Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 179 - Mohammed Rustom on 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 the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about philosophical Sufism with Mohamed Rustam, who is Associate Professor of Islamic Studies at Carleton University. Hi Mohamed. Hello Peter. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me. So I guess the obvious first question here is what do we mean when we talk about philosophical Sufism? Obviously, it must have some relationship to philosophy on the one hand and Sufism on the other hand, but I suppose maybe it's a more specific idea than Sufism in general, some specifically philosophical kind of Sufism. Is that the idea? Yes, well, the term philosophical Sufism is somewhat problematic because it can take in Sufism, Muslim mystics who are well trained in philosophy, the formal discipline of philosophy, and as well as philosophical theology in the later period. And it can also relate to authors who had a penchant for philosophical modes of expression, but who were not really philosophers in any way at all. So with that in mind, we can kind of say that philosophical Sufism broadly refers to the theoretical or doctrinal attempt on the part of Sufis to articulate some of these more central topics in Islamic thought pertaining to things like cosmology, ontology, theology, so on and so forth. So within the framework of what we can call their spiritual vision, this means that at minimum we encounter in philosophical Sufism a more concrete kind of articulation of any given abstract philosophical theological problem or position. While it's true that philosophical Sufism and philosophy are conceived here from one perspective as two sides of the same coin, I would not wish to indulge in the simplistic characterization that we sometimes find that says that philosophical Sufism is simply philosophy clothed up in mythic form or symbolic garb or something like that. Philosophical Sufism presents itself by virtue of its emphasis on the lived and the concrete understanding of revelation as if you like a kind of improved version of philosophy or philosophical theology, but one in which the philosophical vision and revelation are kind of complementary and articulated in something like a highly symbolic form. Often philosophical Sufism refers to the school of Ibn Arabi in particular, so there's that added nuance there. And this is because an increasingly systematic and more philosophical understanding of Ibn Arabi's own teachings eventually come to take center stage in the writings of his followers, particularly Huniway, who is of course his stepson and his most important direct disciple. Thus the term school of Ibn Arabi describes a particular approach largely colored by the thought of Ibn Arabi himself to the major philosophical and religious issues which confronted medieval Islamic thought. But it should also be noted that the term normally used in Arabic and Persian to characterize the perspective of Ibn Arabi on the one hand, but also kind of philosophical Sufism more generally is Irfan Naveri or Persian Irfan Nazari, which is normally translated as something like theoretical Sufism or even speculative Sufism I guess would work. This is a fairly helpful designation in terms of what's happened in philosophical Sufism, conceived in the widest possible sense, but with the caveat that by the term theoretical Sufism we mean here the wedding of philosophical activity and lived practical aspect of Islamic spirituality. There are less, if you like, armchair philosophical Sufis in classical Islamic civilization, if you will. So it sounds like in a way we could think about philosophical Sufism either as part of the history of philosophy in the Islamic world or as part of the history of Sufism in the Islamic world, and either one would be legitimate. Yes, on one level this is correct, especially as we move further into the East and down the historical unfolding of the Islamic intellectual tradition where the lines start to get blurred in so many different places. Philosophers of Aristotelian kind of peripatetic bent now writing as illuminationists on the one hand and then engaging people like Rumi and Ibn Arabi on the other hand. So that kind of ambiguity I think that you're drawing on or the kind of universal applicability of this term really is kind of symptomatic of the more eclectic nature of the Islamic intellectual tradition in the post-Abbas and in the face of Islamic history. So you've already mentioned in passing the most important figure in the history of philosophical Sufism and maybe the second most important, Ibn Arabi and his follower Qunawi. Do you think it would be fair to say that Ibn Arabi was the first philosophical Sufi or the first to do philosophy within Sufism? I would not say that. On the one