Allah Transcendent: Studies in the Structure and Semiotics of Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Cosmology.

Reviewed by Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad 

What do Sufism, Ismaelism and the falasafas have in common? Despite their differences, all depart from the Qur'an's uncompromising depiction of God as the willful Creator and Sustainer of all things by introducing the Neoplatonic doctrines into their cosmology. Using semiotic, structualist, and post-structualist tools, Ian Netton does an outstanding job of detailing how major representatives of these streams of medieval Islamic thought evolved away from what he calls the Qur'anic Creator paradigm and into emanationism.

Netton does not closely examine the Qur'anic Creator paradigm itself. As long as he is using it as a mere reference point for the study of philosophies that depart from it, this does not cause a problem, and he is able to develop wonderful insights into the development of Neoplatonic thought among Muslims. It is only when he seeks to draw conclusions about medieval Islamic thought that his failure to explore the meaning of the Qur'anic conception of the relationship of God to His Creation and the diversity of the views of those scholars who stood by that conception becomes a problem.

Until the point that Netton lays out his conclusion, Allah Transcendent is a tour de force. The careful organization and analysis which the author applies to the scholars and theories he does examine is stunning.

Netton begins with the emergence of Neoplatonism in the falasafas. First, we see al-Kindi writing about God in a new vocabulary adopted from a mixture of sources: Qur'anic, Mu'tazilite, Aristotelian, Neoplatonic, and Christian. As al-Kindi is the earliest of the philosophers analyzed by Netton, it is unsurprising that Qur'anic "theologemes" (a semantic unit of obvious theological specificity) play a dominate role. The Mu'tazilite, Aristotelian and Neoplatonic terminologies are employed to describe God within the Qur'anic Creator paradigm. Similarly, al-Kindi uses proofs for God's existence obtained from the Christian John Philoponus without embracing Christian doctrine. Despite al-Kindi's use of Neoplatonic terminology picked up from Plotinus, including allusions to emanation, he rejects the concept of emanation, in that he maintains God's creative action as willful.

Al-Farabi goes beyond mere vocabulary to attempt an actual synthesis. The Great Chain of Being makes its appearance in an emanated string of intellects between God and Man, associated with astral bodies. God has become "remote and the focus of a metaphysical and ontological hierarchy that found its inspiration in Plotinus and his successors rather than in the Qur'an. Al-Farabi's search for order led him to establish a hierarchy in the two Islamically related realms of theology and politics" (p. 125).

With Ibn Sina a mystical dimension is added. Christian terminology becomes more prominent and, as in the Sufi paradigm, God "can be represented as 'loved, lover and love.' He is Pure Love. . . ." (p. 156). Similarly we find a foreshadowing of "al-Suhrawardi's Neoplatonic and light-infused ontology . . . ." (p. 157). Netton argues convincingly that Ibn Sina is a "half-way house" to al-Suhrawardi's "full Neoplatonic dimension for the Qur'anic metaphor" (p. 158).

The chapter on Ismaeli theology is the most difficult to follow, but Netton makes an admirable effort at separating out the Gnostic, Neoplatonic, and mythic strands. Despite its complexity, Netton establishes clearly that the early Ismaeli myth involves a blend of creationism (God willfully creates Kuni ex nihilo and commands him to create Qadar) with a full blown emanationism (starting with six hudud which emanate from Kuni). Additional Neoplatonist and illuminationist elements were easily incorporated by later scholars.

Moving on to the mystics, Netton notes that al-Suhrawardi is concerned not with the symbolism of light, but with an ontology of light. Here is "a radical identification of emanation, intellect, archangel, and light" (p. 260). The blending of philosophy and mysticism in dealing with the tensions between emanationism and essentials of Qur'anic Islam reaches a higher level of sophistication with Ibn al-Arabi: "Everyone who perceives must have some relationship to the light, by which he is made able to perceive, and everything which is perceived has a relationship with God (al-Haqq) Who is Light. . . ." (p. 278). In this mystical paradigm, the Creator is Light, and the Cosmos (His creation) is His Shadow. This is taken to the radical Sufi conclusion of the unity of all being: "The shadow is no other than He. All we perceive is nothing other than the being in Reality in the essences of contingent beings" (p. 279). Ibn al-Arabi turns the Chain of Being into a circle by having Man seek to realize (or discover) his union with God. We also come full circle in another sense, for Netton paints Ibn al-Arabi as a kind of al-Kindi in reverse: describing emanationism in Qur'anic vocabulary.

What makes Netton's topic so important for Islamic studies (and ultimately for understanding the events in the Arab World today) is the role emanationism - and its cosmological association to the Great Chain of Being - played in undermining the political egalitarianism implicit in the concept of God as the imminent Lord directly sustaining every element of His creation. Netton mentions the connection between emanationist hierarchy and political hierarchy in his discussion of al-Farabi, but seems unaware of the political egalitarianism implicit in the unhierarchical Qur'anic Creator paradigm.

For Netton, the Asharite insistence that Muslims are obligated to believe that God has "hands" (for example), while forbidding them to hold a doctrine as to what God's hands might mean, nullifies all meaning from the concept of God. He misses the point that the tendency to avoid such dogma is the strength of Asharite doctrine. Refusing to make an interpretation of God's hands (whether allegorical or anthropomorphic) leaves the stage clear to discuss what is important about the nature of God: Man's relationship to Him as the khalifa, i.e., His agent on earth. The transcendence of God may leave certain things about Him hidden mysteries (al-ghaib), but it does not make the concept of God meaningless. For those who do not replace the Qur'anic Creator paradigm with a doctrine of emanation, the word God will always have a denotation of the Creator. Further, the knowledge that he is Sustainer (not hopelessly separated from the sublunary sphere by three, or ten, or eighteen thousand intermediaries) permits the worshiper to maintain a direct relationship with Him without resorting to mysticism. Finally, the knowledge that there will be a Day of Judgment will impact the daily choices of the believer, regardless of whether he understands the Qur'anic descriptions of Heaven and Hell as literal or allegorical.

Thus, Netton's conclusion that the concept of God's transcendence paves the way for the death of God is incorrect. It is at best applicable only to certain medieval schools of Islamic thought. It is irrelevant to other medieval Muslims and it would be dangerously misleading for anyone to try to apply it to the Islamic movement today.

Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad is author of Signs in the Heavens: A Muslim Astronomer's Perspective on Religion and Science.