The Keys of Naming and the Recovery of Authentic Knowledge

With much patience I watched how the guardians of Concretion used language as iron moulds, casting the collective consciousness and freezing it at the limits of matter. Anyone who tried to abstract a meaning, or reach its depths, was met with charges of taʿṭīl — emptying God of His attributes — or of hollow philosophising, sophistry and apostasy. Yet I became certain that authentic knowledge begins only when we hold the keys of naming: the power to form terms that express the truth. When I named the superficial material tendency Concretion, I was able to put my finger on the disease that had afflicted the body of the community — the worship of images and formalities, and a halt at the surface of things. And when I named the spiritual, knowing tendency that is joined to the Source from the Lord Abstraction, I opened a flowing path for the rabbānī human being to breathe freely outside the narrow bottle of matter. This coining of terms was no linguistic luxury. It was my open admission that human languages fall short before the majesty of existence and the greatness of the Source. We are in the direst need of a transcendent tongue, fluid by nature like light itself: a tongue able to describe the cosmic self-disclosures and the bonds with the higher worlds without falling into the trap of mental corporealism (tajsīm), which imprisons God, glory be to Him, in an image or a place — a tongue that comes close to the clear Arabic tongue of the Qurʾān. These two terms were born in my mind out of a long and deep burning in the search for knowledge. I would sit for hours trying to account for one existential riddle: how can God be “nearer to him than his jugular vein” (Q 50:16)? To be more precise and more candid, the original name of this philosophy was “the philosophy of the Manifest and the Hidden”. I chose instead to call it “the philosophy of Concretion and Abstraction” for two reasons. First, the Manifest and the Hidden are Names of God, and I did not want them confused, as Names of God Almighty, with the same words used as philosophical concepts. Second, Concretion and Abstraction are established philosophical concepts — even if I differ from others in how I use and employ them — and they sit closer to the shared home of world philosophy. Hashem Nassar All rights reserved