The Legacy of Mulla Sadra  in the Writings of Western Scholars in Iranian and Shí’í Studies:Use or Abuse?

Andrew J. Newman

 

   The title of the present paper is intended to be provocative. For more than ten years I have been interested in aspects of the careers and contributions of such eminent scholars of the early and mid-eleventh/seventeenth century as Shaykh Baha al-Dín Muhammad, Shaykh Baha’í, Mír Damad, Fayd al-Kashaní and Taqí al-Majlisí, members of the so-called ‘Isfahan School of Philosophy’. I am mainly interested in Twelver fiqh and hadíth as a result of which I am not as well versed in all of the great philosophical contributions of these scholars as I ought to be. While I was unsure as to the validity and usefulness of the notion of the ‘Isfahan School of Philosophy’ when I was writing my Ph.D. in the early 1980’s, subsequent research has convinced me that the term is a useful one, in that it distinguished a period of great intellectual renaissance, the basis of which was certainly the effort of the members of the School to infuse, and thereby regenerate, existing theological and philosophical inquiry by reference to a distinctly Twelver framework of understanding and analysis.

On the other hand, I have not changed several earlier opinions. These include, first, that well before Corbin and Nasr formally established the concept of the ‘Isfahan School’ in the West in the 1950’s. Such earlier Western scholars as E. G. Browne and Laurence Lockhart had viewed the early and mid-eleventh/ seventeenth century as a period of intellectual renaissance and enlightened philosophical inquiry. Secondly, for Browne this picture served mainly to contrast the earlier part of the century with the late eleventh/seventeenth century which these scholars saw as dominated by religious intolerance and bigotry, chiefly promulgated by Baqir al-Majlisí, the severity of which so weakened Safavid Iran that it was unable to resist the Afghan invasion in the early twelfth/eighteenth century. Thirdly, that this picture of the eleventh/seventeenth century as having begun with a burst of cultural and intellectual achievement, in an atmosphere of military, political, and economic stability, only to end in the darkness of fanatical religious orthodoxy amid military, political, and economic chaos remains the dominant framework within which Western scholars view the accomplishments of such figures as Sadra.

In sum, Western-language studies of the period and its intellectual figures, including Sadra, has undergone little development in the more than seven decades since Browne published the fourth volume of his A Literary History of Persia in 1924[1]. In essence, I would argue, Sadra was and is still a figure who attracts Western interest mainly insofar as he serves as a foil for Baqir al-Majlisí. Thus, if the question in my title is provocative, the answer is intended to be even more provocative. The answer is ‘abuse’.

 Early Views of the Achievement of Sadr al-Dín al-Shírazi

 

In our own century Western conventional wisdoms about the Safavid period all too often have their origins in the works of Edward Browne. Browne perhaps was the first Western scholar in this century to stress the philosophical proclivities of a select group of early seventeenth\century Imamí clerics, and emphasize their role in the broader process of enlightenment and intellectual achievement characteristic of the reign of ‘‘Abbass I. Browne identified such figures as Mír Damad (d.1041/1631\1632), Shaykh Baha’í (d.1030/1620\1621), Muhsin Fayd al Kashaní (d.1091/1680), Mír Findiriskí (d.1050/1640), and ‘Abd al Razzaq al Lahíjí (d.1072/1662) as ‘philosophers, as well as, or even more than, theologians[2]. As to Sadr al-Dín al-Shírazí (d. 1050/1640) in particular, Browne referred to him as ‘the greatest philosopher of modern times in Persia’, in ‘constant conflict with the ‘ clergy’ and whose ‘speculations’ were not ‘conditioned by and subordinated to revealed Religion (sic).’ He repeated earlier suggestions that Sadra’s works provided the bases for the later development of Shaykhí and Babí thought but does not himself seem to have studied any of Sadra’s works first hand.[3]

