The Decline of Knowledge and the Rise of Ideology in the Modern Islamic World

Joseph E.B. Lumbard

From Dr Joseph E. B. Lumbard (ed.), Islam, Fundamentalism and the Betrayal of Tradition (By kind permission of World Wisdom Books, 2004

Throughout the twentieth century, Muslim scholars called for a revival of the Islamic intellectual tradition in order to address the moral and spiritual malaise which has too long afflicted Muslim peoples the world over. Both Sunnis and Shiites, from the heartland of medieval Islamic civilization such as Syria, Egypt, and Iran, to its later lands such as Malaysia and West Africa, to its most recent penetrations into Europe and America, have long decried the intellectual decrepitude of modern Islamic civilization. To many scholars of Islam, both Muslim and non-Muslim, the rise of violence, punctuated by the events of September 11, 2001, are the latest symptoms of an underlying illness, a cancer which has been eating at the collective moral and intellectual body of the international Islamic community. In retrospect, such events were not a surprise but a painful indication of how deep this crisis has become. Unfortunately, the solutions sought by the American-led coalition involve significant risks, and to the minds of many condone senseless violence and wanton killing as a just response to senseless violence and wanton killing.1 Critics of the policy maintain that such a response rarely does more than beget the same violence from whence it was begotten. If this is correct, removing one or two more heads from the hydra of religious extremism will only succeed in breeding more of the same. In any case, what is needed is to strike a fatal blow to the heart of this beast, a beast whose name is ignorance.

From an Islamic perspective, it could be said that ignorance is our only true foe and that knowledge is our only true need, for when applied and lived, knowledge provides all that is necessary to overcome our spiritual, moral, emotional, and even physical decrepitude. Viewed in this light, the myriad social, economic, and political problems which have given rise to extremist reactions are in part the symptoms of an underlying intellectual crisis. The role of European and American influence in contributing to this is discussed in Ibrahim Kalin’s and Ejaz Akram’s contributions to this volume. In this essay we will discuss the role of modern ideological trends within Islam itself. But as these are relatively recent developments, which for the most part represent deviations from the traditional Islamic sciences, we must delve into Islamic intellectual history in order to fully address these issues. Historical contextualization of movements in the Islamic world is important for non-Muslims because an inability to appreciate the subtleties and complexities of the Islamic intellectual tradition leads to egregious misunderstandings, which can in turn lead to devastating political miscalculations, as is demonstrated by Walid El-Ansary in his essay The Economics of Terrorism. It is also of central importance for Muslims because much of the thought now produced in the Islamic world is not in fact Islamic. Western ideologies are presented by both dogmatic literalists and modern “liberal” secularists with a thin veneer of Islamic terms and sayings, while the voice of traditional Islamic thought is often muted and ignored. But through the work of scholars such as S. H. Nasr and Hamza Yusuf Hanson in America, A. K. Brohi and Suheyl Umar in Pakistan, Abd al-Halim Mahmud in Egypt, Naquib al-Attas in Malaysia, and Martin Lings, Hassan Gai Eaton, and T. J. Winter in England, it can continue to be heard.

Many of the most influential modern Muslim thinkers, such as Sayyid Ahmad Khan (d. 1898), Muhammad Abduh (d. 1905), Jamal al-Din Afghani (d. 1897) and Rashid Rida (d. 1935),2 were so awed by the technological achievements of Western civilization that they freely surrendered the ground of intellectuality to the secular humanistic and scientistic (as opposed to scientific)3 world-view that gave rise to them. While, as Fuad Naeem has demonstrated,4 the secularism and modernism of Sayyid Ahmad Khan and his followers in India is immediately evident, that of Abduh and Afghani has been more insidious. They tried to be modernist without being secularist, not realizing that the former opened the door to the latter. In adopting foreign theories and analytical models without fully evaluating them, both modernist and puritanical reformist (to avoid the amoeba-word “fundamentalist”) Muslims have abandoned the guidance of their own intellectual heritage. But in order to be effectively assimilated into the Islamic world, such modes of thought must first be evaluated. Then what is found to be of value can be incorporated organically through a genuine intellectual and civilizational discourse, as happened in the encounter between Islam and Greek thought in the ninth and tenth centuries. When, however, one intellectual tradition is abandoned outright, there is no basis for the evaluation of another intellectual tradition and none of the fertile ground that is necessary for effective assimilation. Recovering the Islamic intellectual tradition is thus an essential, if not the essential, step to ameliorating the malaise which Muslims and non-Muslims alike have long bemoaned and decried. When this has occurred, Muslim peoples will be better prepared to engage Western civilization without surrendering to it altogether or opposing it outwardly while capitulating inwardly.

Indications of Islam’s intellectual decline can be found in all the traditional Islamic sciences. On the one hand, jurisprudence (fiqh) has been abused by extremists so as to excuse and even promote suicide killings. On the other, it has been abandoned by modernists because they believe it is rooted in a medieval code of life which is not applicable in the “new world order.” Puritanical reformists have distorted theology so as to deny the immanence and closeness of God, affirming only the transcendence and remoteness of the Divine. Modernists, such as Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Chiragh Ali of India, have rejected every facet of theology and philosophy which does not accord with an Enlightenment and positivist notion of reason. Doctrinal literalists have decontextualized the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad so as to deny women rights that were granted to them from the beginning of Islam, whereas many modernists have rejected the authenticity of the sayings of the Prophet, and even the Quran. Both have almost completely abandoned the principles of Islamic thought. Puritanical reformists do so because they favor an opaque literalism which denies the efficacy of our speculative, intuitive, and imaginal faculties. Modernists do so because they have capitulated to the mental habits of their conquerors, conditioned as they are by relativism, scientism, and secular humanism. Each side continues to advance its position, but there is no dialogue; for in the absence of the traditional Islamic modes of interpretation, there is no basis for a common discourse among Muslims.5

All of the dimensions of this intellectual decline cannot be covered in one essay, or even one book. Here we will focus on one dimension of the Islamic intellectual heritage whose true nature has been abandoned, rejected, and forgotten for much of the modern period. In this essay it is referred to as the “ihsani intellectual tradition.” Ihsan is an Arabic word which comes from the root hasana, meaning to be beautiful, good, fine, or lovely. The word ihsan is the noun form of the verb ahsana, which means to make beautiful, good, fine, or lovely. Ihsan thus means making beautiful or good, or doing what is beautiful or good. The ihsani intellectual tradition begins with the teachings of the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad, who told his companions that “God has ordained Ihsan for everything.”6 In perhaps his most famous teaching on the subject he said: “Ihsan is to worship God as if you see Him, and if you do not see Him, He nonetheless sees you.”7 The central manifestation of the practice of ihsan took form in what is traditionally known as Sufism (Islamic mysticism), where the emphasis is on making one’s heart and soul beautiful so that beauty will arise naturally from within. But the ihsani tradition has taken on many forms, under many names, throughout Islamic history. Wherever there has been a vibrant Islamic civilization, be it Sunni or Shii, the ihsani intellectual tradition has been present in one form or another. Though it is not absent from the modern world, its political, social, and intellectual influence has decreased dramatically.

Like the philosophy of Plotinus, Meister Eckhart or Shankaracharya, the ihsani intellectual tradition comprises a science of Ultimate Reality in which metaphysics, cosmology, epistemology, psychology, and ethics are elaborated in terms of the attachment of all things to their one true origin, which is also their ultimate end. From this perspective, philosophy is not simply ratiocinative deduction and speculation; rather, it is the science of the Real. But to truly see the Real without the obfuscations of passional predilections and mental constructs, one must first perfect the organ of thought and perception – i.e., the intellect, which according to most traditional Islamic thinkers, resides in the heart. As Mulla Sadra, a preeminent representative of this tradition, writes: “Know that philosophy is the perfection of the human soul to the extent of human possibility through perception of the realities of existent things as they are in themselves and judgment of their existence verified through demonstrations, not derived from opinion and tradition.”8 From the perspective of the ihsani intellectual tradition, perception and understanding are not merely a way of knowing, they are moreover a way of being, and any form of perception or understanding which is not informed by the awareness of God’s omnipotence and omnipresence is not in keeping with the ultimate purpose of being human. Not all the solutions to the malaise of Islamdom lie within this dimension of the Islamic tradition. Nonetheless, its absence from contemporary discourse is among the most severe of the symptoms indicating the illness of the whole. But before we examine some teachings of the ihsani intellectual tradition, we must first look to the Islamic view of the human being; for all of the Islamic sciences, from philosophy to jurisprudence, are designed to address the one shortcoming of man from whence all other shortcomings stem – ignorance.

From one perspective, the message of Islam is one of knowledge having come to cure ignorance, truth having come to abolish error. The conception of the human being expounded in the Quran and the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad is not of a fallen being in need of redemption, but of a forgetful being in need of remembrance, an ignorant being in need of knowledge and thus of instruction. Where a Christian may see the ills of the human condition as a result of original sin, a Muslim will see these same ills as the result of ignorance or forgetfulness. In Islamic anthropology, the human is believed to have been created according to a norm (fitra) in which he knows that there is no god but God, that God is the only source of truth and reality, that God is the Origin of all things, that all things continually exist through God, and that all things will return to God. This is the vision of tawhid, which literally means “making one” and can best be expressed as “asserting the unity of God.” Throughout the centuries this vision of tawhid is the one thing which has been agreed upon by all Muslim scholars, of whatever sect or creed. Arguments have never centered on the veracity of tawhid itself, but upon the best means of recognizing and averring it.

As humankind has exhibited a tendency to be heedless of tawhid, and to forget and ignore its implications, the Quran states that God has sent messengers to remind them of this essential truth. It is in this spirit that the Quran tells us, “Verily this is a reminder” (73:19, 76:29). This reminder is the truth of tawhid, a truth expressed in the first testimony of the faith, “There is no god but God” (la ilaha illa llah). It is to remind humankind of this truth that every prophet has been sent. In the Quran, God specifically addresses Moses: “I am God! There is no god but I. So worship Me ….” (20:14). The seventh chapter of the Quran tells us that the Prophets Noah, Hud, Salih and Shuayb all said to their people in different lands and in different ages, “O my people! Worship God! You have no other god but Him” (7:59, 7:65, 7:73, 7:85). In another passage we are told, “Ask those of Our messengers We sent before thee: Have We appointed gods to be worshiped apart from the Merciful?” (43:45). But the answer to this has already been given: “And We never sent a messenger before thee except that We revealed to him, saying, ‘There is no god but I, so serve Me'” (21:25). It is a fundamental principle of the Quran that every human collectivity has been sent a prophet: “And We have sent to every people a messenger, that they may worship God” (16:36). Every human collectivity has thus been sent a reminder of tawhid, of God’s oneness and its consequences. From this perspective, the purpose of revelation is not to bring a new truth, but to reaffirm the one truth, the only truth that is, the only truth that has ever been.

