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Between Heidegger and the Hidden Imam: Reflections on Henry Corbins Approaches to Mystical Islam1
Nile Green

Dailleurs, si on examine de prs leur religion, on y trouvera comme une semence de nos dogmes. Montesquieu, Lettres persanes, lettre XXXV.

Introduction
Almost three decades after his death, the legacy of Henry Corbin (19031978) reaches across a vast domain in the study of Shiism, Sufism, Islamic philosophy and the wider spiritual traditions of Iran (Adams 1985, Algar 1980, Avens 1988, Gril 1991). As the author of some two hundred published studies, this is partly due to the prolific and energetic nature of Corbins work, but it is also due to the sheer monumentality and ambition of his scholarship. The breadth of its field of reference, both within and without Corbins particular area of study, was frequently startling and its philosophical intent, for many readers, no less alarming. Few would challenge the claim that Corbin opened uncharted territory to nonMuslim scholars in the realms of Shia and Iranian thought, and his work as an editor of unpublished Arabic and Persian texts and as director of the Bibliothque iranienne series alone would have secured him this reputation. Corbins career led him from philosophical studies in Paris and Germany during the 1930s, to war years spent in the imperial libraries of Istanbul and post-war travels throughout the Middle East (Shayegan n.d. 1990). In 1946 he organised the Department of Iranology at the Franco-Iranian Institute in Tehran, before becoming the successor to his former teacher the great French Islamicist Louis Massignon (18831962) as directeur dtudes at the Sorbonnes Ecole pratique des hautes tudes. The successes of Corbins career were reflected in the wide influence and respect he commanded during his lifetime and yet, since his death, there has been a widespread tendency to brush aside the more remarkable elements of his approach to his subject. Unfashionably earnest and uncomfortably continental in the empiricist world of Anglo-American scholarship, Corbins presence has for the most part been one to be politely ignored. In a sense, there
1

An incomplete draft of this essay was previously published through editorial error in Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, vol. 17, no. 3 (2005).

Green, N., Between Heidegger and the Hidden Imam: Reflections on Henry Corbins Approaches to Mystical Islam, in M.-R. Djalili, A. Monsutti & A. Neubauer, Le monde turco-iranien en question, coll. Dveloppements, Paris, Karthala; Genve, Institut de hautes tudes internationales et du dveloppement, 2008, pp. 247-259.

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is little importance in this, for Corbins work was in itself complete, providing a deeply individualistic but none the less philosophical vision that was lucidly presented in volume after volume of densely argued text. His project, in this sense, has little need for continuation or commentary by later generations. Like the structuralist system created by his contemporary Claude Lvi-Strauss, Corbins work is perhaps best seen as a fully realised world within and of itself, more profitably admired for its innate harmony than adapted or adopted for the pursuit of different kinds of intellectual goals. While it is not the intention of this article to argue for a revival of Corbins methodology in the study of Islam or Iran, in ignoring Corbin we overlook one of the most remarkable examples of intellectual exchange between the philosophical and humanist traditions of Europe and the Middle East. Writing expressly as a philosopher rather than as a historian, Corbin was well aware of the earlier tradition of what we might term philosophical cosmopolitanism that sought an underlying epistemological unity in the diverse philosophical projects of Europe and Asia. In this sense, Corbin rejected the splintering and divisive cognitive principlesof historicism, culturalism, relativismthat separate people (as eastern or western, Islamic or Christian) in favour of a universalist means of knowing based on a hermeneutics of the basic common ground of human being. Yet whether placed within a specifically French or more wider cosmopolitan tradition of universalism, Corbin here trod on ground that in the same year as his death would undergo a seismic shift with the publication of Edward Saids Orientalism. For in Corbins confident claims to access the inner worlds of long dead Asians and to speak to and through them through the medium of a totalising project of universalist phenomenology, and to favour tradition and metaphyics over modernity and materialism, his writings may be read as the supreme apogee of the orientalist learning which Said sought to expose. Although Said did not deal directly with Corbin, his critique of such earlier French figures as Ren Guenon (18861951) and Corbins own teacher Massignon give sufficient idea of Saids opinion of this tradition of suspiciously spiritualistic scholarship. If the passing decades have allowed us to sort the wheat from the chaff of Saids argumentsnot least in salvaging the political reputations of scholars like Massignon and of such British counterparts as E.G. Browne (Irwin 2006)it seems only fair to attempt a similar reappraisal of Corbin. For if Saids work was so germane through its debt to one tradition of French thoughtthe postwar Marxian tradition of philosophy as history as reformulated by Michel Foucaultthen somewhat paradoxically Corbin represents another tradition in French philosophy grounded in the principles of universalism and humanism. As scholars of the left might rightly point out, the historical realities of the twentieth century seem to have comprehensively quashed the high talk of Corbins foundational European universalism, from the Nazi collusion of Corbins model Martin Heidegger to the mockery of French egalitarianism in Algeria and the postcolonial failure of social integrationism in metropolitan France. Yet the underlying philosophical argument between Corbin and Said is a more fundamental question of epistemology that cannot be swept

