The World of Image in Islamic Philosophy: Ibn Sina, Suhrawardi, Shahrazuri, and Beyond.

• Author: Janssens, Jules

The World of Image in Islamic Philosophy: Ibn Sina, Suhrawardi, Shahrazuri, and Beyond. By L. W. C. VAN LIT. Edinburgh Studies in Islamic Apocalypticism and Eschatology, vol. 2. Edinburgh: EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2017. Pp. viii + 278. $110, [pounds sterling]75.

Given the clear description of the bodily resurrection during afterlife in the Quran on the one hand, and the prevailing idea of the sole survival of the soul in philosophy on the other, Muslim philosophers had to either renounce their religious beliefs or abandon their philosophical convictions. However, a solution for these seemingly incompatible views was elaborated in the Ishraqi school. Its first explicit formulation, namely, "world of suspended images," was related to al-Suhrawardi's acceptance of another world, different from the bodily world. After al-Suhrawardi, it found a more mature expression in the notion of "world of image" ('alam al-mithal), coined by his disciple al-Shahrazuri. However, before al-Suhrawardi, Ibn Sina had already posed a kind of preliminary basis for this idea--the possibility for souls to perceive images in the hereafter, thanks to a link with celestial bodies. The intention of L. W. C. van Lit's book under review is to highlight the crucial steps in the development of this theory, as well as significant elements of its reception in the later tradition.

In the introduction (chapter one), van Lit claims that the main focus of his book is on the notion of 'alam al-mithal, its genesis, and its reception. He insists that he gives priority to al-Suhrawardi (and his commentators), although he had just before (rightly) criticized Henry Corbin (and others after him) for having used the expression 'alam al-mithal in their discussion of al-Suhrawardi's thought. This is somewhat confusing, especially given the book's title, which seems to place al-Suhrawardi--and the expression--on the same level as Ibn Sina and al-Shahrazuri. The introduction offers a valuable survey of contemporary scholarship on al-Suhrawardi and discusses several methodological issues. Van Lit explains the--for his study crucial--distinction between a "close reading" (related to one source) and a "distant reading" (connecting different texts--from F. Moretti's Distant Reading [London, 2013)). Finally, he indicates that he will pay no attention to variants in the quoted texts, which "can be shown to be mistaken in more than one place" (p. 18). If so, why not offer the correct reading?

The second chapter opens with a valuable basic outline of Ibn Sina's view on the use of imagination in the hereafter by the imperfect souls (a well-known doctrine since the seminal study of J. R. Michot, La destinee de l'homme selon Avicenne [Louvain, 1986]). Although van Lit is inclined to believe that this view is original with Ibn Sina, he points to al-Kindi's al-Qawl fi l-nafs and al-Farabi's Ara' ahl al-madina al-fadila as possible sources. But in the former the accent is on the gradual purification of the soul and in the latter on two types of knowledge, i.e., demonstrative and imaginative--not from an eschatological perspective, however, but in the specific context of the relationship between philosophy and religion. All this is far removed from Ibn Sina's doctrine. In the second part of the chapter, van Lit quickly surveys the--for the large part, negative--reception of Ibn Sina's idea in post-Avicennan thinkers with an impressive list of both Sunni and Shii authors. In my view, for such major thinkers as, e.g., al-Ghazali or Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, the information provided is too limited to allow for a proper...