Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi

[4] Though relatively unfamiliar to Westerners, the spiritual and systematic character of Qūnawī's approach to reasoning, in the broadest sense of the term, has found fertile soil in modern-day Turkey, North Africa and Iran not to mention India, China, the Balkans and elsewhere over the centuries.

But while he was reputed for his profound understanding of the Quran and Ḥadīth, he knew the ancient Peripatetic philosophy intimately, no doubt thanks chiefly to Ibn Sīnā, who commented extensively on the works of Aristotle.

If God sublime and transcendent hath shown Himself to me in a flash of manifestation from the noble elevation of the essence, absent hast thou been from me therein by a mere glance of an eye.” I agreed at once and, as if he had been standing there [bodily] before my eyes, the Shaykh al-Akbar [i.e., Ibn Arabī] greeted me with the salutations of reunion after a parting and embraced me affectionately, saying: “Praise be to God who the veil hath lifted and who bringeth those dear unto each other into reunion.

Qūnavī's significance arises from his firm place in Islam's "post-Avicennan" (or, more precisely, post-Falsafah) period, of which Latin European Scholastics (themselves struggling with the problematics posed by Avicenna) were likely oblivious.

At times, it seems, he distanced himself from Ibn 'Arabī altogether due to the emphasis on personal witness above the interpretation of others’ experience regardless of their social or spiritual station.

[9] Al-Qāshānī likened the “flash” to “the illumination appearing to a person that beckons and summons to the Presence of Proximity to the Lord for a journey within God.”[10] Ibn 'Arabī referred to the deep tranquility felt by the saintly “friends of God,” the awliyā’, who take their repose in it.

To the followers of Ibn 'Arabī, “exegetical grammar” was vastly more suited to the paradoxical movements of the spirit, “dialogue” with God, and in a purely epistemological sense, the true “knowledge of the realities,” an expression that Qūnavī took to be chiefly of Avicennan inspiration.

On the surface, this formulation and the logical corollaries flowing from it appear to seal man's incapacity to discover the “realities of things” on his own (i.e., by his own inborn faculties).

He took up this selfsame issue with Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī (d. 672/1274) in a fascinating philosophical correspondence, where "tashkīk" ("systematic ambiguity," a concept key to later philosophy) figures.

In a larger sense, Qūnavī was able to deepen the transformation of philosophical reason begun by his predecessors by virtue of a simple, incontrovertible fact: the mechanical logic of Peripatetic philosophy could not quite overcome the distinction between subject and object (the two most elementary “realities” in every act of knowing) except by correspondence, concomitance, etc.

But the new synthesis he was so keen to elucidate for "theological science," or 'ilm ilāhī, had to be properly anchored to a logos exhibiting the same characteristic concreteness as that familiar to him from divine speech, “God’s communications” to man (e.g., the "Qur’ān").

And yet, incessant migrations to Anatolia had given this frontier capital a distinctly cosmopolitan character, making it the envy of every seeker of knowledge—Muslim, Greek and Armenian—but also innumerable foes.

[11] This was about the time when Qūnavī's father,[12] Majd al-Dīn Isḥāq, began his career as a statesman and, reflecting mysticism's pervasiveness, acquired the status of a revered spiritual figure.

Numerous schools and colleges had earlier been built by the Ayyūbids in Syria and Egypt, where Arabic was studied by people who congregated from all over the Islamic world.

Damascus, at the time, had fostered a broad intellectual fraternity that was felt across the traditional lines of jurisprudence, even if the religious sciences were more deep-rooted and variegated there than in Konya.

One of the most prestigious centers, established earlier in the twelfth century, was the Dār al-Ḥadīth al-Ashrafīyah, whose the first shaykh was celebrated Shāfi'ī muḥaddith Ibn al-Ṣāliḥ al-Shahrazūrī (d. 643/1245).

Their numerical preponderance in iqrā’ (Quran recital) and naḥw (grammar)[15] managed to sway the general interest even more toward Arabic philology.

For Qūnavī, its “devices of conveyance” (adawāt al-tawṣīl) disclosed “incorporeal and immaterial meanings,” which he explored at a certain remove from the original experience that presumably lay at the core.

[4] What we find in the mystical reflections of Ibn 'Arabī and Qūnavī alike are encoded utterances embodying an asymmetrical division between two components of instructive knowledge.

Philosophically, they consist of the mawḑū' (subject) and the maṭlūb (object of inquiry); in theological dialectics and religious sciences they are generally known as aṣl (root) and far' (branch).

A simple, unreflective cognizance of pregiven religious fundamentals, in the manner advocated by the Salafi-minded Ibn Taymīyyah, was still knowledge; yet nothing could disentangle it from the mundane influences that normally impinge upon the human faculty of comprehension.

In his "Nafaḥāt ilāhiyyah," Qūnavī admitted that in that banal sense one could argue the awareness of existence was simply posited by way of intuition as the “first cognizance,” for which there was no demonstrable proof or true definition and which has merely an indistinct unity.

Contrasted to the second cognizance stood the first, which consisted of the “awareness of existence” and the perception of its “thingness.” His demarcation between this indistinct thingness and singular reality corresponded to the theological division of “subject” (mawḍūc) and “object of inquiry” (maṭlūb)—what is given and what is sought by way of knowledge.

[4] Behind this structural view or formulation remained the vexing question: Should what is sought in the quest for knowledge be considered nothing but the original knowing subject revealed?