From another perspective, the central message of the Quran is expressed in this verse: “Truth has come and falsehood has vanished. Falsehood is ever bound to vanish!” (18:81). In this spirit the text reads, “And we have made the book descend as a clarification for all things” (16:89). The emphasis of Islam is to experience this clarification and thus to know. As is revealed, “We have made it descend as an Arabic Quran, that you may know” (12:2). Such verses do not refer to a knowledge experienced through transmission from one generation to the next; rather, they call humankind to an immediate knowledge of things as they are in themselves (kama hiya). To possess such knowledge is the human norm, the fitra. The function of the Islamic intellectual tradition is therefore not only to transmit and preserve textual authorities which clarify tawhid from one generation to the next, but moreover to cultivate the intellect through which one is able to aver this basic truth through one’s own experience and consciousness. Through the intellect all things are known as signs of God. As the Quran says: “We shall show them our signs on the horizons and in themselves until it becomes clear to them that it is the truth” (41:53). The specific trait which distinguishes man from all else in creation is his ability to read all of God’s signs. The human intellect is in a sense the ultimate decoder, which when refined and polished can witness the face of the Divine in all of Its many modes in all of creation; for as the Quran says: “Wheresoever you turn there is the face of God” (2:115). To see all things as signs of God and be called to the remembrance of God in all modes of knowing is thus the human norm. Islam understands such knowledge to be the goal of all religions. This is not knowledge of facts and information, but knowledge of things as they are in themselves, a knowledge in which everything is given its proper place because everything is seen in relation to God, and the relations between things are understood on the basis of their relationship to God. From this point of view, to know things outside of God is not to truly know them, for nothing can exist outside of its relationship to God; no existent exists outside of its dependence upon Absolute Existence. It is for this reason that the Prophet Muhammad would often pray: “Oh God show me things as they are in themselves. Show me truth as truth and give me the strength to follow it. Show me falsehood as falsehood and give me the strength to avoid it.”9

The Early Intellectual Tradition

Based upon the centrality of knowledge in the Islamic understanding of man, the quest for knowledge is a religious duty. As the Quran reads, “He who has been given wisdom has been given a great good” (2:269). For generations Muslims have sought to comply with the command of the Prophet Muhammad: “Seeking knowledge is an obligation for every Muslim.”10 Such knowledge does not have as its end the utilitarian goals which we associate with modern scientific and rational pursuits; rather, it has as its end the remembrance of God. As the great scientific tradition of Islam attests, knowledge pertaining to worldly endeavors is not outside the scope of Islam. It is in fact incumbent upon every Muslim to seek such knowledge when the exigencies of life demand it. But the first obligation for every Muslim is to learn the principles of both the practices and beliefs of the religion. All subsequent knowledge should then be understood in light of the principles of the religion. What does not support that does not support one’s final end – salvation. The pursuit of such knowledge is therefore believed to be deleterious. As such the Prophet would often pray, “I seek refuge in God from knowledge which has no benefit.”11 He further said, “The world is accursed, accursed is what is in it, save the remembrance of God and what supports it, and the teacher and the student.”12 The injunction to seek knowledge must thus be understood as an injunction to seek knowledge which inculcates remembrance, for all else is accursed. It is for this reason that Islamic scientists never discovered many of the technological applications of modern science, applications which allow us to perform fundamental tasks more rapidly, but do not necessarily increase the quality of life and may distract us from what is most important. By and large the fundamental concern of Muslim scientists was not control of the material realm for worldly pursuits. Rather, they wished to understand the signs of God’s creation so as to better understand the Divine.

Throughout Islamic history, Muslims have traveled extensively in the quest for knowledge. To understand the nature of this knowledge we need, therefore, to investigate some aspects of the historical development of the Islamic sciences and the Islamic pedagogical tradition. The first centuries of Islam (ca. 700 to 900 C.E.) were a time of small diverse communities of scholars often seen to be part of a larger movement known as the Ahl al-hadith, meaning those devoted to the study, preservation, and application of the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad.13 The scholars now known as the Ahl al-hadith exhibited many tendencies and would often focus their efforts on divergent, though complementary, aspects of the tradition bequeathed by the Prophet Muhammad. Although they agreed on several basic tenets, they would often have contentious disagreements over others. What identifies them with a single educational and intellectual movement is their common belief that the Quran and the sunna, or wont, of the Prophet Muhammad were the primary, if not the only, appropriate sources of religious knowledge.14 Not only was the content of their teachings based upon words transmitted from the Prophet, so too was their mode of teaching modeled upon that of the Prophet and his community. Thus the Ahl al-hadith movement was not based so much upon a single method or doctrine as it was an expression of the widely held belief that the guarantee of authenticity, and therefore of orthodoxy, was not only the verbal and written transmission of the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, but the conveyance of the authority contained therein through adherence to his sunna in the very manner of transmission.15 Not only was the content of the Islamic message preserved in the sayings of the Prophet, so too was the manner of instruction preserved in detail. The widespread Hadith movement thus worked to preserve the sunna of the Prophet in the actions, minds, and hearts of the Islamic community. It is important to understand the contours of this movement because modern Islamic revivalist movements also claim close adherence to the sunna of the Prophet Muhammad. The nature of their dedication is, however, quite different. There were those among the Ahl al-hadith who took recourse to a literalist interpretation of scripture while suspending the speculative and intuitive capabilities, and stressing the saving nature of faith alone. But this was never the whole of the Islamic tradition. It was always balanced by other modes of interpretation. To understand the true nature of the early community, and how much it differs from the current situation, we would thus do well to examine some of the subtleties of this movement.

Because they based themselves upon the Prophetic model, a central component of the Ahl al-hadith movement was the training of the soul (tarbiyat al-nafs) and the purification of the heart. Emphasis on the purification of the heart follows directly from the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, such as: “There is in man a clump of flesh. If it is pure, the whole body is pure. If it is polluted the whole body is polluted. It is the heart”;16 and “God does not look at your bodies, nor at your forms. He looks at your hearts.”17 As the Quran tells us, the day of judgment is “a day when neither wealth nor sons shall profit, except for one who comes to God with a sound heart” (26:88-89). While the health of the heart has always been a concern for traditional Islamic scholars of every discipline, as for all serious Muslims, the individuals most dedicated to the purification of the heart are those historically identified as Sufis, usually defined as the mystics of Islam. But as the impetus for inner purification stems directly from the Prophet, most Sufis of the early Islamic community were in some way aligned with the Ahl al-hadith movement. Sufis sat with non-Sufis in circles where both jurisprudence and hadith were taught, and there is no evidence that they were isolated from the social and intellectual influence of the populist movement of the Ahl al-hadith. What distinguishes Sufis from other representatives of this movement is not that they sought inner purification, for this is a concern of all Muslims. They were, however, singularly devoted to purification and believed that it cultivated an unadulterated mode of perception.

Many Sufis not officially recognized as hadith scholars also had some knowledge of both fiqh (jurisprudence) and hadith. The biographical dictionaries of the Sufis, in which are recorded the companions and sayings of many famous Sufis, also serve as repositories of hadith known to have been transmitted by famous Sufi figures. Having observed this trend, Marshall Hodgson, one of the foremost scholars of Islamic history, argues that Sufism was closely associated with the Ahl al-hadith movement. As he observes: “In some cases it is hard to draw a line between what was Sufi mystical self-examination and what was Hadithi moralism.”18 Nonetheless, there has been a tendency among Western scholars and modern Muslims to see Sufism as an esoteric, mystical movement disengaged from the rest of the Islamic community, rather than an integral part of it,19 even though the primary historical sources do not support this view.

The tendency to separate Sufism from other forms of Islamic scholarship and practice arises from a theoretical dichotomy which juxtaposes free esoteric spirituality with restrictive exoteric conformism. Events such as the hanging of the famous Sufi Mansur al-Hallaj in 922 C.E. and the execution of the jurist and Sufi teacher Ayn al-Qudat Hamadani in 1132 C.E. are viewed in isolation, as evidence of an irreconcilable antagonism between a stultified nomo-centric interpretation of the religion and an inspired personal experience of the Divine. But as Omid Safi has observed, this understanding derives from conceptualizing Islamic civilization through post-Enlightenment theories of religion.20 When subject to scrutiny, such simplistic bifurcations often tell us more about the theoreticians who pose them than about their subject matter.

The idea of mysticism as a special category of non-rational or supra-rational spiritual consciousness received one of its first articulations in the nineteenth century in William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience, wherein mysticism is portrayed as an emotional, trans-rational experience akin to drug-induced hallucinations. Spiritual methods were interpreted by James as the methodical cultivation of ecstatic moments of cosmic consciousness, and the entire enterprise was seen to be private and individualistic.21 But Sufis have long decried those who would only seek ecstatic experiences. The goal has been simply to remember God constantly and to see things as they are in themselves. Any experiences, visions, or ecstatic states were seen as accidental, and novices were even warned not to be deluded by visions and delights, for in relation to the ultimate quest, they are as smoke to fire. As the famous Sufi Shaykh Abu Hafs Umar al-Suhrawardi (d. 1234) explains in his Sufi manual Gifts of the Gnostic Sciences (Awarif al-maarif ), to seek wondrous experiences through spiritual exercises is “… pretension itself and sheer folly.” Though such rigors may lead to supernatural experiences that help one to better understand divine mysteries, people are only to engage in such practices “for the soundness of religion, inspecting the states of the soul and sincerity of action towards God.”22

Following upon the trend begun by James, mysticism was described by the tremendously influential Evelyn Underhill as a movement “whose aims are wholly transcendent and spiritual. It is in no way concerned with adding to, exploring, re-arranging or improving anything in the visible universe.”23 Such notions prompted some critics to chastise mysticism for “… its tendency to flee the responsibilities of history and engage in premature adventures into eternity.”24 But the idea that being ever-mindful of the transcendental and the spiritual would necessarily turn one away from the affairs of this world is rarely found in Sufism. Sufis speak of turning away from the world with the meaning of cutting the internal entanglements that come through greed, lust, and pride. It is not that the Sufi is not in the world, but that the world is not in him or her. As Abul-Qasim al-Qushayri (d. 1072), author of one of the most important handbooks of early Sufism, writes: “The sign of the sincere Sufi is that he feels poor when he has wealth, is humble when he has power, and is hidden when he has fame.”25 Any licit act, even war, is open to the saint, so long as he acts from the inner peace to which he has attained and remains in that peace. As Ibn Ataillah al-Iskandari (d. 1309), a Shaykh of the Shadhiliyya Sufi order who was also an accomplished jurisprudent, writes in the second line of his famous book of Sufi aphorisms, al-Hikam, “Your desire to disengage, even though God has put you in the world to earn a living, is hidden passion. And your desire to earn a living in the world, even though God has disengaged you, is a fall from supreme aspiration.”26 From this perspective, Sufism, like the religion of Islam of which it is a fundamental expression, is a middle way in which everything is to be given its proper due. The world is not to be shunned outright, but it is not to be sought in itself. Though representatives of the Sufi tradition sought inner purification, stillness, and unmediated knowledge of the Divine, many – such as Najm al-Din Kubra (d. 1221), who perished in battle against the Mongols, Amir Abd al-Qadir al-Jazairi (d. 1883), whose struggle against the French occupation of Algeria has been examined in Reza Shah-Kazemi’s “Recollecting the Spirit of Jihad,” and Uthman Dan Fodio (d. 1817), who transformed the religious life of Hausaland – sought to have the affairs of this world arranged in accord with transcendent principles, seeing this as one of the meanings of being God’s vicegerent on earth (khalifat Allah fil-ard).

Sufism has almost never been a matter of personal religious expression which stood in contradistinction to communal institutional religion. Rather, those who we now identify as Sufis were a group that sought to live both their personal and communal lives in constant awareness of the Divine. They sought to find their true center and act from that center. As the famous Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) writes:

Sufism belongs to the sciences of the religious law that originated in Islam. It is based on the assumption that the practice of its adherents had always been considered by the important early Muslims, the men around Muhammad and the men of the second generation, as well as those who came after them, as the path of truth and right guidance. The Sufi approach is based upon constant application to divine worship, complete devotion to God, aversion to the false splendor of the world, abstinence from the pleasure, property, and position to which the great mass aspire, and retirement from the world into solitude for divine worship. These things were general among the men around Muhammad and the early Muslims.27

Thus the place of Sufism, as understood by both its champions and its traditional analysts, is very different from the notions advanced in most modes of modern discourse, be they Islamic or non-Islamic.

