Meeting Places of the Two Seas: Philosopher-Sufis during the Golden Age of Ottoman Intellectual Life

In his vast work on the nature of the sciences, Miftāḥ al-saʿāda, Taşköprüzade tells us that the ‘experiential philosophy’ (al-ḥikma al-dhawqiyya)—one of the most prominent later representatives of which he lists as Mulla Fenari, along with the son-in-law and spiritual successor of Ibn ʿArabī, ‘their leader, Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī’—employs a ‘level of speculative thought that shares a border with the way of purification, and which has a similar definition’.¹ He has already introduced Ibn ʿArabī himself as ‘the Sheikh, the Imam, the lordly scholar-sage, and ever-besought ocean, the guide of the spiritual wayfarers, and the saviour of the lost ... may God sanctify his secret ... he was of august standing, and unique in his kind in gnosis (ʿirfān)’.² His successor al-Qūnawī (605–673/1207–1274), ‘brought together the sciences of the Sacred Law and the sciences of Sufism, becoming thus a meeting place of the two seas (majmaʿ al-baḥrayn)’.³ He ‘corresponded with Khwāja Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī on certain philosophical questions, and they had numerous discussions, until Naṣīr al-Ṭūsī admitted [his] impotence and incompetence’ to debate al-Qūnawī.⁴

The notion of the relationship between philosophical investigation and the knowledge resultant of ‘spiritual purification’ was one close to Taşköprüzade’s heart; his ‘fourth introduction’ to his Miftāḥ al-saʿāda is a short section on ‘the relationship between the way of speculative investigation (naẓar) and the way of spiritual purification (taṣfiya)’.

The way of deductive inference ... [and the] way of gnostic witnessing ... both of the two ways sometimes become resolved into the other (qad tantahī kullun min al-ṭarīqayn ilā al-ukhrā), such that the person in possession of [them both] becomes a meeting place of the two seas; that is, the two seas (baḥray) of deductive inference and gnostic witnessing, or knowledge and gnosis, or the observed world and the unseen world.⁵

The knowledge resultant of speculative investigation is not of an altogether different order to that garnered by spiritual purification; as Taşköprüzade has told us, there is a level of the former that ‘shares a border’ with the latter. In this latter quote, we see that this synthesis takes place in the very being of the scholar-sage who masters both of these ways; he becomes the ‘meeting place of the two seas’, a Qur’anic reference (18:60) that for the Akbarian school provides a symbolic allusion to the meeting place of the world of spirits and the world of bodies in the human heart,⁶ which further implies the Akbarian doctrine of the Perfect Man as the degree of being encompassing all of the other degrees within himself (al-martaba al-jāmiʿa). Reason, then, far from being irredeemably cut off from the metaphysical realm, is simply one limited manifestation of a single unified spiritual reality, as representing the finitely intelligible aspect of that reality. 

The sciences that pertain to essences with respect to their ‘state in things as they are (nafs al-amr)⁷ are the true sciences, which do not change with the passing of time, nor the appearance of new creeds and religions; these are named the philosophical sciences (ʿulūman ḥikmiyya) if the investigator of their states has proceeded in accordance with [pure] reason, or sciences of religion (ʿulūman sharʿiyya) if he has investigated them in accordance with the statutes of Islam.’⁸

Taşköprüzade goes on to tell us that this ‘knowledge pertaining to essences in nafs al-amr’ can equally ‘be acquired via speculative investigation (naẓar) or via spiritual purification (taṣfiya)’.⁹ Only the aged (al-shuyūkh) or slow-witted (al-aghbiyāʾ) should suffice themselves with spiritual purification alone, solely due to their inability to learn the way of speculative investigation (al-naẓar); individuals both young and intelligent, but who are unable to find a true teacher in the speculative sciences, should similarly busy themselves with spiritual purification as a means to the acquisition of knowledge of reality. However, those who enjoy both the requisite youth and intelligence, as well as access to a master of the way of speculative investigation, should first busy themselves with this latter way, and then turn to the path of Sufi purification; in doing this, they ‘win unto both ways, and combine both leaderships, and become the possessors of easily acquired spoils that never run out, and an enduring blessing that cannot be reckoned by counting’.¹⁰ Taşköprüzade’s account, then, is remarkable for its synthetical attitude towards mashshāʾī and ishrāqī epistemologies, and even more so for its advocacy of the indispensability of philosophy, for a full account of reality, even to practitioners of Sufism.

Indeed, the merest of glances at the history of the relationship between Sufism and the intellectual sciences therein will demonstrate how fertile an earth was the early Ottoman polity, for the development of this notion of ‘experiential philosophy’, this ‘meeting place of the two seas’; and for the synthesis between all of 1 Sufism in its metaphysical aspect, 2 Peripatetic and  3 Illuminationist philosophies, and 4 kalām, as we see in the writings of Mulla Fenari, Ibn Kemal, Taşköprüzade, and Ibn Bahāʾuddīn. 

