MAHMUD SHABISTARI’S CREATIVE HERITAGE. THE PHILOSOPHY OF MONOTHEISM

Abstract

Mahmud Shabistari is well known in the world as the author of the poem “The Rose Garden of Mystery”. However his thought heritage is not limited to this masterpiece. In this article we would like to show the diversity of his works as well as characteristic features of his world outlook in the intellectual context of his epoch. The central idea of his thought, we can fi nd in most of his writings, boils down to the idea of the oneness of the First Principle identical for him to the God. He states the idea of His oneness by saying, that everything, except for the First Principle is illusion and doesn’t exist beyond one’s mind. This statement was natural for the Ishraqi school of as-Suhrawardi, who claimed anything except for the light, just concepts, that doesn’t have any correlate beyong one’s mind. This idea was not so natural for the philosophical sufi sm of Ibn al-Arabi Shabistari refers to in some passages of his Sa‘dat-nama. However this idea was not at all natural for the falasifa school of Ibn Sina, that Shabistari criticize in most of his works for intermicsture of the possible and necessary being, for they must be ontologically divided from each other. From his point of view, the falasifa not just mix up the immiscible being and non-being in one possible thing, they state the presence of two diff erent natures — “the possible” and “the necessary”. As “the necessary” means for Shabistari “the God”, the statement of another one nature presence (“the possible”) is for him a shirk and contradicts Islamic worldview.