Virtues of Greatness in the Arabic Tradition 2019938273, 9780198842828

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Virtues of Greatness in the Arabic Tradition

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Virtues of Greatness in the Arabic Tradition SOPHIA VASALOU

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Sophia Vasalou 2019 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2019 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2019938273 ISBN 978–0–19–884282–8 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Contents Acknowledgements

Introduction 1. Greatness of Soul: The Reception of an Ancient Virtue Ancient Approaches: One Virtue, Many Configurations Arabic Approaches: Defining a Virtue The Ethics of Honour and Self-Esteem: Miskawayh The Ethics of Honour and Self-Esteem: Al-Ghazālī An Ethical Conflict and its Eclipse Concluding Remarks

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1 13 13 18 27 30 47 62

2. Greatness of Spirit: The Transfiguration of Heroic Virtue Philosophical Handbooks: Aspiring to the Greatest Things Mirrors for Princes: A Virtue Fit for the Great The Genealogy of a Virtue Between Greek and Persian Ethics Pre-Islamic Arab Culture and the Virtues of Heroes Broader Perspectives

65 65 84 97 108 118

Postlude: A Living Virtue? Situating Greatness of Spirit: A Second-Order Virtue? Emulation, Aspiration, Self-Reference Schematizing a Defence

131 134 139 147

Bibliography Index

157 167

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Acknowledgements This book began life in late 2015, a few months before I joined the University of Birmingham as a Birmingham Fellow in philosophical theology. From the start, it was connected to a broader collaborative project exploring the history of philosophical and theological approaches to the virtue of magnanimity. The fruits of this project will appear with Oxford University Press in the coming year as an edited volume under the title The Measure of Greatness: Philosophers on Magnanimity. I am grateful to a number of organizations whose financial support made it possible to organize a conference on that topic, which provided part of the context in which my thinking in this book developed. They include the British Academy, the Mind Association, and the British Society for the History of Philosophy. I benefited greatly from the questions and comments of participants in that conference, especially John Marenbon’s, and also from the feedback I received from audiences in a number of other talks I gave on the topic over the last couple of years, including at the conference of the British Association for Islamic Studies at the University of Chester, the annual conference of the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues in Oxford, the Munich School of Ancient Philosophy, the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and New York University Abu Dhabi. Finally, I owe special thanks to the two readers for the Press for their careful reading of the manuscript. Part 1 of the book includes material previously published in the Journal of Religious Ethics (Volume 45, Issue 4) under the title ‘An Ancient Virtue and Its Heirs: The Reception of Greatness of Soul in the Arabic Tradition’, pp. 688–731, Copyright © 2017 Journal of Religious Ethics, Inc., doi: 0.1111/jore.12197. The Postlude includes material previously published in Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review (Volume 56, Issue 2) under the title ‘Greatness of Spirit: A New Virtue for Our Taxonomies?’, pp. 291–316, Copyright © 2017 Canadian Philosophical Association, published by Cambridge University Press, doi: 10.1017/S0012217317000324. I am grateful to the publishers of both journals for allowing the material to be reproduced here in revised form.

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Introduction

When we survey the rich terrain of ancient ethics and the different visions of the best human character that flourished within it, there is one element— one virtue within these visions—that stands out as particularly distinctive. This is a virtue usually translated as ‘magnanimity’ or ‘greatness of soul’. For philosophical readers, its most familiar expression is the one it received at the hands of Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics. In an evocative portrait, Aristotle had enshrined the great-souled person or megalopsychos as an image of the highest ethical accomplishment. One might call it an image of greatness, as its very name suggests. Greatness of soul was the virtue of a person who possessed all the virtues to a great degree, and whose self-knowledge was reflected in an awareness of the ‘great things’ he was worthy of, above all honour. Looking back, one can already see this virtue occupying an important place among earlier writers, including Plato, who identified it as the philosophical virtue par excellence in the Republic. Under shifting names, under different configurations, the virtue would also feature prominently in the ethical outlooks of a number of other ancient thinkers and schools, notably the Stoics. In later times, it would continue life under a variety of guises among philosophical and theological thinkers, from Aquinas to Descartes, and from Hume to Emerson. Refracted in the virtue—its content shifting with them—were larger conceptions of the good life and the nature of human greatness. Some of the stages of this long history are more familiar to us than others. The sharpest spotlight has often fallen on Aristotle’s account, which has fascinated readers almost as much as it has divided them, and still attracts fresh readings and renegotiations. In recent times, there has been increasing attention to other episodes of its development, both within the ancient world and in later periods, enriching our perspective on the identity of the virtue and furnishing us with new material for chronicling the life it led over the course of intellectual history.¹ Yet to someone considering this broader ¹ See especially the forthcoming collection of essays, The Measure of Greatness: Philosophers on Magnanimity, ed. S. Vasalou (Oxford: Oxford University Press, in press).

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scene, what will be striking is that most of what we know about the virtue tends to be focused on the European context. Among the many lives this virtue has led in philosophical and theological history, one in particular remains conspicuously unwritten. This is the life it led in the Islamic world and the Arabic tradition. This may not be entirely surprising, given how many swathes of the vibrant intellectual history of the Islamic world still remain plunged in darkness. Yet there is much to suggest that such an investigation would be worthwhile. This was a world, as we know, that opened its doors wide to the ancient philosophical legacy early in its history, through a large-scale translation movement that saw an extraordinary array of Greek philosophical and scientific texts translated into Arabic between the eighth and tenth centuries. The response this legacy provoked among Muslim intellectuals was composite. Often amicable and appreciative—as Ibn Qutayba (d.889), one of the founders of Arabic letters, put it, ‘knowledge is the object of the believer, and it profits him whatever the source from which it may be drawn’—their engagement with this legacy was also marked by moments of tension and high conflict.² It is the conflict that has frequently shaped prevailing views of the place of philosophy in the Islamic world. In the past, such views have rallied around the spectacular career of the eleventh-century theologian Abū Hāmid al-Ghazālī (d.1111), and the truculent campaign he _ appears to have waged against the philosophers, notably in his celebrated work The Precipitance of the Philosophers.³ This picture has begun to loosen its scholarly grip, and a changing view of al-Ghazālī’s own relationship to philosophy has been among the many tributaries to its reversal. In recent times, several readers have redirected attention to al-Ghazālī’s indebtedness to and continued appreciation of the philosophical tradition.⁴

² See Ibn Qutayba, Springs of Information/ʿUyūn al-akhbār (Cairo: Matbaʿat Dār al-Kutub _ al-Misriyya, 1996), introduction, p. sīn. Ibn Qutayba himself had an ambivalent relationship to _ the philosophical tradition and its rationalistic methods. ³ Or Incoherence of the Philosophers, as it is often known. See Alexander Treiger, Inspired Knowledge in Islamic Thought: Al-Ghazālī’s Theory of Mystical Cognition and its Avicennian Foundation (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), for a defence of this alternative translation (App. B) and also, more broadly, for an account that contributes to the rereading of al-Ghazālī’s relationship to philosophy. ⁴ A key stimulus for such rereadings was Richard Frank’s seminal account of al-Ghazālī’s cosmology in Creation and the Cosmic System: al-Ghazâlî and Avicenna (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1992), but since that time they have gathered apace. For useful pointers to this scholarship, see Kenneth Garden, The First Islamic Reviver: Abū Hāmid al-Ghazālī and His Revival of the Religious Sciences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, _2014), 5–7.

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Many of the writings and rewritings of the status of philosophy in the Islamic world have focused, unsurprisingly, on issues of metaphysics. These were the issues that apparently channelled al-Ghazālī’s own discomfort in The Precipitance. What about ethics? If we were interested in building a more inclusive picture about the status of philosophy and calibrating more finely the balance of amity and conflict that characterized Muslim thinkers’ transactions with it, it is clear that this could not be achieved without taking into account these thinkers’ engagement with the ethical elements of the ancient tradition. Ethics has sometimes seemed an unpromising subject to commentators addressing the history of philosophy in the Islamic world. ‘Falsafa’, as Peter Adamson matter-of-factly notes in a conspectus of the Arabic tradition, ‘is not particularly known for its contributions to ethics.’⁵ The intellectual giants of Arabic philosophy, such as Avicenna (d.1037) and Averroes (d.1198), devoted their immense energies to other areas of philosophical inquiry and mostly turned a cold shoulder to ethical topics. Those works of philosophical ethics that were written sometimes seem to lack the intellectual élan that gives sparkle to works in other areas. Even among writers with overt religious commitments, conflict does not seem to be in the air to make it crackle. In his famous autobiography where he discusses his relationship to philosophy, notably, al-Ghazālī treats ethics with comparatively velvet gloves. Yet is it possible that by looking closer—and by posing more specific kinds of questions—we might get a different view? These larger perspectives and questions about the place of ancient philosophy in the Islamic world lie in the backdrop of the present book, which began life as an attempt to answer a simple question. Among the many ethical ideas that thinkers in the Islamic world confronted in the Greek texts that reached them in translation, how did they respond to this one—to the virtue of magnanimity or greatness of soul? This is a virtue that occupied a special place in the ancient tradition, embodying a conception not only of goodness, but indeed greatness. No less important, this was a conception that has often been viewed as unusually expressive of the distinctive sociocultural milieu in which it was articulated. How did Muslim thinkers make sense of this distinctive virtue? What story could one tell about the reception of this part of the ancient ethical tradition in the Islamic world? To the extent that the backdrop sketched out above—regarding the place of philosophy in the Islamic world—was shaped by questions about conflict, ⁵ Peter Adamson, ‘The Arabic tradition’, The Routledge Companion to Ethics, ed. John Skorupski (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 63.

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such a story would seem calculated to engage it especially strongly. For conflict has in fact been a salient theme in the trajectory this virtue has traced across philosophical and theological history. This conflict has been palpable among recent philosophers, even among votaries of Aristotle’s ethics, who have taken turns decrying his depiction of greatness of soul for a litany of moral evils. The focus of such criticisms has often been the flawed mode of self-evaluation and deficient humility exhibited by Aristotle’s exemplar. Yet this conflict has also been palpable in the reactions of earlier eras, not least within theological circles, as suggested by the history of the Christian engagement with the ancient tradition. The tension between greatness of soul or magnanimity and humility, as Jennifer Herdt remarks, ‘is often seen as capturing the basic tension between pagan and Christian conceptions of virtue’.⁶ This history of strained responses presents itself as an important foil for considering the Arabic reception. Yet if the present book began as an attempt to answer this simple question, its plot—and the questions that oriented it—was gradually forced to widen during its progress. On the one hand, it was soon clear that the story about the reception of this ancient virtue in the Islamic world was not quite what one would expect coming from the contexts just outlined. This, in fact, turned out to be a story in which the theme of conflict had a more complex place. It was a story that was as much about acts as it was about omissions, and as much about what was said as about what wasn’t (and why). Yet even more importantly for the overall plot, this was a story in which the identity of the subject, as in many good stories, underwent transformation in the telling. Because one of its surprises was that there are no less than two distinct Arabic concepts that can be identified as counterparts or interlocutors—to put it as broadly as possible—of the ancient virtue of greatness that was megalopsychia. These were concepts whose genealogies and trajectories converged but also diverged in crucial respects, and whose content involved an equally delicate pattern of convergences and divergences that marked them off as separate yet consanguineous. The focus of one of these concepts—kibar al-nafs, or ‘greatness of soul’— was on the right attitude to the self and its merits, and bore a strong affinity to Aristotle’s configuration of the virtue. The focus of the second—ʿizam _ ⁶ Jennifer Herdt, Putting on Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 40. For an exemplary expression of this view, see Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 170. Yet even within Christian theological history, the expression of this conflict has not always been straightforward. See my brief comments in chapter 1 below, and also my introduction to The Measure of Greatness.

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al-himma, which I translate as ‘greatness of spirit’—was on right desire or aspiration. Unlike the first concept, which ultimately appears to have failed to strike deep roots in Arabic-Islamic ethical culture, the second spread like wildfire through a number of genres of ethical writing and formed an important element of the visions of character excellence articulated in different kinds of ethical works. Recounting the fuller story about both concepts meant moving away from a simple account of the reception of Greek thought, and toward a more complex narrative about a broader family of moral concepts and larger region of moral thought. One might call this family ‘virtues of greatness’.⁷ While the biography of this family provides new insight into the Arabic reception of ancient ethics, it also has much to tell us about the sources and pattern of Islamic ethical thought more globally. The complexity of this biographical account is reflected in the structure of the present book, which unfolds in two parts. Let me briefly sketch them out. Part 1 focuses on the first virtue of greatness, which is also the virtue that can be most straightforwardly identified as the ‘heir’ of the ancient one. Surveying the ethical works of some of the most prominent Muslim thinkers influenced by ancient thought, notably al-Fārābī (d.950/1), Miskawayh (d.1030), and al-Ghazālī, we find that greatness of soul indeed makes an appearance in these works. It does so under the Arabic term kibar al-nafs, a calque of the Greek megalopsychia. In Miskawayh’s and al-Ghazālī’s classifications of the virtues and vices, this virtue is predominantly defined in terms that approximate to Aristotle’s account. The overall treatment the virtue receives among these writers appears all too cursory. This may seem surprising in view of its relative significance within the ancient tradition. It may also seem surprising in view of what we know about the chequered career of the virtue in other philosophical and theological (Christian) circles, particularly in its Aristotelian version, whose conflict with an ideal of humility has often come up for remark. Did thinkers in the Arabic tradition take a different view of this ideal—a different view of the ‘ethics of selfesteem’ and the right attitude to the self and its merits? I investigate this question by offering a substantive reading of Miskawayh’s, and, rather more concertedly, al-Ghazālī’s account of the ethics of esteem (honour) and self-esteem, drawing on a more extensive range of

⁷ This term has also been used recently by Daniel C. Russell, but in a rather different connection, referring to Aristotle’s virtues of magnificence and magnanimity: ‘Aristotle’s virtues of greatness’, in Virtue and Happiness: Essays in Honour of Julia Annas, ed. Rachana Kamtekar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

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works. There are delicate interpretive issues to be navigated in piecing together a confident account of al-Ghazālī’s ethical commitments in this context. Yet my conclusion is that, just like philosophical and theological critics of Aristotelian magnanimity, al-Ghazālī privileges the virtue of humility and denigrates the status of honour as a good. The virtue of magnanimity that al-Ghazālī incorporates in his tables of the virtues thus appears to be in profound conflict with his considered ethical viewpoint— indeed, with what has a serious claim to being viewed as an ideal central to Islamic religious morality. Why, then, does al-Ghazālī (like Miskawayh) pass this conflict over in silence, leaving it to his readers to read between its lines? I end with some suggestions about where the answer to this puzzle might lie, and what it may have to tell us about these thinkers’ engagement with ancient philosophy more broadly. The first part of the book may seem to lead to a disappointing denouement. That larger-than-life virtue which had formed one of the brightest jewels in the crown for Aristotle and other ancient thinkers enters the Islamic world only to fade away; the foreign graft never takes. Yet this, as Part 2 of the book aims to show, is not the end of the story of the ‘virtues of greatness’ in the Arabic tradition. There was another concept belonging to the same region of moral thought that led a more flourishing and full-blooded life within this tradition, namely greatness of spirit (ʿizam _ al-himma). Crucially, this virtue appears not only in philosophical treatises, but also in a number of other genres of ethical writing, including mirrors for princes and works of etiquette or literature (adab). Unlike the first concept, which thematized the right attitude to the self and its merits, this second concept thematizes right desire or aspiration, and some of its chief architects parse it more specifically as a foundational virtue of aspiration to moral virtue, or indeed moral greatness. I begin by documenting its development in works of a philosophical character, focusing on the works of the tenth-century Christian philosopher and theologian Yahyā ibn ʿAdī (d.974) and the eleventh-century religious _ and literary scholar al-Rāghib al-Isfahānī. I then turn to plot its development _ in mirrors for princes, drawing on a number of prominent representatives of this genre. There are important continuities between the ways the virtue is articulated across these genres, though also some noteworthy discontinuities. There are likewise suggestive comparisons to be drawn with approaches to the virtue of greatness of soul familiar to us from broader philosophical history. Taken together, these observations invite a question about the intellectual origins of the virtue. This genealogical story turns out to be a

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marvellously complex one. While the influence of the Greek tradition cannot be wholly excluded, a stronger argument can be made for the influence of the Persian cultural tradition and, more intriguingly and more convincingly, the influence of pre-Islamic Arab culture. ‘Greatness of spirit’ was in fact one of the epithets applied to the Arab hero of pre-Islamic times. This heroic ideal is reconfigured in telling ways after it is transplanted into the soil of the Islamic faith and exposed to the effects of other intellectual traditions. Against this landscape, one can place on new footing the question about the relationship of the virtues of greatness to Islamic religious morality. Questions about how the approaches taken in the Arabic tradition relate to developments in broader philosophical history form a running theme in Parts 1 and 2 of the book. In the book’s concluding Postlude, this philosophical concern takes a different, and less historical, form. The virtue of greatness I identified as a more prominent and distinctive element of the ideals of character articulated in the Arabic tradition, greatness of spirit, may have much to tell us about the content of these ideals, and about the intellectual processes that shaped them. Yet does this historical lesson exhaust the interest that contemporary readers might take in this particular ideal? Is there anything in this ideal to engage the attention of contemporary philosophers of the virtues? In seeking to answer these questions, I consider two different ways of construing the identity of this virtue: one as a meta-virtue, another as a substantive virtue that has an affinity with the virtue of ‘emulousness’ as theorized in recent philosophical work on the virtues. It is the latter construal that enables us to pick out the distinctive commitments that constitute the virtue, above all its emphasis on open-ended moral aspiration. Many philosophers of the virtues will find these commitments contentious. I outline a number of ways in which this virtue can be defended. Yet the greatest value of engaging with this ideal of character may lie in the very space for debate it opens and in persuading us that this debate is worthwhile. In framing the project of this book, I have spoken of a ‘family’ of concepts, and of different virtues that can be viewed as ‘counterparts’ or ‘interlocutors’ of the ancient virtue of greatness of soul. The question may be raised: how exactly is such talk to be understood, and how much weight is it intended to carry? Put differently: what kind of claim of kinship is being made here, and is it sufficiently robust to ensure that this is a book with a coherent subject—a book about a single subject? Unless the two ‘separate yet consanguineous’ virtues that form the focus of this book can be seen to be united by a robust relation, what sense does it make to treat them as part of a single story?

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These are interesting questions, and they point on to larger questions about what it means to say that one concept is ‘like’ another, or an ‘instance’ of another, or of a larger ‘family’ or ‘kind’. What is particularly worth bearing in mind is that notions like ‘being the same concept’ or ‘being the same kind of concept’ are not fenced off by crystal-clear boundaries which would lend themselves to crystal-clear replies to such questions. Yet as in the literal foundation of the metaphor of ‘families’ and ‘family relations’, this does not prevent us from being able to intuitively recognize resemblances and pick out patterns when faced with actual cases. Thinking about many of the standard virtues, we naturally assume that we have a sufficient grasp of their conceptual contours that there would be no insuperable difficulty in recognizing them even in new contexts—at the limit, in other cultures whose moral language is unfamiliar to us and whose fabric of ethical thought we are newly confronted with. To be sure, this kind of cross-cultural identification is not entirely unproblematic, even when we think of standard virtues such as courage or compassion. ‘It is a difficult question,’ as Daniel Russell points out, whether ‘the courage of a Quaker is the same as the courage of a Samurai’.⁸ Yet from a methodological viewpoint, the confidence that such cross-cultural identification of the virtues is possible would seem to be underpinned by a universalism that has been tightly bound up with an ethics of character, and that in turn is wedded to the naturalistic terms in which this ethics has been commonly developed. This kind of universalism, as Martha Nussbaum suggested in an influential essay, shapes Aristotle’s approach to the virtues. Taken most simply, the virtues and vices represent better and worse ways of handling universal spheres of experience which all human beings share and which necessarily confront them with the choice of acting in one way or another.⁹ Yet this point would now appear to add fresh impetus to the question raised above about ‘families’ and ‘kinds’. Because the virtue of magnanimity or greatness of soul has often been felt to constitute a very special case set against the other virtues that feature in Aristotle’s work and that of his philosophical successors—virtues like courage, temperance, generosity, or justice. It has frequently been described, and decried, as a virtue steeped in the specificities of its time, encoding (in one phrasing) ‘an attitude to one’s

⁸ Daniel Russell, Practical Intelligence and the Virtues (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 173. ⁹ See Martha C. Nussbaum, ‘Non-relative virtues: an Aristotelian approach’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 13 (1988), 32–53.

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own worth that is more Greek than universal’.¹⁰ It is the flagrant exception to the apparent universalism of Aristotle’s ethics—the Trojan Horse, for some, that betrays its contingent cultural roots, serving up the image of the Athenian gentleman in one view (Alasdair MacIntyre) and the repugnant relics of the Homeric hero in another.¹¹ Faced with a virtue of such thick cultural identity, what chance does the notion of a broader ‘kind’ or ‘family’— a family of which this virtue would be only one member among others, and to which virtues articulated in other ethical cultures might be discovered to belong—have of getting off the ground? From this perspective, it would seem that one could only intelligibly speak of this virtue as it lived and breathed in this particular cultural and textual tradition. This would have crucial implications for the way we understand our ability to identify the concept, yielding an emphasis on genetic descent in which the metaphor of ‘family relations’ would come to its narrowest fruition. Our ability to recognize that a given concept found among particular thinkers represents the same concept as the one at work in the ancient tradition would depend on our ability to recognize these thinkers as heirs and participants of this tradition. Isn’t this genetic continuity, it might be said, foundational to our ability to identify Aquinas’ notion of magnanimitas, Descartes’s générosité, or Hume’s ‘greatness of mind’ as instances of the very same concept? On these terms, a story about the life that the virtue of greatness of soul led in the Islamic world could only make sense as a story about the reception of the Greek textual tradition. Yet, on the one hand, it is important to observe that, even within that philosophical tradition which is connected by a visible backbone of genetic descent, this virtue had a far from unified identity. It was a virtue, for one, whose conceptual traits changed over time. Aquinas’ magnanimity, to take the most obvious example, is in some ways a dramatic revision of Aristotle’s, making way, among other things, for the element of humility that the latter has been accused of disregarding. Even within the ancient context, different thinkers approached it in a variety of ways. If Aristotle, for example, articulated it as a virtue of self-evaluation concerned with honour, prominent Stoic thinkers articulated it as a virtue codifying the attitude of indifference to external goods that epitomized their moral approach. We should not ¹⁰ Ibid., 38; cf. 34, referencing the remarks of Bernard Williams and Stuart Hampshire. ¹¹ For MacIntyre’s view, see After Virtue, 3rd edn (London: Duckworth, 2007), 182, and A Short History of Ethics (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 75–7; for the second point, which is in fact closely linked to MacIntyre’s, see Nancy Sherman, ‘Common sense and uncommon virtue’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 13 (1988), 102–3.

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thus overlook the plurality of ways in which this concept was articulated in the ancient context, or indeed the plurality of terms through which it was expressed (Plato’s megaloprepeia, Aristotle’s megalopsychia, Longinus’ megalophrosyne, Cicero’s magnitudo animi). If in fact we look far back enough to take in the Homeric roots of the concept—as Aristotle himself invites us to do in the Posterior Analytics—our sense of the conceptual and linguistic boundaries of the concept will be loosened still further.¹² This is not to deny that many of these articulations had important conceptual ingredients in common. As Arthur Lovejoy noted in a different context, intellectual innovation is often less a matter of the emergence of entirely novel elements than of a new patterning or rearrangement of existing ones.¹³ Many of the ancient configurations of greatness of soul can be seen as different ways of patterning or balancing a limited number of existing elements. These notably include an attitude to self-worth, and an attitude to external goods, including honour. The way such elements were patterned by particular philosophers—a high sense of self-worth as an individual or a human being? attachment to honour or indifference?— reflects larger variances in ethical outlook. Yet the differences are sufficiently real to suggest that the notion of a ‘family’ of concepts—a family constituted by an intersecting pattern of likenesses and unlikenesses exhibited over time—may be required even in approaching an intellectual tradition sharing the same broad pathway of genealogical descent.¹⁴ Once this is granted, the possibility of opening up this family to virtues articulated outside this cultural tradition begins to look less unimaginable. For an example of what such cross-cultural identification might look like, one might consider the case of the Icelandic sagas. In an essay written some time ago, Kristján Kristjánsson proposed that it is possible to recognize a substantial affinity between the concept of greatness of soul articulated by Aristotle and a concept that is central to the moral code presented in the sagas, the mikilmenni—variously translated as ‘great men’, the ‘great-hearted’, or ‘great-minded’. Like Aristotle’s great-souled men, the mikilmenni combine great virtue with a strong sense of self-esteem and awareness of their merits.

¹² In Homer, a common heroic epithet is megaletor. For Aristotle’s remarks, see Posterior Analytics II.13.97b15–25. ¹³ Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 1964), 3–4. ¹⁴ Christopher Gill’s suggestion that the Stoic conception of magnanimity may have developed independently from Aristotle’s adds an interesting twist to this point. See his ‘Stoic magnanimity’, in The Measure of Greatness, ed. Vasalou.

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They are likewise flanked by two vicious extremes, the ‘small-minded’ and the ‘overly ambitious’. Given the heroic roots and overtones of the ancient virtue, there are also suggestive comparisons to be made with saga morality, with its heroic aspect.¹⁵ If this account is correct, here we have two virtue terms which are connected by sufficient similarities in conceptual content for us to be able to identify them as cross-cultural ‘counterparts’. This is one possible model for how such identification could happen, though just how heavily we can lean on this particular instance will ultimately depend on our approach to complex questions about the relative importance of indigenous and foreign elements (notably the influence of Latin literature) in the sagas.¹⁶ It is an interesting question how much cultural luck (to coin a term) is required for felicitous isomorphisms of this sort to emerge. Might this kind of virtue concept have a strong probability of emerging naturally within certain types of social structures or stages of social development? If it did, this would have significant implications for the way we think about the relationship between what is culturally contingent and universal in the concept. In the absence of obvious isomorphic terms, there would still be another possibility if our interest lay in carrying out a cross-cultural ethical conversation. We might instead undertake a comparison not at the level of the virtue term, but of what I earlier described as its core elements or stakes. In the case of our specific virtue, this might mean investigating, for example, whether in a particular ethical culture similar stances were adopted on stakes such as the appropriate attitude to self-worth or to external goods, and whether concordances in ethical stances can be discerned regardless of whether these concordances were codified in a single corresponding term. ¹⁵ Kristján Kristjánsson, ‘Liberating moral traditions: saga morality and Aristotle’s megalopsychia’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 1 (1998), 397–422. ¹⁶ This has been the subject of some debate. As Margaret Clunies Ross notes, the simple earlier view that ‘native traditions taught the Icelanders what to write, but foreign literature taught them how to write it’ has given way among saga scholars to a more nuanced understanding of the interplay between indigenous and foreign traditions: The Cambridge Introduction to the Old Norse-Icelandic Saga (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 48. See Annette Lassen, ‘Indigenous and Latin literature’, The Routledge Research Companion to the Medieval Icelandic Sagas, ed. Ármann Jakobsson and Sverrir Jakobsson (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2017), for a helpful overview that highlights the importance of Latin literature as a background for the sagas while also underscoring the challenges of mapping this relationship in detail. The view that there are significant resemblances between Aristotle’s ethics and saga morality and that these are not to be explained genetically—reflecting, rather, ‘the spontaneous combustion of the human spirit . . . giving off identical heat, light, and power in places remotely separated in space and time’—was clearly voiced by one of the earlier scholars to comment on the affinity. See Sveinbjorn Johnson, ‘Old Norse and ancient Greek ideals’, Ethics 49 (1938), 18–36, 36 quoted.

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This is not the type of project I have pursued here. My investigation in this book has been structured around virtue terms, rather than stakes, though a focus on stakes also forms a building block of my discussion, notably in Part 1, which considers al-Ghazālī’s substantive attitude to the stakes of esteem and self-esteem as a context for his engagement with the specific virtue of greatness of soul. There are certainly many interesting comparative stories waiting to be told about the approaches taken by Muslim thinkers to some of the other elements thematized by this virtue, and to the broader ethical threads that entered into its skein—to questions about the importance of external goods, about the role of luck in the good life, or about the relation between dependence and the aspiration to selfsufficiency. The results of certain comparisons seem more predictable than others. The notion of fortune or luck, for example—such a potent element in ancient philosophers’ confrontations with the fragility of the human good— could hardly be approached in the same way by thinkers steeped in a theistic world-view in which God’s determining influence on all events occupied a pivotal place. The attitude to such events, by the same token, could not be a proud avowal of independence but a sense of dependence embraced as a key moral value. For my purposes, it will be enough if the above has opened up the concept of our focal virtue sufficiently to enable us to entertain the possibility of a larger family of concepts—a family of which greatness of soul, as developed in the ancient tradition, might not form the only member. That the Arabic virtue of greatness of spirit has a good claim to be included within that larger family is a more specific suggestion which can only be borne out through the detailed story that follows, which will allow the pattern of affinities and resemblances to stand out. To this task I now turn.

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1 Greatness of Soul The Reception of an Ancient Virtue

Among the many ethical ideas that thinkers in the Islamic world encountered in the Greek texts that reached them in translation, how did they respond to—and make sense of—the ideal of magnanimity or greatness of soul? A virtue codifying a conception not only of goodness but indeed of greatness, it has often been regarded as one of the most distinctive elements of ancient ethics. In its best-known version, Aristotle’s, it has also been regarded as the element most redolent of the social and cultural contingencies of the world in which it took shape. What story can one tell about the reception of this aspect of the ancient ethical tradition in the Islamic world? The aim of the investigation that follows (Part 1 of the book) is to answer this question. Before we launch into the main story, we need to first say something about the identity of the ancient virtue of greatness of soul, and about the textual sources that gave thinkers in the Islamic world access to it.

Ancient Approaches: One Virtue, Many Configurations So what was greatness of soul, and how did ancient philosophers understand it? For many readers, the primary reference point for answering this question has been the account of the virtue offered by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics. There are certainly good reasons for giving this account a central place in our engagement with the virtue and our effort to map its meaning and conceptual frontiers. Yet in opening this discussion, it will also be important to take a wider view, one that sensitizes us as much to the openness of those frontiers as to their element of fixity. Because since its earliest philosophical beginnings, greatness of soul is a virtue that has not enjoyed perfect unity or stability but has harboured competing tendencies and provoked different articulations, no less within the ancient context than in later philosophical history. Even Aristotle’s account in the Nicomachean

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Ethics has frequently been read as an attempt to adjudicate the different meanings the virtue carried in his own time, as he had outlined them in an oft-cited passage of his Posterior Analytics.¹ The different possibilities harboured by the virtue are already visible from its earliest philosophical appearances. In the Republic, Plato names greatness of soul (using the term megaloprepeia) as one of the chief qualities stipulated in the philosopher, and in that context he forges a strong link between the virtue and the pursuit of intellectual activity. ‘Will a thinker high-minded enough to study all time and all being consider human life to be something important?’ (486a; cf. 487a).² Offering his own account one generation later, Aristotle conspicuously avoids this link, implicitly tying greatness of soul to the perfection of practical rather than intellectual virtue. Greatness of soul, as it emerges in the Nicomachean Ethics, may be characterized as a virtue of self-knowledge or self-evaluation. In Aristotle’s well-thumbed formulation, it is a quality that belongs to ‘the sort of person that thinks himself, and is, worthy of great things’ (1123b1–2).³ Packed into this remark is an understanding of greatness of soul as a virtue incorporating a relationship between three terms: a person’s actual worth, his judgement about his worth, and (his judgement about) what his worth entitles him to. The basis of this person’s worth is his virtue or excellence. ‘The truly great-souled man must be good,’ Aristotle writes, indeed superlatively so: ‘greatness in respect of each of the excellences would seem to belong to the great-souled person’ (1123b30). That to which it entitles him is honour, which is the greatest of all external goods, the one we even bestow upon the gods. The great-souled man is the person of great moral character who, knowing his greatness, knows the recognition it entitles him to receive from others. Greatness of soul is thus a virtue principally concerned with honour. This thumbnail sketch of Aristotle’s view is worth holding on to. Yet for the account that follows, it is also important to attend to some of the nuances which shape its specific identity, and which open out to different ways of configuring the latter. The passage of the Posterior Analytics just referred to ¹ For discussion of this point (and of Aristotle’s view of greatness of soul more generally) see Neil Cooper, ‘Aristotle’s crowning virtue’, Apeiron 22 (1989); Michael Pakaluk, ‘The meaning of Aristotelian magnanimity’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 26 (2004), 269–70; and Roger Crisp, ‘Greatness of soul’, in The Blackwell Guide to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, ed. Richard Kraut (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 169–70. ² I rely on the translation of the Republic by G. M. A. Grube, rev. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992). ³ I draw on the translation of the Nicomachean Ethics by Christopher Rowe with commentary by Sarah Broadie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), with occasional modifications.

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offers a good handle for the purpose. There (II.13.97b15–25) Aristotle had identified two key semantic strands of the virtue—‘intolerance of insults’, notably exemplified by Achilles, and ‘indifference to fortune’, notably exemplified by Socrates. In crafting his own positive account in the Nicomachean Ethics, he had preserved the first meaning by connecting greatness of soul to honour, but he had effected a critical revision when it came to framing the strength of attachment that honour should arouse. The great-souled man should only be ‘moderately pleased’ when he receives the great honour he merits; for it is after all only his due, and ‘there could be no honour worthy of complete excellence’ (1124a6–8). And while his account focused on honour, he had also preserved the second meaning by tying greatness of soul to a similar stance extending beyond honour to encompass all external goods, one that crucially mitigated the attitude of Socratic indifference by the same emphasis on moderation. The great-souled man will be ‘moderately disposed in relation to wealth, political power, and any kind of good or bad fortune’, and he will ‘neither be over-pleased at good fortune nor overdistressed at bad’ (1124a13–16). He is someone ultimately little given to strong responses, whether of dismay or admiration: his sense of his own greatness is partly expressed in the sense that ‘nothing is great’ (1125a3). These moves would be negotiated differently at the hands of other thinkers and other philosophical schools, resulting in competing configurations of the virtue. The dominant Stoic approach notably reflected the more trenchant stance these thinkers adopted on the overarching question of the value of external goods for the ethical life and the role of luck in the human good. Greatness of soul would thus be inscribed among them as a virtue embodying the distinctive Stoic ideal of confronting vicissitudes of fortune with equanimity, affirming the human ability to lead a life of virtue in the face of such vicissitudes and treating external goods with a contempt that revived Socrates’ more categorical indifference. Cicero provided a key expression of this view in his On Duties when he described greatness of spirit as lying in ‘disdain for things external, in the conviction that a man should admire, should choose, should pursue, nothing except what is honourable and seemly, and should yield to no man, nor to agitation of the spirit, nor to fortune’ (Book 1, 66).⁴

⁴ I draw on the translation by M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). For further discussion of the Stoic approach to the virtue, see also René Antoine Gauthier, Magnanimité: l’idéal de la grandeur dans la philosophie paїenne et dans la théologie chrétienne (Paris: J. Vrin, 1951), pt 1, ch. 4; Gill, ‘Stoic magnanimity’.

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He also contributed another important element when fleshing out his reference to the pursuit of ‘what is honourable’ as an imperative to ‘do deeds which are great, certainly, and above all beneficial’. In doing so, he foregrounded an aspect of the virtue that has seemed more muted in some of its configurations: its concern not merely with passive receipt (of honour) or static endurance (of blows of fate) but with active aspiration (to great and virtuous achievements, through which honour may then be deserved).⁵ ‘Nature brought us forth magnanimous,’ as Seneca puts it in one of his Epistles, and just as she ‘implanted in certain animals a spirit of ferocity, in others craft, in others timidity, so she has gifted us with an aspiring and lofty spirit, which prompts us to seek a life of the greatest honour’ (Epistle 104, 23).⁶ The admiration of virtue expressed in Cicero’s remark was implicitly linked to an oft-voiced admiration directed to the human subject in its ability to realize such lofty values, one that preserved Aristotle’s emphasis on self-evaluation while delicately deflecting it from the individual person (the bearer of this or that actualized character) to the human subject in its higher capacity to actualize certain ethical and intellectual possibilities. ‘I am too great, was born to too great a destiny’, Seneca declares with characteristic hauteur in one of his Epistles, ‘to be my body’s slave’ (Epistle 65, 21); and again: ‘Reflect that nothing except the soul is worthy of wonder; for to the soul, if it be great, naught is great’ (Epistle 8, 5).⁷ This selective survey already suggests that greatness of soul was a virtue containing a number of conceptual strands, strands that could be negotiated in ways that yielded divergent articulations. While allowing for the deep internal relations between these strands, we might heuristically pick out the following three: one incorporating an attitude to the self (a judgement of self-worth), another incorporating an attitude to external goods (honour but also good and bad luck more broadly), and arguably a third incorporating an attitude to (virtuous) activity. It is the reach and significance of these strands, taken together, that is reflected in the remark made by the great

⁵ The element of activity seems muted, for example, in Aristotle, who paints a ponderous picture of the great-souled person, describing him as ‘slow to act’ and ‘a doer of few things, but great ones’ (NE 1124b24–6). Yet this interpretation has been contested by other readers, who highlight the great-souled man’s quality as a benefactor to his community, thereby folding the distance between Aristotle’s account and Cicero’s. See, for example, Ryan P. Hanley, ‘Aristotle on the greatness of greatness of soul’, History of Political Thought, 23 (2002), 1–20. ⁶ I draw on the translation by Richard M. Gummere—Ad Lucilium Epistolae Morales, 3 vols (London: William Heinemann; New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1918–25)—with modifications. ⁷ I draw on different translations of Seneca’s Epistles here, respectively by Robin Campbell (London: Penguin, 2004) and by Gummere.

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French scholar René Antoine Gauthier that greatness of soul was the battleground on which nothing less than ‘the relationship between human beings and the world’ was decided.⁸ In moving to the Arabic context, this schematic overview of the plural elements and identities of the virtue is worth keeping in mind. It is a schematization, to repeat, and far from a nuanced account of the full range of ways in which the virtue was approached in the ancient world. It leaves out of view, certainly, the more eclectic moves that would be made by philosophers working in later Hellenistic times, in whose thought diverse intellectual influences—Platonic, Peripatetic, and Stoic—would interweave to form a host of intricate new patterns. This point is especially relevant in light of the textual sources that can be identified as having provided the chief means of access to the virtue within the Islamic world. For these include, on the one hand, some of the major works of Greek ethics in which greatness of soul formed a significant element. On this list one would above all place the Nicomachean Ethics, available in Arabic translation from around the second half of the ninth century. The same applies (though to a lesser extent given its more limited engagement with the virtue) to Plato’s Republic, available not as an integral text but in the form of short quotations, excerpts, and abridgements from a similar time. Yet these sources also include a small flotilla of texts of varying length, many characterized by a complicated textual history and elusive authorship, whose philosophical identity was the product of various kinds of intellectual syncretism. One of these is the Summa Alexandrinorum, an epitome of the Nicomachean Ethics whose provenance has been the subject of extensive speculation, with scholars debating whether it should be seen as a translation from the Greek or as a text originally composed in Arabic. Several parts of this work, including significantly the discussion of greatness of soul, are only preserved in Latin. Other notable texts in this category include the pseudoAristotelian De Virtutibus et vitiis, interestingly extant in two Arabic translations, and an additional ‘seventh book’ incorporated into the Arabic version of the Nicomachean Ethics, which according to one conjecture may derive from a lost commentary by Porphyry. They also include a short treatise on ethics by a certain ‘Nicolaus’ which was found with the manuscript of the Arabic translation of the Nicomachean Ethics.⁹ These ⁸ Gauthier, Magnanimité, 303. ⁹ For this textual background, good starting points are Douglas M. Dunlop’s introduction to The Arabic Version of the Nicomachean Ethics, ed. Anna A. Akasoy and Alexander Fidora

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short texts achieved wide circulation in the Arabic-speaking world among authors approaching ethical subjects on a philosophical footing. Although their treatment of greatness of soul does not compare to Aristotle’s in either depth or length—a reflection, partly, of their overall brevity and epitomic character—it is a theme in all of them.

Arabic Approaches: Defining a Virtue There will be more to say about some of these sources and the uses made of them by different authors as our discussion unfolds. Yet the above has offered an overview in nuce of the identity of greatness of soul and the routes by which thinkers in the Islamic world might have come to learn about it. In doing so, it has also pulled into view some of the grounds for the ambivalence with which this virtue has been met by numerous thinkers of different times, and for the mixture of fascination and repugnance its larger-than-life éclat has provoked. The impossible hauteur captured by Seneca’s turn of phrase—‘I am too great’—precipitates a sense of discomfort that has typically pitted itself less against the Stoic casting of the virtue than against its more individualistic Aristotelian counterpart. Responding to features that came into view above, as well as to some that didn’t, Aristotle’s modern readers have castigated his portrait of the great-souled man on a number of grounds. They have expressed dismay at his arrogance and almost stagnant sense of selfsatisfaction; at his leonine inability to rouse himself for anything but the greatest deeds, being ‘slow to act’ and ‘a doer of few things, but great ones’ (NE 1124b24–26); and at his ungratefulness and inability to tolerate and acknowledge debts, being the kind of person who feels ‘ashamed’ to receive benefits and prefers to forget those he has (NE 1124b9–15)—an attitude that ties in with the heightened concern with ‘self-sufficiency’ Aristotle imputes to him (NE 1125a12). Taking such criticisms together, it may seem little wonder that greatness of soul has enjoyed the dubious distinction of

(Leiden: Brill, 2005), 1–109; Manfred Ullmann, Die Nikomachische Ethik des Aristoteles in arabischer Übersetzung, 2 vols (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2011); Mauro Zonta, ‘Les Éthiques. Tradition syriaque et arabe’, in Dictionnaire des Philosophes Antiques: Supplément, ed. Richard Goulet with Jean-Marie Flamand and Maroun Aouad (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 2003), 191–98; and Anna Akasoy, ‘The Arabic and Islamic reception of the Nicomachean Ethics’, in The Reception of Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. Jon Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 85–106.

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figuring as ‘the relativists’ favorite target’, as Martha Nussbaum notes—the one virtue on Aristotle’s list that reeks of cultural contingency, implying ‘in its very name an attitude to one’s own worth that is more Greek than universal’.¹⁰ Several of these qualms resonate with ones that have historically animated the Christian reception of this virtue, set in the horizon of the broader Christian engagement with pagan ethics. In spearheading this engagement, Augustine himself had not singled out greatness of soul as an intrinsically reprehensible trait. His few references to the virtue in the City of God, for example, show him not so much contesting its status as a virtue as contesting its proper application, in a way that presupposes its acceptance as a virtue or term of praise.¹¹ Yet many of the faults he found with pagan ethics could be said to be enshrined in this virtue, including the preoccupation with honour or glory, the aspiration to self-sufficiency (present even more starkly in the Stoic construction of the virtue), and the vice of pride that orders everything to the self, to the extent that the great-souled man’s ‘consciousness of his own moral worth infects his motivation’.¹² A sense of unease with the ethical credentials of greatness of soul certainly stood in the backdrop of one of the best-known engagements with the virtue in the medieval Christian context, Aquinas’ account in the Summa Theologiae, which reconfigured it in ways that served to embed it more harmoniously into the Christian ethical standpoint. This conflict, it is worth observing, was not necessarily brought out by Christian thinkers in the explicit manner one might expect coming from the more openly polemical reactions of modern readers. As Jennifer Herdt notes, for example, even in the case of Aquinas there is room for debate whether his reconstruction of the virtue was ‘intentionally subversive’ or

¹⁰ Nussbaum, ‘Non-relative virtues’, 38. For an overview of some of the most common criticisms of Aristotle’s megalopsychos, see Crisp, ‘Aristotle on greatness of soul’, 169 ff., and Howard J. Curzer, ‘Aristotle’s much-maligned megalopsychos’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 69 (1991), 131–51. ¹¹ A good example are his remarks in the context of arguing against the idea that suicide displays this virtue. ‘Greatness of spirit is not the right term to apply’ to a person who killed himself to avoid hardship or injustice; ‘we rightly ascribe greatness to a spirit that has the strength to endure a life of misery instead of running away from it, and to despise the judgement of men.’ At the same time, Augustine opens greatness of spirit to a kind of fallibility that will certainly seem remarkable coming from Aristotle’s view of the virtue as presupposing consummate goodness, as suggested by his remark that Theombrotus, who is said to have killed himself to attain eternal life sooner, ‘showed greatness rather than goodness’. See Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin, 2003), Book I, §22, 32–3. ¹² Herdt, Putting on Virtue, 50; and see more broadly her discussion in ch. 2.

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merely ‘an effort to employ a hermeneutic of charity’.¹³ Indeed, as John Marenbon has shown in a panoramic survey of the reception of magnanimity among a number of prominent medieval thinkers, those approaching the Christian context with expectations of conflict are likely to be surprised by the discovery that magnanimity was integrated into the Christian scheme as readily as most other virtues. This, he suggests, was ‘facilitated by the contingencies of textual transmission’, as the account of the virtue that was liable to provoke the greatest tension, Aristotle’s, became available only in the middle of the thirteenth century. By that time, Christian thinkers had already assimilated the Stoic conception of the virtue, which was not vulnerable to the same problems. Even after the arrival of the Nicomachean Ethics, far from precipitating a dramatic clash, any tensions were ‘resolved, or side-stepped or made manifest below the surface’, though there were also instances in which this conflict broke out more openly, as illustrated by the interesting case of Dante.¹⁴ Yet even if muted or implicit, the tensions were not entirely invisible. In the Summa, notably, the question whether magnanimity conflicts with humility comes up as an express objection that Aquinas articulates and confronts. The conflict steps more directly into the open among later Christian authors. When the eighteenth-century thinker John Witherspoon, for example, sets out to recommend magnanimity as a ‘Christian virtue’ against the backdrop of David Hume’s and Adam Smith’s earlier approaches, his engagement with the virtue is framed by an overt concern with the problems it appears to pose from a Christian viewpoint, and by a worry that the ‘worldly cast’ of the virtue and the standards of merit that govern it are such that ‘the gospel seems to stand directly opposed to it’.¹⁵ Thus, whether muted or overt, conflict has been a central theme in the reception of this virtue in both philosophical and theological circles. Coming from this background, one can only approach the Arabic-Islamic encounter with this virtue with a sense of high moment. The sense of moment will seem higher still if we consider that, in the Arabic case, this is an encounter that unfolded on very different terms—more abruptly and less organically— than in the case of the Christian tradition, which developed in a cultural ¹³ Herdt, ‘Strengthening hope for the greatest things: Aquinas’s redemption of magnanimity’, in The Measure of Greatness, ed. Vasalou. ¹⁴ John Marenbon, ‘Magnanimity, Christian ethics and paganism in the Latin Middle Ages’, in The Measure of Greatness, ed. Vasalou. ¹⁵ See the discussion in Ryan P. Hanley, ‘Magnanimity and modernity: greatness of soul and greatness of mind in the Enlightenment’, in The Measure of Greatness, ed. Vasalou.

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environment still suffused with the values of the ancient world. In the Arabic case, by contrast, this encounter has the character of a sharper linguistic and cultural confrontation, one more calculated to capture our imagination and put us in the mind of the potential for collision. It is the sudden encounter between a language and cultural domain that contains the concept of megalopsychia and one that doesn’t, and needs to find the resources for accommodating it. Where to watch for this encounter? One of the first places we will think to look is the work of al-Fārābī (d.950/1), who stands out as one of the few major Arab philosophers to have taken an interest in the normative parts of the philosophical curriculum. Al-Fārābī’s greatest achievements in this connection lie in political philosophy rather than ethics, and in his political works it is Plato’s rather than Aristotle’s influence that figures most visibly. Greatness of soul appears at two significant junctures of his writings, once in his celebrated political work On the Perfect State and once in the shorter work The Attainment of Happiness. In both cases it appears as part of a list of qualities required in the philosopher-king which mirrors the list Plato had given in the Republic (486a, 487a), using the term megaloprepeia. The adjectival Arabic term is kabīr al-nafs, which is a direct calque from the Greek (literally, ‘large of soul’). The philosopher, al-Fārābī writes in On the Perfect State, ‘should be great-souled (kabīr al-nafs) and fond of honour, his soul being naturally above (takburu nafsuhu) everything ugly and base’.¹⁶ One point to notice is that greatness of soul, which in Plato’s discussion had borne a strong link to intellectual activity, is here connected to ethical excellence and concern for honour in a way that gravitates more heavily toward Aristotle’s account in the Nicomachean Ethics.¹⁷ Yet such observations to the side, these modest remarks seem to exhaust al-Fārābī’s interest in the virtue. It is striking that in the detailed discussion of the virtues provided in another of his major political works, Aphorisms of the Statesman—a discussion which displays the unmistakable influence of Aristotelian ideas—al-Fārābī remains wholly silent on greatness of soul. When listing the virtues concerned with self-evaluation, it is in fact humility ¹⁶ I draw on the translation by Richard Walzer, On the Perfect State/Mabādiʾ ārāʾ ahl al-madīna al-fādila (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), with a number of modifications. Cf. The _ Attainment of Happiness/Kitāb Tahsīl al-saʿāda, ed. Jaʿfar al-Yāsīn (Beirut: Dār al-Andalus, __ 1981), 95. ¹⁷ For more on Plato’s view of greatness of soul and the link to intellectual activity, see Gauthier, Magnanimité, pt 1, ch. 2; cf. the discussion in my Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint: Philosophy as a Practice of the Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), ch. 5.

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(tawāduʿ) that appears as the mean, flanked by the vices of arrogance _ (takabbur) and abjectness or self-abasement (takhāsus).¹⁸ The natural place to turn in hopes of a closer engagement with the virtue is a work which constitutes perhaps the most celebrated compendium of philosophical ethics in the Arabic tradition, Miskawayh’s (d.1030) The Refinement of Character. Among other distinctive features, this work contains an extensive section dedicated to the discussion of the virtues and vices. These are arranged in a manner which betrays the peculiar brand of intellectual eclecticism at work among philosophers writing in Arabic— one that, as suggested above, partly reflects the character of their textual sources. Thus, Miskawayh relies on an Aristotelian principle to distinguish between a virtuous mean and two vicious extremes, but then on a tripartite faculty psychology inherited from Plato to identify the cardinal virtues and map these onto the rational, appetitive, and irascible faculties. Wisdom is the virtue of the rational faculty (or soul), courage the virtue of the irascible faculty, temperance the virtue of the appetitive faculty, and justice the virtue that results from the combination of these virtues.¹⁹ Yet the specific structure of the virtues, and in particular the distinction between a number of cardinal virtues and a far larger number of subordinate virtues, speaks to a practice associated with the Stoics.²⁰ Following one’s finger down Miskawayh’s tables of the virtues—past the six virtues under wisdom, past the twelve virtues under temperance—one will find greatness of soul under the irascible faculty, the first of eight virtues presented as subordinate to courage. The entry reads as follows: ‘As for greatness of soul (kibar al-nafs), it is the disdain for what is insignificant and the capacity to bear honour and dishonour. The one who possesses this virtue always judges himself worthy of great things while [indeed] deserving them.’²¹ ¹⁸ Aphorisms of the Statesman/Fusūl muntazaʿa, ed. Fauzi M. Najjar (Beirut: Dar _ El-Mashreq, 1971), 36. ¹⁹ I am simplifying certain things, as Miskawayh maps a pair of central virtues onto each faculty. See The Refinement of Character/Tahdhīb al-akhlāq, ed. Constantine Zurayk (Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1966), 16 ff. Note that Miskawayh interestingly only deploys the mesotes scheme for the cardinal virtues, in contrast, for example, to al-Ghazālī. ²⁰ Cf. Richard Walzer’s remarks in ‘Some aspects of Miskawaih’s Tahdhīb al-Akhlāq’, in Greek Into Arabic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 222–3. ²¹ Huwa al-istihāna biʾl-yasīr waʾl-iqtidār ʿalā haml al-karāma waʾl-hawān, wa-sāhibuhu _ hqāqihi lahā. Tahdhīb, 21. In his_ transla_ abadan yuʾahhilu nafsahu liʾl-umūr al-ʿizām maʿa isti tion of this passage, Zurayk renders the_ last phrase: _he ‘is always preparing himself for great deeds’: Refinement of Character, trans. C. Zurayk (Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1968), 19. I believe this is unsound on both counts (‘preparing’, ‘deeds’), though it would take much textual argument to fully unpack the point. Most importantly, this passage needs to be compared with the corresponding passages of the Nicomachean Ethics, which, along with the

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One complication needs to be quickly mentioned and put aside: this list in fact contains not one, but two, concepts that speak to the ‘greatness of soul’ complex. A few lines below, another virtue makes an appearance, designated through the compound ʿizam al-himma, which I will translate _ as ‘greatness of spirit’. The entry reads: ‘A virtue of the soul through which it endures both good fortune and its opposite, even the travails experienced at the time of death.’²² There is an important question to be asked as to the relationship between these two concepts. One thing seems clear: the latter concept foregrounds what I earlier identified as the second strand of greatness of soul, an attitude to external goods, and appears to frame the right attitude to such goods in terms reminiscent of the Stoic approach. The correlation of greatness of soul with courage, we may note, was itself a characteristic Stoic move.²³ I will be returning to the relationship between these two concepts in the second part of the book. Putting this question aside for the moment, here I will restrict my attention to the first concept. How to parse it? Peering close, we will discern a focus on honour that seems reminiscent of

treatise by Nicolaus, suggest themselves as key influences on this configuration of greatness of soul with its distinctive accent on merit and self-evaluation. The Arabic version of the NE reads: al-kabīr al-nafs huwa alladhī yuʾahhilu nafsahu liʾl-umūr al-ʿazīma wa-huwa li-dhālika ahl (p. 257.10 of the Arabic edition). For the related remarks in_ Nicolaus’ treatise, see ʿAbd al-Rahmān Badawī, ed., al-Akhlāq, taʾlīf Aristūtālīs, tarjamat Ishāq ibn Hunayn (Kuwait City: _ al-Matbūʿāt, 1979), 408. The indeterminacy _ preserved, but if we _ _ _ Wikālat of ‘great things’ is best _ it, the most natural way of doing so would be as a reference to honour given were to determine this context; reference to great action is present in the NE’s portrait of the megalopsychos (e.g. 1124b25–6), but it is not salient. Al-Ghazālī’s phrasing of his corresponding definition, which refers to despising (istihqār) these great things, lends further support to this view (Scale of Action/Mīzān al-ʿamal, _ed. Sulaymān Dunyā [Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, 1964], 277), though it does so by throwing up a textual difficulty given the evident physical resemblance of the term istihqār _ (contempt) to Miskawayh’s istihqāq (merit). Another edition of the Tahdhīb in fact replaces istihqāq with a term close in_ meaning to al-Ghazālī’s, viz. istikhfāf ([Cairo: al-Matbaʿa _ _ al-Husayniyya, 1911], 17; it is not the sole textual discrepancy. But any inclination to privilege the _latter reading of the text must reckon with the fact that the former term appears both in the NE (e.g. p. 257.11 of the Arabic edition) and in Nicolaus’ treatise. ²² Huwa fadīla liʾl-nafs tahtamilu bihā saʿādat al-jadd wa-diddahā hattā al-shadāʾid allatī _ _ 21. Zurayk translates ʿizam al-himma _ _as ‘composure’, which takūnu ʿinda al-mawt. Tahdhīb, _ ethical texts, as I will show in Part 2 seems too restrictive in light of the uses of this term in other of this book. ²³ As noted by M. C. Lyons in his remarks on this treatise: ‘A Greek ethical treatise’, Oriens, 13/14 (1960/1), 52, where he also suggests that the terms kibar al-nafs and ʿizam al-himma _ this suggescorrespond to the Greek terms megalopsychia and megalophrosyne. In appraising tion, one will need to take into account that both terms appear as translations of a single Greek term in the two extant Arabic translations of the pseudo-Aristotelian De virtutibus et vitiis. See the discussion in Part 2.

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Aristotle’s discussion in the Ethics, though we will also discern an emphasis on unconcern (‘the capacity to bear honour and dishonour’) that seems rather less so.²⁴ It is the last part of the statement that places the definition more decidedly in the Aristotelian force field, with its evocative references to self-judgement, worthiness, and desert. Yet what will also stand out is the terseness of the remark, one that leaves plenty of room for ambiguity. What, for example, are the ‘great things’ Miskawayh refers to as the correlate of worthiness? Reading the expression against Aristotle (and indeed against the vocabulary of the Arabic translation of the Ethics), the answer seems clear: honour.²⁵ Yet Miskawayh notably does not volunteer this clarity. The words he does volunteer are, on any estimate, exiguous. Coming from the history of strained responses to greatness of soul in all its provocative brilliance, one will be struck by the sheer procedural matter-of-factness with which this virtue is casually brought up, briefly defined, and then dropped before moving down the list. The only other appearance the virtue makes in the rest of the work is in a passage addressing the impact of misfortunes on happiness, one that mirrors its appearance at the same juncture of the Nicomachean Ethics.²⁶ What to make of this offhand treatment? Before engaging with this question more seriously, we need to allow it to deepen. We can do this by turning to another ethical work featuring a prominent discussion of the virtues, al-Ghazālī’s Scale of Action, composed only a few decades after the Refinement. This is a work which claims our interest on a number of grounds, not only as one of the outstanding ethical treatises in the Arabic tradition attesting the influence of ancient philosophical ideas, but also as the work of a thinker whose religious commitments stand out far more distinctly and whose engagement with philosophical ethics thus demands to be located more firmly within theological space. Al-Ghazālī’s ethics in the Scale, as several commentators have highlighted, bears several debts. Among these, its debt to Miskawayh competes in force with its debt to the literary and religious scholar al-Rāghib al-Isfahānī, whose seminal Pathway to the _ ²⁴ Though note Aristotle’s remark at NE 1124a11: ‘he will treat dishonour in the same way . . . ’. ²⁵ See n. 21. More could be said to unpack the somewhat cryptic reference to ‘disdain for what is insignificant’, but this would be a long textual story. The definitions of the virtue offered by different writers contain a few conceptual elements which my discussion has had to leave out of view. ²⁶ Tahdhīb, 96, cf. 99 (compare NE 1100b32–3); the term ʿizam al-himma is interestingly _ juxtaposed to kibar al-nafs in the first passage.

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Noble Traits of the Religious Law had blazed a trail toward a more compelling amalgamation of philosophical ethics into a Qur’anic framework.²⁷ Each of these thinkers provides his own taxonomy of the virtues and vices, and the family resemblances between these taxonomies often jostle with numerous divergences which no doubt provide the material for more complex stories about their individual genealogies.²⁸ Yet whatever al-Ghazālī’s debt to al-Rāghib’s work, in his discussion of the virtues and vices, and in his discussion of greatness of soul in particular, it is his affinities with Miskawayh that advertise themselves most strongly—though these are indeed affinities that throw the delicate yet significant differences into even sharper relief. Unlike Miskawayh, al-Ghazālī mentions not only the virtue but also its corresponding vices, naming them as smallness of soul (sighar _ al-nafs) and arrogance or presumption (takabbur).²⁹ Unlike Miskawayh, he omits any reference to the second virtue, ‘greatness of spirit’ (ʿizam _ al-himma). And here comes the formal definition, filed once again under the cardinal virtue of courage. Greatness of soul (kibar al-nafs): A virtue through which a person has the capacity to judge himself worthy of grand things while despising them and caring little about them out of delight in the value and grandeur of his soul. Its effect is that one takes little pleasure in great honours bestowed upon him by scholars and one takes no pleasure in honours bestowed by contemptible people, or in small things, or in good things that are a matter of luck or fortune.³⁰

One thing that will instantly stand out are the rather firmer bridges this remark throws to Aristotle’s discussion, as evidenced by the resumption of Aristotle’s qualification about the great-souled man’s response to honour

²⁷ Al-Ghazālī’s debt to al-Rāghib has been emphasized by a number of writers, including Wilferd Madelung in ‘Ar-Rāġib al-Isfahānī und die Ethik al-Ġazālīs’, Islamwissenschaftliche _ Abhandlungen: Fritz Meier zum sechzigsten Geburtstag, ed. Richard Gramlich (Wiesbaden, 1974), 152–63, and Yasien Mohamed in several pieces, including ‘The ethical philosophy of al-Rāghib al-Isfahānī’, Journal of Islamic Studies 6 (1995), 51–75, and ‘The ethics of education: _ al-Isfahānī’s al-Dharīʿa as a source of inspiration for al-Ghazālī’s Mīzān al-ʿamal’, Muslim _ 101 (2011), 633–57. World ²⁸ Among many other differences, al-Rāghib’s focal term is kibar al-himma, a concept I will be exploring more fully in Part 2. For a quick comparison of the tables of the virtues provided by some of our writers (al-Ghazālī, Miskawayh, and Avicenna, though not al-Rāghib), see Mohamed Ahmed Sherif, Ghazālī’s Theory of Virtue (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1975), app. II. ²⁹ Though note that al-Ghazālī gives the term tabajjuh as the corresponding vice a couple of _ pages later (Mīzān, 279). ³⁰ Fadīla yaqdiru bihā al-insān an yuʾahhila nafsahu liʾl-umūr al-jalīla maʿa istihqārihi lahā _ 277. wa-qillat_ mubālātihi bihā ibtihājan minhu bi-qadr nafsihi wa-jalālatihā ( . . . ). Mīzān,

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depending on the identity of its dispenser (NE 1124a5–11). The similarities with Miskawayh’s account will be plain. They notably include the emphasis on worthiness of great things (complete with the same reticence on what those great things are), which highlights the first strand of greatness of soul identified earlier—self-evaluation—and likewise situates al-Ghazālī’s definition within the Aristotelian force field. At the same time, al-Ghazālī incorporates a stronger emphasis on the second strand, the attitude to luck. He also calls sharper attention to the element of self-evaluation by highlighting the double movement of exaltation of the self and contempt for things external to it.³¹ What such a painstaking collation of differentiae points to, however, is the similarity between the two discussions that is most basic—and to the reader approaching these discussions with an awareness of the broader history of the virtue, most surprising: and that is just how impassively and cursorily both writers pick up greatness of soul only to drop it in their forward-moving march down their table of definitions. The space al-Ghazālī devotes to this virtue exceeds the space given to most other virtues on his list, and it is almost double the size of Miskawayh’s. Yet that is to say very little given the brevity of both sets of remarks. What makes this offhand brevity even more striking is that, even in their terseness, these statements have succeeded in giving voice to a conception of the virtue that places some of its starkest and indeed most contentious features on full display. Al-Ghazālī’s statement stands out here with the almost gratuitous extravagance of its wording, picking out the element of self-evaluation to parse it as the great-souled man’s ‘delight in the value and grandeur of his soul’. The grandeur of his soul; or, as an alternative translation might have it, its majesty. For readers familiar with the chequered history of this virtue’s reception, such electric terms will have the effect of returning them to the grounds of this reception and to the moral discomfort the virtue has provoked, particularly in its Aristotelian version. This discomfort has centred on the attitude to the self and the view of the proper way of relating to its merits that it codifies; and it has the strongest hold on theorists whose religious commitments lead them to accentuate the value of humility as an ethical ideal. Given the intellectual identities of both writers, particularly al-Ghazālī’s, their appearance of offering a

³¹ For more on this double movement, see Vasalou, Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint, 181 ff, and more briefly Vasalou, Wonder: A Grammar (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2015), 160–61.

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matter-of-course welcome to this virtue will thus make us wonder, and will call for deeper investigation.

The Ethics of Honour and Self-Esteem: Miskawayh It is an investigation that requires placing the brief remarks of these two thinkers in a more thoroughgoing conversation with their broader ethical schemes. And to the extent that one of the main ethical stakes thematized by the virtue concerns the proper attitude to self-esteem and to the esteem bestowed by others, it is more specifically against these thinkers’ views on those topics that their statements about greatness of soul need to be situated. To understand the Arabic reception of greatness of soul, we thus need a clearer picture of these thinkers’ substantive commitments on the ethics of honour and self-esteem. My focus in the following will principally fall on al-Ghazālī, who provides the richest though not the most unequivocal contributions on the topic, and whose theological commitments give him a higher stake in the subject. My argument, to preview it, is that on closer scrutiny, the virtue of greatness of soul turns out to sit uneasily within these thinkers’ positive morality, particularly al-Ghazālī’s, for reasons that resonate with those of their Christian counterparts and of modern critics of the virtue. The conflict with (one important strand of ) Islamic religious morality seems no less real for being unvoiced; though if this is the case, it will then be an interesting question why the conflict should be obscured. Miskawayh’s broader work offers little sustained commentary on the ethical stakes just isolated, and indeed some of the views he expresses evoke the register of the ancient philosophical schemes in which the virtue of greatness of soul thrived. Thus, the simple affirmations of the dignity of human beings that are woven through his Refinement of Character—the soul is ‘nobler’ in substance (akram jawharan) than all material things and humans have the greatest dignity among mundane beings (ashraf mawjūdāt ʿālaminā)³²—may remind us, minus the specific vocabulary of grandeur, of some of the exulting expressions of human greatness found among Stoic thinkers. ‘The human soul is a great and noble thing,’ Seneca writes in one of his Epistles (102, 21)³³—a greatness partly grounded in capacities for moral transcendence encoded in this particular virtue. Even more importantly,

³² Tahdhīb, 6, 36.

³³ Trans. Gummere.

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Miskawayh fails to follow al-Fārābī’s example with regard to humility and gives it no place in his classification of the virtues.³⁴ Yet a closer look at a number of his remarks—isolated yet no less telling— yields a complex picture that raises questions about the place that greatness of soul, particularly in its Aristotelian modulation, could occupy within his ethics. As regards externally bestowed honour, for one, Miskawayh’s moral exemplar is a person whose pursuit of excellence for its own sake can survive others’ complete ignorance of his merit (though Miskawayh underlines that virtues ‘shine like the sun’ and in practice rarely remain undiscovered). The right attitude to others’ failure to recognize one’s merit, he tells us in one place, is indifference: one ‘should be unconcerned (lam yaktarith)’; he continues, ‘for we know that it is a vice to seek to obtain and to love honour (iltimās al-karāma wa-mahabbatuhā radhīla)’. While Miskawayh recog_ nizes the motivational value of honour and commends the pedagogical use of honour as an incentive among those cultivating virtue, he disparages the desire for it as a vice.³⁵ This last set of remarks is consistent with the guarded attitude to honour expressed in the first part of Miskawayh’s definition of greatness of soul (it involves ‘the capacity to bear honour and dishonour’), yet it is less consistent with Aristotle’s framing of the proper attitude to honour to the extent that this fought shy of Socratic (and later Stoic) indifference. Similarly, unlike Aristotle’s great-souled man—who, if he does not actively ‘look down on people’ in general (NE 1124b5–6), makes a point of acting grandly toward the eminent (1124b18–19)—Miskawayh’s paragon of virtue is explicitly said to be one who ‘behaves humbly toward everyone (yatawādaʿu li-kulli ahad) and honours everyone he consorts with _ _ (yukrimu kulla man ʿāsharahu)’.³⁶ Even more telling, however, are those of Miskawayh’s remarks that touch upon the internal element of the ‘ethics of esteem’ plexus, that which concerns a person’s own estimation of his merits. In this respect, the ³⁴ See Sherif, Ghazālī’s Theory of Virtue, 53–4, for some brief but helpful remarks on the topic. ³⁵ For the last quote, see Abū Hayyān al-Tawhīdī and Miskawayh, The Scattered and the _ ed. Ahmad_ Amīn and al-Sayyid Ahmad Saqr (Cairo: Gathered/al-Hawāmil wa’l-shawāmil, _ 300; and see 307 for the remark _ _about excelLajnat al-Taʾlīf wa’l-Tarjama waʾl-Nashr, 1951), lences shining like the sun (though see also 303, and also densely 192, for a seemingly more positive comment on honour). On the pedagogical harnessing of honour, see e.g. Tahdhīb, 56 (talking about the education of the young). ³⁶ Tahdhīb, 60. As Pakaluk argues in the context of some broader remarks addressing the putative ‘arrogance’ of Aristotle’s megalopsychos, the translation of kataphronei as ‘looks down on people’ is misleading insofar as it introduces an object that the original text lacks. Pakaluk, ‘Aristotelian magnanimity’, 264.

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significance of Miskawayh’s failure to include humility in his list of the virtues needs to be calibrated by the observation that a quality which represents the opposing vice does indeed make an important appearance in his discussion. In a later chapter of the Refinement dedicated to discussion of the maladies of the soul, one of the vices that Miskawayh brings up is conceit (ʿujb), which he defines as ‘a false view that the soul deserves a station it does not (zann kādhib biʾl-nafs fī istihqāq martaba ghayr mus_ _ tahaqqa lahā).’³⁷ The invocation of the notion of desert will remind us of _ Miskawayh’s use of the same term in his definition of greatness of soul. The conceited person, we learn, is the one who has an exaggerated view of his deserts. The virtuous person, by implication, will be the one who takes a just view of his deserts, and who thus only judges them to be great when they really are great (as the great-souled man does). Yet Miskawayh’s continuation, which offers a reflection intended to medicate the vice, is suggestive: ‘It befits one who knows his soul to know the multiplicity of flaws and deficiencies that beset it.’ And it is suggestive for apparently leaving little room for the possibility that self-knowledge could ever yield a judgement of great merit—that it could ever produce legitimate self-satisfaction.³⁸ If this remark does not seem sufficiently conclusive, a pregnant statement Miskawayh offers in another of his works, The Scattered and the Gathered, drives the point more forcefully home. It is pregnant not least in appealing to a term that has already appeared once in this discussion, ‘greatness of spirit’, and whose fuller treatment I have deferred to Part 2. ‘The great-spirited person (al-kabīr al-himma)’, Miskawayh tells us there, ‘belittles the virtues he possesses on account of his aspiration to what surpasses them; for however high the level (martaba) of excellence a person acquires, it is nugatory compared with that which surpasses it’; and it is the limitations of human nature that ‘prevent one from grasping it fully and attaining its utmost degree’ and ‘seeking the highest level of the human excellences’.³⁹ It is a part of virtue, Miskawayh suggests—indeed, part of a virtue of greatness—to never feel satisfied with the excellence of one’s character; because complete perfection in fact lies outside our reach. The proper attitude toward one’s own character is never a static sense of possession such as ³⁷ Tahdhīb, 196. This vice appears more specifically in Miskawayh’s discussion of anger, where it is named as one of the causes of its pathology; we may recall that greatness of soul was also subsumed under the irascible faculty. ³⁸ Ibid.; Miskawayh offers a second, slightly less transparent, therapeutic reflection, which seems to centre on one’s dependence on others and the lack of self-sufficiency of one’s virtue. ³⁹ Hawāmil, 308.

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Aristotle’s great-souled man appears to evince. Moral greatness must always figure in the content of a future-directed aspiration rather than as the content of a factual judgement about one’s existing character.⁴⁰ Taken together, this evidence suggests that the virtue of greatness of soul, particularly in its Aristotelian inflection, could at best occupy an ambivalent place in Miskawayh’s broader ethical scheme. Although Miskawayh allows for the importance of proper self-respect—one should not gratuitously expose oneself to ridicule and dishonour, he notes at one place: ‘the virtuous person . . . honours himself and protects his dignity (yukrimu nafsahu wa-ʿirdahu)’⁴¹—his overall understanding would seem to bear an awkward _ relationship to the view of the proper attitude to honour and self-esteem embedded in Aristotle’s account.

The Ethics of Honour and Self-Esteem: Al-Ghazālī In crafting this comparison, I have held Miskawayh’s ethical viewpoint against Aristotle’s while allowing myself the liberty to look away from Miskawayh’s schema of the virtue, whose bare simplicity and indeed strategic ambiguities make it a limited mirror of Aristotle’s account and present its contentious elements in relatively muted form.⁴² In turning to al-Ghazālī, these kinds of textual scruples loosen their grip given the boldness through which such elements are placed on display. The great-souled man judges himself ‘worthy of grand things’ while disdaining them ‘out of delight in the value and grandeur of his soul’. Now in seeking to situate this remarkable characterization within al-Ghazālī’s broader ethical understanding, it will be instructive to note that this is not the first time across the pages of the Scale that al-Ghazālī ⁴⁰ Note that the understanding of Aristotle’s megalopsychos in terms of ‘a static sense of possession’ is open to debate. For a robust defence of the role of aspiration in Aristotle’s portrait, see Pakaluk, ‘Aristotelian magnanimity’; cf. the discussion in Vasalou, Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint, 184–6. ⁴¹ Tahdhīb, 199. ⁴² This reflects a larger picture of sketchy engagement with the NE which has been the source of enduring doubts as to the precise identity of the texts Miskawayh was using during his composition of the Tahdhīb, and as to whether he had access to the entire text of the NE or was instead using the Summa Alexandrinorum under the mistaken impression that this was the NE. See Akasoy’s brief remarks in ‘The Arabic and Islamic reception’, 101–2, and references there. Cf. Elvira Wakelnig’s remarks in A Philosophy Reader from the Circle of Miskawayh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 18–20, with reference to a philosophical reader which, as she convincingly argues, originates in Miskawayh’s circle.

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has linked a person’s perception of his own character and of the quality of his soul with the experience of a positive affective response. Envisaging the life of sustained religious obedience a few pages earlier, he makes the tantalizing remark that fulfilling this life will lead to greater reward and to a state of greater purity for the soul such that ‘its perfection (kamāl) is more complete, and the joy its owner takes in its beauty (ibtihāj sāhibihā _ _ bi-jamālihā) upon release from the attachments of the body is more intense and abundant’. This point is echoed later in the Scale where al-Ghazālī refers to the way the veil that prevents a person from ‘perceiving his soul and its perfection and beauty (mushāhadat nafsihi wa-kamālihā wa-jamālihā)’ will be lifted upon death, allowing one to witness one’s perfection and to ‘rejoice in it and experience never-ending bliss in it’.⁴³ The focal terms here, it will be observed, are ‘perfection’ and ‘beauty’. These are notions that are organically related and in turn directly linked both to the concept of character and to the more solemn notion of ‘grandeur’ deployed in al-Ghazālī’s remark about greatness of soul. The notion of beauty, al-Ghazālī explains in the Revival of the Religious Sciences, is not confined to things we can perceive with the physical senses but has wider application. In this wider sense, an entity is beautiful when it is characterized by the perfection that is proper to it and possible for it. It is in this wider sense, in which beauty is predicated not of the ‘outer’ but of the ‘inner’ form, that we speak of beautiful or fine character (khuluq hasan, akhlāq jamīla).⁴⁴ Having linked the good to the beautiful—a _ link indeed catalysed by the Arabic term husn, which can signify both _ ‘goodness’ and ‘beauty’, and evoking a conceptual conjunction that was likewise central to the pattern of Greek ethics—elsewhere al-Ghazālī links the beautiful to the great by suggesting that beauty (jamāl) is but the subjective correlate of grandeur or majesty (jalāl).⁴⁵ This last suggestion appears in a short but important work that al-Ghazālī devotes to an investigation of the names of God, The Most Exalted Aim in Expounding God’s Beautiful Names. The distinctive task of this book is to ⁴³ Respectively Mīzān, 256, 357. ⁴⁴ See the discussion in The Revival of the Religious Sciences/Ihyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn (Cairo: Lajnat _ Nashr al-Thaqāfa al-Islāmiyya, 1356–7, 16 vols), vol. 14, 2577–81. ⁴⁵ This not entirely transparent view is expressed in The Most Exalted Aim in Expounding God’s Beautiful Names/al-Maqsad al-asnā fī sharh maʿānī asmāʾ Allāh al-husnā, ed. Fadlou _ _ use of the notion of ‘beauty’ _ A. Shehadi (Beirut: Dar El-Machreq, 1971), 126. The in connection with the soul was certainly present in some of the Greek texts available in translation to Muslim intellectuals. It appears e.g. in Galen’s compendium on ethics: ‘Mukhtasar min kitāb al-Akhlāq _ ʿinda al-ʿarab li-Jālīnūs’, ed. ʿAbd al-Rahmān Badawī, Dirāsāt wa-nusūs fiʾl-falsafa waʾl-ʿulūm _ _ _1981), 196: ‘beauty and ugliness bear (Beirut: al-Muʾassasa al-ʿArabiyya liʾl-Dirāsāt waʾl-Nashr, the same relationship to the soul as do beauty and ugliness to the body.’

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provide guidance to the believer striving to model himself on the divine names and fulfil the religious mandate indicated in a well-known hadith to ‘assume the character traits of God’ (takhallaqū bi-akhlāq Allāh). For our context, it will be particularly relevant to note the appearance that the notions of beauty and majesty make in al-Ghazālī’s framing of this ethical pursuit. The person who has gained insight into one of the attributes of God is struck by its grandeur and splendour (istiʿzām, istishrāq) such that he is _ filled with ‘longing for that attribute, ardour for that grandeur and beauty, and a desire to be adorned by that feature.’ It is the perception of God’s beauty and majesty, this suggests, that arouses our moral aspiration and drives us to imitate it; and what is crucial is that, in responding to that stimulus, it is the desire to be beautiful—a longing to appropriate that beauty as our own—that forms the content of our moral motivation.⁴⁶ Elsewhere the same point is couched using the language of perfection, appearing as the claim that ‘the perfection and virtue of one’s soul’ should form the content of one’s aim in the mundane world.⁴⁷ Taken together, the above suggests that al-Ghazālī’s pithy statements about the great-souled person’s delight in his own greatness betoken, and mesh with, a broader readiness to give ethical sanction to the idea that the perfections of one’s own character might show up as the object of positive valuation. This indeed reflects a psychological truth that al-Ghazālī states in universal tones in the Revival: perfection forms an object of desire, and the attainment of objects of desire causes pleasure; thus ‘when the soul perceives its perfection it is gladdened and moved by joy’.⁴⁸ The understanding of moral aspiration as a self-referential desire for one’s future perfection would appear to tie in with this larger picture. It is not incidental to further observe that in his classification of the virtues and vices in the Scale, al-Ghazālī, like

⁴⁶ The quote is from Maqsad, 43; cf. the phrasing of 44: al-tahallī bi-mahāsinihā. See also the remarks about God’s beauty_ as the stimulus of ethical pursuit _in Mīzān, _402–3. The virtue of noble-mindedness (shahāma) as limned in the Mīzān also appears to incorporate a desire for beauty in the content of motivation. It is defined as ‘alacrity for great deeds in the expectation of beauty (al-jamāl)’; Mīzān, 277. Miskawayh, interestingly, has ‘a fine/beautiful reputation’ instead (uhdūtha jamīla: Tahdhīb, 22). _ 361, in the context of discussing the tasks of the learner. As signalled in the vicinity, ⁴⁷ Mīzān, this should be one’s object in the present life, whereas one’s object in the next should be proximity to God. In fact, read more judiciously, this is the desire (the desire for God) to which the desire for one’s own beauty must ultimately be understood to be ordered. Cf. the phrasing of the Ihyāʾ at the same juncture (vol. 1, 89): the learner’s aim must be to ‘adorn his interior and _ it through virtue’. beautify ⁴⁸ Ihyāʾ, vol. 10, 1847. The context, importantly, is a discussion of the reasons we take _ in praise. pleasure

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Miskawayh before him, not only fails to incorporate humility (tawāduʿ) _ among the virtues, but, unlike Miskawayh, goes further in identifying humility as one of the vicious extremes of a virtue named as ‘dignity’ (waqār) and defined, in terms highly reminiscent of greatness of soul, as ‘assigning one’s soul the status it deserves due to one’s knowledge of its worth (qadr)’.⁴⁹ And whatever we make of Miskawayh’s or Fārābī’s stances on the topic, this understanding of the proper way of relating to one’s merits would in turn appear to connect al-Ghazālī to a view voiced by other stakeholders of the same ethical tradition, albeit with varying degrees of directness. These include the Christian philosopher Yahyā ibn ʿAdī (d.974), _ who, opening his own work on the virtues, The Refinement of Character, would commend it both to the reader who lacks the virtues and to the one who possesses them and who may thus taste ‘a wondrous pleasure and delighting joy’ upon recognizing his own perfections in the ethical ideal extolled in the work. The Shiʿite writer Nasīr al-Dīn al-Ṭ ūsī (d.1274) would _ later echo this thought in the overture to his celebrated compendium The Nasirean Ethics.⁵⁰ Yet this understanding of the broader ethical tendencies animating al-Ghazālī’s thought on this subject turns out, on closer consideration, to carry tensions that make it difficult to simply rest with it. The invocation of merit or desert (istihqāq) in al-Ghazālī’s statements about the virtues of _ dignity and greatness of soul should be one of the first things to give us pause, given what we know about al-Ghazālī’s theological identity. For among Ashʿarite theologians, who vociferously rejected the kind of moral objectivism defended by Muʿtazilite thinkers, the notion of moral desert had a highly contested status. Similarly, it will be noted that al-Ghazālī’s above remarks about the joyful perception of one’s beauty pertain to the posthumous domain. Yet of course this domain is governed by moral conditions so different from those that apply to the mundane one—it is the domain in ⁴⁹ Mīzān, 277–8. An alternative translation for waqār might be ‘gravitas’. Sherif ’s translation as ‘correct evaluation of self ’ (Ghazālī’s Theory of Virtue, 53) seems infelicitous, inter alia, in insulating the term from its ordinary linguistic meaning. Yet note the apparently praising reference to humility in Mīzān, 252. ⁵⁰ Yahyā ibn ʿAdī, Tahdhīb al-akhlāq, ed. Nājī al-Takrītī (Beirut and Paris: Editions Oueidat, _ this joy is compared to the pleasure taken in praise. Nasīr al-Dīn al-Ṭ ūsī, The Arabic 1978), 70; Version of Ṭ ūsī’s Nasirean Ethics, ed. Joep Lameer (Leiden: Brill, _2015), 90. Yet in fact Yahyā, _ like al-Ghazālī (as we will see), turns out to take a more qualified view of the ethics of selfesteem, reserving strong words against the vice of pride, which involves a sense of one’s grandeur and satisfaction in one’s virtue: see Tahdhīb, 96–7. He also elsewhere dismisses the love of honour and praise as a vice, even while recognizing that it has an important developmental role to play: ibid., 101.

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which ethical exertion comes to a rest and its harvest can finally be enjoyed as a sure possession—as to raise a question, at the very least, whether the joyful contemplation of one’s soul in the next world could automatically translate into a model for the right relationship to one’s soul in this one. In the same vein, to acknowledge that we are driven by a desire for our own beauty is not the same as to assert that we should rejoice in the confident certainty that we have realized it. And even the lightest reading of al-Ghazālī’s theological remarks, including his remarks about beauty in the Revival, raises questions about how seriously he might mean to ensconce the notions of perfection, beauty, and indeed grandeur within the self-regard of human beings. For ‘perfection belongs to God alone’, he trenchantly declares in one place, with an exclusivity that recurs in a statement appearing in the same vicinity: ‘To Him belong beauty and splendour, greatness and magnificence (al-ʿazama waʾl-kibriyāʾ).’⁵¹ And again, in The Most Exalted Aim, invoking _ the term that features in his definition of greatness of soul: ‘The only being that is absolutely great (jalīl) is God.’⁵² Meditation on God’s greatness and majesty, we hear elsewhere in the Revival, is one of the chief spiritual tasks of the believer, and anyone who apprehends God’s majesty ceases to perceive beauty in all other beings.⁵³ Such observations will immediately make us wonder how deeply to read the significance of the brief remarks surveyed above, and how seriously to credit them as a guide to al-Ghazālī’s considered ethical views on the topic. Where to look for stronger evidence? The obvious place to turn is al-Ghazālī’s multivolume magnum opus, the Revival of the Religious Sciences. Divided into two halves focusing respectively on the external and internal dimensions of the religious life, the Revival offers, in the second half, a detailed discussion of the ethical and spiritual traits that need to be cultivated and avoided within this life. The topic of honour occupies a salient place in this discussion, as do the ethical traits that concern the attitude to self-worth, with an entire book devoted to the former under the title On the Condemnation of Status and Dissimulation, and another book to the latter under the title On the Condemnation of Pride and Conceit.

⁵¹ Ihyāʾ, vol. 14, 2588; the first remark continues: ‘ . . . and the degree of perfection that other beings_possess depends entirely on what God has conferred on them’. ⁵² Maqsad, 126. _ task of meditating on the greatness of God—a task that, significantly, entails self⁵³ On the forgetfulness in the meditating subject—see briefly Sherif ’s remarks on tafakkur and fikr in Ghazālī’s Theory of Virtue, 122–3; and for the next point, see Ihyāʾ, vol. 13, 2390. _

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The relationship between al-Ghazālī’s ethical thought as expressed in the Scale and as expressed in the later Revival has formed the subject of considerable commentary among al-Ghazālī’s readers, given the more overtly philosophical character of the former and the more palpable Sufi commitments of the latter. Al-Ghazālī’s description of his ‘spiritual crisis’ in his celebrated autobiography, The Deliverer from Error, has drawn many readers toward an understanding of his intellectual development as one governed by decisive moments of rupture. Querying these traditional literal-minded readings of al-Ghazālī’s autobiography, recent scholarship has placed the accent on the stability of his intellectual commitments and the continuity between his ethical works, with one commentator describing the Scale as ‘a sort of first draft of the Revival’ and suggesting that its key concepts and ethical views survive in the Revival ‘largely unchanged’ despite perceptible differences in both form and substance between the two works.⁵⁴ In taking the Revival as a document that can be naturally placed in conversation with the Scale in piecing together a fuller picture of al-Ghazālī’s ethical views, my emphasis also falls on the continuities. Yet this emphasis is compatible with keeping an open mind regarding the precise balance of continuities and discontinuities, and with remaining attuned to interpretive tensions between the two works; as it is compatible with remaining attuned to tensions to be found even within the body of a single work. It is an attunement called into service from almost the very first pages of the remarkable account of honour that al-Ghazālī offers in his book On the Condemnation of Status and Dissimulation. In its basic or original sense, he notes in opening the book, status or standing (jāh) refers to fame. Yet this definition gives way to a more striking formulation a few pages later: the meaning of ‘status’ is ‘possession of the minds of people, from whom one desires aggrandisation and obedience’.⁵⁵ ‘Possession’; or in another, starker translation, ‘mastery’. The concept of mastery continues to play an organizing role in al-Ghazālī’s ensuing exposition. To have ⁵⁴ The quoted remarks are respectively from Garden, First Islamic Reviver, 31, and Garden, ‘Revisiting al-Ghazālī’s crisis through his Scale for Action ( Mizān al-ʿAmal )’, in Islam and Rationality: The Impact of al-Ghazālī, ed. Georges Tamer (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 228. Garden offers a careful reappraisal of al-Ghazālī’s autobiography, drawing on an extensive body of recent work. Debates about al-Ghazālī’s continued commitment to the philosophical ethics articulated in the Mīzān date back several decades, as can be seen from the brief overview in Muhammad Abul Quasem, ‘Al-Ghazālī’s rejection of philosophic ethics’, Islamic Studies 13 (1974), 111–12. They also provide the context for the above-cited study by Sherif, who stakes an implicit claim for al-Ghazālī’s enduring philosophical commitments by seamlessly treating the Mīzān and the Ihyāʾ as equal partners in building his account. _ 1835: mulk al-qulūb al-matlūb taʿzīmuhā wa-tāʿatuhā. ⁵⁵ Ihyāʾ, vol. 10, _ _ _ _

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status is to dispose over people’s minds in ways that allow one to use them in pursuit of one’s ends.⁵⁶ Human minds submit to a person when they form the belief that he is characterized by certain perfections, a class that includes—notably for our purpose—good character but also physical strength, beauty, knowledge, and piety. The person who seeks status seeks to produce such beliefs with a view to producing the state of submission and subservience that results from them. Properly speaking, it is the internal state of judging and believing that constitutes status, which is then outwardly expressed through honour and different forms of service. Coming from many other accounts of honour, this presentation will seem remarkable. Honour emerges here as a special kind of exercise of power; it is a form of mastery or domination, with all the violence these concepts incorporate. To exact honour from people is indeed in a real sense to enslave them.⁵⁷ This way of collapsing the quest for honour into the quest for power will appear particularly striking set against some of the salient moments in the history of the Christian engagement with pagan ethics. It was a crucial distinction between these two drives, for example, that formed the backbone of Augustine’s proposal that pagans can develop virtue ‘insofar as they move from the pursuit of dominium, driven by the desire to impose their own will on others, to the pursuit of glory and honor’. For there is a ‘clear difference between the desire for glory before men and the desire for domination’, he had observed, even if in practice there is a ‘slippery slope’ from one to the other.⁵⁸ It will also appear striking coming from Aristotle, for reasons that help bring out the structure of al-Ghazālī’s reasoning more distinctly. For in characterizing honour as the greatest external good and ‘the one we mete out to the gods’ (NE 1123b18) in his remarks about greatness of soul, Aristotle had suggested an understanding of honour as something possessing intrinsic value and desired for its own sake. Al-Ghazālī’s account, by contrast, reduces this value to purely instrumental terms: if we desire people to honour us, it is because we have other separate ends that this enables us to achieve and other goods we want to obtain. In this respect it is

⁵⁶ Ibid.: li-yastaʿmila bi-wāsitatihā arbābahā fī aghrādihi wa-maʾāribihi. _ ‘The seeker of status seeks _ ⁵⁷ The language is al-Ghazālī’s: to subjugate and enslave free men (yastariqqu al-ahrāra wa-yastaʿbiduhum)’ (ibid.). _ ⁵⁸ The first quote is from Herdt, Putting on Virtue, 48; the latter from City of God, Book V, §19, 212.

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    -: -ĀLĪ 37 like money, which gives us access to an indefinite range of things we might happen to desire.⁵⁹ It is in fact precisely this utilitarian view of honour that al-Ghazālī is next challenged to defend, giving him an opportunity to finesse his account, but also to introduce a new source of ambiguity or tension. For ‘it is a wondrous thing about human nature’, an imaginary reader observes, that we find people treating both kinds of goods—money and honour—in ways that seem utterly resistant to an instrumentalizing construction. We see people insatiably hoarding possessions and amassing wealth that far outstrips their present and conceivable needs. In like manner, we see people eager to have their renown diffuse over the four corners of the earth, in places where it is inconceivable they will ever set foot and whose denizens they will never meet in order to profit from their obeisance.⁶⁰ Al-Ghazālī responds by first querying the notion of possibility or conceivability deployed in this observation; what reason sees as inconceivable, anxious fear deems far less so. Yet it is his second response—which he himself calls the ‘weightier’ of the two—that will rather engage our interest, for it shows al-Ghazālī abandoning the utilitarian part of his argument and making a crucial concession to the truth of his reader’s observation. The spirit, he remarks, is ‘a lordly thing’ (amr rabbānī), as indicated in the well-known Qur’anic verse: ‘The Spirit is of the bidding (amr) of my Lord’ (17: 85).⁶¹ A lordly element forms one of the central constituents of human nature. This element expresses itself as a powerful desire for perfection for its own sake, which in turns manifests as an insatiable desire for domination (istīlāʾ) that is satisfied either by actually exercising power over existents or (where this is not possible) by making them objects of knowledge. Hence indeed our ardour for probing wondrous and mysterious things (asrār, ʿajāʾib); for ‘by knowing an object, one dominates it’.⁶² Our desire for honour is connected to this deeper drive, and represents a desire to exercise power over one of the two classes of mundane entities, namely souls, the other being bodies. ⁵⁹ The analogy is al-Ghazālī’s: Ihyāʾ, vol. 10, 1836. Interestingly, though, Aristotle elsewhere _ appears to acknowledge that the greater majority of people in fact regard the value of honour instrumentally: honoured by people with power, ‘they think that, if they need something, they will get it from them,’ and thus delight in honour as ‘an indication of good things to come’. NE 1159a17–21. ⁶⁰ Ihyāʾ, vol. 10, 1837–8. _ term amr, as these translations reflect, is an equivocal one. ⁶¹ The ⁶² Ibid., 1841 (fiʾl-ʿilm istīlāʾ ʿalaʾl-maʿlūm); al-Ghazālī’s response extends from 1838 to 1841. In the above I am simplifying somewhat a complex and multifaceted discussion.

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We may notice the striking Nietzschean overtones of al-Ghazālī’s understanding of wonder and the drive to knowledge. More relevantly, we will notice that in this account the connection between the desire for honour and the desire for domination has not been expunged, but engraved even more deeply. What will be especially interesting, though, is to note the tension this account now seems to introduce into the status—and valuation—of this desire, one that reflects an important ambiguity about the status of the ‘lordly’ element within his broader scheme. This is not in fact the first time the ‘lordly’ or ‘masterly’ (rabbānī or rubūbī) aspect of human nature has appeared in al-Ghazālī’s discussion. It appeared in an earlier book of the Revival where al-Ghazālī offered an overview of human nature by identifying four elements that enter into its constitution: the ‘predatory’ (sabuʿī), the ‘beastly’ (bahīmī), the ‘satanic’ (shaytānī), and the ‘lordly’.⁶³ This fourfold scheme echoes a more familiar _ tripartite scheme found in numerous works of Arabic philosophical ethics based in the Platonic distinction between the rational, spirited or irascible, and appetitive parts of the soul. Given the frequent identification, within these works, of the ‘predatory’ aspect with the irascible faculty and of the ‘beastly’ aspect with the appetitive faculty, the most intuitive way of reading al-Ghazālī’s ‘lordly’ element is as another designation for the privileged faculty standing at the normative apex of this scheme, namely reason. This is a reading that al-Ghazālī reinforces in several ways, not only by speaking positively about the need to subjugate all other elements to the ‘governance of the lordly attribute’, but also by once again associating this element with the quest for truth and an insatiable drive to knowledge.⁶⁴ As in the discussion we have seen, here too al-Ghazālī associates this element with a different kind of drive directed toward mastery, elevation, and eminence (riʾāsa). A remark in this context stands out as particularly pregnant given the echo it provokes with the terms of al-Ghazālī’s statement about greatness of soul. When this aspect of human nature dominates, he writes, one acquires ‘an entitlement (istihqāq) to pre-eminence over people due to the _ ⁶³ Ihyāʾ, vol. 8, 1356. _ quote is from ibid., 1358. Inter alia, al-Ghazālī compares the lordly aspect to a sage ⁶⁴ The (with the other aspects compared to a dog, a pig, and a demon) and connects it to reason (ʿaql); ibid., 1356–7. This scheme evokes a similar (albeit not entirely identical) one found in Abū Ṭ ālib al-Makkī’s work, which we know al-Ghazālī drew copiously on: Nourishment of the Heart/Qūt al-qulūb, ed. Mahmūd ibn Ibrāhīm ibn Muhammad al-Radwānī (Cairo: Maktabat Dār _ 1, 251–2. Yet al-Makkī made _ _ al-Turāth, 2001), vol. it rather plainer than al-Ghazālī in this context that the lordly aspects must be subdued and replaced by the aspects of servitude (awsāf _ al-ʿubūdiyya).

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primarily mundane goods of a sensory kind in mind, whose pursuit attracts severe strictures within his ethical scheme.⁶⁸ These are strictures that his condemnation of honour directly reflects. A degree of esteem from our fellow human beings is necessary for living in the world—and indeed a degree of attachment to it may form a necessary motivational stepping stone in moral development—but it should not exceed the modicum that enables us to cover our basic needs.⁶⁹ The negative light trained on the lordly aspect of human nature through these distinctions becomes even sharper in other contexts, in ways that crucially transpose al-Ghazālī’s critique of honour into a more decisive stance regarding the internal counterpart of the ethical stakes we have been examining, namely the proper attitude to self-worth and the ethics of self-evaluation. For in making us desire eminence and domination, al-Ghazālī observes when first introducing his fourfold scheme of human nature, this lordly element impels us to ‘loosen the yoke of servitude (ʿubūdiyya) and humility from our necks’.⁷⁰ Yet this is a yoke which, bondsmen of God that we are—in religious texts, the term ʿabd (slave) is the commonest designation for ‘human being’—we cannot quite throw off. ‘The lordship that is in our nature’, al-Ghazālī explicitly declares elsewhere, is ‘the opposite of the servitude that we were commanded to’.⁷¹

⁶⁸ Ibid., 1836; cf. the reference to the needs of the body (muhimmāt al-badan) on 1843, though the preceding context also suggests a broader specification of the ends served. ⁶⁹ Al-Ghazālī’s allowance for the developmental value of the love of honour or eminence—its value as a transitional motivation that should eventually be superseded—is signalled e.g. in Mīzān, 365–6. In a not unrelated context in the Revival, discussing the love of eminence that motivates intellectual achievement, al-Ghazālī makes the highly conditional aspect of its value crystal clear. Just because a certain desire happens to lead to a positive result, ‘this does not entail that the desire . . . is praiseworthy’ in itself, and that the person who experiences it will escape chastisement; Ihyāʾ, vol. 1, 81. ⁷⁰ Ibid., vol. _8, 1356. ⁷¹ Ibid., vol. 12, 2186. Interestingly, in another passage in the same volume (2197–8), where al-Ghazālī revisits the human urge for mastery—remarking that the desire for ascendancy, eminence, and domination is the most powerful desire built into human nature—he openly denies that this desire is blameworthy (laysa al-qalb madhmūman ʿalā hubb dhālika). Yet what _ should be noted is that in his continuation he gives a normative specification of the proper object of this desire, claiming that it is the happiness of the hereafter, which requires mastery of the self and renunciation of the mundane world, that represents true mastery and thus the true consummation of this drive. Among the many puzzles attaching to al-Ghazālī’s account of the lordly element is precisely how he intends to square this with his view (which follows long philosophical precedent) that the drive to domination and honour is grounded in the irascible faculty, which has a bodily basis and is shared with other animals. For this point see e.g. ibid., vol. 12, 2236–8. Cf. Miskawayh’s remarks in al-Fawz al-asghar (Beirut: no pub., 1319 [1901]), 50–1; this faculty, like the appetitive faculty and unlike the_ rational one, perishes with the body.

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    -: -ĀLĪ 41 This, in fact, points to a tension within the project of imitating God that was already evident in the thought of the prominent Sufi writer to whom al-Ghazālī bore the greatest debt in composing the Revival, Abū Ṭ ālib al-Makkī (d.996). In his Nourishment of the Heart, al-Makkī had touched upon the notion of imitating God and highlighted its significance for the religious life. Those who have the greatest love for God are ‘those who most excel in assuming His character traits (ahsanuhum takhalluqan _ bi-akhlāqihi), such as knowledge, clemency, and forgiveness’, among others. Yet he had then appeared to distinguish this from a different form of imitation, one qualified more negatively as a ‘contestation’ of God’s exclusivity and connected to a different list of attributes. The attributes featured on this list included pride or a sense of one’s greatness (kibr), the desire for praise, and the love of self-sufficiency.⁷² Al-Makkī’s implicit distinction between good and bad forms of imitation would find a reflection in the architecture of al-Ghazālī’s The Most Exalted Aim, which is organized by a scrupulous differentiation between the way the divine names apply to God and the way they apply to human beings. Not all divine traits, this suggests, should form objects of human imitation. Certain attributes that are virtues in God may be vices in human beings, and to seek to imitate them (at least in their divine acceptation) may be an unconscionable bid to participate in something that is properly divine. For our purposes, what is especially significant is that the list of traits offered by al-Makkī includes a number of concepts thematized by ancient articulations of greatness of soul and speaking to the ethical field of esteem and self-esteem more specifically. Among these concepts, the most important is the first, which I translated neutrally as a ‘sense of one’s greatness’ to allow for its positive sense as applied to God. If a reflexive perception of oneself as characterized by greatness is appropriate to God, al-Makkī’s remarks already indicate that this perception may not carry the same appropriateness when exhibited by human beings. The term kibr, which bears a positive sense when applied to God, will in turn carry a negative sense in the human context. Applied to human beings, in fact, kibr is the term that signifies the vice of excessive pride or arrogance. This is one of two concepts, alongside conceit (ʿujb), that organize al-Ghazālī’s discussion in that book of the Revival devoted to an investigation of the ethics of self-worth, On the Condemnation of Pride and Conceit, to which we now need to turn in order to place this ethics in

⁷² Qūt al-qulūb, vol. 2, 1042–3.

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fuller view and in fuller conversation with al-Ghazālī’s remarks on greatness of soul. Al-Ghazālī addresses these two vices seriatim, providing separate analyses for each. Yet it is clear that these qualities are deeply intermeshed, not only in a structural sense—conceit is formally identified as the cause of pride— but also in sharing many of the key features of al-Ghazālī’s analysis, including his analysis of what makes them vicious, what is the means of remedying them, and what is the virtue that should replace them. Both qualities represent failures in the evaluative attitude to the self and flawed modes of relating to one’s merits. Given the root meaning of the Arabic word for ‘pride’ (literally ‘magnitude’), the sense of one’s greatness naturally figures more strongly in al-Ghazālī’s account of this vice, which he specifies in terms that incorporate a comparative dimension. The proud person is not simply the person who deems himself great (yastaʿzimu nafsahu), but the person who _ deems himself greater than others and judges his perfections (sifāt al-kamāl) to _ exceed others’.⁷³ This relational aspect is absent from the vice of conceit (literally ‘self-admiration’ or ‘self-amazement’, from the root meaning ‘amazement’ or ‘wonder’). Yet it is again a relational aspect that organizes al-Ghazālī’s specification of the latter, though this is a relation of a very different kind and the vice consists not in its presence but in its absence. Conceit is a sense of satisfaction and confidence in one’s perfections, or more broadly the blessings one enjoys, that fails to have regard for their origin. Whatever the differences that separate these vices, what is crucial is that both fundamentally represent failures in knowledge and self-knowledge; and in both cases, it is a knowledge of the self in its relation to God that supplies the necessary corrective. Fresh from al-Makkī’s remarks, we will instantly recognize one of the grounds that al-Ghazālī appeals to in mounting his critique of the vice of pride. ‘A sense of one’s greatness is befitting to God alone’, and thus the person who displays pride ‘has contested God’s claim over an attribute that only befits His majesty’.⁷⁴ The vice of pride will be uprooted by a knowledge of God that induces a proper appreciation of His greatness, combined with a knowledge of self that induces a proper appreciation of its insignificance. This is a knowledge that al-Ghazālī takes it upon himself to provide in broad brushstrokes at this juncture of the Revival by offering a sweeping portrait of the human condition which traces the long arc of human life from the absolute nothingness of non-existence,

⁷³ Ihyāʾ, vol. 11, 1946. _

⁷⁴ Ibid., respectively 1979 and 1951.

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    -: -ĀLĪ 43 through to birth, to the different stages of development, to death, and on to resurrection and the Day of Judgement, highlighting the powerful hand of God at every step of this narrative sub specie aeternitatis. It is a portrait that in certain respects may remind readers of Pascal’s grandiose exercise in astonishment when conjuring the ‘two infinites’ in the Pensées. The effect is the same: to place us in a way that displaces us, bringing home our insignificance and dependence and provoking in us a sense of humility, which forms the only appropriate moral response to our condition.⁷⁵ Several elements of al-Ghazālī’s confrontation of the cognitive basis of pride recur in his discussion of conceit, but there is a shift of emphasis that reflects the distinctive character of this vice. In turning to examine the latter, it is worth observing that it is in fact conceit that constitutes the most direct interlocutor of Aristotle’s virtue of greatness, insofar as the latter was specified in absolute rather than comparative terms. With this in mind, it will be interesting to consider al-Ghazālī’s critique, which he prefaces with a more nuanced characterization of the nature of this vice. Conceit relative to some perfection is realized when a person ‘rejoices in it and reposes his confidence in it, and when he rejoices in it under its aspect as a perfection or blessing or good or distinction, and not under its aspect as a gift from God and a blessing received from Him. Rather he rejoices in it insofar as it is a quality he possesses and is ascribed to him as his possession.’⁷⁶ Synopsizing: conceit consists in judging a certain asset one possesses to be great (istiʿzām) _ and placing one’s reliance in it (rukūn) while failing to ascribe it to its real giver, that is, God. Add another conceptual filament—a sense of entitlement (haqq) to receive rewards and advantages from God—and you have the _ cognate vice of presumption (idlāl).⁷⁷ Having limned this vice more precisely, al-Ghazālī proceeds to a thorough demolition of its rational basis by a tour de force deconstruction of the notion of human authorship or responsibility embedded in it. Anyone who takes pleasure in his perfections because he believes they have their origin in him dwells, very simply, in the night of ignorance. All the elements of our being on which our action depends—whether the will or power that moves us, or the bodily parts we move—have been created in us by God in an act of undeserved and ungrounded beneficence. If anything should provoke our ⁷⁵ See ibid., 1969–73. I am simplifying al-Ghazālī’s account of the treatment of pride, which includes other cognitive strategies and also incorporates a behavioural component. Some of the cognitive strategies (e.g. the ones schematized on 1981) have much in common with the strategies used to treat conceit. ⁷⁶ Ibid., 1991. ⁷⁷ Ibid., 1991–2.

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wonder or admiration, it is not our own perfections but God’s generosity in conferring them upon us, when indeed he has chosen to withhold them from others. The deterministic underpinnings of this response are hardly hidden from view. Al-Ghazālī continues with an open avowal that ensures nobody could mistake them: ‘It was not you who acted when you acted; it was not you who prayed when you prayed.’ In reality there is no agent other than God (lā fāʿila illā Allāh).⁷⁸ In a later book of the Revival devoted to the topic of gratitude, al-Ghazālī puts the same point using the concept of beauty as his focal term: ‘God bestowed beauty and God then gave praise . . . it is as though a king were to scrub his squalid servant clean, deck him out in the finest clothes he has, and . . . then say to him, “How handsome you are! How beautiful your clothes and how clean your face!” ’⁷⁹ Given God’s ultimate responsibility for the beautiful aspects or perfections a person possesses, it is he who ultimately deserves praise and thanks for them. Once we appreciate our dependence on God, in fact, we will realize that the right attitude to any perfections we happen to possess is not one of joyful confidence but of fear and trembling—a fearful perception of the fragility of our virtue. For what was given to us without reason can be equally easily taken away without reason. And given the distance that still separates our virtue from its happy consummation in the next life, any sense of safety will be premature until that threshold has been crossed. This latter point indeed forms the basis of al-Ghazālī’s engagement with what I earlier described as the ‘psychological truth’ that we take pleasure in our perfection. His normative response to this psychological fact is simply to deny that we should succumb to it. ‘We must not rejoice in [our perfection], because the conclusion (or ‘issue’: khātima) is unknown. For it entails joy because it draws one near to God, yet the danger of the conclusion remains. The fear of a bad conclusion should thus take the place of joy in anything that is found in the mundane world. The mundane world is a vale of sorrows and griefs, not a realm of joy and happiness.’⁸⁰ There will be several things to note about this remarkable positioning. In identifying an overblown sense of security and false sense of self-ownership

⁷⁸ Quotes from ibid., 1993, 1995; and see 1992–7 for al-Ghazālī’s overall discussion. ⁷⁹ Ihyāʾ, vol. 12, 2228–9. Cf. Maqsad, 126: all the beauty and perfection found in this world _ derives_ from God’s being. ⁸⁰ Ihyāʾ, vol. 10, 1852–3. He continues with a familiar affirmation of dependency: ‘Moreover, _ if you rejoice in it in the hope of a good conclusion, what you must rejoice in is God’s bountiful bestowal (fadl) of knowledge and uprightness upon you . . . for the perception of perfection gives one pleasure,_ and perfection exists as a result of God’s bounty.’

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    -: -ĀLĪ 45 as the nub of this moral pathology, al-Ghazālī may remind us of a complaint often voiced against Aristotle’s portrait of the great-souled man: the troubling sense of possession with which he relates to his virtuous character, which combines with an inability to tolerate indebtedness to others that reflects an exaggerated sense of self-sufficiency and a broader failure to recognize his dependencies.⁸¹ By the same token, al-Ghazālī’s account may provoke an interesting comparison with some of the strategies that Christian writers would adopt in seeking to reconcile this virtue with their own characteristic viewpoint on these dependencies. Thus, one of several moves that Aquinas would make in the Summa Theologiae would be to anchor the notion of human greatness more firmly within a theological framework, focusing attention on what is great in a person in its status as a gift from God. As with al-Ghazālī, one consequence of this move was to effect a shift in the place of honour within the ethical landscape (and for Aquinas, within the architecture of magnanimity specifically); for seen in this light, any honour that is due to a person for his greatness ultimately redounds to God. As Augustine had earlier put it in The City of God, when a person recognizes that it is from God that ‘man receives whatever in him is rightly deserving of praise’, his concern becomes that praise should be given not to himself but to God.⁸² Aquinas would join these recalibrations to another, modulating the great-souled man’s sense of his own greatness with a sense of humility that forms the natural corollary of this acknowledgement of dependence. The emphasis on humility will likewise already have stood out as a key feature of al-Ghazālī’s ethical understanding. It is indeed humility that shapes his account of the proper way of relating to the self and its merits, and that constitutes the virtue that should take the place of the vices of selfesteem he outlines. Yet the terms in which he specifies this virtue, as the above will also have suggested, are so stark as to make one wonder what foothold it could still allow to any notion of human greatness. And here, looking away from Aquinas’ delicate recalibrations, we should instead focus on the comparison of greater moment. For in casting pride and conceit as vices of self-knowledge, al-Ghazālī’s account resonates with Aristotle’s understanding of greatness of soul (and its corresponding vices) as I earlier characterized this. Yet if for Aristotle self-knowledge could support

⁸¹ See briefly Herdt, Putting on Virtue, 41–3; as Herdt notes, there is some tension here given Aristotle’s sensitivity to these dependencies elsewhere. ⁸² City of God, V, §19, 212–13. Aquinas’ discussion of magnanimity can be found in Summa Theologiae, IIaIIae, q. 129.

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a judgement of one’s greatness, for al-Ghazālī, as his view emerges from these passages of the Revival, self-knowledge not only fails to support a judgement of one’s greatness—the only judgement it supports is a judgement of one’s baseness. The sweeping vista of the human condition that al-Ghazālī summons to drive such self-knowledge home characteristically terminates in an insight into ‘the worthlessness of one’s being’ (khissat dhātihi). The raft of moral exercises he subsequently offers is intended to lead his reader to ‘regard himself with contempt’ (yuhaqqira nafsahu). ‘The _ higher a believer stands in God’s estimate,’ he approvingly quotes a religious saying, ‘the lower he stands in his own.’ And again, using terms that will seem especially pregnant: God said, ‘You have worth (qadr) in our sight so long as you assign yourself none.’⁸³ It is not that the term ‘great’ could not be applied to human beings at all within this outlook. But it will be applied precisely to the humble; and as the quoted remarks already suggest, it will be applied not from their perspective, but from God’s. ‘The one who is great (kabīr) is the one who is great in God’s estimate in the hereafter.’⁸⁴ In the Scale, al-Ghazālī had referred with apparent approval to the delight the great-souled man takes in the value (qadr) of his soul; in these pages of the Revival, he denies one could ever rightfully assign oneself any. In the Scale, he had spoken with apparent approval of a positive sense of self-worth founded on one’s proper deserts; here any such moderating perspective seems absent. Such a perspective might, for a moment, appear to be offered at one particular juncture of the Revival, in a brief section at the end of al-Ghazālī’s discussion of the vice of pride where he suddenly appears to recollect the Aristotelian principle of the mean and offers to locate the virtue of humility against not only the vice of excessive self-regard, but also against a vice of excessive self-abasement (takhāsus or madhalla). Yet what is striking is that this concept seems to be restricted to external behaviour. It applies to behaviour that is degrading insofar as it violates something we might call social status or dignity, as when the scholar leaps up to offer his seat to the shoemaker and treats the latter with lavish deference. Here, too, al-Ghazālī provides no indication that there is a vice of thinking too ill of oneself on the internal level.⁸⁵ ⁸³ The quotes are respectively from Ihyāʾ, vol. 11, 1971, 1975, 1943, 1959. _ ⁸⁴ Ibid., 1980; cf. 1959, using the alternative term ʿazīm (‘great’) to suggest that the person _ or greater than others. Compare the who is great is the one who does not think himself great rather more stipulative-sounding remarks in the Maqsad regarding the application of the term _ kabīr to human beings (119). ⁸⁵ See the remarks in Ihyāʾ, vol. 11, 1987–8. _

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Taken together, everything we have seen attests a fundamental tension between the view of honour and self-esteem expounded by al-Ghazālī in his major ethical work, the Revival, and the view embedded in the ancient virtue of greatness of soul, particularly in its Aristotelian articulation. Discounting certain sources of ambivalence, his view of honour is overwhelmingly negative; his view of how one should relate to one’s merits is dominated by an emphasis on their deprecation.

An Ethical Conflict and its Eclipse The conversation between the two sets of views, it should be noted, is not a seamless one. There are differences of emphasis between al-Ghazālī’s and Aristotle’s approaches which reflect profound divergences in intellectual outlook and which should not be disregarded. To take one example, alGhazālī’s criticism of the pleasure deriving from an awareness of one’s perfection—‘we must not rejoice in it because the conclusion is unknown’— will seem striking coming from Aristotle’s account, which his terms otherwise engage, in the emphasis it places on future consequences. Future consequences, this suggests, are a factor that can and should affect how we evaluate perfections actually realized in the present. Taken broadly, this of course reflects a basic feature of al-Ghazālī’s religious metaphysics, namely that perfections and imperfections are indissolubly connected to other-worldly outcomes. Yet it represents a more particular (and far from inevitable) way of parsing this connection that has important implications for the status of ethical perfection, and the concept of virtue, in his understanding. In a remarkable passage of the Revival, in fact, al-Ghazālī appears to reduce the possession of present virtue—or to make its attribution contingent on—the future, as yet unknown, outcome. The context, significantly for the thread of our inquiry, is a discussion in which the project of imitating God is called into doubt, and the question is raised whether there are certain divine qualities that do not form an appropriate object of human imitation. These qualities include, notably, self-sufficiency and a sense of one’s comparative grandeur (the term here is takabbur).⁸⁶ Al-Ghazālī responds with a robust defence of this project and of the legitimacy of the human imitation of divine qualities. Among other things, this involves the seminal move of ⁸⁶ Note that al-Ghazālī formally distinguishes kibr from takabbur and relates them as inner attitude to outer expression (Ihyāʾ, vol. 11, 1946), yet these semantic boundaries remain brittle. _

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allowing for the possibility in principle that human beings might instantiate the latter quality virtuously, while joining this to a claim that they can never do so in practice. For the judgement of greatness this quality incorporates must be grounded in true entitlement, and human beings can never have certain knowledge of their entitlement, as it depends on a future eventuality. ‘Were a person to judge that he possesses this attribute with a definiteness admitting no doubt, then the quality of takabbur would be realised in him, would appropriate for him and would be a virtue (fadīla) with respect to _ him. Yet he has no way of knowing this, for this depends on the conclusion (khātima), and he does not know what the conclusion will be.’⁸⁷ This remark will be interesting, on the one hand, for evoking the way some commentators have characterized the proper Christian attitude to greatness of soul. It is not that great-souled people are vicious; it is that they do not exist. This is ‘a virtue possessed by no-one’.⁸⁸ Yet in highlighting the relevance of a future eventuality—an eventuality that represents the closing moment of a person’s mundane life⁸⁹—to our ability to form judgements about the realization of a meritorious attribute in the present time, it is also important in bringing out a feature of al-Ghazālī’s fundamental understanding that makes for a striking contrast with Aristotle’s. The notion that such judgements could be confidently formed was implicit in the basic architecture of the specific virtue of greatness of soul, to the extent that the great-souled person could accurately judge that he ‘is worthy of great things’ and this worthiness was founded on his virtuous character. Yet it in turn reflects Aristotle’s broader understanding of virtue as a stable state or disposition (hexis), which as such could naturally feature in the content of true statements about a person’s character in the present tense.⁹⁰ ⁸⁷ Ihyāʾ, vol. 13, 2415; the discussion builds up from 2411. _ Curzer, ‘Aristotle’s much-maligned megalopsychos’, 147–9. Compare the very different ⁸⁸ See remarks about the sense in which takabbur can be attributed to human beings in al-Ghazālī, Maqsad, 79, where the concept is revamped as a virtue of dedication to God in a way that severs _ its ordinary linguistic meaning and sanitizes it of its reflexive element. This revisionist it from move reflects a broader methodological strategy governing al-Ghazālī’s approach to the divine names and the possibility of their being manifested by and predicated of human beings in this work. Many names—including, notably for our purposes, ‘great’ (ʿazīm or kabīr) and ‘majestic’ _ (jalīl)—can indeed be predicated of human beings, but in a significantly altered sense. ⁸⁹ Far more could be said about this important theological idea; for a wedge into the topic, see al-Ghazālī’s concentrated remarks in Ihyāʾ, vol. 13, 2363–75. ⁹⁰ Al-Ghazālī’s reluctance to license_ definite judgements about the content of a person’s character in this context contrasts interestingly with the attitude he exhibits in a rather different context. In the Book on Vigilance and Self-Examination, he recommends to his reader that he adopt a methodical approach to the virtues and vices, making a list of the most important negative and positive traits and crossing them off as he removes some and acquires others; Ihyāʾ, _

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This point—and the sense of contrast it evokes—ties into an even broader observation concerning the content of the concept of ‘perfection’ that organizes al-Ghazālī’s account. Even though ethical character forms a central preoccupation of the Revival, one of the most surprising features of his discussion of the ethics of self-esteem is how rarely he brings it up in specifying the perfections that are engaged in a person’s self-assessment. The most important (genuine) perfections highlighted in his discussion are knowledge (ʿilm), piety (waraʿ), worship (ʿibāda), and action (ʿamal).⁹¹ It is not that character is formally excluded by the terms of this list. This list can in fact be mapped on to a basic categorial division that is pivotal to al-Ghazālī’s conceptual economy—as indeed to Islamic ethical culture as a whole—and that carves up the field of what is ‘morally relevant’ into two main domains, knowledge and action. Character is formally subsumed in the latter category.⁹² Already on its own, this move raises questions, and one cannot help wondering whether such an act of conceptual housekeeping—which forces the concept of character into a rigid binary structure with the result of assimilating what many philosophers, including Aristotle, would understand as an inner state to what they would understand as its outward expression—could be entirely without significance, and without consequences. Despite this formal inclusion, in fact, direct references to character in specifying the notion of ‘perfection’ are few and far between in the Revival. And given the way in which moral character is out-privileged by knowledge—it is a perfection that is ultimately valued merely instrumentally, as a means to knowledge, and construed merely negatively, as freedom from animal drives and detachment from worldly concerns⁹³—one cannot help thinking that an element which played an important role in the vol. 15, 2807. This practice, of course, presupposes that one be able to form definite judgements as to whether one possesses a particular virtue. Higher-level truth, this suggests, may not be the best compass when it comes to the practical pursuit of moral ends. ⁹¹ See, indicatively, Ihyāʾ, vol. 10, 1852; vol. 11, 1992. _ ⁹² This is signalled clearly by al-Ghazālī in the Mīzān, 192, where he explains ‘action’ (ʿamal) in terms of regulating the appetites and controlling anger and subjecting these two drives to reason—which is what good character comes down to on his account. Cf. Sherif, Ghazālī’s Theory of Virtue, 8. Translating ʿamal as ‘practice’, as e.g. Garden does (‘Revisiting al-Ghazālī’s crisis’, 211), may provide some help, but does not remove the oddity of de-emphasizing the status of character as an inner state. It could be debated whether the emphasis on activity reflects a considered belief that complete virtue can never be attained and all we can hope for is continence and a life of constant inner struggle and self-mastering activity. There is much in al-Ghazālī’s work that would argue both sides of the question. ⁹³ The instrumental and negative view of virtue is crystal-clear, e.g., in Mīzān, 217 (though the issue admits further discussion). See also the stark remarks in Ihyāʾ, vol. 10, 1844, where the _

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architecture of Aristotle’s profile of the megalopsychos has undergone significant displacement. Such observations raise questions about the exact extent of the conversation taking place between these schemes, questions that indeed go beyond our focal virtue and bear on the contours of these thinkers’ ethical projects as a whole. Yet if we prescind from these kinds of questions here and focus on the essentials of al-Ghazālī’s account, the conflict between al-Ghazālī’s views of esteem and self-esteem and ancient views inscribed into the virtue of greatness of soul seems open and direct. What will appear remarkable given this open conflict is that al-Ghazālī himself never confronts it. And this will appear doubly remarkable given the way in which his own language drives him repeatedly up against it. Readers may already have picked up on the interesting lexical affinity between the term used to signify greatness of soul (kibar al-nafs) and the term signifying arrogance or pride (kibr). The terms kibar and kibr, it is plain, share the same triliteral root. The affinity is suggestive; and among the thoughts it suggests is one I framed when first situating the Arabic reception of greatness of soul in a field of expectations, and indeed of heightened curiosity. Here was a culture that lacked the concept of megalopsychia, suddenly confronting a culture that contained it. How would it find the intellectual and linguistic resources to accommodate it? Given the cultural contingency the concept has often been seen to carry—its logic rooted in the world of the Homeric heroes as filtered through the social and intellectual life of the Athenian polis—the confrontation would seem to have the makings of a collision. Taken broadly, of course, this was a collision taking place on a grand scale in the early centuries of the Islamic world, which set itself the task of absorbing a colossal body of philosophical and scientific literature from Greek and Syriac sources from the eighth to the tenth centuries. Translators of these texts had to negotiate the challenge of bridging the ‘cultural gap dividing ancient Greece from medieval Iraq’ case by case.⁹⁴ The success of this undertaking depended on the ability to draw on the existing resources of the language even while expanding its boundaries, and it could hardly leave knowledge–action binary is replaced with a knowledge–freedom binary that accentuates the negative aspect of ‘virtue’. ⁹⁴ The remark is from Anna Akasoy, ‘The Arabic and Islamic reception’, 90, and see ff. for some examples of this kind of negotiation with regard to the translation of the Nicomachean Ethics.

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the language unchanged. One can see this process of boundary-pushing transformation on display in many of the key literary monuments of the translation movement, including, as Manfred Ullmann observes, in the Arabic version of the Nicomachean Ethics.⁹⁵ This is the broader context in which to locate the particular encounter with megalopsychia. Yet one wonders whether, even in a language undergoing seismic changes, some changes would prove harder to absorb, and whether the semantic freight carried by some of the linguistic resources mobilized would complicate the progress of a particular graft. It is a question one raises, certainly, with regard to the Arabic absorption of the virtue of megalopsychia through the simple calque kibar al-nafs, given the awkward contiguity into which it brings it with a term carrying far more negative ethical connotations. The term kibar al-nafs, signifying a sense of one’s greatness understood as a virtue, lies only a morphological whisker away from the term kibr, signifying a sense of one’s greatness understood as a vice. Given this background—given an awareness of both the cultural specificity of the concept and of the potential tensions brooked by its Arabic accommodation—one watches eagerly for an explicit comment on the linguistic character of the term among its philosophical discussants. Among those who touch upon it, the only one who comes tantalizingly close to such comment is Avicenna (d.1037) in his reprise of Aristotle’s above-cited passage from the Posterior Analytics, which is also one of the few occasions when he refers to the virtue. The terms in which Aristotle had set up the discussion in the Posterior Analytics—in order to define the concept, ‘we must consider individual great-souled persons whom we know, and see what one characteristic they all have qua great-souled’⁹⁶—had made an implicit appeal to ordinary usage in presupposing the inquirer’s ability to make judgements about the appropriate application of the concept. Yet when he reprises the point in the Healing, Avicenna passes up the invitation to reflect on the linguistic status of the concept and simply rehearses Aristotle’s claim about people who are ‘described’ as (mawsūfūn) or ‘called’ _ (yusammā) great-souled without so much as a word about who exactly calls them that in his own times.⁹⁷ Other writers who take up the concept either ⁹⁵ See Ullmann’s remarks in Die Nikomachische Ethik, vol. 1, introduction, esp. 27–8. ⁹⁶ I draw on the translation by Hugh Tredennick (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: Heinemann, 1960), with modification. ⁹⁷ Avicenna, The Book of the Healing/Kitāb al-Shifāʾ: al-Mantiq: al-Burhān, ed. Abuʾl-ʿAlā ʿAfīfī (Cairo: Wizārat al-Tarbiyya waʾl-Taʿlīm, 1956), 316. This is_ one of Avicenna’s few forays into the topic of greatness of soul parsed as kibar al-nafs, though, as we shall see in Part 2, he has

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place it, like Miskawayh, in the segregated space of a definition without commenting on its relationship to ordinary speech, or less usually blend it, like al-Fārābī, into the flow of their speech with little to call attention to its linguistic particularity and to thematize its intelligibility to the average reader.⁹⁸ In certain texts, the awkwardness carried by this semantic contiguity edges particularly close to the surface. A notable example is a doxographical work sometimes attributed to the philosopher Abuʾl-Hasan al-ʿĀmirī (d.992), _ The Book of Attaining and Imparting Happiness, which contains a discussion of the virtues that echoes Aristotle’s in several respects (though the influence is far from unalloyed). Yet what is striking is that when it comes to discussing the proper attitude to honour, the author leaves the virtuous mean unnamed, and only the vicious extremes are named, with the vice of deficiency given as ‘smallness of soul’ (sighar al-nafs) and the vice of excess as ‘arrogance’ _ (takabbur).⁹⁹ Interestingly, only a few pages later we find a relatively extensive exposition of greatness of soul—rendered through the familiar term kibar al-nafs—that closely follows Aristotle’s account.¹⁰⁰ This sequence of moves may make us wonder about the degree of integration achieved by the author in approaching his material. Yet it will be hard not to read the first act of omission, and the pointed reservation of the root k-b-r for the vice, as an indication of the challenges posed by the translation of the virtue term to the ordinary Arabic speaker. Yet whatever we make of these other discussants, in the case of al-Ghazālī the potential tensions are signalled with special intensity by his own linguistic usage, and by tremors rippling through the fabric of his own ethical speech. There are several moments in his discussion of pride in the Revival

a few more remarks to contribute on greatness of spirit or ʿizam al-himma. Dunlop documents a _ of kibar al-nafs in his introduction number of Avicenna’s limited transactions with the concept to The Arabic Version of the Nicomachean Ethics, 31–2. And see Dimitri Gutas, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 2014, rev. edn), ch. 6, §2, for a discussion that contextualizes Avicenna’s limited interest in the virtues and the vices as an ethical subject. ⁹⁸ To the extent that the particularity is signalled, it is through the simple fact that the meaning of the term visibly shifts as it enters the flow of ordinary speech and submits to the grammatical force field created by the Arabic, as exemplified by the passage from al-Fārābī cited earlier: the philosopher’s soul is ‘naturally above [takburu nafsuhu] everything ugly and base . . . ’. ⁹⁹ These are not the only terms given for the vicious extremes; see the discussion in The Book of Attaining and Imparting Happiness/Kitāb al-Saʿāda waʾl-isʿād, facsimile edition by Mojtaba Minovi (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1957–8), 96–102. ¹⁰⁰ Ibid., 162–4.

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where the term kibr appears next to the term nafs in a close proximity that will make readers sit up and take notice. Pride, al-Ghazālī says at the opening of his account, refers to an internal characteristic rather than to outward behaviour. If there is no outward expression, ‘one says that a person has pride in his soul (fī nafsihi kibr)’. ‘Pride and a high sense of self-worth (al-kibr wa-ʿizzat al-nafs)’, he writes in another place, close the doors of heaven.¹⁰¹ Yet even readers sensitized to these tremors may be astonished to see the term kibar al-nafs appear only a few pages later in full armour, in a statement that plainly marks the reversal of its positive signification and its assumption of the negative meaning attaching to its linguistic neighbour. When people become indignant on God’s behalf upon the sight of sinful behaviour, al-Ghazālī states, their motives are sometimes baser than they suppose, and it is often ‘pride (kibar al-nafs) and a presumptuous belief (idlāl) in their knowledge and piety’ that drive them.¹⁰² In the Revival, al-Ghazālī provides no commentary on greatness of soul in the manner of the Scale; yet greatness of soul certainly makes an appearance in his list of the virtues.¹⁰³ The unmarked transition of kibar al-nafs from virtue to vice within the body of a single work will seem extraordinary. Yet more extraordinary will be the broader phenomenon it represents, and that is a distinct failure on al-Ghazālī’s part to thematize the existence of conflict where conflict is certainly to be found.¹⁰⁴ In trying to understand al-Ghazālī’s complex relationship to philosophy, readers have often had recourse to his famous autobiography, The Deliverer from Error, where al-Ghazālī had reviewed, in his own stylized way, the milestones of his intellectual career and his relation to the key intellectual approaches competing for truth in his day. In spelling out his attitude to philosophy, his concern had been to distance himself from the philosophical sciences and to highlight his commitment to Sufism. Recent readings of the Deliverer have suggested that this framing of the facts was motivated by specific apologetic aims and furnishes a less than faithful reflection of ¹⁰¹ Ihyāʾ, vol. 11, 1946, 1947. _ ¹⁰² Ibid., 1980; the first term could also be vocalized kibr al-nafs. ¹⁰³ It does not appear in the first list of the virtues given in Ihyāʾ, vol. 8, 1358, but it appears in _ kasr). the second list, ibid., 1437 (reading kibar instead of the edition’s ¹⁰⁴ It is a curious feature of one of the precious few scholarly discussions of this virtue in the Arabic tradition, Sherif ’s remarks in Ghazālī’s Theory of Virtue (49–51), that it reaches the same conclusion as I have, albeit less emphatically (51: greatness of soul does not ‘appeal’ to al-Ghazālī), without making clear that this conclusion needs to be wrested from the texts and is not signposted by al-Ghazālī himself. By contrast, the conflict is explicitly brought up in James Schillinger, ‘Intellectual humility and interreligious dialogue between Christians and Muslims’, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 23 (2012), 369–72.

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al-Ghazālī’s intellectual commitments.¹⁰⁵ Yet what is important is that, even with this ostentatiously negative account, ethics had been singled out from among all other parts of the philosophical curriculum for a particularly irenic treatment. Al-Ghazālī had underscored the consonance between philosophical ethics—notably philosophical accounts of the virtues and the vices—and the teachings of the mystics, and he had indeed claimed the higher ground by suggesting that such similarities in content were the result of the philosophers’ borrowings from the latter. Even when philosophical ethical teachings happen not to have their counterpart in religious writings, the attitude toward them is to be one of qualified acceptance subject to a basic assessment: ‘If they are reasonable in themselves and supported by proof, and if they do not contradict the Koran and the prophetic practice, then there is no reason to abstain from using them.’¹⁰⁶ This irenic treatment and indeed defence of philosophical ethics reflects al-Ghazālī’s heavy incorporation of philosophical material into his ethical work—a feature that, as commentators have observed, makes for the continuity between ethical works of otherwise diverging register, such as the Scale and the Revival. In including greatness of soul into his classification of the virtues, al-Ghazālī would seem to be implicitly denying that any contradiction of the kind indicated in the Deliverer arose to place it beyond acceptance. The above discussion has called this into question, as it called into question, though with a softer touch, the harmony of this virtue with Miskawayh’s environing ethical scheme. In the case of al-Ghazālī, one might be tempted to remove the appearance of conflict by appealing to the chronology of his works—with the Scale usually dated before the Revival—to speculate about a change of intellectual viewpoint. Yet greatness of soul, as I have noted, features in both works, even if it only receives direct consideration in the former. It is the same reason that makes it difficult to accept another candidate explanation, which, while ruling out intellectual change, distinguishes between the two works by reference to their audience and aims. In this vein, James Schillinger has speculated that the ostensible embrace of greatness of soul in the Scale and

¹⁰⁵ See, e.g., the argument and scholarly conspectus in Garden, First Islamic Reviver, and also Garden, ‘Coming down from the mountaintop: Al-Ghazālī’s autobiographical writings in context’, Muslim World 101 (2011), 581–96. ¹⁰⁶ See the nuanced discussion in The Deliverer from Error/al-Munqidh min al-dalāl, ed. _ quoted Jamīl Salībā and Kāmil ʿAyyād (Beirut: Dār al-Andalus, 1967, 7th edn), 86–90; the passage_ appears on 88. I use Sherif ’s translation (Ghazālī’s Theory of Virtue, 18), with one minor modification.

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the foregrounding of humility in the Revival reflect the fact that the former represents a ‘conversation with the philosophers about a level of existence and experience that they can share’, while the latter speaks to the ‘more advanced religious-traditional and mystical levels of experience [that] transcend the merely reasonable’.¹⁰⁷ The two works, on this view, address themselves to different experiential and ethical levels, with the higher morality represented by the Revival. Insofar as this interpretation thematizes al-Ghazālī’s relationship to reason and rational methods, it opens out to a question that continues to divide al-Ghazālī’s readers. Certainly the commitment to rational standards is clear in the Scale, and is already expressed in al-Ghazālī’s overture to the work, where he promises to provide a ‘scale’ of action—a scale of which the virtues form a central part. In doing so, he explains, his aim is ‘not to clarify what is true and what is false by demonstrative proof (burhān)’, but to nevertheless lift his readers’ comprehension above the basic level of uncritical assimilation (taqlīd).¹⁰⁸ The obvious implication is that such proofs of truth could be given in principle, and that the content of the work (including the treatment of specific virtues) should be seen as enjoying the highest rational credentials. While the issue admits debate—and settling it would go a long way toward providing a satisfying account of the relationship between these two works—it seems far from clear to me that the commitment to rational method is unseated in the Revival in ways that would qualify the force of these credentials.¹⁰⁹ If this explanation does not seem persuasive, one might be tempted to remove the conflict by appeal to the special context of al-Ghazālī’s discussion in the Revival. The book that served as our principal informant, it will be observed, is dedicated not to what I have been referring to as the ‘ethics of self-esteem’ more broadly but more narrowly to the class of vices within that field, and, as such, it is governed by a therapeutic aim that would unavoidably influence its presentation. For as al-Ghazālī suggests, reprising an insight of Aristotle’s, the attempt to remedy a vice may sometimes require erring toward the opposite extreme.¹¹⁰ Al-Ghazālī’s failure to thematize ¹⁰⁷ See the remarks in Schillinger, ‘Intellectual humility and interreligious dialogue’, 369–72. Schillinger builds on Sherif ’s account of the relationship between the two works. ¹⁰⁸ Mīzān, 358; cf. 179. ¹⁰⁹ In this regard I’m inclined to side with Binyamin Abrahamov’s argument in ‘Al-Ghazālī and the rationalization of Sufism’, in Islam and Rationality, ed. Tamer. As Abrahamov suggests, building on al-Ghazālī’s discussion in the Book on Meditation/Kitāb al-Tafakkur, the entire Revival can in one sense be taken to be grounded in syllogistic reasoning. ¹¹⁰ This idea is present in al-Ghazālī’s remarks on the treatment of bad character in Ihyāʾ, vol. 8, _ 1446–53; see e.g. the remarks about treating pride on 1449. Cf. Aristotle, NE 1109a30–1109b7.

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a more positive concept of self-esteem may thus reflect the therapeutic character of his discussion, as also the fact that human beings are more likely to err in the direction of too much self-regard than in the direction of too little.¹¹¹ Against this hypothesis, however, one would have to stack a number of observations. Al-Ghazālī’s disavowal, for one, of the notion of entitlement in his discussion of conceit—in tension with the role played by this notion in his positive virtues of self-esteem elsewhere—dovetails with a suspicion of moral desert that formed one of the hallmarks of the Ashʿarite theological viewpoint al-Ghazālī defends in other works. Given the debates that have raged regarding the depth of al-Ghazālī’s Ashʿarite commitments, it might seem risky to place such interpretive weight on them for this purpose.¹¹² Yet on this point al-Ghazālī’s Ashʿarite viewpoint ties in with intellectual commitments so deeply engraved into his overall vision that it is hard not to take them as a central interpretive fulcrum. These include, above all, his deterministic understanding of the relationship between divine and human power, which receives eloquent expression across the Revival, and is at the root of his account not only of the need for humility but also of a number of other moral imperatives such as gratitude and trust (tawakkul) in God. Even more relevantly, an emphasis on human deficiency is integral to the way al-Ghazālī approaches a key ritual observance, prayer, as part of his larger project in the Revival of reorienting attention to the interior conditions that must support external acts of devotion. In the case of prayer, these conditions include a state of awe (taʿzīm) founded on an acknowledgement of the _ ‘baseness and contemptibility of the self ’ paired with an acknowledgement of God’s greatness and majesty. Self-abasement finds its ultimate expression in the act of prostration, in which one places what is most precious, the face, against what is least so, the ground. Yet in adopting this position, al-Ghazālī writes, a person places his soul precisely ‘where it belongs’ (wadaʿtahā _ mawdiʿahā).¹¹³ _ ¹¹¹ Interestingly, Carson Holloway makes a similar suggestion regarding the Christian attitude to honour in the context of an argument for the compatibility of Aristotelian magnanimity with Christian ethics. Holloway, ‘Christianity, magnanimity, and statesmanship’, The Review of Politics 61 (1999), 588–9. ¹¹² Some of the most heated debates have centred on al-Ghazālī’s understanding of the concept of causality. See Frank Griffel, Al-Ghazālī’s Philosophical Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), for discussion of these issues. ¹¹³ See the discussion in Ihyāʾ, vol. 2, 289 ff.; 291 and 303 quoted. To these considerations one _ might add the simple observation: although al-Ghazālī indicated a more positive virtue of selfrespect with regard to external behaviour in the Ihyāʾ, as noted earlier, he did not extend this _ the distinction between outer and inner gesture to internal attitudes despite having registered

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Yet if these attempts to clear away conflict are rejected, what alternatives remain? Looking at the broader philosophical history of the virtue of greatness of soul, it might seem possible to mitigate the force of this perplexity by noting that this would not, after all, be the only occasion over the course of this history on which conflict had failed to crystallize as open confrontation. Something not too dissimilar, as John Marenbon argues, happened among Christian thinkers in the Latin Middle Ages.¹¹⁴ Yet the two contexts would appear to be divided by instructive differences. The ‘contingencies of textual transmission’ Marenbon invokes, for example, in explaining the muted ways in which potential or underlying tensions were negotiated in the Christian context—with the Stoic virtue entering scholarly circles prior to the Aristotelian version and smoothing the latter’s introduction—have no direct counterpart in the Islamic world. While Stoic elements drifted into Miskawayh’s and al-Ghazālī’s conceptualization of the virtue and its Aristotelian aspects were far from unalloyed, the latter stood out with sufficient starkness. Moreover, even though the conflict may have remained unthematized among Christian thinkers, many of them took active steps to iron out potential tensions through constructive reconfigurations or interpretations of the virtue. In this respect, one of the things that stand out in the treatment of the virtue among Muslim thinkers is not only the muting of conflict, but the perfunctoriness of their overall engagement. This last point evokes a familiar reaction—a familiar sense of scepticism— which these kinds of ethical works have aroused when it comes to assessing their philosophical quality or analytical depth, and which the presence of such unexplained and apparently irreconcilable tensions will only seem designed to deepen. Oliver Leaman gives a characteristic statement of this scepticism (one rather more persuasive indeed than his attempt to disarm it) when he remarks that treatises like Miskawayh’s strike readers at first sight as ‘rather banal’ and ‘disappointing in their lack of philosophical sophistication and excess of syncretistic reasoning’. In such works we see ‘a mixture of ideas plainly (Ihyāʾ, vol. 11, 1946). Another alternative for defusing the conflict might be by ques_ of the key assumptions that underpinned my account, namely that the reference to tioning one the soul in the relevant statement in the Mīzān (‘out of delight in the value and grandeur of his soul’) is to be understood not, Aristotelian-style, in terms of the specific individual with his distinctive excellences, but in a universal sense closer to the Stoic understanding: the human soul as such. But the Aristotelian elements of al-Ghazālī’s statement pull strongly against that interpretation. The continuation of the definition clearly situates the subject of the statement in social space as a specific individual. ¹¹⁴ See his discussion in ‘Magnanimity, Christian ethics and paganism’.

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and arguments, a list of other people’s observations, and sometimes rather unexciting advice as to how one should conduct oneself . . . it is tempting to reject it as real philosophy and classify it with literature . . . with little if any philosophical interest’.¹¹⁵ It is not incidental, in this respect, that George Hourani, in his wellknown classification of types of Islamic ethics along two central axes— religious vs secular, normative vs analytic—placed the ethical works of Miskawayh and his successors, notably Nasīr al-Dīn al-Ṭ ūsī and Jalāl _ al-Dīn Dawānī, in the category of secular normative ethics. He justified this decision by citing their derivativeness from the Greek tradition and lack of originality—their framework ‘offers little of general philosophical interest that is new’—and their failure to engage the subject analytically.¹¹⁶ Hourani, it should be remarked, was operating with a highly restrictive conception of what it means to approach the subject analytically, which reflects the biases of the moral philosophy of his time: ethical analysis proprement dit is the analysis of ethical terms. Yet even if we bracket this outmoded conception of ethical inquiry, his classification captures something important about the character of the works that formed our primary sources for the treatment of greatness of soul above, Miskawayh’s Refinement of Character and al-Ghazālī’s Scale of Action. This character in fact reaches its highest expression in the treatment of the virtues and vices in these works, which attests an all-consuming interest in the production of lists and definitions at the expense of deeper analysis, as if the task of ethical inquiry were complete once a virtue or vice had been slotted into a broader hierarchical structure and supplied with a satisfactory definition.¹¹⁷ Seen in this light, Miskawayh’s and to a greater extent al-Ghazālī’s inclusion of greatness of soul in their list of virtues without thematizing the conflict it poses to other elements of their ethical scheme might be taken as a symptom of the limitations of the analytical character of their work. ¹¹⁵ Oliver Leaman, ‘Islamic humanism in the fourth/tenth century’, in History of Islamic Philosophy, ed. Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Oliver Leaman (London: Routledge, 1996), 160. Cf. his remarks about Miskawayh’s work in the same volume: ‘Ibn Miskawayh’, 256–7. ¹¹⁶ See George F. Hourani, ‘Ethics in classical Islam: a conspectus’, in Reason and Tradition in Islamic Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 15–22; 21 quoted. Cf. Walzer’s description of Miskawayh as ‘rather a philosopher by conviction than an independent critical thinker’ (‘Some aspects’, 220). ¹¹⁷ In this respect, these works reflect the character of some of the translated Greek texts referred to earlier—short compendia, such as the treatise by Nicolaus or the De Virtutibus, in which the enumeration of the virtues and vices occupies a salient place. This provides further evidence for the stronger influence exercised by such works compared with more prominent and more analytical works like Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.

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Putting the point more negatively, one might describe it as a failure to fully rationalize and integrate received ideas and place them in thorough conversation with the constants of their overall scheme. Yet the fierce intelligence displayed by al-Ghazālī, for one, in confronting philosophical views in other works makes this negative reading harder to credit, and might make us reach for a more positive way of casting the point. One might thus take it to reveal something important about the nature of the intellectual task these authors saw themselves as pursuing in their works—about the level and type of reflective depth and indeed authorial originality they set themselves as their ideal. The stage-setting statement with which al-Ṭ ūsī would later open his own reworking of Miskawayh’s compendium here seems especially suggestive as a possible expression of the guiding ideal. All the elements of practical philosophy related in this book, he would write, ‘are by way of transmitting and reporting, and by manner of presenting and recounting, the views of the philosophers of ancient and recent times without venturing to declare which view is true and which view false and without undertaking to determine which opinion is most plausible and which doctrine false’.¹¹⁸ This blanket disavowal of intellectual responsibility and renunciation of authorial voice may seem unconvincing as a total characterization of al-Ṭ ūsī’s and his philosophically minded predecessors’ relationship to the material contained in their work, and it will grate with those who reject the dismissive view of these writers as ‘mere copyists’.¹¹⁹ In the case of al-Ghazālī, it will also be hard to reconcile with the intense sense of religious responsibility he displayed in engaging philosophical ideas across his career. Yet one can take it, more modestly, as flagging a feature of this genre of ethical reflection that constitutes what one might cautiously call its internal ‘standards of excellence’ and that serves to distinguish it from other genres of ethical reflection of a more analytical character, such as the one exemplified by works of speculative theology (kalām), which both al-Ṭ ūsī and al-Ghazālī additionally engaged in. In the latter genre—distinguished, in terms of subject matter, by its overridingly meta-ethical focus—the standards of excellence centred on the combative confrontation of opponents through high-octane analytical argument. In the genre of character-focused writing that thinkers like al-Ghazālī and Miskawayh participated in, by ¹¹⁸ Ṭ ūsī’s Nasirean Ethics, 29. ¹¹⁹ As does Lenn E. Goodman vis-à-vis Miskawayh in Islamic Humanism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 108. Cf. Mohammed Arkoun’s remarks about the ‘critical vigilance’ with which Miskawayh approached his sources: L’humanisme arabe au IVe/Xe siècle: Miskawayh, philosophe et historien (Paris: Vrin, 1982), 209.

