BOOK REVIEWS

Allah Transcendent: Studies in the Structure and Semiotics of Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Cosmology. By IAN RICHARD NETTON. Routledge and Kegan Paul: London and New York, 1989. Pp. 393. Price HB 45.00. This relatively voluminous work is in reality two books combined in one. It is an extensive treatment of many of the major figures of Islamic philosophy and in one chapter Sufism and gnosis, and also a commentary or 'discourse', to use a term favoured by the author, about structuralist, post-structuralist and deconstructionist analyses of Islamic philosophy. The two parts of the work, moreover, stand separately and are hardly integrated although the modern philosophical analysis follows the study of Islamic philosophy at the end of each chapter. As a result, it is possible for a student of Islamic philosophy to benefit from the scholarly analysis of Islamic thought without having to concern himself on every page with how the Islamic intellectual tradition is viewed by the latest currents and fashions of European philosophy. In an introductory chapter the author deals with Graeco-Alexandrian thought which Islam was to encounter as it spread north from the Arabian Peninsula. Netton provides a scholarly account of various writings and currents of thought which were to be of particular importance to Muslims, such as the works of Plotinus and Proclus. In this treatment there is, however, an overemphasis of the Byzantine element while Jundishapur which was in Persia is simply mentioned as being 'near Baghdad' (p. 7) and its influence somewhat belittled. Perhaps for the sake of scholarly argument, the author then delineates what he calls the 'Qur'anic creator paradigm' that he defines as the norm vis-avis which the views of various Islamic philosophers are judged. Netton turns first of all to al-Kindl whose views concerning God and creation are well analyzed but always in light of the tension which the author sees between the Qur'anic creation paradigm and Neoplatonic emanationism which appears as a kind of bete-noire throughout the book. The author points quite rightly to various strands of philosophical and theological thought, namely the Qur'anic the Mu'tazihte, the Neoplatonic and the Aristotelian, reacting with each other in al-Kindl's thought. This was bound to happen at the beginning of the formation of Islamic philosophy and before the syntheses of al-FarabT and Ibn Slna. In the third chapter the author turns to al-Farab! whose writings concerning the nature of God as utterly transcencent and emanation scheme of the ten intellects are carefully analyzed and thoroughly discussed. But here again the author sees alienation between the Qur'anic concept of God and the philo-

BOOK REVIEWS

151

sophical concept of God inspired by Neoplatonism. In fact, according to Netton Islamic philosophy is 'a twisting labyrinth' (p. 70) at whose gate the philosophy of al-Kind! stopped while al-Farabl plunged deep into it by creating an 'alienated' view of God. One wonders why al-Farabl would spend a life-time praying according to Qur'anic injunctions to an 'alienated' God. The treatment of al-Farab! is followed by another extensive chapter dealing this time with Ibn Slna and his concept of necessity and contingency as well as his emphasis upon God as love. Netton again provides a clear analysis of Ibn Slna's ontology and the cosmological scheme which depends upon it and makes use of not only the Peripatetic works of the master but also his 'Oriental philosophy'. He also points to the originality of the Avicennan synthesis despite Ibn Slna's heavy debt to al-Farabi. One would expect from a Western scholarly treatment of Islamic philosophy that Ibn Slna would be followed by either al-Ghazzah or Ibn Rushd. But the author surprises the reader by devoting the fifth chapter of his work to 'The God of Medieval Isma'Tlism'. He begins with early Isma'lli cosmology as described in the writings of Abu 'Isa al-Murshid, the Fatimid da'i, and then turns to the 'infiltration of Neoplatonism' with Abu 'Abdallah al-Nasafl, Abu Ya'qub alSijistanl and HamTd al-DTn al-Kirmanl with whom the early synthesis of Isma'TlT doctrines and Neoplatonic theories reaches its peak. Strangely enough, Netton does not deal with perhaps the greatest of Isma'llT philosophers, Nasir-i Khusraw, and concludes with a section on the Yemeni author, Ibrahim alHamTdT, whose work Kttab kanz al-walad he calls the 'apotheosis of the Neoplatonic myth'. Netton continues to depart from the old orientalist scheme of treating Islamic philosophy by turning in chapter six to two figures often neglected in the treatment of Islamic philosophy, namely SuhrawardT and Ibn 'Arabl. The latter was not, of course, strictly speaking a philosopher (faylasiif) as this term is understood in the Islamic context, but he was certainly a master of Islamic metaphysics, the grand expositor of Sufi gnostic doctrines (al-ma'rtfah, not to be confused with gnosticism in early Christian history). The author analyzes clearly the complicated hierarchy of lights and the meaning of the Light of lights (Nur al-anwar) in Suhrawardfs ishraqi or illuminative doctrines and also deals with Ibn 'ArabTs 'unity of being' (wahdat al-wujud) although somewhat less successfully. At the end of the chapter, he makes an interesting compassion between Ibn 'Arab! and Eckhart which is a very worthwhile project to follow in contrast to trying to compare Ibn 'Arabl with a modern European deconstructiomst philosopher. Yet, Netton continues by applying deconstructionist theories to Ibn 'ArabT, even going so far as to say, 'In his peculiar and very individual way Ibn al-'ArabT foreshadows the advent of the deconstructionist movement!' (p. 292). The book terminates with a short conclusion entitled 'The Vocabulary of Transcendance: Towards a Theory of Semiotics for Islamic Theology'. In this conclusion the author outlines four directions in which a theory of semiotics, which could apply to Islamic theology both medieval and modern, could be developed, these being the way of the 'ulama', the way of unknowing, the way of the mystics and the way of deconstruction! (p. 325). It seems that deconstruc-

