1 Mary and Murad: Sight and Insight

Let us begin from the beginning and flesh out the comparison between Frank Jackson’s Mary and Ibn Ṭufayl’s Murad.⁶ Ibn Ṭufayl, like Jackson, posits a person who from birth is deprived of any first-hand experience of colour. There is a difference in the origin stories, inasmuch as Ibn Ṭufayl’s Murad is simply born blind; Jackson, by contrast, has Mary grow up in an artificially set up black-and-white room. Whether this makes the Mary scenario any less fantastical is for the reader to decide.

Ibn Ṭufayl can have his story unfold the way it does because by the precepts of Aristotelian faculty psychology, which the Arabic philosophical tradition inherited, many of the perceptions that we ordinarily associate with eyesight are not exclusive to it. Size, shape, and motion, all of which assist in telling objects apart from one another, can be taken in by the perceiving subject across a range of sense-modalities. Their proper registration occurs in the so-called common sense – the first of the so-called inner senses – rather than the sense of sight, whose only exclusive province is colour sensation. As a result, Murad can be born blind and thereby only be denied an experience of colour, nothing else.⁷

This feature is further exploited by Ibn Ṭufayl in explaining how Murad is every bit as capable of navigating the world in the practical sense as is any person endowed with colour perception. Because shape, size, and motion are taken in through all the external senses, not just vision, Murad can grow to possess a mental map of his city that may not be far off from Mary’s black-and-white upbringing. His situation resembles closely that of the denizens of H. G. Wells’s Country of the Blind (1904) – a speculative fiction short story to which Frank Jackson also refers – who navigate their life-world with striking nimbleness yet know nothing of colours, stars, or the distant mountains.⁸

As with Jackson, Ibn Ṭufayl furthermore stipulates that his test subject comes to possess ample information about colour – not from birth, to be sure, but pre-transformation. This is where things get interesting. Frank Jackson’s Mary is what Laurie Paul dubs a super-scientist. Mary not only possesses every piece of scientific information that we currently have concerning the physiology of colour perception and the chemical composition of pigments, etc.; her knowledge has grown to encompass anything one can ever know about colour in the scientific sense.⁹ Even without a sensory experience of colour, Mary knows what it would take to identify correctly instances of specific colours occurring in the world. As a result, she not only is able to talk about the concept of colour intelligently. Furnished with suitable scientific instruments, Mary will successfully be able to identify objects as possessing specific colours.

This is both similar to and different from what happens with Murad. Ibn Ṭufayl has Murad’s friends and fellow citizens provide him with ‘descriptive explanations and ostensive definitions.’ Now, on the one hand, this is clearly meant to evoke the Aristotelian processes of concept formation and scientific explanation. Translated more literally from the Arabic, what Murad receives are ‘explications of the names’ used of colours (shurūḥ asmāʾi-hā) and ‘some definitions that indicate them’ (baʿḍ ḥudūd tadullu ʿalay-hā).

Is it scientific definitions that Murad learns, then? What would an Aristotelian scientific definition of colour, or of individual colours, look like? Without getting into the weeds of Aristotelian philosophy of science, we may minimally note that the Arabic Aristotelianism of Ibn Ṭufayl’s day was equipped to distinguish between different types of definitions arrived at according to different stages of the concept formation process.¹⁰ Aristotelian commentators ranging from Ibn Ṭufayl’s compatriot and contemporary AbÅ« al-WalÄ«d Ibn Rushd (the Latin Averroes, d. 595/1198) to Katerina Ierodiakonou today have noted that Aristotle actually offers two different definitions of colour, a functional or subjective one in De anima 2.7 (where colour is defined explicitly in terms of visibility) and another more metaphysically grounded account in De sensu 3, where the differentiation of colours builds on the more primitive qualities of translucence (Ar. shufÅ«f) and luminosity (ḍawʾ), which are observer-independent properties present in complex bodies made up of the four elements.¹¹ In principle, one supposes, someone could teach Murad about how translucence interacting with luminosity makes particular objects emit particular colours. If Murad then was provided access to instruments capable of detecting these putative qualities in actual objects – even better, those precise elemental mixtures that facilitate their presence – he might be able to carry a conversation about coloured bodies similar to the one conducted by Mary the super-scientist.

