[Edited] From Leku's Herbal and Magical Store to the Universe: Seeking Transdisciplinary Paradigms: Between Nimi Wariboko's Void, Toyin Falola's Ritual Archives, the Dihlīz Threshold of Al-Ghazali and Ebrahim Moosa, Laura Marks' Enfolding-Unfolding Aesthetics and Bavine Nasser on Islamic Architecture : A Few Words
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Between Nimi Wariboko's Void, Toyin Falola's Ritual Archives
the
Dihlīz Threshold of Al-Ghazali and Ebrahim Moosa
Laura Marks' Enfolding-Unfolding Aesthetics
and
Bavine Nasser on Islamic architecture
A Few Words
Multiple centres in pluriversalistic unity reaching
towards the integration and transcendence of the complex whole in a transdisciplinary synthesis
Islamic arabesque art from CanStock Photo
Accessed 5/25/2023
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge
A quest for paradigms of transdisciplinarity through
dialogue between philosophical and autobiographical texts and ideas of
Toyin Falola and Nimi Wariboko and engagements with Islamic philosophy, art and
architecture.
The essay takes forward my ''Shapes of Discourse: Exploring the Transdisciplinary Dynamics of the Toyin Falola Universe'' and the later ''Textual, Conceptual and Imagistic Windows into the Prolific Multidisciplinarity of Writer and Scholar Toyin Falola'', which leads into ''[ Corrected and Slightly Further Expanded 3rd Edition ] Imaginative Matrices and the Multifarious Universe of Knowledge: The Toyin Falola Cosmos and the Inspiration of Iya Lekuleja, the Magical Herbalist''. This essay is a reflection on the ongoing Lekuleja project.
Transdisciplinary Navigations
Defining Transdisciplinarity
Transdisciplinarity and the Mystical
Iya Lekuleja and Transdisciplinary Hermeneutics
Between
Pluriversality and Transdisciplinarity
Pluriversal and Transdisciplinary Windows in Falola Scholarship
Pluriversalist and Transdisciplinary Paradigms
Nimi Wariboko's Void
Toyin Falola's Ritual Archives
The Dihlīz Threshold of Al-Ghazali and Ebrahim Moosa
Laura Marks' Enfolding-Unfolding Aesthetics
Bavine Nasser on Islamic Architecture
This essay began as a review of the first few pages I have read of Ebrahim Moosa's Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination, promising infinite delights as one goes deeper into the book. The review was to respond to the lucidity and explanatory power of those pages as they mediate between various cognitive and social contexts, dramatizing inimitably the fulfillments of devotion to the assimilative, critical and integrative powers of the human mind, as Moosa initiates me into a world similar to though different from mine, the struggle to craft a critical identity in a personal culture shaped by spiritual, intellectual and imaginative orientations, fired by the breadth of human cognitive capacities across cultures and disciplines, within the entire span of human history.
I was looking for transdisciplinary paradigms and so went to Moosa's book, which promised one such in its study of the Islamic thinker Al-Ghazali.
Defining Transdisciplinarity
What is transdisciplinarity?
I did not know precisely but it sounds sexy and intellectually exciting and so I chose to use it. ''Multidisciplinary'' and ''interdisciplinary'' also excite me and I thought I had reasonable understanding of what those words mean.
When I was about to write this essay I Googled ''transdisciplinary'' and the splendid trove of cognitively rich, wide ranging hits I received convinced me that all those words represent serious engagements with the configurations of knowledge, such that a person who aspires to understand how disciplines may be organized in terms of their inter-relationships needs to be be well informed about those terms.
The Wikipedia essay on the subject presents bold central ideas and strategic formulators of transdisciplinarity. The following summation comes from ''Multidisciplinarity, Interdisciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity in Health Research, Services, Education and Policy'' by Bernard Choi and Anita Pak in the definitions of multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity and, on transdisciplinarity, from their essay and the Wikipedia essay on the subject :
Multidisciplinarity draws on knowledge from different disciplines but stays within their boundaries. Interdisciplinarity analyzes, synthesizes and harmonizes links between disciplines into a coordinated and coherent whole. Transdisciplinarity integrates disciplines, such as the humanities, social sciences and sciences, transcending their traditional boundaries in a unity of knowledge beyond disciplines.
