Science and the occult in the thinking of Ibn Qayyim Al-Jawziyya.

• Author: Livingston, John W.

1. INTRODUCTION IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY, A POPULAR BELIEF in the occult was seen by some to endanger the religious basis of Islamic society. During the previous centuries, especially the tenth and eleventh, the great challenge to the Sunni umma had been Ismaili gnosticism and political revolution. The intellectual reaction to this had come with al-Ghazzali (d. 1111 A.D.) whose literary output reinvigorated the community. A century and a half later, Ismaili political extremism came to an end with the Mongol invasion and destruction of the Nizari mountain fortress at Alamut. The internal challenge of occultism, arising from the ashes of the old, as it were, was seen to be as dangerous to society, as intellectually corruptive and religiously perverse, as had been Ismaili Pythagorean gnosticism in its day. Though it carried with it no armies or secret societies plotting the political demise of Sunni Islam, the new threat did bring along with it a cosmic system that was understood by at least one leading defender of Sunni religious purity to be anathema to the absolute power and unity of God that was the bedrock of Sunni theology. This was the Hanbali jurist and theologian Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, who, inspired by his famous teacher and fellow Hanbali Ibn Taymiyya, devoted himself to the cause of Sunni purity and tradition by waging a life-long war against innovation and religious deviation.(1) Ibn al-Qayyim's attack against what he saw as the invidious popularity of this threat to religion and civilization is found in his book, Miftah Dar al-Saada, a large section of which is devoted to disproving the occult sciences.(2) It is a sharp and comprehensive attack, with arguments taken from every quarter, including even the mathematics, astronomy, physics and logic that his forerunner al-Ghazzali had warned Muslims to shun (though not to reject out-of-hand as that would make of Islam a religion of ignorance), lest their faith be seduced and corrupted by their belief in naturalist scientists, mathematicians, and astronomers whose logical proofs and mathematical precision could be snares for the uncritical and half educated.(3) The occult, or rather a large part of it, had in al-Ghazzali's day been temperately couched in the systemic restraints of an esoteric Ismaili cosmology that made of the universe a macrocosmic being in which the great heavens and microcosmic man on earth found sympathetic resonance as one. Man and the cosmos, science and religion, the physical world and the spiritual were paradigmatically one, as, for example, in alchemy where transmutation from base metal to pure gold stood as a metaphor of purifying the soul to reach higher states of consciousness. This theosophical integration of mathematics, natural philosophy and gnostic speculation appealed to an intellectual elite eager to see manifestations of the unifying principle wherever they looked in the universe, as put forth in the popular treatises of the Ikhwan al-Safa, or Brethren of Purity. When the theosophical restraints imposed by Ismaili cosmologists upon the relationships binding man, soul, astral bodies, number, physical and spiritual transmutation, and the like became a thing of the past with the movement itself, the occult sciences--always practiced in Islamic society to one degree or another as part of its Hellenistic legacy--grew over the centuries. The occult sciences eventually took the place in public notice that the treatises of the Ikhwan had earlier enjoyed, and subsequently turned the old threat to religious purity, the ulum al-awail or sciences of the Greeks, as science and philosophy were called, into an ally in the defense of religion. Ibn al-Qayyim's reliance on arguments drawn from the exact sciences and natural philosophy, curious defenses considering the theological conceptions of the Hanbali traditionist, is a measure of how threatening he perceived the popularity of the occult sciences to be. Curious, because the metaphysical principles of natural philosophy that gave unity to the branches of philosophy--cause and effect, causal chains determining effects over and above God's power to change at will the customary modes of nature's operations, and, unavoidably, the conundrum of free will from below versus determinism from above that came on the coattails of causality--would appear to compromise God's absolute power and eternally predetermined will. Here Ibn al-Qayyim argued as tortuously as had St. Augustine and Ibn Rushd before him, Dante around his time and Erasmus after, each writer working both ends of an implicit contradiction toward the middle that could be reconciled only upon the bedrock of unquestioning faith. In taking up the defense of religion against the expanding incursions of the occult, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya became one of the most forceful and persuasive spokesmen to wield the pen in service of religious