Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 194 - Iran So Far - After Ṣadrā.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, I ran so far after Sadr. Driving a car while under the influence is absolutely unacceptable, but doing philosophy while under the influence is all but unavoidable. Just as practically all art and literature responds to previous works in the same fields, so practically all philosophers are in close dialogue with their predecessors. We've now surveyed almost the entire history of philosophy in the Islamic world, so we would now be in a position to ask, who has been the most influential figure of all from this tradition? Taking the long historical view, there is only one possible answer, Avicenna. But we could take a different tack, and ask which thinker has provided the most inspiration for Islamic philosophy today and in the recent past. Here the answer is not quite so clear, but a very strong case could be made for Mullah Sadr. In modern day Iran, religious scholars still study the works of Sadr, not just as a historical figure, but as a philosopher whose teachings remain relevant to their social and religious concerns. In this episode, we're going to look at how this came about, concentrating on two of the foremost exponents of his thought in the last two centuries, Sabzavari and Tabatabai. They will bring us up to the time of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Of course, when that revolution deposed the last of the Iranian Shahs, it was not the Safavid dynasty that was being ended. The Safavids already lost their hegemony in Iran in 1722, ushering in a period of fractured tribal rule for most of the 18th century. Finally, one tribe, the Khajars, rose to dominance and held sway in Iran from 1796 to 1925. The Khajars liked to compare themselves to great Persian empires of the past, the Ikhaymenids and Sassanians, but the reality was rather different. Throughout the 19th century, they struggled to fend off pressure from the Russians and British. As in the Ottoman Empire, European-inspired reforms were brought in, but this didn't prevent Iran from being effectively colonialized. A new dynasty began when Riza Khan, a Russian-trained officer, seized power in a 1921 coup. He would be installed as the first Pahlavi Shah in 1926. The succeeding line of monarchs would end only thanks to the 1979 revolution. Now, if you read around in Histories of Islamic Philosophy, you can easily get the impression that Mullah Sadra was the central thinker for Iranians throughout all these upheavals and changes of power. But in fact, it was really only in the 19th century under the Khajars that he became the central figure. A good deal of the credit for this can go to Zabzavari. Born on the cusp of the 19th century in 1797 or 98, his name refers to his home city of Zabzavar, which lies in the northeastern corner of Iran. He was scathing in his assessment of the state of philosophy in his day, writing that it was woven by spiders of forgetfulness. Yet it was still possible for him to study the classical works of Sufism and logic, and above all the writings of Sadra, with masters in Mashhad and in Isfahan, still a center of philosophical activity as it had been in the glory days of the Safavids. On the other hand, in Isfahan, he also encountered Ahmed Asahi, known for his highly critical attitude towards Sadra. Like so many of the Muslim thinkers we've looked at, and for that matter the Jewish philosophers we looked at, Zabzavari was a jurist as well as a philosopher. He maintained the ascetic lifestyle we've come to expect from Sufi inclined thinkers, though he did allow himself the luxury of a pair of eyeglasses. A biographical notice on him makes a point of mentioning these, adding that the spectacles make a nice metaphor for his advanced spiritual insight. Well put, but when it comes to stories about eyewear and 19th century Islamic intellectual history, I prefer the anecdote I mentioned in the last episode about the Egyptian Jewish reformer and journal founder called Mr. Sunglasses. To be honest, it puts the one about Zabzavari in the shade. But Zabzavari himself was no shady character. In fact, he was a follower of the illuminationist tradition, or at least the version of illuminationism he found in Mullah Sadra. He wrote a large number of works in both Arabic and Persian, some dedicated to Qajar royalty. Following the tendency of later Muslim thinkers to present their ideas in the form of glosses and commentaries, Zabzavari produced exegetical works on several of Sadra's writings, and also on the poetry of Rumi. He also commented on his own poetry, composing verses on topics in philosophy and logic, and then writing his own explanatory treatises as a guide to the poems. This may sound like a rather odd approach, but it makes a lot of sense if you are trying to explain complicated ideas for the novice. In the days before PowerPoint, the most powerful way to get a point across and make it memorable was to put it in verse. The commentary he added unpacks the poetic material for the student reader. To be extra sure, Zabzavari later added a further layer of explanatory glosses on the commentary. As friend of the podcast Sajjad Rizvi has put it, it was through this