Man, Existence and The Life Balance (Mizan) in Islamic Philosophy

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Man, Existence and the Life Balance (Mizan) in Islamic Philosophy
Article in Journal of Islamic Studies · May 2015

DOI: 10.1093/jis/etv034
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Published online 4 April 2015
Journal of Islamic Studies 26:2 (2015) pp. 145–198 doi:10.1093/jis/etv034
MAN, EXISTENCE AND THE LIFE BALANCE

(MĪZ2N) IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY
A N T H O N Y F. S H AK E R 1
Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University
INTRODUCTION
This study focuses on three master ideas that found expression in the
short transition to the Ottoman world and nowhere with more
refinement than in the Persian heartland. All return to the single
philosophic insight that ‘man measures every thing’, an obvious play on
the Protagorean maxim,2 to which the ubiquitous issue of the m;z:n
(balance) was closely tied. Given the maxim’s enduring importance for
medieval ‘philosophy’, taken in its bedrock sense,3 one is justified in
asking who ‘man’ is and why he is so constituted as to be able to
measure, let alone be the measure of every thing.
The medieval philosophers held that Man is the point of intersection
between two worlds, divine and created, or the isthmus (barzakh).4 This
is of more than just specialized interest. One of the most penetrating
thinkers of our time, Martin Heidegger, recognized the ‘dual’ reality of
man in his interpretation of Hölderlin’s poetic symbolism of earth, sky,
etc. In so doing he placed himself within a tradition he had viewed
mainly through the eyes of the Latin Schoolmen but which had been
flourishing for fourteen centuries as a full-fledged civilization, not just as
a current of thought. Short of laying claim to God’s hidden knowledge or,
1
Author’s note: Many thanks to the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill
University, and to Prof. Robert Wisnovsky.
2
Attributed to Protagoras of Abdera (ca. 490–20 bce). The intention behind
it is unclear, although Plato’s Theaetetus gives some idea of the context in which
it was debated.
3
My blanket use of ‘philosophy’ to describe falsafa, mysticism, certain
aspects of kal:m, al-Aikma al-il:hiyya, etc., is somewhat problematic but
convenient, as no word in Arabic or Persian covers all these branches.
4
This is central to Akbarian philosophy. See 4adr al-D;n MuAammad b.
IsA:q al-Q<naw;, Mift:A ghayb al-jam6wa-l-wuj<d (ed. 2Bim Ibr:h;m al-Kayy:l;
al-Eusayn; al-Sh:dhil; al-Darq:w;; Beirut: D:r al-Kutub al-6Ilmiyya, 2010), 100.
(Hereafter: Mift:A al-ghayb.)
ß The Author (2015). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic
Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com
146 an t h o n y f . sh a ke r
alternatively, to an inconsequential logical identity, isthmus is where
questions of truth, certainty, the balance (m;z:n) that determines them,
and indeed of existence itself, are said properly to arise. By pointing
beyond the narrow concerns of epistemology and psychology, this
basically ontic orientation deepened the transformation of Peripateticism
and lies at a great remove from the good-feel consumer ‘spirituality’ of
our day, a sentiment many writers on ‘mysticism’ seem to reproduce with
cloying regularity.
KNOWLEDGE AND AUTHORITY IN

PERSPECTIVE
The last couple of decades have uncovered ever-deeper layers in Islam’s

vast learning tradition, redrawing attention to two interconnected
though still inadequately explored aspects of knowledge: authority and
ethics.5 What is deemed ‘true’ is not, beyond its purely formal exposition
in logic, unrelated either to the ‘authority’ that grounds it or to the
human receptacle that recognizes (and therefore, ‘requests’) it. The
question is—as always in historical research—what exactly did authority
mean to the world’s first truly ‘global’ civilization? What we propose to
study here used to be, and maybe still is to some extent, part of a living
tradition, rather than a collection of curious artifacts. Modern research
supports the view that this living Islamic or Islamicate6 civilization all
but defined the medieval period, in fact so decisively that our current
fixation on a Eurocentric frame of reference—by which we try to plumb
the secret and origin of ‘modernity’ with threadbare designations like
‘West’ and ‘East’, or ‘modern’ and ‘premodern’—no longer makes sense.
This framing has proven tangential to the main procession of thinking
that characterized the so-called ‘post-Ghaz:l;’ period (another ill-
conceived designation), a key dimension of which I examine in this
paper.
Islamic philosophy envisions an omniscient living God whose justice is
unequalled because He is unequalled; the Muslim experience has not, in
5
See Christian Jambet, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie islamique? (Paris:
Gallimard, 2011), which nevertheless makes little effort at a definition. For an
intelligent view of Islamic philosophy and its significance for modern thought, see
Mohammad Azadpur, Reason Unbound. On Spiritual Practice in Islamic
Peripatetic Philosophy (New York: State University of New York Press, 2011).
6
First coined by Marshall Hodgson, as far as I know, ‘Islamicate’ obviates the
truncated view of religion we tend to impose upon this multidimensional,
multiconfessional civilization.
M A N , E X I S T E N C E A N D T H E L I F E B A L A N C E ( M I¯ Z 2 N ) 147
principle, been one of arbitrariness, much less of capricious deities. As a
result, 6adl (justice) connects the concept of knowledge to a knowing
which is consonant with the structural articulation of existence. This is
somewhat paradoxical, because the balance examined in this paper
offers itself at the pinnacle of creation, where both the ‘justice’ of
distinctions (as suggested by al-Furq:n, a name of the Qur8:n) and true
(i.e., ‘just’) measurement can be rendered. Strictly speaking, this is
neither an ethical theory of knowledge, nor does it imply a knowledge
indifferent to man. Although we will not be specifically preoccupied with
either ethics or authority, let me begin all the same by stipulating an
intermediary epistemological condition—my reason for raising this issue
at all—which I think had wide ramifications for medieval philosophy.
Ethics as a field and literary genre has had a certain, albeit peripheral,
bearing on the concept of existence. Yet, moral consciousness need not
end in the subjective ‘bias’ of moral judgment at every turn. In theory,
such particularism has no place in genuine or true knowledge and, in
fact, categorically excludes it. But this ‘epistemological condition’, as I
call it, is equally incompatible with the anonymity of knowledge, at least
in medieval philosophy, where a separate ‘oracle’ for truth was as
unlikely as the hermeneutical formalism that led to Kant’s ‘moral
imperative’. In Islamic philosophy, the ‘algorithm’ that guides from
knowledge to praxis, as we shall see, neither prescribes a blueprint for
mechanical action nor the specific practical trajectory, even if the latter is
precisely what living, rational beings are enjoined to do. Praxis provides
only an opening for possibilities through which the living could fulfill a
purpose. Language, the vehicle by which these possibilities are realized,
furnishes the pregiven elements (letters, words, etc.) and rules of
grammar that govern the permutations of letters and words, which in
algebra (a field historically tied to linguistics) are said to establish the
specific range of approximations to a ‘solution’. The algorithm called
balance operates on principles of weighing summed up by the term
triplicity (tathl;th). Elucidated by everyone from Ibn S;n: and Ibn 6Arab;
to Sabzav:r;, the idea of tathl;th seems to rescue the oneness of God from
paralysis before the core question about Man, the ‘person’ for whom
God is one in the first place, and his destiny is even posed.
The key for Ibn S;n: and Ibn 6Arab;—effectively, the founders of
Islamic philosophy—lies in fardiyya (individualness, singularity; uneven-
ness, oddness), which like ‘thing’ (shay8) describes the ‘positively’
pregiven in divine tawA;d (lit., ‘declaring [God] one’) in an active (fi6l;)
mode; only, on an order of existence separate from the hidden exclusive
oneness of God, not the inclusive oneness in the divine existentiation
(;j:d) it purports to articulate. The philosophic rule that the one
produces only the one for the manifold testifies to this crucial distinction.
Similar orders of being are assigned to thing7 in the effusion of the
absolute one to the many, all exteriorizations of a hidden factor or
command in their descent.8 As in algebra, where it emerged as a guiding
concept, thing is not a substitute for what is the partially known object of
inquiry. Given that nothing can be known alone in respect of the simple
essence of the primary object, thing merely stands for the object to be
made manifest, just like in an algebraic operation. The thing figuring in
the all-important expression ‘realities of things’ stands for what is known
to some extent; whereas it is the reality of the thing, being simple, that is
famously impossible to know unaided through formal logic.
Fardiyya acquires its key function in existentiation, of which the
triplicity constitutes the m;z:n principle, due to the exclusive unicity of
pure existence. This exclusivity itself can be translated into the
indomitable fact that no mortal can think or act outside of the universe,
no matter how sweeping or abstracted the thinking strives to be.9 Every
knowing denizen of the universe suffers the same limitation, making it
rather childish to seek an Archimedean point outside that universe in
order to ‘explain’ it. The m;z:n opens up the narrow field of vision
assumed by each mortal to unseen ‘practical’ possibilities which, as Ibn
6Arab; asserts, span every science thanks to the magisterial ‘realities of
things’ (Aaq:8iq al-ashy:8) and the concept of thing (shay8).
The algebraic significance of thing was evident to Khw:rizm; (ca. 800–
47 ce), the founder of modern algebra, who broke with classical Greek
tradition by defining the object of algebra as the unknown—more
precisely, the yet-to-be-defined. Algebra attaches this meaning of solution
to its definition of thing.10 In mathematics, thing is taken numerically or
geometrically for the unknown factor x, which allows for any number of
determinations and improvements as its ‘approximations’. It is assumed
to exist independently of them because it signifies what is pregiven. This
is in keeping with the philosophical understanding that something must
7
H. S. Nyberg’s introduction in Kleinere Schriften des Ibn al-6Arab; (Leiden:
E.J. Brill, 1919), pp. 1–162.
8
Mohammed Rustom explains the divine Command in relation to the
Qur8:n, All:h (the comprehensive name) and the soul, in his short but valuable
study, The Triumph of Mercy: Philosophy and Scripture in Mull: 4adr: (New
York: State University of New York Press, 2012), 21–31.
9
The fal:sifa pose this problem in the Peripatetic terms of immateriality and
dematerialization.
10
Roshdi Rashed, D8al-Khw:rizm; à Descartes. Étude sur l’histoire des
mathématiques classiques (Paris: Hermann, 2011), 45–6.
be known about a thing for it to be known.11 Khw:rizm;’s second
original contribution, Roshdi Rashed points out, was to justify the
algorithm geometrically and to demonstrate that it leads operationally to
the result or solution.12 Although the ‘non-Aristotelian zone’ which this
line of thinking represents in mathematics, as Rashed describes it—but
which the idea of thing stakes out for all the systematic sciences—is not
completely foreign to the Aristotelian system of classification, it did
represent a shift in paradigm and ontologies in mathematics, physics and,
most decisively, philosophy.13 Thing privileges the syntactical rules of
language, whether that of mathematics or logic, which in any case no
longer reigned as supreme as it once had.14 Although Ibn S;n: supplied
no syntatical rules for his theory of emanation, unlike NaB;r al-D;n F<s;,
the orientation of his thinking was already in evidence.
While ‘algorithm’ is a fitting description, it should be kept in mind that
philosophy is not the rigorously artificial discipline of mathematics. Even
if it can be represented mathematically and logically, reasoning is always
the reasoning of human beings, which is very hard to disentangle from
what modern philosophy recognizes as the knowing subject. That a
subject of sorts should at some level impinge on the noetic process seems
rather obvious, at least to the extent that it measures in this sense. Plato
saw in the anthropocentrism of the original maxim about man as the
measure only moral relativism. How the Islamic philosophers conceived
the subject afresh as a knowing, value-determining and creative agent
marks a momentous break with this ancient relativism. It also resists the
psychologistic subjectivism generallly associated with Western thought,
for which only the theoretical faculties of ego cogito, an isolated subject
whose only function is to ‘know’ and to make inferences on
11
Ibid, 758. Q<naw; (Mift:A al-ghayb, 17) strikes another philosophic rule: If
the thing entails something (amran) of its essence unconditionally (l: bi-shar3),
then it will not cease so long as the essence persists.
12
Rashed, D8al-Khw:rizm; à Descartes, 45. This ‘new ontology’, as Rashed
fittingly calls it, ‘doit également nous permettre de connaı̂tre un objet sans être en
mesure de le représenter exactement’. On approximation, see ibid, 45–6.
13
Ibid, 758.
14
Ibid, 47: ‘Si une telle conception, sui generis, d’une science mathématique,
fut possible, c’est, on le vérifie, grâce à un choix formel et combinatoire qui a
permis d’établir une classification à priori des équations. Ce choix s’effectue selon
les étapes suivantes: 18 déterminer un ensemble fini d’éléments discrets (le
nombre, la chose et le carré de la chose); 28 à partir de ces éléments, recourrir à
une combinatoire pour obtenir à priori toutes les équations possibles; 38 isoler
parmi ces possibles, grâce à la théorie, les cas qui répondent aux critères de cette
dernière. Ainsi, des dix-huit équations obtenues, al-Khw:rizm; retient les six
canoniques, évitant par là-même redondance et répétitions’.
‘information’ obtained from ‘outside’ his mind. The Islamic philosophers
deem God’s servant (6:bid) whose faculties are indispensable for
cognition and expression, be they moral or otherwise, to be a living,
(causally) active being that both has free will and a passive receptacle of
knowledge thanks to the faculties of perception. To disclose the origin
and ends of man, therefore, they began with that perception according to
which thinking about the object orders itself.
Between the divine attribute of knowledge (6ilm) and the human mind
upon which it confers knowledge, however, lies the abyss of nonexistence
that separates ‘God from the world’. In sheer nonexistence (6adam, or
nothing, nothingness) the exponents of il:hiyya philosophy recognized
merely the ‘root’ of pseudo-knowledge (what is ungrounded)—in their
arguments for creation ex nihilo, for example. Judging from their
fragmentary pronunciations, the mutakallim<n exerted a deep influence
on how later thinkers like Ibn 6Arab; interpreted the concept of 6adam, as
H. S. Nyberg has shown.15 But Nyberg does not consider the purposeful
will of the knowing agent which, even in a derived sense would render
the pursuit of knowledge little more than an idle pastime. If not for the
separate free will and command crossing over from the abyss that
separates creation from the hidden secret of God, one would pay only
lip-service to moral responsibility. This was abundantly clear to the
Mu6tazila, after whom it had still to play itself out beyond the ambit of
conventional logic, which kal:m employed mostly for rhetorical ends,
being the dialectical ‘theology’ par excellence.
In his writings on logic, Martin Heidegger threw the thinking behind
this association of existence and nothing, and unintentionally the Islamic
philosophy that most clearly expressed it, into dynamic perspective. Otto
Pöggeler, his most incisive interpreter, explained how Heidegger under-
stood and related the search for a ‘new logic’ around Leibniz’s time to the
modern ‘scientific’ enterprise. Heidegger had averred that it was just such
questioning that ‘springs ahead as it were into a definite region of Being
[my emphasis]’16 His reflections on this ephemeral ‘region’, into which
he said the modern positive sciences had fallen, appear to take his
thinking beyond where scholastic theology and early modern philosophy
first made commerce in Germany, though he seems not to have
15
H. S. Nyberg’s introduction to Kleinere Schriften is still very useful on this
point.
16
Otto Pöggeler, Martin Heidegger’s Path of Thinking, (transl. Daniel
Magurshak and Sigmund Barber; Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press
International, Inc., 1989), 35. I have relied on Pöggeler’s masterly exposé to
avoid imposing on the reader unwieldy quotations from Heidegger’s works,
many of which have not yet been translated into English.
entertained the possibility that a similar ‘region’ could have come to light
elsewhere, in another form and with other purposes, perhaps under the
aegis of a medieval Islamic civilization.17
Heidegger’s philosophy sprang from earlier German interest in the
‘philosophy of life’. Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), the most cogent
expositor of the ‘life-philosophy’, deflected the tendency to reduce the
‘living force’ of history to factual observations, in the disembodied
manner of late nineteenth-century science, by expanding the cognitive
focus of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason into a critique of historical
reason, which he anchored to lived experience. Instead of demarcating
philosophy as an independent pursuit, though, he devised a new
approach to describe the structures that define the human spirit.18
Heidegger, more specifically, argued that the life force came ‘from the
knowledge of the character of Being of human Dasein itself’, distancing
himself futher from his colleagues’ psychologism.19 Knowledge cannot
be isolated in every respect from its carriers, much less from existence.
Central to Heidegger’s Dasein, which bears a strange resemblance to
m;z:n (balance), are identity and ipseity. Something lives because
identity finds its root origin among the living, not in mental projec-
tions.20 His analysis of the transcendental ‘I’ is, purportedly, of a creative
agent, not ‘a bloodless consciousness’ or self-identity of any particular
living individual.
This old debate not only propelled the rise of the social sciences in the
West, but is germane to the innovations carried out in Islamic
philosophy, from a different direction, with respect to speech (kal:m).
Heidegger regards language, which happens to be central to the
‘prophetic’ soil of Islamic philosophy, as the very articulation of life; it
is, he says, the ‘house of life’, ‘the guardianship to which presence and
absence are each entrusted and thereby the ‘house’ [in a structural sense]
in which beings can find their way into their essence without Being
having to be changed into the rigid permanence of mere presence’.21
17
Heidegger interprets history teleologically as a ‘Western’ march toward
modernity, though he seems to mean it in the Suhravardian sense of maghrib.
Trying to fit history into a mythical ‘West’ or ‘Europe’ in any other sense would
deform his idea of the ‘end of philosophy’ into something like Francis
Fukuyama’s witless declaration that ‘liberal democracy’ somehow ushers in the
triumphant ‘end of history’ for the whole world.
18
‘Wilhelm Dilthey’, first published 16 January, 2008; substantive revision
22 March, 2012; http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dilthey.
19
Pöggeler, Heidegger’s Path of Thinking, 21.
20
Ibid, 18: ‘The factical historical life is ‘‘origin’’ in the sense of the
transcental I’.
21
Ibid, 226.
Such a view brings to mind a gamut of concepts connected with
contingency, where the thinking that ‘experiences Being in its essence. . .
as presence and absence’ requires a different logos (i.e., pattern of
speech) than that of formal logic. Pöggeler clarifies that ‘[t]his thinking
can no longer conform to logic, since it no longer posits beings as
something permanent to which one can always return’.22 Moreover,
‘[l]ife answers its questions only in its own language; it understands
itself. . . In factical life, the sense of performative [my emphasis]
dominates. The performance of life itself comes before the orientation
toward ‘‘contents’’. Life derives its fundamental sense when it grasps
itself in its performance. . .’23 With ‘performance’ we touch the kernel of
m;z:n, according to Islamic philosophy, so we ought to be clear about its
import from the outset: medieval philosophy does not consign ‘per-
formative’ only to the sphere of everyday activities or surface under-
standings. On this detail, Heidegger’s ‘path of thinking’ is astonishingly
similar, surpassing what even Henry Corbin imagined about his affinities
to Islamic mysticism.24 This is neither coincidental nor of idle interest.
Heidegger’s contribution to a mode of thinking that is partial to living as
well as intellecting human being underpins a longstanding project in
which both German philosophy and Islamic philosophy appear to have
participated, without conflating the two.
But what is ‘living’ and ‘intellecting’ without communication, linguis-
tic building blocks (the ‘pregivens’ of letters, words, etc.), or rules for
coherent articulation? Islamic philosophy prioritizes what is given in the
existentiation—otherwise represented as logical premises—by which it
seeks to unravel the hidden articulated existentiations of man, not a
timeless blueprint for a mass cult of pious consumers. As part of the
cognitive architecture of perception, pregiven elements are precondi-
tional to active (causal), living agency in such a way as to combine the
mutual procession of knower and known in a single movement of life.
God’s Command too is a condition, not to say proof of His absolute
prerogative to create the world. God is said to create the world ‘after’
there was nothing, in a sense, as a ‘house of language’ and with the
plenary fullness of articulated existence. The ‘nothingness’ (6adam) that
‘precedes’ the created world is illusory only in relation to existence as
such; it is not a contrary to it, since there is no question of duality,
22
Ibid, 223. Logic is the science of relations between concepts, which are
fixed.
23
Ibid, 17.
24
Cf. ‘De Heidegger à Sohravardı̂. Entretien avec Philippe Nemo’, by Phillippe
Nemo, Association des amis de Henry et Stella Corbin: http://www.amiscorbin.
com/textes/anglais/interviewnemo.htm. Accessed 8 August, 2012.
dichotomy or bipolarity in ever-actual existence, as we will see. What
‘opposition’ they exhibit comes to light, rather, as the dynamic motion of
creation and re-creation, perdurance and annihilation, manifesting and
veiling—all of which are amenable to the m;z:n (balance) as their
regulating principle. In this manner, knowledge—according to Islamic
philosophy—is indifferent neither to the association of the act of creation
with knowing nor their pregiven conditions, which provide the balance’s
proper field of operation. M;z:n was not patterned according to any
single branch we may today call ‘ethics’. Actionable or not, the central
preoccupation of professional ethicists is to attach the prescriptive ‘ought
to’ as a value to everything falling within its purview. Philosophy, on the
other hand, mints truth (Aaqq, Aaq;qa) as a performative causal
relationship involving the realities of things, which amount to more
than just an exercise in epistemology.
Many scholars in Islamic studies understate or completely ignore these
basic considerations, but the old-guard Orientalists, wedded though they
were to a deeply contradictory and anachronistic picture of history, at
least had the advantage of clarity. However flimsy, the latter’s criteria for
judging Islam’s vast learning/intellectual activities have nevertheless
brought this medieval tradition into a sort of intellectual competition
with modern thought, which after all did not appear out of the blue.
G. E. von Grunebaum, tended to reduce ‘Islamic tradition’ to two
aspects, in the main: on the one hand, a ‘religion’ that reduces man to a
sterile relationship with the Creator based on a preordained,
God-centred blueprint based on divine commands;25 whereas ‘we of
the West. . .envisage adjustment to the world which we are subjugating’
for a reason.26 And on the other, craft-based know-how glued to a
practical mien that compared poorly with ‘Western’ standards for
mechanical progress.27 This view, like those of other essayists in Islamics,
is too close to the Salafist strain, which recognizes no such thing as Man
who measures and is measured; who, true to the intention behind the
Qur8:nic sense of Aay:w:n (true life), articulates the living for the sake of
salvation from this world for the Hereafter; who is the balance by which
all is joined and by whom all unfolds. Not the deepest of thinkers, von
Grunebaum, presents a curious but nevertheless useful misconstruction,
given the importance with which tradition invests the practical sphere of
25
An Islam fixated on ‘a reasoned order already in existence’.
26
G. E. von Grunebaum, ‘Concept and Function of Reason in Islamic Ethics’,
Oriens, 15 (1962): 1–17, at 17.
27
Ibid, 16–17.
life, language and knowledge.28 It would be too convenient to turn his
insouciance into a straw man, despite his faith in the ‘Western’ sense of
progress and self-worth.
Ideological banalities aside, the most sensible question to ask is
why Islamicate thought displays such a strong penchant for praxis in
the first place. And why indeed has it given rise to a world civilization
which, not only dominated the ‘medieval period’, but also laid the
foundations of something akin to what we seem to value most about
‘modernity’?
KNOWLEDGE AND PRACTICE AS