152

BOOK REVIEWS

tionists, having destroyed, in their mind rather than in reality, the logocentrism of both Greek and Christian thought, now want to turn upon Islam to disassociate Islamic thought from the truth and from the sacred, to reduce it to a 'discourse' and to lead it to the nihilism and the very death of intelligence which characterizes so much of present day thought and in fact 'post-modern' thought as such. Allah Transcendent is an important work of Western scholarship concerning Islamic thought both because of its scholarly treatment of the subject and also because of the inclusion of SuhrawardT and Ibn 'Arab! although it is unfortunate that the later grand syntheses of Mulla Sadra and Shah Wall Allah were not included, the work has copious footnotes and makes use of the whole spectrum of scholarship in Western languages and most Arabic and Persian primary sources. The only complaint which one can make in this domain is that not enough use has been made of secondary sources in Islamic languages. The work also includes a fine bibliography. The major criticism that can be made of the work is, however, philosophical rather than scholarly. Only the like can know the like. How can the philosophies of figures such as Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Barthes and Dernda come to know a philosophy based on a completely different understanding of the intellect and related to the world of faith and revelation from which the modern philosophical 'discourse' is totally cut off? The analyses at the end of each chapter based on the application of semiotic theories drawn from structuralism, post-structuralism and deconstructionism cannot finally be of more than passing interest even to Western scholars of Islamic thought not only because of the intellectual poverty of such modes of thought, but also because by the time this work becomes well-known, probably these modes of thought will have become already depasse. Today when one reads the study by as a great a scholar as Nicholson of 'Abd al-Karlm al-JIlT, one can still benefit from his fine translation while his Neo-Hegelian analysis of al-Jlll's metaphysics and cosmology appears as stale as the British Neo-Hegehanism of the early decades of this century. This example has much to teach those who attempt to analyze Islamic thought in terms of swiftly changing currents of Western philosophy. Despite the attempt to search in his semiotic analysis for the sun of the Islamic intellectual tradition with the help of a deconstructionist candle, Netton has presented serious scholarship in thefieldof Islamic thought in this work and deserves to be read by anyone interested in the field. Even his analysis, based upon the anti-thesis and alienation between the Qur'anic creator paradigm and the Islamic philosophers' doctrine of God as the One (al-Ahad), is instructive for an understanding of the nature of present day Western thought to those who have understood the traditional Islamic philosophical synthesis between God as Creator and the One Who is utterly transcendent, a synthesis which itself goes back to the teachings, both outward and inward, of the Qur'an and the Hadlth. Seyyed Hossetn Nasr George Washington University