And it is for this reason that Plato, who was the greatest of the philosophers and the
greatest of the Sufis of antiquity, did not see decisive proof in the perceptions of
acquired science, which remained on the surface of the spiritual world. He said,
“Through them, one only arrives at the most probable and the most moral.”And he
established between acquired science and infused science the same relationship as
between opinion and science.
Whereas for al-Ghazali, the Sufipath offers the more direct role to knowl-
edge, ibn Khaldunfinds it generally inaccessible. Rational science thus
enables the most probable and moral, if not definitive, knowledge. Not
everybody in the Islamic world, after all, had to be a mystic.
The repetition of narratives of artistic competition in Islamic discourses
suggests both the mundane nature of painting and its conceptual impor-
tance. Both al-Ghazali and Rumi discuss the symbolic utility of painting
with no concern for the issue of permissibility. Yet Nizami’s inclusion of
Mani, characterized as a false prophet by Firdausi, indicates concern over
sanction. The resultant understanding of the image is not one of prohibi-
tion so much as an expedient for transcendence. Parables of the image
neutralize it, transforming it from a dangerous opportunity for idolatry
into an indication of the impossibility of true representation–similar to
the intertextual ideas embedded in Attar’s rendition of the Simurgh. Far
from the modern assertion of latent secularism underlying representa-
tional painting in opposition to an Islam defined solely by law, the cultural
and religious aspects of Islam emerge as indivisible as a reflection and its
mirror.158 Seeing through the Mirror