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away for all of the horrors of history: that of knowledge of particulars and universals. For Said, like other poststructuralists as well as most historians in the empiricist Anglo-Saxon tradition, basic data are always particular; knowledge is, as it were, textual or territorial. For Corbin the opposite was the case, for basic data emerge from what is universal; true knowledge must ultimately be transcendent. When transformed into the writing of history through the alternate trajectories of either of these basic epistemological standpoints, the past must look radically differentas different as the history of Marx or Hegel. Yet as Corbin himself frequently pointed out, there remains a liberational possibility in philosophical hermeneutics that in its potential to cut through the particulars of empiricist history is genuinely radical, capable of building bridges where the historical particularism of the likes of Samuel P. Huntington can only descry unsurpassable civilisational discontinuities and difference. Orientalism in the Saidian sense is not therefore the sole prerogative of transcendental historiography, but is no less a potentiality of a historiography of particularism. As an exercise in unfashionably transcendental history, Corbins work deserves to be better known beyond the bounds of Iranian and Islamic studies and should be of as much value to those concerned with methodological aspects of history and philosophy no less than religious studies and cultural studies more generally. At a time in which issues of cultural hybridity are the focus of great interest in the humanities, Corbins hermeneutic attempt to forge a synthesis of European and Middle Eastern philosophical traditions is surely deserving of wider attention that it currently commands. Evolving during the decades of the decolonisation of Frances Muslim colonies, whatever else it may have been Corbins uvre was one of the most significant and original cultural projects to emerge from the modern encounter between the intellectual traditions of the Middle East and Europe. Corbins was, moreover, a dialogical project that evolved in conversation with living Muslims as well as textual and dead orientals. The intellectual milieu in which Corbin moved during his years in Tehran is of interest in its own right, having brought together European savants like Corbin with such traditional Shii scholars as Muhammad-Husayn Tabatabai (19021981) and a new breed of Iranian religious intellectuals such as Seyyed Hossein Nasr (b. 1933) (Boroujerdi 1996). From the 1970s, Corbins writings also influenced Muslim theologians in Egypt, helping them reclaim Sufism as an authentically Muslim tradition of spirituality. Here, then, was a philosophical enterprise of a cross-cultural kind, albeit one that was socially disengaged and, arguably, politically reactionary in its living affiliations. But while Corbin has often been regarded as aristocratic in his politics, his correspondence shows him to have been as much the heir to his teacher Massignons anti-colonial leanings as to his tendency to fuse rather than isolate cultures (Schmidtke 1999). For Corbin brought into theoretical clarity what Massignon and other such sympathetic Orientalists had written more opaquely: the capacity of individual human being to transcend and unite the contradictions and divisions of the outside world, of the inscrutable otherness posited by the epistemological skepticism of the hard line Saidian. Perhaps Corbins place in European intellectual tradition should therefore be seen to lie less in a line of academic

