Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 153 - A Matter of Taste – Ibn Arabi and Mysticism.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, A Matter of Taste, Ibn Arabi and Mysticism. Never let it be said that an obsession with Aristotle prevents you from getting out and meeting people. Take a Verruise. There are not one, but two famous stories about his encounters with contemporaries. We've already heard the one about his audience with the Almohad emir. Here's the other one. Averruise has heard tell of a young man who received revelatory insight while engaged in a spiritual retreat. He is eager to meet the youth and upon seeing him gives him a warm embrace. Yes, says Averruise, and the youth replies, yes. So far the discussion is going very positively, so Averruise smiles. But the youth now says, no. Averruise is now troubled and asks the young man about his revelatory experience. Has it taught him the same things that one can learn through reason? Yes and no, replies the youth, apparently figuring that this approach has worked well in the conversation so far. But then he adds, between the yes and the no, spirits fly from their matter and heads from their bodies. Averruise is impressed. Like Ibn Tufayl's fictional character, Hayy ibn Yaqdan, the young man has achieved wisdom without having to study Aristotle or any other books. Averruise can only give thanks to God that he was given a chance to meet this extraordinary individual. The youth's name? Muhiyad-din Muhammad ibn Ali ibn al-Arabi. Averruise was right in his glowing assessment. Ibn Arabi will be honored with the title Ashaykh al-Aqbar, or greatest master, and recognized as the towering genius of the Islamic mystical tradition known as Sufism. The story is obviously more flattering to Ibn Arabi and puts Averruise's hard-won rational scholarship at a distinctively lower level than Ibn Arabi's mystical vision. So you may not be surprised to hear that it is not Averruise, but Ibn Arabi himself who relates the anecdote. Here he is looking back on his younger days in his homeland of Andalusia. He was born in the year 1165 in Mursia, and like Averruise, belonged to a fairly eminent family. He encountered Averruise after his spiritual enlightenment, but before he left Andalusia to go east at the age of 30. He went on the Hajj, or pilgrimage, to Mecca and never came back, eventually taking up residence as a Sufi master in Damascus. Was he a philosopher? As Ibn Arabi himself might say, yes and no. His writings are packed with technical terms borrowed from the philosophical tradition. He also uses vivid imagery to represent concepts familiar to us from philosophers, especially Avicenna. Yet it would be reductive and misleading to see Ibn Arabi as an Avicennan philosopher with an unusual flair for metaphor. As the story of the meeting with Averruise shows, he himself thought that the rational methods of philosophy are limited in what they can achieve. He seeks not the well-grounded, logically valid demonstrations extolled by Avicenna or Averruise, but rather truths that would seem like mere contradictions to such plodding purveyors of rational proof. One might more plausibly say that Ibn Arabi should be credited with bringing philosophy into the Sufi tradition. As I've just mentioned, he does show mastery of philosophical ideas and use them for his own purposes. But it would again be misleading to see him as the first philosophical Sufi. For one thing, he does not yet present Sufism as an explicit philosophical system. That will be left to his followers and especially his stepson and commentator al-Qunawi, who we'll meet in a later episode. For another thing, philosophy influenced Sufism before Ibn Arabi came along. Bear in mind we're in the 12th century here, and Sufism has had a long time to develop by this point in history. The word Sufi derives from the Arabic word suf, meaning wool, a reference to the rough garments worn by these mystics. This tells us something about the outward appearance and behavior of the Sufis. Like the late antique church fathers and mothers, and like the cynics, they were ascetics. Also like the desert fathers and mothers, the Sufis were the subject of an extensive body of literature, with anecdotes highlighting this ascetic impulse as well as their piety and intimate relationship with God, and their indictment of the hypocrisy of fellow Muslims. Here's one anecdote I particularly like, that illustrates not only the asceticism of Sufis, but also the one-upmanship that often features in this literary genre. A Sufi from Khorasan tells a Sufi from Iraq how abstemious he and his colleagues are. If God provides them with food, they give thanks, but if not, they go hungry without complaint. The other Sufi says this sort of thing is known in his land of Iraq too. It's what dogs do there. As for the Iraqi Sufis, when God sends them food, they give it away to the needy, and when he doesn't, they give thanks. And here's another story, which could easily have been a story about an ancient cynic philosopher. A prince is told that a man has been climbing around on the roof of his palace. The prince has the man brought before him and demands to know what he was doing up there. Looking for my lost camel, says the man. The prince laughs, but the man replies that the prince is engaged in an equally absurd task by trying to live a pious life while surrounded by wealth and luxury. The prince repents and becomes an ascetic. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that all three of these ascetic movements—cynicism, antique Christianity, and Sufism—have included women in the ranks of their greatest sages. The cynics had hyparchia, the Christians heroines like Makrina and Melania, and the Sufis have Rabia al-Adawiya. Alive already in the 8th century, she was among the earliest important, Muslim mystics. She introduced into Sufism the central theme of love and erotic longing for God. We have no surviving writings by Rabia, but some lines of verse are ascribed to her and she is a favorite protagonist in later Sufi literature. In one such literary portrayal, she says that the lover seeks a togetherness with the beloved so intense that nothing separates the two. Someone who consummates such an erotic relationship with God has experienced something that cannot be expressed in language. It is like taste in Arabic dhawq, which is a standard Sufi term for direct contact with God. Other stories tell of how she was oblivious to the beauty of the world around her because of her exclusive love for God. She remarked that, This theme of passionate love in Arabic ishq will play a role in the writings of later Sufis, including the great Persian poet Arumi. It is also prominent in the most famous of the early Sufis, the mystic martyr Al-Halaaj, whose name actually means someone who cards wool. I'm not exactly sure what carding wool is, to be honest. Maybe some kind of sheep-related gambling. Al-Halaaj led an eventful life, traveling from his home in the Persian province of Fars, to travel widely, including in India, where Sufism would blossom in centuries to come. But he is better known for the grotesque manner of his death in the year 922. After he set himself up as a religious teacher in Baghdad, he ran afoul of the authorities, making a particular enemy of the vizier Hamid, who served the Abbasid caliph al-Mukhtadir. At the vizier's instigation, Al-Halaaj was imprisoned and, according to one account, This spectacularly brutal murder was perhaps motivated more by political considerations than doctrinal ones. But certainly, Al-Halaaj could shock fellow Muslims with his teachings. He is most famous for a remark he made to his more moderate teacher, Al-Junaid. When he knocked on his master's door, Al-Junaid asked who was there, and Al-Halaaj called out, Since Al-Haq, the Truth, or the Real, is one of God's revealed names, this was a rather shocking remark, and one that the master Al-Junaid repudiated. Another major figure of the earlier Sufi tradition was Abu Sa'id ibn Abi al-Khayr. He played a major role in the social institutions of Sufism, introducing a set of rules to be followed by members of Sufi orders and also the idea of listening to music during Sufi gatherings. This tradition of samāh, or listening, is connected to the famous dance of the whirling dervishes. We know from a previous episode that the enjoyment of music was controversial for pious Muslims, so it was bold of Abu Sa'id to associate music and dance with the asceticism of the Sufis. In fact, it was something Ibn Arabi didn't like one bit. In a kind of foreshadowing of the anecdote that brings together Avarwis and Ibn Arabi, no less a philosopher than Avicenna supposedly made a visit to meet Abu Sa'id. The two got on famously, and after he departed, Avicenna was asked what he made of Abu Sa'id. He answered simply, Everything I know, he sees. Meanwhile, Abu Sa'id's students similarly wanted to know what he thought of Avicenna. His reply? Everything I see, he knows. These earlier figures give us a taste, if you'll pardon the expression, of the richness of, and perhaps the contradictions within, Sufism up to the time of Ibn Arabi. These men and women were recognized as sages, admired for their total devotion to God and renunciation of the things of this world. They often received support from the society around them, especially under the Seljuks, when they were sponsored by the famous vizier Nizam al-Mulk, patron of the Nidamiya schools we discussed in the first episode on Al-Ghazali. Yet, the theology of the Sufis could also provoke hostility, even if it remained largely implicit. Most problematic was the suggestion that the Sufis themselves had attained some kind of divinity. This would be one possible interpretation of Al-Halaaj's statement, I am the truth. He was claiming to be identical with God. In fact, we might even take the Sufis to be teaching that the whole created universe is nothing but God. For, they often describe the universe, with all its variety and multiplicity, as an illusion, or veil, concealing an underlying divine unity, which alone is real. Is this the teaching we find in the much more elaborate and sophisticated works of Ibn Arabi? The answer is inevitable, yes and no. He frequently speaks of God as al-haq, the truth or the real, and does present the created universe as a veil that conceals God. On the other hand, the universe is also a manifestation of God. It is the form in which God shows himself. This sort of idea had occasionally been proposed in antiquity, especially by the anonymous Christian Neoplatonist who called