The letters of “In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful” are the ranks of the Qāʾim of religion. Praise belongs to God, who has granted success and joy to the friends of His religion, brought evil fortune upon whoever turns back on his heels, and ordained disgrace and curses for whoever defies the command and turns aside from the truth. May blessing rest upon the Sun of humankind, the Lamp in darkness, the awaited one through whom the nations are delivered: the standing, guiding Imam. May peace rest upon the interpreters of his wisdom, the ranks close to him, and the witnesses of religion, his noble messengers, who are among the most discerning of genera and species and are endowed with wings in twos, threes, and fours.
Now then: someone came into the pure, sacred Presence in Cairo. He spoke to some young men who had carelessly gathered around him, proclaiming teachings about the return of souls, issuing commands and prohibitions to them. He led them along the difficult path of ignorance and, through his misrepresentations, put them upon a mount that could not carry them. He directed them into blindness and error, decorating his condition with deceptive speech. I learned what he had taught and what he claimed to have established, and found that everything he put forward he attributed to the noble shaykh, the source of excellence and right guidance.
Indeed this shaykh is known for debating and educating those who came to him, and they have acknowledged his learning and benefited from his instruction. But this newcomer claimed on his authority that the soul, after separating from the body, returns to its own world as a subtle spiritual being, no longer in need of a body. His particular proof was that a soul can act apart from the body in sleep, recalling and reporting what it sees in dreams.
I have treated this doctrine at length elsewhere, exposing its false premises by a reasoned explanation and demonstrative proofs. By the favor of the Guardian who shall restore truth and defeat covenant-breakers, I shall tear away the coverings of this doctrine and overthrow the arguments of its supporters. As the scriptural saying has it: “We hurl truth against falsehood, and it crushes it; behold, falsehood vanishes.”
A soul does not carry out its actions apart from some bodily person or instrument. Once that living configuration is dissolved, its capacity for articulated logical expressions ceases. Even when matter is in flux beneath its forms, the form is not manifested apart from matter. Matter itself belongs to compounded things. The assertion that a soul continues to perform the same kinds of acts after the whole configuration has been taken apart remains unproved.
As for this teacher's claim, that the soul separates during sleep, it merely reproduces images of what has been sensed and of bodily things it has previously encountered. Indeed, consider the person born without sight: no soul, whatever excellence one attributes to it, can independently conjure in a dream the visual forms of man-made objects never perceived, much less the forms of divine realities. It dreams of what has entered its experience—bodily intimacy, foods, drinks, and the like. Thus the supposed proof from dreams does nothing to establish the independence of the soul after death. Accurate judgment requires careful distinctions in reality, just as a correct formulation must correspond to the meaning of what it says.
By the kindness of al-Ḥākim, sovereign over all ages, and His servant, the Qāʾim of the Age, whose concealment tests the nations, I shall explain the terms genus, species, individual, difference, and property, so that an argument can establish the truth against those who deny it.
Consider the individual persons, species, differentiating marks, and properties that depend upon soul—that highest genus to which all these are referred. They require it; it does not depend upon their existence. Remove any number of individual persons and particular species, and the genus of life is not thereby destroyed. Remove the genus, and the species, differences, properties, and individuals dependent upon it cannot remain. Whatever disappears when the genus disappears, while the genus does not disappear when they do, is subordinate to the genus. Individual persons fall under the human species; the species falls under the genus, soul or life, which is here treated as enduring. No body exists as a living body without soul, and no spirit belonging to this world is observed as a wholly disembodied physical agent.
The other teacher's claim is no more than an inducement to belief: it is not rooted in the disposition of reason. Worse, it implies injustice in the Creator's governance. Let us ask its adherents whether the Creator is just or unjust. They must answer that He is just and never acts oppressively. Then let them explain why people in this world occupy unequal stations, why their souls vary in aptitude for knowledge and excellence, and why some have stronger faculties and others weaker.
If they answer, as some early philosophers did, that the Creator's bounty flows to His creatures but each receives according to the capacity originally given to it, or as later thinkers do, that the distribution results from His particular will and preference, both answers merely move the inequality back to an unequal initial gift. Why would He bestow capacity on one creature and withhold it from another, then judge them for the consequences? The same objection applies to differences in knowledge, nobility, and livelihood. To attribute them to an arbitrary unequal distribution would be to attribute injustice to the Creator, exalted far above this.
