Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge & Truth — Page 31
h. ISLAMIC SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT matching the intricacies of the. Sufi's ethereal logic. At this point, the king was struck with a brilliant idea and ordered the warden of the elephants' house to have the most ferocious of his elephants brought to the palace grounds. . This particular elephant happened to be stricken with a madness no less than that of the Sufi. The only difference perhaps was that in the Sufi's mind the outer reality did not exist. But the elephant wanted to destroy all outward reality himself. From the one end the Sufi was pushed into the open and from the other the elephant was let loose. The. Sufi without losing his breath, ran for his life forthwith. . Observing this, the king shouted from the balcony of his palace, 'Don't run away O Sufi, from this phantom elephant. He is only a figment of your imagination!" 'Who is running away?' shouted back the Sufi. 'It is only a figment of your imagination. '. Thus ended the predicament of the Sufi but not the debate itself. It still rages on. . The Spanish School of Islamic Thought. We have already discussed the controversy regarding the superiority of revealed truth, vis-àvis observational truth. Some thinkers give preference to revelation over logic, and some others do the vice versa. . Ibne Rushd (known in the West as Averroes), one of the greatest Muslim thinkers of all-time, proposed the idea that the above views express parallel realities and should be treated separately. Revealed truth should be accepted as such and the knowledge gained from observation and experiment should be accepted for what it is. For him, it was not necessary to seek a correlation between the two, 31