Even in the pre-madrasa stage of Ottoman history, Muhlis Baba, a wonder-working sage accompanied Osman Gazi (656–727/1258–1326) on his campaigns, and his son Aşık Paşa, ‘a gnostic and ascetic’, and Ahki Hasan, both wrote works on spiritual wayfaring.¹¹ Yet it was Osman’s son, Sultan Orhan (d. 764/1362), who would build the first madrasa in Ottoman history, in Izniq, for none other than Dāwūd al-Qayṣarī, the commentator on Ibn ʿArabī’s Fuṣūṣ¹², whose Muqaddima contributes some of the most important fundamental elements to our notion of synthesis. Indeed, Orhan’s patronage shows us that Akbarian Sufism and the scholastic college were in a certain way united from the very beginning in the Ottoman state. After all, despite his Sufism, Qayṣarī was ‘outstandingly skilful (baraʿa) in the intellectual sciences’, and his Muqaddima shows his ‘skills in the transmitted sciences also’.¹³

A generation after Qayṣarī, we arrive at the pivotal figure of Shams al-Din Fenari, the first Ottoman şeyhülislam, who wrote classic works in logic and principles of jurisprudence, and notes on one of the most advanced of all kalām summas, the Sharḥ al-Mawāqif, in which he challenged the conclusions of his friend al-Sayyid al-Sharīf on numerous points (one of Fenari’s descendants, Hasan Çelebi Fenari (d. 891/1486), would also write a famous supercommentary on al-Sayyid al-Sharīf’s great work).

However, Fenari’s most original work is probably his Miṣbāḥ al-uns bayna al-maʿqūl wa al-mashhūd, one of the most comprehensive, subtle, and original works of philosophical Akbarianism ever written, which also draws on Avicenna, Suhrawardī, late debates in post-Rāzian kalām and philosophy, and of course, the metaphysics of Ibn ʿArabī and his followers. Fenari had studied Miftāḥ al-ghayb (on which the Miṣbāḥ is a loose commentary) with his father, who had himself studied it with the author Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī,¹⁴ thereby establishing a direct and very short chain of transmission to one of the greatest of all exponents of the school of Ibn ʿArabī, and one of Taşköprüzade’s ‘meeting places of the two seas’.

Taşköprüzade tells us that Miṣbāḥ al-uns contains ‘Sufi doctrines never before heard of, and that [mere] minds are inadequate to understand’.¹⁵ Mulla Fenari was the figure responsible for integrating the works of the philosophical kalām theologian (and polymath) Taftāzānī into the curriculum,¹⁶ despite the fact that he refutes Taftāzānī’s famous criticism of Akbarianism in Miṣbāḥ al-uns—an apparent contradiction justified by Fenari’s account of the subordination of the sciences. It is testament to his renown that, accused of heterodoxy in Herat, the great Akbarian Sāʾin al-Dīn Turka (d. 836/1432) cited the example of Mulla Fenari as part of his defence, who as he put it, had openly taught the sciences of esoteric Sufism for twenty years in the Ottoman lands where Islam enjoyed such strength.¹⁷

To return to examples of the rapprochement between the rational sciences and Sufism amongst the Ottoman ulema in the generations prior to Ibn Bahāʾuddīn, Taşköprüzade tells us of Badr al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Ismāʿīl (d. 818/1415), the one-time military judge under Musa Çelebi (d. 816/1413), who studied the rational sciences under Mubārakshāh alongside al-Sayyid al-Sharīf, and went on to become a Sufi sheikh and writer on Sufism.¹⁸

Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī al-Ḥusaynī, a Bukhāran sage who took up residence in Bursa, studied Qūnawī’s Miftāḥ al-ghayb with Fenari;¹⁹ having witnessed miracles at his hands, the Ottoman sultans of his time would come to seek his blessings before setting out on travel.²⁰ Today of course, he is revered as the great ‘Emir Sultan’ (d. 833/1429), whose tomb is the most important Sufi shrine in Bursa. The great Hacı Bayram (d. 833/1430) of Ankara himself studied ‘the sciences of Sacred Law and of reason (al-ʿaqliyyāt)’ before attaching himself to Sheikh Ḥāmid al-Qayṣarī and ‘reaching the ultimate level (al-ghāyat al-quṣwā) of spiritual perfections’.²¹

Another student of Mulla Fenari, Mūḥyī al-Dīn al-Kāfiyajī (d. 879/1474) was ‘a huge Imam in all of the intellectual sciences (al-maʿqūlāt)’, and had ‘an approving belief in the Sufis’.²² Despite being most famous for his Nūniyya poem in kalām, it was said of Hizir Bey b. Jalaluddin (d. 862/1458) that ‘no one since Shams al-Din Fenari has been so well-acquainted with the occult sciences as he’.²³

Muhyī al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Quṭb al-Dīn al-Izniqī (d. 885/1480) studied the intellectual sciences with Mulla Fenari, and wrote a commentary on Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī’s Miftāḥ al-ghayb meant for beginners (unlike the extremely advanced commentary of his master), as well as a commentary on Qūnawī’s al-Nuṣūṣ.²⁴ In his Miftāḥ al-saʿāda, Taşköprüzade tells us that al-Izniqī ‘combined leadership in both speculative investigation and mystical unveiling’.²⁵ One of the spiritual successors of Hacı Bayram, Yazıcıoğlu Mehmet of Gallopoli (d. 855/1451), who enjoyed ‘outward and inward miracles’²⁶ displays his advanced engagement with the post-Rāzian transcendentals in his paraphrase of Ibn ʿArabī’s Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam.

ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn ʿAlī ibn Ma̲j̲d al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Bisṭāmī, a Sufi guide from the Zayniyya order of Zayn al-Dīn al-Khāfī known as al-Mawlā Muṣannifak (d. 874/1470) (‘the little writer’) because of his voluminous writing in his youth, authored a supercommentary on the advanced work in logic, Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s (d. 766/1365) Sharḥ al-Matāliʿ, a Persian commentary on Najm al-Dīn al-Kātibī’s classic Shamsiyya in logic, a supercommentary on Sharḥ al-ʿAqāʾid; he had emigrated from Iran to the Ottoman lands, and become a teacher in Konya, and died in Istanbul.²⁷

Sinanüddîn (d. 891/1486), the son of Hızır Bey, produced a commentary on the section on substance in Sharḥ al-Mawāqif, in which he raised several questions pertaining to al-Jurjānī’s treatment thereof; he used to ‘frequent Sufi sheikhs and seek their spiritual assistance’ and has a book of supplications in Turkish, as well as a work on the biographies of Sufi saints.²⁸ The aforementioned Hasan Çelebi Fenari, the author of one of the most celebrated supercommentaries on Sharḥ al-Mawāqif, ‘divided his days between science and worship, and would wear coarse clothing, and not ride a beast out of humility, and loved the poor and indigent, and was on intimate terms with the Sufi masters’.²⁹

The extremely prominent positions of Qayṣarī and Mulla Fenari in the early Ottoman establishment and the subtlety and incisiveness of their Akbarian works established the thought of Ibn ʿArabī as a permanent and familiar feature of the Ottoman intellectual milieu, and set the stage for Mulla Jāmī’s (d. 897/1494) decisive adjudication between philosophy and Akbarian Sufism commissioned by Sultan Mehmed Fatih, al-Durra al-fākhira, in which he showed, drawing on both Qayṣarī and Fenari, the intertwining of a shared body of concepts between Sufism, kalām, and Avicennan philosophy; dealing with concepts like the superaddition of existence to the essence of the Necessary Being, the negation of which is one of the cornerstones of Avicennan ontology, and the negation of the whole problematic assumed in the discussion, one of the cornerstones of Akbarian ontology. We have presented only a tiny sample of the ulema of al-Shaqāʾiq al-nuʿmāniyya who combined mastery in Sufism and the rational sciences, but it is to be hoped that this has spoken volumes.

SUPPLEMENT

on Ibn Baha’uddin’s synthesis of kalām and metaphysical Sufism

In the course of his coverage of the ulema of the reign of Sultan Selim I (869–926/1465–1520), Taşköprüzade says something he has never before said about anyone, amongst the hundreds of thinkers he has already discussed.

‘Muḥyī al-Dīn Muḥammad Ibn Bahāʾuddīn,’ he says, ‘synthesised the way of speculative theology and the way of Sufism’ (jamaʿa bayna ṭarīqat al-kalām wa ṭarīqat al-taṣawwuf).³⁰ This integrative project, we are told, unfolded in Ibn Bahāʾuddīn’s commentary on Abū Ḥanīfa’s al-Fiqh al-akbar, where he ‘treated the questions with surpassing mastery, lifting them up from mere knowledge to direct witnessing’.³¹ In his article on Ibn Bahāʾuddīn, Taşköprüzade in fact shared a personal experience he had had of his subject’s spiritual gifts.

One of the remarkable events that transpired between us is that when I was a master at one of the eight madrasas, I saw the Prophet (may blessings and peace be upon him) in a dream-vision bestowing a crown upon me, which came from Medina the Illuminated. This vision happened in the last third of the night, and when I woke up, I rose and looked through the exegesis of al-Bayḍāwī, which I had been reading during that period. After I had prayed the dawn prayer, a person came to me, bearing [Ibn Bahāʾuddīn’s] greetings of peace, and saying, ‘the Sheikh says that the proper interpretation of the vision you saw tonight is that you will become a judge.’ No one had visited me after I had seen the vision, apart from this person who had come with the greetings of peace of the Sheikh [Ibn Bahāʾuddīn], and I knew therefore that what had taken place was the result of his mystical unveiling (kashf). A few days later I went to visit him, mentioning the vision and his interpretation of it, and he said, ‘Yes, it is so.’ I said, ‘I do not seek to become a judge,’ and he said, ‘Do not seek it, but if it is conferred upon you without your asking for it, do not refuse it.’ This was one of the reasons that I accepted a judicial position.³²

Taşköprüzade seems clearly to have experienced first-hand and highly eloquent testimony to Ibn Bahāʾuddīn’s mastery of the sciences of Sufism; exactly what he purports to mean when he says that the latter ‘synthesised the way of speculative theology and the way of Sufism’, we will now briefly examine.

At the beginning of al-Qawl al-faṣl, Ibn Bahāʾuddīn dispels any concerns later readers might have about the commentary format of his book, telling us that it contains ‘critically verified results (taḥqīqāt) that are unprecedented … and that have never before been even implicitly alluded to’.³³ He has already explained, in characteristically enigmatic tone, that he had at first hesitated to write the book, but then ‘my secret called out to me in the language of its state, and awoke me from the sleep of heedlessness, saying “did not your Lord open your breast to the lights of gnosis of Him?”’ He then goes on to explain that he came to understand that he must not deny people the special knowledge he had been given, and thus resolved to write ‘whatever God compels my pen to run with’ namely, ‘the first thing to be reflected from my heart into my writing, and not to change it.’³⁴ He has made it clear, then, without the need for Taşköprüzade’s talk of synthesis, that this is to be no ordinary book of ʿilm al-kalām.

The particularly distinctive aspect of Ibn Bahāʾuddīn’s al-Qawl al-faṣl, when compared to Akbarian works by Ottomans before him, is that unlike them it is very consciously a book of kalām. Qayṣarī and Mulla Fenari opted to weave their syntheses of reason and mysticism decidedly from the perspective of the latter—that is, the new science variously known as ʿilm al-taḥqīq (‘the science of experiential verification’) or ʿilm al-ḥaqāʾiq (‘the science of spiritual realities’)³⁵, in which the tools of philosophy are used to reinforce, explain, and formulate theories about the data of mystical experience.

