Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 178 - Eyes Wide Shut - Rumi and Philosophical Sufism.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Eyes Wide Shut, Rumi and Philosophical Sufism. As you may have noticed, I like a good etymology. About the only thing I enjoy more is an almond croissant. The word croissant, of course, comes from the French for crescent, and that derives from the Latin crescare meaning to grow, because the growing or waxing moon is crescent-shaped. Hungry for more? How about the word mysticism? It derives ultimately from the Greek verb muéin, meaning to shut one's eyes or lips, a reference to the secrecy of Greek mystery religion. Appropriately enough, mysticism makes many historians of philosophy want to shut their eyes and block their ears for good measure. After all, philosophy is devoted to rational discourse, whereas mysticism tries to reach beyond the limits of reason to what cannot be said or even thought. Yet, we've seen before that mysticism has both drawn on and contributed to the history of philosophy. Neoplatonism is often considered a kind of mysticism. That is less true than often supposed. Plotinus, for instance, is far less mystical than his reputation would suggest, but it certainly applies to a figure like the Pseudo-Dionysius. We saw mysticism blooming in the soil of Spain and southern France too, in the case of the Jewish tradition of Kabbalah, and of course with the greatest of the Muslim mystics, the Sufi thinker Ibn Arabi. Now, I'd like to turn our gaze to some other thinkers whose eyes were wide shut, Sufi authors of the Eastern tradition. As with Kabbalah, the full history of Sufism would burst the seams of this podcast series just as surely as too many croissants will burst the seams of your trousers. The Sufis contributed to the literary traditions of Persia, the Ottoman Empire, India, and even China. So we'll have further opportunities to note their influence in future episodes. But in this episode, I'm going to focus on just two men, men who knew each other well, who died a year apart, and who both lived in Konya, in central Anatolia during the 13th century. Probably you will have heard of one of them, but not the other. The less familiar name is Sadr al-Din Akunawi, the more celebrated one Jalal al-Din Rumi. They took very different approaches to writing about Sufi ideas. Al-Kunawi was a systematizer, committed to expounding the ideas of his master Ibn Arabi in relatively clear language, replete with a new technical terminology. In the case of Rumi, as I say I'm guessing you will know who he is. The great Persian poet of mysticism, translations of his works can be found on the shelves of pretty much any bookstore. Though you probably won't find them in the philosophy section, Rumi's poems are packed with philosophical ideas, and make for interesting reading alongside the more technical works of al-Kunawi. The term philosophical mysticism is now regularly applied to al-Kunawi and his heirs, authors like the 15th century Sufis Shams ad-Din Lahiji and Abd al-Rahman Jaami. Their works merit this designation in part because they integrate philosophical language into their mystical writings. As we know, at this point in Islamic history, philosophical language means above all the language of Avicenna. Yet this mysticism is philosophical not just because of its terminology. Al-Kunawi dealt with issues that had been central to Avicenna's metaphysics while adopting the mystical approach of Ibn Arabi. One such issue was the notion of wujud, or existence, which occupied our attention in last week's episode. The doctrine of the oneness of existence, in Arabic waḥtat al-wujūd, became a distinctive feature of the so-called Akhbārian tradition, meaning the followers of Ibn Arabi because of his honorific title al-akhbar, the greatest. See? Etymologies. You have to love them. All this was thanks not so much to Ibn Arabi himself, who does not make systematic use of the phrase oneness of existence, but rather to al-Kunawi and other philosophical Sufis. So what does it mean to speak of the oneness of existence? An eminent critic of the idea was the famous theologian and jurist Ibn Taymiyya, and he thought he knew what the Sufis were up to. Referring to Ibn Arabi, al-Kunawi, and another Sufi philosopher of the 13th century, the Andalusian thinker Ibn Sabīn, Ibn Taymiyya said that for them, there is only one existence. This would mean, on Ibn Taymiyya's understanding, that there is no difference whatsoever between the existence of God and the existence of what God creates. In other words, the philosophical Sufis were monists. Ibn Taymiyya did not hesitate to point out the grim consequences of such a doctrine. The universe, being identical with God, must be eternal, and ironically, given the Sufis' claims of elevated insight, they must think that understanding the universe is just as good as understanding God, since there is no difference between the two. Obviously, this isn't a particularly sympathetic portrayal of the mystic's position, nor do I think it captures