Philosophical Lettrism in Safavid Iran: Mīr Dāmād and His Sources

At first blush, the lettrist or kabbalistic writings of Mīr Dāmād (d. 1630), the Third Teacher, seem a curious rabbit trail with respect to the philosopher’s larger project, and have largely been ignored as a result. Yet the status of lettrism as a mainstream intellectual current in Iran from the early 15th century onward suggests that any analysis that elides this component of Mīr Dāmād’s thought must remain incomplete. He produced at least three lettrist works or works with substantial lettrist content: Jazavāt u Mavāqīt, Nibrās al-Ḍiyāʾ and R. dar Asrār Muqaṭṭaʿāt-i Qurʾāniyya. In these works the philosopher explicitly engages the lettrist writings of Ibn Sīnā (d. 1037) (or pseudo-Ibn Sīnā) and Ibn Turka (d. 1432) in particular; the latter thinker was responsible for the mainstreaming of intellectual lettrism in Iran as a neoplatonic-neopythagorean science, a pursuit continued in the later Timurid period by such worthies as Ḥusayn Vāʿiẓ Kāshifī (d. 1504) and the leading exponents of the ‘school of Shiraz,’ Jalāl al-Dīn Davānī (d. 1502) and Ṣadr al-Dīn Dashtakī (d. 1498). While philosophical lettrism was subject to a certain fluctuation of interest during the Safavid period (it is notably absent from Mullā Ṣadrā’s oeuvre, for instance), it continued to be regarded as an essential feature of the intellectual landscape well into the Qajar period. Most significantly, Mullā ʿAlī Nūrī (d. 1832), the great reviver of Sadrian philosophy, commented extensively on the lettrist writings of both Mīr Dāmād and Ibn Turka. While more popular early modern expressions of lettrism—epitomized by the anarchic Ḥurūfiyya and Nuqṭaviyya—brought the science into disrepute in some quarters, the lettrist proclivities of the Shaykhī and Bābī movements suggest that it remained an attractive discipline to thinkers and reformers in the Persianate world through the beginning of the 20th century. This paper, then, represents the first attempt to contextualize Mīr Dāmād’s lettrist writings within the early modern intellectual history of Iran, with particular attention to his reliance on Ibn Sīnā and Ibn Turka.