Can Evil Be Real? A Philosopher Who Lost Everything for His Ideas

Imagine you’re a teenager in the 1100s, and you’re already famous as a judge. You’ve studied math with one of the greatest poets of your time, you’ve mastered philosophy and law, and people come to you for guidance. Then something strange happens: you start to feel that everything you’ve learned isn’t enough. You have a crisis of certainty—a feeling that the world is not what it seems, and that the usual ways of thinking can’t reach what’s really true.

This is what happened to a young man named ʿAyn al-Quḍāt (pronounced “Ayn al-Kuddat”), born in the Persian city of Hamadan in 1097. He would go on to write books that changed how people thought about God, the self, and the nature of reality. And he would be executed for it at age 33.

His story raises questions that philosophers still argue about today. What counts as real knowledge? Is evil actually real, or just an illusion? And if God is all-powerful and all-good, why does suffering exist?

The Limits of Reason

Most of us think of knowledge as something you get through thinking. You learn definitions, you follow logical arguments, you build up ideas step by step. ʿAyn al-Quḍāt called this ʿilm—ordinary knowledge. It’s how we learn math, science, and history. It works fine for everyday life.

But he thought there was another kind of knowing, which he called maʿrifa—recognition. This isn’t about collecting facts. It’s about realizing something that was already there inside you, like suddenly remembering a dream you’d forgotten. It’s the difference between reading about what honey tastes like and actually tasting it.

He used the word “tasting” on purpose. For him, real knowledge of God and the self isn’t something you can get just by reasoning. Reason is like a scale—it’s good for weighing things, but you can’t weigh everything with it. Some things, he said, are “beyond reason.” That doesn’t mean they’re irrational or stupid. It means they’re more like direct experience. You can’t argue someone into feeling the warmth of the sun. They have to step outside.

This is where the heart comes in. Not the physical heart that pumps blood, but what ʿAyn al-Quḍāt called the “eye of the heart”—a kind of inner perception that sees reality directly, without the usual subject/object split. When you see with your ordinary eyes, there’s you and there’s the thing you see. But in this deeper knowing, the division dissolves. The knower and the known become one.

Here’s a story he used to explain the difference. In the Quran, the prophet Moses meets a mysterious figure named Khidr. Khidr does things that seem terrible: he kills a young boy, he sinks a boat. Moses is horrified and says so. But later, Khidr explains that the boy would have grown up to cause enormous suffering, and the boat would have been seized by a tyrant if it had stayed afloat. What looked like evil from the outside was actually good when you saw the whole picture.

The point isn’t that we should all go around sinking boats. The point is that our ordinary reasoning—our common sense, our immediate judgments—might not be the final word on what’s really real or good.

Is Evil Just a Shadow?

This leads to one of ʿAyn al-Quḍāt’s most controversial ideas. He argued that evil, strictly speaking, doesn’t really exist. That sounds crazy, right? Wars exist. Disease exists. People starve, people betray each other, people die. How could anyone say evil isn’t real?

Here’s how he thought about it. Imagine a parent taking their child to get a shot at the doctor’s office. The child cries and screams and says the parent is being mean. The parent knows that the shot is actually good for the child—it prevents disease, it keeps them healthy. The pain is real, but calling the shot “evil” would be a mistake. It only seems evil from the child’s limited perspective.

For ʿAyn al-Quḍāt, the entire universe is like that. Everything that happens, including suffering, is ultimately good when seen from God’s perspective. Evil, he said, is “relational”—it exists in relation to our limited viewpoint, but not as a real thing in itself. It’s like the relationship between a father and son: the relationship is real in one way (you can talk about it, it affects how people act), but it doesn’t exist as a separate thing. You can’t point to “fatherhood” sitting on a table.

This is a hard idea to accept. It’s easy to say that some things just are evil—that genocide is evil, that torture is evil, that a child dying of cancer is evil. Calling these things “relational” can feel like you’re making excuses or downplaying suffering. ʿAyn al-Quḍāt knew this. He said the truth about evil being unreal is “far-fetched for human understanding.” He wasn’t saying suffering doesn’t hurt. He was saying that from the biggest possible view—from the perspective of ultimate reality—there’s nothing out of place.

Think of it this way. Have you ever been really upset about something that later turned out to be a good thing? Maybe you didn’t get invited to a party, and you felt crushed, but later you found out something bad happened at that party and you were lucky to miss it. Or maybe you failed a test, and it forced you to study harder, and you ended up learning the material better than you would have otherwise. ʿAyn al-Quḍāt’s view is that the entire universe works like that—except we’re always in the limited perspective, and we can’t see the whole picture.

The One and the Many

This connects to another strange idea. If God is one, how can there be many things? How can there be you and me and trees and stars and pain and joy and everything else? If God is all that’s truly real, then what are we?

ʿAyn al-Quḍāt’s answer was radical. He said there’s really only one existence, and that existence is God. Everything else—including you and me—doesn’t truly exist on its own. We exist the way a reflection in a mirror exists. The reflection looks real, but if you turn away from the mirror, it’s gone. It has no independent reality.

This doesn’t mean you’re not real at all. You’re real the way a wave is real—but the wave isn’t separate from the ocean. The wave is ocean, just moving in a particular way. Similarly, everything that exists is God’s existence, just manifesting in different forms.

You can see why this got him in trouble. Religious authorities accused him of claiming to be God—which he denied. He said he was just saying that nothing exists independently of God. But try explaining that to people who already think you’re a heretic.

The Lover Who Lost Everything

This might all sound very abstract. But for ʿAyn al-Quḍāt, it wasn’t abstract at all. It was about love.

He wrote constantly about love—the kind of love that burns away the self, that makes you lose yourself completely. He told the story of Satan (or Iblis, in the Islamic tradition) as an example of perfect love. In the Quran, God commands the angels to bow to Adam, the first human. Satan refuses. He says he was made of fire and Adam was made of clay—how could he bow to something inferior?

But ʿAyn al-Quḍāt read this story differently. He said Satan refused not out of pride, but out of love. Satan could only bow to God. Nothing else would do. Even though God punished him for it, even though he was cast out of heaven, Satan chose separation from God over bowing to anyone else. His love was so pure that he’d rather be damned.

This is the key to understanding the “stage beyond reason.” When you truly love something, you don’t calculate. You don’t weigh pros and cons. You don’t ask “is this reasonable?” The lover and the beloved become one thing. The moth flies into the candle flame not because it’s smart, but because it can’t help itself—the fire is all it sees.

For ʿAyn al-Quḍāt, this is the highest form of knowing and being. It’s not about having correct beliefs. It’s about being consumed by what you love, to the point where “you” disappear. He wrote that “the madness of love is better worth than the cleverness of the entire world.”

Why He Died

In 1128, a legal decree was issued calling for ʿAyn al-Quḍāt’s execution. The official charge was heresy—claims about his theological views, including that he claimed divinity. But he argued in his prison writings that the real reason was different. He had been speaking out against the government’s corruption. He criticized how the wealthy treated the poor. He made powerful enemies.

His execution was public. He was killed in his hometown of Hamadan on May 6 or 7, 1131. He was thirty-three years old.

What’s striking is that his ideas didn’t die with him. His books were studied for centuries afterward. Philosophers and mystics in Persia, India, and the Ottoman Empire read his work. His ideas influenced thinkers as famous as the poet Rumi and the philosopher Mulla Sadra. Today, scholars around the world study his writings.

What’s Still Open

So where does this leave us? ʿAyn al-Quḍāt’s ideas raise questions that are still alive:

If evil is just an illusion from a limited perspective, does that mean we shouldn’t try to stop suffering? Most people would say no—the fact that something is “ultimately” good doesn’t mean we should sit back and do nothing. But then, how do we decide what to fight against?

If reason has limits, how do we know when we’ve reached them? How can you know something is “beyond reason” without using reason to figure that out? Isn’t that a paradox?

If the self is an illusion—if “you” are really just God’s existence appearing in a particular form—then who is it that’s trying to achieve enlightenment or salvation? Who’s doing the work?

And finally: Was ʿAyn al-Quḍāt right? Or was he just saying comforting things to make suffering bearable? How would we even tell the difference?

These aren’t questions with easy answers. That’s what makes them worth thinking about.

Key Terms

Term	What It Does in This Debate
ʿilm	Ordinary knowledge gained through reasoning and the senses
maʿrifa	Direct recognition or “tasting” of truth, beyond ordinary reasoning
Stage beyond reason	The level of knowing that can’t be reached by logic alone, accessed through spiritual practice and love
Relational evil	Evil that exists only from a limited human perspective, not as a real thing in itself
Heart	The inner center of consciousness where direct knowledge of God is possible
Oneness of being	The idea that only one thing truly exists (God), and everything else exists only through that one existence

Key People

ʿAyn al-Quḍāt (1097–1131): A Persian philosopher, judge, and Sufi master who argued that evil isn’t ultimately real and that true knowledge comes through love. He was executed for his ideas.
Avicenna (Ibn Sina) (980–1037): An earlier philosopher whose ideas about knowledge and existence ʿAyn al-Quḍāt both used and critiqued.
Al-Ghazālī (1058–1111): A famous theologian whose writings helped ʿAyn al-Quḍāt through his crisis of certainty, and who introduced the idea of a “stage beyond reason.”
Aḥmad Ghazālī (d. 1126): Al-Ghazālī’s younger brother and a major Sufi teacher who became ʿAyn al-Quḍāt’s spiritual guide.

Things to Think About

If you could know something directly without needing reasons or evidence, what would that be like? How would you know you weren’t just fooling yourself?
ʿAyn al-Quḍāt said evil is ultimately unreal. But if you were the child getting the shot, would that explanation make the pain any less real? Does the fact that something is “good from God’s perspective” change how we should act?
The “stage beyond reason” sounds a lot like what some people call mystical experience. Do you think there are truths that can only be known through experience, not through argument? If so, how would you convince someone else that those truths are real?
ʿAyn al-Quḍāt’s love for God was so intense that he admired Satan for refusing to bow to anyone else. But what happens when love makes you do things that hurt other people? Is all love good, or only some kinds?

Where This Shows Up

Debates about suffering: When bad things happen, people often ask “why?” ʿAyn al-Quḍāt’s view is one way of answering that question—by saying the whole picture is too big for us to see.
Science and mysticism: Some scientists and philosophers today argue that reality is stranger than our ordinary thinking can grasp (quantum mechanics, for example). There’s a constant tension between trusting reason and trusting direct experience.
Arguments about God and evil: The question of why a good God would allow suffering is one of the oldest in philosophy. ʿAyn al-Quḍāt gave one kind of answer. Many people reject it. The debate continues.
Self-help and spirituality: The idea that the self is an illusion and that true peace comes from losing yourself shows up in many traditions—Buddhism, some forms of Christianity, modern meditation practices. You don’t have to be a medieval Persian philosopher to wrestle with it.