Insight Editions · No. 172
Three Muslim Sages
Avicenna, Suhrawardi, Ibn Arabi
Seyyed Hossein Nasr
Seyyed Hossein Nasr examines Avicenna, Suhrawardi, and Ibn Arabi, tracing their philosophical and mystical teachings and their influence on Islamic intellectual traditions.
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Overview
Argument Map
Figure 1. How the three essays fit together.
Figure 2. From the treasury of the ages to the three schools.
Chapter Map
| Part | Sections | Core question |
|---|---|---|
| Introduction | Expansion, translation movement, three schools | How did Islam absorb ancient learning? |
| I. Avicenna | Predecessors; life; corpus; ontology; cosmology; sciences; psychology; religion; esoteric philosophy; school | What did the philosopher-scientist achieve? |
| II. Suhrawardi | Background; life; sources; meaning of Ishraq; classes of knowers; geography; Hikmat al-ishraq; recitals; tradition | How can reasoning and illumination be joined? |
| III. Ibn Arabi | Sufi tradition; significance; life; works; sources; doctrine (symbolism, unity, Names, Universal Man, creation, union, religions); influence | What does gnosis say about God, world and man? |
- Keep the three ways of knowing in view: reason, reason plus illumination, unveiling.
- Watch one question travel through all three: is existence or essence primary? Avicenna says existence, Suhrawardi essence, Ibn Arabi and later Mulla Sadra the unity of Being.
- Watch the angel: instrument of creation for Avicenna, the whole fabric of reality for Suhrawardi, the Names and the Universal Man for Ibn Arabi.
- Watch East and West: the same Avicennian corpus is read with angels in Persia and without them in Latin scholasticism.
- Arabic terms are given in simplified spelling without diacritics.
- Prefer completeness of Nasr's argument over brevity.
| Sage | School | Way of knowing | Peak figure of the knower |
|---|---|---|---|
| Avicenna (980-1037) | mashsha'i philosopher-scientists | Reason and observation, opening to "Oriental" wisdom | The sage-physician who also journeys in vision |
| Suhrawardi (1153-1191) | ishraqi Illuminationists | Discursive philosophy plus purification and illumination | The hakim muta'allih (theosopher) |
| Ibn Arabi (1165-1240) | Sufi gnosis ('irfan) | Direct unveiling, expressed as metaphysics | The realised gnostic; Universal Man as model |
Introduction: How Islam Inherited the Wisdom of the Ages
Introduction
Why did a young religion, busy building a society, turn to Greek, Persian and Indian learning, and why does Nasr choose three sages to show what it made of that inheritance?
Nasr begins with a distinction. The "golden age" of Islam, spiritually, was the lifetime of the Prophet and the first community at Medina. But a civilisation is like a seed that bears fruit only after years of growth: the intellectual and artistic flowering came centuries later, once Muslim society had consolidated and absorbed the legacies of earlier civilisations.
Figure 2. The seed and its fruit: Nasr's two golden ages.
The expansion was astonishing. By the Prophet's death all of Arabia was united; by AD 700, less than eighty years after Islam's birth, its domain ran from the Indus to Andalusia. Unlike the Mongol invasions seven centuries later, the change was permanent: apart from Andalusia, every land became Islamised and many Arabicised.
Figure 3. The expansion as the introduction describes it.
The first caliphs and the Umayyads spent their energy on the urgent business of building an Islamic society: Quranic reading and commentary, collecting Hadith, systematising Arabic (the Kufa and Basra schools of grammar). Only an occasional figure like Khalid ibn Yazid took interest in pre-Islamic science.
Figure 4. What occupied the early community before the ancient sciences.
The treasury inside the citadel
| Centre | What it preserved |
|---|---|
| Alexandria | Meeting place of Hellenic, Jewish, Babylonian and Egyptian learning |
| Antioch, Nisibis, Edessa | Syriac translations carried east by Nestorians and Monophysites after church schisms, protected by Persian kings hostile to Byzantium |
| Harran | The Sabaeans, followers of Idris-Hermes: Neopythagoreanism and Hermeticism |
| Jundishapur | Sasanian academy: Indian and Greek medicine combined; Hindu astronomy; the Zij-i shahriyari tables |
| Baghdad, c. 750-1000 | Abbasid translation movement under Harun al-Rashid, al-Ma'mun, al-Mu'tasim |
When the Abbasids turned to the "wisdom of the ages", qualified translators were already living inside the Muslim world: mostly Christians and Jews, some Persians, fluent in Greek, Syriac, Pahlavi or Sanskrit as well as Arabic. Hunain ibn Ishaq and his son Ishaq (who prepared critical texts before translating), Thabit ibn Qurrah of Harran and Ibn Muqaffa', a convert from Zoroastrianism, enriched Arabic enormously.
Why the sudden interest? Nasr's best answer: Muslims were debating Jewish and Christian theologians who used Aristotelian logic, and the caliphs wanted the same intellectual armour to protect the Shari'ah on which their own authority rested. Private curiosity played a part too.
Figure 5. Nasr's best answer to why the translations began.
From fusion to crystallisation
In the third Islamic century the schools of law and the Sufi brotherhoods became distinct: the revelation, still "fused" near its origin, "crystallised" into components. In the same way, intellectual schools absorbed the ancient heritage into the Islamic view. They can rightly be called Muslim because borrowed concepts were integrated into the Islamic perspective.
Figure 6. From fusion to crystallisation.
| Sage | School | Way of knowing |
|---|---|---|
| Ibn Sina (Avicenna, 980-1037) | Philosopher-scientists (mashsha'i, Peripatetic) | Reason and observation, opening at the end to an "Oriental" wisdom |
| Suhrawardi (1153-1191) | Illuminationists (ishraqi) | Philosophy plus purification; illumination |
| Ibn Arabi (1165-1240) | Sufis, gnosis | Direct unveiling, expressed as metaphysics |
Nasr follows a saying of Ali ibn Abi Talib: consider what is said, not who says it. In the East the idea dominates the individual. Each sage matters in his own right, but each also speaks for a perspective that generations of sages have lived.
What the Muslims took and what they left
Nasr stresses that the absorption was selective. Muslims took the sciences that fitted a religious civilisation and left, or transformed, what did not. Mathematics, astronomy, medicine, logic and metaphysics entered Arabic culture with energy. Dramatic poetry and sculpture, by contrast, found little permanent place. The Quranic ban on figural representation in worship, and a taste for calligraphy and geometry, steered the arts away from the Greek plastic tradition.
Figure. Selective absorption of the ancient treasury.
The House of Wisdom under al-Ma'mun became the symbol of this work, but Nasr reminds the reader that translation also went on in private circles and in older centres such as Jundishapur. Once Arabic had the vocabulary, original composition began almost at once. Al-Kindi already wrote as a Muslim philosopher, not as a mere transmitter.
Three schools, three ways of knowing
Nasr's introduction ends by naming the three perspectives the book will follow. They are not three sealed boxes. Later thinkers, above all in Persia, wove them together. But each has a clear centre.
Figure. Three schools named in the Introduction.
I. Avicenna and the Philosopher-Scientists
The Predecessors of Avicenna
Before Avicenna there was a whole lineage: al-Kindi, al-Farabi, al-Razi and the philosophers of Baghdad and Khurasan. Nasr shows each contributing a trait to the type that Avicenna perfected.
Tradition names a shadowy Persian, Iranshahri, as the first philosopher in Islam, but nothing of his survives. The Peripatetic (mashsha'i) school, only one school among several, though the only one well known in the West, was founded by Abu Yusuf Ya'qub al-Kindi, "the philosopher of the Arabs". It combined Aristotle (read through Alexander of Aphrodisias and Themistius) with Neoplatonism, which reached Muslims through the so-called Theology of Aristotle (really parts of Plotinus' Enneads) and the Liber de Causis (an epitome of Proclus). Science counted as a branch of philosophy.
Figure 7. The lineage before Avicenna, with the dates the book gives.
Al-Kindi (c. 801-866)
Born in Basra to the aristocratic Arab tribe of Kindah, al-Kindi became a favourite of al-Ma'mun and al-Mu'tasim, tutored a prince, then fell from favour under al-Mutawakkil. The Fihrist lists 240 works; only some forty or fifty survive, many rediscovered in Istanbul. His treatise on the intellect (De Intellectu) shaped Avicenna, and in the Latin West he was a top authority on astrology; Cardano ranked him among the twelve greatest minds in history.
Distinctive traits: closer to the Athenian Neoplatonism of Proclus than to Alexandria; a special interest in the occult sciences; sympathy with Mu'tazilite theology. He distinguished divine knowledge (given to prophets) from human knowledge (philosophy at its peak), and held the first superior: creation ex nihilo and bodily resurrection must be accepted even if philosophy cannot prove them.
Figure 8. Al-Kindi's two kinds of knowledge.
Al-Kindi's pupils included al-Sarakhsi (later accused of denying prophecy), the astrologer Abu Ma'shar (Albumasar) and the geographer Abu Zaid al-Balkhi.
Al-Farabi (c. 870-950): the Second Teacher
Born in Khurasan, al-Farabi studied logic in Baghdad with Matta ibn Yunus and in Harran with Yuhanna ibn Hailan, taught the Christian philosopher Yahya ibn 'Adi, and moved in 941 to the court of Saif al-Dawlah at Aleppo. He was called "the Second Teacher" after Aristotle, the First.
Figure 9. The five sides of al-Farabi.
- Logic. He commented on almost the entire Organon and gave Aristotelian logic an exact Arabic terminology used afterwards across Islamic learning. His commentary on the Metaphysics unlocked Aristotle for Avicenna.
- Harmoniser. His Agreement of the Two Sages, the Divine Plato and Aristotle reflects the belief that their wisdom came ultimately from revelation.
- Founder of Islamic political philosophy. Following Plato, he identified the philosopher-king with the prophet-lawgiver in works like The Opinions of the Citizens of the Virtuous City; Averroes was closer to him than to Avicenna.
- Musician. His Grand Book of Music was the leading medieval work on music; his compositions are still performed in some Sufi orders.
- Sufi. He lived simply, loved nature, taught in fields by a river, wore Central Asian dress and a fur hat at court. His Fusus al-hikam (Bezels of Wisdom), whose authenticity Nasr defends, is still taught in Persia as a full cycle of gnosis.
Al-Razi and the bridge generation
Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi (Rhazes, d. c. 925-932) saw himself as a great philosopher with a cosmology of five eternal principles, but contemporaries valued him as a physician. His experimental medicine (al-Hawi, the Continens) and alchemy shaped Avicenna's science, though al-Farabi and al-Biruni attacked his philosophy.
Between al-Farabi and Avicenna came scientists (Abu'l-Wafa', al-Kuhi, Ibn Yunus, al-Biruni, the Ikhwan al-Safa'), encyclopedists (al-Khwarazmi, Ibn al-Nadim) and philosophers: Abu Sulaiman al-Sijistani, the leading philosopher of Baghdad whose salon his disciple al-Tawhidi recorded; Ibn Miskawaih, the ethicist; and Abu'l-Hasan al-'Amiri (d. 992), perhaps the most important figure between al-Farabi and Avicenna. Al-'Amiri defended Islam's superiority, channelled Sasanian political ideas into Muslim thought, and was the first to accept the union of intellect and intelligible, a doctrine Avicenna rejected and Mulla Sadra later revived.
Al-Kindi and the first philosophical synthesis
Al-Kindi (d. ca. 870), called the Philosopher of the Arabs, stands at the head of the line. He wrote on nearly every science then cultivated: metaphysics, psychology, optics, music, medicine and astrology. Nasr notes that he sought to show the harmony of Greek philosophy with Islam, and that he prepared the ground for the fuller systems of al-Farabi and Avicenna. His treatises on the intellect and on the first philosophy already set the vocabulary of necessary and contingent being that Avicenna would perfect.
