Muslim Traditions of Learned Ignorance

In my work on apophatic mysticism and philosophies of the unsayable, I have often encountered outstanding figures of genius who have made unmistakable the eminent role that Muslims have played in developing knowledge which, at its truest and highest, cannot but be an unknowing knowing. These voices and visionaries from medieval Muslim tradition are among the finest and subtlest witnesses illuminating our human predicament in which knowledge that can claim genuine universality can only be cast in the mode of learned ignorance. However, the wisdom of unknowing is one that needs to be approached cross-culturally because only the limits of any and every culture can open the dimension of the universal as transcending all cultures and their historically relative terms. Muslim culture, in this regard truly cognate with its Jewish and Christian sister cultures, has made strong claims to universality throughout its history. These claims have also been based on the sense of a transcendent divinity as source of all truth and value, and approachable for humans only by negative ways and means. In this essay, I explore these themes by looking at the mystical philosophy of ibn al-Arabi, ineffability in the poetry of Rumi, self-reflection in Arab medieval thinkers, and compare them similar notions in western mystical traditions. 

Ibn al-Arabi and Mystic Philosophy 

Called the ‘supreme master’ or ‘greatest shaikh’ (al-Shaikh al-akbar), Ibn al-Arabi (1165-1240) is widely recognized as representing the peak of speculation in the mystic current of Islamic tradition known as ‘Sufism.’  He was born in Murcia in Andalusia into the midst of the great age of Muslim influence over the southern Iberian Peninsula from the eighth through the fifteenth century.  However, with the rising power of the Almohads, generally suspicious of Sufis, he migrated from Spain to North Africa and thence to the Near East, summoned to Mecca in a vision and eventually settling in Damascus.  Alongside the voluminous Meccan Revelations (al-Futuhat al-Makkiyah), the Bezels of Wisdom (Fusus al-Hikam) counts as his major work from among about 400 extant treatises that can be genuinely attributed to him.  

Like Sufis before him and especially like al-Ghazali (10-58- 111), Ibn al-Arabi’s principal emphasis is on the oneness of truth and the unity of being (wahdat al-wujud).  Wisdom is to wake up to one’s own identity with Reality (al-Haqq: the Real, the True), with Being-Perception.  Outside this Oneness, all is illusion.  Whatever is, to the extent that it is, cannot but be really just this oneness.  Even the illusion of separateness belongs intrinsically to Reality’s consciousness of itself.  

Everything that exists, or is at all, manifests the one divine Reality. Thus: ‘He may be defined by every definition.’  Of course, such definitions state not the divine essence—which cannot be said—but only its Names or modes.  The Real, as absolutely unmanifest and incapable of becoming manifest, is absolutely different from all its Names.  Yet all that they really are is nothing different from it.  Reality is One, and all that is is from and of Him (hu), is in fact identical with Him as to its being or reality.  Although ‘strictly speaking no predication is possible’ with regard to it, the Absolute is nevertheless qualified as absolute being or essence or existence – as ‘existence viewed in its unconditional simplicity.’ 

Ibn al-Arabi is working from the mainstream metaphysical tradition flowing from Plotinus and his Neoplatonic heirs.  He resembles most closely Parmenides in affirming that Being alone is and is one and that all else is appearance.  Yet Ibn al-‘Arabi also places an emphasis on the immanence of this metaphysical principle to the world of appearance.  Any doctrine of pure transcendence of divine Reality he condemns as a misrepresentation.  The Cosmos is the manifestation of divine Reality, in effect, the divine Name.  Even as the Unmanifest, this divine Reality is apprehended in relation not to abstract thought of transcendence but rather in the manifest forms of the Cosmos.

This valorisation of the sensible world as mystical revelation is crystallized, for example, in Ibn al-Arabi’s The Interpreter of Desires, poems inspired by the feminine charms of an enrapturing virgin of Mecca.  Ibn al-Arabi took pains to exonerate himself of charges of sensual concupiscence by writing voluminous commentaries on the mystical meanings of these poems.  The parallel to Dante’s relation to Beatrice is not inapt:  both cases suggest how metaphysical vision, when given a mystical emphasis, can twist back round towards vigorous affirmation of the senses.  This legacy from Dante develops in Christian epic and prophetic poetry through Torquato Tasso (1544-1595) and John Milton (1608-1674) to William Blake (1757-1827) and Walter Whitman (1819-18-92).  But just such a reappraisal of sense experience in its revelatory capacity appeared much earlier in Ibn al-Arabi.