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scholars of Islam than among a lineage of religious philosophers and cultural transgressors, at the end of a genealogy connecting Ramn Llull and Friedrich Schleiermacher with Ren Guenon and Victor Segalen. What makes Henry Corbin at once so interesting and so awkward, therefore, is the fact that he was a philosopher standing in a field dominated by historians. It is important to be clear about these definitions, because they are fundamental in analysing Corbins legacy and the disputes surrounding it. Corbin sought to approach Islamic philosophical and mystical thought as a philosopher, even when writing what could appear to the uninitiated as history. Among an academic community in which Islamic philosophy and spirituality is taught and examined almost exclusively by historians (the distinction intellectual and political historian and so on is irrelevant here), this inevitably causes conflict. Although more recently we have begun to see Iranian Muslim philosophers themselves, such as Mehdi Hairi Yazdi (19231999), presenting their ideas in English (Hairi Yazdi 1992), the vast majority of serious studies of Islamic thought in European languages belong to the category of the history of philosophy and so concern themselves with the presentation of Islamic philosophy almost exclusively from the perspective of ideas-in-time. But as a philosopher rather than a historian, Corbin only sought out the idea an sich, the idea in itself. Unrepentantly ahistorical in his approach, Corbin believed passionately that ideas are always potentially alive and so remained ever suspicious of what he saw as the dustbin of history. For at its most crass, history writing can be profoundly anti-intellectual, descriptively guiding ideas into what Corbin regarded as a historicising dead-end rather than hermeneutically opening upliberatingideas onto wider vistas of intellectual possibility. Corbins way in, both for himself in his work and for the outsider as an interpreter of it, is to be found in the writings of Martin Heidegger (18891976). Corbins early studies in Paris were almost exclusively in the field of contemporary European philosophy, leading him to spend several years in Germany in the mid-1930s, where he met Heidegger as well as Karl Jaspers, Ernst Cassirer and Karl Barth. Indeed, Corbins early reputation was secured not as an Islamicist but as the first French translator of the work of Heidegger, whose importance he was among the earliest to recognise. It is notable that he achieved the same distinction with regard to the writings of Karl Barth. With the Protestant spirituals remaining a theme throughout his lifes work, it is important to bear in mind this Protestant dimension to his thought, a tradition also seen in the phenomenological approach to mystical Islam adopted by Annemarie Schimmel (19222003) in her Deciphering the Signs of God (Schimmel 1994), which in its attempt to read the plurality of Muslim practice through the lenses of Sufi theory is one of the few works to have found a place for popular religion within the proper bounds of Islam. Yet what attracted Corbin to Heidegger in the first place was the latters emphasis on ontology, on the study of being. In Sein und Zeit (Being and Time, 1927), Heidegger had argued that since Descartes European philosophy had lost its way in its increasing concentration on epistemology. For Heidegger, epistemology is not only the less essential and easier issue but, insofar as it lacks an

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ontological grounding, it is also in a sense a false issue. In the retreat that Heidegger proffered to Daseinhis label for the Being-of-beinghe argued that we are in fact moving forwards, for only through encountering the purity of Dasein can we hope to genuinely encounter anything (that is, any-being) else. Reflecting on the importance of Heidegger in the last years of his life, Corbin remarked,
The phenomenon of the senses, which is fundamental to the metaphysics of Sein und Zeit, is the link between the signifier and the signified. But what is this link, without which the signifier and signified would remain objects of only theoretical consideration? This link is the subject, and this subject is the presence, presence of the mode of being within the mode of understanding. Presence, being there (Da-sein) (Jambet 1981: 2526, authors translation).

