No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2021
Various models of interreligious relations have been proposed in recent scholarship, including most prominently the several varieties of inclusivism, exclusivism, and pluralism. One abiding presupposition shared across these models takes the religious adherent (or community of adherents) as a unified individual (or collective of such individuals). This assumption overlooks an important feature of the mystical strains of religiosity, which is to negate selfhood. This article seeks to problematize standard scholarly models of interreligious relations by working through and applying to them such mystical understandings of (non-)selfhood, with particular focus on the Islamic mystics Abū Yazīd al-Bisṭamī, Abū l-Qāsem al-Junayd, ʿAbd al-Karīm ibn Hawāzin al-Qushayrī, Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār Nayshābūrī, and Muḥyiddīn Ibn al-ʿArabī. Based on this textual study, I propose an alternative to interreligious dialogue more adequately termed ‘polyglot monologue’ or, in order to avoid pluralistic implications, ‘omnilogue’.
1 I explain these terms and refer to relevant scholarship below. Here, I note only that interest in specifically Islamic elaborations of interreligious relations and related topics is growing, though of course the number of works published in the field still lags far behind that devoted to Christian perspectives. Introductory summaries include: Engineer, Ashgar Ali, ‘Islam and Pluralism’, in The Myth of Religious Superiority: A Multifaith Exploration (ed.) Knitter, Paul F. (Maryknoll, 2005), pp. 211–219Google Scholar; Thomas, David, ‘Islam and the Religious Other’, in Understanding Interreligious Relations (eds.) David Cheetham, Douglas Pratt and David Thomas (Oxford, 2013), pp. 148–171Google Scholar; and the chapter on ‘Submission to a Divinely Willed Diversity: Islamic Pluralism’, in Schmidt-Leukel, Perry, Religious Pluralism & Interreligious Theology (Maryknoll, 2017), pp. 42–53Google Scholar. Book-length studies include: Waardenburg, Jacques (ed.), Muslim Perceptions of Other Religions: A Historical Survey (Oxford, 1999)Google Scholar; Waardenburg, Jacques, Muslims and Others, Relations in Context (Berlin, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schmidt-Leukel, Perry and Ridgeon, Lloyd (eds.), Islam and Inter-Faith Relations (London, 2007)Google Scholar; and Friedmann, Yohanan, Tolerance and Coercion in Islam: Interfaith Relations in the Muslim Tradition (Cambridge, 2009)Google Scholar. Further sources are referenced in the bibliographies of these works.
2 While I am well aware that the Arabic-derived term ‘Sufi’ (Ṣūfī) is not co-extensive with the English term ‘mystic’ for many historical and etymological reasons, given the colloquial adoption of it into the English lexicon as more or less denoting ‘Islamic mystic’, I have not seen any problem in using it in this sense throughout the present article.
3 Throughout this article, I use the EI3 transliteration system for Arabic as well as Persian terms and names; where the same term is used in both languages but transliterated differently in each, I have let linguistic context dictate which version to use. I have typically included diacritical marks in citations where these are missing in the original. Regarding dates, I have chosen to provide these in the ‘common era’ (ce) calendar for simplicity, particularly given that the Arabic and Persian contexts use differing systems (that is, the lunar as opposed to the solar Hijri calendar respectively).
4 See in this regard the discussion in Ernst, Carl W., Words of Ecstasy in Sufism (Albany, 1985), pp. 49–51Google Scholar, in which the author traces the ultimately quite artificial repartitioning of Sufis between these two schools back to the Kashf al-Maḥjūb (Unveiling of the Veiled) of ʿAlī al-Hujvīrī (circa 990–1077). For a more recent scholarly assessment of the distinction, see Mojaddedi, Jawid, ‘Getting Drunk with Abu Yazid or Staying Sober with Junayd: The Creation of a Popular Typology of Sufism’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 66, 1 (2003), pp. 1–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Sells, Michael A., Early Islamic Mysticism: Sufi, Qur'an, Mi'raj, Poetic and Theological Writings (New York, 1996), p. 97Google Scholar. Both for the sake of readers’ convenience and on account of the excellence of its translations, I have used Sells’ anthology for citations from Bisṭamī, Junayd, Qushayrī and related authors throughout. I provide bibliographical details of original source texts ad locum below; these can also be found in Sells’ notes to the relevant chapters (pp. 322–374). For details regarding the source texts and translations for ʿAṭṭār and Ibn al-ʿArabī, see notes 35 and 42 below.
