Alhassanain(p) Network for Heritage and Islamic Thought

An Annotated Bibliography of the Works of Sadr al-Din al-Shirazi (Mulla Sadra) with a Brief Account of His Life

Ibrahim Kalin

College of the Holy Cross

Table of Contents

[Introduction] 3

Sadra’s Life 4

Sadra’s Works 10

A: Works in the Field of Transmitted Sciences 14

B: Works in the Field of Intellectual Sciences 19

Notes 37

[Introduction]

Muhammad ibn Ibrahim ibn Yahya al-Qawami al-Shirazi (1571-1640), known more commonly as Mulla Sadra, ranks among the towering figures of post-Avicennan Islamic philosophy along with Suhrawardi and Ibn al-‘Arabi, and is certainly the most important philosopher of the Safavid Persia (1501-1722). As a prolific writer, Sadra authored a number of works and dominated the Persian-Islamic philosophical scene ever since. The rapid spread of Sadra’s ideas won him many honorific titles in Persia and in the sub-continent of India where his works has had considerable influence on many philosophers and intellectuals from Shah Waliullah of Delhi to Muhammad Iqbal. Among these titles by which Sadra is most commonly known, one may mention sadr al-din. The word 'sadr', meaning chest and/or bosom, signifies, on one hand, the heart, essence and source of something, and ‘foremost’, on the other. The title 'sadr al-din' thus denotes the one who is the foremost and most prominent in religion. The same etymology applies to another title given to Sadra, i.e., ‘sadr al-muta’allihin’, 'foremost among those who have become Divine-like'. The wordmuta’allih , 'becoming Divine-like', goes back to Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi, the founder of the School of Illumination (ishraq ), and has a specific referent in Suhrawardi’s triple classification of the paths of human thought and knowledge.[1] According to the Illuminationist terminology, themuta'allih , whom Suhrawardi identifies as God’s real vicegerent on earth (khalifat Allah )[2] , is the philosopher-sage or the godly philosopher who has combined rational inquiry with spiritual realization and discipline.[3]

In the case of Sadra,sadr al-muta'allihin , which is probably the most honorific title given to Sadra, has a twofold function. On the one hand, it refers to the philosopher-sage of the School of Illumination. On the other hand, it reveals the extent to which Sadra has been considered by posterity to be part of the School of Illumination even though there are some fundamental differences between him and Suhrawardi. Nevertheless, the ideal synthesis of rational-logical analysis with mystical experience underlies a persistent current in Sadra's thought, and this links him closely to the Illuminationist tradition. Lastly, Mulla Sadra is also known with a more popular name in Iran, namely as ‘akhund’, meaning a learned person.

Sadra’s Life

Mulla Sadra was born in Shiraz in 979-980/1571-1572 into a wealthy and influential family, his father reportedly having been the governor of the province of Fars. Following the tradition of classical madrasah education, Sadra was trained first in what is called the transmitted sciences (al-'ulum al-naqliyyah ), which included such disciplines as grammar (nahw ), Qur'anic exegesis (tafsi r), jurisprudence (fiqh ), and the science of the sayings of the Prophet and Shiite Imams ('ilm al-hadith ). Sadra's firm training in the transmitted sciences appears to have a lasting impact on his philosophical work as he was to write an incomplete commentary on the Quran. Considering that the majority of Muslim philosophers prior to Sadra were concerned with transmitted sciences only in a secondary way and that very rarely did they compose works in this field, Sadra stands out as a conspicuous exception, a figure who combines both the transmitted-religious and intellectual-philosophical sciences.