I find this utterly exciting on account of my orientation as a cognitive, aesthetic, devotional and practical mystic, a person who seeks direct perception of or union of self with ultimate reality through the use of that range of approaches, categories adapted from the Indian Bhagavad Gita and Platonic thought.
My approach to mysticism is inspired by the idea of a quest to grasp the unity of existence and the transcendence of that unity in a source beyond being and non-being, a paradoxical Buddhist formulation striving to project the idea of the limitations of conceptualization when dealing with the ultimate.
Iya Lekuleja and Transdisciplinary Hermeneutics
What have such grand ideas got to do with Falola's account of Iya Lekuleja in his autobiographies A Mouth Sweeter than Salt and Counting the Tiger's Teeth, a dealer in herbs and other items for healing and magical pursuits, whom he became close to as a child in Ibadan in the 60s, an account that inspires this essay?
Falola's account is the story of a person amazed by an encounter with forms of human embodiment of reality that transcend the cognitive categories he has been introduced to through a lifetime of learning in the dominant streams of the globally pervasive Western created knowledge system.
This is a disjunctive experience related to his efforts in seeking what he describes as pluriversalistic forms of knowledge ( in "Pluriversalism'' and "Ritual Archives'' in The Toyin Falola Reader and Decolonizing African Studies and Decolonizing African Knowledge) a plurality of approaches to knowing that would make sense of the kinds of knowledge represented by people like Leku, the short form of her name, a knowledge both intricate and numinous, socially empowering and vast in scope, yet unrecorded in writing, resisting encapsulation in terms of the circumscriptions of textual sequences.
The following summation of orientations to transdisciplinarity from the Wikipedia essay on transdisciplinarity reinforces the urgency of pluriversality:
Currently, transdisciplinarity is a consolidated academic field that is giving rise to new applied researches, especially in Latin America and the Caribbean.
In this sense, the transdisciplinary and biomimetics research of Javier Collado on Big History represents an ecology of knowledge between scientific knowledge and the ancestral wisdom of native peoples, such as Indigenous peoples in Ecuador.
According to Collado, the transdisciplinary methodology applied in the field of Big History seeks to understand the interconnections of the human race with the different levels of reality that co-exist in nature and in the cosmos, and this includes mystical and spiritual experiences, very present in the rituals of shamanism with ayahuasca and other sacred plants.
In abstract, the teaching of Big History in universities of Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, and Argentina implies a transdisciplinary vision that integrates and unifies diverse epistemes that are in, between, and beyond the scientific disciplines, that is, including ancestral wisdom, spirituality, art, emotions, mystical experiences and other dimensions forgotten in the history of science, specially by the positivist approach.
Awesome. John Trevanian's Shibumi depicts a character who periodically enters into a state both different from his immediate reality and united with it in a heightened manner. In a similar way, those lines from Wikipedia on transdisciplinarity in Latin American scholarship and education suggest directions in my efforts to conjunct diverse knowledge systems from different parts of the world.
This vision aspires to a pluriveralistic synthesis such as that of Falola's resolve in exploring dialogue between contrastive knowledge systems represented by such examples as Leku's pharmacological and magical orientations, on one hand, and the fundamentally intellectual knowledge systems of the Western academy, on the other.
Pluriversal and Transdisciplinary Windows in Falola Scholarship
I am trying to develop a structure of ideas which I would use in mapping the polymathic scholarship and writing of Falola and construct it into a matrix for the study of various subjects across all disciplines, an inspirational structure, a unifying body of ideas, a portal through which various disciplines engage in dialogue, a dialogue ideally integrating Falola's own efforts at such myriad disciplined discourse but also useful for me as a structure of ideas I can use in my own efforts along similar lines.
I am presently working on building the images of the magical herbalist Iya Lekuleja and her store of herbal items and objects and animals for use in healing and magical procedures from Falola's autobiographies into such cognitive matrices, as evident in my essays along those lines, the latest edition of which is ''Imaginative Matrices and the Multifarious Universe of Knowledge: The Toyin Falola Cosmos and the Inspiration of Iya Lekuleja, the Magical Herbalist''. I am currently thinking of how to move beyond the level I have reached so far in this effort.
