Mulla Sadra

• 1. Introduction

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  Mulla Sadra moved through three successive Safavid capitals before he ever wrote the work that would define him. Born around 1571 or 1572 in Shiraz, he went to Qazvin in 1591, then to Isfahan in 1597, chasing teachers who could feed an appetite for philosophy that no court tutor had been able to satisfy. He was the only child of a wealthy provincial ruler, and he could have governed Fars after his father. Instead he chose contemplation, exile, and a school of thought he named the Transcendent Theosophy. According to Oliver Leaman, he is arguably the single most important and influential philosopher in the Muslim world in the last four hundred years. Yet his own contemporaries condemned and excommunicated him. How did a child of court officials become a hermit in a village near Qom? What did he believe that was unorthodox enough to provoke the Shi'i ulama? And what was the single question, one that had haunted Islamic philosophy for almost a thousand years, that he claimed to have finally answered?

• 2. A Prince Who Chose Philosophy

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  Khwajah Ibrahim Qavami ruled the vast region of Fars province, granted independence by Safavid kings, and he was rich and held a high position. His only child was named Muhammad at birth but called Sadra, and the family raised him as aristocrats did, with private teachers inside their own palace. The boy was described as intelligent, strict, energetic, studious, and curious. He mastered Persian and Arabic literature and the art of calligraphy in a very short time. Before the age of puberty he had also learned horse riding, hunting, and fighting techniques, alongside mathematics, astronomy, some medicine, jurisprudence, and Islamic law. None of it held him the way philosophy did, and mystical philosophy and gnosis most of all. The nickname that stuck, Mulla, meant great scientist. The path of court politics that his father had walked was open to him, and he turned away from it toward the seminaries of the Twelver Shi'ite capitals.

• 3. The Masters Of Isfahan

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  Mir Damad was the teacher Mulla Sadra always introduced as his true teacher and spiritual guide. In Qazvin, Sadra studied under two prominent figures, Mir Damad and Baha' ad-Din al-'Amili, and he followed them when the Safavid capital moved from Qazvin to Isfahan in 1596 CE, 1006 AH. Shaykh Baha'i, the name by which al-'Amili was known, ranged across astronomy, theoretical mathematics, engineering, architecture, medicine, and some fields of secret knowledge. Mir Damad kept to a narrower domain of jurisprudence, hadith, and mainly philosophy, but he commanded both the Peripatetic, or Aristotelian, school and the Illuminationist school. From Damad, Sadra drew most of his knowledge of philosophy and gnosis. The two men anchored what would later be called the School of Isfahan, a lineage Sadra's own students would carry forward.

• 4. Exile At Kahak

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  After finishing his studies, Mulla Sadra began to explore unorthodox doctrines, and some Shi'i ulama responded by condemning and excommunicating him. He withdrew for a lengthy period to a village named Kahak, near Qom, and gave himself over to contemplative exercises. The retreat was not idle. While at Kahak he wrote a number of minor works, among them the Risala fi 'l-hashr and the Risala fi huduth al-'alam. The seclusion ended in 1612, when Ali Quli Khan, son of Allahwirdi Khan and the powerful governor of Fars, asked him to leave his exile and return to Shiraz. The summons came with a purpose: a newly built madrasa, the Khan School, needed someone to teach and run it. Sadra accepted, and he devoted the rest of his life to teaching the intellectual sciences and his own Transcendent Theosophy.

• 5. Existence Before Essence

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  "Existence precedes the essence and is thus principal since something has to exist first and then have an essence," Mulla Sadra wrote, becoming the first to introduce the concept, though his version is not identical to existentialism as defined today. His was a question of existentialist cosmology bound up with God and God's position in the universe. That sets it apart from the individual, moral, and social concerns at the heart of Russian, French, German, or American existentialism. His metaphysics gives priority to existence over essence, which is to say over quiddity. Essences, in his schema, are variable and determined by existential intensity, a phrase drawn from Henry Corbin, and so they are not immutable. Immutability belongs to God alone. This let Sadra preserve God's authority over all things while solving the problem of God's knowledge of particulars, including evil ones, without making God responsible for them. He held that Reality is Existence, and that an essence by itself is a general notion that does not, in reality, exist. Reality in Arabic is Al-Haq, stated in the Qur'an as one of the Names of God.

• 6. A Cosmos In Motion

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  Aristotle and Avicenna accepted change in only four categories: quantity, quality, position, and place. Mulla Sadra rejected that limit with his theory of substantial motion, al-harakat al-jawhariyyah. He argued that everything in the order of nature, including the celestial spheres, undergoes substantial change and transformation. The driving force is the self-flow and penetration of being, the fayd that gives every concrete individual entity its share of being. Where his predecessors had walled off the category of substance from change, Sadra ran change through it, making transformation an all-pervasive reality across the entire cosmos. He put the idea to work in his treatise Huduth al-'alam, on the origination of the world, a problem he called complicated and disputable for many philosophers. There he proved his solid theory through the trans-substantial motion. The notion that even substance is in flux became one of the load on which his larger system rested.

• 7. How God Judges Sin

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  "How is God able to judge sin without knowing sin?" That question, Mulla Sadra said, had haunted Islamic philosophy for almost one thousand years, and his theory of causation answered it. He argued that all contingent beings require a cause that tips their balance between existence and non-existence toward existence, and that nothing can come into existence without a cause. A causal regress was impossible, he held, because a causal chain works only in matter that has a beginning, middle, and end: a pure cause at the start, a pure effect at the close, and a nexus of cause and effect between. For Sadra the causal End is as pure as its corresponding Beginning, which places God at both ends of the creative act. God measures the intensity of existential reality by measuring causal dynamics and their relationship to their origin, rather than by knowing their effects. So God judges sin by perceiving existence, without possessing sin. His logical proof for God ran through the same grammar of intensity: existence is a singular and simple reality, graded in a scale of perfection, and that scale must have a limit point of greatest intensity, which is God.

• 8. The Four Journeys And After

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  It took almost 25 years to finish. Mulla Sadra began his main work, Hikmat al-Muta'alyah fi-l-asfar al-'aqliyya al-arba'a, the Transcendent Philosophy of the Four Journeys of the Intellect, around 1015 AH, or 1605 AD, and completed it some years after 1040 AH, or 1630 AD. The book runs to four large volumes, also published several times in nine smaller ones, and gathers philosophers from Pythagoras to those alive in his own day. It was far from his only work. His list of writings includes a commentary on the Qur'an, the al-Masha'ir on existence, which Henry Corbin translated into French, the 'Arshiyyah, translated into English by James Winston Morris, and an exegesis of the Shi'a hadith collection Al-Kafi, which carries narrations from the twelve Imams. He died in Basra after the Hajj and was buried in the present-day city of Najaf, Iraq. His influence remained limited in the generations right after his death, then grew markedly in the 19th century, helping inspire a renewed Akhbari tendency within Twelver Shi'ism. His pupils carried the line forward, among them his son-in-law Mulla Muhsin Fayd Kashani and Abd Razzaq Lahidji. In the twentieth century Muhammad Husayn Tabataba'i, who died in 1981, became one of the most widely read interpreters, and study expanded after the 1979 Islamic Revolution into both seminaries and universities. His reach extended beyond Iran: in India, Akbar Subut compiled references to him in the writings of roughly 90 scholars, and Mawdudi translated thousands of pages from the Asfar in his youth. Each year on the first of Khordad, Iran marks his Commemoration Day.