The perfect man
idea · 3 works · 4 mentions · 10 anchored passages
the perfect man · the human reality · الانسان الكامل · الحقيقة الانسانية · a perfect prophet · al-insān al-kāmil · al-rajul al-kāmil · an abridged book · the complete copy · the human configuration
in the texts
Kitāb al-Zawrāʼ wa-al-taʻlīqāt ʻalayhi
Al-insān al-kāmil, the human reality in which all divine names and attributes appear in their traces, model and abridgement of all the worlds.
Then the human configuration is the locus of manifestation of all the names and attributes, since there is gathered in it every one of the realities — the immaterial and the material, the subtle and the dense, and the rest of the particulars treated by those who trace out the signs of the horizons and of the souls.
and the celestial souls, granting them and granting their immateriality, know Him, exalted be He, only by the attributes of transcendence and by what their configuration confers of subtlety and of perpetuity in a single mode — unlike the perfect man (al-insān al-kāmil), who, inasmuch as he is the sum of the world entire, knows Him, exalted be He, by all that is conferred by all the configurations …
They sometimes express this as latency (kumūn) and emergence (burūz), meaning by it that all the names and attributes are folded, with a kind of manifestation, into every existent, but that in it some of them are manifest as to their determinations and traces and some are hidden as to their determinations and traces, these being veiled — except the human reality, for in it all the names and attrib …
al-Saʻādah fī falsafat al-akhlāq
The Sufi-philosophical ideal of the completed human being, identified here with Muḥammad.
And it is from Thee that I invoke blessing upon him whom Thou madest the chosen one and rendered perfect, in whom humanity came to its term so that it appeared in its clearest manifestations, and who took on the character until he became tender and merciful:
you will find that he is the perfect man (al-insān al-kāmil), by virtue of the lofty character and the great, exalted spirit that were his.
Perhaps, on reading these words, you find in yourself a longing to see the man, and you would love the enjoyment of sitting with him, and you yearn for his friendship.
Risālat al-Wāridāt
Al-rajul al-kāmil, the perfect human being who stands to the world as the spirit stands to the individual body, whose existence the ordering of the world upon causes and degrees makes indispensable, and whose highest instance is the prophet of universal thought.
And when the world had reached a degree (1) in the acquisition of knowledge and the modes of objection, and men had ranged freely in the ordering of ideas and stood ready for awakening and insight, He sent among them a perfect prophet, universal in thought, truthful in utterance, in the highest ranks of perfection;
It will not escape the intelligent man that such a perfect man is indispensable in the world of existence for this nurture, in accordance with what the world requires and its being ordered upon causes and degrees.
So if this perfect man is not to this world what the spirit is to the individual, might he not at least be like the hollow of the palm, the arching of the eyebrow, the fringe of the eyelashes and the like!