It was this connection between being and knowing that first led Corbin to the study of Islamic philosophy. This orientationto use a term of whose dual senses Corbin was very fondis fundamental to understanding his important contribution to Islamic studies in general. For reasons quite distinct from those offered by Said, Corbin was unhappy with the term Orientalist. When asked to describe himself, he would reiterate that he was neither a Germanist nor even an Orientalist, but a philosopher pursuing his quest wherever the spirit guides him (Jambet 1981: 24, authors translation). On the one hand, the sincerity with which he tried to think through medieval Muslim categories of thought is the very antithesis of the trivialisation of a culture described by Said, and yet on the other, Corbins anti-historicism could be seen to render him the essentialising high priest of Orientalism. The transcendental Being that underlies the work of Corbin and Heidegger could here be read as a mystification of the Eurocentric model of universal humanity deconstructed in Saids critique of classical humanism. But at a time when European academe is increasingly uncertain of its ability to interpret or even comprehend the phenomena of other cultures, Corbins premise that there is truly neither east nor west in the geographical sensethat there is no dichotomy of Western philosophy and Islamic philosophy but only philosophy, only humans exploring the phenomena of their worldcan come as a welcome relief. Corbins escape from history was neither nave nor simplistic, but one which was based on the principle (Heideggeran or otherwise) that being is that which (is the only thing that) can know being. By subsequently drawing on the mystical writings of the Sufis and the Shia tradition of mystical philosophy known as hikmat or irfan, Corbins version of Heideggers hermeneutics sought to put this into practice.

Corbins hermeneutics: thinking with the Sufis

Some time during the early 1930s, Louis Massignon presented his student Corbin with a gift of an early copy of the Kitb Hikmat al-Ishrq (Book of Oriental Illumination) of the Persian mystical philosopher Shihab al-din

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Suhrawardi (d. 1191). This gift, which Corbin characteristically regarded as a kind of personal initiation, was to change the subsequent course of his career. Certainly, the gift would prove an appropriate one, for Suhrawardis own philosophical enterprise involved reconciling the insights of the Greek, Persian and Islamic spiritual and philosophical traditions; appropriately, the same criticism of making a travesty of each of his sources could be levelled at either Corbin or Suhrawardi. Yet Corbin recognised Suhrawardi as a fellow pursuant of the philosophical cosmopolitanism that had for so long fuelled intellectual traffic between those too easily identified as Christians and Muslims, from the sharing of Greek philosophical works in Toledo and Baghdad and the emergence of a trans-religious Hermetic revival in the circle of Ibn Sabin (d. 1268) in medieval Spain to the transmission of the monism of the Sanskrit Upanishads between the Mughal prince Dara Shikuh in India to Arthur Schopenhauer in Europe. While even a thumbnail sketch of Suhrawardis vast spiritual and philosophical synthesis is beyond the scope of the present article, what is important to note is the presence of certain common and key themes in the work of Heidegger and Suhrawardi, the very themes that lie at the heart of Corbins own philosophical enterprise. For as a philosopher, Suhrawardi addressed the issue of the validity of human knowledge, and ultimately sought to show how this was intimately connected with human being. In Suhrawardis system, humanity experiences two kinds of knowledge, ilm al-husl (derived knowledge) and ilm al-huzr (immediate knowledge, literally knowledge by presence). The second form of knowledge is higher, rarer and purer than the first, and may be most simply demonstrated in the difference between knowing about love and being in love. Only through our essential Being, then, can we hope to achieve reliable knowledge. For Suhrawardi, the discursive intellect and its abilities (such as reasoned philosophising) can only take us so far towards knowledge. At that point it becomes necessary to simultaneously retreat and proceed into our being. This step beyond the frontiers of the intellect is easily labelled as mysticism and yet both Suhrawardi and Corbin would argue with this designation. For Corbin, the dichotomy of mysticism/philosophy was misleading, since, as for Suhrawardi, the use of intellect and being are different stages of the same journey towards certain knowledge. Thus, in his work on Islam, Corbin rarely used either the terms philosophy or mysticism, preferring the word theosophy. As a translation of the Persian term khudal-husldn and the Arabic hikma ilhiya, theosophy is strictly appropriate and fitting. But be it by navet or hauteur, Corbins use of such terminology, so redolent of Madame Blavatsky and her ilk, has only served to add to the glee of his critics. Corbin and Heidegger differed greatly in the directions they took from their point of recognising the identity of knowing and being; Heideggers existence until death (Sein zum Tode) was not a feature of Corbins work. Instead, Corbins hermeneutic studies of the thought-world of the Iranian theosophers presented a universe where bodily death is merely one stage of a grander journey. He pursued the subjects of his research, not only Suhrawardi but almost all of the major names of the Persian Sufi and Shiite traditions, to their every conclusion. Here lay the essence of Corbins method, the hermeneutics that he drew from Heidegger and