textbook that "...the thought of Mula Sadra was simplified, vernacularized, and disseminated." Its popularity is shown by the fact that it has itself become the object of further commentaries, more than 40 of them in the past century and a half. Zabzavari's commentary on his philosophical poem has been translated into English. A quick perusal of the book will show even the casual reader that, well, that the reader is going to have to spend some more time with it to make any sense of what Zabzavari is trying to say. It may be a carefully thought out textbook, but is also full of technical language and subtle metaphysical argument. It does help if you know something about Sadra and the tradition of debates over Avicenna's metaphysics that led up to him, which fortunately we do. Zabzavari starts by sounding a familiar note when he argues for the primacy of existence. This position, which was also the one adopted by the mature Sadra, insists that existence is not a mere mental construct, but a concrete reality out in the world. Indeed, again following Sadra, Zabzavari holds that there is really nothing out in the world other than existence. Its reality is in fact obvious, a point already made by Avicenna. The hard question is what we should understand by existence exactly. He gives a number of arguments against those who, like Sadra's teacher, Mir Dhanad, instead hold that essences are real and that existence is all in the mind. My favorite of these goes as follows. Causes are obviously prior to their effects. But if all we have to work with is essences, then this priority remains inexplicable. Imagine for instance that one fire starts another fire. Clearly, every fire, just insofar as it is a fire, is equal in essence to every other fire with none having priority to any other. So the fire that plays the role of cause must have something else that is giving it priority over the one it ignites. This will be existence, since the cause is the source of the existence for the effect. That is what makes it prior. You'd think that Mir Dhanad would have seen this point, given that one of his most important works was entitled Blazing Embers. Of course, the cause that most interests Zabzavari is God, and here his burning ambition is to keep the flame of a sadra's philosophical theology alight. To this end, he explains and defends the core sadrian teaching of modulation or analogy in being, in Arabic tashqiq. You'll remember that according to this teaching, all things have existence in varying degrees or intensities. Not only does Zabzavari think this doctrine is true, he argues that it is really unavoidable, at least once sadra has pointed out the option. Again, his argument is ingenious. Start with the fact that, as Avicenna already observed, God does not just have a particularly impressive essence that receives existence. God does not receive existence at all, for he is a necessary being, and has no cause. For this reason, we must say that God or God's essence just is his existence. But if this is right, then as At-Tuzi already observed, what we mean by existence, in God's essence, cannot be the same as what it means in the case of something like you, me, a giraffe, or the Eiffel Tower. All of these non-divine things have existence as additional to their essences. Actually, Zabzavari can't quite say that, since like sadra, he doesn't think that essences are real, only existence is real. But he can say that created things have causes, and are thus dependent in their existence. In this respect, they are fundamentally unlike God. So if we say that existence is not modulated, in other words that existence always means the same thing, we are faced with a stark choice. Genuine existence belongs either to God or to created things. It can't belong to both, since the two cases are so different. But if genuine existence belongs to created things, we are putting God beyond the bounds of existence completely. That doesn't look like a good move, especially if we want to keep saying that God is the necessary existent. Zabzavari says that such a move would in fact render God completely unknowable to us. So it looks like it will have to be God that genuinely exists. But in that case, it is created things that don't exist, which looks equally implausible. Instead, we should drop the assumption that existence always means the same thing. Rather, existence varies from case to case. Both God and the Eiffel Tower exist, but with vastly different intensities of existence. Also with vastly different views of Paris. God's is even better. As I say, Zabzavari follows Sadr in believing that essences are only in the mind, not in reality. It may seem to us as though the world is divided up nicely into various kinds of things, but in fact there is only the scale of perfection in existence, decreasing gradually as it moves away from God. Zabzavari draws an important conclusion from this. Avicenna and earlier Aristotelian philosophers had assumed that the world of the mind corresponds quite closely to the concrete world out there. But now that we are thinking along these Sadrian lines, we see that this is just not true. Our minds impose rigid distinctions where none really exists. In one of the most striking illustrations of the gulf between