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Brian Anthony

Dr. Brian Satterfield

Directed Readings: Plotinus

November 28, 2013

Which Dawn Light: Situating the Imamology of Rajab al­Bursi

The legacy of Platonism in the religious life of the Ancient, Late Antique, and Islamic worlds up

through the present is so pervasive that it is a challenge to know where Platonism ends and any native

religious tradition begins. The narrative records of Islam make significant reference to Platonic ideas

which were certainly “in the air” throughout Late Antiquity, an atmosphere that would set the context for

the proliferation of Islamic Neoplatonist perspectives from al­Kindi through Ibn Arabi and beyond. In

part, the ferocious sectarian conflicts of the present day represent a decidedly un­scholarly effort to

expunge Platonist and other intrusive elements from the pure font of revelation. But whether through

scholarship or militancy, the project of reform on this Salafist pattern is doomed owing to the intricate

ways in which Islam, as any other faith, is rooted in historicity and the deep cross­influences it imposes.

Shi’a Islam garners particularly violent attention in the attempt to purify revealed faith of pagan

elements and remove it from the corrosive impact of history. The early historical discords of the Muslim

community loom large in the doctrinal formulations of the sect, and in particular surrounding the question

of the succession of the community in the wake of the demise of the Prophet Muhammed. Most Shi’i

groups followed one or another member of the lineage of Ali ibn Abi Talib, the prophet’s cousin and

son­in­law, designating their champion as “Imam” of the community. Owing to the passionate and

chiliastic nature of Shi’i movements from earliest times, a rich diversity of positions arose and fell, all of1

1 Though adhering to an arbitrary number of Islamic sectarian divisions, Shahrastani was nonetheless able todistinguish over 30 subsects within Shi’a Islam. See Shahrastani, Abu’l­Fath Muhammed ibn Abdul­Kareem. Kitabal­Milal wa­l Nahal. Beirut: Dar al­Kutub al­^Ilmiyyah, 1992. Print.

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which can roughly be categorized on a continuum between mufawidha and muqassira, lit., “those who

attribute too much” versus “those who cut short”; i.e., some Shi’i movements attributed divine or

semi­divine attributes and powers to their Imams, while for others the Imam was merely an inspired but

nonetheless human guide or political leader. Even as the “Twelvers” predominated other forms of

Shi’ism and various lesser movements died out, the role of the Imam remained, and remains, a matter of

constant and vigorous internal debate and external recrimination.

This very debate about the nature and role of the Imam most offends the ahistorical­revelatory

view held by our contemporary Salafists and others throughout the annals of Islam. Al­Hafez Rajab

al­Bursi, the subject of the present study, resolutely and infamously falls in the aforementioned

mufawidha camp of those who nearly apotheosize Imam Ali and others of the household of the

Prophet Muhammed, thus earning the ire of theological opponents both within and outside his Twelver

Shi’a community. That he took such a position itself was not a radical innovation, as even a cursory

view of early Shi’i doctrinal innovation will reveal. Rather, it was his single­minded focus on devotion to

the Imam as the means of salvation, and at a late date of development, that makes him so controversial.

His most in/famous work, Mashareq Anwar al­Yaqeen , or Dawn of the Lights of Certainty, written2

most likely at the turn of the 15th century, is a veritable handbook of extreme Imamology . The book is3

comprised of roughly two­hundred sections, each on average a page to two pages in length. The

2 The full title of the book, Mashareq Anwar al­Yaqeen fi Asrar Amir al­Mu’mineen, presents a challenge oftranslation. An artful modern translation might be: Dawn of the Lights of Certainty: On the Secrets of the Prince ofBelievers. Lawson offers Dawning Places of the Lights of Certainty in the Divine Secrets Connected with theCommander of the Faithful, which successfully eliminates all traces of the economy and rhyme of the original. The“Prince of Believers” mentioned in the title is an epithet of Ali ibn Abi Talib, the first and prototypical Imam of Shi’aMuslim sacred history, and the mystical subject of the book. The title of this paper is a play on the suggestion of thetitle that there are multiple dawn lights, and thus this inquiry is the attempt to determine which “dawn light” RajabBursi was viewing while developing his unique theology.3 Imamate is one of the pillars of the Shi’a Islamic faith, and so theorizing about the definition, succession, andsignificance of the Imamate is a special theological activity amongst Shi’a sects. Needless to say there is enormousvariation in how Imamology is articulated across these sects, with some common themes.

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sections are mostly self­contained discourses on various religious topics relating to Bursi’s central theme

of Imam­centric devotionalism. Many of the sections present analogies to describe the relationship

between God, the Prophet, the Imam, and the rest of existence in the form of letter­ and

number­correspondences, Neoplatonic schemata, and Gnostic creation and other narratives. He

justifies his views with specialized interpretations of the Qur’an that reveal Imam Ali as the secret and

central theme of scripture, histories of the lives of the Imams in the early Muslim community, and

perhaps most prominently, a series of apocryphal and highly Gnostic (and certainly from the perspective

of the Salafists mentioned above, highly blasphemous) sermons purportedly delivered by Ali claiming his

nearly divine role in issuing and maintaining existence.

The literature on Bursi is scant; traditional Shi’i writers have generally dismissed his

Imamological scheme while praising his poetic skill. Bursi has been maligned by some Muslim scholars

as a “Hurufist,” one of the devotees of Fazlallah Astarabadi’s roughly contemporaneous messianic4

movement that shared an interest in letters and numbers as objects of theological engagement, but little

else that would validate that association. More commonly, and up to the present, Bursi has been

4 Fazlallah Astarabadi (1340­1394CE) was the leader of an Islamically­inspired messianic movement that came to beknown as Hurufism (from Arabic huruf, letters) because of its purported interest in gematria or the supernaturalscience of letters. While Astarabadi’s ideas and practices are not especially remarkable in the spectrum of theso­called ghulaat Shi’a sects, they do not comport in any significant way with the text of the Mashareq. The abjadsystem that Bursi employs, assigning numbers to letters, then extrapolating divine meanings from the ensuingcoincidences, was not peculiar to Astarabadi or his movement. Bashir remarks, “Letter mysticism had long been partof Islamic esoteric traditions such as Sufism and Shi’ism, and a general concern with deciphering language at thislevel was not extraordinary in Fazlallah’s times….In addition to the esoteric traditions, the abjad system that gave anumerical value to each letter of the alphabet and then tried to extract meanings from words by performingmathematical calculations was common currency among all educated Muslims in the medieval period. Works byFazlallah and his followers make use of this system only occasionally” (Bashir 67). In the absence of any textual orother evidence linking Bursi to Hurufism, this assessment can be safely dismissed out of hand. See Bashir, Shahzad.Fazlallah Astarabadi and the Hurufis. Oxford: Oneworld, 2005. Print.

