Three Muslim Sages

192 Pages·2012·3.21 MB·English

by  Seyyed Hossein Nasr

THREE MUSLIM SAGES
Avicenna-Suhrawardi- Ibn 'Arabi
Seyyed Hossein Nasr
CARAVAN BOOKS
Delmar, New York
For
Shaikh Isa Nur al-Din
<e> 1964 President and Fellows of Harvard College
Reprinted by arrangement with Harvard University Press
Published by Caravan Books,
Delmar, New York 12054-0344, U.S.A.
First Printing 1976
Second Printing 1985
Third Printing 1997
Printed and made in the United States of America
§ The paper used in this publication conforms to the
American National Standard for Information Sciences
Permanence of Paper for Publications and Documents
in Libraries and Archives ANSI/NISO/Z39 .48-1992.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nasr, Seyyed Hossein.
Thre Muslim sages: Avicenna, Suhrawardi, Ibn 'Arabi.
Reprint of the 1969 ed. published by Harvard University Press, Cambridge.
Bibliography: p.
1. Avicenna, 980-1037.
2. Al-Suhrawardi, Yahya ibn Habash, 1152 or 3-1191.
3. Ibn al-'Arabi, 1165-1240.
I. Title.
[BP70.N36 1975] 297'.6 [B] 75-14430
ISBN 0-88206-500-9 (pbk.)
Published under the auspices of the
INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES
EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE
Parviz Morewedge, Baruch College
of City University of New York
Milton K. Munitz, Baruch College
of City University of New York
Nicholas Rescher, University of Pittsburgh
and the
IMPERIAL IRANIAN ACADEMY OF PHILOSOPHY
e
HONORARY PATRONESS
H.I.M .. THE SHAHBANOU OF IRAN FARAH PAHLAVI
DIRECTOR
Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Aryamehr University
and Tehran University
List of Tran.~literations
t
Ara,.b tc characters gh short vowels
,
,..; a
<.:1 b
"
q u
~
~
.!I
,!;,J th k
J
~
r
z; Diphthongs
1;1 m ·--,
aw
'z; kh ,
~ n
4$_ ai (ay)
) d -
,& h
) dh w -e...-.'. iy (final form i)
y uww (final form u)
J
y
~
j
z
i oh; at (construct state)
Cf Jl Persian letters added to thtJ
(article) al-ond '). (even Arabic alphabet
before the antcropalatals)
c)- sh "t p
0
(J' ch
.:.
4i' , %h
d long vowels ~
•
'
cSI i ._)
,
J; ' u
t
c5 "i
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 1
I. AVICENNA (IBN SJNA) AND THE PHILOSO-
PHER - SCIENTISTS 9
The Predecessors of Av icenna - 9
Av icenna, a Biographical Sketch - 20
The Av icennian Corpus - 23
Ontolofo': - 24
Cosmo ogy and Angelology - 28
The Natural and Mathematical Sciences-31
Psychology - 38
Religion and Revelation - 40
The Esoteric Philosophy - 43
The School of Av icenna - 45
II. SUHRAWARDi AND THE ILLUMINATIONISTS 52
The Backfound before Suhrawardi-52
Suhra war i's Life and Works - 55
Sources of Ishraqi Doctrine-60
The Meaning of lshriiq - 62
The Classes of Those Who Know - 63
Geographic Symbolism - 64
Ifi kmat al-i.shriiq and Its Basic Doctrines - 66
The Si~ni6cance of the Visionary Recitals -77
The Is riiqi Tradition -79
III. IBN 'ARABI AND THE ~UFiS 83
The ~Ufi Tradition - 83
The Significance of Ibn 'Arabi-90
The Life of the Sage from Murcia-92
The Works-97
The "Sources .. of Ibn 'Arabi -100
The Doctrine - 102
Sufism after Ibn 'Arabi-118
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 125
NOTES 131
INDEX 171
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The three chapters which follow were delivered originally
as open lectures at Harvard University during March 1962,
under the auspices of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies
and the Center for the Study of World Religions. I am
particularly indebted to Professor R. H. L. Slater, the director
of the Center for the Study of World Religions, for making
possible the delivery of these lectures and for helping to have
them appear in published form. I am also thankful to Miss
M. Kathleen Ahern and to Mrs. Patricia Swanson for prepar
ing the manuscript for publication.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr
V iBitlng Lecturer
In World ReUgiom,
Cambridge. Massachusetts 1961-1962
1963 Harvard U nlversity
Bl 'awnika ya wtif
Introduction
THE "golden age, of Islam, insofar as the intensity of the
religious and spiritual life and the realization of its ideals are
concerned, must be identified with the lifetime of the Prophet
Mul}.ammad-upon whom be peace-and the first Muslim
community at Medina. But just as the seed sown in the
ground grows into a tree and finally bears fruit only after
the passage of time and. the gaining of nourishment from a
suitable soil, so did the tree of Islamic civilization bear its
intellectual and artistic fruits several centuries after its incep
tion, during which it was nourished by the legacy of the
previous civilizations to which Islam became the heir. The
arts and sciences, as well as philosophy and metaphysics,
reached their zenith of formal perfection and became fully
articulated only after Muslim society had become completely
consolidated, and only after the tenets of the Islamic revela
tion had been realized in concrete and tangible forms so as
