Shāh Muhammad Dārābī and the Emergence of Shiʿite Discourse on ʿIrfān

It is a commonplace among scholars of the Safavid religious history that ʿirfān, as the leading semantic signifier of a new and distinctly Shi’ite discourse on spirituality and metaphysics, emerged during the Safavid period to replace tasawwuf. While the emergence of this “ʿirfānian discourse” has been generally attributed to the Safavid suppression of Sufis, I believe our understanding of the exact processes under which this transformation happened and the intellectual players involved therein is sketchy, at the best, and distorted, at the worst. This paper take one small step to amend this situation. While the so-called “luminaries” of the Safavid period in Isfahan like Majlisī Jr., Mullā Ṣadrā and Mīr Dāmād have been at the center of scholarly attention and research, I argue that figures understood to be “marginal” to the intellectual developments of the late Safavid period have in fact played a crucial role in the formation of the ʿirfānian discourse. Shāh Muhammad Dārābī (d. ca. 1717) is one such figure. As one of the most prominent scholars of his time in Shiraz, his works in defense of Sufi teachings and practices is an untapped source in our gradual reconstruction of the initial stages of the development of the ʿirfānian discourse. For this purpose, I will specifically focus on an unpublished treatise of him titled Miʿrāj al-kamāl written after 1692. The work is a direct response to the unprecedented wave of attacks against Sufism at the second half of the seventeenth century Safavid Iran. As a Twelver scholar, firmly grounded in the study of philosophy, Shiʿi hadith and kalam, Dārābī’s Sufi-minded rhetoric departs significantly from traditional Sufi responses to such attacks in crucial ways. His redefinition of the role of the spiritual master (pīr) and the master/disciple relationship is a perfect example. While he is definitely in favor of preserving this, and some other, fundamental elements of Sufi thought and practice, the originality of his approach lies in his attempt to detach it from the traditional Sufi discourse and the socio-cultural network in which it has been traditionally understood. It is precisely this de-contextualization, I argue, that enable him and, many other Sufi-minded Shiʿi scholars, to transplant such ideas in Twelver religious discourse of his era and argue for their legitimacy and authenticity within this new discursive framework.