Mulla Sadra and the School of Isfahan

Mulla Sadra (Sadr al-Din Mohammad Shirazi, c. 1571–c. 1640) was the most influential philosopher of Safavid Iran. Building on the teaching of Mir Damad and others in Isfahan, the circle modern scholars call the “School of Isfahan”, he created a system he called the transcendent philosophy, centred on the primacy of existence and on change within the very substance of things. It is still taught in Iran’s seminaries today.

Philosophy in Safavid Isfahan

When the Safavids made Twelver Shi’ism the religion of the state, as described in Twelver Shi’ism becomes Iran’s state religion, they needed scholars, and the court supported a wide range of learning. Alongside jurists, Isfahan in the early seventeenth century had teachers of Avicenna’s philosophy, of the “illuminationist” thought of the twelfth-century mystic Sohravardi, and of the mystical theology of Ibn Arabi. The French scholar Henry Corbin and the Iranian philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr later grouped these thinkers together as the “School of Isfahan”. It was not a formal institution, but a network of teachers and students who tried to bring reason, revelation and mystical experience into one system.

Mir Damad

The leading figure was Mir Mohammad Baqer Astarabadi, called Mir Damad (d. 1631), a grandson of the great Arab jurist al-Karaki, who was both a senior religious official and a philosopher. His admirers called him the “Third Teacher”, after Aristotle and al-Farabi. He wrote poetry under the name Eshraq and was known for a difficult, compressed Arabic style. His best-known doctrine, set out in his book al-Qabasat, was a new solution to an old problem: how a timeless God relates to a world in time. He argued for a “perpetual creation” (hodus-e dahri), a kind of origination that was neither in time nor simply eternal.

Other teachers included Sheikh Baha’i, mathematician, jurist and poet, whose life is told on the Sheikh Baha’i page, and Mir Fendereski (d. 1640), who taught Avicenna’s philosophy and travelled in India. Their tradition rested on the work of Avicenna, written six centuries earlier.

The life of Mulla Sadra

Sadra was born in Shiraz to a family of officials. As a young man he went to Qazvin and then to Isfahan to study, and he regarded Mir Damad as his true master. His ideas, and perhaps his outspokenness, made enemies among scholars who saw philosophy and mysticism as threats to the faith. He withdrew for some years to Kahak, a village near Qom, where, according to his own account, he spent his time in prayer and spiritual exercise and gained insights he had not reached by argument alone.

Around 1612 he was invited back to Shiraz to teach at the Khan school, a new madrasa founded by the Safavid governors of Fars, the family of Allahverdi Khan and his son Imam Qoli Khan. He spent the rest of his life there, teaching and writing. Tradition says he made the pilgrimage to Mecca seven times, on foot, and that he died at Basra on the way home from the last one. The year of his death is given as 1635–1636 or 1640–1641 in different sources.

The transcendent philosophy

Sadra called his system al-hikma al-muta’aliya, “the transcendent philosophy” (hekmat-e mota’âliye in Persian). His main work, usually called simply the Asfar, “the Journeys”, is organised as four journeys of the soul: from creation to God, in God, from God back to creation, and in creation with God. Three ideas are especially associated with him.

The primacy of existence

Earlier philosophers had distinguished between what a thing is (its essence, mâhiyat) and the fact that it is (its existence, vojud). Many had treated essence as the real thing and existence as an idea added to it. Sadra argued the reverse: existence is what is real, and essences are only the mind’s way of marking out the limits of particular existences. This doctrine is known as asâlat-e vojud, “the primacy of existence”.

Degrees of existence

Existence, for Sadra, is one reality that comes in degrees, like light in different strengths, from God as pure existence down to the weakest material thing. This “gradation” (tashkik) let him combine the unity of being taught by mystics with the variety of the world described by philosophers.

Substantial motion

Aristotle and Avicenna had held that change happens only in a thing’s qualities, quantity, place or position, not in its substance. Sadra argued that the substance itself is always in motion, harakat-e jowhari: the material world is constantly being renewed and moving towards a more perfect existence. He used this to explain how the soul can grow out of the body and survive it.

Critics and successors

Sadra also wrote a sharp Persian treatise, Se Asl (“Three Principles”), attacking scholars he considered narrow-minded literalists, as well as false Sufis. Not surprisingly, many jurists distrusted him. His sons-in-law and students, Mohsen Feyz Kashani and Abd al-Razzaq Lahiji, became leading scholars, though they were more cautious than their master. At the end of the seventeenth century Mohammad Baqer Majlesi and his allies turned the court against philosophy and Sufism, as described on the Shah Soltan Hoseyn page.

Sadra’s ideas survived in the teaching circles of Isfahan and returned to prominence in the nineteenth century, when Molla Hadi Sabzevari wrote a widely studied verse summary of his philosophy. In the twentieth century his thought became central to the teaching of philosophy in the seminaries of Qom, through scholars such as Allameh Tabataba’i. Corbin and Nasr also made him known to Western readers, who now often place him with Avicenna and Sohravardi as one of the three great philosophers of the Islamic East.

For the city where he taught, see the Shiraz city guide.