Ibn Bahāʾuddīn, however, deems it very much worth also guiding readers through the standard questions of post-Jurjānīan and Taftāzānīan kalām, offering intricate solutions to numerous longstanding problems, often involving or even correcting the most cutting-edge solutions of the likes of Hocazade in his Tahāfut. He treats standard questions pertaining to the transcendentals (al-umūr al-ʿāmma) in this taḥqīq manner: the nature of individuation, the question of whether quiddities are formed, the question of whether non-existent entities are ‘things’, questions of mental existence and mental representation, and so on.

For some of these questions, the approach of speculative investigation suffices to yield certainty; for others, the results of naẓar must be augmented or transcended by the intellectual formulations yielded by mystical experience. These treatments are interwoven with his taḥqīqāt, following the topical structure of the matn or basic text of Abū Ḥanīfa, of the central questions of special metaphysics: the existence of God, the incorporeality or otherwise of the human soul, the nature of God’s attributes, and so on. It is then, at the end of his ‘traditional’ treatment of each of these philosophical and theological questions, that Ibn Bahāʾuddīn’s cup overflows, as he sheds light on aspects of these questions from the perspective of the schools of Ibn ʿArabī and, to a lesser extent, Suhrawardī, often attempting to demonstrate that the Akbarian and ishrāqī approaches provide the only ways to resolve lingering difficulties brought on by inherent failings in what is, broadly speaking, the Peripatetic method.

This takes place in the context, however, of his recognition that discursive reason nonetheless does possess its legitimate areas of competence, where it is sufficient, within its limited domain, to provide real knowledge.

The Divine unity and transcendence, for example, are two truths that he tells us ‘reason can arrive at independently’³⁶ (closely mirroring some of al-Shaykh al-Akbar’s formulations in the Futūḥāt);³⁷ and even in areas where discursive reason is not adequate to the task, it remains highly valuable. However, Ibn Bahāʾuddīn also mirrors al-Shaykh al-Akbar’s broader perspective in the Fūtūḥāt, when he tells us unequivocally that ‘tradition is worthier of trust (aḥaqqu bi al-iʿtimād) and closer to caution (aqrab ilā al-iḥtiyāṭ) than reason’ and that any reductively rationalistic doubts about revealed teachings ‘should be driven away by the lights of luminous texts from scripture’³⁸ — the literal sense of scripture being thus validated by direct experience of its spiritual luminosity.

Ibn Bahāʾuddīn’s elaborate treatment of the question of the incorporeality or otherwise of the human soul offers some insight into his epistemology. He first presents twelve arguments from Avicennan philosophers for the incorporeality of the soul, and twelve counterarguments from Ashʿarī theologians against, and tells us that while some of these Ashʿarī counterarguments are cogent enough to damage the claims to absolute conclusiveness of any individual Avicennan argument for the incorporeality of the soul, ‘it is not far-fetched that conclusive knowledge, or something near to it, should obtain from the combination of these pieces of evidence, and most of the aforementioned [counterarguments], although possible in reason’s reckoning, are not acceptable to intuition (ḥads) or to unbiasedness; indeed, intuition judges, when there is no bias, that the human soul is incorporeal’.³⁹ If this last sentence seems daring for a book of kalām, Ibn Bahāʾuddīn’s actual taḥqīq, which he comes to shortly thereafter, will seem positively seditious:

The main source [of knowledge] regarding this topic—namely, knowledge of the incorporeality of the soul, is spiritual tasting, experience, witnessing, and gnosis. For he whose spiritual capacity (istiʿdāduhu) is in his original disposition (aṣl fiṭratihi) pure, and whose lot in the world of spirits (ʿālam al-arwāḥ) was to be showered with light from [the Divine] Presence, and who has then disciplined his own self through spiritual exercises and strivings, and freed himself from imprisonment by the veils of lust and anger, and the rest of the blameworthy attributes, will be overtaken by the Divine solicitude, and drawn by the Presence of Singularity, such that his spirit and soul are detached from his body just as a snake becomes detached from its skin; sacred castings-off of physicality and subtle spiritual ascensions will then transpire, and he will fly to the worlds of all-pure lights, and to the sacred ascending stairways of Divine destining; his body is left as if an inanimate thing, until, sooner or later, the spirit returns to it. Sheikh Shihāb al-Dīn [al-Suhrawardī] says in one of his treatises⁴⁰ that ‘when the human soul undergoes a spiritual transport, it nigh on leaves the corporeal world, and seeks out a world that is infinite’.⁴¹

Ibn Bahāʾuddīn had already made clear, invoking the ishrāqī authority of Plato himself, that despite its ability to point to the truth, the knowledge yielded by reason must ultimately be grounded in a deeper, spiritual knowledge:

The [function of the] positions of the philosophers … are as pointers and to arouse desire [for knowledge]; but the true criteria belong to spiritual taste and experience alone, after the fashion of what is said about the divine Plato and others of the ancient philosophers, namely that they grounded their knowledge in exalted spiritual states, in sacred castings-off [of coarse materiality] (insilākhāt qudsiyya). This account is supported by the discipleship of some [of these philosophers] to the Prophets, may the blessings of Allah be upon them all.⁴²

However, even demonstrating the solutions to metaphysical questions that are within reason’s ken is extremely difficult using discursive reasoning alone; and this very point constitutes one of the numerous wisdoms underlying Divine revelation to human beings. For, 

one cannot be guided, through the power of the understanding (dirāya), to certain of the articles of belief and actions, without being taught by tradition (riwāya), and the difficulty of coming to knowledge of that part which is possible, is a difficulty close to impossibility, such that it does not come to pass except for one amongst thousands.⁴³

