It is indispensable that man’s attention move from the meaning (al-ma‘na> ) to the wording (al-lafz}) more than it move from the term to the meaning, for in reality the wording does not evince the meaning save by the mediation of the ‘form’ of that meaning in the ‘heart’ (illa> bi-wa>sit}ati s}u>rati dha>lika l-ma‘na> fi> l-qalb); when the form of the meaning is not ascertained in the heart, the meaning can never be grasped through the wording.

[al-Ra>ghib al-Is}faha>ni> (11^th cent.), al-Dhari>‘ah, ed. Abu> Zayd al-‘Ajami>, p. 124]

Spirit in the body is like Meaning in the word /

al-ru>h} fi> l-jasad ka-l-ma‘na> fi> l-lafz}.

[Sala>h} al-Di>n al-S{afadi>, Sharh} La>miyah al-‘Ajam (Cairo: 1290 H) II p. 133]

Introduction. How the language of Scripture and Tradition embedded in revealed texts or sacred writings, and in the foundational narratives supporting pre-modern world-views, may be understood and applied today remains a major issue for the world religions. Traditional articulations of religious conceptions and past modes of discourse now appears inadequate for meeting sweeping global challenges facing most human societies. Increasingly, thinking people of faith seek to re-awaken and re-appropriate essential religious teachings through creatively transformative understandings yielding more meaningful ways of addressing problems raised by our global reality—in relation to pervasive material and cultural conditions. The axis around which these attempts revolve is twofold: First, recovering primary values of universal true validity, and recognizing which disciplines and individuals really possess the authority to enunciate application of such values in the context of specific conditions prevailing within our societies. Secondly, recovering the deep essential intelligiblity of Knowledge and Virtue at the heart of the endeavour to more fully realize our humanity. These two efforts are interwined and should not be pursued separately.

Such an awakened awareness involves a creative adjustment and appreciation of new modes and applications of knowledge in our age — without doing violence to the genuine modes of knowing and being that provided strength and versatility in the past and which potentially offer resources that may aid us now. This mode of self-awareness involves training the imagination to live the creative process received from within our own traditions of learning, practice, and organization so as to see and to grasp what is most adequate to our task, discriminating what remains ‘moist’ and viable from what has dried out becoming ‘brittle’ and no longer adequate or needing to be discarded or archived.

Approaches embedded in past models may be contrasted with those arising from specific cultural and political realities of our modern age — an era posing unprecedented changes signalling a rupture from the past. We shall take as our model of pre-modern (traditional) experience the Islamic intellectual and spiritual teaching discipline,[1] and seek to draw out its relevance for peoples and cultures when searching for more adequate ways of invoking religious teachings in response to contemporary needs. Ideally we should pursue a double path by first invoking instructive models from the past, and then demonstrating in what manner such previous efforts achieved more adequate modes of conceptualization and application during their particular eras, thereby pointing to modes of activity required for us to accomplish a parallel task. Regretfully we only have space to briefly suggest these tasks, and our remarks resemble more of a partial skeleton than a full bodied entity.

The promise inherent in comprehending past modes of conceptualization and application may assist efforts by individuals and leading circles for awakening a fuller adequacy of traditional ideas and values. Such awakening has the potential to facilitate wise solutions to personal, societal, regional and international problems, and to meet the challenge of inhabiting our individual and communal humanity more fully. However, this potential is conditioned by the manner with which permanent values are grasped and brought to life within individuals and by extension throughout their societies and polities.

Value. Values are essential for revitalizing the universal rather than the national or particular (exclusivist) side of religious identity. Values are critical for nurturing a faith-commitment that affirms the unity and dignity of the fullness of human life. The primary values upheld, for example, by leading Muslim exponents in their experiential teachings embrace: Oneness of The Real (tawh}i>d); Security Peace, Justice, Knowledge (with its hierarchy of knowers and their authority), and Integrity Purity of Soul [‘virtue’] through cultivating and practicing praiseworthy character traits—with these values embodied in the psychic and intellective substance of individuals [Soul] radiating through their community and beyond into the world.

