Imitate or realise
Taqlīd, taḥqīq — the two paths of knowledge. A very ancient distinction that says, with a forgotten precision, what we have ceased to know how to do.
A question of seemingly harmless appearance
When you say “God exists,” from where do you know this? Your parents told you so? A teacher? A book? Have you understood it yourself, to the point that, if all the parents and all the books disappeared, you would still know it?
When a scientist says “the Earth turns around the Sun,” where does this certainty lodge within him? Has he verified it? Or does he trust — like everyone — specialists whose work he has never read, in a language he does not speak, on instruments he would not know how to build?
The intellectual tradition of Islam — that of the philosophers (falāsifa) and the Sufis (ṣūfiyya) — spent a thousand years digging into this distinction. It named it by a pair of words that has no real equivalent in English: taqlīd and taḥqīq.
All the knowledge we believe we possess belongs in reality to one of two regimes: what we hold from another, and what we know by ourselves. To confuse the two is the first source of error. To distinguish them is the first step toward wisdom.
Two knowledges, two regimes
At the heart of the Islamic tradition, two families of knowledge are distinguished — not by their object, but by the manner in which one accedes to them.
What is transmitted from generation to generation. The only means of acceding to it is to receive it from another: language, the Quran, the ḥadīth, history, law, customs. “Why do we pray five times a day? — Because God said so.” One knows it by authority, never by oneself.
What is discovered within oneself. No one can transmit it to you — one must realise it through one's own intelligence. The perfect example: mathematics. “Two and two make four” is not true because the teacher said so, but because one sees it oneself. Once understood, it is self-evident.
Metaphysics, cosmology, the knowledge of the soul, true ethics — for Chittick, all belong to the second regime. They can be presented by books or masters; they are known only when one has verified them within oneself.
The trap of confusion
The collapse of the living tradition begins when one treats the intellectual as the transmitted. This is what happens in the majority of universities: one teaches Ibn ʿArabī or Mullā Ṣadrā as one would teach the history of ancient Egypt — as past opinions to be known, not as truths to be tested. An old teacher of Chittick's in Tehran said of his young university colleagues:
They know everything that can be known about a text — except what it says. Cited by Chittick, Introduction
Taqlīd and taḥqīq
To each family of knowledge corresponds a method. And each method has its human type that practises it.
Literally, “to pass the collar around the neck” — as one tethers a pack animal: one follows an authority, one trusts it. It is necessary and good in the transmitted domain. One learns grammar or ritual prayer by imitation. The one who practises thus is called a muqallid (مُقَلِّد), an imitator.
From ḥaqq (the Real, the True): “to render real,” “to verify by actualising.” It is to know by oneself, until the truth becomes flesh within us. The one who practises taḥqīq is called a muḥaqqiq (مُحَقِّق), a realiser. It is the most honoured title in the tradition.
A nuance often forgotten
The word ijtihād (اِجْتِهَاد) — usually translated as “effort of interpretation” — designates something else: it is the mastery of law (fiqh) that permits the issuing of a juridical opinion. The mujtahid therefore remains, despite his immense learning, in the regime of the transmitted. He can only judge from the Quran, the ḥadīth, the opinions of the predecessors. Quite other is the muḥaqqiq, who can, in principle, attain a metaphysical truth without any prophet: because that truth is inscribed in the very structure of the intelligence.
You do not need a prophet to tell you that two and two make four, or that God is one. Once this knowledge is grasped, it is self-evident — it carries its proof within itself, in the very act of understanding. Chittick, ch. 1
Tawḥīd and takthīr — the One and the Multiple
The taqlīd / taḥqīq distinction is fully understood only in the light of another pair, more fundamental still. The tawḥīd is the first principle of Islamic thought:
Chittick refuses to call modernity shirk (شِرْك, associationism) — a word too charged. He prefers to say that modernity is the reign of takthīr: the infinite multiplication of gods, of ends, of urgencies.
The “little gods” of modernity
According to Chittick, a god is that which gives meaning and orientation to a life. In the traditional world, all meanings, all goals were subordinated to a single One. In modernity, they are innumerable — and each bows in turn before the one who speaks to it:
Liberty, equality, evolution, progress, science, medicine, nationalism, socialism, democracy, Marxism. But perhaps the most dangerous are those one recognises the least: they have inoffensive names — care, communication, development, education, information, standard of living, service, system, well-being. Chittick, ch. 1 — borrowing from Uwe Poerksen, Plastic Words
These “plastic words” function exactly like secondary divinities: one cannot be against development or well-being without being taken for a fool. Their experts become the new ʿulamāʾ, whose fatwas are the norms, the recommendations, the standards. And this whole system rests on taqlīd — blind trust. No one verifies. Everyone imitates.
Modernity is not an avowed “shirk” — it is an unrecognised takthīr. And its functioning rests entirely on the extension of taqlīd to the domain where it has no business: that of truth.