mental and concrete existence we've seen so far, Zabzavari points out that even impossible things, like a second god, can exist in the mind. In fact, even non-existence has mental existence because we can think about it. This sort of point could easily lead to skepticism, as it threatened to do at around this same time among Muslim philosophers working in India. In the 20th century, Sadr himself would be greeted with some skepticism. A group of Iranian theologians, known as the Maqtabi tafqiq, have been bitterly opposed to his influence, and the practice of philosophy more generally. They urge us to turn, not to Sadra and other philosophers, but to revelation and the teachings of the Imams recognized in Shi'ite Islam. Paired with the innate awareness of God, implanted into every human soul, these religious sources offer the best, indeed the only, way towards knowledge. With their hostile stance towards philosophy, the members of the Maqtabi tafqiq were carrying on a tradition of opposition to Sadra that extends back to the Safavid period, and as I mentioned before, Sabzavadi's contemporary Ahmad Asahi was similarly critical. In the 20th century, the anti-philosophical movement even tried to have one of the foremost adherents of Sadra's thought banned from teaching the subject. The adherent in question was, however, not to be budged. He insisted that his students had come to him with a suitcase full of doubts and problems, as he nicely put it, so that he had a duty to share his learning with these troubled young men. And share he did. His name was Sayyid Muhammad Hossein Tabatabai, usually honored with the epithet alama, meaning the knowledgeable or the erudite. Alama Tabatabai was born in 1904 into a family with long-standing scholarly credentials. He was orphaned at an early age and brought up by one of those scholarly relatives, an uncle, who saw to it that Tabatabai was properly trained. He studied law and philosophy in Najaf. The philosophical works he read there give us another indication of the remarkable staying power of authors from the formative period. Of course, Tabatabai was schooled in Avicenna, but he also studied Miskaway for ethics. In the Sadrian tradition, he read works by Sadra himself and the explanatory guidance of Sabzavari. After a stay in the city of Tabriz was cut short by a Soviet invasion of northern Iran, Tabatabai came to the city of Qom in 1946. This is where he would spend the rest of his career teaching the works of Sadra and other philosophers against some opposition, as I just mentioned, and producing a staggeringly huge commentary on the Quran. This took Tabatabai about 20 years to write and is distinguished by its insistence on using the Quran to interpret itself. That is, he explained each passage in light of other passages from the Quran, rather than extraneous material. At this point, I probably don't still have to be emphasizing that there have been extremely pious Muslims on both sides of the debate as to the value of philosophy. But what the heck, I'll emphasize it one more time. Tabatabai led an ascetic life, like Zabzabari before him, venerated the Shiite Imams, and was one of the great modern-day commentators on the Quran. The tension between him and the skeptical critics of philosophy among the Muqtabi tafkik was not a conflict between reason and Shiite piety, but between two different conceptions of what pious-Shiism should consist in. While Tabatabai was obviously on the pro-philosophy side in this debate, he was no blind follower of Mullah Sadr. He avoided teaching Sadr's views on the afterlife, evidently finding these problematic. More positively, he brought the Sadrian philosophy to bear on contemporary issues, arguing forcefully against the atheism and materialism of the Marxist philosophy that had just gained ascendancy in the Soviet Union. Against this ideology, Tabatabai put forward a novel distinction between the etibari and the hakiki, which means something like conventional as opposed to inherent. His idea was that social arrangements are brought about by human convention, but that they nonetheless have a basis in what is really useful and good for humankind. A simple example would be something like real estate. If someone is recognized as the owner of a parcel of land on the basis that he moved onto the land and worked it so as to raise crops there, then his ownership is, as Tabatabai would put it, a matter of etibar, or social custom. But it is based on the real effort that the farmer put into the land, so that the custom has a basis in reality. A similar story can be told about all good political and legal arrangements. Tabatabai died in 1981, only two years after the 1979 revolution which deposed the last of the Pahlavi Shahs. His relationship to the revolution remains a contentious issue. In 1979, he was too old to take part in any meaningful way, but some of his students were involved in the revolution. He had also earlier endorsed the notion that an outstanding individual may be recognized as head of the jurists in the absence of guidance from the line of imams venerated by the Shiites. This idea was also used by Khomeini, the spiritual leader of the revolution. Less controversial is the role Tabatabai played in influencing two