6 Studies of Islamic mysticism in relation to interreligious relations include Reza Shah-Kazemi, ‘Light Upon Light? The Qurʾan and the Gospel of St. John’, in Interreligious Hermeneutics, (eds.) Catherine Cornille and Christopher Conway (Eugene, 2010); Mahmut Aydin, ‘A Muslim Pluralist: Jalaluddin Rûmi’, in The Myth of Religious Superiority, (ed.) Knitter, pp. 220–236; Stepien, Rafal, ‘Rūmī, Balkhī, Mevlevī: The Ambiguities of Identity in the Poetry of Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad (1207–1272 ce)’, in In Quest of Identity: Studies on the Persianate World, (eds.) Michałak, Mirosław and Zaborowska, Magdalena (Warsaw, 2015)Google Scholar; and the section on ‘The Impact of Islamic Mysticism’, in Schmidt-Leukel, Religious Pluralism & Interreligious Theology, pp. 48–53, where (passing) mention is made of both Junayd and Ibn al-ʿArabī among other Islamic mystics.
7 Sells, Early Islamic Mysticism, p. 80. For Jaʿfar's original text, see Nwyia, Paul, ‘Le Tafsīr Mystique Attribué a Ga'far Ṣādiq: Édition Critique’, Mélanges de l'Université Saint-Joseph 43 (1968), pp. 181–230Google Scholar.
8 Schimmel, Annemarie, As Through a Veil: Mystical Poetry in Islam (New York, 1982), p. 218Google Scholar.
9 For detailed discussion of jihād al-nafs from the Sufi perspective, see Chapter 3 on ‘Jihād al-Nafs: The Spiritual Struggle’, in Richard Bonney, Jihād: From Qur’ān to bin Laden (Basingstoke, 2004), pp. 91–107.
10 Qurʾān 5:35; ‘Abdullah Yūsuf ‘Alī (trans.), The Meaning of the Holy Qur’ān (Beltsville, 1998), p. 258, and Qurʾān 9:88; ‘Alī, Holy Qur’ān, p. 463. All quotations from the Qurʾān will cite the sūrah and āyah (chapter and verse) number, and are taken from the ‘Alī translation, which includes the original Arabic text.
11 Qurʾān 29:6; ‘Alī, Holy Qur’ān, p. 988.
12 See in this regard the comment by Sells, Early Islamic Mysticism, p. 45: “the ground of Qur'anic revelation is the affirmation of divine unity”.
13 The latest scholarly introduction to Baqlī is Murata, Kazuyo, Beauty in Sufism: The Teachings of Rūzbihān Baqlī (Albany, 2017)Google Scholar.
14 See Ernst, Words of Ecstasy in Sufism, p. 93, where the author quotes Baqlī as saying: “Creation, in the beginning of the act of creating, was ‘approved (mustaḥsan)’ in (the state of) essential union (ʿayn-i jamʿ). To become other than that, (to fall) from its own place, in reality is infidelity” (italics and additions in the original).
15 Corbin, Henry, Histoire de la philosophie islamique (Paris, 1986), p. 357Google Scholar.
16 Ernst, Words of Ecstasy in Sufism, p. 10.
17 See Schimmel, As Through a Veil, p. 219. Also known as the ‘Murdered Sheikh’ (Shaykh al-maqtūl), Sohravardī was in fact executed for heresy on account of just such pronouncements. For longer discussions concerning this controversial figure and his philosophy and legacy, see e.g. Schimmel, Annemarie, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Lahore, 2003), pp. 259–263Google Scholar, and Corbin, Histoire de la philosophie islamique, pp. 285–305. Book-length studies include Razavi, Mehdi Amin, Suhravardi and the School of Illumination (Richmond, 1997)Google Scholar, and Henry Corbin, En Islam iranien: aspects spirituels et philosophiques, vol. II: Sohrawardi et les Platoniciens de Perse (Paris, 1971).
18 Three of the most famous are the Book of Flashes (Kitāb al-Lumaʿ) of Abū Naṣr al-Sarrāj (d. 988), which includes comments by Junayd; the Ranks of the Sufis (Ṭabaqāt al-ṣūfīya) (somewhat misleadingly, given the standard rendering of walī (pl. awliyā̫ʾ) rather than ṣūfī as ‘friend of God’, translated Ranks of the Friends of God by Sells, Early Islamic Mysticism, p. 24) of Abū ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Solamī (d. 1021); and the Commentary on Ecstatic Sayings (Sharḥ-e Shaṭḥīyāt) of Rūzbehān Baqlī. Bisṭamī himself is aching to receive a modern scholarly monograph devoted to him; the best summary of his life, works, and teachings remains: Gerhard Böwering, “Besṭamī, Bāyazīd”, Encyclopaedia Iranica, Vol. IV, Fasc. 2 (Encyclopaedia Iranica Foundation, 1989), pp. 183–186, consulted online at: <http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/bestami-bastami-bayazid-abu-yazid-tayfur-b> (accessed 8 October 2020).
