are not abstraction or ideals; light is not a metaphor but the visible spectrum
of brightness and color which literally produces the world below. The “Ori-
ent,” the home of light, is both the dawning place of knowledge and the rising
sun, whose rays can illuminate the soul. There are temples of light in the
intermediate cosmos, with archangels of purple and mystic green. The human
ideal is to become the “perfect man,” the sage who combines philosophical
knowledge with mystical experience; he becomes the “Pole” of “the invisible
mystical hierarchy without which the universe could not continue to subsist”
(Corbin, 1969: 22).
Ibn ÀArabi produced a similar position, somewhat more coordinated with
Muslim scriptures and less tied to the Zoroastrian religion of light. For him
the “universal man” contains the Platonic essences, which are the archetypes
simultaneously of the macrocosm which is the universe and of the human
microcosm; these essences provide the ideal model toward which the person
should strive. The “universal man” rationalizes the powers of the scriptural
prophets; he has a magical ability for seeing the esoteric significance in visible
physical objects, like the ability of Moses to see God in the burning bush. Here
the position of Ibn ÀArabi and of Suhrawardi has turned away from the
scientific causality incorporated into the lower regions of the world hierarchy
by Neoplatonists like Ibn Sina or Aristoteleans like Averroës. Ibn ÀArabi’s
philosophy is a deliberate repudiation of the dying Spanish rationalist tradition
from which he came. The cosmos was being reenchanted by the philosophers.
We can see how far the intellectual atmosphere had changed from the time of
al-Ghazali, with his moderate use of kalam and his skepticism about meta-
physical constructions. Al-Ghazali had attacked the esotericism of the IsmaÀilis
and Imamites; now Suhrawardi and Ibn ÀArabi gave a philosophical basis for
ShiÀite belief that the Imam is the terrestrial pole of the cosmic Intelligences,
or an angel hidden between heaven and earth (Corbin, 1969: 80–81, 86). By
the mid-1300s, ShiÀite leaders (such as 291 in the key to Figure 8.3) were
identifying Sufism with ShiÀism. At the same time, orthodox Sunni theologians
had incorporated Sufism into the curriculum of the madrasas. Sufism was both
systematized and reconciled with kalam.
By this time there was not much intellectual life left. There continued to be
networks (see Figure 8.3) connecting the more important teachers and pupils
all the way into the 1400s. But for the most part they were academics in the
worst sense: unoriginal compilers of handbooks and summarizers of predeces-
sors’ texts (Rescher, 1964: 68–69, 76). The most innovative were scientists: in
the mid-1200s Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, one of the greatest astronomers of Islam,
eliminated some of the Ptolemaic planetary eccentrics and foreshadowed the
Copernican system (DSB, 1981: 13:508); his pupils and grandpupils carried
on the creative pulse. But scientific topics had grown marginal to Islamic
intellectual life and faded from the attention space.
Tensions of Ideas: Islam, Judaism, Christendom^ •^427