ABSTRACT
It is often assumed that “philosophy” and “mysticism” are mutually exclusive. Of course, this all depends on how we define our terms, which is not something I will attempt to do here. In medieval Islam, the philosophy/mysticism dichotomy becomes even more problematic, since these are not necessarily watertight categories to begin with. This is why such a philosophical giant as Ibn Sīnā (d. 428/1037) wrote favorably about mysticism (Avicenna 1996), and why the influential philosopher and founder of the school of Illumination Shihāb al-Dīn Suhrawardī (d. 587/1191) openly espoused mysticism in both theory and practice (Aminrazavi 1997: 58–120). We even find a number of well-known figures in the Islamic mystical tradition (commonly referred to as “Sufism”) whose approach to things was “philosophical,” but who had little interest in the actual discipline of philosophy (Mayer 2008: 276–7). There are also Muslim mystics or Sufis who had a good grounding in philosophy proper, and some of whose works bear witness to a sort of wedding between philosophy and mysticism. The most eminent early examples of this tendency are to be found in the works of Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111) (al-Ghazālī 1998) and the pivotal figure ‘Ayn al-Quḍāt Hamadānī (d. 525/1131) (Izutsu 1994: 98–140).
