World Religions

Transmodern Sufism, Or Stepping With Levinas On The Footprints Of A Speculative Sufism Not Re-Framed By 20th Century Orientalists, Part 2 (Philipp Valentini)

The following is the second installment of a three-part series.  The first can be found here.

A non-Paulinian theology understands the Law not as a whole but as an indefinite set of rules where each rule is split between the conversations it opens on the meanings it expresses and the action it performs. The excess of meaning that organizes the social interactions is the signifier “whole of wisdom” as it appears in the above mentioned sentence of Lévinas – la sagesse talmudique or in the sentence attributed to Imam Malik that works as an authoritative refrain in those debates that wish to show the compatibility of juridical thinking with Sufism: “Whoever studies jurisprudence [fiqh] and didn’t study Sufism (tasawwuf) will be corrupted; and whoever studied tasawwuf and didn’t study fiqh will become a heretic; and whoever combined both will be reach the Truth”[1].

This last sentence is important as it brings together the study of singular cases (fiqh) and the practice of the science of wisdom (Sufism). It doesn’t directly bring together the signifier Shari’a (which in the Muslim mind evokes, among other meanings, the whole of the Law) with the signifier Sufism. This means that in transmodern Islam, the religious Law is not governed by the exceptional status of the political authority but establishes instead a political relative autonomy[2] from the political ruler. These dynamics are highly discursive as they depend on the fiction of the general agreement of all scholars, something that as such doesn’t exist and thus translates the ‘whole of wisdom’ that is sought and constantly re-created behind the links that are discursively forged between the customs and the divine speech (Qur’an and the sayings of the prophet Muhammad).

The simultaneous utterances of different Juridical opinions becomes so overwhelming that the humming effect of the excess of speech[3] not only rebukes the political ruler that would want to organize it but becomes channelled only through the endeavour to find the mystical reality (the ‘whole of wisdom’ that exceeds the social interactions) that justifies this same political autonomy from the government.  The affect of being ‘overwhelmed’ indicates here the subjective passage from the social interactions to the apprehension of the ‘whole of wisdom’ that is expressed by each singular voice that had been before the silence apprehension of the “whole of wisdom” felt as being an undifferentiated mixture of syllables.

In this non-Paulinian theologies, the splits of the Law are to be found in the asymmetry between the discussions of the Law and its silent enactments. There is an anxiety that its silence enactments might violently stop the on-going discussions and there is also an anxiety that its on-going discussions might encourage people to give less attention to its performances. The two internal enemies are then here those that embody one of the two anxieties while the absolute enemy is the one who embodies both of them.

When the Qur’an names the hypocrites, the text names those that enact the Law but secretly don’t recognize being part of the people who discuss the Law. An example of this can be found in the following verse of the Qur’an (2:14): “And when they fall in with those who believe, they say: We believe; but when they go apart to their devils they declare: Lo! we are with you; verily we did but mock.”.

When the Qur’an names those that are in a state of un-mindfulness, it names those that recognize being part of the discussion of the Law but don’t enact its gestures: “They have hearts wherewith they understand not, they have eyes wherewith they see not, and they have ears wherewith they hear not (the truth). They are like cattle, nay even more astray; those! They are the heedless ones” (Qur’an 7:179).

The one who is presented as an absolute enemy of Islam is the one who identifies himself as having the power to stop both the discussions on the Law and its performances: “As for the Disbelievers, Whether thou warn them or thou warn them not it is all one for them; they believe not /Allah hath sealed their hearing and their hearts, and on their eyes there is a covering. Theirs will be an awful doom.” (Qur’an 2:6-7). The three figures of the enemy here draw the threefold borders of a surface on which Muslim singularities take place.

Deleuze names the surface the place where spoken meanings and moving actions encounter[4]. This metaphor helps us to escape the need to appeal to a deeper reality that would need to always add a new layer of generalization to be able to embrace and thus explain the event of unforeseen singularities that exceed its theoretical landscape. Are we now able to answer the question: What is a mystical experience inside a similar transmodern context is?

I would rephrase this question by asking how are we to understand what Imam Malik said when he states that he was overwhelmed or overcome by the many opinions he heard while seeing to establish legal rules? The affect of being “overwhelmed” or ‘overcome’ indicates here the subjective passage from the social interactions to the apprehension of the “whole of wisdom” that is expressed by the multiple singular voices that had been, before the silent apprehension of the “whole of wisdom”, felt as being an undifferentiated mixture of syllables and thus overwhelming.

