More Persian Lessons

In 2004, Professor Richard Foltz published Spirituality in the Land of the Noble: How Iran Shaped the World's Religions and, in so doing, attempted to educate a wider public about the pervasive significance of Iranian theosophy--for the development of the so-called "Abrahamic" religions as well as Buddhism and the Baha'i. The book was, and remains, a noble undertaking: for it opens up the possibility of a Transcendentalist revival among educated Americans. Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman all acknowledged their debts to Persian religiosity; what prevents the average citizen of these United States from achieving similar insights?

Persian Lessons

Dervishes at play

It is utterly bewildering to consider the depth, richness, and sublimity of Persian culture and then compare these to American attitudes towards Iran.

This is not an endorsement of the present regime in Iran. It is a Whitmanian Persian lesson.

Farid ud-Din Attar (d. approx. 1220)

Khorasanian poet and druggist Farid ud-Din Attar was a Muslim pietist and author of the Persian classic The Conference of the Birds (Manteq at-Tair)--an extended allegory of life understood as a tariqa or path of disciplined longing. The goal of this "path" is purification: one is doused in the flames of passion (ishq) until the impediments to love (mahabba) are burned away. What remains is what is made indistinguishable from what ought to be. One may think of the "path" as an Islamic tantra--but unburdened of the prurience associated with popular (mis-)understandings of Hindu or Buddhist practices that go by that name.

In the words of his most accomplished translators to date (Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis), Attar's poem is "...continually interesting and amusing, [with] moments of great psychological insight, humour and narrative suspense...[its over 4,500 lines transform] belief into poetry, much in the way that [the poems of] Milton or Dante [would later do]" (Attar, Conference of the Birds, Penguin Classics, 1984, p. 15).

Attar "is said to have spent much of his childhood being educated at the theological school attached to the shrine of Imam Reza at Mashhad (the largest town in north-eastern Iran and a major centre of pilgrimage), and later to have travelled to Rey (the ancient Raghes, near modern Tehran), Egypt, Damascus, Mecca, Turkestan (southern Russia) and India. Such itineraries are common in the lives of Persian poets of [his] period, and it was clearly usual for them, like their counterparts in medieval Europe, the troubadours and wandering scholars, to travel from place to place in search of knowledge or patronage or both.



Attar's travels seem to have been undertaken more in the pursuit of knowledge than patronage; he boasted that he had never sought a king's favour or stooped to writing a panegyric (this alone would make him worthy of note among Persian poets). Though The Conference of the Birds is about the search for an ideal, spiritual king, Attar obviously had a low opinion of most earthly rulers; he usually presents their behavior as capricious and cruel, and at one point in the poem he specifically says it is best to have nothing to do with them" (ibid., pp. 9-10).

Santayana the Moor

George Santayana was deeply impressed by Spinoza--he tells us this himself in many of his writings. But he could never take Spinoza whole-cloth: he obsessed about the lens-grinder and tinkered with his thought. Santayana had an itch that Spinoza could not reach to scratch. His "Moorish" side is an expression of his Alfarabian instincts.

I have no evidence that Santayana ever read Alfarabi (I doubt the latter's works were available to him in translation); but Spinoza absorbed much Alfarabian thinking through Maimonides, who revered the Turkoman master. I would argue that Santayana caught little glints of Alfarabian light during his deep reading of Spinoza, and these furtive flashes were the source of his restless dissatisfaction with his great Spanish precursor.

Here, from Santayana's wonderful late-life memoir My Host The World, are some Alfarabian notions about the relationship of philosophy and religion (p. 4):

Each religion, by the help of more or less myth which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny. A philosopher may perfectly well cultivate more than one Weltanschauung, if he has a vital philosophy of his own to qualify his adoption of each, so as to render them complementary and not contradictory. I had, and have, such a vital philosophy; and the movement of my mind among various systems of belief has tended merely to discover how far my vital philosophy could be expressed in each of them. My variations therefore never involved rejecting any old affection, but only correcting such absoluteness or innocence as there may have been about it, and reducing it to its legitimate function. So in 1900 I published the result of the gradual transformation of my religious sentiments. Religion was poetry intervening in life.