Given our presently spatiotemporal human condition, this revelation must be brought by a messenger capable of traversing the chasm between the spiritual and sublunary worlds. This principle gives Ibn Bahāʾuddīn the opportunity to introduce the principle of the Muhammadan Reality ﷺ (al-Ḥaqīqa al-Muḥammadiyya) in thoroughly Akbarian terms:

Because of the necessity of the intermediary possessing two distinct aspects, facing the two [sides] that the intermediary mediates between—in order that he receive the emanation from the higher, and effuse upon the lower—the [Divine] wisdom judged that the Messenger ﷺ must be a man, as the Most High said ‘a human as a Messenger’ (Q17:94), in order to serve as an isthmus (barzakh) between necessity and possibility, and an intermediary between the Real and creation, and the worshipper and the Worshipped, who connects from the aspect of his universal spirituality and luminous intellect to the world of holiness, and the Presence of the Necessary Being, and derives experiential, directly-beheld knowledge, and the universal perfections of the Presence, from the Presence of Absolute Being, and then effuses onto those beneath him, those readied, seeking perfection, requesting the perfections readied for them in the language of their innate capacities, that they be taken out of deficiency and into perfection, and causing them to ascend from deficiency to completion.⁴⁴

The notion that the Muhammadan Reality ﷺ —the original and most perfect ‘locus of manifestation’ (maẓhar) of God and the essence from which all of the other essences in God’s knowledge branched out⁴⁵—constitutes the ‘isthmus’ (barzakh) between necessity and possibility, itself represents a synthesis of the data of spiritual experience with the conceptual apparatuses of speculative thought; and more specifically it is an understanding perhaps most succinctly expressed by Ibn ʿArabī in his al-Ṣalāt al-Fayḍiyya, in which he tells us that the Muhammadan Reality ﷺ is ‘the intermediary between existence and nonexistence,⁴⁶ as well as that which ‘links temporal origination to beginningless eternity’.⁴⁷

And perhaps the clearest statement of Ibn Bahāʾuddīn’s epistemological methodology in al-Qawl al-faṣl occurs when he finds himself compelled to state, in so many other words, that he will not abide by the narrow definition of orthodoxy demanded by sanctimonious conformity.

When treating of a famous point of contention between the muʿtazila and the ashāʿira, concerning whether God’s actions are ‘motivated by objectives’ (muʿallala bi al-aghrāḍ), he inclines towards a position apparently similar to that associated with the muʿtazila, which to earlier Sunni orthodoxy seemed to unacceptably imply that the fullness of God’s perfection is dependent on the fulfilment of His will in His creative action. Ibn Bahāʾuddīn defends his position with the words

… should you say, ‘this is tantamount to departing from the principles of orthodox Sunnism (ahl al-sunna wa al-jamāʿa), and inclining towards the position of the muʿtazila,’ we say, ‘we have never undertaken to do anything other than follow (i) reason (al-ʿaql), (ii) tradition (al-naql), (iii) spiritual tasting (al-dhawq), and (iv) experience (al-wijdān);⁴⁸ blind emulation (al-taqlīd) is not one of the distinguishing marks of the people of experiential verification (ahl al-taḥqīq).’⁴⁹

And thereby Ibn Bahāʾuddīn again leaves us in no doubt that by ahl al-taḥqīq, he means more than just the taḥqīq or ‘critical verification’ of the post-Rāzian kalām, for, as in countless other places in his al-Qawl al-faṣl, his taḥqīq in this case centres around an incisive employment and exposition of Akbarian metaphysical concepts conveying that the ‘objective’ of God having made His creatures responsible agents, accountable for their actions with the eternal consequences of punishment or reward, is to

manifest the beginninglessly eternal degrees of the innate capacities (ẓuhūr marātib al-istiʿdādāt al-azaliyya) [of creatures] that have their origins in the unformed essences (al-dhawāt al-ghayr al-majʿūla) … in order that those destined for bliss arrive at the ranks prepared for them by means of their worthiness becoming manifest, so that the objections of the arrogant repudiators vanish and ‘the irrefutable proof is Allah’s’ (Q6:149).⁵⁰

Here Ibn Bahāʾuddīn has employed the Akbarian term istiʿdād azalī or ‘timeless innate capacity’ that obtains through the manifestation of God’s attributes in the Fixed Essences, which are, as Ibn ʿArabī also tells us, ‘unformed’ (ghayr majʿūla);⁵¹ he alludes, moreover, to Ibn ʿArabī’s seminal interpretation of Q 6:49 in his Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam,⁵² which forms the basis for an important aspect of his influential views on determinism and theodicy.⁵³

This procedure becomes Ibn Bahāʾuddīn’s standard method of dealing with questions in al-Qawl al-faṣl. For each of them, he will first place his readers in the thick of the most advanced debates between post-Avicennan philosophers and mutakallimīn—this usually involves the assumption of a Sharḥ al-Mawāqif and Maqāṣid level of knowledge of the state of these debates—and then will offer his own taḥqīq, which sometimes involves the mere adjustment of already existing positions, but in most cases amounts to demonstrating that no real solution is even strictly speaking possible, except from the perspective of the school of Ibn ʿArabī.

After carefully framing the ultimate unsolvability of numerous important philosophical questions on the Peripatetic principles of the dominant strand of Avicennan philosophy and of later kalām, he often begins the last, Akbarian stage of his treatment with the words ‘no solution is possible except via the position of the Sufis’ (lā makhlaṣ illā bi qawl al-Ṣūfiyya).