himself Dionysius. But Ibn Arabi's works are unprecedented in the detail with which they present this idea. His writings attempt to hold two apparently contradictory ideas in a kind of dialectical tension. On the one hand, being or reality consists of nothing but God, who is utterly one. On the other hand, this single divine reality shows itself forth as a multiplicity of things that are, in their own way, real. As I say, Ibn Arabi was not the first to use philosophical materials in the service of mystical theory. Just think about Ghazali, who apparently saw Sufism as a higher path of understanding than philosophy. But if we're judging by sheer quantity, no one can compete with Ibn Arabi. His most ambitious and massive work, the Meccan Revelations, has received a modern edition which managed to cover only about a quarter of its chapters in about a dozen volumes. So, you'll understand that I only had time to read his works cover to cover twice in preparing this episode. It wasn't really Ibn Arabi's fault that he wrote so much. He was just setting down in writing what had been directly revealed to him from a divine source. In the preface to his most frequently read treatise entitled Ringstones of Wisdom, he explains that the work we are about to read was delivered to him in a dream by none other than the Prophet Muhammad. Ibn Arabi's stories of religious revelation constituted a powerful claim to authority, and one that was rather successful. Much as philosophy in the later Eastern tradition will frequently take the form of commentary on Avicenna, so philosophical Sufism will often be presented as commentary on Ibn Arabi. His Ringstones of Wisdom, far briefer than the gargantuan Meccan Revelations, has been the subject of hundreds of commentaries, stretching right down to the 20th century. The Ringstones of Wisdom consists of 27 chapters, each of which discusses a prophet recognized by Islam. The idea of the title is that every prophet is like a different setting on a ring into which the jewel of God's word is set. This explains why the different prophets bring superficially different messages, despite receiving their prophecy from the same source. The book begins with Adam, yes that Adam of Adam and Eve fame, and explains how God created mankind in order to see himself in this image. Of course, the last chapter concerns Muhammad, the seal of the prophets. Ibn Arabi's scripturally based method is closely related to his philosophical stance. The core of his teaching is that God is, in himself or in his essence, unknowable to us. We grasp him only insofar as he shows himself to us. This is why the application of pure reason, according to Ibn Arabi, tends inevitably towards a kind of emptiness, in which philosophers discover that God eludes all language and thought. Ultimately, this tendency leads to tanzi, meaning the denial of God's attributes because of his absolute transcendence. Equally, though, Ibn Arabi rejects a tendency he finds in some theologians, known as tashbih, to assimilate or compare God's nature to what God has created. Again, Ibn Arabi wants to strike a balance between yes and no, negotiating between the naive positive language of tashbih and the blank negation of tanzi. This is possible only because God has revealed himself. So, we must begin from the texts containing that revelation. Ibn Arabi is particularly glad to find verses in the Qur'an like this. There is nothing like unto him and he is the seeing, the hearing. In this single sentence, we have an apparent case of tanzi, there is nothing like God, and then an apparent case of tashbih, God is hearing and seeing, like you and me. Ibn Arabi's favorite way to explore, if not resolve, these tensions is to consider the divine names. In fact, God's names are infinite, but only a finite number have been revealed to us. It is by these names, and these names alone, that we can speak of God. This, by itself, is not a particularly bold or unusual idea, but in Ibn Arabi's hands it becomes a more radical notion, because he sees the created universe itself as nothing more nor less than the interplay between the divine names. Each name marks a certain relationship between God and the world he has created. For instance, he is said to be merciful because he shows mercy towards his creatures. There are many names because God relates to creatures in a variety of different ways. This strikes me as a very interesting answer to a long-standing philosophical problem, familiar especially from antique thinkers like Plotinus, Proclus, the Cappadocians, and the Pseudo-Dionysius. All these thinkers wanted to say that God, or the first principle, gives rise to the universe, but also that he transcends this universe. Various analogies had been proposed as models of the relationship between God and creation. Usually, the analogies involved relations of cause and effect. God is like a light shining forth rays, a mind giving rise to ideas, and so on. Ibn Arabi's brilliant, and deeply Quranic, idea is instead to think of this relationship as that between a thing and its names. This suggestion has many virtues. It helps to explain how a God who is purely one can give rise to a multiplicity. The most fundamental of puzzles in the Neoplatonic tradition can now be solved, since it is easy for us to understand