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condemned by Shi’i scholars for his ghuluww or theological extremism. Lawson made a significant5

foundational contribution, “The Lights of Certainty by Rajab Bursi,” in The Heritage of Sufism, in

which he usefully contextualizes the life and work of our writer, but dubiously locates Bursi’s thought in

the Sufi tradition and in particular emphasizes the influence of the Andalusian thinker and mystic, Muhiyy

al­Din ibn al­Arabi . This assessment is problematic from several angles; the divergence of ideas,6

identities, and practices amongst “Sufi” groups and individuals is so extreme that no clear central marker

delineates the Sufi from the non­Sufi. Hassan al­Basri, Ibn Arabi, and Ruhollah Khomeini have all been

dubbed “Sufis” by one party or another, yet each might not have recognized the others’ spiritual

legitimacy much less find common cause or identity. Furthermore, one strongly suspects that the

immediacy and importance of Ibn Arabi to post­11th century mystical Islam, while deserving of respect

and study, has been somewhat overemphasized in English­language scholarship. This can be stated with

a high degree of confidence in the case of Mashareq Anwar al­Yaqeen, where the objectives and

textual evidence Bursi puts forth can nearly all be traced to pre­Akbarian, and predominantly natively

5 Lawson mentions that Baqir al­Majlisi (1616­1698CE), a looming figure in the consolidation of what became modernShi’ism during the Safavid period, “seems to have been the first to revile Bursi’s extremism” (Lawson in Lewisohn265). See Lewisohn, Leonard. The Heritage of Sufism: Vol. 2. Oxford: Oneworld, 1999. Print.6 Lawson cites one particular passage as evidence of Ibn Arabi’s influence, portraying a strong parallelism betweenBursi p. 30ff and the first Fass of Ibn Arabi’s Fusus al­Hikam, giving particular weight to the use of the wordsarayan in both passages, which he translates as “permeation/suffusion”. He says that in consideration of thispassage, “[Bursi’s]work acquires the character of a tacit commentary on the Fusus.“ While the two passages bothconcern themselves with the necessity of God’s theophany occurring in a discernible form, this is a theme present inShi’a narrations from at least the 10th century. Bursi is in this passage theorizing an emanationism that is notparticularly Akbarian and in fact departs from Akbarian norms in important ways. By way of comparison, the passagesimply does not bear the striking resemblance that Lawson says evinces “Rajab Bursi’s reliance on Ibn ‘Arabi” (ibid.p.272­273). A conclusion one may draw from the present inquiry is that Bursi adopts a number of metaphors in thisbroad apologia for Imamate, synthesizing, assimilating, and discarding various terms, ideas, and models popular inhis day in the service of that singular purpose. A far more more significant influence may be found in Al­Durral­Manzem fi al­Ism al­^Adham attributed to Kamal al­Din Muhammed ibn Talha al­Shafi^i (d. 1254CE), whose workreveals a folk mysticism between the Shi’i and Sufi traditions, and which could prove a direct source for theapocryphal Gnostic sermons of the apotheosized Imam Ali for which Mashareq al­Anwar is most in/famous. SeeShafi^i, Kamal al­Din Abu Salim Muhammed ibn Talha. Al­Durr al­Manzem fi al­Ism al­^Adham. Collection of KingSaud University. Riyad, Saudi Arabia. Online. http://makhtota.ksu.edu.sa/.

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Shi’i, sources .7

In any case, tracing Bursi’s theological pedigree to either Akbarian Sufi or early Shi’i sources

evades a more pressing challenge, and that is to precisely determine the content of his Imamological

system. While Bursi certainly drew upon mystical, religious, and philosophical formulations and

traditions from amidst his Islamicate context, his innovation is responsive to ambiguities inherent to the

Platonic tradition of which his work partakes. These ambiguities led to open conflict within the Plotinian

school centuries earlier. Scarcely a lifetime had passed since Plotinus’ death, and already a deep rift

appeared amongst the students of the great philosopher­sage. No quarter should be given, Porphyry

would maintain, to the irrationalities of the Gnostics and the religious fundamentalists, whose

superstitious nonsense threatens to overwhelm the rational faculties. Reason is a blunt and flawed tool,

Iamblichus would counter, and it requires the aid of symbol and ritual in order to bring the philosopher

to the ultimate goal. The sometimes fierce dispute was embodied in the written debate that took place

between Porphyry and Iamblichus, the former representing his views in his Letter to Anebo , the latter8

penning De Mysteriis, or On the Egyptian Mysteries , in response. The disagreement, in essence,9

centered on the place of reason in the process of salvation, and the usefulness of revelatory narrative

and religious practice to that process.

The terms of the debate can be traced back to Plotinus himself, and in particular to Enneads

7 Consider especially the 10th century CE work Usul al­Kafi, the landmark collection of sacred narrations compiled byKulayni, with special attention to the Kitab al­^Aql wal­Jahl, Kitab al­Iman wal­Kufr, and Kitab al­Hujjah, chapterswhich contain narrations of the tradition of Imamology that Bursi seeks to revive and justify here. See Kulayni,Muhammad ibn Yaqoub. Usul al­Kafi. Beirut: Dar al­Murtadha, 2005. Print.

8 A concise treatise in which Porphyry pointedly attacks the positions of what he viewed as a highly­gnosticized andsentimental form of Platonism, a retreat from the rational­discursive legacy of his beloved teacher, Plotinus. Thoughnot mentioned by name, it is assumed that Porphyry’s interlocutor here is Iamblichus. See Porphyry, Letter to Anebo(1821) pp.1­16. English translation. The Tertullian Project. N.p., n.d. Web. 9 Oct. 2013. <http://www.tertullian.org/>9 Iamblichus, Emma C. Clarke, John M. Dillon, and Jackson P. Hershbell. Iamblichus, De Mysteriis. Atlanta: Society ofBiblical Literature, 2003. Print.

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II:9, a tractate known as “Against the Gnostics” . The key points on which Plotinus lectures are the10

preeminence of reason versus inspiration, the falsehood of elitism, the restriction to three necessary

hypostases, and the essential goodness of the world. It should be noted that the lecture was delivered as

an admonition to students within Plotinus’ circle rather than an external group of enemies, so the

disagreements were very much internal to his school thus illustrating a lack of homogeneity even in the

presence of this historic curator of Platonist thought. Plotinus’ valiant efforts in this tractate, however,

would come to naught; from Plato’s time up through Late Antiquity and into the Islamic period,

Platonism, Gnosticism, and Semitic revelatory faith and law would increasingly and inevitably voyage

together, even if as uncomfortable co­travelers.

Such intermingling of doctrine, narrative and praxis would mark Bursi’s time even as it did

Plotinus’ or even more evidently Iamblichus’, and so it will be equally fruitless to allow mere

categorization to frame our understanding of his work. Rather than simply labeling the work at hand as

“Sufi”, “Shi’i”, or “Gnostic”, and thus overlooking the ways in which it contrasts with each of those, it

may be useful to employ a comparative approach in isolating and understanding its various doctrinal

positions. Plotinus’ text has the unique advantage of itself engaging in an early landmark debate over the

boundaries of Platonism and the ways it might be variously applied or abused. The tractate “Against the

Gnostics” is special in the Plotinian corpus in attempting to define and defend a particular set of

principles and practices against which other thought systems might be judged, and in particular those

that, like Bursi’s, appear to rest on Platonic foundations. Thus by using Enneads II:9 to interrogate

Mashareq al­Anwar, we will be better able to determine the location and content of Bursi’s radical

10 As Katz points out, the identity of those to whom Plotinus’ arguments are directed is not clear from the body of thetractate and it is Porphyry who gave Enneads II:9 this title. We will use “Gnostic” in a generic sense here to meanthose against whom Plotinus argued in this tractate. See Katz, Joseph. "Plotinus and the Gnostics."Journal of theHistory of Ideas 15.2 (1954): 289­298. Print.

