Obligation Splitting Off from the Decree

The bāb's first sentence startles on sight - it is an exposition of the book's own title:

الحجة البالغة - the argument that has reached its utmost, after which no excuse remains. And notice in what the argument lies: في تكليفِه لعبادِه بالشرائعِ - in His obliging His servants with revealed laws. So the book's subject is that giving commands is, on God's part, a reasoned act, and the reasons lie strewn through creation.

And the method is inductive, not dialectical. The text does not begin its argument from the heavens; it says: look at the trees.

The first step is the plants, and the aim is to establish a principle:

Take up two words and keep them, because everything that follows rests on them. مُلتوية معها - twisted together, like the two strands of a rope. And مُشتبك - interlaced, caught in one another like netting. That is, "let this be a palm" and "let its fruit be thus" are not two decrees later joined - they are one decree, seen from two sides.

Then a fourfold division of a species' properties, which will be applied to man further on:

There are two axes: how evident (known to anyone attentive / only to the keen-witted) and how general (in all individuals / only in those whose matter is ready). The examples come from the medical lore of the age - the ruby's effect on the heart, and myrobalan loosening the bowels of whoever merely holds it.

And now the sentence that is the bāb's logical centre:

This is a solid principle of logic. "Why does a triangle have three angles?" - the question is itself malformed: three angles are a concomitant of being a triangle, not an extra feature whose cause may be sought. In the same way the palm's fruit is a concomitant of its being a palm. And this same weapon will be turned at the bāb's end on "why was prayer made obligatory?" - but first the argument has to travel through animal and man.

In plants there was only shape and taste. In animals something new enters: behaviour.

Cattle and goats graze and chew the cud; horses, donkeys and mules graze but do not chew it; beasts of prey eat flesh; the bird flies in air, the fish swims in water. Each species with its own call, its own way of pairing, its own manner of brooding its young. And the decisive qualification: what is given by prompting is علوماً تناسبُ مزاجَه - knowledge suited to its temperament, and just what keeps that species sound.

Then comes the word we already know:

The footnote gives the word's sense, and an interesting correction besides:

The first footnote explains كوّة as النَّقْب - an opening, a breach. The second is on the example the text gives here: some of a species' rulings are in all its members and some only in a few, "where the matter is ready and the causes gather" - as the يعسوب among the bees, and the parrot that learns to mimic human voices after training. And the footnote pauses to say that the yaʿsūb is female; the Arabs thought it male because of its size.

m The entire argument for prophecy is about to rest on this يعسوب - "as among the bees there is a yaʿsūb that governs all the rest" - and the footnote corrects the biological detail of the image without disturbing the argument.

The third level is man, and the text presents him by summation: both lower levels are in him, and something more upon them.

The tree's share and the animal's share - coughing, stretching, belching, the expulsion of waste, and sucking at the breast at birth. And with these the properties that distinguish him from the rest of the animals: النُّطق, فهم الخطاب, and توليد العلوم الكسبية - by ordering self-evident premises, or by experience, induction and intuition. And something remarkable: his attention to matters that reason calls good but which sense and imagination never reach - كتهذيبِ النفسِ، وتسخيرِ الأقاليمِ تحتَ حكمِه.

After this an argument running from human universality: in the roots of all these matters every nation is found to agree - حتى سكّانِ شواهقِ الجبالِ, even the dwellers on the high mountain peaks. Such convergence cannot be accidental:

Now the text says the same thing from another angle - ثم انظرْ إلى تدبيرِ الحقِّ لكلِّ نوعٍ، وتربيتِه إيّاه، ولطفِه به. And the shape of the argument is this: every species was given exactly what its structure required.

The structure changed, so the means changed: to the insensate and immobile, roots; to the sensing and self-moving, prompting. In both cases the end is one - to bring the species to its nourishment.

And then the text descends into a detail that is unexpected, and most interesting:

The dove's feeding of its young - what is now called crop milk - is here described as the conjunction of three things: the أُنس between male and female, the emptiness of the crop which disposes her to brood, and the "stale moisture" turning toward regurgitation - and over all of them رحمة على الفرخ, mercy toward the chick. Just before it is the account of the hen: after laying, dryness and an empty crop bring on a state that inclines her to withdraw from her own kind and to brood over something.

