The Heart of Islamic Philosophy This page intentionally left blank tHE hEART OF iSLAMIC pHILOSOPHY the quest for self-knowloge in the teachings of afdal al- din kashhani WILLIAM C. CHITTICK OXFORD 2OOI OXFORD Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris Sao Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright © 2001 by William C. Chittick Published by Oxford University Press, Inc., 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chittick, William C. The heart of Islamic philosophy : the quest for self-knowledge in the teachings of Afdal al-DIn Kashani / William C. Chittick. p. cm. Includes indexes. ISBN 0-19-513913-5 I. Philosophy, Islamic—Iran. 2. Sufism—Iran. 3. Baba Afdal, I3th ce I. Title. 6743.17045 2OOO iSi'.oy—dc2i 00-020628 135798642 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper FOR SEYYED HOSSEIN NASR This page intentionally left blank Preface I set out to write this book with two goals in mind—first, to introduce the major themes of Islamic philosophy to those unfamiliar with them, and second, to add Afdal al-DIn KashanI to the list of Muslim philosophers who can be read in English trans- lation. I consider it appropriate to combine these two goals under one cover because Afdal al-DIn wrote with exceptional simplicity, clarity, and directness. The book sprouted from seeds that were sown when I taught a graduate course at Stony Brook in the spring of 1997 called "Neoplatonic Themes in Islamic Thought." The course was listed in the programs of both the Department of Comparative Lit erature and the Department of Philosophy, and it was designed to bring together students of religious literature and the history of philosophy. Only three of the dozen or so students attending the course had any knowledge of the Islamic languages. About half had some familiarity with Islamic thought, especially theoretical Sufism, and the other half had studied Greek and Western philosophy. For background read- ing I assigned Majid Fakhry's History of Islamic Philosophy and suggested a variety of general studies on Islamic philosophy and monographs on individual authors. The goal of the course was to read philosophical literature in English transla- tion and to bring out the ways in which certain themes associated with Neoplatonism have been carried down through the centuries. We read works spanning a period of about eight hundred years, beginning with the so-called Theology of Aristotle, which is in fact portions of Plotinus's Enneads, and then moving on to texts from Avicenna (Ibn SIna), Ghazall, SuhrawardI, Afdal al-DIn KashanI, Ibn al-'Arabl, and Mulla Sadra. What I would have liked to have had available was an anthology of repre- sentative texts translated accurately and consistently and spanning the whole his- tory of Islamic philosophy. But we had no choice but to read translations of dispar- ate quality with no semblance of terminological consistency. viii PREFACE One of my goals was to illustrate how key philosophical themes could be traced by following the use of basic terms. In the Arabic texts themselves, it is easy to see how the same key words are at issue from the Theology down to Mulla Sadra. But the available English translations offer little help toward this goal, because various translators have followed a great diversity of paths in rendering technical terms. The goals, methods, and skills of the translators are so diverse that it is often difficult to see in any more than a general way how specific issues recur and how the philoso- phers dealt with the same issues from various perspectives. Lacking an appropriate anthology of philosophical texts, it would have been useful to have an introduction to Islamic philosophical thinking—rather than to the history of that thinking. Such an introduction would deal with central ideas in de- tail, present teachings in a way that would be faithful to the goals of the philoso- phers themselves, maintain consistency in choice of technical terminology, and be accessible both to those trained in Western philosophy and those versed in Islamic studies. But, to my knowledge, there is no such book. While teaching the course, I assumed, as the students assumed, that Muslim phi- losophers were dealing with issues that are still very much alive, even though philo- sophical language and points of view may have changed radically over the centuries. I found that the students with philosophical training could immediately see that the texts were covering ground with which they were more or less familiar. But I had to spend an inordinate amount of time filling in background to illustrate how the particular approaches were deeply conditioned by presuppositions of the Islamic worldview. On the other side, students unacquainted with the Aristotelian terminol- ogy that is so central to both Western and Islamic philosophy had difficulty seeing how the issues were expressions of Islamic notions with which they were already familiar. I finished the course thinking that I should find time to write one or two of the books that I had wished had been available. For several reasons that do not need to be detailed here, I ended up working on one and then another of the treatises of Afdal al-D!n Kashanl. The more I read and studied these, the more I realized that an intro- duction to his thought could at the same time function as a primer in Islamic phi- losophy. Hence the present book. The anthology of philosophical texts will have to wait for another occasion. This book is not intended to cover the same ground as the several introduc- tions to and general studies of Islamic philosophy that are now available, because all of these focus on the history and development of ideas, typically with a view toward Greek and Western philosophy, and none of them allows the philosophers to engage in sustained arguments.1 There are many specialist monographs, but these are difficult for anyone not already conversant with the history of Western philosophy, or familiar with the abstruse debates that went on in Islamic philoso- phy and theology, or acquainted with the Islamic intellectual tradition in general. No matter how useful the monographs may be for scholars and advanced students, they cannot be recommended to beginners. There are also a good number of trans- lated texts, but again, few of them are accessible to those without thorough train- ing in the history of philosophy. My goal has been to write a book that will present Islamic philosophy as seri- ously engaged with basic intellectual issues and, at the same time, will be accessible PREFACE ix to relative beginners, including undergraduates. Moreover, it seems important to me, in this day and age, to present the philosophical texts in a way that allows us to see how they might be relevant not only to the other great wisdom traditions, but also to contemporary intellectual issues.2 In two of the introductory chapters, I have tried to extend the basic issues of Islamic philosophy in ways that will help students see how this tradition speaks to diverse issues of continuing importance, not to men- tion the perennial quest for wisdom. In brief, I wrote this book for those who want to know something about Islamic philosophy on its own terms, not simply as a chapter in the history of Western phi- losophy, nor as a curious bit of the past that is now concluded. I would like to suggest why this philosophy has always made sense to its practitioners and how they have seen it as a coherent worldview that explains not only the nature of things, but also the manner in which people should live their lives. I will make little reference to the history of ideas, but will rather be looking at Islamic philosophy as a living tradition in something of the way in which it has been perceived by its practitioners in later times, especially in Persia, where it has survived down to the present. In other words, I will be considering Islamic philosophy in terms of the "love of wisdom" that animates it, rather than simply its historical role. Without doubt, many historical studies of the Muslim philosophers are begging to be carried out, but greater attention also needs to be paid to the objectives of the philosophers and to the arguments and practices that were intended to achieve these objectives. Otherwise, Islamic philosophy remains a dead fish, rather than a tradition that continues to swim against the current. In writing the book, I have tried to let Afdal al-DIn explain his teachings in his own terms. The earlier chapters prepare the ground for the presentation of the trans- lated texts in the later chapters. Chapter i suggests something of Kashanf s significance in the Islamic philosophical tradition and provides what little details are known about his life, plus a list of his known writings. Chapter 2 situates Islamic philosophy within Islamic thought, moves on to the philosophical worldview in general, and then ad- dresses some of the broad philosophical issues, drawing both from KashanI and a few of his predecessors.