The Act of Being

The Philosophy of Revelation in Mullā Sadrā

by Christian Jambet Preface to the English-Language Edition

When a philosophical work written by a Westerner attempts to articulate theessential elements of a philosophical system constructed by an IranianShi'ite of the seventeenth century, the potential reader has the right to ask:For what reasons has the author of this book spent so many years readingthe works of this man who will always remain a foreigner, whose very facehe will never know, and whose beliefs belong to the intellectual universe thatcame to an end, in the West, with the mathematization of physical space,with the end of political theology, and with the great revolutions thatradically modified the image of reason?Rarely does such a question fail to become an objection. After reading

The Act of Being

, an erudite and attentive friend, who had long before includedmy first work on Islamic philosophy in the series he was then editing,

wroteto me in all honesty that for us today there is not much to learn from mydear Mulla Sadra. Working before the age of modern science, deeply rootedin the soil of metaphysics, subject to the demands of religious revelation,Sadra, like all the thinkers of Islam, is merely an object of learned study andof the history of philosophy, a kind of scholarly curiosity or even anantiquated exhibit fit for a museum. This objection is not entirely without merit. I would even like to add a fewarguments to it, in order to see whether it is possible to refute it in a seriousmanner. The first argument against such an undertaking is of a historical nature. Theinterest that Western culture has shown for Islam, for its thinkers, poets, andmystics, has its own history. Roughly speaking, this history has had threemajor phases since the eighteenth century: first there was the "OrientalRenaissance," as Raymond Schwab has called it.

Then, in response to thepositivism of Ernest Renan, there was the discovery of the great spiritualfigures of Islam, as part of a quest aimed at starting a dialogue between themystics of the three religions of the Book —Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.Finally, today, the intent is no longer to gain self-knowledge in proximity withIslam, but rather to come to know Islam in its foreignness, or even itsfundamental hostility toward ourselves. A concern no longer for the same, for

similitude, but for the other, for difference, for the absence of any commonspace. This more recent perspective, which is eager to take up thevocabulary of war ("clash of civilizations," and so on) is the unreflectiveresponse to the political emergence of Islam at the present moment of worldhistory. The first phase can be associated with the names of Goethe and Hegel, thesecond with those of Louis Massignon, Henry Corbin, Richard Walzer, andSeyyed Nasr. The third phase, our own, is seen as the time of the sociologistsand the political scientists. The history of this research would thus show thatthe period when Orientalism was closely linked with the colonial era, andwith that of the emancipation of colonized peoples, has ended. The presentis seen as a time involving the reciprocal criminalization of the West and theIslamic East, the hegemony of "revolutionary" doctrines in Islam, and theruin of all "dialogue" between the peoples of the Book. The major conflictscentered in the Middle East are said to overwhelm a more spiritual Islam,drowning it in blood — a spiritual Islam whose death knell was rung duringthe Islamic revolution in Iran. The second argument is closely related to the first. Islam, it is said, is aboveall a political religion and gives rise essentially to political theologies, suchthat the only reason to study its ideologues would be to illuminate thispolitics, identified entirely with the "struggle on the path of faith." Thephilosophers, mystics, and poets should be placed on the shelf of curiositiesbecause they lack any concrete effectivity and reflect a scholarly culture cutoff from the popular masses who make history. This observation is not false. The works of a thinker such as Sadra, like those of Avicenna, al-Farabi, andIbn Hanbal, remain unknown to the people and are of interest only toscholars. The separation between philosophy, spirituality or Qur'anic studies,and popular culture obviously promotes a religion for simple, ordinary peoplecharacterized by a naive adherence to the letter of the Qur'an, to traditionalcustoms, and to the teachings of local preachers, who may be more or lesswell informed. The simplicity of Wahhabism no doubt partially explains itssuccess, and it promotes the expansion of the Islamist political ideologues. These considerations certainly do little to weaken such an argument.Let us remark, however, that the culture of religious scholars is moreconsequential than is often acknowledged. In Iran, and more broadly in theShi'ite world, the actors on the political stage use the discourse of classicalphilosophers or theologians, citing it and adapting it for their own purposes.It suffices to recall the example of the Ayatollah Khomeini, or one of hissuccessors. If Khomeini turned his back, in a way, on Mulla Sadra's thought,he nevertheless knew it very well, and his political gesture cannot beexplained without taking into account his internal dialogue and his criticalrelation with the great Iranian mystic and philosopher. You turn your backonly on someone who rules over you — and who for that reason influences

you in the very gesture of separation.

In the Sunni world, the rupturebetween mystical religion and political religion is in itself a major historicalfact that only the study of the spiritual philosophy of Islam allows us toilluminate in a satisfactory way.It therefore seems to me that the doubts and confusions can be dispelled if we examine their presuppositions. The first objection to there being any present interest in studying thephilosophies of Islam emphasizes the irreducible fracture that separates theWestern system of thought based on thediscourses of Descartes, Locke, and Kant from the system of thought thatfinds its completion and fulfillment in seventeenth-century Iran. Islamicmetaphysics is said to have only a single virtue, namely that it transmittedAristotle to the Latin Middle Ages, despite which it subsequently lost itself inthe sands of perpetual commentary and sterile repetition. To the extent thatWestern metaphysics arrives at an end with German Idealism in thenineteenth century, it would be doubly useless to search for any living truthin the books of the Muslim philosophers. If there is any truth, it can only bemodern, stripped of metaphysical illusions or else located in thedeconstruction of the truths of metaphysics. Only those amateurs of mysticalsentiments, who have no ambitions to attain the concept, could find anyinterest in these "Oriental" thinkers.An attentive examination quickly undermines such certainties. It is now wellestablished that the flourishing of philosophical thought in Islam did notcome to a halt in the thirteenth century. The image, presented by ErnestRenan in his well-known work on Averroes, of a Muslim philosophydisappearing after the immense work of the Andalusian commentator, nolonger exerts as unchallenged a seduction today as it used to.

On thecontrary, reasonable scholars will admit that one cannot treat Islamicthinkers after the thirteenth century as if they were simply "mystics" or"spiritual masters" devoted entirely to an inner salvation devoid of anyconceptual intelligence. One goal of the present work, among the otherpurposes it attempts to serve, is to show how a number of discourses,including metaphysics, the exegesis of the Qur'an, the sciences inheritedfrom the Greeks, Sufism, and morality, were progressively constituted intocoherent systems. The internal movement of the spirit toward its perfection,in the form of the spiritual worship offered to God, and the work of theconcept in no way exclude one another but rather express one another — tothe point that this form of knowledge was able to actualize the ontologicalwealth of the Islamic religion, and that it did so in the work of Mulla Sadra,which I attempt to study here. The interest one may bring to these thinkers is therefore not simply anantiquarian passion. It is a matter of discovering not an old and worn-out