Having completed his formal education in Shiraz, Sadra left his hometown for Isfahan that had then become a major center of high culture in arts and sciences primarily thanks to the visionary leadership of Shah Abbas II (1588-1629), known with the honorific title of the ‘Great’.[4] The vivid intellectual environment of Isfahan was to offer Sadra a unique opportunity to join the line of such Shi’ite philosophers as Mir Damad, Baha’ al-Din ‘Amili, and Mir Abu’l-Qasim Findiriski on the one hand, and to encounter the fierce opposition of many Shi’ite jurists to Sufism and other gnostic tendencies, on the other. When Sadra began his philosophical career in Isfahan, the cultural and religious framework of the Safavid Iran had been to a large extent consolidated, and the process of establishing Twelve Imam Shi’ism as the official religious code of Iran, begun in 1501 by Shah Isma’il, the founder of the Safavid dynasty, had been completed[5] . The origins of the conflict between the Shi’ite religious authorities and the mystically oriented philosophers go back to the beginning of the Safavid dynasty when Shah Isma’il (1501-1524) and his son Shah Tahmasp (1524-1576) engaged in forcefully promoting Twelve Imam Shi’ism against Sunnism and Sufism[6] . By the end of the 16th and the middle of the 17th centuries, the Sunni character of the greater Khorasan, the heartland of Persia, was already erased, and such Sufi orders as the Naqshbandiyyah, Khalwatiyyah, Nurbakhshiyyah, Ni’matullahiyyah, and the Qalandariyyah/Malamatiyyah were either completely subdued or driven out of the Safavid Empire.[7] One of the direct consequences of this policy was the migration of a number of notable Sufi masters to India and other places, and the drastic decline of Persian Sufi poetry in the heartland of Iran.[8]

This process was further invigorated by the revival of Akhbarism by Mulla Muhammad Amin Astarabadi (d. 1627). The akhbari traditionalism, grounded in a strong pietistic anti-intellectualism, was particularly opposed to mystical and philosophical interpretations of the Qur’an and the sayings of the Imams. The followers of this school relied solely on the literal authority of the sayings of the Imams, bolstering the socio-religious status of rulers and scholars who claimed family descent from the Shi’ite Imams. The proponents of the akhbari movement, who had gained the unmistakable favor of the Safavid court until the reign of Shah Safi (1629-1642) and Shah Abbas II (1642-1666), came to be called the ‘people of the exterior’ (ahl-i zahir ) and the ‘scholars of the skin or surface’ (‘ulama-yi qishr ) by their opponents. The mounting tension between the two groups is vividly recorded in contemporary chronicles as well as in Sadra’s fierce and relentless attacks against the exoterist‘ulama’ as we see especially in hisSih asl . The menacing power of the exoterist Shi’ite‘ulama’ , however, do not appear to have deterred Mulla Sadra and his mentor Mir Damad from pursuing a serious career in either speculative metaphysics or theoretical mysticism.

It was against this background that Sadra gave himself completely to the thorough study of intellectual sciences in Isfahan. He studied with the most celebrated teachers of the time, among them especially Sayyid Baqir Muhammad Astarabadi, known as Mir Damad (d. 1040/1631) and Baha’ al-Din Muhammad al-Amili known more popularly as Shaykh-i Baha’i (d. 1031/1622). Some sources add Mir Abu'l-Qasim Findiriski (d. circa 1050/1640-1) to the list of the masters with whom Sadra studied in Isfahan even though no direct historical connection between the two has been established in a satisfactory manner. The life spans of the two, if we can trust Findiriski’s date of death, which is the same as that of Sadra, suggest that the two must have been colleagues rather than student or mentor for one another. Furthermore, Sadra does not mention Findiriski’s name when he speaks of his masters in his autobiography in theAsfar . The fact that the traditional sources associate Sadra with Findiriski in one way or another is nevertheless interesting for Findiriski is considered to be a mystic, even a somewhat ‘eccentric’ one, with such habits as mixing with the low caste vagabonds, dressing up poorly, and having alchemical and mystical powers. Mir Findiriski’s extant works reveal him as a follower of the Avicennan school. This, however, is not sufficient to qualify him as a Peripatetic in the ordinary sense of the term.[9] Mir Findiriski is also known for his travels to India where he is reported to have met a number of Hindu sages and ascetics.[10] One of the fruits of these travels is his Persian commentary on the Hindu mystical and philosophical textYoga-Vasishtha , which is an important text from the point of view of both comparative philosophy and cultural history during the Safavid era.

