At the dawn of the modern age, Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Shirāzī (d. 1640) stood at the pinnacle of an unparalleled civilisation that already spanned more than a millennium and nearly the entire “known world”. His corpus of writings throws a revealing light on the long procession of thinkers with whom he continued to dialogue—Ibn ʿArabī, Qūnawī, Suhravardī, Ghazālī, Rāzī and the ubiquitous mutakallimūn, in the main.

Dr Mohammed Rustom gives us a flavour of the complexity in this rather unassuming volume without straying from what he set out to accomplish (cf. p. 33): “explain, through a textual and analytical examination of one of Ṣadrā's tafsīr works, the manner in which philosophy and scripture interact with each other in his thought” (p. 4). Ṣadrā meant to produce a full-fledged tafsīr (Qur’ānic exegesis) but composed sixteen separate texts, all told, compiled and published as the multi-volume Tafsīr al-Qur’ān al-karīm. Dr Rustom wisely concentrates on his commentary on the Qur’ān's opening chapter, Tafsīr Sūrat al-fātiḥa (TSF). Far from diminishing the value of his analysis, this restriction enables him to probe more effectively why Ṣadrā approached scripture in the way he did. This is the most important of a series of questions the author poses throughout this well-disciplined study, which incidentally spares us the customary thesis-style “review of the literature”; the author discusses his secondary sources in the main body of the book where he can more gainfully assess them.

Ṣadr al-Dīn Qūnawī (d. 1274), Ibn ʿArabī's most important expositor, had composed an exegesis of his own on Sūrat al-fātiḥa entitled Iʿjāz al-bayān. Rustom gives the gist of Ṣadrā's borrowings from this highly influential work, which contains a now-classic introduction. There, Qūnawī made extensive use of Arabic linguistic concepts with a view to developing—in kindred spirit with Ṣadrā and Ibn ʿArabī, Qūnawī's teacher and stepfather—a sort of exegetical grammarFootnote ¹ based on the Qur’ān, which he took as the selfsame divine act of creation. Linguistics is not properly philosophy, but his reputation rested squarely on the imporant technical refinements resulting therefrom. It certainly proved conducive to what Rustom calls, with Prof. William Chittick, a “rapprochement” between the scripture-based language of Ibn ʿArabī and the technical discourse of Peripatetic Islamic philosophy (p. 39). This distinction is now too neat to stand on its own, but it is germane to the enduring rivalries that separated different approaches to the question of knowledge and existence.

Rustom submits that TSF was probably written after Ṣadrā had finished his late and all-important Mafātīḥ al-ghayb, an original version of which formed part of al-Asfār, Ṣadrā's magnum opus, as well as a major textual source for TSF. Miftāḥ 1, in particular, deals with “the nature of revelation and the different levels of the descent of God's Word and its correspondence to the inner layers of man's soul” (p. 10), where Ṣadrā lays down his basic exegetical principles. The author is convinced that the Mafātīḥ, which literally means “keys” in Arabic, offers us “the keys. . .to the hermeneutical perspective Ṣadrā adopts in his Qur’ān commentaries” (p.14). In fact, Ṣadrā's exegetical writings “mark the first time. . .that a philosopher had undertaken such a wide-scale commentary upon the Qur’ān” (pp. 2–3). Rustom easily debunks the notion they might be mere glosses designed to justify Ṣadrā's mystico-philosophical stances on “Qur’ān's dicta.” The Tafsīr as a whole, he assures us, was clearly not an afterthought to philosophy, as it points to the core of Ṣadrā's very approach to “philosophy,” which Rustom qualifies as Qur’ānic.

To philosophers, mystics and theologians alike the opening chapter recapitulates the whole Qur’ān, being an expression at once of the plenary Mercy of God's creative act and man's path to perfection. In this respect, Ṣadrā's thinking on “whether or not God's mercy is open to all human beings in the afterlife, and, if so, how a teaching relates to other scriptural statements which seem to indicate otherwise” (p. 6) constitutes a concrete illustration. For how could God in His mercy and justice create people only to condemn some of them to hellfire for all eternity, asks Dr Rustom?

In his introduction, the author makes brief mention of Max Horten's unique pioneering work on Mullā Ṣadrā. That Horten's famous prewar study occurred in Germany is no accident. This was the birthplace of western European philosophy when it was still dialoguing with medieval Scholasticism, which dialogue Martin Heidegger pursued with equal alacrity in the twentieth century. Heideggger's affinities with the high philosophy of Islamic medieval civilisation is a separate question, to be sure. But his contemporary Horten serves as Rustom's foil to the selective interest of the Western Orientalists’ in pre-Averroës works known and translated by the Schoolmen. Some recent studies have fared little better than the Orientalists from another angle. Christian Jambet's ambitious Qu’est-ce que la philosophie islamique, or Salman Bashier's misleadingly titled The Story of Islamic Philosophy, an exasperating attempt to compare aspects of Islamic philosophy with “ancient Sumerian” and “Israelite” myths, for example, seems aimless compared to this account of Ṣadrās’ philosophy and, by extension, the wider tradition.

