Islamic Sufiism
Universality of Thought in Religions
The oldest religions of the world--exoterically, for the esoteric root or foundation is one--are the Indian, the Mazdean, and the Egyptian. Then comes the Chaldean, the outcome of these--entirely lost to the world now, except in its disfigured Sabeanism as at present rendered by the archaeologists; then, passing over a number of religions that will be mentioned later, comes the Jewish, esoterically, as in the Kabala, following in the line of Babylonian Magism; exoterically, as in Genesis and the Pentateuch, a collection of allegorical legends. Read by the light of the Zohar, the initial four chapters of Genesis are the fragment of a highly philosophical page in the World's Cosmogony. -- H.P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, I Cosmogenesis (London, 1888), Pp. 10-11.
It seems advisable first to speak of two things, a less thing and a greater thing; we take the less thing first. As has been seen from the beginning of our studies, we have been bringing forward for our consideration at every one of our meetings teachings found in the great religions of the world, mostly of the past, which are similar to or identical with our own. This has been done in order to join all these teachings, as found in the old religions, with the teachings as given by H.P. Blavatsky, that is, with theosophy. This shows the universality of thought in religions and thereby induces a spirit of kindliness and brotherhood, and leads to the accentuation of the moral sense which so greatly lacks in the comparative religious study of the doctrines of the predominant ancient religions by the mass of teachers in the Occident today.
It does away at one sweep with the egoistic opinion that "we are more perfect and morally better than you are," with the idea that we Occidentals are a superior people, and with the idea that a certain race and a certain religion are, by the fiat of the Deity, the chosen receptacles or vehicles for the only truth: that all the other religions are false, and that those who professed them in ancient times were merely brands prepared for the burning!
The second thing and the greater is this. We have constantly been bringing forward certain religious or philosophical analogies and certain points of view thereupon which are veritable doctrinal touchstones; our aim being that those who may read these studies shall be enabled to have at hand, and--through the thoughts therein expressed--to have clear-set in their own minds, keys by which to test the truth and reality of the essential or fundamental doctrines of these ancient religions, because all these doctrines in their essence and in their inner meaning, in those old religions, are true. In this sense Brahmanism is true, in this sense Buddhism is true, likewise Confucianism, and the doctrines of Lao-tse called Taoism. They are all true in that sense.
But all of them have been, in greater of less degree, subject to the influences of certain creations of human fancy; and for one who has not been trained in these studies, it is often difficult to separate the merely human fancies from the nature-true teachings of the ancient wisdom-religion. All the ancient religions sprang from that same source--theosophy, as it is called today. But it is, as said before, sometimes difficult to know what is the original teaching and what the merely human accretion or creation. These creations of human phantasy and irreligious fear are very evident in the two modern monotheistic religions which have sprung from Judaism, that is to say, in Christianity and in Islam. In these two the human accretions of phantasy are very marked; but in both of them there exists a solid substratum of mystical thought based on the ancient teachings of the wisdom-religion.
In Christianity it is particularly in the Neopythagorean and the Neoplatonic forms, as Christianized somewhat and as manifested in the teachings of Dionysius, called the Areopagite; and in the later Mohammedan religion it is manifested somewhat more distantly in the borrowings from Greek thought mainly, though also from other sources, as we find them outlined by the Mohammedan doctors and thinkers, such as Ibn Sina, commonly called Avicenna in Europe, a Persian, who lived and wrote at the end of the tenth century; by Averroes in Cordova, Spain, properly called Roshd, who flourished during the twelfth century; and by another eminent Mohammedan scholar (mentioning these three out of many) Al Farabi, of the tenth century, by descent a Turk.
The ancient wisdom also affected the teachings of Mohammed in a highly mystic form, though greatly changed, as shown in the Sufi doctrines, which are particularly and manifestly of Persian origin, owing their rise to the spiritual-minded and subtil people, the Persians. These doctrines are a very welcome contrast with the hard and mechanical religious beliefs which arose out of the egoism of the crude Arabian tribes of that period.
-- Gottfried de Purucker, Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy (Calif., 1932) Pp. 93-94.
