The Primordial in the Philosophy of Nasir Khusraw

The article deals with the problem of determining the primordial in the philosophy of Nasir Khusraw, the Isma‘ili thinker of the 11th century. It seems to be an obvious answer that «the primordial is God», but this statement becomes impossible in Isma‘ilism due to the absolute separation of the transcendent incomprehensible God from the world manifested in intelligible and sensuous diversity. The article deals with the origins of the problem of the relationship of the single original and the multiple world, gives a brief overview of solutions to this issue by different schools of Arab Muslim philosophy. Within the framework of Isma‘ilism, two schemes of the process of creation of the universe were proposed, one of which was actively developed by Nasir Khusraw. According to the views of the Isma‘ili philosopher, the basis of all things is the word of God: it has an absolute being and potentially contains all things. The consequence of the word of God is the Universal Mind, which is endowed with the necessary being and has knowledge of all things. The Universal Soul, which emerges from the Universal Mind, has the power to create and thereby materializes the knowledge of the Universal Mind in the diversity of the material world. So, what can be called the initial? God, in fact, is taken out of the field of reasoning, He only speaks His word. The word of God is the cause of all things, but it does not give existence to the world. The world is created by the universal Soul, it is its Creator, but the Universal Soul itself is the creation of the Universal Mind, the consequence of the word of God. In Nasir Khusraw’s doctrine of being it is impossible to distinguish a single primordial, its functions are distributed between the word of God, his inseparable consequence the Universal Mind and the Universal Soul which derived from the Mind.