While the art of
editing an Arabic text as part of one’s doctoral training seems to have
disappeared from British academia, it is salutary to note that the situation in
Germany remains healthier. Firouzeh Saatchian makes a major contribution to
our study of Islamic intellectual history and particularly the development of
philosophical traditions in the early Safavid period precisely because it
provides us with a careful bio-bibliography and critical edition of two key
texts. Thus far, Shams al-Dīn al-Khafrī (d. 1535) is best known in the
secondary sources as a creative theoretical astronomer, mainly through the
efforts of George Saliba, who has studied his al-Takmila fī sharḥ al-tadhkira carefully in part as an assessment
of the later reception of the scientific thought of Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī (d.
1274) expressed in his al-Tadhkira fī
ʿilm al-hayʾa. That al-Khafrī also wrote on matters of philosophy and
philosophical theology demonstrates the abiding connection between theoretical
approaches to science and philosophy well into the early modern period, an
approach continued in the next generation with Bahāʾ al-Dīn al-ʿĀmilī (d.
1621). However, it was also the work of Henry Corbin and Seyyed Hossein Nasr
who alerted us to the philosophical significance of al-Khafrī as part of the
‘school of Shiraz’ that predated and influenced the more dramatic ‘school of Isfahan’.
It was the short treatise of al-Khafrī entitled On the Four Journeys that directly influenced the schema of the magnum opus of Mullā Ṣadrā Shīrāzi (d.
1645) and there is also plenty of evidence of the metaphysics of al-Khafrī
similarly influencing the later thinker. In terms of the textual production
presented here, Saatchian’s editions should be read alongside her earlier
edition of al-Khafrī’s marginalia on
the metaphysics section of the Sharḥ
al-jadīd li-l-Tajrīd which was published back in 2003, as well as Reza
Pourjavady’s edition of his short Risāla fī marātib al-wujūd published in 2005, and two short theological works on
the exegesis of the Throne Verse of the Qurʾān and a collection of Prophetic
dicta. Taken together these works represent the major contribution of al-Khafrī
in philosophical theology and demonstrates his primary concerns with the proof
for the existence of God and God’s knowledge of and agency in the cosmos – as
the title puts it, a concern with the nature of God and of his agency. Pourjavady’s
recent published dissertation on Maḥmūd Nayrīzī (Philosophy in Early Safavid Persia, Leiden: Brill, 2011) as well as
the work done by Ghassem Kakaie (Professor at the University of Shiraz) and Ahadfaramarz Qaramalaki (Professor at Tehran University) on logic and the
scholastic tradition have also furthered our understanding of philosophical
traditions immediately prior to Mullā Ṣadrā and the developments in the
‘Safavid renaissance’ under Shah ʿAbbās I.
The book is divided
into five chapters and contains editions of two texts. The first chapter is a
very brief introduction to the research question relating to al-Khafrī’s
treatment of the nature of God and his activity. The second is a detailed
biography and bibliography of al-Khafrī. He studied primarily with Sayyid Ṣadr
al-Dīn Dashtakī (d. 1497), and while some suggest that he also studied with
Dashtakī’s rival, Jalāl al-Dīn Davānī (d. 1502), al-Khafrī’s positions are more
in line with the former. His most famous student and a significant ‘export’ of
the philosophical schools of Shiraz was Shāh Ṭāhir Anjudānī (d. 1546), who left
for the Deccan as an emissary of the Safavids and was secretly an Imam of a
line of Nizārī Ismailis. Al-Khafrī’s own adherence to Twelve Shiʿism seems
clear in his theological works as well as his association with the major jurist
at court Shaykh ʿAlī al-Karakī (d. 1534) as well as the time he spent in
Kashan, a town well-known for its Shiʿi adherents. With respect to the
disagreement on his death date, Saatchian opts for 942/1535, which seems a fair
assessment of the evidence. Apart from a few works of exegesis, Prophetic
tradition and short treatises on mystical notions of being (most of which have
been published), his main corpus lies in two areas: philosophical theology with
a particular concern for the nature of God and his knowledge as reflected in
the works that Saatchian has edited, and mathematics and astronomy. She
carefully examines the contents of the text and provides a meticulous
description of the major manuscripts of the texts. One shortcoming here is that
her primary concern is with manuscripts in Iranian libraries; however, there
are numerous manuscripts of al-Khafrī’s work in both of these major areas of
philosophical theology and astronomy in Indian libraries as well as those in
Europe such as the British library. The third chapter is a careful examination
of the twelve manuscripts that she consulted (establishing the manuscript
history and chain of transmission) and used for the critical editions of the
two texts included in the book. Once again, one suspects that there are other
copies especially in the British Library and Indian collections such as the
Raza Library in Rampur, known for its holdings in philosophical theology.
