Mulla Sadra Explained

Ṣadr ad-Dīn Muḥammad Shīrāzī
(Mullā Ṣadrā)
Region:Safavid Persia
Religion:Islam
Denomination:Shia
Era:Post-Classical Islamic philosophy
Birth Date:c. 1571/2 CE / 980 AH
Birth Place:Shiraz
Death Date:c. 1635/40 / 1050 AH
Death Place:Basra
School Tradition:Twelver
Main Interests:Islamic Philosophy, Illuminationism, Transcendent theosophy, Irfan, Tafsir
Influences:Imam Ali, Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi, Mir Damad, Avicenna, Bahāʾ al-dīn al-ʿĀmilī/Sheykh Baha'i, Ibn Arabi
Influenced:Hadi Sabzavari, Muhammad Husayn Tabatabaei, Ruhollah Khomeini, Morteza Motahhari, Abul A'la Maududi, Gholamhossein Ebrahimi Dinani, Hossein Nasr

Ṣadr ad-Dīn Muḥammad Shīrāzī, more commonly known as Mullā Ṣadrā[1] (Persian: ملا صدرا; Arabic: صدر المتألهین; c. 1571/2 – c. 1635/40 CE / 980 – 1050 AH), was a Persian[2] [3] [4] [5] Twelver Shi'i Islamic mystic, philosopher, theologian, and ‘Ālim who led the Iranian cultural renaissance in the 17th century. According to Oliver Leaman, Mulla Sadra is arguably the single most important and influential philosopher in the Muslim world in the last four hundred years.[6] [7]

Though not its founder, he is considered the master of the Illuminationist (or, Ishraghi or Ishraqi) school of Philosophy, a seminal figure who synthesized the many tracts of the Islamic Golden Age philosophies into what he called the Transcendent Theosophy or al-hikmah al-muta’āliyah.

Mulla Sadra brought "a new philosophical insight in dealing with the nature of reality" and created "a major transition from essentialism to existentialism" in Islamic philosophy, although his existentialism should not be too readily compared to Western existentialism. His was a question of existentialist cosmology as it pertained to God, and thus differs considerably from the individual, moral, and/or social, questions at the heart of Russian, French, German, or American Existentialism.

Mulla Sadra's philosophy ambitiously synthesized Avicennism, Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi's Illuminationist philosophy, Ibn Arabi's Sufi metaphysics, and the theology of the Sunni Ash'ari school of Kalam into the framework of Twelver Shi'ism.

His main work is The Transcendent Philosophy of the Four Journeys of the Intellect, or simply Four Journeys, In which he attempted to reach Sufism and prove the idea of Unity of Existence by offering a new intake and perspective on Peripatetic philosophy that was offered by Alpharabius and Avicenna in the Islamic world.

Biography

Early life

Mulla Sadra was born in Shiraz, Iran, to a notable family of court officials in 1571 or 1572,[8] In Mulla Sadra's time, the Safavid dynasty governed over Iran. Safavid kings granted independence to Fars Province, which was ruled by the king's brother, Mulla Sadra's father, Khwajah Ibrahim Qavami, who was a knowledgeable and extremely faithful politician. As the ruler of the vast region of Fars Province, Khwajah was rich and held a high position. When Mulla Sadra was born, the family named him Muhammad but called him Sadra. Years later, Sadra was nicknamed "Mulla", that is, "great scientist". Sadra was Khwajah's only child. In that time it was customary that the children of aristocrats were educated by private teachers in their own palace. Sadra was a very intelligent, strict, energetic, studious, and curious boy and mastered all the lessons related to Persian and Arabic literature, as well as the art of calligraphy, during a very short time. Following old traditions of his time, and before the age of puberty, he also learned horse riding, hunting and fighting techniques, mathematics, astronomy, some medicine, jurisprudence, and Islamic law. However, he was mainly attracted to philosophy and particularly to mystical philosophy and gnosis.