Before we close this evening we have been asked to answer the questions: "What proof can you bring to the average man or woman of the truth of these sublime teachings?" "What are the foundations of the teachings of the esoteric philosophy?" The answer to the first question is this: we can bring proof, cumulative proof, and you will remember what we have pointed out before as being proof. Proof is the bringing of conviction to the mind, and this conviction is brought by a preponderance of evidence. And if asked the further question, "On what foundation do you bring that proof?" we say, on two foundations, mutually supporting. First, on the innate faculties in the human soul which tell a man that such or another thing is true; he then is satisfied spiritually, intellectually, emotionally. To him it is proved. That is one proof.
The other one is perhaps not so strong per se, but to the average man it is perhaps stronger. We can show that the greatest minds of all ages have believed as we believe. They did not use the same words or technical phrases, perhaps, did not teach the doctrines in the same form perhaps, but the heart of it all nonetheless was there, the real thing was there, the core of it. You will find all this in the world's literatures; and the only difficulty that it seems to me could be encountered--and I merely make this remark out of prudence--is this: that only too often the ancient literatures are not understood, even by those who translate them and read them.
Perhaps to the average inquirer the most convincing evidence is that the finest minds of all times have believed in the theosophical doctrines; and it is to these great intellects that we refer, as to an ultimate court of appeal, much as human beings usually refer disputed questions for solution to the noblest minds that they have among themselves, feeling sure that the questions will be solved in the best way in which good and able men can solve them. I repeat, that we bring proof. But, of course, the inquirer, if honest, must do his own thinking; that we cannot do for him.
The foundations of the esoteric teachings, for the average person rest on exactly the same basis of demonstration that the former question does. If you find that back of the teachings which have come down to us from immemorial times, there are certain facts, certain doctrines, which are the same all over the world, and in all ages, which were not outwardly, not openly expressed, but were kept hid, it is logically necessary to assume that they were looked upon as esoteric, otherwise why hide them? These being the same in substance everywhere, we ask the reason, Why are they the same? the natural--and correct--inference is that they were drawn from the same common source which, now an inference, grows into full conviction as we study them.
Really, their best proof is in themselves!
-- Gottfried de Purucker, Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy (Calif., 1932) Pp. 568-569.
Q: What can I say to a friend who is very desirous of having me share her deep interest in Sufiism?
It is amazing that so many people move into these exoteric Oriental beliefs without really knowing what they are. Sufiism is one of the best of them all; but it is really naught, as it now stands, but a species of exoterically esoteric Mohammedanism. So far as it goes, it is quite a beautiful belief, teaching love and brotherhood, kindliness; and the existence of a personal god of a rather impersonal nature--a curious mixture. There is much that is very fine about it and that is what catches our Occidentals. But, as I have often said, why prefer a chapter out of a book, to the whole blessed volume which Theosophy is?
I really think that you can interest your friend in Theosophy. Tell her beautiful things. Talk of love and harmony and mercy and beauty, and of the great Seers and Sages of the world, of the Hierarchies and of Universal Nature, of the Path to Wisdom which lies in the Great Self of every human being, one's inner god. Talk of a spiritual Brotherhood, utterly impersonal, non-political, non-sectarian; in other words, show her how much more beautiful the Theosophical conception is, and how much more all-comprehensive. She does not realize what she has moved into: she sees only the beauty of the modern Sufi mystical thought, but does not realize its philosophical and scientific incompleteness.
But say nothing against Sufiism itself, for indeed there is much that is admirable about it, just as there is in Christianity or Brahmanism or Buddhism, or any other kind of mystical thought. It is the Oriental novelty which attracts Occidental women to these exotic beliefs, but we Theosophists must appeal not only to their hearts but also to their intellects.
-- Gottfried de Purucker, Studies in Occult Philosophy (Calif., 1945) Pp. 475-476.
It might be said in passing that the Sufis may rightly be called the Theosophists of the Muhhammedan religion, and especially does this apply to the Persian branch of Sufiism, which actually represents a revolt against the rigid narrowness of view of orthodox Muhhammedanism and a return towards the essential teachings of the archaic religion of that formerly noble race. -- G. de Purucker, The Esoteric Tradition II, (Calif. 1935) P. 1033 (footnote).
[Cut to the chase: How valid or esoteric is Sufi-ism?]
