Someone on another website asked whether ginans, which are well known as a poetic and mystical tradition, can also be classified as an intellectual tradition. My response:
Thats an interesting question. I see an uninterrupted continuum of intellect starting from the first created being, Intellect, in its purest, most unified and undiversified spiritual form, going down to the intellect wrapped up inside each individual fundamental particle in the multi-dimensional, ultradiversified material universe. In this respect ginans are very high up in this cascading sequence because they mostly deal with issues of tawhid, knowledge of the heart as opposed to the mind and about the manifestation of transcendence in creation. I think they are definitely an intellectual tradition but they deal mainly in issues relating to suprarational knowlegde and intellect.
Further down in the cascading sequence is the kind of rational intellect and knowledge I(for example) was able to acquire in the western, secular tradition with reductionistic subjects like biology, chemistry, physics, geology, astronomy, etc that I was brought up with. Nevertheless, I am an extremely lucky fellow because, in my readings over the years, I discovered a far less reductionistic and more holistic Ismaili cosmological doctrine that allowed me to synthesise all the reductionistic subjects I learned about in my western education into a unified vision of the material universe, using the eastern Iranian as opposed to the Arabic cosmological model, enabling me to see it as one component of the structure of truth, the ultimate nature of which it is the goal of religion to reach.
If I am able to transcend the 'zahir' of the material universe and penetrate into its 'batin', then I beleive I will be starting to speak the same language of the heart that the ginans are so well known for.
easynash
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4.
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3
