The Polished Mirror: Storytelling and

the Pursuit of Virtue in Islamic

Philosophy and Sufism, written by
Cyrus Ali Zargar

Cyrus Ali Zargar, The Polished Mirror: Storytelling and the

Pursuit of Virtue in Islamic Philosophy and Sufism. London:
Oneworld Publications, 2017, 352 pp.

Cyrus Ali Zargar has produced an accessible monograph on

virtue ethics in Islam as theorized and narrated by
philosophical as well as mystical authors, both from the
classical and the medieval periods. Zargar contributes to the
field of Islamic studies a superb, refined analysis of the links
between storytelling and ethical formation in Islamic
philosophy and Sufism. The author guides us through some of
the most fascinating ideas elaborated by Islamic philosophers
and Sufis on moral anthropology, the habituation of virtue, the
place of natural reason in ethical formation, the relationship
between ethics and onto-epistemology, and, not least,
embodied piety as spiritual praxis. In this review, I draw
attention to certain features of Zargar’s rich account in order
to illustrate the kinds of insights Zargar distills from his
sources. In the end, I also identify questions and paths of
inquiry that merit further exploration in the study of narrative
ethics in Islam.

The Polished Mirror models three ways of engaging primary

texts in both Arabic and Persian. To begin with, the author
aspires to describe his sources in terms that recognize their
heterogeneity. Secondly, he attends to both form and meaning
through close reading of various genres within philosophical
and Sufi literature. And finally, Zargar encourages his readers
to approach Islamic philosophy and Sufism as sources of
inspiration for embodying virtue. The Polished Mirror thus
reflects the work of an intellectual historian who encounters
the past on its own terms, an imaginative literary critic who
examines the play between chalice and wine as tropes, and a
constructive ethicist whose moral vision projects better
selves and societies in our broken world.

In the book’s introductory chapter, Zargar briefly surveys the

modern study of ethics and the varied discursive settings of
akhlāq, including theology and jurisprudence. He also explains
to the uninitiated reader the basic thematic structures of
Islamic philosophy and Sufism as well as their affinity,
justifying his own attempt to bring them together in The
Polished Mirror: “these two major branches not only
contemplated virtue more closely than other branches of
Islamic learning, but also at times intermingled and even
merged” (17). Zargar next elucidates his key intervention,
namely, the need to engage with stories for understanding
virtue in Islamic philosophy and Sufism. The key term here is
adab, which at once means “wisdom literature” and “proper
conduct” (22). Stories inform conduct; they enable us to
approach the complexities of embodying virtue in contingent
relational and social settings, where abstract theories about
ethical subjectivity meet concrete expressions of flesh-and-
blood actors. By drawing our attention to the rich literary
heritage of Islamic philosophy and Sufism, Zargar broadens
the field of “literary ethics,” expanding “the scope of the
search for lived and situated human experience” (23).
Collectively, the book’s ten chapters yield a capacious view of
virtuous stories in classical and medieval Islam.

Consider the first literary text Zargar examines. It is the

twenty-second “epistle” of the Brethren of Purity, which
proceeds like a “courtroom drama as varieties of animals and
humans send representatives to make their case for or
against human superiority to animals. The humans do not fare
well until the very end” (42). Zargar deploys this text, and the
genre of the animal fable in general, to underscore the
prevalence of a humor-based moral anthropology in Islamic
philosophy, the “multipolarity of body and soul,” also relevant
to planetary and cosmic frameworks for embodying virtue.
The story of humans and animals debating their cases before
a jinn-king drives home several important points about moral
formation. First, a narrative strategy that makes animals
“agents analogous to humans” enables readers to get a fresh
perspective on admirable character traits by recourse to a
lion’s audacity or a camel’s perseverance. Second, virtue is
defamiliarized, and expanded, by becoming a characteristic of
non-human animals and even planetary as well as cosmic
entities (48). The upshot of this perspective is a
resignification of the category, “human,” itself, as Zargar
explains, “‘Human’ can then mean ‘pinnacle of all creation,’
realized fully by some humans, not at all by others, and in an
attenuated and highly specialized fashion by animals” (48).
Third, Zargar foregrounds the Brethren’s nimble use of the
jinn-king as the arbitrator between humans and animals: “In
this story, the race of jinn, hidden yet sentient, represents all
those virtuous people who must hide their true identities for
fear of hatred or violence. In a similar manner, their king
represents the intellect (as well as possibly the hidden Shiʿi
imam). Like the intellect, the jinn-king is an entity hidden,
rational, merciful, and just, and yet taxed with the
management of the affairs of all beings” (45).