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Imamological vision in relation to other Platonically­inspired systems of thought.11

Describing The One

Plotinus opens Enneads II:9 by affirming the absolute unity of The One. He places this

argument at the outset of his polemic not because his opponents necessarily doubt the unity of the first

hypostasis, but rather to demonstrate that conclusions about subsequent hypostases and their natures

and functions necessarily and logically derive from this most important first principle: “We have seen that

the Good, the Principle, is simplex, and, correspondingly, primal – for the secondary can never be

simplex: that it contains nothing: that is an integral Unity” (Plotinus 150). Lest his audience derive from

the “unity” of The One that it constitutes a presence, an existent amongst existents, he adds, “Even in

calling it The First we mean no more than to express that it is the most absolutely simplex: it is the

Self­Sufficing only in the sense that it is not of that compound nature which would make it dependent

upon any constituent; it is the Self­Contained because everything contained in something alien must also

exist by that alien” (Plotinus 151). The nomenclature applied to this first principle is merely apophatic.

The One is not “one” in a numeric sense, but only in the sense of excluding the notion of multiplicity in

regards to it. This unity is repeated in the procession of subsequent hypostases, which exist in imitation

of and derivation from that absolute unity. The diverse phenomena of the material universe likewise

share in that unity, and thus it is critical for Plotinus to clarify and defend the point at the outset so as to

guarantee the integrity of the whole, particularly in defense against the gnostic notions of the fallenness of

the Soul and the evil of the world.

11 Throughout this analysis, I will treat of the views of the ostensible author of the work and refer to this hypotheticalindividual as “Bursi.” It is not clear from the manuscript evidence or the integrity of the text of Mashareq al­Anwarthat a single author is responsible for this highly varied compendium. Rather, this analysis will seek to understandthe broad Imamological framework from which the author(s) of the Mashareq operated.

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Bursi likewise defends the ineffability of God, though the expression of this ineffability is affected

by the analogies, both narrative and scriptural, in which it is most often expressed. In one of the few

passages in which he directly theorizes about the nature of God, he says in plainly Plotinian terms,

“Absolute being is the being of Almighty God whose being is the essence­in­itself, and its own reality …

[which is] ineffable to humanity” (Bursi 27). This conforms clearly with Plotinus’ imperative that The

One relies on nothing else in its essence, and Bursi’s God is similarly neither created by nor comprised

of any other, and exists eternally and timelessly without origins, endings, needs, or parts. Bursi further

explains that God must be unknowable because otherwise, necessary being would be encompassed by

the merely accidental. Elsewhere in his text, he refers to God simply as “the Essence,” “the One,” “The

Unitary Presence,” each of these designations indicating the same indivisibility, ineffability,

self­sustenance, essentiality, and necessity that Plotinus maintained for The One.

God is the only mode of being that exists in the truest sense, and the being of all other beings is

merely derivative. In an extended play on the name of God, “Allahu,” characteristic of his tangential and

even playful expository style, Bursi unpacks the attributes of his divine essence by removing letters one

by one: “If the letter alif is removed from it, li­llah (for God) remains, and indeed all things belong to

God. And if you remove from it a lam, what remains is alih (god), and He is the God of all things…. If

you removed from it the alif and two lams, what remains is Hu (Eng., He), and He is He, one and with

‘no peer unto Him’” (Bursi 36). From this name, one can understand the “identity before which and

after which there is nothing,” such that although “creation is from Him, by Him, unto Him, and according

to Him” (Bursi 36), Bursi strongly implies that the essence of identities is this godhead and that their

illusory identities are subsumed in or derivative from the supreme essence.

Plotinus’ One, in spite of its preeminent position as the perfect model of all subsequent

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hypostases and by derivation the entire universe, does not directly create, but it is only by the agency of

Soul that creation takes place. Any action, thought, or awareness in the first hypostasis would introduce

a duality that would rupture its necessary perfect unity; this indeed was the problem with Aristotle’s

self­thinking thinker that forced Plotinus to introduce The One as a prior mode of being. “The Divine

Mind in its mentation thinks itself,” Plotinus says (Plotinus 152), but only at the level of Intellect. And it is

the Soul that “[establishes] order by the marvellous efficacy of its contemplation of the things above it”

(Plotinus 153). This clear delineation of the roles peculiar to each hypostasis is one of Plotinus’ chief

purposes in writing tractate II:9, and Bursi can be seen to violate that delineation in a number of ways

that suggest a gnostic narrative.

While Bursi claims on the one hand that the godhead is removed from direct involvement with

the material world, on the other he attributes thoughts, feelings, and actions to this godhead that dilute

the consistency of the former conception. He offers an esoteric exegesis of a Qur’anic formulation to

describe his concept of God’s creatorship: “God created the heavens and the earth in two days,’ and

the [Prophet Muhammed] indicated its true meaning when he said, ‘The first things that God created

was my light, then He split off from it the light of Ali” (Bursi 39), and then all the rest of creation was

fashioned from the light of Muhammad and Ali. He regularly repeats the Qur’anic notion of God as

creator, yet at the same time he attempts to contextualize that creatorship in a loosely Neoplatonic

framework.

Throughout his narrative though Bursi walks a fine line between attributing direct creatorship to

God and attributing a proxy­creatorship to God’s emanations in the form of Muhammed, Ali, and other

members of the Prophet’s family. For instance, one narration has God initiating the act of creation, then

delegating the authority over creation to the Ma’sumeen of the household of the Prophet Muhammed:

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God remained solitary in His oneness, then He created Muhammed, Ali, and Fatima.

They abided for a thousand thousand ages, then He created [all] things and they

witnessed His creation of them. The He imposed upon the [creation] obedience to them

and He made amongst them from Him what He willed, and He delegated the command

of [all] things to them as an act of kindness upon them. They made permissible what

they willed and forbade what they willed, and they did nothing except what God willed”

(Bursi 41).

Bursi is here paying due tribute to the Qur’anic conception of divine power while at the same time

justifying the portrayal of the Ma’sumeen as hypostases by attributing the direct operation and12

oversight of the universe to these emanated beings, a concept known in Shi’i theology as tafwidh or

delegation. This description is qualitatively different than the creatorship of Plotinus’ World Soul. Here it

is the exercise of divine will that first creates, then delegates the management of creation to beings

whose will is subsidiary to God’s persistent will. For Plotinus, a divine “will” at the level of his first

hypostasis would utterly upset the balance of his system and obviate the reasons for establishing the

absolute ontological priority of The One in the first place. Taken literally, the admixture of creationism in

the above passage deeply complicates any effort to cast Bursi as Platonist after a Plotinian model, and

Bursi’s God must be distinguished from Plotinus’ One with that complication in mind. For Plotinus, this

means of expression nullifies both the supposed unity of the first principle, a serious problem for

Qur’anic theology in any case, and the necessity of each subsequent principle. This problem might be

addressed with an eye for the narrative and historical divergences between the two writers, but should

12 Ma’sumeen, lit. the “fortified ones,” meaning personages protected from error or imperfection. In the context ofShi’ism this refers generally to prophets and imams, and is specially used here to mean Muhammed, his daughterFatima, Ali and the eleven imams from the line of Fatima, all of whom are invested with roughly the same impeccabilityand position in Shi’i sacred literature.

