said to have met Suhrawardi in Baghdad, they are said to have had a“short
silent meeting”after which the elder shaykh recognized the younger as“an
ocean of divine truths.”^68 Similarly, hagiographies of Rumi reflect real and
spiritual relationships with predecessors. More than direct referentiality,
such correlations between multiple thinkers suggest that common sight-
related tropes such as the mirror and the veil circulated in mystical
thought, constructing foundational elements in a discursive lexicon of
representation.5.4 Ibn Khaldun and the Polished Mirror as an Allegory
of the Sciences
Appraising the mystical tradition, ibn Khaldun allegorically compares the
physical and spiritual sciences through the competition of the artists.^69 He
explains that the word Suficomes not from any of its popular derivations as
‘wool’from the cloak of the dervish,‘bench,’or‘purity,’but from the verb
tasawwuf, meaning“the vigilant observance of good behavior in relation to
God in interior and exterior works, in precisefidelity to his orders, by
putting the interest of the acts of the heartfirst, from Whose hidden
movements are closely watched, in the ardent desire to obtain thereby
salvation.”^70 He then details the relative roles of juridical science and
tasawwuf, and the ways of attaining knowledge in each.
Citing al-Ghazali as his source and identifying the artists as Indian and
Chinese, ibn Khaldun uses the story to distinguish roles for scientific and
Sufiknowledge. He compares the wall painting with creation and the
divine Tablet:“When God created this creation, he did not bring sensible
existence about all at once. He brought it progressively, in phases. Initially
he gave it its substantial realities and essences, large and small, in their
entirety and in their particularity, and that in the book that he called the
Tablet (al-lawh).”This reaffirms the Ash’ari refutation of a rationally
created Quran. The Tablet had to precede history to not be historical.
Creation therefore must have taken place in phases, with the establishment
of the word/discourse/logos–as embodied in the Quran. Ibn Khaldun(^68) Austin, 1980 :9.
(^69) His workShifa al-Sa’il li-Tahdhib al-Masa’il(The Response that Satisfies he who Tries to Clarify
Questions) was written in Fez in 1372–1374, in response to a controversy among the scholars of
Granada about whether pursuit of the Sufipath necessitated a master.
(^70) Ibn Khaldun, 1991 : 129–132. All subsequent quotations from ibn Khaldun in this section
continue the same passage.
156 Seeing through the Mirror