(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)
Shaykh Ahmad's mystical cosmology and Kabbalah
The close parallels between Shaykh Ahmad's mystical cosmology of the letters and the gematria of the Kabbalah is striking. Moses Cordovera of the sixteenth-century Safed school in Ottoman Palestine saw the Pentateuch or Torah as made up of divine letters, themselves manifestations of the divine light, which go on to form the names of God and ultimately worlds and worldly beings, as the letters undergo a "fall" or materialization. The gnostic motif of the material universe as "fallen" or evil is missing in Shaykhism, though gross matter is seen as inferior to subtle spirituality. But similarities between the two movements clearly exist, and they derive in part from a common Mediterranean heritage of ancient Jewish conceptions, Neoplatonism, and Gnosticism, which percolated into the Shi'ism of the eighth century and into medieval Judaism. The possibility that Muslim mystics and Kabbalists in places such as Muslim Spain, Isma'ili Yemen, and Ottoman Palestine influenced one another also cannot be dismissed. Beyond such a shared legacy of ideas, Kabbalism and Shaykhism developed some of their resemblance because the masters of both employed a similar spiritual logic in reworking this heritage.
(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)
(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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