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used throughout his work as a means of unveiling the world of his chosen theosophers. Corbin referred to himself as a phenomenologist, in the Heideggerian sense of bringing to light or manifesting the real experiences of his subjects. And it is here that we simultaneously witness the strength and weakness of Corbins approach, for in his phenomenological identification with his subjects it becomes difficult to separate Corbin from those whom he studied, his own thought from that of Ibn Arabi (d. 1240) or Ruzbihan Baqli (d. 1209). To his supporters, his method of spiritual hermeneutics (Corbin 1978: 121) made manifest the inner world of his subjects; to his detractors it manifested only the peculiar world of Henry Corbin. Ultimately the question is whether for all his phenomenological prowess Corbin was any more able to enter the mind of his Iranian subjects than Montesquieu two centuries earlier. Did Corbins phenomenology unveil meaningful correspondences, or, as with Montesquieu, were the parallels he drew merely the sham likenesses of the intellectual ventriloquist? However, in a sense the implied dichotomy between neatly independent selves is a false one, assuming a Cartesian model of a self-contained mind that Corbin would have questioned. From a historicist perspective Corbin may well be guilty of misrepresentation, of speaking beyond the limits of the textual evidence on the inner world of this or that figure. His speculative take on the later career of Ibn Sina (Avicenna, d. 1037) is a case in point (Corbin 1960), postulating a late sea-change in Ibn Sinas thought that formed a fitting preamble to the work of Suhrawardi a century later. Even if Corbins reading of Ibn Sina did reflect Suhrawardis own, it creates an unconvincingly teleological pattern as history. But as Corbin frequently reiterated, he was not working within the scheme or tradition of historical scholarship. He spoke of his research as being within the realm of vertical as opposed to horizontal time, making reference to the Persian Sufi Ala al-Dawla Simnanis distinction between zamn-e-fq (time of the horizons, or outer time) and zamn-e-ans (time of the soul, or inner time) (Corbin 1978: 123). As a philosopher, Corbins hermeneutics therefore aimed to bring the phenomena of his subjects to life. Since that meant bringing them into being (as opposed to an historicist having been), there is only presentation, since the categories of representation (and so misrepresentation) belong to the linear or horizontal time of history. More accurately an idealist than an essentialist in the Saidian sense, Corbin would argue that to work within this horizontal schema meant to admit that the past and all that belonged to it is dead. As though in response to Schopenhauers complaint about the essential incompleteness of history, Corbin reflected the high modernists in his search for the completion and system that also underwrote the structuralism of his contemporary Lvi-Strauss. For the hermeneutic philosopher, Corbin argued, the ideas which he studies do not succeed one another in a homogenous time; they are, each of them, their own time (Corbin 1977: 52). He found a parallel to his own hermeneutics in the Sufi/Shii practice of tawl, the interpretation of symbolic communication (be it in the visual imagery of a dream or in the metaphorical language of scripture), the literal meaning of which is to bring back data to their origin oras Corbin sometimes preferredtheir archetype. Corbin