All this, though, will seem far-fetched to the point of absurdity. Surely what Ibn Ṭufayl has in mind is something more like ‘naming’ in the works of AbÅ« Naá¹£r al-FārābÄ« (d. 339/950), that is to say, a conventional and societal process of concept formation and language-learning in which pointing to things is a crucial step in first establishing a shared understanding of the general contours of external reality.¹² This is closer to what Laurie Paul calls ‘ordinary Mary,’ a person learning how to use the term ‘colour’ second-hand through other people’s descriptions, then adding to this knowledge a broad scientific account of the general physics underlying the phenomenon.¹³

Indeed, the most natural interpretation of the evidence is that – to borrow a page from David Lewis – rather than any kind of acquired know-how (whether linguistic or scientific), the story of Murad is meant to support the Hypothesis of Phenomenal Information. There is a realm of the senses that Murad accesses for the first time upon being given sight – hence the daybreak (inbilāj) that is referenced – and with regard to such matters, experience of the sensation simply is knowledge of it. And because the Arabic philosophers were manifestly not physicalists, this is in no way an untoward conclusion for Ibn Ṭufayl or for his readers to reach.¹⁴

2 Inferring, Seeing, Tasting

The super-scientist narrative can nonetheless help illumine the polemical context in which Ibn Ṭufayl’s thought experiment is set. For of course, Ibn Ṭufayl’s interest does not lie in the theoretical representability of either colour, translucence, or luminosity in its own right. Rather, the parable of Murad is meant to illustrate a more general point about the difference between articulated knowledge (ʿilm) about something, on the one hand, and a direct acquaintance (maʿrifa) with that same thing, on the other. Ibn Ṭufayl’s words are offered in the context of defending the plausibility of a hitherto unknown bliss descending upon the person who has grasped a comprehensive set of philosophical truths in a particularly exalted and internalized manner.

The promise of such philosophical ecstasies has a long prehistory. It stretches back to the interpretation of the tenth book of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics; the works of Plotinus (d. 270 CE), funnelled into Arabic learning via the pseudonymous Theology of Aristotle; and Porphyry of Tyre’s (d. 309) explication of both. These conceptual resources, as well as the Aristotelian faculty psychology that stands in their background, were utilized by the Arabic philosophers to articulate a vision of the elevated psychic state enjoyed by the advanced philosopher.¹⁵ In the prologue to Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān Ibn Ṭufayl positions himself as gatekeeper, guide, and ultimate arbiter to this centuries-long conversation, highlighting especially the contribution made by Ibn SÄ«nā in his Pointers and Reminders (al-Ishārāt wa-l-tanbīḥāt).

Ibn Ṭufayl maintains that already his philosophical compatriot Ibn Bājja (d. 533/1139) had acknowledged how in intellection, which in the Aristotelian tradition is envisioned as conjunction (ittiṣāl) with the so-called Agent Intellect, new and qualitatively different beliefs (iÊ¿tiqādāt) are engendered in the knower that were not accessible during one’s prior course of studies. This is because an epistemic gap exists between (1) the reasoning that operates on and abstracts from composite, material as well as physical beings, and (2) the pure cognition of essences from which material accidents are altogether absent. Instances of intellectual conjunction might as well be called ‘divine states’ (aḥwāl ilāhiyya) because they rely on the emanation of intelligibles from on high. Thus far Ibn Bājja.¹⁶

Whether Ibn Ṭufayl’s presentation of Ibn Bājja is fair or historically accurate, we do not need to determine today. We may note how the presentation in outline accords with one interpretation of Ibn SÄ«nā’s cognitive psychology, namely the emanationist as opposed to the empiricist.¹⁷ Ibn Ṭufayl, however, wishes to take things farther, and towards this end he cites the authority of Ibn SÄ«nā himself. Leveraging a much studied and oft-cited passage from the Pointers and Reminders Ibn Ṭufayl portrays Ibn SÄ«nā as someone for whom arrival (wuṣūl) at the highest truths and most exalted states comes “not by theorizing, syllogistic deductions, postulating premisses, and drawing inferences.”¹⁸ However important the ordinary work of philosophy may be – the completion of the philosophical curriculum, with ratiocinations covering everything between the heavens and the earth – the fruits of such efforts are neither equivalent with, nor equal to, those divine disclosures (mukāshafāt) that are the exclusive province of those who get to reside in proximity to the Holy (janāb al-quds).¹⁹ Nor can a theoretical approach to matters metaphysical result in the blissful saintliness (wilāya) that characterizes the sincere lover of God. Ibn Bājja, who could not escape the confines of the theoretical school (ahl al-naẓar), should not discredit that of which he remained ignorant.²⁰

This is not the place to examine in detail what contemplative bliss truly looks like in Ibn Sīnā, except to stipulate that the conversation would be greatly improved if a twenty-year moratorium were placed on the use of the term ‘mysticism,’ whether by way of praise or in the pejorative sense. Suffice it to say that Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān simultaneously pulls on two threads available to Ibn Ṭufayl from the earlier philosophical tradition.