Ghazali and Modern Thought

A frustration encountered by anyone who wishes to come to terms with the thought of the great Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali (d. 1111 CE) is the lack of solid scholarly treatment on the introductory level. With Eric Ormsby's Ghazali: The Revival of Islam (Oxford: Oneworld, 2008 [reprint 2012]), this void has finally been filled. Ormsby has spent enough time reading and thinking about Ghazali's thought, peculiarities of expression, and historical context that he is able to rescue hujjat al-islam (the "Proof of Islam," a traditional title for the Khorasani sage) from the apparent contradictions that beset his work.

The key to unlocking the mystery of al-Ghazali is, as Ormsby remarks on page 75, that he was both a radical skeptic and a passionate believer simultaneously. An aside: some years ago, I recall reading an article written by a Christian critic of Islam who smugly asserted that the Islamic tradition had yet to produce a Kierkegaard--an assertion that was intended by the writer to somehow prove Islam's inferiority to Christianity. What the author of the article did not know is: (a) the Islamic tradition did produce a Kierkegaard in al-Ghazali and (b) the Muslim Kierkegaard (unlike the "Christian" one--who denied to his dying day that he could be considered a Christian) is generally regarded as the St. Augustine or Thomas Aquinas of the tradition. Few modes of discourse are as consistently tiresome as religious apologia--a mode that, I am sorry to say, was one of al-Ghazali's self-indulgences. Kierkegaard was also subject to this bad habit. It is an occupational hazard for anyone who would traffic in "theological" speculation.

Like Santayana (see post of 3/23/13 below), Ghazali struggled to construct a "wholly free and disillusioned" piety and, in so doing, "revived" Islamic tradition at a time when its direction was up for grabs (the crucial 11th-12th centuries CE). Consequently, Muslims can reply to misinformed critics such as the one I referenced above with the words of Joyce's Stephen Dedalus to Cranly: "What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?" (see previous post). Kierkegaard eschewed all system; al-Ghazali, on the other hand, employed system in a fashion that Wittgenstein would later echo in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:

6.54 My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)

In an interesting parallel, Ghazali asserted again and again in his writings what would become Wittgenstein's Tractarian conclusion:

7 Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

[See, e.g., Ormsby pp. 136-137].

As difficult as he can be to interpret, Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali is an indispensable thinker--and has been for the past 1,000 years. His "pre-modern modernity" is striking; he has never been more relevant than today.

The Joycean Turn

--Then, said Cranly, you do not intend to become a protestant?

--I said that I had lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost selfrespect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?

[James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man].

Early in his life, at the hands of his Jesuit teachers, James Joyce experienced the stimulating effect of Aquinas's intellect (and, through Aquinas, that of Ibn Rushd's beloved Aristotle): he benefited from the experience enormously, never to forget or forsake it.

The Ghazalian Difference

Among al-Ghazali's lasting contributions to the Islamic intellectual tradition was his uncompromising refusal to conflate 'ilm (ordinary knowledge acquired through the senses and tested by reason) with ma'rifa (certainty achieved by "extrasensory" means--see, e.g., Sherman A. Jackson, Sufism for Non-Sufis?, OUP (2012), 36).

As Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed out (in a manuscript left unpublished at his death but later edited and published as On Certainty), Western philosophy has been burdened, since at least Descartes, by this particular confusion: in ordinary usage, the statements "I know x to be true" and "I am certain that x is true" are interchangeable. For Wittgenstein, it is "through this misuse [that] a queer and extremely important mental state seems to be revealed" [OC remark 6]. Certainty, for Wittgenstein, is a mental state--an attribute of human psychology--that derives from experience: "My life shews that I know or am certain that there is a chair over there, or a door, and so on--" (remark 7). Of course, as Wittgenstein recognized, the feeling of certainty is not evidence of the truth of the matter asserted (pace someone like Jeffrey Kripal--see Kripal's deeply confused The Serpent's Gift, University of Chicago [!] Press, 2007; cp. OC remark 22).