what al-Kunawi really wanted to say. We can better understand his point by considering one of the technical terms introduced by al-Kunawi, taayyun, or specification. If I may trouble you with another etymology, this comes from the Arabic word ayn, which means an individual or particular thing. So, for something to be specified is for it to be selected as a particular thing. Every existing thing other than God is specified in this way, whereas God is absolute or unrestricted existence. One might therefore think of created beings as limited fragments or better images or representations of God's infinite being. Taking forward ideas from Ibn Arabi, al-Kunawi explains that God's perfect and perfectly unified existence exceeds the grasp of our minds. Yet, he shows himself to us, or as al-Kunawi would put it, he makes himself manifest to us by creating the universe. As in Ibn Arabi, God's names or attributes are seen as a primary case of divine manifestation which provides a basis for linking the whole theory to the language of the Qur'an. So, we can now see that Ibn Taymiyyah was wrong, or at least oversimplifying. Al-Kunawi would say that there is indeed a difference between God and the created universe. It is the same as the difference between a real thing and its name, or a real thing and a mere image of that thing. Characteristically, al-Kunawi expresses this idea in both the metaphorical language of Ibn Arabi and in the philosophical language of Avicenna. One of his favorite metaphors is one that goes all the way back to Plato's dialogue the Taimiyyas. Created objects are mere reflections of divine reality. Other Sufis will add other images, saying for instance that things in our universe are mere waves and ripples in the single infinite sea of divine reality. A more Avicennan note is struck when al-Kunawi says that God's existence is necessary. Created things, by contrast, have a merely contingent existence since it is up to God to decide how to make himself manifest. Again though, there is more going on here than the use of Avicennan terminology. As we saw last time, a pivotal question in the debates over Avicenna's metaphysics concerned the status of things that do not exist. What are we to make of an essence that has not, or not yet, been granted existence by God? Al-Kunawi has a very interesting answer to this question. He says that non-existent things are things that reside in God's knowledge rather than being made manifest in the created world. Before God creates something, it remains hidden in the recesses of the divine mind, just as God himself is hidden. This is the meaning of the prophetic saying that God is a hidden treasure. We might understand al-Kunawi to be making a fairly basic point here, namely that God knows what he can make before he makes it. If God knows about these items, then they must have some kind of metaphysical status. They are, if you will, non-existent things. If that is what al-Kunawi wants to say, then his position sounds a lot like that of the early Islamic theologians called the Mu'tazilites. As we saw last time, these theologians were inspired by the famous Quranic verses that tell us that God creates by saying to something, be. In keeping with these verses, the Mu'tazilites propose that the non-existent is a thing. After all, God can hardly address this command, be, to something unless it is indeed something. Yet, so far, it does not exist. Casting about for a metaphysical drawer to contain such things, a natural thought would be that before being created, they reside in God's power or knowledge, which sounds a lot like what al-Kunawi is saying. I'd like to congratulate myself for drawing this rather unexpected connection. Unfortunately, someone else got there first and deserves the credit. A contemporary of al-Kunawi and a man we've spoken about quite a lot in recent episodes, Nasir ad-Din At-Tuzi. We have an exchange of letters between the two men in which At-Tuzi remarks that al-Kunawi's views on the status of essences sound rather like the position of the Mu'tazilites. In response, al-Kunawi hastens to correct this impression, and upon reflection I think he has a good reason for doing so. His position is unlike that of the Mu'tazilites in that the so-called non-existent things that are still hidden in the divine mind are in fact more real than the things God actually creates. Al-Kunawi speaks of these non-existent essences as paradigms, or patterns. Think again of the Platonic metaphor of the mirror. Just as in the Timaeus, the things we naively take to be most real are in fact mere images of the truly real things, which are the paradigms in the divine realm. Whereas the Platonists were usually confident that the human mind can come to understand these higher paradigms, al-Kunawi accepts significant limitations on human knowledge. His exchange with At-Tuzi is polite and shows a considerable degree of mutual admiration between the two scholars. But in it, al-Kunawi says that the intellectual exertions of philosophers like At-Tuzi can take us only so far. The Sufi climbs