Diachronia

In April 2026, Wissam Saadé delivered four lectures at the University of Bologna. The first, at the invitation of Professor Giovanni Giorgini, was entitled “The Prophet and the Philosopher: The Hierarchy of Knowledge between Avicenna’s Falsafa and al-Kirmānī’s Ismaili Neoplatonism.” Its text is presented here in a revised and expanded version, as part of a series of ten articles. This series explores the intellectual landscape of Neoplatonism in Islam through a comparative reading of Avicenna and al-Kirmānī. Although both thinkers share a broad Neoplatonic horizon, shaped by a metaphysics of emanation, a hierarchy of being, and a synthesis of Aristotelian and Platonic thought, they develop two distinct philosophical projects: Avicenna within the Peripatetic tradition of falsafa , and al-Kirmānī within the framework of Ismaili theology. Despite the differences between their respective intellectual contexts, their systems remain in constant dialogue around the nature of knowledge, the relationship between reason and revelation, and the ascent of the soul. Their respective projects also embody two contrasting conceptions of the political, illuminating different ways of thinking about the place of philosophy in relation to authority, law, and the organization of the community. This article constitutes the tenth and final part of this series. X - Leo Strauss: Esoteric Writing and the Recovery of Practical Wisdom in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Philosophy In the context of the Theologico-Political Treatise , Spinoza’s approach functions as a brilliant form of political neutralization. By relegating theology to the realm of the imagination and assigning philosophy to that of the intellect, Spinoza sought to “contain” theology by lowering its metaphysical status. Theology remains a necessary “salvation for the ignorant,” providing a simplified moral code centered on justice and charity that maintains social order. For the philosopher, however, Reason is liberated to pursue the “knowledge of the whole” without ecclesiastical oversight. Yet the more delicate point is that, for Spinoza, while philosophy cannot as such be popularized for the masses, it must nonetheless exert an influence on the common people through the medium of politics. Without this political mediation, the alternative would be the reverse: the unchecked dominance of the passions or the return of theologico-political tyranny. This leads us to understand the inherently conflictual nature of this political mediation. Filippo Del Lucchese, a leading contemporary scholar who emphasizes the central roles of conflict, power, and the “multitude” in Spinoza’s thought, argues that politics is the battlefield on which reason attempts to organize the multitude. This organization is essential to prevent it from being weaponized as an instrument of tyrants. In his work, particularly Conflict, Power, and Multitude in Machiavelli and Spinoza , Del Lucchese rejects traditional “liberal” interpretations that view the state as the product of a social contract aimed at achieving a static and definitive peace. Instead, he contends that, for Spinoza as for Machiavelli, conflict is not a failure of the state but an inescapable and productive force in political life. Within Leo Strauss’s interpretive framework, Baruch Spinoza emerges not merely as a critic of religion but as a profoundly strategic thinker whose philosophical project unfolds under conditions of prudence and concealment. Strauss characterizes Spinoza as a “master of deception,” suggesting that his apparent moderation conceals a more radical intention. Religion, in this reading, is reduced to a “necessary poison” for the multitude, an instrument of social cohesion rather than a bearer of truth. Spinoza’s redefinition of faith as mere obedience marks a decisive contraction of its epistemic scope: by severing faith from knowledge, he effectively disqualifies theology from making truth claims that could rival those of philosophy or science. The consequence is not an outright refutation of religion, but its quiet marginalization. From a Straussian perspective, the celebrated “separation” between theology and philosophy is less a principled settlement than a tactical armistice. It allows philosophy to survive within a world still governed by theology while gradually eroding the intellectual authority of revelation. Spinoza’s seemingly respectful treatment of Scripture, his “kindness” toward the Bible, can thus be read as a gesture of strategic domestication: religion is not destroyed, but retired from the domain of truth. In this sense, philosophy secures its autonomy not through open confrontation, but through a subtle reconfiguration of the terms of discourse. This interpretation, however, has been contested by contemporary scholars such as Jonathan Israel and Steven Nadler, who regard Strauss’s reading as excessively conspiratorial. Against the hypothesis of esoteric manipulation, they emphasize the sincerity of Spinoza’s project. His reduction of religion to a minimal ethical core, justice and charity, is understood not as a covert strategy to dismantle revelation, but as a genuine attempt to establish civil peace in a context marked by sectarian violence. On this view, Spinoza does not seek to deceive the multitude, but to make coexistence possible by articulating a form of religion stripped of dogmatic antagonism. A further dimension of Strauss’s interpretation emerges in his pairing of Spinoza with Machiavelli. For Strauss, the two form a transhistorical “duo” of covert revolutionaries, jointly responsible for inaugurating the modern project. Machiavelli, described as the “teacher of evil” in a technical rather than moral sense, initiates the break with classical political philosophy by lowering its aspirations. The central question shifts from “How should men live?” to the more pragmatic “How do men live?”, a transition that replaces the pursuit of the summum bonum with the imperatives of security and power. Yet Machiavelli’s innovation remains, in Strauss’s view, incomplete: his political realism lacks a systematic response to the enduring authority of religion. It is here that Spinoza intervenes. By providing a metaphysical and epistemological foundation for Machiavelli’s political insights, he completes the modern turn. If Machiavelli supplies the political technique, Spinoza neutralizes its principal obstacle: the theological claim to superior authority. Through biblical criticism and the strict delimitation of faith, Spinoza ensures that the “priest” can no longer challenge the “prince.” What was in Machiavelli a persistent conflict between political and religious authority is transformed, in Spinoza, into a stabilized order, ultimately compatible with democratic forms of governance. Reason becomes the instrument through which the multitude is organized, no longer as a volatile force but as a structured component of the state. Yet for Strauss, this apparent achievement conceals a deeper loss. The conjunction of Machiavelli and Spinoza produces not only the modern state but also the “modern crisis.” By lowering the horizons of human aspiration to security, utility, and peaceful coexistence, modernity sacrifices the very notions of greatness and truth that animated classical philosophy. What remains is a civilization oriented toward comfort and self-preservation, but deprived of any substantive account of the good life. In Strauss’s view, Spinoza’s “sin” was his effort to sap the vital tension between Athens and Jerusalem, that essential friction between Reason and Revelation, or Philosophy and Faith. By contrast, premodern philosophers sought to maintain this tension through a delicate “esoteric” equilibrium. They did not aim to neutralize one in favor of the other; rather, they lived within the contradiction, preserving the sovereignty of the Law for the many while safeguarding the freedom of the Intellect for the few. These philosophers recognized that their rational inquiries often threatened the very social and religious myths required for communal stability. Consequently, they wrote for a dual audience: the masses, who received a message of piety and law, and the philosophical elite, who could discern the “hidden,” often heterodox, rationalist meanings between the lines. Strauss, Phronesis, and the Art of Writing Strauss argued that modern political science has failed precisely because it attempts either to ignore or to resolve the theologico-political problem. In his view, Machiavelli and Spinoza are the primary culprits in this regard. He advocated a return to the “ancients,” Plato and Aristotle, and to the “medievals,” above all Maimonides and al-Fārābī, admiring in particular the way Islamic and Jewish thinkers handled this tension. Unlike the Christian tradition, which employed “Natural Law” as a means of harmonizing reason and faith, the Jewish and Islamic traditions understood religion primarily as Law, Torah or sharī ʿ a . This structural reality forced the thinker to become a “political philosopher,” one who publicly respects the Law while privately pursuing the Truth. For Strauss, “writing between the lines” is a form of phronesis . It is the “practical wisdom” of knowing what to say in public in order to satisfy the “city,” while reserving dangerous truths for the “few.” If a philosopher lacks this phronesis , he either becomes a target of tyranny or, worse, inadvertently prepares the ground for a new kind of tyranny by being too “honest” about the instability of social myths. Al-Fārābī and Maimonides are, in this sense, the supreme masters of the “art of writing” because they operated in worlds where religion was defined as Law. This created a unique structural pressure: the philosopher could not simply disagree with “dogma”; he had to navigate an encompassing legal framework. Strauss’s discovery of al-Fārābī’s Philosophy of Plato marked a turning point in his own intellectual career. He argued that al-Fārābī used Plato as a “mask” through which to discuss his own radical ideas about Islam. Strauss noted that in al-Fārābī’s summaries of Plato, he often conspicuously omits or downplays the immortality of the soul. For Strauss, this “silence” itself functioned as a loud signal: al-Fārābī was suggesting to the philosophical elite that the afterlife might be a “pious myth” necessary for social order rather than a philosophical truth. Al-Fārābī thus reimagined the Prophet as a “Philosopher-King” or “Supreme Legislator.” By framing the Prophet in Platonic terms, he subtly suggested that the essence of prophecy is political science. He presented the Law as a set of symbols intended to guide the masses toward virtue, while the philosopher understands the rational “demonstration” underlying those symbols. If al-Fārābī used masks, Maimonides used traps. In the introduction to The Guide for the Perplexed , Maimonides explicitly warns the reader that he will employ contradictory statements in order to conceal the truth. He lists seven reasons why a book may contain contradictions. The seventh is the most famous: contradiction may be used deliberately to conceal a truth that the common reader is not prepared to grasp. Maimonides describes metaphysical truth as a flash of lightning in a dark night. His writing strategy mimics this image: a truth is revealed in one chapter, only to be “covered over” by a more traditional or exoteric statement in the next. Maimonides also treats the most sacred parts of the Torah, Ma ʿ aseh Bereshit and Ma ʿ aseh Merkavah , as corresponding to physics and metaphysics. Strauss argues that Maimonides’ “secret” was a radically Aristotelian understanding of nature and divinity, one he could disclose only indirectly in order to avoid charges of heresy. Strauss admired al-Fārābī and Maimonides precisely because they did not try to “harmonize” Reason and Revelation in the Thomistic manner. They left the tension unresolved. For them, the Law was the nomos of the city and Truth the physis of the world. They inhabited the “gap” between the two, using writing itself to build a bridge that only the worthy could cross. While al-Fārābī and Maimonides lived within the “gap” between nomos and physis , Baruch Spinoza sought to close it permanently. Where al-Fārābī used a “Platonic mask” and Maimonides “intentional contradictions” to keep philosophy private and protected, Spinoza used critique to make the philosophical spirit public and political. He exchanged the “noble dissimulation” of the ancients for the “naked truth” of the Enlightenment. In Strauss’s eyes, the medievals were more realistic because they accepted that the “City” and “Philosophy” would always remain in tension. Plato, Esotericism, and the “Impossible City” According to the Straussian perspective, this “reading between the lines” is a perennial feature of the history of philosophy. Strauss’s interpretation of Plato is defined by the conviction that Plato wrote esoterically, shielding his most radical insights beneath a “surface,” or exoteric teaching. This necessity arose from two motives: protecting philosophy from political persecution and preventing the destabilization of shared beliefs essential to a healthy society. Strauss maintained that the Platonic dialogues are never direct statements of Plato’s own views, since the author never speaks in his own voice but only through characters such as Socrates. In this context, Socratic irony becomes a form of “noble dissimulation,” a method by which a superior mind conceals its wisdom either to avoid giving offense or to guide worthy students toward deeper truths. Where a thinker such as Karl Popper reads Plato’s Republic as a literal blueprint for a totalitarian nightmare, Strauss argues that it is, in fact, a profound critique of political idealism. He famously characterized the Kallipolis as “The Impossible City.” Strauss contended that this “city in speech” is intentionally presented as unattainable because it requires a radical abstraction from the human body, including the abolition of private property and the dissolution of the family, both of which human nature strongly resists. By exposing the extreme, and often grotesque, measures necessary to achieve “perfect” justice, Plato was not drafting a utopian manual. Rather, he was warning against the fanaticism that arises when one attempts to impose a perfect political order upon an imperfect world. For Strauss, philosophy is inherently subversive. By its very nature, it interrogates the “opinions” that serve as the foundational pillars of any stable society. Every “city” requires “pious myths” or “noble lies” to preserve its internal cohesion and unity. Yet because the philosophical life reveals that the city’s laws are rooted in convention ( nomos ) rather than nature ( physis ), the political order, and the tyrant in particular, will always regard the philosopher with a fundamental, and perhaps justified, suspicion. This is the enduring lesson of the trial and death of Socrates. To survive the perennial threat of tyranny, and to prevent radical philosophical inquiry from inadvertently unraveling the social fabric, Strauss contends that thinkers must master the “Art of Writing.” This esoteric strategy allows the philosopher to appear on the surface as a law-abiding, even traditional, citizen. Meanwhile, the most destabilizing insights remain “hidden between the lines,” reserved for the select few capable of confronting the “truth of the whole” without lapsing into nihilism or revolutionary fanaticism. Philosophy, Tyranny, and the Temptation of the “Platonopolis” Ultimately, the relationship between philosophy and tyranny constitutes the supreme “theologico-political” problem. Strauss explores this tension primarily through his famous dialogue with Alexandre Kojève in On Tyranny , his commentary on Xenophon’s Hiero . He argues that philosophy and tyranny are not merely polar opposites but are inextricably linked by a mutual, if fraught, necessity: the philosopher requires the city’s protection, while the city requires the order that only authority can provide. Throughout history, philosophers have been seduced by the prospect of advising the tyrant, or the enlightened despot, in order to bring about a rational social order. The philosopher’s temptation is to transform the world into a “Platonopolis,” a place where the pursuit of truth is institutionalized. Yet Strauss issues a stark warning: when a philosopher seeks to rule directly or to guide the hand of absolute power, philosophy collapses into ideology. By becoming an instrument of statecraft, it loses its essential “searching” or skeptical character, sacrificing its freedom to the demands of political totality. Falsafa as a “Cautious Enlightenment” In the Straussian interpretation of intellectual history, the falsafa tradition, comprising a transreligious linguistic community of Arabic-writing thinkers, including Muslims, Jews, and Christians such as Yaḥyā ibn ʿAdī, offers a unique meta-framework that stands in sharp contrast to both Latin Scholasticism and the modern paradigm. While the Latin West sought to harmonize Faith and Reason into a transparent, systematic totality, best exemplified by the Summa Theologiae , the falāsifa maintained an “energetic tension” between these two poles. They did not seek a final, public reconciliation; rather, they lived within the contradiction, employing esotericism as a strategic necessity to protect the purity of the philosophical quest while respecting the social and normative requirements of religious Law. For Strauss, this medieval model represents a “cautious Enlightenment” rooted in phronesis , providing a vital critique of the Western Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. The latter was founded upon the conviction that the “exercise of reason” should no longer be restricted to a rare elite but disseminated among the masses. Strauss contends that this project of universal disclosure neglected a long-standing tradition in which truth was recognized as potentially destabilizing, harmful both to the social fabric and to thought itself if exposed without restraint. By seeking to lead the “common people” toward rational thinking without mediation, the modern Enlightenment inadvertently paved the way for nihilism, stripping society of the “noble lies” and shared prejudices necessary for stability. In this context, Strauss identifies a fundamental “lowering of the bar” in early modernity. Thinkers such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke replaced the classical pursuit of human excellence and virtue with a focus on “peace and security.” This shift transformed politics from an art concerned with the cultivation of character and the vision of the philosopher-king into a technical science preoccupied with “rights” and bureaucratic management. Machiavelli’s primary error, in Strauss’s view, was the destruction of the noble lie. By suggesting that lying is structurally bound to politics without distinguishing between its base and noble forms, he eliminated the protective distance between philosophical inquiry and political necessity. The “two-truths” doctrine attributed to falsafa , the distinction between an esoteric, demonstrative truth for the elite and an exoteric, symbolic truth for the public, was thus a safeguard. It allowed thinkers such as al-Fārābī, Maimonides, and Avicenna to navigate the volatility of the masses and the rigidity of institutions. Strauss’s “conservatism” was therefore not a reactionary rejection of reason, but a “rescue mission” aimed at rehabilitating the rational traditions of antiquity and the Middle Ages. He argued that the absence of caution, the modern principle of “truth for all,” converges with the dynamics of “post-truth,” in which unmediated exposure leads to the erosion of genuine meaning. Beyond Strauss: The Return of “Philosophical Religion” Ultimately, however, the nuanced distinctions among these philosophers are precisely what is lost in Leo Strauss’s interpretation. Their respective relationships to the crystallization of falsafa as a “philosophical religion” diverge significantly. From my perspective, the impulse to constitute falsafa as a philosophical religion reached its most potent expression only in the works of al-Kirmānī and Avicenna, although they pursued markedly different strategies. Al-Kirmānī functioned as the “organic philosopher” of the Fatimid project, arguably sacrificing the autonomy of philosophical reason to serve ideological ends. Avicenna, by contrast, achieved this through a conscious decoupling from his Ismaili background; yet, from a strictly Aristotelian vantage point, he engaged in a form of “heresy” by developing the concept of the “Sacred Intellect” ( al- ʿ aql al-qudsī ). The investigation of the concept of a “philosophical religion” demands both rigorous inquiry and heightened conceptual vigilance, particularly when tracing structural continuities between medieval metaphysics and modern rationalism. In the eleventh century, Avicennism emerged not merely as a school of logic, but as a project of philosophical religion. By transforming the Aristotelian “Unmoved Mover” into a source of ontological emanation, Avicenna established a framework in which the human soul’s highest objective is conjunction with the Active Intellect. This system suggests that the philosopher and the prophet draw from the same source. Yet while the prophet receives truth through imaginal intuition, the philosopher attains it through discursive reason. Consequently, falsafa is elevated into a path of spiritual realization that is functionally equivalent, and often intellectually superior, to the observance of traditional religious Law. Parallel to this, the Ismaili project, as articulated in the thought of Ḥamīd al-Dīn al-Kirmānī, constituted a comprehensive philosophical-religious endeavor. Al-Kirmānī functioned as the “organic philosopher” of the Fatimid state, synthesizing Neoplatonic emanationism with political theology in order to provide the regime with a metaphysical foundation. From al-Kirmānī to the Druze Tradition The Druze tradition represents the most distinct historical instance of a community founded explicitly upon such a philosophical religion. Unlike traditional creeds centered on a personal, volitional deity, the Druze faith is rooted in a highly technical Neoplatonic cosmology. Its primary scripture, the Epistles of Wisdom ( Rasā ʾ il al-Ḥikma ), consists of philosophical and theological epistles rather than a conventional scriptural narrative. The “Five Limits” ( al-Ḥudūd ), including the Universal Intellect ( al- ʿ Aql ), the Universal Soul ( al-Nafs ), and the Word ( al-Kalima ), among others, provide a philosophical map of the cosmos. Within this framework, these metaphysical principles are also embodied in figures occupying specific positions within the sacred hierarchy. While Avicenna and al-Kirmānī primarily addressed scholarly and initiatory elites, the Druze project effectively “socialized” these philosophical building blocks, employing them to define a resilient communal and spiritual identity. Spinozism as a Modern “Philosophical Religion” If these medieval precedents are maintained, a critical question emerges concerning the status of Spinozism in the modern epoch. While Spinozism transcends a mere hermeneutic of Baruch Spinoza’s personal corpus, it fundamentally constitutes a philosophical religion in its own right. Although the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus formally mandates a sharp demarcation between theology, relegated to the sphere of social obedience, and philosophy, understood as the sole domain of truth, the Ethics effectively collapses this distinction. In the latter, these spheres are reintegrated into a singular, immanent “religion of reason,” in which the traditional pursuit of piety is subsumed by the intellectual drive toward metaphysical necessity. In this light, the Ethics functions as an ultimate scripture. Written with geometric, almost ritualistic rigor, it serves as a manual for “blessedness” ( beatitudo ) and liberation from the “bondage” of the passions. It fulfills the traditional religious function of providing a path to salvation, yet does so without the need for church, clergy, or revelation, grounding the sacred entirely within the exercise of the intellect.