scholars who have had a major impact on the perception of Islamic philosophy in Europe and the United States. In 1958, he was visited by the French scholar Henri Corbin, and he was later a colleague of the Iranian-born philosopher and historian Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Nasr had been educated in the United States before returning to Iran to work as a professor of philosophy. The revolution broke out while he was on a trip abroad, and Nasr did not return, instead taking up academic positions in the States. Tabatabai inspired Corbin and Nasr to advance a new assessment of the philosophical tradition of Islam. Like this podcast, they argued forcefully against the idea that this tradition ended with Haverawis. They and their students have emphasized the role of Persian culture throughout the history of philosophy in Islam, and seen Mullah Sadra as the key figure of the later centuries. Taking their cue from Sadra himself, they have promoted an interpretation of Islamic intellectual history which highlights philosophical Sufism and Illuminationism. Nasr in particular, however, has not been content to be a mere historian of philosophy. Inspired not only by Sadra, but by traditions of thought from across the globe, he has been an advocate of what he calls the perennial philosophy, which consists of a core of doctrines and spiritual goals that is found in many religious and philosophical traditions including Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christianity. With this idea of perennial philosophy, Nasr is apt to remind us more of Dara Shikoh and especially Shah Wali Allah, Muslim thinkers who have likewise pointed to the commonalities spanning religious and cultural boundaries. Admittedly, when Nasr spells out the content of this perennial philosophy, he does tend to sound a lot like a Sadrian philosopher. He says things like, But what is really important to Nasr here is the idea of the absolute, which for him represents a core religious teaching that conflicts with modern-day relativism and materialism. He does not discount the differences between religious traditions and ritual practices. To the contrary, he insists that each such tradition represents a new independent descent of the absolute into our reality. But the unity of God as the absolute guarantees that there will be a single unity underlying all the disparate religious teachings. The perennial philosophy has some surprising advantages according to Nasr. For instance, it can form the basis of a realistic and effective environmentalist philosophy, because members of all these religions accept the need to place cosmic harmony above the selfish gratification of our individual desires. Nasr is rather dismissive of secular atheistic approaches to environmental ethics, however well-intentioned, if only for practical reasons, since most people on the planet are religious and need to be given reasons to safeguard the environment that speak to their religious worldview. Speaking as one of the mere historians, another group that Nasr tends to dismiss, I see another significant advantage in Nasr's approach. He and Courban were among the earliest to call attention to the riches of later philosophy in the Islamic world. In these podcasts, I certainly haven't adopted their interpretive approach wholesale. For one thing, I've emphasized the role of philosophical theologians in the Sunni tradition more than they would. Also, I tend to disagree with them when it comes to the interpretation of Avicenna himself, no small point, since Avicenna has been so central in nearly all subsequent philosophical developments in the Islamic world. But without the work of Courban and Nasr, there would be far less awareness of post-Avicenna and Eastern thought in the Islamic world. So indirectly, you have them to thank, or blame, for the last 25 podcasts or so. With Nasr and a few of the other still-living or recently deceased thinkers I've looked at, like Fatimah Mernissi and Muhammad Arkun, I've now brought this story of philosophy in the Islamic world up to the present day. Obviously, there would be much, much more to say about the last century of Islamic intellectual history. One could easily imagine another dozen episodes or so on topics we've only touched on briefly, such as political Islam, the rationalism of thinkers inspired by Averroes, and also on regions in the Islamic world I haven't even mentioned, like Indonesia. But one has to stop somewhere, and I'm going to stop here. In two weeks, I'll be rewinding one and a half millennia to pick up a thread that I left dangling 75 episodes ago, the beginnings of medieval philosophy in Latin Christendom. After that, we'll be looking at philosophy in the Byzantine Empire, and somewhere in there I'll also be kicking off the spin-off series of episodes on classical philosophy in India in collaboration with Jannardin Gennari. But speaking of collaboration, I do want to devote one more episode to developments in recent Islamic philosophy. For that, I'll be joined by one of the very few European scholars who is doing research on that topic, Anke von Kügelgen. She'll be my guest in the next and last episode on philosophy in the Islamic world, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.