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contrast, the core values constituting the standards of excellence centred not so much on critical argument and rational coherence as on an attitude of appreciation and accommodation, and a concern to transmit received funds of ethical wisdom which need not necessarily (and despite al-Ghazālī’s suggestive reference to the possibilities of ‘demonstrative proof ’ in the Scale) entail scrutinizing the relationship of every element to every other and subjecting every element to stringent critique. This, in turn, might be connected to the practical aims shaping these works, insofar as they strove to have a direct effect on the moral life of their intelligent reader. Miskawayh flags these aims clearly at the opening of the Refinement: ‘Our objective in this work is to acquire a moral character by virtue of which all the acts that issue from us may be fine.’¹²⁰ Indeed, one of Miskawayh’s most distinguished readers, Mohammed Arkoun, has suggested we take the first-person framing of this mission statement sufficiently seriously to approach the book as nothing less than the author’s ‘spiritual autobiography’—a document of ideals that Miskawayh sought to put to practice in his own life. By the same token, the definitions and analyses of the virtues and vices should be considered, not just as the expression of a ‘scientific’ approach to ethics, but ‘as rules inspiring the author’s conduct’.¹²¹ Something similar could be said about the works of al-Ghazālī’s that we have considered. The pedagogical aims of both the Revival and the Scale— their aspiration to produce not merely theoretical conviction but ethical conversion—are revealed, among other things, in the pervasive use of imagery and metaphors, which serve to concretize abstract messages and render them more digestible and attractive by mobilizing emotion and imagination beyond mere rational understanding. In the Revival, they are openly expressed in al-Ghazālī’s characterization of his scope as the science of praxis (muʿāmala), whose intended effect is to ‘medicate people’s hearts and spirits’.¹²² In ethical works governed by such practical standards, one

¹²⁰ Tahdhīb, 1. These practical aims are reflected in the association of several of the works considered above with a genre of ethical writing intended as a propaedeutic to philosophical learning and distinguished from other genres of higher-level ethical thought that presuppose such learning. See briefly Thérèse-Anne Druart, ‘La philosophie morale arabe et l’antiquité tardive’, Bulletin d’études orientales 48 (1996), 183–7, and references there. The point, of course, can only be pushed so far (without introducing finer-grained distinctions, that is); Aristotle also characterized his aims in practical terms with little sacrifice of analytical depth. ¹²¹ Arkoun, L’humanisme arabe, 34–5. ¹²² Ihyāʾ, vol. 1, 5–6. Cf. Jules Janssens’ assessment with reference to the Revival: its intended _ was less the critical reader ‘in search of profound, theoretical knowledge’ than the audience average man ‘in need of guidelines for good behaviour’. Janssens, ‘Al-Ghazālī between

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might say, certain lower-order elements might occasionally pass the gates which a more critical spirit would have screened out. This explanation will not satisfy everyone. Among the questions it provokes, one of the most interesting is how writers like al-Ghazālī and Miskawayh understood the status and significance, more specifically, of their classifications of the virtues and vices, which is the component of their works that gives the least evidence of higher-order critical reflection and that is also least easy to envisage serving a practical aim. Even if we pay due regard to the undergirding conviction, voiced by Miskawayh but boasting a venerable philosophical lineage, that to know the definition of a thing is to grasp its essence, the line between the bookish recital of definitions and their ‘inspirational’ potential (in Arkoun’s suggestive phrase) and full-blooded embodiment in moral practice is hard to trace out clearly.¹²³ One of the greatest obstacles to accepting this explanation is that it would challenge a conviction that exercises a magnetic effect over us as readers and interpreters, and that is the faith in a unified consistent viewpoint that is present among conflicting and ambiguous textual phenomena waiting to be discovered. This interpretive heuristic seems especially seductive in the case of a thinker as perspicacious yet also as elusive as al-Ghazālī, whose ambiguous pronouncements on a host of questions have often driven readers to the kind of task I pursued above—to a painstaking effort to place the different parts of his work into conversation and piece together a unified account of his ‘real’ view. Its appeal is only enhanced by al-Ghazālī’s habit of calling attention to his self-restraint and his decision to leave certain things unsaid, as he commonly does in the Revival. Taneli Kukkonen offers a particularly relevant expression of this stance in a recent essay devoted to an interpretive effort of this kind, where he stakes a claim for there being a ‘theoretical backdrop . . . to al-Ghazālī’s seemingly disjointed accounts of the various virtues and vices’ and states that ‘a unitary account must undergird the different presentations given to our moral striving in various contexts, even if the exact formulation should prove elusive’.¹²⁴ The distinction drawn philosophy (falsafa) and Sufism (tasawwuf ): his complex attitude in the Marvels of the Heart _ (ʿAjāʾib al-qalb) of the Ihyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn’, Muslim World 101 (2011), 632. _ ¹²³ For Miskawayh’s remark, see Tahdhīb, 19. ¹²⁴ Taneli Kukkonen, ‘Al-Ghazālī on the emotions’, Islam and Rationality, ed. Tamer, 140; Kukkonen’s project in this paper is shaped by a methodological insistence on an analytical rather than ‘compilatory’ or descriptive approach to al-Ghazālī’s thought which leans heavily on this heuristic. The elusiveness of al-Ghazālī’s thought has been a central factor in the colossal amount of interpretive debate his work has aroused, but it should be kept in mind that this kind

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above between different domains of ethical writing and their respective levels of reflective depth, if sound, might lead us to question this faith, suggesting that the right way to approach certain textual phenomena may not be by striving through toilsome interpretation to incorporate them into a well-ordered universe in which each and every one of them has a meaningful and coherent place, but rather by accepting that certain phenomena may carry reduced significance within this universe and might even be dropped out of it altogether without serious loss. Yet, of course, in practice such faith could only be abandoned after pushing it as far as it will go.

Concluding Remarks In the above discussion, my aim was to turn a searchlight on the reception of the virtue of greatness of soul among thinkers within the Islamic world. While this searchlight took in a number of figures along the way, my main focus was on two prominent figures with a strong interest in ethical questions, Miskawayh and al-Ghazālī. Both thinkers, as I have shown, allocate this virtue—as identified through the Arabic term kibar al-nafs—a distinct place in their taxonomies, specifying it in ways that evoke several of the conceptual strands featuring in ancient configurations of the virtue and that notably include an Aristotelian emphasis on the agent’s self-evaluation and relationship to his merits. Yet as thus construed, greatness of soul appears to come into conflict with their larger ethical schemes. This holds especially true of al-Ghazālī, whose considered stance on the ethics of esteem and selfesteem drives a deep wedge between his outlook and the one embedded in ancient conceptions of the virtue and Aristotle’s more particularly. A reflexive appreciation of one’s greatness—one perhaps expressed even more eloquently among the Stoics than by the mouth of Aristotle’s megalopsychos—would seem to have no place within this outlook, as conditioned by al-Ghazālī’s religious commitments. Taken as an account of the reception of this ancient ethical idea within the Islamic world, there are no doubt many ways in which the above narrative could be extended, for example by expanding the inevitably finite base

of elusiveness is pervasive in the field, as I suggested in my study of the Muʿtazilites (Moral Agents and their Deserts: The Character of Muʿtazilite Ethics [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008], esp. ch. 1) and also more recently of Ibn Taymiyya. See e.g., briefly, Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 6–7, 16–21.

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of texts and thinkers surveyed. There are also many ways in which its comparative dimension could be developed, placing it in deeper conversation not only with ancient philosophy but also with other instances of the latter’s reception among thinkers of different religious traditions, including ones belonging to the same historical milieu. How, for example, might the fate this idea met with among Muslim thinkers compare with its fate among Jewish intellectuals living in the Islamic world? On one reading at least, there might be an interesting contrast to be drawn between the approach to the virtue and to the ethical stakes it incorporates taken by al-Ghazālī and the one taken by the great Jewish scholar Maimonides (d.1204). Raymond Weiss thus suggests that there is a certain ‘irony’ to be discerned within the piety endorsed by Maimonides. Appealing to a distinction that will be familiar from our discussion—between humility on the level of outward behaviour and on the level of inner attitudes—Weiss takes Maimonides to have endorsed a kind of self-appreciation on the latter level which allows for a pleasured awareness of one’s own perfection, and which has a ‘certain affinity with Aristotelian greatness of soul’.¹²⁵ This attitude would tie in with the views expressed by other Jewish thinkers living in the same milieu, including the eleventh-century writer Bahya Ibn Paqūda, for whom, as Dani _ Rabinowitz suggests, humility is entirely compatible with a sense of ‘pride in one’s spiritual achievements and qualities’.¹²⁶ Other possible conversations, such as with the reception of the virtue among Christians in the medieval Latin world, have drifted into view in the above narrative, and could take deeper probing. Yet putting these possible continuations of the present narrative to the side, its chief denouement seems clear. Taken as an answer to the question from which I began—among the many ethical ideas that thinkers in the Islamic world encountered in translations of Greek philosophical texts, what story can one tell about their response to the virtue of greatness of ¹²⁵ See the discussion in Raymond Weiss, Maimonides’ Ethics: The Encounter of Philosophic and Religious Morality (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991), ch. 2, esp. 35–46. To the extent that Weiss draws on Maimonides’ use of a Sufi story to frame his view, however, and to the extent that al-Ghazālī’s moral inspiration is also rooted in a Sufi sensibility, one wonders about the robustness of this reading. Later in his discussion (43–4), Weiss suggests that Maimonides endorses a notion of greatness of soul that partly centres on a ‘striving for great things’; if correct, this would bring his notion close to the conceptions of greatness of spirit analysed in the second part of the present study. ¹²⁶ Steven L. Porter, Anantanand Rambachan, Abraham Vélez de Cea, Dani Rabinowitz, Stephen Pardue, and Sherman Jackson, ‘Religious perspectives on humility’, in Handbook of Humility: Theory, Research, and Applications, ed. Everett L. Worthington, Jr., Don E. Davis, and Joshua N. Hook (London: Routledge, 2016), 54.

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soul?—this denouement may strike us as in some respects anticlimactic. That larger-than-life virtue of greatness which formed one of the signature elements of ancient ethics, and which carved colourful and sometimes turbulent tracks through the thought of prominent philosophers and theologians in subsequent times, simply fails to elicit serious response in the Islamic world, let alone take root in it. It is transplanted into its soil only to atrophy, dutifully slotted into taxonomies of the virtues by several thinkers but ultimately never meaningfully digested into their ethical schemes. In this respect, and given the prominence of the virtue in Aristotle’s work, this denouement would seem to offer yet another token of Aristotle’s relatively limited influence in the Arabic-Islamic tradition.¹²⁷ Yet while this might be the denouement of the story taken narrowly as a question about the reception of this ancient virtue, there is a rather different kind of story one might tell if one allows the boundaries of its central concept to breathe. There is another virtue of greatness—a virtue arguably belonging to the same broader family as the one we examined above—that lived a far more vibrant life in the Arabic-Islamic tradition, striking deeper and wider roots that reflect the complex genealogies that entered into its formation and the multiple ethical discourses it inhabited. This will form the focus of Part 2 of this book.

¹²⁷ As often observed: see e.g. Druart, ‘Philosophie arabe morale’, 187; Walzer, ‘Platonism in Islamic Philosophy’, Greek Into Arabic, 239–40.

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2 Greatness of Spirit The Transfiguration of Heroic Virtue

In Part 1 of this book, I sought to plot the contours of the story one might tell regarding the reception of the ancient virtue of greatness of soul in the Arabic tradition. The concept that forms its clearest heir—kibar al-nafs— was nominally included in the ethical works of major figures such as Miskawayh and al-Ghazālī, as we saw. Yet its apparently amicable inclusion masked conflict, and ultimately this virtue was not meaningfully integrated into these thinkers’ ethical schemes. Looking at this exercise in conceptual importation, one might have to say: the foreign graft never caught. This virtue of greatness simply withered on the vine. Yet there was in fact another virtue, one bearing intriguing relations to the first, that led a far from withered existence within the landscape of Islamic ethical thought—a virtue that indeed flourished with almost explosive vigour. Betrayed in its vigour is the fact that this virtue was watered through a number of roots and fostered by a number of influences, among which the Greek philosophical influence was at best one of many, and probably not the most important. Its complex genealogy and the multiplicity of habitats in which it thrived are factors that serve to distinguish it from its less successful confrère. The two virtues are also distinguished by notable differences in conceptual content, even as they share traits that invite us to place them in the same broader family and broad region of moral thought. By tracking the development of this virtue across its different habitats, we can gain fresh insight into both the sources, and the distinctive texture, of the ideals of character articulated in the Islamic world.

Philosophical Handbooks: Aspiring to the Greatest Things Where to look for this virtue? It is Miskawayh, who served as one of our chief informants in the first part of the book, who gives us a strong lead in this direction. Because we may now recall that in the taxonomy of the virtues

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he presented in his Refinement, greatness of soul (kibar al-nafs) was not the sole virtue to appear whose terms engaged the concept of ‘greatness’. Grouped in the same rubric of virtues subordinate to the cardinal virtue of courage, we saw another virtue, which Miskawayh designated as ʿizam _ al-himma, and which I will translate as ‘greatness of spirit’, reserving further comment on this translation for later. The definition read: ‘a virtue of the soul through which it endures both good fortune and its opposite, even the travails experienced at the time of death.’¹ Looking at this formulation, we may be reminded of a characteristically Stoic understanding of a similarly named virtue and indeed of the moral life. Yet this, in fact, is not the only meaning of the term in play, as signalled by a statement appearing in another one of Miskawayh’s works, The Scattered and the Gathered, in the not-insignificant context of a discussion about the appropriateness of publicizing one’s own merits. ‘The great-spirited person (al-kabīr al-himma)’, Miskawayh writes there, ‘belittles the virtues he possesses on account of his aspiration to what surpasses them; for however high the level (martaba) of excellence that a person acquires, it is nugatory compared with that which surpasses it.’² The first of these statements associates greatness of spirit with the endurance of fortune; the second with a boundless aspiration to virtue. Recalling the schematic overview of ancient approaches to greatness of soul given in Part 1, we might note that these elements had in fact been found entwined in some of these approaches. Yet bracketing finer-grained questions about the relationship between these two meanings, our purposes here are best served by simply fixing our attention on the second. Because it is this second semantic strand that forms the backbone of a virtue that receives pervasive expression across a number of domains of ethical reflection, including works aligned with the philosophical tradition. I will begin by plotting its presence in the Arabic tradition of philosophical ethics, and then move on to take a broader vista into my sweep. Having already found a wedge into this tradition through Miskawayh’s brief remarks, all we need to drive this wedge more deeply is to turn one generation back to consider one of Miskawayh’s older contemporaries and one of the best-known figures of this formative period of Arabic philosophical thought, the Christian author Yahyā ibn ʿAdī (d.974). A disciple of al-Fārābī _ and a member of the Baghdad Aristotelians, Yahyā’s work spans a number of _ ¹ Miskawayh, Tahdhīb, 21.

² Hawāmil, 308.

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philosophical and theological topics. On the subject of ethics, his most prominent contribution is a short compendium running under the same title as Miskawayh’s later work, The Refinement of Character. In this work, the virtue of greatness of spirit forms a salient concern. Indeed, one might even go so far as to describe it as the virtue that holds the entire project of the book together. The evidence for this begins to emerge from the very first lines of the book, where Yahyā opens by staking out his aims and conjuring his intended _ audience. His purpose in detailing good and bad character traits, he explains, is to guide ‘those whose spirit is so lofty as to make them vie with the people of excellence (man kānat lahu himma tasmū ilā mubārāt ahl al-fadl)’, _ placing the image of the perfect human being before them so as to rouse their longing for this beautiful form (li-yashtāqa ilā sūratihi).³ In seeking to _ steer readers toward ethical transformation, this remark suggests, it is their existing loftiness of spirit that the book must appeal to so as to get its very project launched. This remark in fact foreshadows the formal definition of greatness of spirit that appears later in the discussion, where Yahyā _ methodically goes through the tables of the virtues and vices to define each in turn. Coming to greatness of spirit, he defines it as a quality that involves ‘belittling what falls short of the utmost limit among exalted things and seeking lofty stations (istisghār mā dūna al-nihāya min maʿālī al-umūr _ wa-talab al-marātib al-sāmiya) . . . disdaining middling levels and seeking _ the farthermost degrees’.⁴ Now in this remark Yahyā does not specify his reference to the ‘exalted _ things’ and ‘lofty stations’, and he appears to leave it open whether these stations should be understood in terms of virtue or in other terms, for example as stations of a social or political kind. Yet he makes the connection with virtue crystal-clear elsewhere, including in his remarks about the corresponding vice, which he defines in terms of ‘failing to hope in the ³ Yahyā ibn ʿAdī, Tahdhīb, 69. _ 91. As with the virtue of kibar al-nafs, here too there are other elements woven into ⁴ Ibid., the definition which I am leaving out of my discussion, focusing on what I take to be both the more distinct and more central strand. One strand that appears both in Yahyā’s definition and in those of certain other writers concerns the attitude to material goods, and_ links the virtue to contempt of money and liberality in giving. This strand is present in some of the translated Greek texts in which the concept features, whether as kibar al-nafs or as ʿizam al-himma. See e.g., in connection with kibar al-nafs, the treatise by Nicolaus in Akhlāq, 408,_ and, in connection with ʿizam al-himma, Abū Qurra’s translation of the De Virtutibus et vitiis, in Ein pseudoar_ istotelischer Traktat über die Tugend: Edition und Übersetzung der arabischen Fassungen des Abū Qurra und des Ibn at-Tayyib, ed. M. Kellermann (Erlangen: Friedrich-Alexander Univer_ sity Erlangen-Nuremberg,_ 1965), Q4.

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possibility of attaining the farthermost degrees and thinking much of paltry levels of the virtues’.⁵ With this formal definition in sight, we will be able to pick up on the repeated appearances the virtue makes throughout the treatise even beyond its suggestive mise en scène, recognizing the plethora of occasions on which Yahyā implicitly invokes it in framing his ethical _ appeal. ‘The person who desires to govern his ethical character must take aim at the utmost limit and farthermost degree of each virtue, and must not content himself with anything less than that degree.’ And again: the perfect human being is one who ‘does not think much of the virtues he acquires’. The invitation to perfect one’s character is in part constituted as an invitation to be great-spirited.⁶ One reason why the equivocation in Yahyā’s definition is worth flagging— _ stations of virtue or stations of a different kind?—is because it points to an important aspect of his discussion in the Refinement. As several commentators have observed, one of the distinctive features of this work is the emphasis it places on the social circumstances and identity of persons in determining the relevance of particular virtues and vices.⁷ Certain virtues are more relevant to persons of a particular social and political status than to others. Thus, leaders and kings are in higher need of forbearance (hilm) given their _ greater power to exact revenge, and in higher need of fidelity (wafāʾ) given their higher need to command trust from others. Indeed, certain qualities that are vices in people of a certain status may be virtues for people of a different one. Acquisitiveness is one such example—reprehensible in most people but commendable in kings given their need for extensive financial resources.⁸ As these examples indicate, Yahyā’s interest falls disproportion_ ately on the eminent and the great, and on kings in particular. It is in fact ⁵ Tahdhīb, 100: istikthār al-yasīr min al-fadāʾil. The specification of these stations in social or political terms is also flagged in the text, e.g. p._ 92: this virtue forms the special apanage of kings, and ‘it is becoming to leaders and great [or high-standing: ʿuzamāʾ] men, and those who aspire _ to their stations (tasmū nafsuhu ilā marātibihim)’. ⁶ Ibid., 121, 123. ⁷ For discussions of Yahyā’s ethics which touch on this point, see Majid Fakhry, Ethical _ Theories in Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1991), pt 3, ch. 5; Sidney H. Griffith, trans., The Reformation of Morals (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 2002), introduction, and Griffith, ‘Yahyā b. ʿAdī’s (d. 974) Kitāb Tahdhīb al-akhlāq’, in The Oxford Handbook of Islamic _ Philosophy, ed. Khaled El-Rouayheb and Sabine Schmidtke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Marie-Thérèse Urvoy, Traité d’éthique d’Abû Zakariyyâ’ Yahyâ Ibn ʿAdi (Paris: Cariscript, 1991), introduction; and al-Takrītī’s commentary in the second half of his edition of the Tahdhīb, esp. 249–55. ⁸ These remarks can be tracked throughout Yahyā’s discussion of the virtues and vices in _ Tahdhīb, 82–100, but they are found in special concentration from 101 ff. where he specifically addresses the differential application of the virtues and vices to different kinds of people.

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kings and people of high standing that he often seems to have in mind as recipients of his ethical address. Greatness of spirit is in turn explicitly singled out as a virtue forming the apanage of kings (min akhlāq al-mulūk khāssatan).⁹ And it is then precisely their possession of this virtue that __ Yahyā invokes as the enabling condition of their ethical improvement. It is _ because kings ‘have a greater spirit and a higher sense of self-worth (aʿazzu nufūsan)’ that, if they set their sights on attaining human perfection, they find it easy to surmount conflicting drives.¹⁰ There are two points that are particularly worth bringing out if we wish to place the virtue in full profile. One is the peculiarly elusive position this virtue appears to occupy within Yahyā’s philosophical psychology. Like _ many writers in the Arabic philosophical tradition, Yahyā adopts a tripartite _ view of the soul, distinguishing between the rational, irascible, and appetitive faculties (or souls). And although, unlike prominent writers such as Miskawayh, al-Rāghib al-Isfahānī, and al-Ghazālī, he does not formally present _ the virtues and vices by classifying them into cardinal and subordinate and assigning each set to a particular faculty, he offers clear indications regarding the relationship most of the virtues and vices bear to the different faculties.¹¹ Greatness of spirit stands apart among other virtues in speaking to at least two separate faculties. On the one hand, Yahyā flags its link to the irascible _ faculty when he makes the latter the source of the laudable disposition to ‘disdain lowly things . . . and seek high levels of praiseworthy character traits’.¹² Coming from Miskawayh’s classification of the virtue—filed under the cardinal virtue of courage, in turn mapped onto the irascible faculty—this move may not seem surprising. More broadly, the emphasis on striving, competition, and conquest that shapes Yahyā’s understanding of the virtue makes the _ connection to the thymotic part of the soul a natural one. More surprising might be another association, this time with the faculty of reason. The association is flagged by a pregnant remark Yahyā offers in _ the same vicinity. The rational soul, he writes, is that ‘through which human beings gain their dignity and acquire the greatness of their spirit, so that they take pride in their soul’.¹³ The association with reason will also seem natural, however, if we take into account the crucial contribution it makes to the activity identified as the special purview of greatness of spirit, namely the pursuit of virtue. Reason has both an epistemic and a conative role in this ⁹ Ibid., 92. ¹⁰ Ibid., 126. ¹¹ See ibid., 73 ff. ¹² Ibid., 78. ¹³ Ibid., 79: bihā sharufa al-insān wa-ʿazumat himmatuhu. Urvoy reads the first part of the phrase bihā ʿazuma sharaf al-insān in her _edition (Traité, 11). _

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connection. It is reason that enables us to judge what is right and wrong and thus sets the moral ends we pursue; it is also reason that enables us to realize these ends by subjugating the other two faculties when they oppose this pursuit.¹⁴ At the same time, Yahyā appears to extend the link between _ greatness of spirit and reason beyond the practical domain to include the theoretical activity of reason.¹⁵ The unusual status of this virtue within the structure of Yahyā’s psych_ ology is worth highlighting. Yet what should next claim our attention is a point that concerns less its structural position than its conceptual content. I just described the purview of greatness of spirit as the pursuit of virtue. This characterization brings out a striking aspect of this virtue that readers may already have picked up on, and that comes into view most sharply by considering the distinctive place it occupies within the architecture of Yahyā’s ethical address. If greatness of spirit is a quality of character that _ Yahyā can appeal to in order to motivate his audience to the task of self_ improvement and get his project off the ground, what that reveals is that this is no ordinary virtue and bears no ordinary relationship to that project. That relationship—as indeed some of the tensions it carries—is signalled with special clarity in a passage near the conclusion of the work, when Yahyā _ frames a broad exhortation addressed to the kings of this world. True eminence, true mastery, consists in ethical perfection; and therefore it is kings whom it most becomes to possess such perfection. When a king sets himself on this pursuit, ‘the first thing he must habituate himself to is greatness of spirit; for greatness of spirit belittles every vice in his sight and beautifies every virtue’. When a king has greatness of spirit, it keeps him from ‘taking pride in his kingship and makes him see his soul and his spirit as having such great value that he does not think much of his kingship’, allowing him to look with scorn upon the kingship that he normally views as the basis of his greatness, and to perceive that ‘the soul only becomes great through the virtues’.¹⁶ Several things stand out in this remarkable passage. Set against Yahyā’s _ usual practice, this passage is unusual in not presupposing the existence of greatness of spirit in his addressee. Yet this serves to elicit more plainly ¹⁴ Tahdhīb, 79: bihā yastahsinu al-mahāsin wa-yastaqbihu al-maqābih wa-bihā yumkinu _ _ _ and 117. al-insān an yuhadhdhiba quwwatayhi al-bāqiyatayn. Cf. the _remarks on 81–2 ¹⁵ Ibid., 118: idhā irtāda al-insān biʾl-ʿulūm al-ʿaqliyya sharufat nafsuhu wa-ʿazumat himmatuhu. Though note the_ emphasis on the practical ethical consequences of such_ theoretical excellence in the continuation of this remark. ¹⁶ Ibid., 140.

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what is otherwise implicit in Yahyā’s persuasive appeals to it. Greatness of _ spirit is not one virtue among others. It might instead be more appropriately termed the first of the virtues, or perhaps a meta-virtue, to mark its higher-order role. It is the virtue that conducts a person to, and through, the moral life. We might describe it as a virtue of aspiration; it is the virtue of longing for virtue. Such desiderative language is encouraged by Yahyā _ himself in many places. Yet in this passage Yahyā’s accent rather falls on _ the notions of vision, perception, and judgement. Greatness of spirit leads us into and through the moral life by sensitizing us to the right values and reorienting our perception so that we see the values of things in their true light. Greatness of spirit ‘beautifies’ the virtues in a person’s ‘sight’. The great-spirited person ‘sees’ his soul as having great value—value that makes the value of kingship itself, the grandest political station, pale in his eyes. Anatomized in these terms, Yahyā’s account may provoke an important _ sense of recognition among readers familiar with philosophical history; though in the next moment it will also highlight not only what unites it with some of this history but also what divides it. The last way of parsing the virtue’s effect—in terms of a shift of evaluative vision involving a displacement of judgements about what is great—is particularly evocative in tying Yahyā’s account to an element that played a critical if understated role in the _ structure of ancient conceptions of greatness of soul. The great-souled man, Aristotle wrote in the Nicomachean Ethics, is not given to wonder, for ‘nothing is great to him’ (1125a3)—a depreciation of external goods finding its correlate in the appreciation of the greatness of his own soul. One might describe this as a displacement of wonder, as suggested by Seneca’s explicit use of this notion at a similar juncture: ‘Reflect that nothing except the soul is worthy of wonder; for to the soul, if it be great, naught is great’ (Epistle 8, 5). Nil admirari—unless this is the soul in its higher capacities.¹⁷ ‘To wonder at’ or ‘admire’ is in fact another possible translation for the term ‘to take pride in’ (iʿjāb) that appears both in Yahyā’s last-cited statement about kings as _ well as his earlier, more universal statement about human beings: it is through their rational soul that people ‘gain their dignity and acquire the greatness of their spirit’ and thus ‘take pride in their soul’. In associating greatness of spirit with the theoretical exercise of reason and intellectual

¹⁷ I have fleshed out this point more fully in Wonder, 154 ff., and Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint, 181 ff.

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inquiry, Yahyā may also remind us of Plato’s conjunction of the two in the _ Republic, as also of certain Stoic views of natural inquiry and its special status as an activity that puts us in contact with the divine element of reason that grounds human greatness.¹⁸ What this helps underline, of course, is the emphasis on self-worth that shapes Yahyā’s understanding, as it shaped many of the ancient configur_ ations of greatness of soul. Yet this similarity will instantly call attention to a crucial point of difference. Because in Aristotle’s account certainly, the judgement of self-worth that figured at the heart of greatness of soul had a very specific foundation. It was grounded in a justified belief in one’s possession of a virtuous character: in fact ‘greatness in respect of each of the excellences would seem to belong to the great-souled person’ (NE 1123b30). In Yahyā’s account, by contrast, the notion of self-worth shows up in a _ fundamentally different way: less as something based on backward-looking judgements about the excellence one in fact possesses than as something that itself serves as the basis of forward-looking desires for the excellence one aspires to possess.¹⁹ This, in turn, reveals what is perhaps the deepest difference at stake. For Aristotle, greatness of soul is the virtue of one who already possesses the virtues, serving to ‘augment’ them and acting as an ‘adornment’ to them (NE 1124a1–2). Were we thus to locate it in the logical or temporal order of the moral life, we would place it at its very ending. For Yahyā, by contrast, greatness of spirit is the virtue not of the accomplished _ phronimos but of the moral starter or viator; hence its appearance at the curtain-rising moment of ethical pursuit. Yahyā’s account may in fact remind us of an appearance that greatness of _ soul had made outside the Nicomachean Ethics, namely in Aristotle’s discussion of the character of the young and the old in the Rhetoric (2.12–13). There, Aristotle had isolated greatness of soul as a distinctive quality of youth. The young are ‘great-souled; for they have not yet been worn down by life but are inexperienced with constraints, and to think oneself worthy of

¹⁸ As Seneca puts it in the Natural Questions: natural inquiry offers the mind a ‘proof of its own divinity’ (Praef. 1.1.12) and allows us to ‘transcend [our] mortality and be re-registered with a higher status’ (Praef. 1.1.17). I draw on the translation by Harry M. Hine (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010). The idea that theoretical inquiry actuates a divine element in human beings extends well beyond the Stoics, but the link between this idea and a conception of human greatness seems easier to pick out among them, as I suggested in Wonder and Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint (see note 17). ¹⁹ It is telling in this connection that Yahyā uses the language of ‘entitlement’ to frame the point that the king has the ‘greatest title’_ (ahaqq) to ethical perfection. See e.g. Tahdhīb, _ 126, 139.

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great things is greatness of soul and this is characteristic of a person of good hopes.’²⁰ In associating this virtue with the young, Aristotle locates it precisely in the early stages of moral development. He also connects it with a sense of zeal, aspiration, and hopefulness that provide crucial counterweights to his more static image of ne plus ultra character-possession in the Nicomachean Ethics, and that appear to draw him closer to Yahyā’s _ understanding.²¹ Like Yahyā’s moral addressees, the young in Aristotle’s _ description are emulous and driven by an idealistic aspiration for the fine. Hope, we may note, also forms a linchpin concept in Yahyā’s account, _ though it emerges more distinctly in connection with the corresponding vice rather than with the virtue (‘failing to hope in the possibility of attaining the farthermost degrees’). At the same time, it is important to keep in mind that this passage cannot be taken as a straightforward representation of Aristotle’s view of the virtue. As commentators have observed, Aristotle must here be understood as ascribing to the young not the full virtue, but a ‘natural virtue’ requiring further education.²² In this respect, Yahyā’s distinctive emphasis on aspir_ ation invites comparison less readily with Aristotle than with other thinkers in whom this element is foregrounded more strongly, as it is among certain

²⁰ I draw on the translation by George A. Kennedy, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), substituting ‘great-souled’ for Kennedy’s ‘magnanimous’. ²¹ In crafting this comparison, much hangs on the view we take concerning the role of the element of aspiration in the portrait of the megalopsychos in the Nicomachean Ethics. See Pakaluk, ‘Aristotelian magnanimity’, for an account that goes against the grain of many interpretations in highlighting its centrality. The comparison will also shift if we take into account Aristotle’s articulation of the virtue in other works, such as the Eudemian Ethics, where he identifies a sense of this virtue in which it ‘is an aspect of all virtues’ and involves correct judgements about what is great in the ethical sense. See Eudemian Ethics, ed. and trans. Brad Inwood and Raphael Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 1232a31–3. Another point to underline in juxtaposing Yahyā’s account to Aristotle’s in the Rhetoric is that Aristotle’s remarks on emulation _ focus more directly on the striving to attain external goods than on the striving for virtue; though cf. the remark at 2.11.4, which explicitly refers to the virtues as objects of emulation. Whatever view we take of Aristotle’s approach to the element of aspiration in his account of magnanimity, this element, as Terence Irwin suggests, played an important role in earlier Greek conceptions of the virtue, as notably exemplified by the Homeric heroes and as later expressed in the works of the Attic Orators, where magnanimity is connected to great ambition. See Irwin, ‘Generosity as magnanimity’, in The Measure of Greatness, ed. Vasalou. ²² For clarification of this point, see Gauthier’s remarks on this passage in Magnanimité, 30–5; and see Irwin, ‘Ethics in the Rhetoric and in the Ethics’, in Essays on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, ed. Amélie O. Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 142–74, for further context on the relationship between the ethical viewpoints of the two works. Kristján Kristjánsson implicitly takes a different position in his Aristotle, Emotions, and Education (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), ch. 5, where he defends the view that greatness of soul is indeed a proper virtue in the young, though a virtue to be later transcended.

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Stoic writers. We may recall Seneca’s remark from the opening sketch in Part 1: ‘Nature brought us forth magnanimous’, implanting in us ‘an aspiring and lofty spirit, which prompts us to seek a life of the greatest honour’. An emphasis on the ardent desire for what is great and honourable is similarly at work in Cicero’s discussion of greatness of spirit in On Duties, and is indeed mobilized in his key argument that public office provides a crucial context for its exercise. For ‘greater impulses to achieve greater things are aroused in the spirits of those engaged in public life than of those who live quietly’ (Book 1, 73). Plato’s own understanding of greatness of soul, though more narrowly tied to intellectual activity, gave an important place to this desiderative element insofar as this activity was textured by a passionate ardour or eros for truth.²³ Such intellectual reverberations are worth documenting if we are interested in placing this virtue in conversation with the virtues of greatness articulated in the ancient context. For our present purposes, however, it is important to turn our attention to Yahyā’s more immediate context in order _ to situate his account within its own internal conversation. With this account before us, we have caught hold of a thread that we can follow through to a host of ethical works of philosophical vintage, recognizing the distinctive patterns it forms there. A couple of generations later, we can follow it, however briefly, into the work of Avicenna, whose otherwise exiguous output on ethics includes a short treatise devoted to the topic of virtue and vice titled the ‘Epistle on Character’. This is a work burdened with a vexed transmission history and riddled with textual problems that make it inadvisable to lean too heavily on its content. Yet all we need to do at this juncture is to take note of the appearance that greatness of spirit (ʿizam _ al-himma) makes in Avicenna’s taxonomy of the virtues and to then note its specification. Greatness of spirit involves doing one’s utmost with regard to things that augment one’s virtue and dignity (sharaf ), aspiring to what is ever loftier and greater. We will recognize the continuity of this specification with Yahyā’s. Coming from Yahyā, we may also be able to explain what _ _ might otherwise have been Avicenna’s puzzling move to range it with the virtues of the rational faculty ( fadāʾil tamyīziyya).²⁴ _ ²³ In the memorable words of the Republic (485b), the philosopher is ‘in love’ with all learning that helps reveal the unchanging reality to him, and indeed ‘in love with that whole reality’. ²⁴ Avicenna, ‘Fī ʿilm al-akhlāq’, in ʿAbd al-Amīr Shams al-Dīn, al-Madhhab al-tarbawī ʿinda Ibn Sīnā (Beirut: al-Sharika al-ʿĀlamiyya liʾl-Kitāb, 1988), 370 for the association with the rational virtues, and 372 for the definition (an lā yaqsura ʿalā [sic] bulūgh ghāyat al-umūr allatī yazdādu bihā fadīlatan wa-sharafan hattā yasmū ilā_ mā warāʾahā bimā huwa aʿzamu qadran _ _ _

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Looking across to Avicenna’s contemporaries, we can also follow this thread into the work of Miskawayh, as I have already indicated. The appearances the virtue makes are again brief, but not for that insignificant. The context of one of these appearances in the Refinement is particularly worth highlighting. ‘The man of reason and virtue’, Miskawayh writes, ‘directs his aspiration (himma) to the highest stations.’ He goes on to rehearse a celebrated and muchcontested passage from the tenth book of the Nicomachean Ethics in which Aristotle, having outlined the ideal of intellectual activity, commends it as a way of life that enables us to transcend the human to the divine and ‘assimilate to the immortals’ (NE 1177b33). ‘Even though one is a human being,’ Miskawayh reprises, ‘one’s concerns (himam) need not be human’, and one should rather ‘strive with all one’s powers to live a divine life’.²⁵ The highest expression of greatness of spirit, these remarks suggest, lies in the pursuit of an ideal understood as an assimilation to or imitation of God. The connection just forged is a significant one, and we will be meeting it again in the ensuing discussion. Far more interesting, however, both for plotting the history of this ethical conversation and for unveiling its richer texture, is the appearance the virtue makes in the work of another writer, al-Rāghib al-Isfahānī. Until not long ago, al-Rāghib was a figure who tended to _ be overlooked in many narratives of the Arabic engagement with philosophical ethics, and it is only recently that he has begun to be appreciated not only as an important contributor to this tradition, but also as a seminal influence on other thinkers already featuring prominently in our narratives. Among the latter, the best-known case is al-Ghazālī, whose considerable debts to al-Rāghib’s work on the virtues, The Pathway to the Noble Traits of the Religious Law, have been copiously documented in a number of studies.²⁶ Recent scholarship places

wa-ajallu khataran). Avicenna’s discussion is pockmarked with oddities that I must simply _ bypass. A helpful compass to the text and its complications is provided by Dimitri Gutas in Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition, 497–500. ²⁵ Miskawayh, Tahdhīb, 171; cf. the references to himma that appear on pp. 77–90 in a related context. Miskawayh’s quotation of Aristotle’s statement corresponds almost verbatim with the text of the Arabic edition of the NE (Arabic Version, 561.12–13). Compare also al-Tūsī’s reprise of this same point using similar language in Tūsī’s Nasirean Ethics, 108–14, _ _ passim. The extent of Miskawayh’s familiarity with Yahyā’s work is a question that attracts _ different views: Fakhry is cautious (Ethical Theories, 107); al-Takrītī is far more confident (Tahdhīb, 263 ff.), but his evidence does not seem to me unequivocal. If a degree of familiarity were assumed, the interesting question would be why a theme so strongly foregrounded by one writer should have been sidelined by another. But that is a conundrum that would attach itself to other writers we have considered, including al-Ghazālī, as we will soon see. ²⁶ See Part 1, n. 27.

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al-Rāghib in the same generation as Miskawayh and Avicenna, whom it is speculated he may have met, and Miskawayh’s work is in fact one of several influences identified as possible tributaries to al-Rāghib’s ethical thought.²⁷ The intellectual debts evident in al-Rāghib’s Pathway run sufficiently deep to locate his work firmly within the horizon of the philosophical tradition. Yet no less important in limning the character of his ethical engagement are the religious commitments that shape this, which already stand plain in the very title of the book. Part of the distinctiveness of al-Rāghib’s work lies in its trail-blazing venture to effect a closer rapprochement between philosophical ethics and the Islamic scriptural tradition. With al-Rāghib, as Wilferd Madelung notes, the ‘Islamisation of Hellenistic ethics’ takes a big step forward;²⁸ hence, indeed, his appeal to al-Ghazālī, given the latter’s preoccupation with a task of the same kind. The hesitation shown by commentators in classifying his work—as a form of religious ethics, philosophical ethics, or indeed literary writing?—mirrors the complex identity of the work and its author. The last characterization in particular picks up on al-Rāghib’s identity as a notable participant in the tradition of Arabic belles-lettres or adab, which formed one of several key discursive contexts in which ethical ideas were treated and propagated within the Arabic-Islamic cultural milieu.²⁹ The engagement with ethical norms within this tradition was typified by a higher concern with aesthetic form and persuasive appeal than with analytical rigour or reflective depth, features that are to a certain extent reflected in the intellectual style of the Pathway. As Madelung suggests in assessing the philosophical character of al-Rāghib’s work, al-Rāghib is ‘rather a philosopher by conviction than an independent critical thinker’, though this assessment would in the view of many unite him with other philosophical moralists such as Miskawayh or indeed Yahyā.³⁰ _ ²⁷ Hans Daiber highlights the importance of the work of Miskawayh, the Ikhwān al-Safāʾ, and al-Fārābī as influences on al-Rāghib in ‘Griechische Ethik in islamischem Gewande: Das_ Beispiel von Rāġib al-Isfahānī (11. Jh.)’, in Historia Philosophiae Medii Aevi: Studien zur Geschichte der Philosophie des_ Mittelalters, ed. Burkhard Mojsisch and Olaf Pluta (Amsterdam; Philadelphia: Grüner, 1992), vol. 1, 181–92. Madelung sounds more cautious about Miskawayh’s influence in ‘Ar-Rāġib al-Isfahānī’, 161–2. For a detailed discussion of the gnarled question of al-Rāghib’s _ dates, see Alexander Key, A Linguistic Frame of Mind: ar-Rāġib al-Isfahānī and What It Meant to _ be Ambiguous (PhD thesis, Harvard University, 2012), 32–40. ²⁸ Madelung, ‘Ar-Rāġib al-Isfahānī’, 162. _ ²⁹ Madelung underlines al-Rāghib’s literary identity in ibid., 161; and see Mohamed, ‘Ethical philosophy’, 51–2, for a conspectus of different views regarding the intellectual character of his ethics. ³⁰ Madelung, ‘Ar-Rāġib al-Isfahānī’, 161, quoting Richard Walzer’s characterization of _ Miskawayh in ‘Some aspects’, 220.

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Al-Rāghib’s interest for us is intimately bound up with this complex intellectual identity, and not least with the theological concerns that leaven his negotiation of philosophical ideas. These concerns manifest themselves on a number of levels in the way he approaches the main topic of the Pathway, the virtues and the vices, whose treatment otherwise betrays significant philosophical debts. They manifest themselves, most basically, in the interest al-Rāghib shows in providing scriptural grounding for the character traits he incorporates into his scheme. Even more fundamentally, they manifest themselves in the overall framework in which he anchors these character traits and locates their significance. The value of the virtues is grounded in their conduciveness to a kind of happiness understood chiefly if not exclusively in other-worldly terms. No less importantly, the pursuit of the virtues is seen as part of a broader conception of human life as finding its fulfilment in the imitation of God, in turn construed through the Qur’anic concept of vicegerency (khilāfa).³¹ It is by acquiring the virtues, or what al-Rāghib parses in a more theological diction as the ‘noble traits of the law’ (makārim al-sharīʿa), that human beings can properly govern themselves and others and thereby live up to the possibility held out in a well-known Qur’anic verse: ‘Perchance your Lord . . . will make you vicegerents (yastakhlifukum) in the land, so that He may behold how you shall do’ (Q 7: 129).³² All of this provides important context for considering the account al-Rāghib gives of the virtue of greatness of spirit. Like many other philosophical writers, al-Rāghib organizes his discussion of the virtues by mapping them onto the different faculties of the soul. What will be surprising coming from other writers is his specific decision about where to locate the virtue. Deviating from every other decision we have seen, he classifies it under the appetitive faculty (al-quwwa al-shahwiyya). I quote his remarks at length: One says, ‘So-and-so is great-spirited (kabīr al-himma)’ or ‘So-and-so is small-spirited (saghīr al-himma)’ when one of them seeks a greater or _ nobler possession than the other. The one who is great-spirited without qualification is the one who does not content himself with animal desires

³¹ Al-Rāghib introduces this idea in The Pathway to the Noble Traits of the Religious Law/ Kitāb al-Dharīʿa ilā makārim al-sharīʿa, ed. Abuʾl-Yazīd Abū Zayd al-ʿAjamī (Cairo: Dar al-Salam, 2007), 83. The deployment of the Qur’anic concept of khilāfa in this kind of context is not exclusive to al-Rāghib. Miskawayh also invokes it in the Tahdhīb, where he ties it to the task of ethical self-governance, that is, the task of subjugating all other powers to the power of reason (53–4). The successful execution of this task is grounded in reason’s recognition of its superior status and dignity (sharaf ). ³² I draw on the translation of Arthur Arberry with some modification.

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   (himam) to the extent of his ability and does not become the slave of his stomach and genitals, but rather strives to deck himself with the noble traits of the Law (makārim al-sharīʿa), so that he may become one of the vicegerents and friends of God in the present world and one of those who enjoy His proximity in the next. The small-spirited person is the opposite of that. A Bedouin Arab said: The greatness of so-and-so lies in the smallness of the mundane world in his eyes, so that he is not subject to the power of his stomach . . . and he is not subject to the power of his genitals . . . Human beings have a title (haqq al-insān) to treat these things with moderation, _ for even though they are animals through their natural substance, they are angels through their reason and thought . . . It has also been said: A person of great spirit does not content himself with possessions due for return and a life given out on loan. So if you can acquire a permanent possession and an eternal life, do so, for what is perishable is of no consideration. The greatspirited person without qualification is the one who pursues the virtues (fadāʾil) not out of a desire for status, for wealth, for pleasure, or for deriving _ a sense of hauteur and superiority over people.³³

There are several things to notice in this dense passage, including a number of visible continuities with what we heard earlier from Yahyā. We will _ recognize the connection between greatness of spirit and a desire for what is great or noble, with the latter once again notably specified in terms of the pursuit of virtue. We will also recognize the shift in evaluative perception that accompanies it (a person’s greatness ‘lies in the smallness of the mundane world in his eyes’), which displaces the value we assign to bodily drives that oppose that pursuit. Greatness of spirit involves a transcendence of such drives and refusal to be mastered by them. A reflexive element of self-worth is also present in these remarks, though it may take a moment to elicit it. It is our nature as human beings that gives us both the right and the obligation—the chameleon term haqq allows for both significations—to _ aspire to the higher life of virtue, in which our specific nature as rational beings finds its fulfilment. Here, too, the notion of self-worth serves to ground less a claim to receive than a claim to strive, and is not so much grounded in virtue as a ground for it.³⁴

³³ Dharīʿa, 209. ³⁴ In light of this, it is interesting to note some of the more Aristotelian elements present in the discussion, such as the deployment of the principle of the mean and the identification of two opposing vices, one that involves deeming oneself worthy of (or laying claim to) what one does not deserve (taʾahhul al-insān limā lā yastahiqquhu) and one that involves renouncing what one deserves (tarkuhu limā yastahiqquhu). Ibid._ _

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What will be new is the religious emphasis that shapes the discussion, which transposes the virtue into a theological framework through a number of subtle yet significant moves. Greatness of spirit is expressed in a pursuit of virtue that is grounded in a desire to become close to God; its highest object lies not in this life but the next, which is the good that has greater permanence and thus greater worth. It is not incidental that the relevant shift of evaluative vision flagged in this passage is parsed, less directly as a displacement of the greatness of external goods or physical desires through a perception of the greatness of virtue, than as a displacement of the greatness of the present world through a perception of the greatness of the next. With these revisions, what was a central virtue in the pursuit of the ethical life among al-Rāghib’s predecessors becomes a central virtue in the pursuit of an ethical life understood in thicker religious terms. Set against the larger history of this type of virtue, the novelty of this move—and thus the distance separating it from more properly ‘philosophical’ articulations—should not be exaggerated. Many of the ancient philosophers couched their views in ways that carried strong religious overtones, and nursed theological concerns that left a perceptible print on their ethical meditations. This is clearly visible in the Platonic notion of imitating God (finding its locus classicus in Theaetetus, 176a–b), which passed into the Arabic tradition under Neoplatonic colouring, and which forms the distant philosophical origin of the one deployed by al-Rāghib.³⁵ It is also visible among the Stoics, whose theological commitments have been a matter of note, though also debate. At the most basic level, these commitments are intimated in a common reframing of the core ethical imperative of aligning our will with nature as an imperative of showing obedience to the gods.³⁶ And although Stoic views about the nature of the gods and the existence of another life are not free from ambiguity, among some writers the idea of a future life is not only present but appears as an object of aspiration in ways that speak strongly to the field of the virtues of greatness. Once we recognize our kinship with the gods, as Epictetus writes in one of the Discourses, we ³⁵ For discussion of this Platonic ideal, see Julia Annas, Platonic Ethics, Old and New (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), ch. 3. In the Islamic context, the most prominent early articulator of this idea is Abū Bakr al-Rāzī. See briefly Charles E. Butterworth, ‘Ethical and political philosophy’, in The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy, ed. Peter Adamson and Richard C. Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 274. ³⁶ See e.g. Seneca, Epistle 107.9: one should ‘refrain from railing at nature . . . attend uncomplainingly the God at whose instance all things come about’. Cf. Epistle 90.34: philosophy ‘has taught us not just to recognize but to obey the gods, and to accept all that happens exactly as if it were an order from above’ (trans. Campbell).

