Introduction

In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.

Praise be to God, necessary in His existence, universal in His bounty; and blessing and peace upon our Prophet, the wisest of the world's sages and the seal of the great masters of divine science (al-ilāhiyyūn), our lord Muḥammad, and upon his family and his Companions.

And now: Muḥammad ʻAbduh, son of ʻAbduh, son of Ḥasan Khayr Allāh, says — he who was reared in the province of Miṣr, in the district of al-Buḥayrah, in a village called Maḥallat Naṣr; a servant in the service of wisdom (ḥikmah); one who has turned away from grammar (naḥw), theology (kalām) and the word; one who has stripped off the constraint of the garb of the schools for the open field where the quarry of the sciences is hunted down: I had been occupied with seeking the sciences, and while I was circling about the gardens I stumbled upon the traces of the real sciences (al-ʻulūm al-ḥaqīqiyyah), and I was smitten with love for them — but I found no one who had any long practice (ṭawīlah) in them. So I was at a loss in my affair, and I set my thought roving; and whenever I asked, they answered me that to occupy oneself with them is forbidden, or that the scholars of kalām had prohibited them. I marvelled with the utmost marvelling — and the heedlessness of those who merely transmit is more marvellous still. I reflected upon the cause of this and saw it to be this: whoever is ignorant of a thing is hostile to it, and whoever sinks earthward away from the heights refuses it. I found them to be like one who chews jujube leaves with his tongue and so knows neither the bitterness of colocynth nor the sweetness of honey. And while I was in that state, the sun of the realities rose, and by it the subtlest of fine points was made clear to us, through the arrival of the presence of the perfect sage, the upholder of the truth, our teacher al-Sayyid Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī — may he never cease to be the (best) gatherer of the fruits of the sciences. We entreated him for something of this, and he assented; praise be to God for that. This was in the year 1290, and thereby we obtained rare and choice gifts. He gave us intimations of universals whose particulars these are, and of signs whose clear proofs these are — and that in a time of dearth in wisdom, so that he was like a rain sent to revive that blessing. I have named it The Influxes, on the Secret of the Self-Disclosures (al-Wāridāt fī sirr al-tajalliyāt). So I say — and from God comes success. (1)

— Notes —

[scan 8] «1» I know that he, may God Most High have mercy upon him, retracted many of these theories which he set down in this treatise, their falsity having become clear to him — among them everything built upon analogising knowledge of God Most High to knowledge of His creation, and His ways (sunan) to a part thereof. Written by Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā.