek knowledge even unto China", unaware that science is driven by takthir and has goals unlike those of Islamic knowledge.
Chittick defends Nasr's grounding in the tradition. That Nasr often cites Frithjof Schuon or Ananda Coomaraswamy rather than Muslim authorities is no evidence against him; he writes as a philosopher who found clear statements of his vision in contemporary authors. Nasr's "traditional" or "perennialist" view holds that humans everywhere have had access to one Absolute principle, an access given from the other side, hence the need for prophets, avataras, buddhas, sages and shamans. It does not claim that all such claims are true or lead to the same place.
For Nasr and for al-Ghazali, Islam's beliefs, practices and institutions make up its body and Sufism is its life-giving spirit. Modernists and fundamentalists who reject Sufism must then draw life from foreign sources. The word sufi came into regular use only in the third/ninth century; the argument concerns what the great authorities meant by it.
Naming Reality
Every Islamic cosmology shares tawhid: one ultimately unnamable principle from which all things come and to which they return. Naming it is still necessary, and the most effective naming comes from the principle itself. Names have consequences: call a thing a chair and we sit on it; call it firewood and we burn it.
When God taught Adam all the names, he taught the names of God, cosmos and soul, and the names were not cut off from the realities they named. Rumi:
for the Creator, the name of each is its inner mystery.
Humans are "talking animals" (hayawan natiq), usually rendered "rational animals"; the Arabic stresses that human reason is spoken. To know the real names of things is to know them as God knows them, which requires that he name them for us. A worldview that leaves out the divine dimension must work with inadequate names, "if not misnomers."
So what happens when the important names are quasars, quarks, muons, black holes and big bangs, or mathematical formulas only an elite can read? The cosmos comes to look inhuman, and humans a cosmic accident. Chittick's reply is the chapter's best line: "The Islamic God is anthropomorphic, because the Islamic human is theomorphic." People treat the world as they picture it. "Those who live in a mechanistic universe will treat everything as a machine. Those who find the universe cold and uncaring will reciprocate."
The Qur'an's picture of God is not polytheistic but "polynomial": many names, enacted daily in ritual, starting with "In the name of God, the All-merciful, the Ever-merciful." God's mercy "embraces all things" (7:156), and the Prophet added: "God's mercy takes precedence over His wrath." Hence the trust that marks the traditional outlook, against ideologues who ask Muslims to trust utopias, military technology and coercive law.
The Living Universe
The key word is wujud, normally "existence" or "being." In Arabic it also means finding, awareness, consciousness and joy. There can be no inanimate, unaware wujud, so God's life and awareness run through everything, most visibly in living things. A Sufi axiom holds that wujud descends with its soldiers. Its soldiers are the divine attributes, traces of which are in all things.
| God seen as | Names | The world appears as |
|---|---|---|
| Transcendent, "incomparable" | Names of majesty | Nothing; only God is alive |
| Immanent, "similar" | Names of beauty | Something; everything alive and aware in some degree |
Since God's reality establishes the rights (huquq) of all things, and our relative reality gives us the responsibility to answer them, there are no moral vacuums. "Scientific disinterest" becomes at best ignorance, at worst moral failure.
Islamic Science and the Power of Names
Why then was Islamic science the most advanced in the world for centuries? Chittick questions the question. Historians measured "advance" by a belief in progress; they ignored whatever looked theological or mystical in the texts, as they discarded much of Newton. They seldom asked how Ibn al-Haytham or al-Biruni understood their own work, or how contemporaries read it. Rationalism played a smaller part than apologists claim. The symbolic approach, the one that sees God's nearness in things, was branded superstition, which made it easy, he says, to justify the "technological rape of the earth."
He quotes Toby E. Huff: modern science "is a metaphysical system" asserting that man, "unaided by spiritual agencies or divine guidance", can grasp the laws of the universe. The break came when people began naming things without reference to their founding myths. As al-Ghazali puts it, the Qur'an is to intelligence as the sun is to the eye.
He adds that science in Islamic countries is often taught by converts, more fervent than born believers, and that the "mullah regimes" changed nothing; the same teachers now recite pieties where they once recited slogans.
