Sh. Muhyiddin Ibn al-ʿArabī

10a Knowledge From the Outside: naqlī / ʿaqlī, Intellectual

In discussions of epistemology, Muslim scholars often called knowledge from the outside naqlī, ‘transmitted.’ Those who gain a firm grounding in this sort of knowledge are then called the ʿulamāʾ, the knowers or scholars.

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In contrast, knowledge that is discovered inside the heart was called ʿaqlī, ‘intellectual.’

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Those who found intellectual knowledge were commonly called ʿurafāʾ, ‘recognizers’ – or, as translators usually render the term, ‘gnostics.’ The word recognizer was probably used for great Sufi  teachers more often than the word Sufi itself, which suggests that Sufism was considered the pre-eminent path for achieving unmediated knowledge of things as they truly are.