that a single thing might have many names while itself remaining one. The names can even be in apparent tension with one another, because God can bear apparently contradictory relations to things in the universe. Ibn Arabi goes out of his way to emphasize this dwelling on opposed names like the merciful and the vengeful. In God himself, there is no opposition or multiplicity, yet we find conflict and variety in the way that he shows himself, which is to say in his names. Another advantage is that names have a rather ambiguous metaphysical status. Ibn Arabi's handling of this issue is sophisticated. He distinguishes carefully between three levels. There is the meaning, or bearer, of the name, in this case God, then the name itself, and only then is a third item the linguistic expression which we actually utter. He calls this linguistic manifestation the name of the name, and compares it to a cloak covering the name of God. All this nicely captures the situation we find ourselves in relative to God. We usually only see an outward surface appearance of God's self-manifestation. When we remove this first veil, we come to God's names, which are the ways in which God has shown himself the ways he relates to his creation. But even here, we have not arrived at full-blown reality or being. This would be God himself, which is why one of his names is al-Haq, the truth. Rather, we are here in the realm of yes and no, a kind of compromise between reality and illusion, between existence and non-existence. This is as real as created things can get, since they are only a manifestation or representation of what is really real, namely God. Ibn Arabi has several ways of articulating this idea. One is borrowed from Avicenna. In the Avicenna idea of a contingent thing that exists by being necessary through another, Ibn Arabi sees an example of the kind of halfway house he is looking for, between genuine being and total non-being. With characteristically beautiful imagery, he talks of non-existent things as suffering from a kind of restriction or constraint, and then finding relief as God breathes them out into their state of dependent existence. He refers to this process with a phrase taken from prophetic hadith, the breath of the merciful. Because of the ambiguous and even self-contradictory status of created existence, Ibn Arabi thinks it can best be grasped not by philosophical reason, but by what he calls imagination. This is something we access most frequently through dreams, whose conjuring of impossible images gives us a better insight into created reality than any Aristotelian syllogism. Consistently with this, when Ibn Arabi comes to consider specific philosophical problems, he often seems to revel in paradox, especially if he can ground the paradox in Scripture. A nice example is what he has to say about human action. Ibn Arabi instead draws our attention to an episode in the life of the prophet, when the tide of a battle turned after Muhammad symbolically threw a handful of sand towards the enemy. Subsequently, it was revealed to him, You threw not when you threw, but it was God who threw, that he might test the believers. An Asharite would embrace this Quranic verse as proof that God was really the one who performed the action of throwing. Ibn Arabi instead points out that the verse still says to Muhammad, when you threw. In other words, Muhammad did throw the sand, but only because God threw it. As always, created things are nothing but a manifestation of divine truth and reality. There's a widespread perception, I think, that philosophy in the later Islamic tradition becomes entirely suffused by mysticism. Rational argument is set aside in favor of a direct vision or taste of God, which cannot be put into words. Some welcome this development, ascribing to Ibn Arabi and his heirs the discovery of insights deeper than anything rationalist philosophy can offer. Others lament the slide of Islamic intellectual traditions into paradox-mongering and obfuscation. In fact, though, things were more complex. As we've just seen, Ibn Arabi does see philosophy as fundamentally limited, yet he weaves it into mystical Islam. Also, though his historical influence is enormous, it is not as if Sufism and later Islamic philosophy are just identical. Sufism will be a major player in the later development of philosophy, but the same is true of Asharite Kalam and Avicenna. So, whether you like mysticism or loathe it, later philosophy in the eastern lands of Islam will have something to offer you. We're not ready to look at it yet, though. Soon we'll be turning to the Jewish contribution to philosophy in Andalusia, something that will take us a number of episodes to cover. And before that, we have one last Muslim from the West to consider. What I've just been saying illustrates his thought rather well, as it happens, that to understand history we need to attend to interacting forces that are always more complex than they first may seem. Should you join me again next time? The answer is not an Ibn Arabi-style yes and no, but the one given by Molly Bloom at the end of James Joyce's Ulysses, Yes, yes, yes, yes. Because our subject will be a man with some claim to be the greatest of all pre-modern historians, Ibn Khaldun. Here on The History of Philosophy, without any caps. .