In their contributions to this volume, Waleed El-Ansary and Ibrahim Kalin have observed how religious polemicists, orientalists, and political scientists among others have long interpreted and represented Islam through simplistic cultural essentialisms which are usually more problematic than useful. This, too, is the case with Sufism. For years scholars and laymen, both Western and Muslim, have been guilty of assuming that the divisions and juxtapositions which modern man employs to analyze the world are reflections of age-old dichotomies. On the one hand, it is assumed that Islam is a rigid, desert religion of the sword whose most native expression is found in rigid reformist movements (what many like to call “Islamic fundamentalism”). On the other hand, Sufism is seen as a free, even supra-Islamic, expression of individual spirituality. In the early nineteenth century, many scholars looked for its origins in Hinduism and some in Christianity. Perhaps the best example of the tendency to view Sufism as an extra-Islamic phenomenon is found in one of the earliest treatises of orientalist studies of Sufism, an essay by Lt. James William Graham entitled “A Treatise on Sufism, or Mahomedan Mysticism”:

With regard to the religion (if it can be so termed in the general acceptation of that word) or rather doctrine and tenets of Sufis, it is requisite to observe, first, that any person, or a person of any religion or sect, may be a Sufi: the mystery lies in this: – a total disengagement of the mind from all temporal concerns and worldly pursuits; an entire throwing off not only of every superstition, doubt, or the like, but of the practical mode of worship, ceremonies, &c. laid down in every religion, which the Mahomedans term Sheryat, being the law or canonical law; and entertaining solely mental abstraction, and contemplation of the soul and Deity, their affinity, and the correlative situation in which they stand: in fine, it is that spiritual intercourse of the soul with its Maker, that disregards and disclaims all ordinances and outward forms…28

Developments in recent scholarship have provided many corrections to these errors, but such notions persist. An example of this is found in Julian Baldick’s Mystical Islam, where he writes that Islam developed more slowly than is usually believed, “… and that in the slow process of development Christian materials were used to build the mystical side of the religion, the side which was to become Sufism.”29 But a close examination of the original sources reveals that the proponents of Sufism drew upon the same materials as other scholars and were an integral component of the scholarly community as a whole. The Ahl al-hadith movement, the jurisprudents and the Sufis comprised intertwining circles whose methods, interests, and members overlapped. Whereas the jurisprudents, the Quranic exegetes and the Ahl al-hadith transmitted knowledge in a way which could properly be called teaching (talim), the Sufis put more emphasis on inner training (tarbiyya) for the sake of purification (tazkiyya). But talim and tarbiyya are by no means mutually exclusive. They are in fact complimentary parts of a greater whole. By observing how closely connected the Sufis were with the Ahl al-hadith, we can see that tarbiyya and tazkiyya were not just individual spiritual practices, but an important aspect of early Islamic pedagogy and thus intellectuality.

A study of the biographies of early Sufis demonstrates that the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad were an intricate component of their discourse and thus of their self-understanding. Well-established Sufis also reached a high degree of competency in other fields. A noted hadith scholar and one of the foremost authorities of early Sufism, Abu Abd al-Rahman al-Sulami (d. 1021) compiled the biographies and teachings of over one hundred Sufis from the early Islamic period in a book entitled Generations of the Sufis (Tabaqat al-Sufiyya). Among those he recorded as companions of the Sufis and of the Ahl al-hadith are men such as Abul- Abbas al-Sayyari (d. 953-4), a Sufi Shaykh, a jurist, and a noted hadith scholar. According to Sulami, all the Ahl al-hadith were Sayyari’s companions.30 Ruwaym b. Ahmad al-Baghdadi (d. 915) was among the most revered Sufi Shaykhs of Baghdad. He is recorded by Sulami as a practicing jurist, a noted reciter of Quran, and a scholar of Quranic exegesis (tafsir).31 The most famous of the early Sufis, al-Junayd al-Baghdadi (d. 910), known as the Shaykh of Shaykhs, was also a practicing jurist who studied with many scholars known to be directly aligned with the Ahl al-hadith. Foremost among his teachers were Abu Thawr (d. 855), the pre-eminent jurist of his day in Baghdad, and Ibn Surayj (d. 918), heralded by many as the leading scholar of usul al-fiqh (the principles of jurisprudence) in his day. It is said of Junayd, “His words were connected to the texts (i.e., the Quran and the hadith).”32

In addition to these points of convergence, there were also points of divergence. But the importance of hadith and the sunna was never disputed. Many Sufis entered the path of Sufism because they found that the sciences of jurisprudence and hadith did not offer sufficient knowledge of God. But in such cases one does not always find condemnations of the jurists and the Ahl al-hadith themselves; rather, a belief that their sciences are limited in scope and function when not complemented by the inner training which cultivates those very actions that the jurist can only regulate. The goal of the Sufi community was not to toss aside the transmitted knowledge of the jurists and the Ahl al-hadith, but to recognize its proper place in the scope of all knowledge. As another famous Sufi, Abu Bakr al-Wasiti (d. 942), said in a commentary on the hadith, “Question the scholars, befriend the wise, and sit with the great ones”:33 “Question the scholars with regard to what is lawful and unlawful. Befriend the wise who wayfare by means of it (i. e., wisdom) on the path of truthfulness, clarity [and sincerity]. Sit with the great ones who speak of God, allude to His lordship, and see by the light of His nearness.”34 Although he is calling others to seek more than the knowledge obtained from scholars, even the injunction to go beyond the transmitted wisdom of the Islamic tradition in order to “see by the light of God” is believed to have a foundation in transmitted knowledge.

Given these observations, the Sufis of the early Islamic period should be viewed as one of the many groups among the broad based Ahl al-hadith movement. Not only were many trained in the sciences with which this movement is commonly associated, more importantly, they shared with them in the common understanding that the Quran and sunna of the Prophet are the criteria of all knowledge. As the famous Sufi Abu Yazid al-Bistami (d. 849 or 875) is reported to have said: “The sunna is abandoning this world, and religious obligation (al-farida) is companionship with the Master (i. e., the Prophet), because the whole of the sunna points to abandoning this world, and all of the Book points to companionship with the Master. So who has learned the sunna and the obligation has become complete.”35 Indeed, the path of Sufism is defined by the foremost Quran commentator of the early Sufis, Sahl al-Tustari (d. 896), in a manner that emphasizes the centrality of the sunna: “Our principles (usul) are seven: holding fast to the Book, emulating the Messenger of God through the sunna, eating what is permissible, desisting from doing harm, avoiding misdeeds, repentance, and fulfilling the rights [of God and all things].”36 Moreover, those who inclined to the Sufi way often saw the Quran and the sunna as the instruments by which to measure the validity of their insights and inspirations, the validity of what is seen “through the light of God.” Abu Sulayman al-Darani (d. 830) said, “Whenever one of the subtle teachings of the Tribe (i.e., the Sufis) descends into my heart for a few days, I do not yield to it unless it is with two just witnesses, the Book and the sunna.”37 Abu Hafs al-Naysaburi goes further, making the Quran and the sunna the criteria not only for the validity of one’s knowledge, insights, and inspirations, but for the purity of one’s state at every moment: “Whoever does not weigh his actions and states in every moment by the Book and the sunna and is not attentive to his incoming thoughts (khawatir), he will not be counted in the book of men (diwan al-rijal) (i.e., he will not be counted among the Sufis).”38 The most influential of the early Sufis, al-Junayd al-Baghdadi, said, “All paths (turuq) are blocked to mankind, save he who imitates the Messenger, follows his sunna, and adheres to his path. Then the path of all good things is opened to him.”39 His students report, “We heard Junayd say more than once, ‘We teach what is determined by the Book and the sunna.’ Whoever does not memorize the Quran, record hadith or study jurisprudence does not emulate him.”40

While all the subtleties of the early Sufi movement and its interconnections with the Ahl al-hadith movement cannot be examined here, this short survey should be enough to indicate the extensive personal, methodological, and theological affiliations between the two movements. The fundamental methodological distinction is that the Sufis believed that “the wisdom which derives from the impressions upon the heart of one of God’s friends” should accompany the Quran and sunna as legitimate sources of religious knowledge.41 Their substantiation for this was derived from the sunna itself. As another compiler of Sufi teachings, Abu Nasr al-Sarraj (d. 988) writes in his Kitab al-Luma (The Book of Illumination), one of the most important handbooks of early Sufism:

The source of that is the tradition regarding faith when Gabriel asked the Prophet about the three roots: about islam (surrender), iman (faith) and Ihsan (doing beautiful), the outer, the inner, and the reality. Islam is the outer, iman is the inner and the outer, and Ihsan is the reality of the outer and the inner. That is the saying of the Prophet, “Ihsan is to worship God as if you see Him, and if you do not see Him, He nonetheless sees you.” And Gabriel corroborated that for him.42

Sufis such as Sarraj and Junayd saw themselves as the transmitters of the living prophetic sunna pertaining to the cultivation of praiseworthy states (ahwal) and noble character traits (akhlaq), and believed that jurisprudence and knowledge of hadith in and of themselves were limited to the transmitted sunna, which pertains more to actions and beliefs. This is not to say that they had contempt for scholars who limited their concerns to these domains. Many of the Sufis saw themselves as part of the larger community of scholars all of whom were “the inheritors of the Prophets.”43 The Sufis saw their way as a science among the Islamic sciences which is superior because it cultivates not only external obedience to the teachings of the Quran and the sunna, but also the character traits and states of soul from which such actions arise. As Sarraj writes:

The Sufis also have a special place among the people of knowledge regarding the observance of verses from the book of God, and reports from the Messenger of God. What a verse has annulled and the decree of something which a report has abolished calls to the noble character traits (makarim al-akhlaq). It encourages the excellence of states and the exquisiteness of deeds (asmal), and imparts high stations in the religion and sublime way-stations particular to a group among the believers. A group of the companions [of the Prophet Muhammad] and the generation after them adhered to that. That is modes of comportment from the Messenger of God and character traits from his character traits, since he said: “God taught me comportment and made beautiful my comportment.”44 And God said: “Verily you are (fashioned) upon a great character” (68:4). That is found in the records of the scholars and the jurisprudents, but they do not have a comprehension and understanding of that like their comprehension in the other sciences. Other than the Sufis, none of the possessors of knowledge who are abiding in justice have a share in that, other than consenting to it and believing that it is true.45

Like any group, the Sufis were sometimes loved and sometimes hated, at times supported and at times persecuted; but they were part and parcel of the early intellectual tradition, and thus an important component of the overall pedagogical effort to establish a society based upon the Quran and the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, a society based upon submission, faith, and “doing beautiful” – islam, iman, and ihsan. The efforts of figures such as Seyyed Ahmad Khan, Muhammad Abduh, the Wahhabis, and some factions among the Muslim Brotherhood to curtail their influence, if not abolish them altogether, is thus an indication of how far Muslims have strayed from their own traditions.

The Ihsani Tradition

As is evident from Sarraj, the Sufis saw themselves as that group among the scholars who were especially devoted to the science of doing beautiful or doing good (ihsan). To understand the central thrust of the Sufi movement, we must therefore examine the Quranic roots of ihsan. The verb “to make beautiful” (ahsana) and its derivatives occur over fifty times in the text and it is often found in the hadith. According to these sources, the first to make beautiful is God Himself, “Who made beautiful everything which He created” (32:6). It is God who “formed you, made your forms beautiful, and provided you with pleasant things” (40:64). “He created the heavens and the earth through truth, formed you and made your forms beautiful, and to Him is the homecoming” (64:3). God is thus the first to make beautiful (muhsin), and to do beautiful is to imitate the Creator as best a human can. This is fundamentally important for understanding the place of ihsan, for while islam and iman are important Quranic concepts, neither pertains to, nor can pertain directly to God. God cannot submit, He can only be submitted to, and God does not believe or have faith, He knows. Ihsan is thus the dimension of the religion wherein one draws closest to God by being as God-like as one can be: “Do what is beautiful as God has done what is beautiful to you” (28:77). In this vein, the Prophet Muhammad would pray, “Oh God, You have made beautiful my creation (khalq), make beautiful my character (khuluq).”46 From this perspective, doing beautiful is not only a way of performing specific actions, it is a way of being. Only when God has beautified one’s character is the human servant then able to do beautiful, for only the like comes from the like. This in turn leads to the continued beautification of one’s self. As the Quran says: “Is not the recompense of doing beautiful, other than doing beautiful?” (55:60). So just as God has beautified man’s form, so too He may then beautify his character, and when the character is beautified, the servant performs acts of beauty by which he participates in the inner beautification of his soul and moves towards his Lord: “Those who do what is beautiful will receive the most beautiful and more” (10:26). Indeed, God “will recompense those who do what is beautiful with the most beautiful” (53:31). And what is most beautiful is God Himself: “God is beautiful and He loves beauty,”47 “and to Him belong the most beautiful Names” (18:110, 20:8, 59:24).

The Prophet Muhammad said to his companions: “God has ordained doing beautiful for everything. So when you kill, make the killing beautiful, and when you sacrifice, make the sacrificing beautiful. You should sharpen your blade so that the sacrificial animal is relieved.”48 While the first part of this hadith is a re-affirmation of the general principle expounded in the Quran, the second demonstrates that even acts which seem ugly can and must be done with beauty. Doing things with beauty is thus obligatory in all licit acts. As a Muslim, one should therefore do all things as if one sees God, for as observed above, “Ihsan is to worship God as if you see Him, and if you do not see Him, He nonetheless sees you.”49 It is thus to do all things as an act of worship, for as God says, “I did not create jinn and man, except to worship Me” (51:56).

This, however, requires an initial understanding of beauty. On the intellectual level, the Sufis saw themselves as those who developed the science by which the beauty which has been ordained for everything is discerned and properly observed. This, however, was not a science which could be cultivated through transmission, like the sciences of hadith and of law, but through discipline and inner purification; in order to do what is beautiful one must train oneself to be beautiful. As Abul-Uasan an-Nuri (d. 908), one of the most famous of the early Sufis said, “Sufism is neither regulations nor sciences, rather it is character traits.”50 This emphasis on inner cultivation is such that some Sufis identified the entire enterprise of Sufism with the adoption of noble character traits in accordance with the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad: “I was only sent to complete the beautiful character traits”;51 and “Among the best of you is the most beautiful in character traits.”52 Without this active inner purification, Sufism would be but another science among the transmitted sciences. Thus, without Sufism or some form of the Ihsani tradition, Islam is liable to become an ideology devoid of spiritual efficacy, and its central teaching – la ilaha illa llah – is reduced to a slogan.

The Place of Sufism in the Middle Period

The preceding discussion has demonstrated that in the early period Sufis did not see themselves as a group completely separate from the ulama and the fuqaha, and were not aloof from the corresponding intellectual disciplines. Nonetheless, they saw their science, the science of character traits (akhlaq) and of doing beautiful (Ihsan), as the means by which the fullness and depth of the other sciences was to be realized. In the fifth and sixth Islamic centuries both Sufism and the more standard intellectual disciplines came to be identified with particular institutional manifestations. Fiqh (jurisprudence) and kalam (theology) came to be taught in the madrasa (college), while many Sufis began to congregate in khanqahs or ribats, where they could study and dedicate themselves to private and collective spiritual practices. Both institutes were funded by a variety of sources, from well-wishing individual patrons to power-brokering Sultans and viziers. Unfortunately, the facile bifurcation between jurisprudence and Sufism employed by many scholars has caused the relationship between these institutions to be misunderstood and thus misrepresented. In analyzing tenth century Iranian politics, one scholar describes an antagonism between Sufis and jurisprudents which he calls:

… a reflection of two fundamentally opposed interpretations of the Koranic revelation and the Muhammadan legacy. The positive nomocentricity of Islamic law found the language of Islamic mysticism as quintessentially flawed in nature and disposition. The feeling was mutual. The Sufis, too, rejected the rigid and perfunctory nomocentricity of the jurists as quintessentially misguided and a stultification of the Koranic message and the Prophetic traditions.53

As in the early period, there are too many convergences between the Sufis, the jurists, and their supporters to provide any evidence that such a dichotomy existed. The most influential political figure of this time period, the Saljuq vizier Nizam al-Mulk (1063-1092), was renowned for his support of both Sufis and sulama´. He established both madrasas and Sufi khanqahs, as did relatively unknown individuals such as Abu Sasd al-Astarabadi (d. 1048-9)54 and Abu Sasd al-Kharkushi (d. 1013 or 1016).55 Abu Ali al-Daqqaq (d. 1015), renowned as a Sufi master, is also said to have founded a madrasa in the city of Nasa.56 He and his more famous son-in-law, Abul-Qasim al-Qushayri (d. 1072), author of one of the most influential handbooks of Sufism, are said to have taught in a madrasa which later became known as the Qushayriyya madrasa.57 Shaykh Abu Ali al-Farmadi (d. 1084), known as the Shaykh of Shaykhs in the city of Nishapur, is said to have professed a love for his Shaykh which soon inspired him to move from the madrasa to the Khanqah.58 Al-Farmadi was in turn a teacher of both Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111) and Ahmad al-Ghazali (d. 1126), two brothers who are known to have traveled freely between madrasa and Khanqah and were revered for having reached the highest levels in fiqh, kalam, and Sufism. The more famous and influential of the two, Abu Hamid, rose to the highest level of the madrasa system and was appointed chair of Shafisi law at the Nizamiyya madrasa in Baghdad, the most influential educational institution of its day. After leaving his teaching position for over ten years he returned to his homeland of Khurasan, where he spent his last days providing instruction in a “Khanqah for the Sufis, and in a madrasa for the sake of those who seek knowledge.”59

Though only a handful of figures have been mentioned, the free movement of such intellectuals between the khanqah and the madrasa demonstrates that in medieval Islamdom there was no hard line between the Sufis and the ulama, nor between the madrasa and the khanqah. The lines which have been drawn by secularist and revivalist Muslim interpreters, as well as orientalists, are more a result of the modern mind, which imposes Enlightenment and Protestant Christian notions of mysticism upon the medieval Islamic world: a world in which most intellectuals, though they frequently criticized one another’s predilections (as in any healthy intellectual environment), participated in the same discourse. Their particular interests and resulting identities often differed, but still overlapped. Failure to admit this basic historical reality has led generations of Muslims to discard an integral part of their faith and has blocked many more from understanding and experiencing the fullness of their tradition. When this occurs, the religion is reduced to an ideology, and when it is reduced to an ideology it no longer functions to purify hearts, but rather to justify individual aspirations and political ambitions.

Abu Hamid al-Ghazali

Though the aforementioned Abu Hamid al-Ghazali was the most accomplished scholar in both jurisprudence and theology of his day, in his later years he became a chief proponent of the ihsani intellectual tradition. His later writings argue for the primacy of Sufi knowledge received through inner purification and the actualization of one’s inherent noble character traits, a knowledge which he and others referred to as “knowledge by presence” (al-ilm al-huduri or al-ilm al-laduni). His belief in the primacy of “knowledge by presence” did not take hold among all Muslim scholars and many disputed his claims. But his Revival of the Religious Sciences became the most popular book in the history of Islam and his writings exercised an influence in all fields of scholarship throughout the Islamic world, from his native Iran to India, Morocco, Indonesia, and even Muslim China. His view of knowledge and the relation between the Islamic sciences is therefore one which has been widely contemplated and which did much to shape medieval Islamic civilization. Even if a scholar was vehemently opposed to the primacy of Sufi knowledge, or knowledge by presence, he would have been influenced by this notion because he had to account for it as an important player in the intellectual dialogue of his day. To understand the manner in which the ihsani intellectual tradition continued in the middle period, and to see more clearly what some of the central concerns of most Muslim intellectuals until the modern period were, we would thus do well to examine the contours of Ghazali’s thought.

Ghazali left a vast corpus of writings which dramatically changed the direction of philosophy, theology, jurisprudence, and Sufism. But due to his attack on the philosophers in Tahafut al-falasifa (The Incoherence of the Philosophers), several Western scholars and modernist Muslims have held him responsible for the intellectual decline of Islamic civilization. He is often seen as the implacable adversary of philosophy and the fundamental cause for the demise of philosophy, and thus intellectuality, in the Islamic world. This is a lamentable misunderstanding, for although Ghazali’s intention in the Tahafut was clearly to deconstruct, in many other works it was to reconstruct. In works such as The Niche of Lights and even Ghazali’s magnum opus, The Revival of the Religious Sciences, one finds a recurrent implementation of philosophical terminology and philosophical modes of discourse.

As T. J. Winter, one of the leading authorities on the teachings of Ghazali, has demonstrated, Ghazali’s presentation of the soul and its virtues in the twenty-second book of The Revival, “On Breaking the Two Desires” is borrowed directly from the Tahdhib al-akhlaq (The Refinement of Character Traits) of the Neoplatonic Islamic philosopher Abu Ali ibn Miskawayh (d. 1030), a follower of the Islamic peripatetic tradition, whose primary representatives are al-Farabi (d. 950) and Ibn Sina (d. 1037).60 Like Ibn Miskawayh, Ghazali begins with the three faculties of the soul: the rational, the irascible, and the appetitive, and the four Platonic virtues, or “principles of virtue”: Wisdom (al-hikma), Courage (al-shujaa), Temperance (al-iffa) and Justice (al-adl) from which derive all secondary virtues. As with Ibn Miskawayh and others before him, Ghazali believes that the human objective is to maintain the four cardinal virtues in perfect equilibrium (itidal). But he differs from Ibn Miskawayh in two fundamental ways. First, he argues that the good deeds which result from equilibrium are not only recognized by the intellect, but also confirmed by the revealed law (sharia). Secondly, he believes that the Prophet Muhammad is the only person to have attained complete equilibrium. Stylistically, Ghazali differs in that he precedes the discussion with selections from Quran, hadith, and the sayings of Sufis, such as the aforementioned Abu Bakr al-Wasiti and Sahl al-Tustari. Thus, although this is clearly a Neoplatonic discussion of virtue, Ghazali introduces it in a manner which thoroughly Islamicizes it, and then employs it to support fundamental assertions of the Islamic faith.