Most of the studies made currently by Western orientalists as well as by contemporary modern Muslim scholars of the cosmological and natural sciences in the Islamic world have been carried out with the aim of establishing a relation between these sciences and those cultivated in the modern world. Only rarely has attention been turned to the general world view of the Muslims themselves, a view in whose matrix they studied the particular sciences of Nature. Our aim in this book, which is a revised and elaborated version of a thesis presented to the Department of the History of Science and Learning at Harvard University in 1958, is to clarify some of the cosmological principles and to bring into focus the contours of the cosmos in which the Muslims lived and thought, and which to a certain extent still provides the framework in which they envisage the world.
Our aim [in this book] is primarily to study the Muslim cosmological sciences in themselves, and try to envisage the world in its totality in the manner seen by those who cultivated these sciences, and not as viewed by one who stands on the outside and seeks to dissect the Muslim world view into its constituent elements according to the historical sources from which they were adopted.
Historical studies...validate the significance of the Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, and...Indian origins of the Muslim sciences [which are] ... closely bound to the metaphysical, religious, and philosophical ideas governing Islamic civilization...and which has sustained and nourished them ever since...
The close relation is best observed in the case of Muslim students who, upon the most cursory contact with modern sciences, usually lose their spiritual footing and no longer feel in harmony with their tradition, whereas the same students might have studied traditional mathematics and the natural sciences for years without being in any way alienated from the Islamic revelation. The difference lies in the manner and perspective n which the materials and facts of the sciences are interpreted in each case, although sometimes the facts are the same in both instances.
Consequently, the knowledge of the general Islamic vision of the cosmos provides not only a key for a true understanding of the Muslim sciences and a necessary background for any basic study of the history of medieval science, but also the principles which, being intrinsically bound with the immutable and nonhistorical essence and spirit of the Islamic Revelation, must guide the Muslims in judging all other sciences of Nature with which they come in contact. Only when the contour of the Islamic conception of the cosmos is clearly delineated will the Muslims be able to absorb and integrate those elements of foreign sciences which are in conformity with the spirit of their tradition into their own world view.
The Muslim world until now has had no need to be conscious of the cosmos in which it has lived. But now faced with the challenge of the modern sciences which are the fruit of a totally different conception of the world, the Muslims must bring into light the Islamic conception of the cosmos if they are to avoid the dangerous dichotomy which results from a superficial "harmony" between the Islamic perspective and the modern sciences to be seen so often in the writings of modern Muslim apologists. If the modern sciences are going to be anything more than an artificial "tail" grafted upon the body of Islam or even an alien element, the ingestion of which may endanger the very life of the Islamic world, the Muslims must find the universal Islamic criteria in the light of which the validity of all sciences must be judged.
-- Sayyed Hossein Nasr, An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines, Shambhala, Boulder, 1978, Introduction, Pp. xix-xxiii.
In traditional civilizations the study of nature may be made for the sake of utility as is seen in ancient and medieval technology where aspects of Nature were studied with the aim of discovering the qualities which might make them useful to the daily needs of the society. Or such a study maybe made with the aim of integrating cosmic existence into a pervasive rational system as with the Peripatetics, or into a mathematical system as with Archimedes. or it may be with the aim of describing in detail the functioning of a particular domain of nature, as in the biological works of Aristotle, and the medieval natural historians, or, again in connection with the making of objects in which process art and industry before the machine age were always combined as in the medieval guilds and the branches of Hermeticism connected with them. Finally, Nature may be studied as a book of symbols or as an icon to be contemplated at a certain stage of the spiritual journey and a crypt from which the gnostic must escape in order to reach ultimate liberation and illumination, as is seen in the writings of Illuminationists and Sufis like Suhrawardi and Ibn 'Arabi. [See Note #1 following] Moreover, all of these different manners of studying Nature are sometimes superimposed upon each other in the writings of a single author, especially in the Islamic civilization which forms the subject of our present study.
[Note #1: In Islam where the Revelation has taken the form of a sacred book, the symbolism of the word is of special significance. The Quran often call Nature a book which is the macrocosmic counterpart of the Quran itself and which must be read and understood before it can be put away.