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will no longer entertain ‘mean and humble thoughts’ about ourselves, and we will, rather, need to be restrained from the idealistic desire to be freed from our bodily ‘shackles’ through death and to be repatriated to our spiritual ‘home’.³⁷ Al-Rāghib’s configuration of the virtue is interesting on many levels, and not least for the closer attention it invites to the linguistic status of the concept we have been tracking. This attention is solicited with particular directness by al-Rāghib’s striking decision to locate greatness of spirit within the desiderative or appetitive faculty. The decision seems surprising, as I noted, coming from the very different taxonomical choices made by his predecessors. Yet of course it appears rather less surprising set against the dominant conceptualization of the virtue among al-Rāghib and his fellow thinkers. Greatness of spirit presents itself in their accounts primarily as a virtue of aspiration. While it also speaks to reason insofar as it requires a judgement about the value of its object, and to the spirited part of the soul insofar as the pursuit of this object requires arduous striving, one can in principle see why the taxonomical decision to ground it in a fundamentally desiderative drive would have been appealing. The space for diverging intellectual choices may here provoke an interesting comparison with Aquinas, who faced a similar choice when addressing the virtue of magnanimity in his Summa Theologiae, which he defined as a ‘stretching forth of the mind to great things’ (ST IIaIIae q. 129 a. 1) and specified as a virtue that governs the passion of hope. Hope addresses itself to a great future good that is difficult yet possible to attain; qua good it forms an object of the appetitive faculty; qua difficult of the irascible. Magnanimity, in turn, Aquinas placed under the irascible faculty. Yet while one can see why al-Rāghib’s move would have been ‘in principle’ appealing, I would suggest that in order to read this move in its proper light, we need to locate it more firmly against a consideration of the linguistic meanings of the terms at stake and the facts of linguistic usage. The term I have been translating as ‘spirit’ (himma) derives from a verb (hamma) whose meaning is simply ‘to purpose’, ‘to intend’, ‘to desire’, ‘to determine (to do)’. This root meaning is reflected in the nouns that derive from it, notably hamm (pl. humūm) and himma (pl. himam). Both of these ³⁷ Epictetus, Discourses, Book I, 9.10–14, quoted from Discourses and Selected Writings, trans. Robert Dobbin (London: Penguin, 2008). The aspiration to a future life also features in Augustine’s remarks about greatness of spirit in City of God, Book I, §22. Seneca provides a good example of the uncertain messages issued by Stoic thinkers regarding the possibility of a future life in Epistle 65.

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terms also carry the simpler meaning of ‘purpose’ or ‘concern’, though the latter carries the stronger sense of ‘ambition’ or ‘aspiration’. These semantic facts make it easier to understand why several writers on the virtues not only associate the term himma with the notion of ‘willing’ (irāda) but indeed subsume the one under the other or even identify the two.³⁸ Al-Rāghib himself identifies the two concepts in an earlier passage of the Pathway. The later Hanbalite writer Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d.1350) makes _ himma the ‘terminus’ of willing, taking the partner concept hamm to represent its beginning.³⁹ The context of Ibn Qayyim’s remarks is particularly worth noting. They appear in his seminal compendium of spiritual guidance, Passages of the Wayfarers, which formed a commentary on a classic Sufi treatise composed by a writer living in the same century as al-Rāghib, al-Ansārī al-Harawī’s (d.1089) Stations of the Journeyers. Both works offer a _ detailed exploration of the spiritual stations structuring the believer’s interior progress toward God. Greatness or loftiness of spirit, significantly, represents one of these stations. No less significantly, its meaning is defined in terms that will instantly remind us of the ones we heard from al-Rāghib, as a singleminded drive toward what is highest whose proper object is God and which involves reorienting one’s desire away from what is mundane and ephemeral to what is other-worldly and eternal.⁴⁰ These resemblances are telling—furnishing, among other things, important indications about the diffusion of the religious construal of the virtue through different types of religious discourse, including ones with weaker intellectual links to the philosophical tradition watering al-Rāghib’s ethical thought. In doing so, they raise interesting questions about the wider cultural reach of the virtue and indeed about its intellectual foundations. Deferring these questions for the moment, here we may focus our attention

³⁸ They also make it easier to explain the special challenges the term himma poses on the level of translation. Matters are relatively simple when himma appears in compound form (ʿizam/ʿuluww/buʿd al-himma), where it lacks a grammatical object. Yet many of the writers _ discuss the virtue deploy the term in more complex syntactical structures, essentially who converting the compound into a verb–noun structure in which the verb governs an object. We have already seen examples of this, e.g. Yahyā’s reference to ‘those whose spirit is so lofty as _ a spirit that rises to vying with] the people of to make them vie with [more literally: who have excellence’ (man kānat lahu himma tasmū ilā mubārāt ahl al-fadl). In the effort to preserve a _ roughshod over the Arabic, certain degree of consistency in the English while not entirely riding some awkwardness is unavoidable. ³⁹ Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, Passages of the Wayfarers/Madārij al-sālikīn, ed. Shuʿayb al-Arnaʾūt (Beirut: Muʾassasat al-Risāla, 2010), 750. And for al-Rāghib, see Dharīʿa, 94. ⁴⁰ See the discussion in Ibn Qayyim, Madārij, 750–2, and al-Ansārī al-Harawī, Stations of the _ 31. Journeyers/Manāzil al-sāʾirīn (Cairo: Mustafā al-Bābī al-Halabī, 1966), _ __

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on a simple point which the above helps elicit more sharply concerning the character of the virtue and its precise status within the religious ethic. This is a point that stands out especially plainly in Ibn Qayyim’s last formulation. Greatness of spirit, his remarks suggest, may simply be described as a virtue of right desire, whose proper expression lies in the reorientation of desire toward God and the next life. Yet this, of course, is an orientation that gives the religious life its most elementary identity. Greatness of spirit is thus not merely central to the religious ethic but indeed codifies the most basic values that constitute it. Having isolated this broad significance of the virtue and the equally broad meaning of its root term, we will be able to pick up on the resonance of this virtue among a number of writers, including ones who do not formally identify greatness of spirit as a separate virtue. The most striking case here is al-Ghazālī, who represents one of the more enigmatic contributors to the Arabic-Islamic history of the virtues of greatness. One enigma, as we saw in Part 1, concerns his apparent endorsement of the ancient virtue of greatness of soul—designated through the Arabic term kibar al-nafs—while failing to flag the conflict it poses to his understanding of the ethics of esteem and selfesteem. With al-Rāghib’s account of the alternative virtue of greatness of spirit before us, there will be another enigma in the fact that al-Ghazālī, despite his unfeigned enthusiasm for the latter’s work, should have passed over this particular virtue in silence in his own taxonomy. Yet even if greatness of spirit does not feature formally in his classifications of the virtues, its vocabulary registers pervasively throughout his work, and so do the fundamental values it codifies. The term himma thus appears on numerous occasions in the Revival of the Religious Sciences in the context of al-Ghazālī’s characterizations of his spiritual ideal. This is an ideal which at its most basic demands severing one’s worldly attachments and attaching oneself exclusively to God. It demands ceasing to devote oneself (insirāf hammihi) to animal desires like _ food and drink or sex, relinquishing one’s ardour (qatʿ al-himma) for mun_ dane objects such as wealth, social status, or family life, and instead dedicating oneself wholeheartedly to God (al-iqbāl bi-kunh al-himma ʿalaʾl-Lāh).⁴¹ It ⁴¹ Such remarks are diffused throughout the Ihyāʾ, but the above draws on passages from Ihyāʾ, vol. 9, 1743, and vol. 8, 1371 (the context of_ the latter remark is a discussion of the Sufi _ view of the means to knowledge). Cf. the remarks opening the Book of Poverty and Renunciation in Ihyāʾ, vol. 13, 2390, where al-Ghazālī pairs the renunciation of the mundane world to a _ wholehearted direction of desire or aspiration (himam) to God’s presence and to the prospect of union with Him. In the Most Exalted Aim, al-Ghazālī qualifies this ethical orientation as

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also demands seeing the relative values of the present world and the next in their true light: wrongdoers whose hearts have been blinded, al-Ghazālī observes in one place, ‘make light of the next world and magnify (yastaʿzimu) _ the mundane world, and their concern (hamm) restricts itself to the latter’.⁴² No less interestingly, the telltale vocabulary and basic meaning of the virtue feature in several prophetic traditions that al-Ghazālī invokes in the course of his discussion. Asked about the identifying marks of the believer and the hypocrite, the Prophet is reported to have said: ‘The believer’s preoccupation (himmatuhu) is prayer, fasting, and worship; the hypocrite’s preoccupation is food and drink, just like an animal’s.’ In the crucial context of praising the quality of renunciation (zuhd), al-Ghazālī quotes the following prophetic tradition: ‘When a person gets up in the morning and the mundane world is his main concern (hamm), God brings his affairs into disorder and scatters his means of subsistence . . . but when a person gets up in the morning and the next world is his main concern (hamm), God gathers his concern for him and preserves his means of subsistence for him.’⁴³ The core messages and distinctive vocabulary of these statements thus indirectly thematize what other writers identify more formally as an independent virtue. In doing so, of course, they reflect the breadth of the concept in ways that raise interesting questions about what it means for the virtue to be ‘present’ as a subject of ethical reflection and indeed what it means to set the boundaries of the concept.

takabbur (Maqsad, 79), here understood in a positive sense rather than the pejorative sense _ Condemnation of Pride (kibr) and Conceit. This move is an interesting if discussed in The unlabelled episode in the relationship between the two concepts of greatness examined in this study. The most concentrated appearance the terms hamm/himma make in the Ihyāʾ, as far as _ regarding I am aware, is in a section in vol. 8, 1410–15, where al-Ghazālī confronts a question the extent of human accountability for different psychological events, and offers an anatomy of the sequence of internal events that precede the performance of an act. Hamm features as the final stage of this sequence, the stage of decisive intention and resolve to act, for which human beings are crucially held accountable insofar as it is a voluntary act of the heart. For discussion of this passage, see Kukkonen, ‘Al-Ghazālī on the emotions’, 156–9, and Janssens, ‘Al-Ghazālī between philosophy ( falsafa) and Sufism (tasawwuf )’, 630–1. There is certainly far more to say about the presence of the notion of himma _in Sufi discourse, where, as Annemarie Schimmel indicates, it carried meanings that went beyond the ones alluded to above. See briefly Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 79, 257, 270. ⁴² Ihyāʾ, vol. 8, 1359. Compare the remarks in ibid., vol. 2, 290, in the context of a discussion _ cf. the reference to himmat al-dunyā and himmat al-ākhira on p. 296. of prayer; ⁴³ Respectively, ibid., vol. 8, 1464, and vol. 13, 2441.

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Mirrors for Princes: A Virtue Fit for the Great In the above, I plotted the development of the concept of greatness of spirit (ʿizam al-himma) among a number of prominent representatives of _ the Arabic tradition of philosophical ethics. As this virtue emerges from their work, it is defined by an emphasis on boundless aspiration for what is great—an aspiration to virtue, but also, reframed in religious terms, to the fundamental values of the religious life. The ease with which this virtue was integrated into the ethical schemes of thinkers of varying philosophical and theological temperaments may seem simple to understand in light of this basic profile. In every ethical scheme that incorporates a conception of the good, the capacity to aspire to this good will naturally carry great importance. In one respect, this virtue might be viewed simply as a heightened codification of this capacity, compatible in terms of its structure with a plurality of different ways of specifying the good that forms the object of aspiration. From a philosophical perspective, this structural plasticity raises interesting questions about the nature of the virtue and about its claim to represent a substantive trait of character. These are questions to which I will be returning in the Postlude. But in terms of the present narrative, the easy integration of this virtue of greatness in both philosophical and religious schemes may suggest the following way of relating the different stages of the investigation so far. In Part 1 of the book, my account was shaped by an emphasis on conflict. Concentrating on a virtue of greatness that bore a distinct affinity to Aristotle’s conception of greatness of soul with its characteristic focus on self-worth, I called attention to the conflict—however covert—a virtue of such complexion posed to Miskawayh’s and even more pointedly al-Ghazālī’s ethical views on honour and self-evaluation. A simple way of summing up the history of the virtues of greatness in Arabic-Islamic ethical culture might then be as follows. One strain of these virtues, designated through the term kibar al-nafs and codifying an emphasis on selfappreciation, failed to flourish within the Arabic tradition, for reasons possibly linked to its conflict with characteristic features of Islamic religious morality. It was another strain, designated through the term ʿizam (or kibar) _ al-himma and codifying an emphasis on aspiration, that flourished instead, for reasons perhaps linked to the breadth of its conceptual boundaries and its compatibility with a wide range of evaluative schemes. Yet this way of telling the story would be a partial one, as we will now see. It leaves out of view an additional set of developments of the virtue we have

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been tracking—greatness of spirit—which are crucial for putting together a fuller account of the concept and the life it led within Arabic-Islamic culture, and thus the life led by the virtues of greatness more broadly. A closer look at these developments yields a more nuanced picture of the conceptual content of the virtue and its cultural habitats. In doing so, it also invites finer-grained reflection on the notion of ‘Islamic morality’ deployed in characterizing the relationship of the virtues of greatness—conflict or harmony?—to the Arabic-Islamic ethical landscape. To locate these developments, we need to look away from the kinds of philosophical treatises we have considered thus far to a rather different form of ethical writing—to that genre known as ‘mirrors for princes’, whose special concern was the moral instruction of rulers. This genre of writing enjoyed a long and vibrant history in the Islamic world, achieving its efflorescence in the eleventh century after several centuries of evolution. During this period, it served as a melting pot of diverse intellectual and cultural influences, with the Persian ethico-political tradition often identified as the paramount tributary to its formation. The aim of these works, as Ann Lambton puts it, was fundamentally practical. It was ‘to restrain rulers and to bring the kingdom of God nearer’ by providing the rulers with appropriate moral counsel and helping them reflect on their conduct (hence ‘mirrors’).⁴⁴ To that end, many of these works made the moral character of the ruler a central focus, commending the art of self-mastery as a precondition for political mastery and setting their sights on what Patricia Crone describes as an ‘inner conversion of the prince’.⁴⁵ It is this focus that partly explains the strong bridges that developed between this genre and works of a more strictly philosophical kind, though mirrors shared their concerns and material with several other genres of ethical writing, such as wisdom literature and works of etiquette (adab). With this genre in our sights, in fact, we may now recall the heightened interest shown by Yahyā ibn ʿAdī in his ethical compendium The Refinement _ of Character in addressing his remarks to kings and people of elevated social status. The sources of this interest have been debated, with some

⁴⁴ Ann K. S. Lambton, ‘Islamic mirrors for princes’, in Atti del convegno internazionale sul tema: la Persia nel Medioevo (Roma, 31 Marzo-5 Aprile 1970) (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1971), 442. ⁴⁵ Patricia Crone, Medieval Islamic Political Thought (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 161. Aziz Al-Azmeh suggests that works focusing on the ethics of the royal person did not form the most dominant strain of the genre: Muslim Kingship: Power and the Sacred in Muslim, Christian and Pagan Politics (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 1997), 96.

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commentators taking them as a reflection of al-Fārābī’s earlier preoccupation with the figure of the ruler and openly disputing the idea that Yahyā saw _ himself as participating in the mirrors-for-princes tradition.⁴⁶ Whatever view we take on these debates—and Yahyā’s interest in providing instruction _ to flawed kings rather than offering idealized representations of them raises a question about the first perspective—this suggests, at the very least, that certain bridges between the two genres were being built from early stages of their respective histories. A closer comparison of the contents of these works will bolster that impression further. Without aiming for exhaustiveness, here I will focus on a number of prominent mirrors. One is the Counsel for Kings, formerly ascribed to the eminent jurist al-Māwardī (d.1058), which recent scholarship now dates to the first half of the tenth century, with one commentator tracing it to the cultural milieu of the city of Balkh and suggesting a special connection with the philosophical legacy of al-Kindī in particular.⁴⁷ Another is al-Māwardī’s Facilitating Inquiry and Precipitating Success in the Character of Kings and the Administration of Kingship, read alongside the same author’s ethical treatise Right Conduct in Mundane and Religious Affairs. A third is another treatise by the title Counsel for Kings, formerly seen as a work of al-Ghazālī’s and now generally considered the product of fusion between two textual components, one penned by al-Ghazālī and another of uncertain authorship.⁴⁸ Originally written in Persian, this work passed out of circulation in the Persian and achieved renown in its Arabic translation under the title Smelt Ore in the Counsel of Kings, which is the title I will cite in what follows, to avoid confusion. Given the continuities between these works, I will treat them together, focusing on the traits that unite them while also attending to some of the traits that divide them. Without a doubt the most notable continuity, for our purposes, is the preeminent place all these writers assign to the virtue of greatness of spirit within their overall discussion, and within the vision of moral character they ⁴⁶ See Griffith’s discussion in his introduction to the Reformation of Morals, xli–xliii, and references there. ⁴⁷ Louise Marlow, ‘Abū Zayd al-Balkhī and the Nasīhat al-mulūk of Pseudo-Māwardī’, Der _ Politics in Tenth-Century Iran, vol. Islam 93 (2016), 35–64, and Counsel for Kings: Wisdom_ and 1—The Nasīhat al-mulūk of Pseudo-Māwardī: Contexts and Themes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh _ _ 2016), ch. 1. The work’s composition date, and the identity of its author, have University Press, been hotly contested. If recent hypotheses about its chronology are correct, the bridges being built between philosophical works and mirrors for princes can be dated even earlier. ⁴⁸ The argument for this view was made persuasively by Patricia Crone in ‘Did al-Ghazālī write a mirror for princes? On the authorship of Nasīhat al-mulūk’, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and _ _ Islam 9 (1987), 167–91. This view continues to generate debate; for references to some dissenters and for another argument in support, see Garden, The First Islamic Reviver, 213–14 n. 88.

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present to their distinguished addressees. In the second (non-Ghazālian) half of the Smelt Ore, greatness of spirit is the subject of one of the longest independent sections devoted to a single character trait. It enjoys similar prominence in the other works, where it figures not simply as the discrete subject of specific sections, but as a cardinal conceptual fibre that weaves itself throughout their length, recognizable through the delicate shifts of register it sustains. Unlike the philosophical works we surveyed earlier, where the virtue was relatively stably designated through a single compound term, in these mirrors we encounter the virtue in a variety of compound forms: we hear of ‘greatness’ (ʿizam) of spirit but also of ‘loftiness’ (ʿuluww, _ sumuww) and ‘far reach’ (buʿd). Among kings, greatness of spirit is not merely one trait among others; it is a royal trait par excellence. It is in fact one of the traits that ground the natural distinction between kings and other people, constituting their higher nature and innate nobility. The author of the second half of the Smelt Ore openly designates greatness of spirit as an inborn characteristic which God ‘implanted’ (rakkaba) in kings.⁴⁹ Greatness of spirit is also the quality that accounts for the singular relationship in which kings stand to all other acquired virtues and to excellence of character. It is the quality that drives them to seek such excellence, so that, as al-Māwardī puts it in Facilitating Inquiry, ‘they should not be devoid of any acquired excellence . . . and they should have exclusive possession of the virtues of the soul just as they have exclusive possession of sovereignty and command’, becoming cannier in the exercise of power, more adept at governing their people, and more worthy of praise, given that ‘praise is deserved for acquired virtues’.⁵⁰

⁴⁹ Al-Ghazālī/Pseudo-Ghazālī, Smelt Ore in the Counsel of Kings/Al-Tibr al-masbūk fī nasīhat al-mulūk, ed. Ahmad Shams al-Dīn (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1988), 93; cf. _ of five qualities that are a matter of inheritance (irth). This is also _ _where it is listed as one 106, the implication of al-Māwardī’s remarks in Facilitating Inquiry and Precipitating Success in the Character of Kings and the Administration of Kingship/Tashīl al-nazar wa-taʿjīl al-zafar _ _ da fī akhlāq al-malik wa-siyāsat al-mulk, ed. Muhyī Hilāl al-Sarhān (Beirut: Dār al-Nah _ al-ʿArabiyya, 1981), 10. The idea that greatness of_ spirit may not _be the product of voluntary acquisition is also present in al-Rāghib, though with a different emphasis which raises other kinds of questions. In one passage he refers to it as a quality bestowed by God—one of God’s many ways of guiding and assisting a person (Dharīʿa/, 121). Although al-Rāghib does not associate this virtue with particular social or political classes, the connection with kings is not entirely absent from his work; see e.g. the passing reference in ibid., 219. The Smelt Ore has been translated into English from the Persian (read together with an early edition of the Arabic translation) as Al-Ghazālī’s Book of Counsel for Kings, trans. F. R. C. Bagley (London: Oxford University Press, 1964). The section dedicated to the virtue, which Bagley translates as ‘magnanimity’, is found at 118–33. ⁵⁰ Al-Māwardī, Tashīl, 10.

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One will notice the element of persuasion obliquely present in this remark, which adroitly introduces moral reasons by camouflaging them as factual description. This element, and the special connection it bears to our virtue, emerges more plainly elsewhere, as in the remarks with which the author of the Counsel for Kings opens the first unabashedly titled chapter, ‘On exhorting rulers to accept counsel’ (or ‘On why it is advisable to accept advice’). The somewhat circular logic of this title makes the problem of moral persuasion stand out particularly crisply. How could such persuasion gain a first foothold? The author proposes a list of such reasons, first among them that kings must distinguish themselves from the benighted masses who are ignorant of their best interests and overcome by their passions and desires. For ‘this is something that people endowed with greatness of spirit and a proper sense of hauteur must consider beneath them and must rise above through their spirit (yajibu li-dhawī al-himam al-baʿīda waʾl-anfus al-abiyya an yataraffaʿū wa-yasmū bi-himamihim ʿanhu)’.⁵¹ It is thus the kings’ greatness of spirit that these ethicists—just like Yahyā _ in the discussion we saw earlier—appeal to in order to engage their listeners’ ear. In al-Māwardī’s case, this general appeal finds its counterpart in more concrete appeals to the same virtue in admonishing against particular vices, such as conceit or envy, later in his discussion.⁵² What will also be interesting in al-Māwardī’s case is that, unlike many of the other accounts we have seen, which leave the unique relationship of this virtue to the overall project of character cultivation unmarked in cataloguing the virtue as simply one virtue among others, in his account this unique relationship receives clearer structural acknowledgement. In Facilitating Inquiry, greatness of spirit makes no appearance in the tables of the virtues and vices organized by the Aristotelian principle of the mean.⁵³ Instead, it appears more formally in the context of two other qualities, ‘nobility’ (karam) and ‘manliness’ (murūʾa), which are distinguished by their global nature: they are qualities that result from (or supervene on) the aggregation of other praiseworthy traits.⁵⁴ Greatness of spirit is linked to the quality of ‘manliness’ more ⁵¹ Pseudo-Māwardī, Nasīhat al-mulūk, ed. Khidr Muhammad Khidr (Kuwait City: Maktabat _ _ _ _ _ al-Falāh, 1983), 39. _ al-Māwardī, Tashīl, 50 (apropos pride and conceit), 119 (apropos envy). On pride and ⁵² See conceit, compare also al-Māwardī’s remarks in Right Conduct in Mundane and Religious Affairs/Adab al-dunyā waʾl-dīn, ed. Muhammad Fathī Abū Bakr (Cairo: al-Dār al-Misriyya _ _ _ al-Lubnāniyya, 1988), 287. ⁵³ Tashīl, 17–18. ⁵⁴ Ibid., 28: laysa wāhid min al-karam waʾl-murūʾa khuluqan mufradan walākinnahu yashtamilu ʿalā akhlāq yasīru_ majmūʿuhā [or: bi-majmūʿihā] karaman wa-murūʾa. The meaning of _

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specifically. In Facilitating Inquiry, al-Māwardī subsumes the former in the latter in a way that suggests no special distinction and that may seem reminiscent of the philosophers’ practice of subsuming subordinate under cardinal virtues. But in his other ethical work, Right Conduct, the distinction is highlighted far more strongly, with greatness of spirit framed as one of two major qualities that serve as facilitators for manliness, the other being ‘honourableness’ or ‘nobility of soul’ (sharaf al-nafs). The roles of these qualities appear to consist, respectively, in setting the ends and providing the means. Greatness of spirit is the ‘motive force’ (bāʿith, dāʿī) that impels one to reach for ‘exalted things’ (maʿālī al-umūr); honourableness the moral muscle or stamina that enables one to carry through, making it possible not just to see what is good, but to realize it.⁵⁵ The continuity with many of the philosophical works we considered earlier will be evident. Here, as there, greatness of spirit is a quality connected to an aspiration to lofty goods, with virtue prime among them. Yet having picked up on the continuities, we may also notice certain changes in emphasis that shift the conceptual balance in new directions. The change of emphasis is palpable when one turns one’s attention to the notion of selfworth to consider how it appears within the architecture of these discussions. As in some of the philosophical accounts we saw earlier, an appeal to the term akhlāq takes discussion, as it can also refer to actions in some contexts (as it does in much of the material al-Māwardī cites), but the focus is squarely on character traits on pp. 30–1, where al-Māwardī lists the virtues (including greatness of spirit) subsumed under these global qualities. ⁵⁵ See the discussion in Adab al-dunyā, 380–4. My instrumental characterization of nobility of soul directly echoes al-Māwardī’s term āla on p. 382. The brief remarks in the main text condense what seems to me a suggestive yet ambiguous and philosophically difficult discussion. One of the intriguing features of al-Māwardī’s schema is the use he makes of it in distinguishing between virtuous and vicious manifestations of greatness of spirit (or aspiration, if we reserve the virtue term for the former). The person who is virtuously great-spirited is the one whose aspiration is rightly proportioned to the nobility of soul he is endowed with. When a person’s aspirations are not proportionate to his endowment in this regard, what he seeks outstrips what he is entitled to (383: mutaʿaddiyan ilā talab mā lā yastahiqquhu). Greatness of spirit must thus _ the main object _ of this knowledge is the stamina or be grounded in a kind of self-knowledge; quality of will represented by sharaf al-nafs; and that which it entitles one to is aspiration. Philosophically, what seems particularly difficult about this idea is the way in which a volitional aspect of the person is treated as a natural endowment that can figure as the object of descriptive factual knowledge. Both qualities, ʿuluww al-himma and sharaf al-nafs, are discussed by al-Māwardī in language that presents them in the light of natural givens; see e.g. the passive language used on p. 382: ammā man muniya bi-ʿuluww al-himma wa-suliba sharaf al-nafs (‘as for one afflicted with greatness of spirit and deprived of nobility of soul’). One wonders whether this approach reflects the history of these concepts, and their strong association with the high-born and the born leaders. For a few additional remarks on this passage of the Adab aldunyā, see Fakhry, Ethical Theories, 165–6.

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self-worth and to a sense of entitlement plays an integral role in the structure of these ones; and as in those accounts, the notion of self-worth shows up, less as an entitlement produced by virtue than as an entitlement to produce it. Yet unlike some of those other accounts, notably al-Rāghib’s,⁵⁶ in which the notion of self-worth was anchored in one’s universal status as a rational human being, here this appeal is framed far more directly as an appeal to the king’s social status and pre-eminence, and to a sense of superiority and pride—indeed a sense of one’s greatness—deriving from this elevated status. This was already intimated in the shrewd exhortation to kings, quoted from the Counsel for Kings above, that they distinguish themselves from the benighted ill-born masses (ahl al-ghabāwa waʾl-jahāla wa-sūʾ al-nushūʾ). Another adroit statement from the same work lays it even barer. ‘None is more entitled (ahaqq) than kings’, the author writes, ‘to choose and make a _ habit of praiseworthy traits, for they will not be fulfilling the claims of their majesty (muʾaddiyan haqq jalālatihi) or recognising the excellence of their _ station until they have abandoned many of the appetites of the soul and the pleasures of the body besides acquiring the virtues they must possess.’⁵⁷ None is more entitled; or, in an alternative translation of this mercurial word, none is more obligated—a semantic ambiguity revealing the special aptness of this choice of words for framing tactful moral exhortations to a king. This shift in emphasis, in fact, reflects a broader shift within the conceptual economy of the virtue, which propels the element of self-evaluation to a position of prominence that it had not quite carried in the philosophical accounts we considered. This is particularly evident in the Smelt Ore (once again its non-Ghazālian half ), which is also, it is interesting to observe, the work in which the emphasis on the aspirational character of greatness of spirit is weakest, though the connection with virtue is likewise present.⁵⁸ Greatness of spirit is above all a matter of the way a man esteems himself; it is a matter of knowing one’s proper worth. Hence its special link to people of status, for such people ‘know the value of their soul and hold it in honour (yaʿrifūna qadr anfusihim fa-yuʿizzūnahā)’. This sense of self-worth cannot be given from outside, the Smelt Ore stresses, in a remark with powerful

⁵⁶ Also Yahyā’s, though the appeal in his account is more composite given his special interest _ in a high-standing audience. ⁵⁷ Pseudo-Māwardī, Nasīha, 59. _ ⁵⁸ Among the vignettes _related in the chapter, there is only one (though this is the longest and in many ways the most interesting) that foregrounds the element of aspiration and hope relatively strongly: see Tibr, 99–101. This element is also to an extent thematized in the closing remarks on 103.

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aristocratic overtones. ‘If a person holds his soul in honour he is exalted, and if he demeans it his value is demeaned and debased. The meaning of greatspiritedness (himma) is that one should raise oneself . . . none can raise the value of another unless he should raise his own value.’⁵⁹ This attitude to self-worth in turn manifests itself in a variety of ways, such as the display of extravagant generosity, self-restraint, and indeed audacious chance-taking—characteristics illustrated through a raft of colourful vignettes in the Smelt Ore. What some of these characteristics have in common is the contempt they show for material goods and lower forms of personal interest. This sense of contempt, correlating with and underpinned by an elevated sense of one’s own dignity, finds perhaps its most pungent expression in Facilitating Inquiry in the context of a discussion of anger, where al-Māwardī, having admonished his reader against succumbing to anger, couples this to a similar admonition against joy. Neither anger nor joy should be permitted to convulse one: one should instead regard ‘all glad tidings, however extraordinary, as of little account considered against the sublimity of one’s station and measured against the greatness of one’s spirit (idhā . . . udīfat ilā ʿazīm himmatihi)’.⁶⁰ A little later, _ _ this picture of supreme self-mastery is further finessed as an ideal regarding the proper response to adversity and the vicissitudes of fate. ‘If misfortunes strike and adversities descend, one’s fortitude and noble-mindedness will serve to blunt their force, and one’s power of endurance and greatness of spirit (buʿd himmatihi) will help lighten their effect.’⁶¹ The picture of superb imperturbability—an ideal of equanimity before the blows of fate and disdain for things external—will evoke an ethical ideal we associate with Stoic thought more specifically, and indeed with the Stoic articulation of the corresponding virtue of greatness. It will thus be highly interesting to register such a potent expression of this ideal within the pages of Muslim thinkers’ discussions of this virtue. Yet this comparison helps bring out a further feature, and further shift of emphasis, subtly altering the conceptual economy of the virtue in these discussions. Because the Stoics, certainly, had included within the scope of their disdainful stance that good which other philosophers—notably Aristotle in his account of megalopsychia—had singled out as the greatest external good, namely honour. In these discussions, by contrast, we suddenly hear a new accent on the status of

⁵⁹ Tibr, 93.

⁶⁰ Al-Māwardī, Tashīl, 79.

⁶¹ Ibid., 81.

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honour as a valued good, indeed a good closely bound up with the virtue of greatness of spirit. This accent can be picked up with unmistakable clarity in the second half of the Smelt Ore. ‘You should know’, the author instructs his readers, ‘that a fine reputation and an excellent name are the best of goods (al-sīt al-hasan _ _ waʾl-ism al-jayyid khayr al-ashyāʾ).’⁶² It is honour that motivated the conduct of the great kings of bygone times, who strove to ensure that eternal glory would abide after them.⁶³ It is honour that ought to motivate people in their choice of virtuous conduct: people in general and kings in particular must act well ‘in order to leave a good name behind them’ and ‘not to be spoken of badly’; for a good name is like a second term of life.⁶⁴ Justice and rectitude are the means by which lasting glory and renown may be attained.⁶⁵ The same accent can be heard equally strongly in the Counsel for Kings, whose very first words incorporate an avowal of the ‘love of enduring fame’ ingrained in human nature and a promise that the moral advice included in the book can help procure this—as indeed it can vouchsafe happiness and prosperity more broadly.⁶⁶ Kings should steer clear of lowly conduct in order not to besmirch their honour (yushīnu al-ʿird) and bring lasting _ disrepute (qubh al-uhdūtha) upon themselves, and they should learn to _ _ govern themselves in order to obtain eternal renown. For ‘exalted things (maʿālī) are only secured by enduring things one abhors, and the outer reaches of the virtues are only attained by withstanding hardships’.⁶⁷ The terms of this remark will, of course, evoke the signature pattern of the virtue of greatness of spirit. This connection is cemented in another passage, which places the value of honour in even more brilliant light. The most excellent men have always expended their lifeblood to obtain honour and praise; this pursuit is in fact ‘one of the most sublime characteristics that reveal the presence of greatness of spirit (buʿd al-himma)’.⁶⁸ Honour is not only a legitimate object of pursuit and a legitimate motive for moral action, but indeed one of the distinctive goods with which greatness of spirit is concerned and through which it is manifested. I have been suggesting that, alongside multiple continuities between the way greatness of spirit is articulated in philosophical treatises and in mirrors for princes, there are shifts of emphasis that yield notable discontinuities. These include, above all, a marked shift toward the notion of self-worth—a ⁶² Tibr, 46. ⁶³ Ibid., 53–4. ⁶⁴ Ibid., 44 and 45. ⁶⁵ Ibid., 56; cf. 60–1. ⁶⁶ Nasīha, 33 and 35. ⁶⁷ Ibid., 55 and 56. _ _ ⁶⁸ Ibid., 154.

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shift involving a new affirmation of the sense of self-worth and thus a valorization of proper pride—and a shift toward honour as an object of ethical concern. This is important, on the one hand, for building a more inclusive picture of the development of the virtue in the Islamic context, and thus for reflecting on its conceptual identity and how its boundaries as a concept might be drawn. Among other insights, it suggests that these boundaries would be drawn in different places depending on the specific domains or genres of ethical discourse that formed our primary focus. It is also important for the larger story we might wish to tell about the relationship of these developments to the broader philosophical conversation. At the most general level, for example, it is worth observing that the special connection established by these works between greatness of spirit and membership of the higher sociopolitical classes mirrors a move that had often been made in the history of the corresponding ancient virtue. This connection is plain in Aristotle’s account in the Nicomachean Ethics, which one commentator has described as a portrait of the ‘political man par excellence’, and which has indeed sometimes antagonized readers on account of its apparent focus on the privileged elite, to whom alone this virtue would seem to be open. It is also plain in other prominent philosophical discussions of the virtue, such as Cicero’s in On Duties.⁶⁹ Other comparisons also suggest themselves—most obviously the one provoked by the mirrors’ resonance with Aristotle’s emphasis on self-evaluation and honour—though they would require deeper probing to be judiciously appraised.⁷⁰ Yet more important now will be another point, which returns us to a question raised earlier concerning the place of the virtues of greatness within the Islamic tradition itself. A natural way of telling this story, I suggested at the start of this section, would seem to be by drawing a sharp wedge between the two concepts we encountered, greatness of soul as kibar al-nafs and ⁶⁹ The quoted remark is from Harry V. Jaffa, Thomism and Aristotelianism: A Study of the Commentary by Thomas Aquinas on the Nicomachean Ethics (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1952), 130. For a robust defence of Aristotle’s account against such charges of elitism, see Russell, ‘Aristotle’s virtues of greatness’. This is not to overlook important differences between Aristotelian and Stoic views of greatness of soul, given the overall more egalitarian bent of the latter, which allowed for the possibility that even slaves could be great-souled (Gauthier, Magnanimité, 132). The connection between greatness of soul and the political sphere has been thematized in some of the very few independent books dedicated to the topic, including Carson Holloway’s edited collection Magnanimity and Statesmanship (Lanham; Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008) and Robert Faulkner’s The Case for Greatness: Honorable Ambition and Its Critics (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007). ⁷⁰ Among other points to consider, Aristotle takes a more qualified view of honour than the one implied in these works, and grounds the concept of self-worth rather more firmly in virtue.

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greatness of spirit as ʿizam al-himma. The first virtue, shaped by an _ emphasis on self-appreciation, failed to flourish, perhaps because of its conflict with Islamic religious morality, as suggested by a reading of al-Ghazālī’s work; the second, shaped by an emphasis on aspiration, thrived. The above discussion reveals this narrative to be simplistic; and in doing so it raises interesting questions about the relationship of these virtues to the Islamic ethical landscape and indeed about the notion of ‘Islamic religious morality’ just invoked. Given the sheer scope of his synthetic ethical vision and the extent of his influence, al-Ghazālī has often seemed one of the worthiest candidates to install in the position of standard-bearer and representative exponent of this morality. And as I argued in the first part of this narrative, al-Ghazālī’s stance on the ethics of esteem and self-esteem, as paradigmatically expressed in the Revival of the Religious Sciences, is too negative to give purchase to a virtue valorizing self-appreciation and the love of honour. Yet, of course, readers coming to these works of political advice from al-Ghazālī will be struck by the contrast in their attitudes to these topics and indeed in their ethical vantage points as a whole. Where al-Ghazālī focuses on exclusive attachment to God and happiness in the next life and recommends extreme humility and a life of obscurity, these writers focus on the promise of worldly success and legitimate a sense of pride and the pursuit of honour among other mundane goods. Now on the one hand, this contrast should not be drawn too sharply. A moral concern with defective ways of relating to self-esteem, and a problematization of the vices of pride and conceit, are also present in the mirrors we have considered, though more strongly in some than in others— far more strongly in the Counsel for Kings and Facilitating Inquiry than in the Smelt Ore. Pride is one of the moral hazards that stalk kings most tenaciously. In cautioning against these vices and commending humility, al-Māwardī interestingly appeals to greatness of spirit in the aspirational sense to mount his moral critique. The conceited make much of their virtue and believe it requires no further enhancement. The great-spirited think little of it as they always aspire to what lies beyond it.⁷¹ Greatness of spirit in the aspirational sense is antithetical to pride; the great-spirited are humble. The corresponding discussion of pride and humility in the Counsel for Kings is particularly suggestive in this respect, as it echoes the precise meditations ⁷¹ See the discussion of pride and conceit in Tashīl, 50 ff.; the appeal to greatness of spirit is far clearer in Adab al-dunyā, 287.

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that al-Ghazālī would later present in the Revival as a moral exercise to help inculcate self-knowledge and thus humility in his reader, inviting the reader to dwell on the cosmic vista of God’s creation in order to displace his pride through a new appreciation of his vulnerability and insignificance.⁷² Similarly, the worldly concerns of these treatises far from exhaust their moral texture, in which mundane and religious emphases are inextricably entwined, though this is more visible in some works than others. The Counsel for Kings explicitly frames its advice as a means both to worldly and other-worldly prosperity.⁷³ The terms in which it characterizes its moral programme and identifies the bases of right conduct are especially noteworthy in this regard. The king’s conduct must be grounded in two sources: in following God’s command, and in following or imitating God’s example (al-iqtidāʾ biʾL-lāh) to the extent possible; for ‘this is the highest end that aspiration can reach for and that bold hope can attach to (arfaʿ mā tasmū ilayhi al-himam wa-yantahī ilayhi buʿd al-amal)’.⁷⁴ The appearance of the notion of the imitation of God will remind us of al-Rāghib, though, as Louise Marlow points out in her meticulous study of this work, its invocation must be read against the deeper roots of this ideal in the philosophical tradition.⁷⁵ As in al-Rāghib, greatness of spirit is linked to the pursuit of the afterlife at several junctures of these works. The great-spirited person is the one ‘whose sole objective is paradise’ and who prefers what endures to what perishes.⁷⁶ Yet even with these qualifications, the contrast between these ethical works remains real. It is not incidental that, in the Smelt Ore, the otherworldly orientation of the virtue is listed as one of several possibilities placed on a footing of seemingly equal validity, with little to indicate that it should be ranked any higher than the rest.⁷⁷ Indeed, the contrast between these ethical perspectives—and the naturalness of al-Ghazālī’s taken as an articulation of central religious values—is so keen at times as to make one wonder whether it could be partly interpreted away through a deeper excavation of authorial intent. Set against al-Ghazālī’s understandable theological suspicion of honour, the mirrors’ naked appeals to their addressees’ pride and desire for honour in seeking to motivate them to virtuous conduct seem so

⁷² Nasīha, 99–100. ⁷³ Ibid., 35. ⁷⁴ Ibid., 134–5. _ _ Marlow, Counsel for Kings: Wisdom and Politics in Tenth-Century Iran, vol. 2—The ⁷⁵ Louise Nasīhat al-mulūk of Pseudo-Māwardī: Texts, Sources and Authorities (Edinburgh: Edinburgh _ _ University Press, 2016), ch. 3. ⁷⁶ E.g. Nasīha, 100; cf. Tibr, 95. _ _cf., in a different context, Nasīha, 154. ⁷⁷ Tibr, 95; _ _

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startling it is difficult to hear these appeals in tones of full seriousness without thinking one can detect traces of irony in them. The use of irony could not be put past the writers of mirrors, with their mastery of the arts of tactful persuasion and the subtle manipulation of language. ‘None is more entitled than you, O king, to be virtuous’—‘None is more entitled to abandon his desires.’ ‘You owe it to your greatness to be virtuous.’ Such deft exhortations may remind us of the analogy between ethical reform and medical therapy often encountered in the Arabic philosophical tradition (as in Greco-Roman philosophy before it), with its concomitant emphasis on the doctor’s need to tailor his prescriptions to the needs and circumstances of his particular patients. They will also remind us of a nuanced perspective on praise and honour expressed in many works of philosophical ethics, condemning honour as an end and motive for action among the fully virtuous, but sanctioning its pedagogical or developmental use among those striving to be virtuous.⁷⁸ In harnessing the king’s sense of pride and desire for praise, one might say, the writers of these mirrors address the king as if they were speaking to a child.⁷⁹ This proposal would involve highlighting the important distinctions separating the rhetorical contexts of these works—their different aims and audience—which affect the values they foreground. And it is indeed a proposal not far removed from this one that is suggested by the Counsel for Kings itself in a crucial passage toward the end of the book which thematizes precisely the relationship between the different evaluative perspectives we have been considering. There, the author distinguishes between three kinds of relationships in which people might stand to the classes of things God has forbidden and permitted. One is the approach taken by the ascetics, who avoid what God has prohibited but also restrict their enjoyment of what He has permitted, contenting themselves with the bare minimum of worldly pleasures and goods. Another is the approach taken by the wicked, who partake of what is forbidden and entirely disregard the limits set by God. Yet a third is the approach followed by people who desire ⁷⁸ See Part 1, nn. 35, 50, 69. ⁷⁹ This interpretive proposal would thus involve questioning the depth of some of these writers’ commitment to an idea often picked up by commentators, the belief in the inherent superiority and sublimity of the king, which on some views reflects the influence of characteristically Persian views of kingship. See e.g. Crone, ‘Did al-Ghazālī write a mirror for princes?’, 180–1, and Medieval Islamic Political Thought, 153–4, 162–4. The proposal will seem more natural in some cases than in others—more natural, for example, in the case of pseudoMāwardī, who conveys a clear awareness of the ideal of purity of intention that underpins the suspicion of praise as a motive among writers like al-Ghazālī. See Nasīha, 238. _ _

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both to enjoy the pleasures of this world but also to reap reward and enjoyment in the next, and who do not contravene God’s prohibitions but allow themselves to enjoy permitted goods without excessive restriction. Set against this threefold scheme, the author’s advice to the virtuous king is that if he finds that ‘it lies beyond his strength to reject the world in order to attain the station of the admirable ascetics, then he should not satisfy himself with the station of the dissolute and the depraved’.⁸⁰ While treating the ascetic life with respect and perhaps even delicately hinting at its superiority, the author suggests that both ethical routes, ascetic and moderate, carry religious legitimacy. Which of them is more appropriate in a given case may depend on the individual’s disposition and capabilities. The first approach, of course, represents the ascetic ethic expressed in al-Ghazālī’s Revival, whose moral rigour is reflected in an austere stance on the ethics of self-appreciation and on the value of honour taken as a mundane good. The adoption of a more positive stance on these issues in the mirrors thus implicitly aligns them with the more permissive third approach—an approach better tailored to their royal audience’s disposition. What this suggests is the existence of a range of possible ethical responses to these issues, with different responses foregrounded in different genres of writing in view of the rhetorical contexts that individuate them, even while allowing for the possibility of drawing hierarchical distinctions between higher and lower alternatives. To the extent that these genres convey, in however varying degrees, concerns of a religious kind that entitle them to be included under the roof of ‘Islamic morality’ broadly construed, this yields a pluralistic picture of this morality that has important consequences for the way we script the relationship of the virtues of greatness to the ethical landscape of ArabicIslamic culture more generally and to Islamic morality more particularly. Conflict or harmony? Our view of this relationship will have to be as pluralistic as the notion of Islamic morality we employ as our touchstone.

The Genealogy of a Virtue Between Greek and Persian Ethics This pluralistic approach would find many defenders among readers of Islamic ethics. Yet there are commentators who would find it too permissive, ⁸⁰ Nasīha, 291–2. See also Marlow’s remarks on this passage in Counsel for Kings, vol. 1, 236–7. _ _

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particularly as applied to the mirrors, and taken as a proposal to bring this genre under the roof of ‘Islamic morality’. This would include George Hourani, who was so impressed by the worldly and pragmatic orientation of mirrors that he preferred to class it as a type of ‘secular’ ethics in his wellknown scheme.⁸¹ For our purposes, it is especially worth picking up on the grounds that Patricia Crone would use in her study of the Smelt Ore to base her conclusions about the inauthenticity of the second half of the book taken as a work of al-Ghazālī’s. Crone noted the profound differences in ethical orientation separating the two halves of the book, and indeed the ethical values expressed in al-Ghazālī’s main works and the values conveyed in the second half of this one. Among the points highlighted in her discussion, the one that interests us is the emphasis on honour and eternal renown, as also on the splendour of the king’s person, that dominates the second half of the book. This emphasis, which is entirely out of keeping with al-Ghazālī’s views as expressed elsewhere, is perfectly in keeping with the cultural values of preIslamic Iran, with which Crone associates the author of the second half, conjecturing that he must have been an Iranian nationalist who ‘cannot have come from a very Islamized background’. Yet in making her case for the conflict between al-Ghazālī’s values and those values expressed in the book, Crone placed the accent rather more widely. Whoever put the two halves of the book together, as she tellingly states in conclusion, ‘must certainly have contributed his fair share to al-Ghazālī’s torments in the grave: the imam cannot have taken well to his posthumous fate as the author of so un-Islamic a book.’⁸² The continuities documented above in the treatment of the themes of honour and royal grandeur among major mirrors, including ones written by authors of more robust religious credentials such as al-Māwardī, should already make us wonder how heavily one could lean on these themes to draw conclusions about their authors’ identity. Yet here it is a different point that should engage us more immediately. Crone does not touch on the virtue of greatness of spirit specifically; yet this virtue is deeply enmeshed with the themes on which she grounds her last trenchant designation (‘so un-Islamic a book’). And to the extent that Crone’s focus falls on the cultural sources of the views presented in the book, her discussion points to an important ⁸¹ Hourani, ‘Ethics in classical Islam’, 16. Cf., indicatively, the remarks in Crone, Medieval Islamic Political Thought, 150–1. ⁸² Crone, ‘Did al-Ghazālī write a mirror for princes?’, 189, 191.

