Late Antique Intellectualism in Medieval

Late Antique Intellectualism in Medieval Islam: The Shiraz
Circle and the Revival of Ancient and Islamic Knowledge
Ahab Bdaiwi*
Leiden University and University of Cambridge
Abstract. This article seeks to offer a new reading of how we frame medieval
Islamic intellectual traditions in relation to the question of Late Antiquity. It
introduces a group of medieval Muslim thinkers, known as the Shiraz Circle, who
remain largely unknown to modern scholarship. The main argument is that for
these thinkers knowledge of the pre-Islamic past and their Islamic present was
mediated by the same lens. The article also examines the main themes in the study
of Late Antiquity, such as intellectualism, religion, and philosophy, and the
relevance of such themes in medieval Islam.
Keywords. Shiraz Circle, intellectualism, Late Antiquity, philosophy, religion,
occultism
Beliefs and ideas are indeed contagious, and the history of beliefs and ideas
is often a history of imitation by contagion. But for the contagiousness of
a belief or an idea to take effect, there must be a predisposition and
susceptibility on the part of those who are to be affected by it. In the case
before us, we must always ask ourselves, what was there in Islam that made it
susceptible? To that particular foreign influence?1
The Shiraz Circle of Shiʿi thinkers who were active in the late fifteenth and
early-sixteenth century is hardly known to modern scholarship. These little-
studied intellectuals laboured hard to forge a Weltanschauung that engaged with
*
Email address for correspondence: a.bdaiwi@hum.leidenuniv.nl
1
H. Wolfson, The Philosophy of Kalam (Cambridge Mass., 1976), 70.
Journal of Late Antique, Islamic and Byzantine Studies 2.1–2 (2023): 128–171
DOI: 10.3366/jlaibs.2023.0017
© Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/jlaibs
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the antique past and ancient learning traditions while remaining firmly committed
to the theological confessions of Twelver Shiʿi Islam. The scholarly productions
of the Shiraz Circle offer rational and religious discourses that imagine, present,
conceptualise, and re-evaluate Late Antique modes of knowing but re-invented in
Shiʿi colourings.
The principal figures of this tightly knit interpretive community are S ̣adr
al-Dīn al-Dashtakī (d. 1498) and his students Ghiyāth al-Dīn Mans ̣ūr al-Dashtakī
(d. 1542), Mullā Shams al-Dīn al-Khafrī (d. 1535), and Najm al-Dīn Mah ̣mūd
al-Nayrīzī (d. 1541), the foremost Shiʿi thinkers, polymaths, and teaching elite in
late Timurid and early Safavid Iran. Al-Dashtakī and his students cast a wide net
of research activities covering a range of topics and themes, such as philosophy,
logic, ethics, mathematics, literature, natural science, theology, Qurʾānic exegesis,
fiqh and usūl ̣ al-fiqh, occultism, astrology, h ̣adīth studies, medicine, poetry, and
history.
Medieval Islam is not short of polymaths and religious savants. One would
not struggle to comes across a great many thinkers of broad intellectual tastes
and wide-ranging proclivities towards both religious and secular subjects. What
makes the Shir9az Circle remarkable, however, is the relative ease with which they
wed ancient ideas to the Muslim tradition. Characteristic of their approach is a
palpable, simultaneous commitment to Shiʿi Islam and rational traditions such as
falsafa and kalām; to extra-rational modes of knowing such as occultism and
astrology; to scripturally inspired reasoning models such as the jurisprudential
approaches of usūl ̣ al-fiqh; and to more secular subjects such as mathematics and
medicine.2
How then do we read and make sense of the Shiraz Circle? Are we in
the presence of commentators, philosophers, exegetes, scientists, theologians,
occultists, legalists, or Shiʿi pietists? Insisting on singular labels to describe
medieval polymaths and savants steeped in several traditions of learnings is in
my view an act of diminishment that takes away from their quest to exhaust
the world’s meaning. Parochial readings and focussed case studies that lose sight
of the whole forest could leave the modern reader with a disjointed view of things.
In my 2015 doctoral study, I investigated the main protagonists of the
Shiraz Circle, coming to the conclusion that these thinkers belonged to a long
line of Avicennan philosophers who were concerned primarily with establishing
Avicennan metaphysics and epistemology as the most efficacious mode of
knowing and religious deliberation. Their chief adversaries were the philosophis-
ing Sunni Ashʿari theologians working in the tradition of Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī
(d. 1111) and Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 1210). I showed that the Ashʿari figures of
2
There was hardly a shortfall of polymaths and versatile scholars and intellectuals in Islamic
societies before and after the Shiraz Circle. Some emphasised specific disciplines over others, some
were specialists with an impressive command of various disciplines. There were those who looked
exclusively within the Islamic intellectual terrains, while others beyond and outwards.
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Western Iran went to great lengths to critique Avicennan thought in order to claim
the Muslim intellectual landscape during a period of socio-political upheavals. In
response to the Sunnification project of the Ashʿaris, the Shiraz Circle laboured
hard to rid the Muslim intellectual scene in western Iran of what they saw as
egregious distortions. The new alternative proposed was a philosophical brand of
Shiʿism. They presented this as a healthier intellectual tradition, one that was
appreciative and perfectly cognisant of Avicennism as an intellectual and religious
worldview while being simultaneously grounded in ancient wisdom and Shiʿi
teachings.
In a recent article, Robert Wisnovsky arrived at similar conclusions after
examining the philosophical views of al-ʿAllāma al-Ḥillī (d. 1326), arguing
(correctly in my view) that Ḥillī’s reading of Ibn Sīnā carries an interpretative
prejudice anchored in sectarian motivations. In other words, Ḥillī, as well as other
Shiʿi readers of Ibn Sīnā, held up their Twelver Shiʿi lens to settle contested
Avicennan doctrines.3 While the position I took in 2015 is in agreement with
the findings of Wisnovsky, the present article seeks expand the frames of reference
by looking back at the world of Late Antiquity and early Islam as interpretive
historiographical models. The goal is to insist on continuity and inherited out-
looks, as opposed to abrupt and drastic change. In doing so, I aim to achieve the
following: (i) to take the Shiraz Circle as a case study to contour remarks on the
continuity of Late Antique intellectualism in late medieval Iran; (ii) to argue that
the Shiraz Circle represent a strand of Shiʿism little-known to modern scholarship
and of significance to Late Antique and medieval Islamic studies; (iii) to present
short biographical and bibliographical accounts of al-Dashtakī and his students;
and (iv) to frame the thematic coverage in the writings of the Shiraz Circle in the
intellectual and religious epistemic space of the world of Late Antiquity. I will
make the case that the outlooks of Late Antiquity survived in the Muslim world
particularly among Shiʿi Muslims long after the eighth and ninth centuries, the
terminus of the long Late Antiquity.4
I agree in part with Wisnovsky’s long Late Antiquity thesis, at least as far as
metaphysics is concerned. For Wisnovsky, the ‘decisive moment’ marking the end
of Late Antiquity culminated around the year 1001, where Ibn Sīnā had conducted
some of his most rigorous study in the Sāmānid library. To this end, Wisnovsky
argued that the late antique Ammonian synthesis, in metaphysics at least, reached
its conclusion in Ibn Sīnā, making the latter the last of a line of readers of an
3
R. Wisnovsky, ‘On the emergence of Maragha Avicennism’, Oriens 46 (2018), 263–331.
4
A. Macrone, ‘A Long Late Antiquity?: Considerations on a Controversial Periodization’,
Journal of Late Antiquity 1 (2008), 4–19. See also the excellent corrective of A. Cameron,
‘Introduction’, in A. Cameron (ed.), Late Antiquity on the Eve of Islam (Farnham, 2013), xiii–xxxvii.
The general gist of the present article benefitted greatly from R. Hoyland’s framing of early Islam as a
religiosity that fits neatly with the intellectual and religious worldviews of Late Antiquity. See
R. Hoyland, ‘Early Islam as a Late Antique Religion’, in S. F. Johnson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook
of Late Antiquity (New York and Oxford, 2012), 1053–77.
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Aristotle interpreted through the prism of late antique philosophers.5 Even if we

limit our discussion to metaphysics, the definition of Late Antiquity proffered
by Wisnovsky is somewhat parochial. Were metaphysical deliberations in Late
Antiquity the sole preserve of Aristotelians? And, perhaps more significantly, if
commenting on and engaging with Aristotle is the major criteria to qualify one
as a late antique thinker, even if their engagement is separated by geography,
time, and scores of intermediaries, why is Ibn Sīnā counted among the late antique
folk, or part of the late antique model of doing philosophy, whereas the Shiraz
Circle is not? Al-Dashtakī and his disciples interrogated Aristotelian doctrines as
rigorously as Ibn Sīnā. They too read Aristotle very carefully, to be sure; but they
read an Avicennan version of Aristotle. In doing so, they did exactly what Ibn Sīnā
did to earn Wisnovsky’s label of late antique philosophy, so why should our
periodisation of late antique metaphysics terminate in the eleventh century? Even
so, the purpose of this article is to make a case for the Shiraz Circle that reaches
beyond the study of metaphysics and Avicennism, as I will show later.
Like the towering intellectual figures of Late Antiquity, the thinkers of the
Shiraz Circle were stridently religious (in this case, Shiʿi), avowedly rational, and
ubiquitously committed to suprarational modes of enquiry such as occultism;6
they cared little whether intelligent ideas and modes of knowing had roots in
medieval Islam or the ancient Greek world. To them, Plato, Pythagoras, Aristotle,
Alexander of Aphrodisias, Muh ̣ammad, ʿAlī, Ibn Sīnā, al-Ṭūsī, and al-Ḥillī
belonged to the same universe where the lines separating the spiritual, religious,
and intellectual were deliberately blurred.
One hopes that a preliminary study of this nature will bring us closer to an
understanding of the yet-to-be determined religious and intellectual universe of
medieval Shiʿism. Mohammad A. Amir-Moezzi stated the problem aptly when he
wrote:
Studies into the mystical and esoteric dimensions of the various Shiʿi trends in
the classical period have shown definitively the primordial role of Shiʿism in
the adoption, transmission, adaptation and development in Islam of numerous
intellectual and spiritual themes arising from the traditions of Late Antiquity,
including Judeo-Christian trends, Gnostic movements, Manichaeism and the
Hellenistic doctrines of Neoplatonism, Pythagoreanism and Hermetism, as
well as a dualist Weltanschauung, emanationism, the hybrid nature of man,
apophatic theology, the redemptive role of knowledge, the centrality of the
Divine Guide, the double level of the scriptures, hermeneutics, the
5
See R. Wisnovsky, Avicenna’s Metaphysics in Context (Ithaca, New York, 2003), 266.
6
The Shiraz Circle held a deep fascination with occultism and letter magic. This is significant in
helping us find more apposite categories that define their worldview. Simply referring to them as
Avicennan is insufficient, given Ibn Sīnā’s disdain towards the occult. On their occultism, see
sections below.
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Ahab Bdaiwi
significance of the occult sciences, the cult of the secret, the initiatic structure
and messianic cults.7
I am acutely aware of the impressionistic and loaded claims on offer;