''How can I use such an idea in interpreting Leku's evocative significance?'', I wondered.
Her store, in Falola's description, suggests an endless proliferation of myriad objects, organised in terms of a structure known only to her and intimately internalised by herself.
What is the cognitive foundation and implications of that cornucopia of plants, animals and other objects used for various healing and magical purposes?
The image of the void, for Wariboko, suggests both creative potential and the unfixity of creativity, its unlimitedness by its own achievements, its capacity for recurrent recreation, going beyond former patterns and insights it has constructed, from my basic acquaintance with his use of this image in The Principle of Excellence, a perpetual self reworking evident in the multivalent creativity of scholars and writers such as himself and Falola.
By ritual archives, I mean the conglomeration of words as well as texts, ideas, symbols, shrines, images, performances, and indeed objects that document as well as speak to those religious experiences and practices that allow us to understand the African world through various bodies of philosophies, literatures, languages, histories and much more.
By implication, ritual archives are huge, unbounded in scale and scope, storing tremendous amounts of data on both natural and supernatural agents, ancestors, gods, good and bad witches, life, death, festivals, and the interactions between the spiritual realms and earth-based human beings.
To a large extent, ritual archives constitute and shape knowledge about the visible and invisible world (or what I refer to as the “non-world”), coupled with forces that breathe and are breathless, as well as secular and non-secular, with destinies, and within cities, kingships, medicine, environment, sciences and technologies.
Above all, they contain shelves on sacrifices and shrines, names, places, incantations, invocations, and the entire cosmos of all the deities and their living subjects among human and nonhuman species.
In varied ways, a countless number of sages, priests, devotees and practitioners created oral and visual libraries, which are linked to ritual complexes and secular palaces.
Subsequently, cultural knowledge has extended from the deep past to our present day. It is through their knowledge that histories and traditions were constituted, while identities were formed, and philosophy as we know it emerged.
…components of the archives can be isolated, but they can also be combined into a body of interlocking ideas and philosophy in the context of the broad terrain of ancestral knowledge. … Ritual
archives lead us into the re-invention of the cosmos that we inhabit, different from but not useless to what modern science does.
Do I not see in those lines echoes of Leku's awesome collection of objects and animals from various orders of nature, a collection subsumed in terms of her arcane personage for whom those items constitute worlds of knowledge, both material and spiritual, perhaps integrated in terms of a cosmographic whole, a metaphysical and spiritual dynamism which the dazzled and puzzled child that Falola was when he frequented her shop may have sensed in observing her engaged in streams of verbal discourse directed at the powers she associated with the items in her shop as he describes in A Mouth Sweeter than Salt?
She had a successful store on a streetcorner about six miles from the house. This was the most famous store for herbs, ingredients for all diseases and ailments, and mixtures and materials for all kinds of charms, both for good and for evil.
I would visit this store many times in seven years, in part because I became fascinated with her and also because of the knowledge offered by Leku and her store. I doubt if Leku herself could have known the number of items in the store.
Arranged in a way known only to her, they comprised an assortment of all known herbs, dried leaves, roots of many kinds of trees and shrubs, fresh and dead plants, bones of various animals (including tigers, leopards, and hyenas), skulls of various animals, dried rats, rodents, other animals, dry and living insects such as millipedes and centipedes, reptiles (including parts of snakes, lizards, and alligators), rocks and soils, and ritual lamps and pots. Tortoises, snails, and small cats walked around, and they, too, were for sale.
...she was knowledgeable about all items used to cure diseases, that is, she was a trader in herbs and all ingredients for charms and medicine. Her knowledge of traditional pharmacology was deep.
She had not gone to school and had memorized all the items. Even the smaller items, the visible dried leaves, and the wrapped ground leaves ran to over a thousand types. The bone pieces ran to another thousand. Even the various types of clay lamps were many. Leku could produce an object in a split second, pointing to where a customer should go and get it when she was not in the mood to get up.
...she knew the combinations of plants and other objects needed to cure all common diseases, and she could provide advice for the more complicated ailments.
When she was not smoking her pipe, she was talking to unseen strangers, appealing to gods, cursing witches, praising herbs, and begging the gods. Too strange for me to understand, she was obsessed with appealing to the gods and all universal forces not to make impotent the plants, roots, bones, and other items in her store. The Yoruba she used to communicate, to talk to herself, and to say all these strange things was not the language we used at home or school.