CONTINUOUS ACTIVITY
4adr al-D;n al-Sh;r:z; (ca. 1571 or 2–1640), or Mull: 4adr:, expounded

the theoretical and practical predispositions with respect to man, who he
says is kneaded from two elements—a conceptual form of the command
(B<ra ma6nawiyya amriyya) and a sensory matter of creation—just as his
soul has two aspects, attachment and detachment to matter (ta6alluq wa-
tajarrud).29 Wisdom (al-Aikma) is accordingly variegated into two fields:
theory and detachment, on the one hand; practice, attachment and self-
creation (or self-molding), on the other.30 The Qur8:n, he argues, points
to these ‘two fields of wisdom’ (fannay al-Aikma): ‘Verily, We have
created Man in the best mold’ (Q. 95.4), where ‘taqw;m’ implies a
symmetry of constitution, which of course is not peripheral to the idea of
the balance. This :ya, he says, spells the form of man which is also the
‘model of the world of the divine command’ (3ir:z 6:lam al-amr). Second,
the Qur8:n says, ‘Then We cast him back to the lowest of the low’,
indicating man’s matter containing the opaque and coarse bodies.31
Third, ‘. . .except those who attain to faith’, pointing to the final goal of
‘theoretical wisdom’. And fourth, ‘. . .and do good works’ (Q. 95. 5–6),
which has to do with the perfection of ‘practical wisdom’. Philosophy
28
To ‘prove’ his points about Islam, he often used half-digested references to
everyone from Husserl, the pre-Socratics and Lévi-Strauss to a host of American
social scientists (Edward Said, Orientalism [New York: Vintage Books, 1978],
296).
29
4adr:, al-Eikma al-muta6:liya f; al-asf:r al-arba6a (Beirut: D:r al-MaAajja
al-Bay@:8, 9 vols. in 3, 2011), i.31. (Hereafter: Asf:r.)
30
4adr: does not mean takhalluq only in the ethical sense of the wayfarer
returning to his or her created nature. Takhalluq has the same radical as khalq
(nature, creation) and khalaqa (to create); hence, ‘self-creation’.
31
4adr:, Asf:r, i.32.
establishes these two ‘fields’ because it is driven by a concern for the
‘imitation of the deity’. This is so fundamental to Islamic thought that it
agrees even with those intellectual figures whose views were disputed or
maligned—such as MuAammad b. Zakariyya8 al-R:z; (ca. 854–925 or
935). It is certainly in keeping with the Greek-inspired maxim above, the
purpose of which the Islamic thinkers understood as the imitation of God
by way of His names and attributes.
Although characterizing this mature philosophy as both theory and
practice would not be far off the mark, 6amal (practice, performative
activity), which receives wide berth in Islamic philosophy, remains the
key to the ‘algorithmic’ character of weighing with the m;z:n.32 Ibn
6Arab; (1165–1240), an indispensable authority on this approach, divides
it twofold: what is of the senses and what is of the heart, just as
knowledge is said to be of the intellect and of the law. But both are
aspects of the same reality. Each division has ‘a known weighing [wazn
ma6l<m] with God when He bestows it’, for He asks the servant,
whenever He charges him with a task, to ‘set up the weighing equitably
[bi-l-qis3]. . . Therefore, He asks for justice from His servants in their
transaction with Him and what is other than Him, including their own
souls’.33 All activities join in their common pursuit of ‘justice’ through
weighing as a single, continuous act that binds theoretical knowledge to
its performative consequences. Weighing remains an activity whether it
occurs in the realm of sensory experience or indirectly as mental
reflection.
Be it ‘practice’, ‘activity’, ‘performance’ or ‘operation’, 6amal
encompasses every dimension of man. There is much textual support
for this inclusiveness. As H:d; Sabzav:r; (1797–1878 or 1881) explains,
4adr:’s understanding of Aay:t (life) as ‘the life of knowledge and
cognizance according to God’ assumes several levels of life. First, there is
the life that accompanies existence and ‘roams’ where it does, just as
God’s life roams the selfsame existence that permeates all.34 Second, life
implies overtaking (al-dark) and acting (al-fi6l), just like the Living One
32
Paul Kraus has a useful introduction to m;z:n’s arithmetical and linguistic
background, despite his fragmentary philosophical views: (J:bir b. Eayy:n.
Contribution à l’histoire des idées scientifiques dans l’Islam (Paris: Société
d’Édition Les Belles Lettres, [1942] 1986), 187–303.
33
Ibn 6Arab;, al-Fut<A:t al-makkiyya (Beirut: D:r al-Fikr, 1994), iii.6.
34
Sabzav:r;’s commentary on 4adr:, Shaw:hid al-rub<biyya f; l-man:hij al-
sul<kiyya b: Aav:sh; H:d; Sabzav:r; (introduced, edited and annotated by Jal:l
al-D;n Ashtiy:n;; Qum: B<st:n-e Kit:b Qum, 1382 sh [2003 or 4]), 684.
(al-Eayy) who gives forth with overtaking and acting.35 A literal
rendering, ‘overtaking’ is another word for perceiving (Ar. noun, idr:k),
one of life’s functions, since God cannot be said to ‘perceive’ through any
organ. The third level entails that knowledge proceed according to God
and His angels, books, messengers and the Last Day.
It is worth noting that F:r:b; (d. 950) early on compared perceiving to
engraving a tablet (lawA), just as God authors His creation with words
on a tablet.36 The spirit (r<A) of the person is that by which that person
likewise ‘engraves’. It originates in the essential reality of the world of
divine command (min jawhar 6:lam al-amr). Essential reality remains
unchanged by any multiplicity belonging to the ‘letters’ or the perceptive
faculties, and it is not shaped by a form, molded by a nature or specified
by a sign.37 Each person embodies two essential realities (jawharayn),38
one of which is ‘varied, formed, qualified, quantified, moved, at rest,
corporeal and divisible’, the other not. . .You are a combination of the
world of created nature [6:lam al-khalq] and the world of Command
(6:lam al-amr),39 because your spirit is from your Lord’s command and
your body is from your Lord’s created nature’.40 The faculties employed
by the human spirit are similarly of two kinds, depending on whether
they are charged with a specifically performative (muwakkil bi-l-6amal)
or perceptual (bi-l-idr:k) task. He stipulates that everything within their
range contributes to the human act, which ‘consists in choosing the
beautiful and the useful as pertain to the final goal (al-maqBad) known as
the Afterlife (bi-l-Aay:t al-6:jila). But foolishness overtakes equity (al-
6adl), to which an intellect then gives guidance for the purpose of trial
and error, offers intercourse, and inculcates training after a soundness
from the primary intellect (al-6aql al-aB;l)’.41
He explains that equity (6adl, i.e., in the ‘weighing’) can only be
restored through a further factor referring back to the essence. This is
35
Dark, darraka and other forms derived from the root d-r-k have various
shades of meaning: overtaking, accomplishing, attaining, comprehending,
perceiving, and attaining to a perception.
36
F:r:b;, ‘‘K. FuB<B al-Aikam’ in 6Im:d Nab;l (ed.), al-Thamara al-mar@iyya f;
ba6@ al-ris:l:t al-f:r:biyya, (Arabic text, with introduction and notes; Beirut: D:r
al-F:r:b;, 2012), 273. This ascription of this work to al-F:r:b; is uncertain.
37
Ibid, 271.
38
This idea predates Ibn 6Arab;’s own description.
39
Amr signals the decisive, actuating and creative essence. Cf. Rustom, The
Triumph of Mercy, 21–3; the author illustrates 4adr:’s exegetical view of 6:lam
and 6:lam;n (ibid, 141).
40
F:r:b;, ‘K. FuB<B al-Aikam’, 271.
41
Ibid, 273. This is very close to the thinking behind Ab< Bakr MuAammad
Zakariyy:8 al-R:z;’s (d. 925 or 934), or Rhazes’, allegory of the fall of the soul.
how ‘guidance’ is said to be only by the root (aBl)—e.g., al-6aql al-aB;l (the
root or primary intellect). Man receives the ‘guiding intellect’ because of
the weakness of his perceptual faculties (his first point of contact with
reality) and general constitution. Short of a root or an essence to anchor
his thought and practice, neither the power of choice nor the line of
thinking that valorizes it would be of avail. Given this obstacle, finding
‘equity’ requires a specifiable range of activity for the active intervention
of the ‘intellect’ (6aql) on behalf of man. The senses pave the way to the
perception of pure meaning or concept (Birf al-ma6n:), so one cannot
cavalierly expunge them for the sake of the imaginary. These are ‘part of
a mixture’ and cease at some stage in the perception. But while this is so,
nothing can stabilize concept and meaning after the sensation ceases
better than purity from matter.42 With the formation of a definite
concept or meaning (taBawwur al-ma6n:) representing the reality from its
manifold externalizing implications (law:Aiq al-gharbiyya), the percep-
tion then stabilizes through the power of the theoretical intellect (al-6aql
al-naCar;), which F:r:b; likens to something polished to refinement.43
The spirit, being a ‘polished thing’, is itself a tablet, where the
intelligibles (al-ma6q<l:t) from the divine emanation (al-fay@ al-il:h;)
become fixed like images (ashb:A) on a polished mirror.
Without the will to posit purpose, obviously none of this would hold
much significance and practice could not mean, as it should, a life
activity, the finality of which stands for a ‘new creation’, the conse-
quence. For there can then be no stable concept, manifestation from the
hidden or, for that matter, creation from ‘nothing’ without God’s will
and command. These terms relate to His creative power as the Prime
Mover. In perception, though, primary concepts are directly intuited and
require no movement at all for their comprehension. They resemble
direct experience in that, in principle, they have no intermediaries or
sensory organs. In a sense, they are logically self-identical, since the act of
knowing them resembles the rounding of the circle of identity in less than
an instant. To become fixed (th:bit), conceptualization (taBawwur)
aspires to the same stability of form (B<ra). Truth determination bonds
with perception in this manner. The trouble is that this truth can never
exactly correspond to the totality of sensations that make it up.
However, there are different kinds of ‘identity’ (Ar., huwiyya bi-l-dh:t)
and ‘contradiction’ (Ar., @iddiyya). Although the law of identity is
normally understood as A = A, for instance, the copula in this predication
has received various interpretations. Modern philosophy considers it
42
F:r:b;, K. FuB<B al-Aikam, 275.
43
Ibid, 276.
ambiguous by reason of the variable-A and its range.44 But the
traditional law of identity can also be expressed mathematically as
x = x, ‘either of the functional calculus of first order with equality, or in
the theory of types (with equality defined), or in the algebra of classes,
etc’. Then there is identity as the essence of truth, the identity of subject
and predicate (of early modern philosophy), and so on. ‘Metaphysics’,
for lack of a better word, has to do with both the mental operation that
equates A with A and the existential by which the point of origin qua
truth/reality governs the existentiation, failing which there would be only
either/or and no vanishing ‘in-between’. However, in becoming A, is A
really A, a variable-A or an entirely distinct B? B (or not-A) is clearly not
a variable of A or, in philosophy, an intermediary or a midpoint between
the two limits circumscribing a whole. Although conceptually distinct as
noun forms, knowledge and existence spurred interest in various devices
(e.g., analogy) by which to relate one level, station, etc., to another for
the variablity or ‘becoming’ within a single permament whole, which can
be divided indifferently to infinity. Infinite regress never constitutes an
acceptable expression of the object questioned; having an intermediary
or isthmus that joins two things for a third is unavoidable if there is to be
‘knowledge’ and ‘knowing’.
As the true intermediary point, m;z:n brings into play the so-called
‘practical’ exigencies of man, not just scientific explanations—more
completely, the contingent operational unfolding of a simplex according
to the determinate purposes of human beings. Normally, we interpret
purposeful action in terms of means and goals. Like a beacon, the m;z:n
guides each step in strikingly similar fashion as a calculus of movement,
change, transition, derivation, etc. It is also ubiquitous among the
medieval branches of knowledge as a criterion (mi6y:r), principle
(mabda8), rule (@:bi3), in a secondary sense. Ibn 6Arab; associated it
with every ‘field of production’ (Ban6a),45 level, state or station over
which the weighing (al-wazn) judges ‘in both knowledge and practice
(6ilman wa-6amalan)’.46 Thus, ‘concepts have a balance in the hand of
reason named logic (al-man3iq) that includes two scales named premises.
To speech belongs a balance named grammar which weighs utterances in
order to verify the meanings (al-ma6:n;) denoted by the tongue’s
44
q.v. ‘Identity, law of’, Dictionary of Philosophy (ed. Dagobert D. Runes;
Totawa, NJ: Littlefield, Adams & Co, 1976), 140.
45
God is the 4:ni6, the Creator who ‘produces’ the world. 4an6a can also mean
craft, art, occupation, etc.—basically, any purposeful activity to create something
from something else.
46
Ibn 6Arab;, Fut<A:t, iii.6.
utterances (al-lis:n).47 Everything that has a ‘tongue’ is itself a balance,
which is the known measure that God has combined with the bringing
down of His blessings. [God] says, ‘And We did not send it except in a
known measure’ [Q. 15.21]’.48 Each application of ‘balance’ occurs in its
own manner on the same principles of weighing. These principles
regulate the relation of knowledge up to its practical instantiation in the
same way the essence governs its respective manifestations. In a way,
then, ‘practice’ (6amal) acts as the branch (far6) of knowledge, such that
both root and branch continue to be linked at every level of the
emanation, not as a pure identity, but with every act of Ban6a, fi6l or 6amal,
which are all similar in meaning.
6Amal requires the m;z:n for a willed ‘operation’ resembling speech, a
purposeful activity that presupposes a willing agent endowed with the
power of speech, or nu3q. The unfoldings of reason, which aspires to the
real and to the true, would be inconceivable without this association
with language. Divine speech is essentially the Command, or that aspect
of essential creative agency by which the absolute essence, beyond which
there can be no separate human or other material manifestation, survives
through all its manifestations. This is not epistemologically different
from, say, ‘humanness’, the full dimensions of which can never be
concretely and completely embodied in any single human being.
Humanness qua essence ‘survives’ in all its instantiations on the pattern
of articulated speech, the parts of which are not given in the way
physiological functions are in relation to the body. This is why 4adr: and
Heidegger set out consciously to loosen Aristotle’s rigid focus on
‘substance’ as the prime root of everything entifiable.49 4adr: and the
Isfahan school focus decisively on motion in the substance itself
(al-Aaraka al-jawhariyya) as a simplex.
It is important, finally, to distinguish 6amal (practice) from fi6l (act,
actuality), a synonym that does not automatically translate into moral
‘deed’ and in philosophy means literally something actualized.
‘Actuality’ was important to the philosophers of il:hiyy:t and the late
Latin Schoolmen for different, sometimes radically diverging, purposes.
47
Lis:n in the sense of tongue refers also to one of the balance’s parts. Just
below, Ibn 6Arab; likens man to the lis:n on the balance (see Ibn 6Arab;, Fut<A:t,
iii.6).
48
Ibid.
49
The Islamic philosophers rejected substance at the heart of the question of
divinity. 4adr:’s most enduring contribution is to have transformed the concept
of substance, just like Heidegger. With movement by essence, the act of
existentiation is more plausibly the articulation of existence essentially and
bodily to avoid breaching either God’s oneness or hiddenness.
Whereas the active f:6il (‘actor’) has to do with an acting agency—in
God’s case, pure actuality—the passive maf6<l refers to the effect in a
permanent relation to its causal agent so long as the cause persists. But
semantically, fi6l may itself be an operation (6amal) regardless of whether
or not that operation has been completed in the concrete.50 This agrees
with both the standard usage and the concept of m;z:n as an ‘algebraic’
device of sorts, where fi6liyya (‘actuality’ or ‘pure actuality’) would be
unintelligible without the singular essence qua the creative source, and
before which every other consideration ultimately must dissolve.
SIMPLES AND COMPOSITES
In hindsight, theory and practice partake of the same field of philosophic

