AVICENNA

v. Mysticism

Avicenna and Sufism​. Avicenna’s philosophical system, rooted in the Aristotelian tradition, is
thoroughly rationalistic and intrinsically alien to the principles of Sufism as it had developed
until his time. It is also self-consistent and unified, and therefore free of any other mystical or
esoteric aspect—however these terms are understood—that would represent a different
form or body of knowledge and create a dichotomy within the system. Avicenna, however,
did maintain the validity of Sufism, just as he maintained the validity of other manifestations
of Islamic religious life, but he interpreted it, just as he interpreted them, in terms of his own
system.

Avicenna’s epistemological theory revolves around the pivotal concept of ​ḥads. All
knowledge consists of the totality of the intelligibles contained in the intellects of the celestial
spheres, and is structured in a syllogistic fashion; that is, it contains the extreme terms of
syllogisms along with the middle terms which cause, or explain the conclusions. The
acquisition of this knowledge, which is the goal of all human activity because the misery or
bliss of the immortal rational soul in the hereafter depends directly upon it, proceeds
accordingly by the consecutive discovery of middle terms. The capacity to hit spontaneously
upon the middle term in any syllogism is called ​ḥads. It is a mental act whereby the human
intellect comes into contact (​etteṣāl) with the active intellect (​ʿaql faʿʿāl​) and receives what
Avicenna frequently describes as “divine effluence” (​fayż elāhī​), i.e., knowledge of the
intelligibles through the acquisition of the middle terms. ​Ḥads constitutes the ​only ​point of
epistemological contact, in Avicenna’s thought, between the sublunar and the supralunar
realms, or between the mundane and the transcendental, and it refers to a strict and precise
syllogistic process. Avicenna admits no other way to a knowledge of the intelligible world and
ultimately of the Necessary Existent (​wājeb al-wojūd)​ .

Avicenna derived the concept of ḥ​ ads directly from a passage in Aristotle’s ​Posterior
Analytics (89b.10-11, ​eustochia ​= ḥ​ osno ḥadsen in the Arabic translation, ʿA. Badawī,
Manṭeq Aresṭū, Cairo, 1948, p. 406), to which he added Galen’s idea that the different
degrees of acumen in people are consequent upon the temperament of the body (I. Müller,
Galeni Scripta Minora​, Leipzig, 1891, II, p.79 = H. H. Biesterfeldt, ​Ketāb fi anna qowa ’l-nafs .
. . , ​AKM 40/4, p. 43). The resulting theory in its final form, Avicenna’s original creation,
enabled him not only to rank people on the basis of their capacity for ​ḥads, but also to
suggest the means whereby one could improve one’s standing on that scale. If, as Galen
taught, the faculties or powers of the soul follow the humoral temperament of the body, then
clearly the more balanced temperaments would have a greater predisposition for hitting
upon the middle terms. One should therefore strive to acquire a balanced temperament, or,
in religious terminology, a pure soul. At the lower end of the scale there is thus the impure
dullard, and at the upper end the pure person who can consistently hit upon the middle
terms. This is the prophet. In his case, “the forms of all things contained in the active intellect
(i.e., the intelligibles) are imprinted on his soul either at once or nearly so. This imprinting is
not an uncritical reception of the forms merely on authority (​taqlīd​), but rather occurs in an
order which includes the middle terms” (A. F. Ahwānī, ed., A ​ ḥwāl al-nafs​, Cairo, 1371/1952,
p. 123 = ​al-Šefāʾ​, ​al-Nafs,​ ed. F. Rahman, London, 1959, pp. 249-50 = ​al-Najāt​, Cairo, 1331,
pp. 273-74).

