TRAVERSING THE BARZAKH: THE PROBLEM OF UNIVERSALS IN ISLAMIC

PHILOSOPHY AND THEORETICAL SUFISM

by

JUSTIN CANCELLIERE

(Under the Direction of Alan Godlas)

ABSTRACT

This study investigates the problem of universals in the works of Shihāb al-Dīn

Yaḥyá al-Suhrawardī (d. 587/1191) and Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī (d. 673/1274)—figures of

universally agreed-upon importance to the development of theoretically sophisticated

mysticism in Islamic lands. It also examines relevant works of commentary by Shams al-

Dīn al-Fanārī (d. 834/1431) and Mullā Ṣadrā (d. ca. 1050/1640). Chapter 1 provides

necessary context. Chapter 2 argues that, contra a somewhat commonplace

characterization of Suhrawardī’s view, he is not a nominalist and is more justly classed as

a realist. Chapter 3 demonstrates that a nuanced presentation of Qūnawī’s doctrine of

universals must take account of the nature of the interrelationship between two key

concepts, namely the “fixed entities” (al-aʿyān al-thābitah) and the divine names.

Chapter 4 shows how both Fanārī and Ṣadrā harmonize Suhrawardī’s “Illuminationist”

and Qūnawī’s “Akbarian” teachings on universals. Chapter 5 summarizes the study’s

findings.

INDEX WORDS: Suhrawardi, Qunawi, Fanari, Sadra, Problem of universals,

Illuminationist, Akbarian, Islamic philosophy, Sufism

TRAVERSING THE BARZAKH: THE PROBLEM OF UNIVERSALS IN ISLAMIC

PHILOSOPHY AND THEORETICAL SUFISM

by

JUSTIN CANCELLIERE

H.A.B., Xavier University, 2008

A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial

Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree

MASTER OF ARTS

ATHENS, GEORGIA

2019
 © 2019

Justin Cancelliere

All Rights Reserved

 TRAVERSING THE BARZAKH: THE PROBLEM OF UNIVERSALS IN ISLAMIC

PHILOSOPHY AND THEORETICAL SUFISM

by

JUSTIN CANCELLIERE

Major Professor: Alan Godlas

Committee: Kenneth Honerkamp
Carolyn Medine

Electronic Version Approved:

Suzanne Barbour
Dean of the Graduate School
The University of Georgia
May 2019
Dedicated to my wife, Banan Aldaheri

iv
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Praise be to God, on whom all beings rely, and who gives “without reckoning.” I

am grateful first of all to my advisors Dr. Alan Godlas and Dr. Kenneth Honerkamp, both

of whom have been exceedingly generous to me during my time at the University of

Georgia and indeed from the moment I was fortunate enough to make their acquaintance.

It is difficult to imagine a more supportive environment in which to study Islamic thought

academically than the one they provide for their students. Thanks are due as well to Dr.

Carolyn Medine, who graciously agreed to serve on my advisory committee, and to Ms.

Kimbley Scott, Ms. Zinetta McDonald, and Ms. Cheryl Gantt for their patient assistance

in all things administrative and official.

Beyond the UGA community, I wish to thank the following individuals: Seyyed

Hossein Nasr for his guidance, Dr. Waleed El-Ansary for opening up the world of Islam

to me, Farzin Negahban for his boon companionship, Dr. Gholamreza Aavani for his

confidence in me as a seeker of knowledge, Dr. Mohammed Rustom for his kind support

of my studies, and Mr. M. Ali Lakhani for giving me the opportunity to write for a wider

audience. I am grateful to Mr. Lakhani not only for publishing the second chapter of this

thesis in volume 42 of Sacred Web but also and especially for supporting my efforts at

writing from the beginning. Regarding the process of returning to academia to pursue

formal study again, I thank Drs. Mohammad Faghfoory, Yousef Casewit, and William

Chittick for their aid and advice, the Aavani family for their warm and unsparing

hospitality throughout my time in Iran learning Persian, Ms. Reem al-Jazairi for her

v
incredibly generous financial assistance, which enabled me to spend six months in Egypt

laying the foundation of my knowledge of Arabic, and my friends Muhammad, Nicholas,

Nariman, Hassan, and Munjed for their help at every step of the way.

Finally, I thank my beloved family, especially my parents, for their support. I pray

they attain to all their hearts’ truest desires.

vi
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................................................................... v

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION.......................................................................................... 1

Greco-Latin Background .......................................................................... 6

Islamic Background ................................................................................ 13

2 SHIHĀB AL-DĪN AL-SUHRAWARDĪ AL-MAQTŪL ............................... 30

3 ṢADR AL-DĪN AL-QŪNAWĪ ..................................................................... 63

4 SYNTHESIZING THE ILLUMINATIONIST AND AKBARIAN

DOCTRINES ............................................................................................. 107

Mullā Fanārī ......................................................................................... 111

Mullā Ṣadrā .......................................................................................... 137

5 CONCLUSION .......................................................................................... 155

REFERENCES ............................................................................................................ 157

vii
 CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

When thinking about two or more things, it becomes apparent that they are similar

in certain respects while differing in others. If all things were identical in every respect,

“they” would be one thing, and if all things were different in every respect, they could not

all have existence in common. In talking about the shared element, philosophers typically

speak of the “universal,” which can be defined simply as that which is “said of many,” or

“predicated of more than one thing,” unlike the “particular,” which is not.1 For example,

insofar as Zayd is Zayd, he is a particular person, and his name cannot be said of anyone

but him. But Zayd is also a person in the general sense, which is to say that he is not the

only person who exists. So the name Zayd refers to a particular being, and the word

“person” refers to a universal concept, with the latter being predicable of many, and the

former being predicable of only one. Given this mysterious compresence of sameness and

difference running through all things, how do the two relate to one another? How does

the universal, which is expressive of sameness,2 relate to the particular, which is

expressive of difference, and what is the ontological status of each? Such is the “problem

of universals,” as it has been called, and which is subsumable under the broader question

of the one’s relation to the many and vice versa.

1
Aristotle, On Interpretation, 17a39.
2
Or similarity, depending on one’s point of view.

1
 In light of the arguable centrality of the problem of universals to the discipline of

philosophy as such3 coupled with the current dearth of scholarship dealing with it in the

context of the intellectual traditions of Islam, the present study aims toward a deeper

engagement with this subject through an examination of the teachings of two key figures,

namely Shihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī al-Maqtūl (d. 587/1191) and Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī

(d. 673/1274), as well as later works—both commentarial and original—by Shams al-Dīn

al-Fanārī, known as Mullā Fanārī (d. 834/1431), and Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī, known as

Mullā Ṣadrā (d. ca. 1050/1640), all of whom sought, in their own ways, to harmonize

discursive philosophy with initiatic spirituality. Specifically, the thesis will argue (1) that,

contra a somewhat commonplace characterization of Suhrawardī’s view, he is not a

nominalist and is more justly classed as a realist (positions to be discussed shortly); (2)

that a nuanced presentation of Qūnawī’s doctrine of universals must take account of the

nature of the interrelationship between two key concepts, namely the “fixed entities” (al-

aʿyān al-thābitah) and the divine names (al-asmāʾ al-ilāhīyah, or asmāʾ Allāh); and (3)

that the writings of both Fanārī and Ṣadrā on universals constitute the fruits of a shared

gift for synthesis through which the “Illuminationism” of Suhrawardī and the “Akbarian”

gnosis of Qūnawī found integral, unified expression.4

3
Indeed how one answers it is arguably determinative of whether philosophy, for those who would pursue
it, proves to be love of wisdom or something else entirely.
4
Regarding the romanization of foreign-language terms, I will hew predominantly to the Library of
Congress method, with any exceptions pertaining largely to cases of elision (notably in Arabic
prepositional phrases) where adherence to the convention would be cumbersome and/or aesthetically
unappealing. As for direct quotations, transliterations will be modified for the sake of consistency
(excepting conventions that differ significantly from that of the LC), and all parentheses within quotations
indicate parenthetical phrases belonging to the text itself, whereas brackets indicate inserted material.
Lastly, the phrase “see note” (abbreviated “see n.” when in parentheses) will invariably refer to footnotes
belonging to the present study. Notes belonging to cited works and specified in the citation will be
appended directly to the page number, preceded by “n.”

2
 Although the discussion of universals in works of Islamic philosophy and

theoretical Sufism ended up maturing and then blossoming in a manner different in

important respects from what one finds at the apogee of medieval European

scholasticism, the common ground—rooted no doubt in a more or less shared inheritance

of Greek thought5—is broad enough to merit an overview of the relevant “Western”

intellectual history, which for our purposes begins with “the divine Plato,”6 whose theory

of Forms is perhaps the most widely known solution to the problem of universals ever to

have been proposed. Before setting off in this direction, however, it will be helpful to say

something regarding the reasons why a person might develop interest in a problem as

seemingly arcane as the one with which we are dealing.

First, as Hilary Staniland observes, “the investigation of almost any philosophical

problem, if taken far enough, will bring us up against some aspect of the problem of

universals. So even if we do not find the problem of universals interesting in its own

right, we must still recognize the need to deal with it as a means of dealing with other

philosophical problems.”7 Second, fundamental problems have fundamental implications.

For some the idea of universality constitutes an essential part of the philosophical

fundament of an integrally sacred worldview such that to deny its coherence or, worse,

abandon it is to unwittingly render the civilization in which this occurs vulnerable to

5
For the Islamicate side of this unwieldy subject, see, for example, Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic
Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ʿAbbāsid Society (2nd-4th/8th-10th
centuries) (London: Routledge, 1998). For the linguistic mechanics of the translation movement, see the
monumental A Greek and Arabic Lexicon: Materials for a Dictionary of the Mediaeval Translations from
Greek into Arabic, ed. Gerhard Endress and Dimitri Gutas (Leiden: Brill, 1992-present).
6
Suhrawardī refers to Plato by this honorific, as did many author Muslim philosophers, who considered
him one of the “five pillars of ḥikmah” (asāṭīn al-ḥikmah al-khamsah) along with Empedocles, Pythagoras,
Socrates, and Aristotle. See Hikmet Yaman, Prophetic Niche in the Virtuous City: The Concept of Ḥikmah
in Early Islamic Thought (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 5; John Walbridge, The Leaven of the Ancients: Suhrawardī
and the Heritage of the Greeks (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), 83.
7
Hilary Staniland, Universals (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1972), ix.

3
forces of an inferior nature, since, from the point of view in question, it is universals that

bridge the gap between the human mind and spiritual realities and thus help moor the

former to the latter. For others, conversely, such “logocentrism” provides tyranny with its

most vital intellectual root such that to renounce the desire for universality is to obviate

injustice and oppression.8 Thinkers of this persuasion, according to Staniland, “tend to

see the doctrine they are attacking as not merely false, but pernicious: a web of

mystification with more than a hint of sinister interests in the background. In disposing of

universals and other ‘occult entities’ they are, they feel, reasserting the claims of common

sense and the plain man.”9 And as Peter Kreeft has noticed, “To most modern minds,”

speaking of “the logic of an ordered hierarchy of objectively real categories … sound[s]

almost as archaic as alchemy or feudalism. Many criticize them as ideologically

dangerous. These critics dislike categories because they ‘feel that’ … classifications, and

universal statements about classes … , constitute ‘prejudice,’ ‘judgmentalism,’

‘oppression,’ or even ‘hate speech.’”10 It is interesting, however, that Kreeft, who

criticizes such thinkers harshly on the basis of his Aristotelianism, is wary of outright

Platonism:

If universals are more real than individuals, then individuals, and human

individuals too, are not primarily important—a convenient philosophy for

totalitarians! And if individual things are less real than universals, then the

senses do not reveal anything very important, and only the few “brains”

8
See, for example, Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, “Postmodernism and the Holocaust,” in
Postmodernism and the Holocaust, ed. Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998),
2-3.
9
Staniland, Universals, x.
10
Peter Kreeft, Socratic Logic: A Logic Text Using Socratic Method, Platonic Questions, and Aristotelian
Principles, ed. Trent Dougherty (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2014), 21.

4
 who can think very abstractly are wise. On the other hand, if universals are

not real at all, then we have the even more radical consequence of

skepticism: reality is an unknowable chaos, and all so-called universal

truths are merely subjective and man-made, including all principles of

science and ethics.11

Concerning what is at stake in the context of Islam, the problem of universals—

intimately bound up as it is with the oneness/manyness problematic—reaches directly

into the heart of Islamic belief and practice, which are based upon and centered around

tawḥīd, or the affirmation of God’s oneness.12 If God is truly one, how can a Muslim

account for God’s knowledge, speech, and creative act—all of which have something to

do with things presumably other than God—in a way that safeguards divine unity from

“contamination” by multiplicity? Such issues are arguably easier to resolve from, for

example, a Christian point of view,13 since in Christianity the divine Essence, while

simple, paradoxically comprises three Persons or hypostases. For their part, the Muslims

were confronted with the difficulty under consideration in a doctrinally formative period

that culminated most dramatically in the miḥnah (lit. “ordeal”) instituted in 827 by the

ʿAbbāsid caliph al-Maʾmūn, who, having adopted Muʿtazilite views, required the

scholarly class (ʿulamāʾ) to follow suit on pain, in some cases, of torture.14 On the

reasoning of the Muʿtazilites, the Quran, which Muslims believe to be the very speech of

11
Ibid., 43.
12
For an introductory explanation of this concept, see Sachiko Murata and William C. Chittick, The Vision
of Islam (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1994), xxx, 43. On the barest, literal level, the verbal noun tawḥīd
means “making one.”
13
At least when confining oneself to the realm of what one might call dogmatic theology as opposed to less
encumbered modes of metaphysical speculation, which always find their place somewhere within the
bounds of an integral religious tradition taken as a whole.
14
Khalid Blankinship, “The early creed,” in The Cambridge Companion to Classical Islamic Theology, ed.
Tim Winter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 49.

5
God, could not be uncreated, for to believe as much would make the Word coeternal with

God Himself—a position not essentially different from that of the Christians.15

Furthermore, discussions concerning the relationship between the orders of universality

and particularity would eventually come to a head in al-Ghazālī’s condemnation of

Avicenna’s statements regarding the nature of divine knowledge as blasphemous (kufr).16

Although much more could of course be said about this vast subject, the above will

suffice by way of introduction.

Greco-Latin Background

In the Republic, Plato describes “the upward journey of the soul into the region of

the intelligible,”17 which earlier in the work,18 as well as in other of the dialogues, is said

to be populated by the essential Forms or Ideas of things, for example Beauty or

Goodness in and of themselves, which are taken to explain the sameness-in-difference

characteristic of the multiple entities that reflect or instantiate them.19 In other words, the

Forms, which are immaterial, subsist in an intelligible realm wholly independent of the

particulars through which they—or rather their natures—are made manifest to the senses.

As for Aristotle, Plato’s most illustrious student, he is commonly believed to have

disputed his master’s cardinal doctrine in the Metaphysics,20 where he criticizes various

15
Wilfred Madelung, “The Origins of the Controversy Concerning the Creation of the Koran,” Orientalia
Hispanica: sive studia F. M. Pareja octogenario dicata 1, no. 1 (1974): 517.
16
To be discussed below.
17
Plato, Republic, trans. Francis MacDonald Cornford (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 231.
18
Ibid., 183, 217-18.
19
For a nuanced treatment of this doctrine, see Lloyd P. Gerson, “Plato on Identity, Sameness, and
Difference,” The Review of Metaphysics 58, no. 2 (December 2004): 305-32.
20
Albeit perhaps only prima facie. For a forceful and sustained defense of the Neoplatonic “harmonist”
position concerning the relationship between the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, see Lloyd P. Gerson,
Aristotle and Other Platonists (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). For Aristotle on the Forms, see
chapter 7 in particular.

6
conceptions of the Forms. For him, the crux of the matter was the difficulty posed by

what came to be known as the “third man” argument, which called into question the

explanatory power of the Form based on the purported need for yet another Form to

ground the relation between the first Form and its image. 21 To use the example after

which the argument is named, if the “man-ness” of a particular man is explained by his

participation in the Form of Man, then a “third man” will be required to explain what the

particular man and the Form of Man have in common. Without going into unnecessary

detail, the important point is that this seeming flaw in Plato’s theory prompted his

successors to refine their thinking on universals with the result that the “naive” realism

just outlined—whether rightfully attributable to Plato or not—was supplanted by the

“moderate” realism of Aristotle, which in its turn was eventually subsumed into the

remarkably sophisticated synthesis of the Neoplatonists.

Regarding this latter tradition, which is only anachronistically referred to as in

any significant sense distinct from the precedent Platonic tradition of which it provides an

especially lucid distillation, it produced a widely read commentary on Aristotle’s

Categories that is often cited in connection with the problem of universals on account of

its succinct formulation thereof. Penned by Porphyry (d. 305), the preeminent disciple of

the Helleno-Egyptian sage Plotinus (d. 270), the Isagoge, or Introduction, as the work is

called, begins with a simple statement of the importance of the so-called “five

predicables” (viz., genus, species, differentia, property, and accident) to any

21
As Gerson points out, it was Plato himself who introduced this argument in the Parmenides, and as he
further observes, “There is one passage … in which Aristotle says that it is ‘they’ (i.e., Platonists) who
introduce the third man. Aristotle cannot but have been aware that third-man arguments were used in the
Academy to separate inadequate from adequate understandings of Forms. It was natural for Neoplatonists
to assume that Aristotle’s own views were in harmony with the latter and not the former” (ibid., 228).

7
understanding of Aristotelian category theory before its author informs us of the precise

scope of the treatise as follows:

I shall avoid the deeper issues and in a few words try to explain the

simpler notions. For example, I shall put aside the investigation of certain

profound questions concerning genera and species, since such an

undertaking requires more detailed examination: (1) whether genera or

species exist in themselves or reside in mere concepts alone; (2) whether,

if they exist, they are corporeal or incorporeal; and (3) whether they exist

apart or in sense objects and in dependence on them. Instead, I shall try to

make clear to you how in logic the ancients, and especially the

Peripatetics, dealt with genus, difference, and the rest. 22

To relate such questions back to our above characterizations of Plato and Aristotle we can

consult Boethius (d. 524), who both translated Porphyry’s Greek text into Latin and

composed an influential commentary on it. Having discussed the above passage at some

length, Boethius makes the following, summary remarks:

Plato thinks genera and species and the rest are not only understood as

universals, but also exist and subsist apart from bodies. Aristotle, however,

thinks they are understood as incorporeal and universal, but subsist in

sensibles.

I did not regard it as appropriate to decide between their views. For

that belongs to a higher philosophy. But we have carefully followed out

Aristotle’s view here, not because we would recommend it the most, but

22
Porphyry, Isagoge, trans. Edward W. Warren (Toronto: The Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies,
1975), 27-28.

8
 because this book, [the Isagoge], is written about the Categories, of which

Aristotle is the author.23

In both Porphyry and Boethius, then, we find allusions to the fact that the problem of

universals harbors a kind of esoteric dimension, and with Boethius the further intimation

that Plato’s is the higher of the two views. As for the “why” of this putative superiority in

certain circles, especially those distinguished by the earnestness of their spiritual

involvements, it is hoped that the present thesis will shed some light on this question in

its specifically Islamic context. But before discussing the positions of various Muslim

authors in anticipation of our engagement with the writings of Suhrawardī and Qūnawī, it

will be helpful to further address the various positions on the problem of universals that

took shape in Western discourses on the subject, since knowledge of the relevant

technical terminology is often taken for granted in studies dealing with philosophy in the

Islamic world.

With this objective in mind, it is first important to point out that the word

“universal” can signify three basic types of things, namely terms, concepts, and realities.

For example, from a broadly Platonic point of view, the universal term “man” is a word

that refers to a concept in the mind, and the concept in turn refers “upward and back” to a

transcendent reality whose immutability both guarantees the stability of the concept’s

meaning and safeguards the boundaries of the species in the midst of its individual

members’ multiplicity.24 Realism in this context, then, refers to the idea that both

universal terms and the concepts they denote are rooted in “realities” that subsist

23
Boethius, Second Commentary on Porphyry’s Isagoge, in Five Texts on the Medieval Problem of
Universals: Porphyry, Boethius, Abelard, Duns Scotus, Ockham, trans. and ed. Paul Vincent Spade
(Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994), 25.
24
One might notice here the implications of this doctrine for the notion of “macroevolution,” for which no
such boundaries exist in any genuinely non-provisional—or “non-epiphenomenal,” one might say—way.

9
extramentally, or independently of human cogitation. Conceptualism refers to the

position claiming that the terms refer to objective universal concepts, but that these

concepts constitute the “end of the road,” so to speak, and are not “backed” by

extramental, universal realities. The third and final position—nominalism—holds that

although universal terms are part and parcel of thought and speech, universal concepts

enjoy only a nebulous kind of epistemological status not anchored in any stable, objective

meanings, let alone mind-independent realities. As Gyula Klima explains in a summary

of William of Ockham’s thought, nominalism maintains that “our common terms should

not be regarded as primarily signifying … a common intelligible content in the

individuals grasped by means of our intellectual concepts; rather, they should be regarded

as signifying the singulars themselves, indifferently represented by the concepts

expressed by these terms.”25 In other words, nominalists are not concerned to uncover

any genuine correspondence between human thought and the ostensibly rationally

discernible features of external reality.26

To fill out this admittedly simplistic account, we can further distinguish between

what came to be classified in the Latin-language literature as ante rem, in re, and post

rem universals, for failing to do so leads to unnecessary confusion. Meaning literally

before, in, and after the thing, respectively, these phrases refer to the status of the

universal vis-à-vis the particulars that manifest it. Considered ante rem, universals exist

prior to their particularized instantiation, and this in one of two ways, historically

25
Gyula Klima, general introduction to Medieval Philosophy: Essential Readings with Commentary, ed.
Gyula Klima, Fritz Allhoff, and Anand Jayprakash Vaidya (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 22.
26
Gyula Klima, “Ontological Alternatives vs. Alternative Semantics in Medieval Philosophy: A
Philosophical Study of Some Medieval Theories of Signification and Mental Representation and their
Bearing on Contemporary Problems in Cognitive Science,” S : European Journal for Semiotic Studies 3,
no. 4 (1991): 608.

10
speaking. Whereas Plato is conventionally taken to affirm the self-subsistence of the

Forms in the intelligible world, “Middle” and then late antique Platonism (i.e.,

Neoplatonism)27—and with it orthodox Christian doctrine in the wake of St. Augustine—

placed the Forms into the mind of Plato’s Demiurge28 and that of the divine Word or

Second Person of the Trinity, respectively, which move was thought to secure the central

insight of Platonism29 against its undermining through the third man objection.30

Considered in re—a position commonly associated with Aristotle—the universal exists in

the particular as its nature. From this point of view, humanity exists insofar as particular

human beings exist, but it does not exist apart from them. Lastly, the category of post rem

refers to the universal qua mental entity, that is, as a word or concept. As Lloyd Gerson

argues convincingly, the purported “problem” of universals is both badly formulated and

insoluble insofar as its very existence is predicated on a conflation of the concept of a

nature—corresponding to the categories ante rem and/or in re, depending on one’s

perspective and definition of terms—and that of a universal in the strict, post rem sense.31

For Plato’s Forms are not really universals,32 as they rather comprise natures33 that

27
Richard Sorabji, “Universals Transformed: The First Thousand Years After Plato,” in Universals,
Concepts and Qualities: New Essays on the Meaning of Predicates, ed. P.F. Strawson and Arindam
Chakrabarti (Aldershot, Hants, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 110, 124n14.
28
Or Intellect (nous) qua hypostasis of the One in Neoplatonism.
29
Namely that “what accounts for the necessary, intelligible features of the ephemeral particulars of the
visible world is the presence of some universal exemplars in the source of their being….” Gyula Klima,
“Natures: the problem of universals,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Philosophy, ed. A. S.
McGrade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 197.
30
Gyula Klima, “The Medieval Problem of Universals,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (Winter 2017 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta.
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/universals-medieval/.
31
Lloyd P. Gerson, “Platonism and the Invention of the Problem of Universals,” Archiv für Geschichte der
Philosophie 86, no. 3 (2004): 236-46 passim.
32
Ibid., 235.
33
Properly speaking, the Form is “that which is unparticipated” as distinct from the Form’s nature, or “that
which is participated in.” Said differently, from one point of view the Form is a nature, and from another
point of view it has a nature. There is thus “a distinction between the paradigmatic nature which is
transcendent or unparticipated and its image or inferior version which is immanent or participated” (ibid.,
247-48).

11
subsist ontologically independent of and thus prior to the sensibles with whose existence

the very notion of universality is bound up, since the latter is arrived at through the

abstractive function of the human intellect. Said simply, the Forms, which explain

sameness in difference, are prior to the particulars, and universal concepts, which rely

upon the Forms for their epistemic legitimacy, are posterior to the particulars by way of

abstraction. We are therefore beginning to appreciate the fact that the problem of

universals has both metaphysical and epistemological dimensions. In the concise

statement of Di Bella and Schmaltz: “With regard to epistemology, the problem is how

universal cognition of sensory particulars is possible. The metaphysical problem concerns

the precise ontological status of the universal features that we grasp by means of such

cognition.”34 For Gerson’s part, he expresses the distinction even more succinctly in

juxtaposing the separate yet related questions of participation and predication, the former

referring to Plato’s teaching according to which, for example, all beautiful things

participate in the Form of Beauty, and the latter referring to the question of how we are

able to justifiably predicate one and the same term of numerically distinct beings.

According to Gerson, “to suppose that universals are a substitute for Forms is to make the

mistake of supposing that what follows from the phenomenon of sameness in

difference—the legitimacy of universal predication—is an explanation of it. … Aristotle

seems to recognize that Forms are not predicates and participation in a Form is not

predication. But this recognition is, it appears, lost in the rush to see a theory of Forms as

an alternative solution to a problem of universals….”35 In sum, from the “harmonist”

34
Stefano Di Bella and Tad M. Schmaltz, “Introduction to Universals in Modern Philosophy,” in The
Problem of Universals in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Stefano Di Bella and Tad M. Schultz (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2017), 1.
35
Gerson, “Platonism,” 238-40.

12
perspective advocated by Gerson, “Aristotle himself, finally, did not reject the real reason

for positing Forms in the first place and … Plato did not reject the functionality of

universals,” since participation and predication are not, in reality, mutually exclusive.36

Islamic Background

To proceed now to the Islamic world, we should first mention the brief but

pioneering study by Nicholas Heer,37 who adumbrated the various positions taken by

Muslim authors over the centuries on the problem of universals, or more specifically that

of the “natural” universal (al-kullī al-ṭabīʿī), or nature qua nature, which resembles a

Platonic Form at the very least in that it is unconditioned by either universality or

particularity, and which in the standard Avicennan metaphysics inherited by both

Suhrawardī and Qūnawī is contrasted with the logical universal (al-kullī al-manṭiqī) and

the mental universal (al-kullī al-ʿaqlī), all of which will be discussed in due course.38

According to Heer, “[The] alternatives are, first, that natural universals exist in the mind

only and have no existence in the external world; second, that natural universals exist

outside the mind as corporeal substances; third, that natural universals exist outside the

mind not as corporeal substances but as incorporeal substances placed in sensible

36
Ibid., 244.
37
Nicholas Heer, “The Sufi Position with Respect to the Problem of Universals.” Last modified December
2016. faculty.washington.edu/heer/universals-sep.pdf. See also “Al-Jāmī’s Treatise on Existence,” in
Islamic Philosophical Theology, ed. Parviz Morewedge (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press,
1979), 227-28.
38
Heer summarizes these distinctions very well, but for a more extended discussion of these terms, one can
consult the following works: Sayyid Muḥammad Ḥusayn Ṭabāṭabāʾī, The Elements of Islamic Metaphysics,
trans. Sayyid ʿAlī Qūlī Qarāʾī (London: Islamic College for Advanced Studies Press, 2003), 46-55; Mahdī
Ḥāʾirī Yazdī, Universal Science: An Introduction to Islamic Metaphysics, trans. John Cooper, ed. Saiyad
Nizamuddin Ahmad (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 144-52; and Michael E. Marmura, Probing in Islamic
Philosophy: Studies in the Philosophies of Ibn Sīnā, al-Ghazālī and Other Major Muslim Thinkers (Albany,
NY: State University of New York Press, 2005), 33-70. It is important to note (and this likely goes without
saying) that certain of the technical terms under consideration vary in their exact meaning from author to
author (or from commentator to commentator, as the case may be).

13
substances; and fourth, that natural universals exist outside the mind as incorporeal

substances but separated from sensible substances rather than placed in them.”39 He

identifies the first position with the theologians, the second with “the waḥdat al-wujūd

school of Sufism,” the third with “the Islamic philosophers in the tradition of Ibn Sīnā,”

and the fourth with “the Ishrāqīs and other Platonists.”40 Without venturing to comment

on the accuracy of Heer’s classification, which would be a herculean task, we can see that

all but one of the four positions outlined by him qualify as realist according to our above

definition.

In setting the stage for our two main authors, we will focus mainly on the

Peripatetic philosophers for the following reasons. First, Suhrawardī and Qūnawī

themselves represent the Ishrāqī (Illuminationist) and waḥdat al-wujūd (Akbarian)

approaches, respectively.41 Second, in the words of Qūnawī, regarding “the mutakallimūn

[‘dialectical theologians’], in all their manifold guises, the verifiers hardly ever agree

with them, except on the most straightforward of questions.” 42 And third, Suhrawardī’s

philosophy is unambiguously Avicennan in its foundation, and Qūnawī took the

Peripatetics (al-mashshāʾīn) seriously enough to not only gain a thorough understanding

of Avicenna’s thought but also correspond at some length with the latter’s preeminent

contemporary expositor, Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūṣī. That being said, some discussion of the
39
Heer, “Sufi Position,” 2.
40
Ibid., 2-4.
41
Qūnawī’s teacher, the Andalusian saint and metaphysician Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn al-ʿArabī, came to be
referred to after his death by the honorific al-Shaykh al-Akbar, or “the greatest master,” hence the nisbah
adjective akbarī. Regarding the term waḥdat al-wujūd and its connection with the Akbarīyah, or Akbarian
school of Sufism, see William C. Chittick, “The Central Point: Qūnawī’s Role in the School of Ibn ʿArabī,”
Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society 35 (2004): 27-29. For the complex reception of Ibn ʿArabī’s
ideas in the Islamic world, see Alexander D. Knysh, Ibn ʿArabī in the Later Islamic Tradition: The Making
of a Polemical Image in Medieval Islam (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999).
42
Trans. Richard Todd, The Sufi Doctrine of Man: Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī’s Metaphysical Anthropology
(Leiden: Brill, 2014), 53. The term “verifiers” here (muḥaqqiqūn) refers to those who verify (or “realize”)
truths through “tasting” (dhawq) versus or in addition to mere ratiocination, which for Qūnawī is unreliable
when left to itself.

14
theological (kalām) tradition will not be out of place, not least because the Akbarian term

“fixed entity” (ʿayn thābitah), which we will examine at length in the third chapter,43 is

of Muʿtazilite provenance, as acknowledged by Ibn ʿArabī himself.44 Also, the

theologians provide a kind of bridge between philosophy and Akbarian Sufism in that,

like the partisans of the former, they rely heavily on ratiocination, and with respect to the

latter, there is a shared concern with the ontological status of the names of God.

* * *

Beginning, then, with al-Kindī (d. ca. 870 CE), “the philosopher of the Arabs”

credited with introducing Aristotelian metaphysics to the Islamic world,45 he affirms that

true knowledge is of universals,46 the totality of which subsist in—or more properly as—

the supra-individual or transpersonal “First Intellect” independent of both body and

soul.47 Like Aristotle,48 whom he acknowledges as the author of this doctrine,49 al-Kindī

maintains that the intellecting subject and intelligible object are, in the intellective act,

one and the same thing.50 Accordingly, he distinguishes between discursive thought

(fikr), which is bound up with sensory experience and thus prone to error, and the

43
Although I will follow Chittick in translating thābit as “fixed,” the term is difficult to render into English.
For uses of the viable translation “established” (the main flaw of which relates to the entities’ being
uncreated [see pp. 72, 93 below]), see Bakri Aladdin, “The Mystery of Destiny (sirr al-qadar) in Ibn ʿArabi
and al-Qunawi,” Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society 49 (2011): 134-45 passim; Hülya Küçük and
Stephen Hirtenstein, “Sadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī’s al-Nusūs: Considerations of al-Haqq and tahqīq,” Journal
of the Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society 49 (2011): 114. For the common translation “immutable,” see note 264
below. I thank Arash Aboutorabi for discussions that prompted me to think more carefully than I had been
about the nuances of the concept of thubūt as employed in various Islamic sciences.
44
William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press,
1989), 83.
45
Peter Adamson, Philosophy in the Islamic World: A History of Philosophy without Any Gaps, vol. 3
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 26-27.
46
Peter Adamson, Al-Kindī (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 128.
47
Ibid., 120, 124.
48
See Metaphysics xii, 7, 1072b20.
49
Peter Adamson and Peter E. Pormann, trans., The Philosophical Works of al-Kindī (Karachi: Oxford
University Press, 2012), 97.
50
Mullā Ṣadrā would later attach great importance to this axiom (i.e., ittiḥād al-ʿāqil wa’l-maʿqūl).

15
nonrepresentational activity of pure intellect (ʿaql), which “unerringly grasps

universals.”51 Regarding the process of acquiring these intelligibles, al-Kindī’s writings

seem to exhibit some ambiguity in this respect,52 but its basic contours are clear enough.

Since, as in Aristotle, something that is potentially x relies for its becoming x upon

something that is already actually x, all potential intellects, or intellects in the state of

potency, depend for their actualization on the First Intellect, which is always “in act.” In

his magnum opus On First Philosophy, al-Kindī describes the passage from potency to

act thus:

What brings the soul that is potentially intellective, to be actually

intellective—i.e. that which unifies the species and genera of things, I

mean their universals, with the soul—is the universals themselves.

Through their union with the soul, the soul becomes intellective, that is, it

comes to have a certain intellect, that is, to have the universals of things.

Thus the universals of things, since they are in the soul, go from

potentiality to actuality, and are the acquired intellect of the soul, which it

had in potentiality. They are the intellect in actuality that brings the soul

from potentiality to actuality.53

In other words, the First Intellect is consubstantial with what it knows, and what it knows

are the universals, which in and of themselves are always already actual in spite of their

lying dormant, as it were, and thus in a state of potentiality, in this or that individual

human soul. So the soul qua potential intellect is made an actual intellect through contact

51
Adamson, Al-Kindī, 141-42.
52
Ibid., 127-35.
53
Trans. Adamson, Al-Kindī, 123-24. For an alternate translation, see Adamson and Pormann,
Philosophical Works, 49.

16
with the First Intellect, from which it directly acquires the intelligibles.54 As for the

“how” of this acquisition on the part of the seeker, al-Kindī advocates a Platonic theory

of recollection according to which any propaedeutic exercise—whether theoretical in the

form of “abstracting” universals from the storehouses of one’s sensory experience or

practical in the form of ascetic discipline—can at best serve as an occasional cause of

illumination, which always has the First Intellect for its properly efficient cause.55

Moving forward to al-Fārābī (d. 950-51 CE)—the next major Islamic philosopher,

chronologically speaking—we find a doctrine very close to that of al-Kindī. For

according to the Second Teacher (al-muʿallim al-thānī), as al-Fārābī has been referred to

in Islamic literature (the First Teacher being Aristotle),56 not only is the function of the

rational faculty to receive the intelligibles, which are immaterial universals, 57 but it is

also the Active Intellect (al-ʿaql al-faʿʿāl)—al-Fārābī’s synonym for al-Kindī’s First

Intellect—that is the ultimate source of all humanly attainable knowledge. Furthermore,

both thinkers attest to the identity of the intellect with the objects of its intellection,58 both

posit an integral connection between knowledge and virtue,59 and both allow some role to

the various faculties (quwwāt) of the soul (e.g., sensation, imagination, and reflective

thought) in making one fit to acquire a universal knowledge whose source is essentially

spiritual in nature. If the language of “allowing” here seems strange in reference to

54
Adamson, Al-Kindī, 125.
55
Ibid., 133-34, 145. I hope that I have not, in this brief account, taken any blameworthy liberties
respecting the abovementioned ambiguity, which Adamson has glossed as al-Kindī’s having his cake (i.e.,
Aristotle’s “empiricist epistemology”) and eating it (i.e., Neoplatonic epistemology) too. Peter Adamson,
“Al-Kindī and the reception of Greek philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy,
ed. Peter Adamson and Richard C. Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 41.
56
See Seyyed Hossein Nasr, “Why Was al-Fārābī Called the Second Teacher?”, in The Islamic Intellectual
Tradition in Persia, ed. Mehdi Amin Razavi (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2013), 59.
57
Osman Bakar, Classification of Knowledge in Islam: A Study in Islamic Philosophies of Science
(Cambridge, UK: Islamic Texts Society, 1998), 55.
58
Ibid., 62.
59
Ibid., 113.

17
Peripatetic philosophers—which, incidentally, it perhaps shouldn’t60—it will help to keep

in mind that for the mashshāʾī tradition of Islamic philosophy taken as a whole, there

exists an ineradicable element of passive receptivity vis-à-vis the celestial Intellect on the

part of the would-be knower, and this regardless of a certain variation in emphasis among

this tradition’s most representative thinkers as regards the complementary pole of active

initiative, which in all cases is of very recognizably Aristotelian inspiration.

To further illustrate this general interpretive difficulty by way of al-Fārābī in

particular, we can explore what strikes some readers as a potential contradiction in his

epistemology. In his Treatise on the Intellect, al-Fārābī discusses the abstraction of

intelligible quiddities from matter by the intellect, which is actualized eo ipso.61 As

Davidson explains, in certain works al-Fārābī interprets Aristotle as saying that

knowledge of principles comes from the Active Intellect, which causes the potential

intellect (al-ʿaql bi’l-quwwah) to exercise its abstractive capacity. However, in the

Treatise he says that scientific principles are obtained “by innate character and nature, or

else at youth, or in such a way that there is no inkling of whence and how they came,”

with the Active Intellect rendering intelligible concepts actual, but not first principles.62

Davidson states the seeming inconsistency plainly: “If knowledge of the principles of

science is inborn, it does not come from the transcendent active intellect.”63 But perhaps,

as we saw with al-Kindī, we are faced with a false choice, since both abstract concepts

and intuitively grasped principles—which latter, moreover, are given propositional

60
Given the special difficulty of the question here alluded to, it can be posed only briefly and in passing:
To what degree was Aristotle pious? For a book-length investigation of this figurative query in the context
of Islamic philosophy, see Mohammad Azadpur, Reason Unbound: On Spiritual Practice in Islamic
Peripatetic Philosophy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2011).
61
Herbert A. Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, on Intellect: Their Cosmologies, Theories of the
Active Intellect, and Theories of Human Intellect (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 69.
62
Ibid., 68-69.
63
Ibid.