activity, to which we may now add wherever composite beings are
found. Like all created beings, man is simple in one sense, composite in
another. As an intermediary between two realities the perceiving, unitary
agent is called the Perfect Man (al-ins:n al-k:mil), who is said to be
neither a particular or a universal. Fusing two realities, the Perfect Man
consummates the upward/downward movements in divine manifest-
ation. As an intermediary, he cannot achieve complete self-identity, at
least not in the strict logical sense where A = A, because the root of his
existence neither is posterior to nor depends on the elements of his
composition. Paradoxically, as long as man acts on his own behalf, not as
the rump of some other being and purpose, there is no question of a
static self-identity, either in the pursuit of knowledge or on the Day of
Reckoning. By ‘living’ one means to refer to living personhood
(shakhBiyya). The truest identity this ‘person’ receives accords with his
Aaq;qa and what essential pregivens articulate his concrete existence. As
a field of activity, the pursuit of knowledge (6ilm), which is an attribute
man shares with God, is coterminous neither with itself nor with any
specific instance of its activity in the lap of the multiplicity. This is the
only locus where something new may be said to come forth, as the word
Ban6a implies for the creation as a whole. In every instance of production
(Ban6a), a new element comes to light, where ‘coming to light’ refers to
the exteriorization, manifestation, etc., of the inner recesses of the
indecipherable simple essence.
The ‘nothing’ that precedes every new creation, not the absolute
nothing, is therefore not completely vacuous. In the mind, at any rate,
something has to be partly known or assumed for it to properly known.
50
Lis:n al-6Arab (Beirut: D:r 4:dir, n.d.), xi.528.
Whereas the ancient Peripatetics privileged the rigidly stable concept as
the desirable endpoint of this process, Ibn 6Arab; argues for the
directness, rather, of the noetic unveiling (kashf ), which is based on a
‘vision’ bestowed by one’s Lord (6al: baB;ra min rabbihi), who addresses
whatever His servant’s constitution or nature calls for. This assumes a
soupçon of knowledge ‘before’ the search for knowledge begins, even in
the absence of any proof of the object’s existence. Unveiling is best
thought of as a mode of knowledge. Unvarnished but not arbitrary, it
does not simply connect to the object. It is the realization of knowledge
for the specific pupose of a request. Compared to it and the ‘guiding’
intellect (6aql), reflective thinking (fikr) can only hold the promise of
perfecting knowledge for the created constitution of the person who
thinks. Indeed, Ibn 6Arab; recognizes it as the very receptivity of human
perfection (qub<l kam:lihi). In turn, this receptivity requires a balance
(m;z:n) to make things known to the fullest possible extent and, in this
way, set the seeker’s constitution (fa-yuq;muhu) for the weighing.51 In
this way, construction (tark;b) and composition (ta8l;f ), which are
pregiven, play a part in the outcome of measuring with the balance,
which outcome makes its appearance as a primordially new unity.
Clearly, the classical distinction between simple (lit., ‘singulars’) and
composite realities (al-Aaq:8iq al-mufrada wa-l-murakkaba)—both of
which are tributaries to the concept of mufrada (simple or isolated), a
word derived from fard and about which we shall have more to say—
helps clarify the nature of that man who ‘measures every thing’. The key
to being fard (single, individual, uneven, odd) is, then, the intermediacy
between the two realities in a root–branch relation, as presented above.
Fard signals this peculiar characterization thanks to its unity qua the first
odd number; it should not be thought of as a combination in a duality of
two realities. To explain the advent of unity in the many, Ibn 6Arab; and
the mystical philosophers begin with idea of the ‘realities of things’
(Aaq:8iq al-ashy:8), a common enough expression in nearly every science
but extremely important in systematic science. These realities are deemed
permanent and stable because they do not resemble things of the senses.
Knowing them in their simplicity rather than their composition becomes
a problem when their truth cannot be settled through conventional logic
alone, a problem which only the paradigm of speech seems capable of
overcoming.52 This is why Ibn 6Arab; interprets the active unity ‘secretly’
conferred upon tark;b linguistically.53 Whereas tark;b simply means
assembling something out of several elements, ta8l;f is closer to fusing,
51
52
On the realities as the product of mixtures, see ibid, i.55–6.
53
Ibid, i.56.
synthesizing and composition, with no particular ‘spatial’ connotation.
Ta8l;f can also mean composing a text.54 Now, when man’s constitution
(khalquhu) requests an ‘insight’ (kashf ), as expected with the immediacy
of experience, there is no intervening factor between the receptacle and
the guiding intellect, which is a succour from God.
4adr al-D;n Q<naw; (1207–74), the most important systematizer of
philosophy in the Seljuk period after Ibn 6Arab;, homes in on Ibn S;n:’s
(980–1037) inquisitive doubt that man is capable of knowing the ‘reality of
things’ in any formal sense because neither construction nor constitution in
and of itself can offer such grounding; parts do not in and of themselves add
up to a unit. If man cannot know the realities of things in this primitive
facultative sense—that is, through their attributes and qualities—then there
is no such thing as even a root knowledge of all the realities (idh l: mawq<f
6alayhi fa-l: mawq<f fa-l: 6ilm bi-l-Aaq:8iq aBlan), according to him. Despite
their epistemological simplicity, we nevertheless expect to know the realities
of things primarily or essentially. This is unfeasible from the standpoint of
their specification in respect of their exclusive oneness (min Aaythu
aAadiyyatuh:), because we know a thing, he says, only ‘in respect of the
attribution of existence to our specifications, the raising up of life and
knowledge through us, the lifting of hindrances that keep us from what we
desire to perceive. Consequently, all we know of the realities are their
attributes qua attributes, not in respect of their realities for what takes place,
as Ibn S;n: acknowledged’.55 This amounts to a full-blooded rejection of the
Aristotelian fixation on substance, but not, as one may imagine, of the
possibility of true or genuine knowledge.
Shams al-D;n b. MuAammad Eamza Fan:r; (1350–1431), one of
Q<naw;’s most important commentators, parenthetically notes that such
an illusion accounts for the disagreements and proves there can be no
knowledge of the realities without such lifting of hindrances ‘upon
realization in the station of kuntu sam6ahu wa-baBarahu’ (‘I am his
hearing and sight’).56 The last of this sentence is the coveted outcome.
Human beings may ‘know’ the realities only insofar as they are worthy of
the living, self-acting and -creating essence that permeates its every
manifestation, not as beings with a penchant for moralizing or the
prisoners of their own self-enclosed psychological states. That he and
Q<naw; should refer the question of knowledge (in Arabic, 6ilm, not just
the anthropocentric ma6rifa), effectively the knowledge of the ‘realities of
things’, back to man might appear odd given his denial that this
54
F:r:b;, ‘K. FuB<B al-Aikam’, 273.
55
Ibid. Ibn S;n: ‘acknowledged’ it in his K. al-Ta6l;q:t.
56
Shams al-D;n MuAammad b. Eamza al-Fan:r;, MiBb:A al-uns bayn al-
ma6q<l wa-l-mashh<d (Beirut: D:r al-Kutub al-6Ilmiyya, 2010), 136.
‘knowledge’ was even possible for man. It makes sense because Q<naw;
construes theoretical knowledge as an aspect of the spirit (r<A), which
governs a common ‘spiritual’ field where the root activity can take place
by way of consonance, perfection and, finally, the exchange (badal) of
attributes.57 These appear distinct only when the act of knowing is
artifically made to be the simple reality of the pair.
6Amal in its basic fundamental sense brings knowledge and practice
together in this spiritual field of activity as a single operation at the core of
which remains, however, the essential distinction between God and ‘what
is not God’. This is the distinction that creates all other distinctions, not
only because it preserves God’s utter hiddenness, but also because with it
essence is conferred upon an active, creative mode of the ‘one’ as the
manifestation of what the hidden one hides. In this sense, distinction is the
very stuff of creation and safeguards the divine hiddenness together with
the manifesting form of creation. Knowledge is, then, relational not
simply because there are two interlocutors, but inasmuch as it is a
cognizance of the divine emanation exteriorizing in the essences of
possible things (ma6rifat al-tajall; al-C:hir f; a6y:n al-mumkin:t) either as
the world’s connection to God or as His connection to the world.58 That
every knowledge occurring to man is attached either to God or to what is
other than God paves the way to the sole real object of attachment
(muta6alliqahu al-Eaqq).59 Knowledge according to God’s hidden He-ness
(6ilm al-huwiyya al-b:3ina) requires the lifting of any consideration of the
world, whether the world’s attachment to God or His attachment to it,
and a relationship of ‘consonance’. Furthermore, a person observing and
attending to existing things and for whom God is the object of attachment
is not the person who does the same by way of attachment to the world,
even if this is the same activity.60 In the former, knowledge is perfectible,
not frozen for all time in all its external features.
57
‘The discourse on God’s word and name ‘‘al-RaAm:n’’ in the basmala has
two aspects: essence and attribute. Therefore, whoever interprets [this name] by
substitution (fa-man a6rabahu badalan) renders it an essence (ja6alahu dh:tan);
whoever interprets it descriptively (na6tan) renders it an accident (6ara@an). The
attributes of soul are six; life is a condition for these attributes, making them
seven. All these attributes belong to the essence, which is the alif existing between
the ‘‘m’’ and the ‘‘n’’ in the name RaAm:n’. (Ibn 6Arab;, Fut<A:t, ii.157).
58
That is, the connection of deity (il:h) with ‘that to which it is deity’ (ma8l<h)
and that of the ma8l<h to the il:h (Q<naw;, Mift:A al-ghayb, 73). See my
discussion of Q<naw;’s ‘permanent distinction between God and the other than
God’, in Thinking in the Language of Reality. 4adr al-D;n Q<naw; (d. 1274) and
the Mystical Philosophy of Reason (Montreal: Xlibris, [2012] 2015), 279–99.
59
Q<naw;, Mift:A al-ghayb, 72.
60
Cf. Ibid, 73.
Q<naw; is then able to distill a ‘knowledge attained’ from self-identity,
an 6ilm A:Bil: attachment to God Himself can only refer to something
hidden in Him (min Aaythu b:3inuhu), to His He-ness (huwiyyatuhu)
under an—albeit ‘secretly’—exteriorized aspect. Because reason unaided
cannot securely fasten itself thus, man its expositor has to rely, literally,
on his thinking as a share of the spirit of thinking. At the level of the
divine name ‘Exterior’, where God is known through His manifestation
(tajl;hi), unveiling (kashf) apprises the seeker, at the very least, that
behind what he or she perceives of the many exteriorized manifestations
and experienced forms exists another factor (amran :kharan; literally,
another ‘deciding command’) back to which their precepts refer. While
these ‘relations’ (nisba, i@:fa), as he calls them, are not strictly speaking
about movement, it is possible to express them in terms of movement,
given that movement requires either an internal or external force to
trigger it. Islamic philosophy clarifies the movement of perception and
thinking based on the levels and perspectives relative to each other in
ever-changing patterns, not just for classification purposes. Technically, it
is algebraic reasoning—rather than ‘analogy’ or the syllogism as is often
thought—that coordinates this movement,61 though this approach
deepened also the general thinking on the tangled branchiations of
religio-intellectual doctrines and methods (i.e., in the madh:hib).
‘Opinion’ on this grand scale must have been dreaded for the pervasive
relativity and doubt (shakk) it seemed to suggest. The works of Q<naw;,
which evince a strong concern with doctrinal disagreement,62 helped
raise the debate on knowledge, what is knowable, etc., to a far richer
level precisely because it was possible to know despite—or indeed
because of—their relational character.
THE LIFE PRINCIPLE
Rather than marshal every available textual support, let us now sketch
the general features of life, existence and m;z:n, and their interconnect-
edness in man.
61
The value of algebra to logic as a science of relations was understood very
late in the West thanks mainly to Charles S. Peirce’s doctrine of logical relations
in the nineteenth century.
62
See Q<naw;’s Mift:A al-ghayb, I6j:z al-bay:n and correspondence with F<s;:
4adr al-D;n Q<naw;, Annaherungen. Der mystisch-philosophische Briefwechser
zwischen Sadr ud-Din Qonawi und Nasir ud-Din Tusi (ed. and comm.. Gudrun
Schubert; Beirut: Franz Steiner, 1995).
Life enthralls and puzzles for some of the same reasons that ‘existence’
does. Though both are considered simple ‘primary concepts’, they have
meant many things. For example, Aay:t in Arabic, as in English, can
carry the plainly ethical meaning of ‘the life of this world’. The Qur8:n
proclaims, ‘What is this worldly life if not a passing delight and play?’
(Q. al-6Ankab<t, 29. 64). Yet, the living soul cannot but seek knowledge
from within the spatio-temporal of Aay:t al-duny: (i.e., the life of this
world) even if the world is play and amusement. This is because the
Qur8:n regards life with both unmitigated gravity as well as a matter of
amusement for human beings.
Life may be conceived of as the body’s ‘animating force’. The Ikhw:n
al-4af: defined ‘living being’ (Aayy), in the more restricted sense of
movement given it by Kind; (801–873), as ‘what moves of its own
accord,63 reaffirming both movement and the freedom to move in the
act. The famous al-Sayyid al-Shar;f al-Jurj:n; (1340–1413) echoed this
with a precise definition of Aayaw:n (animal or living being) as ‘the body
that grows and senses and which moves according to will’.64 This is
distinctly different from speaking of life as the ‘beginning’ (or principle)
of the human soul, or even the active source of all life, al-Eayy being the
‘Living One’ of the Qur8:n and one of God’s names. This is why 6Abd al-
Kar;m al-J;l; (1365–1428) recapitulated it in five senses. First is
existential life (Aay:t wuj<diyya), which permeates all existents and
constitutes their very essence.65 Second, ‘spiritual life’ (Aay:t r<Aiyya), or
angelic life, which belongs ‘fundamentally to the existents in the spiritual
world (al-6:lam al-r<A:n;)’; the animals partake of the spirit but have no
intellectual faculty. Third is the life of the beasts, consisting of ‘heat and
humidity which are natural and latent in the blood penetrating the cavity
of the liver’; in short, the animal soul. Fourth, Aay:t 6:ri@a—roughly
translatable as ‘ascribable life’—comprising ‘the perfections that occur
according to the thing obtained—for example, that knowledge for
ignorance is life, or that spring for the earth is life. . . or the rise of the
sun’s luminosity [ka-ishr:q @aw8 al-shams] upon the surface of the earth
that is likewise life to the earth’. And fifth, ‘the life of the concomitant
63
Ikhw:n al-4af:, Ras:8il Ikhw:n al-4af: wa-khull:n al-waf:8 (ed. Khayr al-
D;n Zirikl;; Cairo: al-Ma3ba6a al-6Arabiyya, 4 vols. in 2, 1928), iii.320.
64
al-Sayyid al-Shar;f Jurj:n;, K. al-Tacr;f:t (Beirut: D:r al-Kutub al-6Ilmiyya,
1983), 94. This definition betrays the influence of empirical medicine, which, of
all the disciplines, was instrumental in anchoring the medieval conception of
animal life to its organic functionality.
65
6Abd al-Kar;m b. Ibr:h;m al-J;l;, Mar:tib al-wuj<d wa-Aaq;qat kull mawj<d
(ed. 62Bim Ibr:h;m al-Kayy:l; al-Eusayn; al-Sh:dhil; al-Darq:w;; Beirut: D:r al-
Kutub al-6Ilmiyya, 2004), 40.
root figure (Aay:t al-hay8a al-aBliyya al-l:zima), every aspect and every
consideration of which belong to perfection to the greatest extent’. This
is not an exercise in semantics, but the concatenated meanings of a single
reality. Whereas some existents exhibit only one type of life and others
more, J;l; says, only the Perfect Man (al-ins:n al-k:mil) encompasses all
five; hence his rank as jam6 (comprehensive union). ‘Perfect Man’ is an
important concept to retain, because without it no comprehensive union
(considered the cause of manifested life) is conceivable, but only
separation and death, assuming those were then even possible. F:r:b;
held that Aayy (living) may be ascribed to every existent, or mawj<d, that
attains its ‘last perfection’ and reaches this existence ‘so as to produce
from it that whose nature it is to be from it exactly like its nature to be
from it’.66
Given these senses, life then cannot be reduced to a passive receptacle
or an object for sensory observation. Zamakhshar; (1075–1144) ascribes
to the mutakallim<n the idea that a living thing, or Aayy, is what has
knowledge and power, the two most consequential divine names
according to Islamic tradition.67 N:sir-i Khusraw (1004–1060) preg-
nantly defines ‘living’ as that from which an action proceeds, applying
the same principle to ‘power’, ‘will’, ‘act’, and other nouns.68 These
primordial associations give an indication of how the divine name life
operates and, indeed, what the main object of philosophy is: life or the
living, existence or the existent? The Mu6tazila like NaCC:m (d. ca. 835–
845) judiciously denied that the substantive ‘life’ (as opposed to verbal
noun ‘living’) could apply to God because God was said simply to live, in
actu. The majority followed Jubb:8;, for whom certain divine attributes
were identified with the divine essence, though they may be attributed to
both God and the human being.
From another angle, 2mul; (1319 or 1320–1385) alludes to 6ayn al-
Aay:t (source or wellspring of life) as the interior (b:3in) of the name
Eayy,69 since the Qur8:n associates water with life. Whoever imbibes it
66
F:r:b;, K. Ar:8 ahl al-mad;na al-f:@ila (ed. Albert Nader; Beirut: al-Ma3ba6a
al-Kath<l;kiyya, 1964), 32.
67
Zamakhshar;, al-Kashsh:f (Cairo: Ma3ba6at MuB3af: al-B:b; al-Ealab;,
3 vols., 1948), i.291.
68
Eric Ormsby, Between Reason and Revelation. Twin Wisdoms Reconciled
(an annotated English translation of NaB;r-i Khusraw’s Kit:b-i J:mi6 al-
Aikmatayn; London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), 87.
69
Sayyid Ism:6;l 2mul;, J:mi6 al-asr:r wa-manba6 al-anw:r, texts published
with introductions by Henry Corbin, Osman Yahia and Sayyid Jav:d Fab:3ab:8;
(Tehran: Centre de Publications scientifiques et culturelles, 1989), 381.
shall never die, because he lives through the life of the Real—God’s.70 In
his commentary on 4adr:’s al-Shaw:hid al-rub<biyya, Sabzav:r; tellingly
refers to ‘the water of life which is existence’71 to indicate the active
mode of the singular source of all existents and living beings, whereupon
living—a divine name—is equivalent to existing. God, as well as created
and uncreated things (necessary of existence), are considered existents
(mawj<d), though no one thinks that existents or ‘living beings on their
own measure up even to ‘what is other than God’ (creation) as their
proximate cause, let alone the divine essence under any guise. That only
God is the Living One and who alone knows Himself in His absolute
hiddenness does not, however, contradict the master idea that everything
living in the world lives through the life of Man, whose life is that
of God.
For mature Islamic philosophers like 4adr:, life and such are as you
have learned in connection with the root of existence (aBl al-wuj<d),
correlative (al-mu@:f ), when (al-ayn), continuity and so on (Asf:r,
ii.660). Necessary Existence (w:jib al-wuj<d) is first in that His life
cannot but be existence, because He is a simple reality. Even more
explicitly, ‘Know that the life of every living being is a mode of His
existence, since life is the thing in respect of the acts that emanate from
living things’ (ibid, 659). It is only the factor of corporeality that
distinguishes ‘what is God’ from ‘what is other than God’. Living things
are of two kinds, he states: that for which a pregiven coming-to-be
(kawn) is necessary (i.e., their living bodies), and that for which this is
not necessary because bodies are irrelevant. The second kind obviously
refers to the separate and the immaterial forms, for which existence is by
essence their very life (kawn wuj<dih: bi-6aynihi huwa Aay:tuh:) and
which do not suffer the composition of matter and form (ibid, 660)
Finally, the life that is in the separate substances and immaterial forms ‘is
not that by which a thing is alive, but the very fact that it is alive
(Aayyiyyatihi)’ (ibid).
70
The Qur8:n says: ‘And from water we made everything’. 2mol; refers to
al-m:8 al-mu3laq (absolute water), which corresponds to absolute knowledge,
or mu3laq al-6ilm. Absolute knowledge cannot be ascribed to anything, nor can
it be ascribed truth or falsehood. The product of ‘living water’, contrary to the
worldly sense of wellwater, is ma6rifa, Aikma, akhl:q, taw:@u6, khush<6, iAs:n,
waf:8, Aay:t, mur<8a, futuwwa, shaj:6a. . .6ad:la. God’s Throne is above the
‘formal water’ (6al: al-m:8 al-B<r;), since the latter exists only ‘after’ the
Throne in a time proper to the one and with the absence of time for the other
(ibid, 519–22).
71
Sabzav:r;, commentary on 4adr:’s al-Shaw:hid al-rub<biyya, 704.
When 4adr: interprets the concept of life as ‘principle’,72 though, it ‘is
not [equivalent to] the concepts of knowledge and power’ with which it
is usually grouped among the divine names. Referring to a contemporary
kal:m view of how the divine names are related to the divine essence, he
adds, ‘It is as if it were the principle of both’ (ibid, 660). With respect to
human beings this principle enables life to act like other perfectional
attributes (al-Bif:t al-kam:liyya),73 figuring as it does among the
perfections of the existent qua existent (ibid). At the same time,
‘perfection’ cannot be specified by any natural, quantitative or numerical
method with respect to either the Absolute Existent (al-mawj<d al-
mu3laq) or to the existent qua existent, since it is ‘affirmable only of the
mabda8 (principle) of existence and its first perfection with that
perfection’.
4adr: uses mansha8 (origin, source) and mabda8 (beginning, principle)
several times in this section in connection with life in the physical world,
which he points out is perfectible through perception and action (bi-
idr:k wa-fi6l). Perception in animals connotes the sensory and ‘act’ the
spatial movement spurred on by desire (ibid, 657). Perception higher
than sensation (e.g., intellection) is different. ‘If what is its mabda8 of
perception is the selfsame and indistinguishable mabda8 of its action,
without any modification, such that its own perception is the action and
origination (fi6lahu wa-ibd:6ahu), then it is all the more deserving of this
name because it is free of composition’ (ibid). By the same token, the
‘true Eayy’ (the Living One) cannot be affirmed by means of any
compositeness (tark;b), especially through the human faculties that
perceive it. The Necessary Being is a simple reality that possesses the
exclusive oneness of the essence (aAadiyyat al-dh:t), such that God’s
intellection of the things (al-ashy:8) is their very emanation from Him.
Put differently, from the simple inclusive oneness (w:Aidan bas;3an) stem
both this intellectual principle and beginning (mabda8) of the whole.
Mabda8 (principle) would not make complete sense if it did not also
mean ‘beginning’; however, the beginning 4adr: has in mind is neither
the absolute origin nor a beginning in space/time. Let us for a moment
assume that such an origin refers back, not to what actually originates
beings, but more categorically to what cannot but be hidden from view
in any current mental operation. Epistemologically, it would have the
functional equivalence of ‘nothing’ (6adam), though not as an opposite of
existence as such. In his discussion on perception (idr:k) and intellection
(ta6aqqul ), 4adr: distinguishes 6adam simply as the hiddenness and
72
Cf. Aristotle, De Anima 402a, 6–7; for life explained as movement, see
405b, 32.
73
That is, divine attributes by which human beings may perfect their souls.
nothingness ascribed to ‘matter and material [things]’, which ‘have no
presence in themselves (l: Au@<r lah: f; nafsih:) and not a thing
according to that existence’ (ibid, 659). Perception is thus more easily
grasped as consisting ‘of the existence and presence of a thing to a thing’,
which is true to the literal sense of the word Aa@ra—or ‘presencing’, as
Heidegger would say. Failing this, the hiddenness and nothingness of
matter and material things’ comprehensive existential union (ghaybatih:
wa-6adam wuj<dih: al-jam6;) leave the perception merely unknown. And
there it remains unknown until form is manifested. The divine name
Living One (al-Eayy) alerts, then, to an intellectual existence considered
in relation to ‘the form of the whole, which is intellected also in the
secondary intention. . .since the Living One effects both perception and
agency’ (ibid).
MĪZ2N AS WEIGHING AND GUIDANCE
M;z:n, which involves a living process, is derived from wazana74 (to

