Insight Editions · No. 118
The Heart of Islamic Philosophy
The Quest for Self-Knowledge in the Teachings of Afdal al-Din Kashani
William C. Chittick
William C. Chittick presents Afdal al-Din Kashani’s Islamic philosophy through writings on self-knowledge, intellectual practice, and the unity of knower, known, and knowledge.
A study guide to The Heart of Islamic Philosophy 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.
About the Book
William C. Chittick's The Heart of Islamic Philosophy does two things at once. It introduces the main themes of Islamic philosophy to readers who do not know them, and it puts into English, for the first time at length, the Persian philosopher Afdal al-Din Kashani, known as Baba Afdal, who died, by the date Chittick accepts, in 610/1213-14.
The book has two parts. Part I, "Islamic Philosophy", has three chapters: a portrait of Baba Afdal, a long essay on the worldview of the Islamic philosophers, and a survey of their basic terms. Part II, "The Writings of Baba Afdal", has three chapters of translation: the Greek and Ghazalian texts he translated or abridged, his writings on practice (essays, maxims, quatrains, all seven letters), and his writings on theory (essays, four complete treatises, two long selections and many quatrains). Chapter 6 alone fills some 140 pages. The notes at the back are short but carry much of Chittick's commentary on the translations.
In one sentence: Chittick argues that Islamic philosophy, read on its own terms, is a way of life aimed at self-knowledge, in which knower, known and knowledge become one, and that Baba Afdal, writing plain Persian for a circle of disciples, states this aim with unusual simplicity, clarity and directness.
The argument map
The book's case can be put in six steps. Each is argued in Part I and shown at work in Part II.
- Islamic philosophy should be read on its own terms, as "love of wisdom" and a way of life, not as failed Greek or failed modern thought (Preface, chapter 2).
- It shares the three principles of Islam, unity, prophecy and return, and differs from Kalam and Sufism in method, trusting intellect (chapter 2).
- Its world is one of qualities, ranked from the One down to matter, and its central term wujud means finding as well as being (chapters 2-3).
- The human soul descends and must return; the voluntary return is knowledge, ending where knower, known and knowledge are one (chapters 2-3).
- Baba Afdal states this with special clarity in Persian, makes self-knowledge the whole aim, and teaches disciples as a guide (chapter 1).
- His writings show the program: practice that prepares the soul (chapter 5), and theory that leads it to know itself as intellect (chapters 4 and 6).
The chapters at a glance
| Edition part | Book chapter and pages | Main question | Key answer |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Preface | Preface and dedication (vii-x) | Why this book? | No anthology or introduction to thinking existed; Baba Afdal is clear and untranslated |
| 2. A Persian Philosopher | Ch1 (3-27) | Who was Baba Afdal? | A guide to disciples whose one theme is self-knowledge; Sufi only in a broad sense; a Persian stylist |
| 3-4. Worldview | Ch2 (29-68) | What did the philosophers see? | A world of qualities; being as finding; Origin and Return; an anthropocosmic vision |
| 5. Basic Notions | Ch3 (69-100) | What do the terms mean? | Wisdom as becoming like God; two worlds; levels of awareness; complementary pairs |
| 6. Background Texts | Ch4 (101-26) | What did he translate? | Aristotle as a sage of the soul; Hermes; Ghazali's Four Headings |
| 7. Practice | Ch5 (127-68) | How should one live? | Know self, attend to death, keep company with the wise; letters as guidance |
| 8. Theory I | Ch6 (169-239) | What survives? | Intelligence, which has no opposite; the human being as God's book |
| 9. Theory II | Ch6 (239-308) | What is knowledge for? | Seven rungs of knowledge; finding made actual is intellect; logic as the path to certainty |
| 10-12 | Edition apparatus | Slips, synthesis, glossary | Notes on the text; takeaways, frameworks, closer look, Who's Who; terms |
Reading paths
- For the main idea in an hour: Parts 1 and 2, then Being as finding in Part 3, then The Road's End in Part 9.
- For readers of Sufism: Part 2 on whether he was a Sufi, the quatrains and letters in Part 7, The Book of the Everlasting in Part 8, and Door 3 of the Rungs in Part 9.
- For philosophers: Parts 3 to 5, then the De anima epitome in Part 6 and The Clarifying Method in Part 9.
1. Dedication and Preface: Why This Book
The front matter (pp. vii-x) explains where the book came from, what it is for, how it is arranged and why it is dedicated to Seyyed Hossein Nasr. There is no separate foreword: the page facing the preface is a dedication, "For Seyyed Hossein Nasr".
- Two goals: to introduce the major themes of Islamic philosophy, and to make Afdal al-Din Kashani readable in English.
- The book grew out of a graduate course taught at Stony Brook in spring 1997.
- It is an introduction to philosophical thinking, not to the history of ideas.
- Three introductory chapters prepare for three chapters of translations, ordered from easiest to hardest.
Two goals under one cover
Chittick opens by naming his aims plainly: "first, to introduce the major themes of Islamic philosophy to those unfamiliar with them, and second, to add Afdal al-Din Kashani to the list of Muslim philosophers who can be read in English translation". The two goals fit together, he says, because Afdal al-Din wrote with unusual simplicity, clarity and directness.
The seed was a course called "Neoplatonic Themes in Islamic Thought", taught in spring 1997 and listed by both the Comparative Literature and the Philosophy departments. Of about a dozen students, only three knew an Islamic language. Half knew something of Islamic thought, especially theoretical Sufism; the other half had studied Greek and Western philosophy. The class read some eight hundred years of texts in translation, from the Theology of Aristotle (in fact portions of Plotinus's Enneads) through Avicenna, Ghazali, Suhrawardi, Afdal al-Din and Ibn al-'Arabi to Mulla Sadra. The trouble was the translations: they were "of disparate quality with no semblance of terminological consistency", so it was hard to follow one theme by following one term from text to text.
What kind of book this is
Chittick says he wanted two books that did not exist: an anthology of texts translated consistently across the whole tradition, and an introduction to Islamic philosophical thinking that would deal with central ideas in detail and be faithful to the philosophers' own goals. The more he worked on Afdal al-Din's treatises, the more he saw that an introduction to his thought could double as a primer in Islamic philosophy. The anthology, he writes, "will have to wait for another occasion."
Existing surveys, he notes, focus on the history and development of ideas, usually with an eye to Greek and Western philosophy, and none lets the philosophers carry on sustained arguments. Monographs are too hard for beginners. His aim is to present Islamic philosophy "on its own terms", as a living tradition in the way its later practitioners saw it, especially in Persia where it has survived to the present. Without attention to the philosophers' objectives, he warns, "Islamic philosophy remains a dead fish, rather than a tradition that continues to swim against the current."
The plan of the book
| Chapter | Content as the preface describes it |
|---|---|
| 1 | Kashani's place in the tradition, what little is known of his life, list of his writings |
| 2 | Islamic philosophy within Islamic thought; the philosophical worldview; broad issues |
| 3 | Basic terminology and how it is used in the texts |
| 4 | Background texts: his translations from the Greek philosophers and his abridgment of a work by Ghazali |
| 5 | Writings on practice: essays, two lists of maxims, poetry, all his letters |
| 6 | Writings on theory, the longest section: essays, four full treatises, selections from two more, poems |
In the book's own contents these chapters fall into two Parts: Part I, Islamic Philosophy (chapters 1-3), and Part II, The Writings of Baba Afdal (chapters 4-6). Koranic citations are italicised in the translations, and transliteration follows the modified Encyclopaedia of Islam system with no allowance for Persian pronunciation ("Afzal" for Afdal).
The dedication
Nasr was Chittick's first teacher in Islamic philosophy and the first person from whom he heard of Baba Afdal. Long before Nasr's article introducing Baba Afdal to Western scholars, Chittick heard him praise the beauty of Baba Afdal's prose. With a light touch he adds that this affection had little to do with the fact that Nasr's paternal ancestors came from Kashan. Thanks go to Peter Manchester, Edward Casey, Tony Tuft and David Burrell, who pointed him to Pierre Hadot's writings.
2. A Persian Philosopher (Chapter 1)
Chapter 1 (pp. 3-27) gathers the little that is known of Afdal al-Din's life, asks whether he was a Sufi or a mystic, sets out his central teaching, explains why he wrote in Persian and how Chittick translates him, and catalogues all his known works.
- Almost nothing is known of his life; he died, it seems, in 610/1213-14 and is buried at Maraq near Kashan.
- He taught a circle of "brothers" and "companions"; for him philosophy was a way of life, not a school subject.
- His one question is "Who am I?", and his answer is that the true self is intelligence, which knows itself.
- He is a "Sufi" only in the broadest sense; at most a "rationalistic mystic".
- He wrote mainly in Persian, deliberately, and in plain words, which Chittick tries to keep in plain English.
- His corpus is small: six long works, five translations, an abridgment of Ghazali, seven letters, some forty short pieces and poems.
What is known of his life
His death date has been disputed, but Chittick takes 610/1213-14 as correct. That makes him a contemporary of Suhrawardi al-Maqtul (d. 587/1191), founder of the School of Illumination; Averroes (d. 595/1198); and Ibn al-'Arabi (d. 638/1240).
In Iran he is known as Baba Afdal, "Papa Afdal". Nasr reads the title as a sign that he was a practising Sufi, since Sufi masters often carried it: Baba Kuhi of Shiraz (fourth/tenth century), Baba Tahir 'Uryan of Hamadan (fifth/eleventh century), Baba Rukn al-Din of Shiraz (eighth/fourteenth century). Chittick is not convinced. In a note he reports that Dihkhuda's dictionary lists about forty people known as "Baba": nearly half are Sufis of no renown, about a third political figures, the rest scholars and poets.
| Item | What the book reports |
|---|---|
| Tomb | Maraq, a mountain village about forty kilometres northwest of Kashan; pyramidal tiled dome said to date from the Mongol period; visited by Chittick in May 1999 during repairs |
| Second grave | Attributed to the "king of Zanzibar" (padishah-i Zang), said to be a devoted disciple |
| Age | At least seventy: a letter speaks of sixty years on the path of wisdom |
| Last words | A letter sent from Maraq is noted as his final words |
| Family | Children and relatives; a hagiographical history of Kashan says two sons died in a fall while climbing |
| Only recorded event | Imprisoned by the local governor on trumped-up charges of sorcery (sihr); a prison poem survives |
| Tusi link | Nasir al-Din Tusi (d. 672/1274) studied with Kamal al-Din Muhammad Hasib, a student of Baba Afdal, and cites his view on a point of logic; an exchange of quatrains is impossible if the death date is right |
The editors of his Persian works, Mujtaba Minuwi and Yahya Mahdawi, suggested he might have been an Isma'ili. Chittick finds no evidence, and in a note cites 'Abbas Zaryab: the writings are "totally empty of the religious and sectarian terminology of the Isma'llls". In one passage Baba Afdal calls Sunnism the best of paths; a quatrain asserting the exclusive truth of Twelver Shi'ism is "certainly spurious". He names no Islamic philosopher, only Aristotle and Hermes, so his teachers cannot be traced. Zaryab says he "follows a new road in the formulation of questions, method of argumentation, and the presentation of philosophical views, a road that distinguishes him from the earlier and later philosophers." Chittick notes that how new this road really is still awaits study.
Brothers, companions and a way of life
Baba Afdal had students, whom he calls "religious brothers" (baradaran-i dini) and "true companions" (yaran-i haqiqi). The first term echoes the Theology of Aristotle and the Brethren of Purity (Ikhwan al-Safa'). The second, Chittick argues, matches Arabic sahib, a standard Sufi term for a disciple, and Baba Afdal also pairs it with salik, "wayfarer". The point is that philosophy for him meant training the soul and acquiring the virtues. One of his lists of maxims is titled "The Testament of the Sages; or, Twenty-Eight Words of Counsel to the Brethren".
Chittick finds support in Pierre Hadot's account of philosophy in Plotinus's time: "The philosopher was a professor and a spiritual guide, whose goal was not to set forth his vision of the universe, but to mold his disciples by means of spiritual exercises."
The students were probably not at ease with philosophical Arabic. The Rungs of Perfection, Baba Afdal says, was written in Arabic at the request of his companion Muhammad Dizwakush and then put into Persian when a second companion asked for a clearer version. Minuwi had promised a study of the people named in the letters, but it was never written.
Self-knowledge as the whole aim
Nasr has called Baba Afdal's philosophy an "autology", an account of the human self. Chittick adds that it is not a cold analysis but a warm encouragement to readers to know themselves. In his summary: "For Baba Afdal, to know true consciousness is to be truly conscious, and to be so eternally."
Baba Afdal thought his own work stood apart. Of the earlier philosophers he writes: "we intend and aim for a meaning that cannot be found in their books". In the introduction to The Makings and Ornaments of Well-Provisioned Kings he describes his soul becoming a mirror of the cosmos through intelligence, and then a reversal:
In a letter to the vizier Majd al-Din he speaks of sixty years crossing "deserts and steeps" in search of the fountain of life: "I finally reached the point of referring to it by the name "intelligence," and I saw that life was nothing but its trace and ray." Asked how beauty enters language, he answers that it comes from a living meaning: "The speaker of living speech takes provision from intelligence." Chittick takes this as the goal of all his writing: to stir up yearning for the wellspring of meaning.
He wrote for those in the middle, neither perfect nor indifferent: "If someone in the middle level who has this attribute is present, then our discussion is with him, and if he is absent, then our message is for him". And he warned the unprepared away. Of The Book of the Everlasting he says: "Any soul that has not been released from these illnesses will become more ill from this book".
Was he a Sufi? Was he a mystic?
Chittick avoids the word "mystic" without qualification, so he first asks whether Baba Afdal was a Sufi. His answer depends on the definition:
| Definition of Sufism | Was Baba Afdal a Sufi? |
|---|---|
| Broad: the inner, spiritual side of Islam takes priority over the outward, legal side | Yes, as were most of the philosophers |
| Narrow: formal tie to a guide (murshid) and a chain (silsila), or stress on unveiling (kashf) and direct perception of God | Little if any evidence; he may have been, but nothing documents it |
His Sufi vocabulary comes from the Koran and Hadith and from standard moral works such as Ghazali's Ihya', though he explains the terms through his own philosophy. Nothing in his corpus compares with Avicenna's "stations of the gnostics" in al-Isharat wa'l-tanbihat. The quatrains prove little, because of poetic licence, uncertain ascription and the need to read them through the prose. Still, Chittick says, "I would be the last to deny to my Sufi friends the right to claim Baba Afdal as one of their own".
As for "mystic", the usual connotations (fuzzy thinking, emotional devotion, intimate contact with God) do not fit. But he could be called a "rationalistic mystic" in Philip Merlan's sense, where union is with thought thinking itself, not with a God beyond thought. Merlan writes: "In lieu of the cloud of unknowing, we have in rationalistic mysticism the flood of sheer light." In such knowing "what is known is identical with what knows." Chittick thinks this could have been written about Baba Afdal, except for Merlan's phrase "second god", which Islam's ban on shirk rules out.
The teaching in brief
Baba Afdal wrote when others were bridging philosophy and Sufism: Avicenna (d. 428/1037), Ghazali, 'Ayn al-Qudat Hamadani (d. 525/1131), and in his own time Suhrawardi and Ibn al-'Arabi. He followed none of these new paths. He used the terms of the Neoplatonising tradition, yet his works "give off the fragrance of a special awareness and intuition". His nearest forerunners may be philosophers such as the Ikhwan al-Safa' who cared for Hermes; Corbin called him "Hermetizing".
What he leaves out is telling. He does not treat God as an object of philosophy, so he never discusses the Necessary in Existence or the divine attributes. Being belongs to the cosmos; God is in effect beyond it. He wrote nothing on medicine, mathematics or astronomy, though a short essay on music survives.
His one question is the Delphic "Know thyself", or "Who am I?" His answer: the true substance of the human self is intelligence, and its proper object is itself. He uses Persian khirad and Arabic 'aql as synonyms, rendered "intelligence" and "intellect". Intelligence is complete only when knower, known and knowledge are one, and that achievement is tawhid, literally "making one". As Chittick puts it, "No one can grasp the unity of God who is not himself one." The one intellect so reached is God's everlasting "radiance" (furugh).
Philosophy wakes people from forgetfulness. Those who reflect, Baba Afdal says, "will have found it before seeking". Like Plato's philosopher, the seeker prepares for death by a cognitive separation from the body: "The reality is that until the soul's disseveration is known, there will be no disseveration". "Nothing causes the soul's misery in the next world but ignorance of self."
Chittick admits that this position is not unusual in Islamic philosophy. What is unusual is the clarity with which Baba Afdal explains it to readers without technical training.
Why Persian
Avicenna, Suhrawardi and Mulla Sadra (d. 1050/1640) wrote some Persian, but their major works are in Arabic, Islam's learned language, much as Latin was in Christendom. The only other philosopher of note writing mainly in Persian is the Isma'ili Nasir Khusraw (d. ca. 464/1072). Paradoxically, writing in Persian kept Baba Afdal marginal: in modern Iran he is better known as a poet.
He knew Arabic well and wrote at least two works in Arabic first, so his choice was deliberate. His students were Persian speakers, some in official posts, intelligent but without the long training philosophy normally required. Translating The Rungs of Perfection, he found that its meanings "became more apparent and more unambiguous in the clothing of Persian speech". And he doubted the trained scholars anyway: "Suffering to efface the bad forms from such souls is much more difficult than guiding those who have not acquired anything at all".
Chittick adds a picture of traditional study: a text read slowly with a master, every term memorised, a year or two spent on a short treatise, ending in permission (ijaza) to teach it. That is why Mulla Sadra translated Baba Afdal's Book of the Everlasting into Arabic as Iksir al-'arifin ("The Elixir of the Gnostics").
Concrete words, not abstractions
Chittick's work on Ibn al-'Arabi taught him that scholarly English favours Latin and Greek abstractions where the original is concrete and imagistic. His example is mujarrad, usually rendered "abstract". Literally it means peeled, pared, stripped; he translates it "disengaged". God's Essence is disengaged from creation, not an "abstraction". The soul's aim is to strip itself of attachment and join the Agent Intellect, becoming an "intellect" among the disengaged spirits that religion calls angels. These are "disengaged," but they are not "abstract." A note adds that the soul can be disengaged while still embodied: "The disengaged soul controls the body and at the same time is utterly free of it, just as God controls the world and at the same time transcends it absolutely."
He illustrates with the three souls of Nasir Khusraw, who called them the "growing" (ruyanda), "eating" (khwuranda) and "talking" (guyanda) souls instead of using the Arabic terms. In plain words we cannot file them away as the old Greek scheme, because "it is patently obvious that all of us grow, eat, and talk". A recent translation that rendered these with standard Latinate terms lost the point.
Baba Afdal himself contrasts intellect with "taste" (dhawq), unmediated apprehension. His whole maxim reads:
So Chittick renders Persian words in plain English and Arabic terms in technical English. Persian jan (life, spirit, soul) becomes "anima"; danish-ju becomes "knowledge-seeking".
The writings
Baba Afdal's prose would fit in five hundred pages, and about half is translated in the book. Chittick numbers the works:
| No. | Work | Notes from the book |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Clarifying Method (Minhaj-i mubin), also The Treatise on Knowledge and Rational Speech | Arabic first; second longest; logic; the quarter on knowing is translated |
| 2 | The Rungs of Perfection (Madarij al-kamal) | Fullest account of the soul's transformation; eight chapters; Arabic first |
| 3 | The Makings and Ornaments of Well-Provisioned Kings | The perfect king and the perfect soul; "Hardly a typical "mirror for princes,"" |
| 4 | The Book of the Road's End (Rah-anjam-nama) | Self-knowledge as the road to perfection; three talks |
| 5 | The Book of the Everlasting (Jawidan-nama) | Most Islamic, least rigorous; esoteric reading (ta'wil) of the Koran; four sections |
| 6 | The Book of Displays ('Ard-nama) | Longest, a summa in four "displays": bodies, souls, concepts, intellects |
| 7-11 | Translations: The Fountain of Life (ascribed to Hermes, identified as Idris), Aristotle's Treatise on the Soul, The Treatise of the Apple, An Epitome on the States of the Soul, questions of Alexander to Aristotle | "masterpieces of the art", slightly closer to his views than the Arabic |
| 12 | The Four Headings of The Alchemy of Felicity | Abridgment of Ghazali; only the last paragraph is his own |
| 13-19 | Seven letters: Majd al-Din, Taj al-Din Nushabadi, two to Shams al-Din Dizwakush, Shams al-Din Diya' al-Islam, Shams al-Din Majd al-Islam, Muntakhab al-Din Haraskani | The last is his final writing |
| 20-51 | Essays, from two lines to twelve pages | Music appears only here |
| 52 | Poetry | Nafisi printed 483 quatrains; Musannafat about 200; a later diwan 687, rejecting 37 |
Chittick suggests the four letters to a Shams al-Din may go to one disciple, tracing a story: great promise, then coolness, then worry that he is slipping. Quatrains "float" from diwan to diwan, so no poem can be firmly assigned. Among doubtful works, a commentary on Ibn al-'Arabi's Fusus is ruled out by dates and is probably by 'Abd al-Razzaq Kashani (d. 736/1335); a commentary on Avicenna's Hayy ibn Yaqzan seems "highly unlikely" given his independence of mind.