The 8th/14th century Sufi master 'Aziz al-Nasafi, in his Kashf al-haqa'iq, compares Nature to the Quran in such a way that each genus in Nature corresponds to a surah, each species to a verse, and each particular being to a letter. Concerning this book of Nature he writes: "Each day destiny and the passage of time set this book before you, sura for sura, verse for verse, letter for letter, that you may learn the content of these lines and letters...But he who finds for himself the eye of the eye and the ear of the ear, who transcends the world of the commandment (spiritual world), he obtains knowledge of the whole book in one moment, and he who has complete knowledge of the whole book, who frees his heart from this book, closes the book and sets it aside. He is like one who receives a book and reads it over and over until he finally knows its content; such a man will close the book and set it aside. This is the sense of the words 'On that day We will roll up the heavens as one rolleth up written scrolls' (Sura 21:104), and that other passage: 'And in his right hand shall the heavens be folded together' (Sura 39:67) whence it can be seen that the people of the left have no share in the folding together of the heavens." -- F. Meier, "Nature in the monism of Islam," Spirit and Nature (New York, 1954), pp. 202-203.]
The symbols used to interpret and understand Nature depend upon the form of the Revelation, or Idea, dominant in a civilization which sanctifies and emphasizes a particular set of symbols as a distinct from the general symbols inherent in the nature of things. As for the symbols which are in the nature of things, like the colors of plants and flowers, or the light and heat of the Sun, they are independent of the subjectivism of the individual observer but are rather ontological aspects of things, enjoying a reality that is independent of our subjective whims.
[The science of symbols--not simply a knowledge of traditional symbols--proceeds from the qualitative significances of substances, form, spatial directions, numbers, natural phenomena, relationships, movements, colours and other properties or states of things; we are not dealing here with subjective appreciations, for the cosmic qualities are ordered both in relation to Being and according to a hierarchy which is more real than the individual; they are then, independent of our tastes, or rather they determine them to the extent that we ourselves are 'qualitative'. -- F. Schuon, Gnosis, Divine Wisdom, trans. G.E.H. Palmer (London: John Murray, 1959), p. 110.]
Despite the difference in the forms of the ancient and medieval cosmological sciences, there is an element which they shared in common, this element being the unicity of Nature which all of these sciences sought to demonstrate and upon which they are all based. This unicity is the natural consequence of the Unity of the Divine Principle which formed the basis of all the ancient "Greater Mysteries" and which, either veiled in a mythological dress or expressed directly as a metaphysical truth, is to found as the central Idea in all traditional civilizations. [See Note #2 following] Ancient cosmologies are not childish attempts to explain the causality of natural phenomena as they may appear to the untrained eye; rather, they are sciences whose central object is to show the unicity of all that exists. [See Note #3 following]
[Note #2: The attitude toward Nature is always a reflection of the attitude toward metaphysics, the "earth" being a reflection of "heaven" in the religious and symbolic sense. The cosmological sciences are the "Lesser Mysteries" and metaphysical knowledge the "Greater Mysteries" in whose light the "Lesser Mysteries" are usually absorbed, as the Alexandrian cosmological sciences were integrated into the perspective of Islamic gnosis. -- See T. Burchkhardt, "Nature de la perspective cosmologique," Etudes Traditionnelles, 49:218 (1948).]
[Note #3: This conception is also expressed in the Golden Verses of Pythagoras:
If Heaven will it, thou shalt know that Nature,
Alike in everything, is the same in every place.
I have already said that the homogeneity of Nature was, with the unity of God, one of the greatest secrets of the mysteries. Pythagoras founded this homogeneity upon the unity of the spirit by which it is penetrated and from which, according to him, all our souls draw their origin. This dogma which he had received from the Chaldeans and from the priests of Egypt was admitted by all the sages of antiquity...These sages established a harmony, a perfect analogy between heaven and earth, the intelligible and the sentient, the indivisible substance and divisible substance, in such a manner that that which took place in one of the regions of the Universe or of the modification of the primordial ternary was the exact image of that which took place in the other. -- A. Fabre d'Olivet, The Golden Verses of Pythagoras (New York, 1917), p. 251.]
