Another library goes online - Majlis

Amazing that libraries are realising issues over access. The library of the Majlis in Tehran has made its excellent collection of 35,000 mss available as pdfs online. The link is here.

Some Recent Titles on Mullā Ṣadrā

Of course, visiting Iran provides opportunities to see what’s recently been published (although I’m lucky to receive books all the time from generous friends). A few more titles have been published by the Sadra Islamic Philosophy Research Institute (SIPRIn) including a new edition of Risāla ittiḥād al-ʿāqil wa-l-maʿqūl edited by Biyūk ʿAlīzāda. The edition itself is prefaced with practically 200 pages of discussion. No doubt it should be used alongside Ibrahim Kalin’s new translation which is embedded in his recent book on Mullā Ṣadrā’s epistemology published by OUP.

Since I am currently writing a series of pieces on Mullā Ṣadrā’s noetics including the issue of eschatology and the final destination of the human, I finally got hold of the famous explanation and commentary by the late (and greatly missed) Sayyid Jalālodīn Āshtiyānī (d. 2006). All of Āshtiyānī’s works on Mullā Ṣadrā as well as his various editions of texts have been reprinted by the press of the Ḥawzeh in Qum since the late 1990s (Daftar-i tablīghāt – now known as Bustān-i kitāb). The importance of the Sharḥ bar Zād al-musāfir is all the more because the actual text of Mullā Ṣadrā (to my knowledge) has yet to be published in the critical edition – and Āshtiyānī is always worth reading. He begins by replicating the original text – around eight pages of Arabic. This text takes up the issue of corporeal resurrection in a brief manner discussing twelve principles required to understand the issue – and as such mirrors the final volume of al-Ḥikma al-mutaʿāliya where Mullā Ṣadrā mentions eleven principles needed to understand corporeal resurrection and abandon metempsychosis. This is then followed by over 500 pages of Āshtiyānī’s commentary that given his style and interests constitutes a full history of the ḥikmat tradition on this issue. Mullā Ṣadrā’s position is, of course, controversial and has often been criticised and condemned, not least by the school of uṣūlīs hostile to philosophy known as the maktab-i tafkīk. Therefore, I also acquired a new defence of Mullā Ṣadrā published by Bustān-i kitāb. Murtażā Pūʾīyān’s Maʿād-i jismānī dar ḥikmat-i mutaʿāliya published for the first time in 2009 addresses the criticisms by first showing that Mullā Ṣadrā’s position is both defensible rationally and scripturally, and then criticising the refutations or modification proposed by Mullā Ismāʿīl Khājūʾī (18^th C), Mullā Muḥammad Taqī Āmulī (a famed teacher of Sabzavārī’s Sharḥ al-manẓūma), Muṭahharī, ʿAllāma Ṭabāṭabāʾī, and the maktab-i tafkīk especially Mullā Mahdī Iṣfahānī, Muḥammad Riżā Ḥakīmī, and Shaykh Mujtabā Qazwīnī.

Other acquisitions included:

· Hastī va chīstī dar maktab-i Mullā Ṣadrā on the central issue of the relationship between existence and essence in contingents written by Ghulām-Riżā Fayyāżī, a well-known ḥawzeh teacher and published by Pazhūhishgāh-i ḥawzeh va dānishgāh last year in 2009.

· Zamān dar falsafa-yi Ṣadr al-mutaʾallihīn va Saint Augustine by Mahdī Munfarid is also published in the current year by the ḥawzeh and tackles a central issue of the reality of time and its relationship to motion within a comparative context that is so popular in Iran. The comparison with Augustine is quite interesting and appropriate.

· Mabānī, uṣūl va ravish-i tafsīrī-yi Mullā Ṣadrā by Majīd Falāḥpūr is a recent contribution to the question of his hermeneutics and should be read alongside two other recent works published by SIPRIn.

· Khayāl az naẓar-i Ibn Sīnā va Ṣadr al-mutaʾallihīn by Zohreh Burqeʿī tackles a central issue in noetics relating to the imagination – which for Ibn Sīnā is the key internal sense and the one most heightened in prophets, and for Mullā Ṣadrā the one which is the seat of the creative power of the soul whence it reproduces the bodies of the afterlife. This is another offering from the ḥawzeh.

