Monday 18 October 2010

Salman H. Bashier & Ibn Arabi

Dr. Bashier's highly readable and succinct book on Ibn Arabi is available here.
In some ways, by stressing the continuity, so to speak, between Philosophy and Ibn Arabi's thought-  it is an anti-dote to the heady wine of Corbin, Izutsu and Chittick.
Indian readers, especially those with an interest in Jainism, may well reflect on the evils proceeding from Islam's Aristotelian captivity such that, to this day, self-confessed incarnations of the Muhammadiya line might as easily proclaim the validity of all religions as prosecute a cowardly and capricious jihad against some ragged old neighbor not of, or not sufficiently of,  the sect.
What a net of perplexities was cast when Aristotle's organon illicitly fed upon itself!
The mirror, in Islam, Alexander's invention- showing that student of the Stagyrite the one horizon he couldn't conquer- becomes as unavailing as that Book of Sand which can never open on the same page twice.
How different from the nigrantha- grantha means both a knot and a book because leaves were knotted together- doctrine by which mirrors become frames of reference embedded in a field such that a metric, a stitching together, is established and no frame of reference is privileged over any other.

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