Rafey Jabal

Ibn Arabi | Proclus | Guenon | Suhrawardi

[Rafey Jabal @MuslimPhil]

“Never have I dealt with anything more difficult than my own soul, which sometimes helps me and sometimes opposes me.”

~ Imam Al-Ghazaliرض

[Rafey Jabal @MuslimPhil]

How can one miss this!

[Abdullah Ansar @ShaykhIshraq]

Four of the best works to learn about the more theoretical dimensions of Sufism/ʿIrfān.

Collectively, these four works will give you a great introduction to the metaphysics and practice of the serious esoteric-exoteric high Persianate Sufism.

[Rafey Jabal @MuslimPhil]

And we have Plato on the other hand, who in Timaeus clearly distinguishes between atemporal eternity and time. The picture attached is from Prof. Jens Halfwassen’s Plotinus, Neoplatonism & the Transcendence of the One.

[Rafey Jabal @MuslimPhil]

ARISTOTLE WAS A WAHHABI

It seems that his God endures eternal duration. Lloyd P. Gerson rightly states that it is far from certain that Aristotle makes a distinction b/w 1. that which is in time & 2. that which is not is time; & that he attributes the latter to Divine Intellect.

[Rafey Jabal @MuslimPhil]

In his Bk. 12 of Metaphysics, Aristotle predicated eternal duration of his God. (In the Sorabji’s reference’s picture attached above you can see him quoting one of Aristotle’s passages as well).

[Rafey Jabal @MuslimPhil]

@SheeisM39853 Even in Zubdat al-Hikmat (which is a Mashshai manual [similar in structure to Hidayat al-Hikmah] writ by Allama Abdul-Haq Khayrabadi), he presents it. But to make of it that he believes in it, one either has to be stupid or cunning. My guess is that da latter’s true in OP’s case

[Abdullah Ansar @ShaykhIshraq]

(🧵) Thread of Works on South Asian Islamic Philosophy. I will add all the relevant works to this thread.

1. Palimpsests of Themselves

An introduction, study, and translation of one of South Asia's most famous logic textbooks, Sullam al-ʿUlūm (The Ladder of the Sciences).

[Rafey Jabal @MuslimPhil]

@pingu_ak Towards a neoneoplatonism is a must.

[Rafey Jabal @MuslimPhil]

@KhalilAndani @safwanSpiker7 True.

[Rafey Jabal @MuslimPhil]

@SYED_A_L_I @theogeopolitics No doubt on that. I don’t really watch anime, but had watched it in like a couple of years back. It still has a place in my being.

[Rafey Jabal @MuslimPhil]

@RealHasanSpiker Assalam O Alaikum Shaykh, please do something with your website. I had sent your article in which you use Al-Shaqaiq al-Numaniyya, to someone important publisher here who publish khayrabadi stuff. And they couldn’t open it.

[Rafey Jabal @MuslimPhil]

@safwanSpiker7 He is the hunted one. Being trained to hunt.

[Rafey Jabal @MuslimPhil]

Imtina’ al-Nazīr Allama Fazl e Haq Khayrābādī

[Rafey Jabal @MuslimPhil]

@RealHasanSpiker These beautiful tweets are what we were missing. God bless you Shaykh!

[Hasan Spiker @RealHasanSpiker]

TWO CONCEPTIONS OF WHAT IT IS TO BE RELIGIOUS
Calculating Wager or Sweetness of Tasting ?

Two main forms of religion have and always will exist, one authentic, the other, counterfeit, corresponding to two human types. The first, phoney variety is a kind of bargain you claim to have entered into with the Divine, in which, somewhat grudgingly, you offer to exchange a finite quantity of deprivation, from all the exciting stuff like fornication and drinking you’d really like to do here, for a larger quantity of revelling and enjoyment in the Hereafter. Religion is a pain, but one that simply has to be done. It is, after all, why you are better than everyone else. At least that is worthwhile!