Al-Razi: the physician who challenged prophecy
Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi (Rhazes) is treated with care. He was a great clinician and chemist, and his medical works were studied for centuries. Philosophically he was more radical: he affirmed the eternity of five principles (God, soul, matter, space, time), criticised organised prophecy, and held a view of nature that left less room for the angelic hierarchy Avicenna would restore. Nasr presents him as a brilliant but heterodox voice inside the early scientific culture, against which the main philosophical line defined itself.
| Al-Razi | Avicenna (after al-Farabi) |
|---|---|
| Five eternal principles | Necessary Being and contingent possibles |
| Critique of prophecy as social authority | Prophecy as highest intellective and imaginative perfection |
| Medicine and chemistry as central | Medicine inside a full metaphysical cosmos |
| Less angelology | Angels as Intelligences and Souls |
Al-Farabi: the Second Teacher
Al-Farabi (d. 950) is for Nasr the true architect of Islamic Peripatetic philosophy. Aristotle is the First Teacher; al-Farabi is the Second. He systematised logic, wrote on music and political philosophy, and framed the hierarchy of Intelligences that Avicenna would refine.
His political writings, especially the Opinions of the People of the Virtuous City, present the ideal city ruled by a philosopher-prophet who receives truth from the Active Intellect and translates it into law and symbol for the many. Religion is the imaginative and symbolic expression of the same truths philosophy knows demonstratively. This is not a dismissal of religion; it is a ranking of modes of presentation. Avicenna inherits this structure and deepens its psychology and ontology.
Figure. The Peripatetic succession Nasr emphasises.
The Ikhwan al-Safa and Ismaili currents
Nasr also places the Ikhwan al-Safa (Brethren of Purity) and related Ismaili philosophical currents in the background. Their encyclopedic epistles mixed Neopythagorean number symbolism, Neoplatonic emanation and a strong interest in the esoteric meaning of revelation. Avicenna's own early contact with Ismaili missionaries in his father's house, which he reports in the autobiography, belongs to this atmosphere even though he did not become an Ismaili.
Avicenna: Life and Works
A prodigy, physician to princes, vizier, prisoner and fugitive, who wrote encyclopedias on horseback: Avicenna's life explains both his breadth and his reach.
Abu 'Ali Sina was born near Bukhara in 980. His father, an Isma'ili, filled the house with scholars. Avicenna knew the whole Quran and Arabic grammar by ten, then logic and mathematics, then physics, metaphysics and medicine. By sixteen he had mastered every science except metaphysics: he had read Aristotle's Metaphysics many times and memorised it without understanding it, until he found al-Farabi's commentary by chance. By eighteen he had learned everything "in breadth"; late in life he told his disciple al-Juzjani he had learned nothing new since.
Figure 10. Avicenna's schooling as the book tells it.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 980 | Born near Bukhara (Samanid state) |
| c. 997 | Cures the ruler; access to the palace library |
| 1012 | Mahmud of Ghazna's rise forces flight: Jurjaniyah, then across the desert to Khurasan (meets the Sufi Abu Sa'id ibn Abi'l-Khair, tradition says); patron Qabus already dead |
| c. 1015 | Rayy (Fakhr al-Dawlah), then Hamadan: cures Shams al-Dawlah, becomes vizier; later imprisoned, escapes disguised as a dervish |
| c. 1022-37 | Isfahan under 'Ala' al-Dawlah: fifteen productive years, an observatory; Mas'ud of Ghazna's invasion destroys many works |
| 1037 | Dies of colic in Hamadan, where his tomb stands |
He lived hard and worked harder: long nights of festivity followed by a treatise, works dictated on horseback on the way to battle. Yet this man of court and politics "laid the foundation of medieval scholastic philosophy" and synthesised Hippocratic and Galenic medicine. His titles: al-Shaikh al-ra'is (Master of the wise), Hujjat al-Haqq (Proof of God), and in the West the Prince of Physicians.
- About 250 surviving works, mostly Arabic, some Persian.
- al-Shifa' (The Healing, Latin Sufficientia): the longest encyclopedia ever written by one person.
- al-Najat (its summary), 'Uyun al-hikmah, and his last masterpiece al-Isharat wa'l-tanbihat (Directives and Remarks).
- Danishnamah-i 'Ala'i: the first philosophical work in modern Persian.
- al-Qanun (The Canon of Medicine): perhaps the most influential single book in medical history; plus a medical poem.
- "Esoteric" works: Treatise on Love, Hayy ibn Yaqzan, Treatise of the Bird, Salaman and Absal, the last chapters of the Isharat, Logic of the Orientals.
- Poems (the Ode on the Soul) and Quran commentaries, where he began harmonising reason and revelation.
His Arabic was rough until critics in Isfahan provoked him to study literature; the Isharat shows the polished result.
The autobiography and the unfinished life
Avicenna dictated his autobiography to Abu Ubaid al-Juzjani, who completed the narrative after the master's death. The famous story of reading Aristotle's Metaphysics forty times and finally understanding it with the help of al-Farabi's commentary is Nasr's emblem of intellectual apprenticeship: genius still needs the Second Teacher. The young Avicenna's mastery of medicine by sixteen, his service at the Samanid court in Bukhara, his wanderings after the fall of that dynasty, and his later years in Isfahan and Hamadan form the outer frame. Imprisonment, political intrigue and relentless composition fill the middle years.
Figure. Outer frame of Avicenna's life.
Major works Nasr groups
Nasr distinguishes (1) the great Peripatetic encyclopedia (Shifa'), (2) shorter philosophical digests (Najat, Isharat wa'l-tanbihat), (3) the Persian Danishnamah, (4) medical works headed by the Canon and the Poem on Medicine, (5) scientific treatises, and (6) the visionary or "Oriental" writings (Hayy ibn Yaqzan, Risalat al-tair, Salaman wa Absal, and related texts). The last group is not a rejection of the first; it is the same universe spoken in the language of symbol and journey.
Figure. Main groups in the Avicennian corpus.
Ontology
Avicenna's metaphysics is a metaphysics of being, built on two distinctions that shaped Islamic, Jewish and Latin thought for centuries.
The reality of a thing depends on its existence, and to know something is ultimately to know its place in the chain of being. Everything is "plunged in Being", yet God, Pure Being, is not the first link of a continuous chain: He is transcendent and prior, as in all Abrahamic philosophy.
Figure 11. Avicenna's three modalities of being, his own innovation beyond Aristotle.
First distinction: quiddity and existence. Think of a horse: you can separate its quiddity (what it is: shape, form, colour) from its existence in the world. In the mind they are separable; in the world they are one, not "cream added to coffee". Yet existence gives each quiddity its reality and is principial (asil); quiddity is an ontological limit abstracted by the mind. Suhrawardi and Mir Damad later reversed this; Mulla Sadra defended Avicenna, adding that all existence is a degree of the light of Being, the transcendent unity of Being behind the veil of quiddities.
Second distinction: impossible, possible, necessary. If a quiddity cannot accept existence, it is impossible; if it is indifferent to existence and non-existence, it is possible (all creatures); if its non-existence is contradictory, it is necessary: God, whose Essence is His Being. The universe, as a whole, is contingent and depends at every moment on the continuing effusion of Being. This triad, absent from Aristotle in this form, became common property of Muslim philosophers and Latin scholastics alike.
Quiddities are also either accidents (colour on a wall) or substances (the wall), and substance comes in three kinds: intellect (free of matter and potentiality), soul (immaterial but needing a body to act) and body (divisible, extended).
Existence, essence and the possible
Avicenna's ontology rests on a distinction that later Latin and Persian schools never stopped debating: existence (wujud) and essence (mahiyyah). In every contingent thing, essence answers what it is; existence answers that it is. Existence is not a constituent of the essence; it is something that comes to the essence from outside. Only in the Necessary Being (wajib al-wujud) are essence and existence identical. Everything else is possible in itself and necessary through another.
Figure. Ontological ranks in Avicenna.
Nasr underlines a further cut inside the possibles. Some possibles are eternal: the Intelligences, the celestial Souls and the spheres receive existence without beginning in time, yet they remain contingent because they depend. Other possibles are temporal: they begin and end in the sublunary world. Contingency is metaphysical dependence, not merely having a birthday.
Substance, accident and the categories
Following Aristotle as filtered by al-Farabi, Avicenna treats substances and the nine accidents. The substance is what exists in itself; accidents exist in another. Later Suhrawardi will compress the accidents and attack the definition theory; Avicenna still works inside the Peripatetic grid. Knowledge of a thing is knowledge of its essence; demonstration moves from causes to effects or from effects to causes within this structure.
| Question | Avicennian answer |
|---|---|
| What is it? | Essence (mahiyyah) |
| Does it exist? | Existence (wujud) added to essence in contingents |
| Why does it exist? | Caused by the Necessary Being, mediately through Intelligences |
| Could it fail to exist? | Yes, considered in itself; no, once necessitated by its cause |
The proof of the Necessary Being
Nasr presents Avicenna's metaphysical proof as moving from the sheer fact of contingent existence to a being that is necessary in itself. An infinite regress of caused causes is rejected; the series of possibles requires a terminus that is not possible. This is not primarily a temporal first-cause argument. It is an argument from ontological dependence. St. Thomas's third way, Nasr notes in the School section, is essentially Avicennian.
Cosmology and Angelology
Metaphysics stresses God's transcendence; cosmology shows the continuity between the Principle and its manifestation, and the angel is the instrument.
Using Plotinus' scheme reinterpreted through contingency, and the rule "from the One only one proceeds", Avicenna explains creation as intellection: higher beings bring lower ones into being by contemplating.
- From the Necessary Being proceeds one being, the First Intellect (the supreme archangel).
- It contemplates three things: God as necessary; itself as necessary through God; itself as merely possible. These three acts produce the Second Intellect, the soul of the first heaven and its body.
- The process repeats down to the Tenth Intellect and the ninth heaven, the Moon.
- The remaining "cosmic possibilities" are too impure for another heaven; they yield the sublunar world of generation and corruption.
Figure 12. The procession of the Intellects.
The Tenth Intellect has three jobs. It is the Giver of Forms (wahib al-suwar): when water freezes, it withdraws the watery form and bestows the icy one. It illuminates the human mind, letting it raise abstracted forms back to universals, which live first in the "angelic mind", descend into matter, and return through human knowing. And it is the channel of revelation to prophets and, more partially, inspiration to saints.
In his Risalat al-nairuziyah Avicenna goes further, linking the hypostases to letters of the Arabic alphabet in abjad order (A = 1 the Creator, B = 2 the Intellect, J = 3 the Soul, D = 4 Nature), like the jafr of Islam and the Kabbalah. It shows him reaching for an "Oriental wisdom" beyond Greek philosophy.
Figure 13. Hypostases and letters in abjad order.
Emanation, love and the motion of the spheres
From the Necessary Being proceeds, by intellection, the First Intelligence. Each Intelligence intelligises its principle and itself, and from that double (or triple) act proceed the next Intelligence, a celestial Soul and a sphere. Nasr stresses that this is not a material outflow. It is an order of dependence and illumination. The spheres move out of love and desire for the Intelligences above them; motion is the longing of the cosmic Soul for its intellective beloved.
Figure. Emanation as Avicenna frames it.
The Active Intellect and its offices
The Active Intellect (al-aql al-fa'al), usually identified with the tenth Intelligence, has several roles Nasr keeps together: it is the giver of forms to sublunary matter, the illuminator of the human intellect, and the angelic presence that prophecy and vision contact. Without it there is no natural generation and no human knowing. Angelology is therefore not decoration; it is the machinery of cosmos and mind.
Why the cosmos is single and ordered
Avicenna rejects a plurality of unrelated worlds. From one Necessary Being, under his premises, a unified hierarchical cosmos follows. Providence works through the order of causes. Evil is explained as privation or as the by-product of a good that a greater good requires; it does not overturn the dependence of all things on the Good.
Being as the first object of metaphysics
Nasr underlines that for Avicenna metaphysics studies being as being. The subject is not God alone, though God is its noblest object; the subject is existence in its full amplitude. This is why the distinction of existence and essence can structure physics and psychology as well: every science studies a region of being under a particular aspect, while metaphysics studies what all share.
Figure. Metaphysics as the umbrella science.
