The Prophet and the Philosopher (3/10)

In April 2026, Wissam Saadé delivered four lectures at the University of Bologna at the invitation of Professor Giovanni Giorgini. The first lecture, entitled The Prophet and the Philosopher: The Hierarchy of Knowledge between Avicenna’s Falsafa and al-Kirmānī’s Ismaʿili Neoplatonism, is presented here in its revised and expanded essay form, published as a ten-part series.

The series explores the intellectual landscape of Islamic Neoplatonism through a comparative reading of Avicenna and al-Kirmānī. Although both thinkers share a broadly Neoplatonic horizon, shaped by an emanationist metaphysics, a hierarchy of being, and a synthesis of Aristotelian and Platonic thought, they develop distinct philosophical projects: Avicenna within the tradition of Peripatetic falsafa, and al-Kirmānī within Ismaʿili theology. Despite these different intellectual settings, their systems remain in continuous dialogue on the nature of knowledge, the relationship between reason and revelation, and the ascent of the soul. Their respective projects also embody contrasting approaches to the political, illuminating different ways of understanding the place of philosophy in relation to authority, law, and the ordering of the community. This article is the third installment of that ten-part series.

III - Gnosis without Escape: The Management of the Pleroma in al-Kirmānī’s Quietude of the Intellect

Between the 9th and 11th centuries, the Islamicate world witnessed the translation and transformation of Greek philosophy, especially Aristotle and the Neoplatonists, into Arabic. This produced falsafa, a tradition that sought to construct a rational, demonstrative account of reality (burhān), often integrating metaphysics, cosmology, and psychology into a unified system.

At the same time, Shiʿa intellectual movements, especially Ismailism, were developing their own highly sophisticated metaphysical systems. These were not simply theological doctrines but also philosophical cosmologies, often structured around emanation, a hierarchy of intellects, and the symbolic interpretation (taʾwīl) of revelation.

Thus, Avicenna and al-Kirmānī are not working in separate worlds: they are responding to a shared intellectual environment in which philosophy, theology, and esoteric interpretation overlap.

In the confrontation between these two near-contemporary authors, Avicenna and al-Kirmānī, both rely on strategies for constructing a philosophical religion. For Avicenna, this philosophical religion is his falsafa; for al-Kirmānī, it is Ismaili Shiʿism.

Avicenna lived in the Persianate world under Samanid and later Buyid influence. He was a polymath, physician, logician, and metaphysician, and produced one of the most systematic philosophical architectures in pre-modern history.

His aim was to construct a complete rational science of being: a metaphysics centered on the distinction between necessary being (wājib al-wujūd) and contingent being; a cosmology structured through emanation from the First Principle; and a psychology in which the human intellect can ascend toward conjunction with the Active Intellect.

Avicenna does not reject religion. Instead, he reinterprets it. Prophecy becomes an imaginative translation of philosophical truths. Ritual and law are directed toward the moral and cognitive perfection of society.

Al-Kirmānī and the philosophical architecture of Ismailism

Ḥamīd al-Dīn al-Kirmānī (c. 996-1021) was a preeminent Ismaili thinker and missionary (dāʿī) active during the intellectual consolidation of the Fatimid Caliphate in Cairo. His work represents a sophisticated attempt to harmonize Neoplatonic metaphysics with Ismaili cosmology.

Al-Kirmānī developed a systematic metaphysics that interprets reality through a rigid hierarchy of intellects, anchoring all philosophical reasoning within the absolute authority of the Imam. A defining feature of al-Kirmānī’s thought is the belief that Scripture possesses a hidden, intellectual reality (bāṭin) beneath its literal form (ẓāhir).

For al-Kirmānī, the Imam is the indispensable guide to this inner truth. Consequently, philosophy is not an independent pursuit but is subordinated to a revealed, hierarchical authority structure.

While reason is considered real and necessary, it is hierarchically embedded; it cannot reach its peak without the pedagogical and spiritual guidance of the Imamate. In contrast, Avicenna (Ibn Sina) offers a model in which philosophy moves toward the autonomy of reason.

Despite their divergence, both systems share a common architecture: they construct a totalizing vision of reality, spanning cosmology, psychology, and eschatology, and link the acquisition of knowledge to the transformation of the soul. Both thinkers organize the universe into hierarchical metaphysical structures, blending rational inquiry with a salvific horizon.

In this sense, both projects constitute “philosophical religions,” albeit with different points of departure. Avicenna’s aim is to establish Falsafa as the philosophical religion of the Islamicate world, producing a philosophical system that behaves like a religion. Conversely, al-Kirmānī’s goal is to reshape Ismaili Shiʿism into a system centered on a philosophical religion, producing a religious system that behaves like a philosophy.

Radical tawḥīd and the First Intellect

Al-Kirmānī develops a radically refined doctrine of tawḥīd that pushes philosophical theology toward an extreme form of transcendental negation. In his system, divine unity is not understood in numerical terms, nor can it be predicated of God in any positive ontological sense. God is neither “one” in the numerical sense, nor “being,” nor “intellect,” nor any determinate entity. Any attempt to ascribe such predicates to the divine is already a fall into conceptual inadequacy. The most adequate form of tawḥīd, therefore, is not affirmation but radical tanzīh: the stripping away of all attributes that belong to created existence.

Yet this radical negation does not lead to a void; rather, it produces a precise metaphysical reconfiguration. All the noble attributes commonly associated with God, unity, truth, knowledge, existence, are, in al-Kirmānī’s doctrine, transferred to the first created being: the First Intellect, the primordial entity brought into being by divine origination (ibdāʿ). The divine essence itself remains beyond predication, beyond language, and even beyond conceptual accessibility. It is, as al-Kirmānī insists, veiled by the brilliance of its own creative act.

The First Intellect thus occupies a unique ontological position. It is the first existent, unpreceded by anything in the order of creation, yet it is not self-subsistent. Its existence is entirely derived, not through temporal causation but through divine origination. It is neither body nor embodied power; it is entirely outside the realm of physical extension. At the same time, it is the locus in which all divine predicates become intelligible: it is the true “one,” the true “knowing,” the true “living,” the true “powerful,” insofar as these qualities can appear within the order of creation.

In this sense, tawḥīd in al-Kirmānī does not eliminate attributes but displaces them. It is not God who is described as unity, knowledge, or being, but the First Intellect, which becomes the mirror of divine creative overflow. God remains absolutely beyond both affirmation and negation in any ordinary linguistic sense. As al-Kirmānī states, no language is capable of expressing what befits the divine essence; every attempt at predication is already a descent into inadequacy.

The limits of knowledge and the hierarchy of being

This leads to a doctrine of radical epistemic limitation. The divine essence cannot be grasped by any intellect, nor perceived by any sense. It is, in principle, inaccessible. Even the highest rational contemplation reaches only its own limit, recognizing the impossibility of its object. True knowledge of God thus culminates not in vision but in bewilderment, a recognition of the structural impossibility of comprehension.

Paradoxically, this epistemic impossibility does not abolish metaphysics but intensifies it. The First Intellect, as the primordial emanation, becomes the axis of all subsequent reality. It is through it that all other levels of being unfold, in a structured hierarchy extending from pure intellect to soul, to nature, and finally to the material world. Each level is an effect of divine origination mediated through increasingly dense ontological veils.

Within this structure, al-Kirmānī also integrates a cosmology of correspondence between metaphysical and religious orders. The First Intellect corresponds symbolically to the Pen (al-qalam) in sacred language, while the Universal Soul corresponds to the Tablet (al-lawḥ). These correspondences establish a parallel between the hierarchy of being and the hierarchy of revelation, allowing cosmology to be read as a structured symbolic order.

Unlike strict Neoplatonic emanationism in its purely linear form, al-Kirmānī does not adopt a simple one-to-one cascade of intellects. Rather, he proposes a more complex mechanism of reflective and composite unfolding, in which multiple intellects emerge through structured relations of derivation and resonance. This allows for a multi-layered hierarchy of Ten Intellects, culminating in the Tenth Intellect, associated with the sublunary world and the administration of form in matter.

At the human level, this metaphysical structure is mirrored in the organization of knowledge and authority within the Ismaili daʿwa. The ranks of ḥujja, dāʿī, and maʾdhūn reflect graded capacities of access to truth, corresponding to degrees of proximity to the intelligible order. Knowledge is thus never purely individual; it is structurally mediated through a hierarchical pedagogy of initiation.

Matter itself, in contrast, represents the lowest level of ontological determination, pure receptivity without intelligibility, set at the furthest distance from the luminous origination of the First Intellect. Between these poles, the entire cosmos unfolds as a graded descent from origination to material dispersion, and an inverse ascent of reintegration through knowledge.

What emerges from this system is a highly structured metaphysical vision in which divine transcendence is absolute, but its creative unfolding is fully rationalized. The divine is inaccessible, yet its effects are entirely intelligible through a carefully articulated hierarchy of intellects, souls, and cosmic correspondences. In this sense, al-Kirmānī constructs not merely a theology, but a complete philosophical cosmology in which metaphysics, epistemology, and religious hierarchy are inseparably intertwined.

Origination beyond emanation and creation

Al-Kirmānī exempts himself from providing proof for the existence of God, because this “Unseen of Unseens” can be described neither as existent nor as non-existent; rather, attributes and names belong only to the First Primary Intellect, the first created being. The Ismaili philosopher, however, rendered the relationship between the Originator (God) and the First Originated Being (al-Mubdaʿ al-Awwal) as a relationship that is neither emanationist nor creative in the conventional sense. Rather, it is a relationship of Origination (ibdāʿ), the secret of which remains inscrutable to all, including the First Intellect itself.

In this context, al-Kirmānī does not differ from his predecessor in the pioneering of Ismaili-linked philosophy, Abū Yaʿqūb al-Sijistānī (d. post-971 AD), except that al-Sijistānī’s double negation remained within the application of the Neoplatonic emanationist scenario.

Al-Sijistānī and the vertical duality of Intellect and Soul

Al-Sijistānī represents a pivotal moment in the evolution of Ismaili thought, a period in which philosophical Gnosticism became inextricably fused with the tenets of Neoplatonism and Neopythagoreanism. Operating as a prominent dāʿī in the regions of Khorasan and Sistan, al-Sijistānī posited a radical theology of transcendence, identifying God as the “Originator of originators” (Mubdiʿ al-mubdiʿāt), a primordial principle existing beyond all ontological dualities. Paradoxically, beneath this absolute transcendence, al-Sijistānī’s emanationist hierarchy relied on a fundamental “vertical duality.” In his system, the Universal Intellect, the first originated being or Logos, gives rise to the Universal Soul (Sophia), from which the forces governing the material world subsequently flow.

This dualistic framework, however, faced a rigorous systematic critique by Ḥamīd al-Dīn al-Kirmānī. For al-Kirmānī, the notion that a perfect, first-originated Intellect could produce a “lesser” entity like the Soul through a process of yearning or deficiency was philosophically untenable. He sought to distance Ismaili metaphysics from any suggestion of “process” or “striving” that might inadvertently compromise the absolute nature of the Creator. Consequently, al-Kirmānī replaced the Intellect-Soul duality with a sophisticated system of Ten Separate Intellects.

Al-Sijistānī followed Neoplatonism in its entirety: the Veiled God, then the Intellect, then the Soul; for him, the Soul is in constant motion and longs for the perfection represented by God. Al-Kirmānī deviated from this triad by adopting the Farabian system of the Ten Intellects. Consequently, the celestial world was no longer centered around the duality of Intellect and Soul (Logos and Sophia). While al-Sijistānī considered the Soul a distinct substance from the Intellect, one in a state of deficiency seeking to complete itself through the emanation coming from God, al-Kirmānī distributed perfection throughout all the ranks of the Ten Intellects.

From the Universal Soul to the Ten Intellects

In this revised cosmology, the “Universal Soul” is stripped of its status as a distinct, second cosmic rank. Instead, its position is occupied by a “Second Intellect” which, unlike the striving Soul of al-Sijistānī’s model, is an entity of static perfection and full actualization. By transforming the Soul into an Intellect, al-Kirmānī established a more stable celestial hierarchy, free from the inherent “incompleteness” of the Neoplatonic Soul.

This shift was not merely a metaphysical refinement but also a structural necessity for al-Kirmānī’s broader project: the doctrine of correspondence (taṭbīq). By expanding the celestial realm to a decadic structure, he was able to demonstrate a rigorous mapping between the Cosmic World (the Ten Intellects), the Human World (the ten levels of the religious hierarchy), and the Biological World (the ten internal and external senses). For al-Kirmānī, this ten-fold intellectual hierarchy provided the necessary complexity to explain the intersection of cosmic order, the physical universe, and the terrestrial mission of the daʿwa.

A Peripatetic reinjection into Neoplatonism

Thus, to a certain extent, it can be said that al-Kirmānī reinjected his Neoplatonism with a Peripatetic dose. He achieved this by utilizing al-Fārābī’s schema of the Ten Intellects, which for al-Fārābī consisted of the First Intellect (God) and the nine spheres. For al-Kirmānī, however, the First Intellect became the “Originated from God” and never God Himself. It is this First Intellect that is worthy of the attributes and names of Majesty and Splendor; indeed, in al-Kirmānī’s logic, there is no fear of shirk [associationism] here. Rather, shirk only occurs by deviating from this distinction.

From the axiality of the Soul to the axiality of the Intellect

The shift from the God–Intellect–Soul triad to the Farabian Decad marks a fundamental transition from the “axiality of the Soul” to the “axiality of the Intellect.” Originally, al-Fārābī designed this Decad to harmonize Aristotelian physics (the celestial spheres) with metaphysics. Al-Kirmānī recognized the need for this Peripatetic consistency, specifically by establishing Intellection (ʿAql) as the highest form of existence and moving away from a pleroma split between the duality of Logos and Sophia.

However, al-Kirmānī maintained a critical theological boundary: he limited the prerogatives of this Intellection. The First Intellect cannot “intellect” or encompass the Originator (al-Mubdiʿ), who remains an absolute mystery. Furthermore, he bridged this philosophical structure with Ismaili doctrine by asserting that humans cannot rely solely on their own intellection; they remain dependent on the Taʿlīm (authoritative teaching) of the Imam to navigate these truths. The Aristotelian framework provides the logic, but the Imam provides the access.