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described tawl as preeminently the hermeneutics of symbols a matter of harmonic perception, of hearing an identical sound on several levels simultaneously (Corbin 1977: 5354). In this way, he attempted to transpose his methodology from being an eminently modern philosophical tool to being a trans-historical feature of the human quest to understand the world across time. Reflecting Heidegger, he claimed that the past is alive when it is summoned into the present, that a dialogue is therefore possible not only through historical time but also through cultural space. In studying the ideas of the historical past, the philosopher thus brings them to being in the living present. Corbins was in this sense a profoundly humanist philosophy that nonetheless stood calmly, even coldly, nonplussed beside the human drama of history. In works like The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism (Corbin 1978), Corbins hermeneutic method allowed him to step into the rich visionary world of the medieval Sufis whose texts he had so carefully studied. While it is all too easy to scoff at Corbins enthusiasm for this visionary literature, if we are to realise its value it is, ironically, important to see Corbins approach in the context of his time. In the Anglo-Saxon world in particular, the generation of Islamicists before Corbin had been extremely reticent about delving too deeply into the visionary texts that made up so important a part of the epistemology of pre-modern Islam, from the prototypical visionary text of the Quran through the writings of medieval visionary-theorists like Ibn Arabi to the dream diaries of modernists like Sayyid Ahmad Khan and the intervention of dreams in the careers of such contemporary figures as Mullah Omar (Green 2003). The failure to reckon with this important and in some senses axiomatic dimension of Muslim religious experienceof visionary communication through space and timewas the price that historicist and otherwise positivist scholarship has to pay for its own methodological framework. Through adopting a hermeneutic method based on an entirely different paradigm from that of historicism, Corbin was able to bring the discussion of such experiences, and the texts that mediated them, into the realms of professional scholarship. In this way he felt able to confront the rich and strange world of the medieval Sufis on what was, for him at least, its own terms. His enthusiasm for the visionary basis of Islamic epistemology could sometimes lead him astray, as seen again his work on the meager symbolic treatises of the great peripatetic Ibn Sina in Avicenna and the Visionary Recital (Corbin 1960). Yet in Corbins finest works, such as the four volumes of En Islam iranien (Corbin 19711972), his approach allowed the modern reader to enter the radically different world of the Persian mystics without ever quite abandoning the guiding terms and references of his own world. But while since Corbins death work on a plethora of Islamic visionary texts has expanded enormously in response to his studies, the hermeneutic tightrope that he laid out has generally been ignored for academically safer modes of transit between epistemological worlds. If the resulting scholarship has provided few spectacular falls as a consequence, it has also brought an inability to enter the estranged mental worlds of the past in the same way as Corbins work; the other remains an inscrutable stranger, the past

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another country. Without some form of phenomenology, for better or worse we remain outsiders looking through textual windows onto a past that is forever apart from our own time and ultimately unknowable in its difference.

Against history: Corbin and the world

In Being and Time Heidegger argued that, in its factual Being Dasein always is as and whats it already was. Whether explicitly or not, it is its past (Heidegger 1994: 63). Corbins work is thus in some ways a practical application of Heideggers insights and it is from this perspective that Corbins writing must be read. In Spiritual Body and Terrestrial Earth (Corbin 1977), for example, he saw parallels in the differing cosmologies of Mazdean and Shiite Iran where historians could see only difference; we should note here the difference between parallels and connections. What we witness here again is a clash of paradigms. The historicist perspective is based upon the supposition of a materialist view of history (there need be no sense in history), while Corbins world (and/or the world of his subjects) is based on an idealist or spiritually immanent view of history (there must be sense [made] in history). While Corbin went against both the empiricist and literary critical foundations of modern historical scholarship, from first principles his rationale has no less validity than a materialist paradigm. As a philosopher by training, Corbin felt that his critics had no greater philosophical basis to their approach to the past than he did. Although Corbin was keen to stress the importance of historical awareness when speaking on a materialist level, he nonetheless felt that to be aware of the past only on this level was one of the tragedies of the modern age and what he saw as its Cartesian roots. For Corbin, it was a tragedy because he regarded such awareness as robbing humanity of a living connection with its past, a past that on the level of material history is by definition dead. Here we might do well to remember the darker side of an earlier generation of Romantic historiography whose dangers were so persuasively, if helplessly, demonstrated in the work of Ernst Cassirer (18741945), whose critique of the irrationalism of symbolic knowledge was all too clearly borne out by the successes of the Nazis spectacular ritualism. Here Corbin reflected a number of thinkers often grouped together as proponents of the perennial philosophy (Sedgwick 2004), including his Iranian colleague Seyyed Hossein Nasr and earlier French esoterists like Ren Guenon. But methodologically Corbin was far more sophisticated and philosophically far more interesting than any of these figures. As a scholar, he was better equipped than perhaps any of his generation to write an historical account of the development of Shii and Sufi thought and his History of Islamic Philosophy (written in collaboration with Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Osman Yahya) at least disguised itself as such. But as a philosopher, his basic project remained a different one and his historical writings further entangle rather than disentangle the complex knots of history. But to read his other major works in this way, as guides to episodic history (lhistoire vnementielle), would be a mistake. For Corbin, the ideas of the past are only meaningful and relevant to us personally