By the end of the century, however, the ‘clergy’ with whom Sadra had been in conflict during his own lifetime were now in control, headed by Muhammad Baqir al-Majlisí (d.1111/1699-1700) whom Browne called ‘a fanatical divine’ and ‘perhaps the most notable and powerful doctor of the Shí’ah who ever lived’. Elsewhere, Browne declared al-Majlisí ‘one of the greatest, most powerful and most fanatical mujtahid of the Safavid period’, and suggested that ‘the narrow intolerance so largely fostered by him and his congeners’ ... ‘left Persia exposed’ to ‘the troubles which culminated in the supreme disaster of 1722’, the Afghan invasion.[4]

Although in his 1958 The Fall of the Safavi Dynasty Laurence Lockhart devoted no attention at all to the philosophical achievements of the early eleventh/seventeenth century, he did continue to exploit the name of al-Majlisí in the same manner as had Browne, and with just as little justification, since Lockhart, like Browne, had read very little of any of al-Majlisí’s writings. Lockhart’s characterization of al-Majlisí’s impact on Safavid society both echoed and, in several areas, elaborated upon those of Browne. On the one hand, Lockhart described al-Majlisí as, among other things, ‘an extremely bigoted mujtahid ‘ and ‘a rigid and fanatical formalist.’ He was ‘ violently opposed to the Sunnis’ and disliked the Sufis as much, owing to ‘ their pantheism, but also because so many eminent Sufis had been Sunnis.’[5] Like Browne, Lockhart censured al-Majlisí for his role in weakening the resolve and fibre of Iranian society. According to Lockhart, al-Majlisí initiated a ‘religious campaign’ which ‘took the form of denunciation, and often persecution, of all who did not follow the strait and narrow path of his own choosing’. Because the Sunni Ottomans and Shí’í Safavids were at peace at the time, this campaign was waged inside Safavi territory. It both aroused the ire of Iranian Sunnis and failed to inspire Iranian Shí’ah ‘ with any real martial spirit ‘ at ‘ the moment of supreme national crisis in 1722’ - the latter a point validated by reference to Browne’s earlier description of the wider impact of al-Majlisí and his ‘ congeners’.[6]

Lockhart was not, however, content merely to validate Browne by reproducing either the thrust of his arguments or his actual comments. Lockhart added three features to the critique of al-Majlisí. First, having noted his antipathy for the Sufis, Lockhart stated al-Majlisí also fiercely denounced Aristotelian and Platonist philosophers as being ‘followers of the infidel Greek’ - this citing a single essay in the Browne Collection at Cambridge, from which he quoted no more than those five words.

Secondly, Lockhart stated that al-Majlisí’s influence over Shah Sultan Hussein was substantial and was demonstrated by latter’s appointment of himself as mulla-bashí or head of the Mullas’.

Finally, although Lockhart acknowledged’ we have no definite proof’, he nevertheless concluded ‘it seems highly probable that it was this fanatical leader who was responsible for this increase in persecution’ of Jews and Armenians - this because in the late eleventh/seventeenth century, when a revival of Shi’ism was in progress ‘ largely through the power and influence of al-Majlisí, orders for the execution of several prominent members of each community were obtained, though not all those were carried out.[7]

The Contribution of Corbin and Nasr

When, in the late 1950s, Corbin and Nasr then developed the notion of the ‘Isfahan School of Philosophy’ to describe the philosophical project of such thinkers as Shaykh Baha’í, Mír Damad - whom Corbin dubbed the ‘ founder’ of the Isfahan School - Fayd al-Kashaní and, of course, Sadra himself there was, therefore, already in place in Western scholarship an intellectual paradigm which placed limitations on the accomplishments of these thinkers. Corbin and Nasr chose not to challenge that paradigm.[8] As for Sadra, Nasr, for example, hailed him as the individual in whom ‘ [t]he intellectual activity revived in Persia during the Safavid period...found its culmination’[9], while in an article in the same collection he referred to al-Majlisí’s persecution of ‘the intellectual methods of the hakims and philosophers’ and, echoing Browne, implied a connection between such persecution and the subsequent fall of the dynasty to the Afghans. Elsewhere, Nasr described al-Majlisí as ‘ the most formidable spokesman for the reaction which set in within Shí’í religious circles during the later Safavid period’ and also noted his condemnation of the hukama (philosophers).[10]