One notable example is Ibn Bahāʾuddīn’s taḥqīq of the much wrangled-over question of the nature of knowledge, and especially the knowledge of God. Elaborating aspects of the thought of Qayṣarī and Mulla Fenari,⁵⁴ Ibn Bahāʾuddīn notes that the standard view of the ḥukamāʾ and mutakallimīn—that only individual things exist, and that universal concepts are just that, mere concepts abstracted from individuated essences that are the only reality—leads to numerous problems, not least amongst them that of how to account for God’s knowledge of His creation before their existence, and almost as fundamentally, how to account for the meaning of an ‘essence’ at all—if essences have no existence before they become particulars, how is it that ‘they’ become particulars at all?

Because of their commitment to this Peripatetic view, says Ibn Bahāʾuddīn, the Avicennan philosophers and the mainstream mutakallimīn ‘become so entangled in difficulties that every time they try to extract themselves from one they fall into another’.⁵⁵ However, the Platonic and Akbarian view that, as Ibn Bahāʾuddīn says, ‘the sciential forms are the essences [of things], and the forms of extramental particulars are shadows thereof, subordinate (tabaʿ) thereto, is the terminator of all difficulties, and the guide against all misguidance; not as the philosophers have reversed matters, [saying] that the extramental particular forms constitute the fundamental principles, and the intellectual forms representations and shadows thereof.’⁵⁶

Similarly, in treating the almost paradoxical question of the ontological status of being or existence itself, a common whipping-horse for Akbarian writers appalled by the relegation of ‘existence’ to the status of a ‘perspectival’ (iʿtibārī) entity,⁵⁷ Ibn Bahāʾuddīn introduces the Akbarian (rather than Avicennan) formulation⁵⁸ of the concept of ‘absolute being’ (al-wujūd al-muṭlaq)—which provides the conceptual cornerstone for the doctrine of the unity of being (waḥdat al-wujūd). Avicennan philosophers and mutakallimīn

have made existence posterior to the superaddition of differentia and individuations, but we say that existence and being existent are prior to all of the degrees of genus, species, class, and individual, all of which are [mere] ‘thisnesses’ (hādhiyyāt) and qualifications (quyūdāt) restricting Absolute Being—which exists of its own Essence—and that cause it to descend until they entify and individuate it, even though they are all non-existent perspectival entities with respect to themselves; however, because of their becoming annexed to and pertaining to the Essence of Being, they become coloured by the characteristics of existence.⁵⁹

The Pure Being of God is what bestows the limited ‘existence’ we know upon distinct entities (‘thisnesses’); which with respect to their restricted self-identities are ‘other than God’. Censure of the deflationary ‘extramental-particular existence’ ontology of Avicennan philosophers and kalām theologians — in which despite being acknowledged conditions of the being and intelligibility of individuated entities, a cherished immanentist dogma maintains that unindividuated entities do not ‘exist’ at all — is a constant theme throughout al-Qawl al-faṣl. Whereas the use of the term ‘non-existence in extramental particulars’ can have some application if we presuppose an Akbarian ontology, on the terms in which the Peripatetic thinkers intend it, the concept is completely incoherent.

He is the only self-subsistent essence, all other quiddities being concepts that are not self-subsistent, but that pertain to the essence of Being, and subsist through it … through the superaddition of concepts to [Being], it becomes determinate and unfolds into the degrees of genus and species—and when it unfolds into the [degree of] individuals, it takes on maximal density, and this is the lowest of all the degrees. Yet those whose purview is restricted to outward appearances have restricted being to that lowest of its degrees, which they call extramental existence (al-wujūd al-khārijī); they thus say that if a quiddity is not individuated, it does not exist, making existence into a subsidiary of individuation. The truth of the matter is that the degree of Being is prior to all other of the degrees, that is, the degrees of genera and species, to say nothing of [the degree of] individual particulars. Now, if the people of outward appearances—who attribute ‘non-existence in extramental particulars’ to quiddities that have no instantiated individuals, and that have not descended to the lowest of the degrees—mean by ‘non-existence’ that [that quiddity] has not descended to the final degree of existence, their statement is correct. Yet if by this they mean ‘absolute non-existence’, it is false, because there are [numerous] degrees to Absolute Being, ordered from the brink of absoluteness all the way to the degree of extramental individuation.⁶⁰

Ibn Bahāʾuddīn

Ibn Bahāʾuddīn (Behâeddînzâde) was a spiritual master and guide of the Bayramī order, who also studied the rational sciences with some of the greatest philosophers and theologians of his time. His first master in the sciences was Hatipzade (d. 901/1496), the one-time personal tutor of Sultan Mehmed II who fell in and out of favour with the Ottoman establishment because of his audaciously independent spirit and refusal to abide by court protocol in his dealings with his imperial patrons. Alongside Hocazade (838–893/1434–1488) and Mulla Kestelli (d. 901/1496), Hatipzade was probably the greatest philosopher-theologian of his time in Istanbul, acknowledged and admired even by Jalāl al-Dīn al-Dawānī (830–907/1427–1501) in faraway Fars; Hatipzade’s supercommentary on Jurjānī’s famous supercommentary on the Tajrīd was widely used, and he also wrote a supercommentary on the ‘transcendentals’ (al-umūr al-ʿāmma) section of Jurjānī’s Sharḥ al-Mawāqif. (Taşköprüzade, al-Shaqāʾiq al-nuʿmāniyya, 91–2.) Ibn Bahāʾuddīn then became a student of Mulla Kestelli, perhaps an even greater giant of the ʿaqliyyāt, who was entrusted with one of the newly founded şahn-i seman colleges in Istanbul by Mehmed the Conqueror himself.

