Over four decades
ago, Mian Muhammad Sharif collected a serious of articles in two volumes
entitled A History of Muslim Philosophy,
which, especially given its provenance from South Asia, insisted upon the
continuity of philosophical inquiry and tradition throughout the ages and
comprised studies of the Aristotelian tradition as well as the non-Aristotelian
developments of the early modern period. Significantly, the collection not only
included articles on Mullā Ṣadrā Shīrāzī (d. 1635) and later thinkers in the
Qajar period, it also included the likes of Sharīf ʿAlī al-Jurjānī (d. 1413)
and Jalāl al-Dīn Davānī (d. 1502) integrating philosophical theology (ʿilm al-kalām) into the story of
philosophy in Islam. The breadth of interest in that collection and the depth of
some of the contributions have yet to be surpassed. While the work of Henry Corbin and Seyyed Hossein Nasr at the same time in the 1960s did much to
encourage research on thinkers of the Safavid and Qajar periods, they also
recognised the important transitional role and influence of thinkers at the
cusp of the new Safavid age in the transmission and transformation of the
Neoplatonising Aristotelianisms of the medieval period. They dubbed that period
the ‘school of Shiraz’ by analogy to the ‘school of Isfahan’, which they coined
for Mullā Ṣadrā, his teachers and his students. While the concept of school is
much debated, and may be rejected if we assume a singular body of doctrines and
teachings, there can be little doubt of clear common intellectual inheritances
and of the common teaching space that rendered Shiraz central to the study of
philosophy from the Timurid to the Safavid periods.
If we want to
understand the course of the history of philosophical traditions in Islam, we
need a number of studies of themes and thinkers between Avicenna and Mullā Ṣadrā
to understand the ethical turn towards philosophy as a way of life that became
central to the later traditions without being entirely absent from the earlier
ones. Recent research has not only enriched our understanding of the subsequent
course of Avicennan thought, including into philosophical theology – and here
the writings of Robert Wisnovsky, Meryem Sebti, Ayman Shihadeh, Rüdiger Arnzen,
Asad Ahmed, Ahmed al-Rahim and Heidrun Eichner are significant – but also
clarified the ways in which alternative traditions interrogated and debated
Avicennism not least through the Illuminationism (ishrāq) of Suhrawardī (d. 1191) and his followers – as exemplified
in the work of the late Hossein Ziai, John Walbridge, Lukas Muehlethaler,
Hermann Landolt, Tzvi Langermann and Roxanne Marcotte. For that crucial period
from the fourteenth century, Josef van Ess contributed a study on al-Ījī some
decades ago, and more recently Sabine Schmidtke has not only focused on
theology and philosophy from ʿAllāma al-Ḥillī (d. 1325) to Ibn Abī Jumhūr al-Aḥsāʾī
(d. after 1501) but also organised around herself an exciting research centre
on Islamic intellectual history. It is therefore no accident that Pourjavady
undertook his doctoral research under her supervision and the present book
under review is the fruit of that labour. The pioneering figures and rivals of
the school of Shiraz, Jalāl al-Dīn Davānī (d. 1502) and Mīr Ṣadr al-Dīn
Dashtakī (d. 1497) have been the subject
of important studies in Persian – and Ghasem Kakaie and Muhammad Barkat have
written on the history of the thinkers of Shiraz and most recently Firouzeh
Saatchian, who also did her doctoral research in Germany, has published
editions of texts and a study of Shams al-Dīn al-Khafrī (d. 1535). It is in this intellectual trajectory – within
the transformation and interrogation of Avicennism within the centres of
learning of Shiraz – that the contribution of Reza Pourjavady ought to be gauged and
recognised. The study is divided into an introduction on six thinkers who
provide the intellectual background to Pourjavady’s subject Maḥmūd Nayrīzī,
four chapters on the intellectual biography of Nayrīzī, on his relationship to
the two dominant figures of Shiraz, a detailed and careful bibliography of his
works based on extensive manuscript research, and his response to the thought
of Suhrawardī. These chapters are then followed by four appendices: on an
inventory of his works, on the Nayrīzī codex of philosophical works which gives
us a valuable insight into the curriculum of the period, an ijāza from Dashtakī fils, and a list of the Arabic citations in the book. As Pourjavady
suggests, the subject of the research was suggested by his father, himself a
leading Iranian scholar of Islamic intellectual history, no doubt partly
inspired by the need to provide another correction to the often hasty
conclusions of the late Henry Corbin. It was the Frenchman who famously gave a
lecture at the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy in Tehran on three
thinkers of Azerbaijan within the tradition of Suhrawardī including a subtle
commentator named Vadūd Tabrīzī – who was none other than Maḥmūd Nayrīzī – the
confusion of the name is not the only example of a copyist’s wayward rendition
of Arabic orthography leading to a change in intellectual history. Through the prism of a careful historical
study of a little known figure beyond the manuscript traditions of the
transmission of Illuminationist philosophy, Pourjavady constructs a creative
argument for how philosophical traditions developed in the crucial period from
1450 and 1600, the formative period for much of what passes as Islamic
philosophy today and the lens through which the traditional seminary curricula
read the classics of Avicenna and Suhrawardī.