3. The Worldview of Islamic Philosophy I: Faith, Quality, Being (Chapter 2, pp. 29-49)
The first half of chapter 2 places philosophy inside the Islamic tradition, contrasts the qualitative outlook of the philosophers with modern scientism, and shows how Baba Afdal reads "existence" as "finding".
- Whether philosophy is "Islamic" depends on how narrowly Islam is defined; most philosophers saw no conflict.
- Islam addresses practice, understanding and virtue; philosophy is one of three schools of understanding.
- All three schools treat the same three principles: unity, prophecy, return.
- For the philosophers reality lies in quality, not quantity; scientism reverses this.
- Wujud, "existence", literally means "finding"; for Baba Afdal to know is to be.
Is philosophy Islamic?
Modern scholars disagree on whether philosophy and Islam belong together, and Chittick thinks the disagreement turns on definitions. Western experts were trained in Greek and Western philosophy and often assumed that religion and philosophy must be hostile. Some argued that philosophers hid their real views in "esoteric" writing and that their professions of faith were "window-dressing to fend off the criticisms of benighted dogmatists."
Chittick grants that philosophy clashed with the religious feeling of many Muslims, but many philosophers were sincere believers. Critics such as Ghazali were themselves skilled philosophers who objected to certain conclusions, not to the training of the mind. A note cites Marmura, the translator of Ghazali's attack on the philosophers, to the effect that its case rests on closely argued criticisms that are themselves philosophical. Theologians and jurists attacked each other just as fiercely; the philosophers were one faction among several. And in most times and places, Chittick suspects, "the philosophers could say and write anything they wanted, because no one really cared".
Three domains, three schools
| Domain | Koranic term | Human level | Institutional form |
|---|---|---|---|
| Practice | islam (submission) | Body | Sharia, jurisprudence (fiqh), the 'ulama' |
| Understanding | iman (faith) | Mind, intellect ('aql) | Kalam, theoretical Sufism, philosophy (falsafa) |
| Virtue | ihsan (doing what is beautiful) | Heart (qalb) | Sufism, love of beauty, adab |
Adab, "courtesy", has no good English equivalent: proper and beautiful conduct, from small politenesses to calligraphy and poetry, in harmony with inner attitude. Chittick stresses it because it matters in Baba Afdal's account of virtue. A note quotes the Sufi saying "Sufism, all of it, is acts of courtesy." The domain of virtue is summed up in the Prophet's definition of ihsan: "It is that you serve God as if you see Him, for if you do not see Him, He sees you."
Saying "There is no god but God" requires knowing what God is. Kalam, theoretical Sufism and philosophy all tried to make sense of this, under three principles: tawhid (asserting unity), nubuwwa (prophecy) and ma'ad (the return to God). They differ in method and goals, not in subject:
| School | Starting point | Means | Goal |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kalam | The Koran first | Reason ('aql) | Largely "apologetic": defend the Koranic accounts |
| Philosophy | No need to begin from the Koran | Intellect alone suffices | "Wisdom": knowing things as they are, with practice to match |
| Theoretical Sufism | The Koran first | Reason is not enough; God teaches the devoted | Unveiling (kashf), gnosis (ma'rifa), witnessing (mushahada) |
Ghazali already cannot be placed in one column. The philosophers demonstrated unity instead of taking it on faith, and this drew them into cosmology (how the world relates to the First), epistemology (how the knower knows) and logic. They also never avoided prophecy, which raises the question of what people must know and whether they need a teacher to know it.
The third principle is the most basic. Philosophers discuss "The Origin and the Return" (al-mabda' wa'l-ma'ad). The "compulsory return" is death and resurrection, which comes whether we want it or not. The "voluntary return" is the route a person can choose that fully develops the soul. Its fruit is sa'ada, "felicity", the Koran's word for the happiness of paradise. Translating it as "eudaemonia", Chittick argues, wrongly suggests a foreign idea. Since "All is perishing but the face of God," philosophy was preparation for death.
Ethics follows. Akhlaq is the plural of khuluq, "character", from the same root as khalq, "creation", and written the same way. So "ethics is not simply a moral issue, but a cosmological and ontological one as well." Virtues are not conventions but belong to the nature of things; human freedom is "the wild card". The goal is the "Sheer Good" (al-khayr al-mahd), a philosophical name of God.
Quality and quantity
Modern readers find the premodern mind hard to enter because science, and with it the belief that only empirical knowledge is valid, has dominated for two centuries. Chittick calls that belief "scientism". Professional philosophers may have seen through it, but it shapes education and popular culture. He cites the physicist Rustum Roy: science has become our "theology" and technology our "religion".
To clarify, he borrows a contrast found in Rene Guenon's The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times and, from a different angle, in Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Pure quality is the light of Being, God's Essence, known through relative qualities, the divine names. Quantity is born when that one Quality is understood as many. Modern science studies the quantitative side, things as discrete and divisible. Chittick does not object to that; the error is to claim that only it is knowledge. The result is that people see things "never as signs or markers or pointers or symbols", and love, justice and compassion are pushed into the merely subjective. For Islamic thought it is the reverse: the nearer to the One Quality, the more real, and to grasp tawhid is to find the echoes of the One in the cosmos and the soul.
A. H. Armstrong describes the modern condition: "Our consciousnesses are nowadays pretty firmly settled on the bottom of the lake, down among the broken lights and shadows and reflections." The philosophers wanted to lift their heads above the water. Baba Afdal says why he will not discuss individual things in detail:
Without "the final goal of going and looking", judgments about "the particular bodies and the states of the individuals" are arbitrary. Modern thought answers by treating all goals as private, and so ends in relativism; Islamic philosophy held that "absolute relativism" contradicts itself, because the One Real is always the fixed point. And the final goal depends on self-knowledge, which cannot be studied in quantitative terms.
Basic qualities
The philosophers think that describing things by quantity is putting the cart before the horse. Numbers matter only to show how qualities unfold, which is why the Pythagorean tradition attracted them. Kalam and Sufism name the basic qualities with Koranic divine attributes; the early philosophers preferred "rational" words, but most of these still had Koranic roots.
Avicenna's Persian Danish-nama-yi 'ala'i is the example. After general terms, it treats the Necessary in Existence and seven attributes: unity, eternity, knowledge, desire, power, wisdom and generosity. Six are Koranic attributes and the seventh comes from the Hadith. The book ends on evil, summed up in one sentence: "The root of evil is not to be." The world of generation and corruption, the object of all modern disciplines, is in Avicenna's terms the least real domain, nearest to nonexistence.
Ethics shows the point most clearly. Justice, courage, continence and wisdom cannot be quantified, so for the modern mind ethics is never "scientific". It is valued only when society breaks down, because "it keeps the rabble in check." Chittick replies that these human qualities are more real and more rooted in the nature of things than quarks or genes. That is why Avicenna could treat love as a cosmological principle.
Being as finding
Philosophy's subject is wujud, existence as such. Zoologists study animals and linguists study language, but neither asks what it means for their objects to exist. Hence philosophy oversees all sciences, and many philosophers were polymaths.
Baba Afdal ignores the "divine things" (ilahiyyat) and "Lordship" (rububiyya). In a note Chittick qualifies his claim that he never ascribes existence to God: he does so only to rule out discussion, as in "There is nothing to be discussed concerning [His] Being and Ipseity". He calls God khuda, haqq ("the Real") or occasionally izad, and places Him outside the scheme as Essence, Ipseity and Reality. Existence is God's effulgent light.
He uses Arabic wujud and Persian hasti as synonyms; Chittick renders them "existence" and "being". Wujud literally means "finding" or "foundness", from wajada, "it found". Unlike coined terms such as anniyya ("that-it-is-ness") and huwiyya ("ipseity"), it is an everyday word, and its verb occurs more than a hundred times in the Koran. It suggests that to be is also to find: "Just as the First Being finds all things, so also do humans find by their very being."
Baba Afdal makes this explicit. Wujud has two senses, "to be" (budan) and "to find" (yaftan). The "found" (yafta) is both the existent and the perceived; the "finder" (yabanda) exists and also finds. The Book of the Road's End then divides each sense by potency and act:
| Level | Example in the book |
|---|---|
| Potential being | A tree in a seed, a table in a tree |
| Actual being | The tree, the table |
| Potential finding | The soul, able to know things and itself |
| Actual finding | The intellect: the soul that knows itself and, in itself, all things |
The highest level is the Agent Intellect. Merlan, writing on Aristotle's Metaphysics, puts it starkly: omniscience, he says, "this is the ultimate goal of man's search." And: "Man desires and is able to divinize himself." Chittick links this to ta'alluh, "deiformity", and to Mulla Sadra's title Sadr al-Muta'allihin. Finding proves being, much as in Descartes, but the conclusion differs: "knowing is being, truly to know oneself is truly to be, and truly to be is to be forever." Once reached, this cannot be lost, any more than a tree can shrink back into a seed.
Two more of Baba Afdal's ladders:
| The Rungs of Perfection | The Book of Displays |
|---|---|
| Possible: hidden from itself and the world (animal in the egg, shirt in the cloth) | Deed (karda): bodies |
| Existent: apparent to finders, not to itself (inanimate things) | Doer (kunanda): souls that animate bodies |
| Finder: finds things but not the finder (plant, animal, human soul) | Known (danista): disengaged realities in knowledge |
| Aware of self through self: "This is the rank of the existence of the intellect." | Knower (dana): the soul identical with intelligence |
The fully actual knower reaches "joining" (paywand) or "conjunction" (ittisal) with the First Intellect. Merlan again: "The full conjunctio is the moment in which man becomes omniscient." Outwardly the ladder runs from mineral to plant (growth) to animal (appetite, shahwa, and wrath, ghadab) to human, each level containing the ones below.
Psychology: soul and potency
What matters is each thing's "specificity" (khassiyya), its reality (haqiqa) and quiddity (mahiyya); whether it exists outside comes second. So the philosophers' cosmology is logical, psychological and epistemological, and "mythic" more than "scientific": things are "bundles of known qualities". In Baba Afdal's words, "Nothing can be reached through the meaning of speech but the meaning of self. This is not solipsism or Kantian agnosticism: what is outside corresponds to what is inside because both come from common roots.
The goal is certainty (yaqin), knowledge with no intermediary: "'Certainty' is theoria's return from other than self and arrival at self." Every intermediary adds doubt, and instruments are intermediaries too. Chittick is blunt: "the least reliable knowledge is knowledge by hearsay, and upon it we build our world." For the philosophers, senses, a reflective mind and the wish to understand are enough to begin; there is no way to say "objective" and "subjective" in the premodern Islamic languages.
The three kingdoms are the "progeny" (muwalladat), born from the marriage of heaven and earth. Minerals have only "nature" (tabi'a). Plants first have a "self", nafs, which in Arabic is simply the reflexive pronoun; Persian khwud, a note adds, is the same. Each power of a soul is a quwwa, which Chittick translates "potency" throughout, whether it means strength, faculty or potentiality, since the authors saw one meaning. A potency may lie unused: we can see, but our eyes may be closed. Its complement fi'l is "act", and fa''al is "agent", so the Agent Intellect is best understood as the "fully actual intellect".
4. The Worldview of Islamic Philosophy II: Origin, Return, Hierarchy (Chapter 2, pp. 49-67)
The second half of chapter 2 turns to the microcosm, the descent and ascent of the soul, the two intellects that rank human beings, and closes with what Chittick calls an "anthropocosmic" vision.
- What we see outside, we find inside: the human being is a microcosm.
- Nothing can go up that has not first come down; the Return mirrors the Origin.
- Modern myths of progress are the only ones that tell of ascent without a primal descent.
- People are ranked by how far they actualise the theoretical ("seeing") and practical ("working") intelligence.
- Islamic philosophy never split the human being from the cosmos, and that is its lesson now.
The microcosm
An animal soul has the plant's potencies as well as its own, and the human soul has the animal's. This is not a count of souls but a description of what one soul can do. So we find in ourselves what we see outside, which is the meaning of microcosm and macrocosm. If "heaven and earth are within you," this concerns qualities, not size: "Only intelligence can recognize intelligence", and by doing so it recognises everything intelligible. When people act like dogs, pigs, snakes or asses, they are actualising animal potencies they carry.
The human soul is the "rational soul" (nafs natiqa), which Chittick prefers to call the "rationally speaking soul"; Baba Afdal and Avicenna say in Persian nafs-i guya, the "talking soul". It is potential intellect; the Agent Intellect is intellect in act. To become truly human is to actualise this and so know "the enduring intellect, the eternal radiance of God."
When the body reaches the level of nature, nature the level of soul, and soul the level of intellect, then the bodily, concealed existence disappears.
Chittick asks readers to set aside "the science pages of the New York Times" when Baba Afdal speaks of plants and animals. In The Book of the Everlasting he divides animals into humans, four-footed things, flyers and crawlers. The literal Persian terms show that he cares about qualities, not about telling sparrows from bats.
Origin and Return
A simple theological answer would say God made things as they are. The philosophers wanted more: the Necessary in Existence brings the world about through its seven attributes, gradually, in an ordered series of stages, and that order also maps the way back.
The Return rests on an intuition everyone has: we have "come up" from the womb, childhood and ignorance, and can go further. The descent rests on a second intuition, that nothing goes up that did not come down. Baba Afdal says it in passing: "Whatever does not fall from heaven does not rise from earth". If we aspire upward, something of the "up" must already be in us.
| Premodern myths | Modern myths of evolution and progress |
|---|---|
| The trajectory begins on high, with God or the gods; humans came down and are going back | We stand at the top and look back at the bottom |
| Alpha and omega are finally one | The alpha lies far below; we are the omega |
| No guarantee of ascent; people must strive | Impersonal laws push us upward |
| Rooted in seeing invisible qualities behind things | Rooted in seeing nothing beyond quantity |
Even the Islamic account, which promises a return to a loving God, insists on effort; those not ready will go back under constraint and suffer from the mismatch with what they meet, which is how Baba Afdal explains suffering after death. Chittick satirises the modern alternative: we posit an impersonal "Chance" working through an omnipotent "Time" to produce "our marvelous, all-knowing and all-reducing egos." Perception of quality lets people see things as "diaphanous screens within which the gods are dancing".
Baba Afdal adds that the search itself proves a higher source. If the wish to know arose from individuals as such, everyone would have it, and no individual can encompass both worlds. So the wish "arises from the soul that is radiant with the divine light."
Against reading the philosophers as failed moderns
Chittick rejects two habits: treating the philosophers as early, naive gropings toward modern science, and treating them as secret moderns hiding from the religious majority. Both, he says, are ways to "pat oneself on the back". The claim that all ideas are historically conditioned is itself a philosophical claim, and if applied consistently it never ends; it becomes "an endless samsara of reductionism that knows no nirvana save tenure and promotion." If earlier people had nothing to say because they were conditioned, so are we.
Read on their own terms, the philosophers saw the study of the soul as indispensable, and ethics as the soul's balance with itself and harmony with the First. We did not choose to come into the world (or, on one Neoplatonic view, we did), but we have come and must go back. As adults we already hold the mineral, plant and animal stages and stand at the human level, free to rise or to actualise "lust and ambition". Intelligence needs discipline and guidance, like learning the piano or basketball. And the soul has two perfections, theoretical and practical, which cannot be separated: the virtues (fada'il) are the soul's own aptitudes.
For the religious tradition the goal comes from Koran and Hadith and the practice from Sunnah and Sharia; for the philosophers both require thought and self-reflection (fikr, tafakkur).
The two arcs
Later texts picture Origin and Return as two arcs of a circle, the "descending arc" and the "ascending arc". Baba Afdal keeps the simplest scheme, already found in the Arabic Plotinus.
Farabi and Avicenna spoke of ten intellects and ten souls, matching nine spheres and the sublunary world; Ibn al-'Arabi described twenty-one stages from the First Intellect down to earth. Chittick warns against reading this as reified forces or as astronomy. Looking up outside, we see planets and stars; looking up inside, we see soul and intelligence. "The key is looking, gazing, thinking, reflecting, pondering, meditating, contemplating."
The Prophet's night ascent (mi'raj) gives the religious reading of the heavens: the Koran came down so that people may go up, and as the Prophet is said to have remarked, the daily prayer (salat) is the believer's mi'raj. For Baba Afdal the ascent ends with the soul encompassing all things. In The Rungs of Perfection he writes:
I do not enumerate laudation of Thee; Thou art as Thou hast lauded Thyself.
The heavens are higher because they are up, closer to the First's simplicity; some philosophers held them incorruptible. On the Origin, they are the stages by which the self, coming down into the womb, becomes distinct and dispersed; on the Return, the stages by which it gathers itself and rejoins the intellect.
Chittick defends the First Intellect and Universal Soul against the charge of unthinking borrowing from the Greeks. The same prejudice reads the Koran's paradise and hell as crude images for bedouins. But myth "happens to be the richest and most direct manner of expressing the inexpressible", and "Revelation is precisely knowledge that comes from the top down." We know all things come from a Universal Soul because our own soul holds the plant, animal and human potencies; we know the First Intellect embraces all because our intelligence conceives the whole. "What goes up must have come down."
The Origin is centrifugal, like light leaving the sun; the Return centripetal, like perceptions passing through the mind into self-awareness. Focusing on things as discrete objects keeps intelligence in the outward movement. Today's flood of information would look to Baba Afdal like the "last flickerings of the intelligible light".
Hierarchy: the ranks of human possibility
Since the soul can become almost anything, few become a "complete human being" (mardum-i tamam). A note says the phrase recalls Ibn al-'Arabi's "perfect human being" but there is no reason to suspect a direct link. The intellect looking toward the First is the "theoretical intellect" ('aql nazari); the one looking toward work in the world is the "practical intellect" ('aql 'amali).
Chittick renders nazar as theoria, the Greek sense of gazing. Baba Afdal's Persian is binish, "seeing", from the everyday verb "to see", and he calls the theoretical intellect khirad-i bina, "seeing intelligence". The mind becomes another kind of eye. Armstrong is cited: "We can only go beyond thought through thinking." Avicenna makes the same point with the sun: the Agent Intellect is to our souls as the sun is to our eyes.
The practical intellect is the "working intelligence" (khirad-i kargar), seen in craftsmen and, more importantly, in right action toward God and people. Baba Afdal summarises the ranks:
| Intellect | Lower level | Higher level |
|---|---|---|
| Practical | The professions: artisans, craftsmen, masters | Ascetics, the folk of worship, those yearning for the afterworld |
| Theoretical | Knowers of the mathematical sciences, "a tribe who are not content with hearsay" | The utmost end: the practice, character and knowledge of the prophets |
The ascetics (zuhhad) correspond to what Chittick calls "practical Sufism". Mathematics was a "training" (riyada) that helped the soul disengage from forms in matter. Those who study it leave the circle of taqlid, "following authority". In law taqlid is proper and opposed to ijtihad, but in matters of understanding it is opposed to tahqiq, "verification" or "realization", and to follow authority there is to have no understanding. Today, Chittick observes, we cannot avoid following authority in nearly everything we think we know. Baba Afdal says most people admit, "We find no certainty in self." The prophets stand highest, as for Avicenna.
An anthropocosmic vision
Chittick closes with a term from Tu Weiming's account of Confucianism: "anthropocosmism". Islamic philosophy cannot think of humans apart from the cosmos; the two face each other "like two mirrors." Historians lament that Muslims did not develop the scientific insights of their early masters; Chittick answers that the tradition "remained true to itself." It never split self from world as the Cartesian method does, and for Muslim intellectuals down through the eighteenth century the cosmos stayed sacred. For this tradition the universe is "nothing if not a nurturing womb."