It is only after this mystical apprehension that the “whole of wisdom” is felt as allowing the hearing of a symphony of a plurality of singular voices and faces that will make out the pages of his spiritual and juridical treatise. Later in the 18th century, Ahmad Tijani expresses this same idea in the main book of his Sufi order, the Jawahir al Ma’ani. Ahmad Tijani is asked by his secretary how we should understand the word “with” in the sentence “God is with you wherever you are” (Qur’an 57;4).  Is God with his servant only through His having a knowledge of the servant or is it the case that God’s Essence is necessarily present with His servant?

Ahmad Tijani answers that the best metaphor to answer this question is given by the man who in paradise physically enjoys as single ḥūri while in the same instant he feels having a sexual relationship with each singular ḥūri to which he is related to, knowing that they will be as many as the angels[5]. In other extract of this same book, we read the following sentence that describes what the mystic experiences once the eye of the spirit opens to divine sight of reality. It is stated that he gains a vision in an unique instant, in a single occurrence of existence:

He hears all the languages praising God. No word or language is mixed with any other langue or word. He hears each word and language distinctively[6].

In this context, the relationship between God and man is a relation where each concrete existent singularity is never erased in an abstract whole that would homogenize and erase the concrete specificities of each one. The surface of the instant is the locus where constant processes of singularizations take place (Iẖtiṣaṣ and Infirad). This locus takes on the metaphysical features of the eternal instant and the one unique occurrence of being that gives the gift of existence to the immutable essences that are present in God’s science. Or in another words, the individual human becomes a person once she/he is admitted inside the community of individuals that speak about God’s own language. What is then a mystical experience inside a similar transmodern Sufi context?

It is an experience where a Muslim person through the interactions with his peers undergoes a moment in which she is overcome by the humming of the voices and thus comes to experience the ‘whole of wisdom’ that makes out the shape of the surface on which these opinions are orally exchanged. Through this experience, her perceptions have changed, and she now hears simultaneously all the voices and the singularity of each voice. The mystical experience is then an experience of the surface on which the discussions between singularities take place inside an Islamic theopolitical context. This theopolitical context is the one in which by appealing to the “whole of wisdom”tra, a community of believers negotiates a space of autonomy from the rule of the State.

The Main Epistemological Coordinates of Transmodern Sufism Readings of Ibn’Arabī’s Teachings

The trajectory of a hermeneutical device of the interpretation of Ibn’Arabī’s teachings that has escaped the process of being reframed by White Perennialist scholars, sees in its first moment Ibn’Arabī’s stepson, Ṣadr al-Dīn Qūnawī (1207-1274), in the middle position Abd al-Ġanī an-Nābulusī (1641-1731) and in the end of the trajectory Ibrahīm Niasse (1900-1974).

Abd al-Ġanī an-Nābulusī is famous for having given a new impulse to the study of Ibn’Arabi’s mystical insights in the early modernity when the neo-rationalist episteme was trying to gain a hegemonic position in the Ottoman Empire, leaving only Damascus out of its tentacles.  Ibrahīm Niasse was a Senegalese Sufi who took part in the anti-colonial battles of Jamal Nasser in Egypt and Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana.

This trajectory is not entirely arbitrary in the sense that Ibrahīm Niasse

  • quotes in his book Ibn’Arabī’s immediate heir when it comes to present eschatological questions[7].
  • the Tijaniya Sufi path to which he belongs has received an intellectual inheritance that goes back to Abd al-Ġanī an-Nābulusī’s revival of akbarian teachings[8].
  • finally, he is the name that appears in French orientalism when it comes to denote the alleged subaltern character of West African Sufism. Zachary Wright has written on this topic the following sentence: ““A later Islamologist, Michel Chodkiewicz, concludes that Shaykh Ibrāhīm Niasse had no direct contact with the writings of Ibn al-‘Arabī (d. 1240), one of Islam’s greatest thinkers. This can only mean it was Chodkiewicz who never had direct contact with Shaykh Ibrāhīm’s writings: the Kāshif is in fact replete with precise chapter references to Ibn al-‘Arabī’s greatest works. (…). It seems to have escaped Chodkiewicz that the Kāshif contains frequent precise references to the works of Ibn al-‘Arabī but only one reference to Sha’rānī’s Yawāqīt. Indeed, Chodkiewicz’s characterization of Niasse, whom he mistakenly labels as a “dissident” and elsewhere as “another black African Sufi ,” seems prejudiced from the start.”[9]

I wish here to present the four discursive markers that constitute, in my view, the main epistemological coordinates of this transmodern Sufism.

