This panel explores the importance of Platonic and Neoplatonic thought in the mystical thought of various Muslim thinkers. Towards this end, the papers that make up this panel address a number of questions with regard to the nature, scope, audience, and context of Platonic texts that were translated during the Arabic translation movement that occurred in ninth-century Baghdad, Iraq from Greek into Arabic. This panel seeks to show how the translations of the Dialogues of Plato, the ontology of Plotinus, and the theurgical practices of Iamblichus and Proclus became part-and-parcel of Islamic mystical thought after the ninth century. The ideas in these original Greek works were also often misattributed and even heavily redacted to conform to the monotheistic worldviews of their Muslim and Christian readers. The papers in the panel examine the use of these translations in the thought of various mystics and philosophers during the Medieval period.
The Brethren of Purity (Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’) were a ninth-tenth century Shi’ite philosophical movement from Basra. Most modern scholars have denied that Hermeticism as a distinct school of philosophy ever existed. Due to this, earlier studies have not shown what role Hermetic and Neopythagorean mysticism played in the Treatises of the Brethren of Purity. This paper rejects a theory posed by André-Jean Festugière and Kevin van Bladel that Hermeticism is merely a bricolage of concepts. Instead, as Christian H. Bull and J. Peter Södergård have argued, this paper supports the theory that a distinct form of Hermetic mysticism is present in the Brethren of Purity’s Treatises and that they used magic, theurgy, and numerology to achieve mystical union with the Universal Soul through invoking spirits (angels and jinn). These spirits taught the Brethren empirical sciences and also how to unite with the Universal Soul.
This talk engages in what I argue to be the continuation of the ancient philosophical tradition of the care of the self (epimeleia heautou) as formulated by Michel Foucault in the Islamic context. While many elements found new life in the Islamic world through the engagement with Hellenistic philosophy following the Graeco-Arabic translation movement, I will focus here on the Platonic notion of recollection (anamnesis) and the echoes of Platonic epistemology in Islamic philosophy, theology, and mysticism. The talk briefly charts the reception of Plato’s theory of recollection in the Islamic context, and posits various afterlives of anamnesis in the Islamic world despite widespread rejection of reincarnation and the pre-existence of the soul. Specifically, I highlight the mode of recollection in Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s (d. 1210) developed philosophical theology, which I argue to be an ontological rather than epistemological principle.
The Andalusian mystic ‘Abd al-Ḥaqq ibn Sab‘īn al-Ghāfiqī (d. 1271 CE) has long been considered a radical monist because of his theology of absolute oneness (al-waḥḍa al-maḥḍa). In this paper, I will argue that the key to this theology comes from a monotheistic gloss on the metaphysics of Proclus (d. 485 CE), as expressed in his work The Elements of Theology. Two Arabic translations of portions of Proclus’s Elements were made in the medieval period. The Arab translators of the Elements eliminated the pagan parts and transformed the One, which is beyond being for Proclus, into God as the First Cause and the First Being. For Ibn Sab‘īn, since God as the First and True Being (al-Awwal al-Ḥaqq) must be present in all forms of multiplicity, He is also present in all things. The outcome of this logic is his monistic theology of absolute oneness.
What must the world be like, to host natural laws as well as their violations? Must one choose between a scientific worldview and a world with a God with untrammeled power? I lay out an interesting strategy in Ibn Sina that attempts to preserve causal powers of nature as well as the possibility of the divine in overriding them to perform miracles. Ibn Sina introduces into the cosmos an extraordinarily powerful agent, a human nonetheless, who functions as a kind of “soul for the world”. Just as our souls influence our own bodies, the soul of a mystic and prophet is said to influence bodies other than their own. By working miracles into his system in this way, Ibn Sina’s theory of prophecy, I argue, brings together his scientific worldview as expressed in his thoroughgoing philosophical works with his more esoteric views expressed in his mystical works.
This paper proves the substantive role that Twelver Shiʿite sources played in the development of medieval Sufi piety, well beyond what is known to modern scholarship. Specifically, I show how Sufis as early as the 8th/14th c. expressed devotion to the Twelfth Imam of the Shiʿa as awaited Mahdi and supreme spiritual authority or “Seal of the Saints,” through significant reliance on Shiʿite sources. After considering this doctrine’s origins in Mongol Iran, I sketch its transmission through Persian Sufi orders until the Safavid period (10th/16th – 12th/18th c.). Prompting a serious return to the old hypothesis of “Shiʿite influence” on Persian Sufism, these sources suggest that the readiness throughout much of Iranian society to accept Shiʿism under the Safavids may have rested partly on a Sufi, specifically emanationist reinterpretation of Shiʿism’s normative claims – but also that such conceptions were too widespread to guarantee confessional outcomes by themselves.