18
expression a posteriori by means of the former, which Osman Bakar characterizes as

“single universals”64—can be made intelligible to the potential intellect by the Active

Intellect while nevertheless belonging to the former by nature, as one can possess

something without having knowledge of it.65

In any case, al-Fārābī’s general view of the of the actualization of the intellect’s

potential through its acquisition of the intelligible, universal forms of things can be

summarized as follows. The potential intellect, which readies itself by discerning

sameness amidst difference, actualizes its capacity to receive intelligibles through its

being illuminated by the Active Intellect, which renders it an actual intellect (ʿaql bi’l-

fiʿl) vis-à-vis the received universals while remaining in the state of potentiality vis-à-vis

the ones it has not received. Then, once the intellect ceases to rely upon the sensorial and

imaginal faculties for its acquisition of intelligibles, it becomes the acquired intellect (al-

ʿaql al-mustafād),66 which is the perfection of a human being’s receptivity to the

emanations of the Active Intellect.67

With Avicenna (d. 1037 CE), the basic picture sketched by his predecessors is

adopted more or less wholesale and then built upon and refined. Again the Aristotelian

framework in which knowledge is of universals is maintained, 68 as is the Neoplatonic

64
Bakar, Classification, 59.
65
For the distinction between possessing and having in Plato and Aristotle, see Gerson, Aristotle and Other
Platonists, 166.
66
Al-Fārābī’s use of this term differs from that of al-Kindī, who posits it as a stage intermediate between
the potential and actual intellects. See Adamson, Al-Kindī, 121.
67
Bakar, Classification, 56-57, 62-64. Cf. Davidson, Intellect, 48-53, 68-70; David C. Reisman, “Al-Fārābī
and the philosophical curriculum,” in The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy, 62-65; Majid
Fakhry, A History of Islamic Philosophy, 3rd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 125-27;
Ian Richard Netton, Al-Fārābī and His School (London: Routledge, 1992), 47-51; Henry Corbin, History of
Islamic Philosophy, trans. Liadain Sherrard with the assistance of Philip Sherrard (London: Kegan Paul,
1993), 162.
68
According to C.D.C. Reeve, Aristotle “is explicit that universals (specifically, definable universal
essences) alone enjoy epistemological primacy, since they are the first principles of the sciences.” C.D.C.
Reeve, Substantial Knowledge: Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2000), xiii. Gerson also

19
emanationist cosmology.69 We also find the same play between active abstraction of

universals from sense-experience and passive reception of them from the Active Intellect.

Wisnovsky summarizes the first of these two vantage points nicely: “My being as human

as I can be entails my being as rational as I can be, since rationality is what sets the

species ‘human’ apart from other species of animal such as ‘cow.’ My being as rational

as I can be consists simply in my thinking about universal intelligibles as much as I can;

and by thinking about universal intelligibles as much as I can, I revert upwards to the

higher level of the Active Intellect, which is thinking about universal intelligibles all the

time.”70 As for the second way of looking at things and its relation to the first, even

though the Active Intellect is the “ultimate” source of knowledge, the latter has a

proximate cause in the preparatory activity of the human intellect,71 which in resolving its

potency into act passes through various stages, namely the potential or “material”

(hayūlānī), “dispositional” (bi’l-malakah), actual (bi’l-fiʿl), and “acquired” (mustafād).72

In attaining to this latter, final degree of actualization, the intellect’s grasp of universals is

no longer mediated by any sensory or psychological processes; rather, through its contact

with the Active Intellect, it enjoys direct knowledge.73

speaks fittingly, in a discussion of Aristotle’s epistemology, of the universal as “the sine qua non of all
thinking.” Lloyd P. Gerson, Ancient Epistemology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 77.
69
For this latter in al-Kindī and al-Fārābī, see Adamson, Al-Kindī, 59, and Davidson, Intellect, 44-48,
respectively.
70
Robert Wisnovsky, Avicenna’s Metaphysics in Context (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 11.
71
For both a summary of the “traditional” reading of Avicenna on the details of this point and a
presentation of an alternative view, see Jon McGinnis, Avicenna (New York: Oxford University Press,
2010), 269n16.
72
McGinnis, Avicenna, 118-20. Cf. Davidson, Intellect, 83-94; Fakhry, History, 144-46; Corbin, History,
172.
73
Fakhry, History, 145-46. Adamson is at pains to disassociate the non-discursive aspects of Avicenna’s
epistemology from any kind of mysticism, but the proffered argument, at least to this reader, comes across
and forced and therefore unconvincing. See Peter Adamson, “Non-Discursive Thought in Avicenna’s
Commentary on the Theology of Aristotle,” in Interpreting Avicenna: Science and Philosophy in Medieval
Islam; Proceedings of the Second Conference of the Avicenna Study Group, ed. Jon McGinnis with the
assistance of David C. Reisman (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 87-111.

20
 Regarding the philosophical heart of Avicenna’s theory of universals, 74 which has

exerted considerable influence, it consists in the idea that a quiddity qua itself (e.g., tree-

ness) is neither universal nor particular. If it is a universal, it is because it has taken on the

accident of universality through its being thought about,75 and if it is a particular thing

(e.g., an individual tree), it is because it has taken on accidents productive of extramental

individuation. If the quiddity were by nature universal, there could never be particular

instances of it, and if it were by nature particular, there could be no sameness in

difference, which phenomenon provides the term universality with its raison d’être. As

Avicenna himself explains, using the language of generality (ʿumūm) instead of that of

universality (kullīyah), “If [animality] were in itself general, so that animality by reason

of animality is general, it would then follow necessarily that there would be no individual

animal; rather, every animal would be general. If, moreover, animal by virtue of being

animal were individual, it would then be impossible for any other individual to be

animal.”76 Similarly, a quiddity considered in itself is neither one nor many, for if it were

one in its very nature it could never occur multiply, and if it were intrinsically many, it

would not be some one quiddity found in many. Moreover, Avicenna asserts that all

things exist either in the external world or in the mind such that the quiddity in and of

itself is not an entity.77 Indeed Avicenna follows Aristotle in criticizing the notion of self-

74
According to Marmura, “The universals Avicenna discusses are Porphyry’s five predicables—genus,
species, difference, property, and accident. Following custom, as he tells us, however, he confines himself
to genera and species, the concept of a genus becoming for him, in effect, the paradigm for the other
universals” (Probing, 36).
75
To connect this idea with the terminology encountered above, a quiddity becomes a mental universal
through its being qualified by the “logical genus” of universality.
76
Trans. Marmura, Probing, 63.
77
Ibid., 65.

21
subsistent Platonic Forms,78 and as McGinnis notes, it is by virtue of this peculiar

ontological status that the quiddity qua itself “bridges the gap” between mind and world

and thus both makes possible and guarantees the correspondence between logic and

science.79

Before discussing the kalām, we should note that it was in the wake of Avicenna

that the subject of universals assumed wider importance in the Islamic world, as his way

of thinking about God’s knowledge was famously deemed heretical by al-Ghazālī.80

Notwithstanding possible problems with the imam’s interpretation of Avicenna’s position

on this perennially vexed philosophical issue,81 as well as the current scholarly

controversy surrounding the exact consequences of al-Ghazālī’s critique for subsequent

Islamic history, there can be little doubt that a certain shadow was cast over the

predominant Avicennan philosophy of the day as a result.82 Although Avicenna affirms

unambiguously that God knows all things, he says that God knows the particulars

“inasmuch as they are universal” (min ḥaythu hīya kullīyah) or “in a universal way” (ʿalá

nawḥin kullīyin).83 According to Ibn ʿArabī, whom we can give the last word,

those [without faith] who say, “God does not have knowledge of the

particulars,” did not mean to negate His knowledge of them. They only

intended that His knowledge of a thing does not come to Him newly. On

78
See Avicenna, The Metaphysics of The Healing, trans. Michael E. Marmura (Provo, UT: Brigham Young
University Press, 2005), 244, ¶ 4.
79
McGinnis, Avicenna, 35.
80
See Al-Ghazālī, The Incoherence of the Philosophers, trans. Michael E. Marmura (Provo, UT: Brigham
Young University Press, 2000), 226.
81
See Rahim Acar, “Reconsidering Avicenna’s Position on God’s Knowledge of Particulars,” in
Interpreting Avicenna: Science and Philosophy in Medieval Islam: Proceedings of the Second Conference
of the Avicenna Study Group, ed. Jon McGinnis with the assistance of David C. Reisman (Leiden: Brill,
2004), 142-56.
82
For a discussion of al-Ghazālī’s criticism of the philosophers, see Frank Griffel, Al-Ghazālī’s
Philosophical Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 97-105.
83
Marmura, Probing, 72, 74.

22
 the contrary, He knows the particular things as inserted within His

knowledge of the universals. Hence they affirmed that He has knowledge,

though they are not among the faithful. They intended thereby to declare

His incomparability, but they were mistaken in their way of expressing

that.84

Arriving now at the theologians, we find the most contentious questions with

which they dealt all revolving in some way around the relationship between the One and

the many, or God and the world—an enigma to which, as we have seen, the problem of

universals is integrally related. In debating the precise nature of God’s names and

attributes as well as that of the Quran (viz., whether it is created or uncreated), the

mutakallimūn found themselves grappling with those purely philosophical categories of

thought (e.g., unity, multiplicity, identity, difference, etc.) most relevant to such creedal

matters while also being forced to confront the variety of approaches—in some cases

radically divergent—to scriptural hermeneutics that had crystallized into distinct

“schools” in the early centuries of Islam.85

Given the vastness of this area of study, it will be necessary to limit our

discussion to only a handful of issues, namely those most closely related to our authors’

treatments of universals. In the case of Suhrawardī, whose thought, as noted above, is

firmly rooted in that of Avicenna, arguments addressing the interrelationships of basic

concepts like existence, intelligibility, and “thingness” (shayʾīyah) are especially

relevant, since the Shaykh al-Raʾīs (“the Foremost Master,” as Avicenna is often called)

took positions on these subjects that in some instances agreed with and in others

84
Trans. Chittick, Sufi Path, 248.
85
Nader El-Bizri, “God: essence and attributes,” in The Cambridge Companion to Classical Islamic
Theology, ed. Tim Winter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 121.

23
contradicted the established teachings of the kalām schools. For the majority of

Muʿtazilites, the nonexistent (al-maʿdūm) is a thing (shayʾ)86 that is both real (thābit)87

and an object of knowledge (maʿlūm),88 whereas the Ashʿarites and Māturīdites deny the

thingness of the nonexistent on the grounds that to admit it would compromise God’s

oneness and transcendence by making the objects of His knowledge coeternal with

Him.89 Wisnovsky outlines the difficulty with admirable clarity: “Let us say that they are

all located somewhere outside God’s mind; in that case they will share the attribute of

eternality with God, and the precept of tawḥīd, understood as divine uniqueness, will be

violated. Let us then say that they are all located within God’s mind; in that case they will

introduce multiplicity into God, and the precept of tawḥīd, understood as divine

simplicity, will be violated.”90 But what, then, was motivating the Muʿtazilites in

attributing thingness and fixed reality (thubūt) to the nonexistent? In two well-known

verses of the Quran, God’s creative act is described as His addressing things into

existence, so to speak: “And Our Word unto a thing [shayʾ], when We desire it

[aradnāhu], is only to say to it, ‘Be!’ and it is” (16:40); “His Command when He desires

a thing is only to say to it, ‘Be!’ and it is” (36:82).91 Now, if God utters commands to

86
Wolfson traces the origin of this problematic to the early ninth century CE. See Harry Austryn Wolfson,
The Philosophy of the Kalam, vol. 4 of Structure and Growth of Philosophic Systems from Plato to Spinoza
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 359-60.
87
Fedor Benevich, “The Reality of the Non-Existent Object of Thought: The Possible, the Impossible, and
Mental Existence in Islamic Philosophy (eleventh-thirteenth centuries),” in Oxford Studies in Medieval
Philosophy, vol. 6, ed. Robert Pasnau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 33.
88
Richard M. Frank, “Al-maʿdūm wal-mawjūd: the non-existent, the existent, and the possible in the
teaching of Abū Hāshim and his followers,” chap. 4 in Early Islamic Theology: The Muʿtazilites and al-
Ashʿarī, vol. 2 of Texts and Studies on the Development and History of Kalām, ed. Dimitri Gutas
(Aldershot, Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 186-89. See also Jan Thiele, “Abū Hāshim al-Jubbāʾī’s (d.
321/933) Theory of ‘States’ (Aḥwāl) and Its Adaption by Ashʿarite Theologians,” in The Oxford Handbook
of Islamic Theology, ed. Sabine Schmidtke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 373.
89
Frank, “Al-maʿdūm,” 186.
90
Wisnovsky, Avicenna’s Metaphysics, 148.
91
All translations of Quranic verses, unless otherwise noted, will be taken from The Study Quran: A New
Translation and Commentary, ed. Seyyed Hossein Nasr et al. (New York: HarperCollins, 2015).

24
things prior to their existing and in so doing brings them into existence in accordance

with His will (irādah), do not the above verses constitute definitive proof texts in favor of

the Muʿtazilite doctrine? It would seem that they do, hence the dilemma.

Regarding the positive content of the Ashʿarite and Māturīdite positions, it can be

summarized simply by saying that both groups posited the synonymy of thingness and

existence—to be a thing is to exist, and to exist is to be a thing.92 The most important

upshot of this claim for present purposes is that the nonexistent, being nothing at all

(laysa bi-shayʾ), cannot be known either in its own reality (ḥaqīqah) or as belonging by

nature to a given class of things subsumable under a universal concept, at least, that is,

until God brings it into existence,93 for, according to this perspective, “He makes the

contingent existent He creates be what it is when He creates it and so at that moment to

be a member of a particular class of entities.”94 So, for the mainstream Sunni theologians,

things have realities or natures, but only upon existing, before which time there simply is

nothing there to do the “having.”

For his part, Avicenna concurs, as he does not find it meaningful to affirm the

reality of things that do not exist.95 He does, however, acknowledge that things can be

thought about irrespective of whether they exist, hence his distinction between that which

exists in the external world (mawjūd fi’l-aʿyān) and that which exists in the mind

92
Robert Wisnovsky, “Avicenna and the Avicennian Tradition,” in The Cambridge Companion to Arabic
Philosophy, 106.
93
As Frank explains, according to the Ashʿarites, a ḥaqīqah, when “said of a particular entity as a member
of a primary class of contingent entities … is what unites (ǧamaʿa) essentially similar entities as belonging
to a single class (ǧins).” Richard M. Frank, “The Ašʿarite Ontology: I. Primary Entities,” chap. 9 in
Classical Islamic Theology: The Ashʿarites, vol. 3 of Texts and Studies on the Development and History of
Kalām, ed. Dimitri Gutas (Aldershot, Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 185-86.
94
Frank, “The Non-Existent and the Possible in Classical Ashʿarite Teaching,” chap. 8 in Classical Islamic
Theology, 34 (emphasis added).
95
Marmura, Probing, 118-19.

25
(mawjūd fi’l-dhihn).96 But unlike the Sunni mutakallimūn, who take “thing” and

“existent” to be strictly synonymous—that is, both “extensionally” (extramentally) and

“intensionally” (semantically) identical—Avicenna accepts the former postulate without

accepting the latter, since he agrees with the Muʿtazilites and al-Fārābī that the two terms

have distinct meanings, even if, out there in the world, their referents are coextensive.97

Ibn ʿArabī, by contrast—who provides the necessary context for Qūnawī in a

manner at least somewhat analogous to Avicenna’s precedence vis-à-vis Suhrawardī—

defends the Muʿtazilite affirmation of extensional distinctness against its detractors. In

his own words: “I wonder at the Ashʿarites! How could they reject him who says that the

nonexistent is a thing in the state of its nonexistence and that first it possesses an

immutable entity, then existence is added to the entity?”98 The Muʿtazilite position on

this question thus prefigures that of the Shaykh al-Akbar—he himself credits the term

ʿayn thābitah to the Muʿtazilah99—“though he also states that they did not reach a full

and true understanding of its significance.”100

Turning finally to the names and attributes of God, which through the writings of

the Akbarīyah provide the most significant point of contact between the philosophical

and spiritual discourses of Islam, we can sketch the kalāmī context before situating Ibn

ʿArabī’s way of seeing things within it. Generally speaking, 101 according to the

Muʿtazilites, all attributes (e.g., knowledge or power) and descriptions (e.g., knowing or

96
Wisnovsky, “Avicennian Tradition,” 108.
97
Wisnovsky, Avicenna’s Metaphysics, 153.
98
Trans. Chittick, Sufi Path, 205.
99
“Until 595/1198 Ibn ʿArabī spent his life in various cities of Andalusia and North Africa meeting Ṣūfīs
and scholars and occasionally holding debates with such diverse groups as the Muʿtazilites who had made a
rationalistic interpretation of Islam.” Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Three Muslim Sages (Delmar, NY: Caravan
Books, 1976), 95.
100
Chittick, Sufi Path, 83, 204.
101
What follows is only a very broad characterization, the nuances of this subject being beyond the scope
of the present thesis.

26
powerful) denote the divine Essence and are only perceived as distinct from it due to the

limitations of the human intellect,102 whereas the Ashʿarites draw a distinction between

an attribute (ṣifah) and a description (waṣf), with the former constituting a meaning

(maʿná) that enjoys extralinguistic subsistence (qiyām) and the latter being only a word,

which does not.103 Furthermore, although the Ashʿarites posit an intermediate predicative

status for the attributes such that they are said to be neither identical with God nor other

than Him,104 they nevertheless maintain their being existent contra the Bahshamite

(Baṣran Muʿtazilite) theory of states (aḥwāl),105 according to which the attributes are

neither existent nor nonexistent106—an intermediate ontological status that the early

Ashʿarites rejected.107 As Frank explains, for al-Ashʿarī, “to predicate the term ʿâlim,

employing it in its strict sense (fī l-ḥaqîqa and not as maǧâz nor talqîban), of any being,

whether of God or of Zayd, implies and asserts … the actuality of existence of an act of

knowing which is the ‘attribute’ (ṣifa, maʿnà).”108

As for Ibn ʿArabī, he mentions the Muʿtazilites by name in a passage from the

Futūḥāt, characterizing their view as follows: “They said that God is Speaker through a

quality of being a Speaker (qāʾilīyah), Knower through a quality of being a Knower,

Powerful through a quality of being Powerful, because they fled from affirming any

superadded attribute to the Essence of the Real in order to declare His incomparability.

102
El-Bizri, “God: essence and attributes,” 122-24.
103
Thiele, “Abū Hāshim,” 377-78.
104
Frank, “Attribute, Attribution, and Being: Three Islamic Views,” chap. 5 in Classical Islamic Theology,
271.
105
According to Wolfson, who cites al-Ghazālī among others, states are equivalent to universals
(Philosophy of the Kalam, 170). For the passage in al-Ghazālī, see Incoherence, 181. The imam here
equates the states and “aspects” (wujūh) of the theologians with the abstract universals (al-kullīyāt al-
mujarradah) of the philosophers.
106
Thiele, “Abū Hāshim,” 368.
107
Ibid., 378. Later Ashʿarites, by way of Abū Bakr al-Bāqillānī and Imām al-Ḥaramayn al-Juwaynī, came
to accept the concept of a ḥāl, though with some adjustments (378-79).
108
Frank, “Three Islamic Views,” 270.

27
They strove in this direction and came near.”109 Regarding terminology, however, the

shaykh says that God’s names are “called ‘names’ by the Law (sharʿ), ‘relationships’ by

sound rational faculties, and ‘attributes’ [only] by imperfect rational faculties [that is, by

the proponents of kalām].”110 Lastly, on the question of whether the names are existent

things: “Here there is a dispute among the considerative thinkers (ahl al-naẓar). As for us

[i.e., Ibn ʿArabī], there is no dispute: They are relationships and names which designate

intelligible, non-ontological realities. Therefore the Essence does not become multiple

through them, since a thing can only become multiple through ontological entities, not

through properties, attributions, and relationships.”111

* * *

With the foregoing background in place, the perspectives of Suhrawardī and

Qūnawī can be briefly described in anticipation of the full-fledged discussions of chapters

2 and 3. Although Shaykh al-Ishrāq (the “master of illumination,” as Suhrawardī came to

be known) agreed with Avicenna on both the post rem universal’s extramental

nonexistence and the in re instantiation of natural kinds, he disagreed with him

concerning ante rem universals, namely the Platonic Forms, whose existence he affirmed

while also being careful to specify that they are only called universals metaphorically

(tajawwuz). Qūnawī’s doctrine is somewhat more difficult to condense into a few lines

owing mainly to the forceful originality of Akbarian metaphysics, but Shaykh Ṣadr al-

Dīn, like Suhrawardī before him, accepted much of Avicennism while criticizing it where

necessary. Regarding universals in particular, Qūnawī spoke of universal realities (al-

109
Trans. Chittick, Sufi Path, 398n19.
110
Trans. Chittick, Sufi Path, 34. The explanatory material is Chittick’s.
111
Trans. Chittick, Sufi Path, 52.

28
ḥaqāʾiq al-kullīyah) on the basis of his own direct experience thereof, but he also avoided

reifying them in light of the fact that ultimately only God is real. For reasons that will be

examined in depth in chapter 3, both the divine names and fixed entities are nonexistent

(ʿadamī) in themselves, and neither is subsumable under the category of the universal, in

any case.112 That being said, both Suhrawardī and Qūnawī, as well as their kindred

inheritors Mullā Fanārī and Mullā Ṣadrā, are rightly called realists.

112
Pace Izutsu, who writes of the “permanent archetypes” (al-aʿyān al-thābitah): “They are Universals
standing over against Particulars. And the relation of the archetypes to the world is exactly the ontological
relation of Universals to Particulars. The problem of how the Divine self-manifestation is actualized in the
realm of external existence through the fixed channels of the archetypes is nothing other than the problem
of the individuation of Universals.” Toshihiko Izutsu, Sufism and Taoism: A Comparative Study of Key
Philosophical Concepts (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983), 163.

29
 CHAPTER 2

SHIHĀB AL-DĪN AL-SUHRAWARDĪ AL-MAQTŪL

The present chapter began as a broad-based review of the scholarly literature on

Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyá al-Suhrawardī (d. 587/1191),113 whose writings have, as is

unanimously agreed, played a decisive role in the development of philosophy in the

Islamic world.114 Given, however, the exceptional vastness and depth of both the learning

and thought of this sage, it became apparent that discussion, and thence the scope of the

thesis as a whole, could fruitfully be restricted to those of his teachings most relevant to

the problem of universals with an eye toward elucidating, on a more fundamental level,

his views regarding the relationship between discursivity and gnosis,115 and this for the

simple reason that a subject so central to the strivings of this eminent author as yet awaits

adequate treatment in the English-language scholarship.

If these two themes are bound up intimately with one another in the writings of

Shaykh al-Ishrāq, it is due to a doctrine of universals whose philosophical function it is to

bridge the gap between the twin modes of knowing in question. For Suhrawardī, such a

113
Suhrawardī is sometimes distinguished in Islamic sources from other prominent figures bearing the
same nisbah by the laqab al-Maqtūl, or “the slain,” on account of the manner of his death, for which see
Hossein Ziai, “The Source and Nature of Authority: A Study of al-Suhrawardī’s Illuminationist Political
Doctrine,” in The Political Aspects of Islamic Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Muhsin S. Mahdi, ed.
Charles E. Butterworth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Walbridge, Leaven, 201-10.
114
Suhrawardī’s status as a properly epochal figure in the history of Islamic philosophy can be attributed to
his being the first major Muslim thinker to attempt a comprehensive rapprochement between discursive
philosophy, which had reached its zenith with Avicenna, and the suprarational tasting characteristic of the
Sufi approach to the attainment of true knowledge. For the seminal English-language introduction to the
life and thought of Suhrawardī, see Nasr, Three Muslim Sages.
115
By discursivity I mean the reasoning faculty of the mind, or reflective thought, and by gnosis I mean the
direct or unmediated knowledge of God (minimally) and/or divine realities (maximally).

30
“traversal” is made possible—at least on the preliminary, theoretical level116—by the

multivalence of the universal, which, as we saw in the preceding chapter, has three

primary denotations (viz., term, concept, and reality). In other words, the shaykh is a

Platonist, and if the transition from mere concept to “transcendent reality” seems jarring,

you have already sensed something of the distaste experienced by countless befuddled

students of philosophy when confronted with the decidedly esoteric and even

intellectually scandalous theory of Platonic Forms marking the emergence of the problem

of universals into Western consciousness.

But to work now toward an understanding of Suhrawardī’s approach to the nature

and ontological status of universals, let us examine without further delay the three

interrelated doctrines by which it is principally undergirded: (i) the metaphysically

fundamental nature of light, referred to by some scholars as aṣālat al-nūr; (ii)

“knowledge by presence” (al-ʿilm al-ḥuḍūrī); and (iii) the Platonic Forms or “lords of the

idols” (arbāb al-aṣnām).

* * *

Suhrawardī’s thought is associated above all with the twin themes of light and

illumination, which provide the overarching conceptual framework for his metaphysics

and epistemology, respectively. To begin with the former, he is also commonly identified

as one of the chief proponents of the “primacy of quiddity” (aṣālat al-māhīyah),117 which

while not discussed explicitly by Suhrawardī in any of his works nonetheless came to be

116
The idea of “preliminaries” here pertains to the doctrine/method, or “theoretical/operative,” binary.
117
Mehdi Amin Razavi, Suhrawardi and the School of Illumination (New York: Routledge, 2013), 108;
Toshihiko Izutsu, The Concept and Reality of Existence (Tokyo: The Keio Institute of Cultural and
Linguistic Studies, 1971), 100; Nasr, Islamic Intellectual Tradition, 163; Ibrahim Kalin, Knowledge in
Later Islamic Philosophy: Mullā Ṣadrā on Existence, Intellect, and Intuition (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2010), xiv.

31
attributed to him, especially in the wake of Mullā Ṣadrā’s by now famous “synthesis,”118

at the philosophical heart of which lay his staunch avowal of the “primacy of existence”

(aṣālat al-wujūd). In other words, the attribution in question is arguably a Procrustean

anachronism, albeit one that interestingly is indigenous to the Islamic philosophical

tradition itself. Thankfully, and notwithstanding the eminence of the scholars who have

very understandably taken the tradition at its word, Rizvi has dealt with this issue

convincingly and in satisfying detail on the basis of primary texts.119 Also, while several

scholars have recently employed the phrase “primacy of light” when addressing

Suhrawardī’s ontological commitments120—both with and without reference to Rizvi’s

work—it is likely that the phrase has its origin in the Persian-speaking world, namely

Iran, where it seems to have gained some currency, perhaps due to its being vigorously

pressed into service by the prominent contemporary scholar Ghulāmḥusayn Ibrāhīmī

Dīnānī, both in writing and in his public lectures.121

Regarding light, then, it is clear that it serves as the metaphysical axiom upon

which Suhrawardī’s entire philosophy is based. Said simply, for Suhrawardī, “all of

reality is nothing but light which possesses various degrees of intensity.”122 Or, “all

118
See Sajjad H. Rizvi, Mullā Ṣadrā and Metaphysics: Modulation of Being (New York: Routledge, 2009),
20.
119
Sajjad H. Rizvi, “An Islamic Subversion of the Existence-Essence Distinction? Suhrawardī’s visionary
hierarchy of lights,” Asian Philosophy 9, no. 3 (1999): 219-27. See also “Roots of an Aporia in Later
Islamic Philosophy: The Existence-Essence Distinction in the Metaphysics of Avicenna and Suhrawardī,”
Studia Iranica 29 (2000): 61-108.
120
See Roxanne Marcotte, “Suhrawardi,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2016 Edition), ed.
Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2016/entries/suhrawardi/; Muhammad U. Faruque,
“A Comparative Analysis of the Primacy of ‘Light’ in the Philosophy of Illumination and the Primacy of
‘Atman’ (Self) in Advaita Vedanta” (unpublished); and Kirk Templeton, “Suhrawardī, Abhinavagupta, and
the Metaphysics of Light” (PhD diss., California Institute of Integral Studies, 2013), 192.
121
See, for example, Ghulāmḥusayn Ibrāhīmī Dīnānī, Partaw-i khirad (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Hirmis, 2015),
235.
122
Nasr, Three Muslim Sages, 69.

32
reality consists of degrees of light and darkness.”123 Concerning the nature of light itself,

we can consult the shaykh, who anticipates our question in his magnum opus, Ḥikmat al-

ishrāq: “If you wish to have a rule regarding light, let it be that light is that which is

evident in its own reality and by essence makes another evident.”124 Furthermore, in

keeping with Quranic light symbolism,125 Suhrawardī equates God with the supremely

hidden and yet utterly manifest reality of light: “The independent incorporeal light is one.

It is the Light of Lights [nūr al-anwār]. Everything other than It is in need of It and has

its existence from It. It has no equal, nor any peer.”126 As for darkness, if Suhrawardī

equates the Light of lights127 with the Necessary Being (wājib al-wujūd) of the

philosophers,128 then darkness is tantamount to nonexistence (ʿadam). We should note,

however, that this simple identification constitutes a point of some contention in the

secondary literature. As Walbridge—citing Sayyid Muḥammad-Kāẓim ʿAṣṣār, Nasr, and

Izutsu—notes, “Later Islamic philosophers and some modern interpreters sometimes have

said that Suhrawardī simply substituted light for existence.”129 Yet, while “it is true that

in some places where we would expect to find existence discussed we find light,”

123
Seyyed Hossein Nasr, “Shihāb al-Dīn Suhrawardī Maqtūl,” in A History of Muslim Philosophy, vol. 1,
ed. M. M. Sharif (Wiesbaden, Germany: Otto Harrassowitz, 1963), 387.
124
Shihāb al-Dīn Suhrawardī, The Philosophy of Illumination (Ḥikmat al-ishrāq), trans. John Walbridge
and Hossein Ziai (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1999), 81. When citing Suhrawardī’s text I
will use the Arabic title (any adjustments to Walbridge and Ziai’s translation will be indicated in the notes
by the phrase “trans. modified”), and when citing introductory or explanatory material from the translators I
will use the English title.
125
According the famous “light verse” (ayat al-nūr), “God is the Light of the heavens and the earth”
(24:35). Also: “He it is Who blesses you, as do His angels, that He may bring you out of darkness into
light” (33:43); “Not equal are the blind and the seeing, nor the darkness and the light, nor the shade and the
scorching heat” (35:19-21).
126
Suhrawardī, Ḥikmat al-ishrāq, 87.
127
Instead of capitalizing the second l in this phrase, I will opt for the lowercase to emphasize the
metaphysical disjunction between the Divine Principle and its self-disclosures, or between God and that
which is other than Him.
128
See Walbridge and Ziai, introduction to Philosophy of Illumination, xxvii.
129
John Walbridge, The Science of Mystic Lights: Quṭb al-Dīn Shīrāzī and the Illuminationist Tradition in
Islamic Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 40.

33
Walbridge nonetheless “treat[s] this identification with caution in view of Suhrawardī’s

very clear denial that the concept of existence has any referent outside the mind.”130

Although this matter is undoubtedly complex, I find Rizvi’s analysis to be more

nuanced and philosophically compelling than that of Walbridge, who sometimes seems to

overemphasize the letter of the texts at the expense of their spirit.131 Having observed,

like Walbridge, that “we find Nasr and even Netton arguing that ‘ishrāqī thought saw

existence itself as light’,” Rizvi goes on to explain that “here light has taken on a

metaphorical role with respect to being—often in the later tradition the oneness and

primacy as well as the systematic ambiguity [tashkīk] of being is explained with

reference to light as an ontological trope.”132 Also: “Everything [for Suhrawardī] is

rooted ontologically in light and it has absolute primacy. Given that this is how the

Ṣadrian school describes being, it is not surprising to find the equation with being in the

later tradition.”133 Furthermore, in an earlier and considerably longer treatment of this

same subject, Rizvi states even more directly that “there seems little doubt that what

Suhrawardī means by light, Ṣadrā intends by wujūd.”134 Lastly, we can note that Dīnānī

130
Ibid.
131
This is not to say that scholars like Rizvi, or for that matter Corbin or Nasr, are inattentive to textual
details. On the contrary. In mentioning the “spirit” of Suhrawardī’s writings, I had in mind the following
statement of Nasr: “Ishrāqī wisdom is not a systematic philosophy so that its exposition in a systematic
fashion is hardly possible. What Suhrawardī says in one text seems at first sight to be contradicted in
another work, and one has to discover the point of view in each case in order to overcome the external
contradictions” (“Shihāb al-Dīn Suhrawardī Maqtūl,” 383). Moreover, regarding the “how” of this
reconciliatory method, there are perfectly reasonable grounds for arguing that it normatively presupposes a
“practico-spiritual” dimension to one’s personal life, though such considerations are naturally beyond the
scope of this study.
132
Rizvi, “Islamic Subversion,” 222.
133
Ibid.
134
Rizvi, “Roots of an Aporia,” 101. As mentioned by both Walbridge and Rizvi, we can find the same
point being made by Nasr: “Although Suhrawardī considered wujūd to be merely ‘mentally posited’
(iʿtibārī), he bestowed all the attributes of wujūd upon light (al-nūr), while Mullā Ṣadrā and other later
philosophers of his school who accepted the unity, gradation, and principiality of wujūd often identified
wujūd with light.” Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Islamic Philosophy from Its Origin to the Present: Philosophy in
the Land of Prophecy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006), 80. Indeed Ṣadrā himself,
in his glosses (taʿlīqāt) on Quṭb al-Dīn Shīrāzī’s Sharḥ ḥikmat al-ishrāq (which latter contains the whole of

34
discusses and thoroughly contextualizes the passages from Suhrawardī’s Talwīḥāt in

which the shaykh speaks of God in terms of pure being or existence (al-wujūd al-ṣirf al-

baḥt) à la Avicenna,135 whose philosophy provides much of the materia, as it were, for

Suhrawardī’s “Illuminationism,” to say nothing of the passages from Ḥikmat al-ishrāq in

which its author offers proofs for the existence of the Necessary Being. In any case, we

should now look briefly at what Suhrawardī has to say about the rest of the luminous and

tenebrous entities collectively comprising his vision of the cosmos.

Although, as alluded to above, Suhrawardī’s cosmology is largely consonant with

that of Avicenna, his intelligible universe is populated by a number of immaterial

intellects much greater than the standard ten of the Muslim Peripatetics. 136 To avoid

unneeded detail, we can rely upon Nasr for a concise breakdown of the four basic

categories into which Suhrawardī divides all things: “If light, they are either subsistent by

themselves, in which case they are called incorporeal light (nūr mujarrad), or they

depend on something other than themselves, and so are called accidental light (nūr

ʿaraḍī). Similarly, darkness is either self-subsistent and then it is called obscurity

(ghasaq), or it depends on something other than itself, in which case it is called form

(hayʾah).”137 Nasr also helps us get our bearings by providing concrete examples for each

Suhrawardī’s text), affirms Shaykh al-Ishrāq’s own identification of wujūd with light in the case of “the
glorified existents” as follows:

‫ كالواجب‬،‫ ليس بمحجوب عن حقيقة الوجود في معظم الموجودات‬،‫ قدّس سرّ ه‬،ً‫والمصنّف [المشار إليه هو شيخ اإلشراق] أيضا‬
.‫ ّإّل أنّه يد ّل لفظ الوجود بالنور‬،‫ حاشاه من ذلك‬.‫ بحسب المفاد والمعنى‬،‫ وغيرها‬،‫ والنفوس‬،‫ والعقول‬،‫تعالى‬

Ṣadr al-Dīn Shīrāzī, Addenda on the Commentary on the Philosophy of Illumination: Part One: On the
Rules of Thought, critical edition by Hossein Ziai (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2010), 313.
135
See Ghulāmḥusayn Ibrāhīmī Dīnānī, Shuʿāʿ-i andīshih va shuhūd dar falsafih-yi Suhravardī (Tehran:
Ḥikmat, 1986), 654-55.
136
Walbridge, Mystic Lights, 61.
137
Nasr, Three Muslim Sages, 69-70. Cf. John Walbridge, “Suhrawardī and Illuminationism,” in The
Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy, ed. Peter Adamson and Richard C. Taylor (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005), 212.

35
class. For the self-subsistent, incorporeal lights, he mentions “the angels, the human soul,

and the archetypes”; for the accidental lights, stars and fire; for self-subsistent darkness,

“natural bodies”; and for the dark accidents, colors and smells.138 Given our aims, the

most important of the above “beings” will be the archetypes—by which Nasr means the

“lords of the idols” referred to earlier, and which Suhrawardī himself explicitly identifies

with the Forms of Plato139—since they are the most immediately relevant to our

overarching theme of the problem of universals. But before examining the nature of

Suhrawardī’s Platonism in greater depth, it will be necessary to say something about his

epistemology, the foundation of which is “knowledge by presence.”

Up to the present time, the deepest and most holistic study of presential

knowledge remains Mehdi Ha’iri Yazdi’s monograph,140 which does full justice to both

its technical-philosophical and properly mystical aspects, although at least one scholar

has opined that, “in spite of its undeniable merits, [it] is not a historically rigorous

study.”141 It is interesting, however, that knowledge by presence itself comprises—at

least in its most exalted mode—an atemporal and transhistorical “experience,”142 and as

such rejoins with a kind of coyness or even recalcitrance when importuned from the

138
Ibid., 70.
139
Suhrawardī, Ḥikmat al-ishrāq, 107-8.
140
Mehdi Ha’iri Yazdi, The Principles of Epistemology in Islamic Philosophy: Knowledge by Presence
(Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992).
141
Jari Kaukua, “Suhrawardī’s Knowledge as Presence in Context,” Studia orientalia 114 (2013): 310.
While this may be true, it should also be said that historical rigor is often immoderately fetishized. One
might even characterize this tendency as “modern, all too modern.” But to be clear, I make this observation
only as an aside unconnected with Kaukua’s work, which strikes an admirable balance in this respect.
Moreover, his full comments on Ha’iri Yazdi’s book are perfectly objective and charitable.
142
The scare quotes indicate the fact that, according to Reza Shah-Kazemi, “liberation transcends the realm
wherein experience, defined in relation to individual agency and object of experience, has any meaning.” In
other words—and here Shah-Kazemi has transitioned to Akbarian terminology—“transcendent
consciousness is attainable only when the individual, along with his immutable entity, is completely
annihilated in the unitive state, this being the only conceivable manner in which consciousness—now no
longer qualifiable as ‘individual’—can be said to surpass the level of the individual entity and the
‘manifestation of its properties.’” Reza Shah-Kazemi, Paths to Transcendence: According to Shankara, Ibn
Arabi, and Meister Eckhart (Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom, 2006), 44, 93.

