At the end ofthis book I place my prose of historicality somewhere between Suhrawardi’s and Walter Benjamin’s respective angelology. What do we get when we do that; a transhistorical theology of their respective Islam and Judaism, where history is seen as the interface either between the left and the right wing of Gabriel or between the front and back of Angelus Novus. That is where memory and history come together. Suhrawardi’s Gabriel has one wing turned toward Divine Truth as its Necessary Being and one wing tilted toward the shaded history of humanity as his Contingent Being, while Benjamin’s Angelus Novus has his face facing the troubled past as the storm from paradise is propelling him toward a frightful future. Benjamin’s angel goes backward; Suhrawardi’s sideways. One is teleological, the other contemporaneous. There is no teleology in Suhrawardi and there is no spontaneity in Benjamin’s respective historical theologies. But read together, Suhrawardi’s and Benjamin’s become a prophetic vision of history in which reality becomes unreal in face of a Divinity neither of them could ignore. Like the rest of you, I stand in between Suhrawardi’s and Benjamin’s angelology, with all our history and all our humanity fragmented, just like these stories I have shared, between a necessary past we cannot ignore, and a contingent future we cannot see.

The fifth chapter offers an interpretive approach to Shihāb al-Dīn Suhrawardī’s account of causality. It also examines how he establishes freedom in the created order in accordance with his understanding of causality. It is argued that Suhrawardī’s writings suggest a participatory account of causality. The chapter first examines some salient aspects of Suhrawardī’s ontology that are relevant to our discussion. The second section rethinks the question of causality with respect to Suhrawardī’s ontology. The third section discusses the question of freedom and the responsibility of moral agents in relation to Suhrawardī’s theory of causality.

The ninth chapter examines Mullā Ṣadrā’s account of causality and freedom. It is argued that Ṣadrā’s rich metaphysical treatment of the concept of existence establishes causal efficacy and freedom of entities through the expansion of and participation in existence. The chapter also includes a discussion of the significance of the concept of essence in Ṣadrā’s metaphysics and how this concept is central to his notion of freedom in the created order.

This chapter considers the emergence of one of the main vehicles for the diffusion of new ideas of religiosity, literary Turkish. In contrast to previous studies which have claimed the emergence of Turkish as an expression of a proto-nationalism, this chapter argues that the emergence of Turkish must be seen against the twin background of the interest of Sufis, especially Jalal al-Din Rumi and his circle, in multi-lingual communication, and the new political circumstances thrown up by the Mongol invasions. Turkish is initially used extensively only for literary works in new cultural centres emerging in his period – the Mongol garrison town of Kırşehir, and the Turkmen principalities of the coastal peripheries. In the old Seljuq urban centres of Anatolia, Konya, Kayseri and Sivas, Persian remained the dominant if not the only form of literary language into the fifteenth century. Turkish thus seems to have been a medium not just to communicate with an audience unversed in Persian, but an expression of political and religious aspirations.

Chapter 4 examines how the Quran informs perception outside of the parameters of art. It traces an ontology of perception rooted in the heart emerging from a hierarchy of the senses implicit in Quranic passages. It contrasts the complex ontology of the Quran as representation of the divine tablet as simultaneously writing and sound, always complete and always immanent, with secular interpretations of its material history. The Quran emerges less as a book than as a sonic image of the divine continually present in all its parts. The second part of the chapter examines how internalized perception of the Quran gave way to extensive discourses of love, the composite senses, and the metaphor of the heart-as-mirror as central to sensory and imaginary experience. The emotive response to Quranic beauty reverberates with discourses of the heart, the imaginary, and the contemplative faculties in Islamic thought. The discussion suggests that the aesthetics of the Quran reflected and promoted existing norms of inward mimesis. Drawing out connections with Greek and Buddhist philosophy inherited through Sasanian and Abbasid policies of translation, the chapter belies later European appropriations of antiquity as exclusively ‘Western.’

Chapter 3 examines discussions about the mimetic possibilities of musical and visual images as reflected in late twelfth-century Persian-language epic poetry, focusing on intertextual and intermedial commentaries on philosophical discourses. Focusing on the narration and a sixteenth-century Mughal painting of a story about Plato as a musician in of the Iskandarnamah (1194) of Nizami of Ganj, the chapter argues that poetry served as a popularizing vehicle for Platonic thought consciously engaged at multiple moments in Islamic intellectual history. Painting augmented this discourse, enabling complex references to other texts including the fabular Kalila and Dimna and The Language of the Birds (1177) by Farid al-Din Attar. Delving into the poetry referenced through visual cues in the painting, the chapter reveals powerful currents of Platonic thought traced through Plotinus, the Brethren of Purity, ibn Sina, and the mystic Suhrawardi into the popular epic work by Attar. The analysis suggests that the mythic Simurgh central to the Language of the Birds incorporates complex Platonic symbolism into Islam, with strong implications about the limits and possibilities of representation. The intimacy of the poetry with Platonic thought suggests that far from inimical, philosophy and Islamic discourses may be indivisible.

Chapter 5 traces the heart as a polished mirror in transformations of the story of the competition of the artists as told by al-Ghazali and retold by Nizami, Rumi, and ibn Khaldun. Following the episteme of inward mimesis established in earlier chapters, the story reveals reflection as an enhancement of representation rather than through the model of deception common to modern interpretations of Platonic thought under the influence of biblical image prohibitions. The parable reflects insights suggestive of Platonic and Buddhist sources. Tropes of the heart and the curtain, metaphors for the heart and revelation, persist in later poetic renditions by Nizami and Rumi. They add the figure of Mani, mentioned already in Firdausi’s Shahnameh, to the story, elaborated through the thought of Suhrawardi and ibn Arabi. Ibn Khaldun reprises the tale to compare science and mysticism as paths to knowledge. The story reflects a relationship with the image not founded in prohibition so much as in its utility as a vehicle of transcendence. Far from the modern assertion of latent secularism in epic poetry and underlying representational painting, the cultural and religious aspects of Islam emerge as indivisible as a reflection and its mirror.