Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī

Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī — whom Iran calls simply Mullā Ṣadrā — is the greatest philosopher of later Islam, and one of the most profound that Persian culture has produced. Born in Shiraz at the end of the 16th century, he accomplished something many believed impossible: to unite in a single thought philosophy, illumination and gnosis — the reason of the philosophers, the light of the sages, and the taste of the mystics. This synthesis he named al-ḥikma al-mutaʿāliya, the transcendent wisdom.

Shiraz, Isfahan, the silence

He was born around 1571 in Shiraz, into a notable family. Noticed early for his intelligence, he left to study in Isfahan, then the resplendent capital of Safavid Iran and a great centre of learning. There he had two decisive masters: Mīr Dāmād, a rigorous philosopher, heir of Avicenna and of Suhrawardī; and Bahāʾ al-Dīn al-ʿĀmilī, a universal scholar — jurist, mathematician and mystic at once.

But the young Ṣadrā's bold thought disturbed the most literalist circles. Rather than face controversy, he chose withdrawal. For long years — tradition says some fifteen — he retired to the village of Kahak, near Qom. There, far from disputes, he fasted, prayed, meditated, practised asceticism. And it was in that silence, he says, that his philosophy ceased to be a learned knowledge and became a vision. When he finally returned to Shiraz to teach, at the Khān school, he was no longer a disputant: he was a sage. He died in 1640 at Basra, during his seventh pilgrimage to Mecca, made on foot.

Three rivers, one ocean

Before Mullā Ṣadrā, Islamic thought knew three great ways, often rivals. Philosophy (falsafa), heir of the Greeks and of Avicenna, which reasons. The illumination (ishrāq) of Suhrawardī, which holds that the supreme knowledge is a light, not a reasoning. And gnosis (ʿirfān), that of Ibn ʿArabī, which is knowledge through unveiling and through union. Each was suspicious of the other two.

Mullā Ṣadrā's gesture is to show that they do not contradict one another: they describe, at different levels, the same reality. Reasoning prepares; illumination enlightens; unveiling accomplishes. To which he adds a fourth source, which he places above all: the Quran and the teaching of the Imams. The transcendent wisdom is that point where the four converge.

Existence first

At the heart of his metaphysics, a decision: the primacy of existence (aṣālat al-wujūd). The older philosophy asked: what is a thing? — its definition, its essence. Mullā Ṣadrā reverses the question. What is first, he says, is not the essence (the "what"), it is the act of existing itself. Essence is only a limit, a cut; existence is the living reality that fills that cut.

Existence (al-wujūd) is that which unfolds in degrees, from the densest to the subtlest. Mullā Ṣadrā's doctrine

And this existence is not everywhere the same: it knows degrees (tashkīk al-wujūd, the "gradation of being"). A stone exists; a plant exists; a soul, an angel exist — but not with the same intensity of being. There is only one reality, existence, and it ranges from the faintest reflection up to the pure Light that is God. The whole universe is a single ladder of light.

The movement that runs through things

From this follows his most original intuition: substantial motion (al-ḥaraka al-jawhariyya). For the Ancients, a thing could change place, colour, size — but its substance, its ground, remained fixed. Mullā Ṣadrā affirms the contrary: substance itself is in motion. At every instant, all that exists is renewed, carried one notch further. The world is not a stable stage on which things move; the world is a movement, a continuous ascent of being towards more being.

Man, in this vision, does not have a ready-made soul. He becomes it. Born almost matter, he can, through knowledge and purification, raise his being from one degree to another — until he becomes a spirit. This is what Mullā Ṣadrā calls the union of the knower and the known: to know a truth is to become that truth. The soul is composed of what it contemplates.

His work

Three of his works receive here a detailed presentation — key concepts, architecture, how to read them.

To these are added a vast mystical commentary on the Quran, the Mafātīḥ al-ghayb ("The Keys of the Unseen"), a commentary on the narratives of the Imams, and numerous treatises. The whole work is run through by one conviction: philosophy has meaning only if it transforms the one who practises it.

A thought still alive

Mullā Ṣadrā is not a museum philosopher. In Iran, his thought — the ḥikma — has been taught without interruption for four centuries, in the religious schools as in the universities. In the 20th century, it was he whom Henry Corbin placed at the centre of his immense work on "Iranian philosophy"; it was he whose work Seyyed Hossein Nasr made known to the English-speaking world.

His lesson crosses the centuries: to exist is not a state, it is an act; and the human soul is not a given thing, it is an ascent to be accomplished. To think, for Mullā Ṣadrā, was never anything other than to climb.