to make the new civilization distinctly Islamic, even when
elements of non-Islamic origin had been incorporated into it.
The spread of Islam and the subsequent consolidation of ,..
Muslim society is one of the most rapid and decisive events
in human history. By the end of the earthly career of the
Prophet, under the banner of Islam, the whole of Arabia was
united for the first time, and by A.D. 700, that is, less than
eighty years after the birth of Islam, the new religion had
spread over the whole of the Middle East and North Africa
and its domain stretched from the Indus Valley to Andalusia.
Moreover, unlike the only other expansion that can be com
pared in any way to it, namely, the Mongol invasion of
Western Asia seven centuries later, the effect of the Islamic
conquest was permanent. Except for Andalusia, from which
the Muslims were expelled in the fifteenth century, every
2 . INTRODUCTION
country into which Islam spread during that short period
became Islamicized, and in many cases "Arabicized," and has
remained so until the present day.
As might be expected, this sudden expansion and the con
quest of such a vast territory by the Muslims needed time
before the conquered domain could be transformed into a
society constructed upon the Islamic pattern. There was at
this moment an urgent need to find administrative codes and
rules of government for situations that had never existed in
the Arabian Muslim community at the time of the Prophet,
and to apply the laws of the Quran and the practices of the
Prophet to new circumstances which had never occurred
before. So it was that the early caliphs, the four who followed
the Prophet immediately and who are usually called al-khula
fii' al-riishidun, as well as the Umayyads, spent most of their
energy in solving the immediate problems of creating an
Islamic society. They supported and cultiv~ted such sciences
as the reading and interpretation of the Quran, assembling
the traditions or IJa,diths of the Prophet, and systematizing
the study of the Arabic language, all of which were of im
mediate concern to the new community inasmuch as the
sacred law of this new society, or the Shari'ah, was based on
the Quran and the IJa,dith, and its language, unknown to many
newly converted non-Arab Muslims, was Arabic.
Preoccupation with such immediate concern~ prevented
the Umayyads from turning their attention to the vast heri
tage which the hands of fate had placed in reach of the
Muslims, and so, during this early period of Islamic history,
there was only an occasional figure like Khalid ibn Yazid
who began to cultivate interest in pre-Islamic sciences, and
only very rarely was a book translated from Greek or Syriac
into Arabic. Rather, this early period was one in which the
traditional religious sciences of Quranic commentary and
IJ,adith became fully established, and the study and cultiva
tion of the Arabic language reached a high state of accom-
INTRODUCTION . 3
plishment with the formation of the Kiifa and Ba~ra schools
of grammar and the appearance of many outstanding gram
marians, poets, and literary critics.
It was inevitable, however, that sooner or later the Muslims
would turn their attention to the treasury of pre-Islamic
sciences that had been stored within the very citadel of
Islam. Before the rise of Islam, the writings of many of the
masters of the school of Alexandria, which itself was the
meeting place of Hellenic, Jewish, Babylonian, and Egyptian
cultural currents, were translated into Syriac and trans
planted to Antioch, and from there, farther east to such cities
as N is ibis and Edessa. this situation, which was of great
consequence insofar as it concerned the later Islamic civiliza
tion, had been brought about by the schisms that had devel
oped in the eastern Christian churches. This internal division
had separated the Nestorians, and later the Monophysites,
from the Greek-speaking orthodox church and had forced
them to establish their own schools and centers of learning
and to cultivate their own language, namely Syriac, in order
to be independent of the Greek-speaking church of Alexan
dria and Byzantium from whom they had separated. En
couraged by the Persian kings, who were naturally opposed
to the Byzantines and who therefore favored the opponents ~­
of their enemies, Nestorians spread far into the domains of
the Persian Empire and had even established churches in
Central Asia. Moreover, wherever these churches spread,
they carried with them the Hellenistic philosophy and theol
ogy which Christianity had made its own, along with a tradi
tion of reading and interpreting the Greek texts which con
tained the sciences and philosophy.
In addition to the Christian centers of learning, there was
also the city of I:Iarran, home of the Sabaeans, who con
sidered themselves the followers of the Prophet Idris, or
Hermes, and who had preserved and propagated much of
the learning of the more esoteric schools of the Hellenistic