ABSTRACT

Altmann suggests that Islam draws on three related versions of the motif of KT. Avicenna and Al-Ghazali suggest that the interdependence of knowledge of the soul and of God is found in the Qur'an, 59:19, 'Do not act like those who have forgotten God, so that he has caused them to forget themselves'. In Avicenna the emanationist cosmos is educational in itself, primarily through emanation and an 'angelic pedagogy' in which the individual is able to reorient itself from its earthly form to a spiritual and esoteric journey of KT. The claim, then, is that Avicennan philosophy finds a way of expressing the One knowing itself without dividing into subject and object. The Munqidh of al-Ghazali describes his personal struggle with self-knowing. Man is seen here as a microcosm of all the wondrous intricacies of God's creation. Without imagination, symbols cannot be returned to that which they symbolized or indeed, understood as symbolic at all.