‘Philosophy Contaminated by Monism’: Contesting Hikmat in Safavid Iran

While the study of anti-Sufism in the Safavid period is well advanced with some significant works by Babayan, Jaʿfarīyān and more recently Anzali, apart from the often repeated charge that Mullā Ṣadrā (d. 1635) was hounded out of Isfahan for his mystical commitments, no one has seriously looked at works in the Safavid period that attack the study of ḥikmat and especially that form of philosophical inquiry that is deeply informed and inspired by mysticism. Philosophy had its own internal critics: Mullā Ṣadrā famously criticised Sufis for their approaches to inquiry and Avicennan thinkers for the paucity of the insight and their failure to commit to philosophy ‘as a way of life’. Opponents such as Muḥammad Bāqir Majlisī (d. 1699) clearly condemned the unbelief inherent in philosophical and mystical inquiry.
However, by examining the work of the prominent theologian Mullā Muḥammad Ṭāhir Qummī (d. 1686), especially his Ḥikmat al-ʿārifīn (Philosophy of the Mystics) and al-Fawāʾid al-dīnīya (Religious Insights), I shall argue that the real point of contestation was not the actual practice of philosophy as a form of rational inquiry – other periods of Shiʿi intellectual history in Iran not least in the present maktab-i tafkīk demonstrate that the appeal to reason is one shared by those often accused of scripturalism – but the espousal of philosophy as a holistic means of describing reality and of a hermeneutics of the scripture that was influenced and informed by a worldview of monism (waḥdat al-wujūd) associated with the school of the Sunni Sufi Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240). In his other Persian works, Qummī like others in his period emboldened by the decline at courts of mystically inclined thinkers, attacked the Sufi orders and their practices and rounded upon Ibn ʿArabī and al-Ḥallāj as deviant role models for a Shiʿi society. In the two Arabic works, one finds on the other hand a polemic that is more scholarly and attuned to the study of philosophy. What emerges is a debate that is not for or against philosophy as such but about the very nature of what constitutes legitimate philosophical inquiry – and hence authentic Shiʿi learned culture.