The first point is that what the Sufi strives to achieve is an election, a singularization that places him/here in special relation with God. This election is located above the first intellect.

One of the basic elements of Ṣadr al-Dīn Qūnawī’s worldview is that the individual is split: he has a face towards the transient existence of this world and its concatenations of secondary causes and a face that is above the first intellect and is directed towards the unconditioned one[10]. This split is acknowledged intellectually and physically by one’s inability to perceive our own selves. This inability doesn’t drive Qūnawī to look for a strategy to overcome conceptually this incapacity but rather to transform this split in a locus that opens itself to God’s speech directed to each immutable essence (the essences of the beings such as they are known by God’s eternal science).

This locus becomes then the place where consonant pre-discursive meanings between God and His servant emerge. Only the emergence of a shared and a personalized language[11] between God and myself allows me to relate to my identity or if put differently, only through God’s speech addressed to my specific eternal essence I have access to my own personality.

In the transmodern form of Sufism I am here sketching, the physical presence of the perfect saint gives to his surrounding a sense of the difference between the realm of the intellect (that can lead to a mystical apprehension of the distinction between what is eternal and what is contingent) and the realm of the spirit (that leads to tasting the affects that run through the relation between God and Muḥammad).

The spirit of the prophet Muḥammad is believed to be attached to the utmost proximity of God’s essence: ḥaqīqa aḥmadīa. This utmost proximity has a name: farḍ al waḥid, “singularity of the countable one”. This singularity can be shared by those awliya (too quickly translated as “saints”, but “those who are protected, directly governed by God” might be better) who achieve a spiritual perfection and intimacy with the habits of Muḥammad as they are rendered in the Qur’an and in the literature that surrounds the Qur’an  (Shamā’il).  These include descriptions of the Prophet), ʾaḥādīṯ, (sayings of the Prophet), sira nabawīa (biography of the Prophet) and of course the specific aḏkar (formulas repeated by the sufi in order for him to enter in a state of remembrance of the rapport that connects Muḥammad and Allah)[12].

These perfect saints have reached their original metaphysical state of indifference (between the opposites as for instance wrath vs. kindness; first vs. last) they were in before having been brought into existence but, thanks to their mystical journey started in this transient world, they have added to it a personalized scent that reminds of the production of rose water[13].

This is why, this presence is felt, by the common believers, mainly through the scent of the person on which descended the spirit of Aḥmad (the metaphysical name of Muḥammad) and has not to be perceived mainly as a visual embodiment of the spirit. It is again, the affects that run on the surface of the body of the Saint that do express the spiritual meanings as they appear in his commentaries of the Qur’an or in his poetry. It is believed that the Spirit writes on the body of the Sufi through the language of affects that change the smell of the body of the Saint. Furthermore, it is these affects that the Sufi translates into the language of the Qur’an or Sufi poetry in order to give it a social and spiritual meaning that can be exchanged with other Muslims.

This election is beyond the realm of the intellect and the voice of the perfect saint testifies then of the difference between the realm of the intellect and the realm of the spirit[14]. Here, the perfect saint in his election is believed to enter a careful relationship (‘ināyah)[15] in which God takes care of the Sufi by outpouring on him an always more intense sanctifying grace (fayḍ al-aqdas)[16] that is well above his intellectual apprehension of the world.

This Metaphysical Relation Takes on the Features of the Speech of the Qur’an

According to the understanding of Ṣadr al-Dīn Qūnawī’s books I am trying here to convey, God brings forth His Speech addressed to the metaphysical instance of the prophet, named here Aḥmad. The articulations of this speech are given by the rules of grammar, while the space in which the discourse happens is given by the performances of the ‘Shari’a’. Man can’t know a thing for what it is but only as it is spoken by God’s speech i.e. the morphology and grammar of the language of the Qur’an. The morphology of the letters of the Qur’an as well as its grammatical constructions best describe the relations between God and the Sufi.[17]

The most famous example is a short lesson of Ibn’Arabī that is developed in length by Qūnawī according to which the roots of the words express the reality of the immutable essences of the things in God’s eternal knowledge of them. The vocals and the declinations of the roots express their existentiation in the creation as wells as their relations[18]. The relations between these things is understood through political metaphors (and thus are not ontologized) that refer to the ruler, to his ministers and his subjects[19].