however, I will take comfort in the words of Dimitri Gutas, who once said, ‘I am
not being disingenuous but, given the state of Arabic and Islamic studies
in general, I would rather err on the side of naiveté than on that of theoretical
obfuscation’.8 It is all too easy to lapse into uncritical, repetitive regurgitations
of Islamic history and lazy rehearsals of the key historical epochs that defined
the paths of the great intellectual trajectories of medieval Islam. It would
neither be an exaggeration nor a sweeping generalisation to aver that recent
scholarship on Islamic intellectual and religious history has been remarkably
myopic, lacking the fecund imaginations that characterised the scholarly pro-
ductions of our great predecessors, before and after the turn of the twentieth
century. It is high time we think and write audaciously. For scholarship on
medieval Islam to break away from the moulds of yesteryear we would do well to
frame our research in new analytical and conceptual considerations, and to
discover ways to blur the rigid, sometimes restrictive boundaries, reified long
before our generation, and which remain hitherto unchallenged, undertheorised,
and unproblematised.9 To his credit, Josef van Ess issued a siren call back in the
1980s when he admonished against taqlīd in the academic study of Islam in his
Une Lecture à rebours de l’histoire du muʿtazilisme:
Given the state of underdevelopment that our research is in, it seems to me

that taqlîd can only be disastrous, even more than normal. What we must do
is proceed toward a critical analysis of all the information that the sources
offer, an analysis accompanied by an imaginative understanding of a time
and problems which are not ours. To arrive at the reality of the events it is
essential that we first destroy the interpretations to which the past has
been subjected. We are aware that there is a danger of our doing nothing
7
M. A. Amir-Moezzi, ‘Forward’, in F. Daftary and G. Miskinzoda (eds), The Study of Shiʿi
Islam: History, Theology and Law (London, 2014), xiii. One finds similar strands of intellectualism -
aimed at the continuity of the study of ancient Greek literature and thought - in Syriac-speaking
Christians and the doctors of the Miaphsite Church where Hellenised models of learning in Late
Antique dayrā d-Qenneshrē ( ) were alive up to the twelfth century. See S. Rassi, ‘From
Greco-Syrian to Syro-Arabic Thought: The Philosophical Writings of Dionysius bar S ̣alībī and Jacob
bar Šakkō’, in E. Fiori and H. Hugonnard-Roche (eds), La philosophie en Syriaque (Paris, 2019),
329–79 and J. Tannous, The Making of the Medieval Middle East: Religion, Society, and Simple
Believers (Princeton, 2018), 125.
8
D. Gutas, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition (Leiden-Boston, 1998), 6.
9
See A. W. Hughes, Situating Islam: The Past and Future of an Academic Discipline (London,
2008) and Theorizing Islam: Disciplinary Deconstruction and Reconstruction (London, 2012), as
well as M. Melvin-Koushki, ‘Early Modern Islamicate Empire: New Forms of Religiopolitical
Legitimacy’, in A. Salvatore, R. Tottoli, and B. Rahimi (eds), The Wiley-Blackwell History of Islam
(Hoboken, 2018), 353–75.
132
more than replacing one interpretation with another; but even failure is better
than repetition.10
Van Ess’ warning against uncritical and imitative modes of doing Islamic
studies is especially pertinent to the study of medieval Shiʿism, which, despite
burgeoning academic contributions and initiatives to promote its study, remains
understudied and largely unproblematised. In fact, Shiʿism, in all its manifes-
tations, is by and large one of the least known and least understood facets of Islam
in the modern academy. Shiʿi studies is not a new discipline but a sub-field that
responds to the Sunni-centricity of Islamic Studies. In many ways it is a necessary
methodological corrective. There is merit to the claim that Shiʿism should not be
sequestered from the larger field of Islamic studies and must be thought of as a
tradition that actively engages with other Muslim traditions, past and present.
However, Shiʿism has almost always had an idiosyncratic character, intellectual
traits, spiritual vistas, historical viewings, and political episodes that stand in stark
contradistinction to the larger Muslim community. That distinctiveness - palpable
at certain historical epochs between the Abbasid and Timurid periods - speaks of a
unique modus vivendi modelled on the communio sanctorum of the Imams as
opposed to the communis opinio of the masses.
And yet despite Shiʿi texts and canons enjoying wide availability today, as
they have been for quite some time now, at least since 1979, if not before, the
mode of studying Shiʿism in the academy has hardly changed since the 1905
publication of Die Fortschritte der Islam-Wissenschaft in den letzten drei
Jahrzehnten by Ignác Goldziher. The field of Islamic intellectual history and
Arabic philosophy is only becoming acquainted with the newly discovered trove
of Shiʿi Muslim intellectuals and philosophical thinkers who, like their Sunni
Muslim counterparts, had a great much to say on significant philosophical and
religious issues. For example, in the fields of Arabic philosophy and Islamic
intellectual history, study after study has spilled ink on the (Sunni) Muslim
conception of the divine essence-attribute problem from the perspectives of
various schools and theological persuasions, such as the arguments found in the
Ashʿari, Muʿtazili, Maturidi, Hanbali, and the Taymiyyan traditions; all except
Shiʿism (barring the odd study) have received scores of dedicated and exploratory
studies that enrich our fields of study and help us make better sense of things.
THE SHIRAZ CIRCLE

The city of Shiraz in western Iran witnessed an intellectual revival in later decades
of the 1400s. The influence of this period on later trends in Islamic history is
10
J. Van Ess, Une lecture à rebours de l’histoire du muʿtazilisme (Paris, 1998) (cited in
M. A. Amir-Moezzi, The Divine Guide in Early Shiʿism: The Sources of Esotericism in Islam
(Albany, 1994), 4).
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profound, and while modern scholarship is becoming increasingly aware of the

religious and intellectual imprint of the Shiraz Circle in the early modern
Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal worlds, studies that focus on individual thinkers,
their scholarly output, and intellectual project still await publication. In fact, it can
be said with some confidence that the intellectual revival of the Shiraz Circle has
gone largely unnoticed in modern western scholarship.11
A major reason for this neglect has to do with the nature of knowledge
production during the said period. A significant chunk of the oeuvre of the Shirazi
thinkers remains in manuscript form, written in the style of commentaries,
super-commentaries, glosses, super-glosses, and short summaries. For long a
while, writings of this nature were considered unoriginal compositions, unworthy
11
For a detailed bibliography of English and Persian studies on figures of the Shiraz Circle, see
A. Bdaiwi, ‘Some Remarks on the Confessional Identity of the Philosophers of Shiraz: S ̣adr al-Dīn
Dashtakī (d. 903/1498) and his Students Mullā Shams al-Dīn Khafrī (d. 942/1535) and Najm al-Dīn
Mah ̣mūd Nayrīzī (d. 948/1541)’, Ishraq 5 (2014), 61–4 and 73–9 along with the accompanying
footnotes. For more recent studies that touch on aspects of their thought, see my article on the life and
metaphysics of Mans ̣ūr Mans ̣ūr al-Dashtakī in A. Bdaiwi, ‘The Youth Who Defeated Aristotle: The
Life and Thought of al-Dashtakī (d. 984/1541)’, in A. Bdaiwi and S. Rizvi (eds), Global Intellectual
History (Special Issue on Shiʿi Intellectual History) February (2023) [online edition]. On my claim
that the Shiraz Circle were revivers of late antique wisdom, I do not mean to negate or discount the
revival attempts and projects of the classical thinkers, for the likes of al-Kindī and al-Fārābī, inter
alios, did indeed incorporate ancient ideas into the fold of Islam, and they did so with great fervour. It
was none other than al-Kindī who said, and put into practice, the saying that the truth, regardless of its
provenance, ennobles its bearers, when he averred:
We ought not to be ashamed of appreciating the truth and of acquiring it wherever it comes
from, even if it comes from races distant and nations different from us. For the seeker of truth
nothing takes precedence over the truth, and there is no disparagement of the truth, nor belittling
either of him who speaks of it or of him who conveys. (The status of) no one is diminished by
the truth; rather does the truth ennoble all. See al-Kindī, On First Philosophy, tr. A. Ivry
(Albany, 1974), 58.
When al-Kindī spoke of inheriting the truth, he framed it as a revival of the old ways of the ancients,
pointing to the wisdom of Aristotle first and foremost. Al-Kindī believed in a model learning that
took stock of past learning and use it to orient the now and the later. For him, this is in keeping with
the spirit of Aristotle himself, who is quoted to have said, ‘We ought to be grateful to the fathers of
those who have contributed any truth, since they were the cause of their existence; let alone (being
grateful) to the son; for the fathers are their cause, while they are they cause of our attaining the truth’.
Al-Kindī appends the citation with a succinct token of appreciation: ‘How beautiful is that which he
said in this matter!’. See ibid.
Be that as it may, the revivalism of al-Kindī (and al-Fārābī, too) is far narrower in scope than that
of the Shiraz Circle, as I argue in this paper. For the latter, revivalism took stock of more disciplines
and learned traditions, reaching beyond the confines of philosophy, astrology, and ethics, for
example. To put things differently, the revivalism of the Shiraz Circle is greater in degree than that of
the classical figures. Moreover, their revival is also different in kind. Keeping with the example of
al-Kindī (who exemplifies the classical Islamic revivalism among the early philosophers), his
theological commitment, for instance, hardly permeated his philosophical conclusions, at least not in
the same sense it did in the writings of the Shiraz Circle, whose approach to intellectualism arose
from their theological commitment to Shiʿi Islam.
134
of scrupulous study, and a far cry from the original and monographic productions
Islamicists tend to be acquainted with.12
But what does originality mean precisely? Should the historian of ideas
concern herself with original ideas only? Should she chase relentlessly in search
of origins? And does originality necessarily entail discoveries of the unknown?
No idea is ‘new’. All thinking belongs to perennial questions addressed by those
who came before us. What mattered for medieval thinkers was the sense of
newness and insight that came after old ideas were cast in new light. For ideas to
carry meaning they have to be interpreted. Old ideas projected onto new audiences
will undoubtedly yield new interpretations, and this is because two interpretations
separated by time and space cannot converge on the same substance and form, for
the agents responsible for interpretation are different. The interpretive difference
is what accounts for the newness when old ideas are conceptualised anew. Too
often we fail to recognise that the medieval inheritance of ancient ideas was
undergirded by a creative process which involved new forms of problematisation,
imagination, conceptualisation, and evaluation – an oft-overlooked testimony of
the remarkable originality of our past masters. The twentieth century Jewish
theologian A. J. Heschel confirmed as much when he said: ‘the ultimate insight is
the outcome of moments when we are stirred beyond words, of instants, awe,
praise, fear, trembling, and radical amazement; of awareness of grandeur, of
perceptions we can grasp but are unable to convey, of discoveries of the unknown,
of moments in which we abandon the pretence of being acquainted with the
world, of knowledge by inacquaintance’.13
We would do well to remember that, ‘great achievements lay much less in the
new content created than in the new energies awakened, and in the intensity with
which these energies acted’.14 Less than a century ago when the German historian
of ideas E. Cassirer (d. 1945) was asked to deliver some remarks on the originality
of the Renaissance and the ideas that underpinned it, he found fault in the pro-
position that momentous events in the global history of ideas must be anchored in
12
In a recent special volume on the h ̣āshiya, the marginal multi-layered commentary gloss, Asad
Ahmed, inter alios, challenged the canard still prevalent among old and new Islamicists that tend to
dismiss with little justification the efficacy and originality of the commentary genres in the
post-classical period (ca. 1100s to 1900s). As Ahmed and Larkin note, ‘the most ardent supporters of
the ‘originality thesis’ who saw the proliferation of the commentarial culture of post-classical Islam
in every discipline of learning – ranging from poetry to poetics, to grammar and morphology,
to philosophy and quranic exegesis – could not but settle on the conclusion that pre-modern
Islamic intellectual traditions represented stagnancy typical of the long and tenacious Dark Age of
Islam’: ‘The Ḥāshiya and Islamic Intellectual History’, Oriens 41 (2013), 213 and A. Ahmed,
‘Post-Classical Philosophical Commentaries/Glosses: Innovation in the Margins’, Oriens 41 (2013),
317–48, where he singles out examples of innovation and intellectual growth in post-classical
marginal notes and commentaries (using the example of Muh ̣ibballāh al-Bihārī’s (d. 1707) Sullam
al-ʿulūm.
13
A. J. Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (New York, 1955), 131.
14
E. Cassirer, ‘Some Remarks on the Question of the Originality of the Renaissance’, Journal of
the History of Ideas 4 (1942), 56.
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Ahab Bdaiwi
originally conceived theses, problematising the idea of originality as one that

