Embarking on my doctoral studies on the thought of the Iranian Safavid thinker Mullā Ṣadrā Shīrāzī (d. 1635), I found myself stumped with a basic question of methodology: how do I make sense of his thought which is so removed from the categories and approaches to philosophy of our own time, not least of the major trends within Anglo-American (post-)analytic philosophy? Reading the existing secondary literature did not help much; confusion was a basic state of response. What was Mullā Ṣadrā's thought and how can we gauge the nature of his contribution to Islamic intellectual history? How should we understand what he intended by the term ḥikma(t), often rendered as philosophy? Should we even consider him to be merely a “philosopher”? Does our description of him as a philosopher diminish his role as a thinker, teacher and exegete? Are our tastes in Islamic philosophy condemned to following fashions in the wider history of philosophy? What did he understand by the concept of philosophy? And let us note that nowhere in his work does he describe himself primarily in terms that either render or approximate our concept of “philosopher”.Footnote ¹

In fact, he is quite dismissive of the “philosopher” or a “pseudo-philosopher” who, for him, rehearses and repeats doctrines and positions from within Aristotelianism without either verifying them or being able to construct arguments for understanding the nature of either human reality or the cosmos; they are physicalists and sensory reductionists incapable of witnessing metaphysical realities.Footnote ² His ideal person is a particular type of hieratic, a thinker and an actor whose ethical commitment is clear in his righteous conduct and whose metaphysical acumen is established through his ability to witness reality as it is – in short, one of al-shuhadā’ al-ṣāliḥīn, a deeply Quranic term for the intellectual and spiritual elect.Footnote ³ So what is the nature and goal of intellectual inquiry and “philosophizing” for Mullā Ṣadrā?

The existing works (the nascent sub-field of Sadrian studies within the already rather limited field of the study of philosophy and the intellectual life in Islam) seemed to take me in two contrary directions.Footnote ⁴ On the one hand, the approach favoured by Henry Corbin and Seyyed Hossein Nasr considered Mullā Ṣadrā to be a “theosopher” engaged in a noetic exercise of higher synthesis in which thought was geared to making sense of ultimate reality by blending Avicennan rationalism with mystical insight drawn from Sufi traditions.Footnote ⁵ He was therefore more than a philosopher: to borrow a term from late Neoplatonism, he was a magus.Footnote ⁶ Those trained in philosophy departments, not least in the analytic tradition, are often puzzled by this approach because it does not tally with their concept of philosophy as a discursive training in modes of reasoning in thought and language.Footnote ⁷ Corbin famously explained his approach to ḥikmat as philosophy in the following terms:

It is this emphasis on prophetic philosophy that leads Corbin to privilege the study of the esoteric, the Shii, the Neoplatonic, reaffirmed by his disciple Christian Jambet who asserts that philosophy in the Muslim world necessarily needed to be a meditation upon the sense of revelation and the reality of existence and the divine, failing which it could only be a historical moment in the transmission of Greek learning to the Latin West.Footnote ⁹ While there is much to ponder in Corbin's concept of prophetic philosophy and his re-orientation of the study of philosophy in Islam, it seems that this approach fails in two ways. First, it posits a phenomenological approach to the study of philosophy that deliberately condemns historicism and consequently lapses into an ahistorical mode of inquiry.Footnote ¹⁰ Even a simple acquaintance with conventionalism as championed by Quentin Skinner would hold up the problem of deracinating the work of Mullā Ṣadrā from his context and the intellectual and linguistic conventions of his time.Footnote ¹¹ Second, in its quest for tying philosophical inquiry to religious commitment, it fails to explain the wider intellectual context of the thinker and what he considers philosophizing as an activity and practice to be in his context and for his community. Further, in pursuit of the esoteric, one can easily lose grasp of the basic fact that thinkers like Mullā Ṣadrā claim to provide Aristotelian demonstrations for their mystical insights, and remain keen students of the history of their practice; it for this reason that his major oeuvre The Transcendent Wisdom of the Four Journeys of the Intellect (al-Ḥikma al-mutaʿāliya fī-l-asfār al-ʿaqlīya al-arbaʿa) is a wonderful resource for a selective but extensive history of philosophical and mystical reasoning in the world of Islam.

