Mīr Dāmād in India: Islamic Philosophical

Traditions and the Problem of Creation

Sajjad H. Rizvi
University of Exeter

The history of Islamic philosophy and theology in India has yet to be properly written. The
learned culture of the high Mughal period has increasingly attracted attention, with a focus
on the role of the Dars-i Niẓāmī curriculum, devised in the eighteenth century to produce
cohorts of capable imperial administrators, and on the intellectual life of Delhi, Lucknow,
and the Doab in the middle to late Mughal period. 1 Some have identiied the signiicant role
of Mīr Fatḥullāh Shīrāzī (d. 997/1589), a philosopher trained in the school of Shīrāz, a stu-
dent of the philosopher and sometime ṣadr of the Ṣafavid empire, Mīr Ghiyāthuddīn Manṣūr
Dashtakī (d. 949/1542), and emigrant to the court of Akbar (r. 1556–1605). 2 Numerous
works, both academic and popular, stress his role as the foremost philosopher and scientist of
his time in the Persianate world, and attribute to him a series of important technological inno-
vations and reforms of the administration, including the adoption of Persian as the oicial

1. Jamal Malik, Islamische Gelehrtenkultur in Nordindien: Entwicklungsgeschichte und Tendenzen am Beispiel

von Lucknow (Leiden: Brill, 1997); Francis Robinson, The ʿUlama of Farangi-Mahall and Islamic Culture in South
Asia (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001); Farhan Nizami, “Madrasahs, Scholars, and Saints: Muslim Responses to the
British Presence in Delhi and the Upper Doab, 1803–1857,” Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Oxford, 1983; Margrit Pernau, ed.,
The Delhi College: Traditional Elites, the Colonial State, and Education before 1857 (New Delhi: Oxford Univ.
Press, 2006); Mushirul Hasan, From Pluralism to Separatism: Qasbas in Colonial Awadh (New Delhi: Oxford Univ.
Press, 2004); idem, A Moral Reckoning: Muslim Intellectuals in Nineteenth-Century Delhi (New Delhi: Oxford
Univ. Press, 2005). On the Dars-i Niẓāmī itself, see Malik, Islamische Gelehrtenkultur in Nordindien, 522–35; cf.
Francis Robinson, “Ottomans-Safavids-Mughals: Shared Knowledge and Connective Systems,” Journal of Islamic
Studies 8 (1997): 152–56; idem, The ʿUlama of Farangi Mahall, 48–50, 248–51; Qamaruddīn, Hindustān kī dīnī
darsgāhēn (New Delhi: Hamdard Education Society, 1996), 345–52; on pedagogical disciplines, texts, and authors,
see Muftī Riżā Anṣārī, Bānī-yi dars-i niẓāmī ustād al-hind Mullā Niẓāmuddīn Muḥammad Farangī-Maḥallī (Aligarh:
Aligarh Muslim Univ., 1973), 257–65; Jamīl Aḥmad, Ḥarakat al-taʾlīf bi-l-lugha al-ʿarabiyya fī l-iqlīm al-shimālī
al-hindī (Karachi: Jāmiʿat al-Dirāsāt al-Islāmiyya, n.d.), 17–22; Alṭāf al-Raḥmān Qidwāʿī, Qiyām-i niẓām-i taʿlīm
(Lucknow: Niẓāmī Press, 1924); Barbara Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860–1900 (Prince-
ton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982), 16–45; Muhammad Umar, Islam in Northern India in the Eighteenth Century
(Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1993), 259–305; Ḥabīburraḥmān Maẓāhirī Khayrābādī, Tadhkirat al-muṣannifīn:
Dars-i niẓāmiyya aur dars-i ʿāliyya aur tamām ʿarabī niṣābōn mēn shāmil jumla kutub kē muṣannifīn kā mukammal
tadhkira (n.p: Maktaba-yi Naʿīmiyya, n.d.); Muḥammad Ḥanīf Gangōhī, Ẓafar al-muḥaṣṣilīn bā-aḥvāl-i muṣannifīn,
yaʿnī ḥālāt-i muṣannifīn-i dars-i niẓāmī (Deoband: Ḥanīf Book Depot, 1996); Akhtar Rāhī, Tadhkira-yi muṣannifīn-i
dars-i niẓāmī (Lahore: Maktaba-yi Raḥmāniyya, 1978).
2. Raḥmān ʿAlī, Tuḥfat al-fuḍalāʾ fī tarājim al-kumalāʾ [Tadhkira-yi ʿulamāʾ-yi Hind] (Lucknow: Nawal
Kishore, 1333/1914), 160; ʿAbd al-Bāqī Nihāvandī, Maʾāthir-i Raḥīmī, ed. M. Hidāyat Ḥusayn (Calcutta: The
Asiatic Society, 1910), 2: 550; Sayyid Ghulām ʿAlī Āzād Bilgrāmī, Maʾāthir-i kirām, ed. M. Lyallpūrī (Lahore:
Maktaba-yi Iḥyāʾ-yi ʿUlūm-i Sharqiyya, 1971), 226, 228–29; Sayyid ʿAbdulḥayy al-Ḥasanī, Nuzhat al-khawāṭir wa-
bahjat al-masāmiʿ wa-l-nawāẓir (Rai Bareilly: Maktabat Dār ʿArafāt, 1992), 5: 539–44; Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi,
A Socio-Intellectual History of the Isnā ʾAsharī Shīʾīs in India (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1986), 2: 196–97;
G. M. D. Sui, Al-Minhāj, Being the Evolution of the Curriculum in the Muslim Educational Institutions of India
(Lahore: Shaikh Muhammad Ashraf, 1941), 54–55; M. A. Alvi and A. Rahman, Fath Allah Shirazi: A Sixteenth
Century Indian Scientist (Delhi: National Institute of the Sciences of India, 1968); Sharif Husain Qasimi, “Fatḥullāh
Šīrāzī,” in Encyclopaedia Iranica, ed. E. Yarshater (New York: dist. by Eisenbrauns, 1982–); Malik, Islamische
Gelehrtenkultur in Nordindien, 86–95; cf. Zubaid Ahmad, The Contribution of Indo-Pakistan to Arabic Literature,
from Ancient Times to 1857 (Lahore: Sh. Muhammad Ashraf, 1968), 127–56.

Journal of the American Oriental Society 131.1 (2011) 9

10 Journal of the American Oriental Society 131.1 (2011)

language of the Mughal chancellery; he is also regarded as the main conduit for the serious
study of philosophy and theology in India, laying the foundations for the Dars-i Niẓāmī
curriculum, which emphasized the study of the intellectual disciplines (ʿulūm ʿaqliyya). It is
common, therefore, for intellectual historians of Islamic thought in India to trace a lineage
from Shīrāzī (and, indeed, from the ishrāqī Avicennan tradition that he inherited) to the
“founder” of the Dars-i Niẓāmī, Mullā Niẓāmuddīn Sihālvī Farangī-Maḥallī (d. 1161/1748). 3
It was in this early Mughal period that Islamic philosophical traditions seriously began to
penetrate Indian scholarly circles. 4
Shīrāzī is praised in the biographical literature by friend and foe; the universal approval
relects his signiicant political status at the court of Akbar. 5 His friend Abū l-Fażl wrote:
He was so learned that if all the previous books of philosophy disappeared, he could have laid a
new foundation for knowledge and would not have desired what had preceded. 6

Another contemporary and an oicial historian at court, Khwāja Niẓām al-Dīn Aḥmad
Bakhshī (d. 1003/1594), wrote:
He was superior to all the ulema of Persia, Iraq, and India in his knowledge of the scriptural and
intellectual sciences. Among his contemporaries, he had no equal. He was an expert in the occult
sciences including the preparation of talismans and white magic. 7

Shīrāzī did play a critical role in the dissemination of the works and teachings of the
key igures of the philosophical school of Shīrāz: the Dashtakīs and Jalaluddīn Davānī (d.
908/1502); it is no accident that establishing their work in the curricula of educational insti-
tutions accounts for the numerous manuscript copies of their philosophical, logical, and theo-
logical works in Indian libraries. 8 But, arguably, his most important legacy was bequeathing

3. al-Ḥasanī, Nuzhat al-khawāṭir, 6: 394–96; Malik, Islamische Gelehrtenkultur in Nordindien, 86–95;