36
safety of the armchair. That being said, the real virtue of Suhrawardī’s theory, which

otherwise would be indistinguishable from the theorizations of unitive extinction in God

(fanāʾ)—or, more generally, “unveiling” (kashf) and “witnessing” (mushāhadah)—

already present in the Sufi literature of his time, is that it attempts to draw a

philosophically sophisticated and spiritually instructive analogy between our own

“baseline” state of conscious awareness and the “tasting” (dhawq) spoken of by the

initiates. On the most mundane level, Suhrawardī devoted a portion of his energies to

criticizing the flaws he discerned in the various theories of physical vision (ibṣār)

prevalent in his day. Since the minutia of this issue are not especially important at

present, we can elucidate the shaykh’s underlying intention in proffering what Walbridge

has characterized as a “satirically simple” solution to the problem of vision by saying that

he sought to clear out the cobwebs, as it were, from an intellect that had succumbed to

preoccupation with matters only tangentially related to the quest for felicity.143 Regarding

the solution itself, we can content ourselves with Walbridge’s succinct explanation,

which also establishes a helpful connection with the basic “definition”144 of light given

above. So for Suhrawardī, “Vision is consciousness of the thing seen. There is no

imprinted form transferred to the eye, no visual cone emerging from the eye. No matter

or even accidents are exchanged between the eye and what it sees. … What physical light

is manifest to is a sound eye. Since it is a property of a lighted thing to be visible, no

mechanism is needed to explain how the eye is able to see.”145 As for the link between

143
Walbridge, Leaven, 160.
144
According to the oft-quoted opening lines of the second part (qism) of Ḥikmat al-ishrāq, “Anything in
existence that requires no definition or explanation is evident. Since there is nothing more evident than
light, there is nothing less in need of definition” (76).
145
Walbridge, Leaven, 160.

37
the two levels—optical and transcendent—of presential knowledge sketched thus far, it is

the knowledge an individual person has of his or her own self.

According to Suhrawardī’s own account of how he arrived at an adequate

understanding of the “problem of knowledge” (masʾalat al-ʿilm), the theoretical

lineaments of the latter’s illuminative dimension, along with the basic practical precepts

attached thereto, were transmitted to him in a dream-vision by Aristotle himself. To

summarize the teaching on this subject of the “aider of souls” (ghiyāth al-nufūs) and

imam of wisdom—as Suhrawardī refers to Aristotle in this passage from the

Talwīḥāt146—one could say that it consists simply in the affirmation that self-knowledge

is non-representational in nature (laysa hādhā ’l-idrāk bi’l-ṣūrah).147 As Ziai explains, “it

does not require a conception and then (later in time) an assent, it is non-predicative, and

it does not involve a temporal process. It is immediate; it occurs in a durationless instant

(ān).”148 He furthermore informs us that, according to Quṭb al-Dīn Shīrāzī (d. 710/1311),

one of Suhrawardī’s most widely read commentators, the chief examples of this sort of

“illuminationist knowledge” consist of “knowledge of God (ʿilm al-bāriʾ), knowledge of

incorporeal separate entities (ʿilm al-mujarradāt al-mufāraqah), and knowledge of

oneself (ʿilm bi-anfusinā).”149

At this point one might ask what the relation is between the knowledge of oneself

and the knowledge of God, both of which are said to be atemporal. Regarding the second,

we saw above that besides occurring outside of time it is also “transhistorical.” While this

146
Shihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī, Kitāb al-talwīḥāt al-ʿarshīyah, in al-Muʾallafāt al-falsafīyah al-ṣūfīyah,
ed. Henry Corbin (Freiberg: Al-Kamel Verlag, 2012), 64.
147
Ibid., 65.
148
Hossein Ziai, Knowledge and Illumination: A Study of Suhrawardī’s Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq (Atlanta:
Scholars Press, 1990), 141.
149
Ibid., 142.

38
might be a somewhat clumsy way of drawing the “onto-epistemological” distinction we

wish to explore, one could nevertheless suggest that it is possible for an act of knowing to

be both atemporal in its essence and embedded phenomenologically in the flow of time.

In other words, for individual human beings, the time is always now, whereas for God

there is no time. Elliptical though it be, such a formulation can help us appreciate

Suhrawardī’s basic intention in placing so much emphasis on the question of self-

knowledge, which serves as a propaedeutic springboard, so to speak, for the

contemplation of divine and thus supra-individual realities in quest of an immediate,

experiential knowledge thereof.

As a brief aside, we can also locate the heart of the controversy over how to

interpret Suhrawardī precisely in this area of his thought. Some scholars, most notably

Henry Corbin and Seyyed Hossein Nasr, emphasize the esoterica at the alleged expense

of discursive detail,150 whereas others, foremost among whom are Walbridge and Ziai,

focus the bulk of their attention on the latter to the arguable neglect of the former’s full

import. Moreover, Medhi Amin Razavi has attributed a third, middle-way position he

dubs “neo-Avicennian” to Ha’iri Yazdi and Sayyid Jalāl al-Dīn Āshtiyānī.151 Given this

characterization, which is only very roughly schematic, one might be justified in

150
For the arguments offered in defense of this claim, see primarily Ziai, Knowledge and Illumination, 2, 7-
9; and Walbridge, Leaven, 7-8, 223-24. For more recent comments on the state of Suhrawardī studies, see
Jari Kaukua, Self-Awareness in Islamic Philosophy: Avicenna and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2015), 7-8; Heidrun Eichner, “‘Knowledge by Presence’, Apperception and the Mind-
Body Relationship: Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī and al-Suhrawardī as Representatives of a Thirteenth Century
Debate,” in In the Age of Averroes: Arabic Philosophy in the Sixth/Twelfth Century, ed. Peter Adamson
(London: The Warburg Institute, 2011), 117n1; and Caner K. Dagli, Ibn al-‘Arabī and Islamic Intellectual
Culture: From Mysticism to Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2016), 39-43. Of all the above studies,
Dagli’s provides the most discerning treatment of the interpretive controversy surrounding Suhrawardī. For
a balanced, scholarly account of the mystical heart of Suhrawardī’s epistemology in particular, see
Roxanne D. Marcotte, “Reason (ʿaql) and Direct Intuition (mushāhada) in the Works of Shihāb al-Dīn al-
Suhrawardī (d. 587/1191),” in Reason and Inspiration in Islam: Theology, Philosophy and Mysticism in
Muslim Thought, ed. Todd Lawson (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005), 221-34.
151
Amin Razavi, School of Illumination, xvii.

39
sympathizing with Ziai’s desire for a well-rounded and comprehensive presentation of

Suhrawardī’s philosophy while nonetheless affirming with confidence that writers like

Nasr are ultimately more sensitive to the point of it all.152

Returning now to self-knowledge and its relation in Suhrawardī to divine

knowledge, we have seen that it occupies an epistemic degree intermediate between the

modes of presential knowledge relying for their actuality on objects external to the

knowing subject (as in the case of vision examined above) and the knowledge God has of

Himself. It will perhaps even be noticed that this view of things harmonizes well with the

Islamic conception of the human being as khalīfah or “vicegerent”—the bridge or

pontifex between Heaven and earth, one might say. For Suhrawardī, according to Kaukua,

“God is self-awareness in exactly the same sense as I, regardless of my cognitive

progress or lack thereof, always find myself to be—only to a greater degree.”153 And

concerning the possible mystical attainment of this divine degree, “it is here that the

notion of selfhood as second perfection of the human being introduced in the Arabic

Plotinus is conjoined to the Avicennian concept of primitive self-awareness as its first

perfection. A veridical conception of what I essentially am—i.e. of the Avicennian

152
It is perhaps significant in this connection that Walbridge and Ziai seem to have mistranslated an
especially consequential line from Suhrawardī’s introduction to Ḥikmat al-ishrāq. In commenting on the
“method” (ṭarīq) embodied by the work and comparing it with that of the Peripatetics (ṭarīqat al-
mashshāʾīn), the shaykh tells us (in Walbridge and Ziai’s translation) that “it is more orderly and precise,
less painful to study. I did not first arrive at it through cogitation; rather, it was acquired through something
else. Subsequently I sought proof for it, so that, should I cease contemplating the proof, nothing would
make me fall into doubt” (2). However, the last sentence reads: “Subsequently I sought the proof for it, but
even if I had not, nothing would have caused me to doubt it.” In other words, the first translation makes it
sound as though Suhrawardī’s continued certainty regarding the truth obtained through the “something
else” and embodied in his pedagogy was contingent upon his discovery of an apodictic demonstration for it,
whereas the second translation indicates the contrary.
153
Jari Kaukua, “I in the Light of God: Selfhood and Self-Awareness in Suhrawardī’s Ḥikmat al-ishrāq,” in
In the Age of Averroes, 153. Kaukua elsewhere offers us a nice expression of the same point: “As the
paradigmatic case of knowledge as presence, human self-awareness gives us an idea, as imperfect as it may
be, of what immediate knowledge is like at its most intense” (“Suhrawardī’s Knowledge as Presence,”
321).

40
primitive self-awareness—results in an insight into what I should become in order fully

to realize myself.”154

Before proceeding to Suhrawardī’s teaching regarding the Platonic Forms, we

should mention three other key Illuminationist axioms that will aid us in discerning the

link between these angelic intellects and the shaykh’s epistemology. The first is provided

by Suhrawardī in the form of a “rule” (ḍābiṭ) as follows: “Since you know that any light

that can be pointed to is an accidental light, then if there is a pure light, it cannot be

pointed to, nor be located in a body, nor have spatial dimensions.”155 The second states

that “the dusky substance [al-jawhar al-ghāsiq] is not evident [ẓāhir] of itself or to itself.

… Life is a thing’s being evident to itself, and a living thing is percipient and active. …

Thus, pure light is alive [ḥayy], and every living thing is a pure light.”156 The third, also

from Ḥikmat al-ishrāq, is that “the incorporeal lights do not differ in their realities. …

Thus, all the incorporeal lights must apprehend their own essences, since that which is

necessarily true of a thing must also be true of that which has the same reality.”157 To

summarize, the first axiom establishes the non-spatiotemporal nature of pure light; the

second that it is evident to itself and therefore alive; and the third that the lights are

essentially one, the differences between them pertaining solely to the category of

“intensity” (shiddah), that is, to their degree of perfection (kamāl) or deficiency (naqṣ)

relative to one another.158

154
Kaukua, “Suhrawardī’s Knowledge as Presence,” 321. On this same page, Kaukua also astutely
observes the direct relevance to Suhrawardī’s autology of the oft cited saying attributed to ʿAlī ibn Abī
Ṭālib (as well as, by some, to the Prophet Muḥammad himself), according to which “he who knows himself
knows his Lord.” For the suggestion that “knows” here is perhaps better translated as “recognizes,” see
William C. Chittick, Ibn ‘Arabi: Heir to the Prophets (Oxford: Oneworld, 2005), 21.
155
Suhrawardī, Ḥikmat al-ishrāq, 79.
156
Ibid., 83-84.
157
Ibid., 86.
158
For elaboration on the meanings of these terms, see ibid., 54, 62, 92.

41
 Arriving now at the Forms, we can proceed directly to the heart of the matter as it

relates to the problem of universals. No one denies that Suhrawardī is a Platonist, since

his philosophy is clearly founded on the distinction—taken to be ontologically non-

trivial—between the sensory and intelligible orders of reality. It is thus, at a minimum,

provisionally “dualistic” in this sense,159 though in fact, as the shaykh himself tells us, “I

myself have had trustworthy experiences indicating that there are four worlds: the worlds

of the dominating lights, of the managing lights, of the barriers, and of the dark and

illumined suspended images.”160 Regarding the Forms, then—which Suhrawardī refers to

variously as the “lords of the idols” (arbāb al-aṣnām), “possessors of the talismans”

(aṣḥāb al-ṭillasmāt), and “formal subjugating lights” (al-anwār al-qāhirah al-ṣūrīyah)—

they belong to the first and highest of these worlds and, in Walbridge’s exposition, “care

for the various kinds of things in the world, giving them their characteristic manifolds of

qualities, [and] acting as the efficient causes of the formal causes of material things.” 161

Regarding universals, we can assert that this distinction between efficient and formal

causality arguably constitutes the crux of our inquiry, since it is closely allied with

Walbridge’s further claim that Suhrawardī has “reject[ed] the epistemological use of the

Form in favor of a strictly causal, metaphysical function.”162 That being said, Walbridge

159
It has often been said that such “dualism” is one of the distinguishing features of Platonism in all its
varieties, though as Gerson helpfully notes, “It is … somewhat misleading to characterize Platonism in
terms of dualism(s) such as mind (soul)/body or even intelligible/sensible. The hierarchical explanatory
framework of top-downism is conceptually prior to these dualisms. A type of Platonism might indeed posit
such dualisms. However, more basic is the essential explanatory realism” (Aristotle and Other Platonists,
35).
160
Suhrawardī, Ḥikmat al-ishrāq, 149.
161
Walbridge, “Suhrawardī and Illuminationism,” 214-15.
162
John Walbridge, “The Background to Mulla Sadra’s Doctrine of the Platonic Forms,” Pakistan
Philosophical Journal 34 (1997): 30. Cf. Leaven, where Walbridge offers a slightly different formulation:
“[Suhrawardī] turn[ed] Platonic Forms into angelic intellects, thus stripping them entirely of their
epistemological functions and making them into cosmological efficient causes of the forms of sublunar
beings” (183). The difference pertains to whether the Forms are to be conceived as “the efficient causes of
the formal causes” or the “efficient causes of the forms [themselves].” See also “Suhrawardī’s (d. 1191)

42
elsewhere acknowledges that the Platonic Form is a universal in some sense,163 and

indeed we find Suhrawardī himself saying as much in an important passage worth

quoting in full:

There are metaphors in the words of the Ancients. They did not deny that

predicates are mental and that universals are in the mind, and when they

said, “There is a universal man in the world of intellect,” they meant that

there is a dominating light containing different interacting rays and whose

shadow among magnitudes is the form of man. It is a universal—not in the

sense that it is a predicate, but in the sense that it has the same relation of

emanation to these numerous individuals. It is as though it were the whole

and the principle. This universal is not that universal the conception of

whose meaning does not preclude being shared; for they believe that it has

a particularized essence and that it knows its essence. How, then, could it

be a general meaning? When they called one of the spheres a universal orb

and another particular, they did not mean “universal” in the sense used in

logic. Know this well!164

Intimations of the Tablet and the Throne: The Relationship of Illuminationism and the Peripatetic
Philosophy,” in The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Philosophy, ed. Khaled El-Rouayheb and Sabine
Schmidtke (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 270. In this article, Walbridge seems to suggest
that the unknown author of the work al-Muthul al-ʿaqlīyah al-Aflāṭūnīyah, whom he refers to as the
“Persian Platonist” (and who was separated from Suhrawardī by less than two centuries), endorses his
interpretation of Suhrawardī’s Forms as “the efficient, not the formal, causes of natural kinds” (270). While
it is true that this author does indeed refer to the shaykh’s doctrine of the species lords as a then-
unprecedented formulation of Platonic metaphysics, there is no indication that the Form’s status as efficient
cause of its species, which he explicitly affirms, somehow negates its role in the acquisition of knowledge.
It is not clear why Walbridge thinks that a Form has to be self-predicating in order to be considered either a
formal cause or epistemically relevant or both. See al-Muthul al-ʿaqlīyah al-Aflāṭūnīyah, ed. ʿAbd al-
Raḥmān Badawī (Cairo: Dār al-Kutub al-Miṣrīyah, 1947), 12-13. See also note 187 below.
163
Walbridge, Leaven, 171. See also “Mulla Sadra’s Doctrine,” 27.
164
Suhrawardī, Ḥikmat al-ishrāq, 109 (trans. modified).

43
Also, regarding Suhrawardī’s unambiguous upholding of the mental universal’s

extramental nonexistence, we can reproduce the following rule (ḍābiṭ), which makes its

appearance within the first few pages of Ḥikmat al-ishrāq: “The ‘general meaning’ [al-

maʿná al-ʿāmm] has no reality outside the mind. If it had, it would have an identity by

which it would be distinguished from everything else and in which participation would be

inconceivable. It would thus become a specific thing, whereas it has been supposed to be

general—which is a contradiction.”165

The dilemma can therefore be stated as follows. On the one hand, Suhrawardī

denies the mind-independent reality of the “general meaning,” which Quṭb al-Dīn Shīrāzī

equates with the universal (al-kullī) tout court, and Mullā Ṣadrā with the “intellectual” or

mental universal (al-kullī al-ʿaqlī), which latter, according to him, is to be contrasted with

the natural universal (al-kullī al-ṭabīʿī) enjoying extramental reality.166 On the other hand,

the shaykh endorses what he deems to be a metaphorical ascription of universality to the

dominating light or Form by the ancient philosophers (al-mutaqaddimūn). Two main

questions arise here. One concerns the nature of the relation, if any, between the general

meaning and the “species lord,” and the other concerns the implications of this relation

for Suhrawardī’s position apropos of the problem of universals (i.e., whether he is to be

classed as a realist, conceptualist, or nominalist). In the English-language scholarship, it

is Walbridge who has offered the most detailed answers to both questions, although his

conclusions are open to dispute. Concerning the first issue, we have already seen that he

seems to deny (on behalf of Suhrawardī) any relation between the mental universal and

165
Ibid., 7-8 (trans. modified). Suhrawardī employs idiosyncratic terms such as al-maʿná al-ʿāmm in
Ḥikmat al-ishrāq, whereas in the rest of his doctrinal works he tends to use the standard Peripatetic
language.
166
Ziai, Knowledge and Illumination, 63n4.

44
the Form,167 though in fact one can find statements from him that complicate the matter.

For example, he writes that “the validity of universals is ultimately guaranteed by the

intellects [i.e., Forms] that make them active in the universe.”168 Also: “Given

Suhrawardī’s doctrine of the most noble contingency, the Forms had to be isomorphic to

their instances in some sense, but they were not members of the same class.”169 If these

lines (the first quotation more directly than the second) contradict his primary contention

that Suhrawardī has “stripped [the Forms] entirely of their epistemological functions,”170

we can speculate that Walbridge was motivated in penning them by an awareness of what

Suhrawardī himself has to say on this subject, namely that one cannot “take a mental

predicate (like a genus predicated of a thing, for example), attach it in the mind to any

arbitrary quiddity, and still speak the truth. Rather, the predicate must be applied to that

which is specifically appropriate to it.”171 Interestingly, Walbridge also notes that Quṭb

al-Dīn Shīrāzī had been keen “to justify the objectivity of universals—of genus and

species, difference, correlate accident, and so on—in the light of a metaphysics based on

the concrete particular thing.”172

With this background in place, we are now in a position to focus our attention on

this latter claim regarding the basic thrust and overall tenor of Suhrawardī’s philosophy,

167
Cf. Corbin, writing of “the Suhrawardian theosophy of Light”: “What Aristotelianism considers as the
concept of a species, the logical universal, ceases to be anything more than the dead body of an Angel.”
Henry Corbin, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sūfism of Ibn ‘Arabī, trans. Ralph
Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 22. We also find a similar statement in a later
work, albeit with a qualification comparable to the one we are about to encounter from Walbridge.
According to Corbin, “the archetype of a species has nothing to do with the universals established in logic,
but is the Angel of that species. Rational abstraction, at best, deals only with the ‘mortal remains’ of an
Angel.” Henry Corbin, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, trans. Nancy Pearson (New Lebanon, NY:
Omega Publications, 1994), 6.
168
Walbridge, Mystic Lights, 118.
169
Walbridge, “Mulla Sadra’s Doctrine,” 33.
170
See note 162.
171
Suhrawardī, Ḥikmat al-ishrāq, 51.
172
Walbridge, Mystic Lights, 94.

45
which, according to Walbridge, is founded upon “an intuition of the concrete particularity

of things. A human being or a rock or an intellect or God is a distinct, particular, and

unitary thing.”173 In other words, “only the particular and concrete in its particularity and

concreteness is real. Each thing is absolutely discrete and discontinuous from other

things.”174 Notwithstanding the acuity of many of Walbridge’s analyses, these are

somewhat jarring claims, and they evidently provide the basis for his conviction that

Suhrawardī was a nominalist.175 So what, then, is Walbridge’s reasoning? It seems that it

is rooted in his understanding of knowledge by presence together with Suhrawardī’s

teachings concerning “beings of reason” (lit. “the intellectual considerations” [al-iʿtibārāt

al-ʿaqlīyah]), among which latter the shaykh counted mental universals (e.g., “humanity”

as such or “luminosity” as such176). Regarding knowledge by presence, it is true that

Suhrawardī found Avicenna’s epistemology wanting insofar as it struggled to account

adequately for knowledge of “the concrete particularity of things,” precisely. And, as

both Walbridge and Kaukua inform us,177 this dissatisfaction was rooted partly in a desire

to explain God’s knowledge of particulars in light of the (in)famous Avicennan dictum

that God does not know the particular qua particular.178 Since understanding what is at

stake will require some further setting up, it will not be out of place to quote Kaukua’s

excellent synopsis of the issue at length:

Given that the human soul is intellectual, the manner of cognition proper

to it is the apprehension of universals, and so as an intellect, like God, it

173
Ibid., 51.
174
Ibid.
175
We find, for example, references to Suhrawardī’s “thoroughgoing nominalism” (Leaven, 196), “rigorous
Platonic nominalism” (“Suhrawardī and Illuminationism,” 220), the fact that “he is quite a radical
nominalist” (Leaven, 148), etc.
176
For discussions of these two examples, see al-Talwīḥāt, 20, and Ḥikmat al-ishrāq, 92, respectively.
177
Kaukua, Self-Awareness, 126-27; Walbridge, Leaven, 169.
178
For a nuanced discussion of this issue, see Acar, “Reconsidering,” 142-56.

46
 only has access to particular entities in a universal manner. For instance, I

can only know my friend Zayd as a human being with a particular

complexion, build, gait, humoral character and so forth—with as many

other universal attributes as I like to add. But the problem is that the Zayd

that I thereby grasp is not a particular person but a bundle of universal

properties which can in principle be shared by individuals other than Zayd.

Yet I find it intuitively plausible that my friend is a unique person whose

individuality cannot be reduced to the accidental fact that there happen to

be no other human beings with the exact same bundle of properties. The

problem Suhrawardī seems to perceive here is that I am somehow certain

that I apprehend an individual in this strong sense and that our theory of

knowledge should be able to save this intuition.179

As for Suhrawardī’s proposed solution to this dilemma, we have seen that it hinges on the

idea that, in the last analysis, human beings know things not through the mediation of

universal concepts but rather through the illumination resulting from the unveiled

presence of the known object to the knowing subject whose perceptuo-cognitive faculties

are sound enough to see what light itself has to show it. But the whole question is

whether it can therefore be said that “Suhrawardī solved [the] problem by making all real

knowledge into knowledge of particulars.”180

In what follows we will argue that the situation is considerably more complicated

than this, for the simple reason that the objects of our truest and most real knowledge—

namely God and the Forms—are not particulars in the “naive” sense. To substantiate this

179
Kaukua, Self-Awareness, 126.
180
Walbridge, Leaven, 169.

47
claim, we can begin by recalling that the natural universal or quiddity as it is in itself (min

ḥaythu hīya hīya) is unconditioned by either universality or particularity, and that it

becomes qualified by the former only through its being intellected, and by the latter only

through its existence in concreto. We can also refer back to our earlier question regarding

the relation between the quiddity conditioned by universality (i.e., mental universal or

“general meaning”) and the species lord or Form.181 On Walbridge’s reading, no genuine

relation obtains, with there being at best a kind of mysteriously operative “isomorphism”

between them.182 And while it is true that Suhrawardī does not make plain his own views

on this point,183 it has nonetheless been suggested by Dīnānī that it is possible—on the

basis of a comprehension of the shaykh’s principles—to draw valid inferences in

accordance with them.184 In other words, the speculative reconstruction of a thinker’s

position regarding this or that problem—whether the latter’s intellectual currency is

contemporaneous with the figure being studied or particular to a later historical period—

181
It is important to note here that, as Dīnānī has pointed out (Shuʿāʿ-i andīshih va shuhūd, 641),
Suhrawardī does not discuss the different iʿtibārāt of the universal per se (i.e., natural [ṭabīʿī], logical
[manṭiqī], and mental [ʿaqlī]; or—from a somewhat different point of view, and using the language of
quiddity—“absolute” [muṭlaqah] or “non-conditioned” [lā bi-sharṭ], “mixed” [makhlūṭah] or conditioned
[bi-sharṭ shayʾ], and “disengaged” [mujarradah] or “negatively conditioned” [bi-sharṭ lā]), though he does
address the difference between the universal (al-kullī) and the whole (al-kull).
182
It is interesting that we come across this exact “at best” in the interpretation of Corbin (see n. 167).
183
Yazdānpanāh has observed that when Suhrawardī is especially concerned with a particular point, he
returns to it repeatedly in his writings, but that in this case (that of the relationship between the Form and its
nature, in Neoplatonic parlance) one can find only scattered passages dealing with it, and then only
allusively. Sayyid Yadallāh Yazdānpanāh, Ḥikmat-i ishrāq: guzārish, sharḥ va sanjish-i dastgāh-i falsafī-i
Shaykh Shihāb al-Dīn Suhravardī, vol. 2 (Qom: Pazhūhishgāh-i Ḥawzih va Dānishgāh, 2014), 187.
Muḥammad ʿAlī Abū Rayyān, in discussing the Forms in Suhrawardī, makes the different but
complementary (as well as bold) claim that Mullā Ṣadrā did not understand Suhrawardī’s position on this
subject well, and that this fact can be attributed to “the obscurity [ghumūḍ] of the texts of Shaykh al-Ishrāq
in this respect.” Muḥammad ʿAlī Abū Rayyān, Uṣūl al-falsafah al-ishrāqīyah ʿinda Shihāb al-Dīn al-
Suhrawardī (Cairo: Maktabat al-Anjlū al-Miṣrīyah, 1959), 198.
184
Dīnānī, Shuʿāʿ-i andīshih va shuhūd, 644.

48
is not perforce anachronistic or unscholarly.185 But let us turn now to some of the Persian-

language scholarship, namely the extensive studies of Dīnānī and Yazdānpanāh.

As Dīnānī explains in elaboration of Suhrawardī’s view, the universal intellects or

lords of the species (arbāb al-anwāʿ) are not universal concepts, because the latter allow

of participation (ishtirāk) on the part of particular existents while the former—“in their

specific essences” (dar dhāt-i makhṣūṣ-i khud)—do not.186 He also, however, notes with

approval the observation of Mullā Hādī Sabzawārī (in the margin of his Sharḥ-i

manẓūmih) that “some thinkers are of the belief that the natural universal is the very

wujūd of the lord of the species.”187 Assuming for the sake of argument the tenability of

this conclusion, we will see that pursuing the interpretive line underpinning it bears much

fruit indeed.

The first problem one encounters when setting off in this direction is the absence

in Suhrawardī of any explicit terminological distinction between the general meaning and

the natural universal.188 If the two are taken to be synonymous, our ship is dead in the

water given his unequivocal statements regarding the former’s nonexistence, for the

Forms are eminently real. But perhaps there is more going on here than meets the eye.

185
Thus one can contrast a scholar like Walbridge, who understands this idea perfectly well, with, for
example, Gutas, who while criticizing Walbridge for “hermeneutic arbitrariness” goes on to himself make
the presumptuous claim that Suhrawardī “adopts [Empedocles, Pythagoras, and Plato] as the authorities
whose teachings he [only] pretends to follow.” Dimitri Gutas, “Suhrawardī and Greek Philosophy,” Arabic
Sciences and Philosophy 13 (2003): 309. I should add, however, that the context of Gutas’s critique, which
is directed toward the historical aspects of Walbridge’s scholarship, is different from that of our discussion
in that it concerns what he views as the requisite textual basis for making claims about the historical
transmission of ideas and not, as in the present context, the conditions of legitimate extrapolation on the
purely philosophical level. In other words, it is an overly rigid methodological “textualism” on the most
general level that I have in mind in offering these comments.
186
Dīnānī, Shuʿāʿ-i andīshih va shuhūd, 626. For this same point by way of Neoplatonism, see Gerson,
Aristotle and Other Platonists, 212-13.
187
Ibid., 642. Dīnānī is careful to note that Sabzawārī does not mention Suhrawardī by name here, but of
course the terminology is Ishrāqī nonetheless.
188
Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that, although he distinguishes between the mental
universal and quiddity qua quiddity in keeping with standard Avicennism, he nevertheless at times blurs the
distinction, as did Avicenna himself, by subsuming the latter under the category of the former.

49
We will remember that one of the Illuminationist axioms listed above affirmed the non-

spatiotemporal nature of the self-subsistent lights—a point incidentally entailing the fact

that the Forms are not self-predicating.189 In other words, Suhrawardī guards against the

third man regress by clearly stating that the Form of Man, for example, is itself only

called “man” metaphorically.190 To tie these two points together, one can say that the

Form’s transcendence vis-à-vis its image appears to involve an ontological disjunction

when contemplated “from below,” such that in a certain sense—or from this creaturely

and thus partial point of view—it cannot be said to exist.191 Now, when a quiddity (e.g.,

horse-ness) is said to be neither universal nor particular in itself, we might notice that it

too belongs to a similar sort of ontological no man’s land. So, from this vantage point, it

should not be surprising that if incorporeal light cannot be pointed to, and the quiddity in

itself (i.e., natural universal) is nowhere to be found, the two are somehow integrally

related. As for the distinction between mental and natural universals, one could

reasonably suggest that insofar as Suhrawardī is taken to deny the existence of the latter,

his intention is to forestall any confusion between the mental and spiritual levels of

reality, since even the natural universal—which is not qualified by the logical

universality necessary to the mental mode of a quiddity’s existence—must paradoxically

“don” such universality to enter into conception and thus even be talked about in the first

place. Although we are obviously dealing with subtle nuances here, they cannot be

avoided if we are to make sense of Suhrawardī’s Platonism, which comes to us colored

189
Walbridge notes correctly that the lords of the idols are not self-predicating for Suhrawardī (“Mulla
Sadra’s Doctrine,” 33). Cf. Netton, who thinks that they are: “In a certain sense, these angels become
hypostases of what they govern and signal their existence to the rest of mankind. Thus we can say that
Khurdād is water.” Ian Richard Netton, Allāh Transcendent: Studies in the Structure and Semiotics of
Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Cosmology (London: Routledge, 1989), 301.
190
Suhrawardī, Ḥikmat al-ishrāq, 109.
191
In the words of the shaykh: “Among the sophistries arising from taking the image in place of the thing is
[the] argument used by the Peripatetics to deny the Platonic Forms” (Ḥikmat al-ishrāq, 65).

50
by the categories of Peripatetic discourse even as it ultimately overflows the boundaries

thereof. Regarding the fine point under consideration, we should consult Marmura, who

has outlined this sticking point in the Avicennan theory of universals with admirable

clarity and precision:

Avicenna’s attempt at resolving the problem of predication … consisted in

insisting that the quiddity in itself is neither universal nor particular. The

universal is formed when universality attaches to this “neutral” quiddity,

the quiddity in itself. But it is here that we encounter a difficulty in his

answer. In the passage quoted above [from the Madkhal of the logic of the

Shifāʾ], the accidents universality and particularity attach to the quiddity in

its role or capacity as a concept in the mind. But once the quiddity is

looked at as a concept in the mind, it is no longer the quiddity considered

in itself, the quiddity that is neither one nor many, neither particular nor

universal, and which belongs to neither of the two modes of existence,

mental and extra-mental.192

So, if the quiddity as it is in itself (i.e., natural universal 193) is singularly difficult of

access in this way, one might wonder whether it admits of any access at all. That is to

ask, can one have anything to do with the reality of the natural universal apart from its

evident utility in saving the appearances for a reason that would presume to function

autonomously and thus independently of any higher faculty? We therefore find ourselves

back at the question of how discursivity and gnosis, or the mind and the heart, are related,

192
Marmura, Probing, 68.
193
As has by now become clear, the natural universal is not really a universal at all, being referred to as
such only as a matter of linguistic expediency given its close conceptual relation to the notion of
universality per se.

51
only now we are beginning to appreciate the role of the quiddity qua itself in furnishing

an isthmus or barzakh that at once separates and unites the two domains. If the natural

universal can be known as it is in itself, and thus apart from any mental consideration, it

is only through the immediate apperception or presential knowledge of the Forms with

which we are supposing these “universals” to be ultimately synonymous.

To return now to the textual justification for this thesis, which we first

encountered via Dīnānī, we will find it corroborated by Yazdānpanāh, who also devotes

significant attention to it. Significantly, both authors cite in their discussions the

following relevant passage from al-Mashāriʿ wa’l-muṭāraḥāt, in which Suhrawardī,

referring to the ancient philosophers, tells us, “At times they have called the lord of every

species by the name of that species, and they call it the universal of that thing. They do

not intend by this the universal the conception of whose meaning does not preclude

participation [sharikah], nor do they mean that, when we intellect the universal, the

object of our intellection is that very thing which is the lord [ṣāḥib] of the species.”194 For

his part, Yazdānpanāh offers the following comments: “In the lords of the species, there

is no magnitude, directionality, or extension, to all of which they are indifferent, and in

this respect they resemble the mental universal. Just as, in the mental universal, one finds

neither magnitude nor spatiotemporal extension, so too are the external things [umūr-i

khārijī, i.e., species lords], which are analogous to those mental entities [umūr-i dhihnī],

called universal.”195 Although the terminology is potentially confusing here,196 the point

is clear, and that is his alluding to the non-arbitrary nature of the semiotic nexus linking,

194
Dīnānī, Shuʿāʿ-i andīshih va shuhūd, 631; Yazdānpanāh, Guzārish, sharḥ va sanjish, 180.
195
Ibid.
196
By “external” Yazdānpanāh simply means extramental.

52
by way of “metaphor,”197 the mind to what lies beyond it. In other words, even though

the universal term “man” is predicated of the Form of Man only metaphorically, there is a

reason we say “man” and not “horse.” Neither the term nor the merely mental concept to

which it refers is itself the lord of the species, but both are “tethered” to it by an

emanative relation (nisbat al-fayḍ) that safeguards the structures of correspondence and

thus intelligibility upon which reflective thought relies for whatever limited epistemic

efficacy it may have.198

In another key passage cited by Yazdānpanāh, Suhrawardī writes, “If the nature

[ṭabīʿah] of anything is taken without its qualities, it is the light of which that thing is the

idol.”199 In other words, “Shaykh al-Ishrāq considers the reality and nature of every

[individual] thing to be the species lord of that thing.”200 Now, while this statement of the

shaykh appears to unambiguously confirm the validity of our argument, we should

nevertheless be aware that a holistic reading of Ḥikmat al-ishrāq doubtlessly frustrates

any overly simplistic appeal to a proof text such as this. To gain some idea of what I

mean, let us examine the following passage:

The argument that the reality [ḥaqīqah]201 of the species occurs and the

accidents follow is unsound, for if the nature [ṭabīʿah] of a species—

humanity, for example—occurs first and then the accidents follow, it will

occur as universal, nondelimited humanity and then be individualized,

which is absurd, for the nature only occurs individually; the nondelimited

197
“If a name is used with other than its meaning due to some resemblance, proximity, or concomitance,
we call it ‘metaphorical’ (majāzī)” (Suhrawardī, Ḥikmat al-ishrāq, 8).
198
For the context of Suhrawardī’s use of the phrase nisbat al-fayḍ, see the passage quoted on page 43
above.
199
Suhrawardī, Ḥikmat al-ishrāq, 131 (trans. modified).
200
Yazdānpanāh, Guzārish, sharḥ va sanjish, 154.
201
Walbridge and Ziai note that the text in Quṭb al-Dīn Shīrāzī’s commentary reads “nature” here
(Philosophy of Illumination, 180).

53
 never occurs among concrete things [fi’l-aʿyān]. … If the nature of the

species were able to dispense with them [i.e., the individualizing

accidents], we would be able to posit its existence without them … which

is not the case. From this it follows that an accident may be a condition of

the existence of a substance and a constituent of its existence in this

sense. 202

Here Suhrawardī seems to be clearly asserting the nature’s dependence on the accidents

for its existence in concreto, which would contradict the first statement that the nature

shorn of its qualities is the species lord. This ambiguity is rooted in what appears to be an

equivocal use of the phrase fi’l-aʿyān by the shaykh. In another passage, he relates and

then responds to an objection concerning the ontological status of the mental universal:

Question: Insofar as the quiddity of luminosity [al-māhīyah al-nūrīyah]

does not necessitate perfection, would not its particularization as the Light

of light [nūr al-nūr] be a contingent effect? Answer: The quiddity of

luminosity is a mental universal not in itself particularized in the external

world. That which is concrete [fi’l-ʿayn] is a single thing, neither a root

[aṣl] nor a perfection. The mental thing has beings of reason [iʿtibārāt]

inconceivable in the concrete thing.203

If the quiddity is neutral as regards perfection and deficiency, must it then be thought of

as ontologically prior to God?204 Since by this point in the text Suhrawardī has already

202
Suhrawardī, Ḥikmat al-ishrāq, 59 (trans. modified).
203
Ibid., 92 (trans. modified).
204
For an excellent discussion of this issue in the context of the by now well-known Qūnawī-Ṭūsī
correspondence, see Dagli, Islamic Intellectual Culture, 72-78. In Ṭūsī’s terminology, the quiddity under
consideration is called “general shared existence” (al-wujūd al-ʿāmm al-mushtarak), and like Shaykh al-
Ishrāq, Ṭūsī denies that it refers to anything real in the external world.

54
dealt with the contention that quiddity as such (mafhūm al-māhīyah muṭlaqan) enjoys

primacy in this way by asserting its iʿtibārī nature,205 the real quandary relates to the idea

of concreteness. On the one hand, the phrase in concreto ordinarily connotes

spatiotemporal extension, while on the other hand, light in itself (i.e., self-subsistent

light) “cannot be pointed to.”206 If “that which is concrete” (mā fi’l-ʿayn) does indeed

refer to light as such independent of its quiddity’s iʿtibārāt, we are faced with the

abovementioned ambiguity. Despite the fact that an easy solution to this problem does

not readily present itself, we can offer the following, brief reflections before concluding

our discussion.

Since it is clear that when Suhrawardī says fi’l-ʿayn or fi’l-aʿyān he means real in

the sense of not contingent upon mentation—whether in the realm of sensory or spiritual

experience—we are left with a kind of dualism, and it is perhaps for this reason that

Walbridge claims, as we saw above, that for Suhrawardī “only the particular and concrete

in its particularity and concreteness is real.”207 But assuming Walbridge’s interpretation

to be unsatisfactory for the reasons given thus far, one might suggest instead that, in the

shaykh’s writings, one encounters two types of nonexistence, so to speak: that of the

mental universal, which is not fi’l-aʿyān, and that of incorporeal light, which is fi’l-ʿayn.