and scientific purity. In a reversal of the Islamic rationalist tradition informed by the Hanbali jurist's great Muslim predecessors, al-Kindi (d. 890), al-Farabi (d. 950), Ibn Sina (d. 1038), Ibn Tufayl (d. 1185) and Ibn Rushd (d. 1198), who had all defended philosophy and the non-Arab sciences by referring to scripture, Ibn al-Qayyim employed science to defend a religion cleansed of alien accretions, and in arguing his case incidentally defended a purified rational science and logic free of transmutational alchemy, astrology and augury that he saw as having displaced true science. The creative period in Islamic science extended into Ibn al-Qayyim's time and beyond. But the position of the great scientists of earlier centuries in Islamdom, back when royal patronage of an Abbasid, Samanid, or Fatimid court offered generous support to science, had in Mamluk-ruled Arabic-speaking lands given way to practitioners of the occult; patronage of the philosophical and exact sciences was not an outstanding feature in the courtly culture of the Burji or Bahri sultans, and men pursuing the scientific tradition were then forced to make a living as best they could. Casting horoscopes was an attractive option. Even in the brightest years of scientific creativity many of the greatest astronomers in Islamdom had given some support to astrology in that they believed the formation of heavenly bodies influenced the formation of elemental traits shaping human character. With the general public offering a market of buyers ready to pay for and believe almost anything that was well dressed in logical structure and scientific jargon, and that offered the hope of gain or security in a tumultuous period, the occult prospered. This Ibn al-Qayyim strove to redress as the most pernicious enemy of true religion. Born in Mamluk Damascus in 1292, Ibn al-Qayyim spoke for the literate Arabic-reading Sunni umma at a time when Islamdom was emerging from or undergoing a series of threatening blows--the Crusades, the Mongol destruction of Baghdad and the Abbasid Caliphate, Mamluk political turmoil that was concomitant with the continuing loss of international transport trade to the Venetians, inflationary periods during which Syrians and Egyptians were reported to have eaten dogs and donkeys in the streets, periodic visitations of the Black Plague when people dropped like flies, and a terrifying earthquake that so shook Mt. Muqattam in Cairo that the people in distant Damascus thought that yawm al-qiyama, Judgment Day, had come.(4) To this could be added the continuing loss of Islamic lands to the Spanish conquistadors, an unmitigated catastrophe for Ibn Khaldun, writing less than a generation after Ibn al-Qayyim. These disasters formed in large part the psychological background to the perceived general malaise besetting Islam in the fourteenth century. As in later Hellenistic times, and perhaps our own, people facing political and economic decline, social insecurity and a threatening host of impending disasters found refuge in the occult. The ulema, with Ibn al-Qayyim taking a leading position, saw the occultic sciences as so many pantheistic demons eating away at Islam's spiritual innards, where God's undivided omnipotence was parceled out to stars and birds, and elemental nature was charged with a transmutational potency that appeared to be self-sustained. Far from being a radical Hanbali fundamentalist, Ibn al-Qayyim was a jurist and theologian who possessed a competent knowledge of science and philosophy, in addition to an inclination toward mysticism.(5) In this, too, his career as defender of Sunni purity against an inner threat of intellectual perversion parallels that of al-Ghazzali's. What follows is an analytical review of the Hanbali theologian's arguments against that perversion as expressed in his Miftah Dar al-Sa ada.(6) II. ASTROLOGY AND SOOTHSAYING Most offensive to religion was the claim astrologers and augurers made in regard to their ability to foresee events. As Ibn al-Qayyim saw it, the occultists were laying claim to God's omniscience. Astrologers were the main culprits. They presumed to constrain human and physical nature to act in accordance with the prescriptions of their science, which implicitly claimed an ordered cosmic system governing, or at least influencing, the human level of action.(7) Human events, being patterned on heavenly constructions, were to the trained astrologers as predictable as planetary positions. A man of true religion must accept that only God knows the future. Hence, for all its logical structures, complex mathematical models and intricate meshing of human character and stellar graphics, astrology is but a flawed art riven with contradiction and inconsistency, an art devoid of demonstrable principles whether empirical or intuitive, a path to error and disbelief: "A science is true when it has supporting proofs based ultimately on sense experience and constraints imposed by the rational mind. Astrology is based on nothing but ignorance, conjecture and opinion. It has nothing...