underground mission — the da'wa, as it is known in Arabic — that
operated in the Iranian province of Khurasan and Sijistan during the
tenth century. In the later part of his life, al-Sijistani was or had
become a supporter of the Fatimids imams, then ruling from their
headquarters far away in North Africa.Al-Sijistani was deeply inspired
by Neoplanotism. His cosmology and metaphysics develop a concept of
God as the one beyond both being and non-being. God is not a
substance, not intellect, nor within the categories that pertain to
the created universe in any way. Intellect is the first existent
being, originated by God as an indivisible whole.
In contrast to many other Islamic philosophers, al-Sijistani insists
that intellect does not divide or separate. The intellect remains a
whole and is universal. Only one intellect engenders by procession the
soul. The soul falls therefore on its higher side within the lower
horizon of intellect whereas its own lower aspect is nature, a
semi-hypostatic being between the spiritual and the physical realm.
The goal of religion and prophecy is to reorient the soul toward its
true higher self and ultimately to return to its original state.
1. Life
Abu Ya'qub al-Sijistani was first and foremost a member of the Ismaili
underground mission — the da'wa, as it is known in Arabic — that
operated in the Iranian province of Khurasan and Sijistan during the
tenth century. His activities and the works he wrote must be seen in
that context; he was a partisan of a specific religious and political
cause that involved the restoration of Shi'ism as the dominant force
in the Islamic world of the time. In addition al-Sijistani was an
important advocate of philosophical doctrines that drew heavily on a
current of Neoplatonism then circulating in intellectual circles of
various kinds in the major centers of Islamic scholarship. For the
latter reason in general and for his clear attachment in his
philosophical writings to a fairly pure form of this branch of ancient
thought, he earned an important place in the history of philosophy,
even though he himself would have insisted that he was not a
philosopher.
Although he is mentioned both in Ismaili and non-Ismaili sources, the
amount of information about his life that survives is scarcely
adequate. Two important details emerge from one of his late works: he
was in Baghdad in the year 934 having just then returned from the
pilgrimage to Mecca, and in about 971 or 972 he composed that treatise
itself. Somewhat later he died a martyr. The one additional fact about
him is a nickname, 'Cotton-seed,' recorded by several observers both
in its Arabic and its Persian forms. By the time he wrote (or revised)
those works of his that are now extant, al-Sijistani was or had become
a supporter of the Fatimids imams, then ruling from their headquarters
far away in North Africa. Hints in his own works and other information
suggests, however, that he may have earlier belonged to a dissident
wing of the Ismaili movement, as was the case with at least two of his
philosophical predecessors in Iran. Accordingly, the works he wrote
prior to his acceptance of the Fatimids as imams, would have been
considered doctrinally false and they, unless revised, were abandoned
and thus did not survive.
2. Neoplatonism
Those now available are certainly not all complete and one exists
solely in a later Persian paraphrase of its original (lost) Arabic.
Critical editions and translations are few in number. Moreover, the
philosophical content in some works far exceeds that of others. It was
al-Sijistani's custom to assemble his material in a series of, often
disconnected, topical chapters and to mix Ismaili doctrinal teachings
with philosophy in alternating, but most often not overlapping, short
sections. Therefore, his Neoplatonism frequently appears in what he
wrote separated — although not always — from his more specifically
religious concerns. Thus his philosophical position becomes apparent
only in portions of his works, in particular certain chapters of his
The Wellsprings, The Keys, Prophecy's Proof, and Revealing the
Concealed. On these titles, their general contents, and the state of
modern studies of them, see Paul E. Walker, Abu Ya'qub al-Sijistani:
Intellectual Missionary (London, 1998) especially the appendix.
The Neoplatonic background to al-Sijistani's thought is fairly
complex. Beginning as early as the middle of the preceding century
several important texts, or portions of them, were translated from
Greek into Arabic, including the widely circulated Theologia,
sometimes called the Theology of Aristotle. Others were a longer
version of this same Theologia, the Liber de causis, and a
doxographical work that goes by the name of the Pseudo-Ammonius. The
Theologia contains for the most part passages from Plotinus's Enneads
IV to VI; the Liber de causis depends ultimately on Proclus's Element
of Theology. All of these texts and others were available to the
Ismaili philosophers —and other Islamic thinkers — by the beginning of
the tenth century. The Islamic world had time by then to digest this
material thoroughly and to begin an elaboration of various specific
doctrines expressed in it. From his position a generation or so later,
al-Sijistani came to Neoplatonism as much from within a nascent
Islamic tradition of it as of his own raw confrontation with specific
individual Greek (or pseudo-Greek) texts, which his own writings
reflect therefore only secondarily.
Nevertheless, the major Neoplatonic influences in the thought of
al-Sijistani comprise a cosmology and metaphysics that adhere closely
to important doctrines of Plotinus, among them an austerely rigorous
concept of God as the one beyond both being and non-being. God is not
a substance, not intellect, nor within the categories that pertain to
the created universe in any way. Intellect is the first existent
being, originated by God as an indivisible whole. It is the source of
all else that exists. In contrast to many other Islamic philosophers,
al-Sijistani adamantly insists that intellect does not divide or
separate. There is only one intellect. It does, however, engender by
procession the soul and the latter again remains a whole and is a
universal. It does, even so, descend in parts into individual
creatures who are thus animated by it. The soul falls therefore on its
higher side within the lower horizon of intellect whereas its own
lower aspect is nature, a semi-hypostatic being at the point of
transition from the spiritual into the physical realm. The goal of
religion and of prophecy is to reorient the soul toward its true
unblemished higher self and ultimately to have it regain its original
sublime existence.
Although the outline of standard Neoplatonic ideas can be observed in
al-Sijistani's thought, there are curiosities that do not seem to
belong. One is his doctrine that God creates by willful fiat — that
is, by issuing a command to be. Another involves the notion that
salvation — the restoration in the soul of its spirituality — is a
historical development that runs upward step by step following the
course of the cycles of prophetic revelations and the religious laws
that each lawgiving-prophet establishes in turn.
3. References and Further Reading
* H. Corbin, Trilogie ismaélienne (Tehran and Paris, 1961)
* H. Corbin, ed., Kashf al-mahjub (Revealing the Concealed)
(Tehran and Paris, 1949), French trans. Corbin, Le dévoilement des
choses caches (Paris, 1988).
* P. Walker, Early Philosophical Shiism: The Ismaili Neoplatonism
of Abu Ya'qub al-Sijistani (Cambridge, 1993).
* P. Walker, The Wellsprings of Wisdom: A study of Abu Ya'qub
al-Sijistani's Kitab al-yanabi' (Salt Lake City, 1994).
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