Mīr Dāmād returned to Avicenna and sought to harmonize his views with those of al-Suhrawardī on the assumption that what Avicenna meant by his “Oriental” (mashriqiyyah) philosophy was identical with al-Suhrawardī’s wisdom of “illumination” (ishrāq), which he interpreted as a Platonic doctrine that asserted the priority of essence (form) over being (existence). Time, for Mīr Dāmād, was neither a mere being of reason nor an accident of existing things. It belongs to the essence of things and describes their mode and rank of being. It is a “relation” that beings have to each other because of their essential nature. There must, therefore, be three ranks of order of time corresponding to the three ranks of order of being. Considered as the relation of God to the divine names and attributes (Intelligences or archetypes), the relation is “everlastingness.” Considered as the relation between the Intelligences, or archetypes, and their reflections in the mutable things of the world below, the relation is “eternity.” And considered as the relation between these mutable things, the relation is “time.” Creation, or origination, is this very relation. Thus, the origination of the immutable Intelligences, or archetypes, is called “everlasting creation,” the origination of the world of mutable beings as a whole is called “eternal creation,” and the generation of mutable things within the world is called “temporal creation.” The teachings of Mullā Ṣadrā
Mullā Ṣadrā superimposed Ibn al-ʿArabī’s mystical thought (whose philosophic implications had already been exposed by a number of commentators) on the “Aristotelian”-illuminationist synthesis developed by Mīr Dāmād. Against his master, he argued with the Aristotelians for the priority of being (existence) over essence (form), which he called an abstraction; and, with Ibn al-ʿArabī, he argued for the “unity of being” within which beings differ only according to “priority and posteriority,” “perfection and imperfection,” and “strength and weakness.” All being is thus viewed as a graded manifestation, or determination, of absolute, or pure, Being, and every level of being possesses all the attributes of pure Being, but with varying degrees of intensity or perfection.
Mullā Ṣadrā considered his unique contribution to Islamic philosophy to be his doctrine of nature, which enabled him to assert that everything other than God and his knowledge—i.e., the entire corporeal world, including the heavenly bodies—is originated “eternally” as well as “temporally.” This doctrine of nature is an elaboration of the last manifestation of what Ibn al-ʿArabī called “nature” or prime “matter” and is articulated on philosophic grounds and within the general framework of Aristotelian natural science and defended against every possible philosophic and theological objection.
Nature for Mullā Ṣadrā is the “substance” and “power” of all corporeal beings and the direct cause of their movement. Movement (and time, which measures it) is therefore not an accident of substance or an accompaniment of some of its accidents. It signifies the very change, renewal, and passing of being—itself being in constant “flow,” or flux. The entire corporeal world, both the celestial spheres and the world of the elements, constantly renews itself. The “matter” of corporeal things has the power to become a new form at every instant; and the resulting matter–form complex is at every instant a new matter ready for, desiring, and moving toward another form. Human beings fail to observe this constant flux and movement in simple bodies not because of the endurance of the same form in them but because of the close similarity between their ever-new forms. What the philosophers call “movement” and “time” are not, as they believed, anchored in anything permanent—e.g., in what they call “nature,” “substance,” or “essence”; essence is permanent only in the mind, and nature and substance are permanent activity. Nature as permanent activity is the very being of natural things and identical with their substance. Because nature is “permanent” in this sense, it is connected to a permanent principle that manifests activity in it permanently. Because nature constantly renews itself, all renewed and emergent things are connected to it. Thus, nature is the link between what is eternal and what is originated, and the world of nature is originated both eternally and temporarily.
Mullā Ṣadrā distinguishes this primary “movement-in-substance” (al-ḥarakah fī al-jawhar) from haphazard, compulsory, and other accidental movements that lack proper direction, impede the natural movement of substance, or reverse it. Movement-in-substance is not universal change or flux without direction, the product of conflict between two equally powerful principles, or a reflection of the nonbeing of the world of nature when measured against the world of permanent forms. It is, rather, the natural beings’ innate desire to become more perfect, which directs this ceaseless self-renewal, self-origination, or self-emergence into a perpetual and irreversible flow upward in the scale of being—from the simplest elements to the human body–soul complex and the heavenly body–soul complex (both of which participate in the general instability, origination, and passing of being that characterizes the entire corporeal world). This flow upward, however, is by no means the end, for the indefinite “matter” (Ibn al-ʿArabī’s “cloud” and the mystics’ “created Truth”) is the “substratum” of everything other than its Creator, the mysterious pure Truth. It “extends” beyond the body–soul complex to the Intelligences (divine names) that are Being’s first, highest, and purest actualization or activity. This “extension” unites everything other than the Creator into a single continuum. The human body–soul complex and the heavenly body–soul complex are not moved externally by the Intelligences. Their movement is an extension of the process of self-perfection. Having reached the highest rank of order of substance in the corporeal world, they are now prepared, and still moved by their innate desire, to flow upward and transform themselves into pure intelligence. Impact of modernism
The new wisdom lived on during the 18th and 19th centuries, conserving much of its vitality and strength but not cultivating new ground. It attracted able thinkers such as Shāh Walī Allāh of Delhi and Hādī Sabzevārī and became a regular part of the program of higher education in the cultural centres of the Ottoman Empire, Iran, and the Indian subcontinent, a status never achieved by the earlier tradition of Islamic philosophy. In collaboration with its close ally Persian mystical poetry, the new wisdom determined the intellectual outlook and spiritual mood of educated Muslims in the regions where Persian had become the dominant literary language.
The wholesale rejection of the new wisdom in the name of simple, robust, and more practical piety (which had been initiated by Ibn Taymiyyah and which continued to find exponents among jurists) made little impression on its devotees. To be taken seriously, reform had to come from their own ranks and be espoused by such thinkers as the eminent theologian and mystic of Muslim India Aḥmad Sirhindī (flourished 16th–17th centuries)—a reformer who spoke their language and attacked Ibn al-ʿArabī’s “unity of being” only to defend an older, presumably more orthodox form of mysticism. Despite some impact, however, attempts of this kind remained isolated and were either ignored or reintegrated into the mainstream, until the coming of the modern reformers. The 19th- and 20th-century reformers Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī, Muḥammad ʿAbduh, and Muḥammad Iqbāl were initially educated in this tradition, but they rebelled against it and advocated radical reforms.