Appearing for the first time in the eighth century was the doctrine of “friendship” with God, which arose from the desire to seek a personal relationship with God. An adept who had achieved a direct experience of God and had demonstrated superior spiritual insight was regarded as a “friend (wali) of God.” Whereas the ordinary believer sought out God, God actually sought out his “friends.” The term wali is often translated as “saint” in English, and if not confused with the term as found in Catholicism, it is a useful concept to express some connotations of the word. Sufis regarded their spiritual teachers as wise, and certainly revered them for their insights and piety; some followers revered their teachers to such a degree that they considered them to be in some sense a manifestation of the divine being. Some saints practiced alchemy, an avocation that reinforced their reputation as healers and workers of miracles, both during their lifetimes and afterward. Their tombs became places of pilgrimage to which those who had special needs would go to pray and present offerings. The “friends of God” thus became intercessors between ordinary human beings and God.
The quest to bridge the gap between God and mankind became at once one of the great strengths of Sufism and the source of many problems for it. The mystical path has often had difficulty fitting comfortably within the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam because of its attempts to overcome the gulf between God the Creator and His human creature. Monotheism places a heavy emphasis on the transcendence, or “otherness,” of God, whereas mysticism seeks to bridge that transcendence and to overcome the gulf between the divine and the mortal. Many Muslims regarded the notion of fana’ to be heretical, for it seemed to suggest the essential identity of God and humans. The belief that “friends of God” could become intercessors between humans and God also seemed to run counter to original Islamic doctrine and was the target of bitter attacks.
The tension reached its peak in the life and death of al-Hallaj (d. 922), originally from Fars in southwestern Iran. He joined a Sufi group in Iraq, but soon quarreled with Sufis there and in his home province, and he devised his own mystical path. He became a missionary to India and Central Asia, and then settled in Baghdad. His reputation for working miracles followed him to that city, and he developed a large popular following. He is widely considered to have uttered the cry “ana al-haqq” (“I am the Truth” or “I am the Real”), from which the authorities would have inferred his claim to be one with God. He was insistent that ritual acts in themselves were merely perfunctory, and that only their inner meaning had value. The court record of his subsequent trial reveals that his offence was his having asserted that the pilgrimage to Mecca could be performed in his own room. Whatever his actual assertions, he clearly suggested that in some manner he was a manifestation of God, and he seems to have sought out condemnation by the authorities, as though to demonstrate that he had not accommodated himself to the worldly order.
Al-Hallaj lived during the unstable time of the rise of the Isma‘ilis, the Fatimid takeover of Ifriqiya, and the raids of the Carmathians. His extreme mysticism, coupled with indications that he had Shi‘ite leanings, caused the ulama and the civil officials to regard him as a threat to their authority. If he and others were able to persuade the common people of the unimportance of ritual acts, or that Alids had a more legitimate claim to the caliphate than anyone else, then the entire religious and political order could be jeopardized. In 922, al-Hallaj was executed in a particularly brutal fashion. His enemies and his supporters alike agreed that, as his feet and hands were chopped off, he faced death with a remarkable equanimity and asked forgiveness for those who executed him.
The Accommodation of Sufism
As remarkable and revered as al-Hallaj was, his defiant disregard for ritual and prescriptive behavior did not represent the future of mainstream Sufism. Whether because of the threat of persecution or because it was increasingly clear to many Muslims that some of the doctrines associated with al-Hallaj could not be reconciled with basic Islamic doctrines, his teachings were permanently eclipsed by the path represented by al-Junayd (d. 910) of Baghdad. Al-Junayd, who had been al-Hallaj’s teacher for a short time before they quarreled, was a gifted thinker who combined an ascetic mysticism with a quest for moral perfection. He is often referred to as the greatest figure in early Sufism, one who created a synthesis between the scrupulous observance of the Shari‘a and a sophisticated theory of mysticism.
Al-Junayd managed to justify the doctrine of a direct experience with God and carefully used the terms fana’ and baqa’ without claiming the permanent “annihilation” of the human identity. According to him, the mystic’s quest is possible only because of God’s active enabling power: God guides and strengthens the seeker in his quest to “die to himself” (fana’) and “live in God” (baqa’). In some sense, the mystical experience recaptures the preexistent state of the human soul as a thought in the mind of God. As a result, the joyous experience of God’s direct presence makes it impossible for the mystic to be satisfied with life in this world, and he is constantly yearning for God’s presence. On the other hand, precisely because he is in this world, the point of “life in God” is to live everyday life transformed by God’s love and guidance. The spiritual experience enables a Muslim to see the world through new eyes, and to become a model of piety for others to follow. Even though al-Junayd shared the common Sufi attitude that the law was secondary to the inward life, he stressed that both were essential.
Al-Junayd’s synthesis was crucial, for it kept Sufism grounded in the ritual and prescribed behavior that provided the common identity for Muslims everywhere. By the tenth century, Sufism was still a minority movement, and in order for it to be accepted as a valid Islamic experience, it needed to demonstrate that it was compatible with the rituals and ethic of the evolving norms of the majority. Few could predict at the time that the Sufi approach would come to dominate the inner life of Islam from West Africa to Southeast Asia. That it did so is a testimony to the wisdom of leaders such as al-Junayd. Their great accomplishment was to combine the doctrine of a transcendent God with the experience of an immanent God who is closer to man than his jugular vein.