The question of the Unity of the Divine Principle and the consequent unicity of Nature is particularly important in Islam where the idea of Unity (al-tawhid) overshadows all others and remains at every level of Islamic civilization the most basic principle upon which all else depends. But it must not be thought that this goal of finding and displaying the unicity of Nature is dependent upon a particular method to the exclusion of others. The Muslims used many "ways of knowing" for formulate sciences based on the idea of the unicity of Nature which is itself derived from the twin source of Revelation and intellectual intuition. In the case of the Islamic sciences, as in all other instances, the ends of a science lie outside of that science which may employ many means to reach those ends but cannot determine its goal itself. The Muslims employed many methods in the various sciences, from observation and ratiocination to contemplation and illumination, but the goal toward which these methods were aimed--that is, the demonstration of the interrelatedness of all things--came from the Revelation which, as we have already noted, determines from "above" the particular cosmological sciences cultivated in a tradition.
Returning to the basic principle of Unity in Islam, it can be said that this doctrine is expressed in the most universal manner possible in the first Shahadah, La ilaha illa'Llah, usually translated as "there is no divinity but the Divine," but which in its most profound sense means there is no reality outside of the Absolute Reality, thereby negating all that is other than Allah. [See Note #4 following] This formula which is the Quranic basis of the Sufi doctrine of the Unity of Being (wahdat al-wujud) does not imply that there is a substantial continuity between God and the world, or any form of pantheism or monism; rather, it means that there cannot be two orders of reality independent of each other.
[Note #4: Islam, as a religion, is a way of unity and totality. Its fundamental dogma is called Et-Tawhid, that is to say unity or the action of uniting. As a universal religion, it admits of gradations, but each of these gradations is truly Islam in the sense that and every aspect of Islam reveals the same principle...The formula of 'Et-Tawhid' or Monotheism is a Sharaite commonplace. The import that a man gives to this formula is his personal affair, since it depends upon his Sufism. Every deduction that one can make from this formula is more or less valid, provided always that it does not destroy the literal meaning; for in that case one destroys the unity of Islam, that is to say its universality, its faculty of adapting and fitting itself to all mentalities, circumstances and epochs. -- Abdul Hadi, "L'Universalite en l'Islam," Le Voile d'Isis, January 1934.]
The formula of Unity is the most universal criterion of orthodoxy in Islam; that doctrine may be said to be Islamic that affirms this unity in one way or other. The Prophet of Islam did not come to assert anything new but to reaffirm the truth which always was, to re-establish the Primordial Tradition (al-din al-hanif), and to expound the doctrine of Divine Unity, a principle that is reflected in one way or another in all the traditions before Islam.
The ancient cosmological sciences were for the most part based upon the unicity of Nature and searched for the transcendent cause of things and were, therefore, far from un-Islamic even if they antedated the historical manifestation of Islam. It was this common factor of seeking to discover and demonstrate the unicity of Nature among such ancient cosmological sciences as those of the Pythagoreans and Hermeticists that made them conformable to the form of the Islamic Revelation and easily assimilable into its perspective...
Islam was revealed in the Arabic language to a people who were of the stock of the Semitic nomads and later spread among the Persians, Turks, Mongolians, Negroes, and other racial and ethnic groups without losing its original character. This gives Islamic spirituality a nomadic trait even when it manifests itself in a sedentary environment. Moreover, the Revelation of Islam was given in the form of a sacred book, the Holy Quran, whose centrality and importance in all facets of Islamic culture and more specifically in the attitude toward Nature, can hardly be overemphasized. The Quran, this intertwining of the beauty of the geometry of the crystal and the profusion of the plant, refers constantly to the phenomena of Nature as signs of God to be contemplated by the believers.
It is quite significant that the phenomena of Nature, the events taking place within the soul of man, and the verses of the Quran are all called ayat, the human soul and Nature being respectively the microcosmic and macrocosmic counterparts of the celestial archetypes contained in the Divine Word.
There are many verses of the Quran in which Nature and natural phenomena are mentioned, as for example the verse "We shall show them our portents upon the horizons and within themselves, until it be manifest unto them that it is the Truth." (Quran, XLI; 53)
The Quran also contains explicitly a cosmology and angelology with its own specific terminology of the kursi, 'arsh, etc., which became the subject of exegesis and commentary by the later Muslim sages who developed Quranic cosmology to monumental proportions.