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indicate to us that Bursi’s aims here are other than Plotinian and that he does not uncritically follow a

Neoplatonic pattern. What clearly remains in common, however, is the notion that the unity of The

One/God cannot be contemplated except by the mediation of its/His hypostases.

Emanationism

Plotinus argues in Enneads II:9 for the simplicity and necessity of his three­tiered conception

and against the unnecessary proliferation of hypostases in order to distinguish his rational system from

the nearly Ptolemaic complexity of the Gnostic narratives. He asserts plainly that there are three and

only three divine modes: “We need not, then, go seeking any other Principles; this – the One and the

Good – is our First, next to it follows the Intellectual Principle, the Primal Thinker, and upon this follows

Soul. Such is the order in nature. The Intellectual Realm allows no more than these and no fewer”

(Plotinus 151). Each of the modes, of necessity, assumes a specific reason and role in Plotinus’ broad

and holistic view of the universe. The proliferation of hypostases found in certain Gnostic writings, he

says, was the result of misunderstanding, frivolous speculation and even deception. He uses the example

of their reading of the Timaeus which results in various divine Intellects each holding its own rarified

position: “Misunderstanding their text, they conceived one Mind passively including within itself all that

has being, another mind, a distinct existence, having vision, and a third planning the Universe” (Plotinus

156). Plotinus says the Gnostics want to apply the nomenclature of Platonism in a more precise way,

without realizing that “this multiplication lowers the Intellectual Nature to the level of the Sense­Kind”

(Plotinus 156). Plotinus aims to demonstrate here that tinkering with the number or quality of hypostases

upsets the entire system as each mode has its own specific and natural rationale.

At first glance, Bursi appears to observe Plotinus’ tripartite elaboration. A number of passages

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address the eternal movement of being from an ineffable point of origin to the world of multiplicity. The

whole of the divine realm can be described by the progression, “Unity, One, Oneness ” (Bursi 38). He13

describes Unity as “the name of the essence with the negation of the enumeration of attributes,” in an

apophatic fashion very similar to Plotinus. Thus Unity is one in the sense of negating number or any other

positive trait. The One, Bursi says, is “the name of the essence with the determination of the enumeration

of attributes,” or in other words, one in the sense of number, and with the added feature of

describability. He continues, “The One emerges from The Unity, and the rest of the numbers emanate

forth from The One. Likewise the line emerges from the point, the plane from the line, the shape from

them, and as letters emerge from the point, and the argument from the letters, and the meaning from the

argument, and the whole from One” (Bursi 39). Bursi here displays several notable points of agreement

with Plotinus: the theme of unity in multiplicity, the idea that unity is repeated at every level of existence,

the argument from necessity, and the preservation of prior simplicity . But even in this passage we can14

detect a disinterest in pursuing the discursive elaboration of the system, and in particular in elucidating

the significance of any emanation beyond the Intellect, a disinterest which will be noted elsewhere in the

text .15

13 The Arabic is “احد و واحد و وحدانية”, Ahad, Wahid, Wahdaniyya. The terminology he applies here will cause someconfusion though it has resonances in other forms of Islamic Neoplatonism. Unity precedes The One, which heresignifies the second hypostasis or Intellect. Bursi never fully explains the significance of Oneness, though we mightspeculate that it signifies the oneness of the universe derivative of the unity expressed at the prior two levels ofbeing. To pursue his analogy, all the subsequent numbers that follow from one share in oneness by virtue of the factthat they are each comprised of a series of ones.14 The idea the preceding modes of being must necessarily be less complex, leading up to a perfect simplex. O’Mearacites prior simplicity as one of the distinguishing characteristics of Neoplatonic thought. See O'Meara, Dominic J.Plotinus: An Introduction to the Enneads. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. p. 44. Print.15 Adamson suggests that “already Porphyry is sometimes thought to at least minimize the distinction between Souland Intellect,” and that from an Aristotelian perspective at least there is scarcely a distinction between “rational soul”and Intellect (personal communication, December 3, 2013). For a thorough discussion of the Porphyrian precedent forcombining Intellect and World Soul, and the possible reception of this idea in the Arabic Neoplatonist corpus, seeCosta, Cristina D'Ancona. "Porphyry, Universal Soul And The Arabic Plotinus." Arabic Sciences and Philosophy9.01 (1999): 47. Print.

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Bursi’s seemingly haphazard preoccupation with emanationism can also be noted in the varied

and often mixed metaphors by which he describes the nature of God, Prophethood, and Imamate. He

discusses the progression of “Throne, Tablet, and Pen,” using Qur’anic terminology to describe divine

emanation in the tradition of the Kindian protegé, Abu’l­Hassan al­’Amiri , pairing those three with16

“Intellect, Spirit, and Soul” (Bursi 20). In a highly gnostic creation narrative, Bursi says that God

manifests Himself to the created universe through “the word ,” which emerges in a series, each stage17

relating to a different aspect of the human being: “As for the letters [of the word], their meaning is in the

Intellect (^aql), their spiritual subtleties are in the Spirit (ruh), their form is in the Soul (nafs), their

engravement is in the Heart (qalb), their expressive power in the tongue, their manifold secret in the

ear.” He further explains, “The Spirit extends from the Intellect, and the Soul extends from the Spirit”

(Bursi 19). He also says, “The Intellect bears the Spirit, the Spirit bears the Soul, the Soul bears the

Heart, and the Heart bears the Body” (Bursi 22). This location of the progression of the divine

emanations in the human has strong Sufi resonances to be certain , although as we will see he employs18

this convention towards a clear Imamological purpose. While here he mixes a language metaphor with a

bodily metaphor, elsewhere and frequently he focuses on the alphabet as an illustration of emanation.

In the most critical move and indeed the key to understanding Mashareq al­Anwar, Bursi

16 ‘Amiri (d. 992CE) was a member of the groundbreaking “Kindi Circle” that is credited with bringing a substantialportion of the Greek philosophical corpus into Arabic. ‘Amiri’s particular innovation and contribution to Islamicmysticism was to pair Neoplatonic nomenclature with Qur’anic terminology, thus paving the way for subsequentNeoplatonic interpretations of the Qur’an. The pairing between Qur’anic and philosophical terms seen in Bursi isultimately derivative of this tradition, which in the context of Shi’ism saw the additional pairing of sacred Shi’apersonages with Qur’anic and Neoplatonic terminology. See Wakelnig, Elvira, and Abu­'l­Hasan M. ʻĀmirī. Feder,Tafel, Mensch: Al­ʻāmirīs Kitāb Al­Fusūl Fī L­Maʻālim Al­Ilāhīya Und Die Arabische Proklos­Rezeption Im 10 Jh.Leiden: Brill, 2006. Print.17 In context, it is not clear that Bursi intends here the Word as cosmic Logos. Given the fact that throughout the texthe uses the term “the Point” that shares attributes with Logos, we will assume here that Bursi is simply using “theword” in the sense of that which is comprised of letters, in keeping with the metaphor in question.18 For a brief but useful discussion, see Shahzad, Qaiser. "Ibn 'Arabi's Metaphysics of the Human Body." IslamicStudies 46.4 (2007): 499­525. Print, especially page 512.