I argue that Ghazālī’s legacy is an imaginative work of tradition. In his own complex space, or the dihlīz, the intermediate space or the threshold space that Ghazālī identified—one with intersecting boundaries and heterogeneous notions of practices and time—he forged different narratives of religion. These narratives were the outcome of his encounter with both inherited and contemporary forms of knowledge.
Indispensable to Ghazālī’s project was the notion of a dialogical imagination: a sense that all meaning is part of a greater whole and that the different parts of meaning constantly interact with each other irrespective of whether those meanings are held by believer or unbeliever, agnostic or mystic, male or female, friend or foe.
In fact, it would not be incorrect to say that to a large extent Ghazālī partially resisted Parmenides’ insistence on the unity of thought and being, or the unity of knowledge and identity. In so doing, he dented the Platonic link between ontology and epistemology. But he was also, in my view, a courageous bricoleur [adapter of ideas from varied contexts in creating new wholes], one who creatively managed to put to work different ideas in a coherent framework for himself, for his society, and for the community that he served.
The Spaces In-Between: Dihliz (pronounced deh-leez in Persian and Urdu and dih-leez in Arabic) is the single word that describes the space between the house proper and the street.
This in-between space also describes my own existential position between several antinomies. Welcome to ebrahimmoosa.com, where I share about Islamic law, Muslim ethics and other related topics.
As scholar, writer and public intellectual my priority is to provoke critical thinking and questioning in matters of religion, politics, philosophy and society.
While tradition is important, I think of myself as a critical traditionalist. My work is animated by our quest to find meaning in our planetary existence, our dilemmas in our encounter with science and technology yet I am deeply indebted to the ancient wisdom of religion, philosophy, the humanities and the insights of the social sciences.
May Leku, her shop and the room she lived in not also represent such a dialogical space where various possibilities converge?
Laura Marks' Enfolding-Unfolding Aesthetics
Other frameworks come to mind from engagements with Islamic thought, art and architecture. These include Laura Marks' enfolding-unfolding aesthetics, an account of image as an interface to information and
information as an interface to the infinite, in Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art and various essays,
such as ''Infinity and Accident: Strategies of Enfoldment in Islamic Art and Computer Art'', ''Enfolding-Unfolding Aesthetics, or the Unthought at the Heart of Wood'' and ''Thinking Like a Carpet: Embodied Perception and Individuation in Algorithmic Media''.
In this context, Leku's vast collection of multifarious objects and animals may be understood as a network of images, of sensorially apprehended forms, forms accessible through sight, forms representing a cognitive network, a structure of understanding configured from a potentially infinite range of interpretive possibilities from which Leku has distilled the hermeneutic universe represented by her store.
Her store may thus be seen as a structure suggesting a limitless range of interpretive and combinatory forms which may be likened to efforts to organise knowledge, interpretive possibilities of the world, in terms of a potentially limitless networks of interrelations.
Moving beyond these networks, adapting an understanding of transdisciplinarity, the structure demonstrated by Leku's store may suggest questions about relationships between these combinatory capacities and the
combinatory structures represented by the cosmos, and by implication, questions of what enables the seemingly fortuitous symmetry that enables existence as a harmonious order of the disparate.
Bavine Nasser on Islamic Architecture
Leku's use of the space of her store and room imply a design consciousness, constructing relationships between space and its contents, maximising finite space in a manner that suggests infinity of presence of objects on account of their sheer volume and scale.
Falola's account of the store and its owner suggests its role for her as a sacred space, one that, adapting Bavine Nasser on Islamic architecture, prioritises ''unseen dimensions (bātin), which enfold visible dimensions (zāhir)'', visible dimensions represented by physical ''forms...perceived as conduits between the physical and spiritual realms and space as a symbol of presence (wujūd) [generating a situation in which] Seen and unseen (zāhir wa bātin) converge into one continuum, potentiating an experience of Oneness (Tawhīd) [ through a space unifying the ] designers’ creative and spiritual practices...'' (''Beyond the Veil of Form: Developing a Transformative Approach toward Islamic Sacred Architecture through Designing a Contemporary Sufi Centre'')