A Safavid philosopher argued existence comes before essence, centuries before Paris cafés did
In 17th-century Shiraz, Mulla Sadra claimed that things must first exist before they can have any nature at all. Condemned by some clerics and forced into rural retreat, he returned to teach, and Oliver Leaman ranks him perhaps the most influential Muslim philosopher of the last four centuries.
Sadr ad-Din Muhammad Shirazi was born in Shiraz around 1571 or 1572, the only child of Khwajah Ibrahim Qavami, who governed the semi-independent province of Fars under the Safavids. Private tutors in the family palace taught him Persian and Arabic literature, calligraphy, riding, hunting, mathematics, astronomy and law, but mystical philosophy pulled at him hardest. In 1591 he went to Qazvin and later followed the court to Isfahan, studying under Shaykh Baha'i and above all Mir Damad, whom he always called his true guide.
His independent thinking provoked condemnation and excommunication from some Shi'i clergy. He withdrew to Kahak, a village near Qom, for a long spell of contemplation and minor writing. In 1612 Ali Quli Khan, governor of Fars, summoned him home to run the newly built Khan School in Shiraz, where he spent his remaining years teaching what he called the Transcendent Theosophy. He died in Basra on the way back from the Hajj and was buried in Najaf.
His central move was to make existence primary and essence secondary. Essences, on this view, are not fixed; they vary with the intensity of existence, and only God is unchanging. Aristotle and Avicenna had allowed change in quantity, quality, position and place; Sadra's theory of substantial motion extended change to substance itself, so the entire cosmos is in constant flux. He also tied this scheme to problems of God's knowledge, arguing that God can know and judge sin without sharing in it.
His great synthesis, known as the Four Journeys, wove together Avicenna, Suhrawardi's Illuminationism, Ibn Arabi's Sufi metaphysics and Ash'ari theology inside a Twelver Shi'i frame. Scholars caution that his existentialism concerns God and cosmology, not the personal and social dilemmas of modern European thinkers. His influence was modest at first, carried on by pupils such as his son-in-law Muhsin Fayd Kashani, then surged in the 19th century and now reaches readers in Iran, Europe and America.
Source: Mulla Sadra
