Bab'Aziz - The Prince Who Contemplated His Soul

Interstitial Being Is Integral Living

The American philosopher Bruce Wilshire first introduced me to the rich possibilities of inhabiting the interstices. Victor Turner deepened my understanding of them with his classic The Ritual Process. Ebrahim Moosa confirmed the significance of this way of being-in-the-world with his study of al-Ghazali.

This way is the Dervish way: it involves slipping through the cracks--for it is always through the cracks that the light gets in.

The Dervish Diaries

Always on the outside
Of whatever side there was
When they asked him why it had to be that way
"Well," he answered, "just because..."

--Bob Dylan, "Joey."

In every society and in every historical period there are always those who preserve their sense of personal integrity by inhabiting the interstices of any institution through which they may pass. This mode of being-in-the-world involves a type of ecstatic asceticism: what Victor Turner called "liminality."

"The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae ('threshold people') are necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial. As such, their ambiguous and indeterminate attributes are expressed by a rich variety of symbols in the many societies that ritualize social and cultural transitions..."

--Victor Turner, The Ritual Process, p. 95.

Asceticism is always and everywhere a form of self-sacrifice. What "threshold people" choose to sacrifice is the security of unambiguous membership in any established community. Ecstasy, in this sense, is, literally, "standing outside" of expected patterns of behavior and identity. This is the self-presentation of the Qalandar Dervishes of the Islamic "middle period" (1200-1550 CE)--the individuals Ahmet Karamustafa has most memorably termed "God's unruly friends."

How Much Land Does A Man Need?

Ask Shaykh Tolstoy.

A Seaside Saint

Safi, Morocco.

Shrines Built to Honor God's Friends

From Palestine:

To China:

You must become completely crazy first...

It starts in the Tavern of Ruin...

"Classical" Romanticism

...the romanticism of Don Quixote is a madness, an accident; not like that of barbarians a beginning of experience that, with time, might lead to the discovery of nature and art. Goethe, if not Faust or Peer Gynt or Ibsen, made this discovery, and became "classical": but I am afraid a retrospective classicism is not genuine, but only a phase of romanticism: true classicism is the understanding that life is an art within natural limits.

--George Santayana, "Hellenism and Barbarism."

Santayana was only dimly aware of his own deep Romanticism; his Romanticism was not of the Don Quixote variety, but that of Goethe--in whom Romanticism became "classical." Classical Romanticism is sober (as in Goethe, Santayana, and Wordsworth); it values the Stoical virtues (as in Rousseau) and yet cultivates passionate attachments that avoid Quixotic madness by seasoning them with irony.

The mode of Classical Romanticism passes through a narrow gate; few find their way to it, fewer still through it.

Spilt Religion To Some, Heroic Argument To Others

I cannot recall when I first read Meyer Abrams's 1971 classic Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, but it was probably in the mid-1980's. What I do remember is that the effect the book had on me was absolutely electric. This is because I had struggled, since my freshman year in college, to articulate my own (late 20th century sense) of a "double-truth" (a counterpart to the late medieval theory of the Latin Averroists that reason and revelation offered two different kinds of "knowledge" that need not be reconciled). By my junior year in college, I was reading Santayana and had found, in his naturalistic approach to religion, an ally in this quest and a continuing inspiration. But Santayana appeared to me to be sui generis and, in American intellectual history, hopelessly isolated. Had no one else created space for the religious imagination in a way that did not compromise the integrity and self-sufficiency of scientific naturalism? What I learned from Abrams's wide-ranging commentary on Wordsworth's Prospectus to his poetry [see NS, 31] is that the Romantic movement (especially as it had constituted itself among the Lake country poets of 19th century England) could be read to have done just that. And certainly, that is how critics of the Romantics like T. E. Hulme understood their achievement (see Hulme's dismissive definition of Romanticism as "spilt religion" in his essay Romanticism and Classicism).

Wordsworth considered the imaginative "miracle" he was able to produce (reconciling human beings to the "common day" by means of a poetic marriage of mind and nature) his "heroic argument" [NS, 29]. The Blakean Northrop Frye may be said to have offered a similarly heroic argument with his late life notion of a "double vision"--though this is a very tentative suggestion that requires further thought and, if warranted, elaboration.