On the one hand, Ibn Ṭufayl exploits the idea, familiar from the late antique schools of Athens and Alexandria, that any form of reasoning that reverts from effects to causes looks quite different from one that proceeds from causes to effects. The two types of knowledge are also experienced quite differently since, again as per Neoplatonic doctrine, causes already contain their effects in the metaphysical sense. Here, the super-scientist interpretation of Murad rears its head one last time. Seeing things sub specie aeternitatis already represents a significant transformation in and of itself. Recounting a discursive description of reality, no matter how complete that description may be, is simply not the same as contemplating that self-same reality as a single whole.²¹ Any attempt to re-translate the latter experience into letters, sounds, and discursive reasonings will falsify its nature.²²

On the other hand, Ibn Ṭufayl hints at the notion that the completion of the philosophical curriculum opens the door to perceptions of a different order, ones that disclose the existence of entities that do not fit the discursive frame in the first place. In late antique Platonism, this had been the domain of the suprarational henads and finally the One beyond being. For Ibn Ṭufayl, schooled in the tradition of Arabic Aristotelianism, the supernal principles are the separate intellects prior in the celestial hierarchy to the Agent Intellect, topped off by Ibn SÄ«nā’s God, the being intrinsically Necessary of Existence.²³ Metaphorically speaking (bi-l-majāz), Ibn Ṭufayl says, such supernal experience is similar to someone being afforded a fresh faculty or mental power (quwwa).²⁴ It is identical to that taste (dhawq) of the divine to which the Sufis so powerfully testified; and it is here that Ibn Ṭufayl’s claims to personal experience come into play. For not only does Ibn Ṭufayl open Ḥayy by claiming that the writing of the entire treatise was occasioned by a flood of ecstasies descending upon him – that is, Ibn Ṭufayl – by the merest mention of Ibn SÄ«nā’s supposed ‘Oriental philosophy.’ Ibn Ṭufayl was also a practicing Sufi himself, standing in an established line of student and master. His claims to having personally verified the identical destinations of the philosopher’s ascent and the Sufi path therefore carry added weight.²⁵

The first interpretation regarding what happens with Ḥayy, or for that matter Ibn Ṭufayl the author, can be used to tease out some of the implications of the super-scientist interpretation of Mary. Suppose Mary develops a comprehensive Theory of Everything regarding the cosmos. Would her possession of such a theory, complete with a correct identification of her own exact position in the universe thus described, differ in some substantial way from her actual experience of living that reality? Part of Ḥayy’s supernal vision is portrayed in just such terms. Proceeding from causes to effects, Ḥayy comes to understand precisely and comprehensively his own position within the universal order. And one can certainly say that such a derivation is missing nothing in the theoretical sense.²⁶

At the same time, Ibn Ṭufayl clearly continues to hold to the second interpretation, which appears more akin to Frank Jackson’s much less frequently discussed case of Fred. Fred according to Jackson is a person who, possessing all the regular sense modalities as well as a perfectly functioning cognitive apparatus, claims to perceive something more than your average person. The Hypothesis of Phenomenal Information is here pressed to serve the notion that some real ontological distinction underwrites an equivalent difference in perceptions, although the outsider will not readily be able to discern the source. And for this interpretation, too, we can find support in Ḥayy. Jackson’s Fred finds company in Ibn Ṭufayl’s Fatima, if you will – a person whose doors of perception have opened up wider than an ordinary person’s – and who therefore knows, intimately and indisputably, the existence of realities of which others remain unaware. (Set aside for the moment the crucial difference that Frank Jackson’s Fred is still sorting out colours, while Ibn Ṭufayl’s protagonist lays claim to tasting the divine.²⁷ )

To sum up: a comparison of Frank Jackson’s Mary and Fred with Ibn Ṭufayl’s Murad and Fatima yields useful results, inasmuch as it helps to clarify the stakes involved in developing Avicenna’s presentation of contemplative bliss either in the direction of (a) demonstrative science being perfected or (b) new types of objects being disclosed through a wholly different mode of phenomenology. The first path will hone our attentions on the structure of scientific knowledge in Arabic Aristotelianism. The second will point to affinities between, among other things, late antique and later Islamic notions of direct cognition of immaterial entities. Specialist scholars will find themselves drawn to one interpretation or the other, depending on which strand of Islamic thought post-Ibn Sīnā they find more appealing (and whether they are drawn to discussions about the role of Neoplatonism in the Arabic interpretation of the Agent Intellect).

