Abdal Hakim Murad - The Cambridge Companion to Islamic Theology

Epistemology and divine discourse 299
In support of this last claim Ghazalı cites the qur’anic verse, ‘‘Everything
is perishing save His face’’ (28:88). To him this verse means that
‘‘there is none in existence save God ... since the essence of anything
other than He is considered with respect to its essence; it is totally nonexistent’’.
To those who see nothing in existence except the One,
knowledge (‘ilm) as tas _
dıq comes to an end. Its ‘‘essential nature
(h _
aqıqa) is recognition (i‘tiraf) of the existence of what the Messenger
has reported (akhbara ‘an) about its existence’’. But if everything other
than God is non-existent, there is nothing about which one can make
such epistemic claims.
The ‘‘knowers’’ then ‘‘see nothing in existence except the One, the
Real’’, that is, God. 44 As Ghazalı explains, ‘‘Everything has two faces: a
face turned towards itself and a face towards God.’’ Only ‘‘from the
standpoint of its own face, it has no existence’’. 45 But ‘‘from the standpoint
of its face which is towards God, it exists (huwa ... bi’ ‘tibar wajh
Allah mawjud)’’, or ‘‘is found there’’. ‘‘From the standpoint of its own
face’’ includes also the self. ‘‘For he [sc. the‘arif] is aware neither of
himself ... nor of any absence of awareness of himself’’, inasmuch as
‘‘awareness of unawareness is yet an awareness of self’’. They have
arrived at the level of total self-extinction (fana’). So at the level of
‘‘withness’’, spatiotemporal proximity and distance have no meaning.
Everything arising from God’s existence is perceived as equidistant from
its ontological source. That is why he says that God’s proclamation to
the ‘arifun ‘‘never leaves their hearing’’ and their position thus differs
from the ‘ulama’ or rational thinkers and the rest of the Muslim community.
The latter hear divine discourse mediated by a report like a man
who says, ‘‘I heard the poet Mutanabbı’’, and means by his claim that he
heard Mutanabbı’s poetry being recited by someone. 46
the subtleties of allusion
Yet, as the Niche continues, if nothing exists other than God, the
‘‘Light of the heavens and Earth’’ (24:35), ‘‘then the name ‘light’ for
things other than the First Light [i.e. God] is sheer majaz’’. 47 Thus, ‘‘the
‘arifun ascend from ... majaz to ... h _
aqıqa’’, from the figural to the
literal. 48 For ‘‘nothing possesses huwıya (‘he-ness’) other than He [huwa]
except in a figural sense (bi’l-majaz)’’. ‘‘Huwıya’’, the abstract form of
the third-person pronoun huwa, isoneofthetermsusedinfalsafa to
render ‘‘existence’’. In his work The Highest Aim (al-Maqs _
ad al-Asna),
Ghazalı isolates ‘‘huwa huwa’’ and ‘‘huwa ghayruhu’’ as the basic
form when one wants to say of something ‘‘It is ...’’ or ‘‘It is not ...’’
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