A far more complex issue is Ghazali’s use of emanationist vocabulary and concepts in the Niche of Lights, where he presents the relationship between God and the many levels of creation as a hierarchy of lights by which subsequent degrees of creation become manifest:

The low lights flow forth from one another just as light flows forth from a lamp. The lamp is the holy prophetic spirit. The holy prophetic spirits are kindled from the high spirits just as a lamp is kindled from a light. Some of the high things kindle each other, and their hierarchy is a hierarchy of stations. Then all of them climb to the Light of lights, their Origin, their First Source. This is God alone, who has no partner.61

Ghazali’s presentation is distinguished from that of earlier Islamic philosophers in that at every turn he is careful to couch his discussion in language which preserves the integrity of Divine oneness and omnipotence, precisely what he accuses the philosophers of failing to do. As he writes, “The only true light is His light. Everything is His light – or, rather, He is everything. Or, rather, nothing possesses selfhood other than He, except in a metaphorical sense. Therefore, there is no light except His light.”62 In other words, for Ghazali, God as light is the true light of everything and nothing has any light in and of itself; it is God’s light within it that allows it to be. It is God’s light within it that is its very being. This is something which can be found in Ibn Sina’s discussion of existence insofar as all that is other than God is not truly existent in itself, but is a possible existent (mumkin al-wujud) deriving its existence from absolute existence (al-wajib al-wujud). But for Ghazali this does not suffice to preserve the complete integrity of God’s oneness and singularity. His view of existence is much closer to the Sufi understanding of the oneness of existence (wahdat al-wujud) than to that of the early Islamic peripatetics, which, although it opens towards the oneness of existence, does not express it outright.

Following upon the well-known saying of the Sufi master Ma’ruf al-Karkhi (d. 815), “There is nothing in existence except God,” Ghazali sees all of creation as having two faces: a face towards itself and a face towards its Lord. Viewed in terms of the face of itself it is non-existent; but viewed in terms of the face of God, it exists:

“Everything is perishing save His face” (28:88), not that each thing is perishing at one time or at other times, but it is perishing from beginninglessness to endlessness. It can only be so conceived since, when the essence of anything other than He is considered in respect of its own essence, it is sheer non-existence. But when it is viewed in respect of the “face” to which existence flows forth from the First, the Real, then it is seen as existing not in itself but through the face turned to its Giver of Existence. Hence the only existence is the Face of God.63

Here the tools of philosophy are used to unpack the meaning within one of the terse sayings of early Sufism in order to give a particular Sufi doctrine a more dialectical architecture.

These two examples clearly indicate that Ghazali found value in the intellectual contributions of philosophy. The potential benefit of philosophy is alluded to in his autobiographical treatise, The Deliverer from Error, where he argues that one must not reject philosophy out of hand, but must develop a strong mind in order to discern what is of value within it:

Those with weak minds know truth by men, not men by truth. The intelligent person follows the saying of Ali, “Do not know truth through men. Know truth and then you will know its people.” So the intelligent person knows truth then looks at the claim itself. If it is truth he accepts it…64

For Ghazali this means that one “must be zealous to extract the truth from the claims of those who are misguided, knowing that the gold mine is dust and gravel.”65 He thus advises his readers to sift truth from falsehood. He likens this process to that of a money changer who does not reject everything a counterfeiter brings to him, but instead uses his knowledge of true currency and false currency to sort the good from the bad and make use of the good. This is in fact what Ghazali does with philosophy. He rejects the arguments and conclusions of philosophy which he finds are non-Islamic, but then incorporates many aspects of philosophy into an Islamic, that is a Quranic, world view.

In the philosophy of the early Islamic peripatetics, Ghazali found powerful tools, which if not tempered by the light of revelation, could lead to a syllogistically imprisoned vision of the truth; that is to say, a vision of the truth which is confined to the mind such that it does not open the heart. Like the money changer, he extracted the good aspects of peripatetic philosophy and incorporated them into an intellectual economy which was fully Islamic. Rather than being a Muslim who is a philosopher, as in the case of Ibn Sina, al-Farabi, and Ibn Miskawayh, Ghazali can be seen as perhaps the first to be a fully Islamic philosopher.66 Rather than converting Muslims to philosophy, he formed a crucial step in the conversion of philosophy to Islam, a trend which was to unfold in the school of Ibn al-Arabi (d. 1240) and the philosophy of Suhrawardi (d. 1191), and which came to full fruition in the seventeenth century through the writings of the Iranian philosopher Mulla Sadra (d. 1640).

To understand what is meant by an “Islamic philosopher,” we must look deeper into Ghazali’s epistemology. In a short treatise composed for a disciple, Ghazali begins by criticizing one who seeks knowledge out of “… preoccupation for the grace of the soul and the paths of the world. For he thinks that knowledge in itself will be his deliverance, that his salvation lies within it and that he has no need for work, and this is the belief of philosophy.”67 Instead he enjoins a combination of knowledge and action in which action is always based upon sound knowledge. As the Prophet Muhammad has said in a hadith often cited by Ghazali: “He who acts according to what he knows, God teaches him what he did not know.”68 Developing upon this teaching, Ghazali writes, “Knowledge without action is madness, action without knowledge is non-existent.”69 This does not, however, refer to the mere outer actions of the body. It refers to inner actions whereby one disciplines oneself by “severing the passions of the lower soul and killing its caprice with the sword of spiritual exercises …”70 For Ghazali, this knowledge is indeed the most important form of knowledge:

If you study and examine knowledge, your knowledge must rectify your heart and purify your soul, as if you know your life span will not last more than a week. It is necessary that you not busy that time with the knowledge of jurisprudence, character traits, the principles [of religion and jurisprudence], theology and the like because you know that these sciences will not benefit you. Rather, you should occupy yourself with observing the heart and recognizing the qualities of the soul and the accidents resulting from its attachment to the world. You should purify your soul of blameworthy character traits and occupy yourself with the love of God and servitude to Him, and with being characterized by beautiful characteristics. Not a day or night passes, but the death of the servant may come.71

Through this one opens the eye of the heart whereby one may reach the knowledge of unveiling which Ghazali describes as “the very end of knowledge” from which all other forms of knowledge derive.72

According to his own account, the understanding of the proper relation between the Islamic sciences, which Ghazali developed in his later writings, is based entirely upon the clarity of understanding he obtained by devoting himself to the discipline of Sufism, which for him:

… is composed of both knowledge and action. The outcome of their action is cutting off the obstacles of the soul, refraining from blameworthy character traits and their depraved attributes, so that the heart may arrive from it to freeing the heart from what is other than God and to adorning it with the remembrance of God.73

When this has been achieved, one can attain to immediate witnessing, which Ghazali believed to be the only true path to certainty, all else being merely confirmation through the imitation of what others have said. But like Sarraj and other Sufi scholars before him, he believed that most Islamic scholars were not on this path: “This knowledge is not obtained through the types of knowledge with which most people are occupied. Thus, that knowledge does not increase them except in boldness to disobey God.”74 As such, he saw a radical need for a revivification of the Islamic sciences, one based on the preeminence of that knowledge received through inner purification and constant remembrance of God – knowledge by presence.

In both The Revival of the Religious Sciences and a smaller treatise entitled The Treatise on Knowledge by Presence, Ghazali outlines a hierarchy of knowledge in which all modes of knowledge are subordinate to knowledge by presence.75 He is indefatigable in promoting his belief that the fundamental objective of all learning is to wipe away ignorance and return to the state of purity which is the human norm – the fitra: “Learning is not but the return of the soul to its substance and bringing what is within it into actuality, seeking the completion of its essence and the attainment of its joy.”76 For Ghazali the goal of knowledge is not advancement in the practical affairs of the world, but a wisdom deriving from a living intelligence that is able to see things as they are in themselves, and is able to realize the applications of that wisdom on all planes and in all affairs. Following the Sufi tradition before him, Ghazali believed that when this is achieved, one realizes that one was a “knower” (arif ) before, but that attachment to the body and its concomitant desires clouded one from the knowledge for which man is created. As this is a knowledge which corresponds to the human norm, it is not a knowledge obtained through learning, though learning can help to actualize it. Rather, this is a way of knowing which requires no intermediary: “Knowledge by presence is that which has no intermediary between the soul and the Creator for its acquisition. It is like the light from a lamp of the unseen [realm] falling upon a pure, empty, and subtle heart.”77 “Those who arrive at the level of knowledge by presence have no need for much obtaining and toil in instruction. They study little and know much….”78 This is thus a knowledge obtained through inspiration (ilham); it is to the saints (awliya) what revelation (wahy) is to the prophets.

The seat of this knowledge, according to Ghazali and many who came before him and followed after him, is the heart or intellect, which is the spirit that God blew into the form of man, a spirit alluded to in the Quranic verse, “And I blew into him from My spirit” (15:29, 38:72). It is through this eternal seat of consciousness that the full awareness of tawhid is realized. From this point of view, things can only be understood in relation to the Creator, who is the Origin and the End and who sustains all things at every moment. Every branch of knowledge must therefore have this understanding as its end, otherwise it is oriented towards a knowledge which is not grounded in the fullness of tawhid, and thus a knowledge which does not assist the human being in achieving the perfection and felicity of the human norm. In other words, all true sciences were seen by Ghazali as applications of tawhid. All knowledge sought in this way is sought with ihsan because it is sought in order to know God and to attain human perfection. It ennobles the human condition by helping one to understand, emulate, and participate in the ihsan of God and His creation. All aspects of a person’s education, from the study of language, grammar, and mathematics, to the study of jurisprudence, ethics, and metaphysics, should thus be integrated into this overarching vision. For if one knows a thing without knowing its relation to God, one does not really know the thing, but rather has compound ignorance (al-jahl al-murakkab) because he thinks he knows what he does not know. Is this not the case of so many today?

Ibn al-Arabi

There were many other proponents of this view, some with very different emphases than that of Ghazali and Sarraj, and Junayd before them, but nonetheless with the same central concern that all knowledge and learning be oriented towards a vibrant actualization of tawhid, lest it become a dead letter. Though the transmission of the religious texts which affirm tawhid was emphasized, this was joined to the inculcation of active and free remembrance of God. For true faith cannot be taught; it must arise from within. Foremost among the later scholars to write of the knowledge by presence, or knowledge by tasting (dhawq) as it is also known, is the great Shaykh of Murcia, Muhyid-Din Ibn al-Arabi (d. 1240). The writings of Ibn al-Arabi and his disciples came to be the most influential expression of the ihsani intellectual tradition until and into the modern period. To know the form in which this tradition continued we must therefore look to him.

Ibn al-Arabi did not often refer to himself and those of his ilk as Sufis, he preferred the term verifiers (muhaqiqqun): “I mean by ‘our companions’ those who possess hearts, witnessings, and unveilings, not the worshipers or ascetics, and not all Sufis, save those among them who are the people of truths and verification (tahqiq).”79 Nonetheless, in many ways he was the intellectual and spiritual descendant of the early Sufi movement. His writings often unpack the meanings contained within the terse and allusive sayings of earlier luminaries of the Sufi tradition, such as the aforementioned Junayd al-Baghdadi, Bayazid al-Bistami, and Sahl al-Tustari, all of whom he considered to be verifiers. Thus many of the teachings attributed to him are in fact teachings which had been within the Islamic community from the beginning, but were now expressed in a new mode. Like his predecessors, he saw Sufism as the perfection of character traits:

The people of the path of God say Sufism is character, so whoever surpasses you in character surpasses you in Sufism…. Among the conditions of being designated a Sufi is that one be wise, possessing wisdom. If he is not, then he has no share of this heart, for it is entirely wisdom and it is entirely character traits. It necessitates complete gnosis, a superior intellect, and strong control over one’s soul, so that selfish desires do not rule over it.80

Thus for Ibn al-Arabi wisdom, knowledge, or gnosis is intrinsically bound to virtue and character, i.e., to doing beautiful.