Among Sadra’s teachers, Mir Damad occupies a special place. It is apparent from his writings as well as personal letters that Sadra had an intimate relation with Mir Damad in addition to his having studied under his tutorship. Mir Damad is best known for hisal-Qabasat haqq al-yaqin fi huduth al-‘alam (“Firebrands: The Certain Truth Concerning the Temporal Origination of the World”), which is an attempt to recast some of the central problems of traditional philosophy from the point of view of Peripatetic philosophy with some influences from the School of Illumination. Mir Damad's prominence as a philosopher and teacher is shown by the honorific title given to him as the 'third teacher' (al-mu'allim al-thalith ) after Aristotle and Farabi..[11] Sadra seems to have made his first full-fledged introduction to formal philosophy under Mir Damad’s generous tutelage. This is evinced by the fact that he mentions, in his short autobiographical essay at the beginning ofAsfar , that he was once an upholder of the fundamental primacy of quiddity (asalat al-mahiyyah ) over being (wujud ), a doctrine which sums up the Illuminationist ontology of Suhrawardi and Mir Damad and from which Sadra was shortly thereafter to depart once and for all. Sadra became so successful in mastering the intellectual sciences under Mir Damad that he eventually outshone his teacher. Today, Mir Damad is virtually unknown in the West and outside of Persia.[12] Even though the difficult language and structure of Mir Damad's works is admitted by both classical and modern authors, his destiny of remaining a background figure in the annals of Islamic philosophy is without doubt related to the overpowering fame and dominance of his most celebrated student.

In addition to the study of intellectual sciences, Sadra continued his education of the transmitted sciences in Isfahan under Baha' al-Din al-Amili, one of the most famous jurists and theologians of the Safavid era.[13] Al-Amili was not, however, an ordinary scholar of religious sciences. He was a polyvalent par excellence: he was at once a philosopher, theologian, jurist, mathematician, architect, Sufi, and poet. This must have had some effect on Sadra's intellectual upbringing as he wrote works in nearly all branches of the intellectual and transmitted sciences. The influence and presence of transmitted sciences in the Sadraean corpus can be seen at two interrelated levels. The first level pertains to the works dealing specifically with such traditional disciplines as Qur’anic commentary and Hadith. Sadra’s thorough knowledge of these and other related sciences are easily visible in his writings. His commentaries on certain Qur’anic verses and philosophical glosses upon the famous Shi’ite book of Hadith collectionUsul al-kafi are the two examples that show Sadra’s deep grounding in the transmitted sciences. The second level concerns the fact that many of Sadra’s ideas, especially those on cosmology, psychology, and eschatology, are always presented as a synthesis of purely religious language and philosophical terminology. Sadra’s writing style easily moves between Greek philosophical terms, long domesticated by the previous Muslim philosophers, and a verse from the Qur’an debated by theologians and jurists over the centuries. Sadra’s unfailing derisive remarks against the theologians (mutakallimun ) seem to derive partly from his confidence in his traditional education.[14] In this regard, Sadra’s style of philosophical writing differs considerably from that of the Peripatetics and comes rather close to such mystical writers as Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi, Dawud al-Qaysari, and Mulla Jami, all of whom are the members of the school of Ibn al-‘Arabi.

In his autobiographical essay, Sadra states that after mastering the views of the previous philosophers and “whatever he was able to find in the books of the Greeks”,[15] he was confronted with the fierce opposition of some simple-minded scholars of the Shari’ah, i.e., theakhbari s, whom he compares to the Hanbalite scholars of Hadith, known in Islamic history for their strict literalism and anti-intellectualism.[16] He uses a strong language in describing the feeble-mindedness of such people, and admonishes them for failing to understand the grand philosophical system that he calls 'transcendent wisdom' (al-hikmat al-muta'aliyah ). This opposition seems to have been a major factor in Sadra's decision to retreat from the public life of both Isfahan and his hometown Shiraz.

Sadra, however, gives his own reasons and explains his retreat on the basis of his philosophical vocation whose ultimate end cannot be reached by mere study and learning.[17] As it is repeated throughout his autobiographical essay, such spiritual practices as the cleansing of the soul, finding the inner calm in oneself, and asking God's help in resolving the difficult problems of metaphysics are asine qua non of the realization or verification (tahqiq ) of what one learns from written and oral sources. Thus he says that