weigh) and commonly refers to the instrument used for weight
measurement. In philosophy, the principles of weighing and value
determination were especially conducive to reasoning past the formalism
of the logicians. Weighing operates on the assumption of a movement of
two scales which begins in earnest from a point of imbalance, which is
set aright by leveling both sides for a unique measurement. What is odd
and single in this calculus—in short, fard—can only be valuated on the
corresponding unity and oneness. The singularity of fard, resting as it
does on this oneness, reflects creative power behind manifested existence.
‘Life’ shares this efficient oneness with existence under an aspect where
the hidden oneness is set in motion as an equally unique process of
self-exteriorization.75
That Ibn 6Arab; should refer to the simple realities as al-mufrada
(singles or, numerically, odd), instead of bas:8i3 (simples), is telling, since
a similar pattern of transference permeates the process that includes the
simple realities. Fardiyya is germane to the effusion of the one from
the one and the many from the one, but it is especially sensitive to the
complication of man’s perspectival faculty of perception. For, how is it
74
Widely used, the word thaqlayn (two weights) in the expression taw:zun
6amal al-thaqlayn is Qur8:nic (see Fan:r;, MiBb:A al-uns, 154).
75
This is not a new idea. See Richard MacDonough Frank, Beings and Their
Attributes. The Teaching of the Basrian School of the Mu6tazila in the Classical
Period (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1978), 42.
even possible to conceive of the ‘highest philosophy’ or wisdom if man
both measures and is measured? There is but one simple answer:
‘philosophy’ conceived in these proportions is not about explanation—of
created beings for scientists or philosophers—but about living in all the
physical, social, political and spiritual dimensions of life on the scale of
Man, not just human beings. This ‘living’ is self-moving and entails the
proportionality of ‘weighing’ in its guiding functionality as a mode of
existence.76 In short, the m;z:n—which conceptually derives from Man,
indeed is Man—cannot replace human agency; it merely formalizes the
purpose of the operation and provides the guidance.
In this respect, it can be descibed more abstractly as an algorithm,
which consists of ‘a mechanical step-by-step procedure operating on
syntactically well-defined symbols in a way that captures relations
among the things the symbols represent’.77 Mathematically, an algorithm
is a finite set of cases with a table of values corresponding to all the
possible answers to a question or problem. Its operation requires
syntactic and semantic rigour and a priori elements similar to the terms/
premises of a syllogism, written or spoken words, letters, sentences, etc.
It generates the most appropriate answer to a question based on a finite
number of steps. That said, no ‘algorithmic solution’ can dictate the act
of living; nor is the philosophic m;z:n reducible to a m;z:n of
ratiocination for just any end.
On the one hand, the Qur8:n describes itself as having come down
with it (Q. 21. 48); on the other, it likens both itself and man to m;z:n.78
All share in the living, purposeful movement where two elements are set
in motion for the ‘measurable’ relationship. Because weighing requires
movement, the m;z:n’s field of operation are congruent with existentia-
tion (;j:d). Aristotle explained both ‘life’ and ‘existence’ in terms of
movement variously defined as actualization from a state of potentiality,
locomotion, etc.,79 where life is quintessentially what is self-driven in its
natural, uninterrupted course as an ‘unmoved mover’. The soul, for
example, need not move just because the body moved. One may refer to
this as a kind of self-guidance, but it remains a guidance when the
structure of reasoning behind weighing is duly considered with its root or
76
‘Algorithm’ is based on a transliteration of the ninth-century mathematician
al-Khw:rizm;’s name in the Latin translation of his theories, Algoritmi de
numero Indorum.
77
‘Algorithm’, The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy: www.rep.routledge.
com/article/GLOSSITEM11. Accessed 13 August, 2013.
78
Rustom identifies 4adr:’s views on the ‘reality’ of the Qur8:n relative to the
structure of existence: The Triumph of Mercy, 21–6.
79
See De Anima 412a, 3–4, 6–7.
source of life, not as a self-enclosed self-generating system. In fact, 4adr:
distinguishes between the hid:ya and irsh:d, the latter suggesting the
more emphatic rightly or correctly guided.80 Divine revelation (waAy)
provides hid:ya for man’s instruction and learning (namely, of pregiven
knowledge). The Qur8:n also provides irsh:d, that human beings may
act with equity (bi-l-qis3) and ‘do commerce’ with justice (mu6:mala-
tuhum bi-l-6adl). As in the m;z:n, this counsel invokes two persons—a
buyer and a seller. As the Qur8:n makes explicit, the real transaction is
with God for the Afterlife, which turns out to be of ‘profit’ in this life
only, because the fulfilment of earthly life takes place only in the next. In
this respect, of all the rational tools at man’s disposal m;z:n comes
closest to the guidance intrinsic to the original act of existentiation. As
word/speech (qawl/kal:m), its soteriology can be didactically broken
down to its algorithmic elements, as indeed Ibn 6Arab;, Q<naw; and so
many philosophers have done.
Islam, after all, was based on kal:m All:h, His qawl. Central to its
civilizational project was not ‘religion’ as we know it today, but the open
and fecund idea of the Book, which enabled it quickly to find its bearings
in relation to a spent Hellenic legacy and to develop its own intellectual,
scientific, spiritual and religious institutions. This is the first instance in
history where systematic thinking appears to have found its place in the
articulation of social order and human relations as a full-blown
multiconfessional, multi-faceted civilization. It is precisely the coherence
it maintained in this richness that writers on Islam overlook with the
legalistic sophism of the Wahh:b;-cum-Salaf; worldview, which is now
more or less what passes for ‘Islam’ in the West today.
THE LANGUAGE OF EXISTENTIATION
F:r:b; writes, ‘The First Existentiator (al-m<jid al-awwal) is alive, being