If one person had been endowed with greater capacity by irresistible favor, there could be no earned reward for it, for the recipient would have been compelled by the gift; and there could be no earned punishment for the person deprived of what was given to another. The just account is rather recompense according to the preceding actions of souls. Choice comes first, and recompense follows what a soul has acquired and the discriminating faculties it has exercised. This preserves the reality of justice. Anyone disputing it must give a coherent explanation of divine justice, and cannot do so simply by appealing to a selective initial donation of capacities.
Suppose the same philosophers say that souls were cast down into this world without knowledge because of an earlier transgression in the different world they describe. There are two possibilities. If a soul descends here to become purified from the defilement of that transgression, then the place where purification is accomplished is superior to the place where the soul originally erred. If, on the other hand, it descends as punishment, to inhabit a low and contaminated condition appropriate to its earlier fault, what meaning can religious worship, education, and the acquisition of knowledge have? The soul would have been brought here merely to suffer in an environment corresponding to its fault, not to pursue perfection.
A place of impurity, as they describe it, cannot simultaneously be the proper setting for worship and the attainment of the highest teaching. Is there anything left here except obstinate argument?
Their theory also implies that a soul could never leave this world. If a transgression caused its original descent, every further transgression must obstruct its return. No human being can sincerely claim never to have erred in this life, excepting the protected and sinless persons recognized in religious teaching. If souls are kept from the higher realm by fault, they will remain here. But if their proponents admit that a soul here can learn after ignorance and purify itself after mistakes, they must recognize that this world has the very excellence that they denied to it. It is a place suited to purification and the acquisition of knowledge, not merely a prison of punishment.
No one who examines himself fairly can claim that he has never made an error. This is beyond any ordinary person's power to maintain. I testify that Shaykh Nuṣrat al-Dīn would never affirm that his own soul has never erred, for he recognizes that he has learned what he once did not know. Consequently, the argument that our souls leave this world for another realm where they will supposedly be perfected is not established; their return and recompense concern this world itself. The objectors have not shown that the souls were once pure, fell here, and shall then ascend out of the very realm in which they acquired their purifying knowledge.
By the favor of the Qāʾim, abrogator of the religions and destroyer of the assemblies of Iblīs, I shall also answer the philosophers who followed the ancients without understanding them. Their successors have left the luminous marks of the spiritual teachers and fallen below the rank of the sages they claim to emulate.
Pythagoras, according to the tradition cited here, taught his pupils the pure unity of God. He affirmed that the Creator, exalted beyond likeness, is an existent, pure Light. The knowledge of that Light becomes manifest only to one who is worthy of it, who has fulfilled the obligations of worship. He compared a person to someone clad in a sheepskin: while the skin covers him, others cannot see what lies within; when he removes it, what was hidden becomes visible. Plato, the great sage and teacher of Aristotle, is also said to have agreed with the central truth of this teaching. Those who reject it, whether ancient or modern, have departed from their masters' path and read books without understanding their demonstrations.
If the greatest sages affirm that the Creator truly exists in relation to this world while remaining transcendent beyond the definitions applicable to creatures, then the nobility of the world of souls and its place within visible human existence becomes apparent. The theory that there is another world in which the soul must be united with a different kind of existence, away from this one, wrongly confines the Creator to some distant upper region. Those who imagine that an ethereal realm must be more sacred merely because it appears far away confuse the bodily distance and motion of the heavenly spheres with the essential nobility of the intellectual soul, which apprehends intelligible truths and remains above the qualities of inert matter.
Many contemporary readers, seeking access to ancient philosophy, have turned to the books of Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī. They know he derived his formulations from earlier sources, gathered their finest sayings, and explained their doctrines. Some mistakenly place him among those earlier sages. But he worked through what he understood and sought to make their subtle teachings intelligible to less experienced minds. In the fifth chapter of the book known as Opinions of the Inhabitants of the Virtuous City, he discussed the separation of souls from bodies.
Let us distinguish possible meanings of that separation. Perhaps by “separating” the soul he meant its independence in essence, rank, and noble intellectual acts while it still possesses and governs a body. Perhaps he meant that the soul separates from vices and bodily passions, whose actions ordinarily originate in the physical constitution. Perhaps he meant that corporeal accidents are removed from its essence and that its scientific acts are independent of material composition, not that the soul ceases to exist together with its living body. Or when he said that this matter is exceedingly difficult to conceive, perhaps he referred precisely to the difficulty of grasping how a soul can be essentially immaterial and intellectually elevated while united with bodily faculties. If so, he has expressed the old sages' teaching with greater clarity and directed attention to the true goal of religious knowledge.