Anṣārī (Bānī-yi dars-i niẓāmī, 42) presents the following important intellectual lineage for the philosophi-
cal curriculum in India: Mullā Muḥammad Niẓāmuddīn Sihālvī (d. 1161/1748)—his father, Mullā Quṭbuddīn
Sihālvī (d. 1121/1710)—Mullā Dāniyāl Chawrāsī—ʿAbd al-Salām Dēwī (d. 1039/1629)—ʿAbd al-Salām Lāhūrī
(d. 1037/1627)—Mīr Fatḥullāh Shīrāzī (d. 997/1589)—Jamāluddīn Maḥmūd Shīrāzī—Jalāluddīn Davānī
(d. 1502)—Muḥyīuddīn Kūshktārī—Khwāja Ḥasan Shāh Baqqāl—Sharīf ʿAlī Jurjānī (d. 816/1413)—Mubārak-
Shāh Bukhārī (d. 740/1340)—Quṭbuddīn Rāzī Taḥtānī (d. 766/1364). One could continue this lineage to Avicenna
in the following manner: Taḥtānī—the eminent Shiʿite theologian ʿAllāma Ibn Muṭahhar al-Ḥillī (d. 725/1325)—his
teacher, the Shiʿite theologian, philosopher, and scientist Khwāja Naṣīr al-Dīn Muḥammad Ṭūsī (d. 672/1274)—
Farīduddīn Dāmād Nīsābūrī—Ṣadruddīn al-Sarakhṣī—Afḍaluddīn ʿUmar al-Ghaylānī (d. after 523/1128)—Abū
l-ʿAbbās al-Lawkarī (d. after 503/1109)—Bahmanyār b. Marzubān (d. 458/1066)—Avicenna (d. 428/1037). On
this latter section of the lineage, see Ahmed al-Rahim, “Avicenna’s Immediate Disciples: Their Lives and Works,”
in Avicenna and His Legacy: A Golden Age of Science and Philosophy, ed. Tzvi Langermann (Turnhout: Brepols,
2009), 1–25; idem, “The Twelver-Šīʿī Reception of Avicenna in the Mongol Period,” in Before and After Avicenna,
ed. David C. Reisman, with Ahmed H. al-Rahim (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 219–32.
4. Shīrāzī was one of a number of students of the “school of Shīrāz” who found fame and fortune in India. Oth-
ers included Abū l-Fatḥ Gīlānī (d. 997/1589), Shaykh Aḥmad Thattavī (d. 996/1588), Sayyid ʿInāyatullāh Shīrāzī
(d. 988/1580), Shaykh Muḥammad Yazdī (d. 998/1588), Mīr Murtaḍā Sharīfī (d. 972/1564), and Shaykh Hibatullāh
Shīrāzī; see al-Ḥasanī, Nuzhat al-khawāṭir, 2–3: 11–12, 26–27, 223–24, 293, 312, 346.
5. ʿAbd al-Qādir b. Malikshāh Badāyūnī, Muntakhab al-tavārīkh, ed. Aḥmad ʿAlī et al. (rpt., Tehran: Anjuman-i
Āthār va Mafākhir-i Farhangī, 1379 sh/2000), 3: 105. Cf. Rizvi, A Socio-Intellectual History, 2: 196–97; al-Ḥasanī,
Nuzhat al-khawāṭir, 2–3: 226–27.
6. Abū l-Fażl ʿAllāmī, Akbarnāma (Calcutta: Biblioteca Indica at the Baptist Mission Press, 1873–87), 3: 401;
cf. Rizvi, A Socio-Intellectual History, 2: 197.
7. Niẓāmuddīn Badakhshī, Ṭabaqāt-i Akbarī, ed. Barun De (Calcutta: The Asiatic Society, 1927–29), 2: 357.
8. There are very few extant works of Shīrāzī himself. One work that does suggest his introduction into India
of the important cycle of kalām texts around the Tajrīd al-iʿtiqād of Naṣīruddīn Ṭūsī is Ḥāshiya ʿalā sharḥ jadīd
li-l-Tajrīd, MS British Library Asian and African Studies (India Oice Delhi Arabic) 961a (forty f. of eighteenth-
century nastaʿlīq in the collected tome; as the author is not identiied, the attribution is tentative). The only other
work that I have found is Risāla dar javāb-i savālāt-i ḥikmiyya va kalāmiyya, MS Raza Library (Rampur) 466bā
 Rizvi: Mīr Dāmād in India 11

a curriculum that combined the study of the scriptures, the traditional religious sciences,
and the intellectual sciences, laying the basis for the Dars-i Niẓāmī. The eighteenth-century
intellectual Mīr Ghulām ʿAlī (“Āzād”) Bilgrāmī (d. 1200/1785) claimed that Shīrāzī was the
leading teacher of the intellectual sciences in his time, and his curricular reconciliation of
the traditional and the intellectual (manqūlāt, maʿqūlāt) was his great achievement that he
transmitted to his student Mullā ʿAbd al-Salām Lāhūrī (d. 1037/1627–8), who was also an
eminent Mughal jurist judging cases and teaching in Lahore. 9
Once the taste for philosophical speculation became critical to the Indian (Sunni) madrasa,
it was the twin schools of Mullā Ṣadrā, particularly disseminated through the study of his
Sharḥ al-Hidāya, and of Mīr Dāmād that dominated the intellectual curriculum of the late
Mughal period. This paper is a study of the latter and the debates that arose on the nature of
God’s creative agency, which were inspired by the doctrine of the perpetual incipience of
the cosmos (ḥudūth dahrī). I will irst examine briely Mīr Dāmād’s teaching and give an
overview of his argument. I will then discuss the formation of a school of “Yemeni philoso-
phy” in India, and, inally, analyze elements of the debate on the argument within the learned
culture of the North Indian towns loosely within the framework of the Dars-i Niẓāmī and its
Lucknow and Khayrābād variants.

mīr dāmād and the argument

Mīr Muḥammad Bāqir Dāmād Astarābādī was an eminent philosopher of the Ṣafavid
period, a companion of Shāh ʿAbbās I (r. 1587–1629) and later shaykh al-islām of Iṣfahān,
involved in the coronation of Shāh Ṣafī in January 1629. 10 Accompanying the shah to the
Shiʿite shrine cities in Iraq, he died there in 1040/1631 and was buried in the precinct of
the shrine of ʿAlī in Najaf. He trained a number of prominent thinkers, including the most
famous philosopher of the Ṣafavid period, Mullā Ṣadrā Shīrāzī (d. ca. 1045/1635). How-
ever, it was his son-in-law, Sayyid Aḥmad ʿAlawī (d. ca. 1060/1650), and Mullā Shamsā
Gīlānī (d. 1098/1687) who are best known for perpetuating his school of thought, not least
his doctrines on the nature of existence and the thorny problem of the relationship between
being and time, or rather how to reconcile the Neoplatonizing Aristotelian account of the
cosmos that is an instrumental, even logical product of a Principle, an unmoved Mover, with
the Islamic and Qurʾanic account of a personal god who creates volitionally. A proliic, if
somewhat obscure, philosopher, prone to an opaque and rather baroque style of writing, he
was best known for his metaphysical doctrines relating to time and creation, returning to the
topic repeatedly in his works. In particular, he was known for his theory that divine creative
agency is neither temporal in this world nor eternal in the world of immutability, but rather
takes place in an intermediate mode of time and existence known as perpetuity (dahr). This
is the concept of perpetual creation or ḥudūth dahrī. 11 The theory is expounded in his two
major works. Al-Qabasāt (“Blazing Brands” or Qabasāt ḥaqq al-yaqīn fī ḥudūth al-ʿālam),

(f. 1v–35v). Another important manuscript for the Avicennan tradition is MS Raza Library (Rampur) 3476 of
al-Shifāʾ of Avicenna which belonged to the Dashtakī family and was brought to India by Shīrāzī and later lodged
in the Mughal royal library from which it transferred to Rampur.
9. Bilgrāmī, Maʾāthir-i kirām, 226, 228–29; al-Ḥasanī, Nuzhat al-khawāṭir, 5: 243–44.
10. The best accounts are ʿAlī Awjabī, Mīr Dāmād: Bunyānguzār-i ḥikmat-i yamānī (Tehran: Ṣāḥat, 2004), and
Sayyid ʿAlī Mūsawī-Bihbahānī, Ḥakīm-i Astarābād, Mīr Dāmād (Tehran: Tehran Univ. Press, 1998).
11. For a more detailed study, see Keven A. Brown, “Time, Perpetuity, and Eternity: Mīr Dāmād’s Theory of
Perpetual Creation and the Trifold Division of Existence. An Analysis of Kitāb al-Qabasāt: The Book of Blazing
Brands,” Ph.D. diss., Univ. of California, Los Angeles, 2006; Fazlur Rahman, “Mīr Dāmād’s Concept of ḥudūth
dahrī: A Contribution to the Study of the God-World Relationship in Safavid Iran,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies
39 (1980): 139–51; Sajjad H. Rizvi, “Between Time and Eternity: Mīr Dāmād on God’s Creative Agency,” Journal
of Islamic Studies 12 (2006): 158–76.
12 Journal of the American Oriental Society 131.1 (2011)

