Introduction
The following excerpt contains material of interest relating to the Bahá’í conception of the prophet or Manifestation of God, the nature of revelation, and the prerogatives of the Divine Educator as conceived in Bahá’í theology—and how Bahá’í tenets historically relate to ideas of past thinkers in Islam. The translation is of a brief passage from Mírzá Abú’l-Faḍl’s Faṣlu’l-Khiṭáb—one first shown me some years ago by that eminently accomplished expert of Persian and Bahá’í literature, Naeem Nabiliakbar, whose radiant erudition is veiled only by his outstanding humility. In this passage, Mírzá Abú’l-Faḍl recounts an anecdote concerning Avicenna (c.980-1037 AD)—outstanding among all the philosophers of Islam—and his devoted disciple Bahmanyár.
This disciple wanted to know why Avicenna, given his prodigious learning, would not advance a claim to revelation or a divine mission (risálah) and establish, according to his own principles, a new religion. Avicenna’s eventual answer is altogether striking; I will leave those curious as to the content and details of that response to peruse the translation. I will make only a few notes on why Avicenna’s answer, and indeed Bahmanyár’s question, has relevance to the Bahá’í conception of revelation.
Avicenna’s doctrine of the prophetology is altogether fascinating, and may be gleaned in the concluding sections of his treatments of metaphysics in works such as al-Shifá, al-Naját, and al-Ishárát wa al-Tanbíhát.
For Avicenna, prophethood is not a function of some occasionalist intervention by God in the created order, by which He imparts revelation, as some foreign and alien influx of words, onto an arbitrary person, which he is then merely to recite or repeat or report. Rather, the existence of the prophet is something inherently provided within the providential Order of the Good (niẓám al-khayr) that is realized in the course of the emanation of things from the Deity, the Necessary Existence. The prophet is a man who, by virtue of the exquisite constitution of the psychosomatic organization of his person, is possessed of superlative intellective faculties; he is thereby empowered to discern the inherent logical relations obtaining between the realities of things, and thus understands the order of the world through immediate intuition. He need not be taught by others, for he apprehends truths before they could be pointed out to him by a teacher.
The truths to which he has access—being intellected by him, as with all others, through the actuating illumination of the Active Intellect—are the same as reason and true philosophy establish. But whereas others apprehend them only after long study and discursive thought—and of human beings even such philosophers are few—he apprehends them with the utmost facility and celerity.
It is such a man who is the true legislator, for he establishes laws on the basis of his knowledge of reality, and conveys philosophic truths—the existence of God and the immortality of the soul—in accordance with the understanding of the commonality of man. As such an educator, he is an essential part of the order of human society, whose native excellence is owed the recognition and obedience of all—he is, Avicenna states with a wondrous boldness in al-Shifá, “well-nigh a human god” (rabb insání).
Through his doctrine of prophetology, Avicenna reconciles the divergence of rationally established and revealed doctrines. Since abstract truths elude the grasp of most humanity, the prophet conveys these truths in image and metaphor. The eschatological vision of resurrection, of paradise and hellfire, thus is provided as an imaginative representation of the true felicity or perdition of the rational soul in the afterlife. For Avicenna there is no external punishment exacted by God for vice, for the pain of the incorporeal soul in the hereafter just is its attachment to sensible pleasures, and its inability to enjoy the supreme delectation of intellective vision of true reality. But progress is possible: the gradual purgation of the soul from its vicious attachments is assured for most everybody.
The similarities between the Avicennian Prophet and the Bahá’í Manifestation, being evident to anyone who has perused ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s explanations in Some Answered Questions, need no expatiation. I will merely note that the mythic image of the Prophet as some empty vessel or unthinking oracle who receives, and then recapitulates, a merely verbal message or disturbing portent is superseded, as an inexact illustration appropriate to primitive humanity, by a far subtler picture in the Bahá’í Writings—even if these Writings participate, at various times for either rhetorical effect or poetic impression, in that ancient mythopoesis. Instead, the Bahá’í Prophet or Manifestation is a higher order of human being. His cognitive perfections are the native possession of His soul. His commandments and teachings are by no means the passively communicated dictates sent down, in arbitrary fiat, by a celestial overlord, but rather the inexorable expressions of His intrinsic insight penetrating all things. His inner faculties of discernment and self-understanding—while they may more decisively manifest themselves in activity and power as He transitions from childhood and youth into adulthood—are always already enjoyed by Him as the inalienable virtues of His mind. His moral immaculacy is assured by the supreme integrity of a will consummately and inevitably harmonized with a perpetually luminous Reason. He is, in fine, what all of us are somehow called, and yet always fail perfectly, to be: the very Image of God in man.
In any case, the implicit scandal of Avicenna’s prophetology is that the doctrine of khátamíyyat, of the finality of revelation, has no justification or acknowledgement in Avicenna’s system. Consider: For Avicenna, creation has eternally emanated from God and shall exist to everlasting. The eschaton as the end of history is but a figuration of the incorporeal afterlife. In addition, the Prophet is a part of the system of the nature—construed as the providential Order of the Good—as much as the seasons of the year, the revolutions of the spheres, the perpetuation of species, and the generation and decay of elementally composed beings. There is nothing with the power naturally to prevent or foreclose the advent, given a suitable elapse of time, of another Prophet. That Avicenna had some intimation of this implication of his theory, but chose out of prudence to sequester it among his most esoteric doctrines, is something I cannot as yet prove but to which I assent. He apprehended that any one religion is but a contingent instance of the grander, transcendental Religion which is but the intelligible sum of truth, which is communicated, in socially conditioned forms, by those superior Beings called, by convention, prophets and messengers. Avicenna thus recognized, however privately, that the advent of another Prophet had merely to wait for the “permission” of God, that is, the correct time and circumstance within the general condition of human civilization.
Nine hundred years would elapse before this Event, so distantly and opaquely adumbrated, would unfold itself in the Persons of the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh. I will end this prolix post by saying that I find it no mere coincidence that Avicenna concludes his deduction of the Divine attributes in al-Shifá with the almost hymn-like affirmation that God—in the unalloyed perfection and goodness of His intellective being—is at once the highest jamál and bahá, Radiant Beauty, and also the transcendent Source of the jamál and bahá immanent in all things. That God Who reveals Himself in His creation discloses Himself precisely as beauty and splendour, and it is thus that His Manifestation assumed, as His proper titles, the infinitely fitting appellations the Blessed Beauty and the Splendour of God.
An Anecdote on Avicenna in Mírzá Abú’l-Faḍl’s Faṣl al-Khiṭáb
Provisional Translation
Bahmanyār was a Persian Zoroastrian among the students and attendants of that preeminent philosopher, Avicenna. He had taken to asking the Shaykh, with subtle but insinuating persistence, why he had not yet advanced a claim to a divine mission and established a new religious law. Avicenna, in response, would observe silence, neither affirming nor denying such ultimate ambitions. Thus the matter stood until ʿAlāʾ-al-Din Kākuya was defeated by Masʿud Ḡaznavi and made to flee from Isfahan to Hamadan. In order to execute his charge of managing ʿAlāʾ-al-Din’s administration, Avicenna was thus obliged to travel, being attended by Bahmanyār.
One night in the course of their journey, Avicenna having set up their camp, the weather was particularly cold. Vexed as they were by the chill winds of Autumn, Avicenna proved unable to sleep through the night. To pass the time, he and Bahmanyār discussed matters of philosophic import, wrapped up snugly in their bedclothes. At some point in their conversation, Avicenna grew thirsty and asked Bahmanyār to bring him a drink of water. Loath to expose himself to the cold, Bahmanyār brought up another topic to distract him from his thirst. He asked Bahmanyār several other times for water over the course of the night, each time Bahmanyār diverting him with yet another question—until morning dawned and the cry of the muezzin resounded from every side.
Avicenna then rose from his bedroll and bade Bahmanyār to get up also, adding that he would, at long last after several years, answer his question. Why had he not, as Bahmanyār so desired, declared himself divinely commissioned and empowered to establish a new religion?
Avicenna thus explained:
“More than four hundred years have now elapsed since the Founder of the Islamic dispensation fulfilled His mission. Not one person among this people has ever attained the honor of His presence; nonetheless, even though the Prophet did not include the call to prayer in the obligatory precepts of His law, these people have forsaken their slumber on this night, braving the depredations of the cold, to observe this custom: They ascend the minarets before the time of dawn prayer, ready to intone the verses of the call to its observance so soon as its moment should come.
“How different is the case with me! As your teacher and master, I am owed your obedience. Yet, despite my firm request that you bring me water several times last night, you failed to heed me. Some chilly weather prevented you. Unwillingness to bear minor inconvenience and discomfort was the occasion of your disobedience and sufficient cause of your defiance. Now, do you truly suppose that just anybody—merely on the strength of acquired knowledge or temporal power—could lay rightful and compelling claim to a divine dispensation, and inaugurate a new religion, without, that is, the express permission of God?”