An Annotated Bibliography of the Works of Sadr Al-din Al-shirazi (mulla Sadra) With a Brief Account of His Life

Sadra’s Works

Mulla Sadra was a prolific writer and his extant corpus ranges from the monumental Asfar to treatises of a few pages. With the exception of his Sih asl and diwan of poetry in Persian, he wrote all of his works in Arabic. His style stands out as one of the most lucid and systematic forms of philosophical writing in Arabic. As a general trait of his philosophy, Sadra weaves together the strictly logical discourse of the Peripatetic philosophers with the ecstatic language of the mystics. Very often we see Sadra bursting into various aphorisms, exhortations, and ecstatic exclamations, comparable only to the language of such figures as Ghazali and Ibn al-‘Arabi, after discussing a particular philosophical or cosmological problem in a rigorously analytical manner. In cases where prose seems to fall short of conveying Sadra’s intended meaning, he does not hesitate to quote poetry both in Arabic and Persian.

Sadra’s corpus spans the entire spectrum of traditional philosophy. Metaphysics, cosmology, ontology, epistemology, axiology, eschatology, psychology, and natural philosophy are treated in their traditional formats. In addition to his purely philosophical works, Sadra has a lengthy yet incomplete commentary on the Qur’an and few other works on understanding the Qur’an and Shiite hadith. For purposes of classification, I shall divide Sadra’s works into two broad categories of transmitted and intellectual sciences.

Sadra’s Qur’anic commentaries are the first works to come to our attention in the field of transmitted sciences. Sadra is certainly not the first Muslim philosopher to write commentaries on the Qur’an. Ibn Sina wrote a short commentary on the famous light verse of the Qur’an (24:35), which describes God as the ‘light of the heavens and the earth’. With this commentary, Ibn Sina has initiated a new genre of philosophical exegesis soon to be followed by Ghazali and Suhrawardi. None of these philosophers, however, wrote extensive glosses over the Qur’anic verses. In this sense, Sadra differs from his predecessors by giving a more prominent place in his writings to the verses of the Qur’an and the sayings of the Prophets and the Shi’ite imams. In fact, his commentaries amount to a considerable size and have been edited and published by Muhammad Khwajawi in 7 volumes as Tafsir al-qur’an al-karim, which will be discussed below. Sadra’s Qur’anic commentaries are of particular importance for they are written from the point of view of his philosophy, i.e., ‘transcendent wisdom’ (al-hikmat al-muta’aliyah), giving one of the finest examples of philosophical and mystical exegesis. This aspect of Sadra’s works has been largely ignored, and consequently there are only a few short essays we can mention on the subject in European languages.[^24]

Sadra has also written a mystico-philosophical commentary on the famous Shi’ite book of hadith Usul al-kafi compiled by Kulayni. As in his Qur’anic commentaries, Sadra deals with various sayings of the Prophet and Shi’ite Imams to bring out their philosophical significance. His commentary on the Usul al-kafi is titled Kitab al-‘aql wa’l-jahl (“The Book of Intelligence and Ignorance”), in which he interprets many sayings of the Imams within the context of such metaphysical issues as the primacy of being (wujud), God’s Names and Attributes, and bodily resurrection. In writing these glosses, Sadra seems to be particularly interested in showing the intrinsic relation between two sources of knowledge, viz., transmitted-religious and intellectual-philosophical.

Mulla Sadra’s most important works that have gained him numerous honorific titles, however, are in the field of intellectual sciences, particularly in traditional metaphysics and philosophy. Although a great majority of these works have been published due to the single-handed and indefatigable efforts of Sayyid Jalal al-Din Ashtiyani and, more recently, Muhammad Khwajawi, we are far from having a complete list of Sadra’s works critically edited and published. The following bibliography will give a detailed discussion of these works.

Sadra’s philosophical works occupy a special place in the annals of Islamic intellectual history. Without claiming to be exhaustive, we can highlight three aspects of this immense corpus. The first point concerns the historical period in which Sadra composed his works. Sadra was a contemporary of Descartes, and is considered to be one of the peaks of the post-Avicennan Islamic philosophy. The fact that Sadra wrote his books in the 17th century and was able to influence a whole generation of philosophers, which eventually resulted in the formation of the school known under his name, disproves the two-centuries old claim of the Orientalists and Western historians of Islamic philosophy that philosophical activity in the lands of Islam came to an end with Ghazali’s attack on Ibn Sina in his Tahafut al-falasifah. Even though this view is no longer held by the serious scholars of Islam, the number of studies on philosophers prior to Ibn Sina is incomparably more than what has been produced on the history of post-Avicennan Islamic philosophy. His school also points to the continuity of philosophical activity in the Persian-speaking world up to our own day.

Secondly, Sadra represents the culmination of various philosophical strands of Islamic intellectual history. Standing at the crossroads of the four major traditions of Aristotelian philosophy (mashsha’i ) associated with Farabi and Ibn Sina, the School of Illumination (ishraq ) established by Suhrawardi, Islamic theology (kalam ), and finally metaphysical mysticism or gnosis (‘irfan ) represented chiefly by Ibn al-Arabi and his school, Sadra launched a grand project of synthesizing them into a coherent whole in the form of a highly original and comprehensive philosophical system that he called ‘transcendent wisdom’ (al-hikmat al-muta’aliyah ). Thus the Sadrean corpus displays a remarkable blend of various strands of thought from the purely logical and analytical discussions of quiddity and logical categories to the extremely poetic and ecstatic discourses on the all-inclusive reality of being and unveiling (kashf ) as a direct way of knowing Divine mysteries. In this regard, Sadra attempts to complete a project whose origins go back to Suhrawardi, namely the reconciliation of analytical and discursive thinking (nazar ) with mystical experience (dhawq ) and spiritual training.