That sentence is the bāb's explicit joint, and both of its terms are bāb 6's: البهيمية and الملكية.

The account of the angelic power begins with a verse:

The question is: in what sense do mountains and trees prostrate? The text answers by a simile, and this is the loveliest place in the bāb:

تكفُّف means to hold out the hand, to beg. Every part of the tree - branch, leaf, blossom - is at every moment holding out its hand to the vegetative soul: asking for nourishment, and unable to live without asking. This is التكفُّف الحاليّ - begging in the language of one's state. And were that part given reason, the same begging would become conscious: تكفُّفاً بالهِمَّةِ.

And in the same connection comes the argument for the necessity of prophecy - from the structure of the species, not from transmitted report:

So a window onto the unseen is in every individual - a dream, an insight, a voice, an intuition - but the degrees differ, and the deficient needs the complete. And this is exactly the structure of section 2: some of a species' properties appear only in those individuals whose matter is ready - as the yaʿsūb among the bees.

Now the bāb reaches its strongest argument. First the premise: the balance of man's temperament is not completed without knowledge and a revealed law - a law containing divine knowledge, contrivances for living, and rules dividing voluntary acts into five classes (obligatory, recommended, permitted, disliked, forbidden). Therefore:

Stop at the word رزق: the sustenance of reason. And now the analogy that is the bāb's whole yield:

Then the text gives the inventory of that pasture, and the first condition deserves attention:

Doctrine, that is, must be in a language within reach of ordinary human reason - not a locked door that only some rare mind can open. And then he shows how the Qur'an did it: God affirmed of Himself attributes يعرفونها ويستعملونها بينهم - which people know and use among themselves: life, hearing, sight, power, will, speech, anger, mercy, dominion, independence. And along with them:

m Transcendence - that nothing is like God - is an abstract theological claim, and left abstract it makes no impression on the mind. The Qur'an conveys it by unimaginable magnitudes: the number of raindrops, the sand of the deserts, the leaves of the trees, the breaths of animals; the crawling of an ant on a moonless night; the whispering under the bedclothes in houses with their doors shut. The attribute stays one we know - hearing, seeing, knowing - but on a scale at which likeness breaks of itself.

And the inventory continues: علم العبادات, علم الارتفاقات, علم المخاصمة - the untying of knots when lower souls raise doubts by which truth is pushed aside - and علم التذكير by God's bounties, by His days, and by the events of the barzakh and the gathering.

Now the text says how that pasture was actually provided. And this is its boldest passage, because here he explicitly ties his own account to an Ashʿarī term:

The first footnote clarifies غيب الغيب as "His knowledge". The second adds a necessary qualification: the "readiness" in view is that of most of the people who count - that is, the law descends to that general level, not to the level of exceptional individuals. This continues exactly the condition of section 7, that doctrine must not be a locked door.

Then four stages are described - the descent of knowledge, from one rank to the next:

The third stage is القِرانات - the celestial conjunctions that accompany the turning of dynasties and communities; at their occasion another spiritual existence was appointed for that knowledge, in detail, suited to its age - and for this the verse ﴿إنا أنزلناه في ليلةٍ مباركةٍ … فيها يُفرَقُ كلُّ أمرٍ حكيمٍ﴾. And the fourth stage is a man:

The word جارحة (a limb, an instrument) and the verse ﴿واصطنعتُك لنفسي﴾ - the prophet is called the "limb" by which God's intent is completed. And now the bāb's conclusion, which is the wording of its opening:

The bāb closes on an objection and a reply, and the reply stands on the principle laid down in section 2:

Recognise the shape of the reply. The question is "from where did it become obligatory?" - that is, what additional reason imposed this ruling. And the reply says: that question is the same as "why is the palm's fruit like this?". Cattle grazing grass and beasts eating flesh follow from no external command - they are concomitants of their specific structure. Prayer, obedience to the Messenger, and the prohibition of adultery and theft are things of that same order: concomitants of the human species.

And that final qualification is exactly where the "splitting off" happens - where obligation breaks out of the decree. The difference is not in the content but in the mode of reception: the animal receives its knowledge by innate prompting, and so bears no obligation; man receives his by acquisition, reflection, revelation or following, and wherever effort and choice enter into the receiving, تكليف arises.