He ends with the present. Philosophy has been largely moribund in most of the Islamic world for at least a century, and theoretical Sufism is the least common form of Sufism. Muslim intellectuals are now mostly doctors and engineers. Those who kept to tradition chiefly study Sharia, which has nothing to say about God, the cosmos or the soul, and revivals often turn to Kalam, whose radical transcendence leaves the universe open to manipulation. Yet there is hope, because more people sense that something has been lost: "The recognition of loss is the necessary precondition for gain."
Note 5 engages Christos Evangeliou's thesis that philosophy outside Greek hands served alien masters. Chittick replies that Islam had no Church, that its only theological axiom, tawhid, raises no mysteries like incarnation and trinity, and that "a healthy intelligence is not the human norm", which is why the philosophers set out to demonstrate it. Note 12 explains rububiyya, "Lordship", which glosses "theology" in the Arabic title of the Theology of Aristotle. Note 20 says that "creation from nothing" was never agreed in meaning, since "creation, not, and thing" all need defining.
5. Basic Philosophical Notions (Chapter 3)
Chapter 3 (pp. 69-97) is a working glossary in essay form. It explains philosophy as wisdom, the plurality of worlds, body and spirit, the four levels of awareness, and the paired terms the philosophers inherited from the Greeks: universal and particular, form and matter, substance and accident. Examples come from the Theology of Aristotle, the Ikhwan al-Safa', Avicenna and Baba Afdal.
- Philosophy (falsafa) is "love of wisdom" (hikma), and wisdom means knowing things as they are and acting accordingly.
- Its practical aim is "becoming similar to God", to the extent of human capacity.
- Worlds are ranked vertically: the higher world is reality, the lower its image.
- Body and spirit are correlative, not two separate "things"; the soul stands between.
- Awareness has four levels: senses, imagination, sense-intuition, intelligence.
- Every Greek pair of terms sets one side nearer the One and the other nearer the many.
Philosophy as wisdom
When the texts explain the Greek word falsafa, they call it "love for hikma." Hikma appears twenty times in the Koran, and hakim ("wise") ninety-seven times, ninety-one of them as a name of God. The Koran says God teaches wisdom and names its recipients: the prophets, the folk of Abraham, David, Luqman, Jesus and Muhammad. Friends of philosophy liked to quote: "God gives wisdom to whomsoever He will, and whosoever has been given wisdom has been given much good" (2:269).
Wisdom is more than knowledge. It means knowing how things are and acting exactly in keeping with that, so it is close to justice, putting each thing in its place. Baba Afdal never uses the word falsafa in his own works (a note finds the adjective once, paired with hikami, "sapiential"), but his translation of The Treatise of the Apple discusses philosophy and wisdom at length, and in his De anima he calls Aristotle "the knower from Greece". Chittick cites Hadot: wisdom "is nothing more than the vision of things as they are, the vision of the cosmos as it is in the light of reason", together with the way of life that matches that vision.
That way of life needs virtues and praiseworthy character traits, built up as malaka, "habitude". A habit ('ada) is something that keeps "returning" unthinkingly; a habitude is adopted on purpose to correct the lower nature until it becomes second nature. Avicenna explains this in the Shifa' and the Najat:
Ethics commands the mean between two opposite traits, and the mean must become a habitude, not just a set of acts. In the animal potencies it takes the "guise" (hay'a) of yielding; in the rational soul, the guise of seeking ascendancy, so that the soul is not drawn toward the body.
Al-Kindi's definitions
Al-Kindi (d. ca. 256/870), the first of the great philosophers, defines philosophy through haqq, which Chittick renders "real" but which also means true, worthy and appropriate, and which became a name of God, "the Real". Philosophy is "the knowledge of things in their realities to the extent of human capacity." Its aim is to hit upon the Real in knowledge and to act according to the Real. Its highest part is knowledge of the First Real, the cause of every real, because "knowledge of the cause is more eminent than knowledge of the effect."
In another treatise al-Kindi passes on six ancient definitions:
| No. | Definition as the book translates it |
|---|---|
| 1 | "love of wisdom" |
| 2 | "paying attention to death" |
| 3 | "the art of arts, and the wisdom of wisdoms" |
| 4 | "for the human to know himself" |
| 5 | knowledge of the endless, universal things, their ipseities, quiddities and causes, as far as humans can |
| 6 | "Philosophy is becoming similar to God's acts to the extent of human capacity." |
Of the sixth, al-Kindi adds: "They meant that the human should be perfect in virtue." The key word is tashabbuh, becoming similar. Kalam condemned tashbih, likening God to creatures, and stressed tanzih, His incomparability. Yet the Koran also speaks of God's nearness, and the Prophet said, echoing the Hebrew Bible, "God created Adam in His form," so the idea is not strange. The virtues (fada'il) come from fadl, God's "bounty", a word used in about eighty verses. They are therefore both given by God and earned. A note contrasts Latin virtus and Greek arete, which mean strength or manliness: in Islamic terms the Christian split between theological and natural virtues is almost superfluous, since nature itself is God's bounty. Another note gives the Sufi maxim "Assume the character [takhalluq] of God's character traits [akhlaq\.", which Ibn al-'Arabi equated with the philosophers' tashabbuh.
To avoid seeming to breach God's transcendence, writers add "to the extent of human capacity". The Ikhwan al-Safa' say philosophy's furthest purpose is "It is becoming similar to God in keeping with the capacity of mortal man," and give it four pillars: knowing the realities of things, sound belief, beautiful character traits, and pure acts. Humans are God's vicegerents in the earth, to govern it wisely, so that "the soul may become an angel among the angels in proximity to God." A note draws a present-day lesson. Ecologists criticise the teaching that God gave humans dominion over the earth, but "before the colonialist era, Muslims never applied this teaching to technological expansion." For the Ikhwan, vicegerency rests on wise governing, which rules out "technological rapacity".
Worlds
Today "many worlds" suggests science fiction: parallel worlds side by side. Muslim thinkers mean a vertical hierarchy; to confuse its levels is to flatten the universe. The two basic worlds are Koranic: heaven and earth, the absent (ghayb) and the witnessed (shahada). Later pairs include subtle and dense, spiritual and bodily, sovereignty (malakut) and kingdom (mulk). None of this leads to Cartesian dualism.
The Theology of Aristotle sets the model: "God is the cause of the intellect, the intellect the cause of the soul, the soul the cause of nature", and "All the sensory world is an image and an icon of that world." The heavens hold a middle position and are sometimes a third world.
Chittick translates fayd as "effusion", not "emanation". The Arabic verb is concrete: water overflowing its banks or gushing from a spring. The Ikhwan describe God effusing forms on the intellect, the intellect on the universal soul "just like the sun effuses its light on the air", and the soul on matter gradually, like moonlight, "In the same way, the student receives one thing after another from the teacher."
The lower world is that of "generation and corruption" (kawn wa fasad). Both words are Koranic. Kawn recalls God's command "Be!" (kun); fasad is the opposite of salah, "wholesomeness", a thing being as God made it. The Koran says "Corruption has appeared in the land and the sea because of what people's hands have earned" (30:41). So the very phrase implies a duty: people must keep the lower world in balance by their virtue.
Baba Afdal lists the names for the two worlds in The Book of Displays and sums them up:
The bodily world is an image and a recounting of the spiritual world.
| World of innovation (ibda') | World of creation (khalq) |
|---|---|
| Spiritual; created without intermediary | Bodily; created by means of something prior |
| World of the beginningless | World of engendering |
| World of intelligence | World of nature |
| Universal world; no quantity or size | Particular world; measure and size |
| Living through self | Dead through self, living through other |
Avicenna gives the overall order. "Existence never ceases sinking down in degrees": intellects (disengaged angels), souls (active angels), heavenly orbs, matter, elements, minerals, plants, animals, humans. Among humans the best are those who perfect their intellect and virtues, and the best of these are "those who are prepared for the level of prophecy." Chittick stresses that this means reaching the prophets' preparedness (isti'dad), not becoming a prophet, though philosophers were often accused of the claim. At its peak, says Avicenna, the soul "turns into an intelligible world, parallel with all the existent world."
The Koran's al-dunya, "the near", is rendered "this world", and al-akhira, "the last", "afterworld". Baba Afdal's Persian "this world" and "that world" can mean the same, or the timeless pair of the sensory and the intelligible worlds.
Bodies and spirits
For Baba Afdal the distinction between spirit and body is the most basic discernment, and failing to make it causes the heedlessness and evil that fill the world. But the two are not two "things". Modern people treat the body as solid and real and the soul as impalpable or illusory; the philosophers doubted neither. The terms are correlative: each is understood through the other's qualities.
The Ikhwan divide bodily things into orbs, elements and the three kingdoms, and spiritual things into First Matter, soul and intellect. God is neither, just as "one" is neither even nor odd but the cause of both. Elsewhere they show how this human duality runs through daily life: there are bodily acquisitions (goods) and spiritual ones (knowledge, religion), sessions for eating and sessions for wisdom, and askers who ask for the body's needs and askers who ask for the soul's deliverance.
Between spirit and body many writers place the soul, and later thinkers a "world of imagination". The Koran speaks of heaven, earth and "what is between the two", and our experience is neither purely one nor the other. It is a twilight where all qualities mix, which is exactly why one must seek to know oneself. The Theology already says the soul should not be blamed for coming down, "because she is placed between both worlds."
Baba Afdal speaks of three domains: bodily, soulish and intellective. One short essay offers a proof found nowhere else in his work: a body takes only one impression at a time, but the soul "accepts a thousand impressions on the spirit's tablet without becoming mixed", so it is "an existent other than the body, from the World of the Absent."
He does not despise the body. What he condemns is ignorance that confuses the two. Here, Chittick says, he stands with Plotinus as Armstrong describes him: the fault is to cling to images and so become imprisoned "in a petty world of bodily needs and desires." And Baba Afdal stresses their unity:
Levels of awareness
The microcosm, like the cosmos, has three levels: intelligence, senses and something between. Senses work through organs; the Arabic ala means both "organ" and "tool", and Chittick translates it "tool". A note traces the root a-w-l, "to return", which also gives awwal, "first", and ta'wil, interpretation that takes something back to its origin. It suggests a family picture: intellect as father, soul as mother, organs as the household's "tools". The Latin translators split ala into membrum and instrumentum, and Chittick wonders whether the later split between organic and inorganic began there, a hypothesis he says still needs testing.
Body is the tool of nature and soul; organs are tools of the senses; senses are tools of the soul. But the soul has no tool for knowing itself. Knowing itself without a tool, it is called intellect: "The finder without tools is the utmost end of the spiritual-beings, for the finder without tools finds self and other than self through self".
Imagination lets us find "the sweetness of honey without the presence of honey in the tool of taste". Sense-intuition grasps states such as hostility or friendliness that come from sensory things but are not sensory; from it arise the animal soul's fear and craving. Chittick translates wahm and guman as "sense-intuition"; a note rejects the usual "estimation" and Morewedge's "prehension" and prefers something like Murata's "sensory intuition". The point of the scheme is to show that intellect is disengaged from soul as soul is from body.
Complementarities
An Arabic proverb says "Things become clear through their opposites," and Sachiko Murata's Tao of Islam shows how the tradition thinks in complementary pairs. Behind all of them lies the One and the many. Our one intelligence was created first and is actualised last; our soul is scattered by the senses into the world, which mirrors creation itself. Such immersion is natural; to call it the soul's highest good is ignorance. There are two hierarchies, one coming down and one going up, and at the end the soul rejoins its starting point: "All that truly comes to be known is identical with the knower."
In each Greek pair one side lies nearer unity, coherence and harmony, the other nearer division and finally evil:
| Pair | Side nearer the One | Side nearer the many | Book's example or gloss |
|---|---|---|---|
| Universal / particular (kulli / juz'i) | Universal: one concept, many things; permanent and real | Particular: one in mind and world; passing | "Human being" and "Socrates"; kull occurs over three hundred times in the Koran, juz' three times |
| General / specific | General | Specific | Bodiment is general; speaking English is specific |
| Simple / compound | Simple: no parts | Compound | Elements, orbs, souls; the One simplest of all |
| Form / matter (sura / madda) | Form: what is perceived or understood; principle of multiplicity, yet real | Matter: no quality, imperceptible, "pure quantity" | Shirt, cloth, thread, cotton, down to Prime Matter |
| Meaning / form (ma'na / sura) | Meaning: inner reality | Form: outward appearance | Baba Afdal's "Essay on Meanings" |
| Substance / accident (jawhar / 'arad) | Substance: underlying reality | Accidents: changing attributes | Jawhar from Persian gawhar, "pearl"; 'arad in the Koran means passing goods |
Baba Afdal explains universals through his levels of awareness: "The "universal existence" is the existence that is one thing inside the perceiving soul, but it can be in many things outside the soul." There is no universal in sensation, imagination or sense-intuition, so "it is clear that [the universal existence] is nothing but the intelligible and the known."
Form, matter and the return
Sura carried Koranic weight: God "formed you, and He made your forms beautiful" (40:64, 64:3) and is called the Form-giver (59:24). So Muslims read "form" in a Platonic more than a narrowly Aristotelian way. A thing's form ties it to unity; Socrates remains Socrates whether alive or dead. Matter has nothing of its own; for Plotinus it is an invisible mirror and "absolute nonexistence". Chittick's illustration: "the more we talk about "population statistics," the less we know about "humanity,"", whose qualities shine most in prophets, avatars, buddhas and sages.
Only intellect can see form without matter, so the whole quest can be called tajrid, disengaging forms from matter. Hadot says of Plotinus that this inward turn "is already an ethical movement". Avicenna adds that what is intelligible by essence is intellect by essence. By attending to form we make a voluntary Return. In two essays Baba Afdal treats tawhid as strictly parallel to disengaging forms from matter.
The Ikhwan show the same thing with crafts: knives, swords and saws differ by form, not by their one substance, iron. They name four kinds of matter (of craft, of nature, of the all, and Prime Matter) and end with a numerical picture: ipseity is like one, quantity like two, quality like three.
Substance, accident and the categories
The Arabic pair suggests a valuable jewel hidden by passing appearances. Substance is the substratum, the "described object" (mawsuf); accidents are attributes (sifa). Aristotle's ten categories follow. Why nine accidents? For the Ikhwan, because things rest on one root and nine branches, as numbers rest on one and the nine digits; "one" is not a number but number's principle. Chittick closes the chapter with the opening of their treatise "On the Categories". The first sages, it says, looked at individuals such as Zayd, 'Amr and Khalid and named the human form a "species"; then donkeys and horses; then saw that life (hayat) embraces them all and named them "animals" (hayawan); then growing things, bodies, the spiritual, and finally substance. The ten "words" become in their plain Arabic: substance, how much, how, attributed, where, when, set-up, ownership, it acts, it is acted upon. Substance has no strict definition, only a description: "that which endures by itself and is receptive to opposing accidents."
Note 18 discusses the Theology's "First That-it-is": the editor Badawi read it as a transliteration of Greek on, but Chittick thinks readers would have taken it as Arabic, the source of anniyya, "that-it-is-ness". Note 41 explains "unconditioned body" (al-jism al-mutlaq) and why Baba Afdal's wujud-i mutlaq means "unconditioned existence", not God's "absolute existence". Note 23 mentions Ibn Tufayl's philosophical novel, "first translated into English in 1710", as the kind of text that led critics to think philosophers saw themselves as prophets.
6. Background Texts: Aristotle, Hermes, Ghazali (Chapter 4, pp. 101-125)
Chapter 4 opens the second half of the book, The Writings of Baba Afdal. Before his own works, Chittick gives the texts he translated or abridged: three Aristotelian works, a Hermetic treatise, and Ghazali's introduction to The Alchemy of Felicity. Most of the chapter is translation, with short framing passages.
- The Muslim Aristotle was a logician and also a spiritual guide; Plotinus circulated under his name.
- Baba Afdal's translations make Aristotle his alter ego: know yourself, actualise intellect, acquire the virtues.
- Hermes was identified with the prophet Idris, so his wisdom counted as revealed.
- Ghazali's Four Headings say the same thing in a religious key: knowing the soul is the key to knowing God.
- Where Baba Afdal changes Ghazali, he moves him toward his own position.
Aristotle as the Muslims knew him
Chittick begins by warning that the Muslims' Aristotle "would not be especially familiar to those acquainted with his depiction by most modern scholarship." He was the master of rational thinking and the father of logic, but also "a man of surpassing virtue", to whom several ethical treatises were ascribed. His De anima, read through the commentators, shaped Muslim thinking on the soul's everlastingness. Strangest of all, passages from the Enneads of Plotinus were put into Arabic and ascribed to Aristotle as the Theology.
Western scholars have set Plotinus and Aristotle sharply apart, but the Islamic tradition joined them from early on. For Chittick this shows that the modern Western conflicts between religion and science, mysticism and logic, imagination and rational thinking "did not exist" for Muslim intellectuals. To the extent such contrasts were noticed, "they were recognized as complementary rather than contradictory."
Baba Afdal's Aristotle is a logician, "but he is also a mentor for seekers of self-knowledge, a guide to virtuous activity, and a beacon on the path to the full actualization of intelligence." The three books and one excerpt he translated all present Aristotle as his alter ego, in the same liquid prose and with the same points: knowing one's self, actualising the intellective potency in the soul, and acquiring the whole range of good character traits.
Alexander's questions
The first selection is a short essay presented as part of a longer work in which Alexander puts 115 questions to his teacher. It is a run of terse exchanges about the human goal and origin:
He said: Because we came last.
I said: If we came at the first of the work, why did we come again last?
He said: The first in thought is the last in practice.
Asked whether motion or rest is higher, Aristotle answers "In the spirits rest, in the bodies motion." The resting spirit is "That which is complete." And thought is "The anima's making a form." The little dialogue states in miniature the Origin and Return described in chapter 2: what comes last in the order of practice was first in the order of thought.
The Treatise of the Apple
The Liber de pomo shows Aristotle on his deathbed, kept alive by the scent of an apple. Four passages follow.
On philosophy. Kriton says the physician has forbidden him to make the teacher speak. Aristotle replies: "I have put aside the opinion of the physician. Enough medicine for me is the scent of an apple." He then leads his students by questions. If wisdom's benefit reaches them in the afterworld, why are they not happy with death, which is "nothing but becoming separate from the mold"? Knowledge comes through the spirit, while the body is "the stuff of blindness, deafness, weakness, and ungainfulness". The body's enjoyments harm intelligence, so the body that receives them harms it even more. When the students ask how to be as brave toward death as he is, he asks for truthful speaking and truthful hearing, and ends: "Do you not know that the meaning of philosophy is "to love wisdom"? Is not the root and stuff of the spirit wisdom?"
On wisdom. Diogenes asks whether truthfulness and falsehood rise from clarity of view. Aristotle replies that "The caprices are of different kinds, and the intelligences of various sorts." Each caprice has an intelligence suited to oppose it. Appetite and ignorance are near each other as running and frozen water are near each other, and both harm intelligence as both kinds of water cut off heat. Knowledge, clemency, generosity and the other traits are "wasted" in the common people, because they are unconscious of them: their knower uses knowledge to increase his weightiness, their bestower gives to the unworthy. These traits resemble the traits of the folk of knowledge only "inasmuch as a picture on the wall is like a living animal." The reason is that "knowledge is livingness and ignorance death".
Diogenes then asks who first learned wisdom. People cannot reach it without being taught, as eyes cannot see without a lamp. Messengers had called people to it for ages, and "The first to whom this knowledge arrived by revelation [wahy] in our land was Hermes." His spirit was taken to heaven and wisdom reached him from the Higher Plenum. The proof that wisdom came from above is that the top of each thing is better than its bottom: the surface of water is clearer, the head is the best member, "and the purest part of the tree is the fruit."
On right activity. Lysias learns that right-talking gives clarity and doubt brings concealment. Justice resembles truthfulness because "Both are to put the work in its own placement." Injustice and falsehood both throw the work outside its placement. When Lysias objects that justice belongs to overseers and judges, Aristotle answers: "All humans are judges." Whoever sees things rightly, speaks the right and is content with what is his own is a justice-doer.
On soul. Simmias asks for the first useful thing for seekers of wisdom. Since the spirit is wisdom's mine, it is knowledge of the soul. It is sought "Through the strength of self", which is "The strength through which you ask of self from me." A self can ask about itself from another, as a sick man asks the physician or a blind man asks about his own colour. When wisdom is hidden from the self, it is blind to itself and others, "just as the eye without a lamp's radiance is blind both to self and to others."
