IBN SAB‘IN
The last of the Muwahhid circle with whom we need deal—and, perhaps, absolutely the last—is Abd al-Haqq ibn Sab‘in. He was as much a mystic as Ibn Arabi, but was apparently more deeply read in philosophy and did not cast his conceptions in so theological and Qur’anic a mould. He, too, was born in Murcia about 613, and must very early have founded a school of his own, gathered disciples round him and established a wide reputation. High skill in alchemy, astrology, and magic is ascribed to him, which probably means that he claimed to be a wali, a friend of God, gifted with miraculous powers. He is accused of posing as a prophet, although in orthodox Islam Muhammad is the last and the seal of the prophets. But against this, it may be said that he had no need of the actual title, “prophet”; many mystics held—heretically, it is true—that the wali stood higher than the prophet, nabi or rasul. He had evidently besides this a more solid reputation in philosophy, as is shown by his correspondence with Frederick II, the great Hohenstaufen (d. 1250 A.D.). The story is told on the Muslim side only, but has vraisemblance and seems to be tolerably authentic. According to it, Frederick addressed certain questions in philosophy—on the eternity of the world, the nature of the soul, the number and nature of the categories, etc.—to different Muslim princes, begging that they would submit them to their learned men. So the questions came to ar-Rashid, the Muwahhid (reg. 630-640), addressed to Ibn Sab‘in as a scholar whose reputation had reached even the Sicilian court. Ar-Rashid passed them on; Ibn Sab‘in accepted the commission with a smile—this is the Muslim account—and triumphantly and contemptuously expounded the difficulties of the Christian monarch and student. In his replies he certainly displays a very complete and exact knowledge of the Aristotelian and neo-Platonic systems, and is far less a blind follower of Aristotle than is Ibn Rushd. But his schoolmasterly tone is most unpleasant, and we discover in the end that all this is a mere preliminary discipline, leading in itself to agnosticism and a recognition that there is nothing but vanity in this world, and that only in the Vision of the Sufi can certainty and peace be found. So we have again the circle through which al-Ghazzali went. As distinguished from Ibn Rushd, the prophet, with Ibn Sab‘in, takes higher rank than the sage. Beyond the current division of the soul into the vegetative, the animal and the reasonable, he adds two others, derived from the reasonable, the soul of wisdom and the soul of prophecy. The first of these is the soul of the philosopher, and the other of the prophet; and the last is the highest. Of the reasonable soul upward, he predicates immortality.
His position otherwise must have been practically the same as that of Ibn Arabi. Like him he was a Zahirite in law and a mystic in theology. “God is the reality of existing things,” he taught, and it is evident that he belonged to the school of pantheism in which God is all, and separate things are emanations from him. In life we have flashes of recognition of the heavenly realities, but only at death—which is our true birth—do we reach union with the eternal, or, to speak technically, with the Active Intellect.
END OF THE MUWAHHIDS
Apparently it was quite possible for him to hold these views in public so long as the Muwahhids were strong enough to protect him. But their empire was rapidly falling to pieces and the time of freedom had passed. An attack on him at Tunis, where the Hafsids now ruled, drove him to the East about 643, and there he took refuge at—of all places—Mecca. The refuge seems to have been secure. He lived there more than twenty years amid a circle of disciples, among whom was the Sharif himself, and died about 667. There is a poorly authenticated story that he died by suicide. The man himself, with so many of his time and kind, must remain a puzzle to us. For all his haughty pride of learning, it is noted of him that his first disciples were from among the poor. His contemporaries described him as “a Sufi after the manner of the philosophers.” The last vestige of the Muwahhid empire passed away in the year of his death.
CHAPTER VI
The rise and spread of darwish Fraternities; the survival and tradition of the Hanbalite doctrine; Abd ar-Razzaq; Ibn Taymiya, his attacks on saint-worship and on the mutakallims; ash-Sha‘rani and his times; the modern movements; Wahhabism and the influence of al-Ghazzali; possibilities of the present.
Our sources now begin to grow more and more scanty, and we must hasten over long intervals of time and pass with little connection from one name to another. Preliminary investigations are also to a great extent lacking, and it is possible that the centuries which we shall merely touch may have witnessed developments only less important than those with which we have already dealt. But that is not probable; for when, after a long silence, the curtain rises again for us in the twelfth Muslim century, we shall find at work only those elements and conditions whose inception and growth we have now set forth.