The school which developed from Ibn al-Arabi’s mode of expressing these teachings came to be known as the school of irfan or masrifa, which can best be translated as the school of gnosis.81 The word irfan derives from the verb sarafa which means to know, but also means to recognize. Irfan thus refers to the recognition and realization of that knowledge which is the birthright of man, the knowledge of things as they are in themselves. From this perspective, to attain to gnosis is to realize the fullness of God and His creation, which is to return to the human norm. According to Ibn al-Arabi, gnosis is distinct from what is learned through transmission and reflection:

All knowledge which can only be attained through practice, godfearingness, and wayfaring is gnosis because it derives from a verified unveiling (kashf muhaqqaq) in which there is no obfuscation. In contrast, knowledge obtained through reflective consideration is never free from obfuscation and bewilderment, nor from rejecting that which leads to it.82

While Ghazali argued for the primacy of knowledge by presence, Ibn al-Arabi wrote directly from the perception derived through knowledge by presence. Like Ghazali, he saw it as the defining characteristic of being human. According to Ibn al-Arabi, only when a human fully experiences knowledge by presence can he truly be called human. To experience such knowledge is to see the truth (haqq) of all things, and one who sees these truths is the verifier. Gnosis could thus be seen as the science of verification: “Verification is the gnosis (masrifa) of truth which is demanded by the essence of each thing. The verifier fulfills that through knowledge.”83 One who has attained to verification witnesses the haqq or truth of everything. But haqq is a deceptively simple word, for in addition to truth it can also mean true, reality, real, right, or due. It is one of the names of God who is al-Haqq or the True, the Real. To verify the truths, rights, or realities of all things is thus to see the self-disclosure of the ultimate Truth within all. As William Chittick, one of the foremost scholars of Ibn al-Arabi, writes:

The goal of tahqiq is to see the face of God wherever you turn, in every creature and in oneself, and then to act according to the haqq [truth] of God’s face. If we understand anything in the universe without taking the Divine face into account, then we have lost the thing’s haqq. By losing sight of the thing’s haqq, we have lost sight of God, and by losing sight of God, we have lost sight of tawhid.84

To verify the truth is a command deriving from the Quranic revelation itself: “Do not dress truth in falsehood and hide the truth, though you know” (2:42). According to the Quran, both the revelation and creation are truth and are brought through truth. The Quran states, “And what We have revealed to you from the book is the truth” (35:31). Several verses affirm that the Quran has descended through truth: “That is because God brought down the book through truth” (2:176); and “We brought down upon you the book through truth, that you may judge between the people in accordance with what God has shown you” (4:105). As regards creation, the text declares, “He is the one who created the heavens and the earth through truth” (6:73). Indeed, humans are challenged to recognize this fundamental reality: “Do you not see that God created the heavens and the earth through truth?” (14:19). Several verses of the Quran respond to this question; one reads: “He did not create the heavens and the earth and what is between them except through truth” (30:8). It is in fact through Himself that God has created and revealed, for He Himself is the Truth: “That is your God, the Lord, the Truth” (10:33); and “That is because God is the Truth” (22:62). All that concerns us as humans is thus to be understood by knowing the ultimate Truth directly, and the other truths, which are in fact an unfolding of this one Truth, through creation and revelation. To know things outside of the truth is to be guided by caprice (hawa) and conjecture (zann), regarding which the Quran cautions: “Do not follow their caprices over what has come to you from the truth” (5:48); and “Verily conjecture is of no avail against the truth” (10:37). The view of verifying the truth or tahqiq advanced by Ibn al-Arabi and his followers thus derives from a thoroughly Quranic understanding of the universe. God is the Truth, truth is from God (18:29), and truth belongs to God (18:44). God reveals through truth, creates through truth, and guides through truth to truth. To see the truth of things is thus the only way to truly see things. It is in fact to see God, for He is the Truth which has made all things descend through truth, i.e. through Himself.

Man is unique in that he is the only being that is able to see all things as they are, the only being able to recognize all of these truths. The Quran teaches that Adam was taught the names of all things (2:31-33). According to Ibn al-Arabi, these names are the traces of God’s own self-disclosure of Himself through Himself. As Chittick explains:

The traces of God’s names and attributes are externalized as the specific and unique characteristics of each thing. Every creature in the universe knows God in a specific differentiated and determined way, defined by the attributes that thing displays, or by the word that it embodies. Each thing displays the signs of God and gives news of Him through occupying its own specific niche in the never repeated speech that is the universe.85

The one being who is able to hear this never-ending speech, and thus witness all the traces of God’s names and attributes, is man. He cannot know things outside of God because things do not exist outside of God. So his knowledge of all things is in fact his knowledge of God. But it is also knowledge through God, which according to Ibn al-Arabi is the only true knowledge there is:

When one wants to recognize (arafa) things, he cannot recognize them through what his faculties give him. He should endeavor in many acts of obedience until the True (al-haqq) is his hearing, his seeing, and all his faculties. Then he will know all affairs through God and will recognize God through God… When you know God through God and all things through God, no ignorance, obfuscation, doubt, or uncertainty will come upon you.86

As such, all knowledge is in fact tawhid, attesting to unity. If one does not see something as displaying the Truth, he cannot really know that thing, for he is being heedless of God, the Origin and End of that thing. If he thinks he knows it, he actually has compound ignorance, because he thinks he knows what he does not know. To know is thus to remember God, for it is to see God in all things: “Wheresoever you turn there is the face of God” (2:115). According to Ibn al-Arabi, to not see this face is ignorance, and this is the greatest of sins from which all other sins derive:

The greatest sin is what kills hearts. They do not die except through the absence of the knowledge of God. This is what is named ignorance. For the heart is the house that God has chosen for Himself in this human configuration. But such a person has usurped the house, coming between it and the owner. He is the one who most wrongs himself because he has deprived himself of the good that would have come to him from the owner of the house had he left the house to Him. This is the deprivation of ignorance.87

Ibn al-Arabi went on to become the most influential intellectual figure of the next six or seven centuries. A glance at the intellectual landscape of Islam after Ibn al-Arabi shows that he had a profound influence on Islamic intellectual discourse in all lands until the middle of the nineteenth century. As Alexander Knysh has demonstrated in his study of the Shaykh’s historical influence: “… from the 7th/13th C.E. onward practically every Muslim thinker of note took it upon himself to define his position vis-à-vis the controversial Sufi master.”88 And as Itzchak Weismann has demonstrated, all the responses to modernism in late Ottoman Damascus necessarily had to respond in some way to the thought of this great master. Among such movements, that of sAbd al-Qadir al-Jaza´iri saw in the teachings of Ibn al-Arabi the tools for a re-establishment of an intellectual elite able to respond in full to the intellectual and institutional pressures of their times.89

As with Ghazali, Ibn al-Arabi and his followers, whether one agreed with them or not, were a force with which any serious intellectual had to reckon. Thus, through the influence of Ghazali, Ibn al-Arabi and the many who followed them, the ihsani intellectual tradition, which developed as a conscious elaboration of the teachings of the early Sufi tradition, was a central component of Islamic intellectual and political discourse until the middle of the nineteenth century. The belief that there is a transcendent source of knowledge which can be obtained without the intermediary of instruction and which is necessary in order to fully understand the knowledge contained in the transmitted sciences thus had an important presence throughout the Islamic world from the time of the earliest scholarly circles of the Ahl al-hadith until the dawn of the modern period. It has never died out; but in their efforts to keep pace with the modern world, both rigid puritanical and secular liberal reformists have attempted to deny that it was an inherently Islamic phenomenon. In doing so, they have denied their own heritage.

The Modern Period

In the modern period, the intellectual landscape of Islam has undergone dramatic changes due to seismic shifts resulting from the challenges of foreign military, economic, and cultural domination. Though not immediately apparent, the foremost of these challenges are those posed by Western thought and its concomitant methodologies, for it is through our ideologies that our institutions are formed. Yet despite its transformations, the Islamic world remains profoundly Islamic in so far as the culture, social mores, and worldview of the people inhabiting it have been molded by the teachings of Islam. Nonetheless, the most vocal trends of the modern period are in danger of removing even this from the Islamic world, for they do not represent Islamic responses to the challenges of the West, responses based upon islam, iman, and ihsan. The solutions to the difficulties of the Muslim world lie not in the complete capitulation or drastic rejectionism which characterize secularist and radicalist movements respectively, but in the interaction with other civilizations on the basis of traditional Islamic teachings. Such a solution is being sought by intellectuals in many parts of the Islamic world. But the loudest voices still belong to those who have in large part rejected or misunderstood their intellectual heritage. For the non-specialist, who has little familiarity with the intellectual tradition of Islam, its voice is easily drowned out by the cries of radicals and the Western bias towards “liberal intellectuals” such as Mohamed Arkoun and Abdul-Karim Soroush. So long as such figures are held up by the West as the leaders of a coming intellectual revolution – the “Martin Luthers of Islam” as is so often said – more Muslim youth will be radicalized by these obvious efforts toward continued intellectual colonization.

The intellectual imbalance and stultification in the modern Islamic world derives not from the failure to modernize and secularize as critics such as Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes, and Salman Rushdie would have it, but from a widespread rejection of the Islamic intellectual tradition, usually in the name of progress. There are important exceptions, such as Shaykh Abd al-Ualim Mahmud (d. 1974) of al-Azhar University in Cairo and the late Allamah Tabatabai (d. 1981) in Iran, whose Usul-i falsafa (The Principles of Philosophy) provides a thorough critique of dialectical materialism from the standpoint of Mulla Sadra’s philosophy. Another exception is Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanvi (d. 1943) in the Indian subcontinent, whose response to modernism has been examined in depth by Fuad Naeem. In addition, the last fifty years has witnessed a resurgence of traditional Islamic teachings in many parts of the Islamic world. But by and large the teachings of Sufism and their subsequent unfolding have been rejected by the most visible and politically active trends of the modern period – be they liberal secularists or religious dogmatists. Unlike earlier opponents of the ihsani intellectual tradition, most modern critics have not seriously studied the works of its representatives. Sufism continues to be practiced on a popular level, but many of the central teachings of such figures as Junayd, Sarraj, Ghazali, Ibn al-Arabi and their intellectual descendants are discounted out of hand by their opponents, or presented in a trite and hackneyed manner by many of their supposed proponents. There are notable exceptions, but for most of the liberal and doctrinal reform movements in the Islamic world,

Sufism became the scapegoat through which Islam’s “backwardness” could be explained. In this view Sufism is the religion of the common people and embodies superstition and un-Islamic elements adopted from local cultures; in order for Islam to retain its birthright, which includes modern science and technology, Sufism must be eradicated.90

This rejection of Sufi teachings and their later intellectual elaborations is among the most significant losses endured by the Islamic world. It is indeed an essential part of what makes much of the current Islamic world “modern.” For in order to be lived in its fullness, every aspect of the Islamic tradition must be present. As C. S. Lewis has observed: once you have rejected a part of a religious tradition, you have ipso facto rejected the entire tradition. Not every individual will be fully inclined to each aspect of a particular religious tradition, but every aspect must be present for people of different predilections to work together in weaving a social fabric that allows for the expression and actualization of the full tradition. Law and creed, which could be said to correspond to islam and iman respectively, are an integral component of any Islamic society, but without the vivifying presence of a full-fledged ihsani tradition, they become opaque and are soon bereft of that light by which God guides. It is for this reason that Sarraj referred to ihsan as the reality (haqiqa) of the religion. The rejection of intellectual Sufism as a major component of the modern intellectual discourse has thus contributed to a catastrophic myopia. Not only have many Muslim thinkers demonstrated a shallow understanding of non-Islamic elements, they have also distorted the religion itself. In attempting to reconstruct and re-interpret the Islamic tradition in light of the perceived achievements of the times, modernist thinkers of the past, such as Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Muhammad Abduh and Jamal al-Din Afghani abandoned the rigorous intellectual discernment of traditional Islamic intellectuality – the first outright, the others with more subtlety. They lost sight of their intellectual traditions and unwittingly surrendered the ground of intelligence to a secular humanist tradition, whose ideologies they tried to foist upon others by reading them into their own traditions or simply by adding the adjective “Islamic.” Their legacy has been carried through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first by thinkers such as Mamadiou Dia of Senegal, Farid Esack of South Africa, Mohamed Arkoun of Algeria, Abdul-Karim Soroush of Iran, Jawdat Said of Syria, and Fatima Merinissi of Morocco to name a few. Though such thinkers may call upon the Quran and hadith as proof texts for their assertions, they are rooted in mental habits that developed in a secular universe that rejects the centrality of revelation, if not its very veracity.