Famously, Mulla Kestelli had read the entire ouvre of Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā), including the Canon of Medicine in its entirety and the 10,000-page Shifāʾ, seven times. He composed a widely used supercommentary on Sharḥ al-ʿAqāʾid, as well as a work bringing up seven unresolved intellectual puzzles that he had discerned in Sharḥ al-Mawāqif, but did not otherwise write extensively because of a famously intensive teaching schedule. (Ibid., 87–9.) The fact that Mulla Kestelli is included in Taşköprüzade’s list of eleven of the most notable masters of metaphysics (al-ʿilm al-ilāhī) in his Miftāḥ al-saʿāda—the only other Ottoman on the list being Hocazade—gives an idea of his stature. (Taşköprüzade, Miftāḥ al-saʿāda fī mawḍūʿāt al-ʿulūm (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1405/1980), 1:294–5. The others are Ibn Sīnā, Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī in the first class, followed by Shihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī, followed in chronological order by Quṭb al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī, Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī, Saʿd al-Dīn al-Taftāzānī, al-Sayyid al-Sharīf al-Jurjānī, Jalāl al-Dīn al-Dawānī, Hocazade, and Molla Kestelli.)

After his intensive studies with these great figures of Ottoman intellectuality, Ibn Bahāʾuddīn inclined towards Sufism and entered the service of Şeyh Muḥyī al-Dīn Muḥammad İskilibî (d. 922/1516), who before his own conversion to mysticism had in turn been a student of the great astronomer and philosopher ʿAlī al-Qūshjī. Şeyh Muḥyī al-Dīn İskilibî was the spiritual guide of Sultan Bayezid II (851–918/1447–1512), (Taşköprüzade, al-Shaqāʾiq al-nuʿmāniyya, 206–7.) and the father of the great Ottoman şeyhülislam Abu Suʿūd (896–982/1490–1574).

Ibn Bahāʾuddīn reached ‘the greatest of his aspirations in Sufi knowledges’ and was given the permission to guide others along the path; and we are told he trained great numbers of adepts. Taşköprüzade is reverential when he tells us Ibn Bahāʾuddīn was ‘a scholar-sage who acted upon his knowledge, virtuous, perfected, a devout worshipper, an ascetic, scrupulous and God-fearing, observant of the limits prescribed by the Sacred Law, and of the spiritual courtesies of the Sufi path; he ever spoke the truth, and in the path of God feared not the reproach of any reproacher. He was a scholar of the religious sciences, both the foundational and the subsidiary, and a scholar of Qur’anic exegesis and hadith, skilful in both the Arabic and the intellectual sciences (al-ʿulūm al-ʿaqliyya).’ (Ibid., 259.) Apart from his magnum opus al-Qawl al-faṣl, he wrote ‘innumerable treatises in Sufism and other sciences’. (Ibid.) When one of the greatest of all Ottoman şeyhülislams, ʿAlāʾuddīn ʿAlī al-Jamālī (Zembilli Ali Efendi, d. 932/1525) became too ill to continue to issue rulings of Sacred Law, amongst all of the Ottoman scholar-sages of the time he chose Ibn Bahāʾuddīn to substitute for him, because of his trust in his ‘jurisprudential acumen, his scrupulousness, and God-fearingness’. (Ibid.) Ibn Bahāʾuddīn is believed at one point to have so offended Sultan Suleiman’s Grand Vizier Pargalı Ibrahim Paşa (899–943/1493–1536) (Ibid., 260.) with certain criticisms that those around him feared for Ibn Bahāʾuddīn’s life and counselled him to say nothing further. He is meant to have countered that there were only three possibilities, ‘either execution, which is witnessdom (shahāda), or captivity, which is spiritual retreat and seclusion (ʿuzla)—and spiritual seclusion is our Way—or expulsion from the country, which is emigration for the sake of God (hijra).’ (Ibid.)

Hadiyyat al-ʿārifīn ascribes six works to Ibn Bahāʾuddīn: Risālat al-tawḥīd [A treatise of Divine Unity], Sharḥ Asmāʾ Allāh al-ḥusnā [A commentary on the Beautiful Names of Allah], al-Qawl al-faṣl sharḥ al-Fiqh al-akbar, [The decisive word: A commentary on the Greater Knowledge], al-Radd ʿalā mā qīla fī ḥaqq al-Shaykh al-Akbar [The refutation of what is said concerning the Greatest Master (Ibn ʿArabī)], Risālat sirr al-qadar [Treatise on the secret of predestination], and Risālat al-wujūd [Treatise on Being]. (See Ismāʿīl al-Baghdādī, Hadiyyat al-ʿārifīn asmāʾ al-muʾallifīn wa āthār al-muṣannifīn (Istanbul: Milli Eğitim Basımevi, 1374/1955), 2:238–9.)

He died in 1551, ten years before his illustrious biographer, and around fifteen years after another giant of the Ottoman ʿaqliyyāt, Kemalpaşazâde, whose defence of Ibn ʿArabī is famous.

NOTES

¹ Taşköprüzade, Miftāḥ al-saʿāda fī mawḍūʿāt al-ʿulūm (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1405/1980), 1:289.

² Ibid., 214.

³ Ibid., 2:109.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Ibid., 1:67. Here I follow the Maktabat al-Lubnān edition, which has baḥray (muḍāf construction) instead of the yujrī in the Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya edition. On the latter wording, the sentence might be interpreted to mean ‘that is, [such a person] causes deductive inference and gnostic witnessing, or knowledge and gnosis, or the observed world and the unseen world to flow into one another’. The first wording, however, seems a more plausible reading, given the components of the sentence.