The fourth chapter is
an historical analysis of the nature of God and his knowledge in later Islamic
thought – particularly useful is her list of texts affirming the existence of
God (ithbāt al-wājib) from Avicenna
to the end of the 18th century (pp. 100-4). She argues quite
successfully that the genre of such treatises was established by Avicenna and
developed in his legacy – even the medieval tripartite typology of the
approaches of the philosophers, the physicists and the theologians is based not
only on late antique Greek methods but also on the text of Avicenna’s al-Ishārāt wa-l-tanbīhāt and a famous
gloss by Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsi (d. 1274). Her discussion of al-Khafrī’s texts
was prefigured in her article from 2003 on the five risālas that he wrote on the topic. She suggests that Mullā Ṣadrā’s
famous version of the ontological proof for the existence of God that he called
burhān al-ṣiddīqīn, and a key feature
of his metaphysics of contingency, the notion that the existence of a
contingent is ontologically prior to its essence (the doctrine of aṣālat al-wujūd), are both indebted to
al-Khafrī.
The final chapter is
a paraphrase of the two texts edited with some considerations relating to their
contextualisation and attempts to trace influences on them. This chapter of
seventy pages is where her analysis of the philosophical content of the texts
finally emerges. She traces the thinkers who influenced him from the Greeks
through to Dashtakī and also mentions some lines of influence on later thinkers,
in particular Mullā Ṣadrā, of whom it is often said that his work is a
veritable journey into the history of philosophy – in practice the style of
argumentation of al-Khafrī and other philosophers of Shiraz is similar and of
great benefit to the intellectual historian as sources are often explicitly
cited. The structure of his Risāla fī
ithbāt wājib al-wujūd follows the concerns of thinkers in the period: it is
divided into four sections – one proving the existence of God as a Necessary
Being, which at its core derives from Avicenna’s famous proof of radical
contingency, next establishing that the Necessary must be one (i.e.
establishing tawḥīd), the third
section moves to the nature of God’s knowledge a controversial issue at least
since the charge of al-Ghazālī (d. 1111) in his Tahāfut al-falāsifa that the philosophers are unbelievers because
they deny God’s knowledge of particulars, and a final, long and profitable
section on the doctrines of the philosophers on the topic. In that last
section, his citation of Qurʾanic verses and the views of mystics demonstrate
al-Khafrī’s holistic approach to knowledge. One can see how his treatise might
profitably be studied in class as a primer on philosophical theology on the
nature of God in pre-modern Islam. The second text, Risāla fī-l-ilāhīyāt is merely a short summary comprising the same
fourfold division. These chapters are then completed with a bibliography and a useful
index of terms. The texts themselves then follow in Arabic and are well set out
and prefaced with a quick statement on the method of the production of the
critical editions.
A fuller and much
desired intellectual history of philosophical traditions in Islam can only be
written once we have various micro-studies such as the present book under
review which cumulatively can build up a picture of how ideas developed.
Saatchian is to be congratulated for producing such a useful work, which does an
excellent job of contextualising the thought of al-Khafrī and even providing
some wider comparative comments of use to specialists in medieval philosophy.
One obvious complaint, and perhaps not entirely a fair one, is that the book is
in German and hence the readership will be limited – at the very least one
hopes she publishes a Persian version shortly – and one also hopes that an
English version will be forthcoming. However, given the technical nature of
much of the book apart from parts of chapter five, one does not actually need that much German to profit from the book
– and the major contribution of the book lies in the two Arabic texts edited.
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