Eighth to the Sixteenth Century - Rashid Islamic Center

The Mosque, the Laboratory, and the Market • 119objects which at the same time exist and are also a particularthing. (Nasr 1997, 103)Like many Muslim thinkers before him, Mulla Sadra alsodiscussed the question of the eternity of the universe versus atemporal creation in his treatise Huduth al-‘alam. This treatisediscusses creation in time based on Mulla Sadra’s doctrine oftranssubstantial motion, al-harkat al-jawhariyyah, which is one of thebasic features of his transcendent theosophy. This principle is usedby Mulla Sadra to deal with many questions related to the physicalcosmos. He believes that love is the most important and all-pervasiveprinciple of the universe, and therefore, as opposed to Ibn Sina,who denied transsubstantial motion and conceived of becoming asan external process that solely affects the accidents of things, MullaSadra “conceives of being as a graded reality which remains onedespite its gradation” (Nasr 1997, 91).The hikmat (wisdom) tradition, which achieved great heightsthrough Mulla Sadra, is “structurally a peculiar combination ofrational thinking and Gnostic intuition,” as Izutsu has described it(Sabzavari, tr. 1977, 3). This tradition remains one of the most vibrantschools of philosophy in contemporary Iran. This “spiritualizationof philosophy,” as it has been aptly called by Izutsu, originatedin the metaphysical visions of Ibn al-‘Arabi and Suhrawardi, andclearly distinguished a rational and a gnostic component in whatwas previously merely a logically construed rational discourse. Inits logical structure, its philosophical terms, and concepts it takesIbn Sina’s Peripatetic tradition as its point of departure. Its secondcomponent, namely a mystical or Gnostic experience, underliesthe whole structure of philosophizing. It is this second componentof Hikmat that makes it a keen analytic process combined with aprofound intuitive grasp of reality. Mulla Sadra had realized thatmere philosophizing that does not lead to the highest spiritualrealization is vain, and it was his belief that there is a reciprocalrelationship between mystical experience and logical thinking. ThisHikmat tradition found a new exponent in the nineteenth centuryin Mulla Hadi Sabzavari, who was to continue the work of MullaSadra. In his Metaphysics, Sabzavari points out that existence is selfevidentand all defining terms of “existence” are but explanations of