Moss,1 H.

. Connor Moss Professor Malek Moazzam-Doulat Rels 225: Sufism November 21, 2012 Midterm: Wasiti on the Essence, Attributes and Acts of God Note: In order to simplify my writing, this paper refers to Gods Essence as (He), although it is incorrect to do so. The parenthesis will be used to emphasize the failure of the pronoun. 1. In A Soaring Minaret, Silvers sets out Wasitis theological principles, which she organizes around the fundamental concepts of Essence, Attributes and Act. Please explain the relationships between Gods Essence, Attributes and Acts as described in the book. Be careful to explain what Wasiti means by his difficult claim that there is no distinction between God, His attributes or his names (Silvers 72). The Essence is God as complete unity, independent of any relation to space or time. The Essence is Being without delimitation. The Essence contains all possible permutations and configurations of Being as potential. This is God as (He) is unknowable, impossible to conceptualize, and impossible even (for Wasiti) to properly allude to. The Essence is God without any specific relation to any created thing. Just God. In Derridas terms, the Essence is God as the radical relationality between all things. The Attributes of God are aspects the Essence extended and realized. It is through the Attributes that most people experience the Essence, because the attribute is the aspect of the Essence that interacts with human existence. The Attribute is the Essence as it relates to the created world. They are the 99 (and more) names of God. These are the Essences specific characteristics as seen from the perspective of human existence. The Attributes, unlike the Essence are knowable and nameable. The Attributes only gain

Moss,2 meaning in relationship to us as human beings, they are the mediator between the Essence and the Acts. The Acts are what we interact with on a day-to-day basis. These are the specific instantiations of the Attributes that exist in a particular space and time. The Acts extend from out of the Attributes, as they are only possible from the source of the Attribute that they convey to us. The Acts contain their parent Attribute as the Acts essence, which is the part of the Act that we recognize and interact with using the intellect. The essence of the Act is the Attribute. The essence of the Attributes is The Essence. Wasiti broke away from the Mutazilite interpretation of theology in his belief that the Essence, the Attributes, and the Acts were all the same thing; there was no distinction between them. From our perspective as humans in a certain time and place, we incorrectly perceive the Essence, the Attributes and the Acts as having separate natures. However, from the perspective of the Essence, the Acts, Attributes and Essence of God are all the same. The Essence flows from Unity to multiplicity, through the Attributes and Acts. From our perspective in multiplicity, Essence, Attribute and Act appear to be separate, but according to Wasiti this is a false perception. As Silvers puts it: While the attributes are experienced as diverse from the side of creation, from the side of incomparability they are identical with the Essence (p. 72). 2. Why does Wasiti argue that Gods Essence cannot be named or spoken, but only indirectly alluded to? Make sure to address the nature of human language and the intellect in this impossibility. We cannot conceptualize Gods Essence because (He) exists only as independent of any created thing. Therefore we can never experience (speak of, name, conceptualize, understand, experience) Gods Essence, because we can never exist as complete unity.

Moss,3 Whenever we approach Gods Essence, the fact that we are approaching it from a specific context means that we will only experience God as specific Attributes and Acts, that is God as (He) exists in relation to us. To speak of or conceptualize Gods Essence would necessitate us approaching Gods Essence from no particular context, which is, of course, impossible. The failure to name Gods Essence lies in our limited human capacity. For Wasiti, the intellect acquires knowledge by recognizing differences (Silvers 72). That is, the way we as humans understand anything is by comparing things to other things, and recognizing the common characteristics (Essence) among a family of forms (Acts). Language only works within a differentiated, plural world. We name differences, (we name this a Dog and this a Cat, because they are different) but we recognize similarities (we understand that this is a Dog because we recognize his Dog-ness). The Essence has no other, and cannot be compared to anything, therefore language fails when we try to conceptualize it. Because languages action is to differentiate and name differences, we cannot name Gods Essence because any name would delimit and restrict The Essence. To give an example, if we were to name God as a male, that would not be naming Gods Essence, but naming one of Gods Attributes. God is neither male nor female, nor is (He) prior to the binary of male/female (God cannot be prior or post anything, because (He) does not exist in relation to time). Gods Essence is neither differentiable, limited, nor comparable, therefore we cannot name (Him) in any satisfactory way without imposing languages distinguishing nature.