The introduction
presents us with intellectual biographies of Jalāl al-Dīn Davānī, Ṣadr al-Dīn
Dashtakī, Mīr Ḥusayn Maybudī (who, contrary to Corbin’s supposition, was not
Shiʿi), Shams al-Dīn Khafrī, and Kamāl al-dīn Ilāhī Ardabīlī. Each one of these
figures merits a monograph and thus far the only study in a European language
is on Khafrī (the Saatchian book referred above). There are some Persian and
Turkish doctoral dissertations and encyclopaedia entries on the figures - and at least one American Ph.D. on Maybudī.
The Dashtakīs on their own certainly merit a monograph because of their
extensive influence on the later Safavid philosophers. Pourjavady’s concern is
not with the geographical dissemination of thought or else he may have included
studies of Mīrzā-Jān Bāghnawī Shīrāzī (d. 995/1587), critical for his influence
in Central Asia (and India), and the trio of Shāh Ṭāhir al-Ḥusaynī (d. 1549),
Mīr Fatḥullāh Shīrāzī (d. 1589), and Jamāl al-Dīn Maḥmūd Shīrāzī (d.
962/1554-5) credited with the establishment of the philosophical curricula of
the Indian seminaries that emerged into the dars-i
niẓāmī in the eighteenth century. Of course, to be fair, these figures were
not terribly prolific but had an important historical role to play. Pourjavady
traces the study of philosophy in Shiraz from al-Ījī (d. 1356) through to
Davānī and the transmission of Avicennan philosopher from its origins to Shiraz
through the pivotal role of al-Jurjānī. The historical sketches provided in
this chapter are rich and allow for many potential avenues for future research.
But the fundamental point is that survival and vitality of the study and
engagement with Avicenna, an often critical assessment of him, and the
increasingly intersection of Avicennan metaphysics with Sufi ideas and
Illuminationist thought. More interesting is that, while we have plenty of
evidence for the study of philosophy from al-Ījī through to the middle of the
sixteenth century, there is nothing on the period from that point until the
teaching of Mullā Ṣadrā a couple of generations later. Even Fakhr al-Dīn
Sammākī (d. 984/1576-7), the teacher of Mīr Dāmād and student of Jamāl al-Dīn
Maḥmūd Shīrāzī, studied in Shiraz but lived and taught in Mashhad where he was
the leading cleric. One small slip of the pen on page 41, Kamāl al-Dīn Ilāhī
Ardabīlī clearly must have been born in the second half of the 9th/15th
century, not 9th/16th century. For those interested in
the dissemination of philosophy to India in its earliest phase, the role of
students of Davānī is crucial – Pourjavady merely nods in this direction.
The first chapter
provides a quick literature survey on Nayrīzī, traces his study with Dashtakīs,
and considers his legacy. Very little is actually known about Nayrīzī – and
this biographical paucity and the little we know about how philosophy was
studied poses major problems for method in the study of the intellectual
history of the period. However, there is much that can be gauged from his texts
and from the codices that he copied – Pourjavady carefully constructs a life
from those sources. What is clear is that Nayrīzī was a Twelver Shiʿi – and
this may signal a generational shift or accommodation to the realities of the
Safavid polity in the second generation of philosophers in Shiraz since Davāni
and probably Ṣadr al-Dīn Dashtakī were not – and while he admired and engaged
with Avicennan thought, his tastes were more in line with Suhrawardī. His
understanding of philosophy seems like a precursor to that of later Safavid
thinkers such as Mullā Ṣadrā: philosophy is linked to the ḥikma of the Qurʾān and to prophetic teachings and this theological
commitment is equated with the work of Avicenna and other earlier thinkers.
This establishes an important conception of philosophy that was dominant in the
Safavid period. Nayrīzī seems to have enjoyed good relations at court and one
of his students, Shāh Mīr, – and only one mentioned in the sources – was a
vizier. He also dedicated one of his works to Shāh Ismāʿīl. Muḥammad Khwājagī
Shīrāzī seems to have known his works and disseminated his ideas in the Deccan.