In order for those at the lower end of the scale of ​ḥads to gain any of this knowledge, it is
obvious that their only recourse is to acquire a balanced temperament (a pure soul) in
anticipation of a later or posthumous understanding, and to learn something about this
knowledge in terms familiar to them. This is the function of religious life in all its
manifestations. The prophet communicates the knowledge of the intelligible world in symbols
and in language accessible to the masses because syllogistic discourse, the medium in
which he himself received this knowledge, is unintelligible to them; and he lays down
legislation whose purpose is to purify their souls. This is the reason for the efficacy of
religious prescriptions like fasting and ritual prayer, of popular religious practices such as the
visitation of saints’ tombs, and of the ascetic practices of the Sufis. Needless to say, these
practices are beneficial not only to the dull masses but also to philosophers when they are
faced with a difficulty and can not find a middle term. This is the reason for Avicenna’s
recourse to prayer in similar circumstances, as recounted in his autobiography (W. E.
Gohlman, ​The Life of Ibn Sina​, Albany, New York, 1974, p. 29).

Avicenna composed his works in a variety of styles for the same reason, i.e., in order to
reach different layers of audience with the same knowledge, not the same audience with a
different, “esoteric,” knowledge. He used symbol and allegory, and some terminology from
Sufism, in order to convey this knowledge that grants salvation to those best disposed to
receive it in such a medium. Otherwise the symbols and Sufi terms correspond exactly to the
philosophical concepts of his system. The ​ʿāref m ​ entioned in the final chapters of the ​Ešārāt​,
for example, refers to the person whose rational soul has reached the stage of the acquired
intellect. In the case of the allegory, ​Ḥayy b. Yaqẓān, it corresponds precisely to Avicenna’s
theory of the soul, as demonstrated by A. -M. Goichon (​Le récit de Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān
commenté par des textes d’Avicenne,​ Paris, 1959). In all these instances there is no
reference to another knowledge (there is none, other than that contained in the active
intellect), nor to another way of acquiring it (there is none, other than through hitting upon
middle terms, ​ḥads).

This is the context in which the treatises listed by G. C. Anawati under ​taṣawwof ought to be
seen (​Moʾallafāt Ebn Sīnā,​ Cairo, 1950, nos. 213-44). T ​ aṣawwof ​is not a proper label for
these treatises, for they do not treat Sufism in terms of Sufism; they deal, rather, with the
workings of the rational soul in Avicenna’s philosophical system, its relationship to the active
intellect, and the influence which the latter exerts on the former, and its results (prophecy,
miracles, wonders, etc.). Metaphysics of the rational soul would be a more accurate
category, for in his philosophical summae Avicenna treated these very subjects in the
section on metaphysics right after theology. Apart from these subjects which he incorporated
in his philosophical system and explained in the fashion described, Avicenna had no relation
with Sufism, or indeed, with Sufis. The celebrated meeting with the Sufi Abū Saʿīd Abi’l-Ḵayr
in all likelihood never took place; only the correspondence appears to be genuine (F. Meier,
Abū Saʿīd-i Abū l-Ḫayr (357-440/967-1049): Wirklichkeit und Legende​, Acta Iranica 11,
Tehran and Liège, 1976, pp. 26-28). Popular tradition in the East after Avicenna’s death,
however, partly misled by the Sufi terminology in some of his works, and partly through a
misunderstanding of his theory of ḥ​ ads as mystical illumination, considered him a mystic and
occasionally even somebody who claimed to be a prophet; but this has nothing to do with
the historical Avicenna (see Biography).

The question of the Easterners (​Mašreqīyūn​). Avicenna’s development of an epistemological

