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Part I
Preliminaries
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1 Methodological concerns
History does not belong to us; we belong to it. Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society, and the state in which we live. The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror. The self-awareness of the individual is only a flickering in the closed circuits of historical life. That is why the prejudices of the individual, far more than his judgements, constitute the historical reality of his being.1
Philosophy, mysticism and pedagogy
Before considering issues of method, I should make explicit some of my assumptions, pre-understandings and conceptions of the cultural and intellectual history of the period. We should examine the contexts for Mullā Ṣadrā, not in order to produce a hard contextualist account of his philosophy or even to reduce his method to an impoverished historicist reading of Safavid thought, but to fill in aspects of the key assumptions about the nature of knowledge, philosophy, pedagogy and the practice of mysticism that are essential for a more holistic understanding of his philosophical method.2
First, one needs to locate philosophical discourse within the wider pursuit of knowledge as a social good in Safavid society. Its cultural importance within the institutional negotiation of power that was the madrasa needs to be recognised.3 Centres of learning were expressions of courtly patronage, fora for the articulation of power and perpetuation of élite ideas, while retaining the possibility for subverting discourses. Knowledge was a social good and practice that facilitated social mobility and for the élites ensured a channel for the retention of power.4 It also expressed strategies of social positioning for the ʿulema. We know that Ṣadrā was the only son of a prominent court family. His pursuit of knowledge could either be seen cynically as a means of securing the social survival of his family in times of provincial disequilibrium in Shiraz, as well as part of his ‘love’ for learning and the truth. His social success can be gauged by the patronage of Imām-Qulī Khān, the governor of his home province who established the Madrasa-yi Khān in Shiraz as a vehicle for his teaching. Although it has been a commonplace among Islamicists to argue that the pursuit of intellectual disciplines in Islam was dealt a death blow by the famous refutation Tahāfut al-falāsifa of Ghazālī [d. 1111], speculative cosmology and ontology did not come to an end. In the Islamic East in particular, Avicennism was closely merged with systematic theology and even with juristic theory; it was inconceivable for the theologian or jurist to embark on discussions and dialectic with respect to rulings in divine law or statements of doctrine without establishing the principles of discourse provided by logic, epistemology and a descriptive metaphysics that explained the relationship between mind, word and world.5
The Timurids, Safavids and Mughals (and their successor dynasties in Iran and North India) patronised the intellectual disciplines (al-maʿqūlāt) and certain key texts constituted the core of this curriculum in the gunpowder empires: in logic (manṭiq), the short al-Risāla al-Shamsiyya of Dabīrān Kātibī Qazwīnī [d. 1276] and Tahdhīb al-manṭiq of Saʿd al-Dīn Taftazānī [d. 1389] with the scholia and marginalia of Mullā ʿAbd Allāh Yazdī [d. 1573] and Mīr Zāhid Harawī [d. 1605]; in systematic theology (ʿilm al-kalām), the pithy and dense Tajrīd al-iʿtiqād of the Shiʿi polymath Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī [d. 1274] with the two main commentaries (the ‘old’/qadīm and the ‘new’/jadīd) of Shams al-Dīn Iṣfahānī [d. 1349] and ʿAlā’ al-Dīn Qūshjī [d. 1474] and the myriad of super-commentaries, scholia and marginalia by Mullā Ṣadrā’s predecessors such as Ghiyāth al-Dīn Dashtakī [d. 1542] and Shams al-Dīn Khafrī [d. 1550] and his successors such as his son-in-law ʿAbd al-Razzāq Lāhījī [d. 1661]; and in philosophy (ḥikma), al-Hidāya of the Avicennan Athīr al-Dīn Abharī [d. 1264] and the commentary of the Timurid court-philosopher Mīr Ḥusayn Maybudī [d. 1504] and of course the later sharḥ of Mullā Ṣadrā himself.6 The existence of multiple copies of manuscripts of these texts in libraries and collection within the Persianate world does not in itself attest to the wide acceptance of the ideas and arguments within them, nor does it necessarily mean that as school-texts they were fully read, digested, debated and critiqued. But the presence of these itinerant manuscripts (many of which are now in the British Library in London, Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin and Princeton University Library among other places) does signal the patronage and dissemination of the intellectual quest in the Islamic East.
Second, we need to recognise the importance of oral teaching at the heart of the madrasa’s pedagogy, what Derrida has pejoratively described as ‘the logocentric hegemony of the spoken word over the written’ in mediaeval culture originating in the famous Platonic dialogue, Phaedrus.7 In Protagoras, Socrates criticises a reliance on books by arguing that books ‘have nothing either to reply or the reasons to ask’.8 It was assumed that dialogue and oral teaching inscribed truth in the soul of the student more efficaciously and in a more lasting manner than the written word.9 To be sure, the privileging of the oral is also a result of the Islamic culture of transmission of ḥadīth and the Qurʾān.
In the Shiʿi tradition, however, written transmission was quite acceptable, even encouraged, in the early period as attested by the survival of the kitāb of the first century H controversialist, Sulaym b. Qays Hilālī.10 The early traditionist Abū Jaʿfar Kulaynī [d. 941] cites a number of narrations extolling the writing of ḥadīth in the chapter on ‘transmission of books and ḥadīth and the excellence of writing and adhering to the written word’ of the book on the excellence of knowledge (faḍl al-ʿilm) in the ḥadīth collection al-Uṣūl min al-Kāfī (The Principles of the Sufficient); for example, Abū Baṣīr narrates that Abū ʿAbd Allāh (Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq) said, ‘Write because you will not be able to preserve (knowledge) unless you write (it down)’.11 In his commentary on this narration, Mullā Ṣadrā states that the import is transparent; narrators are fallible and may forget and so in order to preserve prophetic and Imamic knowledge, they must write it down.12 In another narration reported from Imam al-Ṣādiq, it was said that ‘the heart relies upon writing’; the seat of knowledge and memory is the heart but it requires aid.13 Ṣadrā further comments that this proves that one may act in accordance with the written word.14
Nevertheless, authority of transmission depends upon actual reading (qirā’a), audition (samāʿa) and repetition to the shaykh.15 This process ensures reliability and credibility of scholarship not only in the scriptural disciplines but also in the intellectual ones. It may even suggest the privileging of the esoteric unwritten doctrines over the exoteric and written ones, since true doctrine is transmitted through oral teaching within a community of shared experience.16 However, as the debates over the famous passage in Plato’s Seventh Epistle show, the issue is more complex.17 Scholars such as Nasr have stressed the importance of oral teaching, of sitting at the feet of a learned shaykh and acquiring knowledge ‘from heart to heart’.18 This may help to explain the general trend of writing school-texts that are densely written and require memorisation and exegesis. Moreover, the cost of books before the printing press required that texts be internalised by students with meagre funds. In this context, we can understand the nature of the Asfār and Ṣadrā’s teaching in the Madrasa-yi Khān in Shiraz. Furthermore, since many texts post-date their authors, one can presume that the oral teaching reflected in the recollections of his students was vital. In fact, only the first safar of the Asfār is actually Sadrian prose (insofar as we have a holograph attesting to it), the rest being compiled from the notes of his students.19 Thus, to an extent, we can regard most of the Asfār as a series of ‘lecture notes’. Such an understanding concurs with our notions of the nature of the Aristotelian corpus and would account for three important features of such a text: incompleteness of argument, textual and conceptual inconsistencies, and stylistic and grammatical infelicities.20 It is common in the madrasa for students to transcribe lecture notes and then publish the transcription in the name of the lecturer. The text is thus authentically the work of the lecturer even though it is not his prose.21 This is somewhat akin to the process of transmission of ḥadīth since riwāya bi-l-maʿná is considerably more prevalent that riwāya bi-l-lafẓ.
Logocentrism interrogates the status of the book as an aid and preserver of the word. In order to understand the nature and function of the book in Islamic culture, we must pay attent...