should resist easy conceptualisations:
Whenever therefore we make any comparison between the Middle Ages and
the Renaissance, it is never enough to single out particular ideas or concepts.
What we want to know is not the particular idea as such, but the importance it
possesses, and the strength with which it is acting in the whole structure.
‘Middle Ages’ and ‘Renaissance’ are two great and mighty streams of ideas.
When we single out from them a particular idea, we are doing what a chemist
does in analysing the water of a stream or what a geographer does in trying to
trace it to its source. No one denies that these are interesting and important
questions. But they are neither the only nor the most important concern of the
historian of ideas.15
Cassirer’s prescient words warn against tunnelled vision pursuits in search of

big bang moments in the history of ideas, however important they may be. We
must give credence to the efforts of our medieval predecessors who strove to
assign new functions to the ideas of old. Indeed, old ideas in new garb meant
something to the individuals and groups that appropriated them. As far as the
medieval admirers of antiquity were concerned, the reception of an idea has more
to do with its role in the new the intellectual universe that receives it and less with
the precise origins that first gave rise to it; or, as Cassirer puts it:
The historian of ideas knows that the water which the river carries with it
changes only very slowly. The same ideas are always appearing again
and again and are maintained for centuries. The force and the tenacity
of tradition can hardly be over-estimated. From this point of view, we must
acknowledge over and over again that there is nothing new under the sun.
But the historian of ideas is not asking primarily what the substance
is of particular ideas. He is asking what their function is. What he is
studying – or should be studying – is less the content of ideas than their
dynamics.16
The issue has more to do with the function of the old idea in new garb and
less with the precise origin point in a distant past. Besides, old ideas couched
in new guise are in a sense original insofar as they carry new meaning and
aim at new audiences. Whatever the case may be, one could hardly deny that
the Shiraz Circle provided a new impetus that brought about transformations in
the cultural, religious, and intellectual terrains of medieval Islam, with its effects
lasting well into the late modern period especially in contemporary Shiʿi
15
Ibid., 55.
16
Ibid.
136
intellectualism. But before we delve into the world of ideas of the Shiraz
Circle, a brief outline of the individual thinkers and their intellectual careers is in
order.17
Dashtakī the Father

The scholarch of the Shiraz Circle was S ̣adr al-Dīn al-Dashtakī. He is a
significant but little-known Shiʿi thinker of versatile abilities, but his writings
and place in medieval intellectual history has gone largely unnoticed.18 The
medieval biographical dictionaries and bibliographical literature reveal little
about his life. More times than not, medieval biographers and historians
ignore him altogether, even though they had much to say about his much
better-known son Mans ̣ūr al-Dashtakī. What is clear from the sources
however, is al-Dashtakī’s paramount importance in medieval Shiraz where
he trained half a dozen students in the rational and learned disciplines of
Islam who then went on to become key figures in the early intellectual history
of Safavid Iran; such as, for example Fakhr al-Dīn al-Sammākī, the teacher
of Mīr Dāmād and putative founder of the so-called School of Isfahan.19
I have provided a lengthy and detailed intellectual biography of al-Dashtakī
elsewhere, which includes locations of extant manuscripts of his work, there
is little need therefore for repetition, except to provide a brief biographical
outline.20
17
I focus on al-Dashtakī the father, as the founder of the Shiraz Circle, and his most esteemed
students, Mans ̣ūr, Khafrī, and Nayrīzī, as the most outstanding and first-generation representatives of
the Shiraz Circle. The students of al-Dashtakī the father went on to train others who continued the
legacy of the Shiraz Circle for years to come. For a list and biographies of the scholars in the later
generation of the Shiraz Circle, see A. Bdaiwi, ‘Shiʿi Defenders of Avicenna’, PhD thesis, University
of Exeter, 2015, 106–21 and 256–78.
18
His full name is Sayyid Muh ̣ammad al-Dashtakī Shīrāzī al-Ḥasanī al-Ḥusaynī. For a detailed
biography, works, and thought, see Bdaiwi, ‘Shiʿi Defenders of Avicenna’, 71–121. For pre-modern
̣
biographies, see al-Dashtakī, ‘Kashf’, in Musannafāt, 2:922, 1:980–87; Rūmlū, Ah ̣san al-Tawārīkh,
ed. ʿA. Nawāʾī (Tehran, 2005), 23–32; al-Shushtarī, Majālis al-muʾminīn, 2 vols (Tehran, 1986),
2:229–30; al-Khwānsārī, Rawd ̣āt al-jannāt fī ah ̣wāl al-ʿulamāʾ wa l-sādāt, 7 vols (Beirut, 1991),
7:182–4; al-Fasāyī, Fārs-nāma-yi Nāsirī, ̣ 2 vols, ed. M. R. Fasāyī (Tehran, 1988), 1:86ff. For modern
biographies, see H. Corbin, History of Islamic Philosophy, 2 vols (London and New York, 1962),
2:335–6; al-Mudarris, Rayh ̣ānat al-adab, 6 vols (Tehran, 1967), 2:229–30ff; al-Qummī, Al-Kunā wa
l-alqā, 3 vols (Najaf, 1970), 2:411; Q. Kākāyī, Mansūr ̣ Mansūṛ Dashtakī va falsafah-i ʿirfān (Tehran,
2008), 82–9; P. Bahārzadeh, ‘Mans ̣ūr Mans ̣ūr Dashtakī Shīrāzī’, Māhnāma Fiqh va Ḥuqūq 23
(2001), 30ff; H. Nasr, Islamic Philosophy from its Origins to the Present (Albany, 2006), 195–7;
O. Leaman (ed.), The Biographical Encyclopedia of Islamic Philosophy (London, 2015), s.v. ‘S ̣adr
al-Dīn al-Dashtakī’; R. Pourjavady, Philosophy in Early Safavid Iran: Najm al-Dīn Mah ̣mūd
al-Nayrīzī and His Writings (Leiden: 2011), 13–18. On al-Dashtakī’s confessional identity and the
question of his Shiʿism, see Bdaiwi, ‘Some Remarks’.
19
On al-Sammākī, see Bdaiwi, ‘Shiʿi Defenders of Avicenna’, 262–5. On the School of Isfahan,
see S. Rizvi, ‘Isfahan School of Philosophy’, Encyclopaedia Iranica online (https://www.
iranicaonline.org/articles/isfahan-school-of-philosophy, accessed 16 January 2023).
20
Bdaiwi, ‘Shiʿi Defenders of Avicenna’, 71–121 and 353–78.
137
Ahab Bdaiwi
Born in 1424 in the district of Dashtak in Shiraz,21 Dashtakī hailed from a