theory, whereby the intelligibles are acquired either by personally hitting upon the middle
terms or by receiving them from a teacher who himself successfully traversed part of the
syllogistic process mirroring the structure of the intelligible world, enabled him to have a
progressive view of the history of philosophy. Although the knowledge to be acquired, the
intelligibles, in itself and on a transcendental plane is a closed system and static, on a
human level and in history it is evolutionary: Each philosopher, through his own syllogistic
prowess, modifies and completes the work of his predecessors, thus presenting a body of
knowledge that is an ever closer approximation of the intelligible world, and hence of truth
itself. For Avicenna, the philosophical tradition that had achieved this best was the
Aristotelian, and he saw himself as essentially belonging to it while at the same time revising
and modifying it on the basis of his own syllogistic analyses. In the introduction to his
Mašreqīyūn he specifically says that the Peripatetics are the philosophical school most
worthy of adherence, but he criticizes his predecessors for having failed to revise Aristotle’s
system despite the fact that the truth, i.e., the intelligibles contained in the active intellect,
“can be discovered by anybody who examines a lot, reflects long, and has almost fully
developed the ability to hit upon the middle terms” (​ḥads). He himself claims to have done so
because, he says, he acquired knowledge, i.e., the philosophical sciences reflecting the
intelligible world, “from a direction (​jeha​) other than that of the Greeks,” i.e., not from
teachers and their books (the Greeks), but from the direction of ḥ​ ads, or of the active
intellect, by coming into contact with it while hitting upon middle terms (​Manṭeq
al-Mašreqīyīn,​ Cairo, 1910, pp. 3-4). In the ​Dāneš-nāma (​Ṭabīʿīyāt-e Dāneš-nāma-ye ʿalāʾī​,
ed. S. M. Meškāt, Tehran, 1331 Š./1952, pp. 144-45) he makes an obvious autobiographical
reference to this effect, while the autobiography itself is an illustration of the very concept of
ḥads (see Biography: Analysis of the Autobiography). Avicenna did not, however, claim to
have acquired all the knowledge contained in the active intellect; in other writings he
bemoans the limitations of human knowledge and urges his readers to continue with the task
of improving philosophy and adding to the store of knowledge.

This was Avicenna’s theoretical position regarding the piecemeal acquisition of knowledge
by successive philosophers. In actual practice, this manifested itself in a tendency,
observable in all his major philosophical works, to follow a course increasingly more
independent from the transmitted formats of exposition and discussion in the Greco-Arabic
Aristotelian tradition. With each successive stage in his literary career, the treatment of the
traditional material, as well as of his own revisions, became more systematic, and this was
accompanied either by an attenuated emphasis on the historical aspects of a question, or by
a sharper contrast between the traditional positions and his own. The texts on Eastern
philosophy and the Easterners represent one of the later, but temporary stages of this
development. These texts are the following:

1. ​Ketāb al-Mašreqīyīn (The book of the Eastemers). It was written after the ​Šefāʾ​, in
418-19/1027-28, and the greater part of the first and only draft was lost in 425/1034. The title
of the work, as given above, is the only one attested in the oldest and most reliable MS
containing the extant part on logic (Cairo, Dār al-Kotob, Ḥekma 6M, f. 116v); the expressions
al-ḥekma al-mašreqīya and ​al-falsafa al-mašreqīya which are occasionally used by Avicenna
and others seem to be designations of the contents of the work rather than verbatim
references to the title. ​Manṭeq al-Mašreqīyīn ​is the title invented by the Cairene publisher of
the extant part on logic. The work was another summa of philosophy in the Aristotelian
tradition, as revised by Avicenna on the basis of his syllogistic emendations (​ḥads). It was
parallel to the ​Šefāʾ in content, except that it was systematic in method, whereas the ​Šefāʾ
also treated views which traditionally formed part of the discussion on a given subject, but
which were either disproved by Avicenna or no longer possessed, in his estimation, any
intrinsic value. Avicenna referred to this stylistic difference between the two books in his
prologue to the ​Šefāʾ​, a prologue that was written after both books had been completed
(​Madḵal, Cairo, 1952, p. 10). Because of the parallel content of the two books, Avicenna did
not repeat in the ​Mašreqīyūn those parts of the philosophical sciences for which he had
nothing new to offer. The book thus contained logic (i.e., the “instrumental science,” ​al-ʿelm
al-ālī​, the other name for ​manṭeq referred to in the introduction, p. 3), metaphysics (in its two
major subdivisions, universal science and theology), some parts of physics, and some of
ethics (p. 8). The part that has survived contains the introduction and logic, from the
beginning to the section corresponding to the ​Prior Analytics.​ A section containing the part
on physics and identified in some MSS as belonging to this work needs to be investigated
further (G. C. Anawati in ​MIDEO​ 1, 1954, pp. 164-65).

