Dr Ibrahim Kalin - The Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre

makes the discourse about colors impossible. But a greater
illness is the illusion that we think we see things because we
have eyes when in fact we do not see. 27 The Qur’an insists
that ‘seeing’ as witnessing the truth requires a higher principle
of intelligibility than bodily hearing and seeing:
Indeed, you will not make the dead hear, nor will you
make the deaf hear the call when they have turned
their backs retreating. {80} Nor can you lead the blind
out of their error, you can only make to hear those who believe
in Our proofs/signs, and those who have submitted
[themselves to God]. {81} (Al-Naml, 27:80–81).
Having sound sensate organs is then not enough; they
need to be guided by intelligence and wisdom. As Plato says
in Phaedrus 250, “sight is the most piercing of our bodily
senses; though not by that is wisdom seen”. The heart must
be uncorrupted and untainted in order to function properly.
Quoting the Qur’an and the Prophet of Islam, al-Tirmidhi
(d. 910) concludes, in an important work on the heart attributed
to him, that the “soundness of sensate organs is
possible through the soundness of heart; their corruption
comes with the corruption of the heart”. 28 Thus al-sadr (“the
27 Cf. Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, tr. J. G. Gray (New
York: Harper Books, 1968), p. 165.
28 Abu ‘Abdallah Muhammad ibn ‘Ali al-Hakim al-Tirmidhi, Bayan
al-farq bayn al-sadr wa’l-qalb wa’l-fu’ad wa’l-lubb, (Amman: al-Markaz
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