It must be said, though, that to those of us less attuned to the nuances of Arabic Aristotelianism, each of the aforementioned alternatives may sound equally alien and impenetrable. Ibn Ṭufayl would have found this unsurprising. In his view, “The man who knows only sense particulars and universals drawn from them had better stop up his ears and go back to his friends, who ‘know only the surface of this life and are heedless of the next’ (Q. 30:6).”²⁸ Our predicament in his estimation would rather resemble that of the citizenry of Wells’s Country of the Blind. We mock those who see, not only for their claims to visual sensation (and for visual information existing in the first place) but for their making claims to knowledge based on these perceptions, about items in the heavens of which we must remain wholly ignorant.

If such is the pitiful position in which we find ourselves, how can we ever advance to an appreciation of the contemplative heights Ibn Ṭufayl says he can only ever point towards but never adequately describe? In particular, how are we to commit ourselves to the cycle of study Ibn Ṭufayl lays out before us?

3 Fatima vs. Firas: the Puzzle of Motivating Transformation

With this, we arrive at a juncture at which the long tradition of Western philosophy, promising personal transformation, collides with the challenge that recent scholars, notably Laurie Paul in Transformative Experience, have posed when it comes to any notion of transformative experience. Paul repurposes Frank Jackson’s story about Mary. Through emphasizing Jackson’s remarks about the ex ante inaccessibility of certain kinds of experiential knowledge, she takes aim at features of standard rational-agent decision theory. If a profound personal transformation involves a wholescale adjustment of one’s perceptions and evaluations, then how can the decision to commit to such a transformation – or, for that matter, not to commit – be sufficiently motivated from the standpoint of the pre-transformation self?

The criticism may be applied to philosophy’s purported transformative potential, going back as far as Plato’s Alcibiades I. Especially during the Hellenistic period and after, an understanding of philosophy as a therapy of the soul, and as a series of spiritual exercises capable of adjusting one’s fundamental orientation in life, suffused its practice and (not unimportantly) its public framing.²⁹ And in philosophical proptreptics, of which Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān forms a part, a common first step is a reframing of a person’s life choices in terms of greater vs. lesser aims or transitory vs. lasting goods, where a person will then see the futility in pursuing perishing goods in comparison to a life of the mind and a cleaving to the intelligible.

Yet how can a person who has not yet experienced the superior pleasures of the contemplative life – whether philosophically or religiously understood – commit to a path that will bring about their advent? Set aside for the moment the incommunicability of any mooted beatific vision. Even the initial transition from being a person led by appetite or spirit (the two lower parts of the Platonic soul) to one who follows the dictates of reason (the highest part) is presented as profoundly life-altering. Yet the logic of philosophical protreptic hinges on the attractiveness of the philosophical life being communicable and made persuasive to one who has not yet embarked on it. There seems to be a gap here, albeit one that Arabic Aristotelianism appears not to have explored overly much.

The puzzles associated with this kind of transformation are, however, discussed at length in the works of AbÅ« Ḥāmid Muḥammad al-GhazālÄ« (d. 505/1111). One of Ibn Ṭufayl’s key sources, but also a towering figure in his own right within the genre of Islamic spiritual writing, al-Ghazālī’s entire mature authorship centres on the transformations effected on the believer by an ever-deepening religious devotion. In keeping with the rhetoric of earlier preachers and the incipient Sufi tradition, al-Ghazali contrasts an external commitment to the precepts of Islam with an internalized understanding of its injunctions. The latter according to al-Ghazali affords the believer superior insight into the workings of the cosmos and a relationship with the divine, one that remains as inaccessible to the outsider as will the sensation of intoxication to the teetotaller or the pleasure of sexual intercourse to the prepubescent child.³⁰

Al-Ghazālī’s authorship sets up a picture of laddered spiritual insight, explained again and again in terms of an analogous ladder of more mundane attitudes towards the ways one’s life can be led. In a manner reminiscent of Kierkegaard’s stages in life’s way – albeit more explicitly based on Plato’s depiction of the tripartite soul – al-GhazālÄ« stresses that both the lives experienced by different people and their inner logics are incommensurable with one another, and therefore also untranslatable to a degree. A corollary of this is that the insights of those transformed by God’s merciful intervention, newly possessed of spiritual vision, are no more explicable to the layperson than is the stringency of mathematical reasoning to the person uneducated in mathematics. Al-GhazālÄ« warns the commoner not to judge the visions and the proclamations of the initiated by the faulty standards of those not privy to divine disclosures.³¹

However, this also then sets up a problem for al-Ghazālī, inasmuch as his program of moral and religious improvement – the ‘science of the path of the hereafter’ (ʿilm ṭarīq al-ākhira) – in principle is supposed to be open to everybody. Consider that by al-Ghazālī’s own lights, ordinary people, whether Muslim or non-Muslim, are possessed only of a limited understanding when it comes to the overall dimensions of their earthly existence. Some are driven by their appetites, while others are in thrall to a desire for honours and plaudits. Neither party sees that there would be anything more to explaining human behaviour than the drives they recognize in themselves; neither can interpret the requirements and promises made by religion on terms other than what they know from their current life (e.g., the hedonist weighs the promise of heaven and hell in terms of pleasures to be gained and pains to be avoided, while the spirited person processes religious injunctions in terms of praise and blame). What, then, might prompt an exchange of a felt love of the world for the true love of God? How does one ever come to rise above the worldly pleasures and appreciate the superior, contemplative type of happiness enjoyed by those whom God has elevated?

Think back to Fatima, who claims to be able to see and to experience more than does the average person, and to do so on the strength of a closely prescribed moral and ritual regimen whose inner logic is not immediately obvious from the outside. And imagine now a perfectly ordinary person – Firas, let us call him – who lives a perfectly ordinary life, one that by his own lights is perfectly adequate and complete, with nothing missing from it and nothing to add to it. What reason does Firas have for believing Fatima’s claims to extraordinary visions or to accept that they emerge at the end of a path whose contours remain obscure to him? And what would ever act as sufficient motivation for Firas to follow in Fatima’s footsteps?

Al-Ghazālī circles back to this question time and again in his works, and his answer appears to evolve over time. In his Revival of the Religious Sciences al-Ghazālī leans heavily on the analogy of ordinary human transformations. This, however, only works in his favour up to a point, seeing as such ordinary transformations are all meant to resolve naturally, in a determinate and inexorably unfolding sequence that takes between infancy and adulthood. By the lights of the anthropology that al-Ghazālī shares with scholars of his age,

In his earliest impulses and judgment, a boy displays an instinct for pleasure in games and play. In his opinion these are more enjoyable than other things. Later, he takes pleasure in dressing and in wearing finery and in riding horses; at that stage, he is contemptuous of the pleasures of play to which he had once been so inclined and had loved. Still later he begins to manifest the beginnings of a pleasure in sex and an appetite for women; now he forsakes all the came before for the sole pleasure of attaining women. Afterwards appear the pleasures of command and high status and acquisitiveness. There are the final pleasures of this world as well as the highest and the most compelling.³²

There remains only the awakening of a desire for knowledge, which al-GhazālÄ«, in the footsteps of the Aristotelian tradition, perceives to be as a natural facet of human existence, albeit one that may get thwarted or misdirected.³³

Even within this purportedly natural progression, issues of gaps in cognition and conceivability rear their head. Al-GhazālÄ« describes in sympathetic terms what he takes to be the carefree life of a small child playing ball. Given a choice either to relinquish the ball and mallet or to forgo the chance to become a ruler, the child will surely feel the pain of giving up play more acutely. With play, after all, the child is already well acquainted, whereas the notion of rulership is but a meaningless abstraction. Why would the child be moved to give up a pleasurable pastime in favour of such a thing?³⁴ Similarly, the seasoned glutton will dive into pastries rather than seize an opportunity to do admirable deeds, at least as long as the glutton has not been brought to recognize the value of high esteem. The latter kind of obstinacy is less excusable than that of the child who remains preoccupied with their game; however, idiocy, as al-GhazālÄ« unsparingly labels it, is a real phenomenon and “far from improbable.”³⁵

In each case, the problem is that the pleasure (ladhdha) associated with each kind of life is known only to one who has become habituated to it and grown to appreciate its inner workings.³⁶ For the person who has not yet experienced what it is like to lead a higher kind of life, that kind of life might as well not exist, similar to colours not existing for the blind or sounds for the deaf. This sets up the central dilemma. While the more exalted rewards of the more exalted form of life are evident to the one who has advanced to that stage, this is not so to the one who is not yet there.