life itself, although this does not lead to two essences; rather it is based
on a single essence, such that ‘alive’ means that He intellects the best
object of intellection according to the highest intellect; or that He knows
the best object of knowledge by way of the best knowledge’.81 ‘To live’
(Aayy), he asserted elsewhere, is a metaphor for the true life—or
Aayaw:n, which does not always mean ‘animal’, being the Qur8:nic
80
4adr:, Tafs;r al-Qur8:n al-kar;m (Beirut: D:r al-Ta6:ruf lil-Ma3b<6:t, 1419/
1998), viii.330.
81
F:r:b;, K. Ar:8 ahl al-mad;na al-f:@ila, 32.
word for the Afterlife.82 The connection of life, existence and intellection
that the m;z:n depicts has been a feature of Islamic philosophy from the
outset, and incidentally, can be explained using the light analogy, for
which Shih:b al-D;n YaAy: Suhraward; (1154–1191) is best known.
Affirming their connection by essence, not just their accidential features,
allows Suhraward; in turn to concentrate on life not just as self-moving
or –generating, which is a blunt concept, but as the ‘thing’s being evident
to itself, the living thing being percipient and active [al-darr:k al-fa66:l].
You know about perception and [the attribution] of activity to light is
clear, since light emanates by essence. Thus, pure light is alive, and every
living thing is a pure light’.83 ‘Evident to itself’ here indicates neither true
logical identity nor attribution by correspondence, which in any case
failed to satisfy either Aristotle or the Islamic philosophers, who turned
to the Neoplatonic theory of perception and intellection at least for
inspiration. Thanks to this opening Suhraward; established himself by
presenting the ‘existentiating light’ determining the essence of life for all
created beings, including the human soul, as a trope to account for the
emanation of the many from the one.
Kind; takes a different tack. His description of living being (Aayy) as a
substance (jawhar) cannot pass muster, since substantiality is a relational
concept and applies only to ‘created living being’; it cannot stand as the
grounding essence.84 True, created beings are equally the ‘shadow of
existence’ (Cill al-wuj<d), the ‘contingency’ which Q<naw; collectively
refers to as ‘the ocean and presence of created being’.85 That man should
recapitulate two worlds—divinity and created being—and stand as their
isthmus (barzakh) is, he warns, only a synoptic or undifferentiated
(mujmal) manner of stating the issue. Confusion arises, says Q<naw;,
when Man is so obscured that only a multiplicity of humannesses is
visible and no single willed purpose (al-mur:d) is discernible in the
synopsis or confers identity.86 The line separating existence from
82
Perfect State: Ab< NaBr al-F:r:b;’s Mab:d;8 :r:8 ahl al-mad;na al-f:@ila (a
revised text with introduction, translation, and commentary by Richard Walzer;
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 76.
83
Suhraward;: The Philosophy of Illumination: a new critical edition of the
text of Eikmat al-ishr:q (with English transl., notes, commentary, and
introduction by John Walbridge and Hossein Ziai; Provo, Utah: Brigham
Young University Press, 1999), 83–4. Unfortunately, the authors’ arbitrary
rendering of key expressions and arguments makes the English text somewhat
confusing for the novice.
84
Ya6q<b b. IsA:q al-Kind;, al-Ras:8il al-falsafiya (ed. MuAammad 6Abd al-
h:d; Ab< R;da; Cairo: D:r al-Fikr al-6Arab;-Ma3ba6at al-I6tim:d, 1950–53), 267.
85
86
Ibid.
intellection can be any obscured view that degenerates into such a fiction,
always lagging behind the purpose focusing the will on the given
concern.
Ir:da (will, intention)—both it and mur:d (purpose) are derived from
the same radical—can belong to only one person, not a collection or
multitude of persons. The implications are rather astonishing, as this
implies that ‘community’, which is built on relations, is itself relational
(i.e., composed of at least two elements). Therefore, m;z:n has to operate
to the measure of the singular Man qua fard. In order to ground the
human will according to a transcendent purpose the m;z:n cannot be
identified with an amorphous, self-reproducing collection of human
instantiations. Epistemologically, it may appear as only a simulacrum of
Man’s life, an artificial construct of self-organization and self-movement.
But this holds only if one discounts F:r:b;’s theory of perception, which
connects intellection and existence.
This is very significant, because Fan:r;, for one, avails himself of the
literal meaning of darraka (‘to reach’) in order to describe the ‘perceiver’,
above all, as a ‘relation of joining’ (nisbah ijtim:6iyya) dependent on level
and type of joining, as follows.87 ‘Rise to the perceiver..’., he says—in
other words, rise to the relational level and see with the eyes of the
perceiver, that you may see what the relation brings forth.88 The higher
the ascent, the clearer the perception, the further recedes the multiplicity
of relations, and the more efficiently possibilities are realized. Any
‘relation’ here can only be that of the ‘perceiving’ agent primordially
oriented toward his object of perception.
By capturing this sense, Ibn 6Arab;’s concept of triplicity brings
knowledge and practice together dynamically as a single purposeful
effusion in the form of articulated speech rooted in God, because only
He knows Himself. Jand; (d. 1300) follows him and Q<naw; in
confirming knowledge in its subordinate role relative to (or following)
the object known (al-6ilm t:bi6 li-l-ma6l<m) and shedding light on the
syntactical properties of what I call the ontic orientation.89 He says
God’s ‘eternal knowledge’ itself (al-6ilm al-azal;) signifies ‘that God has
made knowledge. . . subordinate to the object known (al-ma6l<m), which
means that knowledge attaches to the object known according to [the
87
Fan:r;, MiBb:A al-uns, 179.
88
Ibid, 182.
89
Mu8ayyid al-D;n Jand;, SharA FuB<B al-Aikam (ed. Sayyid Jal:l al-D;n
2shtiy:n;: Intish:r:t-i D:nishy:h-i Mashad, 1361 sh/1982), 450. For an
appreciation of taba6iyya’s significance for this new philosophy, its provenance
in Arabic philology and grammar has to be taken into account.
latter]; else it would not be knowledge’.90 The exegetes’ and jurists’
general interest in the syntax of language and dialectics of speech is not,
of course, what the mystics and philosophers saw in the Book. So, what
is it about the revealed Qur8:n, over and above its paper embodiment
that attracts expert and mystic alike?
The same may be asked of Sabzav:r; about his own philosophical
poem, the ManC<ma, on which he penned an influential commentary; or
for that matter of Martin Heidegger for his interest in the German poet
Hölderin, Meister Ekhart and the pseudo-Scotus. The partial answer is
that living language appears to contain the mechanics that allow it to
plead the philosophers’ case more capably than formal logic, which is
merely a tool for mental representation.91 By historical standards alone,
the Qur8:n is not a book one selects off a shelf. It is an address to and
about man in the form of a single divine word (qawl), on the one hand,
and the divine word qua articulated complex or whole known as kal:m,
on the other. In comparison, ordinary language mimics the divine word’s
power to open and close, veil and disclose the hidden realities through
outward expression. In their respective ways, though, both ordinary
language and the Word of God posit, one, the noetic-existential elements
that form each ‘word’ and ‘sentence’; two, the rules of grammar; and
three, the word meanings. A m;z:n like the syllogism cannot discharge its
function without pregiven terms and premises—a recognizable ‘alphabet’
and the building blocks of an argument. Every language, to be a language
for current use, has to display the structural features and coordinating
rules necessary for the intelligible conveyance of meanings.
But what captivated the Islamic philosophers about ‘revelation’ was
not ‘language’ or ‘speech’ per se, but what the speaker/perceiver hides
and makes visible in his ‘intermediary’ role. One would be hard pressed
otherwise to see how speech could create or annihilate the physical
universe on its own. This is not the game of magicians. If words are to be
more than ‘phantom images’ or ashb:A in the mind, then any efficacy
conferred on speech and language has to reside in their relational
fecundity as possibilities. A relation (nisba) is not real in the ordinary
sense. Its function consists in joining two elements either as abstract
correlatives or as a root–branch articulated according to their creative
factor or command. There is no path to the truth without the ontic
orientation expressed in the manner of a single commanding, guiding
source. The essence rushes forth and withdraws with every instance of
90
Ibid.
91
What Pierre Lory calls ‘letter science’, in the J:bir b. Eayy:n tradition,
reflects this logocentrism of Islamic thought; see Lory, La science des lettres en
islam (Paris: Éditions Dervy, 2004).
knowledge, every existentiation, just like speech, which is made up of
sounds but also of silence, pause, stress, etc. Existence as well as
knowledge are grasped as the interplay between b:3in (interior) and C:hir
(exterior). There is no question of an identity between them except by
way of ‘approximation’, which, in turn, conjures up the algebraic search
for a solution.92
In sum, if one assumes every utterance is made by someone, for
someone and to someone, at least one of those ‘someones’ has to be
living, and there is no rule against speaking to oneself. In this sense,
speech and book may be the epitome of willed expression and a mode of
being, but communication is not characteristic of sentient living beings
with the capacity only to use their sensory organs. Creative life—
originally the domain of medicine in ancient times93—attunes thought to
its purposes and through this grants the power it has to fuse the parts of
speech, knowledge and existence together by the root ‘reality of the
thing’ (Aaq;qat al-shay8). This safeguards their affinities, which is why
the object of inquiry revealing itself from the root in the first place occurs
by way of consonance. Islamic philosophy has to clarify consonance as
the very articulation of life for Man as a singular, purposeful living being;
else, what is the sense of anyone even reasoning by ‘consonance’
(mun:saba), as opposed to a mechanical theory of correspondence, to get
at the truth?
EXISTENCE HAS NO CONTRARY
Both medieval and ancient philosophy are agreed that truth by

correspondence, like any sensory mirage, is a poor way to describe
reality, much less partake of it. This is perhaps why 4adr: demurs that
the concept of life (like that of existence) cannot be conditional upon
what we observe of it with our sensory organs.94 Reasoning from
sensations in this fashion leads only to ramshackle inferences. This is
why, too, Ibn 6Arab; invokes the nodal concept of unveiling (kashf) to
establish the exclusivity of existence and, indeed, life. Kashf surpasses
sensation in crucial respects. Both occur without intermediaries, but they
diverge on the question of certainty. Whereas kashf establishes the
92
The thing can only be known by approximation, a notion Rashdi Rashed
uses to describe the algorithmic procedure for a solution.
93
Plato described the cosmos as an animal—that is, as living.
94
exclusivity of life, on par with existence, the senses confirm only that the
world is divided into living and nonliving.95
According to his expansive definition, innate life (al-Aay:t al-fi3riyya)
permeates all things existing: man, animal, plant and even mineral.96 If
‘there is not a thing that does not extol God with His praise. . . nor any
that praises except the living, then every thing is alive’.97 The world ‘in
its entirety is alive’, he says, ‘because the absence of life (6adam al-Aay:t)
or of the existence of the existent (aw wuj<d al-mawj<d) from the world
is [itself] not living’. Life in this essential sense is identifiable with
absolute existence. That existence has no contrary, therefore, can mean
only one thing: there is only existence. This appears to gainsay not only
the common consensus about how our multiplicity-ridden world turns,
but also how the m;z:n works. Weighing requires not one existentiating
factor or byproduct of one, but two sides to compare for a measurement.
While unique and exclusive, however, existence is also inclusive in that it
constitutes the ground of every existent. This inclusiveness introduces the
manifold of nonexistence on a second order. While existence as such
cannot be compared or weighed, it nevertheless disgorges nothingness
and manifestation, presence and absence. From this our philosophers
inferred an ‘existential opposition’ for the special sense of muq:bala
(opposition) they gave to weighing with a balance, as we shall see.
An important consequence of this train of thought is that the 6adam
(nonexistence, nothing, absence or privation) said to precede creation
cannot be its root or the root of anything in any primary sense. ‘Root’
emerges only with ‘branch’ in the existentiation, which in turn is
predicated on a single, exclusive existence. 6Adam has ‘no divine basis in
existence (mustanad il:h; f;-l-wuj<d). . . whereas every created thing
cannot but have a basis’.98 Likewise, death is simply the separation of the
‘living thing qua regulator (mudabbir) of a living thing’ from ‘living thing
qua regulated’—root from branch.99 With separation, death expresses a
relation of nothingness, not of any existence, which nothingness passes
on to passive irrelevance and indifference. Existents are related only to
95
He denies such a division even if sensory observation compels us to the
truism that ‘death follows life’.
96
Ibid, 490–1.
97
Ibn 6Arab;, FuB<B al-Aikam, 211. Based on Q. 17. 44, ‘And there is not a
thing but extols Him His praise’. FuB<B al-Aikam, 170. Su6:d al-Eak;m puts this
in the form of syllogism (al-Mu6jam al-4<f;, [Beirut: D. Nadra, 1401/1981]).
98
99
Ibn S;n: held that life finds its contrary in death (@idd al-Aay:t al-mawtu),
where ‘the body dies but the soul does not’: SharA Kit:b ith<l<jiyya (Paris: Dar
Byblion, 2009), 144.
life such that the essence’s manifestation is to essence what the branch is
to the root.
The pure ‘theorists’, says Ibn 6Arab;, reckon from this that God knows
all things because they assume that to Him belongs the ‘root knowledge
of all things’ and His knowledge transcends (tanz;hihi) all sensations. But
this root knowledge has to be ‘stripped of its garments’—i.e., the
branches, decorations and all else emanating from the root of structured
creation—before it can be said to give forth whatever is created with or
attributed to it. The root extends the branch according to what it
exteriorizes, but the branch will not persist in its ‘branchness’ and the
latter’s precepts (baq:8 f; far6iyyatihi wa-aAk:mihi) except through their
proper root. But since divine transcendence has no attachment, nothing
can issue from God’s hidden Essence (min dh:tihi) before the divine
name ‘Living’ finds precedence over another name for a reality (i.e., to
bring that reality to existence). Whatever lives in this world or beyond is
alive only as the branch (far6) of a particular nominological root (aBl
asm:8;). And what is ‘bequeathed’ of knowledge—recalling that bequests
normally occur after ‘death’, as Ibn 6Arab; points out—is what the
Knower bequeathes through His divine names. This knowledge, he says,
signifies that God can actualize the beginning (yaf6alu l-ibtid:8) of what
He has not fulfilled through human agency.100
In a noetic (light) continuum, not to be confused with numerical or
geometrical infinity, both knower and known are similarly conjoined at
the root of the very existentiation that renders them distinct.101 In this
manner, man is God’s instrument and acts on his own behalf simultan-
eously. A true Akbar;, 2mol; develops the logocentric framework as the
Book writ large, the Qur8:n as the prototypal act of praise (tasb;A).102
Cast as a book, this act extols God through the names by which the one
praising ‘arrives’ at his object of praise in the first place. Similarly to
manifestation from the hidden, divine speech or revelation (waAy)
implies the further technical (is3il:A;) sense of an originating event
indissociably linked to the time of ‘request’, whether for a revelation or
an unveiling.
By ‘technical’ Amol; does not mean contrived, though. Nevertheless,
this technical lexicon is precisely what demarcates the mystics and
100
For this to hold, names and atttributes must at some point be exchanged in
the noetic continuum; hence the concept of badal (substitution).
101
Ibn 6Arab; renders the elements in this dialectic as two personifications (ibid,
Fut<A:t, i.179, 185).
102
This is in keeping with Ibn 6Arab;, Q<naw; and others, for whom the
utterance of divine praise was another name for creation. (Cf. Ibn 6Arab;,
Fut<A:t, iii.324.)
philosophers from the ideological militancy that began to flock around
Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328). Ibn Taymiyya, the irrepressible sceptical
fideist, instead regarded the plain mind (Bar;A al-6aql) interpreting the
plain meanings of the Qur8:nic text as the only path to felicity. He
rejected the mystics and philosophers because the ‘technical’ (amr
iB3il:A;) nature of their discourse, which he claimed was in breach of the
pristine comprehension he attributed to the Salaf, intruded into ‘matters
of the spirit’, and confounded the common man.103 In short, he
connected what he regarded as the pristine religion of the forefathers to
plain reason on the grounds that they are consistent with each other and
with the Qur8:n and refractory to later and foreign additions. His
remedy for the world’s ills was adherence to the Salafiyya and the ‘plain
intellect’, which curiously enough is tantamount to thinking without
roots, references, history or any particular structure. It sounds oddly
close to any run-of-the-mill strain of modern positivism.
The point is that the plain mind bears no essential relation to the
articulation of life beyond surface meanings made to conform to ‘public’
pronouncements about someone’s official ‘truth’. Scripture then becomes
but a ream of declarations timelessly indifferent to either the root (aBl) or
the consequence (nat;ja, athar), the same ‘timelessness’ that the essayists
of Orientalism have propagated about Islam. Islamic tradition took the
life of living beings not just as an observable phenomenon, but as the
possibility of fulfilment in the Afterlife, the ‘true life’ opened up by the
intellect (6aql). Whereas the life of the intellect, by which it becomes
‘evident’ to itself, finds its opposite only in death by separation, the plain
intellect’s life has eternally to dictate opinions it mistakes for knowledge.
Such petty authoritarianism has stood Ibn Taymiyya in good stead with
rootless, profoundly atomized societies, be they of the Wahh:b; or
‘Western’ brand. Sadly, recent history seems to have proven Ibn
Taymiyya’s ‘plainness’ to have been an empty vessel now filled to the
brim.
EXISTENCE, NOTHING AND THE TRIPLICITY