hand, as the tradition develops later, of course it's greatly indebted to him, but we find that Ibn Arabi is really following an intellectual trend within Sufism that largely was made popular probably by Ghazali's time, especially by Ghazali, in which of course a greater attention is paid to issues in cosmology and ontology primarily, but now within the framework of Sufi discourse. So one of the key figures in the integration of philosophy in Sufism, someone who was actually like a younger Andalusian contemporary of Ibn Arabi was Ibn Sabin, who was much better trained actually than Ibn Arabi in the formal discipline of philosophy. Probably the single figure who was the most pivotal in terms of the harmonization of philosophy in Sufism and when we can really start speaking about kind of philosophical Sufism as such is that the great Persian Sufi martyr, Ainuqaddat Hamadani, who died in 1131 of the common era and who was put to death by the Seljib government at the age of 33 ostensibly on charges of heresy. Not only was Ainuqaddat important because he was the student of Ahmad Ghazali, Ghazali's famous younger brother who himself was a major figure in the Persian world, but he was also very well read in Avicenna and of course Ghazali himself. He thus brings together over a century before Ibn Arabi two really important strands in Islamic thought, kind of like a careful synthesis between philosophy, theology, mysticism in a manner which is more explicit than Ghazali in terms of his reliance on philosophy, but which conscientiously seeks to address certain perceived limitations in Avicenna because of his non-committal stance on mysticism. So Ainuqaddat kind of stands as a seriously overlooked figure in this later Islamic intellectual tradition as someone who for the first time articulates a number of concepts that would become kind of stock expressions and ideas in both Persian and Arabic language Sufism. For example, you have the Muhammadan reality, the haqiqah Muhammadiyya, which after Ainuqaddat as far as I can see, and particularly actually in Ibn Arabi and his followers, it really takes center stage, but the idea we find in Ainuqaddat explicitly, the Muhammadan reality is identified with the first intellect of neo-Platonic Islamic cosmology. There is in fact some kind of indication in Ainuqaddat's main theoretical work in Arabic. He wrote pretty much all of his works in Persian, but he has one Arabic book called Zubt-i-Dul-Hakkaiq, or the Quintessence of Reality. And if we read between the lines there, it seems that even Ibn Arabi's most unique doctrine of the nature of the divine names may have at least in part been influenced by Ainuqaddat, but that whole question remains to be answered in furthering the investigation. Okay, that's really interesting. So it sounds like Ibn Arabi's not coming out of a void in terms of the effort to integrate philosophy with Sufism. He's rather responding to something that was already an ongoing process. Yes. And I think it's also interesting, by the way, that Avicenna was already central at this very early stage of philosophical Sufism, and that's something we'll see carrying on through the later Sufi tradition. Yes, indeed. So to what extent would you say that Ibn Arabi is actually doing philosophy in a systematic way? I mean, I've covered him already, right? So there's clearly a lot of philosophical ideas in Ibn Arabi, but he writes these incredibly long sprawling discussions of all sorts of things, right? And really, from what I've read, it seems like usually attempts to cobble together a philosophical system from Ibn Arabi, have to take texts from here and there, bring them together, and then do quite a lot of interpretation. Is that unfair? Or do you think that's basically right, that he's not a systematic thinker, but that he has philosophically interesting things to say unsystematically? Yeah, I think that's actually an excellent characterization. What makes Ibn Arabi so interesting is that, as you've noticed, I'm sure, in reading him, you know, one of the things that jumps out is that there isn't, like, a direct kind of engagement with the discipline of philosophy. In fact, we don't even have a record of him having ever read Islamic philosophy. I mean, he mentions, you know, he never mentions Avicenna, for example, explicitly. But as you've demonstrated in your previous podcast, Ibn Arabi says that he met Averroes, and his writings do evince on one level a deep familiarity with the hosts of philosophical terms and concepts. But, you know, the likeliest place Ibn Arabi would have learned of these was through his formal training in kalam, or philosophical theology. Of course, he was very well versed in Mu'tazilite and Asharite thought. And given the fact that that's not such a surprise anyway, because Islamic theology was thoroughly Avicennized by Ibn Arabi's time, we're thus not surprised that, you know, his ontology, its broad outlines, is even quite Avicennine. That was standard fare in Islamic theology by Ibn Arabi's time, of course. So Ibn Arabi's not technically speaking a systematic thinker, so you're correct definitely to say that. And I'd say that he's not systematic in that he does not try to, like, fit things neatly into an ordered worldview. He continuously, you know, when he'll refine his position, he'll affirm concepts from one different and even antithetical angle on one point, and then he'll go on later to deny it from another point. In fact, this is one of the reasons why Ibn Arabi in early modern scholarship was characterized as a madman. And even today you have people call him, I remember, at least one book has been written which tries to demonstrate how Ibn Arabi was kind of like a proto-postmodernist. Of course, there is a certain degree of coherence in Ibn Arabi's worldview as well. I wouldn't say a certain degree. I'd actually say a great degree of coherence. But it's far from being systematic in any real sense of the term. I mean, sometimes in the middle of a sentence in one of his books he'll insert a parenthetical comment. He'll say something like, you know, the current topic under discussion would actually have come before the topic that preceded this discussion. But then he'll tell us that his ordering of the material is a result of divine unveiling war kashf, and that's not the result of his own intellectual efforts at systematizing. So the kind of anti-systematic spirit, if we can call it that, in Ibn Arabi's writings, and indeed the vast ocean of symbolism, as you mentioned, visionary experiences, arcane, kind of mysterious references, that was clearly imbibed by Qunawiy, interestingly enough. And Qunawiy was, of course, very much a philosopher in a way that Ibn Arabi was not. And so Ibn Arabi trains Qunawiy. He's a stepson. And the same individual ends up becoming so different in so many ways from Ibn Arabi. Qunawiy, you know, we have, for example, a handwritten copy in his own handwriting of Suhrabadi's Hikmahtullah Shrakh, philosophy of elimination. And he initiates, of course, a very serious correspondence with a Nasridian tusi after having read tusi's already famous commentary of Panavasana's Ishaara. So Qunawiy represents a unique turning point in the history of philosophical Sufism in a way that Ibn Arabi doesn't, because we have here for the first time a first-rate scholar, a theologian, but somebody who's trained by none other than Ibn Arabi himself. And he's got kind of a foot in the Perpetetic and the Shraki traditions, and he's also, for better or worse, we can call him an Akbarian or someone who belonged to the so-called school of Ibn Arabi. And one of his own writings are quite different from Ibn Arabi's often in terms of, you know, their modes of expression, their form, and even to some extent their content. They're far more systematic, logical, they're ordered, they're less, if you like, Baroque in style. And there's an element of the visionary there, but we now encounter a visionary who kind of crafts Sufi discourse to sound more logically rigorous and more philosophically inclined in terms of the language, too. It can certainly be said that Qunawiy is the single individual most responsible for the more reified kind of abstract manner of expression that characterizes the school of Ibn Arabi. And, you know, he intended to emphasize, as did every major follower in the school after him, especially Qaysari, Dawudu Qaysari, he wouldn't necessarily have given pride of place to certain elements of these certain aspects of Ibn Arabi's thought, whereas Qunawiy does. And in many ways this is interesting, because Qunawiy, he's commenting on in many ways what is important or what he finds to be important in Ibn Arabi's own articulation of his vision of things. And Qunawiy is necessarily leaving out a lot of key kind of mythological, cosmological discussions you find in Ibn Arabi and things that Ibn Arabi would say over 30, 40 pages in the Fuduhat. And Qunawiy, you know, he'll have a one-page, dense explanation of what's going on there, and in a language that I think his intention is to really speak to audiences whose ears, so to speak, were not as well trained as his were in understanding his stepfather. So sort of Ibn Arabi for dummies. Yeah, in many ways a kind of dumbed-down version of Ibn Arabi. In fact, a teacher of mine once said to me, you know, we should stop calling it the school of Ibn Arabi. We should just call it the school of Qunawiy, because it's largely, you know, like the all the followers after Qunawiy or after Ibn Arabi, they're in one way or another influenced by Qunawiy. And he's really seen as kind of like the filter to interpret Ibn Arabi. Even Shami, the famous poet, Persian