On the other hand, we have what I would term “analytic Sadrianism” by analogy to the well-established analytic Thomism popular among Catholic philosophers especially in North America. This represents an increasingly influential school of Shii seminarians in Iran, enamoured with the Anglo-American analytic tradition, who want to make Mullā Ṣadrā a philosopher tout court who could and should be read alongside the greats and engaged in a dialogue with Descartes and Kant, and influenced by the study and translation of the works of these pivotal figures in the history of European philosophy.Footnote ¹² Located in the hybrid seminary-university known as Mufid University and at centres such as the Imam Khomeini Education and Research Institute, its proponents read Mullā Ṣadrā divorced from his context – social, intellectual and theological – in much the same way that the analytic school treats Kant or seeks to engage in a dialogue with other religiously motivated analytic thinkers.Footnote ¹³ He becomes the systematic philosopher of Islam. Mullā Ṣadrā dominates this understanding of philosophy just as Aquinas does in other contexts and is often shaped into the thinker that one wishes to analyse in order to engage in comparative philosophy. This is partly with a view towards a philosophical triumphalism that vindicates one's religious views, philosophy as handmaiden to theology so to speak, a tendency eminently perceivable in the Shii seminary since the 1950s and disseminated through Usūl-i falsafa va ravish-i ri’ālizm (Principles of Philosophy and the Method of Realism) of the seminarian thinker and exegete Sayyid Muḥammad Ḥusayn Ṭabāṭabā’ī (d. 1981).Footnote ¹⁴ The use of Mullā Ṣadrā in pursuit of this new form of philosophical theology (kalām-i jadīd) is problematic if we wish to consider philosophical reasoning to be preliminary and constantly in need of revision, re-assessment, and re-articulation.

Alongside these two tendencies is a third, which emerged from the late 1990s as a shift in, but continuation of, aspects of Corbin's approach, namely a phenomenological Sadrianism in which Mullā Ṣadrā becomes a Husserl or Heidegger before his time, fundamentally deconstructing substance mode metaphysics and ushering in the phenomenological turn in Islamic thought. This approach has been facilitated by the work of the eminent Husserlian Anna-Theresa Tymieniecka in a number of comparative volumes dedicated to phenomenology and Islamic philosophy.Footnote ¹⁵ This phenomenological appropriation implies an interest in key areas of concern within phenomenology such as the nature of religion in this world, consciousness and intentionality and of course the very self-conscious act of philosophizing.

In this game of discovering the “real Mullā Ṣadrā” (or perhaps appropriating and reading him in the light of one's own experience and training, and one cannot entirely divorce oneself from vulnerability to this critique), reading his actual works seemed to extend this confusion: arguments would branch out from authoritative citations from the Quran, prophetic and imamic sayings and the logia of the ancients, especially the famous Theologia Aristotelis, that famed Neoplatonic Arabic paraphrase of sections of Plotinus’ Enneads IV–VI, syllogistic formulations abound, precise and careful critique of his predecessors not least Avicenna (d. 1037), Suhrawardī (d. 1191), and Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240) and yet all along there would be paeans to the beauty of mystical ecstasy and the desire to conjure divine providence and practise ḥikma with the exercises and supererogatory prayers and supplications that one expects in a spiritual tradition.

So how do we make sense of Mullā Ṣadrā? It was an act of serendipity that one day, sitting in the library at the classics faculty in Cambridge, I came across for the first time the work of Pierre Hadot; browsing in the Neoplatonism section, I found his work translated into English as Philosophy as a Way of Life.Footnote ¹⁶ It led me to rethink fundamentally what Mullā Ṣadrā was trying to do, based on the paradigm and prism of approaching his work as a Neoplatonic practice of askesis, of philosophy as a spiritual exercise and way of life.

Hadot's work seemed to put forward four critical insights for the study of ancient thought that may be grafted (or at least applied as a calque) onto the study of medieval thought and indeed Islamic thought. First, the history of philosophy develops in a series of leaps and contextual and felicitous mistranslations, misreadings and creative mistakes. What is important therefore is not to read Mullā Ṣadrā on Aristotle and compare it to the Aristotle that we know from the (often analyticizing) study of Aristotle in philosophy and classics departments, but the Aristotle that he read, received and creatively manipulated, a thoroughly Islamicized and Neoplatonized Aristotle with elements of Plotinus, Porphyry and even Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240), an Aristotle who spoke Arabic. It is this process that makes commentary literature such a creative force for the history of philosophy and impels us to read philosophy as the product of particular school traditions.Footnote ¹⁷ Thus philosophy takes place within a tradition. Reading the text is not therefore a simple dialogue across time but a practice rooted in a school tradition and the commentary culture associated with key texts and significantly with concomitant spiritual practices, paramount among which is meditation, as means to read the nature of reality and of God. In his inaugural lecture as professor at the Collège de France, Hadot said:

An important corollary of this point is that there is a difference between reading a contemporary philosophical text and one in the past.Footnote ¹⁹ The very practice of reading is distinct because of the privileging of the oral in the latter and the nature of the teaching imparted – and because the professional contexts of the two are quite distinct.Footnote ²⁰