The other, genuine form of religion, involves falling in love with the beauty of God’s creation and of the revelation, and with the life and the spiritual person of the Holy Prophet ﷺ , and thence becoming increasingly nourished, and indeed, enraptured, by the resultant taste and sweetness. This form of religion is the one that the Prophet ﷺ himself calls to. In authentic narrations the Holy Prophet ﷺ speaks about experiential īmān, which, of course, the Sufis later describe. He ﷺ speaks about the sweetness of the experience of faith, and even of tasting it (dhawq). "Whoever has three traits within himself will find the sweetness of faith: one who loves Allah and His Messenger more than anything else, one who loves a servant only for the sake of Allah, and one who hates to turn back to unbelief after Allah has saved him, just as he hates to be thrown into the fire"; and, “He has tasted the sweetness of faith, he who is pleased with Allah as his Lord, with Islam as his religion, and with Muhammad as his Prophet."

All is beauty. Knowing that is love. Love is duty.

Thomas Carlyle (see photograph), one of the greatest prose stylists of the 19th century (and a famous admirer of the Prophet ﷺ), wrote:
“Religion in most countries, more or less in every country, is no longer what it was, and should be, — a thousand-voiced psalm from the heart of Man to his invisible God, the fountain of all Goodness, Beauty, Truth, and revealed in every revelation of these; but for the most part, a wise prudential feeling grounded on mere calculation; a matter, as all others now are, of Expediency and Utility; whereby some smaller quantum of earthly enjoyment may be exchanged for a far larger quantum of celestial enjoyment” (Signs of the Times)

Let’s face it, this spiritual illness afflicts far too many Muslims today, many of whom evidently prefer legalism, formalism, and selfish calculation, to truth, beauty, and goodness. Be in no doubt, then, that the Holy Prophet himself ﷺ exhorts you to taste your faith, not to barter with it.

[Hasan Spiker @RealHasanSpiker]

On Science
There are no rijāl al-dīn (a priestly class, nor even ‘clerics’) in Islam, but instead we have al-ʿulamāʾ, the possessors of knowledge. And so, it is somewhat sad to see wisely wagging heads ordaining that ‘religious’ scholars must stick to religion, and ‘worldly’ scholars, to ‘the world’: although it is true that such pronouncements perfectly reflect the contemporary zeitgeist of the Civilisation of Liberal, Universal Modernity, Neutral and Scientific, that with such alacrity, Muslims now blindly follow.

The word ‘science’ was commandeered and expropriated by ‘modern science’ only quite recently; until the end of the 19th century, it was ‘natural philosophy’ and thus a branch of science still (at least nominally) continuous with metaphysics. The Latin scientia referred most fundamentally to demonstrative knowledge, with metaphysics being the most ‘scientific’ of the sciences because of the unequivocal nature of its principles and conclusions, its foundationality to the other sciences, and its irreducibility to any other science.

In Islam, amongst many definitions of ʿilm, the most pertinent — as indicating, rather than sheer perception, the theoretical certainty which is the fruit of (traditional) scientific activity — was ṣifatun tūjibu tamyīzan bayn al-maʿānī lā yaḥtamilu al-naqīḍ, and thereby ‘science’ pertained properly only to the universal, and thus, to cognition of intelligibles, not indeed to the empirical qua empirical at all. In the pre-Colonial past, then, the ʿulamāʾ were the final arbiters of all of the sciences, and they would study the physics and other ‘natural sciences’ of the time as a matter of course, because they too took their places in a subordinated model of the sciences crowned by metaphysical theology.

Yet today, for a host of sociopolitical and historical (and only very rarely authentically rational) reasons, most Muslims have also fully bought into the ‘bifurcated’ model where ‘the religious sciences’ and the ‘natural sciences’ are wholly compartmentalised divisions, ‘and never the twain shall meet.’ A visitor to most Arab countries today will find, for example, that the word ʿulamāʾ for most ordinary people primarily means ‘modern scientists,’ namely, Stephen Hawking, et al. The Arabic term ʿilm has been largely expropriated just as had previously taken place with the word ‘science.’ This usurpation embodies our unreflective acceptance of a radically idiosyncratic conception of natural science (formerly ‘natural philosophy’) developed in a very different philosophical milieu, in a Europe of the 16th-18th centuries Scientific Revolution, in which formal and final causality had been strictly banished from the realm of ‘nature,’ and prevalent conceptions of what was ‘really there’ in the natural world and thus worthy of study, explicitly confined to ‘primary qualities,’ that is, to fundamentally quantitative dimensions of physical reality.