higher, achieving a mystical insight of God that trumps any intellectual knowledge. Only the prophets are afforded a more intimate knowledge of what is really real. As al-Kunawi often says in his works, the mystics' insights lie beyond the reach of discursive argument and can be communicated only in hints and illusions. Or perhaps in poems. Which brings us to al-Kunawi's famous friend Jalal ad-Din Rumi. The two men both lived, as I've said, in the city of Qonya. In fact, al-Kunawi said the prayer at Rumi's burial in the year 1273 before dying himself a year later and being buried not far from the great poet. But Rumi came originally from modern-day Afghanistan, to be precise from the city of Balkh. His father was also a Sufi master, in fact one link in a chain of teachers and students stretching back to al-Ghazali's brother Ahmad, who was respected as a great authority in Sufism. Rumi's father moved the family east when the poet-to-be was still a child, presumably in flight from the Mongol invasion. Despite the upheaval, young Rumi was trained in a range of disciplines, including law, theology, and philosophy, and studied in the city of Aleppo before settling in Qonya and gathering a group of students around him. We have prose works based on his oral teachings, but his fame is due to the enormous collections of verses in which he devised powerful and vivid images to convey mystical insights. Are these poems works of philosophy? He himself would probably have said no, given that he thinks of the philosophers as a well-defined group with well-defined limitations, as al-Kunawi too had said. Rumi described Avicenna as a donkey on ice and remarked that, The leg of the reasoners is wooden, a wooden leg is awfully unsteady. But of course, having a wooden leg doesn't mean having no leg to stand on at all. Like al-Kunawi, Rumi believed that Sufism is not so much a stark alternative to philosophy as a higher discipline that contains the insights of philosophy within it. This helps to explain why the term intellect has such a positive connotation in his writings. He often contrasts the intellect to the lower self or soul and encourages us to turn away from the latter and towards the former. We are hybrid creatures, an animal-soul tied to a spiritual mind, like angels with asses' tails. Because the terms for intellect and soul, akhl and nafs, are grammatically masculine and feminine, Rumi allegorically represents the relation between intellect and soul with the relation between man and woman, or Adam and Eve. Many of Rumi's most celebrated images appear in verses where he exhorts us to abandon the self. Famously, he makes much use of the sensual metaphors of drunkenness and sex. The self is like the cork, and when removed we find the wine within. Our inability to know God is like the child's inability to imagine the pleasure of intercourse. These metaphors are well chosen to represent the ecstatic abandonment of self that is the ultimate goal of the Sufi path. The tradition had usually called it fana'a, or annihilation. For Rumi, this is the meaning of the shocking statement made by the Sufi martyr Al-Halaaj when he announced that he was God. This meant, as Rumi puts it, that Al-Halaaj had "...become his own enemy, and destroyed himself so completely that it was God and not the man who spoke these words." In loving God and desiring union with him, the mystic is thus in love with his own non-existence, like a shadow in love with the sun, even though the sun's light will banish it. Notice that with such images, Rumi poetically evokes the same idea we found in Al-Khunawi. To ascend to the level of true reality is to leave existence and join non-existence, like a drop of vinegar dissolving in an ocean of honey. Of course, this is no simple process. You're not going to just wake up one morning, have an almond croissant for breakfast, and then abandon yourself and unite to God's essence. The Sufi path is an arduous one of self-transformation and self-realization. Along the way, there are many stages. This is what Rumi understands by a prophetic reference to hundreds or thousands of veils between us and God. All the things we value in the created realm—our loved ones, our friends, food and drink, our knowledge, the cosmos itself, even almond croissants—are but veils that must be torn asunder if we are to know the single reality of God face to face. Rumi is here proposing a radical overturning of values such as we have not seen since the days of late antiquity in the Stoics, who thought that everything but virtue was indifferent, and in Christians like Augustine, who adapted Stoic ethics for their own religious purposes. So, Rumi's insistence on abolishing the self has both a metaphysical and an ethical aspect. The metaphysical point is that, like Akunawe, he thinks anything other than God is a delimitation or specification of God's absolute oneness and existence. Our creaturely limitations make each of us what we are, and in mystical union such limitations are removed. From an ethical perspective, even our most deeply held individual values