The Reception of Science and Philosophy
The Arab conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries obliterated the political barriers that had formerly separated the rich and varied cultures of the areas that lay between the Indus valley and the Atlantic. Not only did a massive migration of peoples occur in their aftermath, but they also provided an economic stimulus to both trade and agriculture. More than commodities and luxuries were traded, however. Architectural styles, potterymaking techniques, and concepts in philosophy, mathematics, medicine, and many other intellectual fields now made their way across this vast expanse faster than ever before. The result was that cultural traditions that had often developed in isolation from each other now began to interact on a regular basis. The scholars and creative artists in the Dar al-Islam were able to synthesize a wide variety of traditions and to make original contributions to them.
Science (“Natural Philosophy”)
When the Arabs conquered Egypt and Syria in the 630s, they entered a cultural zone that had been exposed to Greek intellectual influences for a thousand years, ever since the career of Alexander the Great. Iraq, too, was conversant with the Greek heritage. Unlike Syria and Egypt, Iraq had largely lost the Hellenistic patina that it had acquired during the Seleucid era, but in the fifth and sixth centuries a considerable number of Nestorian and Jacobite (Syrian Monophysite) scholars entered Sasanian Iraq to escape Byzantine persecution. They brought with them their Syriac translations of Greek theological writings, medicine, astronomy, and philosophy. Iraqi Christians were welcomed into the Sasanian royal school at Jundishapur, located approximately one hundred miles east of the capital of Ctesiphon. Jundishapur was a particularly exciting intellectual milieu, for it combined Greek medicine and philosophy with a Persian literary tradition and Sanskritic medical and mathematical influences.
The Arabs themselves had a brilliant poetic tradition, they had an effective tradition of folk medicine, and they could navigate over land and sea by virtue of their knowledge of the heavens, but they were in awe of what they found in the newly conquered territories. They encountered Christians and Jews who could pose philosophical questions about Islam that Muslims could not answer simply because they had never thought in such terms before. Some Muslims quickly appropriated logic and methods of formal argument in order to debate scholars from other religions, and they found the tools useful for controversies within Islam, as well. We shall explore the use of philosophical reasoning in the religious sciences more fully in the next section, since it came within the context of a debate regarding the rightful place of philosophy in religious discussions.
Muslim scholars and rulers were also fascinated by the knowledge that their subject peoples had of numerous fields of study, but especially of astronomy and astrology (the two were not yet differentiated), alchemy, mathematics, and medicine. As early as the late seventh century, certain Umayyad princes commissioned the translation of texts in the field of alchemy and were performing their own experiments. The Abbasid caliph al-Mansur (754–775) commissioned the translation of some of the medical texts attributed to Galen and Hippocrates, and a few other texts were translated during the remainder of the eighth century.
Not until the ninth century, however, did the government organize a systematic approach to the acquisition and translation of foreign texts. Al-Ma’mun (813–833) institutionalized the translation process by establishing the Bayt al-Hikma, or House of Wisdom. This institution became the focus of a massive translation project and served as a library to hold the newly translated books. Scholars at Jundishapur were drawn to the Bayt al-Hikma to become the members of the first major translation project. Almost all the translators over the next two centuries were Iraqi Christians. The notable exception was the pagan Thabit ibn Qurra (d. 901), who was also the court astrologer and physician to the caliph al-Mu‘tadid. Hunayn ibn Ishaq (809–873) determined the framework for the translation process. He acquired as many Greek manuscripts as he could of a given work, compared them to determine the most accurate version, translated the work into Syriac, and then consulted with Arabic specialists to prepare an Arabic translation.
At first, the works to be translated were those with an immediate practical application. Mathematics was an essential tool in the huge construction effort taking place across the empire; medicine and pharmacology were required to keep the caliph and others among the elite healthy; and astronomy-astrology made possible the determination of the propitious times for the caliph and others to implement important policies and to determine the timing of religious festivals. Alchemy held out numerous possibilities: Its practitioners explored the relationship of humans to the natural world, devised ways to purify the soul, and sought ways to transmute base metals into gold.
It was not long, however, before philosophical texts began to be translated. The educational curriculum of the Eastern Christians had for centuries required the study of logic prior to that of theology or medicine, and it quickly became a staple of Islamic education. The majority of the corpus of the surviving Greek philosophical tradition quickly became available in Arabic versions. Because “philosophy” and “science” had not yet been divorced into separate disciplines (likewise, as late as the era of Newton in the European tradition, “science” was usually referred to as “natural philosophy”), Muslim scholars who were interested in the new texts almost always combined an interest in both, and were philosopher-scientists, as their Greek forerunners had been.