A key genre Zargar examines is the philosophical allegory,

analyses of which we encounter in chapters 2 and 4 (with
reference to Ibn Sīnā and Ibn Ṭufayl, respectively) and in
chapter 5 (with reference to Suhrawardī). Zargar’s chapter on
Ibn Sīnā’s philosophical allegories—first, Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, and
second, the story of Salāmān and Absāl—is a tour de force: it
helpfully initiates the reader into a vast conceptual vocabulary,
familiar to philosophers, by distilling from these two allegories
insights about moral discipline and ethical spirituality, all the
while navigating the secondary scholarship with nuance. In
these twin tales, Ibn Sīnā allegorizes the dynamics of the
tripartite soul in its pursuit of virtue by recourse to tropes of
friends and brothers. We encounter the brothers Salāmān and
Absāl, as personifying the rational soul and the theoretical
intellect, respectively, while the other characters in this tale
personify the body, the practical intellect, anger, and desire.
Their story, which Zargar reconstructs based on Naṣīr al-Dīn
Ṭūsī’s ingenious account, serves to drive home a central tenet
of Ibn Sīnā’s ethical teachings: “The body is an obstacle to the
completion of the intellect because it is a combination of
contradictories, namely, contradictory natures and humors”
(71).

Ibn Sīnā’s Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān features a narrator who assumes

the position of the rational soul and is accompanied by three
friends: a loquacious entertainer, an angry person, and a
glutton, respectively personifying “imagination, anger, and
desire” (63). Accompanied by this bevy of friends, the rational
soul encounters “an old man endowed with great wisdom,”
namely Ḥayy. The sage immediately recognizes the true
natures of these companions. He advises the narrator to save
himself from their destructive propensities. “One stratagem
that works with such friends,” counsels Ḥayy, “is that you use
the malicious and irascible one to overcome the frivolous and
gluttonous one by restraining him with rebukes and breaking
him utterly. Also, you can gradually neutralize the
excessiveness of the conceited and rough one by using the
charm of the frivolous and flattering one to subdue him” (64).
The trope of the friend as allegorizing a part of one’s soul is
brilliant: it furnishes a person with the critical distance
necessary for pursuing any program of self-edification. Yet,
the allegory also contains profound implications for political
philosophy that await further research.

Zargar’s discussion of Miskawayh, Ghazālī, and Ibn Ṭufayl can

be related to two questions: To what extent, and in what
specific ways, does the ethical subject require extra-rational
inspiration to become virtuous? Specifically, how do nature,
habit, and culture shape the soul’s dispositions (malakāt)?
Chapters 3 and 4 offer much food for thought to pursue this
line of inquiry. The pairing of Miskawayh and Ghazālī in a
single chapter is especially instructive. While the approaches
of both Muslim thinkers differ from modern liberal
sensibilities as well as post-modern critiques of the
autonomous subject, Miskawayh’s Aristotelian search for the
ethical mean in light of reason contrasts with Ghazālī’s
pietistic yet imaginative quest for the ethical mean in light of
scripture. Future readers might connect the subtle but notable
differences between Miskawayh and Ghazālī to Ibn Ṭufayl’s
appeal to natural reason and universality in order to uncover
the broader epistemological and ontological assumptions at
the heart of becoming virtuous in Islamic philosophy and
theology. Moreover, we are compelled to ask: what literary
functions does the appeal to natural reason and universality
perform in Ibn Ṭufayl’s imaginative and influential tale, Ḥayy
ibn Yaqẓān? In other words, does the narrative refer to these
tropes as philosophical truths or does it construct them
instead to embellish rhetorical force?