The pre-Islamic Arabs to whom the Quran was first addressed had a great love for Nature and like all the nomads who wander endlessly in the great expanses of virgin Nature had a deep intuition of the presence of the Invisible in the visible. Islam, which has always preserved the form of the spirituality of Semitic nomads, emphasized this particular trait of the nomadic spirit and made of Nature in Islam a vast garden in which the handiwork of the invisible gardener is ever present. Islam also emphasized the close relation between man and the rest of creation; the benediction upon the prophet (al-salat 'ala'l-nabi) in its most universal sense being the benediction upon the totality of manifestation.
Another point emphasized in the Quran is that human reason, which is a reflection of the Intellect, when healthy and balanced leads naturally to tawhid rather than to a denial of the Divine and can be misled only when the passions destroy its balance and obscure its vision.
The role assigned to the Intellect and its reflection on the human level--that is, reason--is one of the elements that distinguish Islam from Christianity. Christianity is essentially a way of love and its mysteries remain forever veiled from the believer, at least in the ordinary interpretation of the religion. Islam, on the contrary, is gnostic, and its final aim is to guide the believer to a "vision" of the spiritual realities. That is why there has always been in Christianity the question of preserving the domain of faith from intrusion by reason, whereas in Islam the problem has been to overcome the obstacles placed before the intelligence by the passions in order to enable the believer to reach the very heart of the faith which is the Unity of the Divine Essence.
Reason, therefore, when not impeded by external obstacles does not lead to rationalism in the modern sense of the word, that is, a negation of all principles transcending human reason, but becomes itself an instrument of Unity and a way of reaching the intelligible world. Likewise, Islamic art, instead of being "rationalistic" as it might at first appear, leads the observer through the abstract symbols of geometry to the principle of Unity which can be represented only "negatively" and abstractly. This activity of reason within rather than outside of the basic tenets of the Revelation is ultimately the cause for Islam's ability to respond to the need for causality on the part of its adherents within the tradition rather than see this need seek the satisfaction of its thirst outside of the faith, as was to happen with Christianity at the end of the Middle Ages. It is also this conception of reason that made the study of the mathematical sciences so widespread in the Islamic world and enabled the Muslims to adopt the Pythagorean notion of mathematics so easily as a part of their world view...
In the perspective of the Sufis, especially those belonging to the school of Ibn 'Aragi, and the theosophers (hakims)--that is, the followers of that combination of Peripatetic [Socrates/Plato/Aristotle] philosophy...and gnosis--the other aspect of the Divine Principle and its manifestation came to be emphasized...One can say on the one hand that the infinite is absolutely separate from the finite, or the Creator from creation; and on the other, that since there cannot be two absolutely distinct orders of reality--this view being considered as polytheism (shirk)--the finite must somehow be none other than the Infinite. The Ishraqi sages and Sufis, without denying the absolute transcendence of god, have emphasized this second relationship and through the use of symbolism (tashbih) have sought to show that the manifested world is nothing but the shadow and symbol of the spiritual world and that the whole of cosmic manifestation is connected to its Divine Principle through its very existence.
Islam as the religion of the middle way stands between tashbih and tanzih, or immanence and transcendence, each of which taken alone can lead to serious error but which taken together express the just relationship between God and the Universe...
With the establishment of the Abbasid caliphate, translations of Greek, Syriac, Pahlavi, and Sanskrit sources on the various sciences became available in Arabic...there now began to appear new schools which also drew from non-Islamic sources. These new schools ranged from the logicians and rationalists...to the astronomers and mathematicians, and finally to the followers of the more esoteric forms of the Greek, Alexandrian, and Chaldean sciences...During the third century, when the Islamic spirit began to become crystallized into its permanent forms, as reflected in the formation of the schools of law and the Sufi brotherhoods, the various arts and sciences as well as philosophy also began to flourish, reaching their climax in the fourth and fifth Islamic centuries...
The 4th/10th and 5th/11th centuries constitute, therefore, the period of the formation of the Islamic arts, sciences, and philosophy and the period in which the basis of the Islamic sciences was laid, in such a way as to determine the general contour of these sciences as they have been cultivated in the Muslim world every since. It may be said, then, that to study the sciences in this period is to study the root and formation of the various Islamic sciences and not just a passing moment in the long centuries of Islamic history.
