In the End Will be Consciousness: Farghani on the Ontology of the Soul

By Rahim Acar and Hümeyra Karagözoğlu Özturan

If some historians have downplayed or sidestepped the identity of conscious- ness and being in Islamic philosophy, this may be because they have paid little attention to the literal meaning of the word wujūd, which is the standard Ara- bic term for being or existence. Dictionaries tell us that the verbal meaning of wujūd is to find, uncover, discover, and perceive, which are surely modes of con- sciousness. By settling on the word wujūd as the preferred term for being, the Muslim philosophers were recognizing that any existent thing must be found and perceived, which is to say that it must be the object of consci-ousness. In other words, they understood and often made explicit that wujūd in the sense of being cannot be separated from wujūd in the sense of consciousness.
s a graduate student in Tehran in the 1970s, I heard Seyyed Hossein Nasr say that the Vedantic triad sat-chit-ānanda can best be translated into Ara- bic and Persian as wujūd-wijdān-wajd—“being-consciousness-bliss.” This was many years before I came across Ibn ʿArabī’s statement at the beginning of Chapter 237 of the Futūḥāt, which is called “On wujūd”: “For the Tribe [qawm],” that is, the Sufi teachers, “Being is consciousness of the Real in bliss” (al-wujūd wijdān al-ḥaqq fī l-wajd). These three words—wujūd, wijdān, and wajd—are all derived from the root w-j-d. From early on in Arabic they were understood as variations on the meaning of finding, perceiving, and consciousness.