The Triumph of Mercy , livre ebook

The Triumph of Mercy
Philosophy and Scripture in Mullā Ṣadrā
Mohammed Rustom

Cover art by Mohamed Zakariya.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2012 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rustom, Mohammed.
The triumph of mercy : philosophy and scripture in Mulla Sadra / Mohammed Rustom.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4341-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Sadr al-Din Shirazi, Muhammad ibn Ibrahim, d. 1641. 2. Islamic philosophy. 3. Sufism. I. Title.
B753.M84R87 2012
181'.5—dc23
2011038838
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Nosheen, for all her love and support
Acknowledgments
This book is based on a doctoral dissertation submitted to the University of Toronto's Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations in the fall of 2009. Thanks go first and foremost to my thesis advisor Todd Lawson, who over the years has shared his vast knowledge of Islamic thought with me in unstinting measure. Not only did he see to it that each page of this study conformed to his rigorous academic standards, but he has, through all of my successes and failures, always been a gracious friend and supporter.
Apart from offering helpful comments on the present work at different stages of its gestation, I have also had the fortunate opportunity to learn from Sebastian Günther, Maria Subtelny, Shafique Virani, and the late Michael Marmura. Other teachers from whom I have greatly benefited include Talal Ahdab, Deborah Black, Richard Blackburn, Nasser Danesh, Thomas Robinson, Walid Saleh, and Liyakat Takim. In many ways, they have bestowed upon me the foundational tools necessary for the kind of undertaking presented here.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr's encouragement and guidance from the very outset of this project has been crucial, as has been the time William Chittick spent with me reading the works of Mullā Ṣadrā. Caner Dagli, Robert Dobie, Atif Khalil, Mohammad Hassan Khalil, Joel Richmond, Sajjad Rizvi, Kristin Sands, John Walbridge, and SUNY Press's two anonymous reviewers all provided essential feedback on various aspects of the present study. Nasrin Askari, Ryan Brizendine, Shiraz Sheikh, and my research assistant Rizwan Mohammad have kindly taken care of many nitty-gritty details related to the book, and a number of scholars sent along important references. Specific thanks in this regard are due to Peter Adamson, Jules Janssens, Farhana Mayer, Matthew Melvin-Koushki, James Morris, Gregor Schwarb, and Alexander Treiger.
Over the course of a decade of study at the University of Toronto, on the administrative side of things, Anna Sousa, Jennie Jones, and Elaine Genius have offered a helping hand every step of the way. At Carleton University, the support of my colleagues in the College of the Humanities in general, and Farhang Rajaee and Kim Stratton in particular, has made academic life all the better.
Research for this book was made possible through doctoral fellowships courtesy of the University of Toronto and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, an Ontario Graduate Scholarship, and the Davidson Fund in Religious Studies at Carleton University. Carleton's Office of the Dean (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences) administered a grant in order to commission the artwork which adorns the front cover. For facilitating my research in Iran, I would like to acknowledge the assistance of Hamid Mohammadi at the Iranian Embassy in Ottawa, Jalil Hosseini of the Tehran-based Organization of Culture and Islamic Relations, and Gholamreza Aavani, former director of the Iranian Institute of Philosophy.
A paragraph from the Introduction originally appeared in Comparative Islamic Studies 4, no. 1 (2008): 89, and a sixth of Chapter 1 in the Journal of Qur'anic Studies 9, no. 1 (2007): 128–31, 3. These materials have been reworked into the present book by kind permission of Equinox Publishers and Edinburgh University Press respectively.
Last, but certainly not least, heartfelt thanks go to my family. My parents have supported me from the start, and for this I am very grateful. Abbi, Ammi, my son Isa Ahmed, as well as my siblings, nieces, and nephews have all enriched my work in their own unique way. My wife Nosheen has made innumerable sacrifices and has always sought to create for me an ambience in which I could carry out my research. This book is dedicated to her.
Transliterations and Abbreviations
Transliterations
Arabic and Persian words, proper names, and book/article titles have been transliterated in accordance with the system employed by the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies , with the exception that no distinction is made in transliterating consonants shared between Arabic and Persian. The names of authors who write in European languages in addition to Arabic or Persian have not been transliterated.
