Metaphysical Penetrations: A Parallel English-Arabic Text by Mulla Ṣadrā (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Metaphysical Penetrations: A Parallel English-Arabic Text by Mulla Ṣadrā Ali Paya Metaphysical Penetrations: A Parallel English-Arabic Text by Mulla Ṣadrā, trans. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, ed. and introduced by Ibrahim Kalin, 2014. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, distributed for Brigham Young University), xli + 320 pp. (English/Arabic), $39.95. isbn: 978-0-84252-839-9. A famous philosopher – Karl Popper – once observed that ‘all men and all women are philosophers’. While this observation can hardly be challenged, when it comes to philosophy as a distinct discipline whose aim is the systematic endeavour to explore various aspects of reality by rational means, it seems that only a limited number of cultures can claim to have developed advanced and sophisticated ways of systematic philosophising and possess a variety of well-developed philosophical schools. Philosophy seems to have always been an integral part of the intellectual landscape of Iran whether in her Islamic or pre-Islamic periods. When, due to the dominance of Ash‘ari thought in the Eastern as well as the Western flanks of Muslim lands, philosophy, as a discipline, vanished from Muslims centres of learning, Iranian philosophers, whether Sunni or Shi‘i kept the flame of philosophising alive and continued their intellectual endeavour by producing new and more sophisticated schools of philosophy. Apart from the Peripatetic School with luminaries like Farabi, Ibn Sina, and Nasir al-Din Tusi, among others, Iranians managed to develop entirely new philosophical schools such as the Iluminationist (Ishraqi) School (introduced by Suhrawardi), the School of Isfahan (developed by Mir Damad), the Schools of Shiraz (the first one introduced by Sadr al-Din Dashtaki and the other by Mulla Sadra Shirazi), and School of Khorasan (due to Mulla Hadi Sabzivari). Among modern scholars who have contributed to introducing the achievements of Muslim philosophers to the Western readers, Professor [End Page 529] Seyyed Hossein Nasr deserves special mention. On his own as well as in collaboration with colleagues and students, he has managed to translate many of the works produced by Muslim philosophers since the inception of philosophy among Muslims to the present day. The book under review occupies a special place in his considerable oeuvre. As he explains in his preface, this translation and his annotations are the outcome of a novel project which was carried out for the first time in the West within the confines of an academic setting. Professor Nasr explains that in 1984 at the George Washington University, with the help of ‘a group of advanced and well-qualified students in the field of Islamic philosophy’ he ‘decided to perpetuate [the] time-honoured tradition of dars-i kharij’ by teaching two major texts of Mulla Sadra, who is regarded as one of the greatest Muslim philosophers of all time. The books in question were Kitab al-Hikmah al-‘Arshiyyah, and Kitab al-Masha’ir. As the translator explains, in dars-i kharij, the teacher first reads the text, and then comments upon it. Then students are invited to contribute to the discussions by suggesting their own critical comments, observations, and questions. The book under review is the outcome of this intellectually stimulating process which, in the case of Professor Nasr and his students, went on for a number of years. The book contains the English translation of Kitab al-Masha’ir plus the original Arabic text followed by notes and comments on various aspects of the text. The English translation is edited and annotated by Ibrahim Kalin, who was a member of Professor Nasr’s dars-i kharij sessions and at the time also one of Professor Nasr’s PhD students. The Masha’ir belongs to the period of Sadra’s intellectual and spiritual maturity. He was in his fifties when he finished the book. It provides a clear account of Mulla Sadra’s system of thought in which ‘wujud’ (Being, being, Existence) in itself, and not our conception of it, is the source/originator/creator of everything. It is also the starting point of Sadra’s philosophical deliberations. Sadra has produced a complete metaphysical/epistemological/theosophical system by pondering on wujud itself and its implications. The editor, who is now a professor of Islamic philosophy, in his introduction...