Know Thy Enemy Sayeth The Lord of War

"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle." - Sun Tzu.

"As for the word "Imam," meaning "spiritual guide," this word dominates the form of Islam which will especially concern us here, namely, Shi'ism (also called Imamism) and, above all, Shi'ite Iran. If it is already true to say that cultivated people in the West usually have only an approximate idea of Islamic theology in general, when it comes to Shi'ism, it is to be feared that we are speaking of terra incognita. Some pages in the present book (Ch. 11, 1), as well as the translated texts, may suggest what constitutes its essence. But we could not include here an outline of the history of Shi'ism or explain how and why it became the form of Iranian Islam.

Actually, Iranian Islam belies the opinion according to which Islam is too often identified with an ethnic concept, with the past history of a race. Islam is primarily a religious concept. For centuries, and from his youth up, the Iranian has known his national epic poem contained in the "Book of Kings" by Firdawsi. He is aware that there were great kings and even a prophet, Zarathustra-Zoroaster, before Islam. Yet the Shi'ite Imamology professed by Iran represents the supreme homage that can be paid to the Arabic Prophet and to the members of his Household. The question is one neither of race nor of nation but of religious vision. Again, that is why we would have liked to stress (but cannot do so here) how the relationship between Shi'ism and the principal phenomenon of spiritual Islam, known under the name of Sufism, is regarded in Iran. In any case, suffice it to say that the conditions of the dialogue between Christianity and Islam change completely as soon as the interlocutor represents not legalistic Islam but this spiritual Islam, whether it be that of Sufism or of Shi'ite gnosis.

Even so, the difficulties of approach remain considerable. A Westerner usually takes the terms muslim and mu'min as synonymous. They are, however, by no means synonymous for a Shiite: one can be a muslim and profess Islam without yet (nor for that reason alone) being a mu'min, that is, a true believer, an adept of the holy Imāms and their doctrine. On his side, the mu'min will find it hard to understand immediately the reasons for and import of religious terminology current in the West, where we speak, for example, of the "difficulties of belief"---using the phrase, almost always, with a confessional connotation. This is because the "difficulties" in question depend on a certain concept of philosophy and theology that has accrued during several centuries and, ultimately, on an opposition that is not experienced at all in a milieu where such terms as arif and irfān are in current use. The latter can be translated respectively as "mystical theosophy" and "mystical gnosis," but these technical equivalents do not exactly preserve the familiar shade of meaning in Arabic of these words, which connote a specific type of spiritual knowledge. But does not the very fact that we have no adequate terminology reveal that we are dealing with something which, for us, is not current?

And this, among other things, is what motivates the use of the term "esotericism" because, in this perspective, the polemics between Western believers and unbelievers are seen to have taken place on a plane of knowledge above which neither side was able to rise. For example, there have been arguments about the miracles described in the New Testament. One side acknowledges, the other rejects the possibility of a "breach of natural laws." Belief and unbelief become locked in the dilemma----history or myth? The only way out is to realize that the first and greatest miracle is the irruption of another world into our knowledge, an irruption that rends the fabric of our categories and their necessities, of our evidences and their norms. But it should be understood that the other world in question is one that cannot be perceived by the organ of ordinary knowledge; that it can be neither proven nor disputed by means of ordinary argumentation; that it is a world so different that it can neither be seen nor perceived except by the organ of "Hūrqalyãn" perception.

This other world, with the mode of knowledge it implies, is the one which, as we shall see, has been meditated upon tirelessly throughout the centuries as the "world of Hūrqalya." It is the "Earth of visions," the Earth which confers on visionarv apperceptions their truth, the world through which resurrection comes to pass. This is what will be re-echoed by all our authors. Indeed, this is the world in which real spiritual events "take place," real, however, not in the sense that the physical world is real, nor yet in the sense that events chronologically recorded to "make history" are real, because here the event transcends every historical materialization.

It is an "external world," and yet it is not the physical world. It is a world that teaches us that it is possible to emerge from measurable space without emerging from extent, and that we must abandon homogeneous chronological time in order to enter that qualitative time which is the history of the soul. Finally, it is the world in which we perceive the spiritual sense of the written word and of beings---that is, their suprasensory dimension, that meaning which most often seems to us an arbitrary extrapolation, because we confuse it with allegory. We cannot penetrate the "Earth of Hūrqalya" by rational abstraction nor yet by empirical materialization; it is the place where spirit and body are one, the place where spirit, taking on a body, becomes the caro spiritualis, "spiritual corporeity." Everything suggested here by our authors goes, perhaps, very much against the current of contemporary thinking and may well be entirely misunderstood. We might find their brothers in soul, however, among those who have been called the Protestant Spirituales, such as Schwenckfeld, Boehme, the Berleburg circle, Oetinger, and others, whose line has been continued to the present day." - Henry Corbin, "Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth: From Mazdean Iran to Shi'ite Iran" Translated by Nancy Pearson, Princeton University Press, 1977, Prologue.

"Islamic prophetology already postulates and describes a theory of gnosis, and any inquiry into Islamic visionary experience must begin with an awareness of this doctrine of knowledge. Islam, the youngest branch of the Abrahamic tradition, is a prophetic religion in its essence -- it inherited the theology of the Verus Propheta professed by the very earliest Judaeo-Christian currents. The impact of this heritage is amplified in Shiism, where Imamist theory forms a necessary complement to prophetology, and poses problems inherited from Christology.

Awareness of this doctrine is also necessary because of a certain conviction which is characteristic of Islamic philosophers, especially those of Iranian Islam: that the Angel of knowledge and the Angel of revelation are one and the same ---- namely, that Angel designated by the Our'an as Gabriel and also as the Holy Spirit. The Greek theory of knowledge which Avicenna and Suhrawardi drew upon was translated in accordance with their prophetic philosophy, thereby enabling it to account for both prophetic revelation and the inspiration of the holy Imams, as well as the knowledge granted to philosophers." - Henry Corbin, "The Voyage And The Messenger: Iran and Philosophy" Translated by Joseph Rowe, North Atlantic Books, 1998, pg. 117 - 118.