Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: Juan Cole, Tablet of Wisdom (Lawh-i-hikmat), bahai-library.com.
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Tablet of Wisdom (Lawh-i-hikmat)

Juan Cole

1995

The Tablet of Wisdom was revealed by Bahá'u'lláh for the
Bahá'í philosopher Aqa Muhammad "Nabil-i Akbar" Qa'ini
when the latter came to visit him in `Akka sometime in 1873 or
1874 (1290 A.H.). Bahá'u'lláh recalls in the course of this
Tablet their earlier meeting, around 1859, at the house of
`Abdu'l-Majid Shirazi in Kazimayn, Iraq, at which time
Bahá'u'lláh had expounded Greco-Islamic philosophy. It was upon
listening to such discourses that Nabil-i Akbar (who had the best seminary
training the Shi`ite world could offer at that time) had given
his allegiance to Bahá'u'lláh, though he had earlier been devoted
to Subh-i Azal. Bahá'u'lláh's willingness to engage philosophy in
the tradition of Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus, as it was
elaborated in Muslim culture by Avicenna (d. 1037), Suhravardi
(d. 1191) and Mulla Sadra (d. 1641) among others, marked a major
departure for Babi religious culture. The Bab had earlier
discouraged the study of metaphysics and other scholastic
disciplines, but Bahá'u'lláh made a place for philosophy in the
Bahá'í Faith.

The Tablet of Wisdom, which could also be translated as
"The Tablet of Philosophy," begins with ethical
exhortations directed at the people of the world. Ethics,
politics and household management were considered in Aristotelian
thought branches of "practical philosophy." That he
begins with praise of down-to-earth virtues such as diligence,
generosity and service to humankind suggests that he saw
"practical philosophy" as having primacy over more
theoretical branches of the discipline.

Next, he addresses a question posed to him by Nabil-i Akbar,
about the beginning of creation. The ancient Greeks believed that
the universe has always existed, a doctrine that seems to clash
with the biblical and qur'anic idea of the world having been created
by God at a particular point in time (perhaps as recently as
6,000 years ago if one takes the Bible literally). The great Muslim
mystic and clergyman Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. A.D. 1111) had, in
his Incoherence of the Philosophers, energetically attacked the
idea of the pre-existence of the cosmos, while the master
philosopher Averroes (d. 1198) had in his The Incoherence of the
Incoherence replied with a spirited defense of Aristotle. The
followers of Aristotle in Iran, mostly Avicennians known as
peripatetics, continued to believe in the eternality of the
world. Nabil-i Akbar was eager to have Bahá'u'lláh resolve this
controversy.

Bahá'u'lláh in reply says the both the eternality of the world
and the creation of the world are valid ways of talking, each in
its own way, about the God-world relationship. He affirms the
standard Avicennian position, that the universe has always existed.
"Wert thou to assert that it hath ever existed and shall
continue to exist, it would be true" (Lawh-i Hikmat, Eng.
tr., p. 140). But he says that the world is nevertheless
originated by the creative power of God. That is, the world is
created, but it has always been being created and so has never
been non-existent. Creation is not a unique divine act that
occurs once, at a particular point of time, establishing a
historical dividing-line between nonbeing and being. It is rather
a continuous divine activity.

Yet he also affirms the validity of speaking as though the
pre- existent God created the contingent world out of nothing.
This way of talking, he says, is a metaphor. In Greco-Islamic
philosophy, God's Being is Necessary and must by its nature
exist, so that He is essentially pre-existent (qadim). The world
need not have come into being, existing not because it must, but because
of God's creative Will. It is therefore dependent or contingent
(mumkin) and its essence is originated (muhdath) (Rahman,
"The Eternity of the World," pp. 222- 237). When the
scriptures or hadiths refer to God as having been alone "before"
the creation, then, they are actually pointing to the difference
in his metaphysical level from that of the originated world. His
primacy is essential, not sequential. It is also valid, then, to
speak of the contingent universe having always existed alongside
the deity, since God's "Firstness" is not really a
"firstness" of time but rather of essence (Lawh-i
Hikmat, Eng. tr., p. 140).

