This vast body of writings from Ibn ‘Arabī and Qūnawī to Āqā...

This vast body of writings from Ibn ‘Arabī and Qūnawī to Āqā Muhammad Ridā Qumsha’ī and Amīr ‘Abd al-Qādir and in the contemporary period from Mawlānā Thanwī, Muhammad ‘Alī Shāhābādī and Ayatollah Khomeini to Sayyid Jalāl al-Dīn Āshtiyānī and Hasan-zādah Āmulī contain a body of knowledge of vast richness, a knowledge which alone can provide the deepest answers to the most acute contemporary intellectual, spiritual and even practical questions.

But above all this tradition alone can provide for those Muslims capable of understanding it the Supreme Science of the Real, the science whose realization is the highest goal of human existence.68 Endnotes 1 We use this Latin term to distinguish it from “sacred science” which possesses a more general meaning and includes also traditional cosmological sciences.

2 As far as opposition to Ibn ‘Arabī’s doctrines are concerned, see for example, Alexander Knysh, Ibn ‘Arabī in the Later Islamic Tradition—The Making of a Polemical Image in Medieval Islam (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999). 3 On the traditional understanding of the perennial philosophy see Nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989), pp. 68ff.

See also Frithjof Schuon, “Tracing the Notion of Philosophy,” in his Sufism—Veil and Quintessence, trans. William Stoddart (Bloomington (IN): World Wisdom Books, 1981), Chap. 5, pp. 115-[^128]: 4 The relation between Shi‘ite gnosis and Sufism is a fascinating and at the same time crucially important subject with which we cannot deal here. A number of Western scholars, chief among them Henry Corbin, have treated this issue metaphysically and historically. See for example his En Islam iranien, Vol.

III, Les Fidèles d’amour—Shi‘ism et soufisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), especially pp. 149ff. See also Mohammad Ali Amir Mo‘ezzi and David Streight, The Divine Guide in Early Shi‘ism: The Sources of Esotericism in Islam (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994); and S. H. Nasr, Sufi Essays (Chicago: ABC International Group, 1999), pp. 104-[^120]: 5 Unfortunately there is no complete or even nearly complete history of either Sufism itself nor doctrinal Sufism.

Even the details of the School of Ibn ‘Arabī are far from being known. At the present stage of scholarship we know but a few major peaks of this majestic range and much remains to be discussed and brought to light in the arena of international scholarship.