One of his masterpieces of apophatic rhetoric of negation and tautology is the Treatise on Unity.  God is nothing that can be said or seen or known or formulated in any way.  He is totally unique and incomparable and like only himself.  The self must annihilate itself and know itself as nothing in order to approach the experience of God.  But then it can experience God in everything.  In fact, only God exists.  Nothing and no one else is anything except in identity with God, and this can be realized only in the realization of one’s own utter nullity.  Ibn al-Arabi takes the Islamic confession that there is no God but God in a strong sense to mean that there is no other being whatsoever besides God:  nothing exists except God.  This would be outright pantheism, except that the approach is from God to world rather than the other way around.  God is not degraded to identity with things; he is in no way any thing.  Rather, all things are nothing, except in him.

As in Christian and other mysticisms, the individual (rational) soul attains perfection and unity by its own annihilation (fana).  In Islamic philosophy, al-Ghazali had described this stage as annihilation or extinction in unity. He is the fundamental precursor for Ibn al-Arabi, as well as for philosophical writers such as Ibn Tufayl and Ibn Rushd.  Ibn Tufayl’s philosophical tale Hayy Ibn Yaqzan is rich in apophatic passages concerning mystical experience of ‘a world indescribable without misrepresentation’. He pays acute attention to specifically linguistic limits and failure: ‘the ambition to put this into words is reaching for the impossible - like wanting to taste colours, expecting black as such to taste either sweet or sour.’ Ibn al-Arabi turns the negative theology of Ibn Tufayl and ibn Rushd, with whom he had direct contact, in a deliberately mystical direction and produces thereby perhaps the most deeply felt speculative reflection of Sufi mysticism on the ineffability of the divine.

The apophatic themes that subtend the whole of Sufi culture emerge with particular force and clarity from the ‘bezel’ or ‘ring-setting’ that interprets the figure of Noah in the Qur’an.  Unqualified affirmation of either transcendence or immanence with respect to God is flawed.  Noah’s affirmation, merely of transcendence, limits the deity over the world.  Only the dialectic between these two alternatives, their cancelling each other out, enacts the meaning event in which apophasis essentially consists.  Neither transcendence nor immanence can be affirmed without the other.  By such dialectic, Ibn al-Arabi critiques a polytheistic, as well as a strictly unitarian conception of God.  Of course, uncompromising emphasis on the identity of all-in-one courts charges of pantheism.  And Sufism, especially in the radical form it takes on in Ibn al-Arabi’s arduous speculations, was oftentimes under suspicion from the religious authorities for infractions against the monotheistic premises of Muslim doctrine.  The conflict with rigid doctrinal orthodoxy was inevitable, since for Sufis knowledge is personal rather than objective.  Indeed, they acknowledge no division of subject and object.  Essential to Sufism is the endeavour to re-live the Qur’anic revelation at a more interior level in ecstasy of spirit by a personal appropriation of religious truth.

The theory of the divine Names is developed in many of the twenty-seven chapters of The Bezels of Wisdom, but particularly in the chapters interpreting the Words of the prophets Enoch, Shu’aib, and Joseph.  Ibn Arabi writes that every Name ‘implies the [divine] Essence’ and indeed ‘is the one Named,’ yet never as Himself but rather always as other and as ‘representing some particular aspect.’  The divine Names ‘require our existence,’ but the Essence itself is completely independent of the divine Names.  That the divine Names are contingent on our existence implies that God Himself is Nameless.  All that can be said or made manifest belongs to the sphere of revelation of the Names of God and is infinitely removed from His Reality as such.  

Rumi and Mystic Poetry

Jalal al-Din Rumi’s (1207-1273) name, from ‘Rum,’ ‘Rome’ in Persian, probably indicates that he came from the western, formerly Roman half of Anatolia, that is, Byzantium (the Eastern Roman Empire).  He was well-established as a learned Islamic teacher and preacher (a mullah), when, at 37 years of age, his encounter with the wandering dervish, Shams of Tabriz, transformed him into an ecstatic mystical poet.  Rumi’s creative and personal life remained closely bound up with that of Shams.  The poems were composed and executed as a chant accompaniment to sacred dancing by dervishes.  This resulted in Rumi’s founding of the Mevlevi order of the ‘Whirling Dervishes.’ 

Rumi pursues in verse the Sufi vision that is brought to its philosophical and theological zenith by Ibn al-Arabi, whom he could possibly have met directly in Konya, Anatolia, where he lived and is buried.  His poems, collected in the Mathnawi (rhyming or ‘spiritual’ couplets) and Divani Shamsi Tabriz, consisting in quatrains (rubaiyat) and odes (ghazals), in turn were enormously influential upon subsequent Sufism.  Speaking out of the experience of ecstatic love and enlightenment, their constant deferral to experience beyond the reach of words makes them eminently merit the epithet ‘mystical.’  A. J. Arberry, the noted British scholar of Arabic literature and translator of the Qur’an, offers the view that ‘in Rumi we encounter one of the world’s greatest poets. In profundity of thought, inventiveness of image, and triumphant mastery of language, he stands out as the supreme genius of Islamic mysticism.’  Such views have been current ever since Hegel in his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1817) accorded Rumi unique distinction, celebrating him as mystic poet.

Rumi’s poems embody and articulate, furthermore, a theory of language according to which all our words bespeak our emptiness.  Like the reed cut from the reed bed, we can only express our nostalgia for the source from which we are cut off.  Our words are but resonances of this absence that is a silence at our center.  Our emptiness, like the reed’s hollowness, is the enabling condition for allowing this silence to resonate: 

Listen to the story told by the reed,
of being separated.

‘Since I was cut from the reedbed,
I have made this crying sound.

Anyone apart from someone he loves
understands what I say.

Anyone pulled from a source
longs to go back.

At any gathering I am there,
mingling in the laughing and grieving,

a friend to each, but few
will hear the secrets hidden

within the notes. No ears for that.
Body flowing out of spirit,

spirit up from body: no concealing
that mixing. But it’s not given us

to see the soul. The reed flute
is fire, not wind. Be that empty.’

Hear the love fire tangled
in the reed notes, as bewilderment

melts into wine. The reed is a friend
to all who want the fabric torn

and drawn away. The reed is hurt
and salve combining. Intimacy

and longing for intimacy, one
song. A disastrous surrender

and a fine love, together. The one
who secretly hears this is senseless.

A tongue has one customer, the ear.
A sugarcane flute has such effect

because it was able to make sugar
in the reedbed. The sound it makes

is for everyone. Days full of wanting,
let them go by without worrying

that they do. Stay where you are
inside such a pure, hollow note.

Every thirst gets satisfied except
that of these fish, the mystics,

who swim a vast ocean of grace
still somehow longing for it!

No one lives in that without
being nourished every day.

But if someone doesn’t want to hear
the song of the reed flute,

it’s best to cut conversation
short, say good-bye, and leave.

‘The Reed Flute’s Song’ in Mathnawi)

Coleman Barks, who also translates the verses quoted above, points out that Persian poems typically end with a reference to the poet as a sort of signature.  Rumi concluded five hundred of his odes with the soubriquet khamush, ‘the Silent.’  Barks explains, ‘Rumi is less interested in language, more attuned to the sources of it.  He keeps asking Husam, “Who’s making this music?” He sometimes gives the wording over to the invisible flute player: “let that musician finish this poem”’. For it is not the words as such that count, but what they indicate as beyond saying—the source from which they resound.  Rumi says as much in his avowal that,

This is how it always is

when I finish a poem.

 

A great silence overcomes me,

and I wonder why I ever thought

to use language.

from ‘A Thirsty Fish,’ Barks’ translation

Rumi conceives meaning as an infinite sea that verbal form merely glides across.  Speech is but a ‘veil for the soul.’  His paradoxically verbal soundings of the divine ineffability also retrace poetically the aporias enshrined in the traditional theological problematic of the Divine Names:

Sometimes I call Him wine, sometimes cup,

Sometimes refined gold and sometimes silver ore,

Sometimes grain, sometimes a snare, sometimes a quarry.

Why all this? Because I cannot [or will not] express his name!

The theme of the infinite and ungraspable as present everywhere in everything encountered in experience is pervasive throughout Rumi’s work. I pick by way of illustration a couple of poems that bring this apophatic dimension into the foreground more or less explicitly yet still as ensconced inextricably in Rumi’s metaphorical language. In Burks’s translation: 

Praise to the emptiness that blanks out existence. Existence:
This place made from our love for that emptiness!

Yet somehow comes emptiness,
this existence goes.

Praise to that happening, over and over!
For years I pulled my own existence out of emptiness.

Then one swoop, one swing of the arm,
that work is over.

Free of who I was, free of presence, free of dangerous fear, hope,
free of mountainous wanting.

The here-and-now mountain is a tiny piece of a piece of straw
blown off into emptiness.

These words I'm saying so much begin to lose meaning:
Existence, emptiness, mountain, straw:

 Words and what they try to say swept
out the window, down the slant of the roof.

