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Abstract
This article presents an introduction to and the first complete English translation of Aḥmad al-Ghazālī’s (d. 517/1123 or 520/1126), al-Tajrīd fī kalimat al-tawḥīd, his most widely received Arabic text. The title has a double entendre, meaning both “A Primer on the Statement of Tawḥīd,” and “Disengaging Through the Statement of Tawḥīd.” It is designed to serve both purposes. The first half provides a spiritual typography, juxtaposing “the people of grace” (ahl al-faḍl) to “the people of justice” (ahl al-ʿadl). The former are those who maintain their covenant with God and follow the Prophet Muhammad. The latter are those who break the covenant and follow Iblīs. The second half guides aspirants through the levels of spiritual development and the corresponding modes of remembrance (dhikr), detailing three modes of dhikr – lā ilāha illa Llāh (No god, but God), Allāh, and huwa huwa (He, He). These correspond to three levels within the human being, the heart (al-qalb), the spirit (al-rūḥ), and the secret (al-sirr). The goal is to provide an overview of the means whereby one can disengage from the blameworthy inclinations of their soul through the progressive levels of dhikr until the secret predominates over the spirit and the spirit predominates over the heart, such that one is able to focus solely upon God.
Abstract
I read Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy b. Yaqẓān, a sixth/twelfth-century philosophical narrative, through the lens of two critical terms in Arabic rhetoric: mathal and majāz, loosely equivalent to metaphor and figurative speech. Foregrounding the hermeneutic principles underlying the two concepts allows us to explore the affective and aesthetic means by which knowledge of the divine can be transmitted even through the material limitations of human language. They also provide the epistemological and rhetorical conditions for relating the sensible (maḥsūs) and intelligible (maʿqūl) worlds to each other through repeated crossings that connect divine truth (ḥaqq) with the material conditions of living. By his fractal-like deployment of mathal and majāz, Ibn Ṭufayl brings vividly to life a method of reading that enjoins us to interpret our material world in light of the wider cosmos in the same way that we encounter his text, preparing us to reach for an ever-receding gnosis.