The Cipher

Why this mark, this cipher?

For the simple reason that life, as Santayana reminds us, "is a movement from the forgotten into the unforeseen" [The Birth of Reason and Other Essays (1968), 70].

The human being naturally finds these circumstances (i.e., its own condition) difficult to comprehend and, once comprehended, next to impossible to bear. Consequently, she represses her apprehension of them. This willed amnesia allows for the ordinary business of life (acquiring, consuming, and begetting more of the same) to continue apace. But, every so often, it is salutary for an individual to be caught up short and reminded (as was Santayana's wont) of the nature of her predicament--if, for no other reason than to induce modes of reflection that, in some personalities, conduce to charity.

As Santayana understood (and was quick to point out), the cipher considered here is one such reminder. "What inspired Mohammad?" he asked. Considering the Prophet's cultural context and geographical location (with its attendant climate), Santayana ventured that "amid the burning deserts and under the intense skies of Arabia, where profound meditation and lyric eloquence are natural to everybody, [the Prophet] had ample leisure to think, and enough contacts with the world to know and detest superstitions that prevailed in it. But it was not to destroy traditional religion that his zeal was moved, but only to purify it" [ibid., 95].

"Purification" in this context translates into a kind of acceptance of (or surrender to, i.e., the literal sense of the Arabic term islam) the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune: "...all must be received and retained as the gift of Allah, the immediate, pervasive, all-seeing, all-working will of God. It was this intense presence of the Unfathomable that inspired [Muhammad] and imposed on him the vocation of a prophet and of a conqueror. Away, then, with all vain dogma and ritual. Let religion become a perpetual direct prayer, an uninterrupted colloquy with God. What secrets, what music, what rapture might not break in upon that sacred solitude? What wise monitions also for the conduct of life? To what submission, to what courage, to what sublime identification with divine power might not the spirit, so fortified, attain?" [ibid., 95-96].

Although an outpouring of language is a typically human, all-too-human response to the "intense presence of the Unfathomable" (hence, the related phenomena of prophecy and mystical poetry), language so disgorged may often prove itself as overwhelming as the experience to which it responds. Perfectly suited to practices of memorization, recitation, and as an aid to reflection, such language is not--nor can it substitute for--the experience that engendered it. That experience is universal--though its intensity is muted in most individuals by the psychological filters which enable us to conform our thoughts and actions to socially determined standards of "sanity."

The cipher serves as a kind of hieroglyph for what Eric Voegelin named the "engendering experience" of the mystic or prophet. It does not "capture" that experience (no such experience can ever be "taken alive") but, rather, gestures towards it--weakly, inadequately, but nevertheless, persistently. In so doing, it preserves the possibility of repetition or, at least, an echo of its experiential inspiration.

Voegelin was convinced that a characteristic of the "late modern condition" is the pervasive presence of ideologies that deform traditional symbolism, rendering their meaning opaque and obscure. The vocation of the historian became, for him, a priestly one: valid historical inquiry is not the satisfaction of antiquarian interests but, rather, the retrieval of those engendering experiences that gave rise to "the symbolic articulation of the truth of existence" in the first place [see Michael P. Federici's Eric Voegelin, 216].

Although I tend to regard much of Voegelin's work with extreme circumspection and resist, in particular, this somewhat self-aggrandizing view of historical labor, his notion of the relationship of "engendering experience" to its "symbolic articulation" and the pervasiveness of ideological distortion merits cautious consideration. It is something to keep in mind whenever we consider a cipher such as the one depicted above.

We are a long way from what Voegelin called symbolic "transparency" (see, ibid., 234-5). The questions I always put to Voegelin and his epigones are: when have we not been so estranged? Is not the human condition one of exile from all manner of Edens, experiential, linguistic, symbolic? Is historical inquiry best configured as an outlet for messianic hope? Is this what Walter Benjamin imagined? Do we, as historians, really want to go there? Or is not historical inquiry better conceived in humanistic fashion (a la Seneca)?

