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179 pages

English

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In this innovative work, Salman H. Bashier challenges traditional views of Islamic philosophy. While Islamic thought from the crucial medieval period is often depicted as a rationalistic elaboration on Aristotelian philosophy and an attempt to reconcile it with the Muslim religion, Bashier puts equal emphasis on the influence of Plato's philosophical mysticism. This shift encourages a new reading of Islamic intellectual tradition, one in which boundaries between philosophy, religion, mysticism, and myth are relaxed. Bashier shows the manner in which medieval Islamic philosophers reflected on the relation between philosophy and religion as a problem that is intrinsic to philosophy and shows how their deliberations had the effect of redefining the very limits of their philosophical thought. The problems of the origin of human beings, human language, and the world in Islamic philosophy are discussed. Bashier highlights the importance of Ibn Tufayl's Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, a landmark work often overlooked by scholars, and the thought of the great Sufi mystic Ibn al-Arabi to the mainstream of Islamic philosophy.
Introduction

1. The File of Illuminationist Philosophy and the Purpose of Writing Hayy

The Legend of Eastern Philosophy
Eastern and Western Schools of Philosophy
Plato and Aristotle: The Heart and the Voice of Islamic Philosophy
The Purpose of Writing Hayy

2. The Introduction

Mystical Expression and Experience: Fundamental Sūfi Concepts
Knowledge1, Knowledge2, and Ghazālī’s Niche of Lights
Ibn Sīnā’s Liminal Depiction of the Mystical Experience
Salāmān and Absāl: The Hermetistic Version
Ibn Sīnā’s Version

3. The Naturalistic Account of Hayy’s Birth

Ibn Tufayl’s Method of Concealment
Spontaneous Generation
A Liminal Depiction of the Chain of Existents
In the Earth of Barzakh
Plato’s Myth of Spontaneous Generation

4. The Traditionalistic Account from the End

Divine Origins and Illuminative Gradations
Imitation and Interpretation
Ibn Ṭufayl’s Liminal Declaration

5. The Origination of the World

Between Plato and Aristotle
Aristotle’s Concept of the Infinite
Ibn Tufayl’s Liminal Stand

6. The Shadow of Fārābī

Philosophy’s Ultimate Mission
The Origination of Language
The Quest for Unity
The Development of Meanings
Two Conceptions of Dialectic

7. The Shadow of Ibn Bājja

Ibn Bājja on the Chain of Existents and Self-Intellection
The Presence of the Parable of the Cave

8. The Traditionalistic Account from the Beginning

The Emphasis on Balance and Equilibrium
The Discovery of Fire
The Sleepers in the Cave
The Encounter Between Moses and al-Khadir
Moses in Fusūs al-Hikam

9. Gilgamesh: The One Who Saw the Abyss

The Builder of the Great Walls and the Man-As-He-Was-In-the-Beginning
Intercourse as an Act of Writing
In Company with Gilgamesh
Enkidu’s Death
The Quest for Eternal Life
The Encounter with Utnapishtim
In the Underworld

10. The Tale of Bulūqiya Between Ibn al-‘Arabī and Gilgamesh

The Tale of Hāsib Karīm al-Dīn
The Quest for the Plant of Life
The Mystical Dimension

Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography

Sujets

Islam

Theology

Informations

Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	11 juillet 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781438437446
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

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The Story of Islamic Philosophy
Ibn Ṭufayl, Ibn al- ʿArabī, and Others on the
Limit Between Naturalism and Traditionalism

SALMAN H. BASHIER
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS

To Sara Sviri and David Shulman
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2011 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production    Laurie Searl
Marketing    Anne M. Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bashier, Salman H., 1964-
The story of Islamic philosophy : Ibn Tufayl, Ibn al-'Arabi, and others on the limit between naturalism and traditionalism / Salman H. Bashier.
p. cm.
Includes index and bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-4384-3743-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Islamic philosophy—History. 2. Naturalism. 3. Tradition (Philosophy) I. Title.
B741.B375 2011
181'.07—dc22