family of esteemed scholars among whom were companions of the Shiʿi Imams,
h ̣adīth scholars, philosophers, exegetes, and mujtahids.22 Two of his ancestors
kept close company with the sixth and eighth Shiʿi Imams. Sakkīn b. ʿAmmār
al-Nakhāʿī was a companion of Jaʿfar al-S ̣ādiq (d. 765),23 while his son, Ah ̣mad
(commonly known as al-Sakkīn in the rijāl literature) received religious
instructions from ʿAlī al-Rid ̣ā (d. 818) during the latter’s stay in Medina.24
Aside from his travels to Mecca to perform the h ̣ajj and to Iraq to visit the religious
shrines of the Shiʿi Imams, he lived out his life in Shiraz. It was there that he
received his training in h ̣adīth, tafsīr, usūl
̣ al-fiqh, and Arabic, under the guidance
of his father and family relatives.25
Dashtakī’s career took an important turn in 1474 when at the age of fifty the
Qarā Qūyūnlū prince Yūsuf b. Jahānshāh, known for his Shiʿi sympathies, invited
him to take up a teaching post at the shrine of Ah ̣mad b. Mūsa (the descendant of
the seventh Imām, Mūsā al-Kāz ̣im (d. 799)).26 This princely patronage was a
testimony to the scholarly reputation Dashtakī enjoyed during his lifetime and
points to a commendable thinker respected for his versatility, for we learn from the
21
Dashtak was one of eleven districts in Shiraz at the time. The eleven districts were: 1) Ish ̣aq-i
beg, home of the Mah ̣allātī family; 2) Bāzār-i morgh, home of the Imāmī family who moved to
Shiraz from Qatīf; ̣ 3) Bāla-yi kuft, home of Mīrzā Jān Ḥabīballāh Bāghnawī (d. 1587); 4) Darb-i
shāhzāde; 5) Darb-i masjid-i naw; 6) Serbāgh; 7) Dashtak, home of the Dashtakīs; 8) Seng-i siyā,
home to the Kāzirūn Sufi family who were contemporaries of al-Dashtakī; 9) Leb-i āb, home of the
Kalantar family; 10) Maydān-i shah; and 11) Mah ̣alla-ye yahūd, home to some Jewish families who
lived in Shiraz. See al-Fasāyī, Fārs-nāma, 2:931–1140.
22
̣
Al-Dashtakī, ‘Kashf’, in Musannafāt, 2:982.
23
Mus ̣tafā
̣ al-Tafrishī, Naqd al-rijāl, 5 vols (Qum, 1997), 2: 340.
24
al-Najāshī, Fahrasat asmāʾ musannifī ̣ al-shīʿa al-mushtahiru bi-Rijāl al-Nahāshī,
ed. M. Zanjānī (Qum, 1995), 361. Al-Najāshī describes him as thiqah, i.e., reliable or veracious.
However, according to the Dashtakī genealogy, Ah ̣mad al-Sakkīn was the son of Jaʿfar, not ʿAmmār.
It seems that the descendants of al-Sakkīn (and thus the ancestors of al-Dashtakī) lived in Medina
until the eleventh century. A certain Sayyid ʿAlī b. Zayd (or Abū Saʿīd al-Nas ̣ībīnī (of Nisibis) was the
al-Dashtakī ancestor to settle in Shiraz after a short stay in Nisibis shortly after 1009. Fasāyī,
Fārs-nāma, 2:1038. Another learned ancestor of al-Dashtakī was Sayyid Muh ̣ammad b. Ish ̣āq, Abū
Ibrāhīm, a jurist who attended al-ʿAllāma al-Ḥillī’s classes in Baghdad and later receiving an ijāza to
teach and transmit the latter’s famous legal work Qawāʿid al-ah ̣kām. See Ṭihrānī, T ̣abaqāt aʿlām
al-shiʿa, 26 vols, ed. ʿA. N. Manzuwī (Beirut, 1971), 4:178–9.
25
̣
Al-Dashtakī, ‘Kashf’, in Musannafāt, 2:983. In h ̣adīth he studied the known Shiʿi canons of
al-Kāfī, the Tahdhīb and al-Istibsār ̣ of Shaykh Abū Jaʿfar al-Ṭūsī (d. 1067), as well as the Fiqh
al-Rid ̣ā. An indication of his abilities in h ̣adīth is found in the ijāza he received to teach and transmit
the Fiqh al-Rid ̣ā which contains an isnād that passes through Ḥillī and Mufīd. This is based on the
statement in the ijāza of his grandson S ̣adr al-Dīn IV who says ‘thumma innī arwī ʿan jaddī ʿan abīhi
ʿan abīhi ʿan abīhi ʿan abīhi ʿan al-shaykh al-ʿallāma al-Ḥillī…ʿan abīhi ʿan al-shaykh al-Al-Mufīd’
(and I narrate on the authority of my grandfather, who narrates on the authority of his father, who
narrates on the authority of his father, who narrates on the authority of his father, who narrates on the
authority of his father, who narrates on the authority of al-Shaykh al-ʿAllāma al-Ḥillī, who narrates on
the authority of his father, who narrates on the authority of al-Shaykh al-Mufīd). See al-Dashtakī,
̣
Musannafāt, ed. ʿA. Nūrānī, 2 vols (Tehran, 2007), 1:57–61.
26
On this important shrine in Shiraz, popularly known as Shāh-i Chirāgh, see Muh ̣ammad Zāriʿī,
Āftāb-i Shīrāz: Zindagānī-i Shāhcharāgh (Qum, 1998).
138
endowment of the shrine that Dashtakī received instructions requiring him to

dedicate four days of the week to the teaching of fiqh, h ̣adīth, tafsīr, kalām, and
Arabic grammar.27 The princely ruler insisted that Dashtakī pay special attention
to ‘those prophetic traditions reported by the Shiʿi Imams’.28 A short period later,
in 1478, Dashtakī decided to open up a new school, the Mans ̣ūriyya, founded in
honour of his son,29 where he would teach for the remainder of his life.
Dashtakī lived a simple life devoted to teaching and writing. His oeuvre
reveals him to be a man with penchant for many subjects in the rational, scriptural,
transmitted, and suprarational disciplines of ancient and medieval Islamic
learning.30 He was highly regarded by local and regional rulers, including the
Ottoman Sultan Bāyazīd II (r. 1481–1512) who appears to have held al-Dashtakī
(and his rival al-Dawānī) in high regard.31 Despite holding amicable relations
with the ruling elite for most of his life, Dashtakī led a failed revolt against the
much-despised ruler of Shiraz, Sultan Qāsim Beg Purnāk after growing unrest
among the local population, which eventually led to Dashtakī being placed under
arrest and later execution on 12 Ramād ̣ān 903/9 May 1498.32
Dashtakī the Son

Sayyid Ghiyāth al-Dīn Mans ̣ūr al-Dashtakī, commonly known as Mans ̣ūr,33 was
born in 1462 in the quarter of Dashtak in Shiraz. He was noted for his scholarly
27
Ibid., 76–88.
28
The details of this event are recorded in the endowment deed, the waqfnāma, of the Shāh-e
̣
Chirāgh, which has recently been edited and published in full. See al-Dashtakī, Musannafāt, 1:75–
90.
29
Although the Mans ̣ūriyya would go on to generate large amounts of revenue, its financial
successes would come later and cannot account for the decision of al-Dashtakī to distance himself
from his teaching post in the local shrine. A likely explanation in my view is al-Dashtakī did not wish
to ire the fiercely anti-Shiʿi Āq Qūyūnlū clan after their leader Ūzūn Ḥasan captured Shiraz and
removed all traces of the Qarā Qūyūnlū elite, who were known for their sympathies towards Twelver
Shiʿism. Despite the intra-Turkic rivalry that beset Western Iran in late medieval times and the
internecine strife and numerous local revolts, al-Dashtakī still managed to find favour with most if not
all the local and regional rulers. On the Shiʿi sympathies of the Qarā Qūyūnlū, see J. E. Woods, The
Aqquyunlu: Clan, Confederation, Empire (Salt Lake City, 1999), 195ff; H. R. Romer, ‘The Türkmen
Dynasties’, in P. Jackson and L. Lockhart (eds), The Cambridge History of Iran, 7 vols (Cambridge,
1986), 147–88.
30
For a detailed bibliography and list of extant manuscripts of works authored by al-Dashtakī, see
Bdaiwi, ‘Shiʿi Defenders of Avicenna’, 353–78 and A. Bdaiwi, Echoes of Late Antiquity in Medieval
Islam (Leiden: forthcoming). For a list of Iranian manuscripts, see M. Barakat, Kitāb-shināsī-yi
falsafī-yi maktab-i shīrāz (Shiraz, 2004), 17–22.
31
His Ḥāshiya ʿalā sharh ̣ tajrīd al-iʿtiqād, completed in 1483, was dedicated to the Ottoman
Sultan Bāyazīd II. See Mus ̣lih ̣ al-Dīn al-Lārī, Mirʾāt al-adwār wa-mirqāt alakhbār: Fasl-i ̣ dar
sharh ̣-i h ̣āl-i buzurgān-i Khorasān u Māwarāʾ al-nahr u Fārs, ed. ʿĀ. Nawshāhī, Maʿārif 13.3
(1997), 91–113.
32
Bdaiwi, ‘Shiʿi Defenders of Avicenna’, 87; al-Fasāyī, Fārs-nāma, 1:86. In later biographical
literature, he is sometimes described as al-sadr ̣ al-shahīd.
33
His full name is Sayyid Abū ʿAlī Mans ̣ūr Mans ̣ūr al-Dashtakī al-Ḥusaynī. For a detailed
biography, works, and thought, see Bdaiwi, ‘Shiʿi Defenders of Avicenna’, 226–78. For pre-modern
139
Ahab Bdaiwi
acumen and intellectual rigour from a young age and was described by
contemporaries as a savant who mastered the transmitted and rational disciplines
of Islam, even dubbed the Third Teacher and the Eleventh Intellect.34 He was
trained by his father in a range of traditions and disciplines. A prolific author and
keen analytic mind and wide-ranging capabilities, Dashtakī authored over
seventy-five works in the religious, rational, suprarational, and scientific
disciplines of Islam and ancient thought. His writings engage with esoteric
themes, occult traditions, natural sciences, history, mathematics, astronomy,
ethics, political theory, belle-lettrism, poetry, Arabic grammar, and medicine.35
Mans ̣ūr led a successful political career under the Safavids. He was
instrumental in the invasion of Baghdad in 1508 when Shah Ismāʿīl sent his
armies to wrest control of the city from the local governor Amīr Dhū l-Fiqār, who
opposed the Safavids and refused to pay allegiance. According to one source,
̣
Mans ̣ūr prepared special prayers (adʿiyah) and talismans (tilismāt) to cause the
death of the wayward governor.36 Recognised for his scholarly versatility and
masterful grasp of Shiʿi legalism, Mans ̣ūr was later appointed to the religious post
̣
of sadr in 1529.37 He retired from the office before deciding to spend the
remainder of his life in Shiraz teaching at the Mans ̣ūriyya where he led a recluse
biographies, see al-Qummī, Khulāsat ̣ al-tawārīkh, ed. I. Ishrāqī, 2 vols (Tehran, 1980) 1:126, 959;
al-Shushtarī, Majālis, 2:230–3; Rūmlū, Ah ̣san, 303ff; al-Khwānsārī, Rawd ̣āt, 7:166–86 (including
biographical information on his son and students); al-Fasāyī, Fārs-nāma, 2:21–3; al-Kāzirūnī,
Sullam, ed. A. Nūrānī (Tehran, 2008), 200; al-Qummī, Kunā, 2:497–8; Katip Celebi Ḥājjī Khalīfa,
̣
Kashf al-zunūn ʿan asāmī al-kutub wa l-funūn (with introduction by Ā. Marʿashī), 2 vols (Beirut, n.
d.), 1: 506, 610. In modern scholarship: Corbin, Islamic Philosophy, 2:336; Āqā Buzurg Ṭihrānī,
Al-Dhārīʿa ila tasānīf ̣ al-shīʿa, 26 vols (Beirut, 1983), 1:123, 124, 126, 127; Mudarris, Rayh ̣ānat,
̣
10:423; al-Dashtakī, Musannafāt, 1:19–38; ʿUmar Rid ̣ā Kah ̣h ̣āla, Muʿjam al-muʾallifīn: Tarājim
̣
musannifī al-kutub al-ʿArabiyya, 13 vols (Damascus, 1957–1961), 13:18–19; ʿAbd Allah Niʿma,
Falāsifat al-shīʿa: Ḥayātahum wa ārāʾahum (Beirut, 1987), 615–7; al-Zirkilī, Aʿlām (Beirut, 2002),
7:304; Kākāyī, Dashtakī, 67–79; Bahārzade, ‘Dashtakī’, 43–54; Nasr, Islamic Philosophy, 199–201;
Pourjavady, Philosophy in Early Safavid Iran, 25–8; A. Newman, ‘Daštakī, ʿAtā-Allāh’, ̣
Encyclopaedia Iranica online (https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/dastaki, accessed 13 January
2023).
34
Rūmlū, Ah ̣san, 303. In the medieval nomenclature of Islamic intellectualism, the First Teacher
was Aristotle followed by Farābī as the Second Teacher. The Eleventh Intellect (al-ʿaql al-h ̣ādī
ʿashar) was a sobriquet based on the ten-intellect hierarchy schema in Peripatetic thought and was
applied to learned individuals who excelled in the study of philosophy.
35
For the standard lists of his writings, some of which are partial and incomplete, see Bdaiwi,
‘Shiʿi Defenders of Avicenna’, 353–78; Rūmlū, Ah ̣san, 3:300–3; al-Qummī, Khulāsat, ̣ 296;
al-Shushtarī, Majālis, 2:231–2; Mīr Khwānd, Ḥabīb al-siyar fī akhbār afrād al-bashar (Tehran,
1954), 3:389; al-Fasāyī, Fārs-nāma, 1:21–3; al-Khwānsārī, Rawd ̣āt, 7:169–70. In modern
̣
scholarship, al-Dashtakī, Musannafāt, 1:103–6; ʿU. Kah ̣h ̣āla, Muʿjam, 13:18–19; al-Ziriklī, ʿAlām,
7:304; Q. Kākāyī, Dashtakī, 82–91; M. Barakat, Kitāb-shināsī, 114–71.
36
Al-Shushtarī, Majālis, 2:232. The special prayers and talisman were supposedly written down
by Mans ̣ūr was based on his Qānūn al-saltana ̣ (lost), which is not listed among his works by anyone
except al-Shustarī. Of course, there is no reason to suspect Mans ̣ūr’s engagement with the occult and
lettrism. Both he and his father are said to have engaged in occult and magical practices and wrote
something on the subject.
37
Al-Qummī, Khulāsat, ̣ 1:296; al-Shushtarī, Majālis, 2:230; Rūmlū, Ah ̣san, 303.
140
life away from the politics of the capital. He died on 6 Jumāda I 949/18 August
1542 and was buried next to his father in the family mausoleum.38
Khafrī
As his name suggest, Muh ̣ammad b. Ah ̣mad b. Muh ̣ammad al-Khafrī hailed from
Khafr, a small village on the outskirts of Shiraz. His date of birth is unknown.
Most of his education seems to have taken place in Shiraz where he studied logic,
fiqh, philosophy and kalām, under the tutelage of Dashtakī the father. Some
modern biographers have claimed without evidence that al-Khafrī was in fact a
student of al-Dawānī.39 This seems improbable given that al-Khafrī lampooned
al-Dawānī describing him on more than one occasion as a ‘pseudo-philosopher’
(mutafalsif). Others have erroneously identified al-Khafrī as a student of Saʿd
al-Dīn al-Taftāzānī (d. 1390),40 which is implausible given the century and a half
lapse between the two.41
When the Safavids took control of Iran, al-Khafrī built good relations with the
Shāh Ismāʿīl and his royal court.42 Sometime after 1519, al-Khafrī moved to
Kashan where he would spend the remainder of his life teaching and writing. The
exact reason for this migration is not known. Once in Kashan, however, he acted
as the local mujtahid and held public classes in Shiʿi law and theology, which won
him profuse praise from Shaykh ʿAlī al-Karakī (d. 1534), the supreme religious
authority in early Safavid Iran who was responsible for assessing whether the
doctrinal beliefs and theological stances of local preachers and clerics of
prominence were consistent with those expounded by Twelver Shiʿi theology.43
Like his fellow colleagues in the Shiraz Circle, al-Khafrī cast a wide scholarly
net, dealing with many subjects in his writings, as well as exhibiting profound
knowledge of ancient Greek thought. He authored close to thirty works, on
falsafa, kalām, mysticism, Shiʿi h ̣adīth, astronomy, glosses on mathematics, tafsīr,
38
There is some dispute about Mans ̣ūr’s exact year of death. There are three possible dates:
940/1533, 944/1537, or 949/1542. Al-Shushtarī and al-Khwānsārī suggest he died in 948/1541
(al-Shushtarī, Majālis, 2:233 and al-Khwānsārī, Rawd ̣āt, 7:167). However, al-Kāzirūnī suggests that
Mans ̣ūr died in 944/1537 (al-Kāzirūnī, Sullan, 200). Al-Fasāyī provides an exact date of 6 Jumāda I
949/18 August 1542, citing information from a note written by Sayyid Niz ̣ām al-Dīn al-Dashtakī in
the margins of Mans ̣ūr’s Kashf al-h ̣aqāʾiq. This date is corroborated by Ḥājjī Khalīfa, Kashf, 1:350.
39
ʿAlī Dawānī, Mafākhir al-Islām, 4 vols (Tehran, 1984), 4:412–13; See the editor’s introduction
in Jalāl al-Dīn al-Dawānī, Sabʿ Rasāʾil, ed. A. Tūsirkānī (Tehran, 2002), 25.
40
Al-Shīrāzī, Āthār al-ʿAjam (Tehran, 1983), 586.
41
According to G. Saliba, al-Khafrī may have studied with Ah ̣mad b. Yah ̣yā al-Taftāzānī, the
grandson of Saʿd al-Dīn who was executed by Shah Ismāʿīl in 1510 for refusing to convert to Shiʿism.
See ‘A Sixteenth-Century Arabic Critique of Ptolemaic Astronomy: The Work of Shams al-Din
al-Khafri’, Journal for the History of Astronomy 25 (1994), 17.
42
̣ Shāh, ed. M. R. Nas ̣īrī and K. Haneda (Tehran, 2000), 60ff.
Al-Ḥusaynī, Tārīkh-i Ilchī-i Nizām
43
Rūmlū, Ah ̣san, 249; Rasūl Jaʿfariyān, Nushūʾ wa suqūt ̣ al-dawla al-S ̣afawiyya: Dirāsa
tah ̣līliyya, tr. K. Sayyid (Qum, 2005), 81–7. Shah Ṭahmasp issued an edict ( farmān) which granted
Karakī extensive powers over the sadrs ̣ and all state functionaries alongside suyūrghāl (land grant)
and tax immunities.
141
Ahab Bdaiwi
logic, the geography of Mecca, and the occult disciplines. After an illustrious
career, al-Khafrī passed away in 1535 in Kāshān.44
Nayrīzī
Najm al-Dīn Mah ̣mūd b. Muh ̣ammad b. Mah ̣mūd al-Nayrīzī, known simply as
Ḥājjī Mah ̣mūd, studied under both Dashtakīs, father and son. Little is known of
his life. He hailed from Nayrīz, a town east of Shiraz.45 In his early youth, he
earned a living as a scribe copying philosophical and theological texts.46 In
falsafa and kalām, al-Nayrīzī studied the Najāt and Shifāʾ of Ibn Sīnā under
Dashtakī the father.
An itinerant scholar who wrote some of his works in between travels (he is
known to have visited Qazwin, Gilan, and Isfahan, as well as Mecca and Medina),
he left behind a total of fifteen works.47 Like his Shirazi contemporaries, his
writings address the rational and transmitted disciplines. They include half a
dozen glosses on philosophy and theology, works on logic, mysticism, encyclo-
paedic work, physics, medicine, fiqh, h ̣adīth, tafsīr, geometry, and astronomy. In
1498, a few months before his execution, al-Dashtakī issued a license (ijāza) to
al-Khafrī that permitted the latter to teach the former’s Risāla fī ithbāt al-wājib.48
Al-Nayrīzī passed away in 1541.49
Beyond Teacher-Disciple
The teacher-disciple relationship is, in my view, the best demonstration of the
unified approach to intellectualism which I address in the next section. The unity
of approach we find in the Shiraz Circle is not simply located in the dynamics of
intellectual tutelages and the corollary process of the transmission of knowledge
from teacher to students; rather, it betrays a unity of conviction and shared outlook
in how to rescue philosophy, as well as the learned traditions of Islam, from the
perilous shores of the soi-disant philosophers and intellectuals.
44
This date is disputed. Al-Qazwīnī claims he died in 935/1528 or 957/1550. See ʿAbd al-Nabī
al-Qazwīnī, Tatmīm Amal al-āmil, ed. S. A. al-Ḥusaynī (Qum, 1986), 64–5. According to
al-Mudarris, however, al-Khafrī passed away on 957/1550: Rayh ̣ānat, 2:154. Whereas Ṭihrānī
suggests a third date around 942/1535, which seems accurate, since it is based on the testimony of a
certain Taqī al-Dīn ibn Abī al-Khayr Muh ̣ammad b. Muh ̣ammad al-Fārisī, another student of
al-Dashtakī the father and contemporary of al-Khafrī. See Ṭihrānī, Dharīʿa, 2:9, 4:331.
45
Ibid., 13:140.
46
Ibid., 1:81.
47
Ṭihrānī, Dharīʿa, 1:81, 118, 123, 5:92, 7:184. For a detailed bibliography, Barakat,
Kitāb-shināsī, 198–206; Pourjavady, Philosophy in Early Safavid Iran, 124–51.
48
References to the ijāza are mentioned in several passages in the Dharī‘a; for example, Ṭihrānī,
Dharīʿa, 1:118, 123, 5:92, 6:54, 7:184, 12:12, 13:140, 163, 14:175, 15:253, 20:120, 21:274.
49
Ṭihrānī, Dharīʿa, 2:272. For an inventory of his extant writings, see Pourjavady, Philosophy in
Early Safavid Iran, 153ff. One of the works Nayrīzī authored belonged to the genre of unmūdhaj
al-ʿulūm, a synoptic survey of ten disciplines – such as, fiqh, geometry, tafsīr, etc. See R. Pourjavady,
Philosophy in Early Safavid Iran, 128.
142
Whether al-Dashtakī the father, the son Mans ̣ūr al-Dashtakī, Khafrī, or
Nayrīzī,50 every one of these savants cleaved to the same intellectual approach and
aimed for the same target. In my study of their philosophical works, with falsafa,
kalām, and Sufism standing at the forefront, I was hardly surprised to find a unity
of conception in how to define and promote intellectualism, which was presented
consistently in their scholarly writings, and, one might add, which portrays an
unmistakable esprit de corps that can be summarised as follows:
– To drive a wedge between philosophical Ashʿarism and Avicennan

metaphysics.
– To bring philosophical Shiʿism and Avicennan rationality closer. An
intentionality which is evinced in their writings especially when every one of
them, without exception, falls back on the Shiʿi Imāms as sources of rational
authority.
– To reformulate Avicennan metaphysical speculations anew by emphasising the
primacy of the syllogistic and demonstrative method.
– To dismiss as an invalid epistemology the kalām method of the later
post-Avicenna Ashʿari thinkers, namely the dialectic argument, which
involves knocking down someone else’s premise instead of constructing one’s
conclusion from true and certain premises.
– To introduce philosophical Shiʿism and the teachings of the Shiʿi Imāms that
discuss rational matters as an alternative intellectual discourse to the mature
Ashʿari tradition.
LATE ANTIQUE INTELLECTUALISM
Islam…builds upon and preserves Christian-Antique Hellenism…A time will