Moss,4 3. In referring to Gods Essence, Wasiti chooses to resort to the use of the Arabic letter ha which is a shortened form of the pronoun huwa or He. How does the use of the letter (ha) allow one to carry out this allusion according to Wasiti? Because of the delimiting nature of language, we cannot satisfactorily assign any pronoun to God. Because of the unfathomable nature of Gods Essence, we can only allude or point (ishara) to (Him). Wasiti uses the letter ha to point towards The Essence without naming (Him). The letter ha is neither a noun, nor a name, but is a particle which refers to Gods Essence. As Laury Silvers puts it: the Essence is the particles antecedent (p. 71). Ha is the perfect particle to refer to God because in Arabic it is also the possessive form of he, attached to any noun to indicate whom it belongs to. Therefore ha is used often in Arabic, but only gains meaning when attached a specific noun when ascribing possession of it. On its own, ha does not refer to any particular relationship with a noun, just as The Essence exists separate from any relation to anything else. The use of ha to refer to God alludes to the unified nature of the Essence, without implying the Essence as relative or in relation to something in particular. In addition the letter ha looks in Arabic like a zero, which points to the conspicuous absence of the Essences relation to anything. 4. How are we at once joined with God and separated from Him according to Wasiti? That is, what perspective or understanding of God and beings accounts for each of these perspectives? Because of the radical unity of Gods Essence, there can be neither joining together (wasl) nor division from (fasl) God (Silvers 73). To join or disperse from something presupposes that that thing exists somewhere separate from yourself so that you can then move towards or away from that thing. However this is impossible when

Moss,5 thinking of Gods Essence because (He) is One, and cannot be related to anything. Therefore it does not make any sense to say wasl or fasl when referring to God, we already exist as both joined and separated from (Him), as God radically relates to everything. As Laury Silvers puts it: There can be no joining with or separation from that which is exclusively One and without relationship (p. 74). For Wasiti, joining and separating from God is a matter of perception, merely differences in perspective. One will perceive to be unified (wasl) with God if they see all of creation as a manifestation of God, if they perceive the unity in the world. That is, if someone recognizes the common source of Gods Essence in all Acts and Attributes, they will be joining with God. On the other hand one will perceive to be separated (fasl) from God if they focus on the differences between things in the world, if they perceive the otherness of all things from the self. Hence, if someone only recognizes that which differentiates and distinguishes the Acts and Attributes from each other, they will be separated from God. 5. By what faculty and means do the common people come to know God? For Wasiti, common people know God through his Acts and Attributes. They recognize Actualized things as a manifestation of God and therefore know Him through his Acts in creation. Common people are using their faculties of the intellect to recognize God as the common Essence of all things. As an example of this type of recognition of God, Silvers quotes the Quran: Do they not look at the camels, how they are created? (Q 88:17). This verse calls attention to the recognition of God through created acts, such as the camel. 6. How is this different that the way(s) in which the elect of the elect, Muhammad, come to have a direct experience of God?

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The elect of the elect know God through direct experience of The Essence. They experience God in a direct gnosis of The Essence, an intuitive tasting of truth rather than a rational, intellectual understanding (as with the common people). The elect of the elect know God by experiencing The Essence first, directly, and then recognizing God in all things. As an example of this higher understanding of God, Silvers quotes the Quran: Do you not see your Lord, how He has stretched out the shadow? (Q 24:43). That is, the elect of the elect see God first, and as a consequence ponder at (His) standing through the shadow. The elect of the elect are always shown Gods Essence in accordance with the ability and capacity of their heart. Therefore if some, such as Mohammad have higher capacities of their heart, they are able to experience Gods Essence directly, instead of experiencing (Him) indirectly, mediated through the Attributes and Acts. The elect of the elect use the faculties of the heart (sirr, qalb) in order to intuit Gods Essence directly. The common people understand things defining them in light of their opposite, the elect of the elect know things by intuiting their unity. 7. According to Wasiti, what distinguishes Moses failure to experience God as such (in His Essence) at Mt. Sinai from Muhammads miraj? Because Gods Essence can only be experienced in accordance with the specific capacity of someones heart, different prophets have different (more or less direct) experiences of the Essence. When God revealed himself to Moses, (He) denied Moses direct access to the Essence, instead mediating the Essence by revealing (Himself) to a nearby mountain. Wasiti saw this as a test of the capacity of Moses heart. When God revealed (Himself) to the mountain, it crumbled instantly, and Moses lost consciousness

Moss,7 at the sight of The Essence revealing (Himself) to the mountain. Moses was denied the direct experience of the Essence, and instead experienced a mediated version, because he did not have the capacity or ability to have that experience. Mohammad, on the other hand, was uniquely granted direct access to the Essence during his miraj. Wasiti controversially claims that Mohammad experienced Gods Essence directly, in full, during his mirage a feat that no other human before or since has achieved. Wasiti claims that Mohammad was able to experience the Essence because God opened the prophets heart (Silvers 77) so that he had the capacity of the heart to experience God directly. Only Mohammad was able (through Gods gift of the expansion of his heart) to experience God directly as the Essence, rather than experience God only by witnessing evidence of (Him) in his Acts and Attributes in creation. This full experience of the essence is a complicated issue because we run into many paradoxes when we say he (Mohammad) experienced The Essence. For one, God as The Essence is not divisible into those two separate parties. How to write about this experience would require an entire other paper, but we can say at least that during this experience Mohammad has to have ceased to exist as he was dissolved in the unity of the Essence of God. At this stage no multiplicity exists at all, Mohammad simply is God, as The Essence, unrelated to space or time.

Moss,8 Works Cited Silvers, Laury. A Soaring Minaret: Abu Bakr al-Wasiti and the Rise of Baghdadi Sufism. Albany, New York: SUNY Press, 2010.