Though each has different players with different shades of emphasis, both stringent reformism and liberal modernism constitute artificial limitations of traditional Islamic knowledge inspired by the influence of secular ideologies. This has led to the inversion of Islamic thought and the destruction of Islamic civilization. As Seyyed Hossein Nasr writes, “In trying to render back to Islam its power on the stage of history, many of these movements have disfigured the nature of Islam itself.”91

Stringent reformists, such as the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia, the Jamasat-i Islami (Society of Islam) in Pakistan, and the more militant elements among the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Syria, propose strict adherence to the Quran and the sunna, but in doing so arrogantly discard thirteen centuries of Islamic intellectual history, claiming that there is no need for help from the great thinkers of the past in order to understand and interpret the texts which they themselves preserved and transmitted. They then seek refuge in religious fervor, while closing the door to analysis and deliberation regarding the problems which confront the Islamic world. This approach stirs deep passions in the hearts of people who yearn to live a pious Islamic life, but denies many of the forms of guidance by which such passions were traditionally channeled towards the Divine. In the absence of such guidance a narrow ideological interpretation of the faith comes to predominate. Those who fail to adopt this interpretation are then seen as unbelievers, or at best as misguided.

Modernism originates from the secularizing and humanistic tendencies which began with the Renaissance and resulted in a scientistic and reductionist understanding of reality. But as this mode of thought did not rise organically from within the Islamic intellectual tradition, its expressions in the Islamic world have consisted largely of warmed-over Western ideologies under a thin veneer of Islamic terminology. Liberalizing modernists join with doctrinaire reformists in eschewing the great interpreters of the past, but go further, at times arguing for the abandonment of the Quran and sunna. Reformists join with modernists in thinking that one can adopt the outward trappings of modern science without evaluating the weltanschauung from which it arose. The reformists err in thinking that man can function on the transmitted sciences alone and has no need for developing the critical interpretive skills cultivated through the Islamic intellectual sciences. The modernists err in thinking that one can discard much of the transmitted traditions, such as hadith and jurisprudence, or that these must now be interpreted through Western methodologies. Both take recourse to theories and methodologies which are decidedly un-Islamic, if not anti-religious. Rather than calling upon the guidance of scholars of the past, most of the figures who have dominated modern Islamic discourse have joined with many Western thinkers in an ill-conceived movement towards an undefined goal known as progress.

Liberal modernist Muslim thinkers and radical reformist activists are two sides of the same coin. Whereas medieval thinkers like Ghazali were able to analyze and utilize intellectual tools from outside influences, radical reformists reject them outwardly while submitting inwardly, and modernists attempt to patch them onto the fabric of Islam, some claiming that they have been a part of that fabric all along. Both movements represent a subversion of traditional values and teachings from within the Islamic tradition. In an effort to transform Islamic civilization, each has in fact hastened the onset of the very illnesses they sought to ameliorate. Rather than contemplating and evaluating Western civilization through the Islamic intellectual tradition, modernists have embraced many tenets of Western thought out of a deep sense of inferiority – a sense which results from mistaking the power of Western nations for the truth of Western ideologies. Finding these movements within their midst, the reformists have retreated to fanatical adherence and pietistic sentimentalism. The modernists fail to offer solutions because they begin with intellectual capitulation. The reformists fail because they only provide intermediate solutions which are fideistic and voluntaristic at best. But such a response cannot provide lasting solutions to the challenges posed by the West, because these are at root intellectual challenges which demand an intellectual response.

The diatribes of fanatical rejectionism must be transformed into a logical and objective critique, and the sycophancy of liberalist capitulation must be supplanted by analysis and comprehension. This is what Ghazali advised when saying that one must become like the moneychanger, who through the power of discernment is able to discern truth from falsehood and thus snatch truth from the words of all, be they of one’s own tradition or from another. But in order for this to be achieved, an intellectual universe which is fully Islamic must first be re-established, that is to say an intellectual universe based upon tawhid. Through the sciences which developed in the ihsani intellectual tradition, an objective critique of the modern world which is based upon the verities contained in the Islamic revelation can be developed. Nothing that is objectively true can be rejected through the methodologies of this tradition, for it is in the nature of Islam that it accepts all that bears witness to the Divine – every truth cannot but bear witness to the one Truth. But such sciences must be implemented on all levels, for man is not only a mental being, but a spiritual, emotional, psychological, and physical being as well. In short, the preservation of the transmitted sciences which has continued to the present day must be combined with a rediscovery of the intellectual sciences and a revitalization of the training of the soul and the methods of cultivating inner discernment. This is the way to which Abu Nasr al-Sarraj alluded in the introduction to his Book of Illumination; it is to combine islam, iman, and ihsan in a single composite intellectual approach wherein one seeks to know things as they are in themselves. As William Chittick argues:

The only way to think in Islamic terms is to join thought with the transcendent truths from which Islam draws sustenance. This needs to be done not only by having recourse to the guidelines set down in the Koran and the Hadith, but also by taking guidance from the great Muslim intellectuals of the past, those who employed the Koran and the Hadith to clarify the proper role of thought in human affairs.92

The choice of great thinkers from whom one seeks guidance is not limited to a narrow definition of “orthodoxy,” but extends to all those Islamic thinkers, Sunni and Shii, who have tried to lend clarity to the understanding of reality enjoined by the Quran and hadith. Those intellectuals who have been chosen for this essay are but a few luminaries from an extensive tradition, one which continues into our own day and is now showing signs of new life. In order for the malaise of the Islamic world to be fully addressed and the radical reform movements to be brought back into the fold of the Islamic tradition, the ihsani intellectual tradition needs to be accorded its proper place in a way of life that is fully and truly Islamic. In applying the principles of Islam to the modern world, while avoiding the passionate rhetorical battles which rage around them, the representatives of this tradition exemplify this saying of Abu Said b. Abil-Khayr: “A [true] man is one who sits and rises among others, sleeps and eats, and interacts with others in the bazaar, buying and selling, who mixes with people, yet for one moment is not forgetful of God in his heart.”93 But such a path is not achieved by focusing upon reform of the world, of Islam, or of one’s nation. It is first and foremost a reform of one’s self. As Seyyed Hossein Nasr has written in his seminal analysis of modern Islam, Islam and the Plight of Modern Man:

… the real reform of the world begins with the reform of oneself. He who conquers himself conquers the world, and he in whom a renewal of the principles of Islam in their full amplitude has taken place has already taken the most fundamental step toward the “renaissance” of Islam itself, for only he who has become resurrected in the Truth can resurrect and revive the world about him, whatever the extent of that “world” might be according to the Will of Heaven.94

This fully reformed state of being is that of the fitra, the human norm. To live in this state is to surrender the house of the heart to its true owner. When this is done, the crispations of the heart are stilled such that one can see the truth of all things, for one sees things as they are in themselves, as discrete manifestations of God’s names and qualities. But what has been forgotten and must again be remembered – not only by Muslims but by people the world over – is that to see truth and to know truth one must, as Vaclav Havel has said, “live in truth.” To live in truth is the way of Islam. From an Islamic perspective, it is the way of all religions; it is the way of man.

— — — — —

Notes

1 As journalist Robert Fisk observes: “I’m beginning to suspect that 11 September is turning into a curse far greater than the original bloodbath of that day, that America’s absorption with that terrible event is in danger of distorting our morality. Is the anarchy of Afghanistan and the continuing slaughter in the Middle East really to be the memorial for the thousands who died on 11 September?” (“America’s Morality Distorted by 11 September,” The Independent, March 7, 2002). back

2 For the a brief introduction to the views of Jamal al-Din Afghani, Muhammad Abduh and Rashid Rida see Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1789-1939 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), chs. 5-8; and Malcolm Kerr, Islamic Reform: The Political and Legal Theories of Muhammad Abduh and Rashid Rida (Berkeley, 1966). back

3 We have in mind here the distinction made by Wolfgang Smith: “There is a sharp yet oft-overlooked distinction between scientific knowledge and scientistic belief. And the difference is simple: authentic knowledge of a scientific kind refers necessarily to things that are observable in some specific sense, and affirms a verifiable truth; scientistic belief, on the other hand, is distinguished precisely by the absence of these positivistic attributes.” Wolfgang Smith, Cosmos and Transcendence (Peru, Illinois: Sherwood Sugden & Co., 1984), p. 9. Smith goes on to demonstrate that most of the theories which the common educated person takes at face value as scientific propositions are in fact scientistic beliefs arising from the bias of secular humanism. back

4 See his contribution to this volume, “A Traditional Islamic Response to the Rise of Modernism.” back

5 It is not the purpose of this essay to chronicle all the subtleties of various modern trends, but rather to allude to general errors which most of these trends exhibit. For a more nuanced examination see W. C. Smith, Islam in Modern History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); J. O. Voll, Continuity and Change in the Modern Islamic World (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1994); J. Esposito, Voices of Resurgent Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); and S. H. Nasr, Traditional Islam in the Modern World (London: Kegan Paul International, 1989). back

6 Muslim, Kitab as-sayd, 57. back

7 This is part of a famous hadith, known as the hadith of Gabriel:

Umar ibn al-Khattab said: One day when we were with the Messenger of God, a man with very white clothing and jet black hair came up to us. No mark of travel was visible on him, and none of us recognized him. Sitting down before the Prophet, leaning his knees against his, and placing his hands on his thighs, he said, “Tell me Muhammad about submission (islam).” He replied, “Submission means that you should bear witness that there is no god but God and that Muhammad is the Messenger of God, that you should perform the ritual prayer, pay the alms tax, fast during Ramadan, and make the pilgrimage to the House if you are able to go there.” The man said, “You have spoken the truth.” We were surprised at his questioning him and then declaring that he had spoken the truth. He said, “Now tell me about faith (iman).” He replied, “Faith means that you have faith in God, His angels, His books, His messengers, and the last day, and that you have faith in the measuring out, both its good and its evil.” Remarking that he had spoken the truth, he then said, “Now tell me about doing what is beautiful (ihsan).” He replied, “Doing beautiful means that you should worship God as if you see Him, for if you do not see Him, He nonetheless sees you.” Then the man said, “Tell me about the Hour.” The Prophet replied, “About that he who is questioned knows no more than the questioner.” The man said, “Then tell me about its marks.” He said, “The slave girl will give birth to her mistress, and you will see the barefoot, the naked, the destitute, and the shepherds vying with each other in building.” Then the man went away. After I had waited for a long time, the Prophet said to me, “Do you know who the questioner was Umar?” I replied, “God and His Messenger know best.” He said, “He was Gabriel. He came to teach you your religion” (Muslim, Kitab al-iman, 1; Bukhari, Kitab al-iman, 37). back

8 Sadr al-Din Shirazi, al-Hikma al-mutaalliyya fi l-asfar al-arbaa al-aqliyya (Tehran, 1387/1958), vol. 1, p. 20. back

9 This is an oft-cited saying of the Prophet Muhammad which is not, however, found in any of the canonical collections. back