But, instead of reflecting merely the political power of the times, these political metaphors do often refer to an invisible counter-government of the mystics that is connected to the eschatological times and thus constantly interrogates the legitimacy of the actual political sovereign[20]. What the act of Speech makes explicit is the grasping of the harmonious chord that is between Aḥmad and the divine Essence, or the uncountable divine ‘One’, Aḥad. Anthony Shaker brilliantly translates what I have here clumsily called ‘chord’, as ‘comprehensive union’ which is in English also a notion that expresses well the juridical bonds of marriages and not firstly an ontological transformation of things[21].

The third point regards the actions of the wayfarer that seeks to establish practices of courteous movements (adab) that are taught by the religious law.  Ṣadr al-Dīn Qūnawī expresses the idea that there exist three paths that lead to God. The first accesses a universal knowledge of the concept of the divine Essence and is open to anyone. The second is the path that leads to the knowledge of the agreement between the Godhead and his servant. The third path is the one followed by those who attempt to follow the example of those who trod on the second path. In his views, of all these paths, the second is the most perfect one because it offers the knowledge of the intention of God and how man should answer this divine intention[22].

The intention precedes the fixation of the eternal essences in God’s knowledge. In other words, the question of who they are and to whom do they respond of what they receive from God is more ‘original’, ‘primordial’, ‘initial’ than the question about ‘what’ these essences are. If we were invited to translate this teaching into 20th century philosophical reasoning, we could say with Levinas that the act of Saying is more original than what is said[23]. The direct correlate to this is that some paragraphs later, Ṣadr al-Dīn Qūnawī states:

The knowledge of God happens only through the deen of Islam (the path of Islam). Islam is the path of the Truthful after He sent Muḥammad (peace and blessings upon him). With Muḥammad the truth has come and all that is not Islam is abrogated (mansuẖ) and vain (baṭil). What was before the appearance of Muḥammad is now bygone, elapsed.[24]

I have to enter in the details of Qūnawī’s spiritual interpretation of the Shari’a because it is one of the main differences with those European views that see the religious Law as an obstacle towards any spiritual realization or as an empty form that can be filled with a plurality of eclectic abstract teachings. Ṣadr al-Dīn Qūnawī states that the divine essence loved to be known, and this is why He created the creatures[25]. He lets himself be known through the statutes that He emits. A statute[26] (ḥukm) is the divine rule that regulates and shapes the divine epiphanies that form the transient things we experience in this world. A statute can be shared between the divinity and the perfect servant, between the divine addressing (khiṭāb) instance and the addressed instance of the servant: it thus has the form of truth of the truth (ḥaqq al ḥaqq)[27].

It is in his commentary of the Fatiḥa that Ṣadr al-Dīn Qūnawī expresses his views on the spiritual meaning of the Shari’a[28].

I could synthesize the arguments found in this chapter as follows:

First, shari’a intensifies the desire to reach and realize the truth, while it teaches to scrutinize in one’s self the statutes of the truth.

Here Ṣadr al-Dīn Qūnawī mentions also a person that might disregard the Shari’a as he has felt a joy during his walking on the Sufi path. Ṣadr al-Dīn Qūnawī warns here that such a person hasn’t felt the supreme beatitude that not only happens in an instant but also confirms the reality of the Shari’a itself. The root of the Shari’a indeed has to be understood here as a root that has an effect on the roots of the individuals; in this sense, he who extinguishes himself in his essential root experiences also upon himself the authority of the root of the Shari’a.

Moreover, a person that has not extinguished himself in his root or immutable essence has not experienced the supreme beatitude (sa’ada). He is stuck in the interval between two opposites: the totality of all that is and the perishing of all that is existent. He is not able to understand the empty middle station that is in between these opposites. A similar person disregards often the liturgical gestures of faith. Ṣadr al-Dīn Qūnawī explains that it is due to his disregarding the external dimension of his faith that he won’t be guided to the knowledge of the divine Essence. Knowing the divine Essence is identical with one’s annihilation in his own permanent essence while upholding the juxtaposition of the two opposites: the totality of all that is and the perishing of all that is existent[29].  This is precisely made possible by performing the Shari’a.

Second, what the Shari’a also enables is the intensification of the divine succour that leads an individual to rise to the loving election of his relative singularity by the Absolute Singularity of God.  Ṣadr al-Dīn Qūnawī draws here a hierarchy of the process of divine support that progressively singularizes the believer along the Sufi path.  Imdād is a general support. This is the less singularizing kind of divine support. It increases the desire to cross the different degrees of existence that separate her/him from the presence of “God’s” holiness by augmenting her/his capacity to differentiate what is repugnant from what is good for her/him.

