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The Later Ḥikma

Suhrawardī, in the introduction to The Wisdom of Illumination (Ḥikmat al-ishrāq), wrote that his companions had asked him to set down “what came to me by taste (bi-l-dhawq) in my retreats and visions”, and that “It did not come to me first by thought (bi-l-fikr) … then I sought the proof for it”. Wisdom has always been present: “The world has never been without wisdom (ḥikma) and without a person upholding it … he is God’s vicegerent on His earth”, and the earlier and later sages differ “only in words and in their habits of explicitness and allusion”. “Knowledge is not a preserve of one people, so that the gate of the unseen world is shut after them”; the worst age is one in which “the carpet of striving (ijtihād) is rolled up”.

He ranked the sages by two capacities, taʾalluh, becoming god-like, and baḥth, research: the divine sage deep in taʾalluh without research, the researching sage without taʾalluh, the sage deep in both, and so on down to the one who seeks research only. Leadership goes to the one deep in both, and failing that to the one deep in taʾalluh; there is “no leadership on God’s earth for the researcher deep in research who has not gone deep in taʾalluh”. His book is “for seekers of taʾalluh and baḥth”; “whoever wants research alone, let him take the way of the Peripatetics, for it is good and sound for research alone”.

Mullā Ṣadrā gave his great work, The Transcendent Wisdom in the Four Intellectual Journeys (al-Ḥikma al-mutaʿāliya fī al-asfār al-ʿaqliyya al-arbaʿa), a definition close to those of his predecessors: “Philosophy is the perfecting of the human soul by knowing the realities of existing things as they are, and judging of their existence by verification through demonstrations, not by taking on opinion and taqlīd, as far as human capacity allows; or, if you like, the ordering of the world as an intelligible order according to human capacity, so that likeness to the Creator may be attained.” Its theoretical part ends in the soul’s “becoming an intelligible world resembling the concrete world, not in its matter but in its form”, the phrase Ibn Sīnā had used, and he cites the prophetic prayer “Lord, show us things as they are”. The book’s plan is a wayfarer’s: “Know that the wayfarers among the gnostics and the saints have four journeys: from creation to the Real; by the Real in the Real; from the Real to creation by the Real; by the Real in creation. I arranged my book … in four journeys”.