2. ​Ketāb al-enṣāf (The book of fair judgment). It was drafted between 15 Day 397/19
December 1018 and 30 Ḵordāḏ 398/7 June 1019, and this first draft was lost in Moḥarram,
421/January, 1030. The work was a detailed commentary on the Aristotelian corpus,
including the Plotinian ​Theologia Aristotelis​, in which Avicenna came to grips with the very
texts and did not merely present their teachings in his own words. In a way it was the
historical counterpart of the systematic ​Ketāb al-Mašreqīyīn.​ There he had presented his
own systematic revision of Aristotelian philosophy without direct reference to or
argumentation against his predecessors; here he juxtaposed the transmitted texts in the
entire Greco-Arabic Aristotelian tradition, which he called that of the Westerners
(​Maḡrebīyūn), with his own systematic elaborations, which he attributed to the Easterners
(​Mašreqīyūn)​ . The extant portions of the work consist of the commentary on ​Metaphysics​,
Lambda (​ ed. ʿA. Badawī, A ​ resṭū ʿend al-ʿArab,​ Cairo, 1947, pp. 22-33), and two partially
overlapping recensions of the commentary on the ​Theologia Aristotelis (ed. Badawī, A ​ resṭū,
pp. 37-74).

3. ​Al-Taʿlīqāt ʿalā ḥawāšī Ketāb al-nafs,​ (Marginal notes on ​De anima​) (ed. Badawī, A ​ resṭū,
pp. 75-116). The title is by the scribe of the MS in which the work has been preserved
(Cairo, Ḥekma 6M), and describes the provenance of the notes. They are comments written
by Avicenna in the margins of his own copy of Aristotle’s ​De anima​, and were later
transcribed cleanly and consecutively by the scribe of the MS, or his immediate source, who
omitted the Aristotelian text. Although these notes follow the same principles of composition
as the E​ nṣāf, they are not part of it; they were written either immediately before it and directly
occasioned it by whetting the appetite of Avicenna’s disciples for a similar but more
extensive composition, or immediately afterwards, in partial compensation for its loss.

In these texts Avicenna wished to designate by a different name his revised systematization
of theoretical knowledge as transmitted in the Aristotelian tradition in order to emphasize the
more advanced level which the history of philosophy had reached through his efforts. The
name he chose reflected appropriately his background in the East (​mašreq)​ of the Islamic
world, i.e., Khorasan, and the philosophical tradition he generated was accordingly Eastern,
i.e., the Khorasani school of Aristotelian philosophy. This designation, however, appears to
have met with little approval and generated even less interest among his disciples and
colleagues (perhaps because not all of them were from Khorasan?), and Avicenna decided
to abandon the idea. He stopped referring to the easterners as a live concept by about
422/1031, six years before his death; with the sole exception of a couple of bibliographical
references in his private correspondence, there is not a single mention of them in any of his
subsequent writings. Their absence is particularly noteworthy in the ​Ešārāt​, a work in which
he achieved the highest degree of independence from traditional models of presentation and
discussion, but in which he claims, in the epilogue, to have presented neither Western nor
Eastern philosophy, but just the truth (​ḥaqq) and philosophical points (​ḥekam).

In the context of Avicenna’s own work, the significance of the concept of Eastern philosophy
lies in displaying his attitude toward his philosophical achievement and toward his position in
the history of philosophy, during a specific and limited period of his
career(418/1027-422/1031). Variants of this attitude are also observable in other stages of
his philosophical activity. As for the texts on Eastern philosophy, the loss of most of them
has resulted only in the loss of variant reformulations of the same positions taken in other
works. In substantial terms nothing seems to have been lost.

This impression is also reflected by Avicenna’s immediate posterity. There is no reference to

the whole issue of Eastern philosophy in what is known of the works of Avicenna’s disciples,
or, a few scattered bibliographical notes excepted, in subsequent philosophical tradition in
the Islamic East, where the surviving fragments of the Eastern texts were available.
Sohravardī, as a matter of fact, who read these fragments, rebuked Avicenna for taking in
vain the name of the east for his revised Aristotelianism (​al-Mašāreʿ wa’l-moṭāraḥāt, in H.
Corbin, ​Šihābaddīn Yaḥyā as-Suhrawardī: Opera Metaphisica et Mystica ​I, Leipzig and
Istanbul, 1945, p. 195).