poet who died in 1492, who was very much a follower of the school of Ibn Arabi, in one of his books he says that if you want to understand Ibn Arabi, you can only do it through reading Qunawiy. So you kind of have this acknowledgement even into the 15th, 16th century that this person is really the prism through which Ibn Arabi is to be interpreted. So let me ask you about a couple of the philosophical issues that seem really central, I think both for Ibn Arabi and Qunawiy. And of course, they're both going to have to do with God and God's relationship to the world since it doesn't get more central than that. And maybe we can go straight to what might be the most obvious worry that someone could have about these philosophical Sufis, which is that they seem to be describing the created universe as nothing but a manifestation, maybe an illusory manifestation of God. And so this might make you think that they're some kind of monists. In other words, they actually think only God exists, or maybe they're pantheists. In other words, they think that everything is God. Do you think they can be defended against these charges? Now that's a trick question, in a sense. See the easiest way to reply to your question would be to say yes, and since there are plenty of passages, Ibn Arabi in particular, that can be read as exclusively a kind of form of monism or pantheism or panentheism, or even as something that brings together one or all of these isms, like pantheistic monism or something like that. The problem here, as I see it, really has to do with whether these kinds of terms, reductive as they must necessarily be, can really do justice to Ibn Arabi's vision. Stress is in the same breath, really. Oneness and unity, but there's alongside that multiplicity, otherness and even relationality. So let's take, for example, the question of pantheism. Does Ibn Arabi say that there's an essential identity or some kind of identity with God in the cosmos? Yes, he certainly does speak like this, and that was enough, of course, to drive Ibn Taymiyya mad. I mean, he really liked Ibn Arabi to a point, but after a while, he just lost, I think he just stopped being patient with him, and then he decides to refute him and call him an incarnationist and all kinds of things, or someone who, he was an ittihadi, someone who didn't really distinguish between the Creator and the creature. Ibn Arabi would tell us that that does not in any way explain the entire picture. So while he'd say yes, that that is true, God and the cosmos are one, or something like this, God has identified with the world or being in the world or part of the world, he'd say bespeaks God's givenness or his revealedness or manifestness in the cosmos, which points up to what he called his imminence or tashbih. And at the same time, Ibn Arabi places just as much, even more actually, emphasis on how the cosmos is not God in any sense of the term, how God is so utterly beyond and distinct from the world and stands above it by virtue of his inaccessibility or hiddenness or non-revealed face if you like, and that points up his transcendence or his tanzi. So Ibn Arabi commonly refers to the cosmos as he, not he, huwa allahu wa, he, not he. And that does away with the kind of simplistic either-or kind of scenario in which the explanation of the cosmic situation and God's relationship to it tries to trap God and is it like this or is it like that. The huwa allahu wa seeks to really retain both. I'd best be very cautious to use any of these terms, pantheism, monism, so on and so forth. If we were to use them, we'd have to add a great degree of qualification. And by the time these qualifications can be made, you know, Ibn Arabi's, if you want to say zamona, sure, but then all the other stuff, the very terms in question would then really not carry much weight because we'd have to add so many caveats and so many explanations and so many, we'd have to really gloss these terms that they really stop, they just lose much of their significance. So I mean, from this perspective, even a term that is used often to explain the perspective of Ibn Arabi and his followers, wa hata tawujood, or the oneness of being, even that phrase, I mean, it's something that Ibn Arabi doesn't use and use the term himself. I mean, it only becomes, you know, a technical term three or four decades after his death. But that term also, it has certain major limitations to it because it can be perceived as emphasizing only the he aspect of the he not he formula. And that's certainly how Ibn Taymiyya understood the term and many other later detractors of Ibn Arabi as well. For example, Sheikh Ahmad Sirhindi, the famous Indian Sufi who died in 1624. It seems like what you're saying is basically that Ibn Arabi gives us this interesting dialectical idea where the world is both God and not God. And so it