which remained more popular in Iran, is notoriously obscure in some of its formulations; it
was written in a six-month period at the beginning of 1625. 12 It was extensively commented
upon and glossed by his students Sayyid Aḥmad ʿAlawī, Mullā Shamsā Gīlānī, Muḥammad
b. ʿAlī-Riżā Āqājānī, as well as other major philosophers of the Ṣafavid and Qājār periods,
such as Āqā Ḥusayn Khwānsārī (d. 1098/1687), Mullā ʿAlī Nūrī (d. 1831), and Mīrzā Abū
l-Ḥasan Jilveh (d. 1896). 13 Al-Ufuq al-mubīn (“The Clear Horizon”) was an earlier, incom-
plete text, covering the totality of issues within metaphysics, which he abandoned before
1025/1615, but it became a major school text in India and was glossed by members of the
Firangī-Maḥall family as well as the Khayrābādī philosophers, as we shall see shortly. 14
Dāmād’s theory represents a conscious middle path between the medieval philosophers
and theologians, an attempt by a thinker to articulate an “Islamic” philosophy, a propheti-
cally inspired way of wisdom, as the concept of “Yemeni philosophy” indicated. Theolo-
gians in Islam had broadly insisted that the Qurʾanic notion of a creator god was one who
produced the cosmos ex nihilo in time. 15 Inspired by John Philoponus’s famous attack on
Proclus (d. 485) and Aristotle’s defense of eternalism, they have asserted that not only was
the concept of an eternal cosmos coeval with God absurd, it was also heretical; al-Ghazālī
(d. 505/1111) in his Tahāfut al-falāsifa (“Incoherence of the Philosophers”) anathematized
philosophers for believing precisely this. 16 Philoponus (d. ca. 570), as a Christian, was fol-
lowed by other theologians in using Aristotelian principles to deconstruct the argument for
eternity. 17 His refutation relied on three premises. First, if the existence of something requires
the pre-existence of something else, then the irst thing will not come to be without the prior
existence of the second. This was a major axiom in later Islamic metaphysics and was known
as the “rule of subordination” (qāʿida farʿiyya). Second, based on sound Aristotelian science,
an ininite number cannot exist in actuality, nor be traversed in counting, nor be increased.
The medieval rule that actual ininites do not obtain was upheld. Third, something cannot
come into being if its existence requires the pre-existence of an ininite number of other
things, one arising out of the other. From these Aristotelian premises, Philoponus deduced
that the conception of a temporally ininite universe, understood as a successive causal chain,
is impossible. The celestial spheres of Aristotelian theory have diferent periods of revolu-
tion, and in any given number of years they undergo diferent numbers of revolutions, some
larger than others. The assumption of their motion having gone on for all eternity leads to
the conclusion that ininity can be increased, even multiplied, which Aristotle, too, held to
be absurd.

12. Mūsawī-Bihbahānī, Ḥakīm-i Astarābād, 165–66.

13. Sayyid Aḥmad ʿAlawī, Sharḥ Kitāb al-Qabasāt, ed. Ḥ. N. Iṣfahānī (Tehran: ISTAC, 1997), 26–27.
14. ʿAbdullāh Nūrānī published a non-critical edition of the text in Iran in 2006. Ḥāmid Nājī Iṣfahānī, who
edited Sayyid Aḥmad ʿAlawī’s Sharḥ al-Qabasāt, has prepared a critical edition of al-Ufuq al-mubīn, which is in
press. Despite the many manuscripts of the text in India, there is neither a lithograph nor a modern edition of the
text.
15. For a wonderfully creative study of how Islamic intellectual traditions have shifted from an initial “Qurʾanic
creator paradigm,” see Ian Netton, Allah Transcendent: Studies in the Structure and Semiotics of Islamic Philoso-
phy, Theology and Cosmology (Richmond: Curzon Press, 1989). The standard reference for the arguments for and
against eternity in medieval Islam is Herbert Davidson, Proofs for Eternity, Creation, and Existence of God in
Medieval Islamic and Jewish Philosophy (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987).
16. Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, Tahāfut al-falāsifa (The Incoherence of the Philosophers), ed. and tr. Michael
Marmura (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young Univ. Press, 2000), 12–46.
17. On Philoponus’s argument, see Richard Sorabji, Time, Creation and the Continuum (London: Duckworth,
1983), 193–231; Samuel Sambursky, The Physical World of Late Antiquity (London: Routledge, Kegan and Paul,
1962), 154–75.
 Rizvi: Mīr Dāmād in India 13

Mīr Dāmād’s solution is not primarily concerned with this strand of the argument. Inlu-
enced by Avicenna, he was convinced by the argument that God does not create in time since
that leads to a petitio principii; the cause of time must transcend time. Avicenna reduces
the relationship of the cosmos to the world to one of contingency (imkān) dependent on the
Necessary Existent One (wājib al-wujūd). Further, he distinguishes three levels of “temporal-
ity,” or rather conscious states that entities possess: zamān, dahr, and sarmad. In al-Taʿlīqāt,
a late work based on discussions and questions of his close students, Avicenna wrote:
The intellect grasps three types of entities. The irst is in time (zamān) and expressed by “when”
and describes mutables that have a beginning and an end, although its beginning is not its end
but necessitates it. It is in permanent lux and requires states and renewal of states. The second
is being with time and is called perpetuity (dahr) and it surrounds time. It is the existence of the
heavens with time and time is in that existence because it issues from the motion of the heavens.
It is the relationship of the immutable to the mutable although one’s imagination cannot grasp it
because it sees everything in time and thinks that everything “is,” “will be,” and “was”—past,
present, and future—and sees everything as “when” either in the past or the present or the future.
The third is the being of the immutable with the immutable and is called eternity (sarmad) and
it surrounds perpetuity [. . .]. Perpetuity is a container of time as it surrounds it. Time is a weak
existence as it is in lux and motion. 18

Our linguistic limitations make these notions of temporality rather diicult to grasp, espe-
cially as our language makes and represents our experience and our world, which are inexora-
bly tensed. These three degrees of temporality also indicate three increasingly intense modes
of existence. For Avicenna, radical contingents are utterly dependent on the Necessary and
are in a sense somewhat unreal or non-existent. The higher intelligible beings are more real
and ultimately the Necessary is the Real. In simple terms, sensibilia are purely temporal,
intelligibilia are perpetual and “share” in eternality, and God is eternal. The eternality of the
cosmos is borrowed and a relection of an eternal God and His eternal agency as creator in
the higher world of intelligibles. In efect, Avicenna does not retain the neat tripartite division
and tends to collapse the distinction between eternal and perpetual. 19 Mīr Dāmād insists on
separating the levels and expresses this hierarchy and how human consciousness conceives
of it in al-Qabasāt in the following manner:
In existence that obtains, there are three types of containers: (1) the container (wiʿā) of an exis-
tence that has extension and is in lux and a non-existence that is continuous and has extension
that belong to mutable entities insofar as they are mutable in time (zamān); (2) container of a
pure existence that is preceded by pure non-existence and that transcends the horizon of exten-
sion and non-existence and belongs to immutables insofar as they are immutable while embrac-
ing actuality is perpetuity (dahr); (3) container of a pure Real immutable Existence absolutely
devoid of accidentality of change and transcendent above any sense of being preceded by non-
existence, pure and sheer activity, is eternity (sarmad). Just as perpetuity transcends and is more
vast than time, so, too, is eternity higher, more majestic, more holy, and greater than perpetuity. 20

Contingency is therefore deined not by what did not exist at a prior point in time but
rather as being preceded by non-existence. These three levels of temporality lead to three
conceptions of existence (and, indeed, of non-existence). Before Mīr Dāmād, there was a

18. Ibn Sīnā, al-Taʿlīqāt, ed. ʿA. Badawī (Cairo: al-Hayʾa al-Miṣriyya al-ʿĀmma li-l-Kitāb, 1974), 141–42;
cf. Mīr Dāmād, Kitāb al-Qabasāt, ed. Mehdi Mohaghegh, Toshihiko Izutsu, and Sayyid ʿAlī Mūsawī-Bihbahānī
(Tehran: Tehran Univ. Press, 1977), 7–8.
19. Mīr Dāmād, Kitāb al-Qabasāt, 326–29.
20. Mīr Dāmād, Kitāb al-Qabasāt, 7.
14 Journal of the American Oriental Society 131.1 (2011)

basic dichotomy: either the cosmos has a beginning in time, in which case it possesses
temporal incipience (ḥudūth zamānī), or it is purely preceded by non-existence, and not by
time in which it merely logically succeeds the divine essence, in which case it possesses
ḥudūth dhātī. God as the purely immutable existence only acts at the level of the eternal
and interacts with immutable intellects. He does not intervene in this world of sensibilia nor
does he know the particularity of things in this world; rather, His omniscience is mediated
by an Aristotelian epistemology of essences and universals through which one knows and
recognizes particulars. This absolute alterity of the divine and His “inability” to intervene
in the mutable and the temporal because He is neither mutable nor temporal posed a major
problem, not least for our understanding of theodicy and the relationship between God’s
knowledge and His agency.
Mīr Dāmād’s concept of the cosmos unfolding at the level of perpetuity is thus a com-
promise intended to save the face of divine agency and divine knowledge. He does not deny
that there are types of contingents that have a beginning in time. But the cosmos and creation
as such have a beginning in perpetuity, not in time nor in the leeting moment extensively
glossed by Avicenna. The contingency and incipience of the world lies at the level of per-
petuity, a mode of temporality that is meta-temporal yet not eternal. Just as the theological
doctrine of creation in time was rejected by Mīr Dāmād, so, too, did he want to avoid the
Avicennan notion of contingency based on the priority of an essential non-existence (sibq
bi-l-ʿadam al-dhātī). In al-Qabasāt, which is his most extensive discussion of the problem,
he presents six arguments for perpetual creation. The irst proof is based on three kinds of
creation (ḥudūth) and non-existence and the postulation of three modes or containers of
existence or temporality, namely, time, perpetuity, and eternity, which draw on Avicenna.
The second is founded upon an analysis of the relationship between essence and existence in
contingents and Mīr Dāmād’s position on the ontological priority of essence and three types
of priority. The third examines types of posteriority. The fourth proof is scriptural corrobo-
ration from the Qurʾan and the sayings of the Prophet and the imams. The ifth is based on
the notion of pure, unqualiied natures. The sixth is founded upon the continuities of time,
space, and motion.
Here I will concern myself with the irst proof, based on the twin premises of three types
of creation and the diferent senses of non-existence. 21 Mīr Dāmād’s solution is to allow for
contingents in this world to be preceded not by conceptual or essential non-existence but
by a “real non-existence” (ʿadam ṣarīḥ), which is located at the level of perpetuity (dahr)
and which constitutes a real contradictory for existence. 22 This is a level of ontological
consciousness devoid of extension or change and rather diicult for the mind to grasp, a
point repeatedly made by Mīr Dāmād’s opponents. It can only make sense if we accept Mīr
Dāmād’s position that essences are ontologically prior (aṣālat al-māhiyya), meaning that
within the conceptual dyads that are contingents composed of existence and essence, it is the
latter that is the prior principle, and the former only obtains once the thing possesses actuali-
ty. 23 Mīr Dāmād’s student, Sayyid Aḥmad ʿAlawī, explains the point: the everyday notion of
non-existence considers something that is devoid of extension and matter either in this world
or in the supra-lunary world and thus it is a conceptual version that is opposed to existence
found in this world. 24 However, Mīr Dāmād is concerned with a real and not conceptual type
of non-existence that has neither space nor time and is beyond extension, but his solution

21. Cf. Brown, “Time, Perpetuity, and Eternity,” 66–149.

22. Mīr Dāmād, Kitāb al-Qabasāt, 220–26.
23. Mīr Dāmād, Taqwīm al-īmān, ed. ʿAlī Awjabī (Tehran: Mīrāth-i Maktūb, 1997), 323.
24. ʿAlawī, Sharḥ al-Qabasāt, 472–73.
 Rizvi: Mīr Dāmād in India 15

allows one to insist upon the unreality of everything other than the One posited by monism,
yet at the same time to airm true plurality of contingents. Thus, contingents possess within
themselves a temporal beginning as well as a perpetual eternality (al-ḥudūth al-zamānī wa-l-
azaliyya al-dahriyya). In this sense, the concept of ḥudūth dahrī is akin to his student Mullā
Ṣadrā’s attempt at resolving the opposition of monism and pluralism through his dynamic
twinned conception of substances in processual motion existing within a singular but graded
hierarchy of existence (ḥaraka jawhariyya, tashkīk al-wujūd). At the end of the argument,
Mīr Dāmād demonstrates that all things that are contingent (or possible in themselves) are
preceded by a real, contradictory non-existence, and this requires their actualization at the
level of perpetuity and denies the possibility of their existence at the level of eternity which
is unique to God. 25 This is the primary achievement of his school of Yemeni philosophy.

the yemeni philosophy

The school of Mīr Dāmād was known as the Yemeni philosophy (al-ḥikma al-yamāniyya).
His method involved a presentation of philosophy that existed before him primarily from the
school of Avicenna, which he labels “Greek philosophy” (ḥikma yunāniyya), and then a criti-
cal exposition of the position, replacing it with his improved argument which he described
as “Yemeni,” based on the famous saying attributed to the Prophet: “Faith is Yemeni and
wisdom is Yemeni” (al-īmān yamānī wa-l-ḥikma yamāniyya). 26 He considered all previous
schools of thought (Peripatetic and Illuminationist philosophy, Ashʿarī theology, and even
Twelver Shiʿite theology) to be incomplete and unreliable in their understanding of reality.
His Yemeni position is not a purely ratiocinative one and it extends knowledge and under-
standing beyond the conines of discourse (baḥth) and reason to the non-propositional, intui-
tive (dhawq), immediate, and mystically disclosed (kashf). Often he presents his argument by
stating that he will irst examine the “Greek” philosophical position and then move on to the
Yemeni one. As his primary concern is with the philosophy of theistic creation, his Yemeni
philosophy is deployed to solve the problems of time and creation.
In Jadhavāt va mawāqīt (“Flaming Embers and Epiphanies”), a thoughtful contempla-
tion written in Persian (his only major work in that language) of Moses’s encounter with the
theophany of the burning bush on Mount Sinai, he describes diferent conceptions and level
of creation:
Causation—which is a term for emanation, “making,” and bringing into existence—in the
doctrine of “those rooted in knowledge” (rāsikhīn ʿulamāʾ) and of the metaphysicians of Greek
and of Yemeni philosophy is of four types: ibdāʿ (origination, creatio ex nihilo), ikhtirāʿ (pro-
duction), ṣunʿ (fashioning or creation in the higher intelligible world), and takwīn (generation or
creation in the sub-lunar world). 27

Later in the same text, he analyses the Yemeni philosophical understanding of numerical
order and the existence of Platonic numbers as irst-order emanations from the One, an
important element of the argument concerning levels of creation from the One. 28
In one of his most important works on philosophical theology, al-Ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm (“The
Straight Path”)—primarily concerned with the problem of creation and, like many others, left
uninished—Mīr Dāmād sets out what he intends to accomplish with the work:

25. Brown, “Time, Perpetuity, and Eternity,” 504.

26. Awjabī, Mīr Dāmād, 97.
27. Mīr Dāmād, Jadhavāt va mavāqīt, ed. ʿAlī Awjabī (Tehran: Mīrāth-i Maktūb, 2001), 99.
28. Mīr Dāmād, Jadhavāt, 170.
16 Journal of the American Oriental Society 131.1 (2011)

The one most desirous among creation for his Lord the Self-Suicient, Muḥammad b.
Muḥammad known as Bāqir Dāmād al-Ḥusaynī—may God make his afterlife good—presents
to you, O brothers of mysticism, and expounds for you, O brothers of retreat and solitude, a
solution to the confusion caused in you by the mass of teachers attempting to reveal the diicult
relationship between the Eternal and the incipient, and [aims] to ease its diiculties with clear
thought according to the method of Greek philosophy and of Yemeni philosophy, and to inves-
tigate the discourse of those expounders and make them wither with irm writing and forthright
exposition. 29

He clearly thought that those who had written before him on the issue of creation and time,
including Avicenna, had failed to convince, and he felt that he could produce a more robust
argument and pin his Yemeni philosophy on the central doctrine of perpetual creation. Later
in the text, before he embarks on the main discussion of the doctrine, he distinguishes three
types of prior non-existence based on Yemeni philosophy:
According to what we have acquired from the mature Yemeni philosophy ripened by the faculty
of the intellect, obtained through demonstrative syllogisms and divine inspirations, it appears
that incipience has three possible meanings: The irst of them is the priority of the existence of a
thing by essential non-existence and this is called, according to the philosophers, “essential cre-
ation” (ḥudūth dhātī) [. . .]. The second of them is the priority of a thing by its non-existence in
perpetuity and eternity that is atemporal such that the thing is non-existent in a real sense through
pure non-existence which is not qualiied by continuity and its opposite. It then moves from this
pure non-existence to existence and would appear to be most appropriately termed [incipience],
that is, perpetual creation (ḥudūth dahrī). The third of them is the priority of the existence of the
thing by its non-existence in time so that its existence is preceded by an element of time, and
this is called by the theologians “temporal creation” (ḥudūth zamānī). 30

The very notion of perpetual creation is directly related to his school of Yemeni philoso-
phy. In al-Ufuq al-mubīn, the text that was so popular in India, he begins by saying that the
work on the nature of the metaphysics of theistic creation is the result of what came to him
from “matured Yemeni philosophy and the pure, ecstatic philosophy of faith.” 31
The irst person to take up his school systematically in India and to engage fully and criti-
cally with the theory of perpetual creation was the leading philosopher of the Mughal period,
Mullā Maḥmūd Jawnpūrī, to whom I now turn.