19 In Sells Early Islamic Mysticism, p. 215, italics in the original. As Sells notes, ‘unity’ here translates ‘waḥdāniyya’, ‘subjectivity’ ‘anāniyya’, and ‘oneness’ ‘aḥadiyya’ (p. 352). For the original texts of Bisṭamī (and Ṣarrāj, cited below), see Abū Naṣr ‘Abdallah B. ‘Alī al-Sarráj al-Ṭusi, The Kitáb al-Luma‘ Fi ’l-Taṣawwuf, (ed.) Nicholson, R. A. (Leiden and London, 1914), pp. 380–395Google Scholar. In translating such passages, Sells deliberately avoids capitalising pronomial references to God so as to preserve “the ambiguity over the object seen (him/it) [which] becomes a centrepiece of linguistic play and mystical meditation” (p. 82) in texts such as this. He explains that: “Because we are in the context of fanāʾ (passing away) in which the Sufi passes away in mystical union with the divine, the standard grammatical distinction between self and other, human and divine, reflexive and non-reflexive, begins to break down” (p. 82). Not only do I agree with this principle on hermeneutic grounds, but I consider the absence of a distinction between upper and lower case in both the Arabic and the Persian languages of the original texts under discussion to necessitate such praxis in English-language translation to the extent possible. See Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, p. 49 for an alternative rendering of this saying.
20 In Sells, Early Islamic Mysticism, pp. 216 and 218. See also in regard to this ḥadīth a variant mentioned on p. 353. I will leave undiscussed the entire issue of the disputed status of ‘divine’ aḥādīth such as this, which are considered, like the Qurʾān, to be the actual word of God, and yet do not form part of the Qurʾān. See also Junayd's comments upon this ḥadīth (in Sells, Early Islamic Mysticism, p. 261), which obviously caused him quite some tribulation: “Now if he is the hearing with which he hears and the seeing with which he sees, then how can that be given a how? How can it be delimited in such a way as to be accessible to a category of knowledge?”
21 See in this regard Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, p. 59.
22 The standard book-length source in English on Junayd remains Kader, Ali Hassan Abdel, The Life, Personality and Writings of Al-Junayd (London, 1962)Google Scholar, which includes Junayd's original texts. For a summary, see also, Arthur J. Arberry, “al-D̲j̲unayd”, in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition, (eds.) P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (Leiden, 2012), consulted online at <http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_SIM_2117> (accessed 8 October 2020).
23 See in this regard Sells, Early Islamic Mysticism, p. 222, who calls this “the passing away of passing away… in which the Sufi passes away from consciousness of passing away”.
24 Ibid., p. 255.
25 In Ibid., p. 255.
26 In Ibid., p. 254.
27 The image of the ocean and drop is taken from Mawlānā Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (1207–72); for discussion, see Schimmel, Annemarie, The Triumphal Sun: A Study of the Works of Jalaloddin Rumi (London, 1980), pp. 79 and 315Google Scholar.
28 See in this regard Junayd's comment on Bisṭamī's requesting to be adorned with God's unity: “These are the words of one who has not been clothed with the realities of the experience of tafrīd (singularity) in the completeness of the true tawḥīd” (in Sells, Early Islamic Mysticism, p. 216).
29 For recently-published book-length studies of Qushayrī, see Nguyen, Martin, Sufi Master and Qur'an Scholar: Abū'l-Qāsim al-Qushayrī and the Lạtā'if al-ishārāt (Oxford, 2012)Google Scholar; and ‘Al-Qushayrī and His Legacy’ (special issue, (eds.) Martin Nguyen and Matthew Ingalls), Journal of Sufi Studies 2, 1 (2013).
30 In Sells, Early Islamic Mysticism, p. 141. For Qushayrī's original text, see Al-Risāla al-Qushayriyya fī al-Taṣawwuf, (eds.) ʿAbd al-Kalīm Maḥmūd and Maḥmūd ibn al-Sharīf (Cairo, 1966).