To understand...the totality of the intellectual life of Islam it is necessary not only to place the period under discussion within Islamic history but also to relate the perspectives of the authors under study to the general intellectual dimensions in Islam. The most essential division within Islam is the "vertical" hierarchy of the Sacred Law (Shari'ah), the Way (Tariqah) and the Truth (Haqiqah), the first being the exoteric aspect of the Islamic revelation, divided into the Sunni and the Shi'ite interpretations of the tradition, and the latter two the esoteric aspects which are usually known under the denomination of Sufism. Or, one might say that the Truth is the center, the Way or "ways" the radii, and the Sacred Law the circumference of a circle, the totality of which is Islam.
We can say, therefore, that the dominant perspectives in Islamic history touching upon the study of Nature are those of the mathematicians, Hermeticists, Peripatetics, Isma'ilis, Illuminationistss, gnosts, or Sufis..and finally the theologians.
-- Sayyed Hossein Nasr, An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines, Shambhala, Boulder, 1978, Pp. 2-20.
A close study of the "esoteric" writings of Ibn Sina will reveal that the "Oriental Philosophy" is not at all a philosophy in the rationalist sense, nor a system of dialectic to fulfill certain mental needs; rather, it is a form of wisdom or a "theosophy" which has for its purpose the deliverance of man from this world of imperfection to the "world of light." It is non-Greek in the sense that the specific "genius" of the Greeks of the historical period was dialectical. They even hid the Egyptian, Orphic, and Babylonian mysteries, upon which Pythagoreanism was based, under a veil of dialectics. The "Oriental Philosophy" removes this veil and seeks to present the philosophia perennis not as something to satisfy the need for thinking but as a guide, or at least doctrinal aid, for the illumination of man which arises from the inner experience of its author. Its language is therefore primarily symbolic rather than dialectical even it if begins with Aristotelian logic and employs some of the cosmological ideas of the Peripatetic philosophers...[T]he "Oriental Philosophy" was only a theoretical formulation which borrowed its language of symbols from various ancient mysteries...
-- Sayyed Hossein Nasr, An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines, Shambhala, Boulder, 1978, P. 191.
In the domain of cosmology, the late works of Ibn Sina possess many points of similarity with the conception of Nature of the gnostics ('urafa'). In both cases there is the concept of the interiorization of the cosmos, the journey through the Universe to what lies above it, and a symbolic interpretation of all natural phenomena. Therefore, whatever the effective realization and the spiritual station of Ibn Sina may have been, his theoretical consent to tasawwuf and the expression of many Sufi doctrines in the cosmology of his works on "Oriental Philosophy" permit us to study him in two distinct ways. Firstly, we may identify his early works, especially the Shifa' and the Najat, as the most complete expressions of the philosophy of the Peripatetic [Socrates/Plato/Aristotle] school in Islam, a school that was much influenced, especially in the case of Ibn Sina, by the physics of Aristotle and Neoplatonic cosmology. Secondly, we may study the cosmology of his later works, especially the visionary narratives, as an early expression of the doctrines of the Ishraqi school which were developed more fully in the following centuries and as a description of certain elements of the gnostic conception of Nature...
Ibn Sina is above all a "philosopher of Being"; all knowledge for him involves the analogy of the beings of particular things with Being itself which stands above and anterior to the Universe. The highest form of knowledge, in fact, is the knowledge of Being itself, to which the knowledge of mathematics and of the physical world are subordinated. To understand his cosmological ideas, therefore, it is necessary to discuss briefly the relation of Being to the Universe and its hierarchy, though without going into the details of this question since it belongs to the "First Philosophy," or metaphysics, and so lies outside the scope of this study.
-- Sayyed Hossein Nasr, An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines, Shambhala, Boulder, 1978, P. 196-197.
[Comment from Scribe: Metaphysics is the purview of this website. So we see that 1) Sufism was the preeminent esoteric branch of Islam, and 2) it was but their version of the preexistent "paripatetic" Greek schools--the teachings of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle--and then, apparently, an admixture of the later Gnostic doctrines. Insofar at they interpreted the teachings correctly, which is very doubtful, so far is Sufi-ism worthwhile.]