⁶ See, for example, ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Kāshānī, Tafsīr, published as Tafsīr Ibn ʿArabī, ed. al-Shaykh ʿAbd al-Wārith Muḥammad ʿAlī (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1427/2006), sub Qur’an 18:60.

⁷ For an exposition of Taşköprüzade’s theory of nafs al-amr, in which he synthesises elements of Akbarian and Avicennan metaphysics, see my Things As They Are.

⁸ Taşköprüzade, Miftāḥ al-saʿāda, 1:69.

⁹ Ibid., 70.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ Taşköprüzade, al-Shaqāʾiq al-nuʿmāniyya, 7–8.

¹² Ibid., 8.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ Ibid., 18.

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ Ibid., 20.

¹⁷ See Sāʾin al-Dīn ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad al-Turka, Sharḥ Ṣāʾin al-Dīn al-Turka ʿalā Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam, ed. ʿĀṣim Ibrāhīm al-Kayālī (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2012), 9.

¹⁸ Taşköprüzade, al-Shaqāʾiq al-nuʿmāniyya, 34.

¹⁹ Ibid., 36.

²⁰ Ibid.

²¹ Ibid.

²² Ibid., 41.

²³ Ibid., 56.

²⁴ Ibid., 65.

²⁵ Taşköprüzade, Miftāḥ al-saʿāda, 1:312.

²⁶ Taşköprüzade, al-Shaqāʾiq al-nuʿmāniyya, 67.

²⁷ Ibid., 100–3.

²⁸ Ibid., 108.

²⁹ Ibid., 114.

³⁰ Ahmet Taşköprüzade, al-Shaqāʾiq al-nuʿmāniyya (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿArabī, 1395/1975), 259.

³¹ Ibid., 259. Ibn Bahāʾuddīn’s magnum opus is also listed in Katib Çelebi’s Kashf al-ẓunūn (Beirut: Dār Iḥyāʾ al-Turāth al-ʿArabī, 1360/1941), 2:1287, but his description of the book is quoted directly from Taşköprüzade’s account. The book also lists Ibn Bahāʾuddīn’s Sharḥ al-Asmāʾ al-ḥusnā (2:1034).

³² Taşköprüzade, al-Shaqāʾiq al-nuʿmāniyya, 259–60.

³³ A24, K25.

³⁴ A19, K20.

³⁵ For the usage of both ʿilm al-taḥqīq and ʿilm al-ḥaqāʾiq as referring to a distinct science, as well as the foremost exposition of the fundamental principles of this science with reference to the other sciences, see Fenari’s treatment in al-Qūnawī and Fenari, Miftāḥ al-ghayb wa sharḥuhu Miṣbāḥ al-uns, 39–44.

³⁶ A302, K332.

³⁷ See, for example, Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī, al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya (Cairo: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿArabiyya al-Kubrā, 1329/1911), 1:41, 289.

³⁸ A262, K289.

³⁹ A78, K85.

⁴⁰ He is referring to Suhrawardī’s Hayākil al-nūr. Rather than a direct quotation, this seems to be a mingling of two passages. See the passages in Hayākil al-nūr with Dawānī’s commentary, in Jalāl al-Dīn al-Dawānī, Thalāth rasāʾil (Mashhad: Majmaʿ al-Buḥūth al-Islāmiyya, 1411/1990), 242, 244.

⁴¹ A79, K86.

⁴² A93, K101. Various schools of Islamic philosophy teach that many of the great Greek philosophers were disciples or descendants of disciples of the prophets, especially the prophet Idrīs, sometimes identified with Hermes.

⁴³ A48, K50.

⁴⁴ A49, K51.

⁴⁵ For this point, see Muḥammad ibn ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-Jalīl’s Sharḥ al-Ṣalāt al-Akbariyya, ed. Dr ʿĀṣim Ibrāhīm al-Kayyālī (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1430/2009), 60.

⁴⁶ Ibid., 70.

⁴⁷ Ibid., 71.

⁴⁸ In different contexts, wijdān has been translated variously ‘illuminative experience’, ‘inner experience’, and simply ‘consciousness’. Various indications in Ibn Bahāʾuddīn’s work suggest to me that by wijdān he means a combination of them all (hence my translation ‘experience’), a notion wide enough to include even sensory experience.

⁴⁹ A250, K276.

⁵⁰ A251, K277.

⁵¹ For a discussion of the question of the ‘formedness’ of quiddities, see my Things As They Are.

⁵² Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī, Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam, ed. Nawāf al-Jarrāḥ (Beirut: Dār al-Ṣādir, 1426/2005), 45–6.

⁵³ This influence, especially on the great Iraqi exegete Abū Thanāʾ al-Ālūsī, provoked the ire of Mustafa Sabri in his work on determinism and free will, Mawqif al-bashar taḥta sulṭān al-qadar (Cairo: Dār al-Baṣāʾir, 1429/2008), 271–89, which nonetheless constitutes a largely helpful and accurate introduction to the position of al-Shaykh al-Akbar.

⁵⁴ For Qayṣarī and Molla Fenari on the necessity of the existence of transcendent forms ‘underlying’ individuated particulars, see respectively, al-Qayṣarī, Maṭlaʿ khuṣūṣ al-kalim, 43, and al-Qūnawī and Fenari, Miftāḥ al-ghayb wa sharḥuhu Miṣbāḥ al-uns, 427–8. See also Things As They Are.

⁵⁵ A174, K190.

⁵⁶ A175, K191.

⁵⁷ See, for example, al-Qayṣarī, Maṭlaʿ khuṣūṣ al-kalim, 83.

⁵⁸ For an explanation of the difference, see the present author’s Things As They Are.

⁵⁹ A38, K38.

⁶⁰ A143, K156.