De anima: intellect and the unity of knower and known
Two passages come from Baba Afdal's epitome of De anima. Intellect knows the forms of things, their shapes, flavours and aromas, "taken far and separate from the matter and dwelling place, because intellect is separate from matter." In knowing, it is as if intellect brings forms out of their matter. The talking soul "is potentially everything", since it has both an intellective and a sensory potency; forms are potential in it before knowing and actual after.
The second passage states the doctrine Chittick has called central to Baba Afdal's thought. When intellect knows itself, "it is the knower and intellecter as well as the intelligible." That does not mean intellect becomes like sensibles when it knows them, for they are made intelligible only through sense-perception. But "As for things that are sheerly intellective and without matter, there is no difference between them and the intellect." So intellect is intellecter, intellect and intelligible together, in one respect and not in another.
Hermes and The Fountain of Life
Chittick sets aside the historical search for the sources of the Arabic Hermetica. What matters is that Muslims identified Hermes with the Koranic prophet Idris, so that his wisdom could be counted as revealed. The Apple's account of Hermes can be read as a gloss on 19:56: "Mention in the Book Idris; he was a truthful man, a prophet. We raised him up to a high place". The high place can be the home of the angels, the Higher Plenum; "the Wise" is a Koranic name of God; and God's "remembrance" (dhikr) is a synonym for revelation. So Baba Afdal's Hermetic text would have been read as divine instruction for the would-be philosopher, though without the reverence given the Koran and Hadith. Throughout, Hermes addresses the "soul", and the message is that whoever aspires to wisdom must know self and act by its dictates. "This is the theory and praxis of the philosopher."
On the levels of existence. The first passage climbs the descending arc in reverse. The earth "has sat below everything like dregs"; above it come water, air and fire, each subtler and nearer to life; then the orb of the spheres, whose round shape is the most complete. Beyond that is the substance of the soul, which moves the spheres, is not body, and gives life to all below it. Beyond soul is intelligence, "the first level below the horizon of the Ipseity and the Beginninglessness", which takes from It without intermediary. It is "the greatest translator and the nearest veil-keeper." Chittick notes that Baba Afdal's own picture of the Origin follows the same outline.
On self-knowledge. "O soul, intellect is nothing but to find and see self." A soul that has not found itself is dead. Every natural thing returns to its own element: a clod thrown up falls back to earth, streams run to the sea, fire rises. Why then does the soul, which has intellect, flee its own homeland and choose to "linger in the house of alienation"? If by nature, let it act like nature; if by intellect, how could intellect choose exile? Whoever stays at this level belongs neither to nature nor to intellect, and so "is nothing and is not numbered among the existents."
On tawhid. The third passage joins perseverance to the worship of one God. Whoever plants perseverance picks victory; restlessness yields deprivation. Annoyance multiplies a person's gods: "When someone has many gods, it is imperative for him to worship many." His soul is scattered and perishes in scatteredness. Then the theme turns to self-knowledge: all that must be known is within. "There are many who have what they seek in self, but they have forgotten." What lies outside is only the turbid substance that receives accidents and undergoes generation and corruption. Seeking knowledge out there throws one into "the ocean of scatteredness". Otherness and separation belong to sense-perception, "which belongs to the body and is the tool."
Ghazali's Four Headings
Ghazali wrote about eighty books. His Arabic Ihya' 'ulum al-din sets out, in forty sections, the inner side of Islamic practice. Modern scholars credit it with making Sufism respectable, which Chittick calls "an enormous oversimplification." His Persian Kimiya-yi sa'adat, The Alchemy of Felicity, is a shorter version. Like Baba Afdal, Ghazali writes plain Persian for readers without training in the sciences, which may explain why the Alchemy has a long introduction, about ten percent of the text, with no parallel in the Ihya' until section 21, "On the explanation of the wonders of the heart". That introduction is what Baba Afdal abridged. The four headings are a summary of Islamic theory; the four pillars of the main text cover practice.
The abridgment opens: "Know that the book of humanness is completed in four headings." People must know the reality of self, the Real, this world and the afterworld. The pillars are worship and "interactions" on the manifest side, and on the inner side purifying the heart of the "perishment-bringers" and adorning it with the "salvation-bringers".
First heading: the self
"Know that the key to true knowledge of God is true knowledge of the soul."'Ali is quoted,
"He who knows his soul knows his Lord,"with 41:53 on the signs in the horizons and in the souls. Ordinary self-knowledge is not enough,
"for the cattle know as much of self as you know of self."One must ask:
"What thing are you? Where have you come from? Where will you be going?"In us are attributes of cattle, beasts, devils and angels, each with its own food and felicity: eating and sleeping, tearing and killing, deceiving, or witnessing the divine beauty. The lower ones were created so that we might make one a mount and the other a weapon, hunt
"the bird of your own felicity", and then put them underfoot.
The human being is made of the body and of a hidden meaning called soul, heart or anima. By "heart" Ghazali means that reality, "not the piece of flesh that has been put in the breast." It is a stranger in this world, of the genus of the angels, come "for trading and farming." It belongs to the World of Command, not the World of Creation; having no quantity, it is neither body nor accident.
The body is the heart's empire with its armies: hands and teeth, appetite and anger, the five outer senses and five inner ones in the brain (imagination, reflection, memory, recall, sense-intuition). Then comes the famous parable of the city:
Appetite "is a mixer, a meddler, and a liar"; wrath "is ill-tempered". If the king consults the vizier and keeps the others in check, the empire flourishes. Each faculty serves the one above: the senses spy for intellect, intellect is the heart's "candle and lamp", and "The heart was created for gazing on the beauty of the Lordship." Imagination is the postmaster and memory the keeper of the mailbag. The vizier must not kill rebellious soldiers but bring them back within their limits, so that they become "kind companions, not bandits."
Every movement is written on the page of our essence and becomes a disposition. Obey the pig of appetite and shamelessness and avarice appear; subdue it through courtesy and contentment and shame appear. The same holds for the dog of wrath and for Satan. In the world of meaning, where forms follow meanings, the greedy appear as pigs and the envious as wolves, which is why dreams of wolves mean a wrongdoer. The heart is "like a bright mirror", rusted by bad traits and polished by good ones, and none is saved "except him who comes to God with an unblemished heart [26:89]." The heart's enjoyment is knowing, even trifles like chess, so the most enjoyable knowledge is of the most eminent thing: "no gazing is sweeter than gazing on the Presence of Lordship."
Second heading: knowing the Real
The prophets' books say, "Know your soul, you will know your Lord." The soul is a mirror. From our coming to be we know a Creator; from the wonders of the body, His power and knowledge. The soul shows incomparability too: it has no measure, colour or place, yet no member is empty of its activity. "People are surprised that there should be an existent without "how much" and "how" and without howness, yet they themselves are like this, but they do not know themselves."
God's acts are known from our own. Writing bism Allah begins as a desire in the heart; a subtle body, the physicians' "spirit", carries the trace to the brain, where the form is already pictured in imagination; nerves move the fingers, the fingers the pen. So God's desire appears first in the Throne, is carried by the angel or holy spirit to the Footstool, and the angels move the heavens, the stars and the four natures until forms appear as they are in the Preserved Tablet. Our heart is our Throne, the animal spirit our Seraphiel, the brain our Footstool, memory our Tablet. The heading ends: "So know your soul, O human, and you will know your Lord!"
Third heading: this world
This world is "an adorned bazaar put in the desert so that travelers may pick up their provisions." We came down into earth and water because the senses, the key to knowing God's artisanry, need a body. The body must be tended as a pilgrim tends a camel, only as much as needed; whoever spends all his days on fodder is left behind by the caravan. The body needs only food, clothing and shelter. Appetite came first in infancy and grew strong; intellect and the Sharia came later to hold it within its limits.
Fourth heading: the afterworld
To know the afterworld one must know death, life and the spirit, which means knowing one's own soul. Beyond the bodily paradise of trees, rivers and houris and the hell of fire and scorpions there is a spiritual paradise, the one meant by the hadith of "what no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what has never occurred to the heart of any mortal". A window from the heart opens on it, giving certainty "not by way of following authority and hearsay, but rather by way of insight and witnessing." Most of those called ulama, Ghazali says, are heedless of this and even deny it.
Humans have two spirits. The animal spirit is like a lamp's flame, the heart its wick, nourishment its oil; its failure is death, and "of him the creatures know nothing but the name" is said of the angel of death. The human spirit is indivisible like the One it knows, and survives the loss of its tool and mount. If it has caught its prey of knowledge and love, death is a gift; if not, the regret is "the first chastisement of the grave". The spiritual hell has three fires: separation from worldly appetites, the shame of disgrace, and deprivation of the divine beauty. The abridgment ends on the point Baba Afdal makes everywhere: knowing is the attribute of your own essence and survives the body, and if knowledge is absent its opposite remains, "the spirit's blindness and the seed of endless wretchedness."
Note 1: "caprice" (hawa) is opposed to intellect; the Koran treats it as a false god, and Baba Afdal defines it as "wishing for nonlasting works". Note 2: "godwariness" (taqwa) sums up every virtue; "Surely the noblest of you in God's eyes is the most godwary of you" (49:13). Note 3: "every nation has a messenger", and the hadith number of prophets is 124,000. Note 5: curved brackets mark additions from Khadiw-jam's edition of the Kimiya; Chittick supplies chapter numbers and a few passages. Note 6: Ghazali's two kinds of religious knowledge, unveiling and interaction, and the four quarters of the Ihya'; Baba Afdal uses "interaction" in the narrower sense of knowing the heart's states. Note 7: Baba Afdal reverses Ghazali here: the original says the heart's reality cannot be known, the abridgment that it can, "which is much more in keeping with Baba Afdal's own position." Note 8: Command and Creation from 7:54. Note 11: "soul" here is the soul that commands to evil (12:53), unlike its positive philosophical sense. Note 15 compares Avicenna on each faculty's own enjoyment. Note 16: Throne and Footstool are often identified with the starless heaven and the sphere of fixed stars, Tablet and Pen with the Universal Soul and First Intellect. Note 17: the elements are the "mothers", the heavens the "fathers", their children the "progeny". Note 18: Seraphiel blows the Trumpet. Note 20: the "no eye has seen" saying parallels Isaiah, 1 Corinthians and the Gospel of Thomas. Note 21 quotes an omitted passage of Ghazali on the veil of blind belief: "the belief learned by the common people is the mold of truth, not the truth itself." Note 22: the Arabic of the death hadith is "The gift of the believer is death".
7. Writings on Practice: Essays, Counsels, Letters (Chapter 5, pp. 127-168)
Chapter 5 gathers what Baba Afdal wrote about how to live: short essays, two lists of maxims, poems, and all seven of his letters. Chittick interleaves quatrains between the prose pieces, numbered as in the Musannafat. The chapter has no commentary of its own; the notes carry Chittick's remarks.
- A practice is good if it ends in awareness, whatever its outward form.
- Philosophy has two sides: struggle (practice) and disengagement (knowledge).
- Tawhid is "making one"; its last step is seeing knower and known as one.
- The Sharia is to be kept, and good deeds hidden; the senses are to be turned away from passing things.
- Grief, ambition and indolence all come from tying hope to what does not last.
- What is sought is the seeker: the soul that knows itself does not die.
The quatrains: a running counterpoint
The chapter opens with verses that set its tone. "This world's an inn and we're the guests", says one, and another warns the poet himself: "Afdal, don't let imagination delude you, don't fly around lights like a moth." Many mock outward religion. One addresses a man who thinks voicing the creed is enough: "You say, 'I'm saved because I've voiced the Shahadah'". Another describes a worshipper who mistakes the means for the end: knowledge, abstinence, renunciation, hope and search "they're the road, but he thinks they're the goal." Chittick notes that since abstinence and renunciation are Sufi terms, this can be read as a criticism of "certain self-righteous Sufi types."
Several quatrains say that what is sought lies within. "If you don't find Him in self, where will you find Him?" The poet searched the world for Jamshid's world-showing cup and learned from his master that the cup "was myself." Chittick compares two verses of Hafiz in which the heart "seeking from a stranger what was with itself." Another poem ends: "You've lost God in the house of your self, that's why you've set out for God's House." Chittick warns against reading this as an attack on the hajj: the aim is to wake readers to the purpose of ritual, and Baba Afdal's maxims tell seekers to keep God's commandments, the pilgrimage among them.
Three short essays
On practice. The test of a good act is its outcome. All practices that "in the end pull the human to knowing and awareness" are beautiful, even if most people see no good in them; whatever ends in unconsciousness is not good, "even if it has the form of worship or something else."
On disengagement and struggle. "The seed of existence is awareness, and its fruit is also awareness. In between, everything is rubbish and ill repute." Struggle is to persevere in affliction until one gains fixity. Disengagement is to separate things from oneself one by one and see that none is one's reality, until what is left, without state or attribute, is seen to be the essence by which all things endure. What endures by itself cannot be annihilated. Chittick's note explains that mujahada is grammatically the same as jihad; the Prophet called armed struggle the "lesser jihad" and the struggle against the soul the "greater jihad". Here Baba Afdal uses the two terms for the two sides of philosophy, practice and theory.
On tawhid. In Persian tawhid is "to make one". In practice, one compounds medicines until their names disappear into "theriaca". In theoria, one sees individuals as one through their species: Zayd, 'Amr and Bakr through "human", species through genus, bodies through "unconditioned body", body and soul through substance, substance and accident through "the existent". Then "all existents are one, and the existent for all is one." One level remains: not to see the knower of the unconditioned existent and that existent as two. "Rather, knower and known are one in the unconditioned existent." When this is witnessed, beginning and end disappear and the beginningless and endless remains.
Two lists of maxims
The Testament of the Sages. This list of twenty-eight counsels begins with supplication, which stands to sought things as reflection stands to conclusions: "Supplication brings the origins into movement." The counsels are short and concrete:
Moment by moment remember death.
Preserve the Sharia and the law so that they may preserve you.
Do not torment an ant, for just as the solicitude of Him who gives endurance to the cosmos has reached you, so it has reached it.
Guard against taking oaths, even if they be true.
Speak after much meditation, it says, for speech makes one of the wholesome but silence one of "those given proximity." Lying spoils the soul so that "there will be no reliance whatsoever on your dreams and inspiration." Minor sins lead to major ones and to the fate of Korah. The seeker should give an hour of the night to God, and cut off theoria from sensory things altogether; the Folk of Realization agree that those who can "divest the body and dismiss the senses" will ascend to the World of Holiness. Chittick's notes gloss the terms: "accounting" (muhasaba) and "self-guarding" (muraqaba) have marked Islamic spiritual practice from early times; hiding one's good deeds is a Sufi attitude, carried to an extreme by the Malamatiyya, who acted so as to be blamed by the pious.
Advice to Seekers of Wisdom. The second list begins "The sages have said that the seekers and acquirers of wisdom must know that:" The complete felicity of religion depends on noble character as the tree depends on its fruit. When the right way is unclear, choose what is farther from the soul's caprice. Seekers "should seek the Real for His Essence"; Chittick's note explains this as seeking God for His own sake, not for paradise or from fear of hell, and quotes Avicenna on the gnostic who "does not desire the Real, the First, for anything other than He." Since seekers are free of death in their reality, they should not fear it, but put their work right before it. They should not speak of knowledge with the ignorant, nor claim the beautiful words of others. The list ends with several of the same counsels as the first list.
Essay on Salvation
What do people seek salvation from? Not absolute annihilation, which cannot be painful, "because it cannot be that nothing exist while there be an awareness of nonexistence." The fear is of nonexistence within existence. Bodily existence is no help, since it has no awareness; what is sought is an existence "within which there will be awareness and which will never be unconscious." That is intellective existence. The way is reflection, which needs the soul to be detached, not from everything, but from thoughts of sensory enjoyment. Since reflection is the soul's specificity, a soul turned away from changing things will reflect in itself. A practical chapter follows: resist the wishes of appetite and wrath, bear the resulting grief patiently, and steady perseverance will come to dominate, until "the traces of opposition will not remain."
A ghazal then asks the self what it is: "Are you a slinking snake, or no, a trotting mule?" The body can stand through the soul, "but the soul stands through intellect, not body."
The letters
Chittick translates all seven letters. His notes explain that they follow the conventions of the genre, with elaborate opening and closing prayers and circumlocutions in the third person, which he renders less literally and with first and second person pronouns.
To the vizier Majd al-Din
The vizier had asked for words suitable to open books and treatises. Baba Afdal says he is unfit for the outward service of kings, and turns the request into a teaching on what makes speech beautiful. Words are not new; everyone has spoken them before. So when one person's speech is more beautiful, "the beauty of the speech is the trace of a life that cannot be found in all individuals." The life comes from meaning, and "the speaker of living speech takes provision from intelligence."
A young tree needs rain and dew, but a grown one draws water through its taproot. So a person learns at first from outside, but unless he drives "the taproot of existence into the root intelligence", his speech and deeds stay without flavour. "Nothing can be reached through the meaning of speech but the meaning of self." Speech without meaning is "a mold without spirit": "You may make up a dead face with a rose's color, but it does not cling to the heart and stir up joy." People today are weary of each other's dead words and acts, so they leave their affairs to nature, and the fiercest calls himself sultan. The awake can encompass the heedless, but not the reverse, and "For the possessor of choice, this is enough of the virtue of the one over the other."
He prays that the vizier's companions will not flatter him, and tells two stories: Farazdaq, whose patron refused his praise poem because he knew his own virtues better than the poet, and a great man who preferred enemies to friends because enemies showed him his faults. Then comes the autobiographical passage already quoted in chapter 1: for sixty years he has crossed deserts and steeps seeking the fountain of life, and "I finally reached the point of expressing it by the name intelligence, and I saw that life is nothing but its trace and ray." Having reached it, "he will not seek separation, nor will he sever himself from it." A poem follows: "I would not have found had I dug out a mine, You I found since I dug out my soul."
The Petition
This poem was written from prison. Baba Afdal says God has placed miracles in his certainty, so why would he need magic: "Why would a royal falcon hunt for locusts?" He pardons whoever slandered him and asks the governor for release, not for himself, "for I get along well with blows like this", but for "a house full of children." It ends in the conventional panegyric.
Condolence to Taj al-Din Nushabadi
Writing after a death in his correspondent's house, Baba Afdal says the pain comes not from the other's going but from broken hope: "you have suffered from the breaking of hope, not from the individual's life and death." Regret and sorrow are born of hope, and hope is born of delusion, which rises from heedlessness and "without-self-ness". It is no use cutting hope off from one person only to bind it to another. If you want her dead body, it is there; if you want her alive, imagine her in another city, alive and independent of you. He quotes Idris from Zajr al-nafs: the body is a ship made of the ocean's own water, frozen by artisanry; do not let it melt at once and leave you drowning. So joy at births and grief at deaths are both out of place.
Chittick's notes add that one manuscript's feminine word suggests the dead was a woman, perhaps a daughter, though Baba Afdal may have left the relation unnamed out of delicacy. "Without-self-ness" (bi-khwudi) is the loss of true selfhood for Baba Afdal; Rumi uses the same word in a positive sense, which Chittick renders "selflessness". And since The Fountain of Life renders the Idris passage with more polish, Baba Afdal must have translated that work after writing this letter.
A supplication
A short prayer: "O Lord, Your magnificence prevents recognition of You." Those who find their way to God by the light of intelligence leave the darkness of sense and nature, but "until they lose the lamp of their own existence in the universal sun and become wholly it, two-ness will not disappear". There is nothing to be said of God's Being and Ipseity, and only the knowing heart receives His light.
Four letters to Shams al-Din
Chittick's notes suggest that four letters go to one man, a talented young student whose additional names in the later letters are honorifics. In the first two Baba Afdal is pleased with him; in the last two he fears the young man has lost his drive. The fourth gives "a strong whiff of compassionate anguish."
First letter. Shams al-Din had asked about returning to the root world. Our stay here cannot belong to our root, or it could not change. He urges return before youth ends, with the story of an old flute player who repented: his imam told him that if he could still blow the flute, he would never have repented. Many sincere seekers studied the sciences with great suffering, yet "no aroma of reality's rose garden has reached their nose." Their mistake was to seek the intelligibles as they sought sensibles, outside themselves. Sensation needs tools and intermediaries and grasps one thing at a time; intellect needs no tool, its intelligible "is permanently actual within it", and it grasps many things at once. Whoever keeps the body in one hand and seeks the anima with the other is "wishful", and "Religion does not pertain to wishfulness."