To highlight the ‘synthetic’ nature of his thought, Sadra seeks to combine three established sources of knowledge in the Islamic intellectual tradition:burhan referring to logical-analytical thinking,‘irfan referring to realized knowledge, andqur’an referring to revealed knowledge. Furthermore, Sadra appears to be acutely conscious of these traditions, their differences and similarities as he analyzes a particular problem or adopts a particular point of view within the context of these intellectual traditions. This makes Sadra’s corpus an invaluable source for the history of Islamic philosophy. In many ways, reading Sadra’s text amounts to reading the entire history behind the problem under investigation.

The third important aspect of Sadra’s works is their originality and cogency as a whole. Sadra is known for a number of novel ideas and formulations in the history of Islamic philosophy. Primacy of being (asalat al-wujud ), the idea that a simple reality contains in itself all things that belong to its class (basit al-haqiqah kull al-ashya’ ), gradation of being (tashkik al-wujud ), unification of the intellect and the intelligible (ittihad al-‘aqil wa’l-ma’qul), substantial motion (al-harakat al-jawhariyyah ), and the bodily origination and spiritual subsistence of the human soul (jismaniyyat al-huduth ruhaniyyat al-baqa’ ) are only few of the major contributions that have earned Sadra a unique place among the pioneers of Islamic philosophy.

In the West, Comte de Gobineau’sLes Religions et les philosophies dans l’Asie centrale is the earliest work to refer to Mulla Sadra. In his doctoral thesisThe Development of Metaphysics in Persia , Muhammad Iqbal presented a survey of Sadraa lá Sabziwari, Sadra’s great commentator. The German scholar Max Horten is the first European scholar to have devoted a separate work on Sadra. Horten wrote two books on the subject:Die Gottesbeweise bei Shirazi (Bonn, 1912) andDas philosophische System von Shirazi (Strasburg, 1913), in which he both translated from Sadra’s works and provided a fairly complete analysis of his system.

The French philosopher and Islamisist Henry Corbin, who had started out his career in Western philosophy by translating Heidegger’sSein und Zeit into French, marks a turning point in Sadrean studies. Corbin translatedKitab al-Masha’ir , Sadra’s own summa of his philosophy, into French under the titleLe Livre des pénétrations métaphysiques (Téhéran-Paris, 1956), which contains an extensive analysis of Sadra’s thought with a parallel commentary on the Masha’ir. In addition to devoting a large section to Sadra in hisEn islam iranien: aspects spirituels et philosophiques (4 Vols., 1971-2), Corbin also made a partial translation of Sadra’s commentary on Suhrawardi’sHikmat al-ishraq along with Qutb al-Din Shirazi’s commentary in hisLe Livre de la Sagesse Orientale (Kitab Hikmat al-ishraq ) (Lagrasse: Editions Verdier, 1986).

Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who is largely responsible for putting Sadra on the map in the English language, has written a number of seminal essays on Sadra in addition to hisSadra al-Din al-Shirazi and His Transcendent Theosophy published in 1978 (the second expanded edition 1997). Fazlur Rahman’sThe Philosophy of Mulla Sadra (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1975) deals with Sadra’s philosophy as a whole. Although written from a strictly Peripatetic point of view and thus failing to give a balanced view of Sadra’s ideas on philosophy, kalam, and mysticism, Rahman’s work is the only book-size analysis of Sadra’s thought.al-Hikmat al-‘arshiyyah , Sadra’s most important work on eschatology, has been translated by James Winston Morris asThe Wisdom of the Throne: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mulla Sadra (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981) with a long introduction and extensive commentaries. A new study ofal-Hikmat al-‘arshiyyah by Zaylan Morris calledRevelation, Intellectual Intuition and Reason in the Philosophy of Mulla Sadra: An Analysis of the Al-Hikmah Al-'Arshiyyah is scheduled for publication in 2003. An English translation and bilingual edition ofKitab al-masha’ir has been brought out by Parwiz Morewedge asMetaphysics of Mulla Sadra (New York, 1992). Christian Jambet has translatedRisalat al-hashr , a treatise on resurrection, into French asSe rendre immortel: Traité de la résurrection (Paris: Fata Morgana, 2000) with a well-informed introduction to Sadra’s eschatology. Sadra’s important work on the temporal origination of the world calledRisalah al-huduth has been translated into German by Sayed Bagher Talgharizadeh asDie Abhandlung über die Entstehung (Berlin, 2000). An English translation of Sadra’s Iksir al-‘arifin by William Chittick is also scheduled for publication. al-Shawahid al-rubuiyyah is being currently translated by Caner Dagli of Princeton University. Most recently, S. H. Nasr has completed a new translation of theMasha’ir with a commentary and notes, which is currently being edited by I. Kalin.

We can now turn to Sadra’s own works, which I shall present in alphabetical order.