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associates the first in the series of emanations, the Intellect, with a pre­cosmic and trans­historical

Muhammed. It would be very tempting, given the repetition that Bursi affords this emanationist scheme,

to assume that Bursi simply layers the sacred personages of Allah, Muhammed, and Ali over the three

hypostases, but this will prove a false intuition. Bursi makes it very clear that in his letter schemes, the

first letter of the Arabic alphabet, alef, represents the Intellect: “Likewise all the rest of the letter derive

from the light of the Alef and the earth and the heavens come from it and return unto it” (Bursi 19). He

distinctly ties the alef to other metaphors and theological terms he has used: “Know that all the heavenly

and earthly worlds come together under the orbit of the Alef which is an expression for the First

Creation, the Great Throne, the Illumined Intellect, the Most High Power (jabarut), the secret of reality,

the Holy Presence, and the Furthest Lotus Tree (sidrat al­muntaha)” (Bursi 20). After layering the19

metaphors associated with this first creation and building up its significance, he links it with the

Prophethood of Muhammed:

The first thing God created was the Intellect, the Muhammedan presence, as per the

prophetic narration, ‘The first thing God created was my light.’ Insofar as it is the first of

the existents issued forth from Almighty God without mediation, it is known as the First

Intellect. Insofar as all things derive from it the capacity for intellection, it is known as

the Active Intellect. And insofar as the Intellect emanates forth from itself to all the

existents and they perceive thereby the realities of things it is known as the Universal

Intellect. (Bursi 30)

From the time of al­Farabi, and even dating back to Aristotle , there has been wide contention about20

the roles the self­thinking thinker must necessarily play and the names that should be applied to the

19 A reference to the grand tree said to stand at the furthest reaches of Paradise; cf. Qur’an 53:14.20 Aristotle, De Anima, Book III:5.

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Intellect in its many different iterations. Bursi is here Bursi is attempting to synthesize and so simplify

these various formulations of the progression of Intellect with the singular interest of reclaiming this

emanationist scheme for a practical devotionalism centered on the sacred personalities of Shi’i Islam.

Bursi is effectively borrowing a broadly Plotinian scheme as merely another metaphor for this uniquely

Imamite emanationism, and in doing so he empties Neoplatonic nomenclature of much of its accustomed

meaning.

We must recall that for Plotinus, the chief activity of the Intellect was its perfect

self­contemplation: “Divine Mind in its mentation thinks itself; the object of thought is nothing external:

Thinker and Thought are one …. The very eternity of its self­thinking precludes any such separation

between that intellective act and the consciousness of the act” (Plotinus 152). Thus Plotinus’ Intellect,

although one of the divine intelligibles and itself above even Soul, does not have the power of creation,

proxy­creatorship, or intentionality that we have seen attributed to the Muhammed­Intellect above; it is

completely absorbed in reflection, the illumination from that reflection providing the abundance that

flows forth into Soul, which itself flows forth into the material universe. Yet there is scant evidence in

Bursi’s text to support that conception of Intellect; there are no passages which portray the

Muhammed­Intellect as reflecting upon itself or even contemplating the godhead.

In contrast with Plotinus’ Intellect, this Muhammed­Intellect has two primary functions: to serve

as the substrate of existence, and to provide the form by which God might be known. Bursi draws on

the abundance of Shi’a narrations that place Muhammed at the beginning of creation:

The first thing that God created was my light, which He fashioned from His light and21

separated it from His Great Majesty, and it accepted to circumambulate the Divine

21 The speaker here is understood to be Muhammed.

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Power until it arrived at the Great Majesty after eighty­thousand years. Then it

prostrated to God in confession of His greatness….Then He created the Throne, the

Tablet, the Sun, the Moon, the stars, the lights of the day, the light of the faculty of

vision, human reason and knowledge, the humanity’s faculty of vision, their ears and

their hearts, all from my light, and my light is derived from His light. (Bursi 39)

The Muhammed­Intellect adopts an aspect of Plotinus’ World Soul: “He is the spirit of the world

because the spirit of the world flows into the forms like the light of the Sun in the body of air” (Bursi 35).

It is easy to see why the first and second purposes of the Muhammed­Intellect mutually reinforce one

another; because the Muhammed­Intellect is the stuff out of which the universe is fashioned, and

because that Intellect itself was emanated forth from the godhead, then the means of “knowing” God is

to recognize His proxy in the created universe. Addressing this second purpose, Bursi says, “There is no

[knowledge] left but the knowledge of being in its contingent form … towards which is directed the

gnosis of the gnostics and the wayfaring of the wayfarers. It is the font of certainty, the truth of certainty.

There are many expressions for it, like the Point, the First Emanation, the Intellect, the First Light, the

cause of the existents” (Bursi 27). Since “the essence of Almighty God is ineffable to human beings,” the

only way for created beings to know of God is by acknowledging His proxy unity in the world of

existence, embodied in the personage of Muhammed.

The Necessity and Means of Ascent

In both the Islamic and Neoplatonic conceptions, there is a challenge in solving the problem of

fallenness. It is difficult to explain how the material world of multiplicity and imperfection derived from an

immaterial world of unity and perfection. To solve the problem one either has to admit a flaw in the first

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principle, a path taken by the Gnostics, or one has to assert that the apparent corruption in the world is

the result of flawed perception rather than any intrinsic defect in the universe. Plotinus gravitated

towards the latter of these arguments, maintaining against the Gnostics that the world flows forth from

the abundance of the Soul, which itself is the pouring forth of the light of self­contemplation of the

Intellect, which is the perfect unity that emerges from the ineffable One. The universe that emerges from

that progression cannot but be perfect and good as are its priors: “"To those who assert that creation is

the work of the Soul 'after the failing of its wings', we answer that no such disgrace could overtake the

Soul of the all" (Plotinus 153). Here he defends the creatorship of the World Soul against the idea that a

madness or evil crept into the Demiurge resulting in this hopelessly flawed world we occupy. In stark

contradistinction with the Gnostics, Plotinus firmly maintains the goodness of the world because of the

logical impossibility of perfection devolving into imperfection. The problem lies not in the material

universe and certainly not in the Transcendent realm, but in the Soul’s perception: "For the measure of

its absorption in that vision is the measure of its grace and power, and what it draws from this

contemplation it communicates to the lower sphere, illuminated and illuminating always" (Plotinus 153).

Plotinus’ is a deeply hope­filled universe each particular of which receives a continuous effusion of

divine light, if only our vision permits us to perceive it.

Bursi, in following a familiar Islamic pattern, similarly locates the problem of fallenness in the

human soul rather than in any intrinsic flaw or essential evil. In accord with the Qur’anic conception, evil

is insubstantial in itself, and rather results from a confused perception or from obstinate denial of reality.

He mentions the words “evil” and “Satan” only a handful of times, for example, “Satan descends upon

the heart of the believer 320 times each day with whisperings and deceit, God makes a likeness of the

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light of wilayat of the same number of times as missiles against Satan” (Bursi online 316). For Bursi,22

the problem of existence is not evil , and it is certainly not any imperfection or elaboration of the23

spiritual or material universe. Like Plotinus, he assigns the problem to a lack of recognition of reality.