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question we have not yet confronted, which concerns the intellectual genealogy and roots of the virtue we have been considering. For the type of narrative I have been trying to plot, the question of roots is not a tangential one. In the Introduction to this book, I suggested that the story of the virtues of greatness in the Islamic world can be told on two levels, taking into account the existence of two distinct concepts articulated across different kinds of ethical works. On one level, this is a story about the reception of the ancient philosophical legacy in the Islamic world—a story most naturally tracked, as indicated in Part 1, through the concept of kibar al-nafs. But in the Introduction, I staked a claim for the plausibility of telling a broader kind of story, one that need not be grounded in textual links to the ancient tradition. I defended this story—its unity as a single story—by appeal to the principled possibility of recognizing a broader ‘family’ or ‘kind’ of concept, of which the ancient virtue of greatness of soul might be only one member, suggesting that we might be able to identify other members of this family even in the absence of genealogical links to the ancient tradition. My discussion in Part 2, which focused on the concept of greatness of spirit (ʿizam al-himma), has hopefully borne out that possibility, indicating _ some of my reasons for thinking this concept has a natural title to be ranged within this broader family. Throughout the above, I called attention to a number of similarities linking the various accounts of greatness of spirit found in Arabic ethical texts to the diverse articulations of greatness of soul within the ancient tradition. The global connection with virtue, and with great degrees of virtue, particularly reminiscent of Aristotle; the connection with aspiration, particularly reminiscent of some Stoic writers; the structural role of a concept of self-worth or entitlement, whether understood in backward-looking or forward-looking terms; the foregrounding of honour, at least in some accounts; the connection with the endurance of misfortune, likewise. Not all those features were present in the Arabic texts we examined in the same way, or with the same degree of emphasis, but then neither was this the case among ancient configurations. Without proposing to draw hard-and-fast conceptual frontiers, these physiognomic traits spell out a pattern of conceptual resemblances which seem sufficient on an intuitive level to make us speak of ‘families’ and ‘family relations’ at this juncture. Yet if we take this pattern of affinities seriously, it will then seem natural to ask: Why not take this story in the most obvious manner—as a story of genetic descent? If the roots of our second virtue, greatness of spirit, do not lie in the ancient tradition, where do they? The answer to this question, as we will now see, is a marvellously complex one. These roots turn out to be not

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singular but plural, reflecting the multiplicity of cultural and intellectual influences interdigitating on the terrain of Islamic ethical thought. To investigate them is thus to train the light not only on the history of the virtues of greatness in Arabic-Islamic culture, but on the character and sources of Islamic ethical thought more broadly. For, on the one hand, a survey of some of the key ethical texts available to readers in the Islamic world in Arabic translation indicates that there is certainly an interesting story to be told about the relationship of this virtue to the Greek philosophical tradition. To locate the material for it, however, one needs to look away from the major ethical treatises that constitute the modern-day canon toward a constellation of lesser-known texts. In the sole extant Arabic translation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, greatness of soul is translated consistently as kibar al-nafs, though it is worth noting that the term kibar al-himma appears as a translation for the virtue of magnificence (megaloprepeia).⁸³ Kibar al-nafs is also the term that is used by al-Fārābī in reprising Plato’s remarks about greatness of soul in the Republic.⁸⁴ As several commentators have stressed, the development of Arabic philosophical ethics cannot be understood exclusively in relation to these works despite their current primacy in the philosophical canon.⁸⁵ More influential were a number of shorter treatises and compendia of often shady parentage. These include the Summa Alexandrinorum, parts of which, including the passages on greatness of soul, are only preserved in Latin translation, as mentioned earlier. They also include the pseudo-Aristotelian De Virtutibus et vitiis, which is extant, significantly, in no less than two Arabic translations, as well as a messy yet potent little treatise attributed to some ‘Nicolaus’ that was found together with the Fez manuscript of the Arabic translation of the Nicomachean Ethics. Both of the latter works contain detailed taxonomies of an array of specific virtues and vices, organized on the basis of a distinction between cardinal and subordinate traits.

⁸³ For a survey of this usage, see Ullmann, Die Nikomachische Ethik, vol. 1, 320 and 413–4, s.v. k-b-r and h-m-m. In the so-called ‘seventh book’ of the NE, there is a slight terminological variation, with kibar al-nafs replaced by ʿizam al-nafs. ⁸⁴ In the absence of (extant?) Arabic _translations of the integral text, such paraphrastic references are as close as one can get to witnessing its linguistic reception. Whether complete Arabic translations of the Republic were made (as opposed, for example, to translations of its Galenic synopses) is an open question. See Dimitri Gutas’s very helpful compass in ‘Platon. Tradition arabe’, in Dictionnaire des Philosophes Antiques: Supplément, ed. Richard Goulet (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 2012), vol. Va, 845–63. ⁸⁵ Druart, ‘Philosophie arabe morale’, 187; Walzer, ‘Platonism in Islamic philosophy’, Greek Into Arabic, 239–40.

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It is on these two short works that our attention must focus at this juncture. Greatness of soul appears on the lists of both works. And what will be interesting to observe is that in both works it makes not one, but at least two, linguistic appearances, drawing on both of the terms we have seen. This dual linguistic appearance, however, takes a significantly different form in each work. The treatise by Nicolaus presents kibar al-nafs and ʿizam _ al-himma as two separate virtues, each specified through its own definition. The definitions correspond very closely to the ones offered by Miskawayh in the Refinement of Character, with the former foregrounding a more Aristotelian emphasis on merit and self-evaluation and the latter a more Stoic emphasis on endurance of vicissitudes of fortune.⁸⁶ Things are different with the De Virtutibus. This work, as mentioned, is extant in two translations separated by an extensive interval of time, with one attributed to the Christian theologian and bishop of Harran Theodore Abū Qurra (d.c.825) and the other to the Christian philosopher and physician Abuʾl-Faraj ʿAbdallāh ibn al-Tayyib (d.1043). The translations _ are also separated by internal differences sufficiently stark to lead their editor to conclude that the translators must have been working with a different textual basis.⁸⁷ These differences are reflected in the content of their statements about greatness of soul. In Abū Qurra, for example, greatness of soul is unusually characterized as a global virtue of the soul as a whole (kulliyyat al-nafs), a move that has no counterpart in Ibn al-Tayyib’s _ discussion, and indeed no direct counterpart in any of the Arabic discussions I am familiar with.⁸⁸ The differences are also reflected in the form of their statements about the virtue, and more specifically in their choice of linguistic terms to translate it, though in both cases the choice is marked by a significant degree of fluidity. Thus, Abū Qurra uses the base term himma but conjoins it to two different substantives to form the compound term for the virtue: sharaf (nobility) and ʿizam (greatness). For the opposite vice of smallness of soul, he _ drops the term himma and uses the linguistically unrelated terms danāʾa

⁸⁶ See al-Akhlāq, 408. Cf. Miskawayh, Tahdhīb, 21. ⁸⁷ See the discussion in Kellermann, Ein pseudoaristotelischer Traktat, 26–9. For further discussion of this text and its Arabic reception, see Michel Cacouros, ‘Le traité pseudo-aristotélicien De Virtutibus et vitiis’, in Dictionnaire des Philosophes Antiques, Supplément, 506–46. ⁸⁸ Ein pseudoaristotelischer Traktat, Q1 l. 12, Q2 ll. 7–8. No ‘direct’ counterpart, though as we have seen, in certain texts ʿizam al-himma in particular is conceptualized in ways that lend it a _ more global aspect.

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and dīq al-khuluq.⁸⁹ Ibn al-Tayyib, by contrast, uses the base term nafs for _ _ the virtue and produces the familiar compound kibar al-nafs. Fascinatingly, he then uses the base term himma to form the compound term for the opposite vice, translating qusūr al-himma (literally ‘shortfall’ of himma). _ And even in his translation for the virtue, he slides between the two different words for ‘greatness’ we have seen, kibar and ʿizam.⁹⁰ _ Thus, in a single text we see on display the full gamut of linguistic building blocks and indeed configurations (if we take the relevant vice term into account). The base term himma turns up in both texts, and both of the major virtue terms that have featured in my account—kibar al-nafs and ʿizam _ al-himma—make an appearance, with the former foregrounded by Ibn al-Tayyib and the latter by Abū Qurra. Importantly, unlike Nicolaus’ trea_ tise, in which these terms picked out separate virtues, here they serve as translations for what is a single target term in the edition of the Greek text as we have it: megalopsychia. There are, of course, question marks, as mentioned, about the precise text each translator had before him, and it is also far from clear that they were both translating from the same language,⁹¹ so we need to be cautious about any assumptions we make regarding the target term each translator had before him. For our purposes, what is important is that the notion of ʿizam al-himma _ is thus seen to make a number of strategic appearances within influential ethical works connected to the ancient philosophical tradition, forging what seems to be a direct genetic link with that tradition. Yet further reflection will instantly throw up doubts about the ability of this textual link to singlehandedly provide a cogent account of the notion’s genealogy. It is noteworthy, for example, that neither Nicolaus’ treatise nor the two translations of the De Virtutibus connect the virtue–vice himma complex exceptionally strongly with the elements that shaped its articulation in philosophical treatises and works of political advice. In these texts, the dominant accent falls on the element of endurance (of good or bad fortune, of honour and dishonour). While this element was present in some of the works we surveyed earlier, their emphasis was on the character of greatness of spirit ⁸⁹ Ibid., Q2 l.7 (sharaf al-himma), Q1 l.17 (danāʾa; note that at Q2 l.17–18 danāʾa is described as deriving from or forming part of sighar al-himma), Q4 l.17 (ʿazīm al-himma), _ _ Q6 l.22 (dīq al-khuluq). _ T2 l.6 (kibar al-nafs), T2 l.17 (qusūr al-himma, though he then gives sighar al-nafs at ⁹⁰ Ibid., _ _ to translate T7 l.20), T5 l.6 (ʿizam al-nafs). It is also worth noting that he uses kibar al-nafs _ another term, eupsychia (T3, l.14). ⁹¹ Kellermann notes that while it is clear that Ibn al-Tayyib was translating from the Syriac, it _ is less clear in the case of Abū Qurra, who knew both Greek and Syriac.

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as an aspirational impulsion and an impulsion to virtue in particular. Leaning close to the present treatises, we might indeed be able to detect delicate traces of this idea. Both translations of the De Virtutibus, for example, link the vice of smallness of soul with a tendency to despair and to be feeble in hoping (Abū Qurra: daʿf al-rajāʾ). Ibn al-Tayyib puts the point _ _ particularly resonantly: the small-souled person is one ‘whose soul does not rise to [or aspire to] the paltriest things (lā tasmū bihi nafsuhu ilā aysar amr)’.⁹² Yet this element forms a far from salient pigment within the overall complexion of their remarks. The same could be said about some of the other elements foregrounded more specifically in the mirrors’ articulation of the virtue, such as the emphasis on honour and self-worth, which these philosophical texts connect to the concept of kibar al-nafs but not to that of ʿizam al-himma. _ Thus, while the influence of the Greek tradition in shaping the virtue of greatness of spirit with its distinctive character cannot be excluded, it seems necessary to look beyond it for additional and potentially more influential tributaries. One of the linguistic observations made above helps crystallize this explanatory need further. For if the two major terms designating the virtues of greatness in the Arabic-Islamic context—kibar al-nafs and ʿizam _ al-himma—were used interchangeably at a formative moment of their history, one will need a good explanation of why their fortunes and trajectories diverged so dramatically in later times, with the former receding into the background and the latter taking centre stage. Where to look for alternative sources? Another possibility naturally suggests itself when we cast back to some of the works we considered earlier. I opened this section by outlining Crone’s argument against the attribution of parts of the Smelt Ore to al-Ghazālī, which she ascribed instead to an ‘Iranian nationalist’ expressing values characteristic of pre-Islamic Persian culture. Whatever view we take of the relative prominence of these values in this particular work, the cultural element Crone picks out is known to have played a crucial and well-documented role in the development of mirrors for princes more broadly. As Abdel Hakim Dawood observed in a seminal study of the genre, ‘Islamic Mirrors for Princes, manuals for the guidance of rulers and officials, represent an ethicopolitical tradition which is, by origin, ⁹² Ein pseudoaristotelischer Traktat, Q7 l.2 (cf. Q6 l.23: āyisan ʿinda taʿadhdhur al-ashyāʾ ʿalayhi); T7 l.24. In Nicolaus’ treatise, the only occasion on which the vocabulary characteristic of ʿizam al-himma comes up, as far as I have seen, is in a statement about the exalting effect of _ al-fadīla . . . tarfaʿu al-nafs wa-tasmū bihā ghāyat al-sumuww ilā tabīʿatihā al-khāssiyya. virtue: _ _ __ Al-Akhlāq, 401.

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Persian,’ forming the direct heir of a type of advice literature that had featured prominently in Sasanian court culture in the pre-Islamic era.⁹³ Although other cultural tributaries, such as Greek and more indigenous Arabic-Islamic elements, fed into the genre at different stages of its history, the Persian influence remained paramount, particularly in the early period. With regard to Greek ethics, Dawood allows for some modest early influence reflecting the prior absorption of Greek philosophical ideas in the pre-Islamic Persian world, but he takes the eleventh century to mark the watershed when Greek ethical ideas entered the bloodstream of mirrors more fully on the back of the diffusion of Greek thought in translation.⁹⁴ The pre-eminence of Persian influence, he suggests, is discernible especially strongly in connection with the ethics of rulers and officials, even in strains of the genre (such as the epistolary and testamentary strains) where more indigenous Arabo-Islamic material is quantitatively prevalent. The reason for this, in his view, is simple: ‘Arabo-Islamic morality did not envisage special ethics for rulers and officials, as distinct from ordinary individuals. Such special ethics developed in Islam under the influence of Persian culture from the middle of the first century A.H.’ The image of the ruler in mirrors for princes is thus ‘typically Persian’.⁹⁵ Dawood’s account might need to be nuanced to accommodate the findings of more recent scholarship, which has trained a light on the intellectual transactions between mirrors for princes and Greek ideas taking place from an earlier date.⁹⁶ Yet even so, these positioning statements help propel to the fore an alternative way of approaching the origins of our focal virtue. For while, in some of the works we surveyed, greatness of spirit is a virtue that appears to be made available to all moral subjects without distinction, in many works it is made integral to the character of only a specific subset of those subjects, namely kings and people of high social standing. This applies, obviously, to the discussions of the virtue in mirrors for princes. It also applies to the discussions found in certain philosophical works that arguably fall outside this genre yet betray strong intellectual links to it, such as Yahyā _ ibn ʿAdī’s compendium. To the extent that this virtue forms part of a ⁹³ Abdel Hakim Dawood, A Comparative Study of Arabic and Persian Mirrors for Princes from the Second to the Sixth Century AH (PhD Thesis, University of London, 1965), 2. ⁹⁴ Ibid., 181; cf. the remarks about Greek influence, 19 ff. The absorption of Greek philosophy into Persian culture in pre-Islamic times found its programmatic context in a broader imperial ideology expertly described by Dimitri Gutas in Greek Thought, Arabic Culture (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 1998), ch. 2. ⁹⁵ Dawood, Comparative Study, 121–2; cf. 109. ⁹⁶ See Marlow, ‘Abū Zayd al-Balkhī’, and her book-length discussion in Counsel for Kings.

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distinctive royal ethics which receives paradigmatic expression in a genre highly indebted to pre-Islamic Persian culture, it is not unreasonable to speculate that its most direct roots should lie in the latter. This indeed seems to be the view taken by one prominent commentator, Charles-Henri de Fouchécour, in a large-scale study of Persian ethical literature that spans the Smelt Ore, among other works, and incorporates a rare set of concentrated remarks on our focal concept. The presentation of the virtue in the Smelt Ore, Fouchécour writes, ‘calls upon the most common and most elementary classifications of traditional morality in its Persian expression. In all likelihood, here one sees rising to the surface some of the moral bedrock on which religions like Zoroastrianism or Islam were able to build the moralising part of their cultural edifice.’⁹⁷ This hypothesis is bolstered by some of the observations made earlier regarding the content of the mirrors, such as their emphasis on glory and honour, on the inborn qualities grounding the natural distinction between kings and commoners, and on the splendour and grandeur of the king’s person—all of them staples of the Persian cultural mindset, and all of them enmeshed with the articulation of greatness of spirit we encountered in the mirrors. Perhaps the most suggestive piece of evidence in this respect is provided by the eighth-century secretary and littérateur Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ (d.c.757). Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ is a figure who occupies a position of unequalled importance in narratives of the development of Arabic prose more generally, as also of the genre of mirrors for princes more narrowly. His work is often credited as a key conduit through which Persian cultural values and ethical ideas were introduced into the Islamic world. His best-known and bestloved work is Kalīla wa-Dimna, a collection of old Indian fables whose Sanskrit original can be regarded as a mirror for princes, and which in its Pahlavi translation formed part the Sasanian court literature. In translating it, as J. D. Latham suggests, Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ in turn intended it ‘to serve in Arabo-Muslim court circles the same purpose as it had served at the Sasanian court’.⁹⁸ The term himma does not appear extensively in the work, yet those appearances it does make carry special resonance. The most notable is in a statement that identifies ‘loftiness of spirit’ (ʿuluww himma) as a quality

⁹⁷ Charles-Henri de Fouchécour, Moralia: Les notions morales dans la littérature persane du 3e/9e au 7e/13e siècle (Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les civilisations, 1986), 407. ⁹⁸ J. D. Latham, ‘Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ and early ʿAbbasid prose’, in ʿAbbasid Belles Lettres, ed. Julia Ashtiany et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 52.

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necessary in three distinct spheres of endeavour: sea trade, military combat, and the exercise of political power.⁹⁹ The direct link forged in this remark between virtue and the ruling classes will seem intimately familiar. If indeed we stretch the evidential base a little to include not only Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s own text but also some of the material that came to be closely bound up with it in its textual evolution, the sense of familiarity will deepen. In a preface appended to one of the editions of the text and written by one ʿAlī b. al-Shāh al-Fārisī, readers are provided with some background to the history of the book and its composition. Addressing the sage Bidpai, the Indian king Dabshalim communicates his request that he write a book for him to serve as a chronicle of his times and a repository of wisdom regarding the proper modes of governance and the conduct of kings, which will endure as a monument down through the ages after his death (this being the very book we hold in our hands). Receiving this request with alacrity, Bidpai opens his response with an effusive eulogy of the king and his noble project: ‘The person who has been stamped out for kingship through an outstanding nature and abundant intelligence . . . is driven toward the lofty things that his soul reaches for, and his aspiration attaches to the most sublime stations whose extremities lie farthest away (maʿālī al-umūr allatī samat bihi nafsuhu fa-taʿlū himmatuhu ilā ashraf al-manzila wa-abʿadihā ghāyatan).’¹⁰⁰ Even more striking than the familiar ascription of a lofty spirit to kings—among whose distinguishing inborn qualities it is counted—will be the association of this quality with a characteristic drive to aspire to high stations, which here significantly includes a project intended to harvest lasting honour and renown. If we were looking for the roots of the virtue of greatness of spirit, there are thus reasons for thinking that these could be located within the distinctive soil of the pre-Islamic Persian tradition. This broad hypothesis, to be sure, would require nuancing, particularly in terms of the way we understand the notion of ‘distinctiveness’ used to frame it. This intellectual tradition itself had after all not been insulated from external influences, and had also been fertilized by Greek philosophical ideas transmitted through Persian translations of

⁹⁹ Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, Kalīla wa-dimna, ed. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb ʿAzzām and Tāhā Husayn (Cairo: _ _ al-Yasūʿīyīn, Hindāwī, 2014), 78; ed. Louis Cheikho (Beirut: al-Matbaʿa al-Kāthūlīkīyya liʾl-Ābāʾ _ 1922), 68. Cf. the invocation of the term at 69/46 (rafīʿ al-himma), again in connection with kings. ¹⁰⁰ Kalīla wa-dimna, ed. Cheikho, 15; this statement contains a number of linguistic peculiarities which I have preserved rather than corrected. This preface has been dropped in the ʿAzzām/Husayn edition consulted. _

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Greek texts in Sasanian times. Commentators on Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s work have often picked up on echoes of such ideas, in one case even extending to a comparison with Aristotle’s account of greatness of soul. And although the observation of parallels and analogies has usually stopped short of a historical claim about genetic influence, this possibility cannot be entirely ruled out.¹⁰¹ It is a hypothesis that is rendered somewhat harder to establish with definiteness given the nature of the textual evidence, and the fact that our sole access to the Persian tradition, and to mirrors for princes more narrowly, is provided not by the original works written in Pahlavi but by Arabic works composed under its influence.¹⁰² Even in a work like Kalīla wa-Dimna, which as a translation might be thought to provide fairly immediate access to the political literature in use in Sasanian court circles, it is not a simple matter to disentangle the element of transmission from the element of creative adaptation. As J. D. Latham points out, Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ is generally understood to have followed a translation approach that was not slavishly literal, aiming rather, as a master of both Pahlavi and Arabic, ‘to produce an idiomatic rendering’ of the text that was ‘suited to the taste and grasp of his Arab readers’.¹⁰³ The fact that the strongest linguistic bridges to the himma concept we have seen are attested not in the main body of the text itself but in historical appendages of uncertain date and paternity does little to encourage this hypothesis. Fouchécour’s claim, on its side, seems to me far from compelling, and indeed has the air more of a speculative suggestion than of a robustly developed argument.¹⁰⁴ Even if the Persian ¹⁰¹ These parallels are a theme in Andras Hamori’s essay ‘Prudence, virtue, and self-respect in Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’, in Reflections on Reflections: Near Eastern Writers Reading Literature, ed. Angelika Neuwirth and Andreas Christian Islebe (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2006), 161–79; see 168–9 for his analogy with Aristotle’s megalopsychos, focusing on the external manifestations of a sense of self-worth. They are also a theme in Hans Daiber, ‘Das Kitāb al-Ādāb al-kabīr des Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ als Ausdruck griechischer Ethik, islamischer Ideologie und iranisch-sassanidischer Hofetikette’, Oriens 43 (2015), 273–92. Daiber emphasizes the character of this text as a product of three intersecting cultures—Hellenistic, Iranian, and Islamic. ¹⁰² As noted by Shaul Shaked, in ‘Andarz and andarz literature in pre-Islamic Iran’, Encyclopaedia Iranica, ed. Ehsan Yarshater, consulted online on 21 September 2016, http://www. iranicaonline.org/articles/andarz-precept-instruction-advice. ¹⁰³ Latham, ‘Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’, 52. And in general, the corruption sustained by the text over the course of its transmission history, as noted by C. Brockelmann in his survey article (‘Kalīla wa-Dimna’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, ed. P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W.P. Heinrichs; consulted online on 19 September 2016, http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/ 1573-3912_islam_COM_0427), makes it difficult to place a heavy interpretive weight on any of its isolated linguistic traits. ¹⁰⁴ To the extent that Fouchécour supports this claim, it seems to be by taking pseudoGhazālī’s analysis of the virtue of hemmat to exemplify a conceptual pattern with wide

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origins of this notion were established, we should also note, there would be the further task of explaining how the virtue came to be decoupled from its royal environs and developed into the more universal virtue we meet in the work of writers such as Miskawayh, Avicenna, and al-Rāghib. Future scholarship on the Persian tradition may be able to add to our evidence and shed clearer light on this question. Yet while not categorically excluding this as a source of partial influence and allowing it to stand alongside the Greek philosophical legacy as a possible tributary to the genealogy of this virtue, it seems to me that once again we need to broaden our view if we are to achieve a more satisfactory picture of its origins.

Pre-Islamic Arab Culture and the Virtues of Heroes The key to this picture, I would in fact suggest, lies in a source of cultural and intellectual influence with even wider resonance than the sources we have isolated thus far, and indeed boasting rather more indigenous roots. A simple way to identify it is by turning back to reconsider Dawood’s earlier statement in the context of an argument for the Persian origin of the ethics for rulers found in mirrors: ‘Arabo-Islamic morality did not envisage special ethics for rulers and officials,’ hence the image of the ruler is ‘typically Persian’. For this remark would appear to overlook the existence of an important body of writing of more indigenous vintage in which the qualities of high-standing people came up for concerted consideration. Its earliest and most influential exemplar is a ninth-century writer who has in common with Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ his status as one of the founding fathers of Arabic

resonance in the Persian ethical tradition, insofar as it centres on the core elements of social behaviour, action, speech, and thought (Moralia, 406–7; cf. Tibr, 94). Yet whatever their resonance in Persian ethics, these structural elements are so generic and so central to other forms of ethical thought that it seems hard to place decisive interpretive weight on them, and certainly readers attuned to the Aristotelian affinities of this concept as presented in the Smelt Ore will find it hard to do so. These are affinities Fouchécour himself brings out by placing selfknowledge/self-evaluation at the heart of the virtue, and in turn taking this to be grounded in a moral kind of accomplishment (407). Fouchécour’s primary concern in this study is in fact with advice collections that date no earlier than the tenth century (in all of which, he states, the concept of hemmat can be found). The older, pre-Islamic roots of these collections fall outside his ken. Fouchécour signals the potentially extensive debt of Persian morality to Greek culture, though he gestures toward Greek thinkers predating Aristotle (p. 6; cf. the remark on the same page: ‘il faut renoncer à pouvoir répondre à la question des sources non immédiates de la morale des conseils en persan’). Bagley, for his part, speculates that the concept may be Greek in origin in his introduction to Counsel for Kings, xlvii, but the suggestion is cursory and he elsewhere leaves questions about Greek influence to the experts (lxxiii).

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letters, Ibn Qutayba (d.889). Among his many works, the one that stands out for the sheer extent of its influence on later Arabic literature is his Springs of Information, a sprawling literary anthology of anecdotes and extracts of poetry organized under ten main rubrics or books. These books cover topics such as war, friendship, and women. One of these books is entitled Kitāb al-Suʾdud. E. W. Lane translates the latter term as follows: ‘the rank, station, or condition, or the quality or qualities, of a sayyid [‘a chief ’], i.e. chiefdom, lordship; . . . dignity . . . elevated state or nobility.’ The subject of this book, as the eminent scholar Gérard Lecomte characterizes it, is greatness, the great of this world, and the qualities that are implicated in such greatness.¹⁰⁵ Given its subject matter, it may not be surprising to discover that this part of the Springs has often been approached as an early contributor to the ‘mirrors for princes’ genre.¹⁰⁶ Looking at Ibn Qutayba’s adumbration of the contents of this book, we will be instantly struck by the terms he uses to frame it. This book contains ‘reports about the characteristic signs of nobility among the young and about its causes among the fully grown, about loftiness of spirit and selfendangerment in pursuit of exalted things (al-himma al-sāmiya . . . li-talab _ al-maʿālī)’, as well as a number of other qualities distinctive to eminent people.¹⁰⁷ Loftiness of spirit forms the subject of one of the subsections of the book. Turning to this subsection, readers who have followed the discussion thus far will experience a sense of recognition running on several levels. Most importantly, we will recognize the powerful link drawn between the notion of greatness or loftiness of spirit and aspiration—a link indeed prefigured in the statement just quoted. Greatness of spirit is a quality that makes one aim high and desire great things, as illustrated by a report about the Umayyad caliph ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz. ‘I have a yearning soul,’ he is reported to have said; ‘it kept on yearning for the position of governor, then when I attained this it yearned for the position of caliph, and then when I attained this it began to yearn for paradise.’¹⁰⁸ As the continuation of the ¹⁰⁵ Gérard Lecomte, Ibn Qutayba (mort en 276/889): l’homme, son oeuvre, ses idées (Damascus: Institut Français de Damas, 1965), 145. ¹⁰⁶ As by Dimitri Gutas in ‘Ethische Schriften im Islam’, in Orientalisches Mittelalter, ed. Wolfhart Heinrichs (Wiesbaden: AULA-Verlag, 1990), 355. Gutas significantly characterizes Ibn Qutayba’s account as an expression of specifically Arab perspectives on leadership. Cf. Lecomte’s remarks apropos Ibn Qutayba’s audience (princes and high-standing people, and secretaries) in Ibn Qutayba, 433 ff. Dawood, by contrast, subsumes only the first book, Kitāb al-Sultān (not the Kitāb al-Suʾdud), in the category of mirrors for princes: Comparative Study, 84. ¹⁰⁷ _ Ibn Qutayba, Springs of Information/ʿUyūn al-akhbār (Cairo: Matbaʿat Dār al-Kutub _ al-Misriyya, 1996), introduction, p. fāʾ. ¹⁰⁸ _Ibid., 231.

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remark suggests, such greatness of spirit also expresses itself in a contempt of money and thus material goods. This remark is important for foregrounding another element that will seem intimately familiar, identifying the next life as the highest object of aspiration. Another anecdote cements this point even more firmly. The poet al-ʿAttābī, we hear, was told that so-and-so is great__ spirited (baʿīd al-himma), and he rejoined: then ‘his sole objective is paradise’.¹⁰⁹ Yet paradise is not the only object included within the scope of the virtue as its meaning is illustrated by the anecdotes and poetic extracts that Ibn Qutayba adduces. Greatness of spirit, as ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz’s remark again indicates, finds expression in political pursuits, as well as military exploits. It also expresses itself in the pursuit of honour and glory, as signalled by another saying: ‘Let the one whom it pleases to live pleasantly be content, and let one who desires renown be striving.’¹¹⁰ The accent placed on striving in this statement features recurrently throughout the discussion. ‘Honour lies wrapped in the garments of toil,’ as one poet has it.¹¹¹ Greatness of spirit involves a readiness to endure hardships in order to attain the great objects one aspires to; in this respect it is shaped not only by what one desires, but also by what one renounces. The element of endurance elsewhere emerges in the conceptual print of this virtue not merely as a matter of active undertaking but also of passive undergoing, taking shape as a specific response to the vagaries of fortune. ‘If poverty overtakes you,’ one poet counsels, ‘show pride and fortitude before fate.’¹¹² The sense of hauteur implicit in this counsel is pervasive throughout the discussion, revealing the links of greatness of spirit to a particular attitude to the self and a particular way of esteeming it, one that indeed seems deeply enmeshed with the emphasis on honour and glory in the discussion. In certain locations this attitude steps even more sharply into the light as a distinct sense of pride, as in an anecdote related about the Umayyad governor al-Hajjāj. Offered the governance of the city of Tabāla, _ al-Hajjāj turned his horse around and dismissed it as unworthy of his _ dignity upon discovering its diminutive size.¹¹³ Coming from our earlier texts, one of the aspects of Ibn Qutayba’s discussion that will seem striking is the total absence of first-person commentary. His authorial engagement with the concept of himma is confined

¹⁰⁹ Ibid., 233. It may be recalled that this remark was quoted verbatim in some of the mirrors examined earlier: e.g., Pseudo-Māwardī, Nasīha, 100. _ _ ¹¹⁰ ʿUyūn, vol. 1, 233. ¹¹¹ Ibid., 232. ¹¹² Ibid., 238. ¹¹³ Ibid., 233.

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to denominating it as the organizing theme of the relevant section and selecting anecdotes or sayings that exemplify it, without providing any further gloss or unifying comment in his own voice. No less strikingly (though from a philosophical perspective, to a certain extent not surprisingly¹¹⁴), the term that features in his title—himma or al-himma al-sāmiya—makes few appearances in the body of the discussion and in the quotations adduced to illustrate it. In fact, to the extent that the concept is linguistically flagged, it is chiefly through the use of the cognate vocabulary I isolated earlier as carrying a more basic meaning (‘concern’, ‘desire’, ‘intention’), and this vocabulary is embedded organically in linguistic structures that call attention to its basic meaning rather more strongly than to its special status as a distinct ethical trait. Ibn Qutayba quotes a verse addressed to Mukhallad, the son of the governor of Umayyad times Yazīd ibn al-Muhallab, praising him for the precocious drives that marked him out for eminence from early on: at 10 years of age, ‘your concern (hamm) was with matters of moment, when the concern (hamm) of your peers was to play’.¹¹⁵ Bracketing the significance of the above points—and there will be something more to say shortly about the significance of Ibn Qutayba’s authorial effacement—the key point to focus on here are the unmistakable continuities tying Ibn Qutayba’s discussion to the texts we considered earlier. Many of the themes we identified there find their immediate reflection in his account. This includes the emphasis on aspiration and the desiderative aspect of the virtue,¹¹⁶ on self-worth, and on the pursuit of honour; it includes the religious modulation of the virtue’s objects. The specific concern with virtue as an object of aspiration that typified many of our texts forms perhaps the single most conspicuous absentee in this one. Equally important for the thread of our inquiry, here we also encounter the familiar link between greatness of spirit and people of high social and political standing. This link, diffusely in evidence throughout this book of the Springs, is elsewhere framed more directly with reference to kings, using the cognate

¹¹⁴ Not surprisingly, to the extent that some of the material is framed from the first-person perspective of the possessor of the virtue. As philosophers of the virtues have pointed out, the virtuous need not and often do not employ the vocabulary of the virtues in framing their reasons for acting. See e.g. Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), ch. 6, esp. 127–8. ¹¹⁵ ʿUyūn, vol. 1, 229. ¹¹⁶ This is evident in what was noted above, but becomes more evident still in the juxtaposition of himma to a range of other terms carrying the broad signification of wishing or desiring in the title of one of Ibn Qutayba’s subsections: ikhtilāf al-himam waʾl-shahawāt waʾl-amānī (ibid., 258).

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vocabulary highlighted moments ago: ‘The concerns of people are small, whereas the concerns of kings are great (humūm al-mulūk kibār); the minds of kings are preoccupied with all that is of august importance.’¹¹⁷ These continuities are far from incidental. They provide a limited but eloquent witness to the reach of Ibn Qutayba’s influence, an influence extending not only within the domain of literature (adab) but indeed outside it, and thus they also bear witness to the influence of literary writings on the broader ethical discourse and to the deep interrelations between different domains or genres of ethical writing. In the domain of literature, many features of Ibn Qutayba’s discussion find themselves reprised in the works of his successors. Greatness of spirit becomes a thematic staple in later literary anthologies, where it is revisited in the same context, in connection with nobility or eminence. Ibn Qutayba’s specific emphases and illustrative material also filter through to these later works, though there are often noteworthy differences to be picked up on both levels. There are interesting divergences, for example, between some of the material cited by Ibn Qutayba and that cited by one of his earliest successors, Ibn ʿAbd Rabbihi (d.940), in his literary anthology The Unique Necklace. One consequence of these divergences is that the material cited by Ibn ʿAbd al-Rabbihi privileges rather more strongly the element of hauteur or elevated sense of self-worth.¹¹⁸ In later anthologies the material bases are expanded in ways that bring out all of the conceptual lineaments we have seen more distinctly. A case in point is the literary anthology compiled in the twelfth century by Ibn Hamdūn _ (d.1166 or 1167), Hamdūn’s Memorandum, which features one of the _ longest discussions of the virtue in the tradition, and forms a goldmine for exploring its literary development.¹¹⁹ No less important than the internal development of this concept within the literary tradition, however, are the nerves it sends into genres of writing

¹¹⁷ Ibid., 5. Cf. the verse by the pre-Islamic poet al-Nābigha al-Dhubyānī cited on 237, which includes the expression malik humām. This expression is brought up in many discussions of himma and cognate terms in the classical dictionaries. ¹¹⁸ The discussion of himma can be found in Ibn ʿAbd Rabbihi, The Unique Necklace/al-ʿIqd al-farīd, ed. Mufīd Muhammad Qumayha (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1983), vol. 2, 62–71 _ is buʿd al-himma _ wa-sharaf al-nafs). This emphasis, in my view, lends (the title of the subsection some awkwardness to Issa J. Boullata’s translation of buʿd al-himma as ‘high aspiration’: The Unique Necklace (Reading: Garnet, 2009), vol. 2, 52. ¹¹⁹ The relevant discussion can be found in Ibn Hamdūn, Hamdūn’s Memorandum/ _ _ Dār Sādir, 1996), vol. 2, al-Tadhkira al-Hamdūniyya, ed. Ihsān ʿAbbās and Bakr ʿAbbās (Beirut: _ precious few scholarly _ 28–91. One of the discussions of this topic can be found _in Hasan Shuraydi, The Raven and the Falcon (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 185–93. He translates himma as ‘ambition’.

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nominally lying outside it. The intellectual links connecting the literary tradition to other domains of ethical discourse are hard to overestimate. These links are particularly clear with regard to those ethical discourses that share with this tradition not only their founding fathers but also their foundational documents, as is the case with the genre of mirrors for princes. But they are equally clear in the case of other genres of ethical writing which share less directly in the origins of this tradition than in one of its governing ideals—to give pleasure but also to edify and persuade, and indeed to shape ethical character. This practical aim also forms a hallmark of the works we considered earlier as exemplars of a more philosophical genre of ethical reflection. It is not incidental, in this respect, that in characterizing the philosophical quality of these works, commentators have sometimes stressed their aesthetic as against analytical dimension and their associations with the literary sphere.¹²⁰ Among some of the writers we surveyed, the connections run even deeper than an identity of pedagogical aims and aesthetic standards. The most relevant case here is that of al-Rāghib, who was not only the author of a philosophically minded treatise on character but also a salient participant in the tradition of belles-lettres, to which his most significant contribution was his Colloquies of the Litterateurs (Muhādarāt al-udabāʾ). _ _ In the case of the mirrors, the interdisciplinary links are attested especially strongly by an extensive pattern of concordances between the material they deploy in addressing greatness of spirit and the material featuring in literary compilations at the relevant juncture. Yet to the extent that our main concern here is with the fundamental sources of this ethical idea, the very strength of these links would now seem calculated to reopen a hypothesis we were only recently considering. Because one of the most distinctive aspects of Ibn Qutayba’s work is the kaleidoscopic range of intellectual and cultural elements that enter into its construction. It is this synthetic dimension that was highlighted by Hamilton Gibb and Richard Walzer in an oft-cited article which also drew attention to the pivotal status of the Springs of Information as an ethical document in the Islamic tradition. ‘This work,’ they wrote, ‘which may be called the first comprehensive manual of Islamic ethics, ¹²⁰ Urvoy, for example, characterizes Yahyā as an adīb-moraliste: Traité, 23; though see the more discriminating remarks at 39–44. Cf. _Druart, ‘La philosophie moral arabe’, 185. See also Arkoun’s commentary on Miskawayh’s balancing of literary and philosophical elements in L’humanisme arabe, 206 ff., and Everett K. Rowson’s briefer remarks on Miskawayh in ‘The philosopher as littérateur: al-Tawhīdī and his predecessors’, Zeitschrift für Geschichte der arabisch-islamischen Wissenschaften_ 6 (1990), 84, in the context of a broader exploration of the interrelations between falsafa and adab. Miskawayh was also a more direct contributor to adab through other works, such as his al-Mustawfā fiʾl-shiʿr and his Ādāb al-ʿarab waʾl-furs.

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brought together and to a remarkable degree integrated the Kurʾānic, hadīth, _ _ pre-Islamic and Persian contributions, and by excluding the irreconcilable elements of the two latter, practically defined and standardized the component elements of the orthodox morality in its pre-philosophical and pre-sūfistic stage.’¹²¹ _ As this remark indicates, Ibn Qutayba served as a key conduit for the dissemination and integration of Persian ideas into Islamic ethical discourse.¹²² And what will be especially relevant is that this specific influence registers at critical junctures of Ibn Qutayba’s treatment of the ethical topic that concerns us. The statement tying greatness of spirit to kings that I cited above—‘The concerns of people are small, whereas the concerns of kings are great’—is in fact a quote given by Ibn Qutayba from a certain Book of the Crown, commonly identified with a work translated from Pahlavi by Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ that dealt mainly with court etiquette and that formed an important vector for the Persian heritage.¹²³ Equally important, Ibn Qutayba often quotes from the work of Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, and one of these occasions is precisely in reporting the key statement from Kalīla wa-Dimna I referred to earlier, which connects greatness of spirit with the three spheres of political governance, military combat, and maritime trade. Ibn Muqaffaʿ’s conjunction of loftiness of spirit (ʿuluww himma) with the notion of selfendangerment (ʿazīm khatar) in that context seems particularly suggestive _ _ in evoking the terms used by Ibn Qutayba to caption his own discussion of the subject.¹²⁴ The question naturally poses itself: how to read the direction of derivation? Given the chronological relation between the two men, the answer seems obvious: it is Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ that we should place at the origin of the movement—in doing so, providing fresh impetus to the hypothesis of its Persian origins. The hypothesis that elements found in the Persian tradition may have played a tributary role in the formation of our virtue, even if a limited or ¹²¹ Hamilton A. R. Gibb and Richard Walzer, ‘Akhlāk’, in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn, _ consulted online on 20 September 2016, http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_COM_0035. ¹²² By comparison, his role as a conduit of Greek ideas seems far weaker, though Lecomte notes his heavy use of Greek material relating to the empirical or natural sciences in part of his work (Ibn Qutayba, 189–92). As regards ethical material in particular, he writes that ‘it would be pointless to search in Ibn Qutayba’s work for any reference whatsoever to Greek ethics’, a fact that reflects his ‘constant suspicion toward the philosophical tradition and the intellectual operations it rests on’ (450). ¹²³ Dawood has an extensive discussion of this work and Ibn Qutayba’s use of it (and indeed his use of material of Pahlavi provenance more broadly) in Comparative Study, ch. 2. ¹²⁴ Recall the characterization of the subject of Kitāb al-Suʾdud at ʿUyūn, vol. 1, fāʾ: al-himma al-sāmiya waʾl-khitār biʾl-nafs. _

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subordinate one, is not one I intend to exclude, as I have already said. The question we are tracking seems better approached as a story of inclusions rather than exclusions, and as a story about a plexus of interweaving influences rather than isolated strands. This pluralistic approach after all provides a more faithful reflection of the creative coalescence of diverse cultural and intellectual influences among these early thinkers, as exemplified by Ibn Qutayba himself. Yet while allowing for this pluralistic mode of narration, I would suggest that there is a different soil in which Ibn Qutayba’s account can plausibly be seen to be rooted more immediately, one that reaches farther back than the confrontation with the Persian tradition in the early Islamic world; and that the Arab cultural milieu in which the latter took its beginnings. The bridges laid down by Ibn Qutayba’s compilation into this particular milieu are evident at the plainest level in the material he uses, which includes sayings and poetry whose sources range from prominent religious and political personalities of early Islamic history to poets living in pre-Islamic times. This is also reflected in the kind of material deployed in his section on greatness of spirit, which contains long extracts of poetic verse, many of them composed by poets from the pre-Islamic era. Having discerned these textual bridges to the pre-Islamic Arab context, it will not be difficult to recognize in the themes of Ibn Qutayba’s account a set of values that were central to this social context and to the ethical code that governed it. The concern with honour and glory formed a distinctive part of this code, galvanizing the pursuit of the qualities that pre-Islamic Arabs esteemed as excellences of character. Set against a way of life that was shaped by activities of fighting and marauding, these excellences included an ability to endure hardships with fortitude, to face dangers with courage, and to confront the vicissitudes of fate with steadfast self-assurance. The exemplary individual was one capable of renouncing the lower for the higher, able to launch himself on noble undertakings that would bring glory without regard for possible losses or inferior goods. This meant, above all, a readiness to lavish the most precious possession, one’s very life, heroically conquering one’s inner resistance in pursuit of noble deeds. One had to be prepared, as one poet put it, for ‘the scorning of the precious soul for the sake of glory in the hour when the points of the lances clash.’¹²⁵ Disdaining the lower also meant spurning a life of pleasure and material comforts in favour of a life of noble striving. ‘Staying at home, in the neighbourhood,’ as M. M. Bravmann

¹²⁵ M. M. Bravmann, The Spiritual Background of Early Islam (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 19–20.

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observed in an illuminating study of the spiritual and ethical background of early Islam, ‘is considered a dull, inferior sort of life, devoid of all noble purpose.’ The noble life is not a sedentary existence characterized by comfort and tranquillity. It is a life of venturing abroad, wandering far from home in pursuit of conquests and fighting—a life of arduous movement.¹²⁶ We will recognize the presence of these notions in some of the verses included in the Springs that were already cited. ‘Let the one whom it pleases to live pleasantly be content, and let one who desires renown be striving.’ ‘Honour lies wrapped in the garments of toil.’ And again: ‘In ease lies ignominy; I see no honour in life unless one suffers for it.’¹²⁷ Even more telling, however, is another verse adduced by Ibn Qutayba and ascribed to the pre-Islamic poet Hātim al-Tāʾī, which frames the same point using a _ _ more familiar turn of phrase. The poet expresses his scorn for the kind of person ‘whose sole desire and aspiration (hamm) in life is to obtain clothes and food, who sees hunger as a torment and whose mind, once sated, remains blank from lack of desire (hamm)’. The admirable person is rather the one ‘who marshals his spirit (hamm) and launches himself boldly on terrors and on fate (dahr) . . . if he dies, his glory lives on, and if he lives, he does not sit by abject and dishonourable’.¹²⁸ Reviling the indolent stay-at-home whose only interest is a life of pleasure and comfort, Hātim praises the high_ minded person who desires more out of life and who ventures out on selfendangering activity that may lead to his death but will bring a harvest of glory. For us, what will be especially interesting in this enunciation of a central ideal will be the vocabulary used to couch it, which will instantly refer us to the signature linguistic pattern associated with our focal virtue. Bravmann himself makes the move from this basic pattern to the fullness of a trait in a set of remarks that shine a crucial beam of light on the meaning of this trait and on its place within the pre-Islamic Arab ethic. He identifies greatness of spirit (baʿīd al-himma) as one of the key epithets bestowed on the Arab hero, commenting: ‘the word himmah itself signifies “noble ambition”, and the adjective baʿīd expresses the particularly high degree of this ambition.’¹²⁹ This term, it will be noticed, is a slight variant of the ones that featured in the accounts we studied above, in which the virtue was most commonly designated through a compound incorporating the term ‘great’ or ‘lofty’ (ʿazīm/ _ ʿizam, ʿālin/ʿuluww). Baʿīd literally means ‘far’; and, as Bravmann suggests, it _ was precisely this literal meaning that stood behind the evaluative status of ¹²⁶ Ibid., 32; and see generally the discussion at 32–8. ¹²⁷ ʿUyūn, vol. 1, 232. ¹²⁸ Ibid., 233–4. ¹²⁹ Bravmann, Spiritual Background, 32–3.