By Values we mean those ethical attitudes and immaterial ideals that sincere conviction implants into humans through their family upbringing, training, education, and life experiences—attitudes and ideals which may grow into interior motivating impulses expressed through actions. Values possess a practical force operating deep within the human at the level of conscience and will. Values operate first and foremost by the inner willing of conscience, and are manifested outwardly in praiseworthy character traits and admirable models for behavior. This practical dimension of ethical endeavor and moral volition is termed the faculty of conation (that is to say, volition & will-power). Ethics (in Arabic: the Akhla>q or Mah}a>sin /‘virtuous character-traits’) is the domain of Practical Reason or ‘prudential mind’ (‘aql ‘amali> in Islamic terminology) involving the faculty or power of conation. Conative power denotes the impulse or striving to change one’s behavior and act in accordance with both the directives of inner conscience arising from within the innate constitution of the created person, as well as of outer guidance or revealed imperatives received from without.

Furthermore, the human attitudes and ideals prompting actions, and which are mediated by Values, possess an intellectual or cognitive power shaping the worldview and discourse of humans collectively forming a cultural community functioning for a definite purpose within the created order. For Islam, these two related aspects of Values are bound together through Knowledge: the conative faith-induced dimension of knowledge yielding conviction and moral-volition through the operation of human intelligence embedded in conscience, being intimately joined with the cognitive or perceiving knowing dimension operated by our intelligence. A closely related pair of Islamic notions expressing these two dimensions is the joining of Righteous Action (al-‘amal al-s}a>lih}) with Beneficial Knowledge (al-‘ilm al-na>fi‘ ): knowledge and practice must go hand in hand for Values to become truly operative and effective in human experience. Here is an example of what we just stated concerning the conative and cognitive dimensions of Value. In an utterance by the Shi>‘i> imam Ja‘far al-S{a>diq (d. 765), the term ‘knowledge cognition’ /ma‘rifah is employed in conjunction with ‘activity practice’ /‘amal :^{^[2]}

God accepts (a person’s) practice only (if performed) with ‘cognizance’/illa> bi-ma‘rifatin, and (God accepts a person’s) cognition only (if accompanied) by practice. Whomever knows/‘arafa, the cognition directs them to the practice; and whomever does not practice, that person has no ma‘rifah /cognition…

Islam teaches that the true origin of universal human values mirrors or reflects the transcendent source of all that is ‘valuable’, that the permanent enduring values safeguarding our true humanity are sourced in the divine. The highest human values possess true value only because they spring from a transcendent source and help to draw us closer to the ultimate source of Being, Existence, and Value. A well-known tradition of the Prophet Muh}ammad (S{) counsels us to “Adorn yourself with the virtuous character traits of God /takhalluq bi-akhla>qi lla>hi,” as the chief path to authentic service and inner realization. This fundamental insight insists that the transcendent source of values is the true reason why they are deemed universal and permanent, and objectively to be sought and practiced by all humans. Another way of stating this is to affirm the complementarity of right thought & right activity, or intellectual perfection & moral perfection, or awakened intelligence & ethical action. But here we simply say that cognition and conation are integral to actualising the fullness of human nature, and that realization of value requires their conjoined functioning.

The universal values upheld and taught should be clearly evident and displayed in the lived practice of their practitioners, their exemplars or living examples. Otherwise, one is dealing with hypocrisy—with hollow words lacking any conative force failing to touch and move us from within, thereby failing to manifest outwardly in any substantive change of behavior. Contemporary Scientism [physicalism] universalized by Euro-American inspired modernity is deficient in both the quantity and quality of the bond that arranges universal values into an authoritative hierarchy.

º In general, the traditional (pre-modern) worldviews embedded in religious cultures with elaborated intellectual spiritual disciplines were concerned with realizing knowledge in four domains: metaphysics – or apprehension of The One Real [Being, First Principle, Absolute, … God]; cosmology; spiritual psychology; and ethics.[3] These are four complementary domains: investigation of the cosmos yields insight into the interior world of spiritual psychology, while apprehension of metaphysics and cosmology leads to grasping the true nature of the human ‘soul’, and proper prehension of ‘soul science’ returns the Self to the ground of Being. [yes… soul is now a ‘four-letter word’ to be avoided in contemporary thought and replaced by ‘mind’ or mental.]