31 In Sells, Early Islamic Mysticism, p. 120.
32 Ibid., p. 114.
33 Ibid., p. 132. In his note to this quote, Sells states what he calls “a fundamental theological point”; that is, that “In Sufi understanding of mystical union, there is no ‘meeting of two parties’, but rather one party disappears and the other emerges” (p. 341). While this may be true of one such as Qushayrī eager to avoid the charge of unification (ittiḥād – from the same root as tawḥīd), the positions of Bisṭamī and Junayd we have already seen are significantly more ambiguous; we will see below, moreover, that explicit affirmation of mutual inter-penetration, inter-identification, or inter-unification is far from taboo in the writings of Ibn al-ʿArabī.
34 Sells, Early Islamic Mysticism, pp. 120 and 121, italics and addition added.
35 In the limited space available here, I will look only at a very few passages from the Manṭeq al-ṭayr or Speech of the Birds, and the Asrār nāmeh or Book of Secrets. Translations are my own. For the original Persian texts, see Shaykh Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār Nayshābūrī, Manṭeq al-ṭayr, (ed.) Muḥammad Reżā Shafīʿī Kadkanī (Tehrān, 1384 shamsī / 2005–6 ce); and Shaykh Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār Nayshābūrī, Asrār nāmeh, (ed.) Muḥammad Reżā Shafīʿī Kadkanī (Tehrān, 1386 shamsī / 2007–8 ce). For a much more detailed study of ʿAṭṭār on related themes, and one from which I have had occasion to draw directly here, see Stepien, Rafal, ‘A Study in Sufi Poetics: The Case of ʿAṭṭār Nayshābūrī’, Oriens 41, 1 (2013), pp. 77–120CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The definitive monograph on ʿAṭṭār remains Hellmut Ritter, The Ocean of the Soul: Man, the World and God in the Stories of Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār, translated by John O'Kane, (editorial assistance) Bernd Radtke (Leiden, 2003). For a more recent volume comprising contributions by many of the major contemporary scholars on ʿAṭṭār, see Leonard Lewisohn and Christopher Shackle (eds.), ʿAṭṭār and the Persian Sufi Tradition: The Art of Spiritual Flight (London, 2006), and on the topic under consideration here especially the chapters by Leili Anvar-Chenderoff, ‘‘Without Us, from Us We're Safe’: Self and Selflessness in the Dīwān of ʿAṭṭār’ (pp. 241–254), and Eve Feuillebois-Pierunek, ‘Mystical Quest and Oneness in the Mukhtār-nāma Attributed to Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār’ (pp. 309–329) therein.
36 ʿAṭṭār, Manṭeq al-ṭayr, v. 3999.
37 ʿAṭṭār, Asrār nāmeh, vv. 1584–5. For further discussion of these and the precedently cited verses, as well as explanation of my use of ‘It’, see Stepien, ‘A Study in Sufi Poetics’, pp. 112, 104, and 82 fn. 18.
38 ʿAṭṭār, Manṭeq al-ṭayr, vv. 4005 and 4011–2; see also Stepien, ‘A Study in Sufi Poetics’, p. 113. ‘Borāq’ is the name of the horse-like beast which the Prophet is said to have ridden on his Ascension (meʿrāj). These verses are reminiscent of Bisṭamī's statement:
I came upon the domain of nothingness (laysīyya). For ten years I continued flying in it until I arrived from nothing in nothing through nothing. Then I came upon perdition, which is the domain of tawḥīd. I continued to fly through nothing in perdition until I was lost in the loss of being lost. I was lost to the extent that I was lost from perdition in nothing, nothing in the loss of perdition. Then I came upon tawḥīd in the vanishing of creatures from the knower and the vanishing of the knower from creatures (in Sells, Early Islamic Mysticism, pp. 222–223).
39 ʿAṭṭār uses a wide variety of terms (and the proper names of certain Sufis, including – often – that of Abū Yazīd al-Bisṭamī (Bāyazīd Basṭāmī in ʿAṭṭār's Persian) to designate this category of antinomian, anti-establishment seekers, whose role often merges with that of the ‘holy beggars’ (darvīsh). They are generally referred to as ‘insane savants’ ʿoqalā-ye majānīn) in the wider Islamic context. For more on this figure in ʿAṭṭār's poetry, see Ritter, The Ocean of the Soul, pp. 165–187, and, more recently, Lucian Stone, ‘Blessed Perplexity: The Topos of Ḥayrat in ʿAṭṭār's Manṭiq al-ṭayr’, in ʿAṭṭār and the Persian Sufi Tradition, (eds.) Lewisohn and Shackle, pp. 95–111. For a discussion of ‘mōrosophia’ or “the way of foolish wisdom” (p. 18) specifically as a resource for interreligious relations, see Peter C. Phan, Being Religious Interreligiously: Asian Perspectives on Interfaith Dialogue (Maryknoll, 2004), pp. 3–22.