It was only in the West, both in medieval Andalusia and contemporary Europe, where the
fragments were not available until recently, that the creative imagination of some scholars,
prompted by the suggestive name, the East, and unchecked by any documentation,
fashioned visionary recitals about Avicenna’s mysticism. Ebn Ṭofayl’s Ḥ ​ ayy b. Yaqẓān
proved to be particularly misleading. Ebn Ṭofayl, for his own purposes, misinterpreted as a
difference of substance the stylistic contrast which Avicenna drew in the prologue of the
Šefāʾ between that book and the ​Ketāb al-Mašreqīyīn​, and created the impression, through
the whole tenor of his own introduction, that the Eastern philosophy has somehow to do with
mysticism. The subtitle of his work ​Fī asrār al-ḥekma al-mašreqīya​, (On the secrets of
eastern philosophy) also contributed to this effect. The suggestion was not lost on
contemporary European scholars. Ebn Ṭofayl’s subtitle was appropriated at the end of last
century by M. A. F. Mehren who used it arbitrarily as the Arabic title of his own edition of the
last chapters of the ​Ešārāt and a number of smaller treatises (​Rasāʾel . . . Ebn Sīnā fī asrār
al-ḥekma al-mašreqīya,​ Leiden, 1889-99). This created the unfounded notion that these
works deal with Eastern philosophy. To compound the error, Mehren translated in the same
volume his Arabic title into French as ​Traités mystiques . . . d’Avicenne​, associating this
time, again without any basis, Eastern philosophy with mysticism. Once it gained printed
legitimacy in this fashion, the myth of Avicenna’s mystical Eastern philosophy has since
reappeared in a number of variations that bear no relationship to the extant Eastern texts
and are irrelevant to Avicenna’s thought.

Bibliography​:

Different theories have been put forward about Avicenna’s alleged mysticism. The standard
Catholic version of Avicenna’s “natural” mysticism is that by L. Gardet, “La connaissance
mystique chez Ibn Sīnā et ses présupposés philosophiques,” ​Mémorial Avicenne I​ I, Cairo,
1952, incorporated in a revised form in the same author’s ​La pensée religieuse d’Avicenne
(Ibn Sīnā),​ Paris, 1951, pp. 143-96.

There is a brief review of the theories on this subject by S. H. Nasr, ​Islamic Cosmological
Doctrines​, 2nd ed., London, 1978, pp. 191-95, and, in greater detail, by S. Gómez Nogales,
“El misticismo persa de Avicena y su influencia en el misticismo español,” ​Cuadernos del
Seminario de Estudios de Filosofia y Pensamiento Islámicos ​II, Madrid, 1981, pp. 65-88.

H. Corbin’s own version of Avicenna’s light mysticism is set forth in his classic, ​Avicenna and
the Visionary Recital,​ New York, 1960.

Corbin also gives a brief discussion of the history of scholarship on the subject on pp. 271ff.

A review of the various theories that have been put forward about the “Oriental” philosophy
of Avicenna is given by S. H. Nasr in his ​Cosmological Doctrines​, pp. 185-90; see also R.
Macuch, “Greek and Oriental Sources of Avicenna’s and Sohrawardi’s Theosophies,”
Graeco-Arabica ​(Athens) 2, 1983, pp. 9-13.

The critical study of the question of Avicenna’s Eastern philosophy was inaugurated by C. A.
Nallino’s “Filosofia "Orientale" od "illuminativa" d’Avicenna?” ​RSO 10, 1923-25, pp. 433-67,
and continued by S. Pines, “La "philosophie orientale" d’Avicenne et sa polémique contre les
​ 7, 1952, pp. 5-37.
Bagdadiens,” ​Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge 2

For a full discussion of the question and the bibliographical details about the Eastern texts,
as well as Avicenna’s epistemological theory and the concept of ​ḥads, see D. Gutas,
Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition: Introduction to Reading Avicenna’s Philosophical
Works (​ forthcoming).

(D. Gutas)

Originally Published: December 15, 1987

Last Updated: August 17, 2011
This article is available in print.

Vol. III, Fasc. 1, pp. 79-83

Cite this entry:

D. Gutas, “AVICENNA v. Mysticism,” ​Encyclopædia Iranica,​ III/1, pp. 79-83, available online
at http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/avicenna-v (accessed on 30 December 2012)