The Natural and Mathematical Sciences
Avicenna the scientist used every avenue, from logic and scripture to observation and experiment, and left marks still visible in modern physics.
Europe remembered him chiefly as a doctor: his portrait hung in cathedrals, and Dante placed him in Limbo between Hippocrates and Galen. He wanted all knowledge, from reasoning, scripture, observation and experiment, placed in one vision of macrocosm, microcosm and God. Methodologically he adapted the syllogism to induction by making the middle term empirical instead of metaphysical, and he distinguished primary and secondary qualities, the distinction Galileo would later apply to all of nature.
- Tried to melt a meteorite in Khwarazm; got ash and green smoke, no metal.
- Compared rainbows in a bathhouse and a watered garden with rainbows in the sky.
- Built a new astronomical instrument in Isfahan and criticised Ptolemy's.
- Observed projectile motion and attacked Aristotle's theory of it.
- Held a wave theory of light in his study of the eye.
Figure 14. Avicenna's observations and experiments.
The Canon of Medicine
The Canon crowned earlier syntheses by 'Ali ibn Rabban al-Tabari, al-Razi and 'Ali ibn 'Abbas al-Majusi (Haly Abbas), and replaced them through its order. Its five books cover general principles (anatomy, temperaments, faculties, hygiene, death), materia medica, particular diseases, diseases of the whole body, and pharmacology. Besides Hippocrates, Galen and Dioscorides, it contains new herbs, the antiseptic value of alcohol, brain tumours and stomach ulcers. His theory of vision, light entering the eye while a "psychological act" goes out to the object, influenced Roger Bacon and Grosseteste.
Figure 15. The five books of the Canon.
Earth sciences, physics and music
The mineral section of the Shifa', translated as De Mineralibus (c. 1200), classifies minerals into stones, fusibles, sulphurs and salts, rejects the transmutation of metals while accepting alchemy's cosmology, and explains sedimentary rock, mountain formation by erosion, land becoming sea, and fossils as remains of ancient marine animals.
Figure 16. Avicenna's four classes of minerals.
| Who | Concept |
|---|---|
| John Philoponus | A thrown body carries an impressed force |
| Avicenna | mail qasri ("violent inclination"); it would persist in a void; velocity and distance related to weight |
| Abu'l-Barakat, al-Razi, al-Tusi; al-Bitruji | Refinements in Islam and Andalusia |
| Peter Olivi | inclinatio violenta |
| John Buridan | impetus impressus = mass x velocity |
| Galileo | impeto: momentum, now a mathematical description rather than an efficient cause |
In mathematics, his main contribution was music. In the Shifa', Najat and Danishnamah he described early harmony and "mensural music" with notation for duration as well as pitch, and named the Persian modes. He was theorising the music actually played in Persia, which survives in Persian classical music today.
Physics: nature, motion and the elements
Avicenna's natural philosophy stays inside the Aristotelian frame while sharpening definitions. Nature is an intrinsic principle of motion and rest. The four elements (fire, air, water, earth) mix to form compounds; the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms rise by successive perfection of form. Nasr notes Avicenna's interest in geology and the formation of mountains, in meteorology, and in the classification of minerals: a scientific curiosity that never leaves the metaphysical ladder of forms.
| Level | What is added |
|---|---|
| Elements and mixtures | Basic qualities and temperaments |
| Minerals | Stable forms without nutrition |
| Plants | Nutrition and growth |
| Animals | Sensation and locomotion |
| Man | Intellect; link to the Active Intellect |
Astronomy and the mathematical sciences
Avicenna accepted the Ptolemaic cosmos as the working astronomy of his age, yet he also wrote on the principles of astronomy and on instruments. Mathematics for him includes arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. Music is a mathematical science of proportion that also heals; Nasr links this to the wider Islamic tradition in which proportion mirrors cosmic order.
Figure. Natural and mathematical sciences Nasr surveys.
Medicine: the Canon as world book
The Canon of Medicine organised Greco-Arabic medicine into a system taught from India to Montpellier. Diagnosis, regimen, drugs and surgery sit inside a theory of humours and temperaments that matches the elemental physics. Nasr insists that for Avicenna medicine is not cut off from philosophy: the physician who knows only recipes is incomplete; the complete physician knows man as microcosm.
Psychology
The soul's faculties follow Aristotle, but the soul's destiny follows Plato and the Sufis.
Psychology belongs to natural philosophy for the Peripatetics. As Being descends from God through Intellects and Souls to the elements, an ascending arc rises as elements mix in ever finer proportions and attract, from the World Soul, the vegetative, animal and rational souls. The kingdoms form an unbroken ladder: the highest mineral resembles the lowest plant, the highest plant the lowest animal.
Figure 17. The ascending arc, read from the top.
| Soul | Faculties |
|---|---|
| Vegetative | Nutrition, growth, reproduction |
| Animal | Motion (desire leading to lust or anger; moving the body) and perception: five external senses and five internal ones (common sense, retention of forms, imagination, estimation, memory), located in the brain after Galen |
| Rational (human) | Practical intellect (directs action) and theoretical intellect in four stages: material (pure potential), in habitu (first principles learned), in actu (thinking for oneself), acquired (the intelligible world realised within) |
| Above all | The Active Intellect, source of all knowledge by illumination; prophets are a special case |
Unlike many Peripatetics, Avicenna insists on the immortality of the individual soul, immaterial and imprisoned in the senses. In his esoteric works he becomes a spiritual physician curing the soul's forgetfulness of its heavenly home, as in the Ode on the Soul:
Faculties of the soul
Avicenna's psychology maps the soul's powers with care. The vegetative soul has nutrition, growth and reproduction. The animal soul adds external senses, internal senses and locomotion. The human soul adds intellect. Among the internal senses Nasr highlights the sensus communis, imagination, the estimative faculty and memory. The estimative faculty (wahm) grasps non-sensible intentions such as the lamb's fear of the wolf.
Figure. Hierarchy of soul faculties in Avicenna.
Four stages of the intellect
The theoretical intellect passes through stages Nasr lists in the Peripatetic vocabulary: material intellect (pure potential), intellect in habitu (first intelligibles acquired), actual intellect (able to think at will), and acquired intellect (fully in act, conjoined with the Active Intellect). Illumination from the Active Intellect actualises what is only potential in us. This is why angelology and psychology meet.
Immortality and the individual soul
Avicenna argues for the immortality of the rational soul. The soul is not a bodily temperament; it is a substance that uses the body. After death it continues according to the knowledge and virtue it has acquired. Felicity is intellectual and spiritual conjunction; misery is deprivation of that light. Nasr notes that later critics found some of the arguments weak; Suhrawardi will shift the whole question toward the soul's celestial origin and return.
Religion and Revelation
Avicenna the alleged heretic prayed in the mosque when stuck on a problem, wrote on pilgrimage and prayer, and built a philosophical theory of prophecy.
Stung by accusations of unbelief from strict theologians, he answered in a Persian quatrain: "If I am a heretic, then there is not a single Muslim anywhere in the world." He went to the mosque when a problem resisted him and wrote on the efficacy of prayer, rites and visiting saints' tombs. These work because of a sympathy running through all orders of reality, which comes from love: God is both highest object and highest subject of love, and "no being is devoid of love".
Figure 18. Avicenna's three perfections of the prophet.
Prophecy as perfection of the soul
For Avicenna the prophet is not a political accident. He is the human being whose intellect reaches conjunction with the Active Intellect and whose imagination is strong enough to clothe intellective truths in images, voices and laws the community can live by. Revelation is thus continuous with the metaphysics of illumination, not an alien interruption.
Figure. Philosophy and prophecy in Avicenna (after al-Farabi).
Providence, prayer and the problem of evil
God's providence works through the order of causes. Prayer and devotion are not attempts to twist a reluctant deity; they place the soul in the path of goods already ordered from above. Evil is privation or the concomitant of a good that a greater cosmic good requires. Nasr presents this as Avicenna's way of keeping both divine justice and the reality of suffering without making evil a positive rival principle.
Worship and the return of the soul
Religious acts discipline the imagination and the practical intellect so that the soul turns toward its true felicity. The afterlife Avicenna describes is graded: souls receive happiness or misery according to their intellectual and moral state. This eschatology matches his psychology and leaves room for the visionary language of the Oriental treatises.
The Esoteric Philosophy
Late in life Avicenna announced that his famous Peripatetic works were for the public, and that a different "Oriental Philosophy" was for the elite.
In the opening of the Logic of the Orientals he calls the Shifa' and Najat exoteric, promising "the science of the elite". The rest is lost, but its remains can be traced in the last chapters of the Isharat (a superb summary of Sufi doctrine), the Treatise on Love, poems, and the three visionary recitals: Hayy ibn Yaqzan, the Treatise of the Bird, and Salaman and Absal.
Figure 19. Avicenna's two philosophies.
- Orient = world of light and pure forms; Occident = world of shadow and matter.
- The soul is a prisoner in the "Occidental exile" and needs a Guide (later Shi'ites identified him with Ali or the Mahdi).
- The cosmos becomes an experienced journey through mountains and valleys, not a theory: "the cosmos is interiorised".
- The journey ends in a death that is rebirth, and is irreversible: who has left the cosmos is not imprisoned again.
- Angels guide, as Beatrice and St Bernard guide Dante.
Figure 20. The pattern of the visionary recital.
This points straight to Suhrawardi a century and a half later.
Hayy ibn Yaqzan: the living son of the awake
In Hayy ibn Yaqzan the sage meets a radiant elder who is the Active Intellect in personal form. The elder describes the cosmos as a geography of knowledge and danger: lands of the senses, deserts of appetite, mountains of intellect. Angelology becomes itinerary. Nasr reads the recital as the same Avicennian universe spoken so that the soul recognises itself as traveller.
Figure. Pattern of the Avicennian visionary recital.
The Bird and Salaman wa Absal
Risalat al-tair (the Treatise of the Bird) tells of birds trapped and then rising toward the king. Salaman wa Absal allegorizes the soul's struggle with the lower powers. Nasr stresses high poetic quality and the constant presence of angels as guides. The rationalistic universe of the Aristotelians is here transformed into what he calls a cosmic cathedral where every symbol concerns man immediately.
Angel as Beatrice
Nasr's comparison of the illuminating angel to St. Bernard and Beatrice underlines the personal character of guidance. The angel is not only a cosmic Intelligence; it is the soul's companion on the path of realisation. This is why the School section will say that the East kept Avicenna's angelology while the West gradually erased it.
The School of Avicenna (expanded)
As already said at the opening of the chapter, Avicenna plays the role of the guardian angel of the Islamic arts and sciences. His influence appears wherever philosophy or the sciences have been cultivated in the Islamic world.
Immediate disciples
Of his immediate students the most notable was Abu Ubaid al-Juzjani, his lifelong companion, to whom Avicenna dictated his autobiography and who completed several unfinished works. Abu'l-Hasan Bahmanyar wrote the important philosophical work Kitab al-tahsil as well as Kitab al-hujjah. Ibn Zailah commented on Hayy ibn Yaqzan and summarised the Shifa'. Abu Abdallah al-Ma'sumi, author of a treatise on separate substances, was among the most learned of the students and asked permission to answer the questions al-Biruni had posed to Avicenna.
Figure. Immediate circle of Avicenna.
The next century: admiration and attack
Outside that circle Avicenna's influence touched nearly every important intellectual figure of the next century. Umar Khayyam, the poet and mathematician whose formal doubt Nasr reads as a cure for false religiosity rather than as modern scepticism, respected Avicenna and translated one of his treatises into Persian. Nasir-i Khusraw, the greatest philosopher of Ismailism, writing mostly in Persian, fell under the sway of certain Avicennian ideas. Even the mathematician and optician Ibn al-Haitham (Alhazen) came to know of his writings.
During the following centuries Avicenna came under severe criticism from al-Ghazali and Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, as well as from the Andalusian philosophers, especially Averroes. Then one of the greatest geniuses of Islamic civilisation, Khwajah Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, came to his defense. He wrote a masterly commentary upon the Isharat and brought Avicenna's teachings back to life.