In 1591, Mulla Sadra moved to Qazvin and then, in 1597, to Isfahan to pursue a traditional and institutional education in philosophy, theology, Hadith, and hermeneutics. At that time, each city was a successive capital of the Safavid dynasty and the center of Twelver Shi'ite seminaries. Sadra's teachers included Mir Damad and Baha' ad-Din al-`Amili.[9]

Teachers

Mulla Sadra became a master of the science of his time. In his own view, the most important of these was philosophy. In Qazvin, Sadra acquired most of his scholarly knowledge from two prominent teachers, namely Baha' ad-Din al-`Amili and Mir Damad, whom he accompanied when the Safavid capital was transferred from Qazvin to Isfahan in 1596 CE / 1006 AH. Shaykh Baha was an expert in Islamic sciences but also a master of astronomy, theoretical mathematics, engineering, architecture, medicine, and some fields of secret knowledge. Mir Damad also knew the science of his time but limited his domain to jurisprudence, hadith. and mainly philosophy. Mir Damad was a master of both the Peripatetic (Aristotelian) and Illuminationist schools of Islamic philosophy. Mulla Sadra obtained most of his knowledge of philosophy and gnosis from Damad and always introduced Damad as his true teacher and spiritual guide.

After he had finished his studies, Sadra began to explore unorthodox doctrines and as a result was both condemned and excommunicated by some Shi'i ʿulamāʾ. He then retired for a lengthy period of time to a village named Kahak, near Qom, where he engaged in contemplative exercises. While in Kahak, he wrote a number of minor works, including the Risāla fi 'l-ḥashr and the Risāla fī ḥudūth al-ʿālam .[10]

Return to Shiraz

In 1612, Ali Quli Khan, son of Allāhwirdī Ḵhān and the powerful governor of Fārs, asked Mulla Sadra to abandon his exile and to come back to Shiraz to teach and run a newly bulit madrasa (Khan School, Persian: مدرسه خان). Mulla Sadra devoted his rest of life to teach the intellectual sciences, particularly his own teachings Transcendent Theosophy.

During his time in Shīrāz, Ṣadrā began writing treatises that synthesized wide-ranging strands of existing Islamic systems of thought at Khan School. The ideas of his school, which may be seen as a continuation of the School of Iṣfahān of Mīr Dāmād and Shaykh Bahāʾī, were promulgated after Sadrā's death by his pupils, several of whom would become sought-after thinkers in their own right, such as, Mullā Muḥsin Fayḍ Kāshānī (Mulla Sadra's son-in-law), and ʿAbd Razzāḳ Lāhidjī.

Although Ṣadrā's influence remained limited in the generations after his death, it increased markedly during the 19th century, when his ideas helped inspire a renewed Akhbārī tendency within Twelver Shīʿism. In recent times, his works have been studied in Iran, Europe, and America. He died in Basra after the Hajj and was buried in the present-day city of Najaf, Iraq.

Philosophical ideas

See main article: Transcendent theosophy.

Existentialism

Although Existentialism as defined nowadays is not identical to Mulla Sadra's definition, he was the first to introduce the concept. According to Mulla Sadra, "existence precedes the essence and is thus principal since something has to exist first and then have an essence." It is notable that for Mulla Sadra this was an issue that applied specifically to God and God's position in the universe, especially in the context of reconciling God's position in the Qur'an with the Greek-influenced cosmological philosophies of Islam's Golden Era.

Mulla Sadra's metaphysics gives priority to existence over essence (i.e., quiddity). That is to say, essences are variable and are determined according to existential "intensity" (to use Henry Corbin's definition). Thus, essences are not immutable.[11] The advantage to this schema is that it is acceptable to the fundamental statements of the Qur'an, even as it does not necessarily undermine any previous Islamic philosopher's Aristotelian or Platonic foundations.

Indeed, Mulla Sadra provides immutability only to God, while intrinsically linking essence and existence to each other, and to God's power over existence. In so doing, he provided for God's authority over all things while also solving the problem of God's knowledge of particulars, including those that are evil, without being inherently responsible for them — even as God's authority over the existence of things that provide the framework for evil to exist. This clever solution provides for freedom of will, God's supremacy, the infiniteness of God's knowledge, the existence of evil, and definitions of existence and essence that leave the two inextricably linked insofar as humans are concerned, but fundamentally separate insofar as God is concerned.[12]

Perhaps most importantly, the primacy of existence provides the capacity for God's judgement without God being directly, or indirectly, affected by the evil being judged. God does not need to possess sin to know sin: God is able to judge the intensity of sin as God perceives existence.

One result of Sadra's existentialism is "The unity of the intellect and the intelligible" (Arabic: Ittihad al-Aaqil wa l-Maqul. As Henry Corbin describes:

Substantial motion

Another central concept of Mulla Sadra's philosophy is the theory of "substantial motion" (Arabic:al-harakat al-jawhariyyah), which is "based on the premise that everything in the order of nature, including celestial spheres, undergoes substantial change and transformation as a result of the self-flow (sarayan al-wujud) and penetration of being (fayd) which gives every concrete individual entity its share of being. In contrast to Aristotle and Avicenna who had accepted change only in four categories, i.e., quantity (kamm), quality (kayf), position (wad’) and place (‘ayn), Sadra defines change as an all-pervasive reality running through the entire cosmos including the category of substance (jawhar)."

Existence as reality

Mulla Sadra held the view that Reality is Existence. He believed that an essence was by itself a general notion, and therefore does not, in reality, exist.[13]

To paraphrase Fazlur Rahman on Mulla Sadra's Existential Cosmology: Existence is the one and only reality. Existence and reality are therefore identical. Existence is the all-comprehensive reality and there is nothing outside of it. Essences which are negative require some sort of reality and therefore exist. Existence therefore cannot be denied. Therefore, existence cannot be negated. As Existence cannot be negated, it is self-evident that Existence is God. God should not be searched for in the realm of existence but is the basis of all existence.[14] Reality in Arabic is "Al-Haq", and is stated in the Qur'an as one of the Names of God.

To paraphrase Mulla Sadra's Logical Proof for God:[15]

  1. There is a being
  2. This being is a perfection beyond all perfection
  3. God is Perfect and Perfection in existence
  4. Existence is a singular and simple reality
  5. That singular reality is graded in intensity in a scale of perfection
  6. That scale must have a limit point, a point of greatest intensity and of greatest existence
  7. Therefore, God exists

Causation

Sadra argued that all contingent beings require a cause which puts their balance between existence and non-existence in favor of the former; nothing can come into existence without a cause. Since the world is therefore contingent upon this First Act, not only must God exist, but God must also be responsible for this First Act of creation.

Sadra also believed that a causal regress was impossible because the causal chain could work only in the matter that had a beginning, middle, and end:

  1. a pure cause at the beginning
  2. a pure effect at the end
  3. a nexus of cause and effect

The Causal nexus of Mulla Sadra was a form of existential ontology within a cosmological framework that Islam supported. For Mulla Sadra the causal "End" is as pure as its corresponding "Beginning", which instructively places God at both the beginning and the end of the creative act. God's capacity to measure the intensity of Existential Reality by measuring causal dynamics and their relationship to their origin, as opposed to knowing their effects, provided the Islamically-acceptable framework for God's judgement of reality without being tainted by its particulars. This was a solution to a question that had haunted Islamic philosophy for almost one thousand years: How is God able to judge sin without knowing sin?

Truth

For Mulla Sadra a true statement is a statement that is true to the concrete facts in existence. He held a metaphysical and not a formal idea of truth, claiming that the world consists of mind-independent objects that are always true and truth is not what is rationally acceptable within a certain theory of description. In Mulla Sadra's view one cannot have access to the reality of being: only linguistic analysis is available. This theory of Truth has two levels: the claim that a proposition is true if it corresponds to things in reality; and that a proposition can be true if it conforms with the actual thing itself.[16]

List of known works

Commemoration

Mulla Sadra's Commemoration Day (Persian: روز بزرگداشت) is annually held in Iran at the first of Khordad (the third month of the Solar Hijri calendar); on the other hand, this day (1st-Khordad) has been registered among the occasions of Iranian calendars.[18] [19]

See also

References

Further reading

Works by Mulla Sadra
Studies

External links

Notes and References

  1. Morris . James W. . Revelation, Intellectual Intuition and Reason in the Philosophy of Mulla Sadra: An Analysis of the al-Hikmah al-ʿArshiyya. By Zailan Moris (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 238 pp. Price PB £18.99 0–700–71503–7 . Journal of Islamic Studies . Oxford University Press (OUP) . 16 . 3 . 2005-09-01 . 1471-6917 . 10.1093/jis/eti155 . 360–362.
  2. Web site: Mulla Sadra's Life and Philosophy – London Academy of Iranian Studies. 7 December 2012 . 2021-11-08. en-US.
  3. Web site: 2021-06-14. ملاصدرا کیست زندگینامه، نظریات، اشعار و آثار. 2021-11-08. کجارو. fa-IR.
  4. British Art Studies . Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art . 2058-5462 . 10.17658/issn.2058-5462 . free .
  5. Book: Bloch . Ernst . Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left . 2019 . Columbia University Press . New York . 9780231175357 . 87 . A reference to the work of Mulla Sadra, or Sadr ad-Din Muhammad Shirazi (ca. 1571-1640), a Persian philosopher and theologian..
  6. Leaman 2013, p.146.
  7. http://www.muslimphilosophy.com/ip/rep/H027.htm Mulla Sadra (Sadr al-Din Muhammad al-Shirazi) (1571/2-1640)
  8. Rizvi, Sajjad (2002), Reconsidering the life of Mulla Sadra Shirazi, Pembroke College, p. 181
  9. http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/molla-sadra-sirazi MOLLĀ ṢADRĀ ŠIRĀZI
  10. MacEoin, D. "Mullā Ṣadrā S̲hīrāzī Ṣadr al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Ibrāhīm Ḳawāmī S̲h̲īrāzī". Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition. Edited by: P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W.P. Heinrichs. Brill, 2010. Brill Online. Augustana. 13 April 2010 <Reference Works, Brill brillonline.nl
  11. Corbin (1993), pp. 342, 343
  12. Sayyed Hussein Nasr, Persian Sufi Literature, Lecture, George Washington University, 2006
  13. Fazlur Rahman, The Philosophy of Mulla Sadra State University of New York Press, 1975, pp. 27, 28
  14. Fazlur Rahman, The Philosophy of Mulla Sadra State University of New York Press, 1975, p. 125
  15. Rizvi, Sajjad Mulla Sadra and Metaphysics, 2009, p. 126
  16. Rizvi, Sajjad Mulla Sadra and Metaphysics, 2009, pp. 59–62
  17. https://quranwahadith.com/product/asfar-e-arba/ Asfar e Arba, Tarjuma Maulana Modudi, اسفار اربعہ
  18. https://www.iribnews.ir/fa/news/1643648/%DB%8C%DA%A9%D9%85-%D8%AE%D8%B1%D8%AF%D8%A7%D8%AF-%D8%B3%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%B2-%D8%A8%D8%B2%D8%B1%DA%AF%D8%AF%D8%A7%D8%B4%D8%AA-%D9%85%D9%84%D8%A7%D8%B5%D8%AF%D8%B1%D8%A7 1st Khordad, the anniversary of Mulla Sadra's commemoration
  19. http://www.mefda.ir/news/55647/%D8%A7%D9%88%D9%84-%D8%AE%D8%B1%D8%AF%D8%A7%D8%AF-%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%B2-%D8%A8%D8%B2%D8%B1%DA%AF%D8%AF%D8%A7%D8%B4%D8%AA-%D9%85%D9%84%D8%A7%D8%B5%D8%AF%D8%B1%D8%A7-%DA%AF%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%85%DB%8C%D8%A8%D8%A7%D8%AF Commemoration of Mulla-Sadra; 1st of Khordad