The book’s Part Two (on Sufi texts and authors) contains five
chapters and covers many thematic clusters, including
repentance and self-renunciation, knowledge of the divine self
and the human self, annihilation but also subsistence in God,
the path of love, and the central dyad of Invisible reality and
Visible appearance. While Zargar introduces the reader to a
range of mystical texts and authors, it is his masterful
discussion of Rumi that best exemplifies the promise of virtue
ethics in an Islamic context. Rumi’s poetics draw from
philosophy, Sufism, theology, and jurisprudence in order to
attack superficial and self-righteous piety; the poet/mystic
encourages us to embrace the fragments of truth and virtue
according to our bodily capacities, while keeping alive the
contradictions of our human selves. In this and in numerous
other ways, Zargar’s book offers profound insights about
embodied ethics. He enables us to think more critically about
the differential realities and appearances of the body in
various literary genres. One key question that runs throughout
the book echoes its title: What does it mean to inhabit a body
that is also a mirror, and how do literary narratives polish this
embodied mirror? To ask this question of Islamicate sources
is to connect them to a range of conversations in the critical
humanities.

While Zargar mentions Martha Nussbaum’s musings on the

interplay between the philosophical and the literary, I propose
that we might be better served by returning to the most
extensive textual site where the relationship between the
literary and the philosophical has been the subject of both
critical commentary and personal practice, namely the work
of Simone de Beauvoir. Zargar’s sustained attention to the
bodily dimensions of ethics resonates with Beauvoir’s ethics
of the body. “For Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty,” observes Toril
Moi, “the human body is fundamentally ambiguous: it is
subject at once to natural laws and to the human production
of meaning, and it can never be reduced to either one of these
elements. Because the body is neither pure nature nor pure
meaning, neither empiricism nor idealism will ever be able to
grasp the specific nature of human existence” (Moi 2000, 69).
Beauvoir charts an alternative path; she explores the
ambiguities of ethical embodiment in philosophical works
such as The Ethics of Ambiguity and novels such as The
Mandarins. Her engagement with the major questions of life
at the nexus of philosophy and literature encourages us to
think more creatively about the specific transformative power
of stories. As Moi emphasizes: “All her life she [Beauvoir]
praised the experience of immersed, absorbed, spellbound
reading. A good novel, she wrote, ‘imitates the opacity,
ambiguity, impartiality of life; spellbound by the story he is
told, the reader responds as he would to events in real life.’ To
read is to have experiences one would otherwise not have.
Readers of fiction, Beauvoir tells us, enlarge their world” (Moi
2017, 214–15).
“To enlarge one’s world” brings us to another important
distinction: literature versus fiction. How does this distinction
affect narrative’s capacity to shape ethical self-fashioning,
especially in contexts where notions of truth are of central
significance? To engage with Beauvoir’s focus on literature
and embodied ethics also opens another vista of concerns
about virtue ethics and storytelling in Islam, questions that
connect to, and are inspired by, Zargar’s apt analysis. What
kinds of responses, even identifications, on the part of
readers intensify literature’s capacity to shape virtue and to
transform dispositional habits? What features of the oral
performance of ethical tales touch our minds and polish our
hearts? These are questions that future research on Islamic
narrative ethics can explore, taking inspiration from Zargar’s
pioneering study. The Polished Mirror thus holds up a new
model of constructive inquiry into Islamic ethics; the surface
of this mirror is capacious enough to reflect Islamicate
literature but also allude to a range of debates and themes in
the critical humanities.

Bibliography

Moi, Toril. 2000. What is a Woman? And Other Essays. New

York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.