Persia to the Safavids and today
The tradition was carried generation by generation to the Safavid period. Philosophers such as Sadr al-Din al-Dashtaki, Ghiyath al-Din Mansur al-Shirazi and Jalal al-Din al-Dawani all bear Avicenna's imprint. In these centuries Athir al-Din al-Abhari composed Kitab al-hidayah, which with commentaries by Husain al-Maibudi and Mulla Sadra became one of the two or three most widely studied Peripatetic texts in Persia and India.
During the Safavid renaissance Avicenna received special attention from Mir Damad, who sought an Illuminationist reading; from Sayyid Ahmad al-Alawi, who composed a vast commentary on the Shifa'; and from Mulla Sadra, who made Avicenna one cornerstone of his synthesis. After them Abd al-Razzaq al-Lahiji, Mulla Sadra's student, sought in Gawhar-i murad and Shawariq a Peripatetic line combined with kalam. The school continues into Nasr's own day, exemplified by figures such as Mirza Salih Ha'iri Mazandarani, whose Hikmat-i Bu Ali is an exhaustive recent study of Avicenna's metaphysics from a Peripatetic point of view.
Figure. Eastern school of Avicenna across time.
The Latin reception
In the Occident Avicenna's influence was long and enduring, though more diffuse and less passionately contested than that of Averroes. In the twelfth century works began to pass into Latin: the autobiography via al-Juzjani, sections of the logic and physics of the Shifa', and the entire metaphysics. Most translations were made in the school of Toledo, especially under Dominicus Gundissalvus, and by Joannes Hispalensis (Avendeuth, Ibn Dawud). A new wave rendered further sections of the Shifa' and the Najat. The Canon was translated in the later twelfth century by Gerard of Cremona; in the thirteenth Blaise rendered the Poem on Medicine. Interest continued into the Renaissance, when Andrea Alpago made fresh Latin translations of Avicenna and Averroes despite a reaction against Arabic vocabulary.
Salerno and Montpellier felt him mostly through medicine; Paris and Oxford through philosophy. Gundissalvus himself was influenced by his author. There survive a treatise De causis primis et secundis attributed to Avicenna but not by him, and a gnostic work on the soul's journey, both deeply Avicennian and belonging to what R. de Vaux called Latin Avicennianism. Influence appears in William of Auvergne, Roger Bacon (who praised him over Averroes), Albertus Magnus, St. Thomas (whose third way is essentially Avicenna's), and Peter of Spain (later Pope John XXI). Scientific and philosophical works mattered for Robert Grosseteste and, in the fourteenth century, as a point of departure for the theology of Duns Scotus. In medicine his books, with Galen's, were what Paracelsus burned as a symbol when he defied traditional authority.
| West (Latin) | East (esp. Persia) |
|---|---|
| Rationalistic aspect prized | Full philosophy kept in a small school |
| Scientific and medical works prized | Medical theories still practiced |
| Angelology and illuminative noetics attacked | Esoteric / Oriental Philosophy of greatest import |
| Augustinizing identifies illuminating angel with God | Cosmology and angelology elaborated by Suhrawardi |
| Universe "depopulated," secularised | Cosmology glows in light of gnosis |
Avicennizing Augustinism and the emptied heavens
Despite doubts about a single "Latin Avicennianism," Etienne Gilson's researches demonstrated an Avicennizing Augustinism, whose most important exponent is perhaps William of Auvergne. In the twelfth century the Avicennian corpus gave the Latin world a metaphysical cosmology and even allowed Dionysian angelology to be read in a new cosmological light. But the gradual Augustinizing of Avicenna destroyed the cosmology and cosmogony that became the most lasting aspect of his teaching in the East. The Avicennizing Augustinians sought to identify the illuminating angel with God himself and gradually destroyed the necessity of the angel in the cosmos. Criticism fell most of all on angelology in cosmology and noetics.
With the destruction of this angelology the Universe became "depopulated" of the spiritual beings that sustained it, and therefore secularized, preparing the ground for the Copernican revolution.As a result the Universe began to lose its spiritual character until in the seventeenth century not only traditional cosmology but the meaning of the cosmos itself was destroyed.
In the West it was angelology, cosmology and noetics based on illumination that were most violently rejected; rationalism and science were kept. In the East a small school kept the whole philosophy alive, and medicine continued; but it was essentially the esoteric or Oriental Philosophy that had the greatest import. Cosmology supported by angelology was elaborated by Suhrawardi and, after being divorced from the syllogistic mesh in which it first sat, entered certain schools of Sufism. Like a precious jewel glittering in light, that cosmology began to glow in the light of Islamic gnosis. Theory of noetics through illumination by the angel came to be read as affirming the reality of gnosis, always held as the highest knowledge in Islam.
II. Suhrawardi and the Illuminationists
The Background before Suhrawardi
Why did Peripatetic philosophy fade in the eastern Islamic world, and what took its place? Nasr traces a turning point that divided Islam and Christendom.
Peripatetic philosophy peaked with Avicenna and continued through disciples like Bahmanyar and al-Lukari, but it faced critics from the start: jurists, and Sufis who distrusted Aristotelian rationalism. In the tenth century a new and fiercer opponent arrived: Ash'arite theology (kalam), founded by Abu'l-Hasan al-Ash'ari and developed by al-Baqillani.
While the Abbasid caliphate was weak and local, often Shi'ite, princes favoured the intellectual sciences (al-'ulum al-'aqliyah) over the transmitted ones (al-'ulum al-naqliyah), the tenth and eleventh centuries were their "golden age". Then the Seljuqs reunited western Asia as champions of Sunnism, and Ash'arism gained official support and teaching institutions.
Figure 21. Why Peripatetic philosophy faded in the East.
Al-Ghazali's double achievement
Peripatetic philosophy then moved west to Andalusia: Ibn Bajjah, Ibn Tufail and Ibn Rushd (Averroes), whose Incoherence of the Incoherence answered al-Ghazali. It had little echo in Islam but great effect in Europe, where "Latin Averroism" arose.
| Islamic East | Latin West |
|---|---|
| Rationalism curtailed by al-Ghazali and Fakhr al-Din al-Razi | Aristotelian rationalism arrives via translations of Avicenna, al-Farabi and Averroes |
| Ground prepared for Suhrawardi's illumination and Ibn Arabi's gnosis | Destroys the earlier Augustinian Platonism of illumination |
| Intellectual life continues in illumination and gnosis | Provokes secular rationalism and naturalism that bring down scholasticism in the Renaissance |
Suhrawardi's Life and Works
The "Master of Illumination" died at 38, yet left nearly fifty works and a school that still lives in Persia.
Shihab al-Din Yahya Suhrawardi, sometimes called al-Maqtul ("the one who was killed") but known to his followers as Shaikh al-ishraq, was never translated into Latin, which is why the West barely knew him until Henry Corbin edited and translated his works. Most histories still treat Averroes or Ibn Khaldun as the end of Islamic philosophy, and many modern Arab, Pakistani and Indian scholars repeat the error by relying on Orientalists.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 1153 | Born in Suhraward near Zanjan |
| Youth | Studies with Majd al-Din al-Jili at Maragheh, then Zahir al-Din al-Qari in Isfahan; schoolmate of Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, who later wept and kissed a copy of the Talwihat |
| Twenties | Travels in Persia, Anatolia, Syria; enters the Sufi path; long retreats |
| c. 1186 | Writes Hikmat al-ishraq in a few months |
| Aleppo | Favourite of Malik Zahir, son of Saladin; outspoken, wins every debate, exposes esoteric doctrine to all |
| 1191 | Jurists demand his death; Saladin, needing their support after reconquering Syria from the Crusaders, yields; Suhrawardi dies in prison aged 38, like Hallaj, whom he loved |
- The doctrinal tetralogy (Arabic): Talwihat (Intimations), Muqawamat (Oppositions), Mutarahat (Conversations), all modified Peripatetic philosophy, crowned by Hikmat al-ishraq (The Theosophy of the Orient of Light).
- Shorter treatises: Temples of Light, Tablets for 'Imad al-Din, Partaw-namah, Flashes of Light, and others.
- Visionary narratives (mainly Persian): The Red Archangel, The Chant of Gabriel's Wing, The Occidental Exile, The Language of Termites, The Song of the Griffin, A Day with the Sufis.
- Translations and commentaries: Persian version of Avicenna's Treatise of the Bird, commentary on the Isharat, verses of the Quran and Hadith.
- Prayers and litanies, like a medieval Book of Hours.
His Persian prose became the model for later philosophical and narrative prose. Into an Islamic universe he welcomed Zoroastrian, Pythagorean, Platonic and Hermetic symbols, as Dante's Christian cathedral carried Islamic and Alexandrian ornaments.
Education, teachers and the charge of heresy
Shihab al-Din Yahya al-Suhrawardi was born in Suhraward in northwestern Persia in 549/1153. He studied first in Maraghah with Majd al-Din al-Jili, then in Isfahan with Zahir al-Din al-Qari, and became thoroughly at home in Peripatetic philosophy, especially Avicenna. He traveled widely in Anatolia and Syria, met Sufis, and practiced asceticism. Nasr stresses that his life was itself a demonstration of the union of discursive mastery and spiritual practice.
At Aleppo, under the Ayyubid al-Malik al-Zahir (son of Saladin), his teaching aroused the hostility of certain jurists. Accused of claims incompatible with the letter of the law, he was imprisoned and put to death in 587/1191 at about thirty-eight years of age. Posterity named him al-Maqtul (the Slain) and Shaikh al-Ishraq (Master of Illumination).
Figure. Outer frame of Suhrawardi's life.
Classes of works
Nasr, following Corbin and the tradition, groups the writings:
- Large doctrinal works of a Peripatetic cast: Talwihat, Muqawamat, Mutarahat, and the crowning Hikmat al-ishraq.
- Shorter doctrinal treatises in Arabic and Persian.
- Visionary recitals in Persian (and some Arabic), symbolic narratives of the soul's exile and return.
- Prayers, invocations and liturgical pieces.
- Miscellaneous letters and notes.
The answer to al-Ghazali in the East
Nasr places Suhrawardi after the shock of al-Ghazali's Tahafut al-falasifa. In the West the lasting philosophical reply was Averroes. In the East the lasting reply was not a return to bare Aristotle but a hikmah that kept demonstration and demanded purification. Suhrawardi's claim to revive the wisdom of Plato, Hermes, the Persian sages and the Islamic inheritance in one Illuminationist synthesis is that reply in person.
Figure. Why Suhrawardi demands both wings.
Sources of Ishraqi doctrine (detail)
Nasr lists several rivers that meet in Suhrawardi: (1) Peripatetic philosophy, especially Avicenna; (2) Neoplatonic and Hermetic writings available in Arabic; (3) the wisdom of ancient Persia (Khusrawani sages, Mazdean angelology); (4) Pythagorean and Platonic currents; (5) Sufism as practice and taste; (6) the Quranic and prophetic tradition as the living centre. Suhrawardi himself claims a chain of wisdom from Hermes and Asclepius through Pythagoreans and Plato to the sages of Persia and Islam.
Figure. Rivers that meet in Ishraqi doctrine.
Sources of Ishraqi Doctrine
Sufism first: Hallaj, and al-Ghazali, whose Niche of Lights (Mishkat al-anwar) linked light and the Imam. Then Avicenna's philosophy, criticised but necessary. Then Pythagoreanism, Platonism and Hermeticism (preserved by the Sabaeans of Harran). And above all ancient Persian wisdom, inherited from Idris (Enoch), identified with Hermes. He used Zoroastrian light-darkness symbolism and angel names but insisted he was no dualist: he followed a hidden community of Persian sages "not like those who are called the Magi", whose wisdom Plato also witnessed.
Figure 22. The sources of Ishraqi doctrine.
In a dream, "Aristotle" (really the author of the Theology, i.e. Plotinus) told him the Peripatetics al-Farabi and Avicenna were "not a degree in a thousand" of real philosophers; the Sufis Bastami and Tustari were.