The Myth Read Again
The Men of the Unseen, Chittick concludes, carry four themes: unity (one Pole), bilateralism (Unseen and Visible), hierarchy (ranked degrees) and theomorphism (human functions mirror divine names). The visible world is the body of the cosmos and the unseen its spirit. Love, compassion, wisdom, justice and forgiveness are not by-products; they belong to a higher order of reality, which makes humans, who alone fully actualize them, the most real beings in the cosmos we know. To call them by-products "is to take the highest as the lowest, and the lowest as the highest."
He gives Nasr the last word, a call for "a rediscovery of nature as sacred reality and the rebirth of man as the guardian of the sacred": to accept modern science within the limits its assumptions impose while rejecting its totalitarian claims.
Part 6. The Anthropocosmic Vision
Chapter Six borrows a term from the Confucian scholar Tu Weiming of Harvard, who took it in turn from Mircea Eliade. "Anthropocosmic" names a view in which human beings and the cosmos form one organic whole. Chittick argues that the Islamic intellectual tradition shares this view, and that this is why modern science could not have arisen within it.
Borrowing from China
For Tu, Chinese thought sees humans and cosmos as one organismic whole; the aim of life is to harmonize with heaven and earth and return to their common source. As long as China kept this vision, it could not develop instrumental rationality, which treats the world as objects and knowledge as control. The purpose of knowledge was "to learn how to be human." Chittick finds the description fits Islam with small changes of vocabulary. He focuses on the philosophers, because they are the ones later called "scientists" and because their language works outside Islamic imagery.
Reason and Revelation
The West has long contrasted reason and revelation, Athens and Jerusalem. Islam mostly saw them as complementary, and Chittick traces the difference to the Shahadah. Christianity's defining truth, the incarnation, is a historical event known by transmission. Islam, in the Qur'an's own picture, began with creation: islam, submission, is the condition of everything before its Creator: "To Him is submitted everything in the heavens and the earth" (3:83). Tawhid is a truth about all things at all times and needs no history.
Every prophet brought the same first message: "There is no god but I, so serve Me" (21:25). The first clause is the universal half; "serve Me" calls for a second half, specific forms of worship fitted to each people. Chittick recalls a joke among scholars of Islam that Marxism reduces to its own Shahadah: "There is no god, and Karl Marx is his messenger." Every theory that makes history, genes or the brain foundational rests on prophets of its own.
Prophets came to remind, not to found a belief system. The Qur'anic word dhikr means both "to remind" and "to remember": reminding is the prophets' task, remembering the human answer. Adam's fall was a single lapse, forgiven at once, and he became the first prophet.
Why Modern Science Did Not Arise in Islam
The philosophers knew the transmitted sciences but did not depend on them. They kept apart from theological bickering and preferred Greek vocabulary to Qur'anic imagery. Because tawhid rested on intellect, not history, there was "no historical chink in their intellectual armor."
| What gives modern science its power | Why the Islamic philosophers could not accept it |
|---|---|
| Rejection of teleology | The cosmos exists so that humans can appear and learn to be human |
| Hard separation of subject and object | Soul and cosmos are one organism with two faces |
| Matter treated as more real than consciousness | Awareness is more real than bodies |
| Exclusive attention to the senses | The Unseen is vaster and more real than the Visible |
| Disregard of the transcendent | All knowledge begins and ends with the One |
In the West, the separation of reason from revelation became possible because revelation's givens were dogmatic and historical. When theology was thrown out, tawhid went with it; the baby went out with the bath water. Chittick's first conclusion: the claim that Islamic learning declined when Muslims failed to build on early discoveries reads history through the ideology of progress. There was a serious decline by Islamic criteria, adherence to tawhid, the Qur'an and the Sunnah, but not by the usual yardstick. Christian civilization, by contrast, broke down because its transmitted givens could not survive critical questioning.
The Method of Tahqiq
Everything has its haqq, its truth and rightful due: God absolutely, all else relatively. Nothing in existence is inherently batil, vain or unreal. Even evil has a haqq: part of its role may be to be avoided, and that possibility gives human freedom its meaning. The Prophet's command sums up tahqiq: "Give to each that has a h.aqq its h.aqq." Knowing is not enough; tahqiq requires acting rightly toward each thing.
Appleyard is cited again on scientific certainty: scientists who insist they are describing the world as it incontrovertibly is "are asking for our faith in their subjective certainty of their own objectivity."
Understanding the Soul
Nafs, soul or self, is whatever shows itself wherever there is life. We recognize life in others because we are alive: "It is soul that knows soul." Soul comes in degrees.
| Level | What animates it |
|---|---|
| Inanimate | "Nature" (tabi'a); matter itself is only a receptivity to form |
| Plant | Nature plus soul |
| Animal | Awareness, but not reflective |
| Human | The most complex soul, able to take the whole universe as its object |
| Angel | Pure luminous awareness of the Unseen |
Form descends from intellect and ultimately from God, "the Form-giver", so nothing lacks the presence of intelligence. There is no microcosm without macrocosm and no macrocosm without microcosm. The universe exists so that humans can appear, which is why only humans can love God for his own sake. Chittick quotes Avicenna to show this is not only a Sufi idea: "Knowers desire the Real, the First, only for His sake, not for the sake of something else."
Even the philosophers' ideal states were maps of the soul, not utopian programmes. Every trait of the soul appears in some human type, and the real philosopher-king is the intellect, governing soul and body "with wisdom and compassion."
Origin, Return and Omniscience
The first thing created is called intellect, spirit, word, pen or light. It is the instrument through which all things were made and lies at the root of every subject and object. The fall is its obscuration; the return is its recovery. The soul begins as a "potential intellect" and becomes an actual intellect, which the philosophers sometimes call salvation (najat) or felicity (sa'ada).
Modern scientist: branches, applications, phenomena; analyses, multiplies data, spins theories; one "insignificant cog" in a vast apparatus; quantitative; ends in specialization and mutual incomprehension.
Professors, he notes, often cannot explain their research to colleagues in their own departments. A "theory of everything" defined in physical terms says nothing about the scientist who devises it. Appleyard again: "We have excluded the understanding mechanism, the self."
Part 7. The Search for Meaning
The last chapter asks where meaning is found. Chittick's answer gathers every earlier theme: meaning lies in the knowing self, the self cannot be defined, and the final aim is a "standpoint of no standpoint" that frees the self from every limited view.
Signs and the Unseen
Nothing could be more absurd, in the Islamic view, than to think reality is just what it appears to be. The very basis of Islam is "faith in the unseen" (cf. 2:3), and humans "encompass nothing of His knowledge save as He wills" (2:255). Because people are ignorant, they must search; but real knowledge takes God, his doings and his guidance as its object. It comes through signs (ayat) in three domains: scripture and prophecy, nature, and the self. God alone is Truth, and everything else both conceals and reveals it.
Two Modes of Knowing, Revisited
Academic fields still reflect the old distinction: mathematical fields lean toward intellectual understanding, history and the humanities toward transmission. Mathematics was classed as "intermediate" (mutawassit), intellectual in its principles but dependent on data from outside the self. Modern science leans toward discovery, yet scientists are specialists who build on predecessors; good ones admit they stand on the shoulders of giants. Even a "paradigm shift" only changes which authorities are followed. True intellectual knowledge is not reached by standing on anyone's shoulders. It comes through long mental training and inner purification.
Subject and Object
One fruit of the intellectual quest was to see that object "out there" and subject "in here" are essentially the same. Treating them as separate leads to wrong relations with self, others and the world. So ethics was never optional: philosophers studied it as part of their training, and Sufis made virtue and the avoidance of vice their first priority. Right action depends on right knowledge of the world, and that depends on knowing how soul and cosmos meet.
The split hardened with Descartes, after which knowledge became chiefly an instrument of control. Chittick cites Pierre Hadot's case that philosophy had always been a way of life and a spiritual discipline. Later, inner concerns were left to theologians and moralists, ethics became an afterthought, and fact was cut off from value.
The Worldview
The tradition held that study should not aim at specific problems. One cannot love wisdom, which is the Wise, by aiming at this or that. Since true self-knowledge is open only to the self, any written account of it is transmitted and can only point. A worldview supplies the context in which such pointing makes sense, and the modern worldview reduces reality to what can be verified empirically, which means to what can be controlled, which means to the Visible.
Traditional worldviews had no closed horizons, because every depiction was seen as an inadequate picture of the Invisible. Phenomena were transparent, pointing to the Infinite, whether called God, Brahman, the Buddha-nature or Tao. Even modern science, Chittick argues, rests on the intuition of tawhid: talk of laws and knowability assumes an ultimate wholeness, and the word "universe" itself points to it.