Unlike the earlier forms of ‘natural science,’ this alien, dichotomous conception of ‘science’ never had time to become critically integrated into the Islamic sciences; and in the chaos and confusion of colonialism, the remaining ʿulamāʾ sought to preserve the basic essentials thereof, and thereby ceded, as if by default, the whole area of study of the natural world to the blind followers of the new natural science in the burgeoning third-rate secular schools and universities emerging in the Muslim world, who readily bought into its claims to ‘neutrality.’ And yet the reality of modern science is that far from being ‘neutral,’ it is so geared towards instrumentality, adapting means to ends, and technology, that the best philosophers of science frequently opine that it does not in fact study the ‘nature’ of the physical world at all.

It is an urgent exigency, then, in order for us to counteract this bifurcated, unintegrated vision of reality, that we begin to challenge and transform our contemporary conceptions of the ʿulūm, and of what it means to be an ʿālim. The ʿulamāʾ must as standard study the modern natural sciences, seek to understand their philosophical presuppositions and implications, and become competent to make the distinction between instrumentally-geared ‘model,’ on the one hand, and extramental reality, on the other. It should also become widely known that many and indeed most modern scientists are not able to tell the difference, simply due to their lack of philosophical training. They are incapable even of understanding the genuine demarcation of the domain in which they are themselves working. And this is precisely why so much of ‘modern science’ inexorably deteriorates into the glorified hocus pocus of a materialist cult, stewarded and guarded by an initiated priestly class, who send down their pronouncements to ‘follow the Science’ to the fervent ʿawāmm masses.

As we saw during the dark lockdowns of Covid, however, ‘The Science’ (almost personified, like a false god in the sky) changes its mind rather often, despite so often framing its directives as absolute revelations. Its alliance with the big pharmaceutical companies, which led to the disaster of the ‘follow the science’ Covid vaccines, is just the latest phase of a happy, long marriage between the new science and business; a marriage originally contracted by Francis Bacon, the first individual to have advised a government to invest in ‘Science’ as constituting the means for an increase in material power; this type of mentality would indeed go on to prove itself amongst the primary enablers of the Industrial Revolution.

The healthy nature of informed scepticism about 'science’ is further confirmed by the vast gulf and disconnect that today obtains between popular, false concretizations of scientific theories amongst consumers (as also passive inhalers) of ‘popular science,’ on the one hand, and the actual, highly tentative or even strictly groundless nature of the theories themselves, on the other: theories which are often little more than elaborate mathematical models enjoying exactly no empirical corroboration whatever after forty years of research (string theory), or even, no empirical corroboration even in principle (multiverse theory) — whereas widespread popular conviction (richly imaginative but ultimately fantasy) holds these multiple dimensions to be actual entities. And yet the scientists do not seem quite to be falling over themselves to disabuse the fantasists of this illusion.

A particularly preposterous instance amongst illimitable other examples of this type of phenomenon, lies in the existence of the many popular “Believers in Science” who imagine that once upon a time “Schrödinger's Cat” was indeed an actual cat, that was both alive and dead in a lab somewhere: an awesome testament to the power of the Science.

And yet far from being simultaneously alive and dead, Schrödinger's Cat was not an extramental entity at all, still less a cat. Indeed, Schrödinger's magical Cat was nothing more than a ‘thought-experiment,’ designed to show the absurdity of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, precisely because it would imply that the cat would be alive and dead at the same time. Almost the precise opposite, then, of the popular conception.