One of the most notable scholars of this period was al-Khwarizmi (ca. 780-ca. 850). As his name indicates, he was originally from Khwarazm, but he spent his adult career in Baghdad. He is credited with introducing the Indian numerals into the Muslim world, replacing both the Roman numerals and the awkward Hellenic style of using alphabetic letters. Although the Arabs still call the Indian numerals “Hindi,” the Europeans call them “Arabic” since they in turn borrowed them from the Arabs. The Indian numeric system was not the first to utilize the place value system or to have a concept of zero—both the Babylonians and the Chinese had a place value system and the Babylonians had a blank symbol—but its combination of a decimal system (the Babylonians used a base of 60) and a highly developed concept of zero to signify the “null number”—absolutely nothing—was a powerful innovation and an essential development for modern mathematics. Al-Khwarizmi’s most famous mathematical treatise utilized the new system and compiled rules for the arithmetical solutions of linear and quadratic equations, for elementary geometry, and for the solution of inheritance problems faced in probate cases. No two scholars can agree on an English translation of the book’s title, which contains the word al-jabr, meaning the restoration and amplification of something incomplete. The book later became so influential in Europe that “al-jabr” gave birth to the word algebra. Another of al-Khwarizmi’s works was translated into Latin as Algorismi de numero indorum (“Al-Khwarizmi Concerning the Hindu Art of Computation”), immortalizing his name in our mathematical term algorithm.
Philosophy
In philosophy and medicine, too, Muslim scholars initially were attracted to the richness of other traditions, and then made profoundly original contributions to those traditions. Muslim philosophers, like medieval Europeans, tended either to be idealists, in which case they identified with Plato’s tradition, or empiricists, in which case they considered themselves Aristotelians. Some small groups deliberately cultivated one or the other school, but for almost the entire period under question, philosophers thought that the two Greek philosophers were more alike in their thought than they actually were. For reasons that are not clear, by the time the translations were being made, the Greek tradition had attributed to Aristotle two works that were not Aristotelian at all. They have features in them that are so patently different from the thrust of Aristotle’s own work that modern scholars are baffled that they could have been identified with him. Nevertheless, they became central to the subsequent Islamic and medieval Western Christian philosophical enterprise. One was the so-called Theology of Aristotle, which was actually a paraphrase of Books IV, V, and VI of the Enneads of Plotinus, the third-century philosopher whose writings form the basis for Neoplatonism. The other was the Book of Causes (known later in medieval Europe as Liber de causis), which was excerpted from the Elements of Theology, written by Proclus, a fifth-century Neoplatonist.
Neoplatonism was the substratum for the work that was done not only in philosophy, but in many features of Sufism and the theology of Shi‘ism, as well. It was based on the work of Plotinus, who credited his teacher in Alexandria, Ammonius Saccas, with having provided him the basis for his thought. Plotinus postulates a universe at the head of which is a First Cause, or the One, which so transcends the world we know that Plotinus does not even wish to say that it “exists” or has “being” (which even makes it technically incorrect to say that the First Principle “is” at the head of the universe!).
The concept of the One and of an Unmoved Mover were familiar in the Platonic and Aristotelian systems, but Plotinus’ contribution was to suggest that this wholly transcendent First Principle has no direct relation with the material world. He argued that it “emanates” an entity that he calls nous or the Intellect, which in turn emanates Soul, which in turn contains in itself all particular souls, including human souls. Soul in its turn emanates nature, or the phenomenal world in which we live. Later Neoplatonists made this scheme of emanations much more detailed, and linked it to the nine spheres of the Ptolemaic universe.1 Each sphere, or heaven, had its own intellect and soul, emanated by the previous one. The whole universe is thus the result of a succession of emanations in which each principle produces the next lower principle. Each lower principle is, to the extent that its lower nature permits, the imitation of the higher.
The vision of Plotinus was essentially religious, and in f
act his philosophy was one of the great “natural theologies” of history. Rather than depending on prophetic revelation, he found the divine in nature and accessible by human reason. Like Plato, he felt trapped in his corporeal body, and thought that the highest joy for man is union with the One, attained by purification and contemplation. In classic mystical fashion, he believed that if a person puts aside his identification with his corporeal self and attains to a state of pure thought, he can “return” in a sense to a union with the First Principle in a process that goes in the reverse direction from that of the emanations. The individual soul loses its identity and submerges itself in the One. As we shall see, this scheme helped to give shape to the Islamic mystical tradition.
The fact that Neoplatonism was a self-contained philosophical religious tradition made it in one sense a competitor to the monotheistic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It appropriated Aristotelian notions such as the eternity of the universe, the denial of the resurrection of the body, and the rejection of the notion that prophets have a special knowledge inaccessible to reason. Its doctrine that the human soul loses its individual personality upon the death of the body was also a problem for most Muslims and Christians. On the other hand, certain influential Christian theologians, such as Augustine (354–430), found in Neoplatonism a notion of the deity as a creative force, or energy, that was more sophisticated than that of a crudely anthropomorphic Creator. When combined with an allegorical interpretation of the scriptures, the emanationist theory made the traditions about a Creator God philosophically acceptable, and it avoided having to address the knotty problems of creation ex nihilo (“out of nothing”).
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