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this epithet as a term of praise. Given the value attaching to a life of roving and wandering among pre-Islamic Arabs, what is geographically near (adnā) denotes what is also inferior in an evaluative sense; what is far (baʿīd) denotes both what is geographically distant and also higher in an evaluative sense. Hence the fact that the term baʿīd al-himma, whose primary meaning was ‘a man whose aspiration is directed towards distant regions’, underwent a semantic shift and came to carry the broader meaning ‘a man actuated by noble ambitions’.¹³⁰ The great-spirited or far-spirited person is thus the one who realizes the core ideals of the ethic just outlined—the one who rejects a life of material comfort in favour of a heroic life of hardship and noble undertakings. The centrality of this trait within the pre-Islamic Arab ethic is highlighted from a different direction by Ibn Qutayba himself in another important work, The Pre-Eminence of the Arabs. This is a work whose character makes for an interesting contrast with the Springs, for reasons to do with its compositional context. It was written in response to the polemics of the Shuʿūbiyya, a movement by non-Arab Muslims in the early Abbasid period which sought to challenge the cultural and ethical superiority of the Arabs and in doing so provoked a sharp counter-reaction from many quarters. It is thus shaped by a clear argumentative agenda, which is reflected in its far stronger authorial voice as compared with the Springs. Ibn Qutayba frames a variety of arguments in advancing this agenda and mounting his defence of the Arabs’ excellence. The one that interests us most directly is an argument that focuses on the Arabs’ moral values—and more precisely, on the moral values the Arabs not only expressed in word but embodied in deed, realizing them in the full-bloodedness of their actual character. It is the Arabs’ moral qualities and noble character that partly ground the claim of their distinction. Even before the appearance of Islam, they both extolled and practised a host of virtues, such as forbearance or self-restraint (hilm), modesty (hayāʾ), _ _ fortitude (sabr), courage (najda), generosity, and hospitality.¹³¹ _ These kinds of character traits—and the noble character they comprise— are ultimately grounded in hard facts about people’s natural constitution, which give rise to noble character in one case and base character in another. A lofty spirit forms part of such noble stock. What does it involve? One of ¹³⁰ Ibid., 33. ¹³¹ This claim picks its way diffusely through the book, but for a concentrated set of statements to this effect, see Ibn Qutayba, Fadl al-ʿarab waʾl-tanbīh ʿalā ʿulūmihā, ed. Walīd _ Mahmūd Khālis (Abu Dhabi: Manshūrāt al-Majmaʿ al-Thaqāfī, 1998), 63 ff. And see Lecomte, _ 5, for further discussion. Ibn _Qutayba, ch.

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Ibn Qutayba’s next remarks offers clarification: ‘The great-spirited person is one whose soul makes him reach for lofty things (dhuʾl-himma tasmū bihi nafsuhu ilā maʿālī al-umūr) and makes him turn away from dishonourable things, so that he risks great possessions in seeking what is great and spurns noble possessions in questing for what is noble (ibtighāʾ al-makārim bi-karīmatihi).’¹³² The continuation of this statement evokes many of the elements that we saw above: the ability to confront dangers and terrors, the hatred of ease and repose. No less important is another observation, namely that the terms Ibn Qutayba uses to couch these remarks echo verbatim some of the terms that featured in the poetic extracts he had cited in the Springs. In this passage—which connects greatness of spirit to noble character and thus to the distinctive excellence of the Arabs—Ibn Qutayba thus unpacks the meaning of our focal term through an account that is significant on several levels: for being presented in his own voice, for clearly signalling its Arab sources, and for forging limpid conceptual links with some of the defining features of the accounts we surveyed in the previous stage of our discussion. The emphasis on aspiration for what is lofty, great, and noble will here provoke the strongest sense of recognition. And if we take into consideration that the term makārim appearing in this passage would later figure centrally in a common designation of the virtues (makārim al-akhlāq), the association with virtue will not seem far in the distance.

Broader Perspectives What I have been suggesting is that, in approaching the intellectual origins of the virtue of greatness of spirit, we need to give special consideration to one particular set of roots, which are the ones it strikes into the soil of pre-Islamic Arab ideals. The preservation of pre-Islamic Arab lore in Islamic literary culture ensured that these ideals were not abruptly abandoned with the coming of Islam but continued to flourish in later times. As S. A. Bonebakker writes, it ‘kept alive associations with those ancient virtues which gave the Arabs their title to glory and which later generations still strove to emulate despite the

¹³² Fadl al-ʿarab, 61. Sarah Bowen Savant translates this passage a little differently: ‘He risks _ his greatness in pursuit of a great goal and in his quest for honor treats his honor lightly’; she translates himma as ‘ambition’. See The Excellence of the Arabs, ed. James E. Montgomery and Peter Webb, trans. Sarah Bowen Savant and Peter Webb (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 39 (1.8.9).

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influence of foreign civilizations’.¹³³ The sheer centrality of this literary culture within the Islamic world ensured that even thinkers who were not themselves active contributors to this culture and whom we would align more strongly with other kinds of intellectual traditions were exposed to its influence. This includes some of the philosophers we considered earlier, such as Yahyā ibn _ ʿAdī, whose account of the virtues—and of greatness of spirit in particular— has been read by a number of commentators as reflecting the influence of preIslamic Arab values.¹³⁴ It is these deeper and more indigenous roots, I would suggest, that must partly explain the very different trajectories followed by the two ‘virtues of greatness’ in the Islamic world—the one designated as kibar al-nafs and the one designated as ʿizam al-himma—contributing to the former’s retreat to _ relative insignificance and the latter’s efflorescence. The ready place and prior salience the latter enjoyed in the linguistic habits and ethical ideals of pre-Islamic Arabs made it more natural for it to take the stage as different cultural tributaries and concepts of greatness met within the emerging Islamic civilization, and to become the key hosting concept on whose grounds other influences could be negotiated and onto which further elements could be grafted. One of the many shifts the concept would undergo across its later evolution was a gradual linguistic slide from the term buʿd al-himma to ʿuluww al-himma (prevalent in the mirrors and works of literature) and ʿizam al-himma (prevalent in philosophical works). Among _ its more reflective theorists, it would also receive a thicker articulation as a virtue, as is particularly evident in the philosophical reworking of the concept. The more explicit theorization of the concept as a virtue of aspiration to virtue also has its strongest home, and thus plausibly its source, in philosophical writings. Across these shifts, this is one moral concept, it is clear, that lived and breathed outside reflective works of ethics, as active a

¹³³ S. A. Bonebakker, ‘Adab and the concept of belles-lettres’, in ʿAbbasid Belles Lettres, ed. Ashtiany et al., 23–4. ¹³⁴ See Takrītī’s remarks in Tahdhīb, 234–9, and Urvoy’s more substantial discussion in Traité, 13–26. Urvoy identifies three major influences on Yahyā’s ethics: that of pre-Islamic Arabic culture, the Persian tradition of mirrors for princes, and_ Greek philosophical ethics. She takes the first to be the strongest determinant of the substance of Yahyā’s account of the virtues _ and vices, including greatness of spirit. One of the more puzzling features of Urvoy’s analysis is her decision to treat, not ʿizam al-himma, but another virtue, hilm—which is often translated as _ ‘self-restraint’ or ‘forbearance’, and which Urvoy translates as _magnanimité—as the correlate or indeed heir of Aristotle’s greatness of soul (22–3). This comparison unsurprisingly reveals important differences between the two concepts.

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part of ordinary moral language in later times as it had been at the opening of this history.¹³⁵ Although the term kibar al-nafs did not die out in Arabic-Islamic ethical culture and as time wore on appears to have shed some of its linguistic awkwardness, it remained a more marginal concept, and to the extent that it survived, it may have partly owed its continuance to the close conjunction in which it came to be drawn with the more indigenous concept of himma. Evidence of this conjunction already came before us earlier, where we saw that both terms were used to render the same concept in the two translations of the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise De Virtutibus—with the one (by Abū Qurra) using the himma-compound for the virtue and the other (by Ibn al-Tayyib) using the nafs-compound, though then a himma-compound for _ the opposite vice. These translations were separated by an interval of nearly two centuries and there is much room for speculation about the grounds of their divergent decisions in this regard. Yet the conjunction between the two concepts can be observed even prior to Ibn al-Tayyib’s (d.1043) time. _ Perhaps the most telling evidence is provided in the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity, a philosophical encyclopaedia commonly dated to sometime in the tenth century and possibly no later than its first half. Reprising a well-thumbed passage of al-Fārābī’s work, in which al-Fārābī (in turn reprising Plato) had listed greatness of soul among the qualities required in the philosopher-ruler, the authors of the Epistles had echoed al-Fārābī’s original statement almost verbatim, yet with one important difference. The philosopher, al-Fārābī had written, ‘should be great-souled (kabīr al-nafs) . . . his soul naturally reaching out (tasmū nafsuhu) for the loftiest things’. The ruler, the authors would write, must be ‘great-souled, greatspirited (kabīr al-nafs ʿālī al-himma) and fond of honour . . . the spirit [or aspiration] of his soul reaching out for those things that occupy the loftiest stations and the highest ranks (tasmū himmatu nafsihi ilā arfaʿ al-umūr rutbatan wa-aʿlāhā darajatan)’.¹³⁶ Al-Fārābī’s kibar al-nafs is thus twice reframed using the vocabulary of himma, a reframing that not only places the two on a footing of semantic interchangeability, but indeed shows the latter concept serving in an explanatory role and as such provides eloquent testimony to their differential levels of intelligibility. ¹³⁵ A simple testimony to this is afforded by biographical dictionaries, where the term is often used to describe (and eulogize) particular individuals. For a few examples, see Shuraydi, The Raven and the Falcon, 185 ff. ¹³⁶ Ikhwān al-Safāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Safāʾ wa-Khullān al-Wafāʾ, ed. Khayr al-Dīn al-Ziriklī _ 4, 183. (Cairo: al-Matbaʿa_ al-ʿArabiyya, 1928), vol. _

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The conjunction between the two concepts is also found in later literary anthologies. This is exemplified by Ibn Hamdūn, who in the course of a long _ section thematizing the concept of himma suddenly brings up the term kibar al-nafs with an unselfconscious matter-of-factness as if the subject had remained unchanged.¹³⁷ Ibn Hamdūn is also one of several writers to cite _ a well-known and particularly evocative line of poetry by Mutanabbī at the same juncture: ‘When souls are great, bodies struggle to fulfil their desires (wa-idhā kānat al-nufūs kibāran taʿibat fī murādihā al-ajsām).’ This verse is highly interesting taken as a token both of the naturalization of the vocabulary of kibar al-nafs, as well as of its assimilation to the desiderative or aspirational meaning associated more strongly with the himma complex.¹³⁸ The proposal I have outlined concerning the genealogy of this virtue—to underscore a point that already emerged—needs to be understood inclusively rather than exclusively. Even if we foreground the importance of one particular genealogical strand, as I have, it is clear that this strand came to interweave itself with several others during the course of this virtue’s history in ways that make it difficult to disentangle their individual contributions with perfect clarity. Such complex skeins are far from unusual in the history of ideas. In this respect, the story of this virtue in Arabic-Islamic ethical culture serves as a general reminder of the value of guarding against simplistic ways of approaching this type of history. Yet it also serves as a mirror of something of more specific significance for the Islamic tradition itself, pointing to a pattern of intellectual fusions and cross-pollinations that, as commentators have sometimes observed, forms a hallmark of Islamic ethics as a whole. Gibb and Walzer were calling attention to this feature when they wrote that ‘in Islam ethics appear in their matured state as an interesting and, on the whole, successful amalgamation of a pre-Islamic Arabian tradition and Kurʾānic teaching with non-Arabic elements, mainly _

¹³⁷ Ibn Hamdūn, Tadhkira, vol. 2, 59, §108. ¹³⁸ Ibid.,_ 58, §105; cf. al-Māwardī, Adab al-dunyā, 381. The association of kibar al-nafs with an aspirational element is also evident in al-Fārābī’s remarks. The semantic evolution of the two concepts and the criss-crossings of their paths appear to continue in ensuing centuries in ways that would repay investigation. Despite leaning heavily on Miskawayh’s work, for example, al-Tūsī interestingly departs from it in several respects, such as in including kibar al-nafs and _ ʿuluww al-himma in his list of virtues, and in specifying kibar al-nafs in terms that drain it of the overt element of self-evaluation. His definition of ʿuluww al-himma, in turn, is an alloy containing traces of al-Rāghib’s other-worldly articulation alongside other familiar elements. See Tūsī’s Nasirean Ethics, 143–4. Cf. the significant appearances of the vocabulary of himma at _ 67–9.

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of Persian and Greek origins, embedded in or integrated with a generalIslamic structure.’¹³⁹ An appreciation of the composite texture of Islamic ethics, as Gibb and Walzer suggest, must be tied to an understanding of its history that lays emphasis on its continuities rather its discontinuities, viewing it not as a sequence of abrupt breaks with particular values (such as the values of preIslamic Arabia), but as a continuum in which different values existed side by side. Both elements—the synthetic and the symbiotic—are visible from an early date in the work of Ibn Qutayba. In emphasizing the contribution of pre-Islamic Arab values to the concept of greatness of spirit, the above account has also highlighted the element of continuity, and indeed trained a spotlight on some of the factors that conspired to bolster it. As I suggested earlier, Ibn Qutayba’s implicit authentication of these values through the incorporation of pre-Islamic Arabic material in the Springs of Information finds its complement in the explicit affirmation offered in the Pre-Eminence of the Arabs in a stronger authorial voice. The latter work found its context in a cultural polemics that motivated Ibn Qutayba to mount a defence of Arab culture which partly took shape as a defence of the Arabs’ values and ethical character. The Shuʿūbiyya controversy thus provided a tangible impetus for the celebration of pre-Islamic Arab values and was partly responsible for the sense of continuity between pre-Islamic and Islamic values that ensued.¹⁴⁰ The element of continuity, of course, needs to be placed in careful balance, making room for the important evaluative shifts that occurred in the transition to the moral universe of the Islamic faith, which in many respects left pre-Islamic moral values transfigured. The most fundamental shift, as Paul Heck suggests, concerned the ends to which the virtues were henceforth understood to be ordered, displacing them from their former orientation to ‘personal and tribal reputation, group pride and individual honor’ to a new orientation to ‘the face of God’ and to the community of believers.¹⁴¹ ¹³⁹ Gibb and Walzer, ‘Akhlāk’. ¹⁴⁰ This can be seen not only_ from Ibn Qutayba’s work but also from other writers treating related subjects. For example, in introducing one of the earliest collections on makārim al-akhlāq, by Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, James A. Bellamy picked up on the distinct ‘pro-Arab conciliatory spirit’ underpinning the book, ‘which conveys the idea that Islam, in some moral sense at least, represents a continuation of the ancient Arab way of life’. See the remarks in ‘The Makārim al-akhlāq by Ibn Abī ʾl-Dunyā’, Muslim World 53 (1963), 118. ¹⁴¹ Paul L. Heck, ‘Noble character in Islam’, Archiv für Religionswissenschaft 9 (2007), 44. Compare Fazlur Rahman’s comments in ‘Aklāq’, Encyclopaedia Iranica, accessed online on 25 April 2016, http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/aklaq-ethics-plural-form-of-koloq-inborncharacter-moral-character-moral-virtue. Like Walzer and Gibb, Rahman accentuates the introduction of new virtues as opposed to new ends to pre-existing virtues. Cf. Lecomte’s remarks in

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In integrating different ethical resources in his work, Ibn Qutayba himself, as Gibb and Walzer observed, also undertook to critically filter them so as to exclude any conflicting or ‘irreconcilable elements’. The application of critical filters in a literary work of this kind, to be sure, has to be understood in qualified terms. The overt confrontation of conflict, as Everett Rowson points out, was not a central part of the ethos of adab as a discourse: ‘An author whose chief concern was to edify—and entertain—his readership could draw on a variety of sources identified with non-Islamic cultural traditions without raising the question of how these traditions as a whole conflicted with Islam, because this was not the point of his work.’ This ties in with the quality of the authorial voice in such works, and its selfeffacement behind the polyphony of cited sources with little effort to establish their internal harmony.¹⁴² Yet the aim of providing ethical instruction—his book, Ibn Qutayba states in opening the Springs, aims to indicate ‘what is lofty’ and guide the reader to the ‘noble moral traits’¹⁴³— could hardly be executed without a supporting assumption that the ideals presented were at some level worthy of imitation, and, for writers with clear religious commitments such as Ibn Qutayba, admirable or at least unobjectionable even from the viewpoint of the faith. In thematizing the notion of conflict, this point will naturally return us to one of the key questions raised at an earlier moment of this discussion, which concerns the relationship of our focal virtue to Islamic religious morality. For the fact that this virtue should have survived that critical filter suggests that this was one region of pre-Islamic Arab morality that Ibn Qutayba, and those who would later tread in his literary footsteps, did not perceive to be in fundamental conflict with it. This may seem surprising given some of the elements foregrounded in the textual bases that Ibn Qutayba and his fellow anthologists draw on in approaching the virtue, such as the emphasis on honour and a sense of hauteur. Yet on the one hand,

Ibn Qutayba, 449–50. For another discussion of the delicate balancing of old and new in the Islamic appropriation of Arab virtues, see Toshihiko Izutsu, Ethico-Religious Concepts in the Qurʾān (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), ch. 5. ¹⁴² This indifference to the project of harmonization is arguably on ample display in the account of himma in Ibn Qutayba’s ʿUyūn, whose multifariousness—a quality linked to the pursuit of glory yet also of other-worldly goods? a quality that involves a sense of pride even as humility is praised elsewhere in the book?—leaves readers wondering how Ibn Qutayba might have understood these disparate elements to hang together. For Rowson’s remark, see ‘The philosopher as littérateur’, 52. Rowson describes adab as the ‘more secular side of culture’. ¹⁴³ ʿUyūn, introduction, p. yāʾ.

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to reprise my earlier point, the way we assess the conflict these elements pose to the Islamic ethical viewpoint depends on how sharply we believe we can mark the boundaries of this viewpoint. If we adopt the more pluralistic approach I suggested—allowing for the existence of a number of viewpoints expressed in different genres of writing and embodying different responses to the ethical stakes thematized by the virtue—then our assessment will differ depending on the particular viewpoint we happen to be considering. What conflicts with the austere ascetic ethic of al-Ghazālī with its stern view of honour and self-appreciation will not conflict with the more permissive world-affirming ethic of the mirrors, whose view of these issues is far more continuous with the one embedded in the pre-Islamic Arabic conception of the virtue. At the same time, it is important to bear in mind that the process of critical revision—the effort to critically filter and negotiate different values and clarify their relationship to the requirements of Islamic morality—is one that unfolded over a longer time frame and did not stop with Ibn Qutayba, or indeed with al-Ghazālī himself. This point is important not only for adding volume and nuance to our pluralistic picture of Islamic morality, but also for engaging with those unconvinced by this picture. Because even if we feel compelled (as no doubt many will) to privilege one type of viewpoint over others as a more central or representative expression of Islamic morality, we will need to reckon with the fact that this viewpoint itself did not remain unchanged. The case of al-Ghazālī and the ethics of self-esteem offers a good illustration here, especially in light of the prominence al-Ghazālī has often enjoyed in narratives of Islamic theological thought. Thus, to take but one example, in a recent book the intellectual historian Michael Allen Gillespie speculates about the reasons why Islam proved inhospitable to the kind of humanism that developed within the Christian tradition, and he answers this question by taking al-Ghazālī’s ‘devaluation of the individual’ as his central explanatory plank.¹⁴⁴ This ‘devaluation’ would seem to find its reflection in the attitudes we saw al-Ghazālī express in the Revival, where he emphasized the moral significance of perceiving our inherent worthlessness (khissa) as human subjects. No doubt more could be said about the connection between this judgement and the kind of devaluation Gillespie has in mind. Yet if al-Ghazālī ¹⁴⁴ See Michael A. Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), epilogue.

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failed to foreground a more positive conception of self-worth, and mutatis mutandis human worth, in his flagship work of ethics, such a conception emerges more clearly in other writers who share many of his ethical presuppositions. The Hanbalite theologian Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya—whom we _ already heard affirm a spiritual ideal of religious devotion and worldly renunciation in his commentary on a Sufi classic—provides an interesting example of this in a well-known work, The Book of the Spirit, which inter alia features a detailed discussion of the virtues and the vices. Ibn Qayyim’s list notably includes a virtue which he designates as ‘nobility of soul’ or ‘honourableness’ (sharaf al-nafs), and describes as the product of two elements or moments: a moment of ‘esteeming and honouring the soul’ (iʿzāz al-nafs wa-ikrāmuhā) and another of ‘magnifying its possessor and master’ (taʿzīm mālikihā wa-sayyidihā)—that is, God.¹⁴⁵ _ Here we see a virtue that enshrines a positive conception of self-worth even as it calibrates this worth by placing it within a distinctively theological perspective. Its theological character should not prevent us from hearing the positive emphasis that shapes it. This is after all a character it would share with many of the more programmatic conceptions of human worth and selfworth that have formed the calling card of the humanistic ethic in the Western tradition.¹⁴⁶ As some have underscored, the notion of dignity foregrounded by the Renaissance philosopher often seen as the foremost spokesmen of this ethic, Pico della Mirandola, cannot be divorced from its theological foundations. Human dignity, in this view, must be seen as a ‘gift of God’, for ‘no being can dignify himself ’; dignity is rather ‘a quality with which one is invested; it must be conferred’.¹⁴⁷ Ibn Qayyim’s conception of dignity, it may also be noted, is of a very specific kind, being a sense of self-worth that expresses itself in a desire to preserve oneself from vice. This will remind us of a similar conjunction in which many of the thinkers we studied drew greatness of spirit and a sense of self-worth, and it evokes a broader tendency in the Arabic-Islamic

¹⁴⁵ Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, The Book of the Spirit/Kitāb al-Rūh, ed. Muhammad Ajmal _ _ Ayyūb al-Islāhī (Mecca: Dār ʿĀlam al-Fawāʾid, 1432 AH [2010]), 656–67. _ _discussion in Gillespie, Theological Origins. As Charles Trinkaus notes in con¹⁴⁶ See the nection with Pico’s Oration, the context of Renaissance discussions of the dignity of man is the exegesis of Genesis 1:26. In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1995), 507. ¹⁴⁷ Russell Kirk, introduction to Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man, trans. A. R. Caponigri (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1956), xv, xvii–xviii. Cf. Trinkaus: ‘man’s dignity derives . . . both from his origin’—his divine origin prior to the Fall—‘and from his restoration by the coming of the divine-human exemplar’. In Our Image, 509.

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philosophical tradition to tie the concept of dignity to an ethical project of self-mastery.¹⁴⁸ Such a specification, which interestingly lives on in more recent Muslim attempts to articulate a concept of human dignity on Qur’anic foundations,¹⁴⁹ will again not be alien to the Western context, as notably suggested by Stoic perspectives on human greatness, which were tied no less forcefully to such a project. If we wished to locate this conception against conceptions of dignity familiar from later stages of Western intellectual history, it would be worth recalling that, even for Pico, human dignity was deeply bound up with a sense of the potentialities of human nature— with the capacity of human beings to select among the infinite seeds of ‘every kind of life’ enclosed by God in their nature, and to shape themselves as they choose. Despite the emphasis on free self-shaping, this view was likewise informed by a clear distinction between lower and higher possibilities—the ‘ambition’ pervading our souls, as Pico puts it at a resonant moment of the Oration, should make us ‘aspire to what is loftiest’—and by a distinctly normative understanding of the ethical and spiritual ends to which our energies should be directed.¹⁵⁰ These brief observations point to some of the ways in which the narrative pursued in this book might open out to new forms of conversation with Western intellectual history and its themes. But to return to our immediate concern, they also help open up our picture of Islamic religious morality further in ways that affect how we appraise the relationship of our focal virtue to this morality and how we understand the continuity between Islamic and pre-Islamic values in this regard. Yet in approaching the question of continuity, it will also be important to take into account that this was virtue that did not after all survive its transition into the Islamic moral universe unchanged. In this transition, it underwent a crucial revision that has already come before us but is now worth bringing out more clearly. This revision can be placed in the context of a broader development, which saw older concepts that had occupied a particular position within ¹⁴⁸ More precisely, to a project of mastery over the lower parts of the self by the highest, namely reason. See the passage of Miskawayh’s quoted earlier (Tahdhīb, 53–4), and compare al-Tūsī, Tūsī’s Nasirean Ethics, 74.5–10 (l.8: al-nafs al-nafīsa . . . al-dhāt al-sharīfa). _ I think, _ ¹⁴⁹ for example, of Abdulaziz Sachedina’s proposal in Islam and the Challenge of Human Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), which ties the dignity of human beings to their moral awareness and their moral responsibility of exercising God-given power with justice. ¹⁵⁰ Quotations are from Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man, ed. and trans. Francesco Borghesi, Michael Papio, and Massimo Riva (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). The highest end and destiny of human beings, the Oration suggests, is in fact mystical union with God.

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the architecture of the pre-Islamic Arab heroic ethic transposed into the religious ethic with subtly revised meanings that nevertheless retained important traces of their roots. Such heroic underpinnings, as Bravmann argues, can be uncovered in core Islamic concepts including the very term islām, religious war (jihād), and belief or faith (īmān). Thus, the concept imān originally took its significance from the Arab preoccupation with the dangers of fate (maniyya), which ‘according to early Arab conception, lurk everywhere and at all times, especially during warlike expeditions and predatory raids in which a true Arab, and particular an early Muslim, was constantly engaged’. It referred to a practice of seeking protection or security from powerful men who were able to treat such dangers with scorn and selfassurance in pursuit of noble exploits, and who could extend their protection to those who recognized and obeyed them.¹⁵¹ This is the kind of security now extended, within the Islamic framework, by the Prophet and by God. The religious appropriation of the original concept, as is obvious, involves important changes, including tectonic shifts in the underlying metaphysical assumptions which overhaul some of the structuring notions au fond. God does not after all simply give protection against dangers and vagaries of fortune; he transforms the very meaning of fate. Something similar happens with another pair of foundational concepts, al-dunyā and al-ākhira, usually translated respectively as the ‘mundane world’ and the ‘next world’ or ‘afterlife’. This dichotomy between ontological realms, Bravmann suggests, is the religious transfiguration of a dichotomy that originally referred to geographical realms—a dichotomy between what is near and what is far, which, as we saw earlier, was tightly bound up with the meaning of the heroic epithet ‘great-spirited’ (or far-spirited: baʿīd al-himma). The great-spirited hero was the one who renounced the easy comforts of sedentary life for the harder yet higher life of wandering and marauding and pursuing noble deeds that bring glory (makārim). What was geographically near was evaluatively inferior. Having elicited this pattern, we will now recognize the simple yet seminal transformation undergone by the related virtue in its transition to the moral universe of the Islamic faith. The transformation is already visible among some of the sources Ibn Qutayba cites, who restrict the application of the epithet to those who seek paradise. It is in even plainer evidence in the more reflective articulation provided later on by al-Rāghib al-Isfahānī. The great-spirited person is one who renounces _ ¹⁵¹ See Bravmann, Spiritual Background, 26–31, for a finer-grained presentation of this proposal; p. 30 quoted.

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the inferior pleasures of the present world and chooses the harder yet higher path of seeking God and the next life, and who aspires to the noble character traits (makārim) glorified by the Law. The term dunyā literally means what is ‘lowest’ or ‘nearest’. As in its pre-Islamic cousin, it is the domain that carries inferior value.¹⁵² In this transition, the horizontal plane gives way more openly to the vertical one, the great-spirited religious hero striking high rather than far.¹⁵³ Thus, what was originally a term applied to the pagan Arab hero is transfigured into a trait of the religious believer after sustaining a set of semantic shifts that adjust it to the metaphysical presuppositions of the faith. Appearing at such a juncture, this revision may remind us of a change that took place in a rather different historical context in the transition from a heroic society to one governed by contrasting social and political principles, triggering a similar transfiguration of ethical ideals. In the ancient context, greatness of soul (in its diverse yet cognate Greek expressions) found its original home in the world of the Homeric epics as an outstanding virtue embodied by great warrior heroes such as Ajax and Achilles.¹⁵⁴ The accounts of the virtue offered by later philosophers, notably Aristotle, have often been viewed as an attempt to provide a more cogent articulation that would unify its disparate meanings and accommodate it to the changed world of the democratic polis, in which Socrates could be as much of a hero as—if not more of one than—Achilles. In the Greek context, it has been questioned whether the revision of the heroic virtues was carried off with complete success. This is evidenced by the critique the virtue has sustained in present times on a variety of moral grounds, ranging from its problematic stance on self-esteem—preserving a sense of grandeur and hauteur that might have been at home in the Homeric world but appears repugnant in ours—to its perceived elitism. Nancy Sherman gives voice to the latter when, in an oft-cited remark, she describes the virtue as one of the ‘holdovers from an age of Homeric heroism that lay too much emphasis on the lottery of natural and social endowments’. Greatness of soul, in Aristotle’s account, ‘is a privileged virtue. It is the preserve of those who have the wealth and political position to gain great honour and ¹⁵² For Bravmann’s discussion of this point, see ibid., 32–8. ¹⁵³ I owe the framing of this point to Everett Rowson. This substitution is not necessarily reflected in a blanket supersession of ‘far’ (baʿīd) by ‘high’ (ʿālin) in the compound term for the virtue. ¹⁵⁴ The emphasis is on ‘cognate’. A common cognate heroic epithet used in the Homeric epics is megaletor.

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public recognition for their service.’¹⁵⁵ Even among defenders of Aristotelian ethics, as I noted earlier, greatness of soul has sometimes seemed like the Trojan Horse that betrays Aristotle’s universalism, a mere expression of the contingent values of his time. The Islamic revision of the heroic virtues makes for an interesting comparison in this regard. Greatness of spirit was, of course, articulated in a variety of ways across different domains of ethical discourse, as this discussion has shown, and each of these articulations privileged different conceptual elements from among those present within its plasma—endurance of misfortune, concern with honour, high sense of worth, aspiration to great things—and bore a different degree of proximity to the distinctive pattern in which these elements were organized within the pre-Islamic heroic ethic. Yet if we focus on those philosophical and theological articulations whose reflective character makes them the most natural interlocutor for Aristotle and for the Western philosophical tradition more generally, the construction that prevailed was one that saw greatness of spirit inscribed in terms of disarming simplicity. Greatness of spirit is simply a virtue of aspiration or right desire, expressed in the orientation of desire to the highest and greatest things. Hence, as I suggested, its foundational status in both philosophical and religious visions of the good life. The notion of self-worth that shows up in this construction—a notion that has often seemed to form the Achilles heel of this type of Achillean virtue—is one that is not so much grounded in acquired merits as itself the ground of a drive to acquire them. By the same token, it is a worthiness not so much to receive, as to act and to be. Every ethical scheme that incorporates a conception of the good will naturally attach great value to an attitude of passionate dedication to this good.¹⁵⁶ One can therefore see why a virtue that embodies a heightened codification of this attitude, and whose structure leaves it open to a plurality of competing specifications of the good pursued, would make for an especially irenic entrant in a variety of moral schemes. For the same reasons, one can also see why it would provide little traction for the kind of controversy that has dogged its cross-cultural counterparts.¹⁵⁷ ¹⁵⁵ Sherman, ‘Common sense and uncommon virtue’, 103. ¹⁵⁶ Naturally, though not inevitably, as not all moral schemes take the good-making features of actions (e.g. notably their contribution to happiness) to be the features that should also show up in moral motivation. ¹⁵⁷ At the cost of rendering it so formal that one might question whether it should be counted as a substantive virtue at all? This seems to be the misgiving expressed by Fouchécour when he remarks (Moralia, 406): ‘la notion reste confuse et, pour ainsi dire, vide, hors cette idée de visée, d’une visée élevée dans l’ordre moral.’ He takes pseudo-Ghazālī’s aim to be to bestow a certain

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The simple yet powerful ways in which this construction anchors the virtue in the good life, added to its sheer plasticity, must form part of the explanation for the remarkable resonance and longevity it has enjoyed within the Arabic-Islamic tradition. Even in our days, greatness of spirit continues to attract interest among religious intellectuals, with one leading Egyptian Salafi writer, Muhammad Ismāʿīl al-Muqaddam, even devoting a _ book-length discussion to the subject. His book takes in several of the calling points of the textual tradition we surveyed above and many others besides, thus providing a wealth of insight into the virtue’s historical manifestations. What also stands out—and may help contextualize the burgeoning interest in this virtue among contemporary Muslim thinkers—is a new emphasis on the role of this virtue in motivating the pursuit, not only of other-worldly happiness, but also of activities geared more directly toward this-worldly progress and reform.¹⁵⁸ Having swung from the present world to the next in the virtue’s first revision, the pendulum here makes a gentle swing back. After a long history that saw it migrate from the world of pre-Islamic Arab heroes into the Islamic religious universe via the Persian cultural tradition and the philosophical legacy of ancient Greece to take up residence in the works of philosophers, theologians, littérateurs, and courtiers, the life has not yet gone out of this virtue.

degree of clarity and substance on the notion. The Postlude partly engages with this misgiving, and also with the possibilities of controversy that this most ‘irenic’ of virtues may nevertheless provoke. ¹⁵⁸ See Muhammad Ahmad Ismāʿīl al-Muqaddam, ʿUluww al-himma (Alexandria: Dār _ al-Īmān, 2004)._

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Postlude A Living Virtue?

In the foregoing discussion, I plotted the trajectory traced by two key virtues within the landscape of Arabic-Islamic ethical thought. The first was a recognizable heir of the Greek philosophical tradition, while the second had stronger roots in pre-Islamic Arab culture. The Greek virtue of megalopsychia and the Arabic virtue of ʿizam al-himma, I suggested, are united by _ resemblances that make it natural to regard them as members of the same broad family—what I have been heuristically referring to as ‘virtues of greatness’—even though they had separate origins and developed in different cultural contexts. The fact that in the Arabic context, as in the Greek, the relevant virtue begins life as a heroic quality seems suggestive. Here we may have the beginnings not merely of a local story about the trajectory of one culture-bound virtue or another, but of a more universal story about the emergence of the virtues of greatness as a distinctive schema of ethical thought. The narrative pursued in Parts 1 and 2 of this book addressed its subject primarily on historical terms, working through the approaches taken by a variety of thinkers with the aim of providing a critical account of their views and uncovering some of their origins. In pursuing this task, I also tried to relate these views to the approaches adopted by philosophers outside the Islamic world and to indicate the kind of conversation they spark with broader philosophical history. Yet with this narrative in place, the time is ripe for posing a different kind of question which leads away from a purely historical engagement with the ideas we have considered to a more active confrontation of their philosophical relevance. And here our focus must fall on that idea that forms the most distinctive contribution of the thinkers we surveyed, namely the virtue of greatness of spirit. This virtue, I observed in closing my previous discussion, continues to live on within the Islamic tradition. What can we say about its relevance to those standing outside it? Over the last few decades, the virtues have returned to the spotlight in philosophical circles, and a wide range of historical works are being mined for the contributions they might make to this conversation. Given the

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distinctiveness of this ideal and its wide reach within Islamic ethical culture, this is as good a place as any to begin exploring how the Islamic tradition might be included in this exchange. What claim, we might ask, does this virtue make on our understanding of character excellence? What would it mean to take it seriously as an ideal? This virtue, as we saw, was articulated in a variety of ways across different sectors of the Islamic tradition. For the present purpose, I propose to concentrate on its articulation among philosophical writers, taking the account provided by Yahyā ibn ʿAdī as my main point of reference. Let _ me briefly recapitulate its key features. In Yahyā ibn ʿAdī’s work, greatness of _ spirit is understood primarily with reference to a notion of aspiration. It is defined in terms of ‘belittling what falls short of the utmost limit among exalted things and seeking lofty stations’, with these stations pre-eminently specified in terms of the virtues.¹ We saw that Yahyā invokes the virtue in _ explaining his own aims as a writer, which is to communicate to his readers an image of the perfect human being so as to make it an object of longing and aspiration for them. He also implicitly invokes it in articulating the basic nature of the project of ethical reform: to govern one’s character means to ‘take aim at the utmost limit and farthermost degree of each virtue’, and ‘not to content oneself with anything less than that degree’.² The aesthetic associations of the virtue, implicit in Yahyā’s reference to the ‘image’ of _ perfection, are reinforced by his characterization of it as a virtue whose proper effect is to ‘belittle every vice in [one’s] sight and beautify every virtue’. Greatness of spirit makes us see the vices as contemptible, and the virtues as alluring. It also makes us see our own ‘soul . . . as having such great value’ that external goods pale by comparison.³ In contrast to Aristotelian greatness of soul, this sense of worth is forward-looking, registering the greatness one is capable of rather than the greatness one already possesses, and thereby motivating the acquisition of the virtues in which such greatness finds its true grounds. The special place this virtue occupies within the project of ethical reform is highlighted by Yahyā’s designating it as the first virtue a person must _ acquire when embarking on this project. Insofar as it makes us ‘see’ the virtues as beautiful and ‘see’ our soul in prospect as made great by them— calibrating our perception of what matters—this virtue provides the foundational spur for the moral life. At the same time, greatness of spirit is not

¹ Tahdhīb, 91.

² Ibid., 121.

³ Ibid., 140.

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  ? 133 simply a virtue of the moral beginner, whose function is confined to providing the actuating first stimulus. It is a virtue that remains active throughout the moral life to the extent that it involves a desire not simply for the virtues but for their highest degrees, and these degrees are either impossible or extremely arduous to attain. As Miskawayh puts it, the highest level of excellence to which one aspires in greatness of spirit is such that ‘the limitations vested in human nature prevent one from grasping it fully and attaining its utmost degree’.⁴ For Miskawayh, as for many of his fellow thinkers, this is tied to a conviction that the ultimate object of ethical striving is precisely to surpass human limitations and lead a ‘divine life’ which constitutes an imitation of God. Greatness of spirit, on the terms of these philosophers, is thus no ordinary virtue, a mere virtue among others. It is a virtue that has the superordinate role of making us aspire to the possession and enhancement of virtue both at the curtain-rising moment and in the continued dramatic progress of the moral life. ‘On the terms of these philosophers’—yet what, with this thumbnail sketch back before us, can we say on ours? The answer to this question, as I will suggest, involves tackling a more basic question concerning the nature of this virtue. In concluding Part 2 of this book, I suggested that this is one heroic virtue that, unlike its Aristotelian counterpart, is unlikely to provoke controversy and is calculated to make a particularly irenic entry in a variety of moral schemes, for reasons to do with its open structure and plasticity. Our present line of questioning invites us to reopen this assessment, to ask more critically: just how irenic an entry, and how immune to contention? One difficulty may already have suggested itself, and derives from the very structural features that make for the virtue’s unique plasticity. For if we indeed view it, as I proposed earlier, simply as a heightened codification of an attitude of passionate dedication to the good, however the good might be defined, this understanding seems to lend it a formal character that raises questions about how substantive it really is as a virtue. In what follows, I will explore two distinct ways of conceptualizing the nature of this virtue, one of which involves construing it as a virtue of a second-order and the other as a first-order kind. Each of these construals carries different consequences and raises different types of difficulties. The first construal crystallizes the concern just outlined: that this virtue, far from being a substantive quality of character, is so formal it appears empty, a mere

⁴ Hawāmil, 308.

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piece of conceptual legerdemain. It is the second construal that foregrounds the substantive aspect of this virtue and the substantive ethical commitments it involves, which are incorporated by its emphasis on open-ended aspiration. In doing so, it brings out how this apparently most irenic of virtues after all contains the potential to antagonize modern philosophical sensibilities. Faced with this prospect, I will sketch out a partial defence of the virtue and its constitutive commitments. Yet, as I will suggest, the importance of this ideal—and thus the importance of cultivating a philosophical conversation with it—lies in the very antagonism it ignites and the space it opens for engaging our competing commitments in debate. My own aim here is not so much to settle this debate as to indicate the shape it might take. It is also to hold up one concrete model of what it might mean to fruitfully engage these kinds of historical texts in a philosophical conversation—even when some of their features might seem to grate against it.

Situating Greatness of Spirit: A Second-Order Virtue? Confronting works on the virtues from different cultures and historical periods—particularly outlying works, such as these, with which our own philosophical culture has no established relationship as founding sources or conversation partners—philosophical readers will often be compelled to ask what it would be to meaningfully engage them. The question may initially impose itself as a doubt, given the differences in intellectual standards separating contemporary works of philosophical ethics from many of their historical counterparts. Approached with the more exacting standards of analysis we have learnt to demand of philosophical texts, such works can often seem pocked with moments where intellectual rigour fails. Looking at Yahyā’s account of the virtues, for example, we see that he treats an apparent _ action, ‘the divulgence of secrets’, as a vice of character. He also identifies ‘deceit’ and ‘betrayal’ as two separate vices, the only distinction between which appears to be that the latter relates to the handling of entrusted goods, whereas the former doesn’t. Many would baulk at the idea of taking such proposals seriously. Among other things, they reflect, we might want to say, a rather casual approach to the task of identifying and differentiating the virtues—a higher-level question that writers in the Arabic tradition, including Yahyā, simply do not broach. Such moves might tempt us to dismiss _ these works as historical curiosities root and branch, and to bracket them as inaccessible to serious philosophical interest.

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The questions are large, and here I will not try to tackle them on general terms. Yet it is worth recalling, for one, that the high-level questions just mentioned have been passed over in silence by many of the major contributors to the historical tradition of the virtues. And such silence has not been an argument against scrutinizing their ideas more closely where these ideas otherwise seem interesting or important. The decision to engage with this particular ideal of character more deeply must thus be motivated at least by an initial sense, however tentative or inchoate, that it is sufficiently interesting or attractive to make it worthwhile placing it under a sharper philosophical lens and reflecting on its intellectual credentials. Does this conception, one may then ask, truly merit our interest? What would it mean to take it seriously? Answering these questions in fact involves confronting a rather more basic one: Just what kind of virtue is this? One way of getting to this is by hearing the question ‘What would it mean to take it seriously?’ in the most obvious way it invites, and this is as a way of asking: Could we take it seriously as a contender for inclusion in our lists or taxonomies of the virtues? Thus framed, to some this question might seem idle—a question, certainly, that need not be asked with any degree of seriousness. Not only do we have no definite taxonomies, but our lists of the virtues, such as they are, have no fixed boundaries and are in a process of constant expansion. Every new day brings yet another field to which virtue-ethicists can ply their tools—medicine, law, business, politics, sports, journalism: the list goes on—and with it, a fresh extension of the relevant virtues and vices.⁵ One more virtue would hardly break the camel’s back. The answer to ‘Why incorporate this virtue into our tables?’ is simply ‘Why not?’ Such a cavalier attitude and open-door policy, Daniel Russell has argued, is a mistake, posing a little-acknowledged threat to the integrity and adequacy of a virtue-ethical theory. The admission of an endless number of virtues jeopardizes the concept of what is ‘virtuous overall’ which such a theory needs in evaluating actions and persons. ‘One should not’, he thus cautions, ‘introduce new virtues lightly.’⁶ Russell isolates two kinds of questions one might ask in this context, one of which concerns the ⁵ See, indicatively, the discussion in Candace Upton, ‘What virtues are there?’ in The Handbook of Virtue Ethics, ed. Stan van Hooft (Durham: Acumen, 2014), including the remarks on 174–5, which both embrace this field-specific cataloguing of innumerable virtues and bring into view some of the problems that attach to it. ⁶ Russell, Practical Intelligence and the Virtues, 152, and see generally the discussion in chapters 5–6. Russell’s distinction between enumerating and individuating the virtues is not cleanly drawn by many of those who approach the topic, who sometimes use the term ‘individuation’ to talk about what Russell would describe as ‘enumeration’.

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identification of the virtues, the other their individuation. The former is the question: What makes a particular character trait a virtue? The second is the question: What makes a particular virtue distinct from other virtues? The first question is the one that has engaged philosophical energies most directly in recent times, attracting a variety of competing responses. A virtue is a character trait that benefits its possessor and makes her a good human being (Rosalind Hursthouse); that enables us to handle well certain universal and inescapable spheres of human experience (Martha Nussbaum, expounding Aristotle); that we find admirable (Michael Slote); that enables us to acknowledge and respond well to items within its field (Christine Swanton). Russell’s own focus is on the second question, which he suggests is where the danger he identifies needs to be met. His specific proposal for resolving it is by taking the virtues’ ‘characteristic reasons’ as the basis for individuating them. Bracketing Russell’s own focus for the moment, it is illuminating in approaching the articulation of greatness of spirit in Arabic philosophical ethics to consider how it would fare relative to the first concern and to the competing accounts of how the virtues are identified. For even the lightest reflection will reveal that a virtue drawn up in these terms would meet no theoretical objection from any of these accounts, regardless of their internal differences. In fact, it would appear to be guaranteed automatic acceptance by all of them without exception. If we understand greatness of spirit as a virtue which regulates the aspiration to virtue, it will be irrelevant whether we understand the latter as a type of trait that benefits the possessor, that helps us handle universal spheres of human experience well, or that we find admirable. Our understanding of greatness of spirit will be parasitic on these theoretical accounts and on the substantive lists of the virtues they result in. Greatness of spirit will be the virtue that helps us achieve whatever character traits we identify as virtues through other means. Yet this brings out more distinctly something that will already have suggested itself. And this is that greatness of spirit, as articulated by Yahyā _ and his fellow writers, has the aspect less of a first-order substantive virtue than a second-order one, to the extent that the concept of virtue shows up within the content of its distinctive concern. If we were to try to identify a distinctive ‘sphere’ or context that this virtue regulates, in Nussbaum’s manner, we might come up with something like ‘actions and attitudes with regard to the pursuit of virtue’. This higher-order, virtue-thematizing aspect also emerges when one tries to reflect on what the ‘characteristic reasons’ of this virtue might look like, particularly those lower-level and

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more everyday reasons which Bernard Williams and Rosalind Hursthouse call ‘V-reasons’. To look for these kinds of reasons is to conjure the ordinary agent who exemplifies these virtues, to gain a concrete handle on such an agent by envisaging her patterns of ordinary speech. For justice: ‘I owe it to her’, ‘It’s his’, ‘I promised’. For courage: ‘Someone had to volunteer’, ‘One can’t give in to tyrants’, ‘It’s worth the risk’. For generosity: ‘He needed help’, ‘He asked me for it’.⁷ What about greatness of spirit? Here are some possibilities: ‘One can never be generous enough’, ‘That’s nothing compared with the greatest virtue’, ‘I don’t just want to be 5-out-of-10 kind—I want to be as kind as it’s possible for anyone to be’. But also: ‘I owe it to myself to be as virtuous as I possibly can—anything less would be unworthy of me’. Apart from any other difficulties such expressions may raise, one difficulty will be the concern with psychological plausibility that has stimulated such ‘lowerlevel’ accounts of the ordinary virtuous agent’s reason-giving. Stipulating that the terms of the virtues and vices should show up in the motivation of the ordinary person (‘It was the courageous or generous or virtuous thing to do’) seems to demand an unrealistic degree of sophistication and articulacy that is hardly imaginable except among philosophers and people of unusual reflectiveness. Certain virtues of greatness, such as Aristotle’s account of greatness of soul, have often been understood as (and indeed disparaged for) being the virtues of an extraordinary elite, of whom such unusual expectations might not be out of place. Yet if such virtues are to be more universally accessible—as many, if not all, of our authors in the Arabic tradition suggest about greatness of spirit⁸—then such demands appear problematic. I will return to this point from another direction shortly. But if we put it aside for the moment, the question whether we can take greatness of spirit seriously as a virtue would partly seem to hinge on whether we can make sense of its higher-order status. This would not be the first time a higherorder virtue or meta-virtue has come up for defence. The most natural comparison, in fact, is with the Aristotelian understanding of greatness of soul, which more than one commentator has proposed to analyse as a metavirtue of some kind. In the view of Michael Pakaluk, for example, greatness of soul is best seen as a virtue with a regulative role. It is a virtue that involves ⁷ See Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics, ch. 6, especially the examples on 128. ⁸ Some, as we saw, emphasized the special relevance of the virtue to members of high sociopolitical classes, notably kings.

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‘a settled attitude of conversion to virtue’ which keeps our attention trained on the ‘moral point of view’ and whose function would ‘naturally be described as overseeing and encouraging the development of the other virtues’.⁹ Rather closer to mainstream opinion, a higher-order regulating role has also been assigned to practical wisdom or phronesis, which has the crucial function of integrating the concerns of the particular virtues, and which in Aristotle’s view is a virtue that entails all the other virtues. The comparison with Pakaluk’s analysis of greatness of soul is not exact, given that Yahyā and his fellow philosophers’ emphasis falls not simply on _ the commitment to virtue, but on the commitment to achieving great degrees of it.¹⁰ Yet his analysis provides a good index of the challenges to which analyses of second-order virtues are generally vulnerable. Pakaluk himself confronts some of these challenges squarely when he anticipates the objection that any aspect of virtuous activity could potentially be said to constitute a special ‘point of view’ which requires a corresponding separate trait or habit enabling us to be stably attuned to it. ‘The difficulty is that once we allow that there can be one second-order virtue . . . it seems arbitrary not to postulate a host of them.’ Similarly, this account would appear to render the first-order virtues otiose.¹¹ The first point may remind us of Russell’s concern, though with a different twist. The more specific danger here is not that we get stuck with an infinity of virtues, but that we get stuck with an infinity of philosophical fictions—with figments of an overworked philosophical imagination that multiplies theoretical entities through analysis and then proceeds to reify them. This danger would also seem to haunt Yahyā’s specific parsing of the _ virtue. Should we say that the person who desires to be greatly courageous has an extra virtue over the person who desires to be just plain courageous, or is this merely an act of conceptual prestidigitation? Even those who do not share Russell’s system-building concerns—or indeed his notion of human psychology as a real constraint on the number of virtues human individuals can objectively host¹²—will agree that this is something to be ⁹ Pakaluk, ‘Aristotelian magnanimity’, 260 and 274. Aristotle’s discussion of greatness of soul in the Eudemian Ethics (esp. III.5.3–7) would seem to encourage such interpretations even more strongly than the Nicomachean Ethics. ¹⁰ In this respect, Eunshil Bae’s account of greatness of soul offers a more natural comparison insofar as she takes greatness of soul to be the virtue that accounts for ‘the crucial difference in degree’ in which any one particular virtue is displayed. See ‘An ornament of the virtues’, Ancient Philosophy 23 (2003), 337–49. ¹¹ Pakaluk, ‘Aristotelian magnanimity’, 274. ¹² I have in mind the remarks in Russell, Practical Intelligence and the Virtues, 172–3.

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avoided at all costs because of its potential for trivializing the project of the virtues as a whole.

Emulation, Aspiration, Self-Reference Yet is it possible that the notion of a second-order virtue might be leading us astray here? Because in fact both comparisons—with greatness of soul, and with phronesis—call attention to a distinctive feature of the Arabic understanding of greatness of spirit that seems rather less formal and more substantive; and this is the emphasis on aspiration. It is instructive to approach the point through another comparison with Aristotle. It has been a matter of some debate whether Aristotle’s account of greatness of soul in the Nicomachean Ethics makes room for such an emphasis, given Aristotle’s apparent accent on the closure and completeness of the great-souled person’s character.¹³ Yet even if this accent is lacking in the Nicomachean Ethics, it is certainly present in another work, the Rhetoric, where Aristotle brings up greatness of soul in the context of discussing the character of the young and the old. Greatness of soul is in fact attributed to the young as one of their distinctive qualities, and it is linked with their capacity to have great hopes and expectations and to be moved by an idealistic aspiration for the fine. It is linked with the notion of emulation, which Aristotle defines as a ‘kind of distress at the apparent presence among others like him by nature of things honored and possible for a person to acquire’ (2.11.1) which the emulator lacks and thus strives to acquire. The word for ‘emulation’ is zelos, which gives us our modern ‘zeal’. As mentioned earlier, it is questionable, given the compositional aims and context of the Rhetoric, whether Aristotle meant to ascribe the full virtue of greatness of soul to the young, as against a natural virtue requiring further development. If greatness of soul, as the Nicomachean Ethics instructs us, forms the apanage of the morally perfected, its unqualified attribution to those still on the pathway of moral formation would be hard to account for. Yet the readiness of recent philosophers to countenance the possibility that virtues may be specific not only to different roles but also to different stages of life—so that a quality such as obedience may be a virtue in certain

¹³ Pakaluk is one of few commentators to accentuate this aspirational dimension. See ‘Aristotelian magnanimity’, 245, and also my discussion in Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint, 184–6.

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professions or religious communities or among children while being a vice in other contexts—would appear to have loosened Aristotle’s sharp distinction between full and natural virtue.¹⁴ It is in this spirit that Kristján Kristjánsson recently proposed to give a closer hearing to the quality picked out in this part of the Rhetoric, and mounted a defence of its status as a virtue in the young. Kristjánsson’s focal term is in fact not greatness of soul, but emulation and emulousness, with the first taken to signify the episodic emotion and the second the virtue. He characterizes the virtue by identifying four elements it comprises: affective, conative, cognitive, and behavioural. On the affective level, it involves an experience of distress at perceiving that one does not possess certain desired, honoured goods that another possesses. On the conative level, it involves the motivation (the sense of zeal) to acquire these goods or qualities.¹⁵ On the cognitive level, it involves a rational understanding of why these goods or qualities are valuable and how one might be able to acquire them. On the behavioural level, it involves actually striving to acquire them. Kristjánsson suggests this character trait passes the rudimentary test for admission as a virtue, which involves reference to the two main criteria of whether it ‘(1) contributes to eudaimonia in some relevant sphere of human activity, and (2) admits of the extremes of excess and deficiency’. The relevant sphere, according to him, is ‘our perceived inferiority compared to someone else’. Kristjánsson follows Aristotle in taking emulation to constitute not ‘a virtue of the fully virtuous, who have nothing morally worthy left to strive for’, but instead, rather like shame, ‘a virtue of those on the way to virtue’, and as such a paradigmatic virtue of the young.¹⁶ One important thing to note is that, if we accept Kristjánsson’s view, including his characterization of the sphere of this virtue, we will be able to see how it is possible for a virtue to ‘thematize’ the virtues—for the virtues to ‘show up’ in the description of the agent’s motivation—without thereby being transformed into a merely formal virtue of a second-order kind. There is nothing formal about a young person appreciating the beauty or

¹⁴ Though note that Aristotle himself makes ample room for role-dependent and agedependent virtues in Politics, Bk 1, ch. 13. ¹⁵ Goods or qualities? Aristotle allows for both interpretations in the Rhetoric, though his discussion calls greater attention to the former. Kristjánsson follows this emphasis in places, but he seems to be thinking in terms of the latter when offering his defence of the virtue. See Kristjánsson, Aristotle, Emotions, and Education, ch. 7, for his full discussion. ¹⁶ Ibid., 106.

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greatness of another’s character and wanting to appropriate it as his own.¹⁷ This will be even clearer if we replace the cognitive-sounding ‘appreciation’ with a more concrete range of emotional responses, such as the powerful sense of admiration, longing, and love that we know from experience people of exceptional moral character are capable of arousing. Following Aristotle’s lead, Kristjánsson himself focuses on the negative emotion of distress in filling out the affective profile of the virtue. But it would after all be difficult to separate this negative response, which registers one’s lack of a certain good, to a more positive set of responses which register the value of that good.¹⁸ Positive or negative, the robust and familiar affective profile of this virtue will make it harder to read it as a mere formal concept produced by philosophical long division. Whichever virtue term one chooses to focus on—whether greatness of soul or emulation—it will be clear that this is a quality to which the understanding of greatness of spirit in the Arabic tradition bears a special affinity. Yahyā’s characterization of greatness of spirit as the ‘first of the _ virtues’ signals this affinity particularly strongly. The elements of self–other comparison and underpinning sense of self-worth are also present in his work and the work of other writers in the tradition.¹⁹ Yet there are also notable differences that separate Yahyā’s account of greatness of spirit from _ the virtue Kristjánsson outlines. On the one hand, the self–other comparison is overall rather less pronounced in the different Arabic accounts of this concept than the comparison with virtue itself. The focus is more on excelling relative to the scale of virtue than on excelling relative to other virtuous persons. Similarly, where Kristjánsson’s emulous young person is concerned with acquiring a desirable quality (a quality perceived in another), Yahyā’s _ great-spirited person is concerned with acquiring great degrees of it. Another difference—the more positive affective profile of the virtue held out in the Arabic accounts, as suggested among other things by their aesthetic emphasis on the response to beauty—folds up if we adjust Kristjánsson’s account

¹⁷ There is more to say, of course, about the precise way the virtues ‘show up’ in this case. See below for a brief comment. ¹⁸ Kristjánsson himself elsewhere clearly takes this view: ‘Emotions targeting moral exemplarity: making sense of the logical geography of admiration, emulation and elevation,’ Theory and Research in Education 15 (2017), 24. ¹⁹ Albeit in varying degrees and with differing inflections, especially as regards the description to which the sense of self-worth is pegged: one’s basic humanity in some works (such as al-Rāghib’s), one’s social and political status in others, notably those addressed to the ruling classes (such as pseudo-Māwardī’s Counsel for Kings and other mirrors for princes).

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in the intuitive way I just suggested.²⁰ But the most important difference lies elsewhere. For if emulation, in Kristjánsson’s account, is a formative virtue for young people ‘on the way to virtue’ whose usefulness is outlived when this formative process comes to an end, greatness of spirit is a virtue that is never outlived. It remains operative throughout the ethical life. The implicit claim is that we are always on the way to virtue; the formative process never ends. It is here, I would suggest, that we can recognize the substantive evaluative commitments this virtue carries in a way that points to a more meaningful response to my starting questions—‘What would it mean to take this virtue seriously?’, ‘What can the account of a particular virtue in a historical work offer us?’—than the one we are likely to be drawn into if we take our cue exclusively from Russell’s austere gatekeeping perspective. Taken openly, the question ‘What can it offer us?’ could be read in a number of ways. Does it offer us a new language for approaching moral phenomena, for example, letting us say things we otherwise couldn’t? Does it make a value salient that we were disposed to dismiss or overlook, providing a new focus for ethical reflection and debate? Focusing on the second question, we can say that the substantive value foregrounded in the Arabic ideal of greatness of spirit is the value of sustained aspiration for beauty or excellence of character. The substantive ethical posture to which it would be most opposed, in this light, is the one that has been frequently associated with that other virtue of greatness to which the Arabic ideal is only in part genetically related: the Aristotelian megalopsychos’ sense of ethical closure and pleasured awareness of his character as a perfected sum. Now taken generally, many recent philosophers of the virtues have been keen to acknowledge the importance of continued aspiration in the moral life in a way that breaks with (at least the surface reading of) Aristotle’s ideal. An emphasis on the ‘drive to aspire’, for example, is a central feature of Julia Annas’s account of virtue in Intelligent Virtue. ‘The virtues are not just admirable but inspire us as an ideal,’ she writes, and this ideal aspect ‘leads us to aspire continually, not to get the prize and then retire’.²¹ The notion of continued ²⁰ Not all aesthetic responses, of course, are uniformly pleasant, as demonstrated by the concept of the sublime. And even among those responses that register moral value, there are some, such as awe and arguably admiration, whose affective valence takes discussion. As Kristjánsson points out, the sharp division of emotions into those of positive vs negative valence is a simplistic one: ‘Emotions targeting moral exemplarity’, 24. ²¹ Julia Annas, Intelligent Virtue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 116.

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development also plays an important role in Russell’s understanding. Being virtuous, he points out, ‘is not the sort of achievement that reaching the peak of a mountain is—once it is done, it is done forever—but the sort that involves keeping sharp, learning, and improving’.²² Yet to begin from the most evident point, the acknowledgement of this drive or continued process has not involved theorizing it as a separate virtue, and it has rather been taken to form an integral feature of virtue as such.²³ More relevant, however, is a more substantive point of conflict between the approach to aspiration taken by these philosophers and the approach implicit in the Arabic understanding of greatness of spirit. This point becomes especially visible set against Russell’s account and his analysis of the role of ideals in the moral life in particular. The ‘virtuous person’, in his view, is an ideal model, to accept which is to accept certain principles as one’s own and to give oneself a standard for assessing one’s development and for improving further. ‘To accept an ideal of virtue’ is thus ‘to accept the project of improving’. Yet that, Russell notes, still ‘leaves the question how far each of us ought to take that project’.²⁴ And his substantive claim is that acceptance of such an ideal does not impose the open-ended duty of trying to push that project as far as it will go and to become as close to that ideal as possible. This open-ended idealistic aspiration needs to be balanced by a realistic acceptance of one’s limitations. In certain cases, one may legitimately recognize that further effort and improvement is not ‘possible’ or not ‘reasonable’. Acceptance of ideals is compatible with being able to say: for me, this is the place to stop; my aspiration should go no further. Insofar as I accept these ideals, I will of course continue to recognize my stopping place as a stopping place and a limitation.

²² Russell, ‘Aristotle on cultivating virtue’, in Cultivating Virtue: Perspectives from Philosophy, Theology, and Psychology, ed. Nancy E. Snow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 17. ²³ The above examples could be expanded to include a number other accounts, such as the ‘model of challenge’ spelled out by Ronald Dworkin in his Sovereign Virtue. One of the few writers I am aware of who comes close to the approach found in the Arabic tradition is Swanton, who proposes a ‘virtue of self-improvement’ whose distinctive field or domain is aspiration. But Swanton’s provisional specification of the ‘thick’ account of this virtue—including, above all, the right extent of aspiration and self-improvement—would seem to pit it against the view implicit in the Arabic ideal. See Swanton, ‘Cultivating virtue: two problems for virtue ethics’, in Cultivating Virtue, ed. Snow. Cf. her earlier discussion of what she terms the ‘virtue of perfectionism’ in Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). ²⁴ Russell, Practical Intelligence and the Virtues, 128; and see generally the discussion on 123–30.

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This view, marked as it is by a concern to calibrate an idealistic orientation with soberer realistic elements, reflects a broader preoccupation with the issue of realism that has been given teeth by recent encounters between philosophical ethics and empirical psychology. The conflict with the evaluative perspective implicit in the Arabic understanding of greatness of spirit will be plain. The distinctive values that constitute greatness of spirit as a virtue are precisely a commitment to pulling out all the stops and rejecting stopping places, ruling out even the balancing act of fragile closure that Russell outlines. They are about ‘belittling what falls short of the utmost limit’ and ‘disdaining middling levels and seeking the farthermost degrees’, in Yahyā’s formulation. The utmost limit, as Miskawayh suggests, is where _ human life transcends its limit and enters the domain of the divine. This theological diction merely crystallizes a conflict that is already evident, and no doubt points to some of its sources. There are other substantive commitments and conflicts-in-waiting. These are perhaps best approached by returning to the notion of virtue ‘showing up’ in the content of motivation that I raised earlier. That virtue should show up in this way, I suggested, need not be taken to mark out the presence of a second-order virtue (of which we may or may not be able to give plausible theoretical accounts) or presuppose unrealistic levels of linguistic and conceptual sophistication. Virtue shows up in the content of desire or motivation whenever we encounter moral beauty or excellence and desire to make it our own. The notion of ‘showing up’, of course, invites more careful distinctions. The wow of admiration or love provoked by the experience of moral beauty may often be as inarticulate as the sense of wonder or awe provoked by the encounter with other kinds of beauty—a piece of music, a work of visual art, a natural landscape—and it will often be an achievement to articulate its grounds and explicitly identify the qualities that provoke it. Kristjánsson, on his side, suggests that this identification is essential if the admiration of persons is not to degenerate to hero worship.²⁵ Yet, at the very least, this means that we need not take the sense of admiration to be immediately or initially organized by explicit concepts of the virtues in the ways that Hursthouse and others worry about. Yet even if these concerns with the notion of virtue ‘showing up’ are set aside, there is another troubling element carried by this picture that would not be removed so easily and that is flagged by the notion of beauty just

²⁵ Kristjánsson, Aristotle, Emotions, and Education, 102–3.

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invoked. I mentioned earlier the aesthetic emphasis of Yahyā’s discussion, _ which emerges both in his account of greatness of spirit and in his description (laced with the vocabulary of that virtue) of his own task. Greatness of spirit ‘beautifies every virtue’; it makes us see the virtues as beautiful. The way Yahyā understands his own task, in turn, is as an effort to place an _ image of moral beauty before his spirited reader and arouse his longing for it—that is to say, his longing to possess that beauty. Part of the way his readers’ greatness of spirit is to be manifested is through their readiness to be roused to such longing. But this longing, it is clear, has a distinct selfreferential element that is bound up with the aesthetic character of this moment. It’s not simply that we perceive a certain kind of character as beautiful. It’s that we want to be beautiful in that way ourselves. Taken as a general description of the kind of aspiration—or at least one kind of aspiration—that might drive moral change, such a claim is not entirely new, though it seems to me under-explored in recent literature. This no doubt reflects a broader scepticism among modern philosophers about the basic proposition of bringing aesthetic notions into talk of ethics. It is not a coincidence that one of the few writers to frame this claim directly, Colin McGinn—who takes our desire to be beautiful to be the most compelling answer to the question, ‘Why be moral?’—forms part of a minority of recent philosophers fighting the case for a revived attention to the connections between ethics and aesthetics and a more robust acknowledgement of the aesthetic character of ethical responses.²⁶ Among the difficulties raised by this picture of moral motivation, the most obvious relates to the self-referential element I just isolated, which pits itself against a familiar way of thinking about the practice of virtue. As Nussbaum puts it in one place, in the Aristotelian view the virtuous person’s desire is ‘quite simply, to do those actions and to do them because of their value, not because of what one is oneself in doing them’.²⁷ It is not irrelevant in this respect that one of the great-souled man’s greatest flaws has been held to be the way his representation of his own character enters into the reasons for which he acts.²⁸ Virtuous motives should be transparent, as it were,

²⁶ See Colin McGinn, Ethics, Evil, and Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 119, and ch. 5 for his broader discussion. For other (rather more persuasive) attempts to rehabilitate the idea, one with strong roots in ancient philosophy, see Berys Gaut, Art, Emotion and Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), and Panos Paris, ‘The empirical case for moral beauty’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 96 (2018), 642–56. ²⁷ Martha Nussbaum, ‘Comment on Paul Seabright’, Ethics 98 (1988), 333. ²⁸ Or potentially enters his reasons; see, e.g., Herdt’s remarks in Putting on Virtue, 38–43.

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outward-looking—reaching straight to the act itself untainted by any inward regard for the self. They should be responsive to what Christine Swanton would call the ‘demands of the world’.²⁹ Nussbaum’s point, significantly, was framed in response to the claim made by Paul Seabright that the project of seeking a certain kind of character may be self-subversive. ‘Character may be subverted by the desire to have or to form character’ insofar as one’s attention is focused inward rather than outward to the situations that require moral attention.³⁰ Even if we conceded that such inward-looking attention may be expedient or inescapable in some cases, especially in later life when efforts of moral change are more self-directed and self-conscious, it would be a stage to be left behind as swiftly as possible. The Arabic ideal of greatness of spirit instead engraves it into the moral life across its entire length. Our own character ‘shows up’ perpetually as an object of concern. This is a function, on the one hand, of its emphasis on the role of aesthetic reactions in moral aspiration, combined with its view of moral development as an open-ended process, which demands making lasting room for such reactions. It is also a function of another emphasis, which is linked to but separate from the concept of beauty, namely the special concern with the attainment of degrees of virtue that distinguishes it. Because if we can take a genuine desire to be courageous, just, or generous to be oriented by a perception of the inherent value of these qualities and their constitutive commitments, it seems harder to conceive this in the case of a desire parsed as a matter of degrees. I might want to be courageous, just, or generous. But to want to be greatly courageous or greatly generous—to desire not just a quality, but a scale of it— appears to implicate me in a reflective and comparative viewpoint on my own character that is troubling. This may be partly linked to the stronger reference the concept of greatness makes to the way one is seen and received by others. It may also be linked to the implicit assumption that virtue is present, and only the higher degrees remain to be achieved. We would commend a desire to be good. But would we as easily commend a desire to be great?

²⁹ Swanton, Virtue Ethics. ³⁰ Paul Seabright, ‘The pursuit of unhappiness: paradoxical motivation and the subversion of character in Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady’, Ethics 98 (1988), 313–31, 314 quoted. What is here presented as a problem of self-reference specific to the cultivation of virtue is sometimes framed as a more general problem with the virtue-ethical account of the moral life, insofar as (it is claimed) virtue ethics is ‘committed to the view that the proper motivation for acts is the pursuit of one’s own virtue’. See briefly the discussion in Swanton, ‘Cultivating virtue’.

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Schematizing a Defence The above discussion has brought out some of the substantive commitments carried by the Arabic account of greatness of spirit, and some of the ways these antagonize current philosophical views. The emphasis on open-ended aspiration conflicts with an important view of the need to acknowledge limitations and bring aspiration to a close. The self-concern embedded in the virtue conflicts with an important view of virtuous motivation, and of the need to focus attention outward to the act rather than inward to the acting self. This kind of antagonism signals that—pace general intuitions about this virtue’s irenic nature, taken as an indeterminate schema— incorporating it into the forms of our ethical thought would after all be no trivial act. What makes it worthwhile to confront this ideal will then be, at a minimum, what makes the confrontation of opposing viewpoints worthwhile more generally. Difference produces self-awareness, helping us become more self-conscious about the views and values we hold, and helping us at the very least clarify if not revise them. Yet why not even revise them? Couldn’t this character ideal provide the impetus for taking a more critical view of these values? Consider first the question of aspiration. With the onslaught of the empirical sciences on the once-sacrosanct province of moral inquiry, it has become increasingly common to insist on the need to ensure that ethics remains realistic, and that it makes demands that are not experienced as impossible to fulfil. Advocates of an Aristotelian view of character, in Christian Miller’s words, need to show how ‘realizing such a normative ideal is psychologically realistic for beings like us’—for beings, that is, who are as far from virtue as modern psychology and social science have revealed them to be.³¹ Why is realism important? The main concern here appears to be the potential for demoralization and despair. A morality that asks too much is a morality that demoralizes. Yet this should not make us overlook the motivational risks that can be incurred by a morality that asks too little—or, to move away from this imperative tone, that disconnects us from what is greatest in order to ground us in what is achievable. Because when it comes to galvanizing a sense of moral aspiration, it is not so much the mediocre and attainable as the great and surpassing that inspires us, as Kant (ever the idealist) observed. The ³¹ Christian B. Miller, Character and Moral Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 207.

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representation of the highest expression of virtue, even if it is one ‘of which the world has perhaps so far given no example’, exercises ‘an influence on the human heart so much more powerful than all other incentives’.³² If we were seeking to articulate the appeal and significance of greatness of spirit as an ideal of character, it is in its honouring of this psychological fact—the powerful attraction exerted over us by what is most beautiful and great— that in my view we would find its chief source. There is a double truth, to be sure, that has often been brought up by those concerned with the role of moral exemplars in particular: they can elevate, but they can also deflate.³³ Yet rather than rejecting the concern with the great tout court, the task is to negotiate this truth more insightfully and to understand its conditions. Among the many suggestions made in this context in recent literature, one of the most interesting is the one formulated by Kristjánsson, who draws a critical distinction between admiring persons and admiring transpersonal ideals. If the admiration of moral heroes can stultify, he suggests, the sense of awe provoked by ideals—ideals embodied by specific exemplars but potentially accessible even without their mediation—may not do so.³⁴ Whether it does, in Kristjánsson’s view, is an open empirical question; and, at the very least, one should not close it prematurely given the importance of the intuitions it mobilizes. Kristjánsson’s analysis is particularly relevant here given what I noted earlier concerning Arabic accounts of greatness of spirit, which are predominantly structured by a reference to the scale of virtue as against the scale set by specific individuals. If we wish to honour our attraction to what is greatest while negotiating the darker side of this psychological truth, a virtue with this profile may turn out to provide us with a fruitful framework. Part of this negotiation may have to involve revisiting the way we understand the idea of striving toward an object of aspiration, and the relation of striving for it vis-à-vis attaining it. It is interesting again to approach this via a reflection on the worry about a morality that ‘asks too much’. It is hard to avoid the sense that one can detect in this worry the traces of a conception of morality that virtue ethicists have often viewed themselves as programmatically seeking to dislodge—the legalistic morality ³² The quotes are from Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. and trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 20 (4: 408) and 22 (4: 410), read in context. Kant is referring more directly to duty than to virtue, but the insight is the same. ³³ See, indicatively, the remarks in Linda T. Zagzebski, Exemplarist Moral Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 23–5. ³⁴ See the discussion in Kristjánsson, ‘Emotions targeting moral exemplarity’.

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of duties and rules that makes hard-as-diamond demands that we simply must be capable of fulfilling, the ‘ought’ always implying a ‘can’. This conception seems to go hand in hand with a picture of the moral life as a set of isolated moments of exertion supervening on a larger neutral space in which moral considerations are simply bracketed. Implicit in this picture is the idea that well-defined targets of moral attention can be sought and conclusively attained, and once attained moral striving can come to a rest. The emphasis on open-ended aspiration imported by the virtue of greatness of spirit carries a different picture, incorporating a different understanding of the notions of ‘striving’ and ‘rest’. In many regards it evokes an insight expressed by William James when he remarked that ‘the deepest difference . . . in the moral life of man is the difference between the easygoing and the strenuous mood’.³⁵ The ideal of greatness of spirit can be viewed as a concretization of the latter mood, which places the notion of striving at the centre of the moral life and unseats the picture of discrete islands of moral endeavour through an emphasis on continuous process. Among other things, this involves moving away from the idea of ‘rest’ as the sought-for end state of moral activity. This will seem appealing to those who think, with many critics of (one interpretation of ) Aristotelian magnanimity, that an element of restlessness or discontent forms a necessary part of the most admirable moral sensibility. If we are attracted to this picture, it may become more liveable—and less likely to leave us deflated rather than elevated—with a revised understanding of where in this process value is realized. Rather than representing it as the content of a future end state which we may or may not reach (and from which aspiration may derive a backdated instrumental value), we may be better served by learning to see it as realized in the process of striving, and attaching to aspiration itself as a state embodying a recognition of value that is already a kind of possession. ‘What we hope to be’, as Linda Zagzebski aptly notes, is after all ‘in a real sense an aspect of what we are’.³⁶ There is clearly a moral difference between wanting to be virtuous and being virtuous, a fortiori greatly virtuous. Yet it is also possible that this difference can be inscribed too deeply. Greatness of spirit is a virtue that brings these intuitions to the fore and invites us to clarify them.

³⁵ William James, Pragmatism and Other Writings (London: Penguin, 2000), 260. ³⁶ Linda Zagzebski, ‘The moral significance of admiration’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 89 (2015), 219.

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The link between the rejection of open-ended aspiration and a legalistic conception of ‘ought implies can’ I just suggested might be disputed. Russell, notably, does not see the claims of the maximal ideal as being entirely liquidated upon the agent’s recognition of her inability to realize this ideal. Her limitation remains present in awareness as a limitation, though presumably free from any tragic tint (otherwise the problem of demoralization would have remained unsolved). Yet the balance between abandoning pursuit and abandoning the sense of significance—between ceasing to pursue a value and ceasing to register it as a value—is a fragile one. The question how forcefully the acceptance of limitations can be validated would then depend on how strongly we are convinced that this balance can indeed be struck without abandoning the second term altogether. But there is another point to be made here which concerns the notion of ‘possibility’ deployed in framing this stance of acceptance. ‘Where improving is not possible, or the striving not reasonable,’ Russell writes, ‘“the virtuous person” reveals what limitations one must learn to accept.’³⁷ The decision to cap the sense of aspiration, on the part of a given individual, depends on his ability to arrive at some such conclusion: in my case, no further improvement is possible. Yet what kind of judgement is this? A factual one? How does one discover that fact? How do I know that this is all the kindness possible to me, that this is as courageous or honest as I can ever hope to get? The difficulty here is that to treat this possibility as a matter of empirical fact involves what Kant might have described as exchanging a practical perspective on ourselves for a theoretical one, ceasing to view ourselves as practical agents and viewing ourselves as natural phenomena subject to laws that we cannot control. It’s not simply that we should not do so. It’s also that it is doubtful whether, at some level, even if we want to, we can. We are beings, as Kant put it, who ‘cannot act otherwise than under the idea of [our] own freedom’. As MoodyAdams restates the point, we ‘cannot act—or even conceive of ourselves as agents and persons—except when we believe that our characters do not contain our destinies’ and are open to change.³⁸ A genuine acceptance of one’s limitations, this suggests, is not only not admirable, but also not entirely possible. This, of course, might seem to open the door to a more open-ended notion of aspiration only to close it again

³⁷ Russell, Practical Intelligence and the Virtues, 128. ³⁸ Michele Moody-Adams, ‘On the old saw that character is destiny’, in Identity, Character and Morality, ed. Owen Flanagan and Amélie O. Rorty (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1991), 130; Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 54 (4: 449).

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from a different direction. Because if the belief that change is possible is inescapable for us, the ability to hope for such change would hardly constitute an achievement—an achievement we might describe as excellent or virtuous. Worries about the danger of despair and demoralization would also be ipso facto unfounded. But it is not without reason that one of the major themes of twentieth-century philosophy, from Wittgenstein to Sartre and beyond, has been an effort to come to grips with the ways in which we are constitutionally prone to cede this practical perspective to an objectifying theoretical regard.³⁹ If we follow such philosophers in acknowledging this tendency, the belief in the possibility of transformation will retain its status as an achievement for us. The great-spirited person will be the one who pushes this belief and aspiration even further than most. What about the question of self-concern? The issues are large, and all I can do is offer a number of observations. It is worth remembering, for one, that moral philosophers have not always taken such a purist view of the role of this type of concern within moral motivation, whether in its formative or in its perfected stage. Aristotle’s ideal of greatness of soul is the strongest witness to this, as already mentioned, and he has been emulated by a number of more recent thinkers intent on purging moral philosophy from the demands for self-effacement which they identify as a relic of its theological past. Hume is the clearest example, with his reinstatement of legitimate pride and his claim that pride forms not only the legitimate harvest of virtue, but also its best motivator. A certain level of self-awareness—a certain ‘habit of surveying ourselves . . . in reflection’—begets a sense of ‘reverence’ for ourselves which is the ‘surest guardian of every virtue’.⁴⁰ This ethical positioning, of course, remains contested. And even those who might accept the utility of such habits of mind in the stage of moral formation would be inclined to reject their appropriateness once this stage has been left behind. Yet, on the one hand, if we agree that virtue has an inherently progressive character, this stage—and the moral habits that sustain it—will never be entirely transcended. In many ethical and religious traditions, this insight finds tangible embodiment in a range of practices that make self-examination a regular focus of moral energy and openly foster a form of self-concern as a valued habit of mind. I think of the ³⁹ Richard Moran’s Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001) is a helpful companion for thinking about this tendency. ⁴⁰ David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, rev. P. H. Nidditch, 3rd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 276.

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ancient spiritual exercises documented by Pierre Hadot and others and their Christian sequels, and of practices of self-examination in the Islamic world, particularly within the Sufi tradition. Such practices are interesting not only for the way they inscribe self-concern into the everyday grit of the moral life, but also because they point to the possibility of drawing more nuanced distinctions between different modulations of this concern. If we think of self-concern in the way some of these practices encourage—as a kind of care, care as of something entrusted—we might find ourselves less monolithically opposed to the appearance of the self within the structure of moral motivation. If this suggests one way of nuancing the concept of self-concern, closer reflection on the aesthetic character of moral aspiration, to which I linked such self-concern above, might suggest others. One may glimpse some of the possibilities by looking beyond the Arabic tradition to other philosophical works where the appeal to aesthetic concepts forms a central element. An interesting case study here is Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, rife as it is with such concepts. Among the many junctures where these concepts make an appearance, an especially instructive one is in the context of Smith’s remarks about the different standards we use in assessing our own character. There are two such standards, one an idea of ‘exact propriety and perfection’ and another the common instantiation of this idea or ideal. The best kind of person measures himself against the former, not the latter. This is an ideal that Smith characterizes in aesthetic terms on at least two levels, with regard to the way it is produced, and with regard to the way it is experienced. We create it like artists, ‘drawing’ it with varying degrees of accuracy based on our experience, ‘colouring’ it more or less justly, and constantly refining it and trying to form a more correct ‘image’ of it. Confronted with this image, the best kind of person experiences a powerful aesthetic response, finding himself ‘deeply enamoured of its exquisite and divine beauty’.⁴¹ The Platonic echoes of this notion will be obvious. What will also be interesting, given the anti-theological sentiment governing the work of Hume and his successors—a sentiment in sharp contrast with the one that runs through many Arabic philosophical texts and that underpins many of their ethical tendencies, including their idealistic orientation—is the idealistic view in which it results. The virtuous person who perceives this ideal ‘endeavours as well as he can, to assimilate his own character to this ⁴¹ Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Ryan P. Hanley (London: Penguin, 2009), 291–2.

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archetype of perfection’, even as he recognizes he must always fall short. As a result, he is deeply imbued with a sense of modesty.⁴² The virtuous person’s moral experience, on this account, is enmeshed with images—his moral standard parsed as the grasp of an image, and his moral aspiration grounded in a comparison of that image with the image of his own character—in ways that involve an important self-referential dimension. The virtuous person looks at the image of perfection, and looks at his own, as in a mirror. Like the great-spirited person of the Arabic tradition, his perception of beauty translates into a desire to possess it as his own, a desire to be beautiful himself, and indeed to be as great as the ideal he surveys. But in looking at his own image, he is constantly referring it to something that surpasses it. And he knows that any beauty he succeeds in assimilating is only his ‘own’ in a derivative sense, and he is merely participating in a greatness that does not properly belong to him, as a copy relates to the original. This kind of perspective does not lie many leagues removed from the Arabic tradition, where the understanding of the moral life as an effort to assimilate a beauty only derivative to human beings—belonging properly to God—achieved prominent expression.⁴³ More could be said about this perspective, and about how well it exonerates the self-concern implicit in the aesthetic model of the moral life. My skeletal defence of the value of open-ended aspiration could also take further development. Could one sign up to the moral project of an incessant striving for ever-greater excellence, it might for example be asked, without ever counting the cost? Is there no point at which the next increment of moral improvement comes at a price too high to pay, for example in requiring the sacrifice of important nonmoral goods or developmental possibilities? Or again: does such a project allow room for legitimate self-satisfaction—for an enjoyment of ‘who one is’, which, as John Kekes argues, is a central part of what gives life its salt?⁴⁴ And can its fundamental attitude be reconciled with a number of other valuable attitudes through which we may relate to our character, such as a sense of gratitude for our comparative strengths, and for the circumstances which spared us from the moral challenges faced by others less fortunate with their ⁴² Ibid., 292. ⁴³ This conception came into view at several junctures of the foregoing discussion, for example in reference to Miskawayh, al-Ghazālī, and al-Rāghib. The notion of imitating God was a topos among philosophical writers from Abū Bakr al-Rāzī onwards. ⁴⁴ John Kekes, Enjoyment: The Moral Significance of Styles of Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008). I’m grateful to Dan Russell for driving these kinds of questions home.

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genetics or upbringing? Above all, a deeper engagement with this virtue would require a more careful negotiation of the complex truth mentioned earlier about the elevating yet also potentially deflating effects of taking greatness as one’s moral compass. My outline of a proposal—which upholds the value of great aspiration partly by rolling up the distance being aspiring and possessing—is certainly not free from tensions. In this context, I have not sought to settle all questions invited by this ideal; my aim has been more modest. Focusing on the articulation of greatness of spirit among philosophical writers in the Arabic tradition, I asked what it would mean to go beyond the historiographer’s descriptive concern and take this virtue seriously as an ethical ideal. Answering this question, I suggested, requires confronting a more basic one: just what kind of virtue is this? I explored two construals of the virtue, one as a meta-virtue, another as a first-order virtue whose closest cousin is an Aristotelian trait recently rearticulated as the virtue of emulousness. It is the latter construal that enables us to pick out the distinctive values incorporated by the virtue and those of its substantive commitments which would make it a non-trivial and debatable entrant in our vision of the best kind of human character. These commitments include the emphasis on open-ended aspiration and the self-referential elements built into moral motivation. Having isolated the features that might provoke controversy, I tried to outline some of the ways in which they could be defended, and some of the most important intuitions which the virtue of greatness of spirit helps mobilize and articulate. Although my defence has been limited, it will be enough for my purposes if I have suggested that this ideal opens a reflective space worth exploring, and if I have indicated some of the gains we stand to make by engaging these kinds of historical texts in a philosophical conversation. It might here be asked: suppose we grant the utility of engaging with the evaluative viewpoint expressed by this particular ideal, and suppose that, after a process of debate and reflection, we were to see its merits and decide to endorse it as our own. Just how far could we push the idea of ‘learning’ from historical texts? We might conceivably appropriate a reflective understanding of what matters. But could we appropriate the language in which this understanding was expressed by thinkers of another place and time— including ones not already organically connected to our present through a longer history of cultural and intellectual influence? Can we envisage the possibility that ‘greatness of spirit’ might become a living part of our moral vocabulary? And does anything hinge on it?

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The distinction between acknowledging the scope and concerns of a virtue and being able to give that virtue a place in ordinary language is at least as old as Aristotle’s nameless virtues in the Nicomachean Ethics. Looking at other philosophical attempts to engage with historical texts on the virtues, the instruction they derive from them would seem to relate to the former level. Aristotle’s discussion of greatness of soul is a good example: its few defenders have sought to exonerate its contentious validation of the reflexive attitudes of the morally worthy without generally translating this into a claim about the necessity of recovering the specific term in which this validation was originally expressed. Ordinary language is in some respects more recalcitrant to revision than evaluative views. Yet it is doubtful that the two dimensions can be entirely decoupled. Even if we accept the philosophical distinction mentioned earlier between lower and higher levels of first-person reason-giving, an ideal of character that has no purchase in ordinary language would seem to be an ideal with a weaker hold on our moral life. Could we, for example, motivate others or ourselves to cultivate an ability to feel for others in their suffering if we couldn’t praise people who showed such an ability as ‘kind’ or ‘compassionate’? And however things may stand with greatness of soul, several philosophical projects on the virtues (including ones grounded in a historical listening exercise) can be seen proposing not merely values, but a not-so-ordinary language for them. Perhaps changing the way we speak is not impossible once we have changed the way we think.⁴⁵ These are challenging questions. Yet if we wish to imagine what it would be like to have not just the concerns of this particular virtue but its language, a very first step would be to lean in even more closely to the historical texts that carried it to observe its ordinary life. This book will have served its purpose if it has conveyed some of the excitements this may hold in store, not just for specialists of Islamic historical scholarship but also for those with a more vital philosophical interest in the virtues and their tradition. If being invested in the virtues means being invested in a tradition of thinking about the virtues, the effort to engage its past contributors in conversation will be no small way of extending that tradition forward.

⁴⁵ Kristjánsson’s bid to introduce ‘emulous’ and ‘emulative’ into our vocabulary is one such example; his bid to instate ‘pridefulness’ as a praiseworthy trait—a trait that can be seen, importantly, as a modern-day heir of Aristotle’s megalopsychia—is another. See his Justifying Emotions: Pride and Jealousy (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), chs 3 and 4, esp. 3.3.

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Index Abū Qurra, Theodore 101–3, 120 Achilles 14–15, 128 Adamson, Peter 3 admiration 140–1, 144, 148 al-ʿĀmirī, Abuʾl-Hasan 52 _ ancient philosophy Arabic reception 2–3 influence on Arabic treatments of greatness of spirit (himma) 100–3 source-texts for Arabic treatments of greatness of soul (nafs) 17–18 Annas, Julia 142–3 al-Ansārī al-Harawī, ʿAbd Allāh 81 _ 9–10, 19–20, 44–5, 80 Aquinas Aristotle 1–4, 8–10, 23–6, 28, 36–7, 44–6, 63–4, 93, 128–9, 155 account of greatness of soul 13–15, 71–4, 139 Arkoun, Mohammed 60 Ashʿarites 33–4, 56 al-ʿAttābī 109–10 __ 19, 36 Augustine Averroes 3 Avicenna 3, 46, 74–6 beauty 30–2, 43–4 moral motivation as a desire for 31–4, 144–5, 152–4 Bonebakker, S. A. 118–19 Bravmann, M. M. 115–17, 126–8 Cicero 15–16, 73–4, 93 conceit (ʿujb) 28–9, 88–9, 94–5 al-Ghazālī on 42–5 conclusion of life (khātima) 44, 47–8 courage 8, 22–3, 25, 69, 115–17 Crone, Patricia 85, 97–9 Dante 19–20 Dawānī, Jalāl al-Dīn 58 Dawood, Abdel Hakim 103–5, 108–9

desert (istihqāq) 33–4, 56 _ 30, 32–4, 46, 69–70, 74, 77n.31, dignity 27–8, 124–6 emulation 139–42 Epictetus 79–80 al-Fārābī, Abū Nasr 5, 21–2, 46, 66–7, 85–6, _ 100, 120 Fouchécour, Charles-Henri de 104–5, 107–8 Gauthier, René Antoine 16–17 al-Ghazālī, Abū Hāmid 2–3, 76–8, 86, 97–8, _ 124–5 attitude to philosophical ethics 53–4 autobiography 35, 53–4 character of his ethical works 57–62 concept of virtue 47–50 on greatness of soul (kibar al-nafs) 24–7, 52–3 on honour and self-esteem 30–47, 49 reasons for obscuring conflictual status of greatness of soul 53–62 as a representative of ‘Islamic religious morality’ 94–7 Gibb, Hamilton A. R. 113–14, 121–2 Gillespie, Michael Allen 124 gratitude 43–4, 56 greatness of soul Arabic translation 50–3 Aristotle on 13–15, 71–4, 139 Christian reception 19–20, 48 criticisms of Aristotelian account 3–4, 18–19, 128–9, 145–6 cross-cultural identification 7–12 cultural contingency 8–9, 18–19 in al-Ghazālī’s ethics 24–7, 53–62 and the Icelandic sagas 10–11 as a meta-virtue 137–8 Miskawayh on 22–7 Plato on 14, 21–2 Stoic view of 15–16

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greatness of spirit (ʿizam/kibar/buʿd/ʿuluww _ al-himma) Avicenna on 74 comparison with ancient virtue 71–4, 91–3 and concept of self-worth 72, 78, 89–91, 94–5, 110, 112 contemporary relevance 131–55 and emulation 139–42 influence of Greek philosophical texts on 100–3 influence of Persian culture on 103–8 linguistic term 80–1 Miskawayh on 23, 29–30, 65–6, 75 and moral aspiration 65–8, 70–1, 74–5, 77–9, 88–90, 119–20, 142–4, 146–51 pre-Islamic Arab roots 114–18, 126–9 al-Rāghib al-Isfahānī on 75–81 _ as a religious virtue 77–9, 81–3, 95, 109–10 as a second-order virtue 134–9 special connection to ruling classes 68–70, 85–97, 104–6, 111–12 treatment in adab works 108–18 and the varieties of Islamic ethics 94–7 Yahyā ibn ʿAdī on 66–74 _ Hadot, Pierre 151–2 al-Hajjāj 110 _ al-Ṭ āʾī 116 Hātim _ Heck, Paul 122–3 Herdt, Jennifer 3–4, 19–20 honour 110, 115–16 al-Ghazālī on 34–42 in mirrors for princes 91–2, 95–8 Miskawayh on 28 hope 72–3, 80, 102–3 Hourani, George 58, 97–8 human nature lordly (rabbānī) aspect of 37–40 Hume, David 20, 151 humility 3–4, 9–10, 20–2, 27–8, 40, 62–3, 94–5 al-Ghazālī on 32–3, 45–7 Hursthouse, Rosalind 136–7 Ibn ʿAbd Rabbihi, Ahmad 112 _ Ibn Hamdūn, Muhammad 112, 121 _ _ Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, ʿAbdallāh 105–8, 114

Ibn Paqūda, Bahya 62–3 _ Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, Muhammad 81–2, _ 124–6 Ibn Qutayba, ʿAbd Allāh 2, 127–8 on the concept of himma 108–18 on the excellence of the Arabs 117–18, 122–4 Ibn al-Ṭ ayyib, Abuʾl-Faraj ʿAbdallāh 101–3, 120 Icelandic sagas 10–11 Ikhwān al-Safāʾ 120 imitation of_ God 31–2, 41–3, 47–8, 48n.88, 77, 79–80, 95 greatness of spirit and the 75 Islamic ethics relation to pre-Islamic Arab ideals 114–19, 121–8 and the virtues of greatness 94–8, 123–4 James, William 149 Kant, Immanuel 147–8, 150 Kekes, John 153–4 kibar al-nafs. See greatness of soul Al-Kindī, Abū Yūsuf 86 kings greatness of spirit as a virtue of 68–70, 87–92, 104–6, 111–12 Kristjánsson, Kristján 10–11, 139–42, 148 Kukkonen, Taneli 61–2 Lambton, Ann 85 Lane, E. W. 108–9 Leaman, Oliver 57–8 Lecomte, Gérard 108–9 Lovejoy, Arthur 10 MacIntyre, Alasdair 8–9 Madelung, Wilferd 76 magnanimity. See greatness of soul Maimonides 62–3 al-Makkī, Abū Ṭ ālib 41–2 manliness (murūʾa) 88–9 Marenbon, John 19–20, 57 Marlow, Louise 95 al-Māwardī, Abuʾl-Hasan 86–97 _ McGinn, Colin 145 megalopsychia. See greatness of soul Miller, Christian 147

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mirrors for princes 112–14 greatness of spirit (ʿizam/ʿuluww/buʿd alhimma) in 85–97_

Rowson, Everett 123 Russell, Daniel 8, 135–6, 142–3, 150

Persian influence on 103–8 Arab perspectives 108–9 and the varieties of Islamic ethics 94–8 Miskawayh, Abū ʿAlī 5, 57–8, 69, 75–6, 132–3 character of his ethical works 57–62 on honour and self-esteem 27–30 on greatness of soul (kibar al-nafs) 22–7 on greatness of spirit (ʿizam/kibar al_ himma) 23, 29–30, 65–6, 75 Moody-Adams, Michelle 150 moral exemplars 148 Mukhallad ibn Yazīd ibn al-Muhallab 110–11 al-Muqaddam, Muhammad Ismāʿīl 130 _ ayyib 121 Al-Mutanabbī, Abuʾl-Ṭ Muʿtazilites 33–4

Seabright, Paul 145–6 Schillinger, James 54–5 self-abasement (takhāsus, madhalla) 21–2, 46 self-respect 30 self-restraint (ḥilm) 68–9, 117, 119n.134 Seneca 16, 27–8, 71–4 Sherif, Mohamed Ahmed 53n.104 Sherman, Nancy 128–9 Shuʿūbiyya 117, 122 Slote, Michael 136 smallness of soul 25, 52, 101–2 Smith, Adam 20, 152–3 Socrates 14–15, 128 speculative theology (kalām) 59–60 Stoics 1, 9–10, 15–16, 19–20, 22–3, 71–4, 79–80, 91–2 Swanton, Christine 136, 143n.23, 145–6

nobility of soul (sharaf al-nafs) 88–9, 124–5 noble-mindedness (shahāma) 32n.46 Nussbaum, Martha 8, 18–19, 136, 145–6 Pakaluk, Michael 73n.21, 137–8 Pascal, Blaise 42–3 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni 125–6 Plato 1, 14, 21–2, 71–4, 79–80, 100 Porphyry 17–18 practical wisdom (phronesis) 137–8 prayer 56 pride (kibr) 33n.50, 41–2, 89–90, 92–3, 110, 151 treatment in different ethical genres 93–7 al-Ghazālī on 41–7, 52–3 Pseudo-Ghazālī 86–97 Pseudo-Māwardī 86–97 Rabinowitz, Dani 62–3 al-Rāghib al-Isfahānī 24–5, 87n.49, 89–90, _ 112–13, 127–8 on greatness of spirit (kibar alhimma) 75–81

Treiger, Alexander 2n.3 trust in God (tawakkul) 56 al-Ṭ ūsī, Nasīr al-Dīn 32–3, 58–60 _ Ullmann, Manfred 50–1 ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz 109–10 vicegerency (khilāfa) 77–8 virtues of greatness 7–12 relation to ‘Islamic religious morality’ 84–5, 94–7, 123–4 Walzer, Richard 113–14, 121–2 Weiss, Raymond 62–3 Williams, Bernard 136–7 Witherspoon, John 20 Yahyā ibn ʿAdī 32–3, 85–6, 104–5, 118–19, _ 132–4 on greatness of spirit (ʿizam al_ himma) 66–74 Zagzebski, Linda 149