To explain the dependence of complex matter on simpler
building blocks, Bahá'u'lláh employs the formulation of Avicenna (Shifa',
ed. Madkur, 7:147-59), which is in turn based on the schema put
forward by Aristotle in his De generatione et corruptione.
Ancient Greek thought identified the basic qualities out of which
the universe was formed as moistness, dryness, heat and cold.
Avicenna considered the tangible qualities of heat and cold to be
"agents (Ar. sing. fa'il)," or active forces. He believed
moist and dry to be "patients" or passive (Ar.
munfa'il). The mixture of an agent and a patient in turn produced
each of the four basic elements. That is, moistness and cold
combined to form water, whereas dryness and heat made fire. This
is the meaning of the phrase, "The world of existence came
into being through the heat generated from the interaction
between the active force and that which is its recipient"
(Lawh-i Hikmat, Eng., p. 140). In this way, from the combination
of these attributes, the four elements of earth, air, fire and
water came into being. Since the underlying qualities are
indestructible, and they part and recombine, the processes of
generation and disintegration are continuous and eternal. This
Aristotelian physics was dominant in Islamic science, and became
so in Western thought, in the medieval period, and continued to
be held in Iran by most thinkers until the twentieth century.
Bahá'u'lláh in using it was simply employing the terms that would
be understood by his immediate audience, Nabil-i Akbar and other
traditionally-trained Muslim philosophers.

Bahá'u'lláh then expatiates on his Logos theology, which holds
that the origins and development of the universe ultimately depend
not merely on natural forces, but upon the active Word of God
(kalimat Allah) (Cole, "Concept of Manifestation," pp. 8-9).
Nature itself, he says, is a reflection of the will of God. He
makes it clear that his advocacy of a theology of science, wherein
delving into nature represents an exploration of the divine will,
is intended to counteract the influence of eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century European materialism and positivism (Lawh-i
Hikmat, pp. 141-144).

Bahá'u'lláh points out that modern European thought owes a
great deal to the philosophical tradition of classical Greece. He goes
on to quote verbatim from medieval Muslim writers such as
Abu'l-Fath Shahrastani and `Imadu'd-Din Abu'l-Fida in praise of
Empedocles, Pythagoras, Hippocrates, Socrates, Plato, and
Aristotle. He further discusses Apollonius of Tyana (Ar. Balinus,
b. 4 B.C.), and speaks of the Hermetic corpus (a group of
anonymous, esoteric Greek writings produced in the centuries
immediately after Christ and incorrectly attributed to Hermes of
ancient Egypt; see Affifi, "Influence," pp. 840- 855).

The medieval Muslim biographers of the Greek philosophers
quoted in this Tablet stress two important themes. First, the Greek
philosophers tended to believe in the divine, and most were not
materialists. This is true enough, though neither were all these
Greeks Muslim-style monotheists, as Shahrastani and Abu'l-Fida
tended to paint them. Second, they maintain that Pythagoras was
influenced by Hebrew prophetic wisdom, and that other
philosophers also "acquired their knowledge from the
Prophets." (Lawh-i Hikmat, Eng., pp. 144- 145). The latter
belief was held in Europe, as well, among thinkers such as St. Augustine
and the Cambridge Platonists, but no historical evidence exists
for it. These Muslim sources placed Empedocles in the time of
David and Pythagoras in the time of Solomon, a chronology typical
of Greco-Islamic works but which is mistaken (Cole,
"Problems of Chronology," pp. 32-38). Here, as
throughout this Tablet, Bahá'u'lláh quotes or presents
information from the standard Middle Eastern reference works
considered authoritative at the time among thinkers such as
Nabil-i Akbar (`Abdu'l-Bahá/Ethel Rosenberg, 1906, in A.
Ishraq-Khavari, Ma'idih, 2:69).

