Machine summary:
Rather than being outdated ways of looking at the universe and our relationship to it, Chittick argues that traditional Islamic cosmological teachings are just as pertinent to the question of the self today as they were yesterday.
Key Terms: William Chittick, cosmology, scientism, anthropocosmic vision, microcosm, macrocosm Every student of Islamic thought is, in one way or another, familiar with William Chittick’s work.
5 A proper understanding of the self and its relationship to the cosmos, Chittick maintains, is the most important question at present, since it is the failure to understand both of these realities that have resulted in our current human predicament.
Perhaps the most significant reason for why the bifurcated conception of the cosmos reigns supreme is because contemporary cosmology qua discipline is, itself, confined to scientism, for while it conceives of a cosmic picture in which subject and object are not separated, it must eventually fall back on the mathematical and quantitative in its formulations.
"15 Thus, there is an intimate connection between the ways in which a subject experiences the world and the cosmic picture in which the experiencing subject lives: The Islamic philosophical tradition can only understand human beings in terms of the unity of the human world and the natural world.
Chittick argues: The governing insight of Islamic thinking, after the assertion of the unity and ultimacy of the Real, is that the true nature of the world is inaccessible to human beings without help.
7. Chittick, Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul: The Pertinence of Islamic Cosmology in the Modern World (Oxford: Oneworld, 2007), 83.