· Natāʾij-i kalāmī-yi ḥikmat-i Ṣadrāʾī, also published by the ḥawzeh and written by Muḥammad Amīn Ṣādiqī addresses a further issue of the implications of philosophy for theology – I noticed other more basic titles in this vein published by the many pazhūhishgāhs now in Qum.

Cusanuswerk Conference

Spent the weekend in the lovely town of Mainz near Frankfurt for the annual Cusanuswerk conference on philosophy. The Cusanuswerk is a scholarship and mentoring scheme run by the Catholic church in Germany. It's interesting that they picked the theme of Arabic/Islamic philosophy (that old debate returned again). A number of experts were invited to give talks in German and English from the Graeco-Arabic Neoplatonica and Abu Bakr al-Razi through to Mulla Sadra (no prizes for guessing who gave that talk). It was a great experience giving a paper to a collection of experts as well as enthusiastic and bright philosophy students many of whom knew nothing about the Arabic tradition or about Islam. Along the way Prof Ulrich Rudolph from Zurich gave a couple of public talks on Arabic Islamic thought as well as the history of the academic encounter with the study of philosophy in the Muslim world. Those giving papers included Prof Peter Adamson on Razi and how we can not the heretic we all think he was, Prof Heidrun Eichner (Tubingen) on philosophy and theology in post-Avicennan Islamic world engaging with the critical issue of what Islamic theology is given the current German debate on this new centre of Islamic Studies/theology, myself on Mulla Sadra's monistic noetics, Prof Rahim Acar (Marmara) on Avicenna and Aquinas on creation (drawing on his published PhD), Dr Rotraud Hansberger (King's, Cambridge) on the Arabic Parva Naturalia, and others. In the evaluation, we commented on the absence of philosophy of language and ethics and some students were disappointed with the absence of Averroes (although their reasoning was rather old-fashioned and enlightenment oriented as if only Aristotelianism was the way back and forward for dialogue).
One can of course only dream at this stage of Muslim communities in Europe getting their act together to support the education and intellectual development of their own through schemes such as this and also run such wonderful conferences of real debate and exchange.

WPD - First Day, First Panel

The Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo had just flown in from Brazil - and flew out almost immediately not spending a day there. I missed much of his talk but what I did catch struck me as being standard for him - a denial of God but affirmation of belief and religion, a denial of objective truth and indeed of the problem within philosophy to seek universals while insisting upon a concept of truth as intersubjective negotiation. This latter makes little sense to me and I cannot quite locate it. While there are plenty of theories of truth out there (wonderfully summed up in Wolfgang Kunne's book) as well as a wide ranging epistemological belief in relative truth, I do not see how truth as inter-subjective negotiation works. I much prefer (as I mentioned before) traditionalist accounts of truth or even tradition-based ones such as MacIntyre's.

Interestingly, the celebrity Ghulam-Hossein Ibrahimi Dinani who has a regular philosophy programme and is at Tehran University took a different view - philosophy as open inquiry and questioning but which assumes a singular truth with 'many faces'. His basic position that humanity is present and alienated in language (using a verse of the poet Bedil) was well taken - and generally his performance reminded me of his excellent recent book on Nasir al-Din Tusi as 'filsuf-e guftagu' (philosophy of dialogue). Philosophy concerns dialoging and practices of discourse that are universal and global and should not be excessively parochialised as Greek, Islamic, Iranian and so forth. This commensurability is precisely what makes philosophy possible and why dialogue at its heart is most effective when it is conducted by philosophers (a probably self-serving suggestion which many in the audience enthusiastically received). To the objection that this seems unrelated to Islamic concerns, he was careful to note that philosophy is tafakkur, tadabbur and ta'aqqul and these are basic epistemological and moral imperatives in the Quran. He remains a eudaimonist at heart - since flourishing happiness arrived through understanding reality and harmonising inter-subjective relations is critical to philosophy, inquiry should keep this in mind. Change is not just about exegesis but fundamental transformation. As such this was a paper clearly geared to a strong ethical role for philosophy in contemporary societies and in Iran critical, citing along the way that change was central to philosophising, quoting Imam 'Ali on the basic point that if any two days of one are the same then one is dead - stable and still and not moving. A wonderful potential call for political change?