Ṣadr al-Dīn Qūnawī writes: “The one who is desired remembers his affair and the selves are prepared to receive the imdād to desire to be dyed by God’s presence (by the colours/attributes of the divine presence”. ‘Inaya[30] or the loving divine succor that the divine Essence showers on the immutable essences is here the most intense divine support as it is the most singularizing one. This occurs when one gathers all his manifested existence inside his immutable essence.

The Shari’a produces a hierarchy of these succors. This intensification of the divine succor also makes the person pass (Itib’ara[31]) from the general intellect (‘aql) to the most inner side of one’s heart (lubb)[32].

Philipp Valentini submitted his PhD thesis at the university of Fribourg (Switzerland) in April 2018. He works at the crossroad between 20th century French anti-philosophy (Levinas, Lacan) and early modern and West African speculative Sufism. The title of his PhD Dissertation is “A Critical Portrait of Four Perennialist Scholars: Franz-Joseph Molitor, ʿAbd al-Halīm Mahmūd, Michel Valsan, Henry Corbin. How Sufism became a European Philosophy of Religion“. Together with Prof. Mahdi Tourage, he is currently editing a book Esoteric Lacan for the serie Reframing Continental Philosophy of Religion (London: Rowman and Littlefield International, April 2019). This book gathers twelve scholars from different disciplines and religious backgrounds around a quest for the unspoken message of Lacan’s teachings.

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[1] Thomas Pierret, Religion and State in Syria, The Sunni Ulema, from Coup to Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 118-119.

[2] Armando Salvatore, Sociology of Islam (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2016) 148-149, and 80-81.

[3] While explaining how Imam Malik did compilate his legal doctrine, the Muwatta, he said to this pupil: “Indeed, most of the contents of the book are not my opinions but rather those which I heard from many leading scholars. Their opinions were so many that they overcame me. But their opinions are the ones which they took from the companions, and I in turn took these opinions from these leading scholars. They are a legacy which devolved from one age to another till these times of ours (…).When I say “The matter as we have it,” it means the matter which constitutes the practice in our midst and region, which jurists apply, and with which both laymen and scholars are familiar.”. The fiction that holds together the society emerges here with the word ‘but’ that assigns the power to order the noise to the way of life of the Companions that is reflected in his times in the tacit agreements between the laymen and the jurists. This tacit agreements are translated though the world ‘familiar’ that indicates a wisdom that underscores the social interactions but that can be only spoken through the discussion of singular rules and cases. See: Wael Hallaq, Authority, Continuity and Change in Islamic Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 34.

[4] Gilles Deleuze, Logique du sens (Paris : Minuit, 1969) 15.

[5] Ali al Harazim, Jawahir al Ma’ani (Beyrouth: Bouraq, 2010), 637.

[6] op.cit. 788-789.

[7] Ibrahīm Niasse, The removal of confusion concerning the Flood of the Saintly Seal Ahmad al-Tijani, trans. Abdullai i-Okene, Mukhtar Holland, Zanchary Wright (Louisville: Fons Vitae, 2010), 157. With regard to Niasse’s critique of the figure of Paul that he calls “Bulus” see  Fy Ryāḍ At tafsyr Li’l Qur’an Al Karym Vol. 2, ed.  Shaykh Tidiane Cisse  (Madina Kawlakh, Senegal, Tunis, Tunisia, 2010) pp.156-157. I thank S.H for this information. At a first glance, it seems that this sentence follows the classical Muslim critique of Paulus as the betrayer of Jesus’ monotheism. Nonetheless, it needs to be put back in its historical context in which French Christian missionaries were trying to convert West African people to the Catholic religion of the colonizer.

[8] Frederick De Jong, Turuq and Turuq-linked institutions in nineteenth century Egypt (Leiden: Brill, 1978) ;  Gideon Weigert, “Shaykh Mustafa Kamal al Din al Bakri – A Sufi reformer in Eighteenth-century Egypt” published on the website of the Israeli Academic Center in Cairo : http://www.academy.ac.il/SystemFiles/21083.pdf  and accessed on the 28.08.2016.

 

[9] Zachary Wright, “The Kashif al Ilbas of Shaykh Ibrahīm Niasse: Analysis of the Text”, in Islamic Africa, 1, 1 (2010). Emphasis is mine.

 

[10] Kitāb Al-Mufawadat. Briefwechsel Zwischen Șadr Ud-Dīn-I Qūnawī (Gest. 673/1274) Und Naṣīr Ud-Dīn Ṭūsī (Gest. 672/1274), ed. Gudrun Schubert (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1995) 48-49.

