Islamic Philosophy from Its Origin to the Present: Philosophy in the ...

Mullå |adrå and the Full Flowering of Prophetic Philosophy 231
Trans-substantial Motion
In a cosmos dominated by prophecy and revelation, the human collectivity
and the world of nature in a sense participate in the revealed
reality. The Ganges is not only a river issuing from the Himalayas, but
for those who belong to the Hindu universe, it also has a sacred
significance. Likewise, according to Islamic teachings the cosmos is
itself the first revelation of God. In such a sacralized cosmos phenomena
are at once veils of spiritual realities and symbols that reveal those
realities. In the Abrahamic world the world of nature is itself a book
to be deciphered but only by virtue of access to prophecy as the
Abrahamic religions understand it. More specifically, in Islam the
emphasis on the Divine Oneness has as its concomitant consciousness
of the interrelatedness of all multiplicity and the harmony that pervades
all things, harmony being nothing other than the consequence
of the manifestation of the One in the many.
In the universe sacralized by the Quranic revelation through a
return to the view of the primordial nature of creation, many philosophies
of nature were developed by Peripatetic and Ismå‘¥l¥ philosophers,
later scholars of kalåm, ishråq¥s, Sufis, and others. 19 All of these
philosophies were related directly or indirectly to the reality of prophecy
and revelation, and Mullå |adrå was far from being the first Islamic
thinker to have developed a natural philosophy relevant to a
cosmos dominated by prophetic reality. Nevertheless, Mullå |adrå
did develop the doctrine of trans-substantial motion (al-÷arakat aljawhariyyah),
which is both the basis of a profound natural philosophy
and also the means to create an ineluctable link between natural
philosophy, on the one hand, and metaphysics, cosmology, and
eschatology, on the other.
Instead of positing existents with permanent substances in which
only accidents could undergo motion in the classical philosophical
sense, or asserting the existence of immutable atoms as in classical
atomism, Mullå |adrå saw the whole world of nature as partaking in
a transformation that affects the very substance of things. He saw the
world of corporeal existence—and of course not the immutable intelligible
world—as being like a long caravan moving from the lowly
state of material existence to the Empyrean without this movement,
which Corbin called poetically “l’inquiétude de l’être,” implying any
form of Darwinian evolution or transformism. 20 In divorcing traditional
cosmology from its reliance upon Ptolemaic astronomy, in integrating
the dimensions of time and space, in providing a means to
understand natural transformations without falling into the error of