come when one will learn to understand late Hellenism by looking back from
the Islamic tradition.51
The Shiraz Circle was much more than philosophers rehearsing ideas from the
ancient and medieval past, rather they are made up of a tightly knit circle of
ambitious intellectuals and versatile thinkers versed in the whole gamut of learned
traditions. They set out to exhaust the world’s meaning without prejudice. They
saw learning and high culture not as an end in itself but an instrument in the
service of higher religious truths. Their writings could be characterised as
revivalist of the kind that was typical among Late Antique pagan and Christian
50
There is a neat continuity, at least physically, from the Shiraz Circle to the so-called School of
Isfahan. For instance, Sạ dr al-Dīn al-Dashtakī trained Mans ̣ūr al-Dashtakī, who in turn trained Fakhr
al-Dīn al-Sammākī, who in turn trained Mīr Dāmād, who in turn trained Mullā S ̣adrā.
51
C. Becker, Islamstudien: Vom Werden und Wesen der islamischen Welt (Leipzig, 1924–2),
1:201 (translated in R. Hoyland, ‘Early Islam as a Late Antique Religion’, 1067.
143
Ahab Bdaiwi
thinkers. Their intellectual universe was vast, consisting of multi-coloured firma-

ments of ancient and Islamic traditions of learning, a feature peculiar to medieval
Shiʿism, which was to fizzle out in the early modern period.52 To put it differently,
that the main thinkers of the Shiraz Circle were Avicennan philosophers who were
confessionally attached to Shiʿism tells us only part of the story while overlooking
many equally significant parts of the larger jigsaw.53 In my view, the terms
intellectuals and intellectualism are the most apposite descriptors that accurately
connote the Shiraz Circle especially their versatility and penchant for ancient and
Islamic knowledge. Before proceeding further, however, a few explanatory
remarks on the terms ‘intellectual’ and ‘intellectualism’ in Late Antiquity are in
order.
Intellectuals and Intellectualism
It will, however, of course, be understood that we only ascribe universal

education to one who in his own individual person is thus critical in all or
nearly all branches of knowledge, and not to one who has ability in some
special subject.54
Generally, an intellectual is one who leads a life of the mind, a scholarly figure
engaged in critical thinking, reading, research, and reflections about herself and
her place in the world. In his survey of ancient and medieval world religions, Max
Weber speaks of ‘privileged intellectualism’ as an interface between religion and
philosophy. Intellectuals are described as following carriers of knowledge that
function similarly to a literary guild.55 They interpret texts – particularly
52
Two contrasting views can be identified in response to the question of why Shiʿi universalist
outlooks are on the decline in modern times: first, those who confirm the decline, laying blame on the
excessive fiqhification of Shiʿi intellectualism which was precipitated by the hegemony of legalism,
casting a large shadow over other learned disciplines; second, those who insist the decline is
exaggerated and does not hold true among post-1979 Iranian clerical intellectuals whose scholarly
outlooks is universal and combines the rational and transmitted. For the former view, see M. Asadī,
Azmat al-ʿaql al-Shīʿī (Beirut, 2017); on the latter view see, ʿA. Rifāʿī, Manhaj al-Shahīd al-S ̣adr fī
tajdīd al-fikr al-Islāmī (Beirut: 2000); Jadal al-Turāth wa l-ʿasṛ (Beirut: 2001); Falsafat al-fiqh wa
maqāsid ̣ al-sharīʿa (Beirut: 2001); ʿIlm al-Kalām al-jadīd wa falsafat al-dīn (Beirut, 2002). On
modern Shiʿi intellectual trends generally, see D. Hermann and S. Mervin (eds), Shiʿi Trends and
Dynamics in Modern Times (Beirut, 2010). On Shiʿi thought and reform projects in post-
revolutionary Iran, see E. Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, Revolution and its Discontents: Political Thought and
Reform in Iran (Cambridge, 2019), 20–58.
53
There is a difference between (i) a study of the Shiraz Circle which views them as a coterie of
philosophers only, as if to say their entire worldview is constituted by a parochial definition of
philosophy and that philosophy is the main and dominant element in their intellectual makeup, and
(ii) a study of the Shiraz Circle anchored in atomistic and analytic considerations that bring to light
certain philosophical positions or doctrines undertaken by them, without reducing their intellectual
and religious outlook to the singular discipline of philosophy.
54
Aristotle, On the Parts of Animals, tr. W. Ogle, Book 1 (639a).
55
M. Weber, The Sociology of Religion, tr. E. Fischoff (London, 1971), 116.
144
scriptures – and act as pedagogues to those who come under their tutelage.
Intellectuals in the Weberian sense imbue meaning to things. Metaphysical and
ethical deliberations become their sole preserve.56 In ancient and medieval times,
the religious intellectual active in demarcating philosophical and ethical truths
occupied high rank in the social hierarchy, in part because of his training and
proclivity to exegete. For Weber, the function of medieval intellectuals in the
Abrahamic traditions is comparable to the enterprise of Platonic academics and
other schools in ancient times.
From the third century CE onwards, there emerged an interpretive tendency to
understand religion on a rational and philosophical basis.57 Inspired by the
Aristotelian ethos, Late Antique thinkers led a life of intellectualism characterised
by their grasp of many sciences and disciplines. The presence of the divine was to
be found in intellectual and philosophical activity.58 An intellectual of this
persuasion was more than a bookish scholar pouring over the ancient pages of
learning, rather he led a ‘life exercising itself for wisdom’.59 All physical
reality – the entire universe, in fact – was considered sacred. As Pierre Hadot, the
doyen of ancient studies, writes, ‘the learning material gathered was not, however,
intended to satisfy vain curiosity. The Aristotelian researcher was no simple
collector of facts. Rather, facts were amassed to make possible comparisons and
analogies, to establish a classification of phenomena, and to enable an
investigation into their causes’.60
In Late Antiquity more specifically, the summum bonum of intellectualism
was to lead a life of the mind. But a cerebral life in chase of highbrow
matters was not without concerted religious and spiritual activity, the propae-
deutic of intellectualism proper. Typical in Late Antique intellectualism was
the figure of Plotinus (d. 270) who led a life of the mind in the manner of
Socratic intellectualism, one that balanced between theoretical knowledge
of the human soul and the pitfalls of akrasia, and the practical knowledge
of learning to recognise false opinion.61 In fact, religion formed an integral
part of ancient intellectual life. I follow King in his understanding of religion
in ancient society, which he sees as ‘activities and lifestyles that might usefully
be analysed as religious, those performances that function in some way
within a given community to link that community, or the individual within
in, to the realm of powers that are beyond their normal reach, whether or
not these are referred to as “divine”’, and further adding, ‘this approach
also does not need to make any awkward distinction between religion and
56
Ibid.
57
P. Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy? (Cambridge Mass., 2002), 77.
58
Ibid., 77ff.
59
Ibid., 86.
60
Ibid., 82.
61
See B. Van den Berg, ‘Plotinus’s Socratic Intellectualism’, Proceedings of the Boston Area
Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy 28 (2013), 217–31.
145
Ahab Bdaiwi
magic’.62 Too often the assumption is made that ancient Greek thought marked
the ‘triumph of the scientific method over superstitious beliefs’.63 But this is not
subtle. Religion and ancient intellectualism went hand in hand. Religious
activities were a pervasive part of the ancient Greek world. The idea that religious
identity was integral to ancient Greece has roots as far back as Herodotus.64 Tim
Whitmarsh argued persuasively that the defining features of ancient Greek
religion permeated public space finding expression in ‘social and political
structures’.65 Intellectualism, then, permeated public and private life, through
religion, in ancient times especially in Late Antiquity. It defined the life of the
mind lived by the learned elites who were set on empirical discoveries and
religious commitments that entailed things conceptual and ritual in equal measure.
Intellectualism as sobriquet for the ancient savant, or philosophos as he would
later become known in Byzantine nomenclature, does not encapsulate a singular
reality; on the contrary, it defined a vast outlook on life and learning marked
by scrupulous syncretic activities, fusing into one a melee of Late Antique
worldviews and intellectual disciplines.
While there have been numerous attempts to define precisely the label
Late Antiquity, I contend myself with the definition proffered by Hervé Inglebert in
the Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity. Inglebert speaks of four defining charac-
teristics: (1) a periodisation consisting of long durations; (2) expansive geo-
graphical area; (3) central themes made up of numerous or singular foci;
(4) judgement of overall value.66 In what follows, I will single out two key
features appositely reflective of the overarching spirit of Late Antique intellect-
ualism. P. Brown famously opined in his The Making of Late Antiquity (1978) that
cultural and religious themes capture the Late Antique mood quite succinctly
and arguably more than any other set of ideas and thematic concerns.67 The features
of ‘theologising philosophy’ and ‘occultism, theurgy, and magic,’ serve two
representatives, but hardly exhaustive, examples of the Late Antique intellectu-
alism later echoed in the writings of the Shiraz Circle. Considerations of space
prevent me from exploring other strands. I will, however, address a broader range of
themes and topics in my forthcoming monograph on the same subject.68
62
D. King, ‘Ancient Philosophy Transformed: The Religious Turn in Philosophy’, in J. Lössl and
N. J. Baker-Brian (eds), A Companion to Religion in Late Antiquity (Chichester, 2018), 412.
63
Paraphrased from King, ‘Ancient Philosophy Transformed’, 412.
64
J. Lössl, ‘Religion in the Hellenistic and Early Post-Hellenistic Era’, in Lössl and Baker-Brian
(eds), Companion, 33ff. The summaries that follow elucidating the role religion in ancient times are
indebted to the lines of enquiry followed by Lössl and King.
65
J. Lössl, ‘Religion’, 25. See also T. Whitmarsh, Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World
(London, 2015), 21. The religion that permeated social and political life in ancient Greece was
polytheism.
66
H. Inglebert, ‘Introduction: Late Antique Conception of Late Antiquity’, in S. F. Johnson (ed.),
The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity (New York and Oxford, 2012), 3ff.
67
See P. Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1993), 1–26.
68
Bdaiwi, Echoes of Late Antiquity.
146
Theologising Philosophy
Beginning in the Hellenistic period, but gaining greater traction in Late Antiquity,
religion and religiosity began to exert more influence not just on social and
political life but on the intellectual too. There was a close interaction between the
practice of religion and philosophical reflection. Peter van Nuffelen in his study of
the first two centuries CE showed that, ‘philosophers interpreted traditional
religion and appropriated it as a source of authority for their philosophical
project’.69 As a consequence, not only was religion thereby becoming more
‘illuminated’ by rational inquiry, but also the other way round, philosophy became
open to ‘trans-rational’ aspects of religion such as transcendent deities, miracles,
demonic influences upon physical world, etc.70 Josef Lössl describes the new
cultural dispensation in early post-Hellenistic world as characterised by the
intellectual turn of religion and the religious turn of intellectual culture.71
Philostratus in his Lives of the Sophists described these epochal changes around
the second and third century CE as referring to the Second Sophistic.72 The
Second Sophistic marks the beginning of a cultural change that was broached by
public educators and philosophers trained in rhetoric. As the Shiraz Circle would
do in later centuries, the ancient Sophists educated, inspired, and entertained
broad swathes of the population.73
The Sophists were intellectuals. Their philosophical rationalism was
melded to religious practice. The same was true for their near contemporaries
the Neopythagoreans, the legatees of Pythagoreanism who imbued religious
belief with empirical and theurgic practices grounded in numerology. The most
famous of the Late Antique Neopythagoreans was Numenius of Apamea, who
gave philosophical rigour to religious and spiritual rituals, underscoring the
perceived filiality between rational mode of enquiry and ritualistic religiosity in
the world of Late Antiquity.74
Christians of Late Antiquity also held firm to a kind of intellectualism that
wed religion to philosophy. A distinctive feature of Christianity in the third
century CE and onwards, is its pronounced penchant for rational learning and
religious disciplines.75 Philosophy in Late Antiquity was affected by religion, and
in turn religion was affected by philosophy. A representative example is found in
workings of Late Antique Christian ascetics. They viewed the contemplative and
69
P. Van Nuffelen, Rethinking the Gods: Philosophical Readings of Religion in the
Post-Hellenistic Period (New York, 2011) apud Lössl, ‘Religion’, 43.
70
J. Lössl, ‘Religion’, 44.
71
Ibid., 45.
72
Ibid.
73
G. W. Bowersock, Greek Sophists in the Roman Empire (Oxford: 1969) apud J. Lössl,
‘Religion’, 45.
74
D. King, ‘Ancient Philosophy Transformed’, 417.
75
J. M. Cooper, The Pursuit of Wisdom: Six Ways of Life in Ancient Philosophy from Socrates to
Plotinus (Princeton and Oxford, 2012), 21; J. Lössl, ‘Religion’, 50.
147
Ahab Bdaiwi
spiritual trend of Idiorrhythmic or eremitic monasticism in fourth century CE