By distinguishing 'ilm from ma'rifa, al-Ghazali associated the mental state of certainty with the latter, leaving the former free for continual revision in light of reason and new evidence. By the same stroke, however, he insulated from doubt what we would call (in the West today) "religious experience." What may appear, at first blush, to be a victory for religion (or at least religious experience) is, upon further inspection, a Pyrrhic one: for religious experience is rendered completely unavailable to anyone but the individual who has the privilege of such an experience. In other words, al-Ghazali rendered religious experience entirely private and--like Wittgenstein's famous metaphor of the "beetle in the box"--unavailable for public inspection. As such, it is beyond empirical proof. There is only one person in the world who may find him or herself under any obligation to believe claims made about such an experience: the person who has had it.

This state of affairs never satisfies religious people with an "evangelical" bent (like Kripal--a bent, to be fair, that he denies; in my view, however, Jeffrey Kripal is a case study in self-deception). So they "compare" experiential claims and satisfy themselves and one another that, because their claims are comparable, their underlying experiences are comparable as well. But such comparisons amount to little more than what Wittgenstein termed "pretensions": "a mortgage which burdens a philosopher's capacity to think" (OC remark 549; see also remark 574).

"An inner experience cannot shew me that I know something" (OC remark 569)--here, al-Ghazali would agree with Wittgenstein--if his "know" corresponded to 'ilm. But by applying ma'rifa in such a case to "know," al-Ghazali places the thing claimed to be known outside of publicity and testability. It "convinces" only those who require no convincing. Such is the nature of belief built upon the quicksand of "religious" experience.

The truly fascinating aspect of al-Ghazali's thinking in this regard is that he appears to understand the problem completely. He accepts, in principle, the impossibility of acquiring knowledge of God (see, e.g., the remarkable 4th chapter of Part One of al-Maqsad al-asna fi sharh asma Allah al-husna)--a peculiar stance for someone who is remembered by the Islamic tradition as its great Renewer.

I will write more about the enigmatic al-Ghazali in future posts.

Ghazalian Fideism

We return to Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali, the St. Augustine/Thomas Aquinas of the Islamic tradition.

Thanks to the great al-Ghazali, embedded at the center of the Muslim intellectual tradition lies a recognition of different kinds of knowledge: (1) 'ilm, which is composed of data acquired through the senses and discriminated by means of 'aql (reason) and (2) ma'rifah, something akin to what Michael Polyani called "tacit knowledge." Ma'rifah (unlike Polanyi's "tacit knowledge") is a gift of God's grace and discriminated by means of dhawq ("taste"). Dhawq is not the sense of taste of the tongue that is discriminated by 'aql--it is called "taste" only for lack of a better word. It is a metaphor that "stands in" for a direct experience of the Divine. According to al-Ghazali, there is no accounting for ma'rifah; it is a gift that Allah gives according to his/her/its inscrutable design. No one can make such an experience happen. At best, the pietistic disciplines (asceticism, etc.) can prepare one to receive the gift (and make the most of it) if/when it comes. But Allah's will determines the matter.

Muslim piety is hunger; thirst; longing for the Divine. Abu Bakr al-Shibli (d. 946 CE) compared tasawwuf (the pietistic disciplines associated with ma'rifah) to "a burning flash of lightning." If it strikes, it strikes. If it doesn't strike, it doesn't strike.

Religious Studies

A short-list of important themes found in various "world religions" might read as follows:

Hinduism: world maintenance;
Judaism: a priestly people distinct from others;
Buddhism: escape from the fix we're in;
Christianity: salvation from sin;
Islam: longing for (re-)union with the Divine.

Such differences are fascinating and worthy of study. Of course, they can also become occasions (or pretexts or ex post facto justifications) for conflict.

The great 11th century Persian Dervish-Poet Abu Said Abu'l Khayr wrote the following quatrain:

With any gait they walk your path, it is good.
By any means they seek your union, it is good.
With any eye they see your face, it is good.
In any language they utter your name, it is good.

[trans. Reza Saberi]

Style vs. Substance

Turkish Dervish


Lookslike Dervish