ISLAM 622-1200 C.E.

 

Islamic Cosmological Doctrines

 

With the establishment of the Abbasid caliphate, translations of Greek, Syriac, Pahlavi, and Sanskrit sources on the various sciences became available in Arabic, with the result that in addition to the earlier schools of grammarians and poets, traditionalists, commentators, historians and Sufi ascetics, all of whom relied almost entirely upon the Islamic revelation for their knowledge, there now began to appear new schools which also drew from non-Islamic sources. These new schools ranged from the logicians and rationalists, to the astronomers and mathematicians and finally to the followers of the more esoteric forms of Greek, Alexandrian, and Chaldean sciences connected with the Sabean community in Harran.[1]

 

The journey of the traveller through the whole of the visible heavens is a passage across nine celestial spheres of Islamic astronomy. He passes through nine domains.

 

(1) The Moon. The climate inhabited by a people with short trunks and rapid motion.

 

(2) Mercury. A kingdom occupied by people of even shorter trunks but whose motion is slower. They love the art of writing, the sciences of stars, theurgy, magic; they also have a taste for subtle and profound actions...

 

(3) Venus. A region whose inhabitants are extremely beautiful and lovable, who like gaiety and possess no worries. They have a refined taste for music and beauty and are ruled by a woman...

 

(4) Sun. A kingdom whose inhabitants have very large bodies and are very handsome. Their nature is to have great bounty for all that is distant from them...

 

(5) Mars. A kingdom where there dwell a people who bring destruction to earth. They love to wound, to kill, to mutilate, and are ruled by a king who is red in colour and who always inclines toward doing evil. He is said to be seduced by the female ruler already mentioned and to have been inspired by a passionate love...

 

(6) Jupiter. A vast realm whose inhabitants have great wisdom, temperance, and piety and who spread their virtues to all parts of the Universe. They have great compassion for those who are near and far, for those who know him, and for those who are ignorant of their existence. They are of extraordinary radiance and beauty...

 

(7) Saturn. A kingdom whose people tend toward evil but if inclined toward the good they go to the extremes of goodness. they do not hasten in their actions and are accustomed to long delays...

 

(8) Heaven of the Zodiacal Signs. A kingdom of vast space with numerous inhabitants some of whom live alone outside cities. This realm is divided into twelve regions and twenty-eight stations. No group hastens to invade the station of another until that station has been abandoned. All the expatriated travellers described already journey across this realm and revolve about it.

 

(9) The Starless Heaven. A realm at the limit of the cosmos which no one has attained or seen until today... Its inhabitants are spiritual angels, and no human being can have access to it or live in it. From here descends the Divine Imperative and Destiny for all beings below it.[2] [This is the dark beyond the stars of the mystics!]

 

He who is taught a certain road leading out of this clime and who is helped to accomplish this exodus, such a one will find an egress to what is beyond the celestial spheres. Then, in a fugitive glimpse, he describes the posterity of the Primordial Creation, over whom rules as king the One, the Obeyed.[3]

 

At the end of the Isharat, Ibn Sina describes the categories of those who know and the special qualities of the gnostic who is the traveller in the visionary narratives. There are, according to Al-Shaik al-Ra’is, three classes of knowers;

the Zahid, who practices asceticism and is pious,

the Abid, who turns his thought to the sanctity of the Divine,

and the Arif, who knows through illumination and ecstasy.

 

The sole aim of the Arif is to know and to become identified with the Divine. His journey through these stages corresponds to his journey through the cosmos. He leaves the world of illusions for the world of Reality, and when his journey is complete he becomes himself the mirror in which Truth and its cosmic manifestation are reflected. The whole being of the gnostic is transformed by the Truth he has realized in the centre of his being.[4]

 

The adventure of the gnostic in the Salaman wa Absal and his ultimate death symbolize the final stage of the journey from the “roof of the cosmos” to the Divine Presence, and union with God. In leaving the cosmos, the gnostic has integrated within himself all that is positive in the world of manifestation. In order to be able to pass through the cosmic mountain, he has had to possess the virtues of all the domains of the cosmos including the celestial spheres; he has been allowed to fly beyond the cosmos on the condition of having integrated the cosmos within his own being. His spiritual death, which means the return of his soul to its Origin. The gnostic asks permission to enter the city of the King of the Universe in the name of the whole creation. The cosmos prays with him before the Divine Presence and shared with him in the beatitude of the contemplation of the Divine Beauty. The gnostic who has journeyed beyond the cosmos becomes the norm of the Universe and the channel through which all of Nature receives Divine grace. In his union with God, the whole Universe becomes once again integrated into its Transcendent Principle, as his life is the life of the cosmos and his prayers before the Divine throne, the prayer of all Nature before the Divine artisan. [5]

 

 

Night Journey of the Prophet[6]

 

Al-Fattah, praise the Opener and recite

The marvels of that ‘Journey of the Night’.