40 ʿAṭṭār, Manṭeq al-ṭayr, vv. 3832–7. My use of masculine pronouns here is in accordance with ʿAṭṭār's original, which speaks explicitly of a mard-e ḥayrān (‘bewildered man’). While the Persian term ‘mard’, like the English ‘man’, can well apply to the whole of humanity, considerations of both the sense and fluency of the translation of this passage led to the rendering given.
41 Leonard Lewisohn, ‘Sufi Symbolism in the Persian Hermeneutic Tradition: Reconstructing the Pagoda of ʿAṭṭār's Esoteric Poetics’, in ʿAṭṭār and the Persian Sufi Tradition, (eds.) Lewisohn and Shackle, p. 279, italics in the original.
42 Chittick, William C., The Sufi Path of Knowledge (Albany, 1989), p. 10Google Scholar. All citations and translations from Ibn al-ʿArabī are taken from this authoritative source, which together with its follow-up volume—William C. Chittick, The Self-Disclosure of God: Principles of Ibn al-ʿArabī's Cosmology (Albany, 1998)—remain the best book-length introductions to Ibn al-ʿArabī's thought. For Ibn al-ʿArabī's original text, see Al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, (ed.) O. Yahia (Cairo, 1972).
43 Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, p. 127.
44 He says:
Though Being is One Entity, the entities of the possible things have made It many, so It is the One/Many (al-wāḥid al-kathīr)… Without Him, we would not be found, and without us, He would not become many through the many attributes and the names diverse in meaning which He ascribes to Himself. The whole situation depends upon us and upon Him, since through Him we are, and through us He is (Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, p. 214).
Corbin glosses the whole situation as follows:
[E]ach being is an epiphanic form (maẓhar, majlà) of the Divine Being, who in it is manifested as invested in one or more of His Names. The universe is the totality of the Names by which He is named when we name Him by His Names. Each divine Name manifested is the lord (rabb) of the being who manifests it (that is, who is its maẓhar). Each being is the epiphanic form of his own Lord (al-rabb al-khāṣṣ), that is, he manifests only that aspect of the divine Essence which in each case is particularized and individualized in that Name. No determinate and individualized being can be the epiphanic form of the Divine in its totality, that is to say, of all the Names or ‘Lords’ (Henry Corbin, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sūfism of Ibn ‘Arabī, (trans.) Ralph Manheim (Princeton, [1969] 1997), p 121.
Note also that Ibn al-ʿArabī's statement above to the effect that “through us He is” directly challenges the “fundamental theological point” made by Michael Sells cited above (see note 33). Ibn al-ʿArabī makes this point in various ways throughout his writings, as cited, for example, in Corbin, Alone with the Alone, pp. 124 and 129 respectively: “By knowing Him, I give Him being”; “We have given Him the power to manifest Himself through us, Whereas He gave us (the power to exist through Him). Thus the role is shared between Him and us.”
45 See in this regard Sells’ study of what he calls “mystical languages of unsaying”, wherein he reads Ibn al-ʿArabī, among others, as engaging in “a discourse of double propositions, in which meaning is generated through the tension between the saying and unsaying” (Michael A. Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago, 1994), p. 12).
46 In Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, p. 94.
47 Ibid., pp. 116 and 149 respectively. Ibn al-ʿArabī refers explicitly to Junayd in the passage from which the latter quote is taken, and indeed the entire ‘He/not He’ motif may be seen to be prefigured in passages by Junayd such as the one cited in note 26 above.
48 Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, p. 29. See also, among many possible examples, “Every existent thing other than God dwells in a never-never land of affirmation and negation, finding and losing, knowing and not-knowing. The difference between the Finders and the rest of us is that they are fully aware of their own ambiguous situation” (pp. 3–4); “The outstanding feature of the cosmos is its ambiguous status, the fact that it is He/not He” (p. 18); and “Ambiguity… is an ontological fact, inherent in the nature of the cosmos. Nothing is certain but Being Itself, yet It is the ‘coincidence of opposites’ (jamʿ al-aḍdād), bringing all opposites together in a single reality” (p. 112).
49 Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, p. 362.
