Avicenna's Allegory on the Soul by Wilferd Madelung;

Author:Wilferd Madelung;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2015-10-11T00:00:00+00:00

In his article on the text, Corbin states that Ibn al-Walīd’s ‘immense work, to give a pertinent response to Ghazālī, is required to take up all the major themes of Ismāʿīlī gnosis’,205 but he goes on to concede that, on closer scrutiny, many counter-arguments in Dāmigh al-bāṭil carefully skirt the Ṭayyibī ḥaqāʾiq-system. As he suggests, there was a good reason for this strategy: Ibn al-Walīd’s reluctance to right possible distortions of Ismaili teachings or excurse on details of Ṭayyibī doctrine, and his leaning instead to ad hominem responses, are symptoms of his esoteric faith. As Corbin says: ‘he has obeyed to the letter the strict rule of the esotericist: Return the opponent’s attack and undermine his positions, but without betraying one’s own secrets, the sirr al-ḥikma with which one has been entrusted. This is the way a true bāṭinī should behave.’206 Notwithstanding certain stable fundamentals, Ismaili doctrine is neither diachronically nor synchronically monolithic. It might change and develop over history, but also might vary at a single time within a single system, on the basis of an initiatory ladder or ‘tiered hermeneutics’. It is, moreover, likely that Ibn al-Walīd’s circumspection was heightened by his historical milieu, dominated as it was by the Ayyūbid conquerors in Yemen and their Sunni programme.

205 Corbin, ‘Ismāʿīlī Response’, p. 73.

206 Ibid., pp. 78–79.

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