“I refrained my thoughts from dealing with people and mixing with them, and abstained from their companionship and friendship. Then the turning of cycles [i.e., the passing of days] and the obstinacy of the people of the present time became easier for me. I released myself from their repudiation and acceptance, and their praise and harm became equal for me. Then I turned my face to the Cause of all causes, and humbled myself before the One who makes all difficult matters easy. I stayed in this state of secrecy, retreat, obscurity, and withdrawal for a long time. I busied myself with long moments of spiritual exercise as a luminous work, and my heart burned with the desire of attaining more spiritual discipline in a very strong way. Then the lights of the angelic world (anwar al-malakut ) began to emanate upon my heart, the secrets of the world of Dominion (jabarrut ) were unfolded, the light of the One reached it, the Divine subtleties came upon it, and I obtained the secrets of which I was not aware before. The symbols were unveiled to me, and this unveiling (inkishaf ) was not a result of logical demonstration (burhan ). On the contrary, with a plenitude of direct witnessing and seeing of the Divine mysteries, I witnessed everything that I had learned before through logical demonstration.”[18]

That Sadra’s retreat was in tandem with his philosophical pursuit is attested by numerous other passages in his writings. In one such passage, Sadra, after quoting various views on the soul and its faculties all the way from Aristotle to Ibn Sina, admonishes speculative philosophy and insists on the necessity of spiritual practice:

“Know that [the meaning of] this subtle point and its likes that belong to the study of beings cannot be obtained except through esoteric unveilings (mukashafat batiniyyah ) and the witnessing of secrets and with the help of being. In these matters, it is not sufficient to memorize the principles of speculative philosophy and essential and accidental concepts. These unveilings and witnessings cannot be reached except through spiritual practice and effort in spiritual retreats by abstaining completely from the companionship of people and cutting oneself off from the lures and false desires of the world, its delusive arrogance, and its illusionary security. Most of the words of this philosopher [i.e., Plotinus, the author of the ‘Uthu lu jiya , thought to be Aristotle] testify to the prowess of his unveiling, the light of his inner reality, and the proximity of his station [to the Divine in the spiritual path].”[19]

Sadra's physical and spiritual retreat to Kahak, a small village near Qom, constitutes the second phase of his life, during which time he continued his studies in solitude and completed the groundwork for the composition of his major works. After terminating his solitary years in Kahak and upon the request of Shah Abbas II, Sadra returned to Shiraz to teach at the Khanmadrasah built by Allahwirdi Khan. The third phase of Sadra's life begins here in the Khanmadrasah , whose building is still extant in its original form in the city of Shiraz, Iran. It was here that Sadra taught, composed his major works, and trained his choice students. As a devout philosopher-sage, he went on pilgrimage on foot to Mecca seven times, and died in Basra in 1050/1640 on his way back from his seventh pilgrimage.

Among the students whom Sadra trained, Mulla Muhsin Fayd Kashani (d. 1680) and 'Abd al-Razzaq ibn al-Husayn Lahiji (d. 1662) are particularly significant. Fayd Kashani is best known for hisal -Kalimat al-maknunah , an important work of philosophy-cum-theology. Lahiji, Sadra’s second important student, played an important role in the spread of his master’s ideas by writing Persian summaries of his works, among whichShawariq al-ilham is to be noted. In addition to their intellectual lineage, both Kashani and Lahiji married Sadra's daughters, carrying their master-disciple bond to a personal level. In addition to these two immediate students, Sadra had a long list of followers after his death as his ideas continued to influence the Persian and Indian worlds in the post-Safavid era. Aqa Muhammad Bidabadi (d. 1783), Qadi Sa’id Qummi, Mulla ‘Ali ibn Jamshid Nuri (d. 1830), Mulla Muhammad Isma’il Isfahani (d. 1860), Mulla ‘Abdullah Zunuzi, Mulla Muhammad Ja’far Langarudi, Mulla Isma’il Khaju’i, Mulla Hadi Sabziwari (d.1873), Mulla ‘Ali Mudarris Zunuzi (d. 1889), Aqa Muhammad Rida Qumsha’i (d. 1888-1889), Mirza Mahdi Ashtiyani, and most recently Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i are among the most prominent figures of the school of Mulla Sadra.

