Вестник Православного Свято-Тихоновского гуманитарного университета: Серия I. Богословие, философия (Dec 2021)
Interpretation of the idea of monotheism in the chapter on the Oneness of the Almighty God from the poem by Majdud Sanai ‘’The garden of the truth…’’
Abstract
According to the Persian poetry canon, every mathnavi-poem begins with an introduction chapter, known in tradition as “tawhid”. These chapters give a rich material for research of the way the author interprets the Islamic key doctrine – the unity of the God (tawhid). Majdud Sanai is the founder of the Sufi poem tradition. The later authors like Farid al-Din Attar, Jalal al-Din Rumi and others relied on his works. The text of this article describes the preamble chapter, dedicated to the matter of the God’s oneness, as far as possible within the scope of the article and shows the specifics of the Sanai’s approach to the tawhid issue. Unlike other authors such as, for example, Mahmud Shabistari, Sanai, while discussing the God’s oneness, emphasizes not His self or essence oneness (tawhid al-dhat), but on his oneness of actions (tawhid al-af‘al). The oneness of the God for Sanai is His oneness as a universal actor, so as nothing can start or stop its motion without His action. This approach inluenced a lot at the Sanai’s vision of the God and the world relations. Though Shabistari and Sanai both were hanafites and sufies and both sought the eternal oneness of the God, Shabistari, emphasizing the oneness of the Gods selfness (dhat), would have to state the world’s illusory. Sanai, on the contrary, because of his adherence of the tawhid al-af‘al, treated the world as real, for in the context of his radical interpretation of the oneness of the God’s actions, irreality of the world entails irreality of the God. In the annex to the article, we give the first detailed commented Russian translation of the tawhid-preamble to the section “About the God Almighty’s Oneness” from the poem “The Garden of the Truth and the Law of the Path”.
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