Metaphysical Obfuscation in the Islamic World

Khwajah Naqshband says that all that is heard or seen or known is a veil. It must be negated with the word ‘none’ (la). (1)

Dualism of mind and matter (mind-body problem) goes back to the ancient Greek philosophers. Matter of which our universe is constituted was regarded inferior to mind which was considered a divine quality. A close study of ancient Greek philosophy reveals that many of the world religions are greatly influenced by the Greek thought. At the same time, it seems plausible that Greek metaphysics was influenced by the older civilizations such as the Babylon, Egyptian and the Hindu civilizations, etc.

According to Russell (4), “Pythagoras (569-475 BC) taught that … the soul is an immortal thing, and that it is transformed into other kinds of living things; further that whatever comes into existence is born again in that all things that are born with life in them ought to be treated as kindred.” He believed in transmigration of soul (Hindu cycle of rebirth and reincarnation). The premise that the material world is only an illusion (maya) goes back to Pythagoras. Quoting Burnet, Russell (4) described about Pythagoras, “We are strangers in this world, and the body is the tomb of the soul, and yet we must not seek to escape by self-murder; for we are the chattels of God who is our herdsman, and without his command we have no right to make our escape.” Quoting Cornford, Russell stated of Pythagoras, “All the systems that he (Pythagoras) inspired tend to be otherworldly, putting all value in the unseen unity of God, and condemning the visible world as false and illusive, a turbid medium in which the rays of heavenly light are broken and obscured in mist and darkness.”

The Greeks called mind “nous” which was also identified with soul. Discussing Anaxagors (500-428 BC) Russell (5) said, “He (Anaxagoras) differed from his predecessors in regarding mind (nous) as a substance which enters into the composition of living things, and distinguishes them from dead matter…Mind has power over all things that have life; it is infinite and self-ruled, and is mixed with nothing.”

Likewise Plato (427-347 BC) and Aristotle (384-322 BC) believed in the supremacy of mind over matter. A culmination of these metaphysical ideas reached in the philosophy of Plotinus (204-270 CE) according to whom there is a “..Holy Trinity: The One, Spirit and Soul…The One is somewhat shadowy. It is sometimes called God, sometimes the Good; it transcends Being, which is the first sequent upon the One…The One can be present without any coming: ‘while it is nowhere, nowhere is it not’…The One is indefinable, and in regard to it there is truth in silence than in any words whatever….We now come to the Second Person, whom Plotinus calls ‘nous’,” (6). Nous is difficult to translate in English. According to Russell (6), “Nous, we are told, is the image of the One; it is engendered because the One, in its self-quest, has vision; this seeing is nous…Thus when we are ‘divinely possessed and inspired’ we see not only nous, but also the one….Soul is the third and the lowest member of the Trinity. Soul, though inferior to nous, is the author of all living things; it made the sun and the moon and stars and the whole visible world.”

I have produced this rather extensive excerpt in order to emphasize that Plotinus’s ideas are the bed rock as well as the fountain spring of the subsequent metaphysics of most of the Sufis and mystics. Many subsequent metaphysical developments were inspired directly and indirectly by Plotinus’s metaphysics. So much so, the state of ‘wajd’ (ecstasy) into which many qawwali listeners are transported, goes back to Greek times. According to Russell (7), “The experience of ‘ecstasy’ (standing outside one’s own body) happened frequently to Plotinus.”

In due time, many of Plotinus’s ideas were Islamized so seamlessly that many of the later Muslim theologians and theosophists believed them to arise from Quran. The monotheist concept of Tauheed (Unity of God) is similar to the concept of Plotinus’s One. The Islamic Sufistic concept of soul and spirituality has its roots in Plotinus’s metaphysics and is equally muddled cognitively.

In spite of its excessive emphasis on the otherworldliness, metaphysics of religion is a branch of epistemology and should be considered as such. It is not the termination of all knowledge; it should not exclude the pursuit of material knowledge as has happened selectively in the Muslim world.

The tragedy in the Muslim world that set it apart from Europe and other growing civilizations was excessive emphasis on metaphysics of religion compared with other branches of knowledge which were practically excluded from its culture. Metaphysics was the only branch of philosophy that was accepted in the Muslim world; other branches including logic and physical sciences were denigrated if not totally prohibited. Metaphysics became the epitome of philosophy in the Muslim world.

Metaphysics as we have seen deals with the knowledge of God, the ‘Absolute Reality’, and the otherworld. It holds knowledge of the material world in low esteem. The knowledge based and derived from sense-perception is unreliable according to the metaphysics of religion. The ontological knowledge of the Absolute Reality is identified with the nous (Arabic ‘nafs’) or the mind and the sense-perception knowledge is identified with the material knowledge of the world gained through human intellect. The human intellect by the usual definition is lowlier than the mind. Since according to this line of thought mind is superior to reason, the only worthwhile knowledge is the knowledge of the Absolute Reality.

In this way, majority of the Islamic thinkers and philosophers got trapped in the otherworldliness. Al-Ghazali condemned the philosophers and found salvation in Sufism. He found his enlightenment only after abandoning philosophy and the pursuit of material knowledge. I have emphasized al-Ghazali’s role in directing the Muslim world away from rationalism in my previous papers also because he is held in such an inimitable esteem in the Muslim world. He is recognized as the Mujaddid (Revivalist) of the first millennium. He denigrated philosophy and physical sciences but embraced metaphysics passionately. He thus demarcated a definite line of thought for the subsequent theologians and theosophists to follow. Every other form of knowledge was kind of innovation.

Wahdat-al-Wujud (Existential Unity)

If man is actually part of God, the evil in man is also in God. (Bertrand Russell, 8)

Metaphysics is a boundless ocean of otherworldly concepts. It is difficult to describe it, even in summary form, within the scope and framework of this paper. Usually the words used to describe metaphysical concepts are the familiar ones but when they are strung into sentences and assembled together to describe metaphysical concepts, the whole usually becomes a meaningless jumble which can be interpreted in numerous and sometimes contradictory ways. They are a maize of blind alleys which does not lead any where. One of such concepts is wahdat-al-wujud, the existential unity, propounded by ibn-Arabi. Even this concept seems to have its roots in Greek metaphysics. This has been selected herein only for purpose of illustration. Other concepts of Sufism and mysticism are equally vague and shrouded in the mist of incertitude.

There is a Persian idiom which summarizes the essence of wahdat-al-wujud. This is “Hama O’ast” (Every thing is from Him or every thing belongs to Him). According to this thinking, all the living things have unity of being. (Of course, this is not the same thing as Darwin’s theory of biological evolution). The culmination of human life is to seek one-ness with God or to get merged in Him (Fana-fi-Allah). A good example of this kind of thinking was Hallaj who had pronounced Ana-al-Haq (I am God or I am one with God) in a ‘state of deep absorption’. He was declared an apostate and hanged.

I am digressing a little bit here to illustrate that metaphysics, pantheism, and mysticism were not the exclusive preserves of Muslim thought only, the Hindus and the western world also freely indulged in them. However, it is the Muslim world which got inextricably trapped in it. According to Angelus Silesius, a German mystic of the seventeenth century, “God is the fire in me and I am the light in Him; do we not intimately belong to each other?...I am as rich as God; there is no grain of dust that I (Believe me, O Man) do not have in common with Him…God loves me above Himself; if I love Him above myself I give Him as much as He gives me out of Himself…Without me God cannot make a worm; if I do not preserve it with Him, it must straightaway fall to pieces…I know that without me God cannot live for an instant; if I come to nothing He must needs give up the ghost…,” (10) so on and so forth.