At first glance, Seneca's admonitions appear congenial to Voegelin's--and, perhaps, they are. But I tend to read Seneca as advocating (like Santayana) a program of imaginative self-improvement and edification; I tend to read Voegelin as issuing a call to radical restoration of past conditions. Seneca's program is surely within every thinking individual's grasp. Voegelin's tends to appeal most to political and cultural reactionaries.

Dr. Williams Demonstrates Santayanan "Spiritual" Vision

Dr. Williams's "so much" is what Santayana called "living in the eternal." That life is a visionary mode: learning to see through our symbolic appropriations of things (what Williams termed "the idea of the thing") to the point where we can see them for "what they are in themselves" (Williams's "the thing itself"). And "what they are in themselves" remains a symbolic appropriation (Santayana was no naive realist; he understood this sort of transfiguration of sense perception is inescapable) but, seen sub specie aeternatis, it is recognized as such. Re-cognition at this level of sophistication is effected by divesting the symbol so acquired of personal interest.

Santayanan spiritual vision is a variety of Schopenhauerian liberation.

Santayana's Schopenhauerian Spirit

Spirit is not an instrument but a realization, a fruition. At every stage, and wherever it peeps out through the interstices of existence, it is a contemplation of eternal things. Eternal things are not other material things by miracle existing for ever in another world; eternal things are the essences of all things here, when we consider what they are in themselves and not what, in the world of fortune, they may bring or take away from us personally. That is why piety and prayer are spiritual, when they cease to be magic operations or efforts of a celestial diplomacy: they lead us into the eternal world.

--The Philosophy of Santayana, The Modern Library (1936), 371-2.

Wallace Stevens On Beauty

Beauty is momentary in the mind--
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.
The body dies; the body's beauty lives.

from "Peter Quince at the Clavier" (1915)

How Jesus Became God

Bart Ehrman's most ambitious work yet.

The School of Al-Kindi

Abu Yusuf al-Kindi (d. 866 CE) was a Muslim intellectual intimately involved with the 'Abbasid translation project of the 9th century (Baghdad's "House of Wisdom"). He is emblematic of the marriage of Irano-Semitic prophecy and late Hellenism--a marriage that sired the sophisticated, urbane, and intellectually progressive Islam of the 9th through 13th centuries.

During that same period, tasawwuf ("Sufism") moved to center stage in the tradition, receiving al-Ghazali's crucial endorsement in the Ihya some time in the late 11th century. Though not himself associated with any particular tariqa, al-Kindi's writings on the relationship of prophecy to rational inquiry open the door to non-rational (experiential) modes of "religious knowledge" (what the practitioners of tasawwuf refer to as dhawq or "taste"). As an interesting aside, despite his strong endorsement of the "Sufi path," Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali, like al-Kindi before him, did not associate himself with any particular tariqa. Intellectual independence remained key for both of these gentlemen, and al-Ghazali even referred to the practice of taqlid (or blind obedience to a teacher) as the "religion of donkeys."

Kindian Islam is cosmopolitan in outlook and eclectic and synthetic in method; the life of the mind is never divorced from the life of the body (it is, therefore, practice-oriented, manifesting itself as asceticism); it is literary and philological in the classically broad and humanistic sense (the Kindian thinker is in love with the logos); epistemologically skeptical (despite its rationalistic tenor, Kindian thought openly admits that rationality has its limits); and metaphysically minimalist (metaphysics yields to two other "sciences": on the one hand, there is theology, about which al-Kindi had very little to say, and, on the other hand, cosmology, about which al-Kindi had much to say, and which took the form of a systematic attempt to offer causal explanations for how things happen in the world--a desideratum of natural science).

Like tasawwuf, Kindian Islam is aesthetically oriented--attuned to a beatific vision of beauty. Unlike tasawwuf, Kindian Islam does not accept the notion that there is a specific path (tariqa) one must choose to enter (or not) in the course of one's life; rather, one's life is the path. At some point, an individual may achieve this insight and then begin to live consciously the life of a wali ("friend of god"--al-Kindi would have employed a different term such as faylasuf). This view is somewhat problematic for Sufis because it renders the institutions and personnel of Sufism optional.