Clearly, then, the pleasure of governance, which is inner, is more powerful in the peaks of its perfection than all the pleasures of sense; clearly, too, this pleasure does not accrue to the best, the child, or the imbecile. And yet, knowledge of God … offers a pleasure greater than that of governance; he who has attained, and tasted, a certain degree of knowledge knows this … [However] to assert to young boys that the pleasures of sexual intercourse are superior to those of playing with a polo stick is impossible, just as it is to assert to the impotent that sexual pleasure is superior to the pleasure of sniffing violets; the impotent man has lost the ability by which he could perceive this pleasure. But he who is unimpaired by impotence and who possesses an intact sense of smell perceives the difference between the two pleasures. On this there remains nothing but to say: He who has tasted knows.³⁷

“This is the way people are at every stage: ready to deny anything beyond the stage [they are in],” al-GhazālÄ« avers. In a striking thought experiment al-GhazālÄ« posits that if the fetus in the womb were possessed of intellect, it would deny the possibility of a human surviving in the open air. Birth into this world is a transformative experience if ever there was one; yet it is one that remains beyond the ken of the unborn child.³⁸ In another striking statement al-GhazālÄ« further posits that the embryo cannot truly know the state of the infant, the infant the state of the discerning child, or the discerning child the state of the adult who has grown to reflect and reason.³⁹

Al-Ghazālī’s intellectual autobiography, The Deliverer from Error (Al-Munqidh min al-ḍalāl) addresses the theme head on. In the Deliverer al-GhazālÄ« famously describes how two transformative crises reoriented his own life. The first was a sceptical crisis from which only the dawning of a divine light rescued him; the second, an existential crisis that led al-GhazālÄ« to renounce his previous life of governmentally funded scholarship and made him take on the mantle of religious reformer. Al-GhazālÄ« clearly intends for the earlier crisis to foreshadow the later one; Reza Hadisi has already pointed out how both map on to aspects of Laurie Paul’s account of transformative experience.⁴⁰ Similar to Paul’s emphasis on how Mary’s way of perceiving the world is immeasurably different before and after she experiences colour, al-GhazālÄ« places both the dawn of reason and the actualization of prophecy in the context of a sensory analogy. According to al-GhazālÄ«, the seeing person gains access to a different world (ʿālam) from the blind, and consequently lives in a different one as well, richer in phenomenal content, and the awakening of the reasoning and prophetic powers similarly open up new worlds to the recipient of such experience.⁴¹ Also similar to Paul, al-GhazālÄ« underlines the incommunicability of any such qualitative difference in discursive terms, even when the ostensive description of the end state is as comprehensive as can be:

How great a difference there is between your knowing the definitions and causes and conditions of health and satiety and your being healthy and sated! And how great a difference there is between your knowing the definition of drunkenness – viz., that it is a term denoting a state resulting from the predominance of vapours which rise from the stomach to the centers of thought – and your actually being drunk! Indeed, a drunken man, while he is drunk, does not know the definition and concept of drunkenness and has no knowledge of it. But a physician knows the definition and the elements of drunkenness, though he is experiencing no actual drunkenness.⁴²

These words occur in the context of al-GhazālÄ« explaining why he could not initially make a move to embrace the Sufi path, even when he had become intellectually convinced of its validity. In his autobiography al-GhazālÄ« portrays himself as a person for whom, going into the year 488 AH/1095 CE, honour and fame de facto were the highest goods in life, all the way up to the point at which a new and different perspective was forced on him. This certainly looks like a transformative experience: it is interesting that – similar to his earlier sceptical crisis – the change did not come about by al-GhazālÄ« reasoning his way to it.⁴³ Al-GhazālÄ« says that on some level he knew that he needed to make a change, and that yet he was unable to do so. The comforts and goods of his existing life were real to him, in a way in which his religious calling for a long time was not. It took a literal act of God for the matter to be decided in favour of repentance, fear of God, and renunciation (zuhd).⁴⁴

4 Reasons for Believing

Even if al-Ghazālī puts the key to his own dual personal transformations in God’s hands, that is not the frame in which he wishes for his reader to view their lives or the possibility of setting forth on the path of religious renewal. Instead, al-Ghazālī in the Deliverer considers anew the issue of how, and under what circumstances, a person might reasonably put their trust in a future they cannot yet see and a life’s orientation they cannot yet fathom. The test case is adherence to the demands of religion and the admonitions of a would-be prophet. But the results appear generalizable to any potentially transformative practice, and the picture stays relatively consistent over the course of al-Ghazālī’s exposition.