Behind the dogged mechanics of The Triumph of Mercy lies an authoritative understanding worth more than a shelf full of titles one might think of that treat of divine revelation, scripture, existence, knowledge, etc. This author actually explains the relevance of Qur’ānic exegesis to philosophy, constantly returning to Ṣadrā's conversations with predecessors in taṣṣawwuf (“Sufism”), falsafa (“Islamic Peripatetic philosophy”) and kalām (“dialectical theology”). Clearly, we are in the presence of a broad philosophical tradition for which knowledge was not consigned to the husk of doctrinal “divides” that we keep harping about today—e.g., between “Sunna” and “Shīʿa.” Very early on, this tradition embraced the possibility of more than one solution or diagnosis to any given problem. This was as patently true in Qur’ānic exegesis as it was in astronomy, mathematics and medicine without the need to collapse one field into another. Hence, Ṣadrā's “strictly-defined philosophical writings” distinguish themselves from his tafsīr because they “are more concerned with explicating the nature of reality in purely philosophical terms. But when Ṣadrā approaches scripture,” explains the author, “he is able to discuss the same themes he takes up in his philosophical works in more familiar ‘religious’ language, as he is now operating within the framework of the Qur’ān's mythic structure” (p. 4).

Rustom is well to put “religious” in quotations, but why not drop threadbare words like myth, gnosis and teleology by the wayside, too, not to mention a rather inconsequential comparison with Kabbalism, much of which is a hodge-podge of exotically framed racial particularism, anyway? Religion in English is not, at any rate, equivalent to Islam's dīn. Rustom compensates by linking it to its more properly practical sense. To his credit, the “familiar religious language” to which he alludes already appears to presuppose this division of labor, since in the Tafsīr Ṣadrā is not specifically interested in either the practice of ritual or “religion” or personal gratification, spiritual or other. That would banalise the lived experience of the Qur’ān. To Ṣadrā, the language of divine self-manifestion is at once the prototype “cosmic event” and the divine mercy embodied in man's intimate relationship with God, all in a single process.

Rustom straightaway moves to the concretising interpretation of the actual Qur’ān (pp. 11–5) and finds it grounded in kashf (p. 15ff), or “unveiling.” Kashf is inextricably tied to the seeker's “request” to know. Several of Rustom's quotations have Ṣadrā admitting to his own efforts to “consult my soul [nafs], casting aside the arrows of my own opinion” (p. 11). The author brings to the fore this nodal function of the Qur’ān, whose purpose it is to permit man to live experientially and creatively for his own perfection. Not under the permanent pretense of doctrine, religious ritual or, for that matter, passive empirical observation, but through that reality which discloses itself in the first place. The repercussions of this for philosophy are far-reaching, because Ṣadrā purported to give exegesis “a more concrete form to the abstract ideas contained in his philosophical book” (p. 117).

“Casting aside opinion” is not how most people today view the perspective of the interpreter on behalf of whom the Qur’ān is to be interpreted. Ṣadrā consciously precludes the subjectivity—in modern jargon—of opinion from what the nafs desires most: namely, the Beautiful, the True and the Real (just like al-Fārābī). True, nafs provides the only access to truth value and, more consequentially, to ḥaqq as self-realisation, where every act of creation is governed by a single amr (theologically “divine command,” logically “regulating factor”) such that nothing may act outside the command.

Though Ṣadrā confesses having received his personal “command” to undertake a tafsīr, Dr. Rustom—who is well versed in Western philosophy—appears to circumvent the spiritualist psychologism that still ails the contemporary study of Islamic thought. His discussion about “command” is enlightening (cf. p. 21ff) for the philosophical implications it has for the essence-attribute and the root-branch. Qūnawī tellingly remarked that human beings can benefit from their theoretical intellect despite their limitations because the latter partakes of the creative spirit (rūḥ)—i.e., precisely on account of the actualising nature of the command. Here, Dr. Rustom reminds us of the underlying paradox: existence (wujūd, which he consistently refers to as “being”) has a “self-evidentiary nature” which “veils it from us” (p. 19). It was Henry Corbin (Heidegger's first French translator and on of the greatest students of Islamic thought) who had first made the connection with Hiedegger about this propensity of existence to veil as it lays bare. Based on “existence” as both manifestation and veiling Ṣadrā views the Word of God as “that by virtue of which man ‘ascends’” (p. 22). This implies levels of plurality, because existence discloses itself in modes of being according to intensity and diminution, on the one hand, and in the consonance of any two things the relation of which is expressible as a root and branch, on the other. Only Man in the singular (al-Insān al-Kāmil)—the root and isthmus between what is divine and what is other—can plumb the Qur’ān's deepest levels by penetrating “his own deepest levels” (p. 29); he worships God above the delimited deity of vocalised belief (see p. 48).

However, Ṣadrā does not define the Qur’ān, and Dr. Rustom rightly takes two scholars to task for claiming he “identified” it with existence, with no regard to their languages. The only conceivable “identity” is between existence and God's (unknowable) essence and mercy (the root of creation), where the highest form of the Word corresponds to the originating Command of God (p. 25), Be! In other words, essence to essence, existentiation to existentiation. This unfolding of the “cosmos,” articulated as the Breath of the Merciful, is the basis for Ṣadrā's understanding of “being” articulated as Word. In Chapters 4 and 5, Rustom expands on the concept of praise (ḥamd), which is intimately related to the Word of God, Qur’ān, life and Man, who most properly personifies divine praise by way of God's names and the prototype for “all of what is in the cosmos” (p. 71).

Attached to The Triumph of Mercy are more than forty pages of appendices containing key Ṣadrā passages and long tracts from Ibn ʿArabī's al-Futūḥāt al-makkiyya. One may quibble with some renderings but these translations are perfectly sound for the technical purpose in hand.

With this systematic study, Dr Mohammed Rustom has executed a solid framework for the meaningful study of Ṣadrā, not to speak of the wider research that lies ahead in Islamic thought. Student and specialist will find it supremely useful in a field that has too long been stuck in the “interdisciplinary” boondocks.