He describes the lowest wayfarers as patients who obey the physician sometimes and then give in to appetite until they perish, and the highest as healthy people who need no physician, since every faculty obeys intellect. In them divine light shines, and both worlds become bright. The search itself "arises from the soul that is radiant with the divine light." Then he insists that the seeker needs a guide, someone "who has marked the waystations to the destination one by one a thousand times." Plants and animals are nurtured by giving them what they need and training their bodies; humans must be turned away from the enjoyments of sense and imagination, and "the nurturer of the human soul must be a knower of self so as to be able to make the soul reach self." On the way, the "satans of jinn and men" will enlist the soul, "the worst of the wayfarer's enemies", to test him.
Chittick's notes observe that "stations" (maqamat) is a Sufi term, but Baba Afdal uses it here for habitudes, since he speaks of avoiding blameworthy stations; and that his word for nurture shifts between Persian parwarish and Arabic tarbiyat, whose strongly moral sense explains why modern Persian renders "education" as "teaching and nurturing".
Second letter. He refers the student to The Rungs of Perfection for the path, and to The Book of the Road's End for the soul after death. To know the soul's states one must first know the soul, and most people never separate it in thought from the vegetal and animal souls. Then comes a sentence Chittick quoted in chapter 1: "The reality is that until the soul's disseveration is known, there will be no disseveration". The difficulty comes "not because of utmost hiddenness, but because of utmost clarity."
Baba Afdal then rejects the common view of the ulama, and even of those counted as sages, that every human body is joined to a subsistent rational soul which separates only at death. "But the state is not like this, for the intellecting soul has no joining with any of the bodies." What joins the body are the growing and animal souls; intelligence shines on the animal soul only when it has become limpid enough. The completeness of the body is no sign of a complete soul. A soul that is only a potential knower stays as it was when the body dies; if it had no search, its anima will be like that of the beasts. The soul that is actually an intellecter is one: a hundred knowers "are all one through intellect, no matter how many they may be." Intellect has no essence other than its existence, and its existence is knowing. He tells the student to treat as superfluous the "sensory and sense-intuitive virtues" that the ulama and sages of the day think indispensable.
Third letter, to Shams al-Din Diya' al-Islam. A hurried note: the messenger was in a rush. To be content with the husks of existence "is not the work of men." People chew dried date-leaves thinking them fresh dates, but they have an excuse: in cold lands people have seen nothing of date palms "but brooms and fans." He asks for the Risala-yi jami'a and sends a copy of Zajr al-nafs. Chittick's note says the Risala may be the Ikhwan's book of that name or an unfinished work of Baba Afdal's lent out for copying.
Fourth letter, to Shams al-Din Majd al-Islam. He asks anxiously whether the young man is still resolved, or whether "the Iblis of imagination" has cooled him. His words are like alchemy, but only if the heart is first melted in the fire of resolve, and every attention given to worldly fortune or misfortune is "cold water poured on the fire of resolve." The one astray is not he who never had, but he who had and lost. "The worst blight for the possessors of preparedness is indolence of nature", the hope that a satan will suddenly turn into an angel. Waiting for destiny is allowed only on condition that one does not ruin one's provisions meanwhile, as a pilgrim waiting for the caravan must not burn his clothes or lose his silver.
The last letter: answers to Muntakhab al-Din Haraskani
The closing piece answers a student's questions. A note at the end says "These answers were the last words of the master." They were sent from Maraq after his death to the questioner; Chittick's note places Haraskan, now Harazjan, about 100 kilometres west of Kashan.
| Question | Baba Afdal's answer |
|---|---|
| 1. Does the astrological ascendant concern the bodily soul or the spirit? | The bodies only. Planets are like tools; good and ill fortune are relative, as fire is good for a pot and bad for a house. Those in whom awareness was lit escaped by becoming all soul and intellect "through knowing, not through form". |
| 2. Do spirits have fortune in Illiyyun or Sijjin? | Separated from bodies, spirits become one, as sunlight through several windows becomes one when the windows go. Illiyyun is the spirits' relation to their root, Sijjin their tie to bodies. |
| 3. Where are the satanic, beastly and predatory caprices? | In the soul, which shows them in the body. Like a king's executioners and sweepers, they are bad only if the king obeys them. He breaks off: "a bit of illness appeared and a fever began, so excuse me." |
| 4. What should the senses avoid? | Whatever increases the soul's heedlessness. "The soul that is heedless of self is "without self," and this is its death." |
| 5. Verses and hadiths; is reflecting on self going astray? | He will not give exegesis of others' words, only what he has found in himself. Every existent is a "sign" or mark of the unconditioned existent, and the knowing soul is the truest mark. Reflection on self is the one needful work: "then you will see that the object of search was the searcher." |
| 6. Proof that the spirit subsists | The spirit is the radiance of the Essence and subsists through it; its name is "intelligence", not the particular intelligence that knows up from down. |
| 7. Why is a child not obliged by the Sharia? | Spirits are many: motion-inducing and vegetal in the womb, sensory and animal at the breast, human at maturity; the holy spirit may not appear for generations. |
| 8. Is not every human given commandments? | Prophets, ulama and saints never debated with the heedless; the other-worldly treasure cannot be shared by talk. "Make do with self and eat out your own liver." |
| 9. Is God known "without how and why"? | If the author of all those books is a falsifier, how could someone who does not know how his own food becomes nourishment know God? |
| 10. How can intelligence master caprice? | "Caprice" is wishing for nonlasting works. Ask of every wish whether it will last forever; such thoughts strengthen intelligence. |
| 11. What should occupy the senses and members? | Only what the body needs at the moment; going beyond is "to waste the life of self." |
Chittick's notes on these answers: "the object of search was the searcher" is the unification of intellecter, intellected and intellect, and Sufis express the same unity as lover and beloved. Baba Afdal's wish that the student's pain increase is not unusual in Sufi teaching, and Chittick quotes Rumi: "Seek pain! Seek pain, pain, pain!" The word for "rulership" (walayat) can also mean sanctity, and Baba Afdal may be glancing ironically at those the people think saints. Note 40 adds that Baba Afdal separates two kinds of knowledge: the Sharia's commands, which students must follow, and knowledge of the realities, which they must verify for themselves.
The chapter ends with quatrains of union: "I am not I, who would you say is the one that is I?"
Note 1: the quatrain numbers follow the Musannafat. Note 9: the "wholesome" and "those given proximity" match two of the three groups of Sura 56. Note 15 and note 10 together show the balance Chittick wants kept: Baba Afdal criticises empty ritual but insists on the commandments. Note 19: the Koran uses najat, "salvation", once, of the next world, and the most famous philosophical use is the title of Avicenna's al-Najat. Note 24: Ayaz was the wise vizier of Mahmud of Ghazna. Note 29 gives Suyuti's text of the hadith on wishfulness: "Faith does not pertain to wishfulness or self-adornment." Note 32 suggests the saying "Your worst enemy is the soul between your two sides." Note 33: the Rungs titles appear in Arabic, so the Persian version did not yet exist. Note 36: the editors could not read part of question 4, and Chittick guessed its sense from the answer.
8. Writings on Theory I: Short Essays, The Makings, The Everlasting (Chapter 6, pp. 169-239)
Chapter 6 is the longest in the book, about 140 pages of translation. Its first half moves from a handful of short essays on intellect and the soul's survival to two complete treatises: The Makings and Ornaments of Well-Provisioned Kings, a book of advice for rulers, and The Book of the Everlasting, the most Koranic of Baba Afdal's works. It closes with the opening of The Book of Displays. As in chapter 5, Chittick adds no running commentary; his remarks sit in the notes.
- Life is alien to the body; knowing is what lives, and what knows through itself cannot die.
- The many knowledges need one root knowledge, which is knowing self.
- Intelligence has no opposite, so it holds all opposites at once and nothing can destroy it.
- A true king is one whose intelligence governs his own soul; rule over others copies rule over self.
- The human being is a book written by God; the outside world and the inside world are read side by side.
- Signs are a mirror: needed to see the face, then to be put down, or one sees two where there is one.
Opening quatrains and the short essays
The chapter begins with two quatrains on unity. The first compares the things of the world to waves: "they call them "waves" but in fact they're the ocean." The second ends "from your head to your feet" with the phrase "He is all". Chittick's first note heads off a misreading. The Persian ust hama is a version of the much debated hama ust, "All is He", which Ahmad Sirhindi and others in India took to name the position of wahdat al-wujud, the unity of existence, and laid at the door of Ibn al-'Arabi. Baba Afdal's use of it proves neither that he held that doctrine nor that he was touched by Ibn al-'Arabi's school: the phrase is already in the Persian of 'Abd Allah Ansari (d. 481/1088), some 140 years earlier, and was common in Sufi-style verse.
The short essays that follow are tight chains of either/or reasoning. The Essay on Self-Awareness argues that life in a body is either essential or accidental; it is not essential, so the body lives through something else. Knowing in turn is not essential to the living, "Otherwise, whenever the name "living" correctly fell on something, it would be a knower." So the chain runs back to a thing that knows through itself, and "As for the thing that is a knower through self, it is the utmost end of all, and all existent things return to it."
Quatrains set out the cosmic ladder that the treatises will use: "Animals from plants, plants from the pillars", and "intellect is the shining light of God's love." One riddling quatrain says "I was born of nine fathers and four mothers"; note 2 decodes the numbers as the nine heavens, the four elements, the seven planets, the two worlds, the three progeny, the five senses and the six directions.
The Essay on Intellect is four sentences long. For a substance, being a substance is other than being a knower, but for an intellect, being an intellect is never other than being a knower. "Since no substance is intellect, no intellect is substance."
Security from the soul's nullification
The longest of the essays, "Security from the Soul's Nullification in the Refuge of Intelligence", was written on request, so that its reading would give "the seeker cognizance of the self s reality" and safety from the soul's nonbeing when the body dies.
The argument starts with appetite. Animals seek only provision for the body; humans also seek provision for the anima, which is knowledge. Bodily provision sates and, taken in excess, sickens. Knowledge never sates: "They never become sated with knowing." Note 4 records a textual crux here: the printed text has a negative before the verb, which would make Baba Afdal say that the knower "no longer sees requirement and neediness", against the sense of the passage. From the contrast follows the main claim: the body's life is alien to it and so does not last, "But the anima's life does not become nullified, because life is the anima's nature." And then the question: "What is dead by nature comes to life through the anima, so how should what is alive by nature die?"
Knowledge is many because things are many. Without a root knowledge, the many knowledges sit in the soul like goods in a house: the house takes no comfort from them, and they gain no adornment from it. With the root knowledge the soul is like a living body that turns food into itself. That root is "knowing self and being aware of self." The way to it is a short exercise. Notice that you have a body, an anima that keeps it alive, and an intelligence that knows both. Then see that each is distinct: the body stays a body with or without life; "Were intelligence the body, all bodies would be intelligent, and were intelligence the anima, all animals would be intelligent."
Next, intelligence is not in the body, because the body is among the things intelligence knows, and "Intelligence cannot be in those things that are in intelligence." Every bodily potency, from nourishment to imagination, is "the radiance of the shining of intelligence." Size, weight, heat and cold are not states of intelligence; they are in it as known things. Most important, intelligence has no opposite. All opposites are present in it equally, and nothing is destroyed except by its opposite. So when the body dies, intelligence loses nothing: "It does not become more alive from knowing the body's life, nor is it destroyed from knowing the body's death." The practical conclusion is to "seek refuge in intelligence and to enter under its guardianship" and to keep its measure "during movement and stillness, sleep and wakefulness." Those who keep its traces will be escorted by it back to the place of return.
The universal and the meanings
The Essay on the Universal is two sentences. "The particular individual has existence through the universal reality." But the one who knows this sentence is not the particular; it is the universal reality itself.
The Essay on Meanings argues that intelligible meanings stand by themselves rather than by the soul that knows them. If they were attached to the knower, no one could teach what he knows, or teaching would empty him of it. That is why they are called "meanings": note 5 explains that Baba Afdal reads the Arabic ma'na literally, as what is intended or "wanted" (khwasta) by a speaker. In themselves meanings are realities; in relation to souls they are forms.
What becomes of particular souls
"The State of the Particular Souls after the Corruption of the Bodies" divides souls by how they act. A soul wholly at work in universals is "actual knowing"; one wholly at work in particulars is "potential knowing"; one that moves between the two is "potential near to actual knowing." This last is the human, given a string of titles, among them "the Pointer to the Two Worlds, the Mirror of Both Universes", the Scales of Justice and the Book of the Judge. Note 6 says the titles resemble the Arabic epithets for the perfect human in Sufi works.
Particular awareness depends on tools; universal awareness does not. A finder of particulars loses its light when its tools fail; "he falls from the small chastisement into the great chastisement." A finder of universals loses nothing, since "its finderness was not with tools that it should alter." At death the sensory preoccupations end and the soul that found through itself "remains permanently in the witnessing of the essence of self, and from potency near to act, he reaches act."
The companion essay on "The Level at which Humans Gain Certainty that They Have Become Secure from Annihilation" adds a point about practice. Certainty of the soul's universality may come at once or may need repeating until no sleep, illness or sensory work can make it forgotten. At that level "he is secure from annihilation and knows that he is secure." But a soul that never perceives itself during life cannot gain this after death; it will be "even more of a loser, because the sensory perceptions will also not remain".
The Essay on the Soul's Subsistence grades the separation of soul from body. The plant soul moves its body; the animal soul wants and knows where its body does not. The animal soul's essence is intelligible but it is not itself an intellecter, which is why people think it perishes; in fact only its working stops when its tools are gone. The intellecting soul knows without tools, "so, when the bodily tool is nullified and destroyed, neither the self of the intellecting soul nor its act is nullified and destroyed."
- A thing is destroyed only by its opposite or incompatible.
- To know a thing is for the thing to come to be in the knower.
- Intelligence knows both members of every pair of opposites at once.
- So no opposite is incompatible with it; all are together in it.
- So nothing can destroy intelligence, and the soul joined to it is secure.
The same steps return in The Makings as the ground of a king's justice, courage and freedom from need.
The Makings and Ornaments of Well-Provisioned Kings
Chapter 1 called this book Hardly a typical "mirror for princes," and the full text bears this out. It opens with the vision that chapter 1 already quoted: Baba Afdal's soul, cleansed by intelligence, became a mirror in which the beings of the cosmos were seen, and "In the second seeing, the world's beings were the trace and similitude, and the knowledges were the root and reality." He then ranks the beings: substances over accidents, compounds over simple things (note 7: the "solitaries" are the four elements), animals over minerals, humans over animals, commanders over followers. Among human specificities talking is the highest, and the most gainful talk is that which reaches the most eminent humans, "The most eminent humans are the leaders and kings." Hence a short book for kings, brief so that it can be read "to the end without weariness." It has three talks and a closing chapter.
First Talk: what a king is
"King" (padshah) is parsed as an old compound: shah is root and lord, pad is protecting and keeping. To protect is to keep a thing from its incompatible, since harm comes only from what is incompatible. So a king must be incompatible with nothing he rules. Baba Afdal then lays out the kings of the cosmos. Unconditioned being, "the radiance of the Real's Ipseity", has no beginning or end; some of the ancient ulama called it the First Intellect, others the Universal Intellect or the First Nature. Nature is king over the four elements; soul is king over nature and the heavens; Intellect is king over soul; the Ipseity of the Real is the innovator of the Intellect.
From the elements come four kinds of compound: minerals, plants (elements joined to the moving potencies of the heavens), animals (with yearning and desire, trace of the soul), and humans (with a trace of the First Intellect). The descent from Intellect to elements is the "origin" of existence, the climb from mineral to human its "return". God's own kingship has no level, since levels measure nearness to Him. Two vicegerents frame the whole: "The First Intellect is a vicegerent of God in sending forth being" down to the elements, and "Humans are a vicegerent of God in taking in the being of the existents, level by level, until all arrive back at God."
The taking-in is modelled on digestion. In plants the attracting potency seeks food, the retentive holds it, the digestive cooks it, the nourishing joins it to the plant, and the expelling removes the rest. In humans the senses play the attractive role, memory the retentive, reflection the digestive, and the intellecting potency joins what has become intelligible to the soul.
Second Talk: human completeness and the king's traits
Humans receive everything through matching tools: bodies through bodily potencies, colours through sight, friendship and enmity through sense-intuition, and "reality and selfhood through the selfhood and awareness that they have from the joining with intelligence." They also give out what they have taken in, writing intellective forms on the outside through practice and speaking them through talk. Walking on two feet and having broad nails does not make anyone human; nor do the animal traits or the satanic ones. The best of common people stand to the First Intellect as night's brightness to the sun.
Two marks show joining with the higher world. Joining with the first soul shows when human desire matches its desire. Joining with the First Intellect shows when "certainties come to predominate", so that a person knows without leaning on the senses or on teachers. A third mark is balance among the animal potencies: mastering them is an excellence only when they work at intelligence's command, not when they are simply weak. Potencies obeying nature rather than intelligence are like rebellious appointees who in the end take the kingdom away.
Governing the potencies is called "courtesy" and "good breeding". Note 8 is one of the longer notes on vocabulary: "good breeding" renders farhang, today the Persian for "culture" and "dictionary"; Mu'in's dictionary gives adab as its first sense. Mulla Sadra, translating the same word in the Everlasting, wrote "the science of the [Sufi] path and religion". In the Treatise of the Apple Baba Afdal quotes Aristotle: "The knower whose knowledge is most lasting is he who does not collect knowledge until after he has given good breeding to his soul and made his own disposition praiseworthy"; in the Fountain of Life farhang renders Arabic irtiyad, usually "asceticism", from the root of riyada, "exercise", whence riyadiyyat, "mathematics". (Note 9 records an emendation, "tasting" for "moving", demanded by the sense.) Governing growth in humans is "medicine", in plants "agriculture"; governing a group is "the science of the Sharia and politics".
The perfection that counts is seeing one's own joinedness with unconditioned existence, and only the perfect can see it; others must learn of it from them. The levels of being form a proportion: kings stand to complete humans as complete humans to incomplete, incomplete humans to beasts, beasts to plants, plants to minerals, and compounds to elements.
The traits of a true king follow from intelligence. His joy is in knowledge. He tends the body only so that it can serve the soul's joining with intelligence, since "life and awareness are alien and accidental to the body, while death and unconsciousness are natural and substantial." He orders his subjects' livelihoods so that they have the repose needed to turn to knowledge; even children in the womb "have all turned the face of existence toward human perfection". Then come the virtues:
Freedom from need. Intelligence has all things in itself, so only the intelligent are not "employees".
Clemency. Impatience means being beaten by one's own appetite and wrath.
Humility. Pride is stinginess with rank; humility shows that one's elevation can bear spending.
Courage. Fear belongs to sense-intuition and imagination, not to intelligence, which already knows the body must decay.
The passage on courage includes a thought experiment: if the body only took in food and never lost anything, it would weigh as much as everything it had ever eaten, "Once it had found one thousand maunds of nourishment, it would weigh one thousand maunds". Alteration is built into the body, so fearing its end is fearing one's own judgment: "How can intelligence seek to avoid its own judgment?" When intelligence settles in the soul, faults turn into virtues: hurry into quick-wittedness, rashness into courage, extravagance into generosity, fear into caution. The kingship of those unaware of their Appointor ranks with that of the elements. Certainty lasts, as arithmetic lasts: "two times fifty yield one hundred, and ten times one hundred yield one thousand, and this never changes."
Third Talk: the king's deputies
To nurture is to bring the worthy what helps them toward perfection and keep away what blights it. So the king must know every class of his people. Some lack preparedness for full human perfection but can master one field, "like architects, arithmeticians, astronomers, physicians, and scribes." Others have no such turn: the weak, who harm no one, and the "folk of ignorance", who damage the prepared: idlers, tricksters, indulgers, wine-drinkers, murderers and thieves.
The method of rule is self-knowledge. The king should take his own body and powers as a map of the kingdom: his health for the healthy subjects, his medical care for the physicians, his appetite for the pleasure-seekers, his greed for the thieves, his wrath for the murderers, his courage for the brave, and his potency of good breeding for "the ulama of the Sharia, the folk of godwariness, and the possessors of noble character traits among the subjects." He keeps his own soul wholesome through knowledge of self and the kingdom through the knowers among his subjects. He asks of each person only the perfection that person is prepared for, and he orders himself after the First Nature, in which no potency does another's work.
The closing chapter: kings as they are
The last chapter says why the book was written. Baba Afdal had watched kings content with the name. The more he looked for kingship in them, the less he found: their appetite, wrath and greed exceeded their subjects', and their leisure went on "excessive eating, gathering playthings, heedlessness, futile laughter, and unsuitable talking." Such rule is closer to the dominance of lions and panthers. What kings call good fortune (soldiers, weapons, treasuries, obedience) binds the heart, and "What the vast majority of people call "good fortune" and "prosperity" is in reality bad fortune and adversity." If all those goods were tied to one man with chains, he would be a captive; tied to the anima with chains made of their substance, this is called "love". The book is short so it can be read every day, since a few readings will not undo dispositions fixed over years.
The Book of the Everlasting
The Everlasting (Jawidan-nama) is addressed "from us to the brethren" to stir them to know their origin and end. It promises brevity, and draws on "the past knowledge-testers" and the books of the prophets, especially the Koran. Note 10: the Persian for "knowledge-testers" is not attested in Dihkhuda; Baba Afdal seems to coin it for muhaqqiq, one who verifies rather than follows authority. The book has four sections: the divisions of the sciences (five chapters), recognizing self (ten), the beginning (ten) and the end (ten).
Section One: the sciences
Sciences are worldly, afterworldly, or the science of thought, which lies between. Worldly science is talking or doing. Talking has a general level, learned in infancy from voice to letters to words, and a specific level from which music, logic ("the scale of the knowledges") and grammar arise. Doing has four kinds: crafts, writing and alchemy, the Sharia, and the science of good breeding (note 11: here Mulla Sadra's Arabic follows closely, then renders farhang as "the science of the [Sufi] path [tariqa] and religion [din]"). Thought covers logic, arithmetic, geometry with astronomy and divination, and nature with medicine. These worldly knowledges help only while one lives, and after death are "like a dream whose trace is remembered in wakefulness." That-worldly knowledge is knowing "the horizons and the souls," (note 12: from Koran 41:53, sometimes taken for macrocosm and microcosm), whose first fruit is tawhid. Ignorance of worldly science makes no one an unbeliever; crooked knowledge of tawhid does.
Section Two: recognizing self
Disagreement among people has four roots: over tawhid (Ineffectualists, Deviators, Aeonists; note 13 says these labels have no precise definitions and mainly mark theological wrongheadedness), over prophets (Zoroastrian, Jew, Christian), over the imam (Sunni, Mu'tazilite, Shi'ite, Kharijite; note 14 says madhhab is used here in a wide sense), and within schools. All go back to names: each people names things in its own language, but what is seen with the eye cannot be seen as different. Anyone may call water by another name, but "he cannot see it with the eye as disagreeing, unless it be an eye that is painful and altered."
Two knowledges are needful: of the encounter with the Real, and of the creation of world and human. Without them people see like dreamers. Prophets are like a muezzin, waking people to make ready. Scriptures are treasure-books: "One must not remain forever reading the book", for they point to the marks written on the world and the soul. The encounter with God is not across distance; God is "nearer to him than the jugular vein [50:16]". What is missing is the specific hearing, seeing and knowing. The great mistake of most people is to wait for forgiveness in the next world, "After all, those who have God's forgiveness have it already in this world."
The human world is the key to the treasure-house of signs. Everything is subjected to humans in two ways: outwardly, as fields, water, animals, air and fire serve them; and more truly, as humans make bodily things soulish by knowing them, moving them "from destruction and annihilation to stability and subsistence". The world is "like a kind mother for humans, and the plants and beasts are her breasts." Plants become animals and animals become humans, but humans do not change into something else; that is why the human world is the "lasting religion" of Koran 30:30. Note 17 defends the reading: din can mean law and custom, and the enduring din is the human substance itself, rooted in intellect. God also calls humans by His own names (hearing, seeing, knowing, king, artisan). Note 18 suggests "sanctity" may fit better than "rulership" for wilayat in this passage.
Then the book image. God's argument against the creatures is the human world itself, written in an inimitable script (note 19: mu'jiz, the word for the Koran's miraculous style). Koranic verses about "the book" are read as the human; note 20 says Baba Afdal here uses ta'wil as distinct from tafsir, and that 'Abd al-Razzaq Kashani read "book" in one such verse as intellect. Note 21: "book" (kitab) here often means "writing".
The governor of this book is found through its nine "commandees": hearing, sight, smell, taste, touch, reflection, memory, rational speech and writing, matched with the nine signs of Moses. The five senses are compelled; they report only what comes from outside and cannot do each other's work. The other four choose freely, and pass their work along: reflection to memory, memory to speech, speech to writing. A neat paradox follows: "Hence, the one who listens is dumb, the one who talks is deaf, and the one who writes is blind." Since none can do another's work, there must be one governor over all. The hand that brings out the nine signs is "the fifth from hearing to touch and the fourth from reflection to writing."
The human is a copy of both worlds. Heaven, fire, air, water and earth produce plants and animals; the five senses produce speech and writing. Without heaven no plants, and "whoever is born deaf from his mother is mute and does not speak." Without sunlight no animals from water, and without sight no writing from the hand. In both cases the work is not the elements' or the senses' but the governor's. Seeing a body is not seeing the person: you say you saw his face or hand, "but you have not seen the human himself." In the same way, seeing the world affirms the encounter with God in one respect and denies seeing God in another.
Chapter 8 (note 23: found in only two manuscripts and printed by the editors as an appendix, but in Mulla Sadra's version and clearly by the same hand) makes number the soul's first awareness: the nine powers give one to nine. The first vowels give alif, waw and ya'; in the abjad order (note 22) alif is one and ya' ten, qaf one hundred and ghayn one thousand. One is the imam of all numbers as reflection is the imam of the powers. Adam's teaching of the names (2:31) means that no creature but the human has number and names. "Whatever does not fall from heaven does not rise from earth."
Chapter 9 sets the hidden beside the visible. Nine bodily signs in the human (ear, eye, nose, mouth, hand and the four numeral characters) answer to nine spiritual ones, and the world's nine visible signs to nine hidden ones. As reflection and memory measure what the hand writes, God measures the world's work through four souls: Seraphiel the highest, Michael the preserving, Gabriel the rationally speaking and Azrael the writing soul. Note 25 identifies these as the four archangels and explains that Seraphiel's "Trumpet" (sur) can be read as the plural of "form", which fits Baba Afdal's making him the one who sets animas in forms at all times. Without a governor the elements would wreck their work, like water turning a mill with no miller or fire that burns instead of baking. Humans stand, beasts bow, flyers and crawlers prostrate, matching the postures of prayer.
Chapter 10 says the true "I" cannot be found in any of these powers. The soul in its levels is the Light Verse (24:35): the soul is the lamp, the hidden spirits the glass, the body the niche, and the soul is the olive tree "neither from the "east" of the spirits, nor from the "west" of the bodies". In the same way God is the lamp of the whole cosmos, bright through Itself and grasped by none of Its commandees.
The section ends with its most quoted image. Signs are a mirror: without it you cannot see the face, "But if you do find the way to the face with the mirror and you fail to put the mirror out of your hand, you will affirm two visions and leave aside oneness." Keeping the signs after tawhid would be "associating" (note 28: shirk, the one sin the Koran calls unforgivable). Or it is a writing tablet, "so that between the writing and the erasing, knowledge and wisdom may arise." Comparing human and cosmos is not tashbih (note 29), because the human is the cosmos's copy, not a separate thing. A dark room is bright from a candle, but the candle needs no brightness to be bright.
Section Three: the beginning
People look for two kinds of beginning: the end-point of an extended thing, and the earliest in a series of events. Both mislead when sought in place and time. A chapter on location shows that once the whole is called "cosmos", nothing outside it can be its place, just as one masters number not by counting forever but by naming it all "number". A chapter on time defines it as the measure of motion; it stands through motion, motion through the moving thing, so there was no time before the cosmos, as there is no lifespan before a body. Change of substance, like water becoming air, has no extension and is measured not by time but by the "moment". True priority is not in time but by selfhood, as the writer comes before the writing although both exist together. The lastingness of essences is measured by "aeon"; between the Real and the soulish sovereignty there is no intermediary at all.
The origin of the human is told through the four souls: Seraphiel blows spirit into bodies, Michael brings daily bread, Gabriel conveys God's words, and Azrael's work is to take in the anima, which means "to separate the meaning from knowing's form and to join it with the knower's substance." This fourth is the human soul, not the particular soul of individuals but the true "father of mortal man" (note 30: the title of Adam). Its work is receiving, not giving, since to know a thing is to take in its meaning. The soul's descent into bodies is likened to a scribe's meaning falling from reflection onto paper, and to a seed that must be destroyed in the soil to grow and come back to the farmer with gain. In six days six things appeared: the heavens, then fire, air, earth, water, then plants and animals. Adam's disobedience "is just this", that he fell into the levels of transmutation far from his shelter. The verse of God sitting on the throne after six days is read of Adam rising (note 31: grammatically far-fetched, though not extreme as ta'wil).
Iblis is interiorised. "Know that everyone's Iblis is his own soul when it seeks the body's pleasures and wishes and goes the way of disquiet and pridefulness." Thought is a lamp that gives off the light of inspiration and the smoke of disquiet. Whoever looks for his devil is the devil, like a sleeper looking for sleep (note 34 cites Rumi's lines on the philosopher who denies the devil). Iblis's "permission" until a known moment is the soul's own disquiet, left free to give out what it has, as a plant's healing property "speaks" to the physician. Note 35 states plainly that interpretations like these raised the ire of the theologians, and that Mulla Sadra, more careful of the literal sense, dropped all of this chapter except its first two paragraphs from his Arabic revision.
The section's summary makes the human two-faced: a bodily passing face and a lasting soulish one, "the face of thy Lord" of 55:27. The body climbs from unconditioned body to compound, vegetal, animal and human body; the soul, in step, is called nature, constitutional potency, growing soul, animal soul, human soul, practical intellect, reflective, remembering and talking soul, and finally the "holy spirit" Note 39 points out that readers of Rumi, born around the time of Baba Afdal's death, will recognise his stages of the soul, sometimes taken as a forerunner of Darwin; Chittick says Rumi simply reflects the wisdom of his time, and quotes "I died from the mineral kingdom and became a plant". Body and soul are one in substance and differ only in attribute (moved and mover, acted on and active), so "at the last end, the twoness disappears". Note 40: "resurrection" here is Persian rast-khiz, "rising up straight".
Section Four: the end
Knowing the end depends on knowing the beginning, "since all those who are aware of where they have come from will be conscious of where they are going." Humans change in body (sperm-drop to old age to earth) and in soul (governing, then sensing, then thinking, then knowing), and whatever changes leaves one state and approaches another. Each thing is complete only in its own shelter, and the soul's shelter is the hidden, soulish world. Illness is the image: fever is the mark of fire, swelling of wind, heaviness of earth, sweat of rain, and on recovery all of them vanish "as if they had never been."
The soul in the body is "a sheep that has been bound by three feet for slaughter, with one foot left loose." It is bound by body, nourishment and senses, but free in thought, and when it reaches the encounter with God "whatever it wants will come to be." (Note 41: Koran 41:31, and Ibn al-'Arabi's fuller account through imagination.) The four animals picture the books of the afterlife: beasts, whose hands cannot write, have the left-hand book; flyers, with hands behind their backs, the book behind the back; crawlers, handless, the book of Sijjin; and upright humans the right hand and Illiyyun. But the blameworthy beast is the one in human form (7:179).
For most people, reading the signs is too hard, so prophets give the names by hearing that the eye's seeing lacks. Revelation comes by three routes matching the three souls above the human (note 43: Seraphiel, Michael, Gabriel, though Chittick says it is not clear which earlier account applies, and Mulla Sadra read them differently), and to three communities: Torah, Gospel and Furqan, with Jesus in the middle. The cosmos is a chain of trees: cosmos yields the human, the human the soul, the soul intelligence, "and intelligence is a tree whose fruit is the encounter with God." (Note 44: "inblowing", nafkh, here the rising of yeast as well as God's breath into Adam.)
Felicity rests on knowledge, wretchedness on doubt and ignorance. A simple soul is clean paper: written with wisdom it can hold the king's secrets; written with "words of idleness" (note 45) it is fit only for burning. The wage of worship is knowledge, and the rich no longer work for wages. One sentence here worried Chittick: "When the soul becomes capable through that, it has no more need, for there is no capability along with need." Note 47 warns that it might seem to free the realised from ritual duty, but other writings, especially the exhortations and letters, show that Baba Afdal shared the usual Muslim view of obligatory worship; Mulla Sadra's translation removes the ambiguity by applying the passage to supererogatory acts only.
Death is twofold, bodily and soulish. Life by authority is like the life of hair and nails, which move only with the body, and it can be abrogated, as each new prophet replaced the religion before. Once plain-seeing comes, there is no more abrogation; this is why Islam will not be abrogated and Muhammad called himself sent with the Hour "like these two." (Note 48: death slaughtered as a ram; note 49: the Prophet holding up two fingers.) Every stage of growth is a forgiveness: the embryo for the womb's blood, the infant for its weakness, the adult for ignorance. The angel of death is a series of souls, each taking the anima of the level below: the growing soul takes the earth's, the animal soul the plant's, the human soul the animal's. And the soul's state after death is the state it already has from knowing death in advance, "This is why the prophets stirred up the people to remember death and forbade them from forgetting death." Note 50 admits the argument is weak unless "knower" means the eternal intellect, not the animal soul.
The book closes with the warning chapter 1 quoted, "Any soul that has not been released from these illnesses will become more ill from this book." It speaks by reminder rather than demonstration, as one need not learn prosody to recite verse correctly.
The opening and close of The Book of Displays
The last pages of this half give the preface of the Displays (Musannafat 147-53). It begins with a prayer and an address to "runners on the path of sincerity": the finder ranks above the non-finder, as even animals prefer seeing to not seeing. The book recounts permanent objects of knowledge and refuses to do what astrologers do, predicting events from conjunctions of stars, since such particulars cannot be counted and leave no lasting benefit. The seeker must look for knowledge at its mine, and "No knower and no one aware is closer to you than your own intelligent anima." The worst blight is to take the body for the self.
The search moves through four displays. Study of bodies gives the display of nature; asking what moves them gives the display of the World of Sovereignty; turning back to the self that knows all this gives the display of the world of Lordship; beyond that lies arrival at the Origin of origins. Existence has four ranks, "deed, doer, known, and knower." Bodies are deeds, souls the doers, disengaged realities the known, and intelligence the knower; complete humans unite all four. Hence the four Displays: of bodies, of doers, of things known, and of knowers.
From the concluding "Seventh Door" comes the passage already quoted in chapter 2: Baba Afdal says he did not describe bodies in more detail because tracking particulars "keeps people distracted from universal existents and meanings." The traveller who stops at every meadow and wellspring may take the caravanserai for his homeland. And he defines certainty: ""Certainty" is theoria's return from other than self and arrival at self."
The Makings is the easiest way into the whole chapter: its argument from opposites gives the logic, and its picture of the king ruling his own powers gives the ethics. The Everlasting then restates both in Koranic language. Chittick's notes are the best guide to where Baba Afdal's reading of scripture went further than later writers dared: Mulla Sadra, who rewrote the Everlasting in Arabic, cut or softened exactly those passages (notes 35, 47).
9. Writings on Theory II: The Displays Concluded, The Rungs of Perfection, The Road's End, The Clarifying Method (Chapter 6, pp. 239-308)
The second half of chapter 6 finishes the conclusion of The Book of Displays and then gives three complete or near-complete works and one long selection. The Rungs of Perfection is a manual of the soul's ascent in eight "doors". The Book of the Road's End answers three questions: what the self is, what knowledge is, and what knowledge is good for. Two short essays sit between them. The chapter, and the translations, end with a long selection from The Clarifying Method, Baba Afdal's book of knowledge and logic. Chittick's notes to these pages are few but sharp, and several of them close loops opened in chapters 1 to 3.
- The sciences of particular things help only this life; the science that lasts is knowledge of the knower.
- The self is so near that it is hidden, as light on the pupil cannot be seen.
- Humans are ranked not by body but by how far intelligence governs their potencies.
- A thing grows strong only from its like; the soul grows from knowledge, the body from food, and feeding one starves the other.
- Knowledge has seven rungs, ending where the knower of the universal of universals is that universal.
- Existence divides into being and finding; finding, made actual, is intellect and the final goal of all things.
- Logic begins from what cannot be defined because nothing is clearer: knowledge, thing, being.
The Book of Displays: the end of the conclusion
The first half of the chapter broke off in the middle of the Seventh Door of the Displays' conclusion, inside a comparison between the sun's light, which is one, and the many places it falls on. The second half picks up mid-sentence: the sun "in Khuzestan is not like the sun in Bulgaria, even though there is no diversity in the sun and its shining and radiance." So the many known things owe their diversity not to the knower but to the way universal theoria attaches itself to particulars through the senses.
Here Baba Afdal steps back to explain his whole book. The First and Second Displays, on bodies and souls, were not his first intention; the Third and Fourth, on concepts and intellects, were. Humans are bodily, so their thought falls first on bodies, and he gave as much on bodies as would content them. To go further would distract them. Chittick quoted this passage in chapter 2 as the heart of his complaint about modern science. In its setting the image is a journey. For "the worthies of theoria" the things of this world are stages on the road; a traveller who stops to admire each meadow and wellspring "may be that he will adopt the passageway's caravansary as his homeland, forget his shelter and his destination, and remain in strangerness."
The passage then defines certainty, in the sentence Chittick quoted in chapter 2: "Certainty" is theoria's return from other than self and arrival at self. This is why certainty is not nullified, and certainty cannot be left behind. Before theoria reaches self it is agitated and muddled, and that is doubt.
Why the book ignores the natural sciences
Baba Afdal is plain about what he did not want to do. He did not want to repeat what natural scientists, astronomers, mathematicians, physicians, "imams of the sharias" and masters of the arts had already written. Their benefit is confined to individual lives; when the individuals pass away, the profit does not stay with them. He adds a shrewd observation: "There is many a human individual who has those sciences and who has no share of this work's harmony and order", and some people's lives pass in harmony without them. Such sciences help universal knowledge only by making people bold with thought, so that later their souls "will not be frightened by witnessing the universal forms".
The positive teaching follows. Things must exist in the human essence, either apparent or hidden; if they were nonexistent they could not appear, and if all were already apparent nothing new could appear. Those who know that all things are within them stand higher than those who see things as outside, for the latter "do not know the cause of this twoness." Knowledge, he concludes, is the knower's existence, and it encompasses all existence while nothing encompasses it. Then comes a chain that runs from top to bottom of the cosmos:
Too near to be seen
Why, then, do people not see this? Not because it is dark or far away. "Rather, they cannot be sought because of the extremity of nearness to the essence." Colored things are seen across a distance, "but when light is placed on the pupil, one cannot see." Limpid air shows dark bodies but is not itself seen. And insight mixed with sense-perception is like a painful eye that cannot open in bright air until it slowly gets used to the light. "Theoria's illness comes from its being mixed with the tool."
The Displays end with the sentences Chittick quoted in chapter 1: when people think about this talk their theoria will settle on self, and "Whatever they seek they will seek in self. They will find that it was found before seeking, and they will see that it was given before wanting." A last image warns that argument alone will not convince: "Until the eye of insight opens, these words will not be believed." However often a sleeper is told that morning has come, "He will fancy that it is night and incline toward sleep." The final instruction, already quoted in chapter 1, is to give each seeker as much as suits him and no more, sealed with Koran 4:58 on returning trusts to their owners.
In chapter 1 (p. 11) Chittick quotes this closing sentence of the Displays in quotation marks as Then they will have found it before seeking, and they will see it as having been given before wanting. The full translation here (p. 242) reads They will find that it was found before seeking, and they will see that it was given before wanting. The meaning is the same, but a direct quotation should match the translation it cites.
The Rungs of Perfection
Chapter 1 told us how this book came to be written: in Arabic first, for Muhammad Dizwakush, then in Persian for As'ad Nasa'i. Of the four treatises translated in full it is the most clearly a manual for disciples. It opens with a prayer that turns on a small reversal: Baba Afdal asks God's help, "though at first there was assistance from Him, then asking from me." Then he tells his "religious brothers and true companions" what they are being offered: awareness that they "were created for the final goal of all final goals and the utmost end of all utmost ends." His astonishment at those who could have this and do not seek it is put as a question: "why are they heedless and how can they sleep?"
