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."