The cause of this misperception can be found in the ego, the perception that one holds necessary

existence: “When Almighty God created the soul, He called out to it, ‘Who am I?’ and the soul replied,

‘Who am I?’ So God cast it into the hidden Ocean of Return until it arrived at the prostrate Alef and

was purified of every depravity [incurred from] asserting selfhood and place. Then it returned to its

source, and He called unto it, ‘Who am I?’ and it replied, ‘You are the One, the Glorious.’” The chief

misperception of the soul is that it enjoys independent selfhood, when true selfhood and identity are

reserved only for God, and it is this misperception that causes it to situate itself improperly in the

material world.

This conforms broadly with Plotinus’ notion that The One is true identity and that all other being

is contingent. Bursi agrees with Plotinus on a related point, that the reduction of the ego can be attained

by means of austerity, as where he continues from the above narration, “This is why it is said, ‘Slay your

soul, because it does not comprehend its status except by domination’” (Bursi 16). The recognition of

one’s emptiness and contingency goes hand in hand with recognition of the divine transcendence: “If one

knows his soul in its contingency, poverty, and destitution, one knows his Lord in His Might, Grandeur,

and Greatness” (Bursi 31). Plotinus likewise says that the removal of our sense of independent and

self­subsistent being brings us into harmony with reality: “This is the true end before the Soul, to take

22 Wilayat could be translated as “dominion”, “authority”, “friendship”, or other possibilities. In the context of Shi’isacred writing, it refers to the spiritual power of the family of the Prophet Muhammed.23 This should be held in contradistinction with other Shi’i texts in which there is indeed an evil force that cyclicallystands against Imam Ali, cf. Friedman, Yaron. The Nusayrī­ʻalawīs: An Introduction to the Religion, History, andIdentity of the Leading Minority in Syria. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Print.

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that light, to see the Supreme by the Supreme and not by the light of any other principle …. But how is

this to be accomplished? Cut away everything” (Plotinus 457). The ego and all its constituent parts and

relations are the cause of the neglect of the Transcendent realms, and this problem will be remedied by

the abnegation of self.

In the Plotinian universe, awareness is the key to salvation, and he sets this imperative against

the ritual pretenses of the Gnostics. Rather than trifling with “sacred formulas,” “spells, appeasements,”

“directed breathings and sibilant cries” (Plotinus 165), we should turn to the proper task of ascent,

which is contemplation. The act of contemplation starts quite simply with recognition, an openness to the

beauty and harmony that derive from The One and suggest the movement of return to it. He uses the

example of the varied response to a single picture to illustrate our varied response to the material reality

before us:

Consider, even, the case of pictures: those seeing by the bodily sense the productions of

the art of painting do not see the one thing in the one only way; they are deeply stirred

by recognizing in the objects depicted to the eyes the presentation of what lies in the

idea, and so are called to recollection of the truth – the very experience out of which

Love arises. Now, if the sight of Beauty excellently reproduced upon a face hurries the

mind to that other Sphere, surely no one seeing the loveliness lavish in the world of

sense – this universal symmetry, this vast orderliness, the Form which the stars even in

their remoteness display – no one could be so dull­witted, so immovable, as not to be

carried by all this to recollection (Plotinus 168­9).

Of course, there are those who are “dull­witted” and “immovable,” and were it not the case, Plotinus

would have no need to discourse on the present topic. There are indeed those who cannot recall the

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higher order from which they derive. But while Plotinus’ system does not condemn such souls to

anything other than a kind of pained ignorance, Bursi more starkly casts a distinction between salvation

and damnation, and it is a distinction that begins in the world of pre­existence.

Bursi shares the themes of recognition and recollection seen in Plotinus above. Like Plotinus, he

believes that we must recognize in the emanation of the material world the markings of a higher order,

but for Bursi, the markings of that order are specially embodied in the personified hidden aspect of the

Intellect, Imam Ali. Bursi truncates the conventional three­tiered Neoplatonic scheme and while he

alludes to emanations beyond the first hypostasis, he says virtually nothing substantive about them.

What, then, is the difference between the Muhammed­Intellect and the Ali­Intellect? The former

personifies the second hypostasis in its mode as conduit of creation, the latter in its mode as conduit of

return. Thus for the believer, the hope of salvation necessitates the recognition of and surrender to the

hiero­historical Imam Ali, who he describes as “the patron of return” (Bursi 161).24

Recognition of Ali and surrender to him become necessary for salvation, a necessity not justified

by mere religious dictate nor by historical claims to succession, but because of his unique ontological

stature in the universe. The latter portion of Mashareq al­Anwar relates lengthy apocryphal sermons25

attributed to Imam Ali in which he reveals the reality of his being. In the Khutbat al­Nuraniyya, Imam

Ali elucidates his connection with the natural world and thus his role as theophany: "My name is written

upon the Throne and thus it abides, and upon the heavens and thus they stand, and upon the earth and

24 I use this term here to signify the mytho­poetic rendering of historical personages common to Shi’i religiousexpression.25 These sermons are part of a long tradition of “identity literature” in which the Imam reveals his true nature to anelite circle of believers, a tradition that remains largely unstudied where not obscured. Amir­Moezzi says that thistradition can be traced to Nusayri/Alawi texts of at least the 10th century CE. For a full discussion on the matter, see“Some Remarks on the Divinity of the Imam” in Amir­Moezzi, Mohammad A. The Spirituality of Shi'i Islam: Beliefsand Practices. London: I.B. Tauris, 2011. Print. p. 103­132. There are strong resonances between this textual traditionand Sethian Gnosticism, and in particular the Nag Hammadi text known as the Trimorphic Protennoia. See Rudolph,Kurt. Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987. Print., with particularattention to the discussion on Sethian narrative starting on p. 141ff.

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thus it spreads forth, and upon the winds and thus they scatter, and upon the lightning and thus it flashes,

and upon the rivulets and thus they flow, and upon light and thus it sunders, and upon the clouds and

thus they rain, and upon the thunder and thus it humbles, and upon the night and thus it shrouds and

darkens, and upon the day and thus it brightens and smiles" (Bursi 162). The evidence of this

Ali­Intellect, this sole means of return, is present everywhere in our world of experience to anyone who

cares to look at the evidence, as Bursi says at the opening of the book (Bursi 18), and it is the capacity

and willingness to do so that distinguishes between the saved and the damned: “"The faith of the believer

is not completed until he has known me in my luminous form, and if he thus knows me he is truly a

believer.... and whoever fails in that is an inferior doubter" (Bursi 160). Further, Bursi’s Imam has been

accessible in all times and places, as he is the referent of all the revelations that have come before: “God

has not sent down a single letter in any of His sacred books but that it refers to [Ali]” (Bursi 164). This

Ali­Intellect is evenly and eternally present, and salvation history is cast as a series of reminders of his

ontological preeminence. Salvation is not attained merely by confessing Islam, nor even by recognizing

and backing the historical Ali; it is only by surrender to this hiero­historical Ali­Intellect that one affects

one’s return.

So why do some souls fail in this respect? Plotinus simply attributes this failure to the state of

the individual soul in relation to the world: “Sometimes the soul in its entirety is borne along by the

loftiest in itself and in the Authentic Existent; sometimes the less noble part is dragged down and drags

the mid­soul with it, though the law is that the Soul may never succumb entire” (Plotinus 152). It is

important to note that for Plotinus, the individual soul by definition can never be “lost”, and by virtue of

its prior relation to the Transcendent it is, at its worst, in a state of unfortunate non­recognition rather

than pending eternal damnation. Bursi on the other hand relates a highly Gnostic explanation for the

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failure of the soul to recognize the Ali­Intellect, and by its mediation, God; one’s free will choice in the

world of pre­existence determines one’s capacity to recognize the Ali­Intellect in the material world:

The Prophet said to Ali, ‘O Ali, you are the one whom God made incumbent upon the

created beings when He made them spirits in their [time of] origin, then He said to them,

Am I not your Lord? and they said, Most certainly. And Muhammed is your Prophet?

They said, Most certainly. He said, And Ali is your Imam? They said, We reject. And

thus the created beings altogether rejected your wilayat and the confession of your26

superiority and they turned arrogantly away, but for a small number of them” (Bursi

17­18).

The failure to recognize the Imam and to surrender to him is not ultimately due to faulty reasoning or

even directly to one’s obstinance, but rather one’s reasoning­capacity and other faculties long­since

determined. Thus those who enter the Shi’a faith, whether by birth or conversion, are merely repeating a

confession they made in the world of pre­existence, and those who turn away are merely affirming their

primordial rejection .27

While Plotinus asserts that the problem of fallenness is resolved in contemplation of the

intelligibles, for Bursi the resolution is found in sacred love. It is affection for Imam Ali and the rest of the

household of the Prophet and the hatred for their historical adversaries (and by extension those who

refuse to acknowledge the preeminence of the former in any era) that carries one along the path of

return. The love of Ali becomes the hidden meaning of Qur’anic imperatives, a common theme in

so­called ghulaat literature : “[Whereas God commends] those who establish ritual prayer, ritual28

26 See note p. 19.27 We should consider here the note of elitism inherent to Bursi’s conception, perhaps similar to the elitism thatPlotinus takes on in Enneads II:9,9.28 Some sects have been accused of antinomianism because their esoteric exegeses reduced the content of doctrinaland ritual imperatives to love of the Imam. It is difficult in Bursi’s case to discern such an antinomianism or otherwise

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prayer in reality is the love of Ali. Indeed, ritual prayer is a means of connection with God, and there is

no better means of connection for the worshipper than the love of Ali” (Bursi 159). While there may be

people who believe in God and submit to the message of Islam, and even accept the historical claim of

Ali to the succession of leadership, the true salvific power of faith and the referent of its imperatives is

the love of the Ali­Intellect.

The Problem of Revelation

Plotinus is clear in his disdain for approaches that purport to facilitate ascent while circumventing

the rational norms of philosophy. In Enneads II:9:6, he upbraids those who draw and innovate on the

Platonic heritage without themselves engaging in philosophical debate: “These doctrines, all emphatically

asserted by Plato, they do well to adopt: where they differ, they are at full liberty to speak their minds,

but not to procure their assent for their own theories by flaying and flouting the Greeks; where they have

a divergent theory to maintain, they must establish it by its own merits, declaring their own opinions with

courtesy and with philosophical method and stating the controversial opinion fairly” (Plotinus 156).

Plotinus views the exercise of reason as a key component of devising a scheme that promises the

contemplation of intelligible truths. The Gnostics, by contrast, take part of what they have read and

possibly misinterpreted from the Timaeus and other sources, he says, appended their own narrative

elements, and claim to have followed the teachings of Plato.

Bursi is quite far removed from the kind of methodologically reasoned philosophy that Plotinus

demands above. He is partisan to a particular faith tradition to which he surrenders his imagination and

through which he therefore reasons, and he does not accept the notion of unaided mentation as a

for lack of evidence. He does however clearly state, in comport with orthodox Twelver Shi’a narratives, that thepractice of rituals without the love of Ali is invalid; cf. Bursi p. 159.

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reliable measure of truth. There is no point in Mashareq al­Anwar that finds Bursi reasoning

discursively at a distance from religious imperatives even to the extent that Iamblichus, or even for that

matter, Ibn Arabi, does. We might consider Porphyry’s attack on the Christian Origen as an indication

of the variance of revealed faith from the philosophical cogitation demanded by their common teacher:

This man, having been a hearer of Ammonius, who had attained the greatest proficiency

in philosophy of any in our day, derived much benefit from his teacher in the knowledge

of the sciences; but as to the correct choice of life, he pursued a course opposite to his.

For Ammonius, being a Christian, and brought up by Christian parents, when he gave

himself to study and to philosophy straightaway conformed to the life required by the

laws. But Origen, having been educated as a Greek in Greek literature, went over to the

barbarian recklessness. (Porphyry, Against the Christians, qtd. in Eusebius, History of

the Church, VI, 19:1­12) .29

It is to this category of “barbarian recklessness” that Bursi’s writings might have been relegated by

Porphyry or even Plotinus himself, for his almost complete inattention to discursive elaboration or even

logical consistency.

But it's not simply that Bursi believes in revelation or confession of a particular faith as a

required means of salvation. For him, revelation is a narrativized and externalized form of the summons

to return that in Plotinus’ conception reaches us from the World Soul; revelation is for Bursi an external

feature of existence that serves an evidentiary purpose in revealing the hidden path of return. The text of

the Qur'an is one with Muhammad as the external (dhahir) form of the Intellect. The text of the Qur'an

serves as a marker of its meaning in the same way that a face conjures the personality that it embodies.

29 Eusebius. Church History. Ed. Philip Schaff. Christian Classics Ethereal Library. 13 July 2005. Web. 1 Dec. 2013.<http://www.ccel.org/>.

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Thus in order to understand the Qur'an and to avail oneself of its salvific power, one must recognize the

referent of the words of the Qur'an, the internal (batin) component of the Intellect, which is Ali. While

Bursi does not explicitly elaborate this understanding of revelation in Mashareq al­Anwar, his

exegetical method bears it out plainly .30

Salvation is contingent not simply on confessing the literal sense of the revealed text, but in

recognizing the hidden ontological significance of its particulars. There are clear indications that Bursi’s

Imam, like Plotinus’ World Soul, is esoterically unified with both the One and the constituent beings of

creation, and it is this preeminent reality that is the true point of the revealed text in the same way that

contemplation of intelligibles is the point of the summons from the Soul. Bursi says of the Imams of the

household of the Prophet, “Whoever reaches unto the luminescence (sh^a^ ) of their light has known31

his [true] soul” (Bursi 179). That divine luminescence is inevitably obscured by the entanglements and

passions of this material world and so requires the intervention of a dhikr, or “reminder”: “God has

never revealed a single letter of one of His divine books but that it made reference to me” (Bursi 164).

Thus the internal referent of revelation is the essence of one’s own being, which itself is the formal,

efficient, and final cause of the holy text.

