Mīr Dāmād

Safavid philosopher of Isfahan, teacher of Mullā Ṣadrā, whose difficult al-Ufuq al-mubīn lies beneath some of the solutions of Sullam al-ʿulūm and much of Qāḍī Mubārak’s commentary, and was taught by the Khayrābādī scholars in India.

Life

According to the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, Muḥammad Bāqir was born in Astarābād. His father, Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad, had married the daughter of the Imāmī jurist ʿAlī b. Ḥusayn al-Karakī, ‘al-Muḥaqqiq al-Thānī’, and was therefore called Dāmād, ‘son-in-law’; the son inherited the name and became known as Mīr Dāmād. He studied in Mashhad with his maternal uncle ʿAbd al-ʿĀlī b. ʿAlī and with ʿIzz al-Dīn Ḥusayn b. ʿAbd al-Ṣamad al-ʿĀmilī, reading Ibn Sīnā’s Shifāʾ and Ishārāt while still a student, lived for a time in Qazvin and Kāshān, and settled in Isfahan, where he enjoyed good relations with Shāh ʿAbbās I and Shāh Ṣafī. Iranians called him ‘the Third Teacher’ after Aristotle and al-Fārābī. He wrote Arabic and Persian poetry under the pen-name Ishrāq. Among his many students the best known are Quṭb al-Dīn al-Ashkūrī, Fayḍ-i Kāshānī and Mullā Ṣadrā (Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī). He died in 1041/1631, some sources say 1040/1630, on a journey to the shrines of Iraq, between Najaf and Karbalāʾ, and was buried in Najaf.

The TDV counts more than fifty works, most unpublished, on exegesis, ḥadīth, law, theology and above all philosophy, among them al-Qabasāt, on the createdness of the world, and al-Ufuq al-mubīn (also called al-Ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm) and al-Sabʿ al-shidād. It notes that the last two, although their author was a Shīʿī, were much read among the Sunnī Muslims of India and Pakistan.

That Indian readership is what ties him to logic. Asad Q. Ahmed’s study of the Sullam, as summarised on the pages of the Sullam al-ʿulūm section, finds al-Ufuq al-mubīn to be an undercurrent of some of al-Bihārī’s solutions; al-Bihārī probably came to know it through the debates in Lucknow around Mīr Dāmād’s doctrine of ‘perpetual creation’ (ḥudūth dahrī). A later glossator of Qāḍī Mubārak’s commentary on the Sullam wrote that its expressions were hard ‘because most of them are taken from the Ufuq mubīn’. In the nineteenth century the Khayrābādī scholars taught the Ufuq and wrote three of the four known premodern Indian commentaries on it (Faḍl-i Imām, Faḍl-i Ḥaqq and ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq).

Works

• al-Ufuq al-mubīn (al-Ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm) الأُفُقُ المُبِينُA difficult philosophical work much read by Sunnī scholars in India and Pakistan (TDV); behind some solutions of Sullam al-ʿulūm and much of Qāḍī Mubārak’s commentary (Ahmed). Commented on by Faḍl-i Imām, Faḍl-i Ḥaqq and ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Khayrābādī.عَمَل
• al-Qabasāt القَبَسَاتُOn the createdness of the world; lithographed Tehran 1315, critical edition by Mahdī Muḥaqqiq (Tehran 1977) (TDV).عَمَل
• al-Sabʿ al-shidādPhilosophy; like the Ufuq, much read in India (TDV).عَمَل
• Risālat ḥudūth al-ʿālamOn the createdness of the world, siding with Aristotle against Plato and criticising al-Fārābī’s harmonisation of the two (TDV).عَمَل

Reception

In Iran he is remembered above all as the teacher of Mullā Ṣadrā; in India, through al-Ufuq al-mubīn, as a hidden presence in the advanced logic course of the Sullam and its commentaries (see ‘Sullam al-ʿulūm: the book’ and ‘The Khayrābādī school’).