                                                                                                                          2011006682
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin Institute for Advanced Study. During my fellowship year at the Wissenschaftskolleg (2007–2008) I enjoyed its most generous support and benefited a great deal from the enlightening conversations with fellows and distinguished scholars from all over the world. I also would like to thank the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute for a five-year Polonsky Postdoctoral Fellowship (commencing in 2008) that allowed me also to complete the work on the present book and also to start working on my new project. Among the several friends and intellectuals that I have interacted with during the work on this book I would like to thank especially Sara Sviri and David Shulman, both professors at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. This book is dedicated to them.

Abbreviations A Alf Layla wa-Layla AEL Arabic-English Lexicon BL Book of Letters BWA The Basic Works of Aristotle FUS Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam FUT Futūḥāt Makkiyya G Gilgamesh IAI Ittiṣāl al-ʿAql bi-al-Insān INM Islamic Naturalism and Mysticism KH Kitāb al-Ḥurūf MHQ The Meaning of the Holy Qur'ān SD The Self-Disclosure of God TCD The Collected Dialogues of Plato THA Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān THY Ibn Ṭufayl's Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān
Introduction
The story of Islamic philosophy is the story of the development of the human intellect from the rationalistic phase, represented in this study by Fārābī (d.950) 1 , to an illuminative phase represented by Ibn Ṭufayl (d.1185) and Ibn al-ʿArabī (d.1240). 2 Illuminative philosophy is based on a model of mystical illumination that found its best expression in Plato's Seventh Letter and that is illustrated in Mishkāt al-Anwār (Niche of Lights ) by Ghazālī (d. 1111) and al-Ishārāt wa-al-Tanbīhāt (Allusions and Intimations ) and the mystical recitals of Ibn Sīnā (d. 1037) 3 The central tenet of this model is that following a rigorous and thorough exercise of the rational faculty, the human reason reaches a certain limit and is flooded with light. The thinker whose reason is brought to this liminal situation becomes aware of the limitations of his rational faculty and the possibility of obtaining knowledge by means of mystical illumination rather than mere rational conceptualization. This epistemological awareness is then extended to a comprehensive, liminal depiction of the ontological status of the world. Things in the world acquire an intermediary nature, and the world as a whole itself becomes a liminal entity between Truth ( ḥaqq ) and its existential manifestations ( khalq ).
In this book, I use Ibn Ṭufayl's work and the work of other Islamic thinkers to present the main principles of illuminative or liminal philosophy, while emphasizing its special capacity at articulating a synthetic vision of the naturalistic (or philosophical) and the traditionalistic (or religious) accounts of the epistemological and the ontological orders of reality. Ibn Ṭufayl was known for his encyclopedic scholarship and his generous sponsorship of intellectual research, which is confirmed by the detailed account that Ibn Rushd (d. 1198) 4 provides for the meeting that Ibn Ṭufayl arranged between him and the Muwaḥḥid Sultan, under whose patronage Ibn Rushd wrote commentaries on Aristotle's corpus. Very little is known about his personal life, and except for some fragments of poetry, Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān (Alive Son of the Awake ) is Ibn Ṭufayl's only extant work. The work has been translated into several languages, including English translations by Simon Ockley (1708) and Lenn Goodman (1972). Goodman's translation is preceded by a significant introduction to the text in which he presents Ibn Ṭufayl's thought as a unique educational philosophy and emphasizes the differences between it and educational philosophies of important Western intellectuals. Sāmī Ḥāwī, whose Islamic Naturalism and Mysticism is one of the most significant studies of Ibn Ṭufayl's work in modern scholarship, follows a seemingly different strategy: He attempts to show the strong resemblances between Ibn Ṭufayl's thought and modern Western intellectuality. This is despite the fact that he has interesting things to say, not only in relation to the shortcomings of the Orientalists' treatment of Islamic philosophy but also concerning the limitations of modern philosophical thought in general. 5 In his treatment of Ḥayy, he seems to be struggling between his desire to apply to his study a strict rationalistic approach and the fact that he is dealing with a philosopher-mystic who makes an explicit declaration of the limitation of rationalistic thought. 6