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insofar as they are brought back to being and so revived as tools for thinking with in the present. As with other Perennialists, the orientalist shades of an antimodernist recidivism are here all too apparent. We remarked earlier that Corbins work is in itself a completed project, even though at the time of his death Corbin was still at work on a number of studies. But at a more important level, the entire direction of his writing was an attempt to show his readers, as he had learned by his own reading of such figures as Ibn Arabi, that there is no finishing or completion in the process of thinking. Rather, Corbins studies of philosophical Islam posited an unlimited series of encounters between the human and the world in which the experience was perpetually redefined by the faculty of imagination (khayl) (Corbin 1969). We have also remarked upon Corbins continued interest in the Protestant Christian mystics, to whom he often drew reference in his work, as though to deliberately plot the eastern and western genealogies of his thought. Certainly, it may be argued that he was a thinker in the Protestant tradition. Likewise, the Islam that he presented was akin to Protestantism in its emphasis on a direct and unmediated experience of Reality, where even the Shia Imams were spiritualised into abstraction and not presented as having mediators in the institutional manner of a Shia clerical class. Critics like Charles Adams (1985) have argued that Corbins is a gravely distorted Islam, idealised and Shia-centric. In a sense, they are quite correct, but there remains a lack of sophistication in such criticism, missing as it does the express purpose of Corbins work as a phenomenological interpretation of the inner world of Shia Islam. Writing against history, Corbin saw himself as discussing a religious ideal, a hermeneutically theosophical reading of Islam rather than an historical or ethnographic one. While Corbins vision of Islam was hardly the most democratic, with little room for the modest pieties of the common man, we should hardly be surprised when he was dealing solely with what he unreservedly saw as a select and privileged corps of mystics. The remit of his work was an expressly esoteric Islam, and his efforts were dedicated to creating a phenomenological account of the mystical states of this distinguished cadre. And for better or worse, Corbins spirituality was one of a gnostic elite, that of the fideli damore of Islam, to use a parallel which he constantly drew to the European singers of courtly love. Like the cliques at the court of the last Shah whose precious world Corbin and his acolytes knew so well, Corbins own notion of mysticism was ultimately an elitist one. As such, it was a decisive step away from that of his teacher Louis Massignon, whose own political and religious views were famous for their antipathy towards cabals of any kind (Rocalve 1993). Unlike Massignon, Corbin seemed serenely unaware of the social, political or even moral dangers of such doctrines. While some of his works are still published in Persian editions in Iran, in recent decades Iranian critics of the Sufis have for their part described Sufism in terms of a suspiciously closed world of secret gatherings, unwarranted pomp and dubious pretensions to authority that is a world away from Corbins comfortably abstracted vision of a Sufi way of knowledge.