maḥmūd jawnpūrī and philosophy in shīrāz-i hind

Following upon the legacy of Mīr Fatḥullāh Shīrāzī, Jawnpūr in the Gangetic plain in
North India became an intellectual center in the seventeenth century and was famously
described as Shīrāz-i Hind by the emperor Shāhjahān (r. 1627–1658). 32 The key igure in this
process was Maḥmūd b. Muḥammad Fārūqī, who was born in Vālidpūr in district Aʿẓamgarh
in Ramaḍān 1015/1603. 33 A child prodigy, by the age of seventeen he had mastered the
intellectual sciences with his maternal grandfather Shaykh Shāh Muḥammad (d. 1032/1623)

29. Mīr Dāmād, al-Ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm fī rabṭ al-ḥādith wa-l-qadīm, ed. ʿAlī Awjabī (Tehran: Mīrāth-i Maktūb,
2002), 3.
30. Mīr Dāmād, al-Ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm, 195.
31. Mīr Dāmād, Muṣannafāt II: al-Ufuq al-mubīn, ed. ʿAbdullāh Nūrānī (Tehran: Anjuman-i Āthār va
Mafākhir-i Farhangī, 2006), 5.
32. Bilgrāmī, Maʾāthir-i kirām, 12; Haiz A. Ghafar Khan, “India,” in History of Islamic Philosophy, vol. 1,
ed. S. H. Nasr and O. Leaman (London: Routledge, 1996), 1059; Hasan, From Pluralism to Separatism, 24.
33. Ghulām Ḥabīb Subḥānī, 101 ʿUlamāʾ-yi Pākistān o Hind (Lahore: Taʿlīqāt, 2002), 622–27; Sayyid Ghulām
ʿAlī Āzād Bilgrāmī, Subḥat al-marjān fī āthār Hindustān, ed. M. Fażl al-Raḥmān Nadwī (Aligarh: Institute of
 Rizvi: Mīr Dāmād in India 17

and a renowned philosopher in Jawnpūr, Shaykh Muḥammad Afżal Radawlī (d. 1062/1652),
and was already teaching philosophy by twenty. 34 Bilgrāmī describes him as the unique and
probably greatest of the ulema of the east (of Delhi) and as the best to combine the methods
of the Illuminationists (ishrāqiyyīn) and the Peripatetics (mashshāʾiyyīn). 35
Jawnpūrī was allegedly the student of Mīr Findiriskī (d. 1050/1640), the itinerant savant
who spent most of his life in India. At the latter’s behest, Jawnpūrī apparently stopped in
Iṣfahān on his way to the ḥajj to study with Mīr Dāmād and there imbibed the “ḥikma
yamāniyya”—his main work, al-Shams al-bāzigha, is inluenced by al-Ufuq al-mubīn. 36
Bilgrāmī stresses that al-Shams is a work in the tradition of ḥikma yamāniyya. 37 Sources par-
ticularly note the disagreement on the question of creation, ḥudūth dahrī; in fact, Bilgrāmī,
among others, replicates the whole critique of Jawnpūrī, to which I will return later. 38
In order to promote the new capital of Shāhjahānābād as an intellectual and imperial cen-
ter, Shāhjahān collected around himself a coterie of intellectual igures, including Miyān Mīr
(d. 1045/1635), the famous Sui from Lahore, the philosopher and theologian ʿAbd al-Ḥakīm
Siyālkūtī (d. 1067/1656), and Maḥmūd Jawnpūrī. 39 The latter was invited to build a new
observatory in Delhi by the courtier Āṣaf Khān. 40 However, as Shāhjahān was soon dis-
tracted by matters of state—in particular the Balkh campaign in the west against the Uzbeks
in 1645–48 for recovery of the Mughals’ ancestral homelands—Jawnpūrī returned to his
hometown where he established a seminary, Madrasa-yi Maḥmūdiyya, which specialized
in the study of the intellectual sciences. 41 There he designed a school text for the study and
dissemination of philosophy entitled al-Ḥikma al-bāligha, on which he wrote his own com-
mentary al-Shams al-bāzigha. 42 Although the text was intended to be a comprehensive ency-
clopedia much akin to al-Hidāya of al-Abharī and its famous commentary by Mullā Ṣadrā
comprising a section on logic, physics, and metaphysics, it was only the physics section that
was ever completed. It is, in fact, one of the peculiarities of the intellectual sciences in India

Islamic Studies, Aligarh Muslim Univ., 1972), 2: 142–70; al-Ḥasanī (Nuzhat al-khawāṭir, 5: 429–31) mentions a
birth year of 993 a.h.; GAL, 2: 554, S II: 621.
34. See al-Ḥasanī, Nuzhat al-khawāṭir, 5: 359; ʿAlī, Tadhkira-yi ʿulamāʾ-yi Hind, 417; Malik, Islamische
Gelehrtenkultur in Nordindien, 98–99.
35. Bilgrāmī, Subḥat al-marjān, 2: 142.
36. ʿAlī Awjabī (“Ḥikmat-i yamānī dar Hind,” Āyīna-yi mīrāth 32 [2006]: 84), Robinson (“Ottomans-Safavids-
Mughals,” 159), and Khan (“India,” 1065) cite this but do not provide any source.
37. Bilgrāmī, Subḥat al-marjān, 2: 145.
38. Bilgrāmī, Subḥat al-marjān, 2: 145–62.
39. Bilgrāmī, Subḥat al-marjān, 1: 170–72. Siyālkūtī is famed for his commentary on three major works of
philosophical theology: the glosses of Aḥmad al-Khayālī (d. 870/1465) and Jalāluddīn al-Dawānī (d. 907/1501) on
the creed of Najmuddīn ʿUmar al-Nasafī (d. 537/1142); Sharḥ al-Mawāqif of al-Jurjānī (d. 816/1413); and Ṭawāliʿ
al-anwār min maṭāliʿ al-anẓār of al-Bayḍāwī (d. 685/1286). He also wrote a gloss on the philosophical commentary
of Mīr Ḥusayn Maybudī on al-Hidāya of al-Abharī. See al-Ḥasanī, Nuzhat al-khawāṭir, 5: 229–31; GAL, 2: 550.
40. As noted in the famous account of Jawnpūrī’s student Muḥammad Ṣādiq Iṣfahānī Ṣubḥ-i ṣādiq, f. 521, and
reported in al-Ḥasanī, Nuzhat al-khawāṭir, and Bilgrāmī, Subḥat al-marjān, 2: 144.
41. For discussions on the Balkh campaign and its failures, see Jos Gommans, Mughal Warfare (London: Rout-
ledge, 2002), 179–87; M. Athar Ali, Mughal India: Studies in Polity, Ideas, Society and Culture (New Delhi: Oxford
Univ. Press, 2006), 327–33; and John F. Richards, The New Cambridge History of India, vol. 1.5: The Mughal
Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), 132–33.
42. Apart from the many manuscripts, the text was printed in lithograph in 1280/1863 in Lucknow by Niẓāmī
Press along with the glosses of Ḥamdullāh on the margins. There is no modern critical edition of the text, although
Sayyid ʿAqīl Riżvī Gharavī in Delhi has begun one based on an autograph manuscript in the Khudā Bakhsh Library
in Patna.
18 Journal of the American Oriental Society 131.1 (2011)

that physics remained the focus of the philosophical curriculum well into the late nineteenth
century. 43
Later, Jawnpūrī became the tutor of Shujāʿ, the son and would-be heir of Shāhjahān, and
accompanied him to the governorate of Bengal. There he is reported to have met the Sui
shaykh Niʿmatullāh Fīrūzābādī and to have taken over the ṭarīqa from him in 1052/1641.
Prominent students of his included Abū Ṭālib Shāʾista Khān, Shaykh Nūruddīn Jawnpūrī, and
Shaykh ʿAbd al-Bāqī Ṣiddīqī, author of a popular commentary on the rhetoric and polemics
of Shams al-Dīn Samarqandī (d. 1310) entitled al-Ādāb al-bāqiya. 44
Bilgrāmī notes that Jawnpūrī had a humble style of teaching and was renowned for his
relective and thoughtful approach to learning. Contemporary biographers would note that
there are two famous Fārūqīs in Indian history: Sirhindī known for his Sui teachings and
Jawnpūrī known for his teaching of philosophy and literature. He died on 21 Rabīʿ I 1062/
March 2, 1652. The popularity of his text is attested by the many manuscripts of the work
available in Indian and Indian-sourced libraries (like the British Library). 45 It has also repeat-
edly been published in lithograph from the nineteenth century on and then ofset by printers
such as Niẓāmī in Lucknow.
Al-Shams al-bāzigha and the rehearsal of philosophical dogma were later considered to be
symptomatic of intellectual stagnation. The famed reformer Jamāluddīn al-Afghānī (d. 1897)
condemned the study of the text as irrelevant to the new intellectual and scientiic challenges
of the modern world that Muslims faced. 46 Indeed, the advent of the new learning and the
new science which came with the colonial encounter, especially after the 1857 revolt, did
seem to make the Ptolemaic cosmology on which much of the metaphysics and physics were
predicated seem increasingly obsolete.
Jawnpūrī’s critique covers various elements. 47 He begins by presenting Mīr Dāmād’s
argument, agreeing that creation cannot be temporal as the idea of priority based on temporal

43. Al-Shams al-bāzigha is one of four important original Islamic philosophical texts produced in India. The
others are al-ʿUrwā al-wuthqā, a short epitome of philosophy written by Kamāluddīn Sihālwī (d. 1760); al-ʿUjāla
al-nāiʿa, a most detailed excursus on metaphysics by the famous philosopher of Farangī-Maḥall, ʿAbd ʿAlī Baḥr
al-ʿUlūm (d. 1810); and al-Hadiya al-saʿīdiyya by the nineteenth-century philosopher of Delhi, Fażl-i Ḥaqq
Khayrābādī (d. 1861). Another short text from the late nineteenth century, which is somewhat like a student’s
primer, is Taswīlāt al-falāsifa by the Patna philosopher Abū Saʿīd Ẓuhūr al-Ḥaqq ʿAẓīmābādī, of which an autograph
copy is MS Khudā Bakhsh 2742. These texts are all commonly found in Indian library collections. For a discussion
of these texts in the Dars-i Niẓāmī, see my forthcoming article, “Calibrating Empires of the Mind: Natural Philoso-
phy in the Dars-i niẓāmī.”
44. Cf. MS Delhi Arabic (British Library) 1550, f. 76v–169v.
45. There are far too many copies of al-Shams al-bāzigha to provide a full inventory (and in the absence of a
critical edition it is worth referring to the manuscript traditions), but here are some of the manuscripts that I have
consulted or am aware of:
British Library: India Oice Islamic 201 (129 f., nastaʿlīq-shikaste, 1129/1717), Delhi Arabic 1618 (175 f.,
nastaʿlīq, 1263/1847), Delhi Arabic 1624 (nineteenth century?), Delhi Arabic 1672 (nineteenth century?).
Khudā Bakhsh [Bankipore] 2393 (81 f., nastaʿlīq, eighteenth century), 2394 (251 f., nastaʿlīq of Najaf ʿAlī
Riḍwī, 1246 a.h., gold borders, inscription of lisān al-sulṭān Maḥmūd al-Dawla Munshī Ṣafdar ʿAlī Khān-Bahādur),
2395 (134 f., nastaʿlīq, nineteenth century), 2399 (gloss of Mullā Niẓāmuddīn Sihālwī, 107 f., nastaʿlīq, nineteenth
century), 2400 (gloss of Mullā Ḥasan Lakhnawī, d. 1189/1783, 198 f., nastaʿlīq, nineteenth century).
Asiatic Society (Kolkata) Calcutta Madrasa Collection Arabic 58 (170 f., nastaʿlīq, eighteenth century).
Rampur Raza Library 3616 (67 f., nastaʿlīq, 1251/1835), 3617 (135 f., nastaʿlīq, nineteenth century), 3549
(232 f., nastaʿlīq, nineteenth century).
Princeton (New Series) 379 (131 f., nastaʿlīq, nineteenth century), 547 (incomplete, nastaʿlīq of Mīrzā ʿAbbās,
1249/1834), 1845 (incomplete, nineteenth century).
Sālār Jung (Hyderabad) 80, 81.
46. Charles Kurzman, ed., Modernist Islam, 1840–1940 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), 106–7.
47. Maḥmūd Jawnpūrī, al-Shams al-bāzigha fī sharḥ al-Ḥikma al-bāligha, MS British Library Asian and
African Studies (Delhi Arabic) 1618, f. 127v–135v.
 Rizvi: Mīr Dāmād in India 19

units or temporal continuity is absurd because it requires there to be a time before time. Tem-
poral non-existence that precedes existence is not a true contradictory of it. His presentation
is based on aspects of Mīr Dāmād’s irst, third, and sixth proofs. 48
First, he examines the notions of priority. Real and opposing notions of priority and
posteriority require the conception of some continuity, whether it is real or imagined
(muḥaqqaq aw mawhūm). It is diicult for the mind to imagine continuity outside of tempo-
ral units and it thus tends to make an absolute distinction between non-existence and exis-
tence. But then the question arises: whence creation, because Aristotelian philosophy does
not permit something out of nothing? 49
Second, if perpetuity is a container beyond temporal existence and beyond both continuity
and lack of continuity, then how can existence obtain in it after it was not? The absurdity of
the situation relates to the example of a point in time and whether two bodies can obtain the
same place in the small point in time within the paradoxical need to ininitely divide units of
time. Besides, non-existence cannot exist at the same point or priority as existence by deini-
tion. It is even more problematic to associate that priority in which the non-existence of the
cosmos is, with the priority in which the existence of God obtains. For Jawnpūrī, perpetuity
is not a container in which God can at times be manifest and at others not be devoid of
notions of continuity. 50 The law of non-contradiction applies to this point. Non-existence
qua non-existence and existence qua existence do not possess the properties of priority and
posteriority. So what arises in perpetuity? If it is the notion of a prior non-existence associ-
ated with the posterior existence, then one is left with the coincidence of contradictories. But
in this objection, Jawnpūrī is not taking into consideration Mīr Dāmād’s position on essence,
which allows for a real non-existence in perpetuity to obtain.
Third, he moves onto the God–world relationship. One of the theological problems with
perpetual creation is that it seems to posit a class of contingents (such as the higher intellects)
that are eternal and perpetual with God such that there is no relation of them being preceded
by a prior state. This seems to pose a problem for the monotheist. There cannot be a difer-
ence in number for a temporal thing between its temporal existence and its occurrence in
perpetuity. It makes no sense for a thing to have existence in perpetuity before its existence
after its creation. 51 Once again, an assumption that essences are ontologically prior would
obviate the objection. Further, he argues that if we say that God can only precede contingents
either by perpetuity or eternity, not by time, then we face a problem in their deinitions. The
state in which God is together with those contingents in perpetuity negates the possibility
of notions of priority and posteriority. “Togetherness” (maʿiyya) cannot contain within it the
idea of some being prior and posterior in the relation. We would therefore be left with a posi-
tion in which we cannot airm that God is prior to the world. 52 Here Jawnpūrī thinks that Mīr
Dāmād is too harsh on the Peripatetic position. One possible objection to Jawnpūrī is that the
notion of maʿiyya to some need not be monological. His contemporary, Mullā Ṣadrā, after
all, allows for the togetherness of God and the world as well as graded stages of priority and
posteriority pertaining to the same pyramid of being.
Finally, Jawnpūrī makes a comment that has since been reiterated by an Iranian phi-
losopher, Jalāluddīn Āshtiyānī (d. 2005), relating to the nature of causation. 53 If an efect is

48. Jawnpūrī, al-Shams, f. 127v–129v.

49. Jawnpūrī, al-Shams, f. 129v–130r.
50. Jawnpūrī, al-Shams, f. 130v.
51. Jawnpūrī, al-Shams, f. 132v.
52. Jawnpūrī, al-Shams, f. 133v–134r.
53. Sayyid Jalāluddīn Āshtiyānī, ed., Muntakhabātī az āthār-i ḥukamāʾ-yi Īrān (Tehran: Institut Franco-Iranien,
1971), 1: 17–19.
20 Journal of the American Oriental Society 131.1 (2011)

dependent upon its cause, then—following the rules of Aristotelian science—it must exist in
a more perfect state at the stage of the existence of its cause. Therefore, the creation cannot
be totally non-existent or possess pure non-existence at the level of eternity. This amounts to
a defense of the traditional Avicennan doctrine of essential creation (ḥudūth dhātī). Jawnpūrī
praises the efort of the intellectually dextrous and able Mīr Dāmād to solve the problem,
but for him it is rather simpler: the real question for “believing philosophers” (al-muʾminūn
min al-falāsifa) is to reconcile the Qurʾanic account and sayings of the prophets and “those
who have arrived at the unseen,” that is, reconciling temporal creatio ex nihilo with ḥudūth
dhātī. But in that they should follow al-Fārābī (d. 339/950), who shows Plato’s reconciliation
of creation and emanation in his al-Jamʿ bayna raʾyay al-ḥakīmayn. 54 For Jawnpūrī, there
are two senses of essential creation, one invalid because it instrumentalizes God and makes
creation eternal as such and in itself with a continuity from the divine, and the other valid
since it insists upon the radical contingency of creation because only God is everlasting and
self-suicient (al-bāqī) and all else is perishing (hālik). The only reason that prophets spoke
the language of temporal creation was because of the need to communicate their utter depen-
dence on God in simple, communicative language. It is always open for intelligent interpret-
ers to make sense of the scripture as they will, even to defend ḥudūth dahrī (as, indeed, Mīr
Dāmād did in his fourth proof, which Jawnpūrī does not discuss). 55
Jawnpūrī’s critique is representative of a school gloss and shows how traditions can be
intellectually dynamic. 56 He praises the master, is fair in his evaluation, and even agrees with
the sentiment but begs to difer on speciic points. The real test of an argument in philosophy
is whether it is logically sound; after all, the mastery of logic that was central to the intel-
lectual sciences in India precluded the easy reliance upon rhetorical argumentation. Thus,
despite his remaining unconvinced by Mīr Dāmād’s solution to the problem of time and
creation, Jawnpūrī remained very much a follower of his school tradition. In the later debate,
he had his own followers: Muḥammad Barkat Ilāhābādī (d. 1780) wrote a short treatise,
Risāla fī ḥudūth al-dhāt, which defended Jawnpūrī’s only interpretation of the Avicennan
doctrine. 57