It is perhaps significant on this reading that Suhrawardī changes the plural of ʿayn to the

singular when discussing incorporeal light (in addition to opting for the phrase mā fi’l-

205
Suhrawardī, Ḥikmat al-ishrāq, 45. It is important to note that the belief in question (that the creative Act
proceeds by way of the “addition” of existence to an ontologically prior quiddity, which paradoxically
exists before existing) may be something of an unintentional straw man, at least insofar as one takes
Suhrawardī to be criticizing Avicenna directly. See Izutsu, Concept and Reality, 97-99. For an excellent
discussion of the meaning of the phrase atbāʿ al-mashshāʾīn (“the followers of the Peripatetics”) in Ḥikmat
al-ishrāq, see Robert Wisnovsky, “Essence and Existence in the Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Islamic
East (Mašriq): A Sketch,” in The Arabic, Hebrew and Latin Reception of Avicenna’s Metaphysics, ed. Dag
Nikolaus Hesse and Amos Bertolacci (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 27-50.
206
See page 41 above.
207
See page 46 above.

55
ʿayn when discussing the issue of “that which is concrete” generally speaking),208 but this

might be considered a kind of speculative indulgence given the lack, as far as I am aware,

of any explicit textual basis for the idea, which, moreover, would rely for its meaning on

the assumption that to move from the material to the incorporeal is to journey from

adumbral multiplicity toward luminous unity—a supposition complicated, some would

argue, by the undeniable complexity of Suhrawardī’s intelligible universe.209 A key

question, then, is whether the Light of lights is fi’l-ʿayn or not. If it is,210 there will

seemingly be a contradiction, since, if the Light of lights is supposed to be the Necessary

Being, and the latter—as wujūd itself—does not “occur independently in concrete

reality,”211 then neither will the Light of lights. Said differently, it seems that in

Suhrawardī existence as such both does and does not exist outside the mind. The

Necessary Being exists outside the mind, but existence does not exist outside the mind,

and yet the Necessary Being is said to be pure existence. However, in Ḥikmat al-ishrāq—

which, despite the difference in terminology, seems to contradict, for example, the

Talwīḥāt212—Suhrawardī challenges the doctrine that God is pure existence (mujarrad al-

208
See, for example, Ḥikmat al-ishrāq, 50.
209
“Although the sphere of the fixed stars is higher than the sphere of the planets, it is actually more
complex. Since there is no disorder in the heavens of Suhrawardī’s universe, the patterns of the stars have
to be the shadow of some intelligible order. … Although there is an intelligible order among the immaterial
lights and their mutual illuminations, it is far too complex to be expressed by any one state of the spheres
and planets, particularly since the spheres veil each other” (Walbridge, Mystic Lights, 68). See also Leaven,
25.
210
Although the Light of lights is obviously fi’l-ʿayn owing to Its extramental reality, from a more
profound point of view its very concept (as opposed to its reality) constitutes one of the iʿtibārāt of the
quiddity of light. In terms of the above-quoted passage, then, “that which is concrete” is neither a “root”
(interpreted here to refer to al-māhīyah al-nūrīyah), nor a perfection (the Light of lights when taken to be
“conditioned” by Its unconditioned-ness), nor any one imperfect thing (a given light other than God).
Rather, that which is fi’l-ʿayn is, in reality, the Light of lights qua “absolutely unconditioned” (lā bi-sharṭ
maqsamī, in the terminology of certain Sufis), though from yet another point of view—that of the
intellecting creature, hence the qualification “in reality”—the Essence is beyond being, and created things
exist “out there” apart from us.
211
Suhrawardī, Ḥikmat al-ishrāq, 50.
212
See Ḥikmat al-ishrāq, 83, and, for example, al-Talwīḥāt, 34.

56
wujūd)213 insofar as one affirms prime matter, since pure existence is predicated of the

latter as well, which, in order to exist, requires particularization through form (existence

being equated here with particularized existence). So, if prime matter is pure existence

and requires form to exist, then so would God. The intention here seems to be not so

much to deny that God is pure being as it is to deny the Peripatetic characterization of

prime matter, or rather to reject outright the latter’s reality.214

To sum up very simply what Suhrawardī is saying, luminosity (al-māhīyah al-

nūrīyah), being a mental universal, has no reality outside the mind, but self-subsistent

light obviously does. Light is luminous, but it does not have luminosity, since to be had

something must be just that—a thing—and luminosity is not a thing alongside light.

Similarly, existence is existent, but it does not have existence. If we insist on this “have,”

neither luminosity nor existence will refer to any extramental reality.

Having thought through all these laborious details, one might understandably

conclude that it all amounts to little more than useless mental gymnastics. But assuming

there is some benefit, how might one describe what that is? Such a question is of course

related to the deeper matter of the mind’s relation to the organ of liberating, unitive

“perception” (the “eye of the heart” [ʿayn al-qalb] as some Sufis have called it). In

sketching a possible answer to this perennial query through the lens of Suhrawardī’s

213
“These people argue that the Creator of everything is nothing but pure existence” (Ḥikmat al-ishrāq,
83).
214
This point incidentally provides us with an opportunity to highlight the very real problem in Suhrawardī
of arriving at an adequate conception of the relationship between the Peripatetic and properly
Illuminationist dimensions of his thought. In the Partaw nāmih, for example, we find the shaykh explaining
that “the thing which accepts all these different forms is called Prime Matter,” and that “Prime Matter and
its forms, and our souls, are all due to [the Active Intellect],” which is “the Lord and Manager of the
elemental world.” He even goes so far as to assert that “Prime Matter is eternal [dāʾim].” Sohravardī, The
Book of Radiance (Partaw nāmih), ed. and trans. Hossein Ziai (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 1998),
19, 56, 65. For a discussion of this and other related issues, see Walbridge, “Intimations of the Tablet and
the Throne,” 255-77.

57
thought, we hope to paint a broad-brushstrokes picture of his intimated solution to the

problem of universals so as to tie together the various threads of the foregoing discussion.

As has been mentioned repeatedly, Suhrawardī denies the extramental existence

of the mental universal. In the world of concrete things, one finds only individual horses,

for example, and there is no one thing that we can point to and exclaim, “There is horse-

ness itself.” But that is not to say that horse-ness is not real, since the lord of the species

“horse” does exist, and it does so at a degree of ontological intensity immeasurably

greater than that enjoyed by any one, particular horse. The problem, of course, is

understanding the notion of immaterial existence (i.e., what it might mean for something

to exist sans extension), hence the temptation to reject the Platonic Forms. The

implication in any case is that if one were to adopt either (i) a naive realism according to

which the universal reality of a thing is spatiotemporally extended or (ii) a kind of idealist

“conceptuo-realism” according to which it is the very object of our thought (i.e., the

mental universal), not only would the third man come knocking,215 but the door to the

suprarational, presential knowledge of the Form would become closed for us.216 We

would mistake the finger for the moon, contenting ourselves with the purported fruits of

the “shackled intellect’s” (al-ʿaql al-muqayyad) striving—mere scraps fallen from the

wedding table. Suhrawardī is not a nominalist;217 he only wishes to forestall the state of

215
According to S. E. Gersh (whose work we encountered via the article of Algis Uzdavinys in Sacred Web
10, entitled “Divine Light in Plotinus and Al-Suhrawardi”), “among the transcendent Forms the
interrelation is non-spatial … and this absence of extension is precisely the factor which precludes the
application of the normal doctrine of genus and species, but in the world of immanent Forms where objects
can be demarcated spatially and temporally the normal rules of Aristotelian logic can be held to apply.”
Stephen Gersh, From Iamblichus to Eriugena: An Investigation of the Prehistory and Evolution of the
Pseudo-Dionysian Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 1978), 95.
216
Due to an unwarranted and metaphysically invalid reification of multiplicity, which latter is, of course,
irremediably characteristic of both external existence and thought taken in and of themselves.
217
For a reference to Suhrawardī’s “conceptualist metaphysics,” see Fedor Benevich, “The Metaphysics of
Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Šahrastānī (d. 1153): Aḥwāl and Universals,” in Islamic Philosophy from

58
affairs just described.218 Taken as an end in itself, a perfected rational faculty—something

of a contradiction in terms for an esoterist like Suhrawardī—is as yet too teetotaling for

the wine of gnosis. As the shaykh himself informs us:

So long as one delights in [his own] knowledge, he is deficient, which

deficiency [the masters] deem a hidden idolatry. One attains to perfection

only when knowledge becomes lost in the Known, for whoever delights in

both knowledge and the Known has, as it were, two objects of aspiration.

One is disengaged [mujarrad] when from knowledge he vanishes into the

Known. When the last traces of humanity are dispensed with, that is the

state of extinction, the station of “All that is upon [the earth] passes away.

And there remains the Face of thy Lord, Possessed of Majesty and

Bounty” [Quran 55:26-27].219

This passage incidentally brings us back to the complexity of the incorporeal lights’

interrelations mentioned above, underlying which issue is the more profound question of

how the One relates to the many and vice versa. If the lords of the species are among the

highest possible objects of supra-individual intellection, would not the process of

becoming directly acquainted with ever more of them ultimately result in a kind of

spiritual clutter and dispersion? This is precisely where Walbridge’s analysis seems to go

the 12th to the 14th Century, ed. Abdelkader Al Ghouz (Göttingen, Germany: Bonn University Press, 2018),
351. It is important to acknowledge that much in these discussions hinges on definitions, since there is a
sense in which Suhrawardī is indeed a conceptualist, especially considering the unfortunate fact that the
problem of universals often gets reduced to the question of the ontological status of reified concepts (i.e.,
purportedly spatiotemporally extended “universals”).
218
Dīnānī also explicitly denies that Suhrawardī is a nominalist: “In no way does he agree with the creed of
the nominalists [aṣḥāb-i tasmīyih]” (Shuʿāʿ-i andīshih va shuhūd, 643).
219
Shihabuddin Yahya Suhrawardi, The Philosophical Allegories and Mystical Treatises, ed. and trans.
Wheeler M. Thackston, Jr. (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 1999), 98-99.

59
awry.220 We will remember that, according to Suhrawardī, “the incorporeal lights do not

differ in their realities” and are instead only distinguished in respect of their degree of

luminosity.221 The Forms are not properly speaking universals, it is true, but it does not

therefore follow that they are particulars, especially ones without any role to play in

epistemology.222 The shaykh himself makes this point for us, albeit in reverse, so to

speak:

220
For indeed the very notion of a properly spiritual, supra-individual mode of consciousness rules out any
such dispersion, since to approach its attainment is to undergo (or effect, depending upon the point of view)
a “gathering” movement (jamʿ), hence the merely rhetorical—one might say academic—nature of the
above qualification regarding the “complexity of Suhrawardī’s intelligible universe” (see n. 209), and
notwithstanding, furthermore, the validity of this “move” on the part of the shaykh himself, who we might
assume would agree wholeheartedly with the statement of Martin Lings that “true simplicity, far from
being incompatible with complexity, even demands a certain complexity for its full realization.” Martin
Lings, Ancient Beliefs and Modern Superstitions (London: Perennial Books, 1965), 12. In the present
context, then, we could say that what naturally appears as awe-inspiringly complex from within certain
limitations (namely those pertaining to thought, imagination, etc.) gradually reveals its superabundant
simplicity as these limitations are cast off, or as the light of the stars becomes lost in that of the rising sun
of gnosis.
221
See page 41 above.
222
And yet, according to Corbin, “the Form or Image of Light—for example, Perfect Nature or celestial
Alter Ego—is perfectly individualized; it is neither logical universal nor concrete sensory [sic].” Henry
Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth: From Mazdean Iran to Shī‘ite Iran, trans. Nancy Pearson
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 317 (see also the passage in Dīnānī associated with n. 184).
At this point the reader will no doubt wonder what the ostensible difference is between the concepts of
particularity and individuality. Without wanting to do violence to language, but keeping in mind the
limitations of the present study, one might call attention to the “pros hen” homonymy governing analogical
relationships. In other words, there are individuals, and there are “individuals,” the former being associated
with particularity for our purposes. When Corbin speaks of the Form’s being “perfectly individualized,” he
is simply affirming the abovementioned Ishrāqī principle according to which incorporeal lights comprise
simple, mind-independent, self-subsistent essences (dhawāt basīṭah) that are sui generis (mutakhaṣṣaṣ) in
virtue of their varying intensities while nevertheless being one in reality (bi’l-ḥaqīqah). That is to say, they
are neither universal nor particular. Furthermore, as we hope will become clearer in what follows, all
phenomenal experience—whether sensory or supra-sensory—is predicated on the presence of some matter
or other—whether gross, subtle, or intelligible—without which no “witnessing” in any meaningful sense of
the word could take place due to the absence of the requisite duality, and regardless of whether the latter be
conceived of hylomorphically (Peripatetics) or in terms of emanation (Illuminationists). In either case, the
upshot is that, since matter in all its guises is simply a conceptual placeholder for nothingness, multiplicity,
which presupposes duality, is ultimately illusory. For the difficult but significant notion of intelligible
matter, see Gregory Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus (University Park, PA:
The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 29. For further discussion of issues associated with the
notion of angelic individuality, see Henry Corbin, Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, trans. Willard R.
Trask (New York: Pantheon Books, 1960), 80n84. And for the distinction between the individual (shakhṣ)
and particular (juzʾī) in the context of post-classical debates around the nature of God’s existence, see
Khaled El-Rouayheb, Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century: Scholarly Currents in the
Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 329.

60
 Some men adduce in proof of the Forms [al-muthul] the argument that

humanity per se is not many, and so it is one. This is not valid, for

humanity as such implies neither unity nor multiplicity but may be said of

both. Were unity a condition of the notion of humanity, humanity could

not be said of many. To say that humanity does not imply multiplicity

does not mean that its not implying multiplicity then implies unity.

Though the contradictory of multiplicity is nonmultiplicity, its not

implying multiplicity is not an implication of nonmultiplicity, and the

contradictory of implying multiplicity is nothing more than not implying

multiplicity. This latter may be so without implying unity. Therefore, the

unitary humanity said of all is only in the mind, and its use as a predicate

does not require another form [ṣūrah]. The argument that the individuals

perish but the species endures does not necessitate that there be something

universal and self-subsistent. One might well answer that what endures is

a form in the mind and with the origins [ṣūrah fi’l-ʿaql wa ʿinda ’l-

mabādiʾ].223

This passage contains the very pith of Suhrawardī’s doctrine of universals. To unpack it

using the terminology with which we are already familiar, we can say that the natural

universal has two faces, as it were. One of them, being turned toward the world, is

reflected in the mirror of the mind as the mental universal, which is not self-subsistent. 224

223
Suhrawardī, Ḥikmat al-ishrāq, 109-10. Walbridge and Ziai gloss this last phrase as “among the
immaterial lights” (182).
224
It is also, we should add, reflected in the shadowy materia upon which forms rely for their outward
manifestation. The word reflect here is, moreover, very semantically precise, since the form qua cause
exercises its synthetic power over the matter without thereby inhering in it. Indeed Suhrawardī ascribes
considerable importance to the symbolism of the mirror in Ḥikmat al-ishrāq, though he does also criticize
the Peripatetics’ hylomorphism in spite of his seeming avowal of it elsewhere.

61
The other, being turned toward God, “endures with the origins.” It therefore functions in

the capacity of a barzakh in a manner not at all arbitrary à la nominalism. If the lights are

multiple, it is only because there is a being called man to whom they appear as such given

the limitations of his faculties.225 In reality there is only the Light, for “the most

spiritually realized [muḥaqqaqtarīn] of all say that ‘I-ness,’ ‘You-ness,’ and ‘He-ness’

are all terms superimposed upon the self-subsistent Essence. They have submerged all

three locutions in the sea of annihilation. Expressions have been destroyed and

indications have disappeared. ‘All things perish, save His Face’ [Quran 28:88].”226

Regarding the nature of Suhrawardī’s Peripateticism, then, it arguably works within the

constraints of a kind of “functional dualism” for the sake of a mind that would seek—

insofar as possible—to discern the traces of Oneness amidst manyness in anticipation of a

spiritual attainment transcending the boundaries of mere ratiocination. Such an existential

denouement can transpire only for the lover who has taken leave of himself, but short of

that, or in the meantime, aligning one’s thought with the nature of things can only help,

especially if we take Aristotle at his word in defining the human being as “rational

animal.”

225
Corbin expresses this point thus (albeit at a primarily “imaginal” level of reference situated
ontologically beneath that of pure intellect): “The significance of theophanies is to be found … in a
coincidentia oppositorum, the dual structure of the one ḥaqīqah, at once singular and plural, eternal and
transient, infinite in its finitude, for its infinitude does not signify a quantitative illimitation of the number
of its theophanies, but the infinitude of this Essence, which, because it is in itself the simultaneity of
opposites, implies the multiplicity of its Apparitions, that is, His typifications, each of which is true
according to the Divine Face pertaining to each of the beings to which it shows itself” (Alone with the
Alone, 377-78). The following passage from Ḥikmat al-ishrāq is also helpful here: “The unity among the
incorporeal lights is an intellectual, not a bodily, unity. When the commanding light has a connection to the
barrier and to the fortress which is the locus in which it is made evident, it imagines itself to be in the
fortress, even though it really is not. When the managing lights are separated from the body, they imagine
that they themselves are the masterful dominating lights and the Light of Lights, because of their extreme
nearness to them and their relations of love with them” (147-48, emphasis added).
226
Suhrawardī, Philosophical Allegories, 100 (trans. modified).

62
 CHAPTER 3

ṢADR AL-DĪN AL-QŪNAWĪ

How, we have been asking, does the one relate to the many? What explains

sameness in spite of difference? It is interesting that, if Alfred North Whitehead could

characterize the European tradition of philosophy as consisting of a “series of footnotes

to Plato,” one might likewise be justified in characterizing its most recent centuries as

consisting of a series of increasingly conscious and concerted attempts to overturn

Platonism, the length of whose shadow scarcely requires mention. Indeed we saw that

some writers have even gone so far as to associate the teachings of this sage with various

forms of oppression, claiming that the latter finds its most profound roots in the desire for

transcendence and the certainties associated therewith. Is Plato then not to be counted

among those who peered beyond the veils, furnishing keys to the mysteries of justice, that

greatest of all virtues? Whence such irony? If, as things stand, Platonism is not wanting

for detractors, such agon—or in some cases mere indifference—might fruitfully be traced

to the loss of gnosis in the West, which loss, moreover, arguably comprises the most

fundamental precondition for the emergence of modernity itself.227

If we began our study with Plato, it is due to his providing those of us whose

educations rest on broadly Western foundations with the most adequate “native” lens

See, for example, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred (Albany, NY: State University of
227

New York Press, 1989); René Guénon, The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, trans. Lord
Northbourne (Hillsdale, NY: Sophia Perennis, 2001).

63
through which to view—or rather initiate our intellectual courting of—the deepest

dimensions of the Islamic worldview, at least as regards the properly philosophical

elaboration thereof.228 It is perhaps no accident, therefore, that Ṣadr al-Dīn Qūnawī,

whose doctrines form the basis of the present chapter, can be found acknowledging

Plato’s connection with the “sciences of wisdom” (ʿulūm al-ḥikmah),229 to say nothing of

the fact that the divine name al-Raḥmān, which in the Islamic tradition possesses a

special status among the canonical names of God,230 is sometimes translated as “the

Infinitely Good.”231 If Islam itself—in its overarching, intrinsic intellectual thrust—is

doubtless Platonic in spirit, what does a philosophically inclined Muslim saint like

Qūnawī have to say about what is arguably the most enduring legacy of Platonism,

namely the problem of universals? Although several excellent studies elucidating the

various aspects and dimensions of Qūnawī’s thought have been published, the nuances of

his position on universals remain somewhat obscure. In the experience of this student, it

is as though all the pieces are there and merely require being brought together in one

place. As for the difficulties involved, they pertain largely to the question of the

interrelationship of two key concepts, namely the “fixed entities” (al-aʿyān al-thābitah)

and the divine names (al-asmāʾ al-ilāhīyah, or asmāʾ Allāh). What are the conceptual

boundaries of these categories, and to what degree do they overlap? In what follows, I

228
This is not to say, of course, that some Western people are not raised in Muslim households, or that
Muslims of Eastern provenance ipso facto understand metaphysics, or that no Westerners of whatever creed
do. The integral reality of the Islamic tradition—in all its depth and breadth—can be just as strange and
even disconcerting to Muslims as it often is to non-Muslims, especially individuals of either a modernist or
fideist bent, whether Muslim or not.
229
Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī, Al-Murāsalāt bayna Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī wa-Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūṣī, ed.
Gudrun Schubert (Beirut: Al-Nasharāt al-Islāmīyah, 1995), 169.
230
“Call upon God [Allāh], or call upon the Compassionate [al-Raḥmān]. Whichever you call, to Him
belong the Most Beautiful Names” (Quran 17:110).
231
Plato, as is well known, refers to Ultimate Reality as “the Good” (to agathon), or the “Form of the
Good” (hē tou agathou idea, lit. “the Idea of the Good”).

64
will venture to show how a solid grasp of Qūnawī’s doctrine of universals perforce

involves clarification of this central issue, it being understood all the while that the “pure

metaphysics” of which Qūnawī is a preeminent expositor is never fully systematic, and

this in virtue of its profound adequation vis-à-vis the Real, precisely.

* * *

Ṣadr al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq al-Qūnawī (d. 673/1274) was a prominent

hadith scholar and Sufi shaykh of Persian descent best known for his role in

disseminating the teachings of Muḥyī al-Dīn ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 638/1240), the highly

influential Andalusian master of gnosis (maʿrifah) of whom Qūnawī was the direct

spiritual heir. By scholarly consensus, Shaykh Ṣadr al-Dīn’s significance to the

development of theoretically sophisticated initiatic spirituality in the Islamic world lies

principally in the characteristic style and terminology he employed in transmitting Ibn

ʿArabī’s doctrines, an approach that has been described as “much more explicitly

philosophical” than that of his teacher, “with far less reference to Koran and Hadith and a

much higher percentage of reasoned and systematic discourse in explanation of basic

ideas.”232 Basically, when we read Qūnawī’s writings, “what we encounter is really a

more orderly, pedagogical version of Ibn al-ʿArabī,”233 though at the same time, “we

should recall that Qūnawī himself is keen to stress that his works are not simply the

product of a bookish study of his master’s teachings” and are rather the fruits of his own

“tasting,”234 which latter involves a direct acquaintance with divine realities that he

232
William C. Chittick, introduction to The Texts (al-Nuṣūṣ), by Ṣadr al-Dīn Qūnawī (available at
https://www.academia.edu/8101330/Sadr_al-Din_Qunawi_The_Texts_al-Nusus_), 1. An abridged version
of this translation appears in An Anthology of Philosophy in Persia, vol. 4, ed. Seyyed Hossein Nasr and
Mehdi Aminrazavi (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), 416-34.
233
Dagli, Islamic Intellectual Culture, 79.
234
Todd, Sufi Doctrine, 45.

65
elsewhere refers to as “taking from God without any causal intermediary” (al-akhdh ʿan

Allāh dūn wāsiṭah sababīyah).235 In other words, Qūnawī faithfully conveys his shaykh’s

essential doctrines while also possessing spiritual authority in his own right. If he does

not “innovate” in any genuine respect, it is because he takes Ibn ʿArabī to have already

stated the truth about the nature of things in the deepest and most comprehensive way

possible, or perhaps one should say ways, for as Dagli reminds us, Ibn ʿArabī “has

several different ontologies and cosmologies.”236 Regarding the hermeneutical

difficulties and thus possible misunderstandings following from such doctrinal subtlety

(one might say “plasticity”), the poet-scholar ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī (d. 898/1492)

claimed that “it is impossible to understand Ibn ʿArabī’s teachings concerning the

Oneness of Being [waḥdat al-wujūd] in a manner consistent with both intelligence and

the Sacred Law without studying al-Qūnawī’s works.”237

If I have dwelled at some length on these points, it is on account of their relevance

to the method adopted in carrying out the research for this thesis. Since the views of

master and disciple are here substantially equivalent, I will not hesitate to make use of the

available literature on Ibn ʿArabī—namely the highly instructive writings of William

Chittick—for the sake not only of providing necessary context but also of directly

illuminating our primary subject. First, however, we can begin with one of the texts of

Ibn ʿArabī himself.

235
Ibid., 42. See ¶ 9 (p. 182) of the Khvājavī edition of the Fukūk for the Arabic.
236
Dagli, Islamic Intellectual Culture, 2.
237
Seyyed Hossein Nasr, “Ṣadr al-Dīn Qūnawī,” in An Anthology of Philosophy in Persia, vol. 4, 413-14.

66
 In the opening chapter of the Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam, Ibn ʿArabī’s most widely read

work,238 the shaykh expounds the theory of universals that will provide the foundation for

subsequent articulations of the core metaphysical doctrine undergirding what came to be

known as the Akbarian “school” of Sufism. He begins by referring to what follows as

wisdom (ḥikmah), explaining that universals (al-umūr al-kullīyah), while not existent in

themselves, are intelligible and known in the mind. In spite of being forever hidden

(bāṭinah) in virtue of the invariably “absent” (ghaybī) mode of their wujūd,239 they

nonetheless possess “rulings” (aḥkām) and “traces” (āthār) in everything enjoying

“concrete” existence (wujūdun ʿaynīun).240 That is to say, insofar as we encounter

something and notice that it is living or knowledgeable (e.g., a tree or human being), such

descriptions have their ontological root in the universals (e.g., life or knowledge as such).

Or in yet other words, things possessing the aforementioned concrete existence (i.e.,

mawjūdāt) manifest the realities of the universals, and the descriptions predicated of the

existents in fact belong—appearances to the contrary notwithstanding—to these realities

themselves. 241

According to ʿAbd al-Razzāq Kāshānī, a disciple of Qūnawī’s student Muʾayyad

al-Dīn Jandī and early commentator on the Fuṣūṣ, the influence exerted over things by

the universals—such that all the modalities of the former’s respective existences are

238
Sachiko Murata, Chinese Gleams of Sufi Light: Wang Tai-yü’s Great Learning of the Pure and Real and
Liu Chih’s Displaying the Concealment of the Real Realm (Albany, NY: State University of New York
Press, 2000), 114.
239
Following Chittick in, for example, his translation of the Nuṣūṣ, this term will often be left untranslated
for reasons that will soon become clear. Regarding the term mawjūd, however, it can usually safely be
translated as “existent,” the implied contrast with pure wujūd being Platonic in nature (i.e., referring to the
being/becoming distinction).
240
Ibn ʿArabī, Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam, ed. Abū al-ʿAlāʾ ʿAfīfī (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿArabī, 1946), 51.
241
“The Real described Himself for us by the descriptions of those things which in our view are temporally
originated. In reality these are His descriptions which have become manifest within us; then [we thought
that] they did not return to Him, so we described Him by descriptions worthy of His majesty. But they are
His descriptions in reality.” Ibn ʿArabī, al-Futūḥāt al-makkīyah, trans. Chittick in Sufi Path, 100.

67
determined in accordance with the natures of the latter—is effected through the identity

of the descriptions themselves with the “entities” (aʿyān)242 of the universals.243 Although

we will gain familiarity with other ways of conceptualizing this elusive relation between

the universals (e.g., life), the descriptive words associated with them (e.g., living), and

the things described by such words (e.g., this or that living thing), for now we can follow

Kāshānī,244 who is concerned to exercise precision in drawing the distinctions under

consideration, namely those between the entities of the universals, the entities of the

descriptions (aʿyān al-awṣāf), and the entities of the things described (aʿyān al-

mawṣūfāt). So for Kāshānī, who is here commenting on a phrase from the text that

employs pronouns whose antecedents are ambiguous, the universals comprise the entities

of the descriptions existent in the described things, and when Ibn ʿArabī refers in this

context to the entities of the individual existents (aʿyān al-mawjūdāt al-ʿaynīyah),245 he

means the entities of the descriptions and not those of the things described, since the

latter themselves comprise universal meanings (maʿná kullī), such as, for example, the

nondelimited (muṭlaq) man constituting the entity of this or that particular man.246 Said

simply, when we consider a proposition like “this man is knowledgeable,” the entity of

242
The meaning of this and other technical terms will be discussed in depth shortly. In the meantime,
“entity” can be taken as synonymous with the philosophical concept of quiddity, or the “what-it-is” of
something. It can also provisionally be thought of as the essence of a thing, though as we will see, this
translation is problematic.
243
ʿAbd al-Razzāq Kāshānī, Sharḥ fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam, in Ibn ʿArabī, Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam: sharḥ ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-
Qāshānī (Cairo: Dār Āfāq li’l-Nashr wa’l-Tawzīʿ, 2016), 23.
244
The idea being not that these other ways of looking at things will contradict what follows, but rather that
they will complement it and thus round out our picture of Akbarian metaphysics—which as already noted
is highly “non-dogmatic” and thus even “spherical” in quality—through the particular lens of Qūnawī’s
works.
245
The translation “individual existents” is Dagli’s, though he opts for “identities” instead of “entities.” So
as not to introduce unnecessary confusion, we will follow Chittick, who consistently renders ʿayn as
“entity,” whereas as Dagli alternates between the two translations depending on the context, and for
perfectly justifiable reasons (to be addressed in due course). For Dagli’s translation, see Ibn al-ʿArabī, The
Ringstones of Wisdom (Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam), trans. Caner K. Dagli (Chicago: Kazi Publications, 2004), 8-9. For
his discussion of the multivalence of the word ʿayn, see Dagli, Islamic Intellectual Culture, 60-61.
246
Kāshānī, Sharḥ, 23.

68
the predicate is knowledge as such, and the entity of the subject is man as such, contra the

interpretation according to which the entity of “this man” (the mawṣūf in this example) is

identical with the reality of knowledge in virtue of his being described as knowledgeable.

Already here we are confronted with the question of the nature of the

interrelations between the universals, for knowledge is a relationship between two things

(i.e., a knowing subject and a known object), whereas man is a being capable of

occupying either side of the relation (man can both know and be known). Further down in

the same paragraph we have been examining, Ibn ʿArabī alludes to the heart of the

relevant mystery in a passage worth quoting at length, as it will establish a sufficiently

broad conceptual framework for all that follows:

There is a determination [ḥukm] of concrete existents which stems from

[the] universal reality as a function of what the realities of these individual

existents require, taking for example the relationship of knowledge to the

knower, or life to the living thing. Life is an intelligible reality and

knowledge is an intelligible reality, distinct from life just as life is distinct

from knowledge. Now, we say of the Real most high that He has

Knowledge and Life, and so is the Living and the Knower. Of the angel,

we say that it has life and knowledge, and so is a living being and a

knower. Of man, we say that he has life and knowledge, and so is a living

being and a knower. … Of the knowledge of God, we say that it is eternal,

and of the knowledge of man we say that it comes to be. So contemplate

what is brought about by the act of placing this determination in relation

69
 with the intelligible reality, and contemplate as well as the connection

between intelligibles and concrete existents.247

If the key to the “how” of all this can fruitfully be associated with a single concept, it is

doubtless that of the “request” (ṭalab) made to the universal realities by the entities of the

individual existents. Furthermore, it will be helpful to note from the outset that, for both

Ibn ʿArabī and Qūnawī, the former are synonymous with the names of God and the latter

with the “possible things” (mumkināt).248

Having laid the above groundwork, let us turn now to a much-needed clarification

of technical terms. Given the centrality of the concept of an ʿayn to Ibn ʿArabī’s

thought—and even more so to that of Qūnawī—it will serve as a natural point of

departure. According to Chittick, “entity” is for Ibn ʿArabī synonymous with “thing”

(shayʾ), and “thing” is among the most indefinite of terms, since “it can be applied to

anything whatsoever, existent or nonexistent (though it is not normally applied to God as

Being).”249 As for the “fixed entities” (al-aʿyān al-thābitah), they are simply the things

“as they are known by God for all eternity” and “without reference to their existence in

the created world.”250 Elaborating further, Chittick explains that “the entity, which is

fixed in God’s knowledge, is not the thing’s ‘essence,’ but the very thing itself. There is

no difference between the entity in God’s knowledge and the entity in the world save that

with God the entity is fixed and nonexistent in relation to itself and others, but in the

247
Ibn ʿArabī, Ringstones, trans. Dagli, 9-10.
248
Although the identification of the universal realities with the divine names may seem imprecise here
given the content of the quoted passage, which seems to posit the contingency of the names “Living” and
“Knower” vis-à-vis the realities of Life and Knowledge (as is presumably the case for the descriptions
living and knowing said of angels and men), the correctness of this “equation” will be made apparent over
the course of the ensuing discussion.
249
Chittick, Sufi Path, 12.
250
William C. Chittick, In Search of the Lost Heart: Explorations in Islamic Thought, ed. Mohammed
Rustom, Atif Khalil, and Kazuyo Murata (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2012), 75.

70
world it is existent in relation to itself and others.”251 Such is the distinction between

thubūt and wujūd, or fixity and existence,252 the meaning of the latter in this context

being restricted to “entified” existence,253 which brings us to another key concept, that of

taʿayyun, or “entification.”

As Chittick notes, the term entity “refers to specificity, particularization, and

designation,” and the term entification, which in Arabic literally means to be or become

an ʿayn, refers to “the state of being specified and particularized.”254 Although Ibn ʿArabī

does not accord any special significance to the word taʿayyun, it comes to play an

important role in the writings of Qūnawī and as such merits detailed consideration.255

Dagli, who has perhaps written the best summary of Qūnawī’s metaphysics available in

English,256 calls attention to the two basic senses of taʿayyun that emerge relative to its

increasingly technical status post Ibn ʿArabī. If, as we saw via Chittick, the word ʿayn

denotes a specified or designated thing, then from the point of view of a human intellecter

such specificity can rightfully be thought of as the product of a process of

“identification.” That is to say, one’s conscious awareness of an entity is obtained

through its having been identified as a thing distinct from other things.257 But from the

perspective of transcendence, an entity becomes what it is through its being “entified”

against the background of its nondelimited principle, hence the concept of la-taʿayyun, or

251
William C. Chittick, The Self-Disclosure of God: Principles of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s Cosmology (Albany, NY:
State University of New York Press, 1998), 389n9.
252
For a discussion of this pair of concepts in Qūnawī, see Ṣadr al-Dīn Qūnawī, Tarjumih-yi nafaḥāt-i
ilāhīyah, Persian trans. Muḥammad Khvājavī (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Mawlá, 1996), 15.
253
For God is also referred to as Wujūd in Akbarian thought.
254
Chittick, Sufi Path, 83.
255
Ibid.
256
See Islamic Intellectual Culture, 69-91, as well as Todd’s exemplary Sufi Doctrine of Man, which
provides a comprehensive overview of Qūnawī’s thought approached from the perspective of his
“metaphysical anthropology.”
257
Dagli, Islamic Intellectual Culture, 61.

71
non-entification, employed by Qūnawī in discussing the oneness of the Divine Essence.

In other words, the ontological “descent” of things from the realm of divinity into the

realm of createdness is effected through their being entified,258 with the understanding,

however, that the entities are eternally fixed in God’s knowledge and as such, or from

this point of view, are uncreated (ghayr majʿūl)259 due to the impossibility of any thing’s

“new arrival” (ḥudūth) for God from a source outside of Himself.260 So just as taʿayyun

can be thought of as either entification or identification depending upon the vantage point

(“from above” or “from below,” respectively), so too can ʿayn be rendered as either entity

or identity.

Regarding the terms ruling (ḥukm) and trace (athar), they denote the same basic

phenomenon while not being wholly interchangeable.261 Whereas “ruling” presupposes a

ruler, or one exercising the ruling power exerted over and thus manifested through the

ruled entity, “trace” is not suggestive of intentionality (whether conceived of as

ultimately metaphorical or not), though both words harbor nuances that frustrate attempts

at generalization.262 For example, ḥukm can also be given as “ruling property,”

“determining property,” “determination,” etc. When thought of as characterizing a

property in either of these senses (i.e., ruling or determining), the power in question is

made to seem immanent to the thing possessing the property, but when thought in terms

258
Ibid.
259
Qūnawī discusses this point in dialogue with the philosophers—or proponents of “rational speculation”
(al-naẓar al-fikrī)—in the Hādīyah, which formed part of his correspondence with Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūṣī. See
Murāsalāt, 146. For the provenance of the various treatises comprising Qūnawī’s contribution to the
correspondence, see Todd, Sufi Doctrine, 35-39. For a study of the correspondence itself, see William C.
Chittick, “Mysticism versus Philosophy in Earlier Islamic History: The al-Ṭūsī, al-Qūnawī
Correspondence,” Religious Studies 17, no. 1 (March 1981): 87-104.
260
For the concept of ḥudūth in Ibn ʿArabī, see Chittick, Self-Disclosure, 34-36.
261
According to Chittick, “Ibn al-ʿArabī employs [the] two terms almost synonymously to refer to the
manner in which the divine names are reflected in the cosmos” (Sufi Path, 39).
262
See Chittick, Sufi Path, 39; Chittick, Self-Disclosure, xxxxviii; Dagli, introduction to Ringstones, xxi-
xxii, note 5.

72
of determination, the ḥukm is the thing itself. In this latter meaning, “the ‘effects’ [athar]

or ‘properties’ [ḥukm] of the divine names are the phenomena of the cosmos. In other

words, they are the creatures—the things, the entities, the forms—considered inasmuch

as they make the divine names manifest.”263 As for athar, it can also be rendered as

“influence,” which while less abstract than “effect” is more abstract than “trace.”

Moving forward now to our main concern, which we said was the relationship

between the names and the entities in Qūnawī’s works, we can first suggest that the

polysemy of the terms examined thus far has its root in the even greater semantic

“capaciousness” of the concepts ism (name) and ʿayn. As mentioned above, the

universals discussed in the opening chapter of the Fuṣūṣ correspond to the divine names,

which latter, moreover, can be thought of as functionally equivalent to the Forms of

Plato. As Chittick helpfully informs us, the translation of the phrase ʿayn thābitah as

“archetype” instead of fixed entity is misleading, since it “may suggest that what is being

discussed becomes the model for many individuals in the manner of a Platonic idea,

[whereas] what corresponds to the Platonic ideas in Ibn al-ʿArabī’s teachings is [in fact]

the divine names, while the immutable entities are the things themselves ‘before’ they are

given existence in the world.”264 Now, if we take there to be some appreciable difference

between a name and an entity, problems begin to arise, at least insofar as we attempt to

263
Chittick, Sufi Path, 39.
264
Chittick, Sufi Path, 84. In The Self-Disclosure of God, which was published after the quoted work,
Chittick settles upon the translation “fixed” in place of “immutable” for thābit, since Ibn ʿArabī employs
this term in diverse contexts, and “the term immutable is only appropriate in the case of the entities in
God’s knowledge,” the idea being that the reader of a translated text should ideally be “able to reconstruct,
on the basis of the translation, the important technical terms in the original” so as to gain an adequate sense
of the various ways in which the author himself uses a given word (Self-Disclosure, xxxviii-xxxix). Also,
regarding Plato’s philosophy and the question of its relation to Ibn ʿArabī’s thought, Salman Bashier, while
acknowledging Chittick’s position, claims that “the Muʿtazilites’ ‘nonexistent,’ Ibn al-ʿArabī’s fixed entity,
and Plato’s Form are three concepts that have similar meanings.” Salman H. Bashier, Ibn al-ʿArabī’s
Barzakh: The Concept of the Limit and the Relationship between God and the World (Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press, 2004), 97-98.

73
secure a quasi-systematic grasp of Akbarian metaphysics. For both Ibn ʿArabī and

Qūnawī, the names are relationships (nisab) and not existing things,265 this being the case

regardless of whether the latter are within or outside of the cosmos. 266 So both God and

everything other than God (i.e., the cosmos) exist, but the names through which God and

the cosmos are placed into apparent relation with one another do not. To gain a more

concrete sense of this idea, we can consider the name “the Guide” (al-hādī), which while

referring to God nonetheless relies upon a guided being (mahdī) for its meaning.

“Before” God creates there is only He, but once other things enter the picture we

inevitably experience God through the mediation of this or that name, since the Essence

is beyond all relationality. In other words, were it not for the names, nothing could ever

exist “apart from” God, who would remain unknown to any but Himself, and if it is only

in virtue of their manifold relationships to the Real that things can exist, the relationships

themselves cannot be subsumed under the category of that which they make possible (i.e.,

existent things).

According to Chittick, “every divine name signifies or denotes two realities: the

Divine Essence and a quality specific to itself that separates or ‘distinguishes’ it from

other divine names.”267 Regarding the latter denotation, or the specific meaning of a

name, it “can be called its ‘reality’ [ḥaqīqah] or ‘root’ [aṣl],” and it is this that

“determines the ‘effects’ [athar] or ‘properties’ [ḥukm] of the name within the

cosmos.”268 Furthermore, “in the present context [Ibn ʿArabī] often employs [the word

ḥaqīqah] more or less synonymously with name,” and “a reality is the Divine Essence

265
Chittick, Sufi Path, 34-35; Todd, Sufi Doctrine, 76.
266
Chittick, Sufi Path, 36.
267
Ibid.
268
Ibid., 34.

74
considered in respect of a particular relationship which It assumes with the creatures.”269

So if the names both possess realities and are themselves realities, what are we to make of

this? In spite of the frequent synonymy, “reality” is often broader in scope than “name,”

since, “strictly speaking, there are a limited number of revealed names that can be

attributed to God … , while everything and every event in the cosmos can be traced back

to a ‘reality’ prefigured by the Divine Essence.” 270 Lastly, regarding the “bedrock”

metaphysical status of the realities—and here we encounter the key to our inquiry271—

they are ultimately “reducible to the things and situations known by God, that is, the

objects of the divine knowledge (maʿlūmāt).”272 Now if, as we saw above, the fixed

entities also are synonymous with the objects of God’s knowledge, they are realities, and

if the names have realities, they “also” have entities, 273 and if the names are realities, they

are fixed entities “as well.”274 Indeed, as Qūnawī states in the Nuṣūs,275 “there is no third

thing other than the Real and the entities,”276 and if one were to object that the names or

relationships are nonexistent and thus ruled out ab initio as a candidate for such a “third

269
Ibid., 37.
270
Ibid., 38.
271
To be elaborated upon by way of Qūnawī.
272
Chittick, Sufi Path, 36. Chittick affirms this conceptual subsumption of the divine names and fixed
entities under the category of “realities” when he says that “the realities of the existent things of the cosmos
are the immutable entities and the divine names” (Sufi Path, 135).
273
See Chittick, Sufi Path, 389n15, where he discusses “the entities of the names.”
274
Regarding Chittick’s numerous avowals that the names are not aʿyān (see Sufi Path, 34-36, 47), the
possible confusion is due sometimes to his taking for granted that the reader will understand “entity” to
mean “existent entity” and other times to his giving only “aʿyān” in parentheses when the English reads
“existent entities.” In other words, in all such contexts, the aʿyān in question are mawjūdah and not
thābitah, though from another point of view (and perhaps this is the reason for the ambiguity), the names
can rightly be considered in contrast to the fixed entities insofar as the latter are taken in a more restricted
sense to refer to quiddities subordinate to those of the names. The notion of subordination (tabaʿīyah) will
be dealt with shortly via Qūnawī.
275
All translations from this text are Chittick’s. Translations from other works are my own.
276
Qūnawī, The Texts, 13. Interestingly, Ibn ʿArabī can be found referring to the reality of the Perfect Man
as “the Third Thing” (al-shayʾ al-thālith). As the “Supreme Barzakh” (al-barzakh al-aʿlá), this “Reality of
Realities” (ḥaqīqat al-ḥaqāʾiq) is “neither existent nor nonexistent” (Chittick, Sufi Path, 139).

75
thing,” we will remember that the fixed entities are not existent either,277 and they are

even mentioned by Qūnawī in connection with the “nonexistent known things” (maʿlūm

maʿdūm) of the Muʿtazilites.278

Before proceeding to our discussion of Qūnawī, we should examine one final

subject related to the names—that of courtesy (adab) with God—in order to justify fully

the above claim that the word ism in Ibn ʿArabī’s thought is remarkably polyvalent.

Although, as was already noted, there is a finite number of names that can be attributed to

God, namely those by which He has named Himself in the Quran and Sunnah of the

Prophet, from a more profound point of view, or in the last analysis, all things name God,

since there is only one Named (musammá). In the concise explanation of the shaykh

himself: “Every name by which something is named and which expresses a meaning is

God’s name. However, it should not be ascribed to Him—and this either because of the

Law, or because of courtesy toward God.”279 Also: “The names of God are infinite, since

they become known from that which is engendered from them, and that is infinite, even

though the names are reducible to finite roots which are the ‘Mothers of the Names’ or

the ‘Presences of the Names.’ In reality one single Reality accepts all these relationships

and attributions which are alluded to as the divine names.”280 If courtesy constitutes the

ultimate or most essential criterion against which the propriety of any given ascription is

277
“A thing known by God but not found in the created world is called ‘nonexistent’ (maʿdūm).” Chittick,
Sufi Path, 81. Cf. Qūnawī, Nafaḥāt, 15, where the shaykh explains that the fixed entity in its state of non-
manifestation “possesses a kind of wujūd relative to the knowledge the Real has of it and its entification
and distinction—in the expanse of His eternal [azalī] knowledge—from the other known things.”
278
Todd, Sufi Doctrine, 90. See Qūnawī, The Texts, 33-34 for the passage in its context. It is important to
note, however, that the shaykh does criticize the Muʿtazilite doctrine in the Hādīyah, where he explains that
the quiddities possess beginningless and endless “epistemic” wujūd in the knowledge of the Real, contra
the Muʿtazilah, who say they are “devoid of the two existences” (viz., epistemic [ʿilmī] and concrete
[ʿaynī]). Qūnawī, Murāsalāt, 145, 165. For Ibn ʿArabī on the Muʿtazilah, see pages 26-28 above.
279
Trans. Chittick, Sufi Path, 42.
280
Ibid.

76
to be judged, the relevant theological principle is that of “conditionality” (tawqīf),281

which refers most proximately to the necessity of refraining from infringing on God’s

right as sole Legislator.282 As for the “how” of ascriptions that seem to contravene the

Law, it involves the operation of a discernment through which the traces of the names are

returned to their abovementioned “finite roots.” The shaykh provides a very clear

example of what this looks like in practice as follows: “There are names that are ascribed

to the servant but not to the Divine Side, even though their meaning includes that. For

example, the ‘miser’ (al-bakhīl) is ascribed to the servant but not to the Real. But

miserliness is a kind of holding back, and one of His names is ‘He who holds back’ (al-

māniʿ). A person who is miserly has held back. This is true, but we ask for another way

to approach the question, so we say: Every miserliness is a holding back, but not every

holding back is a miserliness.”283

If we have failed to discuss Qūnawī in any depth so far, it is because the

foregoing background—provided almost entirely through the incredibly comprehensive

labors of Chittick—will enable us to address the technical details of Shaykh Ṣadr al-Dīn’s

expositions most relevant to the problem of universals forthwith, or in the absence of a

preliminary overview of his corpus of writings, the metaphysical substance of which I

take to be wholly consonant with the teachings of his master. Turning to the Nuṣūṣ, then,

which comprises a veritable summa of the shaykh’s thought,284 we can begin by

281
Ibid., 41-42. See also Chittick, Self-Disclosure, 29.
282
“This is the most complete knowledge of God—that we know Him through Himself, not through our
consideration, and not through our placing. … This is the meaning of the saying of the ulama that the Real
is named only by that by which He names Himself, whether in His Book or on the tongue of His messenger
in respect of the fact that he is His spokesman.” Trans. Chittick, Self-Disclosure, 196.
283
Chittick, Sufi Path, 42.
284
Todd, Sufi Doctrine, 40-41. According to Chittick, this text is “something of a commentary on the
Fuṣūṣ, though there is no direct reference to it except in the full title of the book, given in the concluding
sentence (and not found in all manuscripts)” (intro. to The Texts, 1). Also, Dagli notes the special attention

77
examining the concept of entification, which, as remarked above, first came to the fore as

a technical term with Qūnawī.285 If, as we have seen, entification means simply “to

become an ʿayn” or “to take on the characteristics of an ʿayn,”286 the first such entity—

“firstness” here denoting, of course, ontological and not temporal priority—is that of the

Real Himself, albeit with the qualification that He is, in His essential nondelimitation

(iṭlāq dhātī) and thus in truth, beyond all “entificational” considerations or standpoints

(iʿtibārāt). From this latter point of view, “it is not correct … for Him to be ruled by any

ruling, to be recognized by any description, or to have any relation whatsoever ascribed

to Him—whether oneness, the necessity of wujūd, originatingness [mabdaʾīyah], the

demand of existence-giving [ījād], the emergence of an influence [athar], or the

connection [taʿalluq] of His knowledge to Himself or to anything other than Himself.”287

But insofar as we either believe or know God to be one, an originator, an influencer, an

existence-giver, etc., all this is from the standpoint of “the intellected entifications,” the

first of which is the Essential Relation of Knowledge (al-nisbah al-ʿilmīyah al-dhātīyah)

through the consideration of “its being distinct [tamayyuz] from the Essence, but through

a relative [nisbī], not a true, distinction.”288 Qūnawī then goes on to explain—in a

synoptic passage worth quoting at length—that these relations (i.e., oneness, necessary

existence, originatingness, etc.) are intellected

especially in the respect that [1] His knowledge of Himself is through

Himself, and His very knowledge of Himself is a cause [sabab] of His

given to the Fuṣūṣ by Qūnawī such that “to many he was known as Ṣāḥib al-fuṣūṣ [‘master of the Fuṣūṣ’]”
(Islamic Intellectual Culture, 4).
285
See Qūnawī, The Texts, 5n1, in which Chittick comments on this point.
286
Ibid.
287
Ibid., 4-5.
288
Ibid., 5.

78
 knowledge of everything; [2] the “things” [ashyāʾ] consist of the

entifications of His universal [kullī] and differentiated [tafṣīlī]

intellections; [3] the “quiddities” [māhīyāt] consist of the intellections; and

[4] these intellections are configured [intishāʾ] one from another—not in

the sense that they arrive newly in the Real’s intellection (exalted is God

beyond what is improper for Him!); rather, the intellection of some is

posterior in level [mutaʾakhkhirat al-rutbah] to others. All are

beginningless [azalī] intellections in an identical manner. They are

intellected in knowledge, which becomes connected to them in accordance

with what their realities demand.289

Such, in outline, is the shaykh’s doctrine of universals, which we are now in a position to

unpack.

If God as He is in Himself is utterly beyond all delimitation such that “the

condition [sharṭ] of conceiving [taṣawwur] of the Real’s nondelimitation is that it be

intellected in the meaning of a negatory [salbī] description, not that it be a

nondelimitation whose opposite [ḍidd] is delimitation,”290 the opening up of the

possibility of thinking about God in terms of complementary opposites is effected

through the First Entification, which in the works of Akbarian authors has been called by

a very great many names.291 This Reality, which is the Knowledge God has of Himself,

comprises the “Isthmus of Isthmuses” (barzakh al-barāzikh)—the reality of the Perfect

289
Ibid., 5-6.
290
Ibid., 5.
291
E.g., “Breath of the All-Merciful” (nafas al-Raḥmān); “Mother of the Book” (umm al-kitāb); “Essential
Effusion” (al-fayḍ al-dhātī), which can be subdivided into the “Most Holy Effusion” (al-fayḍ al-aqdas) and
the “Holy Effusion” (al-fayḍ al-muqaddas), which in turn refer to the “exclusive” (aḥadīyah) and
“inclusive” (wāhidīyah) modalities of Oneness, respectively; “Unseen Theophany” (al-tajallī al-ghaybī);
“general wujūd” (al-wujūd al-ʿāmm); “Perfect Man” (al-insān al-kāmil); “Muḥammadan Reality” (al-
ḥaqīqat al-Muḥammadīyah), etc. See also note 273.

79
Man—through which the rulings of necessity and those of contingency become

distinguished from one another, and in which oneness and manyness mysteriously

coincide. In keeping with the pivotal nature of its function in Akbarian theōria, this

concept is addressed by the shaykh in the very first paragraph of his Fukūk, which makes

reference to the chapter from the Fuṣūṣ with which we began (entitled “Ringstone of the

Divine Wisdom in the Word of Adam”).

Regarding the specific association of this Adamic word with the Presence

of Divinity, it is due to [its] participation in the all-comprehensive Unity,

as the Presence of Divinity expressed by the name Allah contains the

specificities of all the names, their differentiated rulings, and their

relations branching out therefrom firstly and being terminative of the

ruling[s] lastly. And there is no intermediary between the two [i.e., the

“descending” and “ascending” modalities of the relations] and the Essence

from among the names, as is the case respecting that which is other than

[the names] relative to It—I mean relative to the Presence of Divinity—

[and] likewise man. From the perspective of his reality and his level there

is no intermediary between him and the Real, for the engendered existence

[kawn] of his reality consists in the all-comprehensive intermediation

between the rulings of necessity and the rulings of contingency, so to him

belongs the encompassment of the two sides.292

This meeting place is Mercy, which in spite of its being a “single, universal reality” is

nevertheless multiple, as affirmed by the Prophet himself in a hadith cited by Qūnawī in

292
Qūnawī, Fukūk, 185.

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Iʿjāz al-bayān: “To God belong a hundred mercies” (inna li’Llāhi miʾata raḥmatin),293 on

which the shaykh comments by explaining that the multiplicity ascribed to mercy pertains

to its levels and is an allusion to “the universal names roused [muḥarraḍ] to their

enumeration [iḥṣāʾ].”294

Regarding the meaning of this “rousing,” it can be thought of as referring to the

request (ṭalab) encountered above via the Fuṣūṣ, namely that of the entities of the

possible things to the universal realities, or divine names. Notwithstanding an important

subtlety to be addressed presently, the passive voice here (“roused”) is precise, since it is

the names receiving the request, which latter Qūnawī refers to variously as a “demand”

(muqtaḍá), an “asking” (suʾāl), and a “summoning” (istidʿāʾ).295 Now, if the entities

admitting of individual existence make requests to the names, which cannot exist in this

way (externally or “concretely” and thus individually),296 it is because the former, in spite

of their being utterly “poor” in and of themselves, or ontologically speaking, nevertheless

possess rulings in virtue of being known by God,297 and these rulings entail certain

things—an entailment personified using the language of requesting or demanding. On the

one hand, according to Ibn ʿArabī, “in the state of their nonexistence in the possible

293
Ṣadr al-Dīn Qūnawī, Iʿjāz al-bayān fī tafsīr umm al-qurʾān, ed. Jalāl al-Dīn al-Āshtiyānī (Qom: Būstān-i
Kitāb, 1949), 174. In the edition of the text published by ʿAbd al-Qādir Aḥmad ʿAṭā under the title al-
Tafsīr al-ṣūfī li’l-qurʾān (Cairo: Dār al-Kutub al-Ḥadīthah, 1969), this passage occurs on page 314. All
subsequent citations will refer to the Āshtiyānī edition. Also, regarding the authenticity (ṣiḥah) of the
hadith in question, in Bukhārī we find a similar narration that begins ‫ جعل هللا الرحمة في مائة جزء‬, and in
Muslim the one cited by the shaykh.
294
Qūnawī, Iʿjāz, 174.
295
In addition to the language of ṭalab, which most literally means seeking.
296
“Every concrete existent is dependent upon these universal realities [amr kullī], which cannot be
removed from the intellect, and which cannot possess concrete existence; such existence would cause them
to cease being intelligible.” Ibn ʿArabī, Ringstones, 9 (trans. modified). Dagli gives amr as “entity” here,
which I have changed to “reality” to preserve the distinction between the names and the entities, though
entity is a perfectly fine translation.
297
To conceive of God’s intellection as differentiated is to pluralize the one, true Object of knowledge such
that the entities become distinct from one another, and to be a specified thing in this way is to possess
“ruling properties.”

81
domain, the things seek their own wujūd. They are poor in essence toward God, who is

their Existence-Giver. They know no one else. Hence they seek, through their own

essential poverty, their wujūd from God.”298 And yet, on the other hand and according to

Qūnawī, “The greatest of obfuscations and veils is the pluralities that occur in the One

Wujūd by reason of the influences of the fixed entities upon It. It is imagined that the

entities have become manifest in wujūd and through wujūd, but only their influences have

become manifest in wujūd. They have not become manifest, nor will they ever become

manifest, because by essence they do not demand manifestation.”299 Speaking from this

latter point of view, Ibn ʿArabī exclaims, “This is one of the most marvelous things: that

the nonexistent (al-maʿdūm) displays effects!”300 If there is a discrepancy between the

vantage point from which things other than God appear to exist and that from which they

are known to be essentially nonexistent, it is because the former pertains to “one of the

levels and the relative tastings,” whereas the latter pertains to the “station of

perfection.”301 Qūnawī, explaining this distinction in terms of “the demand of [the]

realities” of the things known by God, says that it is twofold: “The first [sort of demand]

is that they [i.e., the realities] are intellected inasmuch as their manyness is effaced

[istihlāk] in the Oneness of the Real. This is the intellection of the differentiated

[mufaṣṣal] within the undifferentiated [mujmal],” and “the other sort is the intellection of

the rulings of oneness in one group [jumlah] after another such that each group is

intellected through the quiddities that it comprises. … This is the reverse of the

298
Trans. Chittick, Self-Disclosure, 48.
299
Qūnawī, The Texts, 39.
300
Trans. Chittick, Sufi Path, 50. In Sufi Path, Chittick translates athar as effect, and in Self-Disclosure as
trace. In his translation of the Nuṣūṣ, however, he renders it as “influence,” since “Qūnawī uses the word in
a more abstract manner [than does Ibn ʿArabī]” (Qūnawī, The Texts, 3).
301
Qūnawī, The Texts, 39.

82
effacement mentioned first, for … this consists of the effacement of oneness in

manyness.”302

So, the second type of demand entails an apparently existent multiplicity of

things, and we have seen that the coming-to-be of this manyness can be thought of in

terms of the request made by the possible things to the universal realities in accordance

with what the realities of the former demand or entail, but we must now also note the fact

(the abovementioned subtlety) that the universals themselves make requests, 303 “with the

tongue of their level,” to the name Allah, who obliges by effecting the manifestation of

“that which, in [each universal/name], is its perfection,” and furthermore that the “tongue

of the assembly of these names” is in turn “receptive of the differentiated relations and

the entities of their forms [ṣuwar].”304 There is thus a kind of reciprocal “chain of

requests” occurring among the objects of God’s knowledge, all of which—whether

names or fixed entities—constitute “realities” or “relations.”

If this latter conceptual equivalence occasions cognitive dissonance, since the idea

of a relation commonsensically presupposes two realities between which it obtains, the

reason lies in the pliability in Akbarian metaphysics of the word “name” as discussed

above. For on the one hand, the names comprise intelligible relations between God and

the existent things making up the cosmos, while on the other hand, all things other than

God are His names. That is to say, all existence is only or ultimately God’s existence. But

how does one get to the God/world/relations picture (our natural, earthbound starting

302
Ibid., 6.
303
To avoid terminology-related confusion, the foregoing can be summarized by saying that the two types
of “request” (that of the entities of the possible things to the names, and that of the manifold names to the
name Allah) are subsumable under the second type of “demand,” which results in “the effacement of
oneness in manyness.” The scare quotes around the words request and demand indicate the non-systematic
use—apropos of the distinctions under consideration—of the Arabic words in the texts themselves.
304
Qūnawī, Iʿjāz, 99.

83
point) from there “being” only God and the nonexistent relations comprising His

knowledge of Himself (the higher of the two perspectives)? 305 Making sense of this will

require examining the logic governing the chain or hierarchy (tartīb) of requests, or rather

what appears to us as such through the attempt to intellectually trace the hierarchy

observed in the cosmos back to its prefigurement in the Real. As a first step in this

direction, let us reproduce a passage from the Iʿjāz utilizing some of the language with

which we are now familiar.

The [thing] entified—through the unseen request [suʾāl] made by every

name to the Presence of Synthesis [jamʿ]—is that which the rulings of that

name require from the relations of the level of possibility joined to some

of the possible entities, which are the locus of manifestation of the ruling

of that name. And the [thing] entified—for every genus and class from the

genera of knowledge and its classes and species—from the names, which

are under the watchfulness of the Presence of Synthesis and Its rulings, is

that which the preparedness of that species and class and genus calls for

and is one of the relations of the Presence entified through the secret of

lordship in the level of that species or that existence-bound [kawnīyah]

reality summoning and determining it [i.e., the thing]. So with this

entification and summoning the sultanate of the names Allah and the All-

Merciful comes to overwhelm the existence-bound reality through the

permeation [nufūdh] of the ruling in it.306

305
One is reminded here of the Aristotelian distinction between that which is more evident in itself and less
evident to us and that which is more evident to us and less evident in itself. See, for example, the opening
passage of the Physics (184a17).
306
Qūnawī, Iʿjāz, 100.

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Notwithstanding the density of the language here, we can discern the lineaments of the

cosmogonic process sketched above. The names make a request to the First Entification

and in so doing invoke the possible things to which their realities are principially related

in accordance with the requisites of their rulings. In other words, the names, which are

seeking the manifestation of their perfections, call forth from the “level of possibility” the

specific entities through which this manifestation can be accomplished. For example, the

name Creator will summon the things admitting of being created, and the name Guide

will summon the things admitting of being guided. Furthermore, and more broadly, any

class of things whatsoever is characterized by its own, particular preparedness (istiʿdād)

to receive the effusion of wujūd upon it, and it is this degree of preparedness that

constitutes what both Ibn ʿArabī and Qūnawī refer to as a “level.” On the one hand, the

levels “consist of universal entifications comprised in the one, Essential requisite, which

is knowledge,” and “every level is a supraformal locus for a group of rulings of necessity

and contingency.”307 A level—here said to be universal in nature—is that within which

the various members of a given class become entified, and this according to the rulings of

both the levels and their inhabitants, for the levels themselves “have fixed entities in the

courtyard of knowledge and intellection.”308 From this point of view, the levels comprise

“conditions of possibility” for the manifestation of the things that occupy them.

Moreover, like the names, the levels are intelligible relations and thus nonexistent. To

illustrate this point Ibn ʿArabī gives the examples of servanthood and masterhood, both of

which are levels through which servants and masters become related to one another;

307
Qūnawī, The Texts, 26.
308
Ibid.

85
servanthood itself is not an existent thing.309 On the other hand, there are as many levels

as there are existents, since “every form in the cosmos has a level not possessed by any

other.”310 In the first sense, the levels are finite in number due to their universality, which

they possess in virtue of the fact that they “branch off from the Essential names, from the

Mothers of the Divine Names, and from the ensuing names that follow.”311 As we have

seen, courtesy requires circumspection in ascribing names to God. But in the second

sense, the levels are infinite. So far we have been “looking up” at the Real from the point

of view of the names and fixed entities, but Qūnawī also “looks down” at the latter from

the point of view of God Himself, whose creative Act, in keeping with the language of

the Quran, is synonymous with His Speech.

Know that, regarding the Act of the Real—if by itself it is taken to

mean the act following closely upon It [i.e., the Real], there being nothing

intervening between Its Essence and the object [of Its Act] save the

intelligible relations through whose entification the Essential

Unboundedness [iṭlāq] is distinguished from that which is entified by It—

the name of that act is speech, and the [name of the thing made] manifest

through it is a word, and the intermediation between the True Actor and

that which exists is an instrument of wujūd or a form qua locus of

manifestation in accordance with [the nature of] its entity. [So] the

object’s level, which comprises the substratum [maḥall] of the act’s

cadence [īqāʿ], summons it [i.e., the instrument-form], and the abode of

the permeation of the [act’s] potency [iqtidār] is an utterance, because the

309
Chittick, Sufi Path, 50-51.
310
Ibid., 48.
311
Qūnawī, The Texts, 26.

86
divine influence in every influenced thing is only emanated and entified in

accordance with the level of the object [of the act], and likewise [for] the

instrument and the locus of manifestation [maẓhar], which is the form of

the consideration from whose perspective the existent thing comes to be.

If you have understood this, know that the divine, principial letters

consist of the Real’s intellections of things from the perspective of their

existing in His Oneness, and the likeness of that is the human, soulish [act

of] conception [taṣawwur] prior to the entifications of their forms by

means of his [i.e., man’s] knowledge [and] in his mind, and [the things so

conceived] are the disengaged conceptions devoid of supraformal, mental,

and sensory composition [tarkīb], and [the conceptions] are the foremost

keys indicated by [the phrase] “the keys of the unseen,” and [the keys] are

the Essential Names and the Mothers of the principial Tasks [shuʾūn],

which are the quiddities from among their [i.e., the names’] entailments

[lawāzim] and the outcomes of the intellection of their determinations

[taʿrīfāt].

The second intellection is the intellection of the quiddities in the

courtyard of Essential Knowledge from the perspective of relational

distinction, and it is the Presence of Impression [irtisām], to which the

great verifiers and divinizing philosopher-sages allude by [saying that] the

things are impressed in the self of the Real. The difference between the

philosopher and the verifier in this matter is that, for the verifier, the

impression is the description of knowledge from the point of view of its

87
 relational distinction from the Essence and not the description of the

Essence either in Itself or from the point of view according to which Its

knowledge is Its entity. So the intellection of the quiddity in isolation from

its entailments in the Presence of Knowledge is an unseen, supraformal

letter, and its intellection along with its entailments prior to the

outspreading of effused wujūd upon it and its entailments is a hidden,

supraformal word. [Furthermore,] from the standpoint of the intellection

of the precedence [taqaddum] of the conjoining [ittiṣāl] of wujūd to it

prior to its entailments, it is an existent letter, and from the standpoint of

the outspreading of wujūd upon both it and its universal entailments, it is

an existent word.312

God speaks things into existence, and He does so through the seeming mediation of the

levels, which serve in the capacity of substrata for the melodic rhythms of the Act, which

becomes pluralized through the levels’ summoning of the forms through which the divine

Word can be heard by beings other than the One who pronounces it from all eternity, for

cadence presupposes temporality. Regarding the various ways of conceptualizing the

things known by God, it can be done (i) from the point of view of their effacement and

thus non-multiplicity in the oneness of the Real; (ii) from that of their nonmanifest

distinction in God’s knowledge, in which case they can be considered either in isolation

from one another (supraformal letter) or in groups (supraformal word), this latter

possibility referring to the intrinsic association of certain “disengaged meanings”313 with

312
Qūnawī, Fukūk, 188-89. For a discussion of the symbolism of language in Qūnawī, see Anthony F.
Shaker, Thinking in the Language of Reality: Ṣadr al-Dīn Qūnawī (1207-74 CE) and the Mystical
Philosophy of Reason (Self-published, Xlibris, 2015), chs. 10-12.
313
“Meaning” here being equivalent to “known thing” (this point will be discussed further below).

88
others by way of entailment; or (iii) from the point of view of their extra-divine existence,

in which case they can again be considered either individually—and thus in isolation

from the various states necessitated by their rulings and entailments—or in the

combinations required for their arced movements, both descending and ascending,

through the expanses of the cosmos (existent letter and existent word, respectively).

Returning now to the “logic” we set out to elucidate, Qūnawī explains it in terms

of relations of subordination (tabaʿīyah) among the quiddities, some of which are more

comprehensive than others. In the Iʿjāz, the shaykh discuss the bifurcation of the concept

of subordination—vis-à-vis the names and realities—into the categories of the

subordinating (matbūʿ, lit. “followed”) and the subordinate (tābiʿ, lit. “following”). He

then provides examples for each, namely “sun,” “light,” and “knowledge” for

subordinating, and “red,” “living,” and “forgiving” for subordinate. So “knowledge” is

subordinating and “knowing” subordinate, and likewise for “redness” and “red,”

respectively.314 Looking back now on our discussion of the concept of an entity, these

examples are especially opportune, since they unambiguously underscore the inadequacy

of conceiving of the fixed entities as archetypes, as even the category of matbūʿ

transcends the distinction between universality and particularity.315 Indeed Qūnawī tells

us as much in Miftāḥ al-ghayb, where he explicitly states that the coupling of wujūd with

the entities results in both universal and particular modalities thereof.

The origin of the divine influence for the existentiation [ījād] of the

cosmos, which [former] is the wellspring of the rest of the influences, is

the inducement [bāʿith] of divine love whose ruling is manifest in the

314
Qūnawī, Iʿjāz, 97.
315
The shaykh also discusses the subject of subordination in the Mufṣiḥah, which, like the Hādīyah, was
included in his exchange with Ṭūṣī. See Murāsalāt, 37.

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 wujūd coupled with the entities of the possible things … , and that in

accordance with the level of divinity and its relations entified in the level

of possibility—through the entities of the engendered things—ramifiedly

[farʿan] and principially [aṣlan], in the manner of a part [juzʾan] and that of

a whole [kullan].316

Having thus elaborated on the second of the two most fundamental types of demand (i.e.,

that entailing the effacement of oneness in manyness), it is worth remembering the first

type, which refers to the fact that “in the Presence of the names, there is neither

particularization [tajziʾah] nor division [inqisām],”317 for what appears as many is in

reality one.

Know that originatingness is [ascribed] to the Real from the perspective of

an entification that is all-comprehensive and embraces all of the

entifications; that is to say, an entification that constitutes the lower

[pāyīn] level of the Real’s nondelimitation and from which [all] relative-

considerational [iʿtibārī-i nisbī] and numerical-ontological [vujūdī-i

ʿadadī] multiplicity is negated. There are rulings and descriptions that are

effaced [mustahlak] and hidden in the unity of the Real, and they do not

become manifest save from the perspective of the subjectively posited

[iʿtibārī] entifications branching out from the all-comprehensive

316
Ṣadr al-Dīn Qūnawī, Miftāḥ al-ghayb wa-sharḥuhu miṣbāḥ al-uns, ed. Muḥammad Khvājavī (Tehran:
Intishārāt-i Mawlá, 1997), 17. Notwithstanding the difference in meaning between the words whole (kull)
and universal (kullī), the two are nevertheless related, since, metaphysically speaking, the irreducibility of a
whole to its parts is contingent upon the ontological disjunction between the orders of the universal and the
particular. In other words, a given whole is a particular, and its primacy vis-à-vis its parts means nothing
without some conception of relative universality. Cf. Dagli (Islamic Intellectual Culture, 136), who
provides justification for translating—in a passage from Dāwūd al-Qayṣarī—the terms juzʾan and kullan as
“particularly” and “universally.”
317
Qūnawī, Iʿjāz, 97.

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 entification, and from the perspective of the externally existent [vujūdī]

entifications that are occurrences of the one wujūd from among the

contingent quiddities able and prepared [to receive] it.318

Before proceeding to a summary account of Qūnawī’s doctrine of universals, one final

and especially crucial concept requires explication, namely that of the mutual

“permeation” (nufūdh) and “dyeing” (inṣibāgh) of the realities’ rulings—of and by each

other—since it is here that Islamic metaphysics makes one of its most profound

contributions to the perennial philosophical problem of the relation between the one and

the many.

[The Real] opens the gate of the universal, foremost adjacency

[muḥādhāh] in consideration of the infinitely good, existence-giving

general Mercy [al-raḥmah al-ʿāmmah al-ījādīyah al-raḥmānīyah], which

encompasses everything through the absoluteness of the ruling of

receptivity on the part of the created possibilities and their standing in the

double-faced station [maqām al-murāʾī] for [the sake of] the manifestation

of wujūd. And from a certain perspective, when they—in the manifestation

of the influences of the names and their entifications—exist in a

conditioned mode [sharṭan], they are recompensed through the self-

disclosure [tajallī] of wujūd through which their entity is made manifest.

And the ruling of one permeates that of the other, so that also is the key to

the secret of the Decree [al-qaḍāʾ] and the destinies [al-aqdār].319

318
Qūnawī, Nafaḥāt, 122.
319
Qūnawī, Iʿjāz, 136.

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If the idea of “permeation” seems strangely nebulous or imprecise for a metaphysician as

discriminating as Qūnawī, it is due to its pertaining to that mysterious nexus between

unity and multiplicity wherein abides holy mystery. From the one side, the rulings of the

divine names necessitate the manifestation of their perfections, but for which they would

not possess these perfections in the “first place,” while from the other side, the rulings of

the entities admitting of existentiation demand their serving as conditions sine qua non

for the very manifestation in question. So the perfections of the names are seemingly

contingent upon the realities of the existents, which from this point of view—and in spite

of their essential poverty—“rule” (ḥākim) over that which the names name (viz., wujūd).

But does not the meaning of perfection in matters of divinity preclude contingency? One

would rightly say yes. Therefore, the realities of the existents cannot be other than the

perfections of the names—an identity expressed through the concept of the mutual

permeation or dyeing of the rulings of each category (i.e., “divine name” and “fixed

entity”), both of which are now revealed to be heuristic “constructs” entified320 in

accordance with the ruling of courtesy, which itself comprises a reality or disengaged

meaning known by God, and whose reality is in turn entified in keeping with the rulings

of the realities of servanthood, beauty, objectivity, etc. For one is genuinely courteous

(and not just perfunctorily so) through an objective understanding of one’s own essential

servanthood, and this realization on the part of a being possessing free will—when

followed up by existential conformity to that which the truth of the realization

demands—constitutes a secondary or “occasional” cause for the manifestation in a

320
Entification here referring in the broad sense to a thing’s becoming a thing (taking on the characteristics
of an ʿayn), whether in the manner of a nonmanifest “root” or manifest “branch.” Dagli prefers the
translation “identification” when taʿayyun refers in this way simply to a thing’s being distinguished from
other things while not necessarily existing in the cosmos (Islamic Intellectual Culture, 61).

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delimited mode of the perfection belonging to the name “the Beautiful” (al-jamīl). Said

simply, a servant possessing clear sight recognizes the rightness of courtesy, and freely

acting upon this recognition is beautiful. Such examples could be multiplied indefinitely.

The rarefied nature of such distinctions notwithstanding, one can say that the

concept of a name is a reality or object of divine knowledge just as much as the name

itself, and the same is true for that of a fixed entity or any other intelligible meaning. God

knows the realities of the names, and He knows the reality of the concept of any given

name through which we venture to pass beyond the concept to the reality. The Named is

not ruled by any ruling, nor is He ruled even by Himself, since in the oneness of God—a

oneness not intellected as the contrary of manyness—all relational distinction has

vanished. Indeed it shows itself never to have been at all, for “in the view of the realizers

[muḥaqqiqūn], there is nothing but the Real.”321 But insofar as things other than God

come to be, as they very evidently do, such emergence of multiplicity out of the depths of

divine unity occurs through the Real’s influencing Himself in the guise of the things He

knows. In the words of the shaykh, “the One Wujūd becomes manifest by reason of these

pluralities, first by being influenced, and second by influencing these pluralized things

through returning their influences to them.”322 Such, then, is the meaning of “the secret of

the Decree and the destinies” mentioned above.323 Things only ever become what they

already are.

When someone tastes this locus of witnessing, having already known that

the fixed entities are the realities of the existents; that they are not made

[ghayr majʿūl]; that the reality of the Real is incomparable with making

321
Qūnawī, The Texts, 34.
322
Ibid., 21.
323
Todd discusses this subject in his monograph. See Sufi Doctrine, 93n52.

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 [jaʿl] and influencing; and that there is no third thing other than the Real

and the entities; then he will necessarily know—if indeed he has what we

have mentioned—that nothing influences anything, that the things

influence themselves, and that what are named influencing “causes” [ʿilal]

and “occasions” [asbāb] are conditions for the manifestation of things in

themselves. It is not that one reality influences another reality. So also he

should know the situation in “assistance” [madad]. There is nothing that

assists anything else. Rather, assistance reaches the manifest side of

something from its nonmanifest side, and this is made manifest by the

luminous self-disclosure of wujūd [al-tajallī al-nūrī al-wujūdī]. But

making manifest does not take place by influencing the reality of what is

made manifest. So, the relations influence each other, in the sense that

some of them are the cause of the configuration of the ruling of others and

their manifestation in the reality that is their source.324

It is here that Akbarian thought is at its most provocative, since, from the point of view

under consideration, one could say that each and every thing in existence is its own lord,

and if all things together have a Lord, He only returns to them what they give to Him

from all time.325 Remarking on “the entifications of His wujūd” in the Iʿjāz, the shaykh

tells us rather frankly that “from the perspective of their being multiple they are His states

[aḥwāl], and from the perspective of their being one they are His entity.”326 So the

324
Qūnawī, The Texts, 13.
325
If each fixed entity is a lord or “god”—the existent entity being its “vassal” (marbūb), or subject to its
“divinity” (maʾlūh)—it is a peculiarly nonexistent one in accordance with the first testimony of faith in
Islam (“there is no god but God”). For a discussion of this point in Ibn ʿArabī as well as translation of a
relevant passage from the Futūḥāt, see Chittick, Self-Disclosure, 9-10.
326
Qūnawī, Iʿjāz, 243.

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entifications are the states of the Real, and on the basis of the Nuṣūṣ, it can further be said

that they are synonymous with the rulings of manifestation (aḥkām al-ẓuhūr),327 the

“recipients” (qawābil), and the forms of the Tasks (ṣuwar al-shuʾūn),328 which latter (i.e.,

the Tasks and not their forms) are the realities of the engendered things (ḥaqāʾiq al-

kāʾināt).329 In short, the fixed modality of an entity is not other than the entity of God,

since the Knower is not other than the objects of His Knowledge.

Regarding the concept of a recipient, the first of those who receive is the Real,

who is “a receptacle for the ruling that He is entified [qābilun li’l-ḥukmi ʿalayhi bi-annahu

mutaʿayyan],” though “inasmuch as He is He, He is also not entified in the state in which

it is ruled that He is entified, because of the incapacity [quṣūr] of the perception of those

who only perceive Him in a locus of manifestation.”330 So the entified thing both is and is

not God, and from the “is not” point of view, there is a hierarchy of recipients, the highest

level of which,

in receiving what reaches them from the effusion [fayḍ] and gifts of the

Real, is the vision of the Real’s face in the conditions and causes named

“the intermediaries” [wasāʾit] and “the chain of [cosmic] order” [silsilat

al-tartīb]. The taker knows and witnesses that the causative intermediaries

are nothing but the entifications of the Real in the divine and engendered

[kawnī] levels in all the diversity of their kinds. In other words, there is

nothing between the received effusion of the Real and the recipient except

327
The term ruling can refer either to a “determining property” predicated of a fixed entity or to an existent
entity itself. It is the latter meaning that is intended here.
328
Qūnawī, The Texts, 16.
329
Ibid., 13.
330
Ibid., 23-24. For the Arabic, see Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī, Al-Nuṣūṣ fī taḥqīq al-ṭawr al-makhṣūṣ, ed.
Ibrāhīm Ibrāhīm Muḥammad Yāsīn (Alexandria: Munshaʾat al-Maʿārif, 2003), 68.