In arguing for the originality of Ḥayy , Ḥāwī insists that Ibn Ṭufayl did not borrow his ideas from Ghazālī or Ibn Sīnā, and that the utmost that one can infer is that they had an influence on his thought. 7 But Ḥāwī infers from Ḥayy that Ibn Ṭufayl intended not to follow Ibn Sīnā because in his description of the mystical states ( aḥwāl ) in Ishārāt, Ibn Sīnā was an imitator. 8 Such inferences, needless to say, go against Ibn Ṭufayl's own statements, and Ḥāwī seems to be one step closer to claiming, as Dimitri Gutas and other scholars did, that in attributing illuminative wisdom to Ibn Sīnā, Ibn Ṭufayl was an inventor of a fiction. Instead, Ḥāwī depicts the difference between Ibn Sīnā and Ibn Ṭufayl in terms of a distinction between a possessor of theoretical knowledge ( naẓar ) and a possessor of immediate knowledge ( dhawq ), which he develops into a distinction between conceptual apprehensions and dynamic existential involvement. 9 He finds the parallel to Ibn Ṭufayl's existential involvement in Kierkegaard's dynamic existential breach, which is contrary to the mediating process of reason. Like Kierkegaard, Ibn Ṭufayl teaches us that immediate experience must not be replaced with an abstraction, that reason has limits, and that propositional knowledge of the truth is impossible: “Rationality is not man's only basic differentia . . . Like most existentialists, he strongly contended that man makes himself, fulfills himself, and becomes himself in the dynamic act of knowing the Truth—Necessary Being. Ḥayy's very nature was a process, a project to surpass the now and reach the everlasting eternal.” 10 Thus, Ḥayy, the existentialist, realizes that man's nature is more than his reason and, like the existentialists, he attempts a “hypothetical destruction of, and universal doubt in, the surrounding world of tradition and education.” 11
One might wonder how Ḥāwī's existentialist interpretation can be consistent with his statement that “Ibn Ṭufayl's philosophy becomes almost hollow and indigent if one strips it of its metaphysical locus.” 12 Ḥāwī's depiction of Ibn Ṭufayl's existentialistic literary style, which he contrasts with rigorous logic in his description of Ḥāyy's attainment of mystical experience, seems to be in stark opposition to his own rationalistic depiction of his treatise. 13 Ḥāwī's study as a whole seems to be divided into two unrelated parts in which rationalism and mysticism are presented independently of each other. His failure to present a coherent interpretation of Ibn Ṭufayl's thought stems from his insistence on dissociating him from any possible influence by Ibn Sīnā, which prevents him from properly appreciating the significance of the illuminative account that Ibn Sīnā introduces in Ishārāt and that Ibn Ṭufayl employs as his basic model of the knowledge of illumination. As we shall see, Ibn Sīnā provides a liminal depiction of the mystical states ( aḥwāl ) and of the possessor of knowledge, who becomes, like them, a limit between presence (existence and manifestation) and absence (nonexistence and nonmanifestation) and a polished mirror facing the Real. In the same vein, Ibn Ṭufayl provides a liminal depiction of the transcendent essences ( dhawāt mufāriqa ), which are imaginal reflections of the Real, and Hayy's essence, which becomes, like them, an imaginal representation of the Real.
In his attempt to show that Ḥayy is devoid of the symbolic nature of Ibn Sīnā's mystical recitals, Ḥāwī emphasizes that the major part of the treatise consists of a progressive philosophical argument and that even the part that leads to the attainment of mystical enlightenment “is also progressively substantiated by a full-blooded argument.” 14 But he falls short of explaining how Ibn Ṭufayl's mystical conclusion is related to the progression of his logical argument. It must be admitted, however, that establishing this sort