Figure 23. Suhrawardi's chain of wisdom: two branches from Hermes reunited in him. (Compare Gemistos Plethon's later attempt to join Zoroaster and Plato in Byzantium.)
The Meaning of Ishraq and the Classes of Knowers
Definitions vary. Al-Jurjani calls the Ishraqis followers of Plato; 'Abd al-Razzaq Kashani calls them followers of Seth, founder of the craft guilds and their Hermetic initiation; Ibn Wahshiyah calls them Egyptian priests descended from Hermes' sister. All place Ishraq before philosophy was rationalised, when intellectual intuition was the main road to knowledge. Suhrawardi says the same of his book:
Figure 24. Three definitions of the Ishraqis.
| Class | Description | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Those who begin to thirst for knowledge | Beginners |
| 2 | Perfected discursive philosophy, strangers to gnosis | al-Farabi, Avicenna |
| 3 | Ignored discursive knowledge, purified the soul, attained illumination | Hallaj, Bastami, Tustari |
| 4 | Both perfected: the hakim muta'allih, theosopher | Pythagoras, Plato, Suhrawardi |
Above them stands the invisible hierarchy headed by the Pole (qutb) or Imam, through whom souls are illuminated.
Sacred geography
Ishraq means both "east" and "illumination". Suhrawardi turns the horizontal east-west axis vertical:
Figure 25. Suhrawardi's vertical geography. The decisive boundary is the fixed stars, not Aristotle's sphere of the Moon.
So in The Occidental Exile the soul's fall is pictured as being thrown into a well in Qairawan, in the far west of the Islamic world, while its home is the Yemen.
Classes of knowers and the theosopher
Nasr reports Suhrawardi's ranking of seekers. Some are only discursive philosophers. Some are only purified mystics without philosophical training. The highest is the hakim muta'allih, who joins both. Authority in the Ishraqi school follows this ranking: a theosopher outranks a mere dialectician even if the latter is famous. This is not anti-intellectualism; it is a refusal to let intellect stop at concepts.
Figure. Classes of knowers in Ishraqi ranking.
Geographic symbolism: Yemen and the Orient
In the recitals and in doctrinal asides, Yemen stands for the Orient of Lights, the "right side," the soul's original home. The Occident is exile in matter and in knowledge taken on authority. To "go East" is not a travel tip; it is the soul's return. Nasr ties this symbolism to Avicenna's Oriental Philosophy and shows how Suhrawardi made it systematic.
Figure. Geographic symbolism in Ishraqi texts.
Eschatology: three classes of souls
Suhrawardi sorts posthumous states by purity and knowledge attained here. The su'ada' (felicitous) have reached measure of purity and enjoy illumination. The wretched remain bound to darkness they chose. Intermediate souls receive states between. The decisive joy, even in this life, is illumination by the victorical lights; partial worldly joys are only reflections of that joy. Spiritual union is possible before death when the soul disengages and is lit while still in the body.
Hikmat al-ishraq and Its Doctrines
The masterpiece, "revealed suddenly by the Holy Spirit" when the seven planets were in Libra, begins with logic and ends in ecstasy.
Written in a few months in about 1186, the Hikmat al-ishraq abandons the usual logic-mathematics-physics-metaphysics order. It has a prologue and two parts.
Part one: critique of the Peripatetics
| Peripatetic view | Suhrawardi's correction |
|---|---|
| Definition by genus and difference | A tautology |
| Nine categories of accident | Four: relation, quality, quantity, motion |
| Existence principial (Avicenna) | Essence principial, existence an accident (as commonly read). Mir Damad agreed; Mulla Sadra reversed it |
| No Platonic Ideas | Archetypes are real |
| Hylomorphism (form + matter) | Bodies are darkness obstructing light; "form" is the guardian angel, the light in each thing |
| Proof of immortality from the soul's faculties | Too weak; what matters is the soul's celestial origin and escape |
| Vision by intromission (Aristotelians) or a cone from the eye (mathematicians) | Vision is illumination: the soul surrounds the lit object and is lit by it |
Part two: light, angels, physics, psychology, eschatology
Light needs no definition, since we define the obscure by the evident and nothing is more evident than light. The Light of lights (nur al-anwar) is the Divine Essence, blinding in intensity: "Everything in the world is derived from the Light of His essence... to attain fully to this illumination is salvation."
| Self-subsistent | Dependent | |
|---|---|---|
| Light | Incorporeal light (nur mujarrad) | Accidental light |
| Darkness | Obscurity (ghasaq): bodies | Form (hay'ah): colours, smells |
| Self-aware | God, angels, human souls, archetypes | Stars, fire |
Every domain has a vicegerent of the Light of lights: the Sun in the sky, fire among elements, the "lordly light" in the soul.
Figure 26. The vicegerents of the Light of lights.
Angelology is central. The angel sustains the world, is the instrument of knowledge, and is what man seeks to become. Suhrawardi uses Mazdean names (still found in the Persian calendar) beside Quranic ones, and refuses to limit the angels to ten: they are as many as the fixed stars, and their modes of illumination follow no fixed logical pattern.
Figure 27. The Ishraqi angelic orders. Each light is a barzakh, veiling and revealing the light above it.
- The longitudinal order descends from Bahman, the "Greatest" or "Most Proximate Light". Each "victorial light" dominates the one below and is loved by it; each is a barzakh that both hides and transmits. This is "the world of mothers", from which all things are generated.
- From its masculine aspect (dominion, contemplation) comes the latitudinal order of archetypes, the Platonic Ideas, named after the Zoroastrian Amesha Spentas: Khurdad for water, Shahriwar for minerals, Murdad for plants, Urdibihisht for fire. Every visible thing is a theurgy (tilasm) or icon of its archetype.
- From its feminine aspect (love, receptivity) come the fixed stars and visible heavens, crystallisations of the angels' "non-being".
- The archetypes rule through regent or "lordly" lights; one dwells at the centre of every human soul. Gabriel is the archetype of humanity, identified with the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the Prophet and the source of revelation.
Figure 28. The celestial twin.
Physics of light. Bodies are opaque (earth), transparent (heavens, water) or translucent in degrees (air). Fire is not an element at all but a vicegerent of the Light. Bodies are barzakhs between grades of light; heavens rule bodies, souls rule heavens, angels rule souls, the Light of lights rules all. Gold and jewels gladden us because their light is kin to the soul's. Psychology follows Avicenna's faculties, but all are aspects of the angelic light in each species, and the rational soul is the lordly light, a spark that has forgotten its home.
Figure 29. Suhrawardi's physics of light.
Eschatology. Every soul seeks the Supreme Light, knowingly or not; whoever has not tasted illumination "does not even know what joy is".
| Souls | Destination |
|---|---|
| The fairly pure (su'ada') | World of archetypes, enjoying the originals of earthly sounds, tastes and smells |
| The darkened (ashqiya') | World of "suspended forms", the labyrinth of cosmic imagination, the jinn |
| The sages (muta'allihun) | Above even the angels, near the Supreme Light |
Suffering depends on purity and perfection: only the impure and ignorant soul suffers endlessly from separation from the world.
Critique of Peripatetic philosophy (detail)
In the first section Suhrawardi treats Aristotelian logic without accepting it whole. He criticises the Aristotelian definition as often a tautology and reduces the nine accidents to four: relation, quality, quantity and motion. Then he attacks key Peripatetic tenets to clear the ground for Ishraqi doctrine.
Principality of essence. Against Avicenna he holds (on the common reading Nasr reports) that essence is principial (asalat al-mahiyyah) and existence an accident added to it. Mir Damad later accepted this; Mulla Sadra reversed it, reading Ishraqi wisdom through the principality of being (asalat al-wujud).
Platonic archetypes. He blames Aristotle for refusing the world of archetypes and thereby depriving things of reality in higher orders. Place he prefers in a more Platonic sense. Hylomorphism he rejects: the universe is degrees of light and darkness (absence of light); the "matter" of bodies is obstruction to light; "form" is the angel that watches over each thing, the light by which the body exists.
Soul. Peripatetic arguments for immortality are too weak. Suhrawardi cares less about listing faculties than about the soul's celestial origin, its misery in exile, and the way home from the Occidental prison.
Vision. He rejects both the Aristotelian theory (light from the object into the eye) and the mathematical cone-of-light-from-the-eye theory. Vision is an act of illumination: the soul surrounds a lighted object and is lit by it. Even physical seeing partakes of the illuminative nature of all knowledge.
Figure. Suhrawardi's critique before his own doctrine.
Light of lights and the grades of being
All reality is light in degrees of intensity. Light needs no definition: one defines the obscure by the evident, and nothing is more evident than light. The Pure Light, the Light of lights (nur al-anwar), is the Divine Essence, blinding in luminosity. Nasr quotes Suhrawardi:
Ontological rank is nearness to that Light. Beings may be sorted as light or darkness, self-subsistent or dependent: incorporeal light (nur mujarrad), accidental light (nur aradi), obscurity (ghasaq), form (hai'ah). They may also be sorted by awareness: aware of itself or oblivious; self-subsistent or dependent. The Light of lights has a vice-regent in every domain: the Sun in the sky, fire among the elements, the lordly light (al-nur al-isfahbadi) in the human soul.
Angelology: longitudinal and latitudinal orders
Suhrawardi does not limit angels to the ten heavens. Their number matches the fixed stars: practically indefinite. He describes two orders.
Longitudinal (tuli). At the head stands the supreme archangel, called Bahman (Mazdean Vohuman) and also the Greatest or Most Proximate Light. Each victorical light (al-nur al-qahir) brings forth the next; each higher has dominion (qahr) toward the lower, each lower has love (mahabbah) toward the higher. Each light is a barzakh, a veil that hides and reveals.
Latitudinal (ardi). From the masculine aspect (dominion and contemplation) of the longitudinal order arises the order of archetypes, masters of the species (arbab al-anwa'). They do not generate one another; they stand side by side. Every visible thing is a theurgy (tilasm) or icon (sanam) of its archetype. Suhrawardi names them with Mazdean Amshaspands: Khurdad for water, Shahriwar for minerals, Murdad for plants, Urdibihisht for fire.
From the feminine aspect (love and receptivity) of the longitudinal order come the fixed stars and through them the heavens: visible heavens as crystallization of an aspect of privation relative to the Light of lights. An intermediary order of regent lights (al-anwar al-mudabbirah), also called lordly lights, moves the heavens through love and guards earthly species. For humanity as a whole the archetype is Gabriel, identified with the Holy Spirit and the Spirit of Muhammad, hence with revelation. Each soul also has its own guardian angel; the soul existed in the angelic domain before embodiment and split, one part remaining above. Felicity is reunion with that celestial twin.
Figure. Ishraqi angelic hierarchy (simplified).
Physics, psychology, eschatology
Bodies are degrees of light and shadow: opaque, transparent, or mixed. Fire is not a terrestrial element like the others but a vice-regent of the Supreme Light. Meteorology and the three kingdoms are read through angelic theurgy: gold and jewels gladden the soul because their light is akin to the light within. Faculties of plant and animal souls follow the Peripatetic list but as aspects of angelic light. Man's five inner senses crown in the rational soul, which is the lordly light imprisoned in the body and apt to forget its home.
After death, souls sort into the pure (su'ada'), the wretched, and those in between. Joy is illumination by the victorical lights; one who has never tasted that joy, Suhrawardi says, does not know what joy is. The goal already in this life is disengagement and illumination while still in the body.
The Visionary Recitals (expanded)
Beside the doctrinal books stand the Persian (and some Arabic) visionary recitals: symbolic narratives in which the soul discovers its exile in the Occident of matter and seeks the Orient of Lights. Nasr reads them as the lived form of Ishraqi doctrine. Geography becomes metaphysics: Yemen stands "on the right side" as symbol of the Orient where the soul dwelt before the fall; the West is the well of nature and imitation.
Figure. Pattern of the Ishraqi visionary recital.
Works such as Awaz-i par-i Jibra'il (The Chant of Gabriel's Wing), Aql-i surkh (The Red Intellect), Qissat al-ghurbat al-gharbiyyah (The Story of the Occidental Exile) and related tales dramatize imprisonment, the message from the angelic world, and the difficult ascent. Nasr does not reduce them to allegory for children; they are a mode of knowledge in which imagination, purified, becomes a mirror of the imaginal world (alam al-mithal) that Suhrawardi's school helped to name for later Persian thought.
The Ishraqi Tradition (expanded)
Suhrawardi's blood was shed, but his school lived. Commentators on Hikmat al-ishraq, above all Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi and later Mulla Sadra, made the text a pillar of the Persian curriculum. The Illuminationist current met Avicennian Peripateticism and Sufi gnosis in the School of Isfahan. Mir Damad read Avicenna in an Ishraqi key; Mulla Sadra turned Suhrawardi's metaphysics of essence into a metaphysics of being while keeping the lights, the imaginal world and the demand for spiritual realisation.
Figure. Paths of the Ishraqi tradition after Suhrawardi.
Nasr's point is not only lineage. It is that al-Ghazali's critique of falsafa did not end philosophy in Islam. It ended a certain self-sufficient rationalism in the East and opened the way for a philosophy that joins demonstration to illumination. Suhrawardi is the hinge of that turn. In the West, Averroes answered al-Ghazali by a stricter Aristotle; in the East, Suhrawardi answered by a Platonism of light.
| Andalusian / Latin path | Eastern Ishraqi path |
|---|---|
| Averroes: purify Aristotle | Suhrawardi: join reason to illumination |
| Influence on Latin scholasticism | Influence on Persian theosophy |
| Tension with theology often sharp | Philosophy as hikmah muta'aliyah in later synthesis |
III. Ibn Arabi and the Sufis
The Sufi Tradition
Before introducing the "Greatest Master", Nasr sketches the river he flowed into: Sufism from the Prophet to the founders of the great orders.
Sufism is the heart and esoteric dimension of the Islamic revelation. Its name came later and it borrowed some Neoplatonic and Hermetic formulations, but its reality goes back to the Quran itself. For the Sufi, the first and most perfect Sufi was the Prophet, followed by Ali, the esoteric representative par excellence.
Figure 30. The image of the lava that cooled.
Sufis practise nothing the Prophet and Companions (Ali, Abu Bakr, Abu Dharr, Salman, Bilal) did not: spiritual retreat (khalwah), as in the cave of Hira, and invocation (dhikr). "All the paths are closed except to him who follows in the steps of the Apostle." In essence Sufism has no history; it only re-expresses itself for each age.
Figure 31. The practices traced to the Prophet.
| Period | Figures and works |
|---|---|
| 1st-2nd c. AH | Early ascetics and Quran readers; Hasan al-Basri (643-728); the Shi'ite Imams, esp. Ja'far al-Sadiq and 'Ali al-Rida, in nearly every order's chain; Nahj al-balaghah, Sahifah sajjadiyah |
| 3rd/9th c. | Dhu'l-Nun, al-Muhasibi, Ibrahim ibn Adham (a prince who left court like the Buddha), Bayazid al-Bastami's "theophanic locutions"; the sober Baghdad school of Junaid, Nuri, Shibli; Hallaj: "I am the Truth" |
| 4th/10th c. | Manuals: Sarraj's Luma', Kalabadhi's Ta'arruf, Hujwiri's Kashf al-mahjub (first Persian Sufi prose), Makki's Qut al-qulub, Qushairi's Risalah; first Persian Sufi quatrains by Abu Sa'id; Ansari's Stations of the Travellers and Munajat |
| 5th/11th c. | Seljuq orthodoxy; al-Ghazali legitimises Sufism; his Niche of Lights foreshadows Ibn Arabi |
| 12th c. | Ahmad Ghazali (Sawanih on love), 'Ain al-Qudat; in the Maghrib Ibn al-'Arif, Abu Madyan, Ibn Qasi; founders of orders: Rifa'i, 'Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani (Qadiriyah, Morocco to the Pacific), Najm al-Din Kubra |
Nasr sees Hallaj as embodying the spiritual type of Christ within Islam (following Massignon): his vocation was to divulge esoteric truth to the crowd, and his ana'l-Haqq testifies that Sufism is essentially gnosis, in which God within us says "I" once the veil of otherness is lifted. Persian became Sufism's second great language, preparing Sana'i, 'Attar, Rumi, Shabistari, Sa'di and Hafiz, whose verse reached India, Java and Sumatra, and later attracted Goethe and Herder. Sufis and philosophers traded ideas: the Andalusian Ibn Masarrah's cosmology foreshadowed Ibn Arabi.
The Significance of Ibn Arabi
With Ibn Arabi a complete metaphysics, cosmology, psychology and anthropology suddenly appears. Was this progress, decline, or something else?
Earlier Sufi writings were practical guides or ecstatic sayings, "flashes of light" on one aspect of reality. With Muhyi al-Din the implicit doctrines became explicit; he is "the expositor par excellence of gnosis in Islam". Terms such as wahdat al-wujud (transcendent unity of Being) and al-insan al-kamil (Universal Man) get their names for the first time, though their reality is as old as the tradition.
Doctor Maximus and the two futures
Nasr's title "Doctor Maximus" (al-Shaikh al-akbar) marks institutional recognition inside Sufism, not university rank. Combined with the Averroes meeting, it frames a civilisational fork: the Latin West took the path of Averroes's Aristotle; the Islamic East took the path of Ibn Arabi's gnosis (joined, in Persia, to Avicenna and Suhrawardi). The third essay is therefore also a chapter in comparative intellectual history, written from inside the Eastern memory.
The Life of the Sage from Murcia
Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn al-'Arabi al-Hatimi al-Ta'i, of pure Arab stock from the tribe of Tayy, was born in Murcia in 1165. Posterity called him al-Shaikh al-akbar (the Greatest Master) and Muhyi al-Din (Reviver of Religion). "His greatest masterpiece was his own life."
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 1165 | Born in Murcia; grows up in Seville in comfort |
| Youth | Guided by two women saints, Yasmin of Marchena and Fatimah of Cordova, very old yet radiant "like a girl of sixteen", his spiritual mother for two years |
| c. 1185 | Meets Averroes in Cordova |
| to 1198 | Travels Andalusia and North Africa; debates Mu'tazilites; in Tunis comments on Ibn Qasi's Taking off the Sandals; in Almeria, home of Ibn Masarrah's school, formal initiation (per Asin Palacios); visions of the invisible hierarchy and of the poles of earlier religions |
| 1198 | Vision in Murcia of the Divine Throne on pillars of light; a bird orders him East |
| 1201 | Mecca: begins the Meccan Revelations; meets Nizam, a young woman of a Persian Sufi family from Isfahan, who becomes his image of eternal Sophia, his Beatrice |
| 1204 | Mosul: receives the mantle (khirqah) of Khidr, the "Green Prophet" who initiates outside regular chains |
| 1207 | Threatened by jurists in Cairo; refuge in Mecca |
| Then | Konya, meets Sadr al-Din Qunawi; Armenia; Baghdad 1211, meets Shihab al-Din 'Umar Suhrawardi (not the Ishraqi); Aleppo, welcomed by Malik Zahir |
| 1223 | Settles in Damascus, completes the Futuhat |
| 1240 | Dies; buried at Salihiyah on Mount Qasiyun; Selim built a mausoleum in the 16th c.; the Algerian hero Emir 'Abd al-Qadir, who edited his works in exile, lies beside him |
Yes and no: the meeting with Averroes
Years later Ibn Arabi watched Averroes' coffin loaded on a mule, balanced by his books on the other side. "On one side the master, on the other his works. Oh, how I would like to know if his hopes have been fulfilled!"
Nasr reads the meeting as symbolic: the rationalist who would most influence the Latin West faces the gnostic who would tower over later Islam. The two paths of the two civilisations meet in one room.
Figure 32. Two paths in one room.
Seville, two women saints, and the road
After early years in Murcia, Ibn Arabi grew up in Seville in a well-to-do family that left him free for the spiritual life. He met two women saints, Yasamin of Marshena and Fatimah of Cordova. Fatimah, though very old, possessed a radiance he compared to a girl of sixteen; she guided him for two years and considered herself his spiritual mother. As a young man of twenty he traveled Andalusian cities seeking saints.
The meeting with Averroes
At Cordova he met Averroes in an encounter Nasr treats as symbolic of the later paths of Christendom and Islam: the master of reflective reason facing the young gnostic of vision. Nasr gives Ibn Arabi's own account at length. Averroes said "Yes"; the youth said "Yes," then, seeing the philosopher's joy, added "No." Between yes and no, he said, souls take flight from their matter and necks become detached from their bodies. Averroes trembled and murmured that there is no force but in God. Later Ibn Arabi saw him in a vision behind a veil of light, absorbed in meditation that did not lead where the gnostic stood. At Averroes's funeral in Cordova the coffin was balanced on the beast by his books; a companion remarked on the master on one side and his works on the other. Ibn Arabi kept the phrase as a theme of meditation: had the hopes been fulfilled?
Figure. The Cordova meeting as Nasr frames it.
Visions of hierarchy and the command to depart
Until 595/1198 he lived in Andalusia and North Africa, meeting Sufis, debating groups such as the Mu'tazilites, studying Ibn Qasi's Khal' al-na'lain in Tunis, and visiting Almeria, centre of the school of Ibn Masarrah and Ibn al-Arif (Asin Palacios held that he received formal initiation there). He saw the invisible hierarchy: the Supreme Pole (Qutb), the two imams, the four pillars (awtad), the seven substitutes (abdal), the twelve chiefs (nuqaba'), the eight nobles (nujaba'). He saw poles of revelations before Islam and realised the transcendent unity of traditions. In a vision in Murcia in 595/1198 he saw the Divine Throne on pillars of light and a bird that ordered him to leave for the East.
Figure. Outer frame of Ibn Arabi's life.
Mecca, the Meccan Revelations, and Damascus
He traveled through Egypt and Anatolia to Mecca, where the opening of the Futuhat al-makkiyyah (Meccan Revelations) was given, and where he met Nizam, the learned daughter of a Persian master, who became for him a theophanic figure celebrated in the Tarjuman al-ashwaq (Interpreter of Desires). Attacks on the erotic surface of those poems led him to write a commentary showing their spiritual sense. He continued through Baghdad, Mosul and Anatolia, married, had disciples, and finally settled in Damascus in 620/1223, where he composed and revised until his death in 638/1240. His tomb on the slopes of Qasiyun remains a place of visitation.
The Works
Tradition credits him with several hundred works, many still in manuscript.
- al-Futuhat al-makkiyah (Meccan Revelations): 560 chapters, metaphysics, sacred sciences, his own experiences; "God dictated to me everything that I have written through the angel of inspiration." The main source book of Islam's sacred sciences.
- Fusus al-hikam (Bezels of Wisdom, 1229): 27 chapters, each on one prophet; given to him in a vision by the Prophet holding a book. His most read work and "spiritual legacy".
- Cosmology: Insha' al-dawa'ir, 'Uqlat al-mustawfiz, al-Tadbirat al-ilahiyah.
- Method: Treatise on Retreat, Spiritual Counsels.
- Poetry: Tarjuman al-ashwaq (Interpreter of Desires) and the Diwan; considered second only to Ibn al-Farid among Arabic Sufi poets.
His style ranges from lucid (method) to dense and elliptical (metaphysics), with a technical vocabulary one must master and "read between the lines".
Scale and character of the corpus
Nasr stresses that Ibn Arabi's greatest masterpiece was his life, yet the written corpus is enormous: some enumerations exceed hundreds of titles. Two works dominate later study.
Al-Futuhat al-makkiyyah. The vast Meccan Revelations, opened in Mecca and revised over years, is an ocean of doctrine, law, cosmology, spiritual stations and autobiographical vision. It is not a tidy textbook; it is a revealed expanse in prose.
Fusus al-hikam. The Bezels of Wisdom, received in a vision of the Prophet, presents wisdoms named for the prophets: each prophet is a bezel in which a particular Divine wisdom is set. It became the most commented Sufi metaphysical text in the East.
Figure. Principal works Nasr highlights.
Other treatises, prayers and poems circulate under his name; authorship questions exist at the margins, but the central doctrines of the school rest on the Futuhat, the Fusus and the recognised shorter works. Nasr warns that a bare outline cannot replace lifetimes of study by seers; he offers only the general character of the language and a few dominant principles.
The Sources of Ibn Arabi
A realised Sufi receives knowledge "vertically", through theophanies in the heart, and depends on others only for expression. On that level Ibn Arabi drew on Hallaj, Hakim al-Tirmidhi (The Seal of Sanctity), Bastami and al-Ghazali; philosophers, especially Avicenna; Ibn Masarrah's "Neo-Empedoclean" scheme; the theologians' dialectic; the Jabirian corpus, the Brethren of Purity and Isma'ili writings; and from antiquity, Alexandrian Hermeticism, the Stoics, Philo and the Neoplatonists. Through his mind all these gain "a metaphysical dimension and a transparency".
Sources: Quran, Sunnah, unveiling, earlier wisdom
Ibn Arabi's sources are first the Quran and the Sunnah, lived from within by unveiling (kashf) and inspiration (ilham). He also stands in the line of earlier Sufis and of the Andalusian school (Ibn Masarrah, Ibn al-Arif). Echoes of Neoplatonic and Hermetic vocabulary appear, but Nasr refuses to reduce him to a borrower from Greece. The decisive origin is realisation. What looks like "influence" is often the same truth spoken in several sacred dialects.
The Doctrine
Ibn Arabi is not a philosopher building a system. Doctrine and method are the two legs needed to climb the mountain.
He writes under direct inspiration, so his works lack the coherence of purely human works. His aim is theoria, a vision of reality, attainable only through practice.
Figure 33. Doctrine and method as two legs.
The language of symbolism: ta'wil
Ta'wil means "taking a thing back to its origin": moving from the outward (zahir) to the inward (batin). Nothing in the universe is only what it appears to be. In Arabic, natural phenomena, Quranic verses and inner states of the soul are all called ayat, "signs", because their inner meanings correspond. The Sufi reads nature, then religion's rites, then his own soul, and finds the same essences in all three: the written Quran, the "macrocosmic Quran" of the universe, and the microcosm of man.
Figure 34. Three orders of signs, taken back to their origin.
The transcendent unity of Being
| Label | Why Nasr rejects it |
|---|---|
| Pantheism | A philosophical system, and it requires substantial continuity between God and world; Ibn Arabi affirms God's transcendence even of substance |
| Panentheism (Nicholson) | Less wrong, but the world does not "contain" God |
| Existential monism | A rationalist system that confuses the "vertical" essential link with a "horizontal" substantial one |
| "Natural mysticism" (some Catholic authors) | There is no absolute break between natural and supernatural; calling other religions' mysticism merely natural "limits the mercy of God" |
The Divine Essence is a coincidence of opposites before which reason stands bewildered: Outward and Inward, First and Last, Truth (Haqq) and creature (khalq), Lover and Beloved, knower and known are resolved in it without being reduced to it.
The Names and Qualities
Figure 35. From the Essence to the cosmos through the Divine Names.
On the plane of ahadiyah God is beyond qualities; on that of wahidiyah He has principial modalities from which all qualities of being and knowledge derive. The Qualities "are neither He nor other than He". The Shahadah implies both tanzih (negating every quality: transcendence) and tashbih (every quality reflects a Divine one: likeness); Ibn Arabi stands between them. The Quranic Names are God's possibilities immanent in the world, the paths by which He manifests and by which we ascend.
The Universal Man
The Universal Man (al-insan al-kamil), the "privileged myth" of Sufism, is the total theophany of the Divine Names, the universe in its oneness as seen by the Essence. Microcosm and macrocosm face each other like two mirrors, both echoing their prototype. He is also the Spirit or First Intellect containing all the Ideas, like Philo's Logos, "the first-born of God".
| Aspect | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Cosmological | Prototype of creation; the "Tree of Being" rooted in the Essence with branches through the cosmos |
| Prophetic | The Word, each dimension of which is a prophet; the Reality of Muhammad, "first creature of God", fully manifested in the last prophet as a seed returns in the fruit |
| Initiatic | The model of spiritual life: one who has realised all states of being; first the prophets, then the great saints and the Pole of each age. Potentially every human is Universal Man; actually, only prophets and saints |
Creation and cosmology
Creation is the effusion of Being onto the archetypes, bringing them out of the "hidden treasure". Ibn Arabi offers several images:
Figure 36. Ibn Arabi's images of creation.
- Light through coloured glass onto the mirror of non-being: the cosmos as a set of mirrors.
- A river whose water (Being) is new every moment while its bed (the archetypes) keeps the shape.
- The Breath of the Compassionate (nafas al-Rahman): as breath articulates letters, Divine Mercy articulates possibilities into existence. Like breathing, the universe contracts and expands: annihilated and recreated every instant, and "there is no repetition in theophany".
He uses many cosmologies (tree, Pen and Tablet, Quranic angels, Hermetic natures), always grounded in the Quran and the Arabic letters, because the cosmos can be seen in several lights.
| World | Content |
|---|---|
| nasut | Human and bodily forms |
| malakut | Subtle lights, psychic substance; the world of imagination or similitudes ('alam al-mithal) |
| jabarut | Spiritual existence beyond form |
| lahut | The Divine Nature in its perfect qualities |
| hahut | The Essence beyond all determinations |
Or, in another count, the 70,000 veils of light and darkness over "the face of the Beloved". Known from within, these worlds are "presences" the Sufi passes through toward union.
Union
Most Sufis describe union as fana' (annihilation) and baqa' (subsistence). Ibn Arabi differs: union means realising that we never had an existence of our own to lose.
Figure 37. Two accounts of union.
Operatively, union through love of Divine Beauty has two modes: God present in man, seeing through his eyes, and man immersed in God, seeing through Him, as in the sacred hadith: "I am the hearing by which he hears, the sight by which he sees..." Man is God's shadow made transparent. The path runs from canonical prayer to the prayer of the heart, the invocation of the Name. In the end "God is the mirror in which you see yourself, as you are His mirror in which He contemplates His Names". The Lord stays Lord and servant stays servant, yet in the saint's heart creation's purpose is fulfilled: God comes to know the "hidden treasure".
The unity of religions
His early vision of the Supreme Centre of all revelations, and his Logos doctrine (every prophet a word of the Logos), imply the universality of revelation. He studied other religions in detail. Nasr: today's Muslim efforts at rapprochement "can and should be based" on Ibn Arabi and Rumi.
Figure 38. The reach of Ibn Arabi's school.
Wahdat al-wujud: what it is not
Nasr lists false labels: pantheism, panentheism, existential monism, natural mysticism. All of these accusations are false when they mistake gnosis for philosophy cut off from grace and sanctity. Pantheism fails twice: it either immanentises God into the world or denies transcendence. Sufi unity is the integration of paradoxes and ontological contrasts, not philosophical monism. There is essential identification of the existent with Being in one respect, and no substantial continuity that would make the world a piece of God in another.
While God is absolutely transcendent with respect to the Universe, the Universe is not completely separated from Him.To treat any order of reality as autonomous apart from Absolute Reality is
shirk. The Shahadah means ultimately that there is no reality other than Absolute Reality. The world and the things in it are not God, but their reality is none other than His.
Figure. Clearing false names for wahdat al-wujud.
The Treatise on Unity and the coincidentia oppositorum
Nasr cites the Risalat al-Ahadiyyah (Treatise on Unity) to push transcendence to the limit: He is without after or before, far or near; His veil is only a consequence of His oneness; none sees Him other than He. The mind stands before a coincidentia oppositorum, a center of the circle in which all is unified and which cannot be reduced to rational categories or explained away as a monism that erases distinctions.
Names and Qualities: ahadiyah and wahidiyah
At the level of the Essence, God is ahadiyah, exclusive Unity beyond Names. At the level of the Names and Qualities He is wahidiyah, inclusive Oneness that deploys the many Names. Each Name is a face of the One toward a possible; the creatures are loci of manifestation (mazahir). Tanzih (incomparability) and tashbih (analogy) are both required by the Shahadah: "nothing is like Him" and yet "He is the Hearing, the Seeing."
Figure. From exclusive Unity to manifestation.
The Names are pathways of descent (creation) and ascent (return). The seeker rises by the Name that dominates his constitution; the cosmos descends by the Names that rule each level. Beauty and Majesty, Mercy and Wrath, are paired without rupture of the One.
The Universal Man
Al-insan al-kamil, the Universal Man or Logos, is the mirror in which God contemplates His Names and the model in which the cosmos is written. Nasr notes three aspects: metaphysical (the Reality of Muhammad as first creation), cosmic (the pole through which the world is sustained), and human (the fully realised sage and, in the present cycle, the Prophet Muhammad as last of the prophets). The seed analogy: the seed becomes tree and fruit that again holds the seed; so the Reality of Muhammad manifests fully in Muhammad.
| Aspect | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Metaphysical | Reality of Muhammad; first creation; Logos |
| Cosmic | Pole and mirror of the Names in the cosmos |
| Human | Realised sage; seal of prophetic manifestation |
Creation, breath and the five Presences
Creation is imaged as the Breath of the Merciful, as theophany (tajalli), and as the renewal of creation at every instant (tajdid al-khalq). There is no substantial continuity that would make the world independent; the Vertical Cause sustains each moment. Multiple cosmological schemes appear in the corpus; Nasr highlights the five Divine Presences (or worlds): the Essence; the world of pure Spirits / Names; the imaginal world; the bodily world; and the Universal Man as the totality that gathers them.
Figure. Five Presences (as Nasr summarises).
Union beyond fana' and baqa'
Most gnostics made a ceasing of existence (fana') and a ceasing of that ceasing (baqa') conditions of knowing God. Nasr cites Ibn Arabi's sharper claim: that is an error, because things have no existence of their own that could cease. What never possessed independent being cannot lose it. Union is recognising that our existence belonged to God from the beginning. Operative modes include God as mirror in which you see yourself and you as mirror in which He contemplates His Names; the Lord-servant pair as the secret of creation's purpose; and the prayer of the heart, in which invocation is answered by the One who prays in the servant.
Unity of religions
Because every prophet is a bezel of one Wisdom, the paths are many and the summit one. Ibn Arabi's famous lines (Tarjuman) declare the heart capable of every form: pasture, convent, temple, Ka'ba, Torah, Quran; the religion of Love. Nasr's warning is precise: one cannot reject forms from below without having lived them. Ibn Arabi spent his life in Quran, prayer and the Name; by means of these practices, not in spite of them, he found the formless at the heart of form. To have lived one religion fully is to have lived them all; transcendence of forms is from above, not a modern refusal of observance.
Creation images in more detail
Nasr highlights three images. First, creation as the Breath of the Merciful (nafas al-Rahman): the possibles "breathe" in the Divine Breath as words spoken by God. Second, creation as theophany (tajalli): each level is a self-disclosure of the Names, never a rupture that would make the world self-standing. Third, renewal at every instant: the world is not a clock wound once; existence is given continuously. Continuity that the senses invent is the habit of seeing similar theophanies in sequence.
| Image | What it guards against |
|---|---|
| Breath of the Merciful | Thinking creatures are self-rooted substances |
| Theophany of the Names | Thinking the world is cut off from God |
| Renewal every instant | Thinking existence is a stored capital |
Figure. Descent and ascent through the Names.
Lord, servant and the prayer of the heart
The secret of creation, in this reading, is the Lord-servant pair: God is known as Lord only when there is a servant, and the servant finds his reality only in the Lord. Prayer is not information delivered upward; it is the place where the servant becomes the mirror and God contemplates His Names. Nasr cites the saying that God is the mirror in which you see yourself, as you are His mirror in which He contemplates His Names and their principles; His Names are not other than Himself, so the relation is an inversion.
Significance revisited
Why does Nasr call Ibn Arabi the Revivifier of Religion in a metaphysical sense? Because he made explicit the gnosis that Sufism had lived. After him, Islamic spirituality in the East could speak of Being, Names, Universal Man and the unity of revelation with a precision that matched the intensity of the experience. Controversies followed; so did centuries of commentary. The third essay exists because without him the map of later Islamic thought is incomplete.