the indian school of mīr dāmād

The school of Mīr Dāmād in India is primarily associated with the Khayrābādī philoso-
phers of the nineteenth century who had settled in Delhi. But this famous family was not the
irst to comment on these works. Around a century after Mīr Dāmād, an Iranian philosopher
living in India, Anwar al-Dīn al-Ḥusaynī, wrote a commentary entitled al-Tanwīrāt fī sharḥ
al-Īmāḍāt, copies of which survive in the Raza Library in Rampur, and the former Āṣaiyya
collection (MS Arabic 67) and the Salar Jung Museum in Hyderabad (MS Arabic 11). 58
Another Iranian philosopher, ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd Tabrīzī, the author of a wonderful mystical

54. Jawnpūrī, al-Shams, f. 134v; cf. Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī, al-Jamʿ bayna rayʾay al-ḥakīmayn (L’harmonie entre
les opinions de Platon et d’Aristote), ed. and tr. Fawzī Najjār and Dominique Mallet (Damascus: Institut Fran-
çais, 1999), 126–50: the reconciliation is made easier because he was comparing Plato to the Neoplatonic pseudo-
Aristotle of the Theologia.
55. Jawnpūrī, al-Shams, f. 135r–v.
56. He wrote a separate treatise on the topic related to this discussion in al-Shams: Risāla fī l-ḥudūth al-dahrī
(MS Raza Library, Rampur 1775, f. 1v–5r).
57. For example, MS Raza Library 3620, f. 225v–231r.
58. Imtiyāz ʿAlī ʿArshī, Catalogue of the Arabic Manuscripts in the Raza Library, Rampur (Rampur: Raza
Library Trust, 1963–77), 4: 494–95; M. Niẓāmuddīn, A Catalogue of the Arabic Manuscripts in the Salar Jung
Collection (Hyderabad: Andhra Pradesh Government, 1957), 1: 8; cf. ʿAlī Awjabī, “Ḥikmat-i yamānī,” 79.
 Rizvi: Mīr Dāmād in India 21

work on the nature of being, al-Bawāriq al-nūriyya, was a student who settled in India in the
middle of the seventeenth century, as attested in his own work; no mention is made of him
in the biographical dictionaries. 59 The stories of Jawnpūrī travelling to Iṣfahān to sit at the
feet of the philosopher are probably apocryphal; the irst Indian to transmit the school and to
have studied with him was Mullā Ṣabbāgh of Kashmīr. 60
There are three lines of inluence discernable in the transmission of Mīr Dāmād’s school.
First, there is the inluence of al-Ufuq al-mubīn in India, numerous manuscripts of which
survive in libraries. This was mediated through citations of the work in metaphysical com-
mentaries on the Ṣadrā, the famous commentary on al-Hidāya by Mullā Ṣadrā Shīrāzī.
Examples include the renowned intellectual Muḥibbullāh Bihārī (d. 1119/1707) in his
Musallam al-ʿulūm, Muḥammad Amjad Ṣiddīqī Qannawjī (d. 1140/1727), Qāḍī Mubārak
Gopāmāwī (d. 1162/1749), Muḥammad Aʿlam Sandīlvī (d. 1198/1784), Muḥammad Irtiżā
Khān Gopāmāwī (d. 1251/1835), Barkat Aḥmad (d. 1922), and members of the famed Luck-
now Farangī-Maḥallī family, such as the founder Mullā Niẓāmuddīn Sihālvī (d. 1161/1748),
his son ʿAbd ʿAlī Baḥr al-ʿUlūm (d. 1225/1810), Mullā Muḥammad Ḥasan (d. 1198/1784),
Walīullāh Anṣārī (d. 1854), Muḥammad Yūsuf Anṣārī (d. 1186/1772), ʿAbd al-Ḥalīm (d.
1868), and Abū l-Ḥasanāt ʿAbd al-Ḥayy (d. 1886). 61 Others who engaged critically with Mīr
Dāmād were two controversial and independent Shiʿite philosophers from Ghāzīpūr in East-
ern U.P., Sayyid Ḥusayn Ḥusaynī Nawnehravī (d. 1855) and his son Sayyid Murtażā, who
wrote a fascinating work Miʿrāj al-ʿuqūl fī sharḥ Duʿāʾ al-mashlūl. 62
Second, those who wrote on al-Ufuq al-mubīn were the major philosophers of the
Khayrābād school such as Fażl-i Imām (d. 1824), his son Fażl-i Ḥaqq (d. 1861), and his
grandson ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq (d. 1900). 63 The most eminent of these was Fażl-i Ḥaqq, who wrote
a number of important works in philosophy: al-Jins al-ghālī fī sharḥ al-Jawhar al-ʿālī;
al-Hadiya al-saʿīdiyya on physics, which was written for the Nawab Muḥammad Saʿīd Khān
(r. 1840–1855) of Rampur and became a major textbook, due to its pithy nature, in Rampur
and other madrasas devoted to the study of the intellectual sciences; al-Rawḍ al-mujawwad
fī ḥaqīqat al-wujūd, a short analysis of ontology; Ḥāshiya ʿalā Talkhīṣ al-Shifāʾ, a gloss on
his father’s commentary on Avicenna’s compendium; and Ḥāshiya ʿalā l-Ufuq al-mubīn,

59. According to Brockelmann, GAL, S II: 585, this is ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd b. Muʿīn al-Dīn b. Muḥammad Hāshim
al-Nayrīzī. Sayyid Iʿjāz Ḥusayn Kintūrī (Kashf al-ḥujub wa-l-astār ʿan asmāʾ al-kutub wa-l-asfār [Calcutta: Baptist
Mission Press, 1911], 89, § 402) gives ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd b. Muʿīn al-Dīn b. Muḥammad Hāshim al-Qattālī al-Rifāʿī
al-Tabrīzī. I am preparing a critical edition of this text based on four manuscripts: Delhi Arabic (British Library)
1778, Khudā Bakhsh 1287, Lucknow Nāṣiriyya 356 (from the microilm in the Noor Library in New Delhi, as the
Nāṣiriyya is inaccessible), Asiatic Society (Kolkata) Arabic 1161.
60. Muḥammad Aʿẓam, Tārīkh-i Kashmīr (Lahore, 1886), 148; Rizvi, A Socio-Intellectual History, 2: 215.
61. al-Ḥasanī, Nuzhat al-khawāṭir, 6: 255, 257–59, 281, 284–85, 304–5; 7: 313–18; GAL, S II: 618–24. On
the Farangī-Maḥall, see Robinson, The ʿUlamāʾ of Farangī-Maḥall; Ashfāq ʿAlī, Mullā Jīwan kē muʿāṣir ʿulamāʾ
(Lucknow: Maṭbaʿ-yi Niẓāmī, 1982); Malik, Islamische Gelehrtenkultur in Nordindien.
62. This work in Arabic is a wonderfully independent-minded study of philosophy and theology engaging with
Mullā Ṣadrā and Mīr Dāmād as well as the great mutakallimūn; it includes a thorough critique of the views of the
Ashʿarī school as well as the famous theological compendium of the famed mujtahid of Lucknow Sayyid Dildār
ʿAlī Naqvī Naṣīrābādī (d. 1235/1820) entitled ʿImād al-Islām. The text was published by the author in 1915 and has
been re-typeset by Mahdī Khāje-pīrī with an introduction by Akbar Subūt and will be shortly published by the Iran
Culture House in New Delhi. ʿImād al-Islām was published in ive volumes, corresponding to the ive divisions of
theological discussion in Shiʿite Islam, lithographed in Lucknow by Newal Kishore in 1902, edited by his maternal
grandson Āqā Sayyid Ḥasan (d. 1348/1929), a leading theologian of his time.
63. Muftī Intiẓāmullāh Shahābī, Mawlāna Fażl-i Ḥaqq aur ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq ṣāḥib Khayrābādī (Badāyun:
Maṭbaʿ-yi Niẓāmī, 1920); Afżal Ḥaqq Qarshī, ed., Fażl-i Ḥaqq Khayrābādī: Īk taḥqīqī muṭālaʿa (Lahore: al-Faiṣal,
1992); al-Ḥasanī, Nuzhat al-khawāṭir, 7: 412–15.
22 Journal of the American Oriental Society 131.1 (2011)

