A closer look
If you think modern string theory is complicated, try navigating an eleventh-century universe built out of ten nesting intellects. To solve the problem of how a completely unified, unknowable God could create a messy, fragmented universe, the Fatimid thinker Hamid al-Din al-Kirmani mapped out an esoteric cosmology. He proposed a cascading waterfall of creation where God emanates the 'First Intellect,' which then thinks about itself and generates the 'Second Intellect,' all the way down to a tenth. Our entire physical reality is just the heavy, sluggish afterthought of that very last, lowest cosmic mind.