Egypt as the new philosophy. Eremitic monastic life, centred on contemplative
prayer in the desert regions of the Nile Valley, was considered philosophical and
religious at once, with the desert-dwelling monks dubbed the new philosophers.76
Theodoret of Cyrrhus (d. c. 458) likewise in his Cure of Hellenic Maladies
depicted Christianity as the new philosophy par excellence, which, unlike Greek
philosophy, was open to all. Similarly, Christian theological commitments were
now articulated and couched in the diction of pagan philosophy, with leading
bishop-theologians such as Basil of Caesarea (d. 379) and Gregory of Nyssa
(d. 395) teaching theological doctrine that incorporated elements from Middle
and Late Platonism.77 The philosophising theologians of Late Antiquity had a
profound impact on the genesis of Christian theology.78 Some like Justin the
Martyr (d. 165) went as far as to suggest that a life accompanied by reason is
quintessentially Christian, famously remarking, ‘those who, before Christ, led a
life accompanied by reason (logos) are Christians, even if they were known
as atheists. Such were Socrates, Heraclitus, and those like them’.79 Christian
philosophers tried to Christianise their use of secular philosophical themes by
giving impression that the exercises they advised their adepts to follow had
already been recommended in the Old and New Testament. When Evagrius
Ponticus (d. 399) summarises the Christian faith as ‘the teaching of our Saviour
consisting of ascetical practice, the contemplation of nature, and theology’, he is
following closely the ancient Platonic steps of teaching philosophy popular since
Plutarch, namely ethics, physics, and metaphysics.80
It is important to stress that the religiosity of the Late Antique philosophers or
intellectuals was not uniform, nor does religiosity describe their outlook in equal
terms. Ancient and Late Antique intellectual currents that were in the firm grip of
religion came in different hues. There was the religiously inclined Platonists that
identified with the Dionysiac and Orphic mystery rituals of contemporary Athens,
the Pythagoreans that melded philosophical rationalism with religion, and the
Hellenes who rationalised belief in the gods in a systematic fashion, like
Cleanthes, author of the Hymn to Zeus.81 Later came the Neopythagoreans, Plato’s
immediate successors and the first generation of philosophers of the Academy.
They showed an interest in magic and religion that bore resemblance to the
philosophy of the Neoplatonists. Plotinus, the scholarch of the Neoplatonists, was
a religionist as much as he was a philosopher, with his philosophy being described
76
B. Layton, The Canons of Our Fathers: Monastic Rules of Shenoute (Oxford: 2014), 5. On the
early Christians as the new philosophers and revivers of ancient wisdom, see P. Rousseau, The Early
Christian Centuries (London: 2002), 281ff.
77
D. King, ‘Ancient Philosophy Transformed’, 421.
78
Ibid.
79
Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy?, 241.
80
Ibid., 249.
81
Ibid., 169.
148
‘more even than other philosophies of the first centuries of the Christian eras, not
only a philosophy but a religion, a way for the mind to ascent to God’.82
The study of philosophy in the Shiraz Circle, mutatis mutandis, was
underpinned by religious motivations. The works of Ibn Sīnā were read with
thinly veiled sectarian prejudice. Let us consider a few representative examples.
̣
Dashtakī the father penned the Risāla fī ithbāt al-wājib wa-sifātihi (Treatise on the
Proof of the Necessary [Being] and His Attributes), to achieve two things: first, to
demonstrate that the existence of an absolute being is necessary and based on a
priori assumptions; second, to argue that the divine attributes and the subject to
which they are attributed, al-mawsūf,̣ are identical in fact, i.e., in nafs al-amr,83
suggesting thus that the attributes and essence are distinguishable in sense but
identical in reference.84 For Dashtakī the soundness of the philosophical position
at which he arrives is measured against Shiʿi scripturalism. Among the handful of
proofs Dashtakī presents is his case for God as knowing and powerful based on
Him being living, he marshals a report attributed to the fifth Shiʿi Imam
Muh ̣ammad al-Bāqir (d. 732). Dashtakī writes:
How great are the words of that member of the Household of Prophethood
(ahl bayt al-nubuwwa) peace be upon him, who said: ‘He has not been named
82
Cited in King, ‘Ancient Philosophy Transformed’, 418.
83
Linguistically, nafs is synonymous with dhāt (essence), whilst amr corresponds to shayʾ (lit.
‘thing’ or ‘existent’). The predication of nafs for dhāt and amr for shayʾ is employed frequently in
Arabic literature; hence, when compounded, nafs al-amr can also mean dhāt al-shayʾ. As for the
meaning of the term, generally speaking, Muslim philosophers speak of two realities, or modalities of
existence: one is mental (dhihnī), while the other is extra-mental (khārijī). To grasp the nature of
things, we make judgements about those things whereby we try to ascertain the truthfulness of our
statements, or predications, by relying on the soundness and clarity of reason of our mental activity or
judgements; or by trying to find an external correspondence, or match, to our mental
conceptualisations in order to find an agreement, or assent, to our mental judgements. Beyond the
two modalities of reality identified above, there is a third modality, where pure and incorruptible
essences subsist, which philosophers call nafs al-amr. There, the pure essences of things subsist in an
extra-mental reality akin, but not equivalent, to Plato’s Forms; moreover, it is in nafs al-amr where
the truthfulness of judgements and statements is determined. It follows therefore that nafs al-amr is a
third modality applied generically to mental and extra-mental realities; it is subsistence in general,
including the subsistence of existence, quiddity, and ʿitibārī concepts (al-thubūt al-ʿāmm al-shāmil
li-thubūt al-wujūd wa-l-māhiyya wa-l-mafāhīm al-ʿitibāriyya al-ʿaqliyya). A worthy line of research
to pursue is the comparison between nafs al-amr and the truthmaker defence of divine simplicity,
where, as recently argued, ‘the truth of all true predications, or at least all true predications of the form
‘a is F,’ is to be explained in terms of truthmakers’: M. Bergmann and J. E. Brower, ‘A Theistic
Argument against Platonism (and in Support of Truthmakers and Divine Simplicity)’, in
D. Zimmerman (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics (Volume 2), (Oxford, 2006), 357–86.
84
This was the last work of al-Dashtakī, completed in Shiraz in Dhū l-Ḥijja 902/August 1497,
shortly before he was murdered on 17 Ramad ̣ān 903/9 May 1498. The treatise was dedicated to the
last Āq Qūyūnlū ruler sultan Ah ̣mad Govde b. Ughurlu Muh ̣ammad b. Ūzūn Ḥasan (d. 1497). The
work contains twelve sections ( fusūl)̣ and an epilogue (khātimah). It was subject to an extensive
commentary written by Mans ̣ūr Mans ̣ūr al-Dashtakī entitled Kashf al-Muh ̣amadiyya (Unveiling the
Muh ̣ammadan [i.e., Sạ dr al-Dīn Muh ̣ammad al-Dashtakī] Realities). The commentary was
completed with the assistance of al-Dashtakī the grandson Sạ dr al-Dīn IV over the course of four
months on 11 Muh ̣arram 947/18 May 1540.
149
Ahab Bdaiwi
knowing (ʿāliman) and powerful (qādiran) except for that He has bestowed
(wahab) knowledge to the scholars and power to the powerful. All that which
you conjure up in your minds [about God] through scrupulous contemplation
is in fact created and constructed [in the mind] just as you are created and
constructed. God the Creator is the giver of life.85
Mans ̣ūr al-Dashtakī would later comment that the saying of al-Bāqir is a
perfect example of syllogistic argument, as it lends credence to the philosophical
speculations of rational (Shiʿi) thinkers.86 Similarly, Khafrī in his philosophical
treatises on the Necessary Being and the doctrine of emanation, blurs the lines
separating rational philosophy and sectarian religiosity:
The wājib al-wujūd insofar as He is living (h ̣ayyan), knowing (ʿāliman),

powerful (qādiran), and willful (murīdan) - in fact He is characterised
(mutasṣ ifan)
̣ by all existential attributes of perfection – from Him emanate
that light, which is living, this light is the manifestation of His knowledge and
power and all other existential attributes of perfection except the quality of
being wājib al-wujūb, this light is none other than the Light of Muh ̣ammad
and ʿAlī…it is the First Intellect according to the philosophers.87
In another instance that highlights the intertwining of religion and philosophy,