Figure. Why Ibn Arabi is a hinge for later Islam.
Names as pathways of ascent and descent (detail)
Every Divine Name is a path. In descent, Names deploy the levels of the cosmos as loci. In ascent, the seeker travels by the Name that dominates his constitution, passing from denser to subtler manifestations until the Names gather in the One. Beauty (jamal) and Majesty (jalal), Mercy and Wrath, are not rivals; they are paired faces. To deny either tanzih or tashbih is to cripple the Shahadah.
Figure. Names as two-way pathways.
Unity of religions: the poem and the warning
Nasr quotes the famous lines from the Tarjuman: the heart as pasture, convent, temple, Ka'ba, Torah and Quran; the religion of Love. He immediately frames them. Ibn Arabi does not invite a modern refusal of observance. He wrote as one who lived the Shari'ah and the Name. One cannot reject what one does not possess. The burning of images means first having the images.
Figure. How unity of religions is reached in Nasr's reading.
Sufism after Ibn Arabi (expanded)
After the Shaikh al-Akbar, Sufi metaphysics in the East largely speaks his language, whether by commentary, critique or synthesis. The Fusus generated a vast commentarial tradition in Persian, Turkish and Arabic lands. Orders absorbed his cosmology even when they kept quieter about controversial formulas. In Persia the meeting of Ibn Arabi, Suhrawardi and Avicenna in Mulla Sadra produced the transcendent theosophy (al-hikmat al-muta'aliyah) that still structures advanced study.
Figure. After Ibn Arabi in the Islamic East.
Nasr also notes Western interest: Asin Palacios on Islamic influence upon the Divine Comedy; later Corbin, Izutsu and others as scholarly bridges. For Nasr the point remains existential: Ibn Arabi is not only a chapter in the history of ideas. He is a summit of Islamic gnosis whose vision of the One, the Names, the Universal Man and the unity of revelation still offers a map for the spiritual life.
Synthesis
Key Takeaways
- Islam's spiritual peak came first; its intellectual flowering came centuries later, after it absorbed earlier civilisations.
- The ancient sciences were already living inside the Muslim world (Nestorian, Harranian, Sasanian centres); the translation movement made them Arabic.
- Borrowed ideas became Muslim by integration into the Islamic view, not by origin.
- Peripatetic philosophy is one school among several, not "Islamic philosophy" as such.
- The philosopher-scientists never split science from religion, because they found causality fulfilled within Islam.
- Avicenna's quiddity/existence and impossible/possible/necessary distinctions became common ground for Muslim, Jewish and Latin thought.
- The universe is contingent at every moment, sustained by continuing effusion of Being.
- In Avicenna's cosmology creation is intellection; the Tenth Intellect gives forms, illuminates minds and brings revelation.
- Avicenna's science was observational and experimental; his mail qasri runs in a line to Buridan's impetus and Galileo's momentum.
- The prophet is the perfect human: lucid intellect, perfect imagination, power over matter, plus a law.
- Avicenna's late "Oriental Philosophy" turned the cosmos into a journey the soul experiences.
- The West kept Avicenna's reason and discarded his angels; Nasr ties the "depopulated" cosmos to secularisation.
- Al-Ghazali curbed rationalism as a Sufi, and made Sufism respectable in the madrasas.
- In Persia, Islamic philosophy began rather than ended after Averroes.
- Suhrawardi's ideal is the theosopher who has perfected both reasoning and illumination.
- Suhrawardi saw himself reuniting a single perennial wisdom from Hermes, through Greek and Persian branches; not eclecticism.
- Reality is light in degrees; bodies are darkness that blocks it, and every visible thing is an icon of its angelic archetype.
- The soul is unhappy because it is searching for its celestial other half.
- Sufism is the heart of Islam, rooted in the Prophet's retreat and invocation; orders formed as the "lava" cooled.
- Ibn Arabi made explicit what had been implicit, because the need for explanation grows as intuition dims.
- Wahdat al-wujud is not pantheism: God is transcendent, yet nothing has reality apart from Him.
- The Divine Names are both how God manifests and how the seeker ascends.
- The Universal Man is the cosmos' prototype, the Reality of Muhammad, and the model of realisation.
- Creation is renewed every instant: "there is no repetition in theophany".
- Union is realising we never had independent existence to lose.
- The inner unity of religions is reached through their forms, not by discarding them.
Frameworks at a Glance
| Framework | Source | Use |
|---|---|---|
| Three schools: philosopher-scientists, Illuminationists, Sufis | Introduction | Map of Islamic intellectual life after the formative period |
| Quiddity vs existence | Avicenna | Separating what a thing is from that it is |
| Impossible / possible / necessary | Avicenna | Proof of God's necessity and the world's contingency |
| Ten Intellects and Giver of Forms | Avicenna | Cosmogony, knowledge and revelation in one scheme |
| Four stages of intellect | Avicenna (after al-Kindi, al-Farabi) | Growth from potential to realised knowledge |
| Four classes of knowers | Suhrawardi | Grading reasoning and illumination |
| Vertical Orient/Occident | Suhrawardi | Reading the visionary recitals |
| Longitudinal / latitudinal angels | Suhrawardi | Hierarchy and archetypes of species |
| Three destinies after death | Suhrawardi | Purity and knowledge as what survives |
| Ta'wil: zahir to batin | Ibn Arabi | Reading nature, scripture and soul as signs |
| Tanzih and tashbih | Ibn Arabi | Holding transcendence and likeness together |
| Five Presences | Ibn Arabi's school | Levels of being and of realisation |
| Bezel and jewel | Ibn Arabi, Fusus | How revelation is coloured by and shapes its recipient |
A closer look
| Strengths | Limits |
|---|---|
| Corrects the old Western story that Islamic philosophy ended with Averroes; one of the first English books to present Suhrawardi and the later Persian tradition | Written in 1962-64; later scholarship (e.g. Gutas on Avicenna's "Oriental Philosophy", Chittick on Ibn Arabi) has refined or disputed several readings |
| Clear structure: life, works, sources, doctrine, influence for each sage | Treats the traditional narrative (e.g. Avicenna meeting Abu Sa'id, the authenticity of al-Farabi's Fusus) with more confidence than historians would |
| Shows the living continuity of these schools to the present | Reads all three through a perennialist lens; Avicenna's "esoteric" side is emphasised in ways Aristotelian readers contest |
| Fair-minded defence of Ibn Arabi against charges of pantheism | Nasr's link from discarded angels to Copernicus and secularism is a sweeping causal claim offered with little argument |
Who's Who
| Name | Dates | Role |
|---|---|---|
| al-Kindi | c. 801-866 | "Philosopher of the Arabs", founder of the Peripatetic school |
| al-Farabi | c. 870-950 | "Second Teacher": logic, political philosophy, music |
| al-Razi (Rhazes) | d. c. 925 | Physician, alchemist, heterodox philosopher |
| al-'Amiri | d. 992 | Philosopher between al-Farabi and Avicenna |
| Avicenna | 980-1037 | Master of the philosopher-scientists |
| al-Ghazali | 1058-1111 | Critic of the philosophers; legitimiser of Sufism |
| Averroes | 1126-1198 | Andalusian Aristotelian; met young Ibn Arabi |
| Suhrawardi | 1153-1191 | Founder of Ishraq, executed in Aleppo |
| Ibn Arabi | 1165-1240 | al-Shaikh al-akbar, expositor of gnosis |
| Qunawi | 1207-1274 | Ibn Arabi's chief disciple; link to Rumi |
| Nasir al-Din al-Tusi | 1201-1274 | Reviver of Avicenna; Maragheh observatory |
| Qutb al-Din Shirazi | 1236-1311 | Standard commentator on Hikmat al-ishraq |
| Mir Damad | d. 1631 | Avicenna read through Suhrawardi |
| Mulla Sadra | c. 1572-1640 | Synthesis of all three schools |
| Henry Corbin | 1903-1978 | Editor and translator of Suhrawardi |
Glossary of Key Terms
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| mashsha'i | "Walker": Peripatetic, the Aristotelian-Neoplatonic school of al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Avicenna |
| ishraq | Illumination and "eastern light"; Suhrawardi's school |
| 'irfan | Gnosis, unitive knowledge of God |
| mahiyah / wujud | Quiddity (what a thing is) / existence (that it is) |
| wajib, mumkin, mumtani' | Necessary, possible, impossible being |
| 'aql fa''al | Active Intellect, the Tenth Intellect; identified with Gabriel |
| wahib al-suwar | Giver of Forms |
| mail qasri | "Violent inclination", Avicenna's impetus |
| hakim muta'allih | Theosopher: perfected in both reasoning and illumination |
| nur al-anwar | Light of lights, God in Suhrawardi |
| barzakh | Isthmus: what both separates and joins two levels |
| arbab al-anwa' | "Lords of the species", angelic archetypes |
| nur isfahbadi | "Lordly light" ruling each human soul |
| 'alam al-mithal | World of images or similitudes, between spirit and body |
| Shari'ah / Tariqah | Sacred Law / spiritual Path |
| dhikr, khalwah | Invocation, spiritual retreat |
| ta'wil | Spiritual hermeneutics: leading the outward back to the inward |
| zahir / batin | Outward / inward |
| wahdat al-wujud | Transcendent unity of Being |
| ahadiyah / wahidiyah | Unconditioned Unity / oneness containing the Names |
| tanzih / tashbih | Affirming God's transcendence / likeness |
| al-insan al-kamil | Universal (Perfect) Man |
| nafas al-Rahman | Breath of the Compassionate, by which possibilities are articulated into existence |
| fana' / baqa' | Annihilation / subsistence in God |
| qutb | Pole, head of the invisible spiritual hierarchy |
| shirk | Associating anything with God; treating anything as independently real |
Questions for Reflection
- Al-Kindi says truth "never cheapens him who reaches for it". Where do you resist an idea because of where it comes from?
- If the world depends on its source at every moment, what changes about how you see ordinary things?
- Why might the West have kept Avicenna's medicine and logic but discarded his angels? What did it lose?
- Which of the four classes of knowers describes you today, and what would it take to move toward the fourth?
- Suhrawardi defines light as what needs no definition. What in your experience is "self-evident" in this sense?
- The soul seeks its celestial twin. Is restlessness a symptom to fix or a signal to follow?
- He died for speaking esoteric truths to everyone. When is outspokenness wisdom, and when imprudence?
- "The need for explanation grows with ignorance." Where do you need long explanations for what others grasp from a hint?
- How does Nasr distinguish the transcendent unity of Being from pantheism? Can you state it in two sentences?
- Ibn Arabi says we never had an existence of our own to lose. How does this change the idea of ego-death?
- "One cannot reject what one does not possess." What forms in your life have you rejected without first living them?
- Reread the "religion of Love" poem. Does it argue for one religion, all religions, or something else?
Further terms from the expanded chapters
| Term | Sense in this book | |
|---|---|---|
| Asalat al-mahiyyah | Principality of essence (Suhrawardi as commonly read) | Asalat al-wujud |
| Principality of being (Mulla Sadra) | Nur al-anwar | Light of lights; Divine Essence as light |
| Al-nur al-qahir | Victorical light in the longitudinal angelic order | Arbabb al-anwa' |
| Masters of the species; latitudinal archetypes | Barzakh | Isthmus; veil that hides and reveals |
| Alam al-mithal | Imaginal world | Ahadiyah / wahidiyah |
| Exclusive Unity / inclusive Oneness with Names | Tajdid al-khalq | Renewal of creation at every instant |
| Al-insan al-kamil | Universal Man; Logos; Reality of Muhammad | Qutb / abdal / awtad |
| Pole / substitutes / pillars of the invisible hierarchy | Latin Avicennianism | Twelfth-century Latin reception (de Vaux; Gilson) |
About this book
Three Muslim Sages: Avicenna, Suhrawardi, Ibn Arabi by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, 1964. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
Insight Editions · rajeshrmahapatra.com/insight-editions