Another great follower of ibn-Arabi was the celebrated Maulana Rumi. According to Hitti (2), “Al-Rumi shares with ibn-Arabi theories of existentialist monism. He identifies himself with nature, following a system of transmigration, and rejoices not in a personal life continuing beyond the grave but in self-integration in the person of Godhead:

I died as a mineral and became a plant,
I died as a plant and rose to animal,
I died as animal and I was man.
Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?
Yet once more I shall die as a man, to soar
With angels blest; but even from angelhood
I must pass on: all except God doth perish.
When I have sacrificed my angel soul,
I shall become what no mind e’er conceived.
Oh, let me not exist! For Non-existence
Proclaims in organ tones, “To Him we shall return.”

This is beautiful poetry and I am very fond of Rumi’s poetry. Beyond that, this narration does not mean anything to me. Even if, for the sake of argument, there is a kernel of truth in it, it is unverifiable. I am glad that I did not waste my life in trying ceaselessly to comprehend the incomprehensible (thus going in circles); I was content in contributing, in my own small way, to material knowledge.

In the metaphysical world, Quantum Mechanics, Nuclear Physics, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, etc. are insignificant. These sciences are truly meaningless for those who are bewitched by the beautiful poetry of Rumi and unintelligible webs and woofs of ibn-Arabi and other metaphysicians. The more meaningless a metaphysical description is, truer it seems. Is there any wonder then that many people, including philosophers, could not truly understand Iqbal’s metaphysics but were convinced nonetheless that it was extremely meaningful?

Sheikh Ahmed Sirhandi (1), Mujaddid Alif Thani (Revivalist of the second millennium) was initially enamored of wahdat-al-wujud but later on discerned it was against the teachings of Quran. According to Farman (1), “I (Mujaddid Alif Thani) had accepted pantheism, says the Mujaddid, as it was revealed to me and not because I was directed to it by some one else. Now I denounce it because of the right revelation of my own which cannot be denied although it is not compulsory for others to follow…” The Muslims believe that Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) was the last prophet yet the chain of divine revelations seems to remain unbroken. Mujaddid Alif Thani alluded to his own revelation in the above quotation and many other Sufis also claim to experience revelations.

Although Mujaddid Alif Thani rejected ibn-Arabi’s wahdat-al-wujud, later on Shah Wali Allah claimed to have reconciled Mujaddaid’s basis of rejection with the original postulation of ibn-Arabi (9). Metaphysics is wholly a subjective exercise and ‘play-on-words’. One can invariably get what one wants out of the metaphysical hat.

Based on wahdat-al-wujud, many Sufis deduced that all beings had the same origination, i.e., God, and thus they could possibly merge unto Him. According to Hindu and Greek concept of transmigration of soul, the ‘beings’ continue returning to life, after death, in various forms until they find mukti (nirvana, salvation) and merge with God. Since man can and will ultimately merge with God, according to their beliefs, many wujudis claimed that the difference between man and God is only an illusion, in reality they are the same. Parvez (3) has quoted verses of many Sufi poets, e.g., Bullhe Shah, Khwaja Ghulam Farid, et al which describe this unity. Many Sufi poets including Iqbal have unified Ahmad (name of the prophet) and Ahad (One – God’s attribute) by removing ‘m’ (Urdu ‘meem’) from Ahmad. Parvez quoted Iqbal’s following verse to illustrate his point:

Nigah aashiq ki dekh latee haiy purdah-e-meem ko utha kar
Woh bazm-e-Yathrib mein aa kay baithain hazar mun’h ko chhupa chhupa kar

(The lover’s eye removes the veil of ‘meem’ and gets the vision
Even though He hides his face sitting in Yathrib)

Again, Parvez (3) quoted Bullhe Shah’s following verse to make the same point:

Ahad, Ahmad wich farq nah Bullahya
Ikk ratti bhar marodee da

(O Bullhe, there is no real difference between Ahad and Ahmad but that of a small rounded point {i.e. of m or ‘meem’})

Such conjectural exercises and denigration of the material world and its knowledge through physical sciences, ushered a dark age in the Islamic world in which it is still trapped. Those who want to indulge in metaphysics and mysticism may do so; knowledge of physical sciences should however be not degraded and scientific traditions should be allowed to take roots and germinate in the Muslim society.

