By appealing to both symbols in the same treatise, indeed, Shaykh Ahmad powerfully transcends the dichotomy between nature and culture. If the natural world is spelled out by primal, divine letters, then nature is cultural. If humans are microcosms of the world-tree's leaf, then culture is natural. Nature is cultural insofar as it, like an orthographic system, "makes sense", and letter symbolism thus acts powerfully to reject an understanding of the universe as random and meaningless. It was argued by the great anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss, that myths in primitive culture were often about the transition from nature to culture, and that the contradiction between the two was expressed symbolically, so that nature is represented by fresh food that spoils whereas in culture raw food is cooked. In contrast, Shaykh Ahmad's cosmologies, the product of a highly sophisticated and literate intellectual tradition, deny the nature/culture contradiction by challenging the validity of this binary opposition and showing how each of these opposing concepts demonstrates characteristics of the other. The identification of the microcosm, the human soul, with the macrocosm of the primal leaf even undermines the distinction between the self and the world. In transcending these contradictions, Shaykh Ahmad forcefully underscores the sacredness of the universe, which reflects in its orthographic and organic meaningfulness the creative design of the divine Mind.
(Juan R. I. Cole, The World as Text: Cosmologies of Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsa'i, Studia Islamica No. 80 (1994), pp. 145-163 Published By Brill)
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