50 Ibid., p. 375.
51 Ibid., p. 372.
52 For omnibus compendia delineating the state of the field, see Cheetham, Pratt, and Thomas, Understanding Interreligious Relations; and Catherine Cornille (ed.), The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Inter-Religious Dialogue (Chichester, 2013). For critical engagement with many of the issues surrounding competing models of interreligious relations, see Hedges, Paul, Controversies in Interreligious Dialogue and the Theology of Religions (London, 2010)Google Scholar; and Quinn, Philip L. and Meeker, Kevin (eds.), The Philosophical Challenge of Religious Diversity (Oxford, 1999)Google Scholar.
53 Gerhard Böwering, ‘Baqāʾ wa fanāʾ’, Encyclopaedia Iranica, Vol. III, Fasc. 7 (Encyclopaedia Iranica Foundation, 1988), pp. 722–4, consulted online at: <http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/baqa-wa-fana-sufi-term-signifying-subsistence-and-passing-away> (accessed 8 October 2020).
54 To refer the matter to the relevant debate in the study of mystical experience, I thus side with the contextualist-constructivist approach associated with the likes of Steven Katz and Wayne Proudfoot over the universalist-perennialist approach associated with the likes of Robert Forman and Walter Stace. For details, see e.g. Katz, Steven T. (ed.), Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (New York, 1978)Google Scholar; Proudfoot, Wayne, Religious Experience (Berkeley, 1985)Google Scholar; Forman, Robert K. C. (ed.), The Problem of Pure Consciousness: Mysticism and Philosophy (New York, 1990)Google Scholar; and Stace, Walter T., Mysticism and Philosophy (London, 1961)Google Scholar.
55 Courtney Bender and Pamela E. Klassen, ‘Introduction: Habits of Pluralism’, in After Pluralism: Reimagining Religious Engagement, (eds.) Courtney Bender and Pamela E. Klassen (New York, 2010), p. 1.
56 One particularly influential defence of the standard typology is that of Perry Schmidt-Leukel, ‘Exclusivism, Inclusivism, Pluralism: The Tripolar Typology – Clarified and Reaffirmed’, in The Myth of Religious Superiority, (ed.) Knitter, pp. 13–27. The typology is assumed, albeit as standing in “need of numerous refinements” (p. 11) by McKim, Robert, On Religious Diversity (New York, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and is taken as the starting point for discussion of interreligious relations, religious diversity, and religious dialogue throughout relevant scholarship.
57 Hick, John, ‘Religious Pluralism’, in Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Religion, (eds.) Meister, Chad and Copan, Paul (Abingdon, 2012), p. 246Google Scholar. Hick's ‘pluralistic hypothesis’ is spelled out most influentially in John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent (New Haven, 1989) (2nd edition, 2004), though Hick has continued to reiterate and revise his hypothesis in a multitude of works (for which, see the list in John Hick, The Rainbow of Faiths [London, 1995], p. 151). Hick's position has, predictably, also come under criticism from various quarters, perhaps most conspicuously by Gavin D'Costa (see especially Gavin D'Costa, John Hick's Theology of Religions: A Critical Examination [New York and London, 1987]) and Alvin Plantinga (see especially Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief [Oxford, 2000]). For a compendium of dissenting views, see Gavin D'Costa (ed.), Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered (New York, 1990). Hick's The Rainbow of Faiths is a book-length response to various critiques; this includes an extensive list of critical discussions in the form of ‘Appendix II’, pp. 151–156.
58 Harold A. Netland, ‘Inclusivism and Exclusivism’, in Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Religion, (ed.) Meister and Copan, p. 255. For his part, Perry Schmidt-Leukel defines exclusivism as maintaining that “salvific knowledge of a transcendent reality is mediated by only one religion”; inclusivism as maintaining that “salvific knowledge of a transcendent reality is mediated by more than one religion (not necessarily by all of them), but only one of these mediates it in a uniquely superior way”; and pluralism as maintaining that “salvific knowledge of a transcendent reality is mediated by more than one religion (not necessarily by all of them), and there is none among them whose mediation of that knowledge is superior to all the rest” (Schmidt-Leukel, ‘Exclusivism, Inclusivism, Pluralism’, pp. 19–20). (This article also provides a typology of and responses to critiques of the threefold typology.) Of course, I am well aware that my summary elides important distinctions within the dominant threefold typology that I am adumbrating, such as between extreme and aspectual pluralism, Trinitarian and Christological inclusivism, or theological and formal exclusivism, for instance. Since my stated argument is a general one (one, moreover, which I consider valid across these various sub-types), I hope to be forgiven for painting my picture here in rather broad strokes.