WPD – Final day – Analytic Ontology and Political Thought

While more interesting conflicts were ongoing else, I went to a panel on political thought with the Columbia professors Carol Rovane and Akeel Bilgrami. CR asked the question why individuals matter in the context of considering the limitations of traditional liberal approaches to rights located within a social contract tradition of how the power of the state is restraints by the rights and liberties of citizens. Her argument really asked the question –what do we mean by an individual or even a person and how this conflict brought up the conflict and tension in liberalism between two fundamental commitments that derive from the Enlightenment tradition:
• The moral importance of the individual human being that posits rights, whose integrity is central and whose rights it is wrong to sacrifice for the great good (against utilitarianism)
• The moral importance of rationality (understood minimally through the presence of a first person perspective although one weakness that is clear was the lack of an account of rationality in the presentation)
Solving this tension requires an account of the individual because of the following assumption that rights pertain to individuals:
• I possess rights because I can claim them for myself
Personhood implies membership of civil society but also that anything that can be treated as a person is a person. But how about those who are not rational such as young children, the unborn and the mentally damaged, the old – morally we still do think they are important. Nevertheless we have a basic problem that the rational idea of the individual is not equivalent to the individual human person. Humans are not basic blocks of individualism: deliberation, commitments and the totality of mental states and beliefs suggests that individuals for moral and legal reasons may either be less than one actual person (i.e. with respect to multiple personality disorders) or corporate entities with similar beliefs (and hence have 1st amendment etc rights – CR seems particularly worried about this). But some objections: what about personhood over time? How do we make sense of that? The example given of collective personhood (i.e. the married couple or corporation) does beg the question to what extent it is really position for there to be some form of shared rationality and first person perspective? Does the simple fact of having common goals and shared beliefs really confer personhood and individuality? But the basic take home message that the liberal conception of the individual as the seat for claims to rights needing to be modified and revised seems fair enough.
AB’s paper was related and focused on religious identity and why it clashes with liberal notions and for him this is because of the difference of mentality (and required him to present a schematic and rather generalised view of the too – I look forward to the fully reasoned argument in his forthcoming book). His basic point is that the clash lies at the level of moral psychology and not the rather simple conflict between individual and community. Identity relates to intense commitments and are predicated on reinforced beliefs where reinforcement concerns the linkage between different beliefs/preferences that are held and points towards coherence in will and action (although along the way the issue of weakness of will was discussed). Now in terms of liberalism, he outlined one central proposition:
• Individual citizens must be left unimpeded///to pursue their own conception of the good life
So basically two issues – non-interference and pursuit of the good but which are distinct and can be mutually exclusive (Rawls and Mill). Rawslian position is that one ought to choose liberty for itself regardless of one’s self-interest. He insisted on a present-minded approach to what would happen in the future with liberals open to reversibility of positions held and religious minded committed to irreversibility. However, it seems unclear why one should have such a simplistic opposition. There are religious minded individuals who hold reversibility with respect to postulations of religious truth just as there are liberals committed to the irreversibility of their position. This brought to mind the basic conflict that John Gray discusses between a universalist liberalism that insisted its values represent the ‘end of history’ and those who are open to reversibility and to diversity of positions within society – and in fact one finds the similar tension of positions among the religious. One objection raised including by Tu-Wei Ming was the basic point that there is a distinction between identity politics and identity in politics: the former might well be essentialist, irreversible and highly dangerous, but the latter is unavoidable. After all, none of us are disembodied autonomous selves capable of rational deliberate and its communication in isolation of others. We are rather all rational agents that are products of our communities and our contexts.
Overall, this was a key and excellent panel on analytic approaches to political thought (one of the few properly analytic panels – the absence of many analytic philosophers especially from Iran seemed to be quite striking to me).

WPD - the closing session - what to say?

Finally, at the end of the controlled nature of the event, security re-emerged - scanners. While AN had come for the opening it was unlikely that he would again. The security seemed strict but second tier which suggested a minister. But not just any minister - the minister of justice, and son of a prominent marja' Ayatullah Hashim Larijani and the son-in-law of arguably the leading marja' in Qum today namely Ayatullah Shaykh Waheed Khurasani - of course I mean Sadeq Larijani.