[11] Each devotional or noctunal prayer (munāǧāt) recomposes different verses of the Qur’an in personal order. One verse of the munāǧāt may be taken from the second surah and be immediately followed by a verse that belongs to one of the last chapters of the Qur’an.  It invents a singularizing and structurally language out of the common revealed language that is the Qur’an.

[12]Samuela Pagani, Il Rinnovamento Mistico dell’Islam: Un commento di ʿAbd Al-Ġanī an-Nābulusī a Ahmad Sirhindi (PhD dissertation, Università degli studi di Napoli L’Orientale, 2003), 69-74.

 

[13] Richard Todd, The Sufi Doctrine of Man (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 165 n.136.

[14] On the differential gap between the Spirit and the Intellect in the teachings of Ibn’Arabi, see my interpretation of his escathological treatises: cf. Annex V.

[15] Anthony Shaker, Thinking in the language of reality (Lac-des îles: Xlibris, 1992) 159.

[16] Shaker, Thinking in the language of reality, 167. This is very close to the esoteric teachings of Maimonides that speak about a form of post-intellectual form of mystical understanding of the relation between God and Moses. See: David Blumenthal, Maimonides: Prayer, Worship, and mysticism, in Approaches to Judaism in Medieval Times, ed. D. Blumenthal (Atlanta, Scholars Press: 1988) 1-16, on Maimonides and the personalizing divine providence that is poured on the Jewish Saint, see René Lévy, La divine insouciance (Paris: Verdier 2008).

 

 

[17] For an ethnographic survey of a similar practice, see Paola Abenante, Corpi virtuosi e spiriti sensibili: esperienze e immaginari nel sufismo egiziano contemporaneo (PhD Dissertation, Università Bicocca, Milan, Italy, 17 July 2010), chap. 6 and 8.

 

[18] Shaker, Thinking in the Language of Reality, 38.

[19] Francesco Chiabotti, “Entre soufisme et savoirs islamique: l’oeuvre de ‘Abd al Karim al Qushayri (376-465 / 986-1072) ”(PhD. Diss. Université de Provence, 2014), 517-663.

[20] Ibn’Arabī, Islamic Sainthood in the Fullness of Time. Ibn ‘Arabi’s book ‘The Fabulous Gryphon’, translation and study by Gerald Elmore of the Anqa’ al-Mughrib (Leiden : Brill, 1999).

 

[21] Shaker, Thinking in the Language of Reality, 319-320.

[22] Shaker, Thinking in the language of Reality, chap. 10 and  p. 246.

[23] Emmanuel Levinas, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (La Haye: Martin Nijhoff, 1974), 6-9, 58-77.

[24] Șadr ud-dīn Qūnawī, Tafsīr Umm Al Qur’an (Beyrouth: Kitab al Ilmiyah, 2005), 218-219.

[25] William Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge (New York: Suny Press, 1989), 66.

[26] Shaker, Thinking in the Language of Reality, 147 and 316. Anthony Shaker translates it with the word ‘precept, judgment’.

[27] Anthony Shaker, Thinking in the language of reality, (Lac-des-Iles, QC: Xlibris, 2012), 279-286.

[28] Ṣadr al-Dīn Qūnawī, Tafsīr Umm al Qur’an (Beyrouth: Kitab al Ilmiyah, 2005), 304-308.

[29] Qūnawī, Tafsīr Umm al Qur’an, 304 ; Imam Cheikh Tidiane Ali Cisse, What the knowers of Allah have said about the knowledge of Allah, Atlanta (U.S.A: Faydabooks, 2014) 89 in English,  91 in Arabic.

[30] Shaker, Thinking in the Language of Reality, 185.

[31] Denis Gril, “L’interprétation par transposition symbolique (i‘tibâr), selon Ibn Barrajân et Ibn ‘Arabî,” in Symbolisme et herméneutique dans la pensée d’Ibn ‘Arabî, ed. Bakri Aladdin (Damas, Ifpo, 2007), 147-161.

[32] Hakim at Tirmidhi (750-869) has already stated the differences between these two forms of cognition. Lubb stands for how the Pole of the Time, the supreme authority of the hidden government of the ‘sufis’ cognizes the divine unity (Tawhid). see. Al Hakim at-Tirmidhi, Exposé de la différence entre la poitrine, le coeur, le tréfonds et la pulpe, translated by Isitan Ibrahim ( Beyrouth : Bouraq, 2002), section five.

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