The four domains of taḥqīq
If taḥqīq is the way of true knowledge, one may ask: to know what? To this question, the Islamic intellectual tradition answers with an admirable precision: there are four objects proper to realisation.
The study of the first and last Reality — God, Being, the Necessary, the Real (al-Ḥaqq).
The appearance and disappearance of the world. Whence comes the universe, where does it go, how does it unfold from the Source?
What is a human being? Whence do we come, where do we go? How is the soul (nafs) transformed?
How to live in accord with what one has understood? Practical wisdom, the virtues, just relations.
These four domains are not separate: they are the four faces of one single realisation. To know God without knowing the soul is impossible. To know the soul without understanding the cosmos that contains it does not go far. And knowledge without ethics remains sterile — it has not penetrated life.
The centre of gravity of these four domains is in reality one single object: the nafs (نَفْس), the soul — not in the modern psychological sense, but as the knowing self. It is the soul that knows God, that contemplates the cosmos, that knows itself, that acts. The whole of Islamic metaphysics could be summed up in this ḥadīth:
مَنْ عَرَفَ نَفْسَهُ فَقَدْ عَرَفَ رَبَّهُ
Man ʿarafa nafsahu fa-qad ʿarafa Rabbahu
Who knows himself knows his Lord. Ḥadīth — often attributed to the Prophet or to ʿAlī
The actual intellect and the fiṭra
If each person can, in principle, accede to this knowledge, it is because there is in each of us a faculty capable of receiving it. The tradition names it:
What hinders
Why, then, do so few people attain realisation? Because the fiṭra is, most often, asleep. It is covered over with ignorance and forgetfulness. As long as the soul remains sunk in this state, it does not know its own origin and does not even deserve the name of “intellect.” To become truly intellect, it must actualise its first disposition: return to the names that God taught Adam.
“Compound ignorance”
Worse than ignorance, there is what the tradition calls jahl murakkab (جَهْل مُرَكَّب) — compound ignorance. Simple ignorance is not to know. Compound ignorance is not to know that one does not know. It is the intellectual sickness of the present.
The first step in healing ignorance is to recognise that one does not know. Chittick, ch. 1
As long as someone is persuaded that he understands — his world, himself, God, meaning — he cannot begin to seek. The search for knowledge (ṭalab al-ʿilm, طَلَب العِلْم), which the Prophet said was obligatory for every Muslim, and which Chittick would willingly extend to every human being, begins with the recognition of a lack.
What cannot be imposed
Why does this taqlīd / taḥqīq distinction matter, today, for anyone — Muslim or not?
Because it names what we have ceased to know how to do. We live in a civilisation where each knowledge, or nearly, is transmitted to us by authority: by experts, the media, algorithms, institutions. We believe we know, when we are repeating. We take imitation for thought. It is compound ignorance on a planetary scale.
The tradition that Chittick defends does not say that all imitation is bad — on the contrary, it is necessary for language, culture, ritual. It says something else: that there is a domain where imitation does not suffice. This domain is that of the truth of life — who I am, whence I come, where I go, what deserves to be called real, what deserves to be called good.
There, and there alone, one must verify for oneself. No one can do it in your place. No government, no community, no party can produce muḥaqqiqūn by decree.
The tradition can never be recovered through imitation or through collective action — only through individual dedication and personal realisation. Governments and committees cannot even begin to solve this problem. Understanding cannot be imposed or legislated — it can only grow in the heart. Chittick, conclusion of ch. 1
It is, in a sense, what the whole of Sufism says too — from Rūmī to Ibn ʿArabī. The way is a walking that no one makes for you. No affiliation, no belonging dispenses one from becoming, in one's own measure, a muḥaqqiq — one of those who have realised what they know.
Where does this thought come from?
This entry draws upon chapters 1 and 2 of Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul, by William C. Chittick (Oneworld, 2007). Born in 1943, formed at the American University of Beirut then in Tehran under the direction of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Chittick is today the great English-language translator-interpreter of Ibn ʿArabī and of Rūmī. A professor at Stony Brook (New York), he belongs to the perennialist school by filiation, but with a pedagogical attention that makes his books more accessible than those of Guénon or Schuon.
The book develops its thesis over seven chapters: the disappearance of the intellectual heritage, the nature of intellectual knowledge, the rehabilitation of thought, the exit from ideology, Sufi cosmology (the central chapter, in dialogue with Nasr), the anthropocosmic vision (the human being and the cosmos as reciprocal mirrors), and the quest for meaning. It is, to our knowledge, the best contemporary introduction in English to what one could call the spiritual cosmology of Islam.
To go further on the site:
- Seyyed Hossein Nasr — Chittick's master, and his book What Is Metaphysics?
- The heart (qalb) — the seat of this knowledge that realises itself.
- The 99 divine Names — the Names that Adam learned, and that the fiṭra calls one to find again.