The goal of the Kindian wali (or faylasuf) is beautiful conduct in communion with the beautiful vision. Al-Kindi's work on the imagination suggests that intimations of the beautiful vision may be detected in what Henry Corbin called the mundus imaginalis--though, as a metaphysical minimalist, al-Kindi did not attempt to endow the imagination with any sort of extra-mental ontological status. One apprehends beauty in the cosmological macrocosm and, correspondingly, cultivates it in the human microcosm. Mathematics--for al-Kindi, a science that lifts the mind beyond anything encountered in the imaginary--holds the key to the sublime.

Ultimately, however, for al-Kindi, it is the soul (a kind of emanation from the True Origin of all Being, analogous to a beam of light from the sun), purified of sensory distractions through ascetic practices, that achieves some degree of intimacy (but not, as in tasawwuf, union) with the Divine.

In certain respects, then, the Kindian Muslim exemplifies the old adage that the "true Sufi is the one who is not."

Owning Jesus

It is strange to encounter Christian resistance to Muslim reverence for Jesus. Christians are often disturbed by the fact that Muslims regard Jesus with admiration and affection and yet refuse to deify him. As if deification were a prerequisite to reverence. Perhaps the underlying assumption is that, if you deify Jesus, you own him, and if you own Jesus, you alone are entitled to decide how he is to be imagined and valued.

Owning deity...Now that's a concept.

"Sufi Philosophy"

The article entitled "Sufi Philosophy" in the famous 1967 edition of The Encyclopedia of Philosophy has long struck me as something of an enigma. It was authored by a William Gerber who, I suspect, was the author of an ambitious (but long forgotten) work of analytical philosophy entitled The Domain of Reality (1946). Why Gerber was selected by the editor of the Encyclopedia to contribute an article on Sufism is unclear. There are a variety of factual errors in the article that suggest he had no access to texts in Arabic or Persian (and/or little or no facility in either language). He was entirely dependent upon Orientalist scholarship for what information he had about tasawwuf and, even then, appears to have misread some of his sources.

Despite these unfortunate failings, the article offers peculiar insights into this complex and important movement within the Islamic tradition. How Gerber arrived at these insights, however, is a mystery.

After a couple of paragraphs in which he attempted (with mixed success) to account for the origin and character of the movement, Gerber stated categorically that

Among the principal teachings of Sufism are the following:

(1) Absolute Being (God) is also Absolute Beauty.
(2) Since beauty tends toward manifestation, Absolute Being developed the phenomenal world.
(3) To win a sense of direct communion with the Absolute Being behind the phenomenal world, one should practice the quietistic virtues (poverty, austerity, humility, fortitude, and discipline), devote oneself to the ways of inwardness (withdrawal, silence, solitariness, and self-examination), and keep in mind a constant awareness of God (with faith, awe, and desire).
(4) It is useful to utter certain slogans...as reminders of the mystic belief and aim and as aids to concentration on the quest for unification.
(5) If one follows these directions with sufficient perseverance, one will advance through the standard mystic stages of concentration, apprehension of the oneness of everything [this claim on Gerber's part is somewhat problematic], sudden and unpredictable illumination, blissful ecstasy, sense of union with the Deity, sense of one's own nothingness, and sense of the nothingness beyond nothingness.

What is immediately striking about this summary of the "principal teachings of Sufism" is Gerber's appreciation of the aestheticism that is almost everywhere implicit throughout the movement, but only occasionally rendered explicit in its classical expressions. Gerber's apprehension of the movement's underlying aestheticism and his decision to place it front and center in his brief summary of tasawwuf's "principal teachings" helps, in my mind, to redeem his article from the many factual inaccuracies that otherwise mar it.

It is sometimes the case that the eyes of the untutored see more clearly than the eyes of experts.

A Humanist Encyclopaedia

The Mazeppist and its sibloglings (An American Athenaeum, Ghaffar Khan Society, Amendment IX) combine to form a Humanist Encyclopaedia.