Another is the popular assumption that what philosophers of science call ‘theoretical entities’ and ‘unobservable entities,’ such as quarks and electrons (which latter are detected, but not observed, in cloud chambers), and even atoms, are straightforwardly self-existent, rather than constituting exigencies of explanation and coherence. Because in fact, the existence of these entities and others is the subject of vigorous debate between scientific realists and anti-realists. The latter particularly point to the underdetermination of theories by observational data, which is to say that the data could in fact be explained by numerous other theories. This is partly because of the unobservability of many of the theoretical entities posited by theory, implying that they could in principle be replaced by alternative theoretical ‘entities.’ Major proponents of this view, such as Larry Laudan in his ‘A Confutation of Convergent Realism,’ point especially to the empirical success of theories, invoking unobservable entities such as ‘phlogiston,’ which scientific consensus now deems entirely fictional.

Yes, scientific ‘facts’ exist; the greater accuracy of the Copernican rather than Ptolemaic models of astronomical phenomena, and other similar examples; and yet the popular conception of these as directly ‘observed’ remains, in the vast majority of cases, false. One of the private tutors with whom I studied a little physics and astronomy, Dr. Youssef Ismail, took me through many of the steps involved in getting from the one to the other such that I was able to appreciate some of the monumental calculations involved, which in the process also showed that while the Copernican model removed the equant problem and replaced retrograde with relative motion, and is ultimately the basis of a more precise and accurate model, the Ptolemaic model has considerable predictive explanatory value, and is far from crude or primitive.

On a final note, it is an advanced historical consequence of the trajectory adopted by modern science at its very roots in the Scientific Revolution, particularly in its fixation on primary qualities and its abhorrence of final causes – that something as bizarrely irrational and hollow as physicalism could become a de facto ‘scientific’ orthodoxy of our time, even though it has nothing whatever to do with empirical science, even on the most generous of definitions thereof.

‘Consciousness is an epiphenomenon of brain states, and is therefore reducible to said brain states.’

And yet were this to be true, consciousness would be identified as such, that is, as an epiphenomenon reducible to “physical” brain states, purely through the brain-state mechanism itself. Now, the conscious enunciation of a proposition that the epiphenomenalist considers false, such as “epiphenomenalism is false”, correlates with the brain firing neurons at a certain frequency just as much as does the conscious enunciation of “epiphenomenalism is true.” But brain states have no truth value; “truth” is only a function of the conscious experience.

Now, the epiphenomenalist may concede that in light of this, there isn’t really any such a thing as truth; and it is surely fair to say that we needn’t be terribly concerned about the challenge of a theory whose own proponents do not in fact believe to be true. And if the epiphenomenalist is willing to affirm the truth of his theory, in any objective and literal sense, then it must necessarily be the case that reality (the “physical”, specifically, the human brain) is intrinsically directed towards consciousness, not as subjective experience, but as accurate representation of the intelligible structure of reality; and that as such, the “physical” cannot credibly be construed as “physical” at all.

This, then, captures what is without doubt the most fundamental clash between contemporary conceptions of the nature of “science”, and its own methodological commitments: the absurd abolition of mind from the “natural” world, and of the significance of the inexorable presence of the human knowing subject in all scientific activity. This bifurcation is already present at the roots of modern science in the Scientific Revolution, in its fixation on primary qualities and abhorrence of final causes, and there it has remained. It is not thus sufficient to merely make a few “metaphysical” alterations to modern science; instead, we stand in need of a complete rerooting.

And yes indeed, we would be naïve were we to think that this will be easy, and it is unclear if at this stage it is even feasible, and yes, the ‘success’ of science in developing technology is undoubted; this success will continue, and we will eagerly consume it, often with insufficient discretion.

But as we have seen, science does not need to be a true picture of reality in order to produce instrumentally effective technology — and while the instrumental (if not epistemological) ‘success’ of science is not in doubt, it is surely rather less successful as a depiction of the nature of reality, and even less so as a moral guide .

[Rafey Jabal @MuslimPhil]

https://t.co/8ko6HuKmWz

[Rafey Jabal @MuslimPhil]

Study Metaphysics: Beginner’s Guide, see my new substack post, link below: