Sufism and the Perfect Human

From Ibn 'Arabī to al-Jīlī

Fitzroy Morrissey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000029758
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

Studying the history of the notion of the 'Perfect Human' (al-ins?n al-k?mil), this book investigates a key idea in the history of Sufism. First discussed by Ibn 'Arab? and later treated in greater depth by al-J?l?, the idea left its mark on later Islamic mystical, metaphysical, and political thought, from North Africa to Southeast Asia, up until modern times.

The research tells the story of the development of that idea from Ibn 'Arab? to al-J?l? and beyond. It does so through a thematic study, based on close reading of primary sources in Arabic and Persian, of the key elements of the idea, including the idea that the Perfect Human is a locus of divine manifestation (ma?har), the concept of the 'Pole' (qu?b) and the 'Muhammadan Reality' (al-?aq?qah al-Muhammadiyyah), and the identity of the Perfect Human. By setting the work of al-J?l? against the background of earlier Ibn 'Arabian treatments of the idea, it demonstrates that al-J?l? took the idea of the Perfect Human in several new directions, with major consequences for how the Prophet Muhammad – the archetypal Perfect Human – was viewed in later Islamic thought.

Introducing readers to the key Sufi idea of the Perfect Human (al-ins?n al-k?mil), this volume will be of interest to scholars and students interested in Sufism, Islam, religion and philosophy.

Part I

Al-Jīlī’s life and thought

1 Al-Jīlī’s life and work

Al-Jīlī’s life and times

We know relatively little for certain about al-Jīlī’s life. He does not appear in the medieval biographical dictionaries,¹ nor does he seem to have taken on formal students who could write about him.² For this reason, in piecing together the story of his life we are forced mainly to rely on what he tells us in his own writings, a hazardous task, given that his writings constitute Sufi metaphysical literature, not historically minded autobiography. This absence of firm evidence has produced considerable divergence of opinion among scholars who have written about his life.

We can be fairly sure, based on a verse from his poem al-Nādirāt al-‘ayniyyah, that al-Jīlī was born in ce 1365,³ exactly two centuries after Ibn ‘Arabī (b. 1165). With regards to his place of birth, it has variously been proposed that he was born in Baghdad (in the Jīl district),⁴ Yemen (in Abyāt Ḥusayn, a suburb of Zabid),⁵ and, most recently, India (in Calicut on the Malabar Coast).⁶ Similarly, he is said to have died “sometime between 1406 and 1417”,⁷ between 1402/1403 and 1425/1426,⁸ around 1428,⁹ in 1421 or 1428,¹⁰ 1422/1423,¹¹ and, most precisely and most recently, on Saturday 18 November 1408.¹²

While the decisive resolution of these questions requires further evidence, it seems to me that the proposals of Riyadh Atlagh are both the best documented and fit best with what al-Jīlī tells us in his writings and with the fragments of information that can be gleaned from the works of contemporary historians such as Ibn al-Ahdal. Based on a manuscript of al-Jīlī’s Ghunyat arbāb al-samā’ in the British Library, Atlagh proposes that al-Jīlī was born in the trading city of Calicut in southwestern India in 1365 (24 years after the famous traveller Ibn Baṭṭūṭah (d. 1369) made his way through that city), travelled in his youth to Aden in Yemen,¹³ and made his home in the city of Zabid on the western coastal plain of Yemen, where he joined the community of the prominent Sufi master Ismā‘īl al-Jabartī (d. 1403).¹⁴ From his base in Zabid he travelled widely in the Islamic world, visiting Mecca and Medina (in 1387/1388), Mecca again in 1388/1389 and 1396/1397, and Medina again in 1399/1400, India (in 1388/1389), various Persian provinces, including Fars, Azerbaijan, Shirvān and Gīlān (in the early 1390s?), Damascus (in September or October 1400), Gaza (in October or November 1400), Cairo (in March 1401), and Sanaa (in late 1402),¹⁵ before returning to Zabid, where he died not long afterwards (probably in 1408).

Al-Jīlī, then, was a well-travelled Muslim intellectual living in the second half of the fourteenth and early years of the fifteenth centuries. This was a period of considerable political and social turmoil in the Islamic world. In the 1330s and 1340s, the Black Death had swept through the Middle East, probably killing over 100,000 people in Cairo alone.¹⁶ In Iran, the collapse of the Mongol Ilkhānid dynasty in the 1330s “left anarchy and a time of great confusion in its wake”,¹⁷ with the Chubānid, Injūid, Jalayirid, and Muẓaffarid dynasties competing for control. In India, the last decade-and-a-half of the Delhi Sultan Muhammad b. Tughluq’s reign (1325–1351) witnessed no less than 22 serious revolts, a period of instability from which the Delhi Sultanate never fully recovered.¹⁸ In Egypt and Syria, the final years of the Turkish Baḥrī Mamluk dynasty (1250–1382) were likewise marked by considerable political turmoil, with palace coups and revolts led by the rulers’ slave-soldiers the norm rather than the exception. In 1382, the Mamluk throne was usurped by Barqūq, the head of the army, who inaugurated the Circassian Burjī Mamluk dynasty, which was to last until the Ottoman conquest of 1517. Finally, and perhaps most tumultuously of all, in the last decades of the fourteenth and early years of the fifteenth centuries, when al-Jīlī was travelling through the Islamic world and writing his early works, Tīmūr wrought savage destruction from Anatolia to India, razing Isfahan (1398), Delhi (1399), and Damascus (1401), and defeating the Ottomans at the Battle of Ankara in 1402.

The recurring death and destruction of the period in which al-Jīlī lived might be seen as a factor behind his decision to devote himself to the Sufi path and to metaphysical questions such as the relationship between God and the world and the nature of existence. It might even serve as an explanation for his interest in the idea of the Perfect Human, given that the Perfect Human’s role in the preservation of the world is an important part of his idea, as we shall see. While there may be something in this idea, it is probably too simplistic an explanation for al-Jīlī’s interest in Sufi metaphysics, for it overlooks the wider religious and intellectual trends that marked what Marshall Hodgson called the Later Middle Period (c. 1258–1503) of Islamic civilisation (though these trends themselves, of course, may be connected to the political turmoil of that period).¹⁹ There are three tendencies, I think, that are of particular relevance to us. The first is the spread of ṭarīqah Sufism across the Islamic world, a process that touched all levels of the social hierarchy.²⁰ These orders often played an important role in the socio-political sphere (thereby perhaps undermining the notion that al-Jīlī’s devotion to Sufism was a form of escapism),²¹ and also often served as conduits for the ideas of Ibn ‘Arabī, whose works were widely read in the Sufi lodges alongside the works of his interpreters.²² While it is true that certain ‘ulamā’ were strongly opposed to the Ibn ‘Arabian variety of Sufism,²³ it nevertheless seems fair to say that much of the Islamic world (particularly the central and eastern regions) provided a relatively favourable climate for Sufi metaphysical thought in this period.

Second, the Later Middle Period saw belief in the cosmic status of the Prophet Muhammad taken to new levels.²⁴ Literature connected to the mawlid festival celebrating the Prophet’s birthday,²⁵ Sufi poetry such as the Persian mathnavīs of ‘Aṭṭār (d. 1221) and Rūmī (d. 1273) and the Arabic poems of Ibn al-Fāriḍ (d. 1235) and Qasīdat al-Burdah of al-Būṣīrī (d. 1295),²⁶ popular biographies of the Prophet like al-Bakrī’s (thirteenth century?) Kitāb al-anwār,²⁷ manuals of prayers devoted to him, like the Dalā’il al-khayrāt of al-Jazūlī (d. 1465),²⁸ and accounts of dreams in which he appeared, such as al-Zawāwī’s (d. 1477) Tuḥfat al-nāẓir wa-nuzhat al-manāẓir,²⁹ helped to popularise Sufi and other mystically oriented ideas about the exalted metaphysical status of Muhammad, such as the concept of the primordial Muham...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: Al-Jīlī’s life and thought
• PART II: The Perfect Human
• Conclusion: influences and impact
• Index