Bahá'u'lláh maintains that the philosophers of antiquity were
not solely concerned with abstract thought, but were often imbued
with a spirit of experiment. The sources he quotes say that
Aristotle first suggested the power latent in steam, and a Greek
figure whose name the Arabic sources transliterate as Murtas or
Muristus (Gr. Ameristos?) was said by Abu'l-Fida to have
"invented an apparatus which transmitted sound over a
distance of sixty miles" (Lawh-i Hikmat, Eng., p. 150). In
quoting Abu'l-Fida on this figure, Bahá'u'lláh is arguing that
the philosophical and scientific advances of the European
Enlightenment and nineteenth century are not unique; that they
have parallels on a smaller scale in past world civilizations;
and that in the other instances such civilizational progress was
not associated with atheism or materialism (and so need not be
now).

Bahá'u'lláh's forthright championing of figures such as
Socrates, and his favorable view of modern science, was
remarkable in a nineteenth-century figure from a Muslim
background who had not studied in European or European-style
schools. Many Muslim clergymen of the time rejected either Greek
philosophy or modern Western science, or both. Bahá'u'lláh's
"Tablet of Wisdom" raises some of the same issues as
similar essays by reformers such as the Iranian Sayyid
Jamalu'd-Din al-Afghani (d. 1897) and the Egyptian Rifa`ah
at-Tahtawi (d. 1873). This Tablet strongly affirms of the value
of philosophy and modern science while insisting on the continued
validity of religious beliefs.

Bibliography

The Tablet of Wisdom in English translation may be found in
Bahá'u'lláh, Tablets of Bahá'u'lláh Revealed after the Kitab-i- Aqdas,
trans. Habib Taherzadeh et al. (Haifa: Bahá'í World Centre, 2nd
edn. 1988), pp. 137-152; the Arabic text may be found in the
companion volume, Majmu`ih`i az Alvah-i Jamal-i Aqdas-i Abha kih
ba`d az Kitab-i Aqdas nazil shudih (Hofheim-Langenhain: Bahá'í
Verlag, 1980)

Abdu'l-Bahá's Tablet on the dates for the philosophers in the
Tablet of Wisdom is in Ma'idih-'i Asmani, ed. A. Ishraq-Khavari,2
vols. - (New Delhi: Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1984), 2:68-71 (new
pagination). For its cultural context, see: A.E. Affifi,
"The Influence of Hermetic Literature in Muslim
Thought," BSOAS xiii (1950):840-55

Aristotle, Aristotle's De generatione et corruptione (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1982)

Avicenna, ash-Shifa', ed. Ibrahim Madkur et al., 7 vols.
(Cairo: Dar al-Kitab al-`Arabi, 1984)

J. Cole, "The Concept of Manifestation in the Bahá'í
Writings," Bahá'í Studies 9 (1982):1-38

J. Cole, "Problems of Chronology in Bahá'u'lláh's Tablet
of Wisdom," World Order vol. 13, no. 3 (1979):24-39

Fazlur Rahman, "The Eternity of the World and the
Heavenly bodies in Post- Avicennian Philosophy," Essays in
Islamic Philosophy and Science, ed. G.F. Hourani (Albany, NY:
SUNY Press, 1975), pp. 222-237

Franz Rosenthal, The Classical Heritage in Islam (London:
Routledge, 1992)

Franz Rosenthal, Greek Philosophy in the Arab World (London:
Variorum, 1990)

Richard Walzer, Greek into Arabic (Oxford: Bruno Cassirer,
1962)

Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (New
York: Vintage, 1969).

For Muslim views of the Greek philosophers mentioned in this
tablet, the articles in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn., written
in English but given under the philosophers' Arabic names, are
essential: R. Walzer, "Aflatun;" R. Walzer,
"Aristutalis;" S.M. Stern, "Anbaduklis;" M.
Plessner, "Balinus;" A. Dietrich, "Buqrat;"
F. Rosenthal, "Fithaghuras;" M. Plessner,
"Hirmis."

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