Second, training in philosophizing is to inculcate practices of dialoguing. Philosophy is primarily an oral exercise and requires engagement: merely reading a written text will not allow one to understand the hermeneutical rules and methodology of the school which is unwritten in the treatises.Footnote ²¹ The written word is an aide-mémoire for the spoken word, the logocentrism inherent in the philosophical tradition and predicated on the idea of philosophy as revealed word, encoded in a sacred book, requiring a spiritual master to initiate and explicate.Footnote ²² Dialoguing basic to the Socratic method is a learned practice within a community, an externalization of the need to inculcate an examination of the self, an inner dialogue and attention to and care of the self – to know oneself, as the Delphic maxim has it, and as the famous saying man ʿarafa nafsahu fa-qad ʿarafa rabbahu articulates.Footnote ²³ Of course, it is worth asking in what sense one can consider dialoguing to be a spiritual exercise. Hadot answers in the following manner:

Dialogue is thus a mode for the expression and emergence of the self, in dialogue with the teacher but also with the text itself, insofar as the reading of the text is designed to effect and activate switches in the soul that take it along the path of transformation through the mode of non-discursive pedagogy.Footnote ²⁵ Discourse is thus taken in two rather different senses: the former is addressed to a disciple or the self and linked to an “existential context, a concrete praxis”, while the latter is formal and has an intelligible content.Footnote ²⁶ It is the former that amounts to a spiritual exercise. And significantly this spiritual exercise must be conducted within a tradition and within a community. As Hadot said in a recent interview, “la philosophie implique un certain mode de vie et une vie en communauté”.Footnote ²⁷ The question for historians and contemporary thinkers is whether the madrasa and the university constitute such communities.

Third, philosophizing requires spiritual exercises which are more than just intellectual and contemplative but entail a mode of living, a way of life. The exercise of philosophy is spiritual because it affects the totality of the life of the thinker. Philosophizing is therefore not just about pedagogy or learning how to learn, but also a training and guiding of the soul, or learning how to live and become. Theoretical knowledge is insufficient; it needed to be practised and implemented to become present to the mind and a “habitus of the soul”.Footnote ²⁸ Drawing upon the Stoic ideal of the philosophical life as an art of living, Hadot argues that spiritual exercise takes one beyond the acquisition of philosophy as theory:

In this sense, philosophy is therapy for the soul, in which knowing is being and becoming – philosophy does not just cause one to know but it causes one to be in a particular way.Footnote ³⁰ However, at the same time, it is insufficient to associate spiritual exercises with ethical living alone – after all, ethics is but one of the three parts of philosophy: the distinction between theory and practice applies to the physics and the metaphysics as well in ancient philosophy.Footnote ³¹

Fourth, the cultivation of philosophy was designed to have an effect on the soul of the seeker so that he could not just think but orient himself in the world, with the goal of becoming a sage. At the heart of Hadot's thought is a particular anthropology of the ancient philosopher: humans need to understand and live in this world but also recognize the ability to make their world.Footnote ³² The sage of antiquity is a philosopher whose practice allows him to be embedded in this world. That rootedness makes him cosmic and hence provides the possibility of making and humanizing his world:

It is in this sense that the sage not only affects the world he inhabits and lives in but also is capable of creatively reconfiguring how we understand reality. He is more than just a modern scientist investigating phenomena. This notion of the sage as one who makes the world is a common Sufi trope related to the idea of the realized Sufi as the perfect human (al-insān al-kāmil), in the image of God, who participates in the divine names and deploys divine attributes. Such a sage in the Islamic tradition thus becomes the face of God.Footnote ³⁴

But alongside these useful insights and the desire to address ancient thought as philosophy and not as something of antiquarian interest for the historian for the period, Hadot's own humility before the texts was appealing. It was, therefore, salutary to learn that my confusion was an echo of Hadot's perplexity in the face of the ancient philosophical texts that he encountered. As he says:

So now if we return to our “philosopher” Mullā Ṣadrā, we can consider how useful Hadot's approach may be in understanding him. For this purpose, I will focus on three themes: philosophy as a way of life and of discourse; philosophy as a spiritual exercise; and the problematic concept of philosophy as an act within a community. Hadot seems content to use the term philosophy to describe those practices that he considers to constitute the philosophical life; philosophy is the discipline that he defines. Mullā Ṣadrā similarly is quite critical of philosophy qua falsafa as an Aristotelian discipline of discourse, but champions his approach to reality through the oft-used synonym of ḥikma.Footnote ³⁶ The very definitions that he offers of ḥikma are revealing in that they suggest that the pursuit of philosophy requires more than ratiocination, a heavy dose of intuition, even mystical experience, and an exegesis of the ways in which God discloses himself.