More than ten years later, in the years immediately prior to the Islamic Revolution, the same paradigm of analysis was still alive and well. Thus, in his 1980 study of the Safavid period the ‘dean’ of Safavid studies at the time Roger Savory described the Safavid-period philosophy project as ‘ the resurrection of the important Ishraqiyya ... school of Iranian philosophy’ founded by Suhrawardí (d. 587/1191), stated that it was during the Safavid period that his [i.e. Suhrawardí] teachings came into full bloom’ and concluded that ‘ Suhrawardí’s ideas were revived and developed principally by two Safavid philosophers’ whom he named as Mír Damad and Mulla Sadra.[11]  Further on, Savory echoed the analyses of Browne, Lockhart and Nasr in noting that the period ended with the rise to prominence of the mujtahids, citing al-Majlisí, of course, in particular. Savory noted al-Majlisí’s persecution of the Sufis and, as had Western scholars before, linked the rise of the ‘ulama to the weakness of the last two shahs and the subsequent fall of the Safavid state to the Afghans.[12]

In this same time-frame, al-Majlisí also achieved notoriety outside the field of Safavid studies. In his 1981 study of modern Iran Huma Katouzian, without citing a single source, characterized al-Majlisí as one of the ‘‘ worldly religious leaders - the only one named by Katouzian in fact - who gained a ‘great deal of political power...their influence was the cause of a lot of political mistakes which weakened the state, and helped the Afghan invasion. ‘To this very conventional accusation, Katouzian then added that the unsourced statement that ‘apart from his disruptive political influence, [al-Majlisí] had greatest share in proliferating unreliable akhbar ...and promoting superstitious beliefs, through his writings’. [13]

Continuity or Change Following Iran’s Islamic Revolution?

Fazlur Rahman’s 1975 study of Sadra and his thought represented an effort to study Mulla Sadra and his legacy as a body of knowledge largely detached from his place as a scholars of the Safavid-period. While certainly a valid approach to the subject, Rahman’s failure to have confronted, let alone fully referenced, the existing literature on Mulla Sadra and, in particular, the place Iranian and Safavid studies had already accorded him left his work was available for appropriation by later scholars whose agenda was rather more comprehensive. [14]

James W Morris’s 1981 study of Sadra and his ‘Arshíyya represented a similar effort to that of Rahman to study Sadra and his thought independent of the historical circumstances in which Sadra lived, let alone address the prevailing tendency to use Sadra as a tool with which to contrast the ‘enlightenment’ of the early eleventh/seventeenth century with the ‘reaction’ of the latter part of the century.[15]

The failure to confront the existing scholarship on Sadra and his thought left the work of Rahman and, to a lesser extent Morris, was all the more important in the aftermath of the distinctly Islamic turn taken by the Iranian Revolution.

Prior to the Iranian Revolution the prevailing tendency within Iranian studies in the West was to assume that religion would somehow ‘wither away’ and Iran and, indeed, the rest of the Muslim Middle East would become more, or as, secularized, as modern Turkey.[16] The distinctly Islamic direction which the Revolution rapidly assumed caught scholars in the field by surprise and they have been struggling to explain the apparent resurgence of Islam in Iran ever since 1979.[17]

One of the earliest of these efforts was that of Mangol Bayat who, in her 1982 Mysticism and Dissent, was clearly discontented with the involvement of Shi’ism in politics.[18] Though mainly concerned with the Qajar period, for Bayat Mulla Sadra was one of the ‘Shí’ah mystics and philosophers [who] tried to transcend the legalistic approach the religion, and to keep Shí’ah (sic) spiritually alive’ against the influence of the ‘law-minded ulama [who had] declared the gate to the Imam’s knowledge...closed’ and supported the authority of the mujtahid . Not surprisingly, al-Majlisí was identified as one of the latter. In as much as Bayat herself undertook little original research into Mulla Sadra’s writings, Rahman’s 1975 study and, to a much lesser extent, Morris’s 1981 contribution, featured prominently in her work as did earlier suggestions as to Shaykhí appropriation of aspects of Sadra’s thought as Bayat struggled to prove that genuine dissent became increasingly difficult in Iran owing to the inherently conservative tendencies of the clerical establishment and therefore that such dissent became increasingly secular in nature.[19]

Another negative response to the Revolution was to deny the legitimacy of any political dimension to Twelver Shi’ism at all. This sort of analysis built on the work of H Corbin and S H Nasr who had been pointing to certain points of convergence between Shi’ism and mysticism.[20] To be sure, neither Corbin or Nasr had directly suggested that Twelver Shi’ism was inherently either political or apolitical, but their emphasis on the ‘phenomenological and philosophical’ dimension of Shi’ism were said by S. A. Arjomand, whose 1984 work The Shadow of God, represented nothing less than a new synthesis of ideas as to the political nature of the faith and Corbin and Nasr’s work on the associations between Shi’ism and mysticism, to have ‘clear implications regarding political attitudes’, i.e. that the ‘inherent esoteric quality of Shi’ism in this view induces a drastic devaluation of the exoteric world, thus reducing the propensity to engage in this-worldly political action and nurturing an attitude of radical political indifferentism’, i.e. that genuine Twelver Shi’ism eschewed any interest in, let alone involvement with, secular, worldly activities.[21] At the same time, the author’s disenchantment with the course of Iranian history after 1979 was clear:[22] defining ‘real’ Shi’ism as inherently apolitical and otherworldly in nature facilitated and indeed represented a challenge to the legitimacy and authenticity of key aspects of Iran’s Islamic Revolution.

Such an analysis was completely comfortable with and indeed was built on Browne’s understanding view of eleventh/seventeenth century Iran as a dichotomy between Mulla Sadra and Muhammad Baqir al-Majlisí. Arjomand simply added a sociological dimension to the picture of the period already drawn by Browne. Indeed Arjomand described Mulla Sadra primarily in terms of his having been attacked by ‘the Shi’ite hierocracy’ for ‘gnostic/philosophical’ views and put al-Majlisí at the head of that eventually ‘triumphant hierocracy’ which assumed control of the society and the state in the latter part of the century and sought to suppress all intellectual inquiry and minority religious tendencies; as for Browne, for Arjomand the activities of al-Majlisí and his supporters were ‘an important cause’ of the overthrow of the Safavid dynasty following the Afghan invasion.[23] Popular’ scholarship especially accepted Arjomand’s new synthesis of Corbin and Nasr and the debate over the political nature of the faith generally and, more specifically, the revitalization his sociological analysis offered an sixty-year-old understanding of the Safavid period.[24]

At the same time both this synthesis in particular and the earlier ‘analyses’ offered by Browne and Lockhart to which it gave new life were also accorded prominence in subsequent scholarly works, particularly those of an introductory nature, as the field of Iranian and Islamic studies in the West struggled to explain the resurgence of Islam in Iran. In his 1985 An Introduction to Shí’í Islam

Moojan Momen referred to the School of Isfahan and Mulla Sadra as ‘the greatest figure in this school’ while noting, nearly in the same breath, the attacks of al-Majlisí and ‘his Shari’a-minded colleagues’ on the influence of philosophy and Sufism within Twelver Shi’ism in this period. Momen’s sources on the role and influence of al-Majlisí were Browne and Lockhart.[25]

More recent discussions of Shi’ism and Safavid Shi’ism in particular have likewise produced no new analyses of the role and importance of Mulla Sadra or al-Majlisí, let alone the time in which they lived. Heinz Halm’s 1991 introductory work Shi’ism, a translation of the 1987 German version,[26] summarized the extant scholarship rather than extending its boundaries. For Halm, therefore, Mír Damad was the ‘founder’ of the Isfahan School and the School’s ‘most important representative’ was Mulla Sadra, who ‘transplanted’ the School’s ‘theosophy’ to Qum and Shiraz. Halm’s description of al-Majlisí, in that it portrayed al-Majlisí as representative of the anti-philosophical reactionary clergy, differed little from that offered by Browne more than sixty years before. According to Halm al-Majlisí.