Thus the act of exegesis (ta’wil) is really an act of re­origination . The deepening of one’s32

reading of the holy text is the deepening of one’s contemplative insight and vice versa. As with Plotinus,

30 Throughout Mashareq al­Anwar, and more prominently in Al­Durr al­Thamin, an exegetical text attributed to Bursipublished more recently under the title Khamsa Mi’at Ayat Nazalat fi Amir al­Mu’mineen, the referent of apreponderance of Qur’anic verses is found to be Ali, where the Imam is uncovered as the true meaning of thesymbolism, admonishments, and commands of the holy book. In this tradition of which Bursi is by no means a rareexample, the focus and purpose of revelation itself is Ali. See Bursi, Rajab. Khamsa Mi’at Ayat Nazalat fi Amiral­Mu’mineen. Beirut: Mu’asasat al­^Ilmiy li’l­Matbou^at, 2003. Print.31 An interesting feature of this word is that it is derived from the same root as the word Shi’a, meaning follower ofAli and by extension the other Imams of the family of the Prophet Muhammed. The lexicon applied in the narrationsreinforces the notion that the Imams share in luminous substance with both God and the believers.32 For a full discussion on the concept of ta’wil and its significance to Islamic esoterism, see for example Corbin,Henry. Avicenna and the Visionary Recital. New York: Pantheon Books, 1960. Print. p. 28ff.

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the ultimate task is to grasp identity in the deepest sense. Bursi cites the celebrated Islamic narration,

“Whosoever knows his self knows his Lord,” but elaborates the statement in gnostic Shi’a terms: “The

final goal of the gnosis of the gnostics is the arrival at Muhammad and Ali in the [deepest] reality of their

gnosis,” and thus, “Whosoever knows them knows his Lord” (Bursi 189). For Bursi, like Plotinus, the

task of existence is the return to the personal and intimate contemplation of one’s most actual identity.

But in contrast with Plotinus or even Iamblichus, that contemplation must take place only by the medium

of faith and its narrative and sacred personages. As with much of Late Platonism, one must consider the

historical context to understand why this peculiar model of divine mediation developed.

The schism in the early Muslim community set the stage for this fusion of the cult of Islamic

personality with Platonism moving forward from the first Hijri century . Related to the problem of33

revelation is the sectarianism endemic to the view that God has spoken and the harsh and often violent

reactions that can befall dissenters, innovators, or other heterogenous actors in the interpretation or

appropriation of purportedly revealed texts. In the case of Shi’a Islam, such repressive reactions,

unfolding as they have over such an epochal period of time and particularly during the Abbasid period,

have left a significant imprint upon the Shi’a conception of theophany and the terms in which believers

discourse on that theophany. Thus across the varieties of Shi’ism one will discover the ubiquitous theme

of hiddenness; God’s essence is hidden, the true meaning of the Qur’an is hidden, the Imam is hidden,

the believers (here, sincere Shi’a Muslims) should keep their most intimate beliefs and identities hidden.

It is a theme that comports well with an esoterism the sort of which is strongly suggested by

Neoplatonism, and the sense of disenfranchisement that gives rise to it supports a studied,

33 This trend in Islam can be traced as far back as the 8th century CE to groups like the Mukhammisa, whoapotheosized the five members of the family of Muhammed. See Daftary, Farhad. The Ismāʻīlīs: Their History andDoctrines. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007. Print, p. 94ff.

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quasi­mystical detachment from the world­at­large.

Bursi conjures the history of sectarian repression from the very start. He opens his book, after

hastily offering the obligatory encomiums to the household of the Prophet, with a plainly bitter account of

his harsh reception at the hands even of his fellow Shi’a scholars, who “begrudged me, denied me,

called me wicked, pursued me” (Bursi 14). Assuaging his own evident hurt, a suffering well­familiar to

his coreligionist sympathizers, Bursi recounts the oft­rehearsed narration that says that the secrets of the

faith are “the most challenging difficulty, one that cannot be borne except by a message­bearing prophet,

an angel on high, or a believer whose heart has been tested for faith” (Bursi 16), in order to

preemptively suggest perhaps that the truth Mashareq al­Anwar is set to reveal will not be

comprehended by the general public. Bursi is here tying his own personal rejection to a history in which

the community of true­believers were rejected, the Imams spurned and killed, and more broadly to a

salvation history in which the prophets and sages of centuries past were forsaken, not merely because of

the sinfulness or obstinance of human hearts, but because the obscurity of the truth all but ensures such

widespread rejection. In Shi’a Islam, and particularly Bursi’s variety of it, disenfranchisement suggests

Platonic esoterism and vice versa. Just as social, political, and religious pressures molded and re­shaped

successive iterations of Platonism through Late Antiquity, here in the middle Islamic period a familiar

emanationist paradigm is dressed in the entrapments and personages of the tribal conflict that occurred

following the death of the Prophet Muhammed.

Conclusions

The comparative analysis of Mashareq Anwar al­Yaqeen using a seminal text of the

Neoplatonic tradition yields several useful observations. First and foremost, while there are numerous

Anthony 28

examples of fully­elaborated and discursive Islamic and more specifically Shi'a Neoplatonisms, Bursi

himself cannot be counted as a Neoplatonist. He presents an often self­contradictory array of

metaphors for the progression from absolute unity, and thus would better be described more generically

as an emanationist. While he appears to write with the aim of garnering some of the legitimacy of

philosophical discourse, Mashareq al­Anwar might find further useful comparison with representative

Gnostic traditions.

The aforementioned self­contradictions present some possible avenues of inquiry. In light of the

highly varied style and content of Mashareq al­Anwar, future scholarship might consider the possibility

that this is a compilation, a work of corporate authorship, or some more broadly diachronic collection of

ideas centered on the theme of Imamate and Ali­devotion. Since so little is known about the biography

of the purported author, word­frequency and other textual analyses between this work and other works

attributed to him such as Al­Durr al­Thamin may help elucidate authorship.

Bursi's chief aim in this work is to provide an ontological justification for the concept of Imamate

and devotion to the Imam. He does not address the numerous historical or instrumental arguments for

Imamate, but rather casts the Imam as the personification of an ontological transcendence whose

dominion is indifferent to matters of historical accident. Neither does Bursi observe the clerical

conventions of Islamic scholarship on which the historical view rests; there are virtually no chains of

narration mentioned in Mashareq al­Anwar, and he makes no mention of scholarly precedent to back

his views. It would seem that for Bursi the Imam is a mystical presence the experience of which

animates the formulation of devotional text.

As such, Bursi cannot be placed in the Sufi tradition, even to the extent that the label serves a

descriptive purpose as to the specific content of any given text. The connections between Mashareq

Anthony 29

al­Anwar and representatives of "high" Sufism put forth by Lawson are tenuous, especially considering

the indubitably and uncompromisingly Shi'i purpose which underlies the entirety of the work. There does

remain the point of interest in the textual tradition of the apocryphal "identity literature" attributed to

Imam Ali, a tradition that evidently meandered through several Shi'i and Sufi iterations before the 14th

century. The cross­sectarian nature of that literature as well further dilutes the thesis of such substantial

Akbarian influence.

Rajab al­Bursi represents a certain tradition of Shi’ism that attracts neither admiration on the

part of a majority of the clerical establishment, nor much scholarly treatment in a field where greater

resources are placed elsewhere. But owing to the wide and ardent popularity of Mashareq al­Anwar

and its related traditions, and in consideration of its role in preserving a rarified, millennium­old religious

orientation, greater attention should be given this unique and enigmatic text.

Anthony 30

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