1 Introduction
Aristotle rejected the commonly held belief that we receive new information about the external world from unknown celestial sources in our dreaming states. Avicenna notoriously claimed in his autobiography: “many problems became clear to me while asleep.”1 Avicenna may well have made such statements from personal conviction, but his epistemology included provisions for various forms of knowledge-acquisition by means of dreaming. In this chapter, we will examine several Arabic sources in order to establish the content and context of Avicenna’s discussions of dreaming; we wish to establish that dreams are organically accounted for in his epistemology, that he naturalises prophecy thereby, and that his approach is the culmination of an overall trend in earlier Arabic philosophy. After some preliminary remarks on Islamic concerns related to dreams and prophecy, we will first consider (section two) the account in Avicenna’s Pointers and Admonitions; we will then investigate (section three) earlier approaches in Arabic philosophical literature to the mechanisms of obtaining knowledge of the “unseen,” as Avicenna put it; returning to Avicenna, we will examine (section four) how these ideas are systematically presented in the Psychology of his great philosophical compendium, The Healing. Avicenna’s innovations in the philosophy of mind – rooted in his complex theory of the faculties – are universally credited with changing the course of Western (including Arabic) philosophy. In the following, we will demonstrate that his explanation of veridical dreaming was integral to that accomplishment.
Let us begin by acknowledging that every Muslim intellectual tradition has unequivocally affirmed “true dreams,” and that this posture is not relegated to superstitious elements of society, that is, the occultists and fantasists on the periphery of a pre-modern civilisation, but is wholly ensconced in the central conceits of religious life: revelation and prophecy.2 According to tradition, the Prophet’s first experience of revelation took place in a “true dream”; just as in the case with Avicenna to which we referred above, it occurred “while I [the Prophet] was asleep.”3 “True dreams” are, after the death of the Prophet, our only access to revelation besides the Qurʾān itself and the prophetic tradition (i.e., his recorded words and deeds, the Sunna).4 The term for “true dream,” ruʾyā, is just as naturally rendered “vision”; it is derived from the verb raʾā, “to see,” which is used as such in accounts of dreams. There are other sorts of dreams; indeed, it is his gift for distinguishing true dreams from “mixed-up dreams” (aḍghāth aḥlām) that makes the prophet Yūsuf (Joseph) the paragon of dream interpreters in the Islamic tradition. The veridical nature of ruʾyā is further distinguished from ḥulm (the other sort of dream: “false dreams”) in a well-attested prophetic tradition insofar as the former are “from God,” whereas the latter are from Satan.5 Finally, misrepresenting the content of one’s true dream is severely censured in the prophetic tradition.6
In Avicenna’s psychological works, the topic of dreaming arises in the context of the discussion of the internal faculties of the animal soul (see section four, below). In The Healing: Psychology 4.2, for example, the principle by virtue of which “premonitions (al-indhārāt) occur in the state of sleep” is precisely that “the conceptual realities (maʿānī) of all existing things in the world, be they in the past, at present, or willed to be, exist in the knowledge of God and the intellect-angels in one way, and exist in the souls of the celestial-angels in another way.”7 Access to these maʿānī is freely given to humans, who are after all “more closely related to those celestial substances (al-jawāhir al-malakiyya) than to sensible bodies”:8
There is no veiling or miserliness on the part of the angelic substances; veiling only occurs for those who are susceptible to it, either because they are submerged in bodies, or because they are contaminated by things that draw them downward. If they get close to becoming free from these actions, they obtain a disclosure of what is there.9
The way to miss out on this divine and/or celestial knowledge proffered in dreams, then, is to be contaminated by (tadannus) or submerged (inghimār)10 in the physical world; correct reception of this knowledge is a trait of prophets, to be sure, but it is also among the skills groomed by anyone with a “strong” imagination (see sections 2.1 and 3.1 below). As one develops this skill, Avicenna goes on to explain, one’s dreams come to include more rarefied objects: what is verified for the neophyte in dreams might be that which is connected to his person or his country, whereas the more proficient dreamer will “get” (if you will) objects of intellect (maʿqūlāt) or that which is beneficial to people in general (maṣāliḥ al-nās).11
As a starting point, then, we can see that Avicenna’s project is to provide a philosophical account of the internal faculties that (among other things) justifies the prevailing religious and cultural view of dreaming and prophecy.12 He works from a model according to which celestial entities are privy to unlimited knowledge. His epistemology is naturalised in the sense that access to this knowledge is unrestricted for all human animals insofar as they possess sound internal faculties. Finally, the state of sleep is conducive for this process precisely because the subject is less distracted by the demands of the senses.
In the background of this discussion is a long-festering academic debate concerning the nature of Avicenna’s epistemology. Scholars have disputed whether Avicenna’s frequent suggestion that concepts are obtained by virtue of emanation from the (universal, separate) Active Intellect is compatible with his “abstractionist” model of perception. Interpreters who have favoured one mode of knowledge acquisition in Avicenna over the other have called the apparently opposing mode “metaphorical,” and attempts have been made to have it both ways.13 The material in this chapter may be profitably applied to this debate as well.
2 Al-Ishārāt wa-l-tanbīhāt
The principles governing Avicenna’s account of dreaming are most vividly evoked in his last major work, al-Ishārāt wa-l-tanbīhāt (“Pointers and Reminders”).14 This is a difficult, gnomic work; even enthusiasts will point out that Avicenna explicitly “tried to protect the work from non-philosophers by a veil of ambiguities and vagueness.”15 It is always hard to deal with philosophers when they break into aphorism; hence, historians of philosophy have tethered any analysis drawn from al-Ishārāt to corresponding points in Avicenna’s more systematic works.16 Yet its suggestive compactness has been a boon in another way: it has generated more commentaries than any other Avicennan work.17
The section of the work devoted to physics and metaphysics is divided into ten units.18 The modern editor, Sulaymān Dunyā, entitled the fourth and final volume (consisting of the last three units) “taṣawwuf,” that is, a discourse on the Sufi practice, which is defensible. The topics are “On joy and happiness” (unit eight), “On the states of the Knowers” (nine), and “On the secrets of the signs” (ten). These last two topics, especially, are unapologetically Sufi-sounding: there is no way to render fī maqāmāt al-ʿārifīn (the heading of the ninth unit) without acknowledging the huge significance of both terms in Sufi popular and technical lore, and the contents of this unit read like occult instructions. After a guided series of steps, the practitioner “arrives” at a state in which he is “beside the holy.”19
It is in the final unit (fī asrār al-āyāt, “On the secrets of the signs”) that we find the strongest case for dreams20 as sites of special knowledge acquisition. The “signs” of the unit’s heading are the specific characteristics of “knowers”; both terms (āyāt (“signs”) and ʿārif (“knower”)) are fraught with religious significance. After some preliminary pointers and reminders dealing with the food preferences of knowers, we are advised to trust the assertions of knowers when they inform us of the “unseen”:
When you hear that a knower has spoken of something unseen, having previously predicted good news or issued [valid] warnings, it is true – and you should not find it difficult to believe it. For there are well-known causes for this in the ways of nature.21
This reminder sets the stage for all that is to come regarding access to the “unseen” (al-ghayb), that is, that ocean of knowledge enjoyed by the celestial souls and imparted (under conditions to be elucidated here) to worthy knowers.22 Unquestionably, what follows is a defence, supported by an appeal to “nature,” of prophecy and divination; that this special knowledge may be obtained in sleep is adduced as evidence for its being possible in waking life:
Experience and analogical reasoning are in agreement that the human soul acquires something from the unseen in the state of dreaming (fī ḥālat al-manām). So there is nothing preventing something similar to that acquisition in the waking state such that there would not be some way to remove [the preventing obstacle], or such that there would be the possibility of its being lifted [i.e., by a benevolent outsider].23
The conditions are framed based on the presupposition that “something,” that is, some special knowledge, is accessible with respect to the “unseen.” One might expect that there is some obstacle to such access when the soul is not quiescent, asleep; yet whatever hinders this can be removed.
