Character and School of Mulla Sadra

 

 By: Ayatollah Seyyed Mohammad Khamenei

 Having gone through a period of extreme pressure and ordeal Mulla Sadra was gradually being prepared to get back to an active social life.He visited Qom occasionally and said prayers at Kahak's mosque.This dramatic change of attitude made him available to ordinary people who now felt free to ask him about religious issues and even seek his mediation in their conflicts.The lively style of the First Journey of Al-asfar coincides with the end of Mulla Sadra's years of isolation.

 

Mulla Sadra in Kahak

There is very little information as to when exactly Mulla Sadra arrived in Kahak. Neither can we make sure how long he stayed there. Historians' estimates range between seven to fifteen years.

What is definite, however, is that he spent the early years of his stay in Kahak-perhaps as long as ten years - in the seclusion of his own home.The chain of events in those years reveal the important role played by Mulla Mohsen Feyz Kashani in re- introducing Mulla Sadra to the outside world.He resumed teaching and as Feyz writes in his autobiography, the courses included theosophy, education and even gnosis.

 

Feyz Kashani

One of the most impressive and versatile scholars in Shi'ite history, Mulla Mohsen Feyz Khashani, never won the recognition he deserved. Some Islamologists even believe that Feyz might not be eligible to be viewed on a par with Ghazali.

Despite similarities between the two scholars in terms of writing style and research procedures, I now intend to emphasize that Feyz can be considered in a higher credit bracket.

Unlike Ghazali who approached the caliphate in Baghdad, Feyz to remain anonymous headed for small towns such as Qamsar or Natanz in central Iran.

This did not prevent him from writing, however.

More than 80 books and essays plus a collection of poems - which again distinguishes him from Ghazali - are the outputs of his ceaseless pen stroke.

Feyz comes from a scholarly family. His Father Mowlana Sheikh Morteza was a respected jurist in Kashan and his mother was the daughter of Zia-ul- Orafa Razi, a renowned philosopher of his time.

Feyz's life story can be best reviewed through his autobiography where he states:

"I learned literature, Arabic, logic and religious issues from my father and uncle. I left for Isfahan at the age of twenty and found it a cradle of science. I mastered mathematics and other sciences there.

Then upon hearing that Seyyed Majed Bahrani had settled in Shiraz, I went there and studied hadith with him. After two years the Sheikh permitted me to quote hadiths. I, meanwhile, perfected my knowledge of religious law thus becoming free from imitation. I then returned to Isfahan and attended Sheikh Bahai's classes and obtained his permission for quoting Riwayah. Afterwards, since I could afford a Hajj pilgrimage, I went to Mecca and there I met Sheikh Mohammad Ameli who, too, gave me the permission to quote hadiths.

On the way back home thieves killed my brother. After Hajj, I visited every town and city in search of scholars. That led me to Qom where I met the foremost scholar of all times, Mulla Sadra.

I spent eight years with him purifying my soul and I was finally honored to marry his daughter.

At about the same time, Mulla Sadra was invited to Shiraz and he accepted the request. I accompanied him to Shiraz and after two years returned to Kashan and resumed teaching and writing."

This autobiography nullifies the year 1007 as Feyz's birth date; his father is certain to have passed away in 1009 and Feyz cannot have begun taking literature and Arabic courses at the age of two. Therefore, he must have been born about eight or nine years before i.e. about 1000 A.H. Elsewhere, he wrote that he had spent two years in Shiraz with Seyyed Majed Bahrani. Since Bahrani passed away in 1028, Feyz must have arrived in Shiraz in 1026. That helps us estimate that he entered Isfahan one or two years before i.e. 1024 - 1025.

It is, therefore, logical to assume that Feyz, who was twenty years old upon entering Isfahan, was born in 1004 - 1005.

Another point to verify this date is when Feyz's brother lost his life on a return journey home from Mecca i.e. 1030.

They must have arrived in Mecca at least one year before i.e. 1029, and considering the fact that Feyz had spent a year prior to his Hajj pilgrimage with Sheikh Bahai (1028) right after Bahrani passed away, I conclude that he entered Shiraz two years before that, i.e. 1026, and Isfahan again two years before i.e. 1024. He, therefore, must have been born in 1004.

To sum up, I conclude that Feyz cannot have begun attending Mulla Sadra's classes later than 1030.

His son was born in Qom in 1039 and if we assume that he had married a year before, i.e. 1038, we will have the year 1030 as the date when Feyz became acquainted with Mulla Sadra.

This also proves that Mulla Sadra cannot have been in Shiraz between 1026 and 1028; otherwise, Feyz would have attended his classes or at least mentioned his name.

These calculations also reveal that Mulla Sadra left Kahak for Shiraz in 1038 spending the last twelve years of his life in his hometown.

 

Back Home

Upon an invitation from Imamqolikhan, the ruler of Fars and the Persian Gulf islands, Mulla Sadra returned to Shiraz in 1038 to teach at the newly - established Khan School which was intended to support theosophy and rational sciences against the advocates of Traditionalists (Ikhbariyyun).

Mulla Sadra's return home coincided with Shah Safi's succeeding to the throne.

The young monarch soon revealed himself to be surprisingly inefficient.

Looking at Imamqolikhan as a potential threat to the throne, Shah Safi summoned him and his sons to the capital in 1042 and killed them.

In a letter to Mirdamad Mulla Sadra expresses his dismay at the new situation:

 "It was expected that the country's precarious condition stablizes finally and things fall into the right direction as in the past when men of letter were respected by the court. However, it now seems that this has been a wrong expectation and an impossible dream."

Despite the death of Imamqolikhan, Mulla Sadra continued expanding Khan School's study domains with a focus on philosophy and rational sciences.

Having gained a self-exile insight, the aging Mulla Sadra was not much like the exuberant researcher who had just left Isfahan for Shiraz many years ago.

Now he did not linger on philosophy; he was developing his own controversial version: the Transcendent Wisdom.

 

Translated by: Mahmood Ahmadi Afzadi

 

Abstracts

 

Sadra-ul-Mutaallehin's philosophical Innovations

 

 By Mohammad Entezam

 The author elaborates on Mulla Sadra's concept of the truth of science and how it leads to the formation of one of the basic gnosiological principles of the Transcendent Wisdom i.e. the identity of subject and object.

He then concludes that theories such as the identity of soul and active intelligence, indivisible intellect and resurrection of perfect souls are derivatives of the principle of the identity of subject and object.

 

Resurrection as Viewed  by Sadr-ul-Mutaallehin

 

By Hadi Rastegar Moghaddam Gohari

 Citing Muslim theologians' arguments pertaining to the immateriality of soul and the otherness of soul and body, the author expounds on how Mulla Sadra considers the attachment of soul to body from the angle of contingency.

He points to Mulla Sadra's eleven reasons for corporeal resurrection concluding that, "What is understood from resurrection is that it applies to both soul and body in their present conditions; therefore the very same body will be resurrected".

 

 Corporeal Resurrection and  Transcendent Wisdom

 By Mohammadreza Hakimi

 The author praises Mulla Sadra for verifying the question of corporeal resurrection in the light of revelation or revealed intellect.

Mohammadreza Hakimi then points to Mulla Sadra's eleven principles on corporeal resurrection drawing out what he terms "the seven revealed principles of Mulla Sadra" in this connection.

These principles include:

1) the probative validity of the verses pertaining to resurrection

2) there is no digressive interpretation of verses pertaining to corporeal resurrection

3) there is no necessary relation between accepting the outward aspects of the verses pertaining to corporeal resurrection and rejection of rationalism.

4) there is no necessary relation between accepting the outward aspects of the verses pertaining to corporeal resurrection and Traditionalism.

5) the corporeal resurrection does not include an impossible thing

6) the finality of the universe and the necessity of complete rewarding through an all-out return

7) the basicality and necessity of resorting to revealed sciences

 

Primum Mobile as viewed by Aristotle and Mulla Sadra

 

By Dr. Mostafa Mohaghegh Damad

 The article focuses on how differently the two philosophers touch the question of primum mobile. While Aristotle looks for a natural power to justify every single movement within nature itself, Mulla Sadra simply states that substances are essentially fluid and, therefore, do not require a power to move them. In other words, nature is not other than movement.

However, Mulla Sadra reaffirms that nature cannot be a necessary being because its existence is essentially contingent and it, therefore, needs a cause to exist.

Mohaghegh Damad concludes that the trans - substantial motion theory resolves, once and for all, the long-standing differences over "the temporal creation of the world".

 

 

A Glance at Sadr- ul- Mutaallehin's Transcendent Wisdom

 By Ayatollah Javadi Amoli

 To shed light on Transcendent Wisdom in comparison with other schools, the author has in seven detailed chapters elaborated on issues such as manifestation of justice in Transcendent Wisdom, Mulla Sadra's interpretation of the intelligible life" and his intellectual development.

Ayatollah Javadi Amoli considers demonstration, gnosis and the Quran as the founding elements of Transcendent Wisdom. To reach this wisdom,the soul must set off the four journeys through trans - substantial motion.

The author emphasizes that Transcendent Wisdom is more comprehensive than speculative mysticism, illuminationist theosophy and Peripateticism thanks to its incomparably inclusive nature.

 

 

Platonic Spirit of Mulla Sadra's Philosophy

 By Ayatollah Seyyed Mohammad Khamenei

 Is "spirit" the same as "soul"? Does Mulla Sadra discredit his controversial belief in the corporeal contingency of soul by endorsing the idea that the incorporeal spirit comes prior to body?

Will the question be settled by assuming that he at times uses "soul" and "spirit" interchangeably? Or does he consider one as an incorporeal being existing prior to body and the other as a derivative of body?

Raising such questions, the author makes a successful effort in removing the traditional ambiguities about Mulla Sadra's apparently overlapping notions of soul and spirit.

Having rummaged all of Mulla Sadra's works in search of various interpretations of soul and spirit, Ayatollah Seyyed Mohammad Khamenei writes that Mulla Sadra considers soul and spirit as two entirely independent beings.

Spirit as viewed by Mulla Sadra is the same as Plato's notion of heavenly spirit which is prior to body. Spirit, Mulla Sadra says, is other than the rational soul.

He maintains that the contingency of soul originates from its corporeality which becomes spiritual in the course of time.

 

Temporal Creation of the World and the Trans - substantial Motion

 By Hossein Mousavian

 Conducting a chronological research on the origin and development of the issue of the temporal creation of the world, the author discovers that Mulla Sadra rules out the idea of scholastic theologians who believe in a temporal contingency for the entire universe; neither does he endorse the essential contingency theory put forth by the philosophers of his own time.

Mulla Sadra says that the temporal creation of the world becomes meaningful in the light of the trans- substantial motion on the basis of which no existent, even the primary matter, can remain stationary and subsistent.

Therefore, the author concludes that by tracing the movement of beings within their substance, Mulla Sadra aims to justify movement within creation.

Based on the article, what Makes Mulla Sadra's research on the temporal creation of the world from similar surveys is that he focuses on the "whatness" of the issue rather than on its "whyness".

 

 

(al-Waridat al-qalbiyyah fi ma'rifat-il-rubu'biyyah):

A Mystical Treatise by a philosopher sage

 By Janis Eshots

 This short thesis contains many philosophical and mystical views of Mulla Sadra. He has divided this book into forty chapters and presented the basis of his philosophical views in it. Among these views are Divine Essence and Attributes, the Reality of "being" (wujud), creation and its stages, the spiritual journey and a discussion of the effects of (divine) love.

In the first chapter, Mulla Sadra explicated the meaning and the definition of "being". He asserted that being is an external reality (haqiqat khariji) which has true existence. All other things except for (beings and their) attributes and their relations do not have true existence. Mulla Sadra based this view on the "principality of being" (Isalat wujud) and the "unity of being"(wahdat wujud). Before reaching this conclusion, Mulla Sadra takes into account the views of Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and Aristotle, but his true inspiration and teachings are rooted in the great gnostic, Ibn Arabi.

Mulla Sadra agreed with the Peripatetic and the Illuminationist Philosophers on the order of creation and creation itself. He believed that God Almighty first created a divine "united essence" (jawhar qudsy wa'hid) and out of it came "Intelligible substances" (jawhar aqliyah) which are the cause for the celestial soul and the noble bodies. Sheikh al- Ishraq (Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi, founder of the Illumiantionist School of Philosophy) pays a lot of attention to the issue of celestial bodies and soul. The other mystical issue of this thesis is the spiritual journey. The thing that Mulla Sadra is most concerned with is the first of the four journeys in his celebrated book,AL-Asfar The journeys of the servant to the Creator and the journey of the devoted to the One who is worthy of love.