The philosophers call God the Necessary Being (wajib al-wujud): he cannot not be, and so cannot not be aware and joyful. The first creature, Intellect or Spirit, is as close to that Reality as anything created can be. From it the universe unfolds by stages, dimming like light far from its source, until the process turns back. The cosmos is two-way, always coming from the Real and always returning. In the better cosmologies there are no stark dualisms such as natural and supernatural, mind and body, spirit and matter. Between any two terms stands an "isthmus" (barzakh) that links them. The only absolute is God.
The Self
Life is more real than lifelessness, and it is already invisible: we see only its traces. That is why, Chittick says, biology can never be a "hard" science and medicine will always struggle to fix the moment of death. Animals cannot step beyond non-reflective awareness. Humans can reflect on the self that knows, and so can aim at freedom from every limit. Buddhists speak of removing "the three poisons", anger, greed and ignorance; Hindus call realized selfhood moksha; the Arabic term is tajarrud, disengagement.
Meaning
Meaning is found by the knowing self within itself. There is no meaning out there, Chittick says, apart from an observer. The universe depends not on us but on the Real Knower; some Sufis call it God's dream, and the Vedantists call all things Maya. Can we know the meaning of the dream without knowing the Dreamer? Each discipline gives meanings relative to other things. Meaning as things really are requires the view of the Absolute Observer.
Because the self has no fixed standpoint, it can adopt any, and the sheer number of cultures and worldviews shows it is bound by none. The contemplative traditions agree that one can step outside all standpoints. Chittick names this the "standpoint of no standpoint" (maqam la maqam), or the Point at the Center of the Circle. Every other calling, he says, "represents misdirected love."
"Conclusions are inextricably linked to premises." A search that starts from physics, medicine, sociology or theology will find only what its starting point allows. Only the premise of tawhid, a Reality with no definition and no standpoint, lets the self reach its full potential. The quest has no closure, because the Infinite can never be reached, though it reaches everywhere. True meaning cannot be held in dogma, doctrine or theory. It is found only by going beyond the workings of the mind and returning the self to its Origin.
Synthesis
What the book adds up to, where it is strong and weak, who appears in it, and how its distinctions apply in three practical fields.
Twenty Takeaways
- Know which kind of knowledge you hold. Most of what anyone knows is transmitted; only a little is realized.
- Imitation is right for transmitted matters and wrong for intellectual ones. The error is mixing them up.
- A great jurist is not thereby a realizer; ijtihad and tahqiq are different achievements.
- Consensus does not make truth in intellectual matters, whether the consensus is of ulama or scientists.
- For most people, science is held on trust in experts, which makes it transmitted knowledge.
- A god is whatever orients a life. Modernity has many, some disguised as harmless words.
- Words without definitions but with an aura of goodness deserve suspicion.
- Compound ignorance, not knowing that you do not know, is the first thing to cure.
- Understanding cannot be legislated or imposed by states; it grows in individuals.
- The old sciences aimed at wisdom and self-transformation, not at power over nature.
- Multiplicity is legitimate when governed by unity: takthir in the service of tawhid.
- Knowledge that separates truth from ethics is, for the tradition, a form of ignorance.
- Haqq means both right and responsibility; one cannot claim the first without the second.
- Reformers who attack old authorities often install new ones, sometimes themselves.
- Use both eyes: reason guards against idolatry, imagination against a dead universe.
- How we name things decides how we treat them.
- Love, compassion and justice are not by-products; the tradition treats them as more real than matter.
- Cosmos and soul are studied together or misunderstood together.
- "Decline" depends on the yardstick; progress is not the only one.
- Every standpoint limits what it can find; the tradition aims at a standpoint beyond standpoints.
Frameworks at a Glance
| Framework | Poles | Use |
|---|---|---|
| Two ways of knowing | Transmitted / intellectual | Sort any claim by how it can be verified |
| Two opposites of taqlid | Ijtihad (law) / tahqiq (understanding) | Separate legal reform from intellectual recovery |
| Tawhid and takthir | Making one / making many | Test whether specialization serves a whole |
| Four domains | Metaphysics, cosmology, psychology, ethics | Check whether a field of study is complete |
| Two eyes of the heart | Reason / imagination | Diagnose one-sided religion or one-sided secularism |
| Haqq and huquq | Truth / rights and duties | Join knowing with acting |
| Two quests for omniscience | Qualitative synthesis / quantitative analysis | Contrast wisdom with data accumulation |
| Being, consciousness, bliss | Object / subject / union | Frame the unity of knower and known |
A closer look
• Science is treated as a whole, with little distinction between its method, its institutions and its popular image. The claim that it is "transmitted knowledge" is strongest about the public and weakest about working researchers.
• Benefits are barely weighed. The book does not discuss what modern medicine or technology has given, so its verdict on modernity is one-sided.
• Historical claims rest on argument, not evidence. The thesis that modern science "could not" arise in Islam is a philosophical explanation without case studies.
• Verification is hard to check. Tahqiq is by definition private, so readers cannot easily tell a realizer from someone who only claims to be one; the book does not offer tests.
• Rhetoric sometimes outruns analysis, as in the Ibn Yaqzan satire and the language of priests and cathedrals.
Who's Who
Only dates the book itself prints are given. The book gives no birth or death dates for the classical figures it cites.
• William C. Chittick: author; Stony Brook University; Introduction dated September 2005; book published 2007.
• Ibn al-Arabi: described as a thirteenth-century jurist, theologian, philosopher and Sufi; source of the "two eyes" and of the term "perfect human being."
• Avicenna: called the greatest Peripatetic philosopher; author of al-Najat, al-Shifa and al-Isharat.
• Mulla Sadra: with Avicenna, "arguably the two greatest" Muslim philosophers; wrote a book titled The Origin and the Return.
• Al-Ghazali: master credited with establishing Sufism's central role; critic of the dogmatic mentality.
• Rumi: Persian poet, "a true master of the intellectual tradition."
• Afdal al-Din Kashani: philosopher; vicegerents of the Origin and the Return.
• Ibn Tufayl: author of Hayy ibn Yaqzan.
• Allama Iqbal: author of The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam; Chapter Three was the lecture named after him, November 10, 2000.
• Seyyed Hossein Nasr: subject of Chapter Five; author of Science and Civilization in Islam and Religion and the Order of Nature.
• Tu Weiming: Harvard scholar of Confucian thought; source of "anthropocosmic."
• Others cited: Bryan Appleyard, Uwe Poerksen, Toby E. Huff, Daryoush Shayegan, Muhammad Arkoun, Pierre Hadot, Gustave von Grunebaum, Frithjof Schuon, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Henry Corbin, Ibn al-Haytham, al-Biruni.
Glossary
| Term | Meaning in this book |
|---|---|
| 'aql | Intellect, intelligence; for Ibn al-Arabi, also "reason", the eye that sees God as distant |
| 'aql bi'l-fi'l | Actual intellect: the soul that has realized its potential |
| ayat | Signs of God in scripture, nature and the self |
| barzakh | Isthmus; a third term linking two others |
| batin | Inner, inward; better than "esoteric", per Chittick |
| dhikr | Reminder (by prophets) and remembrance (by people) |
| Term | Meaning in this book |
|---|---|
| fitra | Innate human disposition, inclined to tawhid |
| haqq, huquq | Truth, right, duty; rights and responsibilities |
| hikma | Wisdom; a better name than "science" for the old quest |
| ijtihad | Independent legal judgment by a qualified jurist |
| jahl murakkab | Compound ignorance: not knowing that one does not know |
| khayal | Imagination; the eye that sees God as near |
| Term | Meaning in this book |
|---|---|
| maqam la maqam | The standpoint of no standpoint |
| muhaqqiq | A realizer, one who has achieved tahqiq |
| nafs | Self or soul |
| qalb | Heart: the unitary awareness that uses both eyes |
| rijal al-ghayb | Men of the Unseen, hidden governors of the world |
| shirk | Associating others with God; first principle of wrong thinking |
| Term | Meaning in this book |
|---|---|
| tahqiq | Realization, verification: knowing for oneself and acting rightly |
| takthir | Making many; Chittick's name for modernity's trait |
| taqlid | Imitation, following authority |
| tawhid | Asserting the unity of God; making one |
| wujud | Being, and also finding, awareness, consciousness, joy |
About this book
Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul: The Pertinence of Islamic Cosmology in the Modern World by William C. Chittick, 2007. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
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