which is most salient to us here. 64 These leading public intellectuals represented the learned
culture of the North Indian towns (qasbahs), nurtured by the Mughal empire and its successor
states and principalities, and later reined in opposition and service to the East India Com-
pany and the British Raj. 65 These towns produced many a learned Sunni scholar. The salons
of Delhi reverberated with the study of Mīr Dāmād led by the Khayrābādīs and their friends
among the intellectual elites, such as Ṣadr al-Dīn Khān “Āzurda” (d. 1868), Imām Bakhsh
‘Sehbāʾī’ (d. 1857), Muṣṭafā Khān ‘Shēfta’ (d. 1869), and the great Persian and Urdu poet
Asadullāh Khān Ghālib (d. 1869), all of whom in their own way straddled the old learning
and the new, not least through their association with Delhi College, the former Ghāziuddīn
Khān madrasa. 66 The College taught “traditional” philosophy alongside the idealism, roman-
ticism, and rationalism of European schools of philosophy. The friends shared and corrected
one another’s poetry, discussed matters of theological dispute, and debated metaphysics.
Most of them had a prior training in the metaphysics of the school of Mīr Dāmād from Fażl-i
Imām Khayrābādī. 67 Collectively, in the post-1857 accounts of the lost glories of Delhi,
they were described as the luminaries of the “Delhi renaissance,” both cultural and intel-
lectual. 68 Before the rivalry with the new European learning, the Khayrābādī stress upon the
rational clashed with the puritanical neo-Wahhābīs and the ḥadīth-based Raḥīmiyya madrasa
founded and controlled by the family of Shāh Walīullāh (d. 1762). Al-Ufuq al-mubīn was
the main philosophical text in the Khayrābādī curriculum, replacing the Ṣadrā and al-Shams
al-bāzigha, which were the main texts of the Dars-i Niẓāmī. Even during his exiled deten-
tion on the Andaman Islands, Fażl-i Ḥaqq is said to have continued to teach and discuss the
work of Mīr Dāmād. Apart from the Khayrābādī family, a set of glosses (taʿlīqāt) on al-Ufuq
al-mubīn was also composed by the famous philosopher of the Farangī-Maḥall, ʿAbd ʿAlī
Baḥr al-ʿUlūm. 69 He also referred to the text in his own important summary of philosophy,
al-ʿUjāla al-nāiʿa (“The Beneicial Illumination”).
Finally, there were those who expressed their adherence to the school of Mīr Dāmād
through their commentaries on al-Shams al-bāzigha. Ḥamdullāh b. Shukrullāh (d. 1160/1747),
a well-known Shiʿite scholar from one of the major qasbahs, Sandīla, cites “Bāqir al-ʿulūm”
from al-Qabasāt and Taqwīm al-īmān extensively. Aḥmadullāh Raḍawī Khayrābādī
(d. 1167/1753) was a well-known teacher of the Ṣadrā who also wrote glosses on al-Shams.
Mullā Muḥammad Ḥasan Lakhnavī (d. 1198/1784), a major philosopher of the Farangī-
Maḥall family, defended Mīr Dāmād against the criticisms of Jawnpūrī on the issue of the
creation of the world. 70 On the whole, philosophers upheld the Avicennan doctrine, but most
of the school of Mīr Dāmād clung to the possibility of perpetual creation as a solution to the
problem of creation.

64. Al-Hadiya al-saʿīdiyya is commonly found in major Indian libraries (e.g., MS Khudā Bakhsh Arabic 1924),
not least the autograph copy in the Raza Library in Rampur (MS Arabic 3627). It was continually printed in litho-
graph in Lucknow, the irst time in 1866 by Newal Kishore Press with the gloss of his son (Raza Library Arabic
Printed Books 62) and the last time in 1912 by Aḥmadī Press, which is the copy in the British Library (14540.e.19).
It was also printed in Rampur in 1902 along with the glosses of his son ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq. There is a copy of al-Rawḍ
al-mujawwad in Raza Library in Rampur (MS 3459, f. 1v–23r).
65. See Hasan, From Pluralism to Separatism; Malik, Islamische Gelehrtenkultur in Nordindien, 105–62;
Rizvi, A Socio-Intellectual History, 2: 52–53.
66. Pernau, ed., The Delhi College, especially chs. 4 and 5; ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Marḥūm Dillī kālij (Delhi: Anjuman-i
Taraqqī-yi Urdū Hind, 1989); Muftī Intiẓāmullāh Shahābī, Ghadar kē cand ʿulamāʾ (Delhi: Dīnī Book Depot, 1979).
67. Hasan, A Moral Reckoning, 53–55.
68. Hasan, A Moral Reckoning, 66.
69. For example, MS Raza Library (Rampur) Arabic 3639.
70. Maḥmūd Jawnpūrī, al-Shams al-bāzigha (Lucknow: Lodiana, 1863), 19, 185, 189 on the margins.
 Rizvi: Mīr Dāmād in India 23

The signiicance of the debate in India is all the more, because in Iran the concept of
ḥudūth dahrī was on the whole ignored. Even Mīr Dāmād’s famous student Mullā Ṣadrā
failed to discuss it in his own defense of a paradoxical ḥudūth that was both temporal in its
constant renewal and eternal in the activity of its renewal, a position on time and creation
that relects his doctrine of substantial motion (ḥaraka jawhariyya). The other main students,
ʿAlawī and Gīlānī, defended the position. Later, two philosophers engaged in the debate: Āqā
Jamāluddīn Khwānsārī (d. 1125/1713) attacked the doctrine in his set of glosses on the ontol-
ogy of al-Tajrīd of Khwāja Naṣīruddīn al-Ṭūsī, and Mullā Ismāʿīl Māzandarānī Khwājūʾī
(d. 1173/1759) defended him by responding in his Risāla ibṭāl al-zamān al-mawhūm. 71
Khwānsārī’s position was similar to some Indian criticisms: Mīr Dāmād’s position makes
little sense and fails to solve the problem of creation. Khwājūʾī’s response is consistent with
his understanding of existence: time is a measure of existence and not of motion; in fact,
he argues that Mīr Dāmād’s position on time draws upon Abū l-Barakāt al-Baghdādī. 72 So
we come full circle from the views of Avicenna and al-Baghdādī through the Ṣafavid and
Mughal periods into the aftermath on the question of creation, which still remains elusive.

some concluding comments

The school of Mīr Dāmād is somewhat of a historical relic across the Persianate world,
including in Iran. The dominance of Mullā Ṣadrā in contemporary Iranian intellectual circles
and the perception of the notorious diiculty of Mīr Dāmād make the teacher neglected. In
India, the old traditions of the intellectual sciences nurtured by the Dars-i Niẓāmī are dead;
the philosophy departments of the major universities, including Aligarh Muslim University
and Jamia Millia Islamia, show no interest in Mullā Ṣadrā, Mīr Dāmād, or even Jawnpūrī.
The reformed and revised Dars-i Niẓāmī in most Indian madrasas has little space for the
study of philosophy and even if the texts, mainly the Ṣadrā and al-Shams, are present, it
is a mere genulection to tradition with little critical or analytical engagement. There is no
attempt to rethink the issues of existence, cosmology, and psychology. The impact of the
new learning from the British period has been such that the prejudices of late nineteenth-
and twentieth-century British philosophy, rather hostile to any metaphysics and seeking to
extend the domain of science while whittling down the command of metaphysics, have been
internalized. But a good deal of the nineteenth century was more creative: the Delhi renais-
sance was much enamored and engaged with the old ḥikma traditions at the heart of which
lay Mīr Dāmād’s teaching. The new science, permeating through the translations into Urdu
produced and disseminated at Fort William College and at Delhi College, posed direct chal-
lenges to the old physics found in al-Shams and other texts. 73 This context makes the study
of the debates on ḥudūth dahrī all the more salient and the rise in interest indicates ways in
which traditional education and learning made attempts to revive and make tradition relevant
in a changing world.

71. Jalāluddīn Davānī, Sabʿ rasāʾil, ed. A. Tūysirkānī (Tehran: Mīrāth-i Maktūb, 2002), 229–37, 241–83;
cf. Awjabī, “Ḥikmat-i yamānī,” 118.
72. Davānī, Sabʿ rasāʾil, 243.
73. Consider, for example, two works written in Urdu on philosophy: Gobind Prashād “Āftāb”, Āftāb-i ḥikmat
(Lucknow: Newal Kishore, 1971), and Sayyid Imdād Imām, Mirʾāt al-ḥukamāʾ maʿrūf bih Guldasta-yi farhang
(Patna: Ṣubḥ-i Ṣādiq Press, 1906).