95
 the very entification of the effusion through the delimited receptivity.

There is no inclusion of a ruling of contingency [ḥukm imkānī] that would

be demanded and made necessary by the influence of the effusion’s

passing over the levels of the intermediaries and by its becoming colored

[inṣibāgh] by the rulings of their contingencies.331

In the standard Sufi terminology, Qūnawī is describing the state of “subsistence” (baqāʾ),

in which manyness, while perceived, does not in any way obstruct the vision of God. It is

amazing that this concept—if understood to some basic degree of adequacy (insofar as

this is possible for an “outside observer,” or one lacking the experience)—solves both the

problem of universals and, by inverse analogy, that of God’s knowledge of particulars in

one stroke. To start from the point of view of the “subsisting” (bāqī) saint, it is as though

the focal point of his gaze is fixed immovably upon the face of God while the irradiations

thereof (i.e., “the conditions and causes named ‘the intermediaries’”) suffuse his

peripheral vision.332 His knowledge therefore comprehends both the universal and the

particular and in doing so transcends the distinction between them. In looking upon

anything at all, the realized knower sees through the mirage of its states to the oasis of its

“specific face” (wajh khāṣṣ), which is the term used by both Ibn ʿArabī and Qūnawī333 to

331
Qūnawī, The Texts, 16. Note the word inṣibāgh, which is the “dyeing” discussed above (Chittick renders
it “coloring” here).
332
“In the Mandukya Upanishad, this final state of consciousness is defined as ‘neither subjective nor
objective experience’ (sometimes translated as: ‘neither consciousness nor unconsciousness’), which does
not mean that it is neither subjective nor objective but, on the contrary, that it is both subjective and
objective together—or objectively subjective and subjectively objective. In other words, it is both
awareness and non-awareness, in the sense that deeper awareness beholds Reality inwardly in its non-
differentiated substance while at the same time beholding it outwardly in differentiated modes,
understanding both relationships—impersonally and personally—simultaneously.” Mark Perry, The
Mystery of Individuality: Grandeur and Delusion of the Human Condition (Bloomington, IN: World
Wisdom, 2012), 264-65.
333
See, for example, Fukūk, 264-65, where Qūnawī explains how the various natures of the narrations of
the Prophet affirm this doctrine, since sometimes he narrated on the authority of Gabriel, sometimes
through a chain of angelic intermediaries, and sometimes from God directly.

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denote the point at which a thing “meets” the Real in its innermost, self-annihilative

center. Through this perfection of vision, the verifier (muḥaqqiq) attains to a true

knowledge of the knowable thing, for he perceives his own nothingness in the mirror of

its entity, which “comprises” a void occupied wholly by the Real. Its nothingness is his

nothingness, and thus the gap is closed, “focally” speaking, while paradoxically

remaining open peripherally speaking.

Know that the highest degree of knowledge of a thing—whatever thing it

may be, in relation to whatever knower it be, and whether the thing known

be one or more things—is gained only through unification [ittiḥād] with

the known thing and the knower’s being no different [mughāyarah] from

it; for, what causes ignorance of something and prevents perfect

perception of it is nothing other than the domination of the ruling through

which the two are distinct. This is a supraformal distance [buʿd maʿnawī].

Distance, in whatever respect, prevents perfect perception of the distant

thing.334

As for the how of all this, the state of perfection is arrived at when the Essential self-

disclosure is no longer obscured by any “phenomenological fogginess” resulting from the

seemingly335 dissonant interrelations of the rulings of contingency belonging to the

entities of the levels in which all “relative tastings” occur. If, like all things, the verifier

has a fixed entity, and an entity’s reception of wujūd depends upon the presence of

certain conditions (shurūṭ)—the precise nature of the temporally unfolding configurations

of which is determined from eternity through the Decree and in accordance with the

334
Qūnawī, The Texts, 20.
335
What appears as imperfect or unharmonious from the point of view of any given delimited and thus
partial perception is in reality perfect.

97
reality of the thing—it is as though this reception is, in the case of the one destined for

perfect sainthood, made complete through the auspicious alignment of the relevant

conditions in a manner analogous to what occurs among the stars. In the Hādīyah—here

from the particular point of view of the “unification of the verifier with the First Intellect

[al-ʿaql al-awwal]” and thus in accordance with the symbolism of the Prophet’s “night

journey” (al-isrāʾ wa’l-miʿrāj)336—Qūnawī explains the process in question as follows.

The Real—may He be exalted—when His providence [ʿināyah] takes

precedence in the right [ḥaqq] of one of his servants whom He has chosen,

and He wills that He disclose to him the realities of things in respect of

their entification in His knowledge, He draws [jadhaba] him to Himself

through a spiritual ascent [miʿrāj rūḥānī]. Then [the servant] witnesses the

state of his soul’s casting-off [insilākh] of his body and his progressively

rising up through the levels of the intellects and souls, traversing [mārran]

the celestial [ʿulwī] worlds, one degree after another, uniting with every

soul and intellect, [with this] casting-off (of a number [jumlah] of his

qualities, particular states, and rulings of contingency [characterizing] his

manyness [kathrah]) binding him to the station of every soul and intellect,

group [jumlah] after group in accordance with that station, and in like

manner until his soul unites with the Universal Soul. Thus it becomes like

It, and that which had exposed it to the state of spiritual abasement

336
Our discussion of subsistence took place “on the ground” and so proceeded analogically from the
starting point of everyday, ocular vision. In the following passage, the shaykh moves upward along the
vertical axis of existence (symbolism of height) instead of “laterally” along the horizontal axis (symbolism
of depth). The distinction is that between “piercing” more and more deeply into the nature of things (the
firāsah or perspicacity of the believer, as in the well-known hadith) versus ascending ever higher through
the degrees of the cosmic hierarchy. To reach the summit is to reach the center, and vice versa. Keeping
this in mind can help forestall confusion in what follows.

98
 [tanazzul maʿnawī] for [the sake of] becoming clothed by elemental

composition withdraws from it. Then, if his ascent is brought to

completion [kamula], he unites with the First Intellect, and if his

unification with It is perfected [kamula], he is purified of the rest of the

rulings of manyness and contingency, which are the entailments of his

quiddity from the point of view of its relational possibilities, excepting one

ruling, which is the intelligibility of his being contingent in himself, as is

the case with the First Intellect. And that is not completed save through the

ascendancy of the rulings of necessity over the rulings of contingency.337

The journey from ensnarement in particularity to liberation through the universalization

of one’s mode of consciousness can therefore be expressed in purely metaphysical terms

as a kind of “pole reversal” between the rulings of contingency and those of necessity, the

former being gradually sloughed off over the course of the ascent. To bring this idea to

bear on the problem of universals, we can reproduce the following passage from the

Hādīyah—occurring two pages after the above excerpt—at length.

[The true man] [al-insān al-ḥaqīqī] intellects the quiddities in respect of

their beginningless entifications after the manner of the Real’s intellection

of them—through beginningless intellection from the perspective of the

actual [fiʿlī], unitary, Essential Relation of Knowledge, and not in

accordance with their relational possibilities [imkānāt] in virtue of their

collectively participating in the meaning of possibility [itself]—and not

after the manner of their entification in the intellection of those veiled by

shackled intellects. For to this type of perception belong various

337
Qūnawī, Murāsalāt, 146.

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deficiencies, all of which proceed from the fact that it is a particular [juzʾī]

perception [obtained] through a particular faculty, namely that of

reflective thought [fikr], and [so] through a passive, restricted [kind of]

knowledge. Thus it perceives only that which corresponds to it, and it is

for this reason that intellects fettered by thoughts—due to the

characteristic quality [khāṣṣīyah] of their bindings [taqayyudāt], the

finitude of their receptivities, and the domination of the rulings of their

manyness and contingency [imkān]—are incapable of perceiving the

universals in their principial levels. So it [i.e., reflective thought] is only

able to perceive them subsequent to the observation of particulars and the

extraction [istinzāʿ] [therefrom] of a meaning inclusive of them. Such,

with [this faculty], is the universal—a thing [merely] supposed by means

of ratiocination [mafrūḍ fī al-taʿaqqul al-dhihnī] and without realization in

external reality [lā taḥaqquq lahu fi’l-khārij]. But there is a consideration

to be had here, namely that what realized witnessing [shuhūd muḥaqqaq]

acquired—through the ascent and casting-off of the rulings of multiplicity

and contingency as well as the soul’s becoming free of the specificities of

its particular faculties of perception [madārik juzʾīyah], as was

mentioned—was that its perception of the universal realities comes to

precede the perception of particulars. So, first it perceives the universal

realities, like general existence [al-wujūd al-ʿāmm] and other of the

universal and general matters, then it perceives the particulars of every

universal reality along with what it requires by way of subordination and

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 entailment in virtue of its entification in the Presence of the Real from the

perspective of the Relation of Knowledge and in the essences [dhawāt] of

the disengaged intellects and universals souls.338

For Qūnawī, Peripatetic philosophy has its rights, since it is basically reliable within its

own proper bounds, but again the finger is not the moon. To mistake the concept for the

reality is to unwittingly sequester oneself within the limits of one’s own individuality.

Although ratiocination can play a role in the verifier’s ascent, the concepts with which

rational speculation deals are always understood instrumentally as merely orienting

means contributing to the reintegration of the mental faculty into its properly intellectual

principle, whereas the “veiled,” by reifying the universal, ironically “reinscribe” it back

into the category of the particular, for a multiplicity of universal concepts taken as ends in

themselves is just that—an agglomeration of discrete, albeit distilled, things.

Returning now, having considered the problem from the side of the human

knower, to the question of God’s knowledge of particulars, we can simply say that, in

virtue of His knowledge of the realities of all things, He knows all of their states as well,

since a reality encompasses by way of synthesis and thus with perfect simplicity all of its

rulings and entailments.339 It is only from the point of view of a restricted intellection that

the term ruling or entailment has any meaning at all. The baqāʾ of the Real is His gazing

upon the specific faces of all things, which are only His Face. And if things are only ever

seen against a background, it is this ever-perishing and thus essentially nonexistent

338
Ibid., 148. For an alternate translation of this passage, see Todd, Sufi Doctrine, 200-201. Todd’s
translation, while faithful to the meaning of the text, is a bit freer than the one offered here.
339
In the Asʾilah of his correspondence with Ṭūṣī (see Qūnawī, Murāsalāt, 67), the shaykh describes the
two basic types of quiddity—one prior to the reception of wujūd and one subsequent to it. Then, further
down the page, he asserts that, “from the side of the one, shared wujūd, and not from the side of the causes
and entailments,” God knows everything both universally and particularly (ʿalá ’l-naḥw al-kullī wa’l-
tafṣīlī).

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periphery of divine Seeing called “cosmos”—the mirror of non-being—in which He

loves to be known, without beginning and without end.

To summarize, then, Qūnawī’s doctrine of universals, one can affirm firstly and

above all that the Real is beyond all relational considerations and therefore transcends the

categories of the universal and the particular. But insofar as things other than Him are

perceived to exist, such existence is made possible and thence thinkable through the most

primary universal reality and concept, respectively—namely wujūd itself. This is, from a

certain perspective at least, the ʿayn of the Real—the First Entification or Perfect Man,

who is God’s “intended entity” (ʿayn maqṣūdah).340 As the reality of realities, he has

knowledge of all things through his comprising their very root, and as the isthmus of

isthmuses, he is the “central point of the circle of existence” 341 and therefore

encompasses the “two sides” through his mediating between the rulings of necessity and

contingency. His knowledge, which is God’s knowledge of Himself, is undifferentiated

or “non-dual” while nevertheless synthetically comprehending all multiplicity.342 From

the latter point of view, the objects of divine knowledge are arranged hierarchically in

accordance with their degrees of comprehensiveness relative to each other. Thus, the

divine name “the Living” is more comprehensive than the name “the Knowing,” since

life is logically—and, a fortiori, ontologically—prior to knowledge. Similarly, “the

Knowing” is more comprehensive than “the Compassionate,” since a thing must be

known before it can be an object of compassion. If there is a distinction between a name

340
See Qūnawī, The Texts, 19, 27-28.
341
Ibid., 2, 28-29.
342
Comprehend, that is, in the sense of embrace or encompass. “And with Him are the keys of the Unseen.
None knows them but He; and He knows what is on land and sea; no leaf falls but that He knows it, nor any
seed in the dark recesses of the earth, nor anything moist or dry, but that it is in a clear Book” (Quran 6:59).

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and an attribute (ṣifah), it is that the former is adjectival and the latter nounal in form.343

So “knowing” is a name and “knowledge” is an attribute. Furthermore, an attribute can

either be applied to God or it can denote a relation between God and the cosmos.344 So

God possesses the attribute of knowledge,345 but knowledge is also a relation that the

name Knowing establishes between God and the world by requesting—from the name

Allah—the manifestation or making-apparent of its perfection in accordance with the

rulings and entailments of its reality, which demands the existence of knowable things,

hence the “analytic” differentiation (tafṣīl) of the integral reality of Knowledge into the

ternary relation between knower, known, and the knowledge by and in which the two

poles—subject and object—are united.346 Thus what is in itself a nonexistent relation

(nisbah ʿadamīyah) exerts influences in virtue of which the nisbah comes to appear under

the guise of an ʿayn or ḥaqīqah.347 Indeed, one cannot think of God as having

knowledge—as a knower who knows things—until “after” the relation (i.e., knowledge)

has hidden itself between what “now” appear as its terms (i.e., knower and known) as a

consequence of its having been refracted through the prism of the First Entification,

which is the pivot point of all inversely analogical relationships (in this case that between

what one takes to be the eminently real universal reality of Knowledge and knowledge

343
In Arabic grammar, the names conceived in this way would be ism fāʿil (active participle) and the
attributes maṣdar (verbal noun).
344
See Chittick, Self-Disclosure, xvii.
345
In a manner of speaking, or theological controversy notwithstanding.
346
“The most-perfectness [of the Essential Perfection] is only made manifest through the name-related
perfection [al-kamāl al-asmāʾī], and the names are only entified through the entities by way of knowledge
and wujūd [ʿilman wa-wujūdan]. Were it not for the entities, there would be no level- and name-related
perfection, just as, were it not for the Real, the perfection of wujūd [al-kamāl al-wujūdī] would not be
obtained for the entities.” Qūnawī, Iʿjāz, 340.
347
“Regarding the names, their ruling is not made manifest save through their loci of manifestation, which,
if not considered from the perspective of their wujūd, are also nonexistent relations. There is no
consideration [iʿtibār] of the relations but by wujūd, so the ruling of the names and the entities, which are
the loci of manifestation, is subordinate to wujūd, and this from the secret of the generality [ʿumūm] of the
ruling of the name ‘the All-Merciful’ [al-Raḥmān]” (ibid., 174).

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qua nonexistent relation). For, as Aristotle long ago pointed out, that which is most

evident in itself is least evident to us,348 and this on account of its essential

nondelimitation vis-à-vis the delimiting mode of operation of the human intellect, at least

as regards the merely “reflective” (fikrī) capacity thereof.

All realities are intelligible, “disengaged” meanings (maʿānī mujarradah), hence

the labyrinthine relations of subordination and entailment from the point of view of

which a limited intelligence can set out to contemplate the Knowledge of the Real.349 One

might therefore say that things like individual substances and causes known by God are

independent or subordinating quiddities or meanings; things like particular qualities and

effects are dependent or subordinate quiddities; and things like the concepts of priority

and posteriority, substantiality and accidentality, and independence and dependence per

se (i.e., secondary intelligibles, whether “philosophical” [falsafī] or logical [manṭiqī])350

are quiddities attached via entailment to the reality of subordination itself, which

coincides with that of the Perfect Man without whom the “spaceless space” between

subordinating and subordinate would never open up, leaving God unknown and the world

inexistent.

As for the guiding question and overarching aim of the present chapter, let us

conclude by epitomizing the conceptual distinction between the divine names and the

fixed entities. Both are realities, or objects of divine knowledge. From one point of view,

the names are what allow the entities to leave the state of fixity and enter into the state of

348
See note 305.
349
See Dagli, Islamic Intellectual Culture, 88.
350
For this distinction, see Muḥammad Taqī Miṣbāḥ Yazdī, Āmūzish-i falsafih, vol. 1, lesson 15 (dars-i
pānzdahum), §§ 1-2. This book is available for public viewing online, both in the original Persian and in a
good English translation by ʿAẓīm Sarvdalīr and Muhammad Legenhausen. For the former, see the website
of the author himself (mesbahyazdi.ir/node/1850). For the latter: www.shiavault.com/books/philosophical-
instructions. Both were accessed September 29th, 2018. See also note 444 below.

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wujūd; they are the nonexistent relations between existent things and the Real. From

another point of view, the entities only appear to exist and thus are themselves

nonexistent relations. So both the names and the entities belong in the last analysis to the

same class, namely, that of relations.351 Moreover, the names, like the levels, have fixed

entities. Sometimes Qūnawī equates the names with the levels,352 and other times he

speaks of the names as possessing levels within which their realities become manifest in

accordance with their rulings, which interpenetrate with those of the levels themselves as

well as those of the entities corresponding to, encompassed by, and entified within them.

But in either case, the entities of the names can be conceived of as both one and many. If

the names are viewed as denoting the Essence, they all share the same entity, but if they

denote their own specific natures through which they are distinguished from one another,

then their respective entities are what account for such mutual distinction, precisely.

Also, we saw above that, from the most profound point of view and in the end, all things

name the Real. Therefore, every entity, whether in the state of fixity or wujūd, is a name

of God. Lastly, each fixed entity rules over its own externally existent modality, insofar

as it has one,353 and so nothing influences anything else, all seemingly causal influences

and intermediaries being more properly viewed as conditions of the entity’s manifestation

the precise nature of whose (i.e., the conditions’) spatiotemporal elaboration and

arrangement is determined by the reality of the thing itself. Things only influence

themselves, but the rulings of some demand that they do so through their being lorded

351
Relations, one might say, between God and Himself, or between Being and nothingness.
352
See, for example, Iʿjāz, 50.
353
Some, like those of the divine names and other universal realities, do not admit of concrete existence.
Certain things are always and forever only nonexistent relations, whereas others can be conceived of either
as externally existent entities (with fixed entities “in the courtyard of knowledge”) or as nonexistent
relations, depending on the point of view.

105
over by that which is other than themselves—One to whom they are subordinate, and

whom they call upon by the most beautiful Names.

106
 CHAPTER 4

SYNTHESIZING THE ILLUMINATIONIST AND AKBARIAN DOCTRINES

Writing in the early years of the Ottoman empire, the scholar and gnostic

philosopher Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Ḥamzah al-Fanārī, known as Mullā Fanārī (d.

834/1431), composed what would come to be a widely studied commentary on Qūnawī’s

Miftāḥ al-ghayb, which latter is among the masterpieces of Islamic metaphysics. In the

former work, entitled Miṣbāḥ al-uns bayn al-maʿqūl wa’l-mashhūd (The Lantern of

Intimacy between the Intelligible and the Witnessed),354 Fanārī situates Qūnawī’s doctrine

of universals in a wider intellectual framework with the aid of the more or less

standardized philosophical lexicon that had, by the time of his living and working,

crystallized out of the formative period of Islamic speculative-intellectual discourse.

Although Ṣadr al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Shīrāzī, known as Mullā Ṣadrā (d. ca. 1050/1640),

is often credited with producing what is arguably the most definitive synthesis of

Avicennan, Illuminationist, and Akbarian ideas—albeit through the lens of a Twelver

Shīʿī spiritual practice—Ṣadrā’s harmonizing efforts were impressively prefigured by

Fanārī, the vast breadth of whose learning enabled him to authoritatively demonstrate, in

great philosophical detail, the fundamental consonance between the thought of al-Shaykh

al-Maqtūl and that of Shaykh Ṣadr al-Dīn.

354
For a consolidation and discussion of the relevant scholarly sources commenting on the history and
significance of the Miṣbāḥ, see Alan Godlas, “Molla Fanārī and the Miṣbāḥ al-Uns: The Commentator and
the Perfect Man,” in Uluslararası Molla Fenârî Sempozyumu (2009 Bursa)—Bildiriler / International
Symposium on Molla Fanārī (2009 Bursa)—Proceedings, ed. Tevfik Yücedoğru, Orhan Ş. Koloğlu, U.
Murat Kılavuz, and Kadir Gömbeyaz (Bursa: Bursa Büyükşehir Belediyesi Yayınları, 2010), 35-37. This
article is available online at http://www.ibnarabisociety.org/articlespdf/molla_fanari_by_godlas.pdf
(accessed February 21, 2019).

107
 Although several studies of the work of Fanārī have been published in English,

notably those made available in connection with the symposium on Fanārī held in Bursa

in 2009,355 as well as an article by Yuki Nakanishi,356 who has analyzed Fanārī’s

responses to objections to the extramental existence of the natural universal (al-kullī al-

ṭabīʿī) in particular, a broader examination of this philosopher’s approach to universals

remains to be undertaken. Similarly, although a sizeable body of scholarship now exists

dealing with nearly all the principal dimensions of Ṣadrā’s thought, its explicitly Platonic

aspects—namely those pertaining directly to the problem of universals—have received

only limited attention,357 the most noteworthy exception being Muhammad Faruque’s

fine study of natural universals in Ṣadrā.358

The present chapter will therefore (i) briefly restate the teachings of both

Suhrawardī and Qūnawī on the ontological and epistemological statuses of universals; (ii)

examine relevant sections of Fanārī’s Miṣbāḥ and Ṣadrā’s al-Asfār al-arbaʿah and

glosses (taʿlīqāt) on Quṭb al-Dīn Shīrāzī’s commentary on Suhrawardī’s Ḥikmat al-

ishrāq; and (iii) detail the ways in which these commentaries bring together the

Illuminationist and Akbarian doctrines, providing the basis for a synthetic formulation

thereof with special attention paid to the concepts of the natural universal and the

Platonic Form (al-mithāl al-Aflāṭūnī). For both Fanārī and Ṣadrā, the natural universal—
355
See above note.
356
Yuki Nakanishi, “Post-Avicennian Controversy over the Problem of Universals: Saʿdaddīn at-Taftāzānī
(d. 1389/90) and Šamsaddīn al-Fanārī (d. 1431) on the Reality of Existence,” in Islamic Philosophy from
the 12th to the 14th Century, 357-74.
357
After offering some insightful comments on the relationship between the divine names and Platonic
Forms in Ṣadrā’s writings, Mohammed Rustom cautions that, “before making any concrete judgments, a
more thorough investigation into Ṣadrā’s understanding of the Platonic Forms would have to be
undertaken.” He then directs the reader to a prior note containing “some preliminary leads in this
direction.” We will reference the works he mentions in due course. See Mohammed Rustom, The Triumph
of Mercy: Philosophy and Scripture in Mullā Ṣadrā (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press,
2012), 190n40.
358
Muhammad U. Faruque, “Mullā Ṣadrā on the Problem of Natural Universals,” Arabic Sciences and
Philosophy 27 (2017): 269-302.

108
while not existent in itself (mawjūd bi-dhātihi), unlike the Platonic Form, which, in a

qualified sense, is—nevertheless binds together all the modalities of a given nature

(ṭabīʿah), thus affirming the rational coherence of the cosmos without thereby obstructing

the opening to the suprarational witnessing in which all intellectual strivings find their

genuinely decisive fulfillment.

* * *

According to Suhrawardī, the universal qua concept predicable of many exists

only in the mind, but the universal qua Platonic Form or “lord of the species” does exist

extramentally in the “world of light.”359 While the first type constitutes a predicate

(maḥmūl) capable of being “said of” or shared by more than one logical subject

(mawḍūʿ), the second does not admit of such sharing in virtue of its self-aware possession

of a “unique essence” (lahu dhāt mutakhaṣṣaṣah wa-huwa ʿālim bi-dhātihi).360 In other

words, the Forms are only called universals metaphorically.361 One can encounter a man

and say, “he is a man,” but one cannot say that a particular man is himself the Form of

Man, or the lord of the species man. So Suhrawardī agrees with Avicenna that the

universals dealt with in logic are ontologically dependent on the minds that think them,

but he criticizes the Peripatetics for their anti-Platonism.362 Given this distinction between

the mental universal and lordly “universal,” how do the two relate? How is it that the

latter can be called a universal in any sense at all? Although some scholars have

concluded that the Illuminationist doctrine negates the role of the Form in cognition and

thus its relevance to epistemology, a holistic approach to interpreting Suhrawardī’s

359
Suhrawardī, Ḥikmat al-ishrāq, 108.
360
Ibid., 109.
361
Ibid.
362
Ibid., 65-66.

109
philosophy arguably precludes this hermeneutic outcome. While it is true that, for Shaykh

al-Ishrāq, particular existents are bound to their species lords—which are realities, not

concepts—through a non-predicative relation of emanation (nisbat al-fayḍ) a priori,

nothing prevents their being classed under their universals—which are concepts, not

realities—through structures of correspondence whose non-arbitrary nature is guaranteed

by the emanative relation a posteriori. In other words, were it not for the Forms, there

would be no basis for determining the correctness or incorrectness of any statement—an

idea that Suhrawardī explicitly rejects, since, for him, the very word “proposition”

(qaḍīyah) denotes “an expression whose speaker may be told that he speaks the truth or

falsehood.”363

In Qūnawī’s teaching, similarly, the universal obtained through “abstraction”

(istinzāʿ) from sensory particulars is “without realization in external reality.”364 Although

Shaykh Ṣadr al-Dīn admits the competence, at least in principle, of speculative intellect

when kept within its proper bounds,365 he censures those whose overestimation of

discursive reasoning results in an impoverished vision of reality. In contrast to the

reflective thinkers, who remain hemmed in by their own knowledge, which consists of

intelligibles grasped mentally and thus from within the limits of one’s individuality, the

realizers (muḥaqqiqūn) “do not witness a given universal until they become universal

themselves.”366 Qūnawī therefore distinguishes, like Suhrawardī, between universal

concepts and universal realities, knowledge of which latter entails spiritual

transformation. Regarding the exact nature of these realities, they are nonexistent in

363
Ibid., 12.
364
Qūnawī, Murāsalāt, 148.
365
Ibid., 165-66.
366
Ibid., 171.

110
themselves while nevertheless possessing “epistemic existence” (al-wujūd al-ʿilmī) in the

beginningless and endless intellection of the Real,367 and although some additionally

possess “concrete existence” (al-wujūd al-ʿaynī) as loci for the manifestation of God’s

names, no reality, whether manifested or not, ever leaves His knowledge. Such “fixity”

(thubūt) thus comprises “a kind of existence” (nuwʿī az vujūd)368 relative to the divine

intellection (al-taʿaqqul al-ilāhī)369—in which knowledge, knower, and known are

indistinguishably one370—at the same time that it gets juxtaposed with the state of wujūd

when the latter is taken to denote what is other than God—a category encompassing all

spiritual, imaginal, and corporeal existents. As for the Platonic Forms, the clear

implication of Qūnawī’s doctrine is that they exist, but since the shaykh does not

reference Plato’s terminology directly, we can turn now to Fanārī, who does, for the sake

of working toward the desired synthesis of the Illuminationist and Akbarian theorizations

of the universal.

Mullā Fanārī

If Mullā Fanārī, the first Ottoman Shaykh al-Islam, is rightly regarded as a figure

of no small importance to the intellectual history of the Muslim ummah, this status is

attributable not only to his role in shaping the state-sanctioned madrasah curriculum in

the early years of the Ottoman empire, but also and arguably above all to his role in the

transmission, interpretation, and assimilation into the mainstream of the “doctrinal

367
Ibid., 145.
368
Qūnawī, Nafaḥāt, 15. See note 277.
369
Qūnawī, Murāsalāt, 145.
370
Ibid. In the words spoken by a “divine apparition” to Ibn ʿArabī at the Kaʿbah, as recorded in the
Futūḥāt: “I am the knowledge (al-ʿilm), the known (al-maʿlūm), and the knower (al-ʿālim)—I am al-
ḥikmah, al-muḥkam, and al-ḥakīm.” Quoted in Franz Rosenthal, “Ibn ʿArabī between ‘Philosophy’ and
‘Mysticism’: ‘Ṣūfism and Philosophy are neighbors and visit each other,’” Oriens 31 (1988): 13.

111
Sufism” (al-taṣawwuf al-ʿilmī)371 originated by Ibn ʿArabī.372 In Turkish and Persian

circles of learning in particular,373 Qūnawī’s Miftāḥ al-ghayb has been widely studied in

conjunction with Fanārī’s commentary thereon, and, as Chittick has noted, the two works

were considered so advanced that they were taught subsequent to al-Shaykh al-Akbar’s

Fuṣūṣ, at least in Iranian madrasahs.374

As discussed in chapter 2, the concept of a natural universal is intriguing for its

conceptual affinity to the Platonic Form. Although to my knowledge neither Suhrawardī

nor Qūnawī used the Avicennan term al-kullī al-ṭabīʿī in their discussions of quiddity, by

Fanārī’s time the technical vocabulary employed in philosophical discourse had largely

become standardized due to the prevalence of texts that distilled an ever increasingly

more vast oral and written tradition into sufficiently terminologically broad,

pedagogically effective compendia.375 It is thus that, in “naturalizing” Qūnawī and by

extension the Akbarīyah vis-à-vis the still inchoate ʿUthmānīyah, Fanārī had recourse to a

lexicon especially suited to the task of situating the arcane concepts of the shaykh’s

“theoretical gnosis” in a wider, grounding intellectual framework. As Faruque observes,

by the time of Mīr Sayyid Sharīf al-Jurjānī (d. 816/1413), who was born shortly before

Fanārī, “the Avicennian considerations of quiddity were taken up by the philosophers and

371
For the meaning of this and other related terms, see Seyyed Hossein Nasr, “Theoretical Gnosis and
Doctrinal Sufism and Their Significance Today,” Transcendent Philosophy 1 (2005): 1-36.
372
See, for example, Francis Robinson, “Ottomans-Safavids-Mughals: Shared Knowledge and Connective
Systems,” Journal of Islamic Studies 8, no. 2 (1997): 166.
373
Nasr, “Theoretical Gnosis,” 5.
374
William C. Chittick, “The Last Will and Testament of Ibn ‘Arabi’s Foremost Disciple and Some Notes
on Its Author,” Sophia Perennis 4, no. 1 (1978): 48.
375
Like, for example, Athīr al-Dīn al-Abharī’s (d. between 660/1263 and 663/1265) Kitāb al-hidāyah,
which set forth “a complete cycle of ḥikmat, i.e. logic, natural philosophy, and metaphysics” and “soon
became one of the basic books of instruction in the madrasahs.” Nasr, Islamic Intellectual Tradition,
295n10.

112
theologians alike and were systematized with well-defined terms.”376 And according to

Izutsu, “In the philosophic writings of the post-Mongol periods … we find «nature»

being discussed as a problem of universals, or more precisely, as the problems of what is

called «natural universal» (kullî ṭabîʿî).”377 Since both Suhrawardī and Qūnawī affirm the

relative nonexistence of the nature qua itself (the former as subsumable under the

category of the mental universal and the latter as a reality in God’s knowledge—thus in

different ways, although Qūnawī agrees with Suhrawardī on the purely mental nature of

all mere concepts), it will be instructive to see how Fanārī harmonizes the Illuminationist

and Akbarian doctrines with reference to the language of the natural universal and its

subtypes or iʿtibārāt.

In a section378 dealing with the manner in which principial realities can be said to

play a causal role in the manifestation of particular existents—just over a hundred pages

into Khvājavī’s edition of the text—Mullā Fanārī first raises the question of the

extramental existence of the natural universal. Before doing so, he enumerates five

metaphysical principles pertaining to the relationship between outwardness or

manifestation (ẓuhūr) and inwardness or hiddenness (buṭūn) as follows:

(i) The existents are the forms [ṣuwar] of the self-disclosures of the divine

names and the loci of manifestation of God’s principial tasks and His

epistemic relations, and the form of a thing is that by which it appears and

376
Faruque, “Mullā Ṣadrā,” 289.
377
Toshihiko Izutsu, “The Problem of Quiddity and Natural Universal in Islamic Metaphysics,” in Études
Philosophiques, ed. Osman Amine (Cairo: GEBO, 1974), 131-32.
378
“The fourth section [faṣl]: On [how] anything that [functions as] a cause in the manifestation of the
existence of a [given] manyness and a [given] many—that is, a quantity [of something] and [something]
numerable—is, insofar as it [functions as] a cause in it [i.e., the manifestation], not [itself] entified by any
of its manifestations, nor is it discerned by an observer in any of its observed particulars.” Muḥammad ibn
Ḥamzah al-Fanārī, Miṣbāḥ al-uns bayn al-maʿqūl wa’l-mashhūd, in Miftāḥ al-ghayb wa-sharḥuhu miṣbāḥ
al-uns, ed. Muḥammad Khvājavī (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Mawlá, 1995), 101.

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is entified; (ii) Each thing has an exterior that is its form and its attestation

[shahādah] and an interior that is its spirit, meaning, and absence [ghayb].

The relation of all the forms is to the name the Outward, and the relation

of all the realities and meanings is to the name the Inward; (iii) Each

existent is—from the perspective of its meaning and its being-spiritual

[rūḥānīyah], or the two together—prior to its form in both level and

nobility. If the form also possesses [a certain] precedence from the

perspective of knowledge, [this pertains to] the state of ascent, not the

state of descent, and [it is so] from the perspective of the human, particular

spirits’ [al-arwāḥ al-juzʾīyah al-insānīyah] being entified subsequent to

and in accordance with the constitutional engendering [al-inshāʾ al-

mizājī]; (iv) The world is circumscribed by [maḥṣūr bayna] the two levels

of the Command and the creation, and the world of creation is a

ramification [farʿ] of and subordinate to the world of the Command; and

(v) The divine knowledge, which is light, possesses two relations: an

outward relation whose elaborations are the forms of wujūd (and sensible

light is the ruling of this relation), and an inward relation that is the

meaning of light and the spirit of manifest wujūd that makes plain the

meanings and absent, universal realities, up to the knowledge [maʿrifah]

of their entity, their knowledge, their oneness, and their root, which is the

Real, and the relations of His identity, which are His principial names and

the tasks of the Essence, and thusly [does this relation make plain the

knowledge of] all the realities associated with the Real, or the world, or

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 those shared by both through two different relations. So the forms of the

existents are the relations of light’s exterior, and the intelligibles are the

entifications of His inward relations.379

Next Fanārī explains the correct way to understand cosmogonic causality vis-à-vis

the concept of entification in accordance with the doctrine indicated in the section

heading, which denied that the proximate cause of any given manifested entification380 is

itself entified or made manifest through its externally existent particulars. If the Real is

the ultimate “influencer” (muʾthir) in the process whereby the universal realities cause

the spiritual entifications (al-taʿayyunāt al-rūḥānīyah) and the latter, in their turn, cause

the corporeal entifications—and this through “the volitive, unitary turning-toward” (al-

tawajjuh al-aḥadī al-irādī) and Essential self-disclosure “entified in accordance with the

entifications of the receptacles”—then “every unitary, universal self-disclosure is a cause

in the manifestation of its particulars, and, from the perspective of its being a cause that is

general as regards [the category of] relation, it is neither entified through one of its

determinate manifestations nor discerned in the world of sense-experience by an observer

in one of its observed particulars. Such is the case with general existence [al-wujūd al-

ʿāmm], which, from the perspective of the relation of its generality to the whole, does not

demand discrete [makhṣūṣ] entification among the entifications of the relations of its

manifestation.”381

But the qualification “from the perspective of its being a cause” is significant,

since the universal self-disclosure is entified through its own essence, or “self-entified”

379
Fanārī, Miṣbāḥ, 101-2.
380
The qualification “manifested” refers to the dual meaning of the term entification, which can denote
either a nonmanifest object of divine knowledge or a manifest existent.
381
Fanārī, Miṣbāḥ, 103.

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(yutaʿayyan bi-dhātihi),382 as well as “in some of the levels of its interior with its

universality, like the intellects and universal souls.”383 And regarding the Real Himself,

“He is not entified in the purity of His Essence through an entification able to be

encompassed by the intellect or indicated by the estimative faculty [al-wahm] (again, He

is entified through the levels of the relations of His interior, as in the level of the First

Entification), because His entification … is not through an extraneous cause.”384 Moving

forward, Fanārī argues that were the cause to demand or stand in need of (iqtaḍá) discrete

entification, “that entification would be indispensable for it [lazimahu],” and the

relationship of mutual entailment would generate a contradiction, “because the

consideration [iʿtibār] of participation [sharikah] contradicts the consideration of the

nonexistence thereof.”385 In other words, Mullā Fanārī is alluding to the perennial

problem plaguing any articulation of a genuinely Platonic metaphysics, namely that of

the exact nature of the relationship between an immutable, transcendent cause and its

fleeting, creaturely effect. If a cause is truly “separate” (to use the term familiar to us

from Plato’s dialogues386), how can it produce an effect to which it would presumably

have to stand in some relation? And if the cause is “participated-in,”387 how to maintain

382
For a discussion of this issue in Jāmī, who was born when Fanārī was in his sixties and knew the Miṣbāḥ
well, see ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, The Precious Pearl (Al-Durrah al-fākhirah), trans. Nicholas Heer
(Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1979), 40.
383
Fanārī, Miṣbāḥ, 103.
384
Ibid., 103-4.
385
Ibid., 104. He gives the example of humanity, saying that the reality of man does not stand in need of
the entification of Zayd or ʿUmar. If it did, the integrity of the concept of participation would be violated,
since the cause, in relying upon and thus becoming an effect of its own effect, would be participated in not
qua cause, but qua effect, which is absurd.
386
See, for example, Parmenides 132d-133a.
387
The Arabic terms for participation, also translatable as “sharing” (sharikah or ishtirāk), pose problems
for translation, since a literal rendering like, for example, “its participation” (ishtirākuhu) really means “its
being participated in.” Keeping this in mind will help prevent confusion in what follows, since the second
translation, while more accurate, can be cumbersome.

