In the eleventh chapter, entitled “Of the religion of the Wise,” we find it repeated that Philosophers were divided into two great classes: “the Eastern and the Western.” The first are the Hushangians, teachers of the Greeks until the time of Plato and Aristotle; it is believed that their philosophy, modified and refined, returned from Greece to Asia, and was received by the Muhammedan scholars to be adapted to their own creed. Then took place a singular mixture and confusion of Siderism, Judaism, Christianity, Muhammedism, and all sorts of philosophic opinions. The cosmology of the Hushangians was preserved. Seven special prophets, Ismâil, Jesus, Joseph, Enoch, Aaron, Moses, and Abraham, inhabit the seven heavens,* to begin from that of the Moon, which is the lowest, and rising upwards. If, in general, ten spheres are assumed,* they are made the dwellings of so many intelligences. These ideas, so ancient, as we have seen, were not disowned by eminent men in much later times. The great Kepler, and after him Reaumur, believed that intelligences or souls directed the movements of celestial bodies. Philosophers, struck with the marvellous order of nature, were adverse to admitting any mechanism—the very name of which frightened them; they therefore called all occult powers souls or spirits. The same idea is adopted in morality: whatever is praiseworthy is angelic, whatever blamable, satanic. From goodness arises an angel; from badness, a Satan: so said the prophet. Such simple and truth-like ideas were either originally disguised under the vest of fiction; or existing traditions of various origin were afterwards more or less ingeniously interpreted as allegories. Thus, the ordinary names, expressions, tenets, traditions, and practices of the Arabian prophet received symbolic, allegoric, mystic interpretations. The Kabah (the square temple of Mecca), the holy centre of a living, circumambulating world, becomes an emblem of the sun; its famous black stone, hollowed by the kisses of the pious, represents Venus, the bright star on the borders of heaven; paradise, its milk, honey, wine, Tuba (tree of beatitude), Hur and Kasur (nymphs and palaces) allude to intellectual delights; hell, its Zakum (tree of nature), and torments, are explained as unavoidable consequences of depravity. Such interpretations of the Muhammedans seem often to be like their bridge Sirat, which connects heaven and hell, sharp as a razor and thin as a hair. Transmigration, or rather reproduction, is admitted, although not easily reconciled with the resurrection of the same body. The blasts of the trumpet, and the whole scene of the resurrection lose their materialism in a sort of rational allegory. The other world is the destruction and renovation of nature at the completion and renewal of great periods of time, one of which comprised 360,000 solar years. Resurrection is “the wakening from the sleep of heedlessness;” whenever an intellect attained that degree of perfection, it has returned to its origin; it is restored to life; this indubitably happens when nothing material exists: for, “where there is no body, there is no death.”
After having treated in this way the great dogmas of religion, the Muhammedan philosophers found it not more difficult to rationalise every circumstance respecting their prophet, he who obeyed the voice of an invisible speaker. Did Muhammed really split the moon? Not in the least—splitting is penetrating from the exterior into the interior; the fissure of the moon typifies nothing else but the renunciation of the external for the internal, which is “the superior wisdom;” who possessed it more than the prophet (the peace of God be with him!) he, the master of the lunar sphere? This, with the Orientals, is the seat of human intelligence and perfection.* One of their greatest scholars, or as they say “the learned of the world,” known to us under the name of Avisenna, undertook to give a reasonable account of Muhammed's ascent to heaven, and framed a wonderful romance of mystic spiritualism. He terminates by explaining how the prophet, after his return from such a journey, could find his bed-clothes still warm: “He had travelled with his mind, and when he had completed his mental task, returned back to himself, and in less than an eye's twinkling recovered his former state; whoever knows, understands why he went; and whoever knows not, looks in vain for an explanation.”
We may, not without interest, observe the natural process of the human mind in reviewing and reforming conceptions, the original form of which is not seldom entirely obliterated. The author of the Dabistán does more than satiate the most inquisitive reader with allegoric, now and then very fanciful, interpretations, which he continues, not without repetitions of the same subjects, through the subsequent chapter, upon which I am about to touch. Mohsan Fani, here as elsewhere, fails not to adduce several philosophers of more ancient as well as of his own times. Among the latter is Hakim Kamran, whose free and sound opinions, about the origin of societies and the prophets regulating them, will be read with some interest; as will also the account of the books which Kamran read and explained, whence the state of literature of those times may be inferred.