In the first instance, al-GhazālÄ« maintains that experience and hearsay are valid sources of knowledge regarding the truthfulness of a path for those who do not yet walk it, provided they associate closely with people who do.⁴⁵ This is not explained in the immediate context, but in what follows al-GhazālÄ« gives examples of the kind of evidence that would count. In the case of putative prophetic revelations, the comparison he brings up again and again is that of specialist expertise such as is possessed by the astronomer, legal scholar, or medical doctor. Al-Ghazālī’s initial gambit is to say that the layperson can read about law or medicine in books and acquire some necessary knowledge about what is involved in these disciplines. Thereafter it is a simple matter to apply the relevant standard to a person witnessed firsthand (bi-shāhada) or indeed to a person about whom reports and hearsay is available. One does not need to hold the inward perspective of the doctor or the astronomer to be able to determine whether these experts succeed in healing or in predicting eclipses.⁴⁶

Based on the examples provided, al-Ghazālī holds two tests to be applicable to any claim to greater insight made by somebody who supposedly has access to things others cannot perceive: (a) said insight must have discernible effects in the world to which the adjudicating party is already accustomed, (b) said effects should not be explicable through mechanisms and processes that the adjudicating party already recognizes and accepts. Thus, a would-be prophet’s visions should not amount merely to a travelogue of heavenly realms. The prophet should make concrete claims about the world in which the ordinary believer already lives, such that their verification acts as evidence in favour of the prophet’s exceptional insight. (Conversely, their falsification presumably would damage the claimant’s credibility.) At the same time, there should be something extraordinary about these claims. It will not do to point to phenomena that the non-expert would have predicted with equal accuracy, or phenomena that already receive sufficient explanation within the mundane categories of understanding wielded by the ordinary observer.

The first test helps al-Ghazālī distinguish the true prophet from the kind of religious visionary who invites their followers to follow them on a spirit quest of sorts, mapping out supernal terrain and supra-celestial realms, with no tethering to mundane reality. While al-Ghazālī is very far from denying that such fantastic voyages take place – al-Ghazālī is happy to affirm their reality both in the Deliverer and elsewhere – the test helps him stay true to the intuition that those not in possession of some particular mode of perception will rightfully remain unpersuaded of its existence unless and until something leads to its disclosure.

The difference might be illustrated with the aid of a present-day example. Imagine that a guru of some description assures us that a specific psychotropic drug will provide access to extrasensory perceptions accompanied by, say, self-verifying visions, ones that disclose how we humans actually exist as five-dimensional energy manifestations. By al-Ghazālī’s lights, an ordinary person hearing such a claim should prima facie be unmoved, since the claims about five dimensions sound like so much gobbledygook, and the exploration of such realms could just as readily be attributed to delusions or hallucinations, etc. More persuasive in al-Ghazālī’s mind would be if the guru showed an ability to heal the sick, provide sound ethical counsel, or effect peace in the political sphere, especially if these feats (a) were accomplished in a way that intersected meaningfully with the adjudicator’s ordinary life as it was already led, (b) cast new and unexpected light on that world in a way that surpassed the witness’s ability to understand what might be going on. In the realm of contemporary theorization an analogous phenomenon might be string theory in fundamental physics, a construct that most people find difficult to visualize but many will be ready to accept, provided that it enhances the predictive power of physics in ways that competing theories are unable to accomplish.

This also helps to explain why al-GhazālÄ« would underscore the need for repeat observations, or multiple testimonies, when it comes to the extraordinary interventions claimed by any would-be prophet or expert. A one-off occurrence could be explained through other means, and even a unique miraculous event might invite suspicions of different kinds of agencies at play.⁴⁷ It is only when a consistent pattern of phenomena is tapped into, by somebody with claims to seeing the hidden regularities and realities that might explain those phenomena, that the epistemic claims made by that person must be taken seriously.⁴⁸ Thus the reality of the hidden properties of drugs is shown by their consistent effectiveness, and the ability of the astronomers to predict celestial phenomena shows the power of their prognosticative models. While the scientists are capable of perceiving the patterns that produce these effects, the effects themselves are plain to see even to one unaware of the explanation and unable to reconstruct it. In this case the witness has adequate reason to believe that following the ‘path of science’ would eventually yield an ability to make such predictions oneself.

This pattern then gets reinforced by the way the intellect itself, in al-Ghazālī’s estimation, cedes ground to the reality of prophetic insight, which is the foundation of religious instruction. The intellect can affirm (taá¹£dÄ«q) the reality of prophecy, by way of observing again and again the salutary effect that religious worship and the keeping of God’s commandments has on human affairs, both individually and on the societal level.⁴⁹ In a fetching simile al-GhazālÄ« likens the way that reason takes the reasoner by the hand and leads to the acceptance of prophecy to the way that the blind are given over to guides and worried patients to caring doctors. No wonder that al-GhazālÄ« deems the prophets ‘physicians of the hearts.’⁵⁰ The difference in al-Ghazālī’s mind is that whereas reason operates at the level of science, it can only act as the handmaiden to acknowledging the reality of prophecy. Submitting to the ‘path of the hereafter’ (i.e., religion), accordingly, can be done on the basis of reason, yet its fruits surpass what discursive reason is able to explain.