In addition to these philosophers, Sadra also influenced a number of prominent scholars and philosophers of other schools during and after the Safavid period. Among these, we can mention Muhammad Baqir Majlisi (d. 1111/1699-1700), the great Shi’ite theologian and the author of monumentalBihar al-anwar , Mulla Haydar Khwansari (d. 1099/1688), the author of theZubdat al-tasanif , Mulla Salih Mazandarani (d. 1080/1669), and Shaykh Ahmad Ahsa’i (d. 1241/1826). The most important figure in this list is Shaykh Ahmad Ahsa’i, the founder of a school known as Shaykhism. Ahsa’i wrote commentaries on Sadra’sKitab al-Masha’ir andal-Hikmat al-‘arshiyyah but also criticized two principal ideas of his ontology, namely the primacy of being (asalat al-wujud ) and the idea that a simple being contains in itself all levels of reality (basit al-haqiqah kull al-ashya’ ). Ahsa’i’s connection to Sadra, however, is more interesting for the role it played in the rise of Babism and, later, Bahaism. Babism, a controversial and heterodox Shi’ite movement, branched out from Shaykhism when Sayyid ‘Ali Muhammad of Shiraz, considered to be the founder of Babism, claimed in 1844 that he was thebab , i.e., the ‘gate’ through which the hidden Imam of Shi’ism spoke to his followers. This was a major claim with tremendous implications for the Shi’ite religious and political life, and in 1852 Nasir al-Din Shah was forced to take action against the political activities of the Babis.

In the wake of the persecution of the followers of the Bab, Mirza Husayn ‘Ali Nuri Baha’ullah (d. 1892), an ardent follower of Sayyid ‘Ali Muhammad al-Bab, established Baha’ism by declaring himself the Bab’s successor and later claiming to be a prophet and to have received revelation from heaven. In the history of the rise of both Babism and Baha’ism, the highly questionable link that some scholars have established between Mulla Sadra and these movements goes back to the fact that Sayyid ‘Ali Muhammad Bab, the founder of Babism, was a follower of Shaykh Ahmad Ahsa’i. Considering this historical link and Ahmad Ahsa’i’s commentaries on Mulla Sadra’s works, Muhammad Iqbal,[20] E. G. Browne[21] , and Carl Brockelmann[22] have claimed a philosophical continuity between Sadra’s ideas and the doctrines of Babism and Baha’ism. Even though Henry Corbin rejects any direct link among the three, he argues that “Mulla Sadra’s text have furnished the Shaykhi school with an occasion to formulate and clarify its proper positions”.[23] In light of available evidence, however, it is not possible to verify any of these claims. No compelling evidence has been presented as to how Sadra’s ideas might have influenced or contributed to the foundation of the Shaykhi school. Furthermore, there is no direct reference to Sadra, his works or his school either in the current literature of Babism or Baha’ism.

Sadra’s Works

Mulla Sadra was a prolific writer and his extant corpus ranges from the monumental Asfar to treatises of a few pages. With the exception of his Sih asl and diwan of poetry in Persian, he wrote all of his works in Arabic. His style stands out as one of the most lucid and systematic forms of philosophical writing in Arabic. As a general trait of his philosophy, Sadra weaves together the strictly logical discourse of the Peripatetic philosophers with the ecstatic language of the mystics. Very often we see Sadra bursting into various aphorisms, exhortations, and ecstatic exclamations, comparable only to the language of such figures as Ghazali and Ibn al-‘Arabi, after discussing a particular philosophical or cosmological problem in a rigorously analytical manner. In cases where prose seems to fall short of conveying Sadra’s intended meaning, he does not hesitate to quote poetry both in Arabic and Persian.

Sadra’s corpus spans the entire spectrum of traditional philosophy. Metaphysics, cosmology, ontology, epistemology, axiology, eschatology, psychology, and natural philosophy are treated in their traditional formats. In addition to his purely philosophical works, Sadra has a lengthy yet incomplete commentary on the Qur’an and few other works on understanding the Qur’an and Shiite hadith. For purposes of classification, I shall divide Sadra’s works into two broad categories of transmitted and intellectual sciences.

Sadra’s Qur’anic commentaries are the first works to come to our attention in the field of transmitted sciences. Sadra is certainly not the first Muslim philosopher to write commentaries on the Qur’an. Ibn Sina wrote a short commentary on the famous light verse of the Qur’an (24:35), which describes God as the ‘light of the heavens and the earth’. With this commentary, Ibn Sina has initiated a new genre of philosophical exegesis soon to be followed by Ghazali and Suhrawardi. None of these philosophers, however, wrote extensive glosses over the Qur’anic verses. In this sense, Sadra differs from his predecessors by giving a more prominent place in his writings to the verses of the Qur’an and the sayings of the Prophets and the Shi’ite imams. In fact, his commentaries amount to a considerable size and have been edited and published by Muhammad Khwajawi in 7 volumes as Tafsir al-qur’an al-karim, which will be discussed below. Sadra’s Qur’anic commentaries are of particular importance for they are written from the point of view of his philosophy, i.e., ‘transcendent wisdom’ (al-hikmat al-muta’aliyah), giving one of the finest examples of philosophical and mystical exegesis. This aspect of Sadra’s works has been largely ignored, and consequently there are only a few short essays we can mention on the subject in European languages.[24]

Sadra has also written a mystico-philosophical commentary on the famous Shi’ite book of hadith Usul al-kafi compiled by Kulayni. As in his Qur’anic commentaries, Sadra deals with various sayings of the Prophet and Shi’ite Imams to bring out their philosophical significance. His commentary on the Usul al-kafi is titled Kitab al-‘aql wa’l-jahl (“The Book of Intelligence and Ignorance”), in which he interprets many sayings of the Imams within the context of such metaphysical issues as the primacy of being (wujud), God’s Names and Attributes, and bodily resurrection. In writing these glosses, Sadra seems to be particularly interested in showing the intrinsic relation between two sources of knowledge, viz., transmitted-religious and intellectual-philosophical.

Mulla Sadra’s most important works that have gained him numerous honorific titles, however, are in the field of intellectual sciences, particularly in traditional metaphysics and philosophy. Although a great majority of these works have been published due to the single-handed and indefatigable efforts of Sayyid Jalal al-Din Ashtiyani and, more recently, Muhammad Khwajawi, we are far from having a complete list of Sadra’s works critically edited and published. The following bibliography will give a detailed discussion of these works.

Sadra’s philosophical works occupy a special place in the annals of Islamic intellectual history. Without claiming to be exhaustive, we can highlight three aspects of this immense corpus. The first point concerns the historical period in which Sadra composed his works. Sadra was a contemporary of Descartes, and is considered to be one of the peaks of the post-Avicennan Islamic philosophy. The fact that Sadra wrote his books in the 17th century and was able to influence a whole generation of philosophers, which eventually resulted in the formation of the school known under his name, disproves the two-centuries old claim of the Orientalists and Western historians of Islamic philosophy that philosophical activity in the lands of Islam came to an end with Ghazali’s attack on Ibn Sina in his Tahafut al-falasifah. Even though this view is no longer held by the serious scholars of Islam, the number of studies on philosophers prior to Ibn Sina is incomparably more than what has been produced on the history of post-Avicennan Islamic philosophy. His school also points to the continuity of philosophical activity in the Persian-speaking world up to our own day.

Secondly, Sadra represents the culmination of various philosophical strands of Islamic intellectual history. Standing at the crossroads of the four major traditions of Aristotelian philosophy (mashsha’i ) associated with Farabi and Ibn Sina, the School of Illumination (ishraq ) established by Suhrawardi, Islamic theology (kalam ), and finally metaphysical mysticism or gnosis (‘irfan ) represented chiefly by Ibn al-Arabi and his school, Sadra launched a grand project of synthesizing them into a coherent whole in the form of a highly original and comprehensive philosophical system that he called ‘transcendent wisdom’ (al-hikmat al-muta’aliyah ). Thus the Sadrean corpus displays a remarkable blend of various strands of thought from the purely logical and analytical discussions of quiddity and logical categories to the extremely poetic and ecstatic discourses on the all-inclusive reality of being and unveiling (kashf ) as a direct way of knowing Divine mysteries. In this regard, Sadra attempts to complete a project whose origins go back to Suhrawardi, namely the reconciliation of analytical and discursive thinking (nazar ) with mystical experience (dhawq ) and spiritual training.

To highlight the ‘synthetic’ nature of his thought, Sadra seeks to combine three established sources of knowledge in the Islamic intellectual tradition:burhan referring to logical-analytical thinking,‘irfan referring to realized knowledge, andqur’an referring to revealed knowledge. Furthermore, Sadra appears to be acutely conscious of these traditions, their differences and similarities as he analyzes a particular problem or adopts a particular point of view within the context of these intellectual traditions. This makes Sadra’s corpus an invaluable source for the history of Islamic philosophy. In many ways, reading Sadra’s text amounts to reading the entire history behind the problem under investigation.

The third important aspect of Sadra’s works is their originality and cogency as a whole. Sadra is known for a number of novel ideas and formulations in the history of Islamic philosophy. Primacy of being (asalat al-wujud ), the idea that a simple reality contains in itself all things that belong to its class (basit al-haqiqah kull al-ashya’ ), gradation of being (tashkik al-wujud ), unification of the intellect and the intelligible (ittihad al-‘aqil wa’l-ma’qul), substantial motion (al-harakat al-jawhariyyah ), and the bodily origination and spiritual subsistence of the human soul (jismaniyyat al-huduth ruhaniyyat al-baqa’ ) are only few of the major contributions that have earned Sadra a unique place among the pioneers of Islamic philosophy.

In the West, Comte de Gobineau’sLes Religions et les philosophies dans l’Asie centrale is the earliest work to refer to Mulla Sadra. In his doctoral thesisThe Development of Metaphysics in Persia , Muhammad Iqbal presented a survey of Sadraa lá Sabziwari, Sadra’s great commentator. The German scholar Max Horten is the first European scholar to have devoted a separate work on Sadra. Horten wrote two books on the subject:Die Gottesbeweise bei Shirazi (Bonn, 1912) andDas philosophische System von Shirazi (Strasburg, 1913), in which he both translated from Sadra’s works and provided a fairly complete analysis of his system.

The French philosopher and Islamisist Henry Corbin, who had started out his career in Western philosophy by translating Heidegger’sSein und Zeit into French, marks a turning point in Sadrean studies. Corbin translatedKitab al-Masha’ir , Sadra’s own summa of his philosophy, into French under the titleLe Livre des pénétrations métaphysiques (Téhéran-Paris, 1956), which contains an extensive analysis of Sadra’s thought with a parallel commentary on the Masha’ir. In addition to devoting a large section to Sadra in hisEn islam iranien: aspects spirituels et philosophiques (4 Vols., 1971-2), Corbin also made a partial translation of Sadra’s commentary on Suhrawardi’sHikmat al-ishraq along with Qutb al-Din Shirazi’s commentary in hisLe Livre de la Sagesse Orientale (Kitab Hikmat al-ishraq ) (Lagrasse: Editions Verdier, 1986).

Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who is largely responsible for putting Sadra on the map in the English language, has written a number of seminal essays on Sadra in addition to hisSadra al-Din al-Shirazi and His Transcendent Theosophy published in 1978 (the second expanded edition 1997). Fazlur Rahman’sThe Philosophy of Mulla Sadra (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1975) deals with Sadra’s philosophy as a whole. Although written from a strictly Peripatetic point of view and thus failing to give a balanced view of Sadra’s ideas on philosophy, kalam, and mysticism, Rahman’s work is the only book-size analysis of Sadra’s thought.al-Hikmat al-‘arshiyyah , Sadra’s most important work on eschatology, has been translated by James Winston Morris asThe Wisdom of the Throne: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mulla Sadra (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981) with a long introduction and extensive commentaries. A new study ofal-Hikmat al-‘arshiyyah by Zaylan Morris calledRevelation, Intellectual Intuition and Reason in the Philosophy of Mulla Sadra: An Analysis of the Al-Hikmah Al-'Arshiyyah is scheduled for publication in 2003. An English translation and bilingual edition ofKitab al-masha’ir has been brought out by Parwiz Morewedge asMetaphysics of Mulla Sadra (New York, 1992). Christian Jambet has translatedRisalat al-hashr , a treatise on resurrection, into French asSe rendre immortel: Traité de la résurrection (Paris: Fata Morgana, 2000) with a well-informed introduction to Sadra’s eschatology. Sadra’s important work on the temporal origination of the world calledRisalah al-huduth has been translated into German by Sayed Bagher Talgharizadeh asDie Abhandlung über die Entstehung (Berlin, 2000). An English translation of Sadra’s Iksir al-‘arifin by William Chittick is also scheduled for publication. al-Shawahid al-rubuiyyah is being currently translated by Caner Dagli of Princeton University. Most recently, S. H. Nasr has completed a new translation of theMasha’ir with a commentary and notes, which is currently being edited by I. Kalin.

We can now turn to Sadra’s own works, which I shall present in alphabetical order.