Trilogy of “Islam”, “Faith”, and “Ihsan” from the Viewpoint of Khwaja Yusuf Hamadani: Based on his Newly-found manuscript, Alkashf

Abstract

“Islam” (Submission to be a Muslim), “Faith”, and “Ihsan” (goodness) are the three main dimensions of worldly and other-worldly life. The evidence for this trinity is a hadith known as the hadith of Gabriel, which indicates that Islam implies outward deeds; faith denotes inward deeds, and Ihsan means observation. Accordingly, the faithful are Muslims and the people of Ihsan are Muslims and faithful. Although some Sufis have interpreted Islam and faith and sometimes Ihsan, Khwaja Yusuf Hamadani (1048-1140 AD) has a special view on these categories and is the first person who extensively included this trilogy in his two works; First, in Rotbat al-Hayat and then, in Al-kashf an Manazil al-Saerin elallah. Al-kashf (No. 438 Nafiz Pasha lib.) is the most detailed work of Khwaja Yusuf that has not been published yet. We tried to extract and examine his views based on a newly-found manuscript of this book. In this article, we have shown what a special view Khwaja Yusuf had on this trinity, and how he unprecedentedly explicated the trend of spiritual transcendence by man in these stages. From this perspective, man moves from the level of Islam to faith and then to Ihsan, and eventually, he reaches the stage of observation which Khwaja calls spiritual freedom and liberty.

Keywords

• khwaja yusuf hamadani
• alkashf an manazil al-saerin
• rotbat al-hayat
• hadith of gabriel
• trilogy of “islam”
• “faith”
• and “ihsan”