OF THE BALANCE
Life meets its opposite in death when it no longer finds its origin in the
divine root, the existentiating source of every being. Something similar
may be said about existence; but again, absolute existence tolerates no
103
Ibn Taymiyya, K. al-Ra@@ 6al: al-mantiqiyy;n (Beirut: D:r al-Ma6rifa,
n.d.), 177.
‘other’ either as a contrary (@i@@) or a likeness (mithl).104 This is because
‘what is not God’ is not the contrary of ‘what is God’ or requires
anything like the Judaic ‘thou’ of recent vintage. Still, as we saw,
‘opposition’ (taq:bul, examined below) plays an essential part in the
manifestation thanks to a submeaning allowing for the articulation of
existentiation as a movement from a hidden source.
If it is true that time is the measure of movement (Aaraka), and space is
inextricably linked to time (as M;r D:m:d and 4adr: forcefully argue),
should one then construe the act of creation ex nihilo, from which our
own cognizance of ‘existence’ cannot rightly be disentangled, through
words like ‘before’ and ‘begin’, which would impose a time sequence for
the effusion of the one to the many?105 Plato raised this complication in
the Timaeus with his explanation of the world’s beginning. Literal
interpretations are not the most fecund way to think about origins,
however, because something of the hidden (i.e., a command or factor;
Ar., amr) has still to manifest itself behind a veil of hiddenness for the
manifestation to ‘begin’, in the first instance, and for ‘creation’ to come
forth, in the second. The efficient cause governs the process as a whole in
this manner from beginning to end. Furthermore, this holds as long as it
persists as a single cause, qua manifesting root, whereby the process itself
is one effect—since from the one there is only the one, not the
multiplicity.
This situation helps explain why M;r D:m:d (d. 1630) refers the
question raised by Ibn S;n: in al-Shif:8, about whether the world is
eternal or created from nothing, to a threefold vessel of the being of time
with respect to the act of creation.
1. Being in time (zam:n taken sequentially, where ‘first’ is distinct from the
‘last’.
2. Being with time (dahr belongs to the permanent things qua permanent things
that see everything in zam:n).
3. Permanent being with permanent (sarmad, the highest level encompassing all
other times).106
104
4adr:, Asf:r, i.232 ff.
105
In his debate with Ab< E:tim al-R:z;, Ab< Bakr al-R:z; proposed his
allegory of the fall of the soul as a solution. Modern cosmologists approach the
riddle very differently and their explanatory theories function for a fundamen-
tally different purpose than in philosophy.
106
B:qir al-D:m:d al-Eusayn (or M;r D:m:d), K. al-Qabas:t (ed.
M. Mohaghegh; Tehran: Mu8assasa-i Intish:r:t-i va Ch:p-i D:nishg:h-i,
Tehran, 1998), 3–8.
Each of these ‘times’ is enclosed by the one ‘above’ it, but the whole of
creation cannot be preceded by a nothing (since ‘everything created thing
has a cause’), which is true only during the manufacture of physical
objects. The sheer nothing (al-6adam al-Bar;A) cannot be said to exist
‘before’ sheer existence (Bar;A al-wuj<d), so the nothing must precede the
whole of creation in a special nontemporal time, albeit one the intellect
finds hard to grasp, as M;r D:m:d remarks.107
4adr: considers the movement measured by weighing—existentiation—
based on a submeaning of ‘opposition’,108 because only the coming-to-be
can express opposition, not pure essence or existence, which remain
incomparable. Otherwise everything would cancel itself out on the
‘nothing’. Shaykh AAmad AAs:8; (d. 1826) took 4adr: to task for
dismissing nonexistence as having no positive existence at all.109 Without
taking up the issue, let us just say that 6adam can be as trivial as a logical
equivalence with some unknown, the unknowable, what is merely
assumed and invisible in a given inquiry, or any other hidden factor
(amr)—which are simply questions of relevancy. To 4adr:, ‘natural
movement’ illustrates the sheer positivity of the existant qua existant,
where nonexistence stands for the privation in an act of existing moving
from potential to actualized existence.110 Unlike in modern positivism or
Ibn Taymiyya’s medieval version of the positiveness of what is plain to the
mind, the ‘positivity’ of the existents stems from the singular existence
they receive from the exclusive hiddenness of the absolute. God knows
because the sarmad, the highest time scale, properly belongs to His unique
and exclusive divine hiddenness, which does not admit the ‘sheer nothing’.
Thus, singularity is conferred on the existents and no two things are the
same, which agrees perfectly with the claim that existence can have no
rival or contrary.
Ibn 6Arab;’s elucidation of the single acting, seeing, hearing life of the
existentiating existence testifies to the role of ‘the form of unevenness’ in
this process—that is, the singularity of the form of the fard, on the idea
that the first uneven or odd number is three, not one. This agrees with the
rule that only the one can issue from the one, well above the many, even
if no amount of mental reflection can completely crowd out the many,
107
Ibid, 7.
108
4adr:, Asf:r, iii.232 ff. Cf. YaAy: Suhraward;, ‘K. al-Mash:ri6 wa-l-
mu3:raA:t’ in Oeuvres philosophiques et mystiques [Majm<6a-i muBannaf:t-i
Shaykh Ishr:q] (ed. and introd. Henry Corbin; Paris: Maisonneuve; Académie
Impériale Iranienne de Philosophie, 1976), i.317.
109
Christian Jambet, L’Acte d’être. La philosophie de la révélation chez Mollâ
Sadrâ (Paris: Fayard, 2002), 186 ff.
110
Ibid.
even here. But if we assume that unevenness (or oddness) expresses in
some manner the productive inclusiveness of unique existence, as Ibn
6Arab; certainly does, does this not taint existence with the relationality
of unevenness, since there is no odd number without an even? True,
‘evenness’ is descriptive of two items in a state of evenness. But Ibn 6Arab;
insisted that between any two opposing things weighed lies a triplicity,111
because ‘relation’ need not impugn existence when it is of the nature of
root and branch. Weighing is itself a ‘relational’ concept, but it is
semantically associated to 6adl (justice) and aptly represented by a
balance with two scales. That the opposite of justice is injustice suggests
an ‘unjust’ state of inequality in need of redress through the balance.
Weighing (wazn) is this act of rectification, where rendering justice
(i6tid:l) consists in rectifying two scales for a determination of the mass
of only one of the pair for a new operational outcome. Existence confers
uniqueness on all its existentiations in this way, because weighing is not a
balancing act for the sake of a static cosmic ‘harmony’. The primary
purpose of weighing is to produce a specific outcome (logically, a
consequence), if only a definitive one, that would otherwise stand for the
measure of the physical object’s mass—equal to the existence conferred
upon the reality of the thing. This is the goal of existentiation in a willed
process for a new creation.
This process is called triplicity (tathl;th), which has been the hallmark
of mystical philosophy at least since the early fal:sifa. M;r D:m:d even
begins his K. al-Qabas:t with an analysis of the triplicity of time, the
tripartite division according to being, as we saw above. Tathl;th
considers the preponderance of one side or another in the balance in
order to carry their relative inequality forward as a single existentiation.
According to Ibn 6Arab;, fard stands at the origin of becoming.112 As M;r
D:m:d notes, tathl;th, the first uneven number ‘3’, is called by the
philosophers ibd:6 (literally, ‘new creation’), which he understoods more
or less as the presencing (ta8y;s) of ‘is’ (ays) after ‘is not’ (laysa)—in short,
existentiation.113 Weighing discloses existence in its articulations as a
‘becoming’ as more or less formalized principle of this emergence,
111
See Ibn 6Arab;, Fut<A:t, iii.6.
112
Cf. ibid, ii.519.
113
M;r D:m:d, K. al-Qabas:t, 3. Sabzav:r; calls tathl;th (triplicity) ‘shirk’, but
only in reference to a vulgarized version of the Christian Holy Trinity: Sabzav:r;,
SharA al-ManC<ma f; al-man3iq wa-l-Aikam, (eds. Easanz:da al-2muli, Mas6<d
Falib;; Tehran: Nashr-i N:b, [? 1995] ii.810–11). In his commentary on Ibn
Arab;‘s FuB<B, Af;f; (132–3) wrongly supposed this to be Ibn 6Arab;’s sense.
though as a concept triplicity has untold applications.114 In FuB<B al-
Aikam, Ibn 6Arab; codifies it thus:
Know, may God grant you success, that the [Creative] Command in itself is based
on oddness [al-fardiyya], to which belongs triplicity, and goes from three
upward. . . The world is created according to this divine presence [al-Aa@ra al-
il:hiyya]. For He says, ‘Our Word (qawlun:) to a thing, if We will it, is that We
say to it (an naq<la lahu) ‘Be’ (kun),115 and it is’ [Q. 16. 4]. This is the essence of
a will and a word. Were it not for this essence and its will, which is the relation of
‘orientation through particularization’ to the bringing-into-being of something
(nisbat al-tawajjuh bi-l-takhB;B li-takw;n amr m:) and were it not thence for His
Word ‘Be’ to that thing upon that orientation, that thing would not be.
Thereupon, the triple unevenness also exteriorizes (Caharat) in that thing. . .
[being], its thingness (shay8iyyatuhu) [i.e., qua exteriorly structured sense],
hearing [as an act of receiving] and compliance (imtith:luhu) with [God’s]
Command to bring the thing into being with existentiation. Therefore, three lies
opposite three. [The thing’s] permanent essence (dh:tuhu al-th:bita) in a state of
nothingness116 [occurs] upon weighing of the essence of what existentiates it. It is
hearing upon weighing of the will of its existentiator and its reception in
compliance with what bringing-into-being was commanded [of the thing] in the
weighing of His Word ‘Be’. . . God has established bringing-into-being for the
thing itself, not for God. What is God’s in it is His Command, specifically117. . .
which relates the bringing-into-being to the selfsame thing, based on God’s
Command, and in His Word is He the Truthful (al-4:diq)!118
114
Letter-coded, it looks something like what Ibn 6Arab; writes in Fut<A:t,
ii.157. 2mul; (J:mi6 al-asr:r wa manba6 al-anw:r, 58–9) employs praise and the
divine names as devices for triplicity and ‘creation’, besides ‘water’ and ‘absolute
water’, to depict life.
115
Kun, the imperative form of k:na (to be).
116
Nothingness or absence because the permanent essence would then be
unrealized.
117
Here, Ibn 6Arab; maintains the singular form, ‘Word’, underscoring the
singularity and unity of the Command. As Eric Ormsby notes (Between Reason
and Revelation, 9), ‘The imperative mode in grammar denotes a simple
command (amr), but it also corresponds to the First Intellect in the celestial
hierarchy and so foreshadows God’s own command’.
118
Ibn 6Arab;, FuB<B al-Aikam, ii.115–16. ‘Al-4:diq’ suggests an epistemic
‘resolution’ akin to Leibniz’s understanding of certainty rooted in an identity. See
Martin Heidegger, The Metaphycial Foundations of Logic (transl. Michael
Heim; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1st Midland edn., 1992).
For illustration, he gives the example of the master who commands the
servant, ‘Rise [qum]’, as did Fan:r; with respect to the commanding
height of the perceiver. Qum has the same root as iq:ma and maq:m,
which are connected with weighing. The command (amr) belongs to
the master, the action to the servant. In other words, ‘Nothing in the
servant’s rising will equal the former’s command for him to rise; the
rising belongs to the servant, not the master. The root of the bringing-
into-being rises on the pattern of triplicity; that is, from the three
between the two scales—the scale of God and that of creation.119
For support, he invokes the paradoxical exteriorization of the ‘one’ (qua
essence) in the rather stultifying terms of numbers to clarify his meaning.
Each number is accompanied by an exteriorization, he says, because the
essences (a6y:n) of two, three, four and on to infinity are said to be
exteriorized through the exteriorization of the (essence) one.120 This, he
argues, is the aim of their connection, which allows for the ‘thing’
(al-shay8)—i.e., ‘one’ qua object of inquiry—to be what is itself
manifested. For every pair of interlocutors (here God and His
Messenger), the one vanishes (gh:ba) in the other and one finds only
the one, or the Messenger of God. He regards this as the endpoint of the
connection (gh:yat al-wuBla) called ‘unity’ (ittiA:d) by which the two is
itself a one. Beginning and end share in this manner the same reality and
order of governance. Nothing is added existentially, as would be the case
in an identity like ‘Zayd is the selfsame 6Umar’. On the contrary, the
essence of the instantiations of this human species is that of humanity
(al-ins:niyya); Zayd remains what he is in himself (huwa huwa) in
respect of humanness (al-ins:niyya), not personhood (al-shakhBiyya).
There is no question of either an identity of two individuals or
isomorphism. The sympathy (in6i3:f) of ‘one’ for itself at the level
(martaba) of ‘two’ is the selfsame exteriorization of two and, thence,
equivalent to the selfsame one, and so on for the rest of the infinite series
of numbers.121 Conceiving of or thinking of oneness (of God) by any
other means would achieve only the opposite of oneness, leaving two
irreducible elements—e.g., the interlocutors—not the ‘one’. It may sound
strange to make this long-winded argument just to prove a ridiculously
small point: the near-tautology by which we understand only too well
119
Ibn 6Arab;, FuB<B al-Aikam, ii.116. Ibid, 116. Just below, Ibn 6Arab; converts
the principle of triplicity into a logical proof for the statement ‘Everything
created has a cause’ (thus confirming the role of formal logic as a type of m;z:n,
not as its replacement). On the relation between triplicity and logical proof, see
ibid, 116–17.
120
Ibid, 519.
121
Ibid.
that the thing is what it is (manifested). Though not quite A = A, this in
the rough is what reason strives but cannot attain through formal
thinking or subterfuge. Unraveling the identity, one loses sight of ‘one’ of
the roots as fard (odd), even as it continues to permeate and confer
oddness upon every number.
For Jand;, an influential commentator on the FuB<B who epitomized
the creative spirit awakened by the Qur8:nic scripture, fardiyya remains
the unequivocal reason for existentiation and bringing-to-being (sababan
li-l-;j:d wa-l-takw;n).122 In this sense, he says, tathl;th properly belongs
to the divine presence ‘fardiyya’ and is the very reason that the ‘door of
the consequent opens up’ at the very root of bringing-into-being.123 This
‘secret’, he says, permeates all the levels of existentiation, among which
he includes the existentiation of ‘conceptual proofs’ (;j:d al-adilla al-
ma6nawiyya).124 To others who followed in the footsteps of Ibn 6Arab;
like Fan:r; (the first to assume the Ottoman title of Shaykh al-Isl:m) this
‘secret’ points to the temporality of the agency. It seems almost
inconceivable that the ‘vicar’ of such agency should amount to a
cultured dilettante with no existential interests.
In a discussion on the cyclical paradigm of the wal:ya, Fan:r;
incorporates this broader ‘interest’ into what he called the ‘consonance
by consequences’ (nat:8ij al-tawf;q). He views the master function of
human agency emerging through the prism of submission to God (al-
waC:8if al-isl:miyya) as im:m 6:lam al-shah:da (whose preeminence in
isl:m, or the submission to God, symbolizes the ‘beginning of conson-
ance by consequences’), im:m 6:lam al-jabar<t wa-l-malak<t (preeminent
in ;m:n, or faith, which is the middle of the consonance), al-qu3b al-j:mi6
(preeminent in the seeing and doing of the good, the very purpose of
consonance), etc.125 Though worth noting, given Fan:r;’s importance in
the transition to the Ottoman period, this area is too complex to examine
here.126 To Ibn 6Arab; and his numerous followers such cyclical time
(zam:n, not to be confused with dahr) ‘alerts to the existence of the
122
Jand;, SharA FuB<B al-Aikam, 449.
123
Ibid, 446–7. Kal:b:dh; based many of his technical definitions on al-Eall:j,
who refers muq:bal:t to ‘related opposites’. See Ab< Bakr MuAammad b. IsA:q
Kal:b:dh;, al-Tacrruf li-madhhab ahl al-taBawwuf (ed. AAmad Shams al-D;n;
Beirut: D:r al-Kutub al-cIlmiyya, 1413/1993); and ‘al-Eall:d j ’, EI2).
124
Jand;, SharA FuB<B al-Aikam, 447.
125
Fan:r;, MiBb:A al-uns, 148–9.
126
On man and origin, see ibid, 561ff. The law of identity is not foreign to
wal:ya as an articulation of process, about which Fan:r; had much to say. The
cycles of wal:ya close in one sense but open for a new creation; ‘repetition’ is not
a parody of the previous cycle, as beginnings and conlusions are true even in a
continuum.
Balance’ and flows from the letters in the balance upon the mention of
‘zam:n’ (earthly time).127 There is no question that this balance has
nothing to do with idle interests as these are not trivial but millennial
issues. M;r D:m:d forthrightly states that ‘the totality of order of the
whole is the personhood of the temple of the Perfect Man [shakhBiyyat
haykal al-ins:n al-k:mil]’.128 He takes care to uphold, not an attitude of
passive curiosity toward the world, as one might impute to a ‘person’,
but the personhood of creative agency. Personhood (shakhBiyya) on the
scale conceived in and since the medieval period would have been
meaningless without agency in the coming-to-be; more specifically, the
personifications of ‘humanity’ within their proper spatiotemporal
dimensions, whatever they may be.
There are many ways to address this and the eschatological matter of
the resurrection with which it is intimately connected.129 Rather than
deal with this complicated topic here, however, let us just mention some
generalities offered by Fan:r; about consonance (al-tawf;q, philosoph-
ically synonymous with Q<naw;’s mun:saba) of the consequence, which
he predicates upon the consummation of knowledge (taAB;l al-6ilm) based
on God, creation, the law and the path of salvation.130 As the
‘consequence’, authorization (or deputation) (antaja al-in:ba) confirms
a return of the exterior from discord and transgression by way of the
hidden: from without God toward God. The return, he says, secures the
health of the consonance, though health may be determined also for
thinking. The consequence of retirement (khalwa, or seclusion, refers
here to the necessary separation of the distraction of the senses from
rooted intellection) is the thought or concept (al-fikra) declared upon
attainment of all that necessitates the consummation. The consequence
of thinking (al-fikr) is the memory of what was requested in the first
place in a new guise, and so on.131
MULL2 4ADR2 ON THE NATURE OF WEIGHING
We are now in a better position to examine the philosophical principles

of m;z:n as they stood at the dawn of the modern era, 4adr:’s time.
127
On existence and time, see Ibn 6Arab;, Fut<A:3, i.146. Time is the
compounding factor upon which M;r D:m:d expatiated.
128
M;r D:m:d, al-Qabas:t, 425.
129
Cf. 4adr:’s arguments for Resurrection in body and soul in al-Shaw:hid al-
rub<biyya, 342–405.
130
131
See also Sabzav:r;’s commentary in 4adr:’s al-Shaw:hid al-rub<biyya, 704.
In al-Shif:8: al-Il:hiyy:t, the most Peripatetic of his works, Ibn S;n:
had set the terms by devoting a chapter on the opposition (taq:bul) of the
one and the many. A necessary condition for weighing, ‘opposition’
included the ‘opposition of contrareity’ (taq:bul al- ta@:dd).132 The one
and the many, he said, were not contraries and their only opposition had
to do with measurement: oneness (al-waAda) qua unit of measurement
(miky:l) is opposed to the multiplicity (al-kathra) as the measured
(mukayyal).133 Moreover, the oneness of a thing was not the same as
being a unit of measurement (miky:l).134 Oneness gave rise to the many
(muqawwima li-l-kathra) and was both a unit of measurement and a
cause (6illa), just as the unit of everything (w:Aid kull shay8) could be a
unit of measurement, and its units of measures are of its genus.135 With
respect to length the one (al-w:Aid) was itself a length; for utterances it
was an utterance and for letters a letter.
In his commentary on this passage, 4adr: attempts an objective,
empirically based view of the ‘reality of the balance and proportion’
(Aaq;qat al-m;z:n wa-l-miqy:s). In the first instance, ‘measurability’ for
the balance does not require that the root essence be taken in its absolute
hiddenness. Measuring requires an affinity with or correspondence to the
measurable things. It may be based on proportions, ratios and so on,
depending on the discipline and field—e.g., sound in musicology. Hence,
the ‘reality of the m;z:n’, what it is supposed to do in Peripatetic terms, is
to give cognizance of the state (A:l) of what is of the same genus in every
respect—by way of quantities and qualities, relations and ascriptions
(subjunctions or filiations, i@:f:t), or faculties and habits (malak:t).136
But this can be epistemically true of virtually everything that is said to be
created. ‘There is no sensed or intellected thing but that the one and the
many are assumed about it from its genus,’ he confirms, ‘if only as a
mental consideration and presupposition (al-far@ wa-l-i6tib:r)’.137 In this
primary sense, it is the one and many that are being weighed, exactly as
Ibn S;n: taught. ‘Every universal [founding] principle (q:6ida kulliyya) is
132
Ibn S;n:, al-Shif:8: al-Il:hiyy:t (eds. al-Abb Qanaw:t;, Sa6;d Z:yid; Cairo:
al-Hay8a al-2mma l;-Shu8<n al-Ma3:bi8 al-Amiriyya, 1960), i.126.
133
Ibid, i.130. Likewise, Ibn 6Arab; distinguished aAadiyyat al-6ayn and
aAadiyyat al-kathra. (Cf. discussion of this in Hermann Landolt, ‘Der
Briefwechsel zwischen K:š:n; und Simn:n; über WaAdat al-Wuğ<d’, Der
Islam, 50/1 (1973), 29–81, at 49.
134
Ibn S;n:, al-Il:h;yy:t, i.126.
135
Ibid, i.130.
136
4adr:, SharA va ta6l;q:t-i Il:hiyy:t-i Shif:8 (Freiburg a.N: Al-Kamel Verlag,
2011), 342, 335.
137
Cf. Q<naw;, Mift:A al-ghayb, 18.
correctly said to be a balance and measure (miky:l),’ he declares, ‘by
virtue of the acquaintance with the state of the graduated particularities
beneath it (li-ta6arruf A:l al-juz8;y:t al-mundarija taAtah:)’.138 Logic, a
type of m;z:n, finds its rightful place because it can be said to be ‘a
measure for mental concepts and that by which they are weighed and
their truth or falsehood understood, [together with] what is strong in
them, like demonstration (al-burh:n), or weak, like rhetoric’.139 But for
the Perfect Man this universality would still be vacuous or incomplete.
Despite the Peripatetic jargon, his point has ultimately to do with
consonance and the new way of reasoning. This is not easy to explain.
Ibn S;n: writes,
Since the unit of measurement is that according to which what is measured is
known, then knowledge and sensation count as the measures of things and,
therefore, [things] are known by them. Hence, a certain person said, ‘Man
measures all things’ because [man] has knowledge and sensation and with [these]
two he apprehends all things. It is more fitting, however, that knowledge and
sensation be measured by what is known and sensed, and that [the latter] be the
basis [of knowledge] for him; although it may happen also that the the unit of
measurement be measured by the thing measured. Likewise, it is possible to
imagine the state (A:l) of opposition between the one and the many.140
Q<naw;, for his part, equilibrates the Perfect Man’s relation with each
divine name geometrically with a circle, the centre of which lies
equidistant from every point on the circumference of creation. He calls
the intermediary station of comprehensive union the ‘zenith of univer-
sality’ (nuq3at al-mus:mata al-kulliyya), the very centre of the circle that
comprehends all the levels of rectification or equilibrium, or ictid:l:t—
namely, the incorporeal, spiritual, imaginal, sensory instruments (or
preparations).141 Put differently, the elusive ‘realities of things’ are
perceivable only in respect of their totality and comprehensiveness
through one’s own totality and comprehensiveness, assuming as 4adr:
pointed out above, that perception is based on a relation of consonance,
rather than either correspondence or pure identity. 4adr: extracts two
138
4adr:, SharA va-ta6l;q:t-i Il:hiyy:t-i Shif:8, 342.
139
Another m;z:n, grammar, is said to be the balance with which the modality
of inflection and syntax (kayfiyyat al-i6r:b wa-l-bin:8) are known; while prosody
is ‘the balance for weighing the states of poems [aAw:l al-ash6:r] and rhymed
prose qua the magnitudes and letters of their words’ (ibid).
140
Ibn S;n:, al-Il:h;y:t, i.132.
141
Q<naw;, I6j:z al-bay:n (Hyderabad, Deccan: Ma3ba6at Majlis D:8irat al-
Ma6:rif al-6Uthm:niyya, 2nd edn., 1368/1949), 44. See Shaker, Thinking in the
Language of Reality, 182.
‘undeniable’ considerations from Ibn S;n:’s statement that ‘Man meas-
ures every thing’, a noetic and an ontic one.142 He stipulates that: 1) Man
has the faculties to perceive the objects of sense by sense and the objects
by intellection through knowledge, respectively; and 2) Man is the
Microcosm (al-6:lam al-Bagh;r) that contains everything modeled on and
corresponding to it (mu3:biq lahu).143 Thus, Man perceives the
intelligibles with his intellect; the object of estimation with his estimative
faculty (bi-wahmihi al-mawh<m:t); the objects of imagination with his
imaginative faculty; what is heard with his hearing; and what is seen with
his sight.144 He follows Ibn S;n: also in likening ‘knowledge’ (al-6ilm)
and sensory perception (al-Aiss) themselves explicitly to the balances and
measures of the objects of knowledge and of sensory perception. This, he
says, is because their ‘goal’ is the form that corresponds to the external
thing.145 This way experience and sensory perception play their
operational role within the epistemic boundaries of correspondence
theory, which has its own m;z:n.
He is able to elaborate the relation called ‘opposition’ (al-muq:bala),
with which Ibn S;n: qualified the weighing of one and the many, because
perception is not self-contained or restricted mental correspondence, but
open. This means that whether the form of a thing more properly belongs
to what is sensed or to what is intellected, it will remain imperceptible to
the senses as long as it figures in ‘that by which the external things of its
genus are known’.146 It has to be known through the essence (bi-l-dh:t),
not through the sensory perception or some other organ of man, a fitting
reason to call it a balance. From this flow several implications for the
concept of Man as the one ‘who measures all things’, keeping in mind the
two considerations above. One is that if, as agreed, what is known and
what is sensed can measure knowledge and sensation, respectively, then
they constitute the real root (aBl), which holds true even if—or because—
it so happens that the unit of measure (al-miky:l) is itself measurable
(al-mak;l),147 as Ibn S;n: pointed out.148
142
Ibn S;n: uses the active form ‘mukayyil’, whereas the ancient version of the
maxim seems to ‘pacify’ the action. See translator’s note in Avicenna: The
Metaphysics of The Healing (ed. and transl. Michael E. Marmura; Provo, UT:
Brigham Young University Press, 2004), 395, n. 17.
143
4adr:, SharA va ta6l;q:t-i Il:hiyy:t-i Shif:8, 342–3.
144
Ibid, 343.
145
Ibid, 342.
146
Ibid.
147
Or measured, mukayyal.
148
4adr:, SharA va ta6l;q:t-i Il:hiyy:t-i Shif:8, 343.
The permanent existence of the things known and sensed by
perception in themselves (wuj<dan th:bitan f; anfusih:), to which he
then turns, makes the underlying ontic orientation as permanent a
structural feature as the realities. The realities hold the root of
permanence and confirmation whereby knowledge and sensory percep-
tion are subordinate, being posterior to the root or principal (t:bi6:n
lahu), as we saw.149 His repeated use of terms drawn from Arabic
linguistics illustrates the structural sense in which man’s knowing and
sensing are to be taken as a root. ‘Root’ in the act of weighing signifies,
he says, that the externally concrete things (al-ashy:8 al-kh:rija) are the
selfsame ‘balances’ by which we gain cognizance in the sciences and
perceptions, where the unit of measure is known through what is
measured. Here, the perceptual forms are the first to occur to man, who
becomes cognizant of things unknown and accedes to them by means of
what noetic or sensory forms he comes to possess. With the underlying
order of priority in perception nothing changes in the state of man with
regard to this initial fact, thanks to which knowledge and sensation
remain dependent (‘subordinate’) on the root as one element of a
sentence is dependent on the other.
Lastly, he transposes the finality of man’s state or A:l onto a process of
perfection (kam:l) governed by the ‘greater and less than’, given that
perception is based on a relation of consonance, not mere correspond-
ence.150 On this matter, Q<naw;151 holds that if not for our natural
limitations human intellection would go on endlessly as befits the ‘perfect
epitome’, in reference to the Perfect Man.152 This is why affirming
attributes requires ‘encompassment’, the limiting condition for the
exteriorization of any ascription to a thing. Nothing in the ascription
occurs outside this encompassment, which is no doubt safeguarded by
the exclusivity of existence. It is this ‘perfectional containment and
encompassment’, by which God manifests Himself in the ‘general
existential and perfect form’, that constitutes the most perfect ‘balance’,
‘the most complete, inclusive and broad locus of exteriorization’ (al-
m;z:n al-atamm wa-l-maChar al-akmal al-ashmal al-a6amm). Given
Q<naw;’s earlier reflections about man’s incapacity to articulate (know)
what ultimately lay beyond measure, including God, this final Balance
marks the most complete locus of exteriorization in that sense where it
corresponds to the general existential and perfect form, where ‘form’
149
Ibid.
150
4adr:, SharA va-ta6l;q:t-i Il:hiyy:t-i Shif:8, 343.
151
In The Triumph of Mercy, Mohammed Rustom finally identifies some key
aspects of how 4adr:’s and Q<naw;’s works are textually related.
152
Q<naw;, I6j:z al-bay:n, 44.
(B<ra) signifies the prior articulation of the divine word.153 At their
origin, knowing and existing are not dichotomous but joined.
THE EXISTENTIAL RULE OF OPPOSITION
Q<naw; and 4adr: associate the ‘opposition’ of the one and the many,
the root and the branch, with the act (fi6l) of perception (idr:k) for good
reason. Philosophers are not always clear about how knowledge and
existence are related. With the articulated language the perspective
changes, because here Fan:r;’s ‘perceiver’ cannot simply be dissected into
a physical phenomenon that combines perceiver, perception and
perceived. The grammarians must do this, but these are also the terms
that define knowledge. Still, 4adr: takes the literal meaning normally
attached to perception (idr:k) as the primary, ‘linguistic reality’. One
result is that the acts of knowing and existing are no longer the simple
expression of the laws of logical identity and noncontradiction according
to which they can be analysed.
They are, above all, the single act that constitutes their origin and
which, true, also expresses what we ultimately must assume but never
fully witnesss as their identity in the divine essence. As noted above,
idr:k can mean reaching or arriving; Lis:n al-6arab mentions dark as the
‘attaining of a thing’ (al-wuB<l il: al-shay8) or ‘reaching it’ (luA<q). None
of these terms is far from wajada—finding or existing.154 The former,
anyway, is the primary Arabic signification adopted by 4adr:, who
describes idr:k as ‘meeting’ (al-liq:8) and ‘attaining’ (al-wuB<l). For
example, when the intellectual power ‘reaches the quiddity of the object
intellected and obtains it’ and is said to be a noetic attainment for it (al-
idr:k al-6ilm;), having reached something.155 4adr: contends that what
the philosophers mean by idr:k here corresponds to this linguistic
meaning (al-ma6n: al-lughaw;), even if the ‘real meeting’ (al-liq:8 al-
Aaq;q;) is not corporeal. Reaching this or that table is linguistically real,
in his sense, even though the philosophers use the same expression
figuratively for the intellect’s union with what it intellects.156
For this to hold, the rule has to be that the two things in the ‘reaching’,
can still be ‘opposites’ by accident if they are joined from the source. Like
existence with respect to nothingness (or nonexistence), the one and the
153
Shaker, Thinking in the Language of Reality, 183.
154
Lis:n al-6arab, ‘Idr:k’, x.419.
155
4adr:, Asf:r, i.854.
156
Ibid.
many exhibit opposition only by way of accident, not by substance. This
opposition is accidental only because their accidents cannot be joined,
says 4adr: (SharA va ta6l;q:t-i Il:hiyy:t-i Shif:8, 335). He describes this
relation as ‘measurability’ (al-mak;liyya) and ‘being the unit of measure’
(al-miky:liyya), and alternatively, ‘causativeness’ and ‘causedness’ (i.e.,
cause-and-effect) (ibid, 343). He assumes that in the root lies the origin
(mansha8) of the special opposition between oneness and multiplicity, so
long as that root subsists in a ‘continuous unicity’ (al-waAda
al-ittiB:liyya) and whatever lies opposite the one upon division
(ibid, 343–4). When a continuous ‘one’ (w:Aid muttaBil) is divided and
becomes a ‘many’ composed of ones, then two unicities result: the unicity
opposite this multiplicity and another (in another perspective) from
among the parts (units) of this multiplicity (ibid, 344). The fact that what
opposes unicity is multiplicity nullifies only what is not its unit of
measure, cause or part. Unicity opposes multiplicity insofar as it denotes
a unit of measure, whereas multiplicity denotes only the measurement
(al-mak;l) (ibid, 335). The fixedness of quiddity and concept (ma6n:)
does not allow the thing to be both ‘one and unit of measure’, or ‘many
and measurable’, since that would mean always intellecting the one as a
unit measure and intellecting the many in the same way in which the
measured is intellected. But unicity (waAda) or thing, inasmuch as it is
one, can be said to be a unit of measure (miky:l); and many (i.e., the
many things) can be said to be multiplicity insofar as it is measurable
(mak;la). Finally, when unicity is regarded as a cause (6illa) and
multiplicity the caused, their ‘opposition’ is then in respect of that
filiation or relationship (i@:fa) which is assigned to them.
These distinctions arise, not on account of any inherent duality in the
opposition of the one and the many, but because of the existential
opposition here taken as a relation between two noetic elements—
knower and known—where the ta@:yuf (ascription, filiation or
subjunction) of an accident occurs only by analogy with the ‘one’
(ibid, 344). Although logically no single thing can have two opposites,
any more than a single object of ascription (al-mu@:f al-w:Aid) can have
two ascribable definitions, 4adr: insists that an equidistant point stands
in opposition to the ‘greater and less than’, each instance of which
opposes both the other and the equidistant point or midpoint. He
interprets this in terms of anteriority, posteriority, and simultaneity
(withness/ coincidence; al-ma6iyya), conforming perfectly with the idea of
measurement. The artifice of the either/or dictates that nothing could lie
between one and two, two and three, or greater and lesser, on the
specious grounds that only one thing can oppose another, and that
therefore, there can be no question of an equidistant point between two
limits (ibid). Moreover, the point of equidistance or equivalence
(al-mus:w;) can have, in respect of the ascription, only one opposite that
is equivalent and one other opposite from the standpoint of nonexis-
tentiality, by which there is neither equidistance nor equivalence. The
greater and the lesser are graduated below thanks to the concomitance in
both. This, 4adr: opines, is the proper analogy (qiy:s)157 by which to
construe the lesser. The view that the relation of ascription (nisbat al-
ta@:yuf) cannot belong to a thing save by ‘one’ signifies not only that a
single thing can have no more than one opposite, but also that the
ascription may not vitiate the one (w:Aid) properly assigned to the
integral thing through the ascription, if indeed we are speaking of
the same essential thing after the ascription.158
4adr: construes the second ‘kind of opposition’159 in terms of fardiyya
(unevenness, oddness), just like Ibn 6Arab;, because fardiyya allows the
analogy to preserve the root in all its branchiation. Short of this, one
could not even be sure of remaining within the intended scope of the
inquiry. Under a rule of opposition a thing cannot be known by its
contrary under the aspect of ‘other’ and ‘difference’.160 Q<naw; infers
from this, with a slightly different angle, that the ‘one’ cannot be known
by the simple fact that it is one, nor can ‘multiplicity’ by the simple fact
that it is many,161 since even multiplicity possesses a ‘one’ that is proper
to it, just as the one has a relational multiplicity (kathra nisbiyya)
attached and specified by the one (tata6allauq wa-tata6ayyanu bi-h:),
exactly as we saw with 4adr:. The one and the many cannot rightly be
weighed either as the same thing or as contraries, because an intermedi-
ary position supplies the definitive feature—namely, Man.
For Man, who measures all things and is himself the measure,
consonance is the path to perfection by degrees. Short of consonance in
the becoming, the m;z:n would have no bearing on man. Just as Life is
m;z:n, so the Perfect Man (al-ins:n al-k:mil) is the m;z:n for all of
creation. This spiral of equivalences, as it were, works itself down to the
human beings with their plethora of madh:hib and standpoints. The
157
Underlying which is Q<naw;’s ‘permanent distinction’ between God and
what is other than God: I6j:z al-bay:n, 43 ff., and Shaker, Thinking in the
Language of Reality, 257–74.
158
4adr:, SharA va ta6l;q:t-i Il:hiyy:t-i Shif:8, 344.
159
4adr:, Maf:t;A al-ghayb (eds. MuAammad Khw:jaw;; Tehran: Mu3:la6:t va
TaAqiq:t Farhang;, 1984), 335.
160
See Q<naw;, Mift:A al-ghayb, 15–8.
161
Ibid, 18.
m;z:n sifts through this sprawling complexity too, relating one instan-
tiation to another.162
All told, 4adr: enlists three aspects of perfection: greater, lesser and
equal (equidistant, mus:w;). Given their relevance to the question of
existence, let us briefly describe them. Primarily and by essence (awwalan
wa-bi-l-dh:t), each has a single opposite under two aspects and two
opposites by ascription under a single aspect.163 On the one hand, the
‘greater than’ has an existential opposite (muq:bil wuj<d;) facing the
smaller that is ascribed; and on the other, a nonexistential opposite
(muq:bil 6adam;) facing nonexistentiality (muq:balat al-6adam), or the
‘what is not greater’ (al-l:-a6Cam) that is graduated (yandariju) under the
equidistant and the lesser, which in turn face the ‘greater’ in an
opposition that is not primary.164 Far from primary, their opposition is
due to something concomitant, in the manner of an accident instead of a
genus,165 and what is nonexistential is not a genus to anything perceived
or intellected by its essence.
All this is based on the principles of the balance, which should hold for
every thing that functions as the guiding balance, as we saw in
connection with perception in 4adr:’s Il:hiyy:t commentary. Although
4adr: and the entire philosophical tradition since Ibn S;n: have
demonstrated how the special sense of opposition above cannot be
taken in the restrictive sense of syllogistic logic, they nevertheless
presuppose the laws of identity and noncontradiction. Sabzav:r; expands
on their ‘metaphyical foundations’166 in a discussion on man’s relation to
the world, on the one hand, and to God, on the other. ‘Relation’ (nisba)
here is cast as ‘mirror reflection’ (al-6aks), and—with roughly the same
purport—refers to man as the shadow of God.167 This, even though in a
perfect identity A is A, ne’er the twain shall meet, existentially speaking.
This is the paradox that has always dogged logic in its linguistic soil,
where no existential relation can be a mere equivalence or expressive
162
On the taxonomy of perspectives and discplines, Eric Ormsby points up the
‘contrastive approach’ as a governing principle in much of Ism:6;l; writing, for
example, where the concept of ahl al-taql;d is considered opposite to Aukam:-yi
d;n-i Aaqq. See his Between Reason and Revelation, 8–9, for the rest of his
discussion.
163
4adr:, SharA va ta6liq:3-i Il:hiyy:t-i Shif:8, 335.
164
Ibid, 344–5.
165
Ibid, 345.
166
The idea of ‘metaphyical foundations of logic’, plain to see in the case of
Islamic tradition, crystallized in my mind after I read Heidegger’s The
Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, which I feel provides valuable insight into
a shared tradition of philosophy.
167
Sabzav:r;’s commentary, 4adr:, al-Shaw:hid al-rub<biyya, 704.
even of a dialectic, as long as there is another factor or ‘command’ (amr)
emerging from the root, thanks to the ontic bias—and more basic still,
because no two things are alike in every respect.168
Sabzav:r; refers to the Qur8an: ‘And He placed the balance’ (Q. 55.7),
which he interprets as the lifting up of heaven (li-raf6 al-sam:8). ‘Lifting’
is obviously not unconnected to yaq<mu (i.e., raising to a station on the
balance), the ‘counterpart’ (al-muA:dh;) of creation; God is after all al-
Qayy<m. The existential m;z:n means nothing less than this compre-
hensive act of creation through God’s command. This command is not
fulfilled through a static but ceaselessly ‘moving’ relation of ‘opposition’
(in the form of an unfolding book). Fundamentally, both the dialecticity
of the opposition and the triplicity have to be true of any given ‘thing’,
the reality of which we investigate under the aspect of ‘coming to be’.
KNOWING THE REALITIES OF THINGS
According to 4adr:, intellected things or intelligibles (al-ma6q<l:t) are

distinguishable according to the specific request and the possibility of
acquisition and transformation (istiA:la). He stratifies the intelligibles
accordingly: 1) what no inquiry can attain or make manifest; 2) what is
impossible because of its difficulty or obscurity; and 3) what can be
attained in one respect and which is marked by transformation.169 All in
all, ‘things’ (um<r, here synonymous with ashy:8) are present (A:@ira)
either through actuality and necessity or potentiality and possibility.
Relative to the mind, they consist of two categories—entities interior to
the mind (f; l-dhihn) and those exterior to it (kh:rij al-dhihn). Anything
in concreto (mawj<dan f; l-6ayn) that recapitulates the world of bodies170
may be said to be noetically attainable in a specific sense but not in
another, just as the world of bodies is manifest and sensed but not hidden
and intellected’.171 Quoting the Qur8:n, 4adr: confirms that God shows
us things as they are. What we receive through our senses is not all that
can be perceived.172 Something else is required to act as the root pathway
from what is sensed (maAs<sihi) to what is intellected (ma6q<lihi),
168
To be intelligible, an utterance must display structured relations couched in
the root-and-branch of speech articulation.
169
4adr:, Maf:t;A al-ghayb, 300.
170
Ibn 6Arab; explains the multiple senses of 6:lam (world), a common Arabic
word (Fut<A:t, ii.231).
171
4adr:, Maf:t;A al-ghayb, 301.
172
Sensation is insufficient for seizing the reality of the thing in its fullness, as
Q<naw; and countless others assert.
barring induction, a weak inference, because the intellected secrets of a
thing are hidden deep inside the latter.
To 4adr:, this militates against the doubt concerning the possibility of
knowing the reality of a ‘thing’. That claim—based on Ibn S;n:’s terse
denial that man can know the ‘realities of things’ (Aaq:8iq al-ashy:8)—
inspired a key debate between Q<naw; and F<s;, thereby drawing the
philosophical debate to a focal point of interest. The challenge was to
determine how the realities are known, not if they can be known through
this or that of man’s limited faculties.173 His answer is that man can
discover them scientifically by way of conceptions (al-taBawwur:t) and
judgments (taBd;q:t) in the mind.174 Whereas definition (lit., limit, Aadd)
signals the conception of things, judgment points to demonstration
(burh:n), such that judgment is related to conception as existence is to
quiddity, form is to matter, and differentia are to genus.175 In logical
terms, a m;z:n investigates by way of both judgment and conception,
insofar as they procure knowledge of the unknown, indicating the
synthesizing power of the balance.177 Weighing, m;z:n’s primary
function, cannot however be collapsed back to a judgment, primary
concept or some other isolated element of reasoning (qiy:s).177
This is why Q<naw; considers the most urgent task of al-6ilm al-il:h;
(the ‘divine and noblest science on account of the nobility of its object,
namely, al-Eaqq), besides understanding its balances, to be establishing
its root determinations (@aw:bi3 uB<lihi) and canons (qaw:n;nihi), even
as this science cannot as such be subsumed under the precept of a balance
(l: yadkhulu taAt Aukm m;z:n), being vaster and greater than to be
determined by a law or be encompassed by a specified balance. Far from
having no balance at all, this lofty science requires persons of perfectly
realized cognizance to seek in it a balance for each divine level, name,
station, abode, state, time and instantiation (shakhB). Indeed, this is how
every kind of opening (or conquest) (fatA) and science of witness (or
experience), etc., is to be to distinguished, and how man can differentiate
173
Based explicitly on the premise that something may be real even in the
absence of a proof for it.
174
4adr:, Maf:t;A al-ghayb, 301. This is close to the formulation in Mift:A al-
ghayb, 13.
175
4adr:, Maf:t;A al-ghayb, 301–2. He concurs (300) with Q<naw;’s view that
the primary principles (mab:d;8), taken in the nature of bad;hiyy:t, consist of
conceptions and judgments (Q<naw;, Mift:A al-ghayb, 13) and have to accord
with man’s true nature.
177
Ibid, 302. 4adr: later expounds five kinds of m;z:n (which he goes on to
describe), ending with that of the Day of Resurrection, though we need not
discuss them here.
177
Ibid, 306.
divine or angelic knowledge from the satanic—i.e., truth from falsehood.
Al-6ilm al-il:h;, he argues, opens (yaftaAu) or unravels the whole
(al-jam;6) through a divine opening and the root antecedent (al-qidam
al-aBl;), according to what the (particularizing) Divine Concern
(al-mash;8a al-il:hiyya) requires and the Pen inscribes.178
This scheme links the m;z:n to the act of writing and inscription on the
basis of which Sabzav:r; compares a point raised by 4adr: to another
one closely associated with the mutakallim<n, who were especially
concerned with the moral consequences of their claims. Weighing, which
he likens to a call for an accounting of the good and bad deeds, refers to
the weighing of the ledgers and scrolls (al-daf:tir wa-BaA:8ifih:), which
in turn are possessed of an inscriptional existence (wuj<duh: al-katab;)
free of any weighing of the accidents.179 The books and scrolls of the
deeds are weighed according to the Book and Scroll of God, relative to
which they lie opposite (tuq:balu).180 Sabzav:r; declares maximally that
every ‘rational adult’ has a special m;z:n,181 and that the challenge,
therefore, is to develop a relational consonance for the transformation of
the ‘single man’ (presumably, the individual, community, society, nation
or any entity said to be human, ‘uneven’ and one). Unlike analogical
reason or formal logic, the m;z:n paves the way for tadb;l, the exchange
of one imitative attribute for another. Tadb;l is an important term with
linguistic origins that have not been adequately explored within the
philosophical tradition.
In the end, the object of the person weighing lives, and the balance
always begins and ends, with Man.
CONCLUSION
This study aimed at clarifying the long-tortured question about the place
of man (whom we claim to champion in our time), his future and past.
The m;z:n’s finality is Man himself—i.e., al-ins:n al-k:mil (Perfect Man)
‘who measures all things’ and is ‘the measure of all things’. But Man in
178
179
Commentary in 4adr:, al-Shaw:hid al-rub<biyya, 768–9. On the relation
between weighing, on the one hand, and accounting and vigilance, on the other,
see my introduction to Ghaz:l; on Vigilance and Self-Examination K. al-
Mur:qaba wa-l-muA:saba. Book XXXVIII of The Revival of the Religious
Sciences IAy:8 6ul<m al-d;n (transl. and notes by Anthony F. Shaker; Cambridge,
UK: Islamic Texts Society, forthcoming, 2015).
180
4adr:, al-Shaw:hid al-rub;biyya,769.
181
Ibid, 751.
this sense is not a parody of living humanity with the withering
indifference and anonymity of a stranger. This primary association of
wisdom with the question of man cannot be sundered if its proper scale is
truly that of human civilization, which in philosophy it adumbrates and
crystallizes in various ways. If it can guide all other inquiries thanks to
the regulative inclusiveness of the balance, then weighing clearly has to
do with more than just measuring, analysing, or even asking about and
explaining things.
Man is the measure of everything, furthermore, because existence has
no contrary and, therefore, no ‘other’. Man is not quite God’s ‘other’;
existence is exclusive and the ‘proof’, paradoxically, lies in its
existentiation (;j:d), which we have seen is ‘uneven’ in its singular
uniqueness and thus discloses itself on the pattern of a triplicity by way
of the active, creative unifying singularity transmitted by the root. It
articulates creation at once as a consequence and as the spoken Word
which lives. But who really speaks and lives? God, the Breath of the
Merciful or the Perfect Man? That too has to be answered.
At a primary level, balance has to do with the procession of the many
from the one, which it weighs one against the other. Yet, the door to this
thinking must have been left ajar for a long time, perhaps in
Mesopotamia, Egypt, or even by Cro-Magnon man. The point is that
m;z:n is not about some clever new secret device of either Muslim or
Neoplatonist vintage. It appears to have been posed and reposed again as
an existential question under incomparably different conditions. This
continual questioning suggests a conceptual space with more than one
actor or solution.182 It enabled the Islamic period, in any case, to define
philosophy and reformulate questions on existence and existentiation
under new historical conditions. Hopefully, this paper will help dispel the
view that antecedents (whether Neoplatonist or some other preceding
current) could amount to an explanation, let alone an explanation of the
galaxy of issues that fell definitively within the purview of medieval
civilization.
In the end, taught Fan:r;, what happens to each existent, its
destination, is the fruit of what its precept has exteriorized in it from
the divine names and the created realities (thamarat m: Cahara f;hi
Aikmuhu min al-asm:8 al-il:hiyya wa-l-Aaq:8iq al-kawniyya). While the
criterion (al-mi6y:r) for this remains the reality of the Perfect Man,183 the
182
Roshdi Rashed also expresses this view in his introduction to the historical
interpretation of the exact sciences, D’al-Khw:rizm; à Descartes.
183
mystery of life is that being who lives, because systematic philosophy has
determined fardiyya to be the essence of a singular creation the mode of
existence of which every individual personifies in time and space, rather
than as a truth abstracted and floating above or subsisting inside the
jealous privacy of a mind perched on Mt. Everest.
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Man, Existence and the Life Balance (Mizan) in Islamic Philosophy

Article in Journal of Islamic Studies · May 2015

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MAN, EXISTENCE AND THE LIFE BALANCE

KNOWLEDGE AND AUTHORITY IN

The last couple of decades have uncovered ever-deeper layers in Islam’s

KNOWLEDGE AND PRACTICE AS

4adr al-D;n al-Sh;r:z; (ca. 1571 or 2–1640), or Mull: 4adr:, expounded

SIMPLES AND COMPOSITES

In hindsight, theory and practice partake of the same field of philosophic

THE LIFE PRINCIPLE

MĪZ2N AS WEIGHING AND GUIDANCE

M;z:n, which involves a living process, is derived from wazana74 (to

THE LANGUAGE OF EXISTENTIATION

F:r:b; writes, ‘The First Existentiator (al-m<jid al-awwal) is alive, being

EXISTENCE HAS NO CONTRARY

Both medieval and ancient philosophy are agreed that truth by

EXISTENCE, NOTHING AND THE TRIPLICITY

MULL2 4ADR2 ON THE NATURE OF WEIGHING

We are now in a better position to examine the philosophical principles

THE EXISTENTIAL RULE OF OPPOSITION

KNOWING THE REALITIES OF THINGS

According to 4adr:, intellected things or intelligibles (al-ma6q<l:t) are

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