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the claim of its separation? Anticipating an objection on the basis of the aporia,388 Fanārī

writes, “Let it not be said that what is negated in the abovementioned principle [i.e., that

according to which the contradiction holds true] is that the cause is entified from the

perspective of its participation [ishtirāk], and not that it stands in need of the entification

[of its effects], or that it be gathered together with the consideration of the

entification.”389 That is, what is false is the claim that the cause is entified qua cause, not

that it is entified insofar as it is participated in. Therefore, “if the self-disclosure is

entified from this perspective, the entification is its form [ṣūrah] from the perspective of

its [i.e., the self-disclosure’s] participation. And every form belonging to the thing is its

effect and stands in need of it according to the rule of realization [qāʿidah al-taḥqīq].”390

Arriving now at the question of the ontological status of the natural universal,391

Fanārī sets out to refute the idea that it is a secondary intelligible (min al-maʿqūlāt al-

thānīyah).392 Regarding this latter status, “This is the ruling of the universal reality from

the perspective of its universality and the generality of its thingness”; it is not the ruling

of the nondelimited reality, which is “taken as nonconditioned [bi-lā sharṭ shayʾ], not as

388
The problem is not the supposition of mutual entailment per se, but rather mutual entailment taken
together with the asymmetry demanded by the very nature of causation, which requires that a cause be both
logically and ontologically (if not temporally) prior to its effect.
389
Fanārī, Miṣbāḥ, 104.
390
Ibid.
391
Subsequent to completing the following portion of the chapter I discovered the work of Nakanishi,
whose abovementioned article covers much of the same ground (see n. 356). The closing paragraph does,
however, incorrectly state that Fanārī “does not distinguish what at-Taftāzānī calls ‘quiddity conditioned by
nothing’ (i.e. the universal) and ‘quiddity unconditioned by anything’” before tentatively surmising that
“his interpretation of the history of philosophy, which is based on his understanding of such related terms
… may be far from objective” (“Post-Avicennian Controversy,” 369). In addition to providing an account
of Fanārī’s position respecting the various iʿtibārāt of quiddity, I will attempt in what follows to situate his
treatment of the natural universal in the wider context of his elucidation of Akbarian and Illuminationist
epistemological, ontological, and cosmological doctrines. Specifically, I will discuss his conception of the
natural universal in relation to Platonic Forms, the “suspended” forms of the ishrāqīyūn, and the fixed
entities of the Akbarīyah, in addition, of course, to the manner in which all these concepts relate to the
everyday world of sensory experience.
392
Fanārī, Miṣbāḥ, 105.

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negatively conditioned [bi-sharṭ lā shayʾ].”393 And “the difference between the

nondelimited reality and the reality [considered] from the perspective of its

nondelimitation is clear, since the first is from the perspective that it is neither universal

nor particular, neither one nor many, neither cause nor caused. Thus it is said that the

nonexistence of the consideration is not [i.e., does not entail] the consideration of the

nonexistence.”394 In other words, the extramental nonexistence of a given iʿtibār in and

of itself (that is, a given mental existent or general meaning) does not entail the

nonexistence of the reality of which it is the iʿtibār. In this case, the mental mode of the

reality’s existence, which is perforce universal insofar as it is predicable of many, is just

that—it exists only in the mind and not in the external world. But the same reality shorn

of the “logical genus” of universality (to use Avicenna’s term), does exist extramentally,

and this “on account of the wujūd of one of its two subdivisions [qism], namely the

393
Ibid.
394
Ibid. The phrase “from the perspective of its nondelimitation” points up the fact that, although one can
distinguish terminologically between the nondelimited quiddity, which is neither universal nor particular,
and the quiddity qua universal concept, on the mental level they paradoxically coincide on the very basis of
one’s making any such distinctions to begin with, since to even think about the former is to turn it into the
latter despite their belonging, ontologically speaking, to two different modes of existence, namely the
extramental and mental, respectively. In other words, the epistemological distinction is rooted in the
ontological distinction through an asymmetrical relation productive of intellectual impasses that prove
insurmountable insofar as one insists, whether consciously or not, on restricting knowledge to what is
discursively accessible. In reality, to be is to be conscious, and all consciousness is knowledge, which
latter—understandable conventions to the contrary notwithstanding—cannot in the end be confined to its
ratiocinative modalities, and this whether “upwardly” or “downwardly” speaking, for even subhuman
existents participate in the reality of Knowledge. The universal, to be truly universal—and thus beyond the
distinction between universality and particularity not just conceptually but in reality—cannot be a concept,
which is a mental particular. One can think the “universal,” but it mysteriously ceases—at the precise
moment of its being thought—to be such, hence the inescapable ultimatum: do I press on, positing concepts
of concepts, and concepts of concepts of concepts (i.e., the supposed fruits of conceptualizing the fact that
one is engaging in conceptualization), or do I stop grasping after reality in this way? To what degree is it
productive, both intellectually and spiritually, to draw distinctions? The answer of course depends on the
individual, since what is helpful to one person can hurt another. For our purposes here, at least, one can say
that there is (i) the nature in itself; (ii) our thinking about the nature, to which the concept of a nature in
itself corresponds; (iii) our being aware of the fact that we think about natures in themselves—and thus
particularize them mentally through a de facto, if not de jure, ascription of universality to them—while still
acknowledging that they exist outside our minds, to which all the concept of a natural universal
corresponds; and (iv) our being aware that concepts do not themselves exist outside the mind, to which the
concept of a mental universal corresponds.

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‘mixed’ [al-makhlūṭ], or the conditioned [bi-sharṭ shayʾ] quiddity.”395 Having attributed

this position to “most of the sages [ḥukamāʾ],” Fanārī notes that “[Afḍal al-Dīn] al-

Khunjī, [Sirāj al-Dīn] al-Urmawī, [Najm al-Dīn] al-Kātibī, and others besides have

frankly asserted [ṣarraḥa] the existence of the shared quiddity [al-māhīyah al-

mushtarakah, lit. “participated-in”], whereas al-Muḥaqqiq [Naṣīr al-Dīn] al-Ṭūsī has

declined to accept it,” the latter stating that “the meaning of its being shared between [its

individuals] is only its being predicated of them, and predication is an intellectual matter,

so the shared [quiddity] does not possess wujūd save in the intellect.”396 Rejoining on

behalf of the realizers and citing Qūnawī’s Miftāḥ and Nuṣūṣ, Fanārī affirms that the

nondelimited reality is externally existent in its visible locus of manifestation. He

explains:

The entification is accidental to [ʿāriḍ ʿalá] the reality. If the entification

were not also existent in the external world, nothing would be, since the

affair oscillates [dāʾir] between the entification and the being-real

[ḥaqīqīyah]. … The wujūd of the accidental [thing] without [the wujūd of]

that of which it is an accident [maʿrūḍ] is unthinkable, and this

accidentality—on the supposition of the external existence of the

entification—is an externally occurrent accidentality, and not accidental in

395
Fanārī, Miṣbāḥ, 105. Later in the work, in the course of refuting those who deny that the reality of the
Real (ḥaqīqat al-Ḥaqq) is nondelimited wujūd, Fanārī makes the striking claim that “the Real is the wujūd
of the natural universal in concreto for [the sake of] the wujūd of one its two subdivisions, namely the
‘mixed’ [quiddity]” (Miṣbāḥ, 160). I have translated the particle li- here as “for the sake of” (the
“benefactive” lām) instead of “on account of” (the lām al-taʿlīl), since in the first quotation Fanārī is
speaking from perspective of everyday experience and thus seems to reverse the way of understanding the
relationship between cause and effect advocated for earlier in the text, whereas in the second quotation he
“zooms out” to take account of the fact that the wujūd of the natural universal in no way depends on that of
the mixed quiddity, since it is the wujūd of the Real Himself. With that said, the Arabic is repeated word for
word in the later section, which fact makes it likely that Fanārī intended the grammatical function of the
lām to be understood equivalently in each case, in spite of the broader conceptual context.
396
Fanārī, Miṣbāḥ, 105.

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 the intellectual sense, even though it be fittingly said that its existence is

[also] in the intellect. We say that the realization [taḥaqquq] of the

universal reality both one and variegated in its individuals is qualified at

times by this entification and at other times by that entification, and this

[fact] does not necessitate its being [several] things, just as the

transformation [taḥawwul] of the individual in varying—nay, disparate—

states does not necessitate his being [several] individuals.”397

Fanārī then poses the following question by way of prolepsis: “How can what is

essentially one be qualified by contrary attributes, like eastness and westness, and

knowledge and ignorance, etc.?”398 He responds:

The inconceivability [here] occurs as a result of analogizing the universal

to the particular and the absent to the present. No demonstration [burhān]

for the [so-called] impossibility [is forthcoming] in the case of the

universal. Since the nonexistence of the individual [shakhṣī] entification

does not entail the nonexistence of the entification [taken as]

nondelimited, it is possible that [the universal] be entified through one of

the individual entifications—not in its entity—inasmuch as they [i.e., the

entifications] are imputed [mansūbah] to the universal. Such is “specific”

[nawʿī] or “generic” [jinsī] entification—which is essential [dhātī] and

not epistemic [ʿilmī]—as in the entification of the Universal Spirit.

[Furthermore,] the inconceivability is dispelled on the basis of what we

related from al-Muḥaqqiq al-Ṭūsī, namely that, regarding what is neither

397
Ibid., 105-6.
398
Ibid., 106.

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 locational nor temporal [in nature], the relation of all places and times to

it is the same [such that] nothing is gleaned [yuʿtabar]—regarding it as it

is in itself—from either [place or time]. So [the objector] has not

ascertained—in the state [ṭawr] of realization—the spiritual or

paradigmatic [mithālī] or spirational [nafasī] forms [ṣuwar] of the self-

disclosures in the universal Name-levels, which [forms] are termed

Platonic Forms. Or he claims that the universals [present] in particular

souls are only forms extracted [muntazaʿah] from particulars, while

[averring that] in the supernal intellects, celestial souls, and Essence of

the Real—may He be exalted—they are not extracted; rather, they are of

the nature of supreme knowledge [itself]. There is a group that adheres to

this position, like Avicenna and those who followed him, but the truth is

with the people of realization.399

To summarize the preceding, we first saw that, according to Fanārī, God’s

universal self-disclosures, or the properly transcendent theophanies of the divine

names,400 are causally prior to the existents that manifest their realities in a particular

399
Ibid., 106-8. In the voluminous commentary for this passage (Khvājavī is to be commended for taking
the trouble to draw upon and include excerpts from the works of no less than six commentators in preparing
his edition of the Miṣbāḥ), Mīrzā Hāshim al-Ashkiwarī writes in clarification of the meaning of muthul
Aflāṭūnīyah that “the spiritual and paradigmatic existents are the forms [ṣuwar] and loci of manifestation
for the universal names, because the Real discloses Himself in the spiritual and paradigmatic levels
[marātib] from the perspective of the names of all-comprehensive universality” (107n2). Further down the
page, Sayyid Muḥammad al-Qummī makes the interesting observation that, for Plato and his followers
(ashyāʿ), the lords of the species are luminous forms (muthul), whereas for the knowers or “gnostics”
(ʿārifīn), these same forms are God’s names. He continues: “Every species under a [divine] name is the
servant of that name. For example, the animal is the servant of the Hearing and the Seeing, and the celestial
body is the servant of the Ever Exalted [al-rafīʿ al-dāʾim], and man is the servant of Allah. The
Illuminationists profess [the teaching that] every species-lord is the vassal of one of God’s names. Thus the
outcome [in the case of] the Illuminationist and the ʿārif is the same, since the affair leads back in the end
to the names” (107n3).
400
The Real discloses Himself in an indefinitely gradated hierarchy of levels, not all of which, obviously,
are universal or transcendent in nature.

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mode. Insofar as universal realities are causes, they remain forever non-entified,401 but

insofar as particular existents are ontologically dependent on them, they are entified from

the point of view of the individual entifications’ participation in them. In other words, the

universal realities are at once both beyond and mysteriously present in the world of

creation. As for the problem of universals properly so-called, while it is true that

universals qua universals constitute secondary intelligibles (that is, they exist only in the

mind), the possibility of conceiving of a given reality under the aspect of its universality

in accordance with the modus operandi of discursive intellect does not entail that reality’s

being confined to its seeming universality thereby. Fanārī therefore distinguishes—in

straightforward Avicennan fashion—between mental and natural universals, though

unlike Avicenna, whose views regarding the ontological status of the latter are unclear,402

and who explicitly rejects the existence of Platonic Forms,403 he draws precise

distinctions that, while concordant with the doctrine of the Shaykh al-Raʾīs, remain open

to what lies beyond it with the upshot that he is able to unambiguously affirm the

extramental reality of the nondelimited quiddity or natural universal in the context of an

overarchingly Platonic metaphysics.

In working toward substantiating this characterization, we can consider certain

subtleties related to (i) the fact that Avicenna explains the extramental existence of

quiddities qua particulars in more or less the same manner as Fanārī, and (ii) the

possibility that the master of Islamic Peripateticism may have been a Platonist after all.

401
Non-entified, that is, with respect to cosmic manifestation, since they are entified in virtue of their
manyness even while remaining in the state of non-entification. Fanārī calls the former type of entification
dhātī, or “essential,” and the latter type ʿilmī, or “epistemic” (Miṣbāḥ, 106). Furthermore, one can
distinguish between two senses of epistemic entification on the basis of the distinction between divine and
human modes of knowing.
402
See Marmura, Probing, 66-67.
403
Avicenna, Metaphysics of The Healing, 244.

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Regarding the first point, Fanārī agrees with Avicenna that the nature qua nature is not

present in its individual instantiations “in its entity,” since to claim as much would

undermine the meaningfulness of the distinction between the universal and the particular,

to say nothing, a fortiori, of attendant problems pertaining to causation. Contrariwise,

both thinkers avow that things do in fact have natures not reducible to the category of

secondary intelligibility, since Avicenna plainly says that the natures of things do exist

concretely when particularized in the external world.404 Therefore, when Fanārī says that

the natural universal exists in concreto on account of the wujūd of the mixed quiddity, he

is arguably giving voice to a kind of Avicennan truism. What really, then, is at issue?

Evidently the matter hinges on the second of the above two points, which involves two

questions: (a) that of ishtirāk, or participation, and (b) that of the taqqadum, or

ontological priority, of the universal over the particular. Concerning the first, it is related

to (i) above, since, as already alluded to, Fanārī draws distinctions on the basis of which

he is able to both agree and disagree with the Peripatetics regarding one and the same

postulate, namely the existence of the natural universal, which while non-entified in

itself, and thus in this sense nonexistent for Avicenna, is entified via participatory

relationships, and thus existent for Fanārī.405 If Avicenna’s doctrine is taken to imply the

incoherence of the notion of participation, it is due firstly to his sometimes conflating the

mental and natural universal406 with the result that the latter gets reduced to the former—

in point of fact if not in principle—and then secondly to the reaping of what he has sown

404
See, for example, McGinnis, Avicenna, 33.
405
Barring participation, the nature qua nature exists only in the transpersonal intellects (to be discussed
presently), but if one allows for participation, it exists both supernaturally and in the natural world.
406
“Although … Avicenna clearly distinguishes between the quiddity considered in itself and the quiddity
in abstraction as a mental existent, he nonetheless at times speaks of them as one and the same. It is as
though with a performing magician’s sleight of hand, he exchanges the one aspect of the quiddity for the
other. This is not to suggest that this is deliberately done. But, on our reading of his texts, such an exchange
does take place.” Marmura, Probing, 67.

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eo ipso. Said simply, Avicenna cannot affirm participation in the ontological (and not

merely definitional or predicative) sense due to his rejection of Platonic Forms, whereas

Fanārī is able to say, as we saw above, that the accidentality of the entifications, when

conceived of in terms of its primary rather than secondary intelligibility, presupposes the

wujūd of the “superstrate” (maʿrūḍ)407 in virtue of which the entifications are

“accidental” (ʿāriḍ). Concerning point (b), it is important to note that Avicenna’s anti-

Platonism is not at all nominalistic given his commitment to an emanationist cosmos in

which the natures of things enjoy occult existence in the intellection of supramundane,

angelic intellects.408 As Fanārī himself states, Avicenna and his mashshāʾī followers

acknowledge that, “in the supernal intellects, celestial souls, and Essence of the Real,”

universals subsist consubstantially with, or rather as, their intellecters. In other words,

these exalted modes of knowledge are not contingent upon any sort of prior, acquisitional

activity (viz., the abstractive pursuits characteristic of human seekers of philosophical

knowledge). If Avicenna can rightly be called a Platonist in at least one respect, it

consists in his admitting the existence of ante rem quiddities in the immortal

intelligences, and if he opposes Platonism, it is due to a conception of the Forms that

renders them vulnerable to the third man argument. Even if Avicenna’s epistemology is

not in the least “abstractionist” tout court, since for him ratiocination is only ever

propaedeutic vis-à-vis the emanations of the Active Intellect upon which any properly

human grasp of intelligible forms ultimately relies, the shaykh nevertheless remains silent

407
The term superstrate, while jargony, is metaphysically precise, since “substance” here would be too
broad, and “substrate,” while adequate, does not evoke the sense of transcendence required by the context.
Furthermore, although the term superstratum is perhaps less awkward than superstrate, “stratum” brings to
mind the concept of a level (martabah), whereas “-strate” connotes substantiality, which is more
appropriate here.
408
Marmura, Probing, 66-67.

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regarding the axiom (encountered above) that is most decisive for the Akbarian thinkers,

namely that according to which genuine knowledge of universal realities presupposes the

universalization of the would-be knower’s mode of being. It is perhaps on the basis of

this putative409 lacuna that Rūmī could refer to Avicenna—in spite of the latter’s

undeniably formidable abilities—as “a donkey on ice.”410 For Fanārī, by contrast, one

must seek the “state of realization” in which one witnesses the “paradigmatic or

spirational forms of the self-disclosures,” which belong to the “universal name-levels.” In

short, there is an epistemological elephant in the room, namely the question of the role of

spiritual wayfaring in the quest for knowledge.411

Having thus identified the precise points of both overlap and divergence between

the views of the ahl al-naẓar and ahl al-taḥqīq concerning universals, we are now in a

position to more fully appreciate Fanārī’s achievements in deepening the rapprochement

between discursive reasoning and gnosis initiated in earnest by both Suhrawardī and

Qūnawī. As a first step in this direction, it is significant that Fanārī finds an analogue of

the Akbarian concept of the “specific face” (wajh khāṣṣ) in Suhrawardī’s account of

emanation, which states that the dominating lights populating the vertical axis of

409
The allusion here is to the contested penultimate chapter of Avicenna’s al-Ishārāt wa’l-tanbīhāt, as well
as to his comments regarding the relationship between his “oriental philosophy” (al-ḥikmah al-
mashriqīyah) and the philosophy expounded most definitively and magisterially in the Shifāʾ. For a
translation of the mentioned part of the Ishārāt, see Shams Inati, Ibn Sīnā and Mysticism: Remarks and
Admonitions, Part Four (London: Kegan Paul, 1996). For Avicenna’s oriental philosophy, see Seyyed
Hossein Nasr, “Ibn Sīnā’s ‘Oriental philosophy,’” in History of Islamic Philosophy, ed. Seyyed Hossein
Nasr and Oliver Leaman (London: Routledge, 1996), 247-51. For a dissenting view apropos of Nasr’s
perspective, see Dimitri Gutas, “Avicenna’s Eastern (‘Oriental’) Philosophy: Nature, Contents,
Transmission,” Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 10, no. 2 (September 2000): 159-80.
410
Chittick, Lost Heart, 202. See also Chittick, The Sufi Doctrine of Rumi: Illustrated Edition
(Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom, 2005), 95-99.
411
On the one hand, the preeminent Peripatetic philosophers (e.g., Farābī or Avicenna) acknowledge the
intimate nature of the relationship between virtue and knowledge, with the former constituting a
precondition for the latter. On the other hand, philosophy and Sufism have distinct methods such that the
Sufis can often be found criticizing the “people of reflective thought,” and this notwithstanding the internal
diversity of both traditions, which obviously are not mutually exclusive, at the very least historically
speaking.

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existence receive “rays” (coll. shuʿāʿ; pl. ashiʿʿah)412 both from their immediately

precedent lights and from the Light of lights directly before effecting the horizontal order

of Platonic Forms and all other subsequent existents through their myriad, irradiative

interactions.413 He writes414:

[Suhrawardī] said in Ḥikmat al-ishrāq: His knowledge of Himself is His

being light for Himself and evident to Himself, and His knowledge of

things is their being evident to Him. Thus there is no intermediary at all in

this relational correspondence [al-munāsibah al-rābiṭah]. Rather, the most

sublime Pen and that which succeeds it are equivalent in this relation

through the emanative and receptional [qubūlī] ruling of the two requests

from the two sides. This [ruling] is called the specific face, because the

others—like the spiritual, paradigmatic, imaginal, and sensory faces—

occur only through the intermediation of these engendered [kawnī] levels.

Due to its hiddenness none know it save the realizers from among the

people of unveiling, and the Illuminationists assert [its existence] between

the dominating lights and sublime spirits.415

Given the fact that Suhrawardī himself employs the phrase “with and without

intermediaries” (min ghayr wāsiṭah wa-bi-wāsiṭah) in discussing the manner of God’s

412
In the notes to their translation of Ḥikmat al-ishrāq, Walbridge and Ziai rightly observe that “‘ray’
should be understood not as a line of light connecting the radiant existent with the thing it illumines but as
an increase in illumination caused by the presence of the illumined thing before the radiant light”
(Philosophy of Illumination, 182n6). That is, one should be careful to avoid the sort of “analogizing”
(qiyās) warned against above by Fanārī.
413
For Suhrawardī’s expounding of his own doctrine, which Fanārī relates in an abbreviated form, see
Ḥikmat al-ishrāq, 99-100.
414
In a section entitled “The eleventh principle: remarking on the tracing back of the manifestations of the
ramified existences to the First Effect, which is general existence, and their subsistence and annihilation
until the first of that which is entified in the world of recording [tasṭīr] became a pen, then a tablet, then
what arises after their arisings” (Miṣbāḥ, 408). For the passage in Suhrawardī from which he quotes
verbatim, see Ḥikmat al-ishrāq, 106.
415
Fanārī, Miṣbāḥ, 411.

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illumination of all things,416 the parallel is no doubt direct. And although the doctrine of

the specific face is not immediately relevant to the problem of universals per se, it does

provide part of the necessary backdrop for understanding Fanārī’s integral solution to it,

to which we now turn.

In the ensuing section,417 which contains the culmination of Fanārī’s discourse on

universals, he summarizes the teachings of the Illuminationists and the realizers,

explaining them with reference to each other so as to demonstrate their mutual truth in

spite of certain superficial points of difference. After discussing the world of image, or

“suspended form” (ʿālam al-mithāl),418 and noting the objections of certain of the

speculative thinkers in connection with it, he sets forth the Ishrāqī doctrine as follows:

The Master of Illumination and those who followed him from among the

latter-day divinizing [sages] originated [the doctrine that] there are only

Forms for bodies. If the body is a species, its separate form is intelligible

and called the lord of the idol. It is the Platonic Form and an intellect

belonging to the horizontal order of intellects genuine [wāqiʿah] in

nobility and disengagement from matter, above the order of souls and

below the vertical order of intellects. It is the efficient cause of the

existence of the species and solicitous of its affair—a preserver of it—and

the species is like its shadow, vestige, and reflection. If, [however, the

416
Suhrawardī, Ḥikmat al-ishrāq, 100.
417
Entitled “The twelfth principle: on the order of the manifestation of existents after the arising of the Pen
and Tablet, like the entification of the world of image [mithāl] after the entification of the world of the
malakūt from the world of the jabarūt” (Miṣbāḥ, 413).
418
In the cosmological and metaphysical contexts with which we’re concerned, it is unsurprising upon
reflection that the word mithāl should be so recalcitrant to translation, since the concept it signifies is
inherently liminal and thus especially prone to ambiguity. For a book-length study of the world of image,
see L.W.C. van Lit, The World of Image in Islamic Philosophy: Ibn Sīnā, Suhrawardī, Shahrazūrī, and
Beyond (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017).

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 body] is an individual, its separate form is imaginational [mutakhayyal],

[and] it is the suspended form and imaginal [khayālī] apparition genuine in

nobility and disengagement, under the world of soul and above the world

of sense perception.419

In saying that “there are only Forms for bodies,” Fanārī seems to be alluding to the

passage in Ḥikmat al-ishrāq where Suhrawardī directly addresses the vexed question of

what sorts of things have Forms.420 According to Shaykh al-Ishrāq, one “need not hold

that animality has a Form, and bipedality as well. Rather, each thing whose existence is

independent has something holy that corresponds to it. The scent of musk does not have a

Form and the musk another; rather, there is a dominating light in the world of pure light

with luminous states … whose shadow falling in this world has as its idol musk with its

scent, or sugar with its taste, or the human form with its various organs.”421 So the

criterion for having a Form is independence in existence (istiqlāl bi’l-wujūd). As for the

realizers,

[they state that] the form is not characterized by [one] nature apart from

another. Rather, the nature of every existent disengaged from matter is a

luminous form corresponding to its individuals. So [regarding] the reality

not found save as disengaged, its form is the entity of the likeness

[mumaththal], and [regarding the reality] found disengaged and associated

with matter, the form in it [i.e., the matter] is the first of what is found, and

[the form] actualizes in it[self] the reality from the individuals, and it will

become manifest in the endlessness of nondelimited Being. The attributes

419
Fanārī, Miṣbāḥ, 421.
420
For the founding formulation of this quandary, see Plato, Parmenides, 130b-e.
421
Suhrawardī, Ḥikmat al-ishrāq, 109.

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 of the externally existent loci of manifestation are the attributes of the

form, and [they are attributes] from among the subordinate realities in the

world of intellect….422

Given the obscurity of this passage, it bears unpacking at some length. Fanārī begins by

saying, in effect, that the realizers do not distinguish between two types of mithāl as do

the Illuminationists. The difference is not substantive, however, since the Akbarian

writers obviously do distinguish between the imaginal and intellectual levels of reality.

They only tend—the relevant isthmus notwithstanding—to emphasize the continuity

between the different modalities of a given quiddity’s manifestation to a greater degree

than do the Illuminationists in keeping with the notion of waḥdat al-wujūd, whereas the

Ishrāqī doctrine is more dualistic by comparison, at least prima facie. Next, Fanārī draws

a distinction within the category of the disengaged (mujarrad). If a reality is disengaged

without qualification and thus purely immaterial, its form is beyond the reach of both

sensation and the representational capacity of the intellect, in which case it “appears” to

the latter under the guise of an ungraspable “entity” (ʿayn), hence the difficulty of

thinking Platonically. But if a reality is only partially disengaged such that it is still

associated with matter in some way, its form is “the first of what is found,” which is to

say that form is prior to matter in intelligibility, or rather it is only form that is

intelligible, matter being describable as the absence of intelligibility, precisely; for even

sensorially perceived qualities ultimately rely for their perceivability on the formal

principle of manifestation comprising their ontological root. The role of the form here,

422
Fanārī, Miṣbāḥ, 421. Interestingly, this text can be found with only minor variations in a work of
unknown authorship entitled al-Muthul al-ʿaqlīyah al-Aflāṭūnīyah (see n. 162). Assuming the correctness
of Badawī’s dating (1330-40), Fanārī, who was born shortly thereafter, must have had access to it. For the
passage incorporated by Fanārī into the Miṣbāḥ, see page 13 of the treatise, and for Badawī’s comments
regarding the composition date, see page 43 of his introduction.

129
then, as Fanārī explains, is to “actualize in itself the reality from the individuals,” or to

make the reality phenomenologically available on condition that it be perceived multiply.

In other words, our being able to experience the realities of things while still in our

bodies is predicated on the presence of some matter or other, which entails multiplicity.

Lastly, regarding the attributes of the loci of manifestation, they are in reality the

attributes of the disengaged forms, and these same attributes—whether conceived of as

belonging to the loci or to the forms—constitute “subordinate realities” (ḥaqāʾiq tābiʿah)

in the world of intellect, whereas the forms themselves presumably constitute

“subordinating realities” (ḥaqāʾiq matbūʿah). It is therefore possible to affirm both that

the attributes of sensory things have their own realities and that the latter are ultimately

subsumed by the realities of the forms.

After briefly addressing a fine point related to the ontological status of the

suspended forms of attributes (mithāl al-ṣifah al-muʿallaq), Fanārī prefaces the heart of

his discussion of universals with the question of whether the participation between the

two types of form (mithālayn, i.e., suspended and Platonic) is synonymous (maʿnawī) or

homonymous (lafẓī).423 He answers that it is synonymous,

because the form [taken as] nondelimited is [1] not found in the external

world from among a species or individual that is a body or bodily [in

nature and] self-subsistent; [2] devoid of sensory position; [and 3]

disengaged from sensory matter. This is [what is] shared [mushtarak]

between the intellectual and imaginal [form], and [between] the self-

subsistent and non-self-subsistent form, through forms [ṣuwar]—

occurring in the imagination and the mirrors—corresponding to the

423
That is, do they share or participate in the same reality or is the sharing only nominal?

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 suspended form, such that it is said, ‘He is Zayd,’ and [through forms]—

occurring in the intellect from the species—corresponding to their Platonic

Form, [with these forms serving as] the cause in the sharing [ishtirāk] of

the form of the species between its individuals.424

Notwithstanding the problem posed for translation by the use of terms mithāl and

ṣūrah,425 Fanārī’s doctrine can be summarized as follows. The nondelimited form is

immaterial, but it is not bound by its being so. It therefore comprises a root admitting of

ramification, unlike a quiddity considered solely under the aspect of its universality.426

The category of the nondelimited pertains to divinity for Fanārī, contra the Peripatetics,

who see it as pertaining to secondary intelligibility. Far from being a merely mental

abstraction, nondelimited wujūd is the Real Himself, and, in keeping with the primacy of

wujūd in Akbarian metaphysics generally speaking, any given nondelimited quiddity

constitutes one of an infinite number of faces that God turns toward the world, albeit in

such a way that all such quiddities or realities can be classed hierarchically relative to

each other in accordance with the manifold relations of subordination and entailment

necessitated by—or that unfold as a consequence of—their being what they are, for the

natures of some are intrinsically more compendious and thus greater than others.

424
Fanārī, Miṣbāḥ, 422. It is interesting that Gerson, in a discussion of the distinction between a Form and
its nature in Greek Platonism, states that “it is precisely such a distinction that would enable us to maintain
synonymous application of predicates to the Form’s nature and its participants, even as we maintain
homonymous application of the same predicates to the Form itself and those participants” (Aristotle and
Other Platonists, 185 [emphasis added]).
425
Sometimes, as in the present case, Fanārī utilizes the distinction to address subtleties pertaining to the
broad category of form, while at other times he uses the terms interchangeably. We saw earlier, for
example, that the Platonic Forms are ṣuwar mithālīyah (Miṣbāḥ, 107).
426
That is, a disengaged (mujarrad) or negatively conditioned (bi-sharṭ lā shayʾ) quiddity, in contrast to
both the nondelimited (muṭlaq) or nonconditioned (lā bi-sharṭ shayʾ) quiddity and the mixed (makhlūṭ) or
conditioned (bi-sharṭ shayʾ) quiddity. As we have seen, Fanārī uses the terms “shared” or “participated-in,”
“nondelimited,” “nonconditioned,” and “natural” (when in reference to universals) interchangeably. Also,
both the negatively conditioned and nonconditioned quiddities are disengaged from matter, but it is only
the former that can never leave the state of disengagement.

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Thinking in terms of the third man, although the very notion of al-wujūd al-ʿāmm, or

“general existence,” would seem to render both God and everything else contingent with

respect to it, since anything that exists—whether divine or not—would, through its

participation therein, exist as some determinate being against the background of wujūd’s

indetermination in the manner of an ontologically posterior effect thereof, in reality the

third man is the Form of Man—and general existence is the Real—provided one refrain

from reifying the latter term in each case. Therefore, that which is put forward as a

refutation of ontological independence is seen in fact to corroborate it, since the regresses

in question, if understood in the correct way, furnish keys to or at least indicate openings

onto clear sight, which knows that what is strictly immaterial is not a “thing” at all in the

colloquial or “metaphysically naive” sense of the word. So from this point of view, at

least, the unparticipated Platonic Form,427 which is “imprisoned in the castle of

transcendence,”428 gives way in realization to the nondelimited form, and the “God of

belief” gives way to God as He is in Himself.

To return to the letter of the above passage, we are now equipped to consider the

idea that the nonconditioned nature runs through the totality of its variegated, cosmically

outspread instances and thus binds them together at the same time that it serves as their

principle. Regarding the details of this way of looking at things, and to use the example

from Fanārī’s text, the reality of Zayd spans all the levels of reality,429 which is to say

that in addition to the earthly modality of his being, which belongs to the realm of “the

427
Fanārī repeats Suhrawardī’s teaching according to which the Platonic Form is not shared among its
“idols” (lā annahu mushtarak baynahā), which are rather the beneficiaries of a perpetual emanative relation
(dawām al-fayḍ) through which the solicitude (iʿtināʾ) of the Form reaches them (Miṣbāḥ, 422).
428
Paul Eduardo Muller-Ortega, The Triadic Heart of Śiva: Kaula Tantricism of Abhinavagupta in the Non-
Dual Shaivism of Kashmir (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989), 138.
429
If not in point of fact then in principle of the basis of his being human, which for the Akbarīyah entails
all-comprehensiveness whether one is conscious of this constitutive dignity or not.

132
mirrors,” he possesses a suspended form in the world of image that is in turn subsumable

under the Form of Man. More specifically—and keeping in mind that the mithālayn

together constitute a kind of twofold ontic fundament on which the existence of the ṣuwar

is predicated—the suspended form is reflected in the imagination through an imaginal

form (ṣūrah)430 and in sense-experience through a sensory form, and the Platonic Form is

reflected in the mind through an intelligible form and in the world through the bodily

forms of the various species. Insofar, then, as someone were to either infer or gnostically

discern the presence of a “golden thread” tying the relevant ṣuwar to each of the two

types of mithāl, the object of such a discernment would be the nondelimited form, whose

entity, moreover, is the One.

Finally, after dispensing with some objections raised by certain of “the pedantic”

(baʿḍ al-mutaḥadhliqīn) to the existence of the Forms, Fanārī has the following to say:

The people of illumination and all those who followed them from the

people of rational speculation in affirming [the existence of] the wholly

disengaged intellectual forms, which are entirely without either location

[waḍʿ] or delineation [takhṭīṭ], and the partially disengaged imaginal

forms, which possess location, delineation, and a certain shaping

[tashkīl]—albeit imaginal and not sensory [in nature]—are right to

maintain this orientation. But it is necessary that it be directed to the

realizations of the masters [lā budda min ṣarfihi ilá mā ḥaqqaqa

muḥaqqiqū al-mashāʾikh] … , among which is [the doctrine] that the

430
There is thus a difference between the imaginal mithāl and the “imaginational” ṣūrah. The former is
independent of any given individual’s imaginative faculty and can be experienced through visionary
sojourning in the world of image, whereas the latter is something “mundane” in that all people necessarily
utilize it when they imagine something (e.g., a lush landscape).

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 quiddity of each thing is the manner [kayfīyah] of its fixity in the

knowledge of God—may He be exalted—and that it is nonexistent in itself

inasmuch as He knows neither it itself nor something other than it. Rather,

[He knows it qua nonexistent] through eternal, epistemic being [al-wujūd

al-ʿilmī al-azalī], and if it is subject to becoming [ḥādithah], [He knows it]

in respect of engendered knowledge [bi’l-nisbah ilá ’l-ʿilm al-kawnī].431

The Illuminationist doctrine is sound, but it is brought to fruition through the insights of

the realizers, who trace all quiddities back to their state of fixity in God’s knowledge, the

sovereign nature of which demands their essential nonexistence. If they possess being in

divine knowledge, it is only God’s being, and if they possess being “outside of” God, it is

only because God gives it to them. It is interesting that this kind of synthesis of Platonic

philosophy432 and pure gnosis has a precedent in the Greek Neoplatonic tradition, which

accommodated the Aristotelian refutation of independently existing Forms by placing

them in the demiurgic Intellect,433 just as certain eminent Christian thinkers (e.g.,

Clement of Alexandria,434 Origen,435 and Augustine436) reconciled Platonism with

431
Fanārī, Miṣbāḥ, 423.
432
The intention in speaking of Platonism is not to suggest any crudely historicist notion of horizontal
borrowing—whatever may have indeed transpired on the ground—but rather to a highlight an arguably
transhistorical philosophical disposition for which “Platonism” is the most convenient and familiar term
(pace those scholars who decry all such “essentialism”).
433
And this, it must be added, with careful attention to and, we can assume, sincere respect for the Platonic
dialogues themselves. In other words, one must not rule out the possibility that what nineteenth century
European scholars began to refer to as Neoplatonism is in fact Platonism tout court. For a discussion of this
issue, see Lloyd Gerson, “Plotinus,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2018 Edition), ed.
Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/plotinus/.
434
M. J. Edwards, “Clement of Alexandria and His Doctrine of the Logos,” Vigiliae Christianae 54, no. 2
(2000): 167.
435
Ilaria L.E. Ramelli, “Origen and the Platonic Tradition,” Religions 8, no. 2 (2017): 3-5.
436
Frederick Van Fleteren, “Plato, Platonism,” in Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed. Allan
D. Fitzgerald (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 652.

134
dogmatic theology by speaking of the Forms as the noetic content of the Logos.437 If a

Muslim latecomer like Mullā Fanārī can be said to offer something original to

contemporary readers concerning an issue with such a venerable intellectual genealogy, it

no doubt consists in his being able to simultaneously affirm both the “extradeical” and

“intradeical” Form, to use Harry Wolfson’s helpful neologisms.438 For although the

paradigmatic forms of things are inherently nonexistent, since the Real is One without

second, it is also perfectly possible to directly witness them in a way that verifies their

being not only conceptually but also phenomenologically distinct from the divine

Essence. Having already seen that, for Fanārī, the Platonic muthul are the ṣuwar of God’s

self-disclosures, we can examine in greater detail the manner in which they emanate from

their Principle.

Regarding the divine, name-related relations in and of themselves, their

composition [tarakkub] is [obtained] through their [own] composition.

The composite stands prepared for the All-Merciful Breath’s finding a

spiritual genesis [nashʾah] through it, and it entifies—through the

genesis—other names that mount the spirits and spiritual beings

[rūḥānīyāt] for the begetting of paradigmatic forms [ṣuwar mithālīyah].

This is so if the [names’] turning toward [the spirits is considered] from

the perspective of their [i.e., the names’] paradigmatic loci of

manifestation.439

437
For a historical overview of the question of the relation between the Forms and God, see Harry A.
Wolfson, “Extradeical and Intradeical Interpretations of Platonic Ideas,” Journal of the History of Ideas 22,
no. 1 (1961): 3-32.
438
See above note. The extradeical Form exists in the spiritual world but is “outside of” God, whereas the
intradeical Form exists in God’s knowledge.
439
Fanārī, Miṣbāḥ, 423.