Abbreviations
Journals
BJMES = British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies
CB = Les Cahiers de Byrsa
CIS = Comparative Islamic Studies
DI = Der Islam
DSTFM = Documenti e Studi sulla Tradizione Filosofica Medievale
FADDS = Faṣl-Nāma-yi Andīsha-yi Dīnī-yi Dānishgāh-i Shīrāz
ICMR = Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations
IJAS = International Journal of Asian Studies
IQ = The Islamic Quarterly
IS = Islam and Science
ISt = Islamic Studies
JAAR = Journal of the American Academy of Religion
JIP = Journal of Islamic Philosophy
JIS = Oxford Journal of Islamic Studies
JMIAS = Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society
JQS = Journal of Qur'anic Studies
KHNṢ = Khirad-Nāma-yi Ṣadrā
KN = Kâr-Nâmeh
MBSS = Majallat Markaz Buḥūth al-Sunna wa-l-Sīra
MIDEO = Mélanges de l'Institut Dominicain d'Études Orientales du Caire
MRR = Mawlana Rumi Review
MS = Mediaeval Studies
MW = Muslim World
PBSMS = Proceedings of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies
SI = Spektrum Iran
SIs = Studia Islamica
SMT = Studies in Medieval Thought
Reference Works DC    = Dictionnaire du Coran , ed. M. A. Amir-Moezzi. Paris: Robert Laffont, 2007. EI 2    = Encyclopaedia of Islam 2 , ed. H. A. R. Gibb et al. Leiden: Brill, 1960–2004. EI 3    = Encyclopaedia of Islam 3 , ed. G. Krämer et al. Leiden: Brill, 2007–. EJ 2   = Encyclopaedia Judaica 2 , ed. M. Berenbaum and F. Skolnik. Detroit: Macmillan, 2007. EQ    = Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān , ed. J. McAuliffe. Leiden: Brill, 2001–2006.
Introduction
The great German scholar of Islamic intellectual history Max Horten (d. 1945) published two important books on Muḥammad b. Ibrāhīm al-Shīrāzī (d. 1050/1640)—more commonly known as Mullā Ṣadrā—at the turn of the twentieth century. 1 Yet Horten's works on this towering figure of Islamic thought, as well as his other pioneering contributions to later Islamic philosophy and theology, did not receive the scholarly attention one would have expected. This is partly due to the fact that at the dawn of the twentieth century, the story of the earlier period of Islamic philosophy had not even begun to be told. There were indeed a number of general surveys (now outdated) on the history of Islamic philosophy, but the nature and scope of many early Muslim philosophers' teachings were still largely unknown. Horten's books on later Islamic philosophy and theology were, therefore, eclipsed by concurrent and later studies on some of the seminal figures in early Islamic thought, such as Fārābī (d. 339/950), Avicenna (d. 428/1037), Ghazālī (d. 505/1111), and Averroës (d. 595/1198).
Yet it was not always an interest in the history and development of Islamic thought which impelled scholars to take up its study. For many of these scholars—and not a few contemporary writers on Islamic philosophy—philosophical thinking in Islam only had life and/or interest insofar as it contributed to the development of Western philosophy. From the late nineteenth century to roughly the 1960s, Islamic philosophy was therefore primarily studied in order to understand its historical influence on the West. Since Islamic philosophy's historical contact with medieval Europe came to an end with the work of Averroës, this meant that the writings of some of the major authors of later Islamic thought, such as Shihāb al-Dīn Suhrawardī (d. 587/1191) and Ibn ʿArabī (d. 638/1240), had not been translated into Latin. There thus emerged a view of Islamic philosophy amongst Western scholars which saw it as no more than a conduit for transmitting knowledge from late antiquity to the late medieval period, but which in the process failed to extend and foster its own philosophical heritage. 2
Apart from the question as to why medieval Muslims would be interested in the writings of antiquity in the first place, this view of the historical role of Islamic philosophy went essentially unchallenged for the first half of the twentieth century. But this old story of Islamic philosophy was slowly approaching its end. Between 1938 and 1952, the French Iranologist and philosopher of religion, Henry Corbin (d. 1978), who had already made a name for himself by introducing Heidegger to the French-speaking world, 3 published several groundbreaking books on Avicenna and Suhrawardī. 4 From 1953 to the late 1980s came a steady stream of pioneering publications on later Islamic thought carried out by Jalāl al-Dīn Āshtiyānī (d. 2005), William Chittick, Corbin, Toshihiko Izutsu (d. 1993), Hermann Landolt