Mujaddid's Final Ontology
A Mujaddid is a figure believed to be sent by Allah at the start of every Islamic century to revive and purify the religion. Sheykh Ahmad Sirhindi, a 17th-century Indian Muslim scholar, who is also known as the "Great Mujaddid" (the "Renewer"), is often considered the mujaddid of the second millennium of Islam. The concept of "Mujaddid's Final Ontology" refers to the theological and philosophical ideas of Sheykh Ahmad Sirhindi. It specifically focuses on the seven-descent metaphysical system he developed just before his death, which diverged significantly from his earlier thought and contrasted with the prevailing monistic philosophy of Ibn Arabi.
The Mujaddid and his earlier ontology
He was initially known for his theory of wahdat al-shuhud (unity of witnessing). This concept stated that the "oneness" experienced by Sufi mystics is a subjective state of spiritual consciousness, not an objective reality.
Shift to the "Final Ontology"
Towards the end of his life, Sirhindi reportedly moved away from wahdat al-shuhud and developed a "final ontology" that introduced a new system of seven descents (tanzzulat). This was a radical shift from the five descents of being (wahdat al-wujud), or unity of existence, espoused by the influential Sufi philosopher Ibn Arabi.
The key features of Sirhindi's final ontology included two additional initial descents before Ibn Arabi's five. This framework suggested a more gradual and complex process of creation in contrast to Ibn Arabi's scheme which described a process of emanation where creation unfolds directly from the mind of God. His final ontology rejected Ibn Arabi's monistic view, asserting that God and existence are distinct. In this system, existence itself is a creation (khalq), not an aspect of the divine essence. This is in stark contrast to Ibn Arabi's wahdat al-wujud, which equates God with existence itself. For Sirhindi, God exists by His person, while all contingent things are created by His will.
Sirhindi's final ontology emphasized that all descents, and therefore all creation, are contingent and newly originated. This maintains a strict separation between the eternal, uncreated God and the temporal, created universe. Ibn Arabi viewed the first two descents as taking place in the mind of God, which effectively makes them eternal and on the level of God.
The role of love as the source of Creation
In this later model, Sirhindi identified love as the initial entification (ta'ayyun). He saw it as the ultimate source from which all creation proceeds, a new theological insight. Sirhindi's final ontology is the most missed aspect about of his thought. It is a significant but lesser-known aspect of his thought, as his earlier theory of wahdat al-shuhud is more famous. His final theory is presented in this book as an attempt to reconcile the mystical experience of unity with a robustly dualistic and creationist Islamic theology.
This book is based on Ahmad Sirhindi's final maktub (s) or epistle (s) on the nature of existence that he wrote in the very last days of his life. It describes a science of existence that may be called the "seven-descent dual- ism" that is compared and contrasted Ibn Arabi's five- descent or tanazzulat-i khamsa system of monism, also called wahdatul wujud.
What is unique about this book is that it describes and analyzes the final ontology of the Mujaddid. In contrast, all other articles and books that I have reviewed so far describe earlier sciences that he repudiated later. At first, the Mujaddid experienced the same knowledge that Ibn Arabi experienced the five descent system wahdatu 'l- wujud. Then he ascended to higher stations and he expe- rienced a science where the creation is the shadow of God i.e. shadow-prototype dualism or zilliyat people usually consider this zilliyat to be what the Mujaddid proposed. However, the Mujaddid progressed still further in his sufi journey and experienced a new science that is radically different than zilliyat but at the same time draws much closer to the Ibn Arabi system while still quite different from it. I have named this the "seven-descent dualism". In its face, this seven-descent dualism differs from Ibn Arabi in three points. First, two descents occur initially before the five descents of Ibn Arabi. Second, The Mujaddid proposes that God created existence in His second descent whereas Ibn Arabi proposed that God is existence Himself. Third, the Mujaddid proposes that all the descents are contingent, created and newly-originated whereas Ibn Arabi proposes that the first two descents take place in the mind of God and thus on the level of God and eternal. Someone may call these differences minor.
About the author:
Irshad Alam is a sufi disciple of his teacher Grandshaykh Muhammad Mamunur Rashid of Bangladesh/Cambodia. His teacher has also granted him ijazat to teach this tariqa. He lives in both Berkeley, California studying, translating and writing on the Great Mujaddid Ahmad Sirhindi and teaching the Mujaddidi sufi tariqa. He's the author of the book Faith Practice Piety which is a critical translation from the Maktubat-i Imam-i Rabbani.
Note on the transliteration:
A simpler transliteration system has been used where all diacritical marks have been omitted except the marks for 'ayn and hamza'.
Indexing with the original text:
The translations in this book has been indexed to the original text, which is the book Maktubat-I Imam-I Rabbani, (Quetta, Pakistan: Maktaba'-I Ahmadiya Mujaddidiya, 1999). The page numbers that appear in this book refer to the page numbers in that book from which it has been translated.