The beginning of speech
Every existent has a specific state that sets it apart, and that specificity can be more or less apparent. Fully apparent, it stands "at the peak of perfection"; fully hidden, it lies "in the ditch of deficiency and the pit of lowliness." Causes nearer perfection are called virtues, causes nearer deficiency vices. Then comes a definition that ties the book to the whole tradition Chittick sketched in chapter 2: "The "felicity" of a thing is for it to arrive at the perfection proper to it, and its "wretchedness" is for it to remain back and be cut off from this completeness and perfection."
The mark of hope is firm seeking and patience in the search. The mark of deficiency is slackness, like a sick man who has no wish for food: "Moment by moment he moves further from health, and the illness keeps on increasing until it ends in death and perishment." So the brothers must ask a list of questions about the substance of self: "Which existent is it? Among which division of the beings is it numbered?" What helps it, what holds it back, what are the marks? And finally, is the goal "worth so much suffering or not?" The eight doors answer these questions in order.
Door one: the human substance
The first chapter names the audience. Not the majority of humans; not family or acquaintances; not the complete human, who needs no stirring; not the one who has "stayed as a resident in the ditch of possibility." The name "human" fits people as the name "date" fits fruit: fully when ripe, partly when half-ripe, not at all when the fruit has just begun to come out of the branch. Within the middle level he speaks only to the goers, not the lingerers. This is the passage chapter 1 quoted: "If someone in the middle level who has this attribute is present, then our discussion is with him, and if he is absent, then our message is for him." The chapter ends with a crisp line: "he who sleeps in the path is not numbered as a quickly passing goer."
Chapter two defines the word soul. It means the same as root, reality, essence and self. Reality is "that which is suited for being." Chittick's note 51 explains the odd definition: haqiqa comes from haqiq, "suited, deserving, fit", and it is close to haqq, the Real and the right; Baba Afdal defines reality in the same way in The Road's End. A human is not human by shape, color, upright stature, hairless skin or broad nails, nor by want, fear, anger and greed. The name for that animal is like calling the green shoot "wheat": when the real wheat is separated from it, the rest is called by its other name, "straw." The name "human" properly belongs only to one in whom correct thought, right seeing and certain knowledge are actual or nearly so; for anyone else it is a name held "by borrowing and sharing."
Chapters three to five run through the potencies from the bottom up, in what is the most "scientific" stretch of the book.
| Level | Name in the Rungs | Seat in the body | Servants and works |
|---|---|---|---|
| Body as body | Nature (tabi'at), "imprinted" (muntabi') in the body | All parts | Preserves bodily form, measure in three sizes, through every change of shape |
| Growth | Growth-inciting soul | Liver | Attracting, retentive, digestive, discerning, expelling, nourishing, form-giving and progenerative potencies |
| Animal life: yearning | Animal soul, potency of yearning and wanting | Heart | Appetitive ("beastly") and wrathful ("predatory") potencies; movement |
| Animal life: awareness | Animal soul, potency of awareness and finding | Brain | Five outer senses; imagination, memory, sense-intuition |
| Human | Human soul: theoretical and practical intellect | None | Knowing; "intellective works" such as crafts and the means of living |
Several details deserve notice. Nature is an appointee "from the side of the bodies' king" which keeps a body a body when it changes from round to square. The finding potencies are "the soul's mirrors": they show states, not the things that have them. "In the sense of smell the aroma of musk is shown, not musk itself." Sense-intuition is the highest animal potency, and when strong it can show events before they happen; this is how "The group of diviners" know hidden things. Influence comes down through the potencies in order, like sunlight that brings warmth, warmth subtlety, and subtlety buoyancy.
The relation of soul and body is that of master and work: "The writer is not like the writing, the ringmaker not like the ring, and the tailor not like the sewn clothing". A ring takes shape in stages, melting, bar, band, guise, adornment, but the gold itself does not alter. Baba Afdal then lets the doubting brothers speak: "we always see and find the body and the motion together." His reply: if motion came from body as body, it would be the same in all bodies, which it is not; so it comes from something other than body, and "other than the body is not a body." We cannot see that thing because the senses find only shape, measure and color. He adds the line chapter 1 quoted as a sign of his independence: others have written about the potencies, "But we intend and aim for a meaning that cannot be found in their books."
Chapter six reaches the human soul, "a divine light which is bright through self and through which other things are bright." It is potential when the person is aware of things through it but heedless of it, actual when he is aware of it. Then come the three levels of existence that Chittick summarised in chapter 2: possible existence, like the human in the sperm-drop or clothing in cotton; existence apparent to others but hidden from itself, like bodies; and existence aware of itself through itself, which is intellect. The intellect is one, but not a one with parts that could be handed out, nor does it travel from person to person: "it is a radiance that stands through its Endurance-giver", from which radiances arise one after another.
The actual intellecting soul needs no proof, since nothing but itself could make it clear. Proof helps only those of complete preparedness, who can be shown "that the seeker is the same thing as what he is seeking and that the seeking keeps him heedless of finding." Others must first be made worthy. The relation of theory to practice is that of a scribe's thought to his moving fingers. The door closes with a warning in four steps: not to understand is to be veiled; "If you understand and then forget, you have found self and then again lost it." To preserve but not recall is to leave the harvest unreaped.
Doors two and three: the journey back and the ladder of humans
Door two describes the soul's return as a journey whose name is "reflection." The seeker traces his body back: to the sperm-drop, to the parents' food, to plants and animals, to the elements, to unconditioned body, and to the matter that comes before measure. Then "they have crossed the desert of the bodies." What was aware of the first stage is aware of the last, so it was never the body. Searching next for the soul's origin, he sees that the dead cannot produce the living: "the living does not arise from the dead, and the aware is not born from the unconscious." The ladder therefore runs downward from intellect through soul, material substance, body, elements and compounds to the living and talking body. At the top, intellect cannot be cut off from its source, "for intellect is the radiance of the Essence, and the radiance is not cut off from the Radiant."
Door three ranks humans. Spirits differ in limpidness: the human spirit most limpid, then animal, vegetal, and last nature, the darkest. A thrown stone shows nature's passivity: it obeys the outside force until the force is spent, then nature brings it back to rest. Human perfection itself is "one final goal in which there can be no multiplicity in any respect", but the deficient are of many kinds.
At the bottom are those whose potencies are all weak, who "barely pass beyond the limit of the growing things." Then those ruled by appetite, who spend their moments sleeping and eating, and those ruled by anger, whose "anger's fire blazes up at the slightest disturbance." When both animal potencies command the human one, the result is "satans of men", whose souls belong to the hidden "satans of jinn"; note 53 gives the book in Koran 6:112 and adds that jinn means "hidden". Even they are useful: the worthy, watching them, grow in aversion to ugliness.
The admirable deficient begin with craftsmen, who are "the community and army of the practical intellect." Above them stand those who put intellect to work in their character: the ascetics, the worshipers, the good-doers, "the pious and the best." Above them are the folk of theoretical intellect, who "cannot be content with the things that they hear" and gather mathematics, logic, natural science and divine science to be freed from the prison of generation and corruption. The scheme repeats the four levels in an essay quoted in chapter 2.
The fourth chapter of Door three describes the top. Those who reach it are lost in the divine light as a weak lamp in the sun or a drop in the ocean: "They are the sun and the ocean, and the sun and the ocean are they." No universal encloses such a soul, not "human", not "substance", not even "existence". This is where Chittick's sentence from chapter 2 comes from: "It is self that is present with self. The self is the self s seen, seer, and seeing." No demonstration can prove this rank, since demonstration rests on premises that rest on the highest genus and unconditioned existence: "seeking its existence through demonstration is to seek the radiance and shining of the sun with a lamp." The Prophet's words at the end of his night journey express the state: "I do not enumerate laudation of Thee; Thou art as Thou hast lauded Thyself." Note 54 says only that this hadith is in most authoritative sources.
The door ends with the near ones becoming "essence through His Essence, hearers through His hearing, seers through His seeing". Note 55 is one of Chittick's most useful: here Baba Afdal joins a Sufi expression of the supreme state with the philosophers' Agent Intellect. The Sufi side is the hadith in which God says of the servant he loves, "I am his hearing through which he hears, his eyesight through which he sees"; the philosophical side is Avicenna's soul that becomes an intelligible world.
Note 55 quotes Avicenna's phrase from chapter 3 as an intelligible world, parallel with all the existent cosmos. In chapter 3 (p. 79) the same sentence of Avicenna is translated She turns into an intelligible world, parallel with all the existent world. The note cites the earlier passage, so the wording should agree.
Doors four to seven: helps, blights, marks and practice
Door four lays down one principle: "Nothing takes on potency except from its own suchlike and congenial, and nothing becomes weak save from its own opposite and incompatible." Fire grows from fire, body from body. So the brothers must ask what kind of thing their substance is. Baba Afdal repeats the division of the spiritual into nature and soul, soul into mover and finder, finder into one with tools and one without. Only a finder grows from finding. What helps the soul is whatever keeps it back from passing enjoyments and whatever lets it look at lasting things without the tools of sense.
His analogy is digestion. Food benefits a body only when it joins it and becomes like it; then it cannot be taken back. Likewise knowledge: "Once the known thing becomes one with the soul in intense conjunction, then it will not become separate from the soul and cannot be taken back. Such knowing is called "certainty," and before it joins with the soul it is called "surmise." Fancy is the chewing stage, in which reality and accidents are mixed; reflection separates them, and the accidents fade through forgetting.
Door five names the blight. The soul is a doer, the body a deed. The soul holds contraries together, movement and rest, life and death, white and black, without either weakening the other; the body cannot. What is in the soul never changes. Since a thing weakens from its opposite, "the soul becomes weak and bad in state from mixing with the body." Mixing means turning one's gaze to the body until "it fancies the body as self. This is the worst state of the human soul." The worker and his tool make the point vivid: "when a carpenter's adze becomes dull, it becomes well again with a file, but when the carpenter becomes dull and weak in work, he cannot be made sharp and strong with a file."
Door six portrays the complete human, whose every potency stands in equilibrium and obeys intelligence. The list of balanced traits rises to a run of paradoxes: "They are the absent present, the far near, the evident hidden, the lamp in darkness and obscurity, the clarification in bewilderment and bafflement." They "show the law and rule of the Sunnah and the Sharia in doing", a reminder that for Baba Afdal the summit does not cancel the law.
Door seven gives the practical path in two parts. Preparedness comes from refusing bodily adornments and beastly enjoyments, refining the soul and collecting the virtues until they become a habitude. Knowledge comes from keeping thought on primary truths and asking of every judgment why it is true, "for whatever is not sought will not be found." The seekers must avoid reports that may be lies, "the folk of poetry" who care for outward embellishment, and "the folk of dialectic, whose purpose is to defeat the opponent through talk". Then come exercises that read like a natural philosophy syllabus. Why does a wall block sight while air does not? Because color stops the gaze, and air has no color. Why does a far thing look smaller though neither it nor the eye has changed? Why does a body thrown upward slow down and a falling one speed up? Why do earth and water seek the center and fire and air the circumference? Such questions are not meant for their own sake but to make the student aware of the natural potency and the soul's potency.
Door eight: the seven rungs
The last door gives the book its title. Human specificity is knowledge, potential in most people and actual in few, as a suckling infant is a potential scribe and a person writing is an actual one. The levels of actual knowledge are the rungs of perfection.
The first rung is to know the cosmos, its parts, states and progeny "just as they are and according to what they are." The second adds knowledge of that through which one knows them. The third knows what knowing is: "It is to find the thing in self and to reach the things of self through self." The fourth knows that what is found in self is the reality of the thing, not a trace of it, as sight gives only color and guise; otherwise one could never know that a trace was the trace of that thing. The fifth knows that universal awareness is the root of sensing and imagining. The sixth knows that universals are not infinite but end in "the universal of the universals". The seventh knows that whoever knows that last universal is not something under it: "the knower of the universal of universals is nothing other than the universal of universals."
Then a second chain climbs from the cosmos to the goal: progeneration, compounding, transformation, increase, life and sensation, the potency for intellection, its act, and finally "the unification of the intellecter, the intellect, and the intellected." Note 56 reminds us that "progeneration" (tawallud) means the birth of mineral, plant and animal from the heavens as fathers and the elements as mothers, so "increase" is the mark of plants and "life and sensation" of animals. The door also defines pleasure: "enjoyment is nothing but awareness of arrival at the compatible", and nothing is more compatible than complete being.
The Persian colophon tells the story chapter 1 drew on. Muhammad Dizwakush requested the Arabic book; As'ad Nasa'i, "a serious wayfarer who was aiming for arrival", asked for a Persian version, and as each Opening was finished "its meanings became more apparent and more unambiguous in the raiment of Persian speech." Baba Afdal explains the difference by the two requesters: the first wished for wayfaring, the second was already on the road. Note 57 adds that the last two paragraphs are missing from some manuscripts and are printed separately in the Persian edition.
In chapter 1 (p. 14) Chittick quotes this colophon, with the reference HIP 271, as its meanings became more apparent and more unambiguous in the clothing of Persian speech. The translation on p. 271 reads in the raiment of Persian speech. Small, but it is a direct quotation with a page reference to the book's own text.
Essay: Words Giving Help to the Seeing of the Obtainers
This page-long essay compresses the Rungs into a set of propositions. Whoever knows the world as it is can be aware of "no third being outside the being of the world and the being of the self that is aware of it." Every known is the effect of the knower, and the cause comes first, so the knower is prior to the known. The world is particular, the particular stands through the universal, and the knower of the world, though potentially an intellecter, is actually an intelligible through which the world stands. Its neatest line sorts the three levels: "Bodies are actually natural and potentially intelligible. Soul is actually intelligible and potentially intellecter. Intellect is actually intellecter and intelligible." The chain ends: "the trace of living nature is the body's motion."
The Book of the Road's End
The title means the end or completion of the road. A group of "true companions and religious brothers" asked for a book on three things: the existence of self and its attributes, the reality of knowledge, and the profit of knowledge. Since the request came at three levels, the book has three talks, the first divided into ten doors. Baba Afdal writes because he has a share of the answers and owes gratitude for it, and because "the person most worthy for this knowledge is he who knows to ask of it."
The first talk: the self and its existence
Door one asks how one can explain "existence" at all. There are two ways to make a thing known: by listing its attributes, as "animal" is explained by body, lifebreath, sensation and movement through want, or by listing its divisions, as animal divides into flyers, crawlers and goers. Existence has no parts, since nothing exists before existence and nothing is other than existence except nonexistence. So it can be explained only by its divisions. On the way he clarifies how an attribute relates to its object: it may be more general (every weight has measure, not every measure is weight), equal (moving through desire, for animals), or more specific (scribe).
Door two gives the division Chittick put at the center of chapter 2. "Existence has two divisions, one division is "being," the other "finding." There is being without finding, as in minerals, but no finding without being. Each splits into potential and actual.
The highest level is actual finding, because "being is correct through finding." Without finding, a thing's being and nonbeing are the same as far as it is concerned, though not to someone who finds it. Door three restates this with two Persian words: the existent is either the "come-to-be" [buda] or the "found" [yafta]. The found is either particular, grasped by sensation and imagination, or universal, grasped by intellect. Humanness belongs equally to Zayd, Bakr and 'Amr; one is not more human than another. Through "a light that is the radiance of the Universal Intelligence" the knower sees that white, black and green are one in the meaning "color".
Door four separates the particular cosmos, the root, from its progeny, the branch. Sensation finds what is present; imagination keeps it when absent, and its perception is "fancy" [pindar]. Chittick's note 58 points out that "imagination" here translates wahm, not khayal as elsewhere; Baba Afdal seems to use the two as synonyms, as is common. An individual like Zayd cannot be many even in imagination, whereas the universal "sun" can be imagined as many suns. Doors five to seven treat thing and existent as the highest universal, the four causes, and the causes of perception. The first matter has no matter and the first actor no actor; when the knower knows his own essence "all the causes become one."
Door eight explains why "soul" and "self" mean the same, using everyday Persian: of one who faints people say "He went from himself," because he no longer perceives. Door nine describes inference (istidlal): from motion we find the mover, "From the sensible casket he knows the carpenter." Whoever knows the root only through the branch is still a pupil; whoever knows effects from causes is a knower. The growing soul and the animal soul can be inferred from their traces, since a body stays a body when its growth or life departs. The human soul is stranger, because the seeker of it is that soul itself: "when searching for other than self shows the road to self, this is truly a marvelous work."
Door ten draws the conclusion. Reality means "to be fit for being"; the human reality is the human soul, and the searcher and the sought are the same. "To search for self is to go back to self, and to know self is to reach self." One can search only for what in one respect is and in another is not. "Potential finding is called "desire," that is, one has found and one does not know that one has found. Actual finding is called "knowing," that is, one has found and one knows that one has found." When the soul actually finds itself it is no longer soul but intellect, "for, when the specificity turns into something else, the name also turns into something else."
The second talk: what knowledge is
The second talk is a single chapter, and it opens with a syllogism: "Awareness and knowledge are finding things in self. Whatever is not cannot be found." Humans can know all things, so all things are in the human self. Baba Afdal then retells cosmology as self-knowledge. Bodiment is one and simple, so the first body takes the simplest shape, the sphere. A sphere can only turn; turning fixes a still center and a moving circumference. Heat comes from movement and cold from rest, lightness from heat and heaviness from cold, so fire lies at the edge and earth at the center, with air and water between. The heavens' turning mixes the elements into minerals, then plants, which pull other bodies into themselves, then animals, whose many senses match the many qualities of mixed bodies. At the top, "sensory finding turns intellective, the sensible becomes the known".
The point of the cosmology is that humans share in whatever they find. Their bodies are one with the spheres in bodiment, with compounds in compoundedness, with plants in growth, with animals in sensation, and with all humans in humanness. So in finding anything they find themselves: "The profit of being aware of and knowing this is existence."
The third talk: the profit of knowledge
"Profit" is the final cause, the noblest of the four, since it makes the actor act: "The final goal is before all the causes in essence and after them all in existence." Final goals form a chain: the elements are for compounds, compounds for the balance of natures, balance for receiving soul, soul for knowledge, knowledge for unconditioned existence, and unconditioned existence "for the sake of the Ipseity and Essence."
Door two defines act as "a state that becomes manifest little by little from a substance in a substance", like fire warming water, and argues that bodies act only by accident. Fire warms not as body but through a potency that is one of the soul's branches. So the first actor is soul and the first thing acted on is body. The scheme yields a proportion: "Intellect is to soul as soul is to nature, and as nature is to body." Baba Afdal is careful to say he does not mean that every compound becomes a plant or every plant an animal; each matter has a limit set by its worthiness for form. This matters given Chittick's warning in chapter 2 against reading evolution into such texts.
Door three defines soul as "a substance living by essence, doing by nature, and potentially knowing." It is potentially knowing because, knowing things, it is distracted from itself and thinks the known is outside it. When its potency becomes act, it is knower and known of itself, and that form is intellect. As body's matter is no longer matter once it takes the form of body, so soul is no longer soul once it knows. The intellect has only a final cause, and the book closes with its thesis: "Unaware, natural, particular, deficient, and corruptible existence turns into aware, intellective, universal, subsistent, complete, and endless existence."
The Road's End is the easiest place to test chapter 2's claims. Its doors 2 and 10 contain, in a few paragraphs, the being/finding pair, the soul/intellect name change, and the definition of desire as finding that does not know it has found. Read them before the longer Displays.
Essay on the Reality of the Human
Note 59 says the unnamed "speaker" of this essay is presumably Baba Afdal himself. It proceeds by steps, each opening "Then he said". "The human is." That is, the human is human, which shows the quiddity. The human knows that he is human, and this knowing is the human's "complete existence" and "first intellect". Wishing and striving for knowledge branch from it; pondering, talking and doing branch from the soul; dying and passing belong only to the individual. "The human is not many, but the human's individuals are many."
The essay sorts people into four classes: the "bodily", the "workers", the "spirituals", and "the clear ones, the intelligent, the divine ones." Each lower class takes help from the one above, which leads to an account of teaching. The teacher is the actual knower, aware and aware of being aware; the learner is aware but not aware of his awareness, and finds it through the teacher's clarity, until "the learner becomes the teacher." Known things too have an order, back to the first known, the knowledge of self, which is simple, one, incontestable, known in essence and actual.
The essay then introduces the logical vocabulary of the next selection: "conceptual knowledge" of single things and "knowledge by assent" of their joining, as in "air is light". It says outright that its explanations are not a definition, "because knowledge cannot be defined": to define is to clarify by something clearer, and nothing is clearer than knowledge.
