The World of Images

The bāb opens with the claim itself, and the manner of the argument shows in its first words: دلّت أحاديثُ كثيرة - "many hadiths have indicated".

There are five distinct claims in that single sentence. They have to be separated, or the whole discussion runs together:

1. عالماً غيرَ عُنصُرِي - a world that is not elemental: not compounded of the elements this visible world is made from. The definition is negative first: we are told what it is not.
2. تتمثّل فيه المعاني بأجسام مناسبة لها في الصفة - meanings there take the form of bodies. And this is the finest qualification of all: مناسبة لها في الصفة - the body is suited in quality to its meaning. The form is not arbitrary; it is translation into image.
3. وتتحقّق هنالك الأشياء قبل وجودها في الأرض نَحواً مِن التحقُّق - things are realised there first. And when they appear here: كانت هي هي - they are the very same, not a copy or a likeness. (الهوهو is explained in the footnote as الاتحاد في الذات, identity in essence.)
   But look at the qualification: نَحواً مِن التحقُّق - "a kind of realisation". That realisation is not like being on earth; it is realisation after a manner. The phrase keeps the claim measured: being there is real, but its mode differs from being here. Drop the qualification and the whole matter turns into overstatement.
4. وأن كثيراً من الأشياء مما لا جسم لها عند العامة تنتقل وتنزل - many things which ordinary people take to have no body move and descend. This is the claim the hadiths go on to establish: affliction descends, supplication wrestles with it, deeds come walking.
5. ولا يَراها جميعُ الناسِ - "and not all people see them." This fifth claim is the most useful of them: not being observed is part of the definition itself. The objection "but we see nothing" is forestalled in the opening sentence - it is no later patch. And it is on this that the three roads below (section 5) and al-Ghazālī's three stations both rest.

The footnote quotes Mawlānā Banūrī's معارف السنن: behind the visible world is the world of images, and behind that the world of spirits; and that عالم المثال ألطف وأقوى من عالم الشهادة - the world of images is subtler and stronger than the visible world. Stop at أقوى: this is not a fainter shadow but a more solid reality.

What follows is the longest stretch of the bāb: [الأحاديث الدالّة على عالم المثال] - some twenty numbered hadiths, and several مستفاض reports. Shah Waliullah sets them down much as a list. The order is his; the grouping below is mine m - because there is a logic in the mass that separating them brings out:

And over all of it stands a Qur'anic anchor, carrying the bāb's key verb itself - تَمَثَّلَ:

The spirit "took form" as a well-proportioned man. The spirit did not become a man, nor was this mere imagining. Tamaththul - and from that very word the world of images takes its name.

Through the list Shah Waliullah mostly transmits. But at the hadith of the eclipse prayer he stops and says one sentence of his own - and that sentence is the rational spine of the whole bāb:

That is: "and it is known that that distance will not hold the Garden and the Fire - not with the bodies ordinary people understand them to have."

Look at the structure of the argument; it is perfectly plain:

1. The hadith says the Garden and the Fire were shown between the Prophet and the wall of the qibla.
2. Bodies in the ordinary sense cannot fit into those few yards.
3. The hadith is true (and there is no pressing need to interpret it away).
4. Therefore what was shown was not an elemental body but a taking-of-form belonging to the world under discussion.

Having named the three roads he says a single sentence, and the matter is closed:

"Or he makes them a figure for conveying other meanings. And I do not regard one who stops at the third as being among the people of truth."

Stop at the word المُقتَصِر. He does not say that figurative reading is false. He says: the one who confines himself to it - who grants only that and denies any external reality. The distinction is fine but decisive: that a hadith has a figurative aspect is one thing; emptying it of reality by calling it only a figure is another. The first is permissible; the second, in his view, is departure from the people of truth.

And of the first branch he says: وهذه هي التي تقتضيها قاعدة أهل الحديث. The footnote explains that principle, and it matters to know who "the people of hadith" are:

The principle, then, is to take the texts at their apparent sense and not interpret them away without pressing need. Affirming the world of images is the consequence of that principle - not a separate philosophical claim.

At the end of the bāb Shah Waliullah quotes al-Ghazālī at length. The question is the one that occurs to everyone: we watch the unbeliever in his grave and see nothing - so how can we assent against observation? And it is the second station that unties the knot:

The example is perfect because it is everyone's own experience. A sleeping man cries out, his forehead sweats, he starts up from where he lies. You are sitting beside him - there is no snake. Yet the biting happened, and the pain happened. "The snake exists in respect of him" - and in respect of you it is unobserved. Neither of you is lying.

The third station goes further still: the snake does not itself cause the pain. The pain is from the venom; and the venom is not itself the pain either, for the torment lies in the أثر, the effect the venom produces in you. So if that same effect arises without a snake, the torment is complete. And al-Ghazālī applies this to death: وهذه الصفاتُ المهلكاتُ تنقلبُ مؤذياتٍ ومؤلماتٍ في النفسِ عند الموتِ، فيكونُ آلامُها كآلامِ لدغِ الحيّاتِ مِن غير وجودِها - these destroying traits turn at death into things that harm and pain the soul, so that their pains are like the pains of snakebite, without any snake existing.