59 Azal and abad are technical terms in Islamic mysticism usually translated as ‘pre-eternity’ and ‘post-eternity’ respectively. I have preferred to devise ‘preternity’ and ‘posternity’ (and their adjectival forms ‘preternal’ and ‘posternal’) as potentially more eloquent alternatives hopefully susceptible to incorporation into the English language.
60 For a detailed study of the ‘abandonment of all views’ (sarvadṛṣṭiprahāṇāya) in the pivotal Buddhist thinker Nāgārjuna (circa 150–250), see Rafal K. Stepien, ‘Abandoning All Views: A Buddhist Critique of Belief’, The Journal of Religion 99, 4 (October 2019), pp. 529–66. While I see numerous parallels with this notion among Christian mystics in the form, for example, of Meister Eckhart's (circa 1260-circa 1327) position vis-à-vis what he calls “God beyond God” (Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense, [trans.] Edmund Colledge and Bernard McGinn [Mahwah, 1981], p. 35; for further details, see Bernard McGinn, ‘The God beyond God: Theology and Mysticism in the Thought of Meister Eckhart’, The Journal of Religion 61, 1 [January 1981], pp. 1–19), I will leave it to scholars of Christianity to advance, or reject, that particular claim based on their own expertise.
61 The reference is to Ibn al-ʿArabī's statement that “The Muhammadan is only distinguished by the fact that he has no station specifically. His station [maqām] is that of no station [lā maqām]” (in Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, p. 377).
62 Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, p. 341.
63 Ibid., p. 345.
64 See Ibid., p. 356: “We are faced with plurality wherever we look, though not necessarily an ontological plurality, since there is only One Being.”
65 Ibid., p. 343.
66 Ibid., p. 340. See also p. 347: “Each ‘belief’ ties a knot in the heart of the believer and fixes him upon a path, the object of his belief being the end of the path.”
67 Ibid., p. 353.
68 Ibid., p. 375.
69 Ibid., p. 346.
70 In Ibid., p. 352.
71 In Ibid., p. 340.
72 In Ibid., p. 349.
73 See Ibid., p. 354.
74 This is reminiscent of Bisṭamī's quip that “Those who are unable to bear pure knowing, he has occupied with worship” (Sells, Early Islamic Mysticism, p. 237).
75 As Evelyn Underhill wrote of John Tauler (circa 1300–61), disciple of Meister Eckhart, his sermons “are trumpet-calls to heroic action upon spiritual levels”. See Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness (Woodstock, [1910] 2017), p. 241.
76 The class of mystics is hardly co-extensive with that of monastics, of course, but insofar as a substantial portion of the world's mystics have been monastics, and insofar as monastics – like mystics – are typically invested with religious authority precisely in proportion with their perceived holiness, Pierre-François De Béthune's discussion of interreligious dialogue as undertaken by monastics may be a useful companion to my discussion here. See Pierre-François De Béthune, ‘Monastic Inter-Religious Dialogue’, in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Inter-Religious Dialogue, (ed.) Cornille, pp. 34–50.
77 My notion of ‘ultimate irreligiosity’, as elaborated here through study of Islamic mystics, may be found to correspond in ways worthy of further exploration to what, in a Christian context, John Caputo calls “mystical atheism”. Regarding this, see Caputo, John D., ‘Fundamental Themes in Meister Eckhart's Mysticism’, The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review 42, 2 (April 1978), p. 211CrossRefGoogle Scholar; the notion is also referred to in McGinn, ‘The God beyond God’, p. 10.
78 Aydin, ‘A Muslim Pluralist’, p. 234. Aydin is referring specifically to Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, but his comments elsewhere regarding “a core mystical experience in different faiths… [and thus] a core Mystical Reality within all of them” (p. 222) and “a type of universal faith belonging to all religions” (p. 227) justify, to my mind, extrapolation.
79 Hick, ‘Religious Pluralism’, p. 244.
80 Ibid., p. 245.
81 In Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, p. 357. Cf. also the analogous distinction between ‘Being’, “attributed to God in respect of His incomparability”, and ‘existence’, “attributed to Him in respect of His similarity” (p. 337). More generally, the distinction between what Hick, drawing on Kant, refers to as the ‘noumenal’ and the ‘phenomenal’ aspects of God can be found denominated by various terminological distinctions throughout Sufi literature.