The three talks were by Prof Rao, Larijani and HA. Aavani seemed conspicuously absent from these proceedings - still caught between a rock and a hard place? I caught various bits (including some quite amusing ones) on video on my phone. Finally we had mention of the boycott and UNESCO and FIS's loss.

WPD Day 3

I'll come back to the previous days and the closing session later (in which we were entertained with a ramble through the totality of modern 'western' thought with a special interest in Freud it seemed with a simple take home message - I know your intellectual traditions but you fail to know me - unless you are an orientalist).
The first session was rather scholarly - Reshid Hafizovic from Bosnia gave an excellent paper on poesis within the narrative of the prophetic ascension and spoke lucidly about the need for a mythopoeic approach to thought. This was followed by Miklos Maroth's exposition of Avicenna's Topica, a response to Aristotle and a demarcation of the lines between demonstrative approaches to theoretical science and the practices of dialectic and rhetoric and their roles in ancient thought. This was the second of a couple of papers on Avicenna's logic, the other being Wilferd Hodges (emeritus professor of logic at London and now one of our regional neighbours with an interest in the Arab tradition). The final paper on this panel was my own attempt to think about how we understand philosophy and whether hikmat is more than philosophy, juxtaposing the late Pierre Hadot's readings of ancient thought with Mulla Sadra. This is the abstract:
Philosophy as a way of life in the world of Islam: applying Hadot to the study of Mullā Ṣadrā Shīrāzī (d. 1635)

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? Reading the existing secondary literature did not help much; confusion was a basic state of response. What was Mullā Ṣadrā’s thought and 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 of 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? The basic problem arises out of how we understand philosophy in contemporary thought.
One way out of this impasse was the chance discovery of the work of the late Pierre Hadot on ancient thought. Hadot’s categorisation and conceptualisation of philosophy seems to fit much better into a paradigm that is useful for the study of later Islamic philosophy. In this paper, I critically examine the key insights of Hadot to one’s reading and understanding of philosophy and consider to what extent it is a key to making sense of what ḥikmat is for Mullā Ṣadrā.

Well received I think - had various people come up to me and I sustained conversations is my rather bad persian for the next couple of hours (!). Finally relented and gave a couple of interviews (avoided before and after) - with Radio Ma'arif. Although it was somewhat disturbing to find that instead of question about practice of philosophising as ethics, I was asked how one distinguishes between true and false religious traditions - which I tried to avoid. And the questions seemed quite different - asked about the tafkikis, I said they were philosophical despite themselves and that the so-called clash between religion and philosophy depends on how one reads and understands the two. I am uncomfortable with two definitions of philosophy commonplace during the conference (and that they were both here is testament to discussion and debate) - one in which philosophy is analytically sound reasoning through propositions, and the other in which philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom culminating in spirituality. But where is the ethics? especially of the applied kind? Which is precisely why it was wonderful to see the panels on philosophy and children that included workshops with children of different ages.
Some more controversial things did happen. I leave some of them for later. In a philosophy of religion panel, a prominent hawzawi thinker Shaykh Hasan Ramezani gave a lucid internal discussion of the basic commitment to ‘aql in religion – ‘aql here of course not being reasoning in any noticeably Enlightenment sense but one which draws heavily from the Shi‘i hadith literature. One chap raised a basic objection: the problem with hawzawi chaps is that they continually repeat old stuff and need to engage especially in this context with new thinkers to avoid obsolescence. The tension between secular trained academics from philosophy departments and hawzawi/hybrid trained philosophers is clear – and yet the latter have really leaped ahead not least in their embrace of the Kantian and analytic traditions. The most lucid and vibrant discussions on pragmatics of truth, on the Habermasian public space and on the linkages between the semantic discussions of usul al-fiqh and the philosophy of language (Kripke et al) are conducted with these hybrid mullahs. Yet one feels that this is very much philosophy as defender of the faith, deployed as the handmaiden of theology, as the key weapon in the new theology (kalam-e jadid) that has been dominant since the 1960s.