Here we may invoke the venerable conviction of the uterine inter-relatedness of the celestial, cosmic, and human orders. And as most of us know, the modern heedlessness or ignorance over understanding the Self as a ‘unified field’ for energy activity awareness conjoining cosmos and soul as both object and subject at once, has led humans to falsify the relations between self, people, and nature.

º In order to avoid the traps of exclusivist parochial dogmatism and of the ideology[4] characteristic of our modernities, we must each individually recover for ourselves a proper understanding of our own nature. As W. Chittick states:[5] “…in order to know the proper way of acting in the world and living out our human embodiment, we must know what the world signifies to us. In order to know the significance of things, we must know our own nature and our own proper destiny. In order to know our own nature, we must know the self that knows.”

º What is knowledge for? What is the proper role and qualitative context of human thought? There is a very real discrimination between two fundamental modes of knowing involving distinct faculties or energies :

– Transmitted knowledge employing instrumental rationality [‘brain’] viewing the world as a collection of objects, which understands knowledge as the means to control nature, society, and the body; thus, humans seek control and power over creation by means of the technological application of knowledge and exclusive reliance on instrumental reason.

– Direct unmediated knowledge which transpires by awakening and actualizing human innate intelligence [‘heart’ & ‘spirit’… light : Arabic ‘aql, qalb & ru>h} … nu>r ] forming the peculiarly special perceptive understanding power of our interior self [soul mind]. Such prehension is termed ‘realization’ /tah}qi>q in Islamic teaching — in contrast to the ‘imitative’ mode of transmitted knowledge termed taqli>d. Philosophy with its metaphysic of ‘soul science’ was particularly interested in ways of activating the human potential for realized intelligence or ‘heart’ (contemporary Euro-American ‘philosophy’ does not know of or admit this reality anymore, but speaks of neurophysiological cognition in terms of measurable physical events). To say more about this might mislead and confuse meaning, so I let another speak for me: “Only what is known in the depths of the soul without intermediary is intellectual in the proper sense of the word … the only locus of intellectual knowledge is the knowing self.”[6]

Nor should we forget that transmitted knowledge, since it exists embedded in a specific cultural matrix conditioned by habits of mind solidified within its own ‘priesthoods’ molded by socio-political factors and self-interested needs, frequently becomes a veil preventing attempts to actualize true realized intelligence. A fine example of this is the description provided by the 11^th century authority al-Ghaza>li> (d. 1111) in his analysis of the famous tradition that seventy thousand veils of light and darkness separate God from His creatures.[7]

º ‘Realized Intelligence’ exploits both the critical powers of reason and employs the imagination through envisioning ‘things’ as signs and symbols of The One Real (seeing the ‘Face of God’ everywhere and in everything, as the Qur’a>n states). Intelligence may be rationalist and symbolist together, and it may resuscitate the mythic imagination by restoring the creative power of symbolic and mythic discourse which lies at the heart of traditional religious language (profoundly imbued with anthropomorphic imagery). This mode of trans-rational apprehension vehiculed by the human soul when actualized as ‘realized intelligence’ [the doctrine of the Active Intellect; see Appendix ‘Two Faces of Soul’] enables one to erase the boundary between the literal and figurative meanings of sacred texts, and go beyond this by affirming a reality for the imaginal realm as an intermediate domain partaking of the qualities of the corporeal as well as the purely immaterial. In Islamic experience, this affirmation of an imaginal reality has a long history until our own time, and is particularly associated with the Andalusian saint buried in Damascus, the Greatest Shaykh Ibn ‘Arabi (d. 1240), whose understanding of the ‘World of Imagination’ /‘A<lam al-Khaya>l combining qualities of spirit and body was so influential.[8] Ibn ‘Arabi> integrated the achievments of the philosopher Avicenna (d. 1037) as well as of al-Ghaza>li> in his own grand synthesis; and centuries later the Iranian sages including S{adr al-Di>n Shira>zi> (d. 1640) elaborated upon this in a profound manner which invites serious attention today.[9]

Do not misunderstand my meaning: there is no going back, no return to the dogmatic literalism of traditionalist anthropomorphism when apprehending sacred texts. Yet there remains the possibility for us to expand our horizons, to embrace the truths affirmed by intelligence informed through faith cognition and thereby to awaken the dormant potential of our humanity. Teachings of the order just mentioned offer us a model of a mode of experience and activity to accomplish a parallel task and thus rehabilitate a living intellectual tradition. But it will be ours, not that of the past. Furthermore, we must be especially wary of ill-conceived exploitations of powerful ideas that could yield great harm and falsehood. Is not the energy contained in the human imaginal faculty increasingly being abused in our era by all manner of delectations and temptations facilitated by technological advances (television, electronic media, computers)? Are we even aware of its possible deletrious effects? Here is an area of psycho-somatic research that will have to start from the data already amassed by advertising organizations for decades in their dedicated efforts to persuade consumers.

º Every knowledge makes ethical demands upon the knower. Realized Intelligence becomes actualized within oneself through a lengthy process of cognitive training and inner purification, of disciplining the mind and the soul. Achieving correct understanding of the Absolute, cosmos, and soul by grasping an authentic vision of reality demands the actualization of the pristine human character and cultivation of virtue—the corresponding activity of self-understanding and self-realization in conformity with such direct knowledge. The cognition calls out for its complementary conative practice; or knowledge necessitates virtue. Chittick observes: “…correct activity – ethical, moral, and virtuous action – depends upon correct knowledge of the world, and correct knowledge of the world depends upon knowing the contingent and convergent reality of soul and cosmos.”[10] This entails healing the split between subject and object upon which the prevailing modern scientific worldview is grounded.

There is another issue related to the illumination that awakened intelligence and direct experiencing may shed today on re-thinking values and virtues on the path to becoming more fully human. This involves language with its organic aptitude for sharing and communicating experiences and ideas within one linguistic family. Language may also bridge across different linguistic groups through fostering unitive disclosures of meaning allowing over-arching understanding of more universalizing values dressed in various conceptual and linguistic guises specific to different cultural matrices. In conjunction with this, the barriers between social groups and cultural blocks fostered by linguistic differentiation may under the right conditions operate as filters selectively admitting congenial elements while blocking others.[11] We may observe this operating within the two most significant translation movements in human history: the 8^th–10^th century movement of Hellenic sciences and philosophy from Greek into Arabic, and the 12^th–14^th century transposition of sciences, philosophy, and spirituality from Arabic into Hebrew and Latin in Europe.[12]

Perhaps the most instructive example of the operation of language as a congruent unitary force is the ‘lingua franca’ phenomenon whereby one tongue serves as a ‘vehicular language’ for communication and exchange between many other local vernaculars, reflecting the military, mercantile or cultural dominance of the vehicular language group. Currently the recognized dominance of spoken English with its Latin script [341 million] is rivaled by written standard Chinese and standard spoken Mandarin in East Asia [ca. 1.2 billion persons], spoken Arabic vernaculars [ca. 422 million], Hindi in S. Asia [366 million] and spoken Spanish in the

Americas

[322 million].[13] Today Arabic vernaculars form the second largest spoken language after standard Chinese, while the Arabic script – the language of the Qur’a>n – remains after Latin the second most widely used alphabetic system in the world.[14]

It is well known that few cultures placed more emphasis on their language as a unifying factor than have the Arabs; yet the unprecedented diffusion of Arabic linguistic and conceptual presence from sub-Saharan & East Africa, the Iberian peninsula, through to Central and South Asia, China and to S.E. Asia was due as much to religious and cultural grounds than to commerce or polities. Within various Muslim cultural regions historically, a number of other languages adopting Arabic script also served vehicular functions such as Persian (lingua franca of India before the British conquest), Turkish, Azeri, Urdu, Swahili, and Jawi [Melayu]. This displays the integrating unitive effect of Islam over far flung territories previously separated by geographical barriers and racial–cultural divides. Subjectivities tend to exclusion and conflict, disclosure of meaning tends to inclusion and harmonious awareness.

A) Language — comprising speech and narrative (e.g. text) and poetry — is rightly taken as a key index of the human faculty for grasping and communicating meaning, and is intimately involved in rationality and critical apprehension. A significant aspect of speech and its accompanying seizure of meaning is the conjunction of symbol and the reality it points to, namely the meaning disclosed through its apprehension; or to express this relationship another way: the Word and the Meaning which it discloses. Restoration of the imaginal power of symbolic and mythic discourse at the basis of religious language centers on apprehending the ‘efficacy’ of Names in their qualitative depth, not merely their quantitative flatness.[15]

We can only refer briefly to one aspect of the relation between word and meaning. The word is a tangible sensory form conveying meaning; language points to meaning and discloses significance—thus, Arabic calligraphy became Islam’s pre-eminent art form and mode of symbolic representation. But such disclosure requires the minds and hearts of humans to be prepared and capable to conceive and grasp meaning, to heed the indications or pointers words provide and thereby penetrate to their intended significances. The identity or non-identity of name and thing-named was intensively discussed among Muslim speculative theologians, while the legalist-oriented traditionalists avoided the topic as a reprehensible innovation. This issue was often cast in the polarity of ’ism and ma‘na> /‘name’ and ‘concept’, where proper comprehension elevates the ‘concept¬meaning’ above its ‘name’. The gist is captured in an utterance by the reputable early thinker Ja‘far al-S{a>diq (d. 765):^{^[16]}

…the name is other than what-is-named, so whomever worships the name disregarding the concept/ma‘na> commits unfaith (kufr) and he worships nothing, and whomever worships the name and the concept commits unfaith by worshipping Two, and whomever worships the concept disregarding the name – now that is true ‘oneness’/tawh}i>d.

Two things must be borne in mind: a) the same Meaning may be pointed to by more than one term or phrase within the same language, as well as by several words across several languages; and b) without the Meaning already being present, or sufficiently evoked and indicated, within our understanding intellective faculty, then proper apprehension of the Word is difficult or the Word itself fails to convey the intended Meaning and may even be taken in a ‘wrong’ meaning (e.g. confining the term to merely one restricted surface sense while ignoring its deeper symbolic or mythic significance).

Confirmation of this would be our common experience of first having apprehended the meaning of a term in an ‘ordinary’ sense, then later with increased knowledge and insight achieving a deeper more significant sense. Furthermore, significances may be ‘flat’ (figurative or rhetorical), or may possess ‘depth’ opening out onto a hierarchy of related meanings and apprehensions. Poetry, as well as prophecy, frequently operate in this latter mode of symbolic significance. Incorporation of fresh meanings through borrowing or influence from another language or culture represents a particular case of expansion of meaning, and frequently induce new values or new ways of looking within the worldview of the host culture. The phenomenon of bilingualism (whose many dimensions we leave untouched here[17]) underlines the importance of cross-cultural penetration, and demonstrates that successful bilingualism and becoming bi-cultural require intelligence as well as proper attitudes toward the other group(s) and motivation. Similarly with translation between languages, where the competence of the translator in rendering the meaning requires more than linguistic expertise, but also conceptual and cognitive insight into other cultural patterns of thought and experience and the critical intelligence informing particular disciplines. This reminds us of: the complementary operation of a barrier acting simultaneously and selectively as a filter; as well as: the requirement that Meaning already be present in the mind heart in order that Word may function as disclosing symbol. (The notion of ‘disclosure’ is useful here.)

B) Meaning — the ability facility to elicit or to evoke over-arching correspondences and confluences, or contrasting points of complementarity, bridging separately expressed meaning [discourse, imagery] embedded within distinct cultural matrices — is capable of prompting a unitary sense of value or significance wherein each specific culture with its unique manner of discourse and symbol may come to be seen in some degree as simultaneously a light and a veil. This is not a matter of doctrines or dogma, for the Christian Trinity remains a stumbling block for Muslims and Jews, while the personal Creator of prophetic monotheism may appear strange to the Ineffable Principle of Buddhism. And even within one religious culture there are varying conceptions of origination: thus Islamic thinkers spoke variously of temporal creation /khalq & h}udu>th, or of divine fiat (creative imperative: kalimah & amr), or of timeless existentiation /ibda>‘, or the continual emanation /fayd} of the Peripetetics (all but the last term drawn from the Qur’a>n).

Rather, tapping the unitary sense is a matter of essence and the congruence flowing from it, grounded above all on the reality that the human species is not only biologically but ontologically one and the same. This reality facilitates the openness of religious texts, imagery and symbols to a hierarchy of readings and seizures of meaning, in accordance with the hierarchy of knowers who plumb their depths and hold them up as lenses through which to apprehend metaphysics, the cosmos, and the horizons within the human soul. Knowledge is hierarchical along with the gradations of the knowers who seize its meanings.

Restoration of the imaginal noetic power of symbolic and mythic discourse at the ground of religious language, must be guided by the recognition that the qualitative power of words [Names] affords a more real and effective mode of insight and meaning for bridging across cultures. What is truly being asked of us is to learn new languages of the spirit and heart, to experience fresh thoughts and grasp the knowledge joining our inmost self to the whole and the source. Therefore, cultural multi-lingualism should be one of our means for soliciting the desired unitary sense of value. We all must work as translators from the limiting cultural constraints given us at birth, into the unutterable fullness of being which is our veritable birthright. This might be the best work of translation – to render the Self back into its essential meaning. It is a more adequate response to the global conflicts and cognitive chaos that threaten conscious life on earth.

Ibn Si>na> defined Soul /Nafs to be: “the perfection of a natural organic body /kama>l jism t}abi>‘i> a>li>. ” The Soul clings to the Body to obtain the adornment or ‘beauty’ proper to intellectual realities (al-zi>nat al-‘aqli>yah), and ultimately to gain the possibility of uniting with transcendent ‘substances’ in the celestial realm (ittis}a>l ma‘a l-malaku>t al-a‘la> ). Unlike Intellect, the Soul does not receive its full perfection at its origin, but must acquire it gradually through its ‘desire’ or yearning /shawq. On the other hand, Intellect and the intelligible realm exude the stability of a completeness perfection already accomplished, for there is nothing to realize or achieve. Thus the Body is indispensable for the perfection of the Soul. So the very origin of Soul entails an ontological deficiency—it must move and embrace the physical realm in order to realize its own perfection, which lies in the intelligible realm. The imperfect material world is full of potentialities and possibilities for the Soul: by making the terrestrial Body and corporeal organs to be instruments allowing Soul to acquire its perfection. Thus, the Soul’s ‘yearning’ is directed to the sensible corporeal order.

A maxim from the early 9^th century CE Arabic paraphrase of Plotinus’ Enneads known as Theology of Aristotle[18] conveys the uncomfortable intermediate position of Soul between Intellect and Body, mediating between the intelligible world and the sensory world:

‘Every Soul has something in contact with the Body below, and contacting the Intellect above’ / li-kulli nafsin shay’an yattas}ilu bi-l-Jirmi suflan wa yattas}ilu bi-l-‘Aqli ‘ulwan .

(or ‘Each Soul has a lower side linked to the Body, and an upper side linked to the Intellect.’)

In his commentary in his Kita>b al-Ins}a>f Ibn Si>na> explains this maxim of ‘Aristotle’ [Plotinus]:

Every Soul possesses two powers: a power disposed in a way that enables it to perceive the contiguity of the Soul with the realm of the Intellect; and a power disposed in a way enabling it to perceive its contiguity with the sensory realm. The first power is the ‘material Intellect’, then the ‘Intellect-by-habit’. The second power, which is closest to the Soul, is the Practical Intellect [or ‘applied’, ‘working’ intellect], that is to say the internal and external senses.[19]

This corporeal contact or link (al-‘ala>qah al-badani>yah) with Body realized by the lower ‘face’ of the Soul, is established only to make perfect or complete /takmi>l, to purify /tazkiyah, and to sublimate /tat}hi>r the Theoretical Soul.[20]

This famous passage from the Arabic Theology may be paired with an obscure statement by Plotinus (Ennead III.8.9.29–32):

The intellect must return, so to speak, backwards, and give itself up, in a way, to what lies beyond it (for it faces both directions); and there, if it wishes to see that first principle, it must not be altogether intellect.[21]

The difficulty in grasping Plotinus’ statement revolves around the relation of Intellect’s “amjistomoz /facing both ways” to its “toupisw a