would be overly simplistic to just take one side of this polarity. But on the other hand, I mean, as philosophers, we're probably not too happy with someone saying, well, the solution is to just contradict yourself all the time. And so it seemed to me, and this is something I talked a bit about in the episode on him, but I wanted to get you to say something more about it. It seemed to me that one of the most promising moves he makes to explain this position without just saying, you know, P and not P are both true, is to describe the world in terms of divine attributes or the names of God. Because it seems like a name plausibly is both in a sense the same thing as the named thing and in a sense not the same as the named thing. But on the other hand, it's hard to understand how something like a name could metaphysically be the same as the created universe. So do you think the point he's trying to make there, is that more of an analogy? So is he saying that created things relate to God the way that names might relate to the bearer of the name? Or is it actually that we are literally the names of God as created things? This too is a quick question. You know, Ibn Arabi, his most common way of speaking about what the names are, or really what they're not, is by speaking of them as relationships. So this is something that he does which seems, at least from one perspective, quite revolutionary in the history of Islamic thought. Because I mean, the way we speak about the divine names in classical Islamic theology was to maintain that they somehow inherit in God, or God's essence, what they've called Qayyim Abidatihi, but not in a way that kind of gave them independent ontological status such that they could be said to be super-attitude. So for many medieval Muslim theologians and presumably some philosophers, the objective kind of ontological status of the divine names was never really called into question. It was a given, even if their morality could not be easily understood or explained. Ibn Arabi comes in the scene and he vehemently rejects this common type of picture of the divine names. And he says that the divine names do not inherit God in any way, and he says that they're not ontological entities, which is like one of his main points, and he really tries to explain things from that perspective. He says they're not Umar Ujudiyyah, or ontological things. So instead he says that they are technically speaking relationships, nisa, between what we can call God as revealed or manifest, and the objects of God's knowledge that do enter into concrete existence. So what Ibn Arabi and the later tradition called lokayah, self-disclosure or manifestation, mad'ahir in Arabic. So the divine names come about as a result of God's self-disclosure or manifestation, and they thus make the God-world relationship for Ibn Arabi possible. Yet the cosmos, it's nothing other than a conglomeration of the divine names, we can say, as displayed through the existential aspects of God's knowledge. So the universe is impregnated ultimately with the divine attributes, and the very multiplicity in the cosmos, therefore, as we see it, because it manifests the attributes obviously point to the divine names. So by the same token, since the divine names are relationships for Ibn Arabi and not actual ontological entities, the multiplicity in the cosmos is in actuality not any real kind of plurality. So this kind of move that Ibn Arabi's making here, where he's emphasizing their reality on one level and then ultimately because they're relationships, they're ultimately unreal, has posed the greatest, I think, philosophical challenge for his later interpreters. How do we understand these names? Because the names, they allow for multiplicity to emerge, and at the same time, they're paradoxically the very reason for the world's relative unreality. So actually, I find that very helpful philosophically, because if the names really denote relationships or relations, it does seem like a relation is a real thing without being an entity in its own right, which is kind of what he wants, right? Yes. So let me ask you something rather different now, just about the later historical influence of Ibn Arabi. And actually, maybe we can start with a contemporary of Kunawi, namely Yrumi, who's maybe the most famous Sufi, even more famous than Ibn Arabi because of his poetry and the popularity of his literary outputs. These two were friends, Kunawi and Rumi, were friends. They're even buried near each other in Kunia. And it seems a little bit hard to wrap our minds around, right? So Kunawi is, as you were saying before, systematic, even sort of technical approach to Sufism, Rumi, this kind of ecstatic poet. So how do we reconcile two such different authors as being two outgrowths of the same Sufi tree, as it were? Right. Well, that's, you