Consider two examples. The first is the definition in the Four Journeys, his major work:

This definition makes it clear that philosophizing is more than a ratiocinative discourse but is in fact closely associated with the practice of theosis (ta'alluh in Arabic) central to Neoplatonic conceptions of philosophy as a practice that seeks to invoke the divine through magical practices to understand reality.Footnote ³⁸ It also closely relates this practice to a prophetic inheritance and connects philosophizing to the Quranic notion of wisdom.

This theme is made more explicit in the second definition that derives from his exegesis on the Quran in which he collates an exegetical philosophy with a philosophical anthropology. He writes:

Returning to the themes in Hadot's work, one finds philosophy as both theory and practice in Mullā Ṣadrā, practice as a way of discourse but also as a way of mystical experience and insight. The pedagogy of training souls requires spiritual masters, sages who can inculcate virtues and guide the initiate in the pursuit of the good.Footnote ⁴⁰ Philosophy is thus a religious commitment that requires some divine grace for success and attachment to divine providence.Footnote ⁴¹

But what about the spiritual practices? Dialogue in the Socratic method is a given of madrasa practice, in which is it often called the mubāḥatha or discoursing, during which students repeat, rehearse and critique arguments learnt in class – he makes it clear that the rehearsal of discourse and dialogue is critical to philosophizing.Footnote ⁴² In the narrower sense of quasi-theurgic practices or Sufi disciplining of the soul (through the spiritual exercise of riyāḍa), philosophy for Mullā Ṣadrā cannot forsake it. It is precisely these practices and the cultivation of a mystical method that marks out his philosophical method from Avicennism. In his commentary on the Chapter of the Event (Sūrat al-wāqiʿa), Mullā Ṣadrā writes:

Spiritual practice and discourse that is conscious and self-reflective require a sage as guide and mentor. This further entails a clear idea of what a sage is. In the Four Journeys, Mullā Ṣadrā explains the qualities of a sage:

Such a sage is a Neoplatonic holy man, the hieratic engaged in theurgy. This leads us to the final issue to consider: the nature of the community in which philosophizing is practised and led by the sage as Hadot insisted. Unfortunately we have little in the way of direct accounts of the teaching and practice of philosophy even by Mullā Ṣadrā. The history of the practice of philosophy in Safavid Iran, and indeed in the world of Islam, has still to be written, a history that would be more sociologically attuned to practices of knowledge production, formation and dissemination. Mullā Ṣadrā is clear that there is a community, a qawm, which practises philosophy, a circle centred on texts and sages who define that practice. Even if one does not have much on the details of the community and, of course, any madrasa is a community by definition and we know that his madrasa in Shiraz (the Madrasa-yi Khān) where he taught was founded for the purposes primarily of teaching philosophy,Footnote ⁴⁵ one knows that the community is bounded and closed to those not worthy of it. In the Four Journeys, he says:

By way of a conclusion, it is worth putting forward some reservations. Hadot's approach to the study of ancient philosophy can be a fruitful way of reading Mullā Ṣadrā. But one wonders about basic issues of commensurability. Hadot's own work stresses the need to pay careful attention to contexts of the practice of philosophy without reducing it to historicism. Safavid Iran may share values, ideas and even some contextual parallels to Late Antiquity but basic notions of competing communities of religious and philosophical commitment were not common in seventeenth-century Iran. This is not to argue that Late Antiquity was devoid of imperial fiats in areas of doctrine and philosophy and that heretication and objectification of heterodoxy were absent.Footnote ⁴⁷ But the Shii context of Safavid Iran is a particularity distinguishing Mullā Ṣadrā from a Iamblichus. Even if they shared notions of dialogue, practices of discourse or mysticism, notions of the centrality of spiritual exercises, and even the notion that philosophizing requires not just a spiritual master as guide but also a community, does not necessarily mean that these concepts in different cultural contexts sufficiently overlap. They may just be homonymously understood. Mystical practices and theurgy in pagan Late Antique philosophy cannot be identical to Shii Sufism and spiritual practices through invoking God and supplicating through the intermediaries of his friends. Most importantly, I am not suggesting that one sets aside other approaches and adopts Hadot as a singular, totalizing hermeneutics for studying Safavid philosophical texts. Rather, I am proposing a more open approach to the text that is worth testing. Philosophical practice even within the study of Islamic thought perhaps needs more of an experimental turn, not a conversion from one absolute and closed reading of the text to another. This would be very much consonant with Mullā Ṣadrā's own distrust of closure and his condemnation of imitation and the mere mechanistic rehearsal of doctrine known as taqlīd.