Avicenna's Allegory on the Soul

An Ismaili Interpretation

Wilferd Madelung, Toby Mayer

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781784530884
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857729668
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Eastern Philosophy

I.B.Tauris in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies

The Persian philosopher Ibn Sina (d. 1037), known in Europe as Avicenna, was arguably the greatest master of Aristotelian thought in the Muslim world. The symbolical Poem on the Soul (Qasidat al-nafs), which portrays all earthly human souls as in temporary exile from heaven, is traditionally attributed to Avicenna, and was received with enthusiasm by its commentators. A highly significant commentary on the Qasida was written by ?Ali b. Muhammad b. al-Walid (d. 1215 CE), a major early representative of the Tayyibi Ismaili tradition, which emerged and flourished in medieval Yemen. In his view, the poem encapsulated Tayyibi beliefs, whose doctrines bear striking parallels with late antique Gnosticism. Avicenna s Allegory on the Soul presents the first edition of the Arabic text of Ibn al-Walid s commentary, The Useful Epistle (al-Risala al-mufida), alongside an English translation and extended introduction. It offers invaluable insight into the intricacies of Muslim thought and a deeper understanding of Avicenna s substantial intellectual legacy."

Introduction

Avicennan Allegory: Between Philosophy and Religion

In Muslim dream interpretation (or ‘oneiromancy’, taʿbīr), a pigeon is a beautiful omen. The dove and pigeon family has potent scriptural and cultural associations. While the Christian tradition even views the bird as a symbol of the Spirit (following Matthew 3:16, where it descends in a dove’s form on Jesus at his baptism), the Muslim tradition mainly associates it with another narrative traceable to the Bible: the first evidence for Noah that the world-destroying flood was receding was that his dove returned to the ark with an olive branch.1 This is clearly a motif of great antiquity, as in the Epic of Gilgamesh (ca. 2100 bce), Utnapishtim also releases a dove to try to find dry land and return to him. Such accounts rest on a fundamental behavioural feature of birds of the genus Columbidae, namely, that they can return home from even vast distances. The mysterious mechanism which underlies this ability remains debated, some claiming that navigation is through the use of infrasound, some that it is through an acute sensitivity to atmospheric odours, and some that a specially adapted nerve allows ‘magnetoception’. In view of this homing ability, pigeons were kept and bred as a popular pastime in the great urban centres of the medieval Muslim world. The objective of the sport of pigeon-flying (zajl) was to test from how great a distance a bird could return to its dovecot, and it was claimed that the champion birds (called ‘celestials’, samāwiyyāt) could fly, say, from the Bosphorus to Baṣra at one stretch. From as early as the 3rd/9th century trained carrier-pigeons also had a serious military and intelligence role in Muslim lands by conveying long-distance messages.2 In the medieval Arabic texts contained within this volume, the soul itself is presented as a ‘homing pigeon’ par excellence – descending here from an impossibly remote heavenly abode and then navigating all the way back to it.

1 Franz Rosenthal, tr., The History of al-Ṭabarī (Albany, 1989), vol. 1, p. 357. Also see Genesis 8:6–12.

2 For a detailed study of this subject see Youssef Ragheb, Les messagers volants en terre d’Islam (Paris, 2002). Also see F. Viré, ‘Ḥamām’, Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd ed. (EI2); and Adam J. Silverstein, Postal Systems in the Pre-Modern Islamic World (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 113–114.

This volume involves two distinctive philosophical artefacts from the early 5th/11th century and the late 6th/12th century. The first is a brief allegorical poem, the Qaṣīdat al-nafs (‘The Poem on the Soul’), attributed to Ibn Sīnā (‘Avicenna’), the great master of Muslim Aristotelianism, who was not generally known to be a poet; it is a poem, moreover, with a seemingly anomalous, Platonic portrayal of the soul as fallen down into its earthly, material embodiment which it pre-existed, and from which it may well yet escape. The second is a line-by-line commentary on this poem, entitled al-Risāla al-mufīda, by ʿAlī b. Muḥammad b. al-Walīd, an early leader (dāʿī muṭlaq) of the Ṭayyibī branch of Ismailism which took root and flourished in medieval Yemen. His exegesis is based on Ṭayyibī cosmological teachings which are, in some respects, cognate with those of the Gnostic movements of late antiquity. Based on the idea that our physical universe is overshadowed by, and results from, a primordial rupture in the architecture of the higher, spiritual world, these are unusual doctrines within the intellectual scene of medieval Islam.

Despite his great reputation as a Peripatetic (mashshāʾī), Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥusayn b. ʿAbd Allāh Ibn Sīnā (d. 428/1037) did not just re-work teachings passed down from Aristotle but interwove certain Platonic and Neoplatonic themes in a whole that was more than the sum of its parts. A Platonic debt is felt, for instance, in certain texts by Ibn Sīnā on the human soul’s predicament, development and final salvation. In such texts he limns his teachings in stories rich in imagery, in a manner that echoes Plato’s use of narrative. The latter had articulated his philosophical thought through a dramatic, dialogic format, and also myth. Though the Corpus Platonicum remained neglected in Arabic compared with the Corpus Aristotelicum,3 some knowledge of Plato, unmediated by Neoplatonism, did percolate into Muslim philosophy, for example through quotations by Claudius Galen (d. ca. 216 ce). These included a summary of the Timaeus, that major case of the Platonic ‘reasonable myth’.4 Ibn Sīnā remained unsure of Plato’s value as a philosopher on account of the meagreness of the textual evidence available to him, and Plato’s influence on his narrative experiments is unlikely to have been direct.5

3 Dimitri Gutas, ‘Platon. Tradition Arabe’, in Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques, ed. R. Goulet (Paris, 2012), vol. Va, pp. 845–863.

4 Or ‘truth-like myth’ (Gk. eikôs muthos). In addition to Galen’s summary, the Timaeus came to exist in three translations in Arabic. Abū Bakr Muḥammad b. Zakariyā al-Rāzī moreover wrote an Arabic super-commentary on Plutarch’s commentary on the Timaeus. The Republic, the Sophist, the Phaedo (also in Persian), the Crito, the Laws and the Symposium (but it seems, only Alcibiades’ speech) were made available in Arabic in varying degrees of expurgation, abbreviation and paraphrase. See R. Walzer, ‘Aflāṭūn’, EI2. Also see P. Kraus, R. Walzer, F. Rosenthal and F. Gabrieli, ed., Plato Arabus (London, 1951–1953), 3 vols.

5 Dimitri Gutas, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition: Introduction to Reading Avicenna’s Philosophical Works (Leiden, 1988), p. 38, quoting Ibn Sīnā from the Epilogue to the Sophistics of the Kitāb al-shifāʾ.

Allegories had already been circulating in Arabic philosophy before Ibn Sīnā’s stories came to be viewed as their prime exemplar. It was Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq (d. 260/873), the famous translator of Greek texts into Arabic, who wrote down the first version of Salāmān wa Absāl in Arabic, distinct in its details from Ibn Sīnā’s tale a century and a half later.6 Many allegories feature in the Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ (‘Epistles of the Brethren of Purity’), dating from the first part of the 4th/10th century.7 Ibn Sīnā’s older contemporary and a fellow ranking functionary of the Buwayhids, the philosopher Aḥmad b. Muḥammad Miskawayh (d. 421/1030) showed some interest in the genre, as demonstrated by his text Lughz Qābis (‘The Riddle of Cebes’).8 In view of such precedents, Ibn Sīnā’s symbolic narratives should be seen as forays into an already attested philosophical genre in Arabic, not solely his invention.

6 On a possible, remoter provenance of this story see Shlomo Pines, ‘The Origin of the Tale of Salāmān and Absāl: A Possible Indian Influence?’, in Sarah Stroumsa, ed., Studies in the History of Arabic Philosophy (Jerusalem, 1996), pp. 343–353.

7 The Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ adopt some material wholesale from Plato, notably the Gyges story from the Republic, Book 2 (359d1 ff) which is reproduced in Epistle 52, On Magic, ed. and tr. Godefroid de Callataӱ and Bruno Halflants (Oxford, 2011), pp. 97–99. Also see a recent study of the Rasāʾil’s narrative and allegorical content by Shatha Almutawa, ‘Imaginative Cultures and Historic Transformations: Narrative in Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ’ (PhD thesis, University of Chicago, 2013). An involved allegory about an island of apes is quoted from the Rasāʾil in the course of Ibn al-Walīd’s commentary in our own text.

8 Miskawayh (alternatively, Miskūyah), has here produced an Arabic version of the Pinax or Kebêtos Thêbaiou, a book attributed to Cebes of Thebes, a disciple of Socrates, but almost certainly in reality by a writer of the 1st or 2nd century ce. The tale involves an old man who, for the instruction of some young onlookers, interprets a mysterious picture from the temple of Cronos at Thebes or Athens. The picture’s imagery concerns life’s pitfalls and the development of character. See Aḥmad b. Miskawayh, Le Tableau de Cébès (Laghz Qābis ṣāḥib Aflāṭun), Arabic and French text, ed. and tr. René Basset (Algiers, 1898). Also see Franz Rosenthal, ‘The Symbolism of the Tabula Cebitis according to Abū l-Faraj Ibn al-Ṭayyib’, in Recherches d’islamologie: Recueil d’articles offert à G. Anawati et L.Gard...

Table of contents

• The Institute of Ismaili Studies
• Contents
• Introduction
• Note on the Arabic Edition
• ʿAlī b. Muḥammad b. al-Walīd
• The Epistle Useful in Elucidating What is Enigmatic in the Qaṣīda
• Select Bibliography
• ʿAlī b. Muḥammad b. al-Walīd