The Eye of the Heart

By Dr. Muhammad Maroof Shah, "The Perennial Relevance" - Greater Kashmir - Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, India
Wednesday, July 23, 2008

On the everlasting and never fading importance of Perennial philosophy

If asked to name two or three best book on Islam in the 20th century one can reply, with good reasons, Frithjof Schuon’s (the great perennialist Sufi Isa Nuruudin) books such as Understanding Islam and Islam and the Perennial Philosophy, the works which most of professors teaching Islam don’t care to read many would not even comprehend because of “obscurity” and dense, allusive and demanding philosophical content and style.

If there is an approach that can defend Islam and attract people of the highest intellectual calibre to it, it is perennial philosophy.

Most of the most important scholars in contemporary Islam have appropriated perennialist insights. Sufism or inner dimension of Islam provides the basis for perennialist worldview in Islamic context. Muslim authorities are unanimous in recognizing the batin or inner dimension of Islam and most of them identify Sufism as this dimension.

Religion without esotericism or inward dimension is empty formalism in which modern man has little, if any interest. And those who oppose all Sufism divest Islam of all its vitality and make it irrelevant and defenseless against modernity.

Revolt against traditional philosophy began with the father of modern philosophy, Descartes though some fancy him to be in the service of religion and juxtapose his name with great traditional authorities such as Ghazzali betraying their ignorance of secularizing force of modern philosophy.

It is with Descartes that revolt against traditional epistemology and metaphysics set in to culminate in disguised or sometimes frank atheism of modern philosophy. His cogito principle, his method of doubt, his severance of reason from intellect and rejection of intellective intuition and revelation in philosophy, his soul/body dualism and his other devations from traditional background make him a key figure in modern philosophy’s turning away from traditional roots in religion.

He, along with Newton, despite their concern to defend their own constricted understanding of Christianity epitomizes negation of an epoch in history and are architect of modern desacralizing scientistim and secularization.

Here we may contrast Descartes with Ghazali, who stemmed the tide of faith denying rationalism and metaphysically problematic Aristotelianism in Islam and prevented the development of great aberration in philosophy that was to characterize the post-Descartes’ West.
Ghazali, in contrast, stood for intellect and revelation and didn’t subordinate theology to rational philosophy and was in important respects polar opposite of Descartes. There is little correspondence in their respective methodological doubts or between methodological and existential doubts of Descartes and Ghazzali respectively.
The fruits of their doubting methodologies being so different so we can’t characterize both of them with reference to single conception of “skepticism” or doubt.

If skepticism is a virtue in modern philosophy, it has no place in Muslim philosophy.

Traditional metaphysics doesn’t start from doubt, has nothing to do with synthesizing knowledge of sciences that are never absolutely certain and search for causes of phenomena.

The question is: did Ghazali ever doubt existence of God in his so-called skeptical phase? If he didn’t, how can we assert that he fell under the spell of “skepticism in all its connotations” for some time, as asserted by orientalists and those who read philosophy from Western historians of philosophy. He did become doubtful about the possibility of knowledge by means of reason and senses for sometime but did not turn a skeptic who denies the possibility of finding some means through this impasse and who doesn’t implore God to guide him out of this impasse.

That was more a dark night of soul than the darkness of impasse of other skeptics. Skepticism is a loaded term in modern discourse though if we restrict it to its original sense as inquiry then it is a virtue and all philosophers are skeptics, at least to begin with.

There can be no presuppositionless philosophy despite the claim to the contrary of those who claim otherwise and privilege methodology of doubt.

To accuse perennialists of pantheism shows one doesn’t care to read even the first sentence of perennialist writings on God that asserts the notion of Beyond-Being which is transcendent and pantheism means rejection of divine transcendence.

It is a typical orientalist fallacy to accuse Sufism of pantheism.

Even such a perceptive philosopher as Iqbal fell under the spell of this orientalist misreading (in his Reconstruction he labeled Sufism as pantheistic), not to speak of lesser mortals who have yet to emerge from the spell of modern Western thought which banished Intellect and don’t appreciate that intellective intuition and gnosis is possible by virtue of Intellect.

Intellect is what the Sufis, including Ghazali, call the eye of the heart. It is another face of what the Quran calls Ruh, the Spirit.

Without it man is not man, man in the image of God. Rejecting it in the name of Islam is to reject the intellectual/spiritual foundation of Islam.

The source of revelation in Islam is Gabriel or the Universal Intellect. It is Intellect that makes man immortal and makes man vestigio Dei.

All perception is dependent on intellect though Descartes didn’t appreciate this and up to the present day perception has been an unsolved problem in Western thought.

Gnosis or religious experience on which experimental proof of existence of God and thus possibility of religion is based is an attribute of Intellect.
Intellect and NeoPlatonic hikmah philosophy can be opposed in the name of modern philosophy only and not in the name of Islam and Muslim philosophy.
Aristotle deviated in certain measure from hikmah philosophy and Ghazalian criticism primarily applies to rationalizing Aristotlenism and he did so in the spirit of Neoplatonic mysticism despite his differences with emanationist view.

Bringing Ibn Taymiyah’s authority to refute NeoPlationic Muslim philosophers and perennialists, as is done by exotericists, is to confound separate prerogatives of theology and metaphysics and privilege the former.
It is metaphysics which is equipped to teach theology what polytheism or shirk is in its deepest or most real sense rather than the vice versa. Theology or exotericism for its dualism is inherently unable to taste unity or tawhid and thus a subtle form of shirk.
It argues in propositions and doesn’t see first hand its object.

It is only in the light of perennial philosophy that we can understand Islam most
comprehensively as civilization – its sciences, its arts, its architecture, its philosophy and its theology.

Symbolism of mosque, of cap or turban, of veil, of ritual prayer- indeed of anything associated with Islam, is best deciphered by perennialists.

Perennialists are able to convincingly own Sufis and most philosophers. They accommodate the generality of ulema as well though they are able to move beyond most of these categories.

Maulana Thanvi, one of the towering personalities - jurist cum theologian cum metaphysician cum Sufi- was Hasn Askari’s Murshid.
There is no orientalist influence in the writings of perennialists. They are 100 percent orientalism/Westernism/modernism free.

There can be no unIslamic source at metaphysical plane but only at theological plane. When one transcends theological plane one transcends all talk of “Islamic” and “unIslamic” sources.

The God of the Quran is Truth, Reality (al-Haqq).

Everything in the universe (aafaq) and soul (nafs) is the province of the inclusive truth of which Islam speaks. Wherever wisdom (hikmah) is or truth is, that is appropriated by the M’umin as his own possession.

Adopting perennialist perspective means one leaves aside all human constructions, all merely rational speculative systems, all doubt based and (modern) empiricist modes of thought, all complicity with (modern) science and its notions of causality and rests securely in the timeless truths of revelation and wijdan that metaphysics expresses in consistent format.