Finally, I want to quote Parvez, a modernist Islamic scholar and reformer, who has severely criticized tasawwuf. According to him (3), the qualities and essentials of Sufism are as follows:

• There is a direct relation and communication between man and God. It is called gnosis or ‘esoteric knowledge’ for which no rhyme and reason is needed nor is there any need of proof and evidence.
• Esoteric knowledge is ‘sure knowledge’. Compared to it, the sensible knowledge (knowledge through sense-perception) or intellectual knowledge is of little importance. Sensible knowledge is based on incertitude and analogy. So much so, even the revealed knowledge (wahi) is also not real; it is true only in as much as is certified by the esoteric knowledge.
• The Universe of Senses (phenomenal universe) is not real; it is merely an illusion, superstition, and imagined. The real existence is only that of God and the phenomenal universe is His exponent.
• The end and objective of human life is for the human mind to merge with the ‘absolute reality’. For this reason, Sufism is the name of totally individual and subjective experiences.
• The more a human draws himself away from the mundane attractions (which are effectively material dirt), the more his spirituality progresses. It evidences itself in the form of predictions and miraculous acts.

Conclusion

I want to conclude this essay with the following substantive excerpt from the essay on Mysticism by Bertrand Russell (8). He is commenting on time which many mystics believe is unreal:

First of all, what can be meant by saying that time is unreal? If we really meant what we say, we must mean that such statements as “this is before that” are mere empty noise, like “twas brillig.” If we suppose anything less than this – as for example, that there is a relation between events which puts them in the same order as the relation of earlier and later, but that it is a different relation – we shall not have made any assertion that makes any real change in our outlook, It will be merely like supposing that the Iliad was not written by Homer, but by another man of the same name. We have to suppose that there are no “events” at all; there must be only the one vast whole of the universe, embracing whatever is real in the misleading appearance of a temporal procession. There must be nothing in reality corresponding to the apparent distinction between earlier and later events. To say that we are born, and then grow, and then die must be just as false as to say that we die, then grow small, and finally are born. The truth of what seems an individual life is merely the illusory isolation of one element in the timeless and indivisible being of the universe. There is no distinction between improvement and deterioration, no difference between sorrows that end in happiness and happiness that ends in sorrow. If you find a corpse with a dagger in it, it makes no difference whether the man died of the wound or the dagger was plunged in after death. Such a view, if true, puts an end, not only to science, but to prudence, hope, and effort; it is incompatible with worldly wisdom, and – what is more important to religion – with morality.

Postscript

I would like to end this essay with Iqbal’s verse:

Andaz-e-byan gar chey bahut shokh naheen haiy
Shaayad keh utr jaaye teray dil mein meri baat

(Although the mode of my expression is not very poignant
May be my point reaches your mind nevertheless?)

References

1.Farman, Muhammad, “Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi – A History of Muslim Philosophy,” ed. M.M. Sharif, Low Price Publications, Delhi – 110052, 1999, p. 879.
2.Hitti, Philip, K., “Islam – A Way of Life,” Henry Regnery Company, Chicago, 1970, pp.62-63.
3.Parvez, Ghulam Ahmad, “Tasawwuf Ki Haqeeqat,” Adarah Talu-e- Islam, Gulberg, Lahore 1981, p.97.
4.Russell, Bertrand, “A History of Western Philosophy,” Simons and Schuster, 1972, pp. 33, 32.
5.Ibid. pp. 62-63.
6.Ibid., pp. 288-289.
7.Ibid., p. 290.
8.Russell, Bertrand, “Mysticism,” from Religion and Science, Oxford University Press, 1961.
9.Siddiqi, Abdul Hamid, “Renaissance in Indo-Pakistan: Shah Wali Allah Dihlawi – A History of Muslim Philosophy,” ed. M.M. Sharif, Low Price Publications, Delhi – 110052, 1999, p. 1570.
10.Steiner, Rudolf (Archive), “Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age – Giordano Bruno and Angelus Silesius,” http://elib.com/Steiner/Books/GA007/English/GA007_Giordano.h tm.