Our Lord Muhammad lay upon the hill

Safe, whereby the holy city stands,

Asleep, wrapped in a robe of camel’s wool.

 

Dark was the night of grace, and still:

When all the spheres, by God’s commands,

Opened unto him, splendid and wonderful.

 

For Gabriel, softly lighting, touched his side,

Saying: “Rise, thou enwrapped one, come and see

The things which be beyond. Lo! I have brought

Buraq, the horse of swiftness: mount and ride.”

Milk-white that steed was, with embroidery

Of pearls and emeralds in his long hair wrought...

 

‘Ascend!’ spake Gabriel: and behold! there fell

Out of the sky a ladder bright and great,

Whereby, with easy steps, on radiant stairs,

They mounted, past our earth and heaven and hell,

to the first sphere, where Adam kept his gate,

Which was of vaporous gold and silvery squares...

 

Unto the second sphere by that white slope

Ascended they, where Noah held the key;

And twofold was the throng of angels here,

But all so dazzling glowed its fretted cope,

Burning with beams, Muhammad could not see

What manner of celestial folk was there.

 

A third sphere lay a thousand years beyond

If thou shouldest journey as the sun-ray doth,

But in one Fatihah climbed they thitherward.

David and Solomon in union fond

Ruled at the entrance, keeping the Sabaoth

Of ceaseless. The void was paven hard

With paven work of rubies...

 

So they came to the fourth sphere; where there sat

Enoch, who never tasted death; and there

Behind its awful portal Azrael writes;...

 

Next, at the fifth sphere’s entry, they were ‘ware

Of a door built in sapphire, having graven

Letters of flashing fire, the faith unfolding;

‘There is no god save God,’ Aaron sat there

Guarding the region of ‘the wrath of heaven’.

And Isrefel behind, his trumpet holding,...

 

When to the sixth sphere passed they, Moses sped

Its bars of chrysoprase, and kissed our Lord,

And spake full sweet: “Prophet of Allah, thou

More souls of Ishmael’s tribes to the truth hast led,

Than I of Isaac’s.’ Here the crystal sword

Of Michael gave the light they journeyed through.

 

But at the seventh sphere that light which shone

Hath not an earthly name, nor any voice

Can tell its splendour, nay, nor any ear

Learn, if it listened; only he alone

Who saw it, knows how there the elect rejoice.

‘Isa and Ibrahim, and the souls most dear....

 

So to the region of the veils he came,

Which shut off from eternity.

The bars of being where thought cannot reach;...

Then he saw God! Our prophet saw the Throne!

O God let these weak words be forgiven!

Thou, the Supreme, ‘The Opener’, spake at last.

The Throne, the Throne, he saw...

 

...and the day-star’s torch

Was not yet fading when the journey ended.

 

Al-Fattah! Opener! we say

Thy name and worship Thee always.

 

As in the Merkabah mystics’ account of the journey through the seven spheres the goal is reached when the Prophet “saw the Throne” of God.

 

 

Later Islamic Doctrine

Armstrong, K., A History of God, Heinemann, London, 1993

 

Like the Greeks, al-Farabi (d. 908) saw the chain of being proceeding eternally from the One in ten successive emanations or ‘intellects’, each of which generates one of the Ptolemiac spheres: the outer heavens, the sphere of the fixed stars, the spheres of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury and the Moon. Once we arrive in our sublunary world, we become aware of a hierarchy of being that evolves in the opposite direction, beginning with inanimate matter, progressing through the plants and animals to culminate in humanity, whose soul and intellect partakes of the divine reason, while the body comes from the earth. By the process of purification, described by Plato and Plotinus, human beings can cast off their earthly fetters and return to God, their natural home.[7]

 

 

The Assassins as a Secret Society

 

The object of mathematics as studied at the beginning is to conduct the soul from the sensible to the spiritual, since the theory of number is divine wisdom expressed symbolically. First mathematics leads to astrology, which governs all human life as man comes under the influence of the planets. Yet since all men do not live long enough to allow the slow progress through planetary influence to wisdom, God has sent prophets whose teachings may be used by the initiated to speed up the process.[8]

 

As far as we know, the Iams’ilis used grades of initiation from a very early date,... But in the late eleventh century these grades were recognized and renamed by Hassan-i Sabbah as he established the sect known as the Assassins. These were at first seven grades of initiation,...[9]

 

Although the details of the stages of initiation from which these passages are taken derive from a historian writing around 1332 about the Druzes, we may assume that the procedures were not entirely dissimilar from those adopted by the Assassins up to about the same period. The major difference is that the degrees have here increased from seven to nine, perhaps to agree with the nine celestial spheres, that is the seven planetary spheres plus the Sphere of the Fixed Stars and the Empyrean.[10]

There, then, follows a description of the seven Planetary stages of initiation to the highest order of the Assassins.