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This passage ties together much of the preceding, as follows. The realities of things

mysteriously comprise relations between God and Himself, but insofar as they can be

conceived of as other than God, such a consideration (iʿtibār) on the human level refers

back ultimately to the All-Merciful Breath, the spiration of which effects the emanative

passage from the level or presence of true oneness (aḥadīyah) to that of unicity

(wāḥidīyah), or oneness as comprehensive of or thought in relation to manyness (from the

perspectives of ontology and epistemology, respectively). The Breath, which coincides

with the reality of the Prophet, is thus the barzakh or isthmus between God and

everything else. It will also be remembered that, according to Fanārī, the universal self-

disclosure is entified through its own self, and not through any of its entified particulars.

To say otherwise would be to attribute to created beings a causal power that they do not

possess. Nevertheless, a more complete view of the matter requires that one distinguish

between the two basic ways in which the quiddities can be said to exist (viz., as fixed in

God’s knowledge, in which case they enjoy wujūd ʿilmī in spite of being nonexistent in

themselves, or as existent in the cosmos, in which case they enjoy wujūd kawnī, again in

spite of their essential nonexistence). In the previous chapter we gained familiarity with

Qūnawī’s account of entification, which explicates the profound reciprocity characteristic

of the relations between the names of God and the fixed entities. On the one hand, the

latter are subordinate to the former, since they proceed from them440 by way of an

elaboration (tafṣīl) of their realities. On the other hand, certain of the divine names441 rely

upon the entities not only for the manifestation of their influences (āthār)442 but also even

440
The procession in question is first and foremost logical in nature, since in Akbarian metaphysics the
quiddities of things are uncreated.
441
That is, the “names of the acts” (asmāʾ al-afʿāl), but not the names of the Essence (asmāʾ al-dhāt).
442
All of the names are reliant upon the entities in this sense.

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to be what they are “in the first place,”443 for a lord without vassals is not really a lord, or

a Forgiver, or Abaser, etc. So when Fanārī writes that “the composite stands prepared for

the All-Merciful Breath’s finding a spiritual genesis through it,” he means that, were it

not for the wujūd ʿilmī of the composite in its state of fixity, the Breath would be

“unable” to entify itself in spite of the fact that it in no way, qua “self-entifier,” depends

on the composite’s wujūd kawnī even if, qua manifested, it does in a way. Said simply,

creative power in the sense of efficient causality belongs exclusively to God, the Rich

(al-ghanī), but He “needs” His creations, the utterly poor (fuqarāʾ), in order to be known

as the Creator. Using the language of the text, the “composition” of the name-related

relations is obtained through their own “self-compositing” at the same time that this

activity has the composite’s “standing prepared” for a precondition. Having then itself

found a “spiritual genesis” (i.e., a spiritual mode of entification) by way of the

nonexistent composite, the Breath entifies other names that in turn become spiritually

manifest through “paradigmatic loci of manifestation,” or Platonic Forms.

Mullā Ṣadrā

Just as Mullā Fanārī incorporated Illuminationist elements into his elucidation of

Qūnawī’s Miftāḥ, Mullā Ṣadrā444 wove Akbarian terminology into his commentary on

Suhrawardī’s Ḥikmat al-ishrāq in a way that resulted in a doctrine of universals strikingly

similar to that of the Shaykh al-Islam. Given their basic agreement, which will become

apparent in what follows, we can forgo the relevant preliminaries—common to both

443
Temporal expressions, while helpful, are only ever metaphorical in metaphysical contexts.
444
For an overview of Ṣadrā’s life and thought, see Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Ṣadr al-Dīn Shīrāzī and His
Transcendent Theosophy: Background, Life and Works (Tehran: Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy,
1978).

137
authors and thus already familiar from the preceding—and proceed directly to Ṣadrā’s

discussion of Shaykh al-Ishrāq’s denial of the extramental existence of the mental

universal.

Regarding his saying—may his secret be sanctified—that “the ‘general

meaning’ has no reality outside the mind...”445

What is intended here by the phrase “general meaning” is that in which

generality and universality are discerned, whether in respect of inward

thoughts [dukhūl], as in the case of the mental universal,446 or in respect

of [external] occurrence [ʿarūḍ],447 as in the case of the natural universal

(in the parlance of certain of the logicians). Regarding the first, there can

be no doubt concerning its being nonexistent in external reality.

Regarding the universal according to the second meaning, that is, that

which is qualified by universality, it is also [not existent in this way] in

accordance with the demonstration given by the shaykh and others

besides, and about this there is no dispute. As for the natural universal in

445
For the quoted clause in its context, see Suhrawardī, Ḥikmat al-ishrāq, 7.
446
Lit. “intellectual universal” (al-kullī al-ʿaqlī).
447
In the developed Islamic philosophical tradition, “occurrence” is contrasted with “characterization”
(ittiṣāf), with the former referring to the question of the manner in which a predicate “occurs” to a logical
subject, and the latter to the question of the character of the subject itself (viz., to their respective
ontological statuses). The distinction is bound up with the task of classifying universal concepts into their
various types, namely primary and secondary intelligibles, which latter are subdivided into the
“philosophical” (falsafī) and logical. According to Muḥammad Taqī Miṣbāḥ Yazdī, who acknowledges the
controversy surrounding these issues, the occurrence and characterization are both “external” (khārijī) in
the case of primary intelligibles; mental (dhihnī) and external, respectively, in the case of philosophical
secondary intelligibles; and both mental in the case of logical secondary intelligibles. For example, fire is a
primary intelligible, as is “hot,” since their concepts are obtained immediately upon being perceived or
experienced. But the causal connection between the fire and its heat—the latter being etiologically
dependent on the former—pertains to philosophical secondary intelligibility, since one can feel the heat
without necessarily understanding that it is caused by the fire. In this case, the intelligible relation is a
mental occurrence (one cannot sensorially experience the causality), and that which it “characterizes” (i.e.,
the fire) is extramentally actual. Lastly, the universality predicated of a quiddity is an example of a logical
secondary intelligible, since it occurs only in the mind (it is not itself an externally existent thing), and that
which it characterizes (e.g., the concept “man”) is also mental in nature. See Yazdī, Āmūzish-i falsafih, vol.
1, lesson 15, §§ 1-2; Izutsu, Concept and Reality, 82-84.

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 the sense of the quiddity qua quiddity conditioned by neither generality

nor specificity, nor by its [own] nonexistence, regarding its existence and

nonexistence there is disagreement between the speculative thinkers and

sages, who hold that it is existent as the entity [bi-ʿayn] of the wujūd of

its individuals, and the majority of dialectical theologians, who hold that

it is existent as the wujūd of its individuals. The statements of [these] two

parties are detailed in the available books. The truth with us is that the

quiddity qua quiddity is not existent per se; rather, [that which is] so

existent is the individuation [tashakhkhuṣ] and [that which is]

individuated in itself on account of the influence of the Maker. The thing

that is essentially actualized is the same as the wujūd of the possible, not

quiddity, and wujūd is that which is individuated in itself, whereas the

quiddity is united with that which is existent and individuated per se. So

its existent [instance] is accidental [in nature]….448

It is interesting, first, that Ṣadrā notes here the ambiguity of which the natural universal is

the very conceptual locus.449 On the one hand, and in spite of itself as it were, it is a

universal and thus existent only in the mind. On the other hand, it is supposed to denote

the nature in itself, hence the term “natural.” Regarding the latter meaning, Ṣadrā

mentions the two main ways in which the extramental existence of the quiddity qua

quiddity can be conceived. According to the first, it is existent as the entity of the wujūd

of its instances, and according to the second, its existence is that of its instances. In other

448
Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī, Addenda on the Commentary on the Philosophy of Illumination; Part One: On
the Rules of Thought (al-Taʿlīqāt ʿalá sharḥ ḥikmat al-ishrāq: al-qism fī ḍawābiṭ al-fikr), ed. Hossein Ziai
(Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda, 2010), 33-34.
449
See note 394.

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words, the former position attributes wujūd to the quiddities of things irrespective of their

being individuated, whereas the latter makes their existence contingent upon

individuation. For his part, Ṣadrā is able, like Fanārī before him, to steer a middle course

between these alternatives on the basis of a Platonism formulated within the context of

the primacy of wujūd.450 Without yet discussing his view of the Forms, we can see from

the above passage how he privileges wujūd over quiddity contra the doctrine according to

which—on the basis of a restricted conception of what the word wujūd means—existence

is something “added” to a mysteriously preexistent quiddity.451 For Ṣadrā, wujūd is its

own principle of individuation, which is to say that the quiddities of things, which have

no extramental reality in and of themselves,452 become “united with” possible being—

which does—through the influence of necessary Being.453 Having thus stated his basic

commitments, he proceeds to the heart of the matter:

If you were to say [regarding] the demonstration mentioned in the text [of

Suhrawardī] that, just as it established the negation of the existence of the

general meaning, so too did it establish the negation of the natural

450
According to Muḥammad Ḥusayn Ṭabāṭabāʾī, who is counted among the twentieth century’s most
eminent authorities on Ṣadrā’s philosophy, “[The natural universal] exists in the external world, for two of
its divisions, that is, ‘mixed’ and ‘absolute,’ exist there, and a class is preserved in its sub-classes and exists
where its sub-classes are found.” Sayyid Muḥammad Ḥusayn Ṭabāṭabāʾī, The Elements of Islamic
Metaphysics, trans. Sayyid ʿAlī Qūlī Qarāʾī (London: Islamic College for Advanced Studies Press, 2003),
47. For a reproduction and discussion of an excerpt to the same effect from Ṭabāṭabāʾī’s glosses on the
Asfār, see Ghulāmḥusayn Ibrāhīmī Dīnānī, Qavāʿid-i kullī-i falsafī dar falsafih-yi islāmī, vol. 1 (Tehran:
Pazhūhishgāh-i ʿUlūm-i Insānī va Muṭāliʿāt-i Farhangī, 2001-2), 96-97.
451
Though, as we will see, Ṣadrā acknowledges the relative validity of this manner of speaking.
452
Later in the text (Addenda, 313), Ṣadrā cites the oft-quoted axiom from Ibn ʿArabī’s Fuṣūṣ according to
which the fixed entities “have never smelled, and never will smell, the fragrance of existence” (mā
shammat rāʾiḥah al-wujūd azalan wa-abadan).
453
As he writes in the Mashāʿir, “Wujūd—while being in itself an individual reality, individualized by its
essence and determined by itself—individualizes all of the universal quiddities that exist through it. … The
reality of wujūd, while being individualized by itself, is differentiated according to the differentiation of
contingent quiddities, each of which is united with one of its degrees and one of its stages.” Mullā Ṣadrā,
The Book of Metaphysical Penetrations (Kitāb al-mashāʿir), trans. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, ed. Ibrahim Kalin
(Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2014), 9-10.

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 universal according to the second meaning [above], [and then you were to

wonder] how it is that the sages assert its existence, we would say that

what the demonstration shows is that it is not possible that that in which

generality is discerned be existent on the basis of the fact that the external

existent is not free of individuation and particularity, because generality

and specificity are mutually exclusive. The demonstration does not show

that the existence of the thing for which it is proper that it be [taken as]

general is not possible, for there is no incompatibility between what is

actually particularized and that whose nature it is to be known [only]

potentially [i.e., the mental universal].454

In other words, the natural universal qua universal is nonexistent, but it is existent qua

Form in keeping with Suhrawardī’s discussion of this same issue later in Ḥikmat al-

ishrāq,455 the relevant passage of which we saw Fanārī comment on above. As for the

nature in itself, it functions on the conceptual level as a barzakh joining the mental

universal to the Form, which is “actually particularized” not in the sense that it

constitutes a particular among particulars, but in the Illuminationist sense dealt with in

chapter 2.456 Furthermore, if the nature also exists as its sensory instances, this is due for

Ṣadrā to its being united with possible being. And if the mental universal is known only

potentially, this is so on account of the shadowy mode of its existence, which

normatively—or provided one is not a rationalist—betokens the true object of

454
Ṣadrā, Addenda, 34.
455
See Suhrawardī, Ḥikmat al-ishrāq, 109.
456
The transcendent lights, which are beyond space and time, share the same reality and thus are
individualized only through their varying degrees of intensity.

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knowledge, which is attainable only through the suprarational witnessing whereby the

intellect finds its full actualization.

Ṣadrā’s solution to the seeming contradiction between the demands of reason and

the doctrinal legacy of the sages therefore runs parallel to that of Fanārī, for the external

nonexistence of the mentally existent concept does not entail the nonexistence of that of

which it is the concept, and this in two directions, so to speak, since mental universals are

suspended between two extramental referents—one “facing” or “below” (depending on

the point of view457) and the other “above”—namely the sensory particulars to which

they correspond and the species lords they reflect representationally via the mirroring

function of the mind, respectively.458

To further explore now the details of Ṣadrā’s perspective, we can turn to the

section of The Four Journeys,459 his magnum opus, that deals explicitly and in depth with

the Platonic Forms.460 To prepare the ground for his fruitful discussion of this long-

standing philosophical fault line, Ṣadrā discourses profoundly on the relationship

between form and matter as well as the related issue of the logical distinction between

genus and differentia, which, as he explains, has implications for the problem of

universals.

457
One faces the object of sense-experience phenomenologically speaking while “looking down” on it
ontologically speaking, at least in the case of subhuman percepts.
458
Obviously the existence of the sensory referent is uncontroversial, unless one is either a solipsist or
Berkeleian “subjective idealist.”
459
The full title can be translated as Transcendent Wisdom in The Four Journeys of Intellect (al-Ḥikmah al-
mutaʿālīyah fi’l-asfār al-arbaʿah al-ʿaqlīyah).
460
Taking up about thirty-five pages in the critical edition produced by the Ṣadrā Islamic Philosophy
Research Institute (SIPRIn), this section (faṣl), entitled “In verification of the Platonic Forms” (fī taḥqīq al-
ṣuwar wa’l-muthul al-Aflāṭūnīyah), concludes the “stage” (marḥalah) of the work dealing with quiddity
and its concomitants (fi’l-māhīyah wa-lawāḥiqihā). See also the section of the Taʿlīqāt (Addenda, 434-51)
commenting on the part of Ḥikmat al-ishrāq to which Quṭb al-Dīn Shīrāzī gave the heading “A judgment
concerning the Platonic Forms.” It is basically an abbreviated version of Ṣadrā’s discussion in the Asfār,
which was written earlier than the Taʿlīqāt (he mentions the former by name in the latter).

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 The reality of the differentiae and their essences is nothing but the specific

existences [wujūdāt] belonging to the quiddities comprising real

individuals. So the existent in external reality is wujūd, but there are

obtained in the intellect—by way of either sense-experience or presential

witnessing—general or specific universal concepts from its essence itself,

and in like manner from its accidents as well. … Those which are obtained

in the intellect from its essence itself are called essentialities [dhātīyāt],

and those which are obtained in it not from its [i.e., the existent’s] essence

but owing to another modality [jihah] are called accidentalities

[ʿaraḍīyāt]. The essential, therefore, is existent essentially [bi’l-dhāt]; that

is, it is united with the existent through an essential uniting. And the

accidental is existent accidentally; that is, it is united with it through an

accidental uniting. This does not, as is supposed, constitute a negation of

the natural universal. Rather, wujūd is related to it essentially when it is

essential, which is to say that what is truly existent is united with it in

concreto, not that [the true existent] is one thing and [the natural

universal] another distinguished from it in reality [fi’l-wāqiʿ].461

According to this principle, known as “the self-sameness of existence and quiddity”

(ʿaynīyah al-wujūd wa’l-māhīyah),462 the sovereignty of wujūd does not preclude the

461
Ṣadr al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Shīrāzī (Mullā Ṣadrā), al-Ḥikmah al-mutaʿālīyah fi’l-asfār al-arbaʿah al-
ʿaqlīyah, vol. 2, ed. Maqṣūd Muḥammadī (Tehran: Bunyād-i Ḥikmat-i Islāmī-i Ṣadrā, 2001), 34.
462
Izutsu, Concept and Reality, 122. In Ṣadrā’s own words, “Wujūd is the same as quiddity in point of
concrete reality.” Also: “Wujūd and quiddity, in everything that possesses wujūd and quiddity, are one and
the same unique thing. And what is the object of knowledge is the existent itself. This is a strange secret.”
Ṣadrā, Metaphysical Penetrations, 28, 38.

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relative existence of the quiddities through which it manifests itself. Ultimately only God

is real, and yet God is all things.

Having thus explained the extramental existence of the natural universal, Ṣadrā

proceeds to the Forms, mentioning at the outset both Plato and Socrates, to whom he

attributes the doctrine that “the existents possess disengaged forms in the world of the

Divinity.”463 He then quotes the passage from Avicenna’s Shifāʾ in which the Shaykh al-

Raʾīs criticizes these same two sages. 464 In his response thereto, Ṣadrā in effect defends

Plato against the third man argument, since “the majesty of his affair” demands that one

refrain from imagining that he failed to draw certain consequential distinctions, namely

those “between disengagement according to the consideration of intellect and

disengagement in wujūd, or between quiddity’s being considered unconditioned by a

thing’s being conjoined with it and its being considered conditioned by the nonexistence

of conjoining, or the conflation of the semantically one with the numerically one such

that humanity’s being one in meaning [is thought to] entail its being one in number and

wujūd, and that it is found in many in its [very] entity.”465 So for Ṣadrā, the

disengagement of the Platonic Form is ontological, not ratiocinative; it is an

unconditioned, not negatively conditioned, quiddity; and its oneness pertains to the

category of meaning, not number.466 It is therefore “existent in external reality, self-

subsistent, and in neither a subject [mawḍūʿ] nor a substratum [maḥall].”467 As for their

relation to mental and material forms, the Forms’ ontologically deficient, material

463
Ṣadrā, Asfār, 43. For a brief discussion of this passage, see Walbridge, “Mulla Sadra’s Doctrine,” 33-34.
464
For Avicenna’s text, see note 78.
465
Ṣadrā, Asfār, 44. See also Ṣadrā, Addenda, 438.
466
It is these characteristics taken together that describe the nature of Platonic Forms, since the natural
universal, which unlike the Form is not existent in itself (mawjūd bi-dhātihi), is also unconditioned, and the
mental universal, which like the Form is not spatiotemporally extended (unlike the natural universal when
existing extramentally as a conditioned quiddity), is also semantically and not numerically one.
467
Ṣadrā, Asfār, 46.

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shadows (aẓlāl) or idols (aṣnām), which subsist by way of sensory matter, are needy

(muftaqir) with respect to them, and mental forms, which are “taken” (maʾkhūdhah) from

externally existent things, are non-self-subsistent accidents subsisting in the mind.468 In

short, the material forms stand in need of their Forms or species lords, and the mental

forms doubly so.

After summarizing the various views on the Forms held by his most eminent

predecessors, namely Farābī, Mīr Dāmād, and Suhrawardī,469 Ṣadrā states that “the forms

intellected from things are disengaged and self-subsistent, and the intelligent and gnostics

obtain them in their intellections and knowledges, since they undoubtedly possess

wujūd.”470 Furthermore,

The existence of universal matters—subsisting through their essences (and

not in a substratum) in correspondence with their material particulars and

their universals—becomes manifest when they are taken as unconditioned

by either disengagement or non-disengagement, and when the particulars

are disentangled [jurrida] from their matter and their individual limitations

and engendered, sensory attributes. In a word, their participation is like

that of the forms subsisting via the intellect, and their universality is like

their universality [when considered] in the absence of the presupposition

[istilzām] of one of the perishables.471

The subsistence of universal realities does not require a substratum, unlike that of both

material existents, which require a material substratum, and mental existents, whose

468
Ibid., 58.
469
See also Ṣadrā, Addenda, 434-39. For a discussion of Ṣadrā’s critiques of their views, see Zahra
Mostafavi, “Sadr-ol-Mota’allahin on Platonic Ideas,” Al-Tawhid 15, no. 4 (2000): 147-53.
470
Ṣadrā, Asfār, 67.
471
Ibid., 68.

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substratum is the human mind. And when Ṣadrā says “when taken as” (idhā ukhidhat), he

is alluding to the role of the natural universal in the economy of intellection, since its

being unconditioned corresponds to the unconditioned nature of the Form. In other

words, the natural universal, which is not existent in itself, provides the opening—

between the Scylla of the enmattered form and the Charybdis of the mental universal with

which it only partially coincides—to the Form, and this by way, as we shall see, of its

suspended modality in the world of image, to which process of opening the abstractive

function of the intellect contributes by disentangling particulars from their matter. It is

noteworthy, incidentally, that such a picture of things corresponds more or less exactly to

what one finds in Plotinus, who lived well over a thousand years before the time of Ṣadrā.

According to the Greek Shaykh (al-Shaykh al-Yūnānī), as he came to be known among

the Muslims, “We have the Forms … in two ways: in the soul, in a way, unfolded and

separated, but in Intellect ‘all together.’”472 For Gerson’s part,

It seems that the “unfolded” and “separated” Form is the intellectual

image of what intellect contemplates. The distinction between a concept

consisting of an image derived from sense-perception and the kind of

image intended here seems clear. … I take it that Plotinus’ central point is

that the images or representations derived from sense-perception do not

account for our ability to understand anything, even though they are part

of the aetiology of our ability to apply rules. If we are able to apply rules

472
Plotinus, The Enneads, ed. Lloyd P. Gerson, trans. George Boys-Stones, John M. Dillon, Lloyd P.
Gerson, R.A.H. King, Andrew Smith, and James Wilderbing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2018), 49.

146
 with understanding, that is owing to the presence in the cogniser of a

different sort of image or representation as well.473

The two types of concepts here described are arguably identical to the natural and mental

universals of Islamic philosophy, in which case the former comprise “intellectual images”

of the Forms contemplated synthetically by the divine Intellect,474 and the latter are

derived in the first instance from sensory particulars, since, to use Ṣadrā’s language from

the above passage, the universality of the negatively conditioned quiddity presupposes

the particularity of the perishables and thus accrues to it a posteriori, unlike the true

universality of the Forms. Lastly, regarding Ṣadrā’s statement that the participation of

things in the Forms is “like that of the forms subsisting via the intellect,” we will recall

from chapter 2 that Suhrawardī analogizes this properly vertical, “illuminative relation”

to that between thought and its represented objects in precisely the same way:

Do you not acknowledge that the form of a substance occurs in the mind

as an accident? After all, you say that the thing has existence among

concrete things and existence in minds. If it is permissible for the reality of

substantiality to occur in the mind as an accident, then there may also be

self-subsistent quiddities in the world of intellect, having images in this

world that are not self-subsistent. These are a perfection for another, but

they do not have the perfection of the intellectual quiddities, just as the

forms of the quiddities of substances external to the mind occur in the

473
Gerson, Ancient Epistemology, 149.
474
According to Fazlur Rahman, “These forms, as metaphysical realities, are part of God’s being and only
when regarded in abstracto do they differ and become distinguishable from Him. When so regarded, they
are posterior to His being as His necessary consequents. They then become mutually different and exhibit
an order of priority and posteriority among themselves, as we have seen. But existentially, they are not
different from Him.” Fazlur Rahman, The Philosophy of Mullā Ṣadrā (Albany, NY: State University of
New York Press, 1975), 160.

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 mind and are not self-subsistent—being a perfection or attribute of the

mind and not having the independence and self-subsistence that the

external quiddities have. In this case, that which is true of a thing is not

necessarily true of its image.475

In his commentary on the last sentence of this text, in which Suhrawardī is responding to

Peripatetic objections to the existence of the Forms, Mullā Ṣadrā corroborates the shaykh,

though he does make a point of restating the intended meaning from the perspective of

the primacy of wujūd.

The outward [sense] of this statement indicates that the mental form

[ṣūrah], according to the author, is a figure [shabaḥ] and image [mithāl]

for the external form, and that the separate form also is an image for the

bodily species. The truth is that the quiddity is one in the mental form and

external entity, between which is a likeness according to the definition and

meaning, whereas no [such] likeness [obtains] according to the wujūd.

Rather, the mental existence is an image and figure for the external entity,

and likewise between the disengaged form and the bodily form in that they

agree in quiddity [al-māhīyah baynahumā mutamāthalah] while the wujūd

differs by primacy [aṣālah] and sovereignty [ẓillīyah].476 This is not

congruous with the view of the author in respect of [his] negation of the

[external] realization [taḥaqquq] of wujūd.477

475
Suhrawardī, Ḥikmat al-ishrāq, 66.
476
According to Mostafavi, “It is not clear in the writings of Sheikh Ishraq whether the Masters of Species
have, in his view, the same essence and reality as the sensible things. … The proofs and writings of Sheikh
Ishraq do not deal with this issue” (“Sadr-ol-Muta’allahin,” 151-52). However, as was discussed in chapter
2, Suhrawardī does say plainly that “if the nature of anything is taken without its qualities, it is the light of
which that thing is the idol” (Ḥikmat al-ishrāq, 131 [trans. modified]).
477
Ṣadrā, Addenda, 442.

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If, as we saw in chapter 2, the differences between the basic metaphysical positions of

Mullā Ṣadrā and Suhrawardī have been unduly overemphasized, we can find support for

this claim in the Taʿlīqāt itself, specifically the part of it addressing Shaykh al-Ishrāq’s

keenly wrought assertion of the iʿtibārī nature of wujūd.

Since the wujūd [of things] is in a sense accidental vis-à-vis another

wujūd, and all wujūd is light, the accidental light is light upon light. The

author—may his secret be sanctified—is not veiled from the reality of

wujūd in [the case of] the glorified [muʿaẓẓam] existents, like the

Necessary—may He be exalted—the intellects, the souls, and what is

other than them according to the purport [mufād] and meaning. Far be that

from him! [Rather,] he only indicates “wujūd” by “light.” Were it not for

the manifestation of wujūd in the engendered beings [akwān] and

quiddities, they would remain in the veil of nonexistence and the darkness

of hiddenness; in and of themselves, they are perishing in essence and

tenebrous in ipseity [huwīyah]. So the manifestation of wujūd in every

level, and its condescension [tanazzul] to every waystation [manzilah],

necessitates the manifestation of one of the levels of the possibilities and

one of the fixed entities that have never smelled, and never will smell, the

fragrance of existence.478

To see now how Ṣadrā ties all of the foregoing together, we can turn at last to his

discussion of the key passage from Ḥikmat al-ishrāq in which Suhrawardī explains the

nature of wujūd in a manner entirely consonant with the Ṣadrian doctrine of “modulation”

478
Ibid., 313 (see n. 452). See also Ṣadrā, Metaphysical Penetrations, 37.

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(tashkīk al-wujūd).479 Following up on the shaykh’s contestation of the claim that

“existence applies with a single meaning to the Necessary Existent and to everything

else”480 on the basis of the counterclaim that necessary wujūd is distinguished from

contingent wujūd by its perfection (kamālīyah) and completeness (tamāmīyah),481 Ṣadrā

writes as follows:

Wujūd is not a single species-quiddity [māhīyah nawʿīyah]482 for the

necessary and the contingent, nor is it part of a quiddity for them, since it

is not possible that it vary in substance and accidentality. Positing the

concept of general wujūd apropos of its individuals is an accidental

positing [qawl], for the state of the accidental is able to vary by analogy

with that which is accidental for it. The wujūd of the necessary is not the

same as the wujūd of the contingents in either the whole or a part of the

quiddity, since wujūd has no quiddity to begin with on account of its being

a simple, concrete reality [amr]; quiddity belongs only to those things to

which wujūd is added.483 So the occurrence [wuqūʿ] of general wujūd as

the wujūd of the necessary, and as that of the contingents differing through

the ipseities to which no names belong via elaboration save by ascription

[iḍāfah] to the quiddities, is a [mentally] concomitant [lāzim], and not

[ontologically] constitutive [muqawwim],484 external occurrence.

Regarding the participation in and root [sinkh] of the reality of wujūd

479
For an in-depth study thereof, see Rizvi, Mullā Ṣadrā and Metaphysics.
480
Suhrawardī, Ḥikmat al-ishrāq, 66.
481
Ibid., 67.
482
This translation, though awkward, preserves the technical sense of the term species in philosophy. The
phrase would perhaps be more happily rendered as “specific quiddity” (indeed the Latin word differentia is
usually translated as “specific difference”).
483
See note 451.
484
For a discussion of this distinction in Avicenna, see Faruque, “Mullā Ṣadrā,” 283.

150
among the specific existences, it is not like the participation in a universal

quiddity among its particulars, whether essential or accidental [in nature],

because the truly existent wujūd for every [existent] thing is its individual

ipseity’s simple entity, the acquisition of which in the mind is not possible,

as there is no knowledge [maʿrifah] of it save through presential

witnessing given the fact that all of what is acquired in the mind and

known through acquired knowledge is universal, and this even if [the

entity] be particularized by a thousand particularizations in it [i.e., the

mind]. The analogy between the species-quiddity belonging to the things,

like the quiddity of man and the quiddity of horse, and the reality of wujūd

in its being participated in by the necessary and the contingent is a non-

comprehensive analogy. The appropriate [thing] to be said here is that just

as perfection and deficiency belong to the reality of wujūd in its essence,

so too do they belong to it through the consideration of its names and

attributes of perfection (for example knowledge, power, will, etc.). And to

it belong diverse tasks in accordance with its perfection and deficiency in

these meanings, from which [tasks] the quiddities, called fixed entities by

the Sufis, emerge. Its tasks have different geneses, like the geneses of

intellect, soul, and sense perception, from which emerge three worlds, and

above which is the world of divinity. Thus for every species-quiddity there

are degrees in wujūd. The first is a divine name; the second is an

intellectual form [mithāl]; the third is an intermediate form [mithāl

barzakhī]; and the fourth is a sensory form [ṣūrah]. The quiddity is one,

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 and the wujūd is variable, possessing degrees, some of which are above

others.485

For Mullā Ṣadrā, whose exposition here is basically the same as that of Mullā Fanārī, the

generality of the concept of wujūd does not entail any kind of contingency for God—a

point affirmed, as we have seen, by both Suhrawardī486 and Qūnawī487 as well. The

abstract concept of wujūd is simply the mental concomitant of noticing that a variety of

things exist; it is not a constitutive reality in which both God and everything other than

Him participate. As for the participation of the “specific existences” (wujūdāt) in the

reality of wujūd, Ṣadrā explains it through a distinction between ontological and

predicative participation. The true wujūd of things is not graspable by the intellect, since

it is not a universal concept. Although one can speak of participation in each case, the

analogy between the two modes is “non-comprehensive” (qiyās bi-lā jāmiʿ) on account of

the all-important distinction between concept and reality.

Regarding the fixed entities, which provided the key to Fanārī’s doctrinal

synthesis, it will be helpful to reflect briefly on Ṣadrā’s use of the language of

“emergence” (inbiʿāth), which if misunderstood could lead to the false impression that he

is playing fast and loose with the Akbarian term.488 If the entities emerge into existence in

485
Ṣadrā, Addenda, 448-50. “Sadr-ol-Mota’allahin says that Platonic ideas, the species and bodies have the
same reality, and their manner of being is different from one another; one is material and the other is
rational. But their essence and reality are the same.” Mostafavi, “Sadr-ol-Muta’allahin,” 154. She goes on
to contrast Ṣadrā’s view here with that of Suhrawardī, who she says “does not openly accept the unity of
reality of [a] physical species and its Platonic idea.”
486
Suhrawardī, Ḥikmat al-ishrāq, 92.
487
See Dagli, Islamic Intellectual Culture, 72-78.
488
As indeed Rahman thinks that he is: “In Section B of Chapter IV of Part I we had criticized Ṣadrā for
positing separate ideas or attributes in God’s mind and we expressed there the suspicion that his motivation
for doing this was to bring together diverse elements in Islamic philosophical, mystical, and theological
thought. This suspicion is now further confirmed since, after positing all forms in God’s being in a simple
manner, there seems little need for attributing duplicate explicit forms. It appears certain that he wants to
combine in one stroke the Intelligences of the philosophers, the ‘Essences of Contingents’ of Ibn ʿArabī,
the Platonic Forms of the Platonists, and the angelology of the theologians. This genre of thought was much

152
keeping with the tasks of the Real, they do so from their state of fixity in His knowledge.

In other words, Ṣadrā is not saying that the objects of God’s knowledge are “made”

(majʿūl),489 which claim would run directly counter not only to one of the most basic

tenets of Akbarian thought but also to the whole thrust of his epistemology, which refers

back ultimately to the supremely simple and thus beginningless knowledge of the One.490

Finally, Ṣadrā concludes this particular gloss by affirming that the reality of

wujūd reveals itself through a hierarchy of levels, the integral wholeness, harmony, and

coherence of which are accounted for by the nature of the “species-quiddities,” which

remain always and ever self-identical in the midst of the modulatory actus essendi of the

one true Being.491 In sum, Ṣadrā harmonizes Illuminationist Platonism and Akbarian

too widespread and much too firmly rooted in the diverse currents of the Islamic tradition to be simply
ignored or contradicted. But it is apparently not easily compatible with Ṣadrā’s doctrine of existence and its
movement through various hierarchical forms of existential reality” (Mullā Ṣadrā, 162). Cf. Ibrahim Kalin,
Mullā Ṣadrā (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014), 118; Walbridge, “Mulla Sadra’s Doctrine,” 33-
34.
489
Though he does, incidentally, employ the term “making” (jaʿl) in a manner distinct from its
characteristic use in Akbarian texts. For a helpful explanation of the meaning of jaʿl in Ṣadrā’s philosophy,
see Kalin, Later Islamic Philosophy, 287n15.
490
For an account of Ṣadrā’s view of the nature of divine knowledge, see Sayeh Meisami, Mulla Sadra
(London: Oneworld, 2013), 95-101. See also James Winston Morris, The Wisdom of the Throne: An
Introduction to the Philosophy of Mulla Sadra (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 106-9. In
this text, which Morris has translated, Ṣadrā states that “the view that has been ascribed to Plato is … false
in holding that His Knowledge—May He be exalted!—consists in self-subsistent essences and forms that
are separate both from Him—May He be exalted (above such a defect)!—and from matter” (107). As
Morris astutely observes in a note, “In using the phrase ‘ascribed to Plato,’ Sadra indicates his suspicion
that Plato did not actually intend a dualistic separation of the Forms (or intelligible reality) from the divine
Essence” (107n35).
491
It is interesting that, according to Nariman Aavani, Mullā Ṣadrā’s student Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī Riḍā ibn
Āqājānī, who wrote a commentary on the Qabasāt of Mīr Dāmād, propounded a doctrine similar to that of
his teacher, albeit somewhat simplified by comparison: “In [Āqājānī’s] view, there are two worlds in which
unconditioned quiddities exist: the immaterial and the material worlds. In each of these worlds, the
unconditioned nature exists through its particular instances: in the material realms through the particular
material instances, and in the immaterial world through immaterial instances. Moreover, he calls the
immaterial instances of the unconditioned quiddities in the immaterial realm ‘Platonic Forms.’ … But he
again and again emphasizes that Platonic Forms are particular instances of the unconditioned quiddity in
the external world and are not unconditioned quiddities themselves existing in the external world, such as
would lead to the undesired view that Mīr Dāmād rejects.” He therefore “manifests a Sadrean
understanding of Platonic Ideas according to which an Idea is an immaterial instance of a quiddity in the
immaterial realm.” Nariman Aavani, “Platonism in Safavid Persia: Mīr Dāmād (d. 1631) and Āqājānī (ca.
1661) on the Platonic Forms,” Ishraq: Islamic Philosophy Yearbook 8 (2017): 134-35.

153
gnosis by attributing both intra- and extradeical modalities to the Forms. The entities of

things are nonexistent in themselves, but they are made manifest—supereminently and

“relatively absolutely”492 in the case of the lords of the idols—through “the outspreading

of the light of wujūd upon the temples of the contingents and the receptivities of the

quiddities, and [through] its condescension to the waystations of the ipseities.”493 Wujūd

is one with a true oneness, and thus both one and many in its being beyond oneness and

manyness, and it is universal with a true universality,494 and thus both universal and

particular in its being beyond these and all else besides.

492
We owe this apt phrase to the writings of Frithjof Schuon.
493
Ṣadrā, Metaphysical Penetrations, 9 (trans. modified).
494
For a discussion of this “peculiar kind of universality” in Ṣadrā, see Faruque, “Mullā Ṣadrā,” 292.

154
 CHAPTER 5

CONCLUSION

In the opening chapter of this thesis we gained some familiarity with the stakes of

the debate over universals, both generally and in the context of Islam. If one could put the

most pressing underlying issue into a nutshell—expressed in individual terms and in the

form of a question—it might come out something like, “To what degree does my ability

to understand anything relate to my ultimate end as a human being?” Assuming for

present purposes that our putative capacity for understanding does play a role of some

significance in our efforts, diverse dispositions notwithstanding, to live well, a second

question follows, namely, “To what degree is understanding bound up with universality?”

For Suhrawardī, the relationship between specifically philosophical thinking and

knowledge is such that the highest level of attainment in the latter necessitates doing the

former, even if gnosis is intrinsically epistemically superior to a facility for correct

reasoning. Furthermore, inasmuch as the latter presupposes a sound grasp of logical

principles and thus involves dealing skillfully with universals, doing justice to

Suhrawardī’s position requires that we discern—to the best of our ability given the

elliptical character of his integral doctrine—the precise nature of the relationship between

the Peripatetic and properly Platonist dimensions thereof. With this aim in mind, chapter

2 argued that, when attempting to categorize Shaykh al-Ishrāq’s teachings on universals

using the technical terminology native to the broadly Western tradition of philosophy, he

is best thought of as a realist for the simple reason that nominalism and Platonism

155
comprise mutually exclusive alternatives. The lords of the idols are not strictly speaking

universals, but they do function, epistemologically speaking, as conditions sine qua non

for the valid employment of universal terms in predication.

Leaving behind the language of Scholasticism for the kaleidoscopic intellectuality

of Akbarian esoterism, chapter 3 sought to clarify the relationship—often fuzzy in the

scholarly literature on the school of Ibn ʿArabī—between the concepts of a divine name

and a “fixed entity.” Examining the writings of Qūnawī in particular, it demonstrated the

plasticity—at once profound and paradoxically rigorous—of the words ism and ʿayn

before concluding, in corroboration of Chittick, that the entities are not at all confinable

to the category of the universal, which more readily applies to the canonical names of

God. As for Platonism so-called, the markedly ahistorical nature of Qūnawī’s writings

raised the question dealt with in chapter 4, namely that of the degree of kinship between

the Illuminationist and Akbarian approaches to universals.

Focusing on the commentarial works of Mullā Fanārī and Mullā Ṣadrā, the fourth

chapter provided textual justification for the claim that both authors evince a serious

concern to reconcile the Platonism central to Suhrawardī’s Illuminationism with the

findings of the realizers as elaborated by the Akbarīyah. Specifically, it focused on the

concepts of the natural universal and Platonic Form, showing how both Fanārī and Ṣadrā

argue for the extramental existence of each in a manner that harmonizes with the essential

nonexistence of the fixed entities. The Forms manifest the realities of the divine names in

the world of spirit, and the natural universal vehicles the Form in the realm of

embodiment, with the names themselves all the while naught in the face of the Named.

156
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