‘The World which is Made of our Love for Emptiness’ from Divani Shamsi Tabriz

The liberating surrender to emptiness at the far end of language is a powerful motive for para-liturgical praise. Our experience and love of emptiness displaces and realizes the more traditional experience and love of God in mystic traditions. This experience of mystic contemplation or ‘Quietness’ is reached through a series of metaphorical equivalences enacted in one’s own being:

Inside this new love, die.

Your way begins on the other side.

Become the sky.

Take an axe to the prison wall.

Escape.

Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.

Do it now.

You are covered with thick cloud.

Slide out the side. Die,

and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign

that you have died.

Your old life was a frantic running

from silence.

The speechless full moon

comes out now. 

‘Quietness’ from Divani Shamsi Tabriz

Rumi is partially contemporary with Dante (1265-1321), and both are great mystical poets tapping resources of poetic language for expressing things that otherwise cannot be said. Both are explorers of this vast territory in strikingly original ways. Dante brings in another element besides pure poetics of the ineffable and besides purely mystical contemplation such as is found in Rumi. Dante’s learned ignorance is based on a Scholastic tradition of philosophical reflection in a critical vein that also has its parallels and, in important respects, predecessors and premises, in Muslim intellectual tradition following in the wake of Aristotle and Greek philosophy. I therefore invoke Dante as counterpart to Rumi in order to transition back toward a more conceptual and philosophical approach to apophatic ignorance.

For Aristotle, at the root of Scholasticism, God is thought thinking itself, and indeed this model of self-reflection remains foundational for knowledge of the highest, metaphysical sort. Yet this high knowing needs to be conjugated with the apophatic or with unknowing knowing. Conversely, negative or apophatic awareness is always bound up with affirmative knowledge. The hinge between the two is the difficult juncture that we need to struggle to contemplate. This juncture can be found operating especially in self-reflection. Knowledge of self is fundamentally a knowledge of one’s ignorance – in Socratic wisdom at the source of Greek philosophical thinking. This thinking is developed by Neoplatonist philosophers and forms the common heritage and shared foundation on which philosophy in the monotheistic religious traditions all build. Muslim philosophers have a crucial role in transmitting this knowledge/ignorance of self through the Middle Ages to modernity.

Self-Reflection as Reflection of Transcendence 

‘Reflection’ and ‘self-reflection’ are modern philosophical terms, but they reconfigure age-old mental activities that were long familiar under other names. ‘Speculation’ in the Middle Ages was a kind of poetic knowing through analogy with created, physical beings mirroring the metaphysical realm and serving as vehicles for the ascent to God. This is the path followed famously by Bonaventure (1221-1274), the Italian Catholic Franciscan bishop, in Itinerarium mentis in Deum. Such mirror vision transpires ‘through clouds of corporeal likenesses’ and is appropriate for us as finite, sensuous creatures. ‘Contemplation,’ in contrast, was purely intellectual. For the Scottish mystic Richard of St Victor (d. 1173), speculation took place ‘when we perceive through a mirror, but contemplatio when we see the truth in its purity without any covering and veil of shadow.’ The latter mode is like angelic vision. Any such rigid segregation, however, breaks down in Dante, who uses these terms sometimes interchangeably, elaborating on the ‘speculativa vita’ of the angels under the rubric of the ‘contemplative life’ as the ‘more excellent and divine’. 

Yet another crucial strand of medieval tradition emphasized the idea of self-reflection as entailing integrally a reflection of theological transcendence. Islamic thinkers (and Jewish ones, eminently Maimonides, writing also in Arabic) in the centuries directly preceding Dante had developed this notion in precise philosophical and subtly theological terms. Dante’s deep debt to this Arabic-Aristotelian philosophy is well known. It becomes explicit especially in his Convivio, for example, in the idea of intellectual perfection—la felicità mentale—as the epitome of happiness and the goal of human life. Following cues from Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, the perfection of the intellect by the philosopher counted as blessedness itself and even approached divinization. 

Islamic philosophers, furthermore, translating this into the terms of their revealed religion, viewed prophecy as a matter of intellectual perfection. Ibn Sina (980-1037) placed the prophet at the top of the ladder of knowledge as possessing the highest degree of receptivity to intelligible forms. For ibn Sina, intellection presupposes a conversion of the soul to its Source. This movement is akin to that of the ‘separate intellects’ or angels who intellectually intuit themselves only in turning to their Source. Intellection requires a conversion of the soul back to its Origin, for only by this conversion does the soul grasp itself. The soul must know itself in and through its Cause or Ground.     

Ibn Sina holds, moreover, that the intellect knows interiorly rather than exteriorly: it does not receive intelligibles from an external source but rather reflects them by reflecting on itself and becoming transparent to itself, after the prophetic motto: ‘Whoever knows himself knows his Lord.’ This reflection is a mirror relation that presupposes the simultaneous presence of the soul and the intelligible form that it reflects. If the soul turns away from the intelligible form, the image vanishes - just as a mirror requires the presence in front of it of whatever it reflects. Nevertheless, the initiative for this relation comes ultimately from the intelligible world, which reflects itself in the mirror of human intellect. Self-reflection is most fundamentally the activity of separate (divine) substances that use human intellects as their instruments for self-reflection. 

Ibn Rushd advanced the thesis of the unity of intellect (which figures among the propositions condemned in 1277), according to which man is no longer the agent in thinking but is potentially a participant through an exceptional effort of ‘separate intellect’ in the thinking of intellect itself and as such. ‘Intellect thinking itself’ was the original and true form of all thinking. Humans, in their limited manner, only take part in it. Human thinking was thus essentially a mirroring of the thinking transpiring in the universal intellect that ibn Rushd found in the ‘separate intellect’ of Aristotle’s De Anima. Ibn Rushd’s most truly ‘great commentary’ in this regard is that on Book Λ of the Metaphysics, where Aristotle focuses on thought thinking (or mirroring) itself as the most pleasurable of activities. Only intellect that is always in act, unlike ours, can fully enjoy the pleasure of thinking, and it is at its most intense in thinking of thinking itself.  

Man’s becoming, like the angels, a mirror of divinity was fundamental to the mystical itinerary to God of Islamic thinkers in the Sufi tradition. Al-Ghazali builds on ibn Sina’s theories in order to exalt the religious, revealed, inspired aspect of knowledge in this perspective in which knowing has to pass through and derive from the unity of divinity, which, however, cannot be properly conceived by finite minds. There is thus always an element of unknowing that is built in at the foundations of any knowing exercised by human beings. This predicament of un/knowing is expressed in the Islamic tradition by the mirror analogy, with its structure of triangulation through a transcendent term. Speculation thereby renders possible a kind of union of created with increate being - such as is realized especially in the ecstatic state famously by the Persian mystics Mansour Al-Hallaj (858-922) and Bayazid Al-Bistami (804-874). However, the mirror analogy enfolds a reminder that revealed knowledge furnishes a likeness and does not exhaust the reality of God, who remains the Unknowable.

Al-Ghazali, as mystical philosopher, champions a knowledge by illumination that simply falls from God into the soul. Still, he is careful to avoid conflating image and reality. Rational knowledge of divinity remains distinct from simple mirror reflection: discursive knowing of causes is not the same as immediate reception of truth as a whole. But which is superior? There is here a deep-seated tension between philosophical and mystical ways of knowing. Is the perfect mirror purely passive, or does the created intellect contribute to the object known by becoming that object itself?   

This knowing of nothing, moreover, opens a space for the operation of the imagination. Imaginative construction is necessary in order to make an image of what is properly speaking invisible. Al-Farabi (870-950) developed a theory of symbolic expression based on ontological analogy that presupposes a participative relationship between being and beings beyond all that finite definitions can contain. Words working analogically on the mind prefigure transcendent realities. This bridging prophetically to the transcendent through the imagination was modeled by Ibn Arabi in relation to Al Khadir, his protecting angel. An immediate heavenly connection frees the imagination, as intellectual, to be a truly poetic and productive imagination rather than remaining strictly bound by the senses, as in Aristotle. This conception of imagination in Ibn Arabi owes much also to the Persian theosophist and martyr Sohrawardi (1155-91) with his ‘interworld’ of images and archetypes. 

Direct knowledge of reality in its absoluteness (haqq) - as opposed to knowledge that one takes ready-made and formulated from others, without repeating and verifying it in one’s own experience - is one of the essential aspects of the knowledge through self-reflection that Dante develops in his poetic odyssey by appropriating insights of Islamic philosophy. This heritage is a mighty challenge for the age of information bites that dominates the economy of knowledge in our electronic age. A strong line of continuity connects Dante with Islamic intellectual wisdom in its potential for mounting a fundamental critique of modernity. We need to leverage this Muslim tradition, as it peaks in ibn Rushd, indirectly through Dante in constructing the genealogy of an alternative modernity.