The Clarifying Method: knowledge and logic
The last translation comes from Baba Afdal's longest work after the Displays, written first in Arabic. As chapter 1 said, its first quarter treats knowing and the rest logic. The opening says the two human excellences are knowing and talking, and since knowing comes first by nature, it is treated first.
The origins
The first chapter lists twenty-nine words that name the "origins": knowledge, ignorance, known, unknown, knower, and so on through subject, predicate, conception and assent. They cannot be known through anything better known, since they are the starting points. Then each is glossed in plain Persian. Knowledge ('ilm) is defined as "to be aware and to find in self." Thought (andisha) is "looking in self so as to seek and to find." The universal known is "what is one thing in the soul, while it may be many outside of it."
Chapter two separates first and second knowledge. First knowledge is knowing a thing's ipseity, that it is a thing, without knowing anything else about it; this is "conception" and also "intellection" (ta'aqqul), "that is tying back [baz bastan] the self by the known thing." Note 61 explains: the root of 'aql means to tie, so the intellect ties the soul back from error. Note 60 explains "ipseity" (huwiyya, "he-ness"): Baba Afdal treats it as a synonym for the Persian "to be a thing" and contrasts it with the thing's being, so it matches the familiar pair quiddity and existence. Chittick's gloss is clear: we ask "What is it?" and then "Is it?", and in the West this has been discussed as "essence and existence."
Attributes, genera and the categories
Chapters three to nine build the vocabulary of predication. An attribute may be prior to its object in knowing, requisite, or subordinate; Baba Afdal's examples for humans are "animal", "laughing by nature", and "writer". It may be more general ("body"), equal ("worthy for knowledge"), or more specific ("writing"). It may be primary ("human" for Zayd) or not ("animal" for Zayd). It may be essential or accidental. From these he defines the five predicables: genus, species, differentia, general accident and specificity; note 62 says khassa is usually translated "proprium". The ladder of genera ends at a high genus with no essential attribute, and at the bottom the particular individual, all of whose attributes are essential.
Chapter ten derives the ten categories from looking at one person. Each of these, taken as shared by many, is a universal. Chapter eleven then argues that "thing" is more general than "existent", because "thing" covers what cannot be, what can be and what must be, while "existent" excludes what cannot be. Note 63 connects the three Persian phrases to Avicenna's impossible, possible and necessary, and quotes Baba Afdal's "The Origins of the Soulish Existents": once "existent" is said, "the division of 'absurd' is outside, for it cannot be that an existent's existence be absurd."
The later chapters are dense but full of homely examples. The four causes are shown by a bench: wood, its form, the carpenter, and "the suitability for sitting on top". "In" has three senses, as color is in a body, a man in a house, a part in a whole; only the first is the true sense, and it defines accident. Priority has five kinds: in essence, existence, nature, time and station. The divisions of substance end with a surprise: a substance known without any state is "intellect." Note 64 observes that here Baba Afdal says "thing" rather than "substance", probably because, as the Essay on Intellect said, he does not count intellect a substance.
Two more notes help. The soul that moves bodies only by alteration is called "habitudinal", and note 65 explains that the Arabic malaki is written exactly like the word for "angelic", but Baba Afdal means the vegetal soul; the Displays name three kinds of soulish movement, revolving for the spheres, habitudinal for plants, and chosen for animals. And time is distinguished from aeon: the measure of a substance's being a substance is "aeon" [dahr], while the measure of its passing states is time. Act, finally, is either natural, with one effect only, as fire only burns and rises, or freely chosen, able to produce opposites.
The conclusion: which syllogism is best
The selection, and the translations, end with the conclusion of The Clarifying Method. Definitions lead to conception, propositions to assent, and the best saying leading to assent is the syllogism that gives certainty, the demonstration. Below it come "dialectical," "rhetorical," and "poetical," and below them the counterfeit, "sophistic" and "contentious." Every demonstration must end at primary sayings, known without effort, whose mark is that the intelligent person cannot recall when he learned it, "nor the moment of wanting and seeking it, nor the path of reaching it."
Yet primary truths count only when one is aware of them. That is why most people, asked about certainty, say "We find no certainty in self." A smaller group, who have half-learned reflection, are nearer error than the plain majority, and many of "the folk of the tomes" have built crooked beliefs by their own thought. Baba Afdal's verdict, quoted in chapter 1, is the last line of philosophy in the book before its closing prayer: "Suffering to efface the bad forms from such souls is much harder than guiding those who have not acquired anything at all." If potential knowledge could produce knowledge, he adds, "no human would remain ignorant, and everyone would have certainty in everything."
Chapter 1 (p. 14) quotes this sentence, citing HIP 307, as Suffering to efface the bad forms from such souls is much more difficult than guiding those who have not acquired anything at all. The translation on p. 307 has much harder. A second small slip of the same kind sits in Door 1 of the Rungs (p. 247), where the printed text sets a dash and then a hyphen together after "the possible human limit".
10. Notes on the Text
Only slips that are evident from the book itself are listed: a mismatch with another passage of the same book, a broken sentence, a misnumbered note call, a plain typographical error. Page numbers are printed pages; n. marks a note.
| Page | As printed | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| 14 | in the The Rungs of Perfection | Article doubled |
| 14 | more unambiguous in the clothing of Persian speech (cited as HIP 271) | The translation on p. 271 reads "raiment" |
| 14 | much more difficult than guiding (cited as HIP 307) | The translation on p. 307 reads "much harder" |
| 11 | Then they will have found it before seeking, and they will see it as having been given before wanting | The translation on p. 242 reads "They will find that it was found before seeking, and they will see that it was given before wanting" |
| 14, 140-41 | Letter to Majd al-Din quoted in two wordings | "referring to it by the name" and "nor will he part from it" (ch. 1) against "expressing it by the name" and "nor will he sever himself from it" (ch. 5) |
| 22, no. 9 | to his students (who is described as holding an apple...) | "who" must refer to Aristotle, not the students |
| 27, doubtful no. 2 | the mention of the term al-insan al-kamil | Entry breaks off without an ending; the following note call reads 35 though the notes give 35 to this entry and 36 to al-Mufid |
| 44 | note call 15 after Merlan's "divinize himself" | Note 15 is on kawn; Merlan is note 16 |
| 46 | "Nothing can be reached through the meaning of speech but the meaning of self (Musannafat 694; HIP 138). | Quotation mark opened, never closed |
| 79 and n. 55 | parallel with all the existent world / parallel with all the existent cosmos | The note quotes chapter 3's sentence in a different wording |
| 82 | In other worlds | For "In other words" |
| 86 | like animosity, truthfulness hostility, and friendliness | Comma missing after "truthfulness" |
| 110 | the sweetness of agitation and hurry yield | Singular subject with plural verb, beside "yields" in the same sentence |
| 117 | Chapter | One chapter heading of the Four Headings has no number |
| 135, q. 180 | "Why do you blame me? He told me to do it.' | Opening double mark closed by a single one |
| n. 26 (ch. 5) | kwudi | Elsewhere in the same note bi-khwudi |
| 174 | note call 5 after "the Book of the Judge" | Repeats the previous call; the note is 6 |
| 176 | [54:55]' | Stray closing mark |
| 199 | Thou shall not make the dead to hear, neither shalt thou | "shall" and "shalt" in one sentence |
| 210 | note call 25 after "Location of Locations" | Repeats the previous call; the note is 26 |
| n. 8 (ch. 6) | in the The Book of the Everlasting | Article doubled |
| 247 | limit, then a dash and a hyphen together, before "will show" | Doubled punctuation |
11. Synthesis
What the book teaches, how its parts fit together, where it is strong and where a reader may push back, and how its ideas travel into present-day work.
Twenty takeaways
- Islamic philosophy is best read as "love of wisdom" in the old sense: knowledge of things as they are joined to a way of living.
- The philosophers shared Islam's three principles, unity, prophecy and return, and differed from theologians and Sufis mainly in method.
- Their cosmos is a ranking of qualities, from the One through intellect, soul and nature to matter; quantity is the lowest rung.
- Wujud means "finding" as well as "being"; for Baba Afdal the highest existence is actual finding, that is, intellect.
- Every soul has come down and must go back; the voluntary return is knowledge.
- The goal is the unity of the intellecter, the intellect and the intelligible: to know truly is to be truly, and to be forever.
- Baba Afdal made one question his whole subject: who am I?
- He wrote mainly in Persian, in plain everyday words, which lets English follow his thought without Latinate jargon.
- He was a teacher of "religious brothers" and "true companions", a guide in Hadot's sense more than a professor.
- Whether he was a Sufi depends on the definition; Chittick finds little evidence for formal Sufi ties but much shared vocabulary.
- "Disengaged" (mujarrad) fits his meaning better than "abstract": the soul is to be peeled free of the body, not thinned into concepts.
- The soul is a finder; the body only a tool. Knowing oneself needs no tool, which is why it is intellect.
- Things are found in the self; the sciences of particulars serve this life only.
- A thing grows only from its like: knowledge feeds the soul as food feeds the body, and fattening one thins the other.
- Humans are ranked by how far intelligence rules their potencies, from those barely above plants to those lost in the divine light.
- The self is hidden by nearness, not distance, as light on the pupil cannot be seen.
- Knowledge cannot be defined, because nothing is clearer than it; logic starts from such origins.
- Certainty is not a feeling but the return of seeing to itself; it cannot be lost once reached.
- Half-learning is worse than ignorance: clearing bad forms from a busy mind is harder than teaching a blank one.
- Chittick's wider claim is that modern thought lost the qualitative, anthropocosmic vision, and that recognizing the loss is the start of any recovery.
The book in five paragraphs
Chittick begins with a person almost unknown in the West. Baba Afdal lived in and near Kashan, taught a circle of disciples, was once jailed on a charge of sorcery, and left a body of Persian prose of perhaps five hundred pages, plus hundreds of quatrains. He named only Aristotle and Hermes among his authorities. What sets him apart is not doctrine but manner: he wrote with a clarity and simplicity that make him a natural doorway to the whole tradition.
Chapter 2 builds that doorway. Islamic philosophy, Chittick argues, cannot be judged by modern definitions of philosophy or religion. Its practitioners shared the Muslim worldview and pursued wisdom with intellect alone. They saw a world of qualities radiating from the One and returning to it, and they understood being as finding, so that the human goal was to become a fully actual finder. Chittick sets this against scientism, historicism and the "reign of quantity", and he is frank that he finds the old view truer to human experience.
Chapter 3 explains the vocabulary: wisdom as becoming like God to the extent of human capacity, the two worlds of body and spirit, the four levels of awareness, and the complementary pairs of universal and particular, form and matter, substance and accident. These are the terms the translations use, in Persian dress.
Part II lets Baba Afdal speak. Chapter 4 shows the Greek sources as he knew them: Aristotle as a dying sage holding an apple, an epitome of De anima that makes intellect one with what it knows, and Hermes urging the soul to know itself. Chapter 5 gives the practical side, maxims, quatrains and letters full of warmth and urgency. Chapter 6 gives the theoretical works, from a book of advice for kings to The Book of the Everlasting, The Rungs of Perfection and The Road's End.
The result is a coherent program. Practice refines the soul so that it can see; theory shows it that what it seeks is itself. The last pages of logic remind the reader that all this rests on certainty, which few possess and which no book can hand over. Chittick's notes, finally, keep the reader honest about texts, translations and words.
Five passages to remember
What the book does not claim
Chittick does not offer a history of Islamic philosophy, and he says the anthology he would like to make must wait. He does not claim Baba Afdal was a Sufi in the narrow sense, nor an Isma'ili, nor that he knew Ibn al-'Arabi's school; he rejects each claim for lack of evidence. He does not claim the philosophers were secret unbelievers hiding behind pious formulas. Nor does he claim that the old cosmology is good science; he claims it was never meant as science in the modern sense.
How the arguments depend on one another
The two claims at the top are independent: one could accept that philosophy was a way of life without accepting a qualitative cosmos. But the claim that being is finding needs the first, and the Origin and Return needs the second. Both feed the central thesis that self-knowledge is the goal, and that thesis is what makes the practical and theoretical writings one program.
The circle of Origin and Return
Ten questions for discussion
- Is "love of wisdom" a fair translation of what the Islamic philosophers did, or does it hide their technical side?
- Chittick says modern scientism is itself a kind of theology. Is the comparison fair?
- What changes if wujud is read as "finding" rather than "being"?
- Can the claim that knower and known become one be stated without mysticism?
- Why might Persian, rather than Arabic, have suited Baba Afdal's purpose?
- Is it possible to be a "rationalistic mystic"? What would distinguish one from a Sufi?
- The Rungs ranks humans by the rule of intelligence over appetite and anger. Is this elitist, or simply realistic?
- Door 7 tells students to avoid poets and debaters. What would a modern version of that rule look like?
- Why does Baba Afdal say the self is hidden by nearness?
- Chittick admits his sympathy for the tradition. Does that weaken or strengthen the book?
Frameworks table
| Framework | Where | Elements | Use |
|---|---|---|---|
| Three dimensions of Islam | Ch2 | practice (islam), understanding (iman), virtue (ihsan) | Places philosophy inside the religion's own map |
| Three principles | Ch2 | tawhid, prophecy, return | Shows shared ground with Kalam and Sufism |
| Being and finding | Ch2; Road's End 1.2 | potential/actual being; potential/actual finding | Defines the human goal as actual finding |
| Four levels of awareness | Ch3; Displays | senses, imagination, sense-intuition, intelligence | Separates particular from universal knowing |
| Complementary pairs | Ch3 | universal/particular, form/matter, substance/accident | Each pair has a side nearer the One |
| Ladder of human types | Rungs, Door 3 | weak, appetitive, wrathful; craftsmen, ascetics, theorists; the remotest | Diagnoses where a seeker stands |
| Seven rungs of knowledge | Rungs, Door 8 | from knowing the cosmos to being the universal of universals | Measures progress in knowledge |
| Four classes | Essay on the Reality of the Human | bodily, workers, spirituals, divine ones | Explains teaching as help from the level above |
| Ranks of argument | Clarifying Method | demonstrative, dialectical, rhetorical, poetical, sophistic | Ranks sources of belief by certainty |
A closer look
The book is the first substantial English Baba Afdal, translated with a consistent vocabulary that Chittick explains term by term. The introduction is unusual in teaching how to think with the tradition rather than listing who said what. The notes are disciplined and often correct earlier scholarship and translations.
Limits.Chittick is openly sympathetic, and his attacks on scientism, historicism and the academy, though argued, sometimes run ahead of the texts. The biographical chapter rests on very little evidence, as he admits. The translation's literalness ("finderness", "without-self-ness", "how-much-ness") serves consistency but can tire a reader. Finally, the book's own cross-quotations do not always match its translations, as Part 10 shows; none of these changes the meaning, but a reader checking a quotation should go to the full translation.
Open questions.How far Baba Afdal's Persian vocabulary is his own and how far inherited; how his teaching circle actually worked; how widely he was read before Mulla Sadra translated The Book of the Everlasting into Arabic. The book raises these but cannot settle them.
Who's Who
Only dates printed in the book are given.
| Name | Dates in the book | Role in the book |
|---|---|---|
| Afdal al-Din Kashani (Baba Afdal) | d. 610/1213-14 (the date Chittick accepts) | Persian philosopher; subject of the book |
| Avicenna | d. 428/1037 | The great Peripatetic; source of many terms and of the knower-known identity |
| Al-Kindi | d. ca. 256/870 | First philosopher of the Arabs; definitions of philosophy |
| Nasir Khusraw | d. ca. 464/1072 | The only other major philosopher writing mainly in Persian |
| 'Abd Allah Ansari | d. 481/1088 | Earlier user of the Persian phrase "He is all" |
| Ghazali | d. 505/1111 | Critic of the philosophers; Baba Afdal abridged his Alchemy of Felicity |
| 'Ayn al-Qudat Hamadani | d. 525/1131 | Named among thinkers with related teachings |
| Suhrawardi al-Maqtul | d. 587/1191 | Founder of the School of Illumination; contemporary |
| Averroes | d. 595/1198 | Contemporary; Aristotle's commentator |
| Ibn al-'Arabi | d. 638/1240 | Contemporary; Chittick's comparison for concrete language |
| Nasir al-Din Tusi | d. 672/1274 | Cites Baba Afdal on logic; studied with his student |
| 'Abd al-Razzaq Kashani | d. 736/1335 | Probable author of a commentary once ascribed to Baba Afdal |
| Mulla Sadra | d. 1050/1640 | Translated The Book of the Everlasting into Arabic |
| Baba Kuhi of Shiraz; Baba Tahir of Hamadan | 4th/10th; 5th/11th centuries | Other "Babas", cited on the title |
| S. H. Nasr | none given | Chittick's teacher; dedicatee |
| Pierre Hadot | none given | Historian of ancient philosophy as a way of life |
| Philip Merlan | none given | Source of "rationalistic mysticism" |
| A. H. Armstrong | none given | Plotinus scholar quoted on thinking beyond thought |
| Muhammad Dizwakush; As'ad Nasa'i | none given | Disciples who asked for the Arabic and Persian Rungs |
12. Glossary
Persian, Arabic and technical terms as the book uses them, with Chittick's English renderings, in simple transliteration.
| Term | Chittick's rendering and sense |
|---|---|
| adab | Courtesy; right conduct toward God, people and things; no English equivalent |
| ala | Tool; organ or instrument through which a potency acts |
| 'aql, khirad | Intellect (Arabic), intelligence (Persian); the knower that knows itself |
| 'aql fa''al | Agent Intellect; best understood as the fully actual intellect |
| 'aql nazari / 'aql 'amali | Theoretical intellect / practical intellect ("seeing" and "working" intelligence) |
| andisha, fikr | Thought, reflection; looking in self to seek and find |
| budan / yaftan | To be / to find; the two senses of wujud |
| buda / yafta | The come-to-be / the found (The Road's End) |
| dahr | Aeon; the measure of a substance's being, as against time (zaman) |
| dhawq | Taste; direct experiential knowing |
| fada'il | Virtues; from fadl, bounty, both given and earned |
| fayd | Effusion (rather than "emanation"), as water overflowing |
| hikma, hakim | Wisdom, sage; knowledge of things as they are joined to practice |
| haqiqa | Reality; literally what is fit or suited for being |
| hasti | Being (Persian); from hast, "it is" |
| huwiyya | Ipseity, "he-ness"; for Baba Afdal a synonym of "to be a thing", hence quiddity |
| ibda' | Innovation; bringing the spiritual world into being without matter |
| jan | Anima; the life principle, distinct from self |
| jawhar / 'arad | Substance / accident |
| khassa, khassiyya | Specificity (usually "proprium"); what makes a thing what it is |
| khayal | Imagination; holds sensory forms in their absence |
| kulli / juz'i | Universal / particular |
| al-mabda' wa'l-ma'ad | The Origin and the Return |
| malaka | Habitude; a settled trait, "second nature"; malaki soul = the vegetal soul |
| ma'na | Meaning; inner reality as against outward form |
| mardum-i tamam | The complete human being |
| mujarrad, tajrid | Disengaged, disengagement (rather than "abstract", "catharsis") |
| nafs, khwud | Soul, self; Baba Afdal uses them as one meaning |
| nafs natiqa, nafs-i guya | Rationally speaking soul, talking soul |
| nazar | Theoria; contemplation, seeing (Persian binish) |
| qaws nuzuli / qaws su'udi | Descending arc / ascending arc |
| quwwa / fi'l | Potency / act |
| sa'ada | Felicity; arrival at one's proper perfection |
| sura / madda | Form / matter |
| ta'alluh, tashabbuh | Deiformity; becoming similar to God to the extent of human capacity |
| tabi'a | Nature; the lowest spirit, "imprinted" in the body |
| tahqiq / taqlid | Verification, realization / following authority |
| tasawwur / tasdiq | Conception / assent; first and second knowledge |
| tawallud, muwalladat | Progeneration, progeny: minerals, plants, animals born of heavens and elements |
| tawhid | Asserting God's unity; for Baba Afdal also the unity of knower, known and knowledge |
| wahm, guman | Sense-intuition; grasps nonsensory states, like enmity, in sensory things |
| wujud | Existence; literally finding or foundness |
| yaqin | Certainty; the return of seeing to the self |
About this book
The Heart of Islamic Philosophy: The Quest for Self-Knowledge in the Teachings of Afdal al-Din Kashani by William C. Chittick, 2001. 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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