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Conclusions
Within the limits of his aimsthat is, outside the realm of historical scholarshipCorbins phenomenology can at best be seen to offer a methodological way in to the interior world of mystical Islam. It also offers no less a way out of the agnosticismin its strict sense of a general epistemological uncertainty that stifles so many attempts to study the world as experienced by the other, whether in past or present. Yet as we have hinted earlier, Corbins work is perhaps most fruitfully regarded less as a scholarly baton to be handed on to others than as a cultural artefact in its own right. For three decades after their publication, the four volumes of En Islam iranien stand as a modernist classic in which a complete vision of a self-enclosed world has been realised. Corbins attempt to create the phenomenological resources to interpret one world through the lenses of another is a monumental essay in attempting to communicate across cultures and indeed to question the very assumption that religions, civilisations or worlds exist as discrete cultural units which cannot be accessed from without. With almost tragic irony, it is also one whose heroic modernist ambition was matched by the sheer transparency of its flaws. It may be said that the greatest strengths of Corbins work lie in its very subjectivity, a subjectivity employed with Heideggeran deliberation as the proper means to approach another subject outside oneself, and as such upfront about its principled opposition to the objectivity of historicist writing. Postmodernist critiques of the spurious objectivity of historical narrative have done much to dampen the fires of Corbins ideological opponents in recent years. A reflexive scholar before his times, Corbins greatest academic transgression was perhaps the candour with which he expressed his own involvement in his work, that is, the subjectivity of his philosophical and interpretive quest. Ironically, his greatest misfortune was to be overtaken by the very forces of history to which he had paid so little heed. For the Iranian Revolution of 19781979 seemed to suddenly wash away a whole tradition of scholarship that was sympathetic to an esoteric vision of Shiism and reveal it as politically nave and fanciful if not downright dangerous. Irans revolutionary upheaval also served to highlight Corbins numerous friendships with people suddenly positioned in all the wrong places. Like the moral dilemma surrounding the link between the philosophical writings and political life of Heidegger, Corbins lofty spiritual elitism seemed suddenly compromised by what now appeared as the reactionary and parasitic elitism of his Iranian social world. Yet in the current world climate, and in a Francophone intellectual milieu now deeply intolerant towards an increasingly othered Islam, it seems extraordinary that less than three decades ago Corbin could have attracted even figures like Michel Foucault into an intellectual sympathy with Shia Islam (Khatami 2003). Like LviStrausss recognition that the animals of indigenous religions are good for thinking with as well as eating, Corbins insistence that the intellectual luminaries of medieval Islam were similarly deserving of thinking with, and not only describing or dismissing, was a powerful stand against the complacent Eurocentrism

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that continues to characterise European philosophical and intellectual life more generally. If Corbin bears many of the hallmarks of an Orientalist in the Saidian mode, the grand narrative which he sought was ultimately neither eastern nor western, but one which sought to phenomenologically transcend the boundaries by which the writings of Europeans and Asians were divided by a paradigm foregrounding space, time and difference. For if historical knowledge is by its nature divisive, separating human experience into its distinct regions, periods and categories, as Corbin recognised and expanded from the writings of Suhrawardi and Ibn Arabi, it is the faculties of imagination and intellect that can draw private and collective worlds together. Sharing ideas across the gap of time, space and culture, like other philosophical idealists before him, Corbin defended the realm of ideas as the panacea of history. At a time when historicism slides so easily into idle talk of a clash of civilisations, Corbins idealism seems markedly less unreasonable. References
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SCHMIDTKE, S. (dir.), 1999, Correspondance Corbin-Ivanow: Lettres changes entre Wladimir Ivanow et Stella et Henry Corbin, 19471966, Louvain: Peeters. SEDGWICK, M., 2004, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press. SHAYEGAN, D., (n.d.), Corbin, Henry, Encyclopdia Iranica, Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers, vol. 6. , 1990, Henry Corbin: La Topographie spirituelle de lislam iranien, Paris: Editions de la Diffrence.