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Mulla Sadra's Life, works, and Philosophy

Prof.S.M.Khamenei

The common accusation of excommunication is not something that anybody can bear and a stigma that one could simply live with in his town or even in the corner of his house. At that time, there was needed a firm and strong dam like Mulla Sadra to stand against such a devastating flood and a powerful will such as his to answer each blow of his opponents and secular enemies with a strike of his language and pen. There was also needed a hero not to ever stop fighting with them and defending his school of thought and ideas bravely.

Alongside such social conditions, the moral weakness of some people might have caused them either not to recognize the importance of Mulla Sadra's ideas and school of philsophy and, therefore, to take sacrificing oneself for it for granted, or to be frightened and worried about their material life and value their short life more than what it really deserved.

However, time will not let such weaknesses go by without punishment and will either grant them a small place on the board of history or completely erase their names from it. The Great Judge of the world seeks for those men who are after the truth, defend it bravely, and are not afraid of stigmas and disasters. The truth requires indefatigable fighters who valiantly maneuver in the danger zone and safeguard its holy fronts.

Mulla Sadra's Students

Teaching and learning and the philosophy of descipleship are noticable phenomena from philosophical scientific and sociological perspectives. If we consider the lifetime of a scientist as a single pulse of the Great Man in the chronometer of the world, the chain of the continuous relationship between the teachers and students and the phenomenon of the go togetherness of mastership and studentship in science and philosophy represent the continuity of life in the body of history and the soul of the world.

It is through this phenomenon that wisdom and science are developed, purified and transmitted from one generation to another. If there were no reproduction, the chain of man's life would be torn and there would remain no man on the earth. Likewise, if there were no teaching and learning in human society, the chain of science and wisdom, which is the very soul of creation and the ladder of man's perfection, would be ruptured and man, like all other animate beings, would go on with his life desperately and finally die like a beast.

However, man's destiny has been something other than this since the dawn of creation. Man's life begins with Adam's training. At this time, the Essence of the God Almighty teaches the Divine Attributes to his earthly successor. Then the light of love radiates and drives the evil away and makes angles prostrate. After this very instruction and that first teacher, the seed of science and wisdom blooms, man's nature is based on mastership and descipleship, and he starts traversing the nine thrones of sphere impatiently to seize the treasure of science. For him, science and wisdom are not the form of the porch (nqsh-i itwan), but its foundation, and rather than secondary perfections, they are his first perfections. And as the master of all theosophers taught to his students, learning and storing knowledge are the same as pouring water into one's narrow brook in order to turn it into a vast sea.

Knowledge and the acquistion of knowledge are not merely images to fall on the table of mind, and the teacher is not a portrayer to draw a new image on his students' minds everyday. Rather, in the light of his divine origin and insight, he is a ctaftsman who makes the students in his workshop and everyday adds an existential piece to his existence.

In such an approach mastership and descipleship represent a kind of creation, and God's successor, that is, the all-knowing and the all-wise man, is himself a creator who tranforms the essence of his material wisdom to celestial wisdom and manifests divine creativity and emanation. He generously offers his knowledge to the learners and is like a torch which leads them from the darkness of ignorance to the light of knowledge.

At the time when science and wisdom could only be found in the houses of prophets, the rightful messengers of the Holy Creator were man's first teachers. As these streams separated their way from the mountains and fell into the expansive bed of history, they connected to each other and flowed into minds of the philosophers of the time. Then the philosophers and sages became man's second teachers. They started their journey from Iran, India, Babylon and Egypt and were dispersed all over the world, from the west to the east. They revived the dried lands of hearts in the light of the freshness of their wisdom. The tree of science came to fruition; from each of its branches numerous branches of science and philosophy grew, and thousands of philosophers and scholars, each playing the role of prophets and speaking of truth came into being. And all this music came from the harp played by prophets and their rightful students, philosophers.

Ignoring wisdom, from which the least known songs are heard today, means injustice to the history of science. And not recognizing philosophers as the real teachers of human kind is injustice to humanity, since today, thousands of years after the dawn of wisdom and acquiring philosophy, there stands a prophet-like master of theosophers before us. The echo of his message is still in our ears, and his students, who are bearing the burden of training and leading the contemporary man and carrying the light of man's freedom from the demons of arrogance and exploitation in the world four centuries after him, resurrect like prophets and make a devine and Islamic revolution.

Tht first problem considered in the chapter on Mulla Sadra's students and the philosophers who followed his school of thought is why, except for a few, we do not know of any of his other students and why their names have not been recorded in history. This is especially important because Mulla Sadra's scientific fame had made him the most prominent character of his time. What is more, he had a long and fruitful presence in scientific centers such as Isfahan, Shiraz and Qum, and before and after his retreat in Kahak, he spent so many blissful years in training students such as Fayd and Fayyad.

The greatest number ever recorded in related books concerning the students of this philosopher is ten. That is why they have been called "ash'arah mubasharah" (The ten to whom Paradise was promised), yet, we do not have a record of the names of all of them and only half of them are known to us.

However, if we consider statistical computations and analytical reasoning as the criteria for judgment, he must have had tens or even hundreds of prominent students, since for about ten years he had been the lone rider of the field of wisdom, hadith and exegesis in Shiraz and in Khan's school, while being at the peak of fame and knowledge. And considering the atmosphere and principles of that time, a lot of people must have come from distant places around him for the acquisidion of knowledge and picking fruit from the blissful tree of his existence.

Before that, he also lived in Qum where he had established a seminary for wisdom and theology which seems not to have existed before that time. It is the same seminary that he left to his student Mulla Abdul Razzaq Fayyad Lahiji and where philosophers such as Qadi Sa'id Qumi were trained.

His life time in Isfahan, which was spent on the learning of higher teachings under Mir Damad and Shaykh Baha, was the period of the flourishing of his scientific and philosophical

Ibn-Sina's Treatise of "al-majalis al-saba 'h "

By:Maqsud Mohammadi

This article introduces one of Ibn-Sina's unpublished and handwritten manuscripts called "al-majalis al-saba'h". This treatise consists of fourty one questions and answers between Abulhasan Amiri (the inquirer) and Ibn-Sina (the answerer). The writer has extensively explored the content validity of this work and presented a rather comprehensive analysis of it.

Mulla Sadra's View of the Knowledge of Existence

By:Reza Akbarian

Islamic philosophers have an idea about the object of knowledge and the mode of its relation to the subject which enjoys certain advantages both at the level of the appearance and the different levels of its growth and development. This idea in its most sublime form belongs to Mulla Sadra. In his view the highest levels of recognition are attained when the knower or the subject completely unites with the known or the object, and when their identities become one and the same thing.

Mulla Sadra, who bases his system of metaphysics on the idea of "the unity of the reality of existence", considers "existence" the most sublime object of knowledge. He believes that a real knowledge of "existence" is acquired through a specific type of intuition. However, since in his philosophy he deals with both "existent" and "existence", moves from "existent" to "existence", and presents a new interpretation of "existent" in the light ef existence, he absolutely rejects the idea that the knowledge of

"existence" is merely obtained through mystic intution. He always emphasizes that the knowledge of "existence" is obtained either through presential contemplation or reasoning and on the basis of their effects and concomitants.

His view of the knowledge of existence through intellectual analysis in the domain of speculation might appear greatly presumptuous and strange, since he rejects Ibn-Sina and Farabi's idea concerning the "accidental nature of existence" and claims that a reality which is the signification and reference of the "human existent" is completely different from the signification of other propositions.

In his view, "human", which is the logical and grammatical subject of this proposition, is not a subject in the outside but the predicate. The real subject is the "reality of existence" and all quiddities are nothing more than accidents which make a single reality bound to numerous objects.

As long as man's perception is limited to his daily and routine experiences, the intution of this reality would not be possible.

There should be awakened a completely new awareness in man's mind so that he would be able to perceive the world in this way.

From a metaphysical point of view, Mulla Sadra resorts to trans-substansial motion, and through believing in the "unity of the knower and the known", he views the growth and transcendence of human knowledge as depending on its existential intensification and perfection and internal and essensial development, during which the perceiver goes beyond its existential level and reaches the existential level of the perceived. Accordingly, Mulla Sadra succeeds in proving a reality which plays a significant role in the discussion of the relationship between the subject and object and eliminating the distinction between the subject and object of knowledge. The main purpose of this paper is to explore the above-mentioned principle to discover its roots and to show that Islamic philosphers and gnostics follow a specific approach in this regard.

The Irrelevance of the Decline of Political Thought to Mulla Sadra's Ideas

By:Seyyed Mohammad Naser Taqawi

According to some contemporary researchers in the field of political thought, Mulla Sadra and his school of philosophy represent the height of the decline of political thought in Iran. They also believe that Mulla Sadra's time marks the start of the period of the degeneration of political thought in this country. To check the truth of this claim, we should first deliberate on the concept of political thought and find out whether it ever existed in Mulla Sadra's philosophy and whether it is true to atribute this decline to him.

There are a lot of relatively extensive definitions and discussions in relation to political thought, which we do not intend to deal with in length here. Our aim in this paper is to provide a comprehensive and all inclusive definition which embodies all such definitions.

An Overview of Philosophers' Ideas of the Contingency or Eternity of the Soul