The Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies on Wednesday, 21 November 2018, welcomed Dr. Abdul Karim Barghouti to present its weekly seminar entitled "The Migration of Concepts between Philosophy and Sufism". Dr. Barghouti is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at Birzeit University, where his research interests focus on the history of philosophy, Islamic philosophy and Sufism.
The Arab library is at a critical juncture where it lacks a comprehensive study examining the inter-connected relationship between Sufi and philosophical language. The popular scholarly view sees the evolution of Arab philosophical terminology resulted from the process of separating it from the terminology of their other disciplines, including Sufism. Barghouti has attempted to debunk this supposition, proposing a new methodology for examining terminology in both fields, and creating a schema in which a concept is classified through a philosophical-Sufi dictionary.
To illustrate how the multifaceted relationship formed in the development of philosophical and Sufi disciplines, the researcher focused on three essential aspects. The first is related to the evolution of Arabic philosophical terminology and its relative independence from the influence of the Greek philosophical terminology from Al-Kindi to the Ibn Rushd. It then examines of the influence of Gnosticism, Plato and Proclus in causing terminological ambiguity, which was later clarified by Arabs, and fine-tined by Ibn Rushd. The second aspect is the evolution of Arabic Sufi terminology from the emergence of the ascetic movement until it became fixed with Ibn Arabi. The third aspect is the clashes between philosophical and Sufi terminology, including the intersection of the language of Sufism and philosophy in the work of the Shirazi philosopher Mulla Sadra for example.
Barghouthi stressed the possible aspects through which kinship can be tied and the shared images between the philosophical discourse, which is mostly related to reason and rationality, and the Sufi discourse which emphasizes the force of gratitude and knowledge of heart and spirituality. He suggested a schema for equivalents with words and phrases that are indicative of such a possibility. In order to achieve this endeavor, he began to study philosophical sources in their Arab contexts. These sources are initially established in the Arabic language as it was before the advent Islam and with the same Quranic language, and then in its convergence with Greek sources.
Barghouthi brought examples of the maturity of the language of pre-Islamic Arabs, through the rich lexicon, specifically with regard to the concept of oneness (al-Wāḥid al-Aḥad). He also compared the Qur'anic monotheism to Abrahamic heritage inferring that the search for oneness is included in the Qur'anic text, in addition to the methods of establishing proof before being influenced by Greece. And by revealing the presence of the statements about oneness and existence in early philosophy and the way they migrated into Sufi texts, the connection between the two becomes clear, which is a fundamental dimension in both Sufi and philosophical practices.