The programme of religious improvement that al-Ghazālī details in his Revival of the Religious Sciences assumes a different guise when seen in this light. Even if it is true that there are qualitative, incomprehensible differences between the lives led by (a) one who seeks pleasure, (b) one who seeks honours, (c) one who delights in knowledge, and (d) one who recognizes that the proper object of seeking is only God, it is still possible that an optimally calibrated set of prophetic injunctions and revelations will provide suitable similes to spur a move up the ladder for each type of person, at each stage of life, according to what is possible for each to comprehend. The secrets (asrār) and truths (ḥaqāʾiq) concerning the various dimensions of religion and proper religiosity can each be conveyed on multiple levels, and in Islam they factually are, so that every kind of person always has sufficient reason and motivation to continue moving onwards and upwards. The theme is important in al-Ghazālī and merits further study. That, however, would take us far afield from the limited focus of the present essay.

5 Concluding Remarks

The Arabic materials sketched above may appear excessively entangled in the specifics of Aristotelian cognitive psychology, on the one hand, and in Islamic religious concerns, on the other, for a successful interpolation to be made onto the modern debate over transformative experience explored by Laurie Paul and others. What I hope has become apparent is that the makings of a bridge between past and present are there to be found nonetheless, and that its construction may be worth the effort. By way of conclusion, let me spell out a few connections between the major Arabic thinkers I have referenced and some contemporary areas of philosophical inquiry.

(1) Chris Ranalli has recently suggested a deceptively simple adjustment to one of our standard epistemological stories, namely the claim that our quest for knowledge is always about a search for truth. According to Ranalli, a love of truth may well motivate our search for knowledge, much the same as justified true beliefs may well continue to hold a central place in our conversations about what constitutes such knowledge. Yet “reality is what really matters; truth matters derivatively.” Accordingly, inasmuch as experience (by which direct acquaintance with a phenomenon is meant) puts us in cognitive contact with reality in some special way, it possesses a commensurate special value.⁵¹

The Arabic authors discussed in this essay would readily have agreed with Ranalli’s sentiment, which is not surprising, given that he leads with a quote from Aristotle’s Metaphysics about the intrinsic pleasurability of knowledge.⁵² For the Aristotelian, any true cognition, whether sensory or intellectual, follows the model of forms becoming present in the soul that correspond to those very same forms existing in outward reality. This mirroring act, as has been remarked in the literature, makes concerns with truth secondary. And the Arabic Aristotelians’ conclusion that direct acquaintance with something is both epistemically privileged and intrinsically pleasurable also looks like a natural inference to draw.

However, this then opens up questions regarding how the ladder of knowledge in Arabic Aristotelianism hinges on different types of epistemic transformations. What is it that transports us from the raw prescientific impressions of reality that we have to the proportionately articulated scientific hypotheses that we craft out of them, and thence to the advent of the actual intelligibles? And what accounts for the differences that remain between the three? Some of the story is now beginning to be told when it comes to the foundational figure of Ibn SÄ«nā, and a philosophical reconsideration of the notion of knowledge by presence found in the ishrāqÄ« school is also overdue.⁵³ Even so, much of the work remains to be done. If out of this further research a more nuanced appreciation should emerge of the twin imperatives in Arabic philosophy to explain reality and to appreciate it in experience (unoccluded and unadorned), then that would constitute a win.

(2) The focus in al-GhazālÄ«, I believe, is something altogether different. In al-Ghazālī’s works we find a sincere, if necessarily partial, attempt to grapple with what he perceives of human psychological complexity, and the barriers we face in considering the worth and value of a lifestyle qualitatively different from our own. The picture drawn by al-GhazālÄ« is unquestionably grounded in the tripartite motivational psychology of Plato and the Platonic tradition. Yet instead of treating the souls dominated by appetite, spirit, and reason as fixed types, al-GhazālÄ« explores the notion that we each go through these orientations in stages, with the gap between two different types of life essentially unexplained in terms of standard motivation and decision theory. Al-Ghazālī’s remarks, therefore, are more fruitfully set in dialogue with the likes of Agnes Callard, who also strives to explain how we can reach for that which we do not yet fully understand, and how we can yearn for that which we cannot yet even see.⁵⁴ While al-Ghazālī’s remarks on the subject display a religious mindset, many of his observations show a deep appreciation for the minutiae of human life. In a philosophical literature that still stands in need of texture and real human grit to substantiate its theorization, we might do well to read further into such materials in order for our own perspectives to be transformed.⁵⁵