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Philosophy as a way of life in the world of Islam: Applying Hadot to the study of Mullā Ṣadrā Shīrāzī (d. 1635)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 January 2012

Sajjad H. Rizvi
Sajjad H. Rizvi*
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

The work of the late Pierre Hadot has transformed our understanding of the practice of philosophy, especially in the pre-modern world. This article interrogates how we approach the study of later Islamic philosophy, especially the thought of the Safavid sage Mullā Ṣadrā Shīrāzī (d. 1635), and considers whether the method proposed by Hadot is applicable to this intellectual tradition. While there is much to be gained from the application of a cognate hermeneutics of the text, I also suggest that we still do not know enough about the actual practice of philosophy, of philosophical communities in the Safavid period, to consider whether it constitutes a real intellectual and structural continuity with the late antique Neoplatonic past. Nevertheless, the paradigm of approaching philosophy as a way of life propounded by Hadot does seem to be the best way of making sense of philosophy in Safavid Iran.

Keywords

Philosophylifetheosisḥikmaspiritual exercisescommunitymagusNeoplatonismSafavidPierre HadotMullā Ṣadrā Shīrāzī
Type
Articles
Information
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 75 , Issue 1 , February 2012 , pp. 33 - 45
Copyright
Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies 2012

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References

1 Mullā Ṣadrā seems to prefer the term ʿālim rabbānī or ʿārif rabbānī or ʿārif muta'allih insofar as philosophy is a practice designed for inhabitation and training in methods of reading the modes in which God discloses himself in reality and through which one attains a likeness to the divine (theosis, tashabbuh bi-l-bāri’); see Shīrāzī, Mullā Ṣadrā, The Elixir of the Gnostics [Iksīr al-ʿārifīn], ed. Yasribī, Sayyid Yaḥyā, tr. Chittick, William (Provo, UH: Brigham Young University Press, 2003), 3.Google Scholar The model for the ʿālim rabbānī is the first Shii Imam ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib; see Shīrāzī, Mullā Ṣadrā, al-Maẓāhir al-ilāhiyya fī asrār al-ʿulūm al-kamālīya, ed. Khāminihī, M. (Tehran: Sadra Islamic Philosophy Research Institute, 1999), 51.Google Scholar The term ʿārif rabbānī approximates, and brings to mind, the “holy” or the “divine” man of late Neoplatonism; see Fowden, Garth, The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 289–91Google Scholar; cf. Stroumsa, Guy, “From Master of Wisdom to spiritual master in late Antiquity”, in Brakke, David et al. (eds), Religion and the Self in Antiquity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 183–96.Google Scholar

2 Shīrāzī, Elixir of the Gnostics, 49, 54.

3 This term is extensively instanced in his work; see, for example, Shīrāzī, Mullā Ṣadrā, Īqāẓ al-nā’imīn, ed. Khwānsārī, Muḥammad (Tehran: Sadra Islamic Philosophy Research Institute, 2007), 4–5.Google Scholar

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All of Greek theology is the child of Orphic mystagogy: Pythagoras was the first to receive initiation from Aglaophamos, Plato in turn received from the Pythagorean and Orphic doctrines perfect knowledge concerning the gods. (Proclus, Théologie Platonicienne, ed. H. Saffrey and L.G. Westerink (Paris: Les belles lettres, 1968–87), I.5, 25–6.

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