But if he literally meant that the soul separates from the body it governs, and can act only apart from that body, he contradicts the organization he gave to his own ideal polity. He says that the ruler who reaches his final perfection departs from this body and this world. Taken literally, this leaves no perfected ruler in the city to communicate perfection to others. The stream of instruction ceases; no one remaining can reach the final perfection. The world becomes purposeless, and the perfect ruler would have abandoned his city unjustly. The just Creator is exalted above such injustice.
If a perfected soul can remain here for some period after reaching perfection, why could it not remain longer, or indefinitely as the matter requires? Its perfection while ruling and instructing through its embodied faculties is nobler than an isolated perfection after departure. Indeed the philosophers themselves agree that the soul reaches its final perfection while joined with natural bodily life. Their own premise ought to lead them to acknowledge the superiority of a soul exercising its perfected intellect through the human form, spreading the light of its knowledge to others. Let anyone claiming otherwise demonstrate a spiritual act accomplished by a disembodied soul after its alleged departure from every visible instrument. Mere assertion and imaginative rhetoric do not establish such an act.
I say that Shaykh Nuṣrat al-Dīn did not present all these subtle divisions and demonstrations to his followers because their understanding could not yet bear the full analysis. Their narrow interpretation is no warrant for altering his doctrine. Moreover, he himself feared their bad intentions and their inability to understand him. It is by deeds that a person meets the consequences of his choices. The Book says to the tranquil soul, “Return to your Lord well-pleased and pleasing; enter among My servants,” and elsewhere declares, “That is because of what your hands have sent ahead; God does not wrong His servants.” The criterion is what a person has done, not an unrelated original grant of capacity.
Their view also implies that the souls of chosen prophets and pure imams were themselves sent down into this world because of earlier sins. This destroys their claim to prophetic and imamic authority by making them equal in wrongdoing to ordinary sinners. A person subject to a legal penalty cannot administer that same penalty as an innocent judge, and one who has disobeyed cannot purify the disobedience of another. The implication is contrary to the religious teaching they profess to honor.
There is an account in the seventeenth gathering of the second hundred, read by ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, according to which the purified guides do not extend a hand toward the prohibited, utter unlawful or sinful speech, or break the bonds of kinship by their judgments. Through purity of heart and intention they were allotted the highest station and made foremost among the ranks in every cycle. This is enough to explain the return of souls and the difference in their degrees.
The twenty-ninth gathering of that hundred likewise describes the best soul as one which never has to cry, “Alas for my failure in my duty to God!” The worst is the soul driven into punishment after acknowledging its negligence. Pure souls are those that remain steadfast in religion, believing and doing righteous works. “Remaining steadfast” refers to dwelling and staying in that condition. What room remains for the contrary doctrine of the soul's departure to a different realm?
If this man from Shayzar has falsely attributed the doctrine to Nuṣrat al-Dīn, he should be denounced, his claim exposed, and his authority in the Call rejected. If, however, he has reported accurately, then the doctrine itself demands grave scrutiny. May we be protected from a fall from blessing into punishment.
I have not written this to challenge truth or indulge idle disputation, but to expose those who falsely claim authority in religion. I cannot tell what is more astonishing: the weakness of their perception, the foolishness of their judgment, their blind hearts, or their lack of understanding! They affirm that the Creator can manifest to them through a human form, yet claim that their own souls cannot be satisfied with this form and must become disembodied spiritual entities after death. Their claim is incoherent: they grant the human form to the Creator, then consider it too mean for themselves.
They have spoken falsely and wandered far from truth. Let them withdraw this corrupt belief so that they may be free of the rebuke addressed to it. Otherwise let them go on discoursing and playing until they meet the day promised them, when nothing that any soul has done will be hidden from the Qāʾim. “To whom belongs the kingdom this day?” To our Lord al-Ḥākim, the Overwhelming. “Today you shall be recompensed for what you used to do.” “This is Our Book, speaking about you in truth; We were recording what you did,” until the saying, “When the word falls upon them, We shall bring forth for them a creature from the earth that speaks to them, for people did not believe in Our signs.”
Praise belongs to the Lord of the worlds, through His Guardian and the Qāʾim who brings salvation to the Unitarians; upon him be peace.