know, that's, again, another very, very important question. There's a really nice anecdote, and there are all kinds of anecdotes about, in which Kunawi figures, you know. But this one in the later tradition, it tells us that one day Kunawi and Rumi are sitting together in Kunia, and one of Rumi's students comes up to him and asks him a question that had been bothering him. And Rumi gives him, in characteristic fashion, a couplet in Persian, and the student's happy, and he walks away, and he's very pleased with his answer. So Kunawi turns to Rumi and he says to him, how is it that you can make such difficult ideas seem so simple? And to this Rumi responds, he says, how is it that you can make such simple ideas sound so difficult? What is important to keep in mind here is that neither Rumi nor Kunawi saw a problem with each other's different modes of expression. I mean, Rumi's thought evinces some of the theoretical, philosophical tendencies which characterize Kunawi. I mean, Rumi was a Mas'aridi theologian also. But Kunawi's thought also evinces some of the more poetic tendencies that we find in Rumi. Judging from the plain sense of Rumi's reply to Kunawi, he probably did think that Kunawi was unnecessarily complicating things, if you like. So having said that, there is a caveat here that we need to introduce, at least where Rumi is concerned. He's often seen as kind of being an anti-intellectual or anti-philosophical person. I mean, and there's plenty of verses in his poetry to corroborate that kind of a position. The most common verse, surely, is the one in which it says, he says that the leg of the philosophers is wooden. A wooden leg is terribly unsturdy. Poy istid lal yon chubim bovad, poy chubim sakh mitam kim bovad. But one contemporary scholar, at least one that I've seen, emphasizes here that Rumi doesn't say the philosophers don't have a leg to stand on. He says that they do, but that it's just wooden, so it's not enough to allow them to, in Rumi's language, fly up to the heavenly empyrean. So in order to do this, Rumi would emphasize love, and that's, of course, the thing that he's known best for. But I get the feeling that when we would not necessarily disagree, I think that ultimately they see their goals essentially similar, even if their modes of expression and intellectual types really were not the same. We could even say that in a sense they take on two different sides of Ibn Arabi's thought, because obviously Ibn Arabi is full of poetic imagery. And also, you know, there's the earlier tradition of love, poetry, and Sufism. So Rumi is taking that on, and Kunawi is taking on the more technical philosophically influenced aspects of Ibn Arabi. And how appropriate that he was uniting these two apparently contradictory tendencies in himself. Yes, yes, exactly. Just one last question, looking ahead a bit to where we're going in future episodes. Obviously Sufism has this massive influence across the Islamic world, really down to the present day. But can you say something a little bit more specifically about philosophical Sufism? So what was the kind of geographical spread of philosophical Sufism? I mean, obviously we've been talking about people who wrote in Persian, as well as Arabic. So certainly there's this philosophical Sufi tradition in Persia. What about, for example, in India or elsewhere in the Islamic world in the, let's say the early modern period? Right. So what's particularly interesting here is that, like you said, the philosophical Sufism or Sufism of a more kind of theoretical really spreads throughout the eastern lands of Islam like wildfire. I mean, you have, this is a phenomenon for at least over the next 500 years, you have, you know, people in the Ottoman period, for example, writing in sometimes Persian but often Ottoman Turkish, like Ismail and Qaravi, who's directly bringing together Ibn Arabi's thought, and actually he was a commentator on Rumi too. And the Ottoman world was so vast that you have authors in that universe who belong to, you know, who lived in places like today, will be Bosnia, Turkey, Syria, so very, very vast geographical expanse. Of course, Persia and central Asia. In India, where the school lived in Arabic in particular, had a very important second wind, if you like. The writings there tended to be in Persian because most Indian Sufis in the later period wrote in Persian, in Arabic and Persian, or even, like, an Arab or Persian. And there the aforementioned Shagam al-Siri Hindi, he was very important for the, at least responding to Ibn Arabi, even though he wasn't necessarily always on board with his central theses. Shawali Allah al-Dahlami was a major figure also who was working in the Indian context and who had a very important role to play in bringing Ibn Arabi's thought and bringing his philosophical Sufism into something like a more mainstream