 

‘led an operation to cleanse the Shí’ah in Iran of all trace of Sufism, philosophy and gnosis..’

 

which, in as much as this ‘operation’ was part and parcel of Majlisí’s role in the ‘development of the Shiite lawyer (sic) into a caste’, contributed to the weakening of the ‘Safavid empire’ and, ultimately, the Afghan victory of 1722.[27]

Similarly Yann Richard’s 1995 Shi’ite Islam, an English translation of a 1991 French version, depicted al-Majlisí as ‘the head of the mullas’ and, as such, one of those ‘most learned theologians’ who ‘hounded the Sufi orders’ in this period.[28]

More scholarly, i.e. non-introductory, works similarly echoed the ‘old order’ more often than not. Ahmad Moussavi’s 1996 study of the rise of religious authority in Shí’í Islam, for example, even as it was one of the first to examine Mulla Sadra’s commentary on al-Kafi of Muhammad b. Ya’qub al-Kulayni (d.329/941), nevertheless described Sadra’ in familiar terms as the most prominent of Mír Damad’s students and, following on from Morris, also addressed the confluence between aspects of Mulla Sadra’s thought and Shaykhí thought. As for al-Majlisí, Moussavi identified him as an Akhbari - based rather more on his interest in collecting the akhbar than a critical examination of his legal writings - who utilized rationalist tools of analysis and supported the authority of the mujtahid; in doing so Moussavi, however, applied analyses and terminology derived directly from Arjomand’s The Shadow. Moreover, like both Bayat and Arjomand, Moussavi was clearly disenchanted with the Islamic Revolution, in particular the manner in which the authority of the Imam was replaced by that of ‘the superior mujtahid of the time’.[29]

Summary and Conclusion

Clearly the appearance of these two introductory-level works in German and French respectively and their translation into English coupled with the earlier appearance of Momen’s volume testifies to a new-found interest in the West in Shi’ism generally and Shi’ism in Iran in particular following the Islamic Revolution. It is also sadly all too clear that in undertaking to ‘explain’ Shi’ism to their readers many have utilized forms of discussion and analyses whose origins may be dated to the early twentieth century and which, in the interim, had been subject too all too little serious criticism and commentary. Our own discussion suggests that the authors of these introductory works are not solely to blame for promulgating afresh these older forms of discussion and analyses: the Western-language field itself clearly has done little to question the continued applicability of Browne’s analyses of Mulla Sadra, al-Majlisí and the epoch in which they lived, either before the events of 1978 or after. Indeed following the Revolution Western-language scholars have only breathed new life into the analyses offered by Browne and Lockhart of Safavid-period religious discourse.

This is not to say that there is no hope for the delineation of a more dynamic view of trends in religious discourse in the Safavid period. Thus, for example, V B Moreen has challenged the view that al-Majlisí was fiercely intolerant of the Jews.[30]

The present writer has challenged that notion that al-Majlisí was as opposed to aspects of Greek thought, especially Galenic medicine, as such scholars as Lockhart have supposed.[31] A forthcoming Cambridge Ph.D. thesis promises a more dynamic examination of Mulla Sadra and his legacy.[32]

Additional research into the careers and contributions of these and other scholars can only further contribute to a more dynamic understanding of the nature of philosophical and jurisprudential and theological discourse in this period and, eventually, topple these shibboleths.

 

Notes: