Between Transcendence and Nearness: Tasawwuf's Resolution of the Tanzih/Tashbih Antinomy and the Ontology of the Human Person

Abstract

This article argues that classical Islamic mysticism (Tasawwuf) resolved a philosophical problem that speculative theology (kalam) managed but never solved: the antinomy between divine transcendence (tanzih) and divine accessibility (tashbih). Through analysis of three principal figures, al-Junayd (d. 298/910), Ibn 'Arabi (d. 638/1240), and Ahmad Sirhindi (d. 1034/1624), and the mediating practical anthropology of al-Ghazali (d. 505/1111), the article demonstrates that the Sufi doctrines of fana' (annihilation) and baqa' (subsistence) constitute a philosophical anthropology in which the human person, having shed the illusion of autonomous selfhood, becomes the locus of manifestation (mazhar) in whom tanzih and tashbih are simultaneously upheld. The article gives particular attention to Sirhindi's wahdat al-shuhud, which it reads as both a phenomenological and an ontological correction to Ibn 'Arabi's synthesis, rather than a conservative retreat from it. It concludes that the suppression of this tradition by colonial modernity, Wahhabi reformism, and liberal secularism represents an anthropological impoverishment whose recovery requires institutional as well as intellectual attention.