and concerns separate us from God. Again, Rumi offers wonderful metaphors for the painful and laborious transformation that the mystic must undergo in giving up these things. My favorite, I think, is the allegory of the chickpeas. As they boil in the pot, the chickpeas cry out that they are being tormented by the heat. They cannot comprehend that they are being transformed into something far better. Just so, God sends us troubles in order to purify us even if it means our ultimate destruction. Oh chickpeas, Rumi writes, boil in tribulation so that neither your existence nor your selfhood may remain. This metaphor seems to cry out for a pun, but the only thing I can think of is that if the mystic must die to unite with God, then his vision will be like that of the chickpea, Postomos. Maybe it would be better just to move on. Or rather, let's go back and think again about the relationship between Rumi's mysticism and philosophy. On this score, it's worth emphasizing that knowledge itself is one of the veils that Rumi tells us to remove. How then can he constantly be instructing us to leave the self behind and identify with the intellect? The answer is given in passages that distinguish between two kinds of intellect, partial or acquired, and universal. These are of course philosophical terms, but as often in Sufism they here take on a rather new meaning. For Rumi, acquired intellect is knowledge that is, well, acquired, learned from books and teachers. This includes the philosophical sciences. Such knowledge flows into us from the outside like a stream of water into a house, and is thus dependent on its outer source. Universal intellect, by contrast, is to be found within. As Rumi puts it, using terms already familiar to us from other Sufis, the heart is a mirror and reflects the ineffable divinity that thus dwells inside us. Does this mean that Rumi would have no use for teachers, even teachers of mystical insight and practice? That would be a rather shocking break from tradition, even by his standards. As we saw in the case of Rumi's own father, Sufis did study with masters, as did jurists, theologians, and philosophers. In all these fields, a thinker's intellectual credentials were established by naming their teacher, their teacher's teacher, and so on. Here, Rumi is no exception. Like many other figures we have looked at, he did criticize Taklid, the uncritical acceptance of authority. As usual, he devised a lovely image to illustrate the point. A man of Taklid is like a blind person who has been told there is water rushing through a stream, whereas the man who has his own insight is like the blind person once he has filled a wineskin with the water and can feel its weight. Yet, the most pivotal relationship in Rumi's life was with a spiritual teacher named Shams ad-din at-taprizi. Rumi became so attached to him that Rumi's own students chased Shams away out of jealousy. Shams returned but then left again for good, leaving Rumi to pine for his master. Many of his poems are addressed to Shams. So, Rumi is preaching what he practiced when he warns that even if your goal is direct apprehension of the divine, you must begin more humbly by accepting guidance. Guidance from a human teacher, first learning the theory of Sufism and only then the practice, and of course guidance from God himself. As Rumi says, Since you are not a sultan, be a subject. Since you have not become God's tongue, become an ear. The accomplished mystic also displays a deep humility in that he achieves union only by annihilating himself. God manifests unbidden to the mystic who has removed the veils that used to separate him from reality, just as the whole creation is a voluntary self-manifestation of divine reality. Again, we see that Rumi's mystical practice is grounded in something like the metaphysical picture offered by Al-Kunawi. But with all due respect to Al-Kunawi, I'd have to say that Rumi puts the point more memorably. I'd like to close with a few of his verses on this topic in the translation of a leading scholar of philosophical Sufism, William Chirik. The caravan of the unseen enters the visible world, but it remains hidden from all these ugly people. How should lovely women come to ugly men? The nightingale always comes to the rosebush. The jasmine grows next to the narcissus. The rose comes to the sweet-mouthed bud. All of these are symbols. I mean that the other world keeps coming into this world. Like cream hidden in the soul of milk, no place keeps coming into place. Like intellect concealed in blood and skin, the traceless keeps entering into traces. From beyond intellect, beautiful love comes dragging her skirts, a cup of wine in its hand. And from beyond love that indescribable One who can only be called That keeps coming. I'm no expert on Persian mystical poetry, but I think what Rumi is trying to tell you is this. You should join me next time for an interview with another expert on philosophical Sufism, Muhammad Rustam. He will be the nightingale coming to the rosebush that is the history of philosophy without any gaps.