10 Ibn Maja, Muqaddima, 17. back

11 Muslim, Kitab al-Dhikr, 73; Tirmidhi, Kitab al-Dasawat, 68. back

12 Tirmidhi, Kitab al-Zuhd, 14; Ibn Maja, Kitab al-Zuhd, 3; Abu Dawud, Muqaddima, 32. back

13 A hadith is a saying, action, or description of the Prophet Muhammad which has been transmitted by his companions and by the generations of Muslims which followed. The word hadith is also used to apply to the entire collection of such sayings. Over time an intricate science developed for determining the authenticity of sayings attributed to Muhammad. In the third and fourth centuries, the most authentic hadith were assembled in collections which have been recognized as authoritative since that time. After the Quran, the hadith are the most important source of knowledge for the Islamic sciences. But as the body of preserved hadith is far more substantial in quantity than the text of the Quran, more of the specific injunctions and teachings of Islam are to be found in the hadith than in the Quran. back

14 Lauri Silvers-Alario, “The Teaching Relationship in Early Sufism: A Reassessment of Fritz Meir’s Definition of the shaykh al-tarbiya and shaykh al-taslim” (forthcoming), p. 10. I am indebted to many of Professor Silvers-Alario’s observations in elucidating the place of Sufism in the early period. back

15 Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Religion and Politics under the Early Abbasids (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997), pp. 212-213. back

16 Bukhari, Kitab al-iman, 39. back

17 Ahmad b. Hanbal, 2: 285, 2: 539; Muslim, Kitab al-birr, 33; Ibn Maja, Kitab az-zuhd, 9. back

18 Marshall G. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), vol. I, p. 393. back

19 As will be demonstrated in the following pages, the arguments of scholars such as Montgomery Watt that the Ahl al-hadith were at odds with Sufis are no longer tenable. See Montgomery Watt, The Formative Period of Islamic Thought (Oxford: Oneworld Press, 1998), p. 264. For an example of a modern Muslim who also takes this approach see Fazlur Rahman, Islam, 2^nd ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 128-132. back

20 Omid Safi, “Bargaining with Baraka: Persian Sufism, Mysticism, and Pre-Modern Politics,” Muslim World 3-4 (2001): 259-287. back

21 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1961), pp. 312-14. back

22 Shihab al-Din Abu Hafs Umar as-Suhrawardi, Awarif al-maarif (Cairo: Maktabat al-Qahira, 1393/1973), p. 196. back

23 Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness (London: Methuen, 1911; reprint, New York: Image Books, 1990), p. 81. back

24 Reinhold Niebuhr, from his introduction to William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 7. back

25 Abul-Qasim Abd al-Karim al-Qushayri, ar-Risala al-Qushayriyya, ed. Abd al-Ualim Mahmud and Mahmud b. ash-Sharif (Cairo: Dar al-Kutub al-Uaditha, 1972-4), p. 557. back

26 Ibn Ataillah al-Iskandari, Sufi Aphorisms (Kitab al-Uikam), trans. Victor Danner (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1984), p. 23. (Translation slightly modified). back

27 Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, trans. Franz Rosenthal, ed. N. J. Dawood, Bollingen Series (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 358. back

28 Lt. James William Graham, “A Treatise on Sufism, or Mahomedan Mysticism,” Transactions of the Literary Society of Bombay 1 (1819): 90-91. back

29 Julian Baldick, Mystical Islam (London: I. B. Tauris & Co., 1989), p. 9. back

30 Abu Abd ar-Rahman al-Sulami, Tabaqat as-Sufiyya, ed. Nur al-Din Shariba (Cairo: Matbasat al-Madani, 1987), p. 440. back

31 Ibid., p. 180; Abu Bakr Ahmad b. Ali al-Katib al-Baghdadi, Tarikh Baghdad (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-Arabi, 1966), vol. VII, p. 430-432. back

32 Abu Nuaym al-Isfahani, Hilyat al-awliya, ed. Mustafa Abd al-Qadir Ata (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-Ilmiyya, 1997), vol. 10, p. 274. back

33 This hadith is not found in any of the canonical collections. back

34 Abu Nasr al-Sarraj, Kitab al-Luma, ed. Abd al-Halim Mahmud and Taha Abd az-Zaqi Surur (Cairo: Dar al-Kutub al-Hadithiyya, 1970), p. 164. back

35 Sulami, p. 74. back

36 Ibid., p. 210. The concept of fulfilling the rights of all things is central to Sufism. It is a fundamental tenet of tawhid. It is to understand the truth (haqq) of each thing as a sign of God, the existence of which originates only from God, belongs only to God, and returns only to God. As such its reality (haqiqa) can only be understood through an understanding of God and His attributes, and it is only through such understanding that we can act properly in those matters for which there is not an immediate and evident ruling in the sharia. This will be expanded upon in the section on Ibn al-Arabi. back

37 Sulami, p. 78. back

38 al-Isfahani, vol. X, p. 244. back

39 al-Isfahani, vol. X, p. 276. back

40 al-Isfahani, vol. X, p. 274. back

41 Sarraj, Kitab al-Luma, p. 22. back

42 Ibid., p. 22. Here Sarraj is referring to the hadith of Gabriel, one of the best known hadith of the Islamic tradition. This hadith has been used for generations as a key for understanding the different dimensions of the Islamic intellectual tradition. See note 7 (Muslim, Kitab al-iman, 1; Bukhari, Kitab al-iman, 37). back

43 This is an allusion to a hadith, “The scholars (ulama) are the inheritors of the Prophets” (Bukhari, Kitab al-ilm, 10; Abu Dawud, Kitab al-ilm, 1; Ibn Maja, Muqaddima, 17; Darimi, Muqaddima, 32; Ahmad b. Hanbal, 5:196). back

44 This saying is cited as a hadith, but I have not been able to find it in any of the canonical collections. back

45 Sarraj, Kitab al-Luma, p. 31. back

46 Ahmad b. Hanbal, 1:403. back

47 Muslim, Kitab al-iman, 147; Ibn Maja, Kitab al-dua; Ahmad b. Hanbal, 4:133. back

48 See note 6. back

49 See note 7. back

50 Sulami, p. 167. back

51 Ahmad b. Hanbal, 2:381. back

52 Bukhari, Kitab al-adab, 38; Abu Dawud, Kitab as-sunna, 14; Tirmidhi, Kitab ar-ridas, 11; Kitab al-iman, 6; Ibn Maja, Kitab az-zuhd, 31; Darimi, Kitab ar-riqaq, 74. back

53 Hamid Dabashi, “Historical Conditions of Persian Sufism during the Seljuk Period” in Classical Persian Sufism: from its Origins to Rumi, ed. Leonard Lewisohn (London: Khaniqahi Nimatullahi Publications, 1993), p. 150. back

54 Taj al-Din Abu Nasr Abd al-Wahhab b. Ali as-Subki, at-Tabaqat al-Shafisiyya al-kubra (Cairo: Isal-Babi al-Halabi, 1964-76), vol. 4, pp. 293-4. back

55 Ibid., vol. 3, p. 369. back

56 Nur al-Din Abd ar-Rahman Jami, Nafahat al-uns min Hadarat al-quds, ed. MaHmud Abidi (Tehran: Intisharat-i Ittilasat, 1380 HS), p. 295. back

57 Richard Bulliet, The Patricians of Nishapur (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 151. back

58 Muhammad Ibn Munawwar Mayhani, Asrar-i tawhid fi maqamat Shaykh Abi Said, ed. Muhammad Rida Shafii Kadkani (Tehran: Muassisiy-eh Intisharat-i Agah, 1376 HS), vol. 1, p. 119; Jami, Nafahat al-uns, pp. 373-4. back

59 Jami, p. 376. back

60 For these observations we are indebted to T. J. Winter, who has examined the influence of Ibn Miskawayh upon the Kitab Riyadat an-nafs of the Ihya in the introduction to his translation of the latter. See Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, On Disciplining the Soul (Kitab Riyadat al-nafs) and On Breaking the Two Desires (Kitab Kasr al-shahwatayn): Books XXII and XXIII of The Revival of the Religious Sciences, trans. T. J. Winter (Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1995), pp. xlv-lviii. back

61 Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, The Niche of Lights, trans. David Buckman (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1998), p. 20. back

62 Ibid., p. 20 (translation slightly modified). back

63 Ibid., p. 16. back

64 Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, Majmua Rasail al-Imam al-Ghazali, n. e. (Beirut: Dar al-Fikr, 1416/1996), p. 546. back

65 Ibid., p. 546. back

66 This is not to say that the early Muslim peripatetics were not Muslims and that the nature of their philosophical inquiry was not shaped by the teachings of Islam. They marked the first stage of Islamic philosophy in which questions that arose from the Islamic context and questions bequeathed by the Greek tradition were analyzed through a methodology learned from Greek philosophy. Nonetheless, it is Islamic philosophy in that tawhid is at the root of philosophical inquiry, revelation is considered as a reality, and God is understood to be the Origin and End of all things. For elaboration on this point see S. H. Nasr, “The Meaning and Concept of Philosophy in Islam” in History of Islamic Philosophy, ed. Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Oliver Leaman (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 21-26 and “The Quran and Hadith as Source and Inspiration of Islamic Philosophy,” ibid., pp. 27-39. back

67 Ghazali, Majmuah, p. 257. back

68 Ibid., p. 262. This hadith is not found in any of the canonical collections. back

69 Ibid., p. 258. back

70 Ibid., p. 260. back

71 Ibid., p. 266. back

72 Ibid., p. 230. back

73 Ibid., p. 552. back

74 Ibid., p. 564. back

75 For a comprehensive treatment of Ghazali’s classification of the Islamic sciences see Osman Bakar, Classification of Knowledge in Islam (Lahore: Suhail Academy, 2000), chs. 8 & 9. back

76 Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, Majmua, p. 234. back

77 Ibid., p. 232. back

78 Ibid., p. 233. back

79 Ibn al-Arabi, al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya, n. e. (Cairo: 1911; reprint Beirut: Dar Sadir, n.d.), vol. 1, p. 261. back

80 al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya, vol. 2, p. 266. back

81 The use of the word “gnosis” does not here imply any historical link to the Christian Gnostic movement. It is used with the original meaning of the word, “a special knowledge of spiritual mysteries” (OED vol. 1, p. 1163), p. 248. back

82 al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya, vol. 2, pp. 297-8. back

83 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 267. back

84 William Chittick, “Time, Space, and the Objectivity of Ethical Norms: The Teachings of Ibn al-Arabi,” Islamic Studies 39, no. 4 (2000): 585. back

85 William Chittick, “The Cosmology of Dhikr” lecture delivered at “Paths to the Heart: Sufism and the Christian East” conference, University of South Carolina, October 2001. See Paths to the Heart: Sufism and the Christian East, ed. James Cutsinger (Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom, 2002), pp. 48-63. back

86 al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya, vol. 2, p. 298. back

87 Ibid., vol. III, p. 179. back

88 Alexander D. Knysh, Ibn Arabi in the Later Islamic Tradition: The Making of a Polemical Image in Medieval Islam (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), p. 1. back

89 Itzchak Weismann, Taste of Modernity: Sufism, Salafiyya, and Arabism in Late Ottoman Damascus (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2001). back

90 William Chittick, “Sufism: Sufi Thought and Practice,” in Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, p. 107. back

91 Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Traditional Islam in the Modern World (London: Kegan Paul International, 1987), p. 305. back

92 William Chittick, “The Rehabilitation of Islamic Thought,” p. 1. back

93 Muhammad Ibn Munawwar, Asrar-i tawhid, vol. 1, p. 199. back

94 Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Islam and the Plight of Modern Man (Chicago: Kazi Publications, 2001), p. 195. back