For our purposes, this passage exemplifies the principles we set out at the end of the introduction, above. Moreover, Avicenna asserts that evidence for the claim that occult knowledge is obtained in sleep may be found by means of “experience and analogical reasoning” (al-tajriba wa-l-qiyās). The appeal to experience is to that of all humans: each person’s experience “inspires assent” to this proposition, since the dreaming subject is capable of imagination (al-takhayyul) and recollection.24
The proof according to analogical reasoning is more complicated. Here, unexpectedly, Avicenna introduces the cognitive capacities of celestial souls with respect to the knowledge of particulars. “Particulars are inscribed (manqūsha) in the intelligible world as universals,” but because of their particular perceptions, volitions, and unique point of view, celestial souls can conceive of these universalised inscriptions according to their corresponding particular concomitants in the “elemental” world, just as we would perceive them – that is, in time.25 Thus Avicenna establishes an epistemological continuum whereby an instance of knowledge26 may be realised in different states: that is, as a universal and as a particular. In either state, it is manifest as an “inscription” (naqsh) conditioned by or manifested in the guise of “concomitants.” (Bear in mind that, as we saw in the Introduction, the objects of this mode of knowledge in the Healing are “conceptual realities” – maʿānī.)
Our human souls may acquire such inscriptions if properly disposed.27 Here, Avicenna introduces the variable attitudes of the psychic faculties: the internal senses may exhibit attraction or repulsion with respect to the external senses,28 meaning that the inscriptions under consideration in the sensible world may or may not be registered. Moreover, the proper receptacle for these inscriptions is the common sense: upon this “tablet for inscription” (lawḥ al-naqsh) they are observed, while their sources need no longer be present (indeed, the very senses which bore them may be dormant or no longer functioning). One might suspect that Avicenna means that we can imagine, say, a cat, even when there is no cat in our visual field.29 As it turns out, however, he believes that some phenomena can be observed which never occurred as such in the external world: phenomena such as the straight line observed in the case of the falling rain-drop, or the circle observed in the case of a single revolving point, may be observed even though their sources (a rain-drop, or a point) do not in themselves suggest such an inscription.30
Such inscriptions occur regularly: the imagination may inscribe observable content in the common sense, or such content may be resurrected by means of memory. In such cases, they correspond to an original sensory acquisition, as an Aristotelian might require. But Avicenna immediately introduces exceptional cases:
A group of sick and bile-ridden people may observe sensible forms as manifest and present which have no relation to a sensible external object. The inscription of these forms is due to an internal cause, or to a cause which influences an internal cause. The common sense may also be inscribed due to wandering (al-jāʾila) forms originating in the imaginative and the estimative [faculties].31
Such inscriptions may then bounce back into those faculties “like what happens between facing mirrors.”32 So at least some objects observed in the common sense need have no relation to “sensible, external” reality.33
Now, since sleep “preoccupies the external senses,” it presents an opportunity for an unpreoccupied imagination to imprint observable content upon a quiescent common sense.34 Throughout, Avicenna is careful to refer to such content as “observed” (al-mushāhada) phenomena, presumably in deference to the Aristotelian rule that the external senses do not function in sleep – at least not in terms of registering “new” sensible forms; rather, for Aristotle, dreams consist of delayed sense impressions. In this Pointer, he asserts that “states (aḥwāl) are seen (turā) in the dream as observed content (fī ḥukm al-mushāhada).”35 Illness impedes, corrupts, or disfigures the forms received in the common sense, but a strong psychic faculty (here unspecified) is able to resist the pull of influences from either side – that is, from the external senses and from the unhelpful imaginings of the internal senses. And the stronger the faculty, the stronger the obtained object.36 In this case, Avicenna specifies that what is obtained – that is, that which can be made stronger – is al-maʿnā, the particular content to be cognised. A strong psychic faculty can be further fortified through spiritual discipline, so that the well-trained and undistracted soul, freed from the (ordinary) business of the imagination, inclines towards holiness (ilā jānib al-quds), obtaining inscriptions from the “unseen,” which are then inscribed in the common sense.37
For the imaginative faculty to accomplish such things in the dreaming state, it must be dormant enough that the soul will be able to access the intelligible world without distraction, but precise enough to inscribe them accurately upon the common sense.38 Mastering this technique means that the knower can accomplish it in waking life as well.39
The epistemological model according to which this discourse operates posits unlimited cognisable content accessible by means of psychic training. That such content is obtained in dreams is taken as given and used to support the argument that it must be obtainable in waking life. What is to be obtained is of the “unseen”; this process is not necessary when tackling sensible objects. That the contents of this “unseen” category are not like sensible objects is suggested by the inclusion of examples from delusional perceivers (hallucinations) and concoctions found in the common sense that represent sensible objects (the raindrop) with a figure not derived from the senses thereto applied (a line). Sometimes, what is observed in the common sense is a “trace” (al-athar),40 suggestive of some facet of the “unseen.” Whatever it may be, the “unseen” is not perceptible by means of the external senses alone. What is “seen” is a particular concomitant inscribed in the common sense, more or less accurately representing cognisable content; the stronger the imaginative faculty, the stronger the content and the better its inscription.
This account of knowledge resting on the empirical(!) evidence of dreams and involving objects of knowledge which are not found in the mundane sphere of experience raises some difficulties for anyone attempting to resolve the long-running dispute concerning Avicenna’s empiricism. In a certain way, because of the emphasis on “experience,” the use of dreams to support the viability of prophecy is quite empirical: as Gutas translates a later passage in the Ishārāt,
Know that the way to profess and attest to these things is not [to say], “they are merely plausible conjectures at which one arrives from intelligible matters only,” […] rather they are experiences of which, once confirmed, one seeks the causes.41
That is, indeed, the empirical method, assuming the experiences can be confirmed. Yet the apparent preference, in this unit of the Pointers, for inscriptions derived from the “unseen” over forms abstracted from the (sublunar) external world has fed the enthusiasm of those who suspect Avicenna of being an emanationist.42 Nevertheless, as Gutas has insisted for decades now, all of these acts of imagination belong to the individual human soul, and every step in Avicenna’s process demonstrates where the imagination can get things wrong or right: however eerie we may find the appeal to dream experience, it is an ineradicable part of this process.
3 The Downward Flow of Conceptions in Earlier Arabic Philosophy
Towards the end of The Metaphysics of the Healing, while speculating about the state of souls after death, Avicenna again emphasises the power of “imagined,” as opposed to sensed, forms: “Forms in the imagination are not weaker than the sensible [forms] but are greater in influence and clarity, as one sees in sleep” (i.e., in a dream: fī l-manām).43 This is not to say that dreamt imaginal forms are necessarily more real or valid; this passage occurs in a discussion of how it is that more foolish folk suffer (after death – this is an eschatological issue) more keenly the pains they imagine are due to them, inasmuch as those pains were imaginatively described to them in life. Accordingly, their torment seems all the more horrific to them, as they register imagined forms more strongly than sensed forms (if they could sense forms at all). Moreover, the core idea of Avicenna’s emanative scheme, as presented in texts like the Metaphysics, is that conceptions (al-taṣawwurāt) flow from celestial causes as “principles for the existence of these forms here.”44 We have seen something of the mechanics of this in the Ishārāt passages discussed above, and we shall return to them in the Psychology of the Healing below (section four). In claiming that imagined forms are “stronger” than sensed forms, and in suggesting that some sort of information is received from higher realms, Avicenna is working entirely within the Neoplatonising scheme of earlier Arabic philosophy. In this section, we will consider earlier Arabic accounts of the intelligible content of dreams and its origin.
In his treatise “On the Essence of Sleep and Dreams,”45 al-Kindī started from the same epistemological claims evinced by Avicenna: when the imagination (here al-quwwa al-muṣawwira; “what the Greeks called phantasía”46) acts free from sensation, it obtains and “composes” forms more clearly. The material nature of sense objects confounds the senses; thinking using the imagination yields forms “more pure, cleaner, and more unadulterated […].” “Dreams,” al-Kindī concludes, “are the soul’s use of thought when it has ceased to use the senses.”47 Citing Plato as his authority, al-Kindī holds that it is within the individual human soul that knowledge occurs; the soul is the site for “all sensible and intelligible things.”48 As such, the soul may “see signs about things before they occur, or announce them exactly as they will be (bi-aʿyānihā).”49 As in the Pointers, this is a skill developed by the individual: the imagination may not be ready to read the knowledge of the soul, and in such cases the (individual) soul may use “symbols” to break through to the field of the imagination.50
Thus al-Kindī’s theory prefigures an empirical reading of Avicenna’s. Dream-visions yield true knowledge when the imagination is sufficiently strong because it is sufficiently uninhibited. Yet the source of this knowledge is not so ontologically remote: it is the “soul’s natural knowledge,”51 ready and waiting for our interpretation.
Rotraud Hansberger has documented the origins and influence of the Arabic adaptation of the Parva naturalia called Kitāb al-Ḥiss wa-l-maḥsūs; it is dated from the time of al-Kindī.52 The section supposed to “translate” Aristotle’s sleep and dream treatises, Bāb al-nawm wa-l-yaqaẓa (“Chapter on sleep and waking”), which makes up more than half of the Arabic text,53 favours “spiritual” over “corporeal” modes of knowing: experiences in dreams are “nobler” than those in waking life. The author is unequivocal on the supernatural origin of dreams:
True dream vision, the cause and reason of which is the true Deity […] occurs through the mediation of the intellect. For whatever the Deity […] wanted to become manifest in this world He gave form to in the Intellect at one stroke, and gave form to the forms in this world at one stroke, together with what they imply rationally. The intellect then made [them] manifest to the soul and to each one of its faculties, according to the measure in which the soul decided that [each] faculty could receive [them].54
This passage strikes a chord that we will hear resonating throughout the rest of this chapter: the unrelenting broadcast of information from above, relayed via the (Active) intellect, is stymied only by the failure of the internal senses to receive it. The sleeper’s internal sensation is clearer, as it were, “more apt and more correct.”55 Yet the adaptor retains an Aristotelian model of potentiality and actuality: in his words, “the sense-perception of the sleeper is sense-perception potentially,” and therefore objects are harder to perceive; in the waking state it is actual, and objects are more easily perceived and known.56 As Hansberger has shown, the rest of the treatise is the adaptor’s attempt to reverse this polarity, instructing the dreamer to unite his internal faculties (by means of the “subtlest things”).57
There is a text attributed to Avicenna called Risālat al-manāmiyya, that is, on “dream-states”; it exists in several manuscripts under various titles and was published along with an English translation.58 Gutas has rejected the authenticity of this work.59 In it, “Avicenna” cites the Kitāb al-Ḥiss wa-l-maḥsūs; Hansberger has demonstrated the overall reliance of the Risāla al-Manāmiyya on the Kitāb al-Ḥiss (especially with respect to the “three-faculty” model), and John Lamoreaux has shown its further dependence on Artemidorus.60 In this text, “Avicenna” adopts an unmistakeably “emanationist” attitude towards reception of information: he “ascribes true dream-vision to a ‘divine power’ outside the dreamer, which sends veridical dreams to people in order to inform and warn them about things to come.”61
Other works on dreams were ascribed to Aristotle, including one which epitomises themes found later in al-Fārābī’s work. As an aspect of his theory of prophecy, al-Fārābī had introduced a special act of the imagination which allowed it to recreate sensible and intelligible forms: “imitation” (muḥākāh).62 In a Maqāla (“discourse”) attributed to Aristotle, “On Dreams” (fī l-ruʾyā),63 we find a short description of how this activity is applied. According to this treatise:
A dream is a motion due to the persistence of something from objects of sensation: that is, when the imaginative faculty (al-quwwa al-mutakhayyila) is isolated by itself and idle, in the state of sleep, it returns to the objects of sensation it has at its disposal. It composes them, one to another, and separates them, one from another, imitating (taḥākī) the objects of intellect […] or whatever chances upon the body in terms of its temperament (al-mizāj).64
Muḥākāh is a technical term in Arabic philosophy of language invoking the telling of a story or the reporting of verbal evidence. Although the imagination is working in a familiar way here with respect to the composition and separation of forms, to speak of the faculty as “imitating” an object is new. This internal imitation can have external consequences, as when sexual acts (afʿāl al-jimāʿ) are imitated during sleep; in such cases, memorably, “the limbs may be hoisted in preparation directed toward such an act.”65
From the passage just cited, it might seem as though the imagination can only play with sensible objects already at hand (indeed, with sensible forms “persisting” in the system, as in Aristotle). Yet in the ensuing lines, as with al-Kindī earlier and Avicenna later, we have the notion of the “strengthening” of the faculty of imagination: whereas the “desiring faculty” led to sexualised expressions,
The rational faculty might imitate objects of intellect (al-maʿqūlāt) which it has attained in the extreme of perfection, such as the first cause (al-sabab al-awwal), or things separated66 from matter. When the imagination is strengthened in a person, objects of sensation are not established in him; his state in waking becomes like his state in sleep. When he returns [from such a state], impressions (rusūm) are impressed in the common [sense], and the faculty of vision is affected by them, such that the impressions occur in the air connected to [the organ of] vision. Or he might return having impressed [these impressions] in the imaginative faculty, becoming like one united with the Active Intellect, having seen things great and wondrous.67
Now, this passage is a paraphrase of two passages in al-Fārābī’s Ārāʾ,68 and, as in the previously cited passages, the author skips over a lot of the mechanics of how these impressions are passed between the imagining faculty and the common sense. But once again we find the “strengthening” of the imagination: at this point, the paraphrast has leapt to the beginning of the next section of al-Fārābī’s text, on “divine inspiration and the visions of the king” (fī l-waḥy wa-ruʾyat al-malik). All of the elements of al-Fārābī’s theory of prophecy69 are present in this summary: the faculty of imagination “mediates between the sense organs and the rational [faculty]”;70 imagination is less busy with the incessant activity of the senses in sleep; there is a process involving impressions and – most Farabianly – “imitating”71 those higher things which have no sensible forms; and the proficient user of his imagination may find himself able to do these things as ably in the waking state as in his dreams.
To this framework the paraphrast added two distinctive elements. First, as noted above, he began with the point about the persistence of objects of sensation; this genuinely Aristotelian flourish (recall that the text is attributed to Aristotle) is immediately contradicted by the various ways in which non-sensed objects are imitated and impressed in sleep and then in waking. Second, at the end of the short treatise, he added a summarising statement that (1) speaks of the “soul” as a wandering agent (instead of the acts of the imagination which direct Farabian prophecy) and (2) quickly explains the appearance of the Qurʾānic “mixed-up dreams” (aḍghāth aḥlām), which do not appear at all in al-Fārābī’s text:
When the soul moves toward its highest domain72 on account of its divine contemplation and its freedom from the senses, it sees simple, spiritual things. When it moves towards its “first” domain on account of its natural contemplation, it regards particular things which are prepared for it among the objects of sensation, things which have no order and no use. Perhaps it composes these forms into some silly composition: these are called the “mixed-up dreams.”73
Al-Fārābī, too, was quite happy to speak of things being “seen” once the imagination has impressed them upon the common sense. “Separate objects of intellect and other noble existents” are seen in this way.74 This summary in the treatise ascribed to Aristotle seems to epitomise the Farabian doctrine fairly. For al-Kindī, it is al-quwwa al-muṣawwira (the faculty of “formative” imagination) which mediates between sensation and the intellect; in this concluding summary, al-Fārābī’s imagination (al-quwwa al-mutakhayyila) is not specified, but the Kindian formative function is implied: it composes forms (al-ṣuwar).
4 Back to Avicenna
In the final section of this chapter, we return to Avicenna’s systematic presentation of his epistemology in the Healing.
The second chapter of the fourth treatise of the Psychology of the Healing is entitled: “On the acts of the formative and cogitative [faculties … including] the discourse on sleep and waking, true and false vision (al-ruʾyā al-ṣādiqa wa-l-kādhiba), and one variety of the characteristics of prophecy.” This formative faculty is immediately described as the imagination (al-khayāl); it “stores” (by way of istikhzān, “storage”) what it gets from the common sense, on the one hand, and also “things which are not taken from sensation,” that is, things taken from the cogitative faculty (al-quwwa al-mufakkira) on the other.75 Certain people can develop a stronger imagination (here al-quwwa al-mutakhayyila) more “inclined to the intellect”76 and less apt to be distracted by the senses. In this section, we will explore how this works.
Avicenna’s explanatory scheme aims to account for all experienced phenomena. So it is axiomatic that, due to the machinery of the internal senses, forms can be “impressed upon the common sense itself [so that] one hears and sees colours and sounds which have no existence externally, nor are their causes external.”77 These experienced forms present themselves only under certain conditions: when a governing faculty is quiescent, or when they are not properly directed by the rational soul – for the latter may be distracted, as in cases of (mental) injury, weakness, sickness, extreme fear, and (of course) sleep.78 Although some of these may seem like minor aberrations in sensory experience, the point here is that the forms themselves are not inherently attended by the “relation” (nisba) which indicates whether they are coming from outside or within.79
Of far greater significance are the “notions” (khawāṭir), which occur to everybody on occasion, in the dreaming and waking states, “all at once to the soul.”80 These notions appear unconnected – logically or temporally – to anything else in mental experience. They may be objects of intellect or flashes of poetry, “rare things,” or “like secret hints which are not fixed and remembered,” though the soul “hits upon them with a firm grasp.”81 These notions come to us from the celestial realm, from the malakūt.82 Unlike in al-Kindī, they are not present already in our soul.
The presentation of intelligible realities is conditioned by the (bodily) internal faculties, whose disposition helps or hampers the process. It is the imagination (al-quwwa al-mutakhayyila) that, in Gutas’ words, “converts this knowledge into audible and visual images”83 for the common sense, just as a computer receives transmitted data and subsequently materialises them as sounds and images. When working from notions stored in the memory, this may be easier; but the translation process is fraught for the imagination, which apparently intervenes as the soul tries to fix a notion in the memory:
The imagination (al-quwwa al-mutakhayyila) aligns (tuwāzī) each individual object seen in sleep with an individual or composite84 image (khayāl), or aligns a composite object seen in sleep with an individual or composite image, while continuing to oppose (tuḥādhī) what it has seen there to an imitation (muḥākāh) compiled out of forms and maʿānī.85
This is how disruptions occur. The playfully parallel verbs (tuwāzī86 and tuḥādhī) both describe a mirror-like imaging of some object, a replication. The confusion that follows from some inadequacy in the internal senses produces dream-visions which are missing certain important properties; they will resist interpretation at any level. When nothing but gibberish remains, we have “mixed-up dreams.”87 When the forms are properly lodged in the memory and the mirroring effects described above do not present further confusion – this is the case for such souls as are “habituated to the truth, and have subdued false imaginings”88 – there is the promise of the “soundest dreams” (aṣāḥḥ aḥlām). In most cases, however, the composition of the body (including the rūḥ, that is, the spirit) and the complications this presents to the inner senses result in lazy or zany imitations of whatever is vouchsafed us from above: thus we think we dream of what concerns us in the life of the senses, and Avicenna describes for us the phenomenon of nocturnal emission.89
The most striking constant throughout this discourse is that while so much, and such diverse, interpretive and imitative work takes place in the (bodily) internal senses, the kernel of the dream-image is that which is broadcast (i.e., emanated) freely, universally, and uninterruptedly from the realm of the celestial intellects. This is one of the reasons Gutas has dismissed “mystical” appreciations of Avicenna: “knowledge of past, present, and future events,” bestowed from above, “can come to every man, even simpletons and fools.”90
I have argued so far that Avicenna naturalised the dream experience as part of his epistemology in gnomic (Pointers) and in normative (The Healing) texts. Yet aspects of Avicenna’s epistemology received differing emphases in the imaginations of his readers. There are quite a few claims about “knowing the unseen” in Avicenna’s Dāneshnāme-ye ʿAlāʾī, a text written in Persian for his patron after 1023.91 This text was fairly faithfully repurposed in Arabic by al-Ghazālī as the latter’s Maqāṣid al-falāsifa (“The Aims of the Philosophers”), whence it was introduced to medieval Europeans in a well-known Latin translation.92 As is well-known, al-Ghazālī was hostile to certain aspects of Avicennan philosophy, yet the overall tendency of Ashʿarite theologians to adopt what they could use from Avicenna began with efforts, such as that in the Maqāṣid, to articulate what the philosophers had said in a shared technical language: if there was a philosophical taxonomy of prophecy to be appropriated, so much the better.93
In the Fifth Discourse in the Physics of the Maqāṣid, the overall aim is to show how the transaction of intelligible such-and-such between the celestial and human domains takes place: the Discourse is concerned with “what emanates upon the souls from the Active Intellect.”94 It is instructive to enumerate the topics in this Discourse as al-Ghazālī presents them:
(1) Directing the soul towards the Active Intellect; (2) the quality of the emanations of instances of knowledge upon [the soul] from [the Active Intellect]; (3) concerning the happiness of the soul by virtue of [the Active Intellect] after death; (4) the weariness of the soul veiled from [the Active Intellect] due to faulty morals; (5) the cause of true dream-visions; (6) the cause of the soul’s perception of knowledge of the “unseen” (ʿilm al-ghayb); (7) [the soul’s] connection with the world of objects of knowledge; (8) the cause of [the soul’s] waking observation and vision (ruʾyā) of forms that don’t exist externally; (9) the meaning of prophecy and miracles, and their levels; (10) the existence of prophets, and the need for them.95
The fifth section, on the causes of dream-visions, begins with the physiology of sleep: the spirit (al-rūḥ) withdraws from the outside to the inside. While the spirit goes about its business, which involves a lot of constitutional affectations, the soul is free first to contemplate that which the senses have previously presented to it, and then (if it is so inclined) to commune with the spiritual substances.96 This leads to specific instances of knowledge obtained from the “unseen” (literally, “perception,” idrāk, of such knowledge) in dreams and in the waking state,97 and the opportunity for “connection” (ittiṣāl) with the Active Intellect so that such instances of knowledge may be emanated upon the purified soul.98 It is fair to say that al-Ghazālī’s reading of Avicenna was distinctly Farabian.
5 Conclusion
In light of all of this material, we may conclude by revisiting Gutas’ defence of Avicenna’s credentials as a rationalist:
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.99
This position unequivocally rejects those who would celebrate a “mystical” side of Avicenna. Although there are forms of knowledge that may be quite unlike those obtained through everyday sense perception, they are all made to fit into Avicenna’s system as exoteric facts, demonstrable, classified, and explained. Jules Janssens, commenting on the “natural” rules governing even the most impressive feats of the archetypal “knower” (in Pointers), concurs: “There is absolutely no place for any supernatural intervention or experience. That some of these acts are perceived as extraordinary is only due to a lack of knowledge.”100
Many commentators have remarked upon this naturalising tendency in Avicenna when confronted with the claims about veridical dreams.101 Nevertheless, I have argued that it is important to see how this naturalisation took place. As we have seen, his predecessors swayed between an internal process (al-Kindī) and reliance on celestial intervention (in the Farabian tradition). Plenty of aspects of Islamic “religious” thought were dismissed by Arabic philosophers: the most famous cases being those abhorred by al-Ghazālī (for example, non-resurrection of the body and the temporal creation of the world).102 Yet the general view exhibited in Avicenna’s works, and conditioned by their immediate context, asserts (1) the existence of a broad, atemporal knowledge base accidentally hidden from people (until they look), (2) that this knowledge may be obtained, and (3) that the evidence for this eventuality is that it occurs, manifestly, in dreams. Given the importance of that last point, it is worth wondering whether Avicenna’s epistemology could have been conceived without the conviction that we receive new information about the external world from unknown celestial sources in our dreaming states.
Acknowledgements
I am especially grateful for suggestions from Rotraud Hansberger, Pavel Gregoric, Sten Ebbesen, Mika Perälä, Juhana Toivanen, Richard Lavender, Christina Thomsen Thörnqvist, and the rest of the Representation and Reality team.
Dimitri Gutas, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition, 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 17, 208. Specifically, Avicenna wrote: “Whenever sleep overtook me, I would see those problems by their essences (bi-aʿyānihā (the same phrase occurs in al-Kindī: see below, n49)) in my dream (fī manāmī), such that many problems became clear to me while asleep.” (Edition in William E. Gohlman, The Life of Ibn Sina (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1974), 30.) Avicenna meant it quite literally: ḥads, the operation by which the middle term in syllogisms is obtained (see Gutas, Avicenna, 179–201) may be the pre-eminent intellectual technique, but at least (or even) in Gutas’ reckoning, what is obtained thereby may also be obtained in dreams.
On the importance of dreams in Islamic cultural production, see John C. Lamoreaux, The Early Muslim Tradition of Dream Interpretation (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002). As Lamoreaux demonstrates, dream interpretation was not a fringe occupation, but exercised the minds of the cultural elite: see especially 41–42.
See Lamoreaux, Early, 204n13 and 117, for the scriptural support for these well-known prophetic traditions.
That Muslims of all sectarian stripes should consider the evidence of ruʾyā as an integral part of the prophetic legacy, as their share in prophecy after the death of the Prophet, is attested throughout religious literature: see Leah Kinsberg, “Qurʾān and Ḥadīth: A Struggle for Supremacy as Reflected in Dream Narratives,” in Dreaming Across Boundaries, ed. L. Marlow (Boston: Ilex Foundation, 2008): 26–28.
Lamoreaux, Early, 117. He translates ḥulm as “nightmares.”
Kinsberg, “Qurʾān,” 28–29.
Avicenna, Avicenna’s De Anima: Being the Psychological Part of Kitāb al-Shifāʾ (hereafter Nafs/Shifāʾ), ed. F. Rahman (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 178.12, 14–16. All translations from the Arabic are mine unless otherwise indicated. Deborah Black has also translated this book of Nafs/Shifāʾ; her version is available online.
Avicenna, Nafs/Shifāʾ, 178.17–18; here I follow the translation of Alexander Treiger, Inspired Knowledge in Islamic Thought: Al-Ghazālī’s Theory of Mystical Cognition and Its Avicennian Foundation (London: Routledge, 2012), 79, with minor modifications.
Avicenna, Nafs/Shifāʾ, 178.18–21, again following Treiger, Inspired, 79, with modifications.
Treiger, Inspired, 79: “preoccupied with [their] bodies,” which does not do justice to this rare verb. Deborah Black got it right in her unpublished translation of Nafs 4.2, available online only: Avicenna, al-Shifāʾ: al-Nafs, Book 4, trans. Deborah Black, chapter 2, 8 (i.e., page 8 of chapter 2: the chapters in this pdf are not continuously paginated),
Avicenna, Nafs/Shifāʾ, 178.21–179.4.
On the reception of Avicenna’s philosophical account(s) of prophecy in al-Ghazālī, who systematised Avicenna’s various discussions as the “three properties of prophethood” – that is, the use of the imagination to be discussed in this chapter, the use of “intuition,” and the performance of special, miraculous acts – see Afifi al-Akiti, “The Three Properties of Prophethood in Certain Works of Avicenna and al-Ghazālī,” in Interpreting Avicenna: Science and Philosophy in Medieval Islam, ed. J. McGinnis with D. C. Reisman (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 189–212. See also below, section 4.2.
For the debate in a nutshell, see Dag Hasse, “Avicenna’s Epistemological Optimism,” in Interpreting Avicenna: Critical Essays, ed. P. Adamson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 109–19, and Tommaso Alpina, “Intellectual Knowledge, Active Intellect and Intellectual Memory in Avicenna’s Kitāb al-Nafs and Its Aristotelian Background,” Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale 25 (2014): 136–42. A recent article by Stephen Ogden also attempts reconciliation: “Avicenna’s Emanated Abstraction,” Philosophers’ Imprint 20:10 (2020): 1–26.
Avicenna, al-Ishārāt wa-l-tanbīhāt, ed. S. Dunyā, 4 vols., 3rd ed. (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, 1971– 1992); there is an English translation of the parts of the work discussed in this chapter by Shams Inati: Ibn Sīnā and Mysticism: Remarks and Admonitions, Part Four (hereafter, Mysticism) (London: Kegan Paul, 1996). On issues with the Dunyā edition, see Joep Lameer’s essential critique in Joep Lameer, “Towards a New Edition of Avicenna’s Kitāb al-Ishārāt wa-l-tanbīhāt,” Journal of Islamic Manuscripts 4 (2013): 199–248. The two terms in the title are variously translated in scholarship; I use Gutas’ English title. On the late dating of the text and its composition, see Gutas, Avicenna, 155–59.
Inati, Mysticism, 2. Inati cites al-Ishārāt 4.162, where Avicenna urges the reader to “protect this truth from the ignorant, the vulgar, those who are not endowed with sharpness of mind, with skill and experience, those who lend an ear to the crowds, and who have gone astray from philosophy and have fallen behind” (trans. Inati). On Avicenna’s stated intention to keep the work from public dissemination, see Gutas, Avicenna, 155–56 and 158.
We will do just that: see section 4.1.
Gutas, Avicenna, 159.
The term used, namaṭ, is a “way,” like a madhhab, or a “class,” as a sort of thing, or a “course”; the individual “pointers” and “reminders” are like units in modules. Lameer notes that namaṭ also has the sense of a resting point or waystation on a journey: see Lameer, “Towards,” 207n32.
Avicenna, Ishārāt, 4.92–93. The reader may well feel that he has stumbled upon something like al-Bīrūnī’s translation of Patanjali, which was roughly contemporaneous. This “guided path” flavour to the work inspired “fascination with its intricacies and hidden mysteries,” as Ayman Shihadeh put it, leading a later theologian to call it the “ ‘holy book’ (zabūr) of the philosophers”: “Al-Rāzī’s (d. 1210) Commentary on Avicenna’s Pointers: The Confluence of Exegesis and Aporetics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Philosophy, ed. Kh. el-Rouayheb and S. Schmidtke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 307.
Throughout the passages discussed in this section, Avicenna refers not to dreams as “visions” (al-ruʾyā), but to the (ordinary) dream which occurs in the state of sleep: al-manām.
Avicenna, al-Ishārāt, 4.119. These are my translations; for a published translation of this unit, see Inati, Mysticism, 95–108.
The “unseen” may be defined more prosaically as stuff “beyond the reach of present sensation”: al-Akiti, “Three Properties,” 190n8.
Avicenna, al-Ishārāt, 4.119–20.
Avicenna, al-Ishārāt, 4.120. On Avicenna’s regular position that this (and other) typically “prophetic” proficiency is not “exclusive to prophets,” but attainable for all, see al-Akiti, “Three Properties,” 190.
Avicenna, al-Ishārāt, 4.121–24.
That the particulars are “instances of knowledge” is Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s interpretation: see Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, Sharḥ al-Ishārāt, ed. A. Najafzadeh (Tehran: Anjoman-e Āthār va Mafākher-e Farhangī, 2005), 641.
Avicenna, al-Ishārāt, 4.124.
Avicenna, al-Ishārāt, 4.125–26.
This is an issue discussed in the abstraction/emanation dispute, at least when it is transposed to the case of intelligible forms: these cannot be “stored” in the (human) intellect, or it would constantly be engaged with them; rather, they are on loan from the Active Intellect (Alpina, “Intellectual Knowledge,” 139).
Avicenna, al-Ishārāt, 4.128. On the raindrop phenomenon, see Jari Kaukua, “Avicenna on the Soul’s Activity in Perception,” in Active Perception in the History of Philosophy: From Plato to Modern Philosophy, ed. J. F. Silva and M. Yrjönsuuri (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014), 103–4. This process involves the estimative faculty (al-wahm), which is used to fix such images for the other internal faculties.
Avicenna, al-Ishārāt, 4.129–30.
Avicenna, al-Ishārāt, 4.130: the same metaphor is used in Nafs/Shifāʾ, as we will see below (section 4.1), to describe the imitative action of the imagination.
On the related case of hallucinations, see Ahmed Alwishah, “Avicenna on Perception, Cognition, and Mental Disorders: The Case of Hallucination,” in Forms of Representation in the Aristotelian Tradition, Volume One: Sense Perception, ed. J. Toivanen (Leiden: Brill, 2022), 124–47.
Avicenna, al-Ishārāt, 4.132–33.
That is, with the “property” (ḥukm) of something observed; Avicenna, al-Ishārāt, 4.133.
Avicenna, al-Ishārāt, 4.135.
Avicenna, al-Ishārāt, 4.135–36.
Avicenna, al-Ishārāt, 4.137–38. When al-Rāzī speculates about why this is easier for some people than for others, he points out that one may be quite clever and well-trained and yet still fail to attain “knowledge of the ‘unseen.’ ” He characterises the successful knower as one who is as though “dead, such that his motion and perception ceases.” We might think such things are counterintuitive, al-Rāzī says, until we consider that this is precisely how it happens to one dreaming (al-Rāzī, Sharḥ, 638–39).
The calibration of the imagination is discussed at some length, with examples: Avicenna mentions “the Turkish sorcerer” who sprints to the point of exhaustion in order to curtail the influence of the imagination upon the reception of information from the higher world; children and imbeciles are also more susceptible to insights of this sort, although they lack the intellectual capacity to recount them (see Avicenna, al-Ishārāt, 4.137–38).
Avicenna, al-Ishārāt, 4.139.
Avicenna, al-Ishārāt, 4.149, using the translation of Dimitri Gutas, “Imagination and Transcendental Knowledge in Avicenna,” in Arabic Philosophy, Arabic Theology: From the Many to the One, ed. J. Montgomery (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 352.
On how this enthusiasm tends towards mystical readings of Avicenna, see Alpina, “Intellectual Knowledge,” 136–38.
Avicenna, The Metaphysics of the Healing (hereafter, Ilāhiyāt/Shifāʾ), ed. and trans. M. Marmura (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 2005), 356. I use Marmura’s translation throughout, with occasional bracketed interventions.
Avicenna, Ilāhiyāt/Shifāʾ, 360.
Al-Kindī, Risāla fī māhiyyat al-nawm wa-l-ruʾyā, in Rasāʾil al-Kindī al-falsafiyya, ed. M. Abū Rīda (Cairo: Dār al-Fikr al-ʿArabī, 1950), 1:293–311, trans. P. Adamson and P. E. Pormann, in The Philosophical Works of al-Kindī (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2012), 122–33. I use Adamson and Pormann’s translation, hereafter cited as “Al-Kindī, ‘Essence.’ ”
Al-Kindī, “Essence,” 125. See also Helmut Gätje, “Philosophische Traumlehren in Islam,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 109 (1959): 262–64.
Al-Kindī, “Essence,” 126–27.
Al-Kindī, “Essence,” 129. As Pavel Gregoric pointed out to me, it is not clear how al-Kindī would base this claim in Plato; it does resonate with De anima 3.8, however: see 3.8, 431b21–23 and 3.8, 432a1–3. Nevertheless, the process of soliciting knowledge from the celestial intellects by means of the imagination (al-quwwa al-muṣawwira) is reiterated in another Kindian treatise dealing with Platonic “recollection” of these higher forms: see Gerhard Endress, “Al-Kindī’s Theory of Anamnesis,” in Islām e arabismo na península ibérica: Actas do XI congresso da união europeia de arabistas e islamólogos, ed. A. Sidarus (Évora: Universidade de Évora, 1986), 393–402.
That is, according to their essences: precisely in the same way Avicenna put it (see n1 above). Al-Kindī, “Essence,” 129.
Al-Kindī, “Essence,” 129–30.
Al-Kindī, “Essence,” 128.
See Rotraud Hansberger, “How Aristotle Came to Believe in God-given Dreams: The Arabic Version of De divinatione per somnum,” in Dreaming Across Boundaries, ed. L. Marlow (Boston: Ilex Foundation, 2008), 50–77. See also Hansberger’s chapter in this volume.
Hansberger, “How Aristotle,” 52.
Aristotle [pseud.], Kitāb al-Ḥiss, MS Rampur 1752, ed. and trans. R. Hansberger, fol. 42a; see chapter four below. All references to this work depend upon Hansberger’s unpublished edition, following her translation.
Aristotle [pseud.], Kitāb al-Ḥiss, fol. 21b.
Aristotle [pseud.], Kitāb al-Ḥiss, fol. 21b.
Aristotle [pseud.], Kitāb al-Ḥiss, fol. 22a. This process is described in Rotraud Hansberger, “The Arabic Parva Naturalia,” in Noétique et théorie de la connaissance dans la philosophie arabo-musulmane des IXe–XVIIe siècles, ed. M. Sebti and D. De Smet (Paris: Vrin, 2020), 45–75.
Avicenna [pseud.], Risāla al-Manāmiyya [“A Unique Treatise on the Interpretation of Dreams”], ed. Muhammad ʿAbdul Muʿid Khan, in Avicenna Commemoration Volume (Calcutta: Iran Society, 1956): 255–307, for the Arabic text and critical introduction; Muhammad ʿAbdul Muʿid Khan, “Kitāb Taʿbīr al-ruʾyā of Abū ʿAlī Ibn Sīnā,” Indo-Iranica 9 (1956): 43–57, for an English translation.
Dimitri Gutas, “The Study of Avicenna: Status quaestionis atque agenda,” Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale 21 (2010): 51. Nevertheless, it is cited as the work of Avicenna in Hansberger, “How Aristotle,” 65; its authenticity is unquestioned in the lengthy treatment in Lamoreaux, Early Muslim Tradition, 69–76; Gätje (“Traumlehren,” 267–68) treats it as authentic, as do other modern scholars (e.g., Luis Xavier López-Farjeat, “La versión árabe del De divinatione per somnum de Aristóteles y su impacto en Avicena y su teoría profecía,” al-Qanṭara 38:1 (2017): 45–70).
Hansberger, “How Aristotle,” 65–66; Lamoreaux, Early Muslim Tradition, 72–75.
Hansberger, “How Aristotle,” 65, paraphrasing Avicenna [pseud.], Risāla al-Manāmiyya, 294–95.
On “Nachahmung,” see Hans Daiber, “Prophetie und Ethik bei Fārābī (gest. 339/950),” in L’homme et son univers au moyen âge, ed. C. Wenin (Louvain-La Neuve: Éditions de l’Institut supérieur de philosophie, 1986), 2:729–53; see also Hansberger, “How Aristotle,” 73.
The text and translation of this short treatise are presented in Helmut Gätje, Studien zu Überlieferung der aristotelischen Psychologie im Islam (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1971), 132–35. Daiber has shown that it is nothing more than a paraphrase of a few passages in al-Fārābī’s Kitāb Ārāʾ ahl al-madīna al-fāḍila (hereafter “Ārāʾ”): see Daiber, “Prophetie,” 729n1. References below to Ārāʾ are to al-Fārābī, Kitāb Ārāʾ ahl al-madīna al-fāḍila, ed. A. Nader (Beirut: Dār al-Mashriq, 1986).
Gätje, Studien, 133.3–6 (my translation):
الرؤيا حركة للبقايا التي بقيت من المحسوسات، يعني أنّ القوة المتخيلة إذا انفردت بنفسها فارغةً في حال النوم فإنها تعود إلى ما عندها من المحسوسات فتركّب بعضها على بعض وتفصّل بعضها عن بعض وتحاكي المعقولات […]وما يصادف البدن من المزاج .
Gätje, Studien, 133.8 (my translation). This is an interesting passage, insofar as whoever composed this little treatise skipped over a lot of explanation in al-Fārābī to get to this one example: the passage ending at Gätje, Studien, 133.3–7, is parallel to Ārāʾ, 108.8–109.4; this next passage (Gätje, Studien, 133.8) is parallel to Ārāʾ, 111.6–8. Al-Fārābī used a different term for the sexual acts – namely, al-nikāḥ – but I doubt that is significant. The Arabic text in Gätje:
وربما حاكت القوة النزوعية بأفعال الجماع فينهض أعضاؤه للاستعداد نحو فعله .
Reading wa-l-ashyāʾ al-mufāriqa instead of wa-l-ashyāʾ wa-l-mufāriqa, which is presumably just a typographical error in Gätje, Studien, 133.10; my reading is supported in Ārāʾ, 111.14.
Gätje, Studien, 133.9–14 (my translation):
وتحاكي القوة الناطقة بما يحصل فيها من المعقولات التي في نهاية الكمال كالسبب الأوّل والأشياء <و >المفارقة للمادّة .ومتى قويت المتخيلة في شخص لا يستوى عليه المحسوسات فكان حاله في اليقظة كحاله في النوم فإنّه يعود ويرسم رسوماً في المشترك وانفعلت عنها القوّة الباصرة فيحصل رسومها في الهواء الواصل للبصر، ثم يعود فيرسم في القوة المتخيلة ويصير كالمتّحد بالعقل الفعّال ويرى أشياء عظيماً عجيبة .
That is, al-Fārābī, Ārāʾ, 111.12–14 (through “separated from matter”), and 114.3–115.7.
On this theory, see the classic study of Richard Walzer, “Al-Fārābī’s Theory of Prophecy and Divination,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 77 (1957): 142–48, and Daiber, “Prophetie.”
Al-Fārābī, Ārāʾ, 108.3: this is the first sentence of the relevant section in Ārāʾ, “on the cause of dreams” (fī sabab al-manāmāt).
Scholarship has been consistent in rendering ḥ-k-y expressions as “imitation” (see, e.g., Daiber, cited above, 100n62), but at this point, especially given the context of prophecy, we might well be reminded of the “narrative” aspect of the concept: a ḥikāya is a story.
ufqihā: Gätje (Studien, 132), correctly, translates this as “Horizont.” The invocation of the “higher realm” does have some resonance in other spurious sources: cf. the malakūt aʿlā in pseudo-Fārābī, Risālat Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikma, cited in Gätje, “Traumlehren,” 267.
Gätje, Studien, 133.15–135.2 (my translation):
فإنّ النفس إذا تحرّكت نحو أفقها الأعلى بحسب نظرها الإلهي وتجرّدت عن الحواسّ رأت الأشياء البسيطة الروحانيّة، وإذا تحرّكت نحو افقها الأولى بحسب نظرها الطبيعيّ فإنّها تتصفّح الأشياء الجزئيّة التي استعدّت لها من المحسوسات التي لا نظام لها ولا فائدة فيها، وربّما ركّبت هذه الصور تركيباً عبثاً ويسمّى اضغاث أحلام .
Al-Fārābī, Ārāʾ, 115.10.
Avicenna, Nafs/Shifāʾ, 169.8–15 (unless otherwise indicated, all passages from this text are my translations, but see also Deborah Black’s unpublished translation which indicates this pagination).
Avicenna, Nafs/Shifāʾ, 173.9–11.
Avicenna, Nafs/Shifāʾ, 170.9–11 (Black’s translation).
Avicenna, Nafs/Shifāʾ, 170.11–14, 171.13–16.
See Avicenna, Nafs/Shifāʾ, 173.2.
Avicenna, Nafs/Shifāʾ, 174.1–3 (Black’s translation). See also Gutas, “Imagination,” 349.
Avicenna, Nafs/Shifāʾ, 174.5–10 (Black’s translation).
Thus Avicenna, Nafs/Shifāʾ, 176.11: “what is seen from the [celestial] realm.” See also 103n72.
Gutas, “Imagination,” 344.
“Or composite” omitted in four manuscripts (and in Black’s translation): see Avicenna, Nafs/Shifāʾ, 176n3.
Avicenna, Nafs/Shifāʾ, 176.5–8.
Black (p. 11) translates both terms as “to oppose.”
Avicenna, Nafs/Shifāʾ, 176.15.
Avicenna, Nafs/Shifāʾ, 177.8 (Black’s translation).
Avicenna, Nafs/Shifāʾ, 179.8–180.1: it will be noticed that Avicenna’s language and choice of examples follows the Ps.-Aristotle treatise (i.e., the al-Fārābī paraphrase) described above; this may be why muḥākāh (imitation) is his term of choice in this passage. The dreaming subject imitates “hot,” “cold,” and sexy forms.
Gutas, “Imagination,” 350.
On this work, see Gutas, Avicenna, 118–19, and Jules Janssens, “Le Dānesh-Nāmeh d’Ibn Sīnā: un texte à revoir?” Les Études philosophiques 28 (1986): 163–77.
Al-Ghazālī, Maqāṣid al-falāsifa, ed. S. Dunyā (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, 1965). On the nature of the reproduction by al-Ghazālī, see Janssens, “Le Dānesh-Nāmeh,” and Ayman Shihadeh, “New Light on the Reception of al-Ghazālī’s Doctrines of the Philosophers (Maqāṣid al-Falāsifa),” in In the Age of Averroes: Arabic Philosophy in the Sixth/Twelfth Century, ed. P. Adamson (London: Warburg, 2011), 84–85. For a concise account of the Latin reception of the text, see Jules Janssens, “al-Ġazālī’s Maqāṣid al-Falāsifa, Latin Translation of,” in Encyclopedia of Medieval Philosophy, ed. H. Lagerlund (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), 1:387–90.
See al-Akiti, “Three Properties,” for a recent survey of this phenomenon in al-Ghazālī. For the later tradition, see Ayman Shihadeh, “Aspects of the Reception of Avicenna’s Theory of Prophecy in Islamic Theology,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 86 (2012): 23–32.
Al-Ghazālī, Maqāṣid, 371–85. This section corresponds to the final sections of Avicenna, Ṭabīʿiyyāt, Dāneshnāme-ye ʿAlāʾī, ed. M. Meshkāt (Tehran: Anjoman-e Āthār-e Mellī, 1952), 123–46.
Al-Ghazālī, Maqāṣid, 371.
Al-Ghazālī, Maqāṣid, 376.
Al-Ghazālī, Maqāṣid, 378.
This is from the ninth section, describing the second of three “sources” (uṣūl) of miracles. This second case “applies to the rational faculty”; the Arabic text (al-Ghazālī, Maqāṣid, 382) reads:
هي أن تصفو النفس صفاء يكون شديد الاستعداد والاتصال بالعقل الفعال حتى يفيض عليها العلوم .
This is not exactly how Avicenna put it in the Persian text: see Avicenna, Ṭabīʿiyyāt/ Dāneshnāme, 141–45. There are other notable discrepancies between al-Ghazālī and his original.
Dimitri Gutas, “Avicenna v. [that is, the fifth section of the larger article] Mysticism,” in Encylopaedia Iranica 3:1 (1987), 79.
Jules Janssens, “Ibn Sīnā: A Philosophical Mysticism or a Philosophy of Mysticism?” Mediterranea 1 (2016): 50.
See, for example, Jon McGinnis, Avicenna (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 148: Prophecy “is a wholly natural phenomenon”; the prophet is simply that human whose soul is prepared or properly conditioned for such work.
Interestingly, the third arch-heresy of Arabic philosophers, according to al-Ghazālī, was the denial that God can know particulars. Somewhere in the economy of maʿnā-imitation there may be something that could be said to “naturalise” that theological maxim: but that is a topic for another paper.