82 Schmidt-Leukel, Religious Pluralism & Interreligious Theology, pp. 48–49.
83 See for example the statement by S. Ayse Kadayifci-Orellana opening her section on ‘Objectives of inter-religious dialogue’: “Within the context of peacebuilding, most dialogues aim to facilitate a change from narrow, exclusionist, antagonistic, prejudiced attitudes and perception, to a more tolerant and open-minded attitude”. See S. Ayse Kadayifci-Orellana, ‘Inter-Religious Dialogue and Peacebuilding’, in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Inter-Religious Dialogue, (ed.) Cornille, p. 154. Note that Kadayifci-Orellana is drawing here on Abu-Nimer, Mohammed, ‘Conflict Resolution, Culture, and Religion: Toward a Training Model of Interreligious Peacebuilding’, Peace Research 38, 6 (2001), pp. 685–704CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
84 Böwering, Baqāʾ wa fanāʾ.
85 For a philosophical treatment of negative theology in the context of religious diversity, see Trigg, Roger, Religious Diversity: Philosophical and Political Dimensions (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 52–56Google Scholar; for a feminist re-reading of it in the context of religious diversity, see Sara Rosenau, ‘Excess, Reversibility, and Apophasis: Rereading Gender in Feminist Trinities’, in Divine Multiplicity: Trinities, Diversities, and the Nature of Relation, (eds.) Chris Boesel and S. Wesley Ariarajah (New York, 2014), pp. 168–171.
86 In Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, p. 178. See also my comments and further citations in note 44 above.
87 The prospect of a negative theontology within Islamic mysticism merits further research and elaboration. As it is tangential to the concerns of the present article, however, I will not pursue this line of thought further here. Suffice it for present purposes (that is, in relation to interreligious relations) to note that the notion of ‘Spirit as Destabilizer of Static Ontologies’ within Christian Trinitarian theology, as espoused by Holly Hillgardner, ‘Spirited Transformations: Pneumatology as Resource for Comparative Theology’, in Divine Multiplicity, (eds.) Boesel and Ariarajah, especially pp. 145–146, evokes thought-provoking parallels.
88 Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, p. 127, cited above.
89 Ibid., p. 25. Sam Laurent's discussion of “the Spirit's unifying diversification” (Sam Laurent, ‘The Holy Spirit, the Story of God’, in Divine Multiplicity, [eds.] Boesel and Ariarajah, p. 198) in the context of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (late fifth-early sixth century) offers an analogue to Ibn al-ʿArabī's conception rich with comparative resonance.
90 For further details, see Ibid., pp. 127–130.
91 Ibid., p. 337. See also e.g. p. 338, where the Shaykh even more directly declares that “He is identical to each thing”. It perhaps merits underlining here that, while Ibn al-ʿArabī's philosophy may be amenable to pantheistic (or panentheistic) interpretations, these “cannot begin to do him justice” (Ibid., p. 80) given his unambiguous maintenance of divine unity (waḥdah) in the face of union (tawḥīd) with it.
92 Ibid., p. 37.
93 In Ibid., p. 378.
94 See for example the criticism by the then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, that dialogue “has become the very epitome of the relativist credo” (cited in Trigg, Religious Diversity, p. 59). As Trigg goes on to note, “Dialogue has to be an anti-relativist concept” (p. 59), and “the underlying paradox of pluralism is that, unless it descends into relativism, it has to rule something out” (p. 109).
95 For scholarship relating to interreligious relations between Islam and Buddhism, see esp. Johan Elverskog, Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road (Philadelphia, 2010); ‘The Buddha and the Prophet’, in Schmidt-Leukel, Religious Pluralism & Interreligious Theology, pp. 185–203; Yusuf, Imtiyaz, ‘Islam and Buddhism Relations from Balkh to Bangkok and Tokyo’, Muslim World 100 (2010), pp. 177–186CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shah-Kazemi, Reza, Common Ground between Islam and Buddhism (Louisville, 2010)Google Scholar; Berzin, Alexander, ‘Buddhist-Muslim Doctrinal Relations: Past, Present and Future’, in Buddhist Attitudes to Other Religions, (ed.) Schmidt-Leukel, Perry (St Ottilien, 2008), pp. 212–236Google Scholar; Majid Tehranian and Alexander Berzin, ‘Islam and Buddhism’, in Islam and Inter-Faith Relations, (eds.) Ridgeon and Schmidt-Leukel, pp. 211–260.
96 Although he himself never used the term, ‘waḥdat al-wujūd’ has come to function as an effective moniker for Ibn al-ʿArabī's entire philosophy.