intellectual discourse, because he was a very well-respected scholar who won the Olamat class as well. So India's case is interesting. You have many other minor figures in India, Khawaja Khord and Mubarak Zillah, Ela Habadi, people like this, all of whom, their writing really evince a very deep kind of penetration, if you like, of the central tenets of the school of Ibn Arabi and who, like Bonawi and like his later followers, all try their hand at systematizing this worldview. And then what happens in India is you have many, you know, practical Sufi manuals written by Sufi masters, you know, guides of how to get there, so to speak, but which conscientiously engage the school of Ibn Arabi. One of the most interesting later developments in which philosophical Sufism has yet another sphere of influence is actually in China, which is quite surprising. I mean, research into this is only being done today in a more sustained fashion. But, you know, by the 17th century you have very important Chinese Olam, or Chinese scholars, Wang Daoyu, Lu Zhi, people like this, who in order to attempt to explain Islam to their Chinese counterparts, most of whom were neo-Confucians, they drew on the writings of Ibn Arabi and his followers, usually through Persian translation. But they did so by crafting the Chinese language now to speak the language of neo-Confucianism. So you have Chinese Muslim authors drawing on Ibn Arabi's ideas, but recasting them in Chinese in such a way that a neo-Confucian could kind of understand, and also some of their Buddhist colleagues as well. That's a trend that in many ways characterized the later intellectual life of the Chinese Muslim Chinese. In many ways it's also symptomatic of what's happening in North America and Europe in the 20th century and even into now the 21st century, where you have many authors who for one reason or another espouse the cause of Ibn Arabi or the school of Ibn Arabi or philosophical Sufism or the wedding of philosophical Sufism and who seek to remold even the English language, for example, to speak these things, or French. So that's the influence of the school of Ibn Arabi on Sufism proper. But it also has a very important sustained influence on the discipline of Islamic philosophy as well. And this is most clearly seen, of course, in Amul-i-Sarra, the writings of Amul-i-Sarra. The entire school of Isfahan right into the, again, the 20th century, even until today you have many authors in Iran who are followers of Mu'l-i-Sarra or espouse his views, but who have a vested interest in Ibn Arabi. So in Mu'l-i-Sarra you have the wedding of several different strands of Islamic thought, the Shiite theology, of course, very deep engagement with the philosophical traditions. Mu'l-i-Sarra's responded to Surah Al-Ardi, obviously. And he takes Ibn Arabi extremely seriously, to the point that he's even himself accused at some points in his career of being too pro-Ibn Arabi or too pro-Sunni. So all of these trends, if we look at them together in terms of the geographical dispersion of the tradition, we have a very, very wide expanse in which Ibn Arabi's ideas and the systematization and articulation of his ideas go into so many different modes, so to speak. You have them in practical manuals. Now they're in Chinese, speaking Confucian Chinese. They're in philosophical texts. Of course, the poetic tradition is greatly indebted to Ibn Arabi. And actually, Ayin al-Khuzad and Ibn Arabi actually meet up in the Persian poetic tradition as well, where you have Ayin al-Khuzad speaking theoretically about many of these ideas in Persian in the Ibn Arabi school, articulating some of the same ideas in Arabic and then in Persian. And then you have poets like Iraqi, who died in the 13th century, or Mahmud Shivesteri, who died in the following century, trying to bring them together now within the medium of the poetic tradition. And so Persian poetry also is given a new life because of the school of Ibn Arabi. Thanks. That's really remarkable and amazing. I mean, obviously, the later history of Sufism is so vast that it could be the subject for its own series of podcasts. So someone should really do that, Mahmud. Yes. Just saying. But we're taking hints. Right, exactly. So thank you very much. You also mentioned a lot of things that I'll be getting on to look at. So philosophy in the Ottoman tradition in the Mughal period of India, and especially, I guess, the self of its, but more approximately next week, I'll be moving on to something very different, which will actually be the ongoing tradition of logic in this period. So I hope the audience will join me for that. For now, I'll just thank you, Mahmud, for coming on the podcast. Thank you very much for having me. And please join me next time for the next installment of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Thank you.