A study of Nayrīzī therefore provides further evidence for the contention that
the earliest dissemination of Islamic philosophical ideas in India were in Sind
through the students of Davānī and in Deccan through the mediation of the
students of Dashtakī – a whole generation before the mythology of Mīr Fatḥullāh
Shīrāzī, himself a study of Manṣūr Dashtakī, bringing the teaching of ḥikma to the court of Akbar in the
North. In fact, Indian sources, summarised in Sayyid ʿAbd al-Ḥayy Ḥasanī’s Nuzhat al-khawāṭir, point to a number of
key figures in the early and middle parts of the sixteenth century.
Chapter two is a
pivotal discussion of what is meant by the school of Shiraz. Pourjavady rightly
prefers to think in terms of two rival strands of philosophy associated with
Davānī and the Dashtakīs, and their debates and disagreements were well
attested in the manuscript tradition of philosophy of the period extant in
major libraries in the Persianate world including India. He focuses on five
central issues: the liar’s paradox (edited and studied by Qaramalaki), the
distinction between mawjūd and wujūd that is related not only to
working through Avicenna’s proof of the existence of God through radical
contingency but also to the later debate on the primary of existence (aṣālat al-wujūd), mental existence (a
consistent theme in metaphysics at least from the time of the original
commentators on Avicenna), the nature of God’s knowledge that was much debated
within commentaries on works of philosophical theology such as Tajrīd al-iʿtiqād of al-Ṭūsi (d. 1274),
and the relationship of the body and the soul that again became central to the
architecture of the thought of Mullā Ṣadrā. Nayrīzī takes up the position of
his teachers – and importantly on the metaphysical doctrine of wujūd prefigures Mullā Ṣadrā’s famous
position of the fundamental primacy of existence.
Chapter three that
follows is a careful discursive bibliography of Nayrīzī’s seventeen works based
on serious engagement with their manuscripts. Consistent with the period, he
wrote in Arabic. Like other thinkers of his time, his Neoplatonic commitments
seem clear, especially in his citations of the so-called Theologia Aristotelis (Ūthūlūjiyā).
The curriculum of study can be gauged from not only the commentaries on the
works of Avicenna and Suhrawardī but also those of Taftazānī and al-Ṭūsī
(mediated through the commentary of al-Qūshčī that was preferred among
thinkers in Shiraz). One of the important differences that he has with
contemporaries such as al-Khafrī is his neglect of scientific works.
The final chapter
attempts to assess Nayrīzī’s philosophical contribution in a short chapter that
considers his critical reception of Suhrawardī with respect to six issues in
‘physics’: prime matter, theory of vision, the nature of the ‘imaginal’ world,
sound, political thought, and the thorny problem of bodily resurrection. His
consideration of this latter issue alongside his earlier concern with divine
knowledge demonstrates one further important feature of Safavid philosophy,
namely the need to address the objections of al-Ghazālī to the metaphysics of falsafa and attempt to find
philosophical accounts for the theological doctrines of omniscience and bodily
resurrection. What emerges is that the Avicennan imprint on Nayrīzī remains
paramount as most of these discussions criticise Suhrawardī and reiterate the
Avicennan doctrine. The final section of the chapter considers Nayrīzī’s
sources: al-Shajara al-ilāhīya of
Shahrazūrī (d. after 1288), as Schmidtke showed a decade ago, was a key
influence on the understanding of Illuminationist doctrine in the Safavid
period, and the commentaries of Ibn Kammūna signalled a critical reception of
Suhrawardī that was a critical precursor for the critiques adduced by Mullā Ṣadrā
and others. For intellectual historians working on this period, it is therefore
useful to have good critical editions of these texts now – in fact, if Corbin
had some of the resources that we do, some of his hastier judgements and
mistakes would have been avoided.
One shortcoming of
the book, however, is the absence of a conclusion, which cannot be filled by
the presence of highly useful appendices. So what can we conclude from this
study? First, the study of a seemingly minor figure can still illuminate an
intellectual field and the dissemination of ideas. Second, Nayrīzī’s work
provides us with plenty of evidence for the philosophical tastes of the Safavid
period that we normally associate with the study of Mullā Ṣadrā: the
metaphysical focus on the primacy of existence, the annexation of both logic
and physics to the concerns of ontology, and a deep affinity to Neoplatonism
and philosophy as a prophetic, divine commission and inheritance. Finally, it
demonstrates lines of influence and transmission that will help us to
understand the reception and transformation of philosophy in the Mughal-Safavid
period. Much more is still required on the Mughal side of this relationship –
or perhaps one should say Indian since the earliest reception was outside of
the Mughal realm and the later in those states and cultural spaces that
effectively succeeded the Mughals. Pourjavady has made a significant
contribution to Islamic intellectual history, and any study of later thinkers
such as Mīr Dāmād and Mullā Ṣadrā ought to begin with their predecessors a
couple of generations before.
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