In April 2026, Wissam Saadé delivered four lectures at the University of Bologna. The first, at the invitation of Professor Giovanni Giorgini, was entitled “The Prophet and the Philosopher: The Hierarchy of Knowledge between Avicenna’s Falsafa and al-Kirmānī’s Ismaili Neoplatonism.” Its text is presented here in a revised and expanded version, as part of a series of ten articles. This series explores the intellectual landscape of Neoplatonism in Islam through a comparative reading of Avicenna and al-Kirmānī. Although both thinkers share a broad Neoplatonic horizon, shaped by a metaphysics of emanation, a hierarchy of being, and a synthesis of Aristotelian and Platonic thought, they develop two distinct philosophical projects: Avicenna within the Peripatetic tradition of falsafa , and al-Kirmānī within Ismaili theology. Despite their different intellectual contexts, their systems remain in constant dialogue around the nature of knowledge, the relationship between reason and revelation, and the ascent of the soul. Their respective projects also embody two contrasting conceptions of the political, illuminating different ways of understanding the place of philosophy in relation to authority, law, and the organization of the community. This article constitutes the ninth part of this ten-part series. IX - The Bifurcated Reception of Avicennism and Averroism in Medieval Christendom: Constructing the “Double Truth” Accusation Showing that reason does not quite sabotage revelation became something of a shared intellectual pastime across the Islamicate world, Latin Christendom, and Jewish communities moving between the two. The effort was less a unified project than a recurring anxiety, dressed in different vocabularies: in kalām as dialectical defense, in falsafa as philosophical reconciliation, in anti-philosophical currents as outright suspicion, in Sufism as an experiential bypass, and in medieval Europe as the careful architecture of Scholastic theology. The same problem, in other words, was rehearsed with different accents, and occasionally with the confidence that this time, finally, it might be settled. In medieval Europe, the debate over the relationship between reason and revelation crystallized around two poles: the Augustinian credo ut intelligam (“believe so that you may understand”) and the more systematically articulated Thomistic synthesis. Within this framework, Thomas Aquinas advanced the claim that human reason, operating on its own terms, is capable of attaining certain foundational truths, most notably the existence of God, while remaining intrinsically limited when confronted with the suprarational mysteries of Christian doctrine, such as the Incarnation or the Trinity. Aquinas sets a clear condition for this synthesis of theology and philosophy: philosophy is to function as the ancilla theologiae , the “handmaid of theology.” In his own way, he restates a principle often associated with Averroes, namely that truth cannot contradict truth. Since God is held to be the source of both the “light of reason” and Revelation, a genuine contradiction between the two is, in principle, impossible. Any apparent conflict therefore points either to an error in rational inference or to a misinterpretation of the scriptural text. On this basis, Aquinas formulates his well-known maxim: grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it. By the thirteenth century, this framework reached its most systematic expression within Scholasticism under Thomas Aquinas, where theology came to function as the magister scientiarum , the “master of the sciences,” shaping the intellectual architecture of the emerging universities. Within this hierarchy, theology provides the overarching horizon, while the liberal arts, organized into the trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music), are integrated as preparatory disciplines. Their value is thus not autonomous but instrumental: they acquire their full meaning only insofar as they are ultimately ordered toward theological understanding, flowing, as it were, into its encompassing framework. Kalām, fiqh, and the Sovereignty of Tradition In contrast, kalām in the Islamic sphere never achieved such total hegemony. It failed to subordinate philosophy to its own ends, nor could it maintain its centrality against jurisprudence ( fiqh ). Instead, it was absorbed into the broader legalistic system as a subordinate discipline, a science of creed (ʿ aqīda ), which, after the early Abbasid centuries, could not compete with the sheer momentum, scope, and theoretical depth of fiqh and uṣūl al-fiqh (Principles of Jurisprudence). Islamic civilization evolved as a “civilization of Law.” Within the duality of reason (ʿ aql ) and tradition ( naql ), the balance tilted toward tradition, albeit through continuous attempts to ward off perceived contradictions between the two. A prime example is Ibn Taymiyya’s Dar ʾ Ta ʿ āruḍ al- ʿ Aql wa-l-Naql (“Warding Off the Contradiction between Reason and Tradition”). As the archetypal figure of Salafism, Ibn Taymiyya did not seek to abolish reason, but to demonstrate that “explicit reason” inevitably leads to “authentic tradition.” In this equation, however, tradition remains the standard, while reason serves as the witness that validates it. Notably, the very definition of “reason” shifted from the Ashʿarite-Ghazālian model to Ibn Taymiyya’s Ḥanbalī-Salafist model. For al-Ghazālī, reason was a logical “balance,” largely Aristotelian, a necessary instrument for demonstrating the truth of prophecy that nonetheless halts at the threshold of the Unseen. For him, any apparent conflict required ta ʾ wīl (allegorical interpretation), while reason itself functioned as a “light” cast by God into the heart. For Ibn Taymiyya, by contrast, reason was fiṭra , primordial nature or innate disposition. He rejected the confinement of reason within Greek logical rules, arguing that “explicit reason” is simply that which accords with sound fiṭra . Reason, for him, was not an external instrument but an innate faculty naturally attuned to Revelation. While the Muʿtazilites and the philosophers sought the primacy of reason, the ideological victory ultimately went to those who placed reason under the sovereignty of tradition, eventually redefining it through the lens of fiṭra . Ultimately, uṣūl al-fiqh became the true arena for Islamic logical ingenuity. Rather than constructing grand theological systems on the scale of Aquinas, Muslim intellectual culture turned toward a “methodology of deriving norms.” Reason was “contained” and deployed within a vast linguistic and logical engineering project in the service of the Text. Here, reason is not a sovereign legislator, but an “engineer” who interprets and measures. Ockham, Siger of Brabant, and the Crisis of Scholastic Synthesis Ironically, the very success of Latin Scholasticism in imposing its primacy laid the groundwork for its own eventual undoing. By absorbing Aristotelianism and demonstrative logic in order to make faith a “rationally impregnable fortress,” Scholasticism inadvertently created the tools through which its own authority could later be subverted. In the fourteenth century, William of Ockham declared that universal concepts possess no independent reality; they are merely “names,” a position later associated with Nominalism. This philosophical shift had two major consequences. First, it widened the separation between faith and reason by arguing that God’s “absolute will” cannot be bound by human logic. Second, by redirecting attention from theological universals toward particulars, it helped prepare the conceptual ground for the rise of empirical science. Before Ockham, however, there was Siger of Brabant and the impact of Latin Averroism. Siger embodied the intellect that attempted, prematurely, to liberate philosophy from its theological shroud. A secular cleric rather than a member of the mendicant orders, as Aquinas and Bonaventure were, Siger (c. 1240–1284) became the leading figure of Latin Averroism. He taught philosophy as an autonomous discipline without seeking to subordinate it to theology. Accused of heresy and pursued by ecclesiastical authorities in France, Siger fled to Italy to appeal to the Papal Curia at Orvieto, where he was eventually stabbed to death by his secretary. Notably, Dante Alighieri placed Siger in Paradise in the Divine Comedy (Canto X), alongside his intellectual rival Thomas Aquinas, presenting him as a spirit who had “syllogized envious truths.” In the intellectual milieu of the University of Paris in the late thirteenth century, Siger of Brabant occupied a particularly tense position. He was neither a simple adversary of faith nor a conventional theologian, but a thinker attempting to push Aristotelian rationality to its internal limits, largely through the lens of Averroes. His project did not consist in opposing Revelation as such, but in rigorously articulating what follows if one remains strictly within the autonomy of philosophical demonstration. From this standpoint, several theses became especially controversial. First came the question of the eternity of the world. Against the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo , Siger defended the philosophical plausibility, indeed, from the standpoint of Aristotelian physics, the necessity, of an eternal cosmos without temporal origin. Within this framework, there is no “first moment” and no inaugural human event in the biblical sense, but only an unbroken continuity of motion and causality. Second was the doctrine commonly associated with Averroism, namely monopsychism. Here, the central claim is that the Active Intellect is singular and universal rather than individually multiplied across human beings. The implication is radical: while acts of thinking occur in individuals, the principle of intellection is one and the same for all humanity. This leads to a third, even more destabilizing consequence. If intellect is not individually differentiated in a strict ontological sense, then traditional notions of personal immortality and individual moral accountability become difficult to sustain within a purely philosophical register. The classical framework of reward and punishment thereby risks losing its metaphysical foundation. From these tensions arose the so-called problem of “double truth,” often attributed to Siger in simplified form. In its crude version, it suggests that something could be true in philosophy while false in theology. Siger’s position, however, is subtler. Philosophical reasoning, operating according to demonstrative necessity, may arrive at conclusions that diverge from revealed doctrine; yet this divergence does not negate the authority of Revelation, which remains absolute within its own order. The issue is therefore not simply contradiction, but the coexistence of two distinct epistemic regimes operating according to different criteria of truth. His insistence on the autonomy of philosophical inquiry nevertheless proved institutionally explosive. At the University of Paris, this line of thought contributed to a broader crisis over the status of Aristotelianism in Christian intellectual life, culminating in the Condemnation of 1277, when numerous propositions associated with radical readings of Aristotle were officially censured. Siger’s historical significance thus lies less in any single systematic doctrine than in the pressure his position exerted on the medieval synthesis itself. He made visible the fragile boundary between a theology capable of integrating philosophy and a philosophy that, by pursuing its own rigor, risked escaping that integration. Ernst Bloch and the “Aristotelian Left” In contrast to the “Aristotelian Right” of the Scholastics, who viewed matter as a passive vessel for divine form, the theo-Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch sought to construct the genealogy of an “Aristotelian Left” in his book Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left . He traced a subversive lineage beginning with Alexander of Aphrodisias and reaching its culmination in Avicenna’s concept of the “fertility of matter.” This lineage continued through Averroes and eventually crossed into Christendom with Siger of Brabant. For Bloch, it represented the “warm stream” of materialism, a current that privileges the self-moving and creative power of the natural world over theological imposition. Yet this seamless genealogy glides over an obvious difficulty: Averroes spent much of his career attempting to dismantle Avicenna’s philosophy, to say nothing of the vastly different, and often contradictory, receptions their respective “authorities” encountered in the Latin West. And yet Bloch’s intuition remains brilliant. His genius lies less in cold historical accuracy than in his transgressive bridging of Islamic and medieval intellectual traditions in order to construct a philosophical mythos capable of revitalizing the past. Bloch correctly identified Avicenna as the figure who breathed soul back into matter: by conceiving matter as inherently “form-bearing” rather than as a vacant vessel, he helped lay the conceptual groundwork for an autonomous physics. Perhaps most significantly, Bloch’s decision to enlist both Avicenna and Averroes in a shared “leftist” camp offers a compelling alternative to the influential structural project of Mohammed Abed al-Jabri. In his landmark critique, al-Jabri sought to preserve the purity of “demonstrative reason” ( burhān ), seeing in Averroes the culmination of a rationalist revival that could lead toward modernity, while regarding Avicenna’s synthesis as a turn toward the mystical (ʿ irfān ) that complicated the intellectual trajectory of the East. Bloch, however, through his own distinctive lens, manages to reconcile these two giants. By framing them as part of a single revolutionary lineage, his genealogy invites us to recognize a more inclusive current of materialist thought, one that finds as much value in Avicenna’s “fertile matter” as in Averroes’ rigorous logic, thereby transcending the sharp dichotomies that have long shaped the study of the falsafa heritage. The Bifurcated Latin Reception of Avicenna and Averroes The contrasting reception of Avicennism and Averroism, the latter championed by Siger of Brabant, in the thirteenth century stems from the very architecture of Avicenna’s thought. Unlike the uncompromising Aristotelianism of Averroes, Avicenna offered metaphysical bridges that the Latin West found indispensable. While Siger of Brabant was perceived as an existential threat because of his adherence to a “pure,” radical Aristotle, Avicenna had already synthesized Aristotelianism with Neoplatonism, rendering his system far more “compatible” with monotheistic dogma. Avicenna distinguished between the essence of a thing, what it is, and its existence, the fact that it is. God alone is the Necessary Being ( Wājib al-Wujūd ), whose essence is identical with His existence. All other beings are merely “possible” or contingent: they do not possess existence inherently, but receive it from God. This structure allowed medieval theologians to articulate philosophically the world’s total ontological dependence on a Creator, whereas Siger’s “Averroistic” Aristotle suggested an eternal, self-subsisting universe. Moreover, unlike Averroes and Siger of Brabant, who were associated, in different ways and with different degrees of nuance, with monopsychism, the theory of a single intellect shared by all humanity, Avicenna defended the individuality of the human soul and its survival after death. Through a sophisticated dialectical maneuver, Thomas Aquinas instrumentalized the internal tensions among the “Arab” interpretations, using Avicennism to check Averroism, and vice versa, in order to lay the groundwork for his own Scholastic architecture. Aquinas effectively “baptized” Aristotle by meticulously filtering these Eastern interpretations. He preserved the scaffolding of Avicenna’s ontology of Being while discarding its emanative determinism; conversely, he retained Averroes’ analytical rigor while dismantling his monopsychism. By defining the soul as the form of the body, Aquinas anchored the intellect to the biological individual. Within this framework, man is neither a spirit trapped in a body, as in Plato or Avicenna, nor a body inhabited by a single collective intellect, as in Averroes, but a substantial unity. With striking audacity, Aquinas conceded that reason alone is incapable of proving either the eternity of the world or its temporal beginning. While he held, as a matter of faith, that the world began in time because Revelation says so, he maintained that, philosophically, an eternal world created by God remained a logical possibility. However, the most consequential aspect of the Thomistic intervention was its framing of the intellectual landscape as a binary choice. Philosophy must either declare its independence and drift toward the “absurdity” of a double truth, or submit to theology and assist in the rational articulation of faith, thereby accepting the role of the handmaid ( ancilla ). Yet no major philosopher, Muslim, Jewish, or Christian, ever actually advocated a “Theory of Two Truths.” Their insistence on a hierarchy of knowledge, distinguishing between demonstrative truths accessible to the intellectual elite and rhetorical truths intended for the masses, nevertheless provided the very foundation for the accusations of duplicity leveled against them. Al-Kirmānī, Avicenna, and Averroes were all committed to a single, unified truth; they never posited the existence of two. Even Siger of Brabant held no other view. The problem was that Siger lacked the “Neoplatonic gymnastics” necessary to reconcile his belief in the eternity of the world with religious dogma, yet he could not openly dismiss “non-philosophical” truth. His accusers, however, believed they knew exactly what he was doing: for Siger, there was ultimately only one truth, the Aristotelian, philosophical truth that the world had existed from all eternity. From the “Double Truth” to Spinoza’s Separation This tension gave rise to two distinct strategies for interpreting the history of philosophy and its intersection with religious thought: the first associated with Spinoza in the seventeenth century, and the second with Leo Strauss in the twentieth. Spinoza’s position was that the only way to end the perennial accusation of duplicity leveled against philosophers was to enforce a strict separation between theology and philosophy. Before him, philosophers such as Maimonides and the Latin Averroists had often relied on interpretive strategies to protect their freedom of thought. They argued that the Bible “speaks the language of men” and must therefore be interpreted allegorically in order to reveal philosophical truths. This method left the philosopher vulnerable to the charge of manipulating Scripture to fit a predetermined philosophical agenda. By severing the two domains, Spinoza essentially argued: “Leave the Bible alone.” For him, Scripture contains no hidden philosophical truths; its purpose is not to teach philosophy, but to instill obedience and moral conduct. This separation liberated philosophy from its role as the “handmaid” ( ancilla ) of theology. If theology makes no claim to philosophical truth, its aim being piety and obedience, it can no longer come into genuine conflict with philosophy. The philosopher can likewise no longer be accused of “distorting” the Word of God, having already declared that philosophical inquiry operates on an entirely different plane. Leo Strauss and the Return of Dissimulation Leo Strauss remained skeptical. He argued that Spinoza’s “separation” was itself a rhetorical shield. By claiming that faith and reason were compatible precisely because they belonged to separate domains, Spinoza could introduce radical materialist or atheistic ideas while appearing to preserve respect for “true” piety. For Strauss, even this separation could be understood as a form of dissimulation, since Spinoza’s ultimate project was to replace the authority of Revelation with the sovereign authority of Reason.

In April 2026, Wissam Saadé delivered four lectures at the University of Bologna. The first, at the invitation of Professor Giovanni Giorgini, was entitled “The Prophet and the Philosopher: The Hierarchy of Knowledge between Avicenna’s Falsafa and al-Kirmānī’s Ismaili Neoplatonism.” Its text is presented here in a revised and expanded version, as part of a series of ten articles. This series explores the intellectual landscape of Neoplatonism in Islam through a comparative reading of Avicenna and al-Kirmānī. Although both thinkers share a broad Neoplatonic horizon, shaped by a metaphysics of emanation, a hierarchy of being, and a synthesis of Aristotelian and Platonic thought, they develop two distinct philosophical projects: Avicenna within the Peripatetic tradition of falsafa, and al-Kirmānī within Ismaili theology. Despite their different intellectual contexts, their systems remain in constant dialogue around the nature of knowledge, the relationship between reason and revelation, and the ascent of the soul. Their respective projects also embody two contrasting conceptions of the political, illuminating different ways of understanding the place of philosophy in relation to authority, law, and the organization of the community. This article constitutes the eighth part of this ten-part series. VIII - Reconciling Eternity and Revelation in the Islamic Tradition Al-Kirmānī stands as a transformative figure in the history of Shiʿi Ismaili philosophical mysticism. A thinker of rare pedigree, he spent the better part of his career in the “Persian and Arabian Iraqs,” lands geographically removed from the Fatimid heartland yet central to his mission of defending the Caliphate’s intellectual legitimacy. From this vantage point, al-Kirmānī sought to safeguard ʿirfān (mystical gnosis) from its own radical tendencies. He pursued this through a dual approach. First, by “rationalizing” the Universal Soul so that it mirrored the Universal Intellect, he integrated the Farabian hierarchy of the Ten Intellects into Ismaili cosmology. Second, he took a firm stand against the deification of the Fatimid Caliph-Imam al-Ḥākim bi-Amr Allāh. While rejecting al-Ḥākim’s divinity, he positioned the Imam as the essential earthly culmination of the celestial hierarchy, the vital anchor of cosmic balance in the physical realm. For al-Kirmānī, this equilibrium was the very soul of the state. He envisioned a perfect harmony between Truth (ḥaqīqa) and Law (sharīʿa), the Esoteric (bāṭin) and the Exoteric (ẓāhir). In his worldview, the Empire’s very survival depended on maintaining this tension; without it, the imperial project would lose its raison d’être. Ironically, al-Kirmānī’s plea for stability was written during an era of profound upheaval. His death followed closely upon the mysterious disappearance of the Caliph al-Ḥākim bi-Amr Allāh, an event that triggered the permanent separation of the Druze from their Ismaili origins. This marked the beginning of a long road toward fragmentation, yet it already represented a stark departure from the Fatimid Empire’s zenith around 1000 CE. At that time, the Caliphate reigned as a preeminent Mediterranean power, its authority extending from North Africa and Egypt across the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula, while also establishing a foothold in southern Italy. This presence began with direct Fatimid rule over Sicily following the conquest of the island and eventually extended to the Italian mainland, where a strategic presence was maintained in regions such as Calabria. Subsequently, under the Kalbid dynasty, the territory flourished as a vital vassal center of Fatimid culture and commerce until the mid-eleventh century. Al-Kirmānī successfully synthesized philosophy with Shiʿism within its Ismaili framework. Centuries later, figures such as Mīr Dāmād, Mullā Ṣadrā, and Sabzawārī would achieve a comparable synthesis, albeit within a Twelver context. As for Avicenna, who was raised in an Ismaili Shiʿi environment, he truly emerged as the philosopher we know only by asserting his independence from the tradition of receiving knowledge through an Imam. His philosophy largely “secularized” the premises of this mystical-gnostic intellect rather than adopting them wholesale. This was precisely the distinction the Moroccan philosopher Mohammed Abed al-Jabri refused to accept. Instead, al-Jabri argued that mystical gnosis reached its most tyrannical culmination in Avicenna, whom he held responsible for the subsequent civilizational deadlock. The Sunni Revival and al-Ghazālī’s Dual Assault With the passing of al-Kirmānī, around 1021 CE, and Avicenna, in 1037 CE, these thinkers departed just as the tide began to turn in the Islamicate world. A few decades later, the page turned on what some historians have labeled the “Shiʿi Century,” marking the beginning of the era of the Sunni Revival. Although the Ismailism of Alamut represented a counter-current to this revival, al-Ghazālī, at the end of the eleventh century CE, launched a dual assault against the falāsifa (philosophers) on the one hand and the Bāṭiniyya (Ismailis) on the other. His aim was to raze the Islamic “Platonopolis,” the dream of the philosophical city, to its very foundations in all its various forms. Al-Ghazālī viewed the philosophers and the Ismailis as two sides of the same “heretical” coin. His accusations against the Ismailis ranged from atheism to the doctrine of dyadism. He argued that the Ismailis endowed the Originator (al-Mubdiʿ) with such absolute transcendence that they stripped Him of both existence and non-existence. They then positioned the First Intellect as the actual governor of the universe and the practical object of worship. For al-Ghazālī, this rendered the First Intellect a second god alongside the Creator, moving them away from pure Islamic monotheism toward dualism. Al-Ghazālī emphasized that the ultimate goal of the Bāṭiniyya was to lead the seeker to a station where religious obligations (taklīf), such as prayer and fasting, are dropped once the “hidden meaning” is known. Al-Ghazālī’s intellectual project can be understood as a sophisticated, dual-fronted maneuver in which he skillfully deployed the defense of Reason or Revelation depending on the perceived adversary. In his confrontation with the Ismaili doctrine of taʿlīm, he adopted the guise of a rationalist defender to undermine the necessity of the Infallible Imam. By challenging the Ismaili premise that the human intellect is inherently incapable of grasping divine truths without an external authoritative guide, al-Ghazālī sought to demonstrate that such reliance on charismatic authority inevitably leads to the atrophy of the mind and the abdication of critical thought. This defense of Reason was, however, entirely instrumental, as evidenced by his simultaneous assault on the falāsifa. In this second theater of conflict, al-Ghazālī pivoted to the role of guardian of Revelation, attacking what he perceived as the over-inflation of Hellenistic logic at the expense of dogma. His critique focused on three fundamental points of contention that he believed struck at the heart of the faith. First, he targeted the Avicennian thesis of the eternity of the world. While the philosophers employed Neoplatonic emanation to bridge the gap between an eternal God and a temporal universe, al-Ghazālī viewed this synthesis as a dangerous reduction of the divine nature. For him, a God who emanates by necessity is a mechanical cause stripped of the volitional Free Will essential to the Qurʾānic “Creator.” Furthermore, al-Ghazālī vehemently rejected the philosophical proposition that the Divine knows only universals and not particulars. From his perspective, such a limitation on God’s knowledge effectively nullified the possibility of Divine Providence, severing the intimate, personal connection between the Creator and the individual creature. Finally, al-Ghazālī confronted the philosophers’ conceptualization of the afterlife. Even as they moved away from the more radical Aristotelian views on the total mortality of the soul, he found their insistence on a purely spiritual survival to be an intolerable deviation. By denying bodily resurrection, the philosophers stood in direct contradiction to the literal and symbolic weight of the Qurʾānic texts, which affirm the ultimate resurrection of the flesh. Turning the Philosophers’ Logic Against Them The sharpest point of al-Ghazālī’s attack was his accusation that Avicenna and the philosophers failed to adhere to the very rules of demonstration they had established in their logic, such as those derived from Aristotle’s Organon, when they ventured into metaphysics. Al-Ghazālī’s fundamental maneuver was one of internal critique: he ostensibly accepted the philosophers’ own logical criteria, only to challenge the rigor of their application within the realm of metaphysics. This approach defines the essence of his Tahāfut al-Falāsifa (The Incoherence of the Philosophers), wherein he seeks to demonstrate that the Neoplatonic synthesis constructed by al-Fārābī and Avicenna was not the seamless, demonstrative science it claimed to be. Rather, he exposes it as a fragile architecture of contradictions, effectively turning Aristotelian logic against the very system that sought to canonize it. By shifting the battleground to the consistency of their own methods, al-Ghazālī did not merely reject the falāsifa on dogmatic grounds; he attempted to dismantle their authority from within, arguing that their metaphysical conclusions failed to meet the high standards of proof they demanded in the formal sciences. Historically, al-Fārābī and Avicenna felt the need to present Greek philosophy as a harmonious system. They attempted to bridge the gaps between various schools on the basis of Neoplatonic emanation. The conflicts of ancient philosophy either did not reach them or were ignored in favor of presenting philosophy as a unified and consistent science, “Greek Science,” which could serve as a stable alternative to the fragmented theological and legal sects of their time. Ultimately, al-Ghazālī’s deepest realization was that the “One” and the “Necessary Being” of the Hellenized Muslim philosophers resulted in a “philosophical religion” fundamentally different from the religion al-Ghazālī himself was formulating, a vast synthesis of Sufism and Logic embodied in his project, The Revival of the Religious Sciences (Iḥyāʾ ʿUlūm al-Dīn). One Truth, Not “Double Truth” Despite the ferocity of his attack, al-Ghazālī did not accuse the philosophers of holding a “Double Truth” theory, for a reason both simple and profound: Avicenna and al-Fārābī never claimed that there were two contradictory truths. For them, Truth was one and indivisible. The difference lay not in the essence of truth, but in the mode of its expression. The philosopher grasps truth through demonstration. The Prophet grasps the same truth through the Sacred Imagination, through symbols, stories, and parables. Therefore, for them, Philosophy and sharīʿa (Divine Law) were identical in depth; sharīʿa was simply “philosophy for the masses.” Al-Ghazālī’s attack arose because the philosophers attempted to “occupy” the space of religion and interpret prophecy as a psychological or intellectual phenomenon. By contrast, the attack in medieval Europe on “Latin Averroism,” associated with figures such as Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia, arose because those influenced by Arabic falsafa were perceived as creating an independent domain for Reason, or philosophical truth, functioning separately from Theology. While the “Latin Averroists” were famously accused by the Church of promoting a “Double Truth,” suggesting that something could be true in philosophy while its opposite was true in faith, al-Ghazālī’s critique took a different psychological turn. Instead of “Double Truth,” al-Ghazālī accused the Eastern philosophers of “Deception” (talbīs). He saw them not as maintaining two separate but equal spheres, but as pretending to adhere to the sharīʿa (religious truth) while strategically dismantling its foundations from within through their doctrines of the world’s eternity and the denial of bodily resurrection. In al-Ghazālī’s eyes, this made them intellectual conspirators with the Bāṭiniyya, despite their rejection of the Ismaili reliance on the “Instruction” (taʿlīm) of an Infallible Imam. Averroes and the Restoration of Aristotle While al-Ghazālī’s Tahāfut was a death blow to the specific Neoplatonic-Islamic synthesis of Avicenna, Averroes’ response was less a defense of Avicenna than a project of restoration. Averroes essentially “threw Avicenna under the bus” to salvage the purity of Aristotle. He argued that Avicenna’s famous distinction between essence and existence, in which existence is treated as an “accident” befalling an essence, was a linguistic and philosophical blunder. Furthermore, he dismissed the Theory of Emanation, with its logic that “from one, only one can proceed,” as a Neoplatonic myth that had corrupted Aristotle’s more rigorous focus on the Prime Mover. Much of the confusion Averroes sought to rectify stemmed from the Theology of Aristotle, falsely attributed to the Stagirite. The Cordovan philosopher was deeply suspicious of this contaminated legacy. His Long Commentaries were a deliberate attempt to scrape away the “Gnostic and Hermetic” barnacles that had attached themselves to the Aristotelian ship during its long transit through Hellenistic and Syriac traditions. For Averroes, philosophy was a demonstrative method; if a doctrine failed, it was simply because the philosopher was not being “Aristotelian” enough. Consequently, the battle lines had to be redrawn around the eternity of the world. This Aristotelian premise flatly contradicted the “creation from nothing” central to the Abrahamic faiths, sparking a fundamental metaphysical clash. From al-Kindī to Avicenna: The Problem of Eternity Al-Kindī, the first in the lineage of “the Philosophers” and the quintessential “Philosopher of the Arabs,” descending from the Kinda tribe, sought to circumvent this conflict. He committed himself to the temporal creation of the world, asserting that God is the “First Cause” who brought existence out of “non-existence,” and that the world is a product of Divine Will, not eternal alongside God. Al-Fārābī, on the other hand, was preoccupied with reconciling Plato’s Timaeus with Aristotelian metaphysics. In the Timaeus, the world is understood as “generated,” yet the Demiurge does not create matter from nothing; rather, he is a “Divine Architect” who imposes order (Cosmos) upon a primordial, chaotic receptacle (Chōra) by gazing at the eternal Forms. To bridge the gap between Plato and Aristotle, al-Fārābī argued that Aristotle did not mean that the world was independent of a cause, but rather that it was eternal in time while dependent in existence upon the First Cause. To achieve this, he employed the theory of Emanation (fayḍ): the world flows from God as light flows from the sun; it is “contingent” in its dependence upon the Other, yet “eternal” by virtue of the eternity of the Divine Act. Plato’s notion that time was created with the world as a “moving image of eternity” later allowed Avicenna to formulate the theory of “Temporal Eternity and Essential Contingency.” For Avicenna, God is the “Sufficient Cause,” and logic dictates that a sufficient cause cannot be temporally separated from its effect. To avoid equating the world with God, he introduced a surgical distinction: the world is eternal in time, in the sense that there is no “before” preceding it, yet it is “contingent in essence.” In its own nature, the world is “possible,” and, left to itself, it would be nothingness; its existence is borrowed from the “Necessary Being.” This metaphysical framework provoked al-Ghazālī’s charge of apostasy (takfīr). He argued that the philosophers stripped God of “choice,” reducing Him to a natural necessity, like the sun, which must shine, or fire, which must burn. He mocked the principle that “from the One, only one can proceed,” claiming that the philosophers were restricting God’s omnipotence within the confines of their own man-made geometric rules. Averroes: Eternity as Continuous Creation In response, Averroes sought to defend the eternity of the world without relying on the theory of Emanation. He proposed the concept of “Continuous Creation.” For him, the world is in a state of perpetual “becoming,” dependent moment by moment upon the First Cause. Against the theologians (mutakallimūn), he argued that claiming God “decided” to create at a specific moment implies a change in God’s essence, raising the question: why now and not before? In The Decisive Treatise (Faṣl al-Maqāl), he argued that the literal text of Scripture does not categorically support creation from absolute nothingness, citing verses such as “And His Throne was upon the water” to suggest that a primordial matter preceded the world’s current form. For Averroes, truth does not contradict truth. The “connection” between Scripture and Wisdom was not a diplomatic truce between two separate truths, but a unified witness to the same reality. However, as Latin Averroism, associated for example with Siger of Brabant, emerged, it struggled to maintain this “nexus” between demonstration and faith, leading its detractors to accuse it of the “Double Truth” theory, the idea that two contradictory truths could coexist.

In April 2026, Wissam Saadé delivered four lectures at the University of Bologna. The first, at the invitation of Professor Giovanni Giorgini, was entitled “The Prophet and the Philosopher: The Hierarchy of Knowledge between Avicenna’s Falsafa and al-Kirmānī’s Ismaili Neoplatonism.” Its text is presented here in a revised and expanded version, as part of a series of ten articles. This series explores the intellectual landscape of Neoplatonism in Islam through a comparative reading of Avicenna and al-Kirmānī. Although both thinkers share a broad Neoplatonic horizon, shaped by a metaphysics of emanation, a hierarchy of being, and a synthesis of Aristotelian and Platonic thought, they develop two distinct philosophical projects: Avicenna within the Peripatetic tradition of falsafa , and al-Kirmānī within Ismaili theology. Despite their different intellectual contexts, their systems remain in constant dialogue around the nature of knowledge, the relationship between reason and revelation, and the ascent of the soul. Their respective projects also embody two contrasting conceptions of the political, illuminating different ways of understanding the place of philosophy in relation to authority, law, and the organization of the community. This article constitutes the seventh part of this ten-part series. VII - Avicenna’s Synthesis of Prophetic Necessity and the “Secret” Philosopher-King The challenge of reconciling the Platonic philosopher-king with the Islamic political horizon remains one of the most fertile problems in classical falsafa . In the Islamic context, the figure of the ruler is perpetually overshadowed by the singular authority of the Prophet, whose unique access to the divine renders any subsequent claim to power ontologically secondary. Consequently, the post-prophetic era witnessed a divergence into two distinct modes of “Guidance,” each attempting to bridge the gap between divine sovereignty and terrestrial governance. The Sunni tradition articulated the Caliphate as a synthesis of the Qurʾānic theory of human vicegerency ( istikhlāf ) and the pragmatic necessity of the “Commander of the Believers.” In this framework, the Caliph does not act as an ontological bridge to the divine, but rather as a functional guardian of the sharī ʿ a . His authority is primarily administrative and judicial: he is the executor of a pre-existing, revealed Law. Here, the philosopher-king is tempered by the rule of law; the ruler is “just” insofar as he governs the community according to the dictates of a revelation that has already been perfected and completed. In contrast, the Shiʿi Imamate links vicegerency to the metaphysical continuity of the “Muhammadan Light” ( al-Ḥaqīqa al-Muḥammadiyya ). In this paradigm, while the cycle of legislative prophecy ( nubuwwa ) is sealed, the cycle of spiritual guidance ( walāya ) remains open. Authority undergoes a profound shift from the exoteric phase ( ẓāhir ), the delivery of the literal message, to the esoteric phase ( bāṭin ), the unfolding of its hidden spiritual truths. The Imam, therefore, is not merely a political administrator but a luminous presence who possesses the “Inner Revelation” required to decode the divine mystery for the faithful. The Ismaili tradition, particularly in its Fatimid imperial iteration, offered a radical synthesis of these two paths by merging the Caliphate and the Imamate into a single office. Following the “Period of Concealment” ( dawr al-satr ), the public emergence of the Imam-Caliph in North Africa and the subsequent founding of Cairo transformed a secret spiritual lineage into a global empire. For the Ismaili dā ʿ īs , the Imam-Caliph was the living touchstone for all inherited political theories of antiquity. He represented a singular historical phenomenon: the intersection of absolute nostalgia, the restoration of the pure prophetic atmosphere, and absolute utopia, the realization of a perfect, enlightened state. In the person of the Fatimid Imam, the Platonic philosopher-king finally found a home within the Islamic world, not as a theoretical ideal, but as a sovereign who united the sword of the Caliph with the gnosis (ʿ irfān ) of the Imam. The Fatimid Empire stands as the Neoplatonic empire par excellence , representing perhaps the most ambitious attempt in history to translate the vertical hierarchy of Plotinian emanations into a horizontal, terrestrial political structure. For the Fatimid dā ʿ īs , the state was not merely a social contract but a cosmological necessity. They viewed the universe as a series of emanations descending from the “First Intellect” to the material world. Within this Neoplatonic framework, the Imam-Caliph is the earthly counterpart to the Universal Intellect. He is the “Point” from which all knowledge flows downward. While Neoplatonism provided the “how,” the structure, Platonism provided the “what,” the goal. The Fatimid project was Platonic in its fundamental commitment to the Rule of Wisdom. Like Plato’s ideal city, the Fatimid state was an educational project. The establishment of the Majālis al-Ḥikma (Sessions of Wisdom) and al-Azhar was not merely an instrument of propaganda; it was intended to “elevate” the souls of the subjects. The purpose of the state was the perfection of the human soul, the highest Platonic ideal. It is precisely at this juncture that I propose the following formulation: for a thinker such as al-Sijistānī, al-Kirmānī, or Nāṣir-i Khusraw, the Ismaili Imam-Caliph represented the “Unconscious Philosopher-King,” a figure in whom the Platonic ideal is already ontologically realized and objectively manifest, requiring the philosopher not to legislate, but to decipher. In contrast, for Avicenna, who enacted a Promethean rupture with the Ismaili project, the locus of sovereignty shifts. No longer embodied in a visible imperial institution, the burden falls upon the individual: it is the philosopher who is compelled to inhabit a dual existence, serving simultaneously as a cosmic citizen of the intelligible realm and as the secret king of a hidden, inward kingdom. The odyssey of the philosopher-king within the “Oriental” theosophical horizon is thus anything but linear; it is a profound movement from the political manifestation of Gnosis to the interiorization of Sovereignty. The Philosopher-King Beyond Greece While Plato provided the most rigorous philosophical formulation of the philosopher-king, the concept is not uniquely Platonic; it appears elsewhere in more ambiguous and equivocal forms. In ancient Indian traditions, the closest analogue is not a philosopher-king in the strict Platonic sense, but a ruler subordinated to dharma , often guided by, or acting as an embodiment of, wisdom. In the Upanishadic and epic traditions, figures such as Janaka are presented as the rājarṣi (royal sage). Janaka does not merely receive counsel from philosophers; he is an active participant in metaphysical inquiry. Here, the king becomes a site where political authority and spiritual knowledge intersect, not through systematic, independent philosophy, but through the realization of Brahmanical wisdom. Within this framework, the ruler is legitimized not by a dialectical ascent, but by his alignment with the cosmic order ( dharma ). Thus, while the king wields temporal power, the Brahmin, the “knower,” often retains a superior epistemic authority that outranks the throne. In the Persian tradition, specifically within Sasanian and later Islamicate political thought, the figure of the Just King occupies a central place. Here, the king’s legitimacy is contingent upon his embodiment of justice, a concept that later philosophical elaborations, particularly within the Illuminationist tradition, linked to divine light. This synthesis profoundly shaped both the genre of Mirrors for Princes ( naṣīḥat al-mulūk ) and the development of falsafa . Within the Arabic and Persianate Mirrors for Princes tradition, this synthesis was instrumental in redefining Justice. It was no longer understood merely as the “following of the law,” but as the maintenance of the Equilibrium of the state. This political “homeostasis” mirrors Avicenna’s conception of the Prophet-Legislator as the ultimate “balancer” of divergent human temperaments. Thus, while the falāsifa adopted the vocabulary of Greek political science, particularly Plato’s Republic and Laws , the “flesh and blood” of their ideal ruler was often modeled on Sasanian archetypes such as Ardashir I or Khusraw Anushirvan. The divergence from the Greek source is telling: for Plato, the king’s legitimacy derives from his knowledge of the Forms. The falāsifa , however, beginning with al-Fārābī and culminating in Avicenna, shifted the emphasis toward the Sasanian conception of Justice as Equilibrium. Consequently, when Avicenna discusses the Prophet-Legislator, he describes a figure who establishes a Measure ( mīzān ). In this intellectual move, the philosophical “Good” is translated into the Sasanian “Just Order,” in which the ruler’s primary function is to ensure that no part of the social body transgresses against another, thereby preserving the harmony of the whole. The most famous Sasanian political maxim, attributed to Ardashir I, that “Religion and Kingship are twin brothers,” became a foundational principle of Islamic political philosophy. In its original Sasanian context, religion served as the foundation while kingship acted as its guardian; neither could endure without the other. The philosophical impact of this maxim was transformative, as it effectively replaced the Greek concept of the purely secular polis . The falāsifa drew upon this notion of “twinship” to argue that the Prophet, as the founder of religion, and the King, as the preserver of the Law, were two sides of the same coin. This synthesis allowed philosophers to present the sharī ʿ a not merely as a body of ritual law, but as the equivalent of the Sasanian dād (Just Law), a structural necessity for the survival and stability of the state. From the Philosopher-King to the Prophet-Legislator In Plato’s Republic , the ideal ruler is one who, having attained knowledge of the Forms, governs through rational insight. However, in the Islamicate reception of Greek philosophy, this figure undergoes a significant reconfiguration: the presence of prophecy introduces a second locus of access to truth. The central question, therefore, is no longer simply whether the philosopher should rule, but how philosophical knowledge and prophetic authority are to be related, whether as distinct functions, complementary modalities, or hierarchically ordered manifestations of a single truth. In Plato’s formulation, the philosopher-king is defined by a complex movement of conversion rather than a simple ascent: through dialectical training, the soul is reoriented away from opinion toward knowledge, culminating in the contemplation of the intelligible order of reality. This cognitive transformation is not merely cumulative but involves a decisive “turning around” of the soul itself. Yet this contemplative achievement does not translate smoothly into political sovereignty. On the contrary, the philosopher is compelled to re-enter the realm of appearance and opinion, where governance appears less as the natural extension of metaphysical vision than as a burdensome return to the cave, justified only by the demands of justice. Within the Islamicate tradition of reception, however, most notably in the work of al-Fārābī, this Platonic schema can no longer be preserved in its original form. The institutional presence of prophecy as a constitutive source of truth and law compels a profound reconfiguration of the philosophical model. The problem is thereby sharpened to its core: who, in the final analysis, has access to ultimate truth, the philosopher or the prophet? Or, more radically still, are these two figures genuinely distinct, or are they rather two modalities of a single function articulated within different epistemic regimes? Al-Fārābī’s response is at once systematic and conceptually elegant. He reformulates political perfection through the figure of the “First Ruler” ( al-ra ʾ īs al-awwal ), who integrates within a single figure the philosophical and political functions articulated by Plato. This First Ruler unifies two distinct modes of access to truth: philosophical intellection, grounded in demonstrative knowledge ( burhān ), and prophetic cognition, expressed through imaginative-symbolic revelation. In this configuration, prophecy is no longer positioned outside philosophy as its rival or alternative; rather, it appears as its civic and symbolic completion. The philosopher-king is thus neither simply replaced nor contradicted, but reconfigured. He is effectively transfigured into a figure in whom philosophical and prophetic functions converge, though they remain differentiated at the level of expression: rational demonstration on the one hand, and symbolic-imaginative articulation on the other. Within this architecture, rational truth and revelatory symbolism are not opposed but integrated into a single epistemic and political order. In Avicenna, however, the problem shifts decisively from political theory toward metaphysics. The question is no longer primarily how to govern, but how different degrees of intellect relate to the structure of being itself. The Prophet is no longer conceived simply as a ruler-philosopher, but as an intellect whose relation to the Active Intellect is maximally immediate. Avicenna introduces a crucial distinction between modes of cognition: the philosopher ascends gradually through discursive reasoning and abstraction, whereas the prophet receives an instantaneous emanation ( fayḍ ) of intelligible forms. The philosopher-king thus becomes a limit case within the hierarchy of human cognition, while prophecy is elevated to a superior, non-discursive epistemic mode. Political authority remains implicit in this architecture, but it is now grounded in a deeper cognitive hierarchy rather than in civic function alone. The classical “Philosopher-King problem” is thereby transformed within falsafa into a more radical question: whether philosophy can still claim any form of sovereignty once prophecy has been internalized, rationalized, and repositioned as the highest possible mode of truth. Prophecy, the Sacred Intellect, and the Hierarchy of Knowledge For Avicenna, the prophet and the philosopher share the same destination but follow different paths. Both seek to grasp ultimate truth and the nature of the First Principle, but they do so through different faculties of the soul. Both figures seek conjunction with the Active Intellect, the source of all knowledge and forms in the sublunary world. The difference lies in how they gain access to this source. The philosopher reaches truth through syllogistic reasoning, study, and discursive thought. It is a bottom-up process of intellectual labor. The prophet receives truth through intuition ( ḥads ) and revelation. It is a top-down process in which the soul is so pure that it receives knowledge instantaneously, without the need for instruction. Avicenna introduces a sophisticated psychological framework to explain how the prophet operates at a higher level than the philosopher. He identifies the Sacred Intellect ( al- ʿ aql al-qudsī ) as a superlative degree of human intellect, unique to prophets. It enables them to bypass the slow stages of logical reasoning. While a philosopher might take years to grasp a metaphysical truth, the prophet’s “Sacred Intellect” perceives the entire chain of middle terms in a flash of intuition. The most decisive distinction, however, lies in the prophet’s powerful Imaginative Faculty. Because the prophet must lead a community, his imagination “translates” abstract, purely intellectual truths into vivid symbols, images, and parables. These symbols are so powerful that the prophet “sees” them as angels or “hears” them as voices. The philosopher, by contrast, deals with abstract concepts in their “naked” form. Avicenna argues that the prophet is superior to the philosopher in his social function because he fulfills a role the philosopher cannot: that of the Lawgiver. While the philosopher understands why the truth is true, the prophet provides the sharī ʿ a , a necessary framework of laws and symbols that allows society to function and guides non-philosophers toward a virtuous life. In this sense, the prophet is both a “perfect philosopher” and a “perfect statesman.” Whereas for al-Fārābī the ideal ruler is both philosopher and prophet, because philosophy provides knowledge of what is good while prophecy provides the rhetorical and imaginative means to implement that good in the “Virtuous City,” Avicenna shifts this equilibrium by emphasizing the ontological necessity of the Lawgiver. For Avicenna, the prophet is not merely a philosopher who happens to possess rhetorical skills, but a unique human being whose very nature bridges the gap between the celestial and terrestrial realms. While the Farabian Imam stands at the summit of a political hierarchy, the Avicennian Prophet constitutes the indispensable foundation of human survival: without the divine law he provides, humanity would be unable to establish the justice required to sustain a stable society. Consequently, where al-Fārābī views religion as the “handmaiden,” or symbolic imitation, of philosophical truth, Avicenna elevates the prophetic office to a miraculous psychological state, the “Sacred Intellect,” which allows the prophet to grasp the totality of existence instantaneously, something that remains perpetually beyond the reach of the traditional philosopher’s discursive, step-by-step reasoning. Al-Fārābī sees the prophet as the ultimate legislator and educator who makes philosophy accessible to the public. Avicenna shifts the focus inward, conceiving the prophet as a biological and spiritual phenomenon, a human being whose intellect is naturally attuned to a higher cognitive register than that of even the most brilliant philosopher. The Rationalization of Prophecy The Avicennian project represents one of the most sophisticated “rationalizations” of the prophetic phenomenon in the history of ideas. By transposing the office of the Prophet from the domain of theological voluntarism, where the jurists ( fuqahā ʾ) viewed it as a miraculous, arbitrary act of divine selection, into the domain of natural and psychological necessity, Avicenna integrated revelation into the very fabric of the Aristotelian-Neoplatonic cosmos. In doing so, he did not merely defend the possibility of prophecy; he redefined the hierarchy of human intellects, ultimately carving out a unique, “secret” sovereignty for the philosopher within a world governed by prophetic law. At the heart of Avicenna’s system lies a rigorous classification of the human intellect, ascending from the Material Intellect ( al- ʿ aql al-hayūlānī ), the sheer potentiality for thought, to the Acquired Intellect ( al- ʿ aql al-mustafād ), where the mind achieves conjunction with the Active Intellect. Within this hierarchy, Avicenna identifies the Sacred Intellect ( al- ʿ aql al-qudsī ) as a superlative state reserved for the prophetic soul. Unlike the traditional philosopher, who must laboriously traverse the “middle terms” of a syllogism through discursive reasoning, the possessor of the Sacred Intellect operates within the realm of “Acute Intuition.” For the Prophet, knowledge is not a temporal process but an instantaneous flash; the intellect is so purified that it receives the totality of intelligibles from the Active Intellect “at once or nearly so.” This represents a shift from quantitative learning to qualitative conjunction, where the soul becomes a perfectly polished mirror reflecting the divine order of the universe. Avicenna’s divergence from the jurists is most pronounced in his treatment of the Prophet’s function. Where the fuqahā ʾ saw the Prophet as a messenger of divine commands intended for ritual salvation, Avicenna viewed him as an ontological necessity for the survival of the human species. Because humans are inherently social yet prone to conflict, society requires a Lawgiver to establish the “Universal Law.” This legislator must be more than a mere philosopher; he must possess a powerful Imaginative Faculty capable of translating abstract, intellectual truths into vivid symbols, parables, and sensory warnings, heaven, hell, and the voice of the angel. This “rhetorical” layer of religion is essential: it provides a stable socio-political framework for the masses, who are incapable of grasping purely demonstrative proofs. Thus, the Prophet fulfills the Platonic ideal of the Philosopher-King, but with a psychological depth, the Sacred Intellect, that allows his authority to permeate both the intellectual and the sensory worlds. Avicenna’s description of the Prophet’s intellect as a “Sacred Power,” which receives direct emanation from the Active Intellect, serves as a philosophical rationalization of the Farr-e Izadi (or Khvarenah ). This ancient Persian concept denotes a divine, luminous splendor that descends upon the legitimate sovereign, signaling both spiritual authority and temporal grace. The “Secret” Philosopher-King A critical tension arises in Avicenna’s political thought: if the Prophet is the supreme legislator and the only source of executive and judicial legitimacy, what remains for the philosopher? For Avicenna, the philosopher possesses no formal political power. He is neither judge nor executioner; he is a citizen subject to the Prophetic nomos . However, this lack of temporal authority gives rise to what may be termed the “Secret Philosopher-King.” While the Prophet rules over the “Exoteric,” governing the bodies and social order of the masses, the philosopher attains a “Secret Royalty” over the “Esoteric” ( bāṭin ). The philosopher is the only one who understands the ratio behind the Prophet’s symbols. He obeys the law not out of fear or hope, but out of a rational recognition of its necessity. As hinted in the Metaphysics of The Healing ( al-Shifā ʾ), the continuity of the cosmic order depends on an “Intellectual Successor” who preserves the inner truth of the law. Ultimately, Avicenna transposed the Platonic dream from the public Agora to the sanctuary of the mind. The Avicennian philosopher is a “Cosmic Citizen” who, despite his external submission to the state, lives in an inward kingdom of self-sufficiency. By achieving conjunction with the Active Intellect, the philosopher becomes an independent “mental world,” rendering him immune to the vicissitudes of political power. This “Secret Royalty” grants the philosopher the highest form of freedom: the freedom of demonstration over tradition. He remains a “stranger” ( gharīb ) in the earthly city, yet he is the true sovereign of the intelligible realm, standing as “a nation unto himself” while his soul resides among the “Highest Assembly” ( al-mala ʾ al-a ʿ lā ). The Interiorization of Sovereignty The trajectory of the philosopher-king in classical falsafa is neither linear nor self-evident; it unfolds through a series of reconfigurations that progressively relocate sovereignty. With al-Kindī, philosophy remains external to power: the ruler appears as a patron whose legitimacy is ornamented, but not constituted, by rational inquiry. In al-Fārābī, this balance is overturned, as philosophy claims to define power itself: the ruler becomes the Philosopher-Prophet, and political authority derives its validity from demonstrative truth. In the Ismaili synthesis of al-Kirmānī, this relationship is both inverted and absorbed into a theological architecture, where sovereignty is no longer achieved but ontologically vested in the Imam, and philosophy is reduced to an act of interpretation. The Imam is the actualization of the First Intellect on earth; his “philosophy” is not a discursive pursuit but a lived, sovereign presence. For al-Kirmānī, the King does not need to become a philosopher; he is, by virtue of his cosmic station, the very source from which all wisdom emanates. The philosopher’s role is not to guide the ruler, but to decipher his luminous authority. Finally, with Avicenna, sovereignty is internalized: the philosopher withdraws into a “virtual city” of the soul, where true kingship subsists as an invisible, intellectual state. Sovereignty is no longer a political office but a state of being, constituting a hidden royalty that persists beyond the reach of any terrestrial sultan.

In April 2026, Wissam Saadé delivered four lectures at the University of Bologna. The first, given at the invitation of Professor Giovanni Giorgini and entitled “The Prophet and the Philosopher: The Hierarchy of Knowledge between Avicenna’s Falsafa and al-Kirmānī’s Ismaili Neoplatonism,” is presented here in a revised and expanded version, published as a series of ten articles. This 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 a metaphysics of emanation, 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 the framework of Ismaili theology. Despite these different intellectual settings, their systems remain in sustained dialogue over the nature of knowledge, the relationship between reason and revelation, and the ascent of the soul. Their respective projects also embody contrasting conceptions of the political, illuminating different ways of understanding the place of philosophy in relation to authority, law, and the organization of the community. This article is the sixth installment in the ten-part series. VI - Islamizing Platonopolis, Platonicizing Islam Both al-Kirmānī and Ibn Sīnā belong to a long intellectual tradition that conceives philosophy not merely as theoretical inquiry, but as purification ( catharsis ). Within this horizon, the perfection of the human soul and its ascent toward felicity are achieved through the apprehension of truth. The aim of philosophy thus ceases to be the simple understanding of the world; rather, it becomes a means of detachment from it, in view of union with the Absolute. What emerges is a dense synthesis in which Aristotelianism, Platonism, and Islam are interwoven with residual Hermetic and Gnostic motifs, all of which contribute to structuring knowledge as a form of salvation. Within this broader constellation, Gnosticism manifests itself in both radical and moderated forms. In its radical expression, the world is conceived as a prison, and liberation is attained through contact with the Logos. In its moderated form, the world is understood as a domain of mixture or as the site of the soul’s descent, without necessarily positing matter as intrinsically evil. Ismaili thought, in particular, oscillates between these two poles, between ascetic radicalism and metaphysical moderation. Al-Kirmānī occupies a decisive position within this tension, seeking to regulate ʿ irfān (gnosis) so that the bāṭin (esoteric) does not dissolve the ẓāhir (exoteric). His project may thus be described as one of controlled interiority, informed, implicitly, by the reactivation of Stoic motifs such as ataraxia and apatheia , namely the attainment of serenity through mastery over the passions. Salvation, within this framework, is at once gnostic and eschatological. Yet its ultimate aim is not speculative excess, but the attainment of rāḥat al- ʿ aql , the repose of the intellect. For al-Kirmānī, the intellect attains peace precisely when it ceases to strive beyond its proper rank, recognizing the ontological impossibility of directly comprehending the First Origin. By acknowledging these boundaries, the soul refrains from transgression and constructs, through the synthesis of knowledge and action, a spiritual body destined to endure beyond the dissolution of the material world. In the afterlife, it abides in the light of the first intellects, transcending all veils in a state of final tranquility. A central structural principle shared across esoteric traditions is the doctrine of ẓāhir and bāṭin . Every revealed text possesses both an outward surface and an inward depth; in Islamic terms, this corresponds to the duality of sharī ʿ a and ḥaqīqa . This duality is further reinforced by the notion of divine concealment: God is not absent, but veiled behind a succession of ontological curtains. The very existence of the world presupposes mediation, hierarchy, and graded manifestation. Divine light, in its intensity, cannot be received directly; it must be refracted through successive levels of being, lest it annihilate its recipient. This metaphysics of mediation often finds expression in symbolic systems of number and correspondence. Pythagorean resonances are particularly evident in Ismaili numerology, where numbers acquire cosmological and hierarchical significance. Numerical sequences are used to map the structure of the universe, the ranks of spiritual authority, and the stages of emanation from the First Intellect down to the material world. Number thus becomes a language through which metaphysics is both expressed and concealed. Closely related to this are the traditions of ʿ ilm al-jafr and ḥisāb al-jummal . The former, often associated with esoteric Shiʿi knowledge, designates a science of symbolic interpretation in which hidden meanings are extracted from sacred texts, sometimes through cryptographic or combinatory methods. The latter refers to a system of assigning numerical values to the letters of the Arabic alphabet, analogous to Hebrew gematria, thereby allowing words and phrases to be read as numerical configurations. Through this procedure, language itself becomes a field of correspondences, where letters, numbers, and metaphysical realities intersect. These various traditions converge upon a shared conception: the cosmos is structured as a network of intelligible ratios, in which letters, numbers, and beings mirror one another across different ontological levels. The world is thus not a mute aggregate of things, but a legible order, one that can be deciphered by those initiated into its symbolic grammar. This idea reaches its most comprehensive formulation in the notion of the Lawḥ Maḥfūẓ (Preserved Tablet), a Qurʾānic concept referring to the divine register in which all things are inscribed. Here, the cosmos appears as a kind of primordial archive: every event, form, and being exists first as an intelligible inscription within a divine memory before manifesting in time. The world, in this sense, is the temporal unfolding of a pre-written intelligible order, a visible transcription of an invisible script. The Intelligible Human and the Metaphysics of the Imamate Within this framework, one can discern both a recapitulation and an amplification of several late antique and late Hellenistic anthropological motifs, most notably the Neoplatonic notion of the anthrōpos noētós (the intelligible human). In Neoplatonism, particularly in Plotinus, this figure designates an intelligible archetype situated within the realm of Nous , of which empirical humanity constitutes only a diminished and derivative instantiation. Alongside this tradition stands the Hermetic conception of the primordial human ( Anthropos ), depicted as a luminous being who descends into the material cosmos, thereby instituting the dual condition of humanity as simultaneously rooted in transcendence and immersed in corporeality. In several Gnostic systems, this same figure is reformulated as the “Primal Man,” whose fragmentation accounts for the dispersion of divine sparks throughout the structure of the cosmos. From this broader constellation of ideas emerges, in later Islamic intellectual history, the doctrine of the insān al-kāmil , the “perfect human being.” In its most general formulation, this figure designates a microcosm that reflects the macrocosm, a condensed and integrative image of the totality of the universe. In later comparative discourse, it is often associated with the Kabbalistic notion of Adam Qadmon (אָדָם קַדְמוֹן), the primordial and luminous archetype of humanity. Across these traditions, the human being is thus not conceived as a merely partial constituent of the cosmos, but as its symbolic totalization and metaphysical recapitulation. The tension inherent in al-Kirmānī’s thought lies in his effort to systematically intellectualize the figure of the Imam while presenting him as the historical actualization of a primordial, celestial Anthropos . His project was to conceptualize a philosophical-imperial mediator, a ruler who could embody absolute metaphysical truth within a concrete historical form. Ultimately, al-Kirmānī’s system seeks to bind cosmology and the Imamate into a single, unified architecture of meaning. In this framework, the higher and lower worlds are structurally continuous; every metaphysical level finds its political and historical counterpart. The Imamate thus becomes the terrestrial reflection of the cosmic order, grounding political hierarchy in metaphysical necessity. Within this schema, the Universal Intellect corresponds to the speaking Prophet, while the Universal Soul corresponds to the foundational Imam. Salvation is redefined as the realization of a “luminous anthropology,” in which the Imam possesses both a corporeal presence and a subtle, radiant form inaccessible to ordinary perception. Yet beneath this grand metaphysical edifice lies a more urgent, pragmatic impulse: the desperate need to philosophically secure an Imamate-Caliphate in crisis. Al-Kirmānī’s elaborate intellectualism served as a defensive shield, attempting to provide an unshakable ontological foundation for a Fatimid authority increasingly threatened by internal dissent and external pressure. Al-Kirmānī attempted to solve on a theoretical plane a problem for which no theoretical solution exists: the construction of a Neoplatonic empire. The project he sought to systematically rationalize was, in the end, an ontological impossibility. To envision a “Neoplatonic empire” is to attempt to confine the “One” or the “Universal Intellect” within the strictures of time and space, draping the Absolute in the robes of an imperial institution. While al-Kirmānī addressed this dilemma through a staggering intellectual architecture, it remained fraught with irreconcilable contradictions. By elevating the Imamate into a cosmic necessity, his theoretical solution rendered the empire increasingly a prisoner of its own idealism. Every political failure on the ground threatened to destabilize this coherent cosmic edifice. Al-Kirmānī was essentially attempting to “nationalize” the Unseen for the sake of History, an ambition that, however philosophically brilliant, carried the seeds of its own historical undoing. He constructed a “Virtuous City” of concepts, yet imperial reality was always too narrow to contain such transcendental engineering. Plotinus without Plotinus The true marvel lies in the fact that this monumental Neoplatonic legacy unfolded not merely as a philosophical exercise, but as a totalizing synthesis of the philosophical, the religious, and the imperial, achieved by men who had no direct, formal acquaintance with the preeminent Neoplatonist himself, Plotinus. The most influential figure from the late antique pagan tradition among Islamic philosophers remained, paradoxically, largely unnamed in direct transmission. When he was explicitly distinguished, he was often referred to simply as “the Greek Sage” ( al-Shaykh al-Yūnānī ). Yet it was in fact Plotinus, mediated through Porphyry’s summaries and subsequent reworking, and despite a partial Aristotelian conceptual filtering, who exerted one of the deepest and most enduring influences on the architecture of Arabic-Islamic philosophy. The Enneads (notably IV–VI), as reorganized and reframed in the Arabic tradition, circulated not under Plotinus’s name but under the misleading title The Theology of Aristotle . This misattribution was not a simple error of transmission; it was structurally enabled by Porphyry’s strategy of rendering Neoplatonic doctrine in an Aristotelian conceptual idiom, using concepts such as substance, potentiality, and actuality, thereby making it legible within Peripatetic discourse. Given the authority accorded to Aristotle as al-Mu ʿ allim al-Awwal (“the First Teacher”), the Islamic philosophical tradition received this text as an esoteric extension of Aristotelian metaphysics. The result was a striking historical irony: Plotinian Neoplatonism was assimilated as the “deepest layer” of Aristotle himself. Alongside Aristotle, Plato was also elevated within falsafa , often under the epithet “the Divine Plato,” forming a dual canon in which Plato supplied metaphysical vision and Aristotle methodological rigor. Plato’s reception was, however, highly selective and refracted. Islamic philosophers privileged especially the Republic and the Laws as political blueprints, and the Timaeus as a cosmological foundation. In this configuration, Plato was effectively reconstructed as a thinker of both ideal governance and metaphysical order. The Platonic ideal of the philosopher-king was reinterpreted by al-Fārābī as the figure of the virtuous ruler or prophet-legislator, while the tension between politeia and nomos was resolved through the concept of a divinely grounded political order, the Madīna al-Fāḍila . The Timaeus , in particular, became the most consequential Platonic text in the Islamicate world, though rarely in its original philosophical form. Frequently mediated through Galenic summaries, it entered Arabic intellectual culture as a hybrid of cosmology, medicine, and metaphysics. Galen’s physiological readings of the dialogue contributed to a blurred boundary between cosmological order and bodily structure, allowing the universe itself to be read as an organism whose rational proportions are mirrored in human physiology. Creation, Harmony, and the Greek Synthesis The Platonic demiurgic model posed a further theological problem: how to reconcile a world shaped from pre-existing order with the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo . Philosophers such as al-Kindī and, later, Avicenna reinterpreted the demiurge not as a temporal craftsman but as a metaphor for divine intellection, whereby eternal forms reside in God’s knowledge and ground the intelligibility of creation. The result was a mathematical and harmonic cosmology in which metaphysical necessity and monotheistic creation could coexist. This cosmological Platonism was further developed in traditions such as the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, who elaborated the doctrine of the macrocosm and microcosm: the universe as a “Great Man” and man as a “small universe.” In this framework, the harmonic ratios governing celestial motion were extended to ethics, medicine, and music, forming a unified vision of cosmic order. Aristotle, by contrast, functioned primarily as the guarantor of method. His Organon supplied the logical architecture of demonstration, classification, and inference, allowing philosophical discourse to acquire demonstrative rigor. In combination, Plato provided ontological and cosmological vision, while Aristotle provided epistemic discipline. Within this synthesis, Plotinus introduced a decisive interiorization of metaphysics. Unlike Plato’s Republic , which requires the philosopher’s return to the civic order, Plotinus shifts the center of gravity toward the interior ascent of the soul. The goal of existence becomes henōsis , union with the One, and political life is relegated to a secondary status within the hierarchy of being. His famous motif, the “flight of the alone to the Alone,” expresses this radical reorientation toward interior transcendence. Nevertheless, Plotinus does not entirely reject civic virtue. In the Enneads , he distinguishes between levels of virtue: civic virtues that regulate embodied life, purificatory virtues that detach the soul from corporeality, and intellectual virtues that orient it toward the divine intellect ( nous ). Politics thus becomes preparatory rather than final: necessary for order, but not constitutive of the highest human end. An anecdotal tradition even attributes to Plotinus an unrealized political project, the foundation of Platonopolis under imperial patronage, suggesting at least a tension between philosophical withdrawal and civic aspiration. Whether historical or symbolic, the episode highlights the ambiguity of his position within later political philosophy. The transmission of Platonism into falsafa was further complicated by the absence of direct access to Plato’s corpus, unlike the relatively complete translation of Aristotle. As a result, Plato and Aristotle were often read as complementary moments of a single, unified wisdom tradition. This “harmonizing assumption” reached its most explicit formulation in al-Fārābī’s project of reconciling the opinions of Plato and Aristotle, which presupposed their underlying agreement. Modern scholarship, notably that of Peter Adamson, has shown that the so-called Theology of Aristotle is far from a faithful rendering of Plotinus. It is, rather, a heavily reconfigured text in which Plotinian metaphysics is systematically reframed in Aristotelian terminology. Even critical arguments against Aristotle’s psychology are softened or redirected so as to preserve doctrinal continuity. In effect, Aristotle is not refuted but absorbed into a Neoplatonic framework. This transformation had profound consequences. Aristotle’s definition of the soul as the entelecheia of the body, which in its original form implies mortality, was reinterpreted to preserve its compatibility with immortality. The soul was thus reconceived not as a bodily function but as a transcendent principle of perfection. Within this intellectual constellation, falsafa came to operate on what may be described as a foundational myth: the unity of Greek philosophy. Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus were integrated into a single coherent lineage of truth, despite their historical divergences. Al-Fārābī’s Harmony of the Opinions of the Two Sages can thus be read as a programmatic articulation of this synthetic vision. From “Greek Theory” to Platonopolis Ultimately, the metaphysical outcome of this tradition was the reconfiguration of the soul as an immaterial, self-subsisting substance oriented toward the Active Intellect. Eschatology itself was reinterpreted through an intellectualist and imaginal register: rather than a purely corporeal afterlife, the soul’s destiny unfolds within a non-material domain (ʿ ālam al-mithāl ), in which scriptural imagery is transposed into intelligible form. In this way, falsafa constructed a philosophical eschatology capable of mediating between demonstrative metaphysics and revealed description. The falāsifa effectively curated a “fantasy of consensus,” treating the discordant voices of the Greek tradition as a singular, monolithic “Greek Theory.” This mirrors the way 20th-century American academia distilled the friction between Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan into the unified brand of “French Theory.” While the American “French Theory” was often about deconstruction, the “Greek Theory” of the falāsifa was about reconstruction, building a massive, unified metaphysical system capable of explaining everything from the stars to the soul. Within this Islamic reimagining of “Greek Theory,” catharsis was axiomatic. For thinkers such as al-Kirmānī and Avicenna, this tradition conceives philosophy not merely as an exercise in theoretical inquiry, but as a transformative process of purification. Within this framework, the perfection of the human soul and its ascent toward ultimate felicity are realized through the active apprehension of truth. From this perspective, the aim of philosophy shifts: it is no longer simply to understand the world, but to be purified from it, achieving union with the Absolute while remaining firmly present within the temporal realm. While Plotinus sought Platonopolis as a retreat in Campania for the contemplative life, Ibn Sīnā and al-Kirmānī aimed for a Total Order. For al-Kirmānī, this Platonopolis was to be nearly synonymous with the Fatimid da ʿ wa , a rigid and beautiful hierarchy. Just as the heavens are ordered by ten Intellects, the Fatimid state is structured by degrees of initiation. Here, the city functions as a pedagogical machine, where every rank in the religious hierarchy corresponds precisely to a rank in the cosmos. As for the Platonopolis of Avicenna, where the Platonist remains concealed behind the dual aura of Aristotle on the one hand and the Prophet on the other, it possesses a far more elusive character.

In April 2026, Wissam Saadé delivered four lectures at the University of Bologna. The first, at the invitation of Professor Giovanni Giorgini, entitled “The Prophet and the Philosopher: The Hierarchy of Knowledge between Avicenna’s Falsafa and al-Kirmānī’s Ismaili Neoplatonism,” is presented here in a revised and expanded version, published as a series of ten articles. The series explores the intellectual landscape of Islamic Neoplatonism through a comparative reading of Avicenna and al-Kirmānī. While both thinkers share a broadly Neoplatonic horizon, shaped by a metaphysics of emanation, 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 the framework of Ismaili theology. Despite these different intellectual contexts, their systems remain engaged in a continuous dialogue over the nature of knowledge, the relationship between reason and revelation, and the ascent of the soul. Their respective projects also embody contrasting conceptions of the political, illuminating different ways of understanding the place of philosophy in relation to authority, law, and the organization of the community. This article constitutes the fifth installment of this ten-part series. V - Between Ineffability and Necessity: The Cairene Crisis and the Ontological Turn The arrival of Ḥamīd al-Dīn al-Kirmānī in Cairo must be understood against the background of one of the most intense theological and political crises in the history of the Fatimid Ismaili da ʿ wa : the final years of the reign of al-Ḥākim bi-Amr Allāh (r. 996–1021). This crisis culminated in the “Druze dissidence.” The primary cause was the declaration by certain agitators that the Caliph-Imam al-Ḥākim was not merely the “Proof of God” ( Ḥujjat Allāh ) or a “Pillar of the Pleroma,” but the absolute manifestation of the Godhead itself. Historically, al-Ḥākim’s own attitude toward these figures remained fluctuating, a mercurial stance that only further fueled the antinomian impulse of the movement. These dissidents argued that, because the “End of Times” and the “Final Truth” had been realized in the person of al-Ḥākim, the external religious law ( ẓāhir ), including prayer, fasting, and pilgrimage, had become obsolete. In their view, the mediation of the Law was no longer necessary in the face of radical, unmediated presence. From the perspective of the official Fatimid da ʿ wa , this development represented a dangerous deviation. Traditional Ismaili doctrine maintained a strict metaphysical distinction: God is absolutely transcendent and beyond all predication, while the Imam is a uniquely chosen human being who serves as the authoritative interpreter ( mu ʾ awwil ) of divine revelation. Any collapse of this distinction into notions of incarnation ( ḥulūl ) or divine manifestation threatened the very structure of Ismaili monotheism. It is within this context of doctrinal rupture that al-Kirmānī was summoned to Cairo by the central institution of the Fatimid da ʿ wa . As one of the most intellectually sophisticated Ismaili philosophers of his time, he was uniquely equipped to respond to this crisis. Against the emerging tendencies toward the deification of al-Ḥākim, al-Kirmānī reasserts a strictly hierarchical cosmology. In his system, God remains absolutely transcendent; from Him proceeds the First Intellect through divine origination ( ibdā ʿ), followed by a structured hierarchy of intellects and cosmic principles. Within this architecture, no human figure, including the Imam, can occupy the level of divinity or incarnation. The Imam remains an essential epistemic and hermeneutical authority, but strictly within the created order. Al-Kirmānī’s thought is inseparable from a triple task and a three-dimensional tension. First, he sought to establish Fatimid Ismailism as an institutionalized Islam rooted in a scholarly jurisprudential tradition, a project centrally shaped by the work of al-Qāḍī al-Nuʿmān. Second, he aimed to build Ismailism simultaneously as a proselytizing movement ( da ʿ wa ), both within and beyond the borders of the empire, and as an imperial religion. Third, the objective was to frame Ismailism as a philosophical and, by the standards of the time, scientific religion, deeply rooted in the cosmology and astronomy of the era. All of this raises a central question: how can an esoteric doctrine govern an exoteric state, and conversely, how can a visible empire be grounded in an invisible metaphysics? For a thinker like al-Kirmānī, the answer lies in the theory of correspondence between the celestial and terrestrial orders: everything in the higher world has its analogue in the lower. The structure of the Imamate thus mirrors the cosmic hierarchy. The Quietude of the Intellect In rectifying the previous Neoplatonic model inherited from al-Sijistānī, al-Kirmānī expunged even the slightest imperfections from the highest realm. By doing so, he sought to bring earthly life into alignment with a form of concordia , a harmony based on the “Quietude of the Intellect.” This state is achieved once the intellect realizes that the First Intellect is the first originated and the first existent; that its origination stems from a Source that is eternally and infinitely veiled; that any inquiry into what lies “beyond” it is strictly precluded; that what lies “below” it is both intellect (ʿ āqil ) and intelligible ( ma ʿ qūl ); that the Imamate is the earthly image of this system of Intellects; and that the Imamate serves as the link to the light of these Intellects, rather than as a manifestation of the Veiled One, who never manifests. Al-Kirmānī coupled this with an attempt to preclude any form of intellectual independence in which the intellect might assert its own self-sufficiency rather than humble itself to receive the teachings of the Imam, who alone possesses the key to esoteric interpretation ( ta ʾ wīl ). He further emphasized a rigorous balance between the esoteric ( bāṭin ) and the exoteric ( ẓāhir ), between philosophical gnosis (ʿ irfān ) and jurisprudence ( fiqh ), and between the two forms of worship: the intellectual and the practical. From Cairo to Alamut The period of al-Ḥākim bi-Amr Allāh (386–411 AH / 996–1021 CE) represents the “critical” or “dramatic” moment in Ismaili history. It exposed the latent fissures between the multiple dimensions of the Ismaili project. When al-Ḥākim bi-Amr Allāh mysteriously disappeared one night in 411 AH, the “bridge” al-Kirmānī was attempting to reinforce collapsed. A segment of the da ʿ wa , especially in the Levant, refused to believe that al-Ḥākim was dead. They viewed his disappearance as “Occultation” ( ghayba ). This led to the emergence of the Druze faith, which broke entirely with the Fatimid imperial framework. This demonstrated that the “imperial” dimension could no longer contain the “revolutionary” calling. The caliphs who followed al-Ḥākim, al-Ẓāhir and then al-Mustanṣir, were forced to adopt a highly conservative line in order to preserve the throne. They marginalized the “dangerous” cosmic and philosophical dimensions that had nearly destroyed the state, focusing instead on traditional imperial governance. Missionaries in Persia and Khorasan, such as Nāṣir-i Khusraw (1004–c. 1088 CE) somewhat later, found themselves confronting a vast gap. While they preached about a Cosmic Imam who would transform history, they saw a court in Cairo sinking into the petty struggles of viziers and palace guards. This tension eventually led to the Great Schism: the Nizārī-Mustaʿlī conflict. The final rupture occurred with the rise of Ḥasan-i Ṣabbāḥ and the establishment of the state at Alamut. Recognizing that the Fatimid center in Cairo had traded its revolutionary soul for the trappings of a stagnant empire, the Eastern Ismailis, the Nizārīs, severed ties with the Cairene caliphate. In the rugged mountains of Persia, the “revolutionary calling” was finally decoupled from the “imperial dimension.” Alamut transformed the Ismaili project into a decentralized, militant network of fortresses, replacing the formal jurisprudence of Cairo with the doctrine of ta ʿ līm , the authoritative instruction of the Imam. This shift represented the ultimate triumph of the “Hādī” spirit, militant, secretive, and philosophically intense, over the compromised political structures that al-Kirmānī had once hoped to save. From Ineffability to Necessity The intellectual trajectory of the Ismaili da ʿ wa presents a striking paradox: the transition from Cairo to Alamut was marked by a shift from radical apophaticism toward an ontological, Avicennian framework. Early Fatimid thinkers such as al-Sijistānī and al-Kirmānī upheld a strict apophatic theology. They maintained that the Originator ( al-Mubdi ʿ) was so transcendently “Other” that He stood beyond existence and non-existence. This “double negation” was designed to protect tawḥīd from any human or material association, placing the Divine beyond the reach of language and logic. In contrast, the Alamut period, catalyzed by the declaration of the Qiyāma , a transformative event proclaimed at Alamut in 1164 CE that prioritized the spiritual essence of the ḥaqīqa over the formal requirements of the sharī ʿ a , and later refined by Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī (1201–1274 CE), incorporated the language of the wājib al-wujūd , the Necessary Existent. As Avicennian metaphysics became the standard for high philosophy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Alamut’s thinkers adopted these categories to ensure intellectual rigor. While al-Kirmānī’s Neoplatonism was a dense, elitist system, the besieged state of Alamut required a more direct metaphysical grounding. By embracing the “Necessary Existent,” Alamut theology tethered the cosmic order more firmly to the authoritative instruction ( ta ʿ līm ) of the Imam, providing a stable ontological foundation for a community in a state of permanent revolution. When the Mongols under Hülegü Khan destroyed Alamut in 1256, al-Ṭūsī surrendered alongside the last Imam, Rukn al-Dīn Khurshāh. He soon became a chief adviser to Hülegü and helped establish the Maragheh Observatory. From this point onward, al-Ṭūsī’s public works shifted toward Twelver Shiʿism. He wrote the Tajrīd al-I ʿ tiqād ( The Catharsis of Faith ), which became a foundational text of Twelver theology. Paradoxically, the systematization of the intelligible world undertaken by al-Kirmānī in his masterwork, Rāḥat al- ʿ Aql , likely exerted a more profound influence on the Druze Unitarians than on any other group. Although his mission to Cairo was initially intended to refute the founding fathers of this community, his cosmological rigor became the very intellectual foundation upon which they constructed their own doctrinal edifice.

In April 2026, Wissam Saadé delivered four lectures at the University of Bologna. The first, given at the invitation of Professor Giovanni Giorgini and entitled “The Prophet and the Philosopher: The Hierarchy of Knowledge between Avicenna’s Falsafa and al-Kirmānī’s Ismaʿili Neoplatonism,” is presented here in a revised and expanded version, published as a series of ten articles. This series explores the intellectual landscape of Islamic Neoplatonism through a comparative reading of Avicenna and al-Kirmānī. While both thinkers share a broadly Neoplatonic horizon, shaped by a metaphysics of emanation, 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 the framework of Ismaili theology. Despite these different intellectual contexts, their systems remain engaged in an ongoing dialogue concerning the nature of knowledge, the relationship between reason and revelation, and the ascent of the soul. Their respective projects also embody contrasting conceptions of the political, illuminating different ways of understanding the place of philosophy in relation to authority, law, and the organization of the community. This article constitutes the fourth installment of this ten-part series. IV - No Room for Black Boxes: Avicenna and the Secularization of the Ismaili Project Avicenna grew up listening to Ismaili missionaries ( dā ʿ īs ) who visited his home in Bukhara; both his father and brother were followers of the Ismaili da ʿ wa and frequently discussed its philosophy, specifically the Sijistānian version centered on the duality of Intellect and Soul. While al-Kirmānī sought to transcend this duality by adapting the Farabian Decad to his concept of an utterly transcendent and inscrutable God, Avicenna aimed to overcome both the unknowability of God and the duality of Intellect and Soul altogether. For Avicenna, logic serves as the primary vehicle of salvation. He posits that the perfection of the soul consists in the perfection of the intellect: to fully “intellect” the structure of the universe is to achieve the ultimate goal of human existence. He argued that the potential intellect can reach conjunction ( ittiṣāl ) with the Active Intellect through a combination of formal logic and intellectual intuition ( ḥads ), bypassing the need for a living mediator such as the Imam. Furthermore, while Avicenna maintains that God is simple and unique, he asserts that the First Intellect can and does intellect the Originator. In fact, the entire process of emanation in the Avicennian system is triggered by the First Intellect’s act of knowing its Cause. In this framework, God is rendered “intelligible”, a concept al-Kirmānī would have found dangerously close to shirk , as it threatens the absolute, inscrutable transcendence of the Divine. Avicenna inherited more than a little from the “Ismaili philosophical project”. The notion that existence is not chaos, but rather an ascending ladder of Intellects, is a central pillar of the Ismaili project, specifically in al-Sijistānī and al-Nasafī. Avicenna took this hierarchy and transformed it from “missionary ranks” ( marātib da ʿ wiyya ) or “gnostic symbols” into logical necessities. For him, the system of the Ten Intellects is simultaneously “natural science” and “metaphysics”, much as it is for al-Kirmānī, for whom “nature” is itself “metaphysics”. The Ismaili project centers on the “salvation of the soul” through knowledge, and Avicenna placed this axis at the very heart of his philosophy. His work on the “Soul” is not merely a medical or biological inquiry; it is a study of the “alienation of the soul” and its struggle to return to its celestial realm, as expressed in his famous Ode on the Soul . This “cosmic nostalgia” is a direct echo of the Ismaili spirituality in which he was raised. Ultimately, Avicenna “secularized” the Ismaili project. He took the skeletal structure of Ismaili metaphysics, the Intellects, Souls, Spheres, and hierarchies, and stripped away the secretive, exclusive character tied to the Imam, making it accessible to any human mind possessing intellectual intuition ( ḥads ) and logic. He replaced esoteric interpretation ( ta ʾ wīl ) with Aristotelian demonstration ( burhān ). Yet, in doing so, he was founding a new “philosophical religion” in his own way, one more confident and strategically grounded than even that of al-Fārābī. Al-Fārābī viewed the Prophet primarily through a political lens, identifying him as the “Supreme Ruler” who employs the faculty of imagination to translate abstract philosophical truths into a language accessible to the masses. In contrast, Avicenna argued that the Prophet possesses an extraordinary “intellectual intuition” ( ḥads ), which allows him to connect with the Active Intellect instantaneously, bypassing the need for discursive study. By framing prophecy as a natural, albeit rare, intellectual faculty, Avicenna effectively integrated “religion” into the domain of “science”. Religion was thus refashioned as a specialized branch of psychology, positioning the philosopher as the ultimate judge of its validity. Within this framework, the philosopher no longer requires a politeia , as in al-Fārābī, or an imperial da ʿ wa , as in Ismailism, to achieve salvation. Instead, salvation is transformed into an internal, cognitive event: the “return” of the alienated soul to its source through the autonomous power of the ʿ aql . For Avicenna, if philosophy was to replace the Imam or the da ʿ wa as the source of ultimate truth, it had to be self-sufficient. He wanted to prove God’s existence using logic alone, without relying on “signs”, “revelation”, or even the physical world and its motion. Al-Kirmānī’s God is an “inscrutable mystery” ( ghayb al-ghuyūb ), beyond existence and non-existence. This creates a “gap” that only an Imam or a secret ta ʿ līm can bridge. Avicenna, by contrast, leaves no room for black boxes: his universe is entirely transparent to the intellect. By proving God’s existence as a logical necessity, Avicenna ensured that the human intellect could, in theory, understand the entire chain of being. The Burhān al-Ṣiddīqīn The Burhān al-Ṣiddīqīn (the “Proof of the Truthful”) is one of the most sophisticated and influential demonstrations for the existence of God in the history of Islamic philosophy. Formulated and named by Avicenna in his Ishārāt wa-l-Tanbīhāt , it was explicitly distinguished from earlier theological arguments of the mutakallimūn , which depend on the createdness of the world ( ḥudūth al- ʿ ālam ), as well as from the arguments of the natural philosophers, which rely on motion and physical causality. Avicenna’s ambition was to construct a proof that begins not from the world as effect, but from existence itself as such. The Qur’anic horizon of this argument is often associated with the verse: “We shall show them Our signs in the horizons and within themselves until it becomes clear to them that it is the Truth” (Q 41:53): سَنُرِيهِمْ آيَاتِنَا فِي الْآفَاقِ وَفِي أَنفُسِهِمْ حَتَّىٰ يَتَبَيَّنَ لَهُمْ أَنَّهُ الْحَقُّ alongside the affirmation that divine witnessing is sufficient as proof. Classical interpretations distinguish between two modes of demonstration: the burhān al-āfāq (argument from the external world), which infers the Creator from created things, and the burhān al-ṣiddīqīn , which proceeds directly from existence itself to the Necessary Existent ( wājib al-wujūd ), without passing through contingent beings or cosmological motion. Necessary and Contingent Existence At the core of Avicenna’s argument lies the ontological distinction between necessary and possible existence. The beings we observe are contingent: they come into being and pass away, which indicates that their existence is not self-sufficient but requires a determinant that tips the balance between being and non-being. If every contingent being required another contingent being ad infinitum , no actual existence would ever be secured. An infinite regress of causes is therefore impossible as an explanatory structure. The chain of contingency must terminate in a being whose existence is necessary in itself, whose essence is identical with existence. This is the Necessary Existent, God. This metaphysical move is reinforced by Avicenna’s famous thesis that existence is an accident (ʿ araḍ ) that supervenes upon essence. In the case of contingent beings, essences are in themselves indifferent to existence or non-existence; existence is therefore something bestowed from outside. This conceptual distinction allows Avicenna to articulate a radical form of ontological dependence: essences “receive” existence from the Necessary Existent, which alone exists through itself. The world is thus composed of quiddities awaiting existence, while God is pure existence without quiddity. In this framework, God is the giver of being ( wāhib al-wujūd ), and existence becomes a metaphysical “overflow” or emanation upon essences otherwise immersed in non-being. However, this doctrine was sharply criticized by Averroes (Ibn Rushd), who rejected the notion that existence is an accident added to essence. For him, such a separation is purely conceptual and has no reality outside the mind. To ask how existence “attaches” to an essence is, in his view, a category mistake: nothing exists prior to existence such that existence could be added to it. Against Avicenna, Averroes insists that the being of a thing is identical with its essence in reality. His critique of Avicenna’s “accidentalization” of existence is thus a defense of ontological unity against what he saw as unnecessary abstraction. Emanation and the Hierarchy of Intellects The debate extends into cosmology through the shared but differently interpreted doctrine of emanation. Avicenna formulates the principle that “from the One only one can proceed”. From the Necessary Existent emerges the First Intellect, which in turn produces a triadic structure through self-intellection: knowledge of the First Principle, knowledge of itself as necessary, and knowledge of itself as contingent. This cascade continues through a hierarchy of ten intellects, culminating in the Active Intellect ( al- ʿ aql al-fa ʿʿ āl ), which governs the sublunary world. This cosmological architecture integrates metaphysics with astronomy: each celestial sphere is associated with an intellect and a soul. The soul of each sphere is responsible for its motion, conceived not mechanically but as a form of desire or aspiration toward perfection. Thus, the entire cosmos becomes an intelligible hierarchy of intellects, souls, and bodies. Averroes, by contrast, reorients this metaphysical system toward a more strictly Aristotelian framework. He rejects the need for multiple intermediary intellects and reasserts the primacy of physical motion as the starting point of demonstration. His proofs for God are grounded in nature itself: the argument from providence ( dalīl al- ʿ ināya ), which observes the ordered suitability of the world for life, and the argument from invention ( dalīl al-ikhtirā ʿ), which points to the structured complexity of living beings that cannot be explained by chance alone. The ultimate cause is the Unmoved Mover, inferred from the reality of eternal motion in the heavens. Avicennian and Ismaili Cosmologies Within this broader intellectual landscape, the doctrine of the ten intellects becomes a shared yet contested structure across Avicennian and Ismaili thought. Both systems assume that divine transcendence requires mediation: God does not govern the world directly but through a hierarchy of immaterial intellects. Both also associate the number ten with a complete cosmological architecture, in which the tenth intellect, the Active Intellect, governs the sublunary realm. In this sense, cosmology is simultaneously metaphysical and epistemological: it explains both the structure of the universe and the conditions of human knowledge. A further convergence appears in the role of the Active Intellect as the mediator between the intelligible and human cognition. It is the source of forms, the principle that actualizes the human intellect, and the condition of philosophical knowledge. In Avicenna, this access remains open to the philosopher through intellectual intuition. In Ismaili thought, particularly in Ḥamīd al-Dīn al-Kirmānī, it becomes structurally linked to the figure of the Imam, who embodies and transmits its meaning within a hierarchical order of knowledge. What emerges from this comparative framework is not merely a disagreement over proofs of God, but a deeper divergence over the structure of reality itself: whether existence is fundamentally analogical or identical, whether mediation is a metaphysical necessity or an interpretive overlay, and whether philosophy culminates in autonomous intellectual intuition or in a hierarchically organized order of revealed meaning.

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 Isma ʿ ili 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 ( ta ʾ wīl ) 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 ( dā ʿ ī ) 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 ( ibdā ʿ). 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 da ʿ wa . The ranks of ḥujja , dā ʿ ī , and ma ʾ dhūn 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-Mubda ʿ al-Awwal ) as a relationship that is neither emanationist nor creative in the conventional sense. Rather, it is a relationship of Origination ( ibdā ʿ), 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 dā ʿ ī in the regions of Khorasan and Sistan, al-Sijistānī posited a radical theology of transcendence, identifying God as the “Originator of originators” ( Mubdi ʿ al-mubdi ʿ āt ), 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 da ʿ wa . 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 (ʿ Aql ) 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-Mubdi ʿ), 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 Ta ʿ līm (authoritative teaching) of the Imam to navigate these truths. The Aristotelian framework provides the logic, but the Imam provides the access.

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 Isma ʿ ili 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 second installment of that ten-part series. II - Falsafa as a Form of “Philosophical Religion” The emergence of falsafa is inseparable from a complex history of translation, misattribution, and conceptual convergence. One of its decisive moments lies in the attribution to Aristotle of texts that he did not author, most famously the so-called Theology of Aristotle . This work is in fact an Arabic adaptation of Plotinian material, ultimately drawn from the Enneads of Plotinus, likely mediated through the paraphrastic interventions of Porphyry. As a result, the early falāsifa came to believe that Aristotle himself endorsed a doctrine of emanation. This misattribution was no mere historical accident, but rather an event with profound philosophical consequences; it created, one might say, a potential for receptivity that facilitated the synthesis of these distinct traditions. It allowed the falāsifa to synthesize Aristotelian and Platonic frameworks under a unified metaphysical horizon. Emanation became the key conceptual bridge: it provided a way to reconcile the eternity of the world with a strong doctrine of divine transcendence, while simultaneously elevating the divine beyond the Aristotelian “unmoved mover.” The Theology of Aristotle and the Neoplatonic Aristotle This can be traced back to Aristotle himself. While he defines God in the Physics as a functional necessity of a mechanical universe, the First Unmoved Mover or a “Kinetic God,” he nuances this in the Metaphysics , or “First Philosophy,” with a more noetic and even psychological definition. Here, he defines God as noēsis noēseōs (Thought Thinking Itself). Since God is the most perfect being, His activity must be the most perfect activity, contemplation, and His object of contemplation must be the most perfect object: Himself. Unlike a physical “push,” God moves the world as an Object of Desire ( erōmenon ); the heavens move in an eternal circle because they “imitate” the perfection of the divine mind. Moreover, in his cosmological works, the distinction between the “sublunary” (earthly) and “supralunary” (heavenly) spheres introduces a more “material” divinity, where the divine is often associated with the eternal nature of the celestial bodies themselves. Finally, in the Ethics , Aristotle defines the life of God as a state of supreme happiness consisting of pure theōria . This is where Alexander of Aphrodisias and the falāsifa found the justification for the Active Intellect. The equation was simple: if the human intellect can engage in contemplation, it participates in the divine nature. Thus, the famous Theology of Aristotle (أثولوجيا) was misattributed to the Stagirite; nonetheless, a “disseminated” theology of Aristotle already existed across his authentic works, envisioned physically in the Physics , metaphysically in the Metaphysics , and ethically in the Ethics . This “open door” allowed for a transition from a strictly analytical, “cold” Aristotle to a noetico-mystical one. The internal tensions within the Aristotelian corpus served as a creative opening, allowing for a philosophical contamination that synthesized Peripatetic logic with Platonist and Hermetic metaphysics. Alexander used the gaps in Aristotle’s Ethics and De Anima to solve the problem of how a “self-thinking” God interacts with human minds. By focusing on the Active Intellect, Alexander argued that the human mind, the potential intellect, is “activated” by a single, external, divine Intellect. For the later falāsifa , Alexander provided the “secular” or “natural” mechanism for how prophecy and philosophical insight work, grounding them in the structure of the mind rather than in pure mysticism. While Alexander was looking at the mind, Plotinus and his student Porphyry were looking at ontology, the nature of Being. They saw Aristotle’s God in the Metaphysics , Thought Thinking Itself, as “too low” because “thinking” implies a division between the thinker and the thought. They argued that there must be something higher: the One. Porphyry is widely credited with trying to harmonize Plato and Aristotle. He took Plotinian ideas of emanation and “packaged” them in Aristotelian language. This paved the way for the Theology of Aristotle . By reading Plotinus through a Porphyrian lens, the falāsifa believed they were reading the “true, deeper” Aristotle who had finally solved the problem of how the One becomes the Many. For Plotinus and Porphyry, this necessitated a move toward Emanationism. They “saved” Aristotle from his own mechanical limitations by subsuming his Thought Thinking Itself under the higher unity of the One. At this juncture, one is tempted to view Neoplatonism, taken as a whole, not as a separate system, but as a form of “Mystical Aristotelianism.” In this light, the Neoplatonic project becomes the ultimate Neo-Aristotelianism, providing the “noetic” engine with a “mystical” fuel. Porphyry of Tyre, the disciple of Plotinus, is particularly relevant here; he is credited with the monumental task of harmonizing Plato and Aristotle. Together with Alexander of Aphrodisias, these two figures stand as the twin precursors of falsafa , establishing the intellectual horizon that al-Fārābī and Avicenna would later inhabit. Hermeticism found a home in the Aristotelian framework through the concept of the Active Intellect. If the human mind can “connect” with a divine, cosmic intellect, as Alexander of Aphrodisias suggested, then philosophy is no longer just logic; it becomes a mystical journey. In this hybrid system, the divine is no longer merely “that which moves without being moved,” but becomes the absolute source from which all levels of reality unfold. At the center of the Neoplatonic influence lies the figure of the One in Plotinus: a principle beyond being, beyond thought, and beyond predication. The One is not an object of knowledge but the condition of all intelligibility. It is “hidden” within intellect as a source is hidden within a flowing river, accessible only through a progressive stripping away of intellectual determinations, culminating in a kind of ecstatic return beyond discursive thought. This radical transcendence proved deeply attractive to the falāsifa , because it offered a model of monotheism that was both philosophical and absolute, one that seemed to ground unity beyond the limits of Aristotelian metaphysics. Within the Islamic intellectual field, especially at the intersection of Neoplatonism and Ismaʿili thought, this structure was further intensified through a quasi-Gnostic vocabulary. Reality becomes hierarchized into levels of illumination and concealment, where salvation is linked to knowledge ( gnosis ). From the One to the Gnostic Temptation In its most radical forms, Gnostic cosmology divided humanity into categories, of which only the Pneumatics, those endowed with spiritual insight, could achieve true liberation. Classical Gnosticism often portrayed the material world as a prison, created by a deficient or ignorant demiurgic power, sometimes identified with the God of the Hebrew Bible. In such systems, matter is inherently corrupt and salvation consists in escaping the material order. A more moderate, “assimilated” version of Gnosticism, later absorbed into Christian patristic theology, reinterprets the material world not as evil in itself, but as a created order that has been disfigured by sin. Here, matter retains a positive role: it becomes the site of incarnation, and thus participates in divine providence. It is precisely within this tension, between Neoplatonic transcendence, Aristotelian structure, and residual Gnostic dualisms, that falsafa takes shape. It inherits a vision of reality in which the divine is radically transcendent, creation is structured through necessary emanation, and salvation is reinterpreted as intellectual ascent. At the same time, it seeks to preserve monotheistic coherence by rejecting outright dualism while still retaining a deeply hierarchical and stratified cosmos. In this sense, falsafa is not simply a translation of Greek philosophy into Arabic, but a creative reconfiguration of multiple intellectual genealogies, Aristotelian, Platonic, Neoplatonic, and late antique religious, into a single metaphysical architecture of emanation, intellect, and return. Falsafa as Philosophical Religion For many years, my research has been centered on the intersection of political philosophy and what I would call philosophical religion. I take this category seriously. In this sense, falsafa , as a tradition, is, simpliciter , a philosophical religion. It should not be reduced to the secular wing of the Islamicate intellectual world, especially when contrasted with the scholastic theology of kalām or the jurisprudential reasoning of fiqh . While the falāsifa were ostensibly committed to Aristotelian rationalism, they inherited a “contaminated” framework that pulled them toward an inherent Gnostic temptation. Although they rejected the radical Gnostic view of matter as inherently evil, they remained haunted by the image of the soul as an exiled intellect. Here, we should not neglect the contradiction between Neoplatonism and Gnosticism. Plotinus argued that the material world is beautiful because it is an image of the divine. He rejected the Gnostic idea that the world was created by an “evil demiurge.” While Plotinus shared a similar “atmospheric” concern for the soul’s ascent, he was the author of a polemic titled Against the Gnostics , attacking their “un-Greek” disparagement of the cosmos and their “arrogant” claim to a private, non-rational salvation. Yet, ironically, the Porphyrian synthesis stripped away much of this polemic. What remained was a “contaminated” Aristotelianism that, despite Plotinus’s intentions, functioned as a bridge for Gnostic motifs of intellectual exile and divine return to enter the medieval Arabic tradition. The Soul in Exile: Gnosis, Prophecy, and the Active Intellect Despite Aristotle’s definition of the soul as the “form” of the body (hylomorphism), the falāsifa , influenced by the pseudo- Theology of Aristotle , often treated the soul as a celestial stranger. This is most visible in Avicenna’s Poem of the Soul (the ʿ Ayniyya ), where the soul is a “thick-feathered dove” descending from the high places into a “ruined cage,” the body. This is a purely Gnostic motif dressed in philosophical language. The Active Intellect acts as a “Saviour-Knowledge.” By connecting with it, the philosopher undergoes a gnosis that liberates the intellect, but not typically from the “darkness” of matter. Instead of the material world being a prison to escape, as in ancient Gnosticism, al-Fārābī views the Virtuous City as the site where the soul’s ascent is organized. The Gnostic “stranger” becomes the “Philosopher-King.” Rather than opposing religion outright, falsafa offers an alternative form of religiosity, less juridical, more contemplative; less centered on law, more on wisdom ( ḥikma ). Unlike modern secular philosophy, falsafa does not discard prophecy. It reinterprets it. Prophets become supreme knowers whose imaginative faculty translates intellectual truths into symbolic form accessible to the masses. Falsafa inherits and transforms traditions in which philosophy and religion were never sharply divided, especially in Late Antiquity. Even when it challenges the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo by defending the Aristotelian thesis of the eternity of the world, articulated through a Neoplatonic framework of procession and emanation, it nonetheless chooses to “baptize” its metaphysics as al-ilāhiyyāt (the divine sciences), particularly in Avicenna’s terminology. The Neoplatonic schema of emanation structures reality as a descending and ascending order. This cosmology provides a metaphysical equivalent to religious narratives of creation and return. From Avicenna to later thinkers, philosophy is conceived as a graded movement of elevation, from the sensible to the intelligible, from multiplicity to unity, and ultimately from dispersion to presence. In falsafa , knowledge is never neutral or merely speculative. It is fundamentally transformative: to know is to perfect the soul. In this sense, knowledge functions in a manner structurally analogous to religion, in which gnosis is inseparable from salvation. From Philosophical Religion to Cosmopolitics The boundaries of the falsafa tradition remain fluid, never unequivocally demarcated from either “para- falsafa ” or even “anti- falsafa .” Yet it must be understood as a philosophical religion. It evolved as an internal alternative within the Islamicate world; yet it was an alternative designated not merely for an “elite” in the social sense, but for “the Few” in a noetic one. The resonance with Gnostic categories, specifically the Pneumatics versus the Psychics or Hylics, is striking and structurally very similar. In the Gnostic tradition of Antiquity, the Pneumatics were those who possessed the divine spark and the capacity for gnosis . Similarly, in falsafa and the philosophical Ismaʿili traditions, these “Islamo-Pneumatics” are defined by their actualized intellect. This faculty allows them to perceive either the necessity beyond contingency and the eternity beyond the creation drama, or the “hidden” ( bāṭin ) meanings of the Pleroma and the primordial order, realities that remain “veiled” both to the common people ( al- ʿ awāmm ) and to the structures of exoteric Islam. Crucially, this philosophical religion is, in its very essence, a political philosophy, one whose scope extends well beyond its explicitly political chapters into the very core of its cosmological architecture. The question of the relationship between the Philosopher and the Prophet, an inquiry first articulated in Antiquity by Philo of Alexandria, remained central for thinkers such as al-Fārābī, Avicenna, al-Kirmānī, Averroes, and Maimonides. To borrow a term from Christian Jambet, though not without some displacement of its original inflection, this question remains bound up with a form of cosmopolitics : a totalizing vision in which the order of the city ( polis ) reflects, and is reflected by, the order of the universe ( cosmos ). For the falāsifa , cosmopolitics serves as the ultimate antidote to the “rule of the arbitrary.” Whereas arbitrariness implies a void of reason, a “will to power” devoid of ontological grounding, a cosmopolitical system asserts an immutable necessity inherent in the order of being. Moreover, if wisdom can only be attained by the Few, then, at the intersection where philosophers appear as crypto-prophets and prophets as otherwise-philosophers, the Pneumatics of Islam do not seek merely to navigate outside the world, as the Gnostics of Antiquity aimed to do. Rather, their mission is to “politically” manage the other two categories: the Psychics and the Hylics. Their primary aim is to safeguard the noetic order against those for whom the arbitrary is an ultimate God, an obsession that manifests as a rigorous, legalistic fixation. At the same time, their mission is to find ways to diffuse not philosophy itself, but its civilizing effects, ensuring that the light of the Pleroma might still order the lives of the many without being extinguished by their literalism.

In April 2026, Wissam Saadé delivered four lectures at the University of Bologna. The first lecture, at the invitation of Professor Giovanni Giorgini, 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 first installment of that ten-part series. What, one might ask, is the thread that runs between the hierarchy of knowledge in Avicenna and Ḥamīd al-Dīn al-Kirmānī, the complexities of sectarianism in Lebanon, the dynamics of religious nationalism in South and West Asia, and the role of eschatology in Middle Eastern conflicts? These may be understood as different expressions of a broader—and perhaps persistent—oscillation within the theologico-political domain. This theologico-political dynamic first appears as a form of polarization—at the level of the hierarchy of knowledge, but also in the tension between truth-telling and what might be called right speech—when we turn to the tradition of Hellenizing philosophy in Islam and to Neoplatonism as it was adapted within the Fatimid da ʿ wa . It takes on a different shape in the Lebanese context, where it appears as a certain difficulty—perhaps even an incapacity—to sustain pluralism on the basis of reciprocity, or to establish any shared hierarchy within a frustrated and faltering political model. The theologico-political takes on another dimension when one turns to the question of nationalism. Here, the dynamic unfolds through the labyrinths of secularization: a communal bond is first transposed into the form of the nation, only then to undergo a second movement of intensification—through processes of re-sacralization, mythologization, and eschatologization—of what had initially been rendered secular. What appears, then, is not a simple linear transition from the sacred to the secular, but rather a recursive movement in which the secular itself becomes the site of the return of the sacred in displaced form. This trajectory is particularly evident in the case of religious nationalism. Similar dynamics may also be discerned in the paradoxes of the Lebanese confessional state and in the evolution of sectarianism when approached from what might be called a post-Ottoman perspective. Professor Giovanni Giorgini’s work has consistently brought the history of political philosophy into dialogue with contemporary concerns. This is particularly evident through his engagement with tyranny—understood, in the wake of Leo Strauss, as both the rule of arbitrariness and a paradigmatic philosophical problem tied to the relation between knowledge, power, and the human search for the good—and with phronēsis , understood as practical wisdom. This form of prudence, in order not to succumb to arbitrariness, must give primacy to action, which cannot be indefinitely deferred. Professor Giorgini’s suggestion of reading The Prince through the lens of Aristotelian and Ciceronian phronēsis —that is, as an inquiry into the wisdom of prudence as the form of judgment appropriate to contingent political realities—has been a particularly suggestive point of departure for my own reflections. This perspective ensures that Machiavellian virtù is not viewed merely as a distortion of the classical virtue of prudence, but rather as a complex reimagining of it—one that is acutely aware of political effectivity while remaining decidedly less committed to the classical ideal of concordia . In thinking through these questions, I found myself returning to one that is less straightforward than it first appears: to what extent does phronēsis function as a subterranean form of resistance to tyranny, and at what precise threshold does its commitment to “the possible” transform into a meticulous veil for political passivity? In the Islamicate world, such an inquiry cannot be separated from another concern, one often difficult to articulate, regarding the transmundane, or rather the metaphysical and cosmological dimensions of the rule of arbitrariness. The endeavor to circumvent, on both cosmological and metaphysical levels, the inclination toward the arbitrary, while simultaneously taking care not to stifle the soul, lies, I am inclined to believe, at the very heart of the tension revealed in the two authors upon whom these reflections focus. I - Metaphysical Prudence: The Adventures of Phronēsis in the Islamicate The present essay considers the dialectic between the philosopher and the prophet in Hellenized Islamic philosophy ( falsafa ) through a comparison between Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥusayn ibn Sīnā (Avicenna, d. 1037) and his contemporary, the Ismaʿili thinker Ḥamīd al-Dīn al-Kirmānī (d. c. 1020). In doing so, it also touches, if somewhat obliquely, on the problems of tyranny and phronēsis within the context of the eleventh-century intellectual landscape. For Avicenna, phronēsis , or practical wisdom, is associated with the practical intellect, the faculty concerned with action, ethical deliberation, and the ordering of everyday life. While working within an Aristotelian framework of intellectual virtue, Avicenna subtly extends its scope by relating practical wisdom to the perfection of the soul and orienting it toward a form of moral equilibrium. In Hellenized Islamic philosophy, phronēsis is linked to an almost cosmological journey of the soul. Aristotle and the Architecture of Phronēsis But let us return to Aristotle for a moment. In the Nicomachean Ethics , Aristotle situates phronēsis (φρόνησις) within a broader architecture of intellectual and moral virtues that together enable the phronimos —the practically wise human being—to live and act well, thereby attaining eudaimonia (flourishing or the good life). Moral, or ethical, virtues ( aretai ēthikai ) concern character, emotion, and habit. They are not innate but acquired through practice and habituation rather than through theoretical instruction. Each consists in a mean ( mesotēs ) between two extremes, excess and deficiency, relative to a given situation. Thus, courage stands between recklessness and cowardice, temperance between indulgence and insensibility, generosity between wastefulness and stinginess, justice as the balanced rendering of what is due to each, and magnanimity as a properly calibrated sense of self-worth, avoiding both vanity and self-abasement. Alongside these ethical dispositions, Aristotle distinguishes the intellectual virtues ( aretai dianoētikai ), which pertain to the rational part of the soul and are cultivated through teaching, learning, and reflective inquiry. These include epistēmē , the demonstrative knowledge of necessary and universal truths; technē , the capacity for production or craft; sophia , theoretical wisdom combining epistēmē with insight into first principles; and nous , the intuitive grasp of those first principles themselves. Within this constellation, phronēsis —practical wisdom, or prudence—occupies a distinctive and irreducible position. For Aristotle, phronēsis is neither contemplative knowledge of eternal truths nor technical skill aimed at production. Rather, it is the capacity to deliberate well about action in conditions of contingency and particularity. It is, in this sense, the intelligence of praxis : an applied rationality that determines what ought to be done here and now for the sake of the good life. Crucially, moral virtues such as courage or justice remain structurally incomplete without phronēsis . While virtue defines a stable disposition of character, phronēsis provides the situational discernment through which that disposition can be properly enacted. One may grasp courage or justice in abstract terms, yet without phronēsis one cannot determine how they should be realized in a concrete and irreducibly complex situation. Prudence thus reveals that, in Aristotle, ethical knowledge is never purely theoretical; it is inseparable from judgment, deliberation, and action within lived circumstances. From Phronēsis to Ḥikma Against this background, a recent claim by a contemporary philosopher of Islamist orientation in Morocco, lamenting that the medieval Hellenizing philosophical tradition in Arabic remained “trapped” within the framework of the four Aristotelian virtues and thereby failed to develop an authentically Islamic ethics grounded in taqwā (تقوى), understood in the Islamic tradition as a form of God-consciousness, vigilant awareness of the divine presence, and ethical self-discipline oriented toward avoiding wrongdoing and fulfilling one’s moral and religious obligations, appears conceptually reductive. Such a critique assumes a rigid opposition between an allegedly “Greek” virtue ethics and an “Islamic” ethical horizon, as if the reception of Aristotle in Arabic philosophical culture were a form of conceptual confinement rather than a site of creative translation and transformation. This view overlooks not only the falsafa tradition itself, but also the broader culture of adab , both of which actively integrated ethical vocabularies drawn from multiple genealogies: Greco-Hellenistic, Persian-Sasanian, and Qurʾanic-Prophetic. Rather than abandoning Islamic references, these traditions often operated through a layered ethical synthesis in which revelation, inherited wisdom, and philosophical reasoning were placed in dynamic relation. The dissatisfaction expressed by this contemporary thinker, namely that medieval falāsifa failed to produce a fully “Islamic” ethics, thus reopens a deeper and more enduring misunderstanding regarding the nature of falsafa itself. It also raises the broader question of what counts as “Islamic” within ethical discourse, and whether authenticity should be sought in doctrinal purity or in the historically plural processes through which ethical reason has actually been articulated in Islamic intellectual history. For Aristotle, phronēsis is practical wisdom, the capacity to deliberate well about action, distinct from sophia , which denotes theoretical wisdom. With the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, sophia came to render the Hebrew ḥokhmah . Yet ḥokhmah is primarily oriented toward practical skill and know-how, whereas sophia increasingly came to signify theoretical knowledge and even ultimate reality. In later Hellenistic and Gnostic contexts, Sophia acquires a metaphysical and symbolic dimension, at times personified as a divine emanation or feminine aeon; in certain Gnostic narratives, she “falls” from the spiritual realm into the material world and requires restoration. In Arabic, ḥikma , a term closely related in form to the Hebrew ḥokhmah , derives from the root ḥ-k-m, which originally conveys the sense of restraint, control, or prevention. From this root emerge meanings tied to legal and administrative authority: ḥukm (judgment, ruling), ḥākim (ruler), and ḥakīm (the wise). The semantic field thus binds wisdom to judgment, governance, and measured discernment. In the Qurʾan, ḥikma is described as a divine gift bestowed upon figures such as David (Dāwūd): وَشَدَدْنَا مُلْكَهُ وَآتَيْنَاهُ الْحِكْمَةَ وَفَصْلَ الْخِطَابِ We strengthened his kingdom and gave him wisdom and sound judgment. and Luqman: وَلَقَدْ آتَيْنَا لُقْمَانَ الْحِكْمَةَ أَنِ اشْكُرْ لِلَّهِ We endowed Luqman with wisdom: “Give thanks to God.” Most classical Islamic scholars maintain that Luqman was not a prophet but a pious sage endowed with exceptional wisdom, and he is accorded a position of considerable honor. In later medieval literature, Luqman is often portrayed as a writer of moral fables, drawing comparisons to Aesop. Some traditions depict him as a judge or adviser in the time of David, who is explicitly identified in the Qurʾan as a prophet. Within the Islamic tradition, Luqman the Wise is not identified with the biblical prophet Nathan, although some later accounts suggest a genealogical connection, even presenting Luqman as Nathan’s father. The Metaphysical Expansion of Ḥikma While not etymologically related, ḥikma is, in its original semantic field, closer to phronēsis than to sophia . More precisely, it initially occupies a position at the intersection of the two, mediating between practical and theoretical wisdom. Like phronēsis , it carries the sense of sound judgment: the capacity to apply knowledge to concrete, changing circumstances in view of a virtuous end. In both cases, wisdom is not merely the apprehension of truth but the cultivated ability to enact it through discernment, character, and practical intelligence. During the Islamic Golden Age, however, ḥikma underwent a significant conceptual expansion. It came to function as a privileged Arabic equivalent of the Greek philosophia . Although the loanword falsafa was commonly used to designate the translated Greek sciences, early Muslim philosophers often preferred ḥikma because of its Qurʾanic resonance. This is already evident in al-Kindī, and it finds institutional expression under al-Maʾmūn with the foundation of the Bayt al-Ḥikma ( House of Wisdom ) in Baghdad. This institution functioned as an imperial center for the translation, classification, and development of the so-called “rational sciences” (ʿ ulūm ʿ aqliyya ), often distinguished from the transmitted sciences (ʿ ulūm naqliyya ). Because of its Qurʾanic legitimacy, ḥikma , both as a term and as a concept, remained relatively insulated from the suspicion often directed at falsafa or manṭiq (logic), which were at times criticized as foreign imports, overly dependent on Greek sources, or even associated with zandaqa (heresy). The charge of zandaqa played a central polemical role in medieval Islamic intellectual history. Religious scholars sometimes used it against the falāsifa (Islamic philosophers) to delegitimize their metaphysical doctrines, especially those influenced by Neoplatonism and Aristotelianism. Although originally associated with Manichaean dualism and heresy, the term gradually broadened into a flexible accusation applied to any thought perceived as undermining orthodox monotheism. Philosophers such as al-Fārābī or Avicenna were not usually accused of literal dualism, but rather of introducing foreign conceptual structures, such as emanation or the eternity of the world, which some theologians regarded as doctrinally dangerous or excessively Hellenizing. Broadly speaking, the critiques focused on three principal points. The falāsifa were seen as promoting doctrines affirming the eternity of the world, in opposition to the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo by God. They were also accused of advancing an emanationist conception of existence that left little room for the traditional framework of creation, revelation, and redemption. In addition, they were seen as undermining belief in bodily resurrection, either by following Neoplatonic tendencies toward the idea of a single universal soul rather than multiple individual souls, or by replacing the eschatological distinction between paradise and punishment with an intellectual form of beatitude reserved for the purified intellect. This creates a revealing paradox: although ḥikma originally leans toward practical wisdom, its adoption as a translation of philosophia , combined with its scriptural grounding, allowed it to expand into a far more comprehensive and speculative concept. The dominant tendency among the falāsifa was to equate falsafa with ḥikma , and vice versa, while gradually transforming ḥikma from a notion encompassing both practical wisdom ( phronēsis ) and theoretical wisdom ( sophia ) into an expression of ultimate logos —that is, a comprehensive principle encompassing both rational structure and metaphysical reality. As a result, ḥikma gradually came to denote not only ethical discernment but also a holistic, even cosmic, form of wisdom. This transformation becomes especially visible from Avicenna onward, and, in parallel, within Ismaʿili philosophy, particularly in the works of Ḥamīd al-Dīn al-Kirmānī, such as Rāḥat al- ʿ Aql ( The Quietude of the Intellect ). It reaches a further stage in the Illuminationist tradition of Shihāb al-Dīn Suhrawardī ( Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq ), and later in the School of Isfahan with Mīr Dāmād and Mullā Ṣadrā. In these later developments, ḥikma no longer designates a balance between the practical and the theoretical. It becomes a form of theosophy in which rational reflection and spiritual realization are inseparably united. Wisdom, in this sense, is no longer only the capacity to know and to act rightly, but also a process through which the subject is itself transformed by truth.