Cosmogony and the Ten Separated Intellects in the "Rahat Al-aql" of Hamid Al-Din Al-Kirmani

Download or read book Cosmogony and the Ten Separated Intellects in the "Rahat Al-aql" of Hamid Al-Din Al-Kirmani written by Daniel Carl Peterson and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The philosophical system elaborated by the Fatimi Isma$/sp[/rm c]$ili da$/sp[/rm c]$i Hamid al-Din al-Kirmani strongly recalls the scheme of ten separated intel lects laid out by his non-Isma$/sp[/rm c]R$iipredecessor, Abu Nasr al-Farabi The resemblance is striking, but not absolute: At a crucial point, al-Kirmani unexp ectedly rejects the Farabian model of Neoplatonic emanation and opts for creatio n ex nihilo. This study attempts to explain why he did so. To that end, his chie f philosophical work, the Rahat al-$/sp[/rm c]Aql$, is closely compared to al-Fa rabis al-Madina al-Fadila. Plotinus' Enneads and the pseudepigraphic Theology of Aristotle are also examined, to determine what the doctrines and implications o f Neoplatonism are, and just how al-Kirmani does or does not adopt them. Finally, an investigation of certain events in Egypt under al-Hakim attempts to identif y politico-historical stimuli which may have encouraged al-Kirmani to reject ema nationism. Al-Kirmani represents one chapter in the long interaction between two strains of thought--here termed Platonic and Qur'anic--about the relationship b etween God and man. The Platonic view allowed such a relationship, but denied di vine anthropomorphism; the Qur'anic view allowed divine anthropomorphism, but de nied any genetic relationship between man and God. As Hellenistic philosophical notions entered the Islamicate world, the Platonic and Qur'anic viewpoints strug gled for dominance. Among Muslims, Isma$/sp[/rm c]$ilism was precocious in its r ejection of anthropomorphism. Within a century of its emergence into public view, however, a sophisticated Neoplatonic doctrine, still anti-anthropomorphic but problematically implying divine-human interrelation, supplanted its early gnosti c ideology. That the Neoplatonic chain of being had not only ontological and eth ical, but also soteriological implications, created a theological problem for al -Kirmani which grew critical when some of his contemporaries claimed al-Hakim to be divine. The present study argues that, by adopting a philosophical theology which simultaneously denied anthropomorphism and severed the Platonic linkage be tween the human and the divine, al-Kirmani not only perfected an Islamic via neg ativa but undercut the position of his ideological opponents in the formative Dr uze movement.