this time occurring in philosophical commentaries upon the Tajrīd,88 Nayrīzī in
85
̣
Al-Dashtakī, ‘Risāla fī ithbāt al-bārī’, in Musannafāt, 2:924.
86
̣
Al-Dashtakī, ‘Kashf’, in Musannafāt, 2:922. The emergence of a systematic Shiʿi kalām
tradition came sometime after the major occultation of the Twelfth Imam (circa 942). On the question
of divine attributes post-occultation, Shiʿi theologians followed the traditional Muʿtazili position.
Al-Shaykh al-Mufīd, for example, rejects the Ashʿari thesis of realism which affirms the ontological
reality of God’s attributes. Al-Mufīd accuses the Ashʿaris of violating the basic principles of divine
unity (tawh ̣īd) and transcendence. According to al-Mufīd, the essence-attribute question should be
tackled as a language problem where attributes are looked at as signified ideas (maʿnan mustafād) that
are peculiar to the object signified. Other Shiʿi theologians such as Ḥillī stated that God’s essential
attributes are entailed by His essence. Ḥillī stated that God’s attributes are additional to His essence in
ratiocination (zāʾida ʿan al-dhāt fī l-taʿaqqul); these mental concepts do not, however, have a reality
in the external world ( fī l-khārij) beside His essence. See Muh ̣ammad b. Nuʿmān al-Mufīd, Awāʾil
al-Maqālāt, ed. I. al-Ans ̣ārī (Qum, 1992), 52ff. On Ḥillī, see S. Schmidtke, The Theology of
al-ʿAllāma al-Ḥillī (d. 726/1325) (Berlin, 1991). On pre-occultation Shiʿi kalām speculations, see, for
example, W. Madelung, ‘The Shiite and Khārijite Contributions to Pre-Ashʿarite Kalām’, in
P. Morewedge (ed.), Islamic Philosophical Theology (Albany, 1979), 120–39; T. Bayhom Daou,
‘The Imami Shiʿi Conception of the Knowledge of the Imam and the Sources of Religious Doctrine
in the Formative Period’, PhD thesis, SOAS University of London, 1996. More recently, see
M. A. Amir-Moezzi, ‘Early Shīʿī Theology’, in S. Schmidtke (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Islamic
Theology (Oxford, 2016), 81–90.
87
Bdaiwi, ‘Shiʿi Defenders of Avicenna’, 13.
88
The Tajrīd of Nas ̣īr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī is a significant Twelver-Shiʿi Creed written in philosophical
diction. In the post-Mongol period, it became the central canon of philosophical theology and the
subject of great many commentaries (shurūh ̣), super-commentaries (sharh ̣ al-shurūh ̣), glosses
(h ̣awāshī), and super-glosses (h ̣awāshī al-h ̣awāshī). Two commentaries, however, stood out: the
150
his Tah ̣rīr Tajrīd al-ʿaqāʾid shows disdain for Sunni sacred memory by levelling
scathing vilifications against the caliphs Abū Bakr and ʿUmar, when he writes,
ʿalayhim al-laʿna wa l-ʿadhāb (upon them be curses and damnation).89 Despite the
rich philosophical content of the Tajrīd – without discounting its theological
motifs – Nayrīzī made sure to leave his religious imprint on a philosophical canon
when he opted for the overtly Shiʿi and triumphant title Tah ̣rīr al-ʿaqā’id
al-mushtamal ʿalā zubdat al-masāʾil al-kalāmiyya ʿalā madhhab al-firqah
al-nājiyyah min al-shīʿah al-imāmiyyah (Writing down the beliefs that includes
the essences of the theological articles that accord with the way of the saved group
the Imāmī Shiʿah).90
That confessionalism found expression in medieval Arabic philosophical
discourse is an old problem. Long before the Shiraz Circle, debates over contested
philosophical doctrines in Ibn Sīnā – without doubt the most influential
representative of medieval Arabic philosophy, who, as described by Gutas,
‘represents the culmination of the tendencies that preceded him and constitutes the
fountainhead of everything that came after him’91 – were marked by rhetoric and
arguments undergird by religious and sectarian motivations. Wisnovsky has
shown that the Ṭūsian strand of Avicennism was championed by such noted Shiʿi
thinkers as al-Ḥillī, al-Tustarī, and Qutḅ al-Dīn al-Rāzī. Shiʿi readers of Ibn Sīnā
widely promoted the narrative which hails the Twelver-Shiʿi al-Ṭūsī as the
defender of pure Avicennism and the one who rescued philosophy from the
egregious calumnies of Sunni-Ashʿari distortions, exemplified in the view of
al-Ṭūsī in the critical commentary by Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī upon Ibn Sīnā’s Kitāb
al-Ishārāt wa l-Tanbīhāt.92
The negative portrayal of al-Rāzī, however, persisted well into the middle of
the sixteenth century in the Shiʿi learned circles of Iran. For the Shiraz Circle,
al-Rāzī was nothing but a foe. Time and time again, one finds scornful remarks in
the writings of the Shiraz Circle directed against Sunni theologians, which single
out al-Ghazālī and al-Rāzī as the two main culprits behind the intellectual decline
in Western Iran. The overall sentiment of the Shiraz Circle is neatly summarised
in the scathing and sarcastic words of Mans ̣ūr in his al-Kamāl fī sifāt ̣ Allāh
al-mutaʿāl, a rebuke of the Ashʿari take on the nature of the divine essence:
I could not arrive at the same conclusions stated and affirmed by them
[Ashʿaris]. I do not understand [what they claim to know about the nature of
Tasdīd al-qawāʿid fī sharh ̣ Tajrīd al-ʿaqāʾid by Shams al-Dīn Mah ̣mūd al-Is ̣fahānī (d. 1345), known
as al-Sharh ̣ al-qadīm (The Old Commentary) in scholarly nomenclature, and the al-Sharh ̣ al-jadīd
ʿalā al-Tajrīd (The New Commentary) penned by ʿAlā al-Dīn ʿAlī al-Qūshchī (d. 1474).
89
Apud Pourjavady, Philosophy in Early Safavid Iran, 58.
90
Barakat, Kitāb-shināsī, 199.
91
D. Gutas, ‘The Heritage of Avicenna: The Golden Age of Arabic Philosophy, 1000 – ca. 1350’,
in J. Jannsens and D. De Smet (eds), Avicenna and His Heritage: Acts of the International
Colloquium (Leuven, 1999), 81.
92
R. Wisnovsky, ‘Towards a Genealogy of Avicenna’, Oriens 42 (2014), 4323–63.
151
Ahab Bdaiwi
the divine essence]. In fact, I do not care to understand. If someone other than
I arrive at an understanding [of their claims], so be it, let him believe in and
commit to that understanding. My aim is not to contradict the discourses of
these luminaries, rather it is to show my inability to understand these the
examples of these subtle matters. These [Ashʿari] theologians obfuscate
matters by sayings things which are contradictory…whoever wishes to see
their errors let him peruse their theological works and discover what they
really contain (wa-fīhā mā-fīhā).93
The attacks against al-Ghazālī and later Sunni Ashʿaris would quickly turn
from charged outpourings to scornful remarks. The criticisms were of two types.
First, hidebound Sunni-Ashʿaris such as al-Ghazālī were denigrated on account of
their opposition to and theological condemnation of Ibn Sīnā (and, to a lesser
extent, al-Fārābī). Second, later Sunni Ashʿaris such as al-Ījī, al-Jurjānī, and
al-Dawānī, were recognised as little more than standard-issue Sunni theologians
who fancied themselves as rational thinkers but fell short of properly understand-
ing the pithy and highbrow discourses of savants such as Ibn Sīnā and al-Ṭūsī.
In the handful of instances showing these charged sectarian attacks, the
Shiraz Circle would explicitly describe the Ashʿari engagement with Ibn Sīnā as
little more than sophistry and qarmata.̣ 94 This was the case, for instance, when
Dashtakī the father accused al-Kurbālī and his teacher Jurjānī of confusing
superficial scriptural reasoning with rational deduction. The point made by
Dashtakī is quite telling. Sunni theologians failed to properly understand the
rational disciplines of Islam because they confused philosophy for scripture-
centric traditions (naqliyyāt/samʿiyyāt) that carry minimal amounts of reason-
ing.95 Scripture-centric reasoning was thus rejected as specious form of
ratiocination and wide off the mark of apodeictic demonstrative syllogistics, the
acme of the philosophical process that can deliver results in which one is
genuinely entitled to place complete confidence and trust.
93
̣
al-Dashtakī, ‘Kamāl’, in Musannāfāt, 1:138.
94
In the parlance of medieval Muslim polemics, those who advance ‘specious arguments’ are
said, according to their opponents, to engage in sophistry, particularly when making arguments
pertinent to the rational sciences; while those who engage in ‘superficial reasoning’ are accused of
qarmata,̣ particularly when the argument is connected to the transmitted sciences. Both terms are
used pejoratively (al-qarmatạ fī l-samʿiyyāt wa-l-safsatạ fī l-ʿaqliyyāt). The term is derived from
al-qarāmitạ (Qarmatians), the infamous esoteric and antinomian Ismāʿlī sect.
95
When we consider the Shiraz Circle and their approach to intellectualism that arises from their
commitment to Shiʿism, we have to also consider the broader issue of the socio-political situation
where Sunni intellectualism flourished in Ottoman lands, Western India, and the central Asian
epicentres of Herat and Samarqand. In all of these areas, the figure of al-Dawānī in particular casted a
large shadow of influence. Al-Dawānī’s legacy in Ottoman lands and India is slow but gradually
gaining traction in modern studies. On the influence and reception of al-Dawānī in Ottoman
philosophy, see A. Bdaiwi, ‘Philosophia Ottomanica: Jalāl al-Dīn al-Dawānī’s (d. 1501) Proof on the
Existence of the Necessary Being’, in H. Khafipour (ed.), Empires of the Near East and India:
Sources for the Study of the Safavid, Ottoman, and Mughal Societies (New York, 2019), 319–35.
152
Similar accusations were made by Mans ̣ūr at al-Dawānī, arguably the most
prominent of the philosophising Ashʿari in Iran.96 Deploying harsh putdowns,
Mans ̣ūr in the preface to his Glosses on the New Commentary of the Tajrīd uses
pejorative terms to belittle the position taken by al-Dawānī on the nature of the
human soul:97
And so, the poor and lowly, Mans ̣ūr, commonly known as Mans ̣ūr, says: My
father and master, Foremost of Fathers, Master of the Great among the Sages
and Philosophers, glossed over the New Commentary, offering [his own]
verifications of the truth and meticulous readings, while the noble master, the
honourable disputant, the one who brings to light ill-conceived ideas and the
one who brings to light the name of Jalāl, exerting himself strenuously,
determined to undermine and refute [my father’s glosses]. [Sometimes] he
[al-Dawānī] plagiarised them [my father’s glosses], other times he opposed
them. Concealing and hiding [his views] was a habit of his, out of fear of
entering into debates [with my father], [that is because] he was silenced time
96
Modern studies have yet to investigate the fate of the later Ashʿari tradition in Iran. That later
Ashʿarism faded out some time after the rise of the Safavids is, indeed, the prevailing, standard
account; a detailed analysis, however, is as of yet lacking. At this stage of our knowledge, we can
only hypothesise the following, partly based on the recent studies of the present author, partly on
ongoing research on some of the major figures of this period, and partly on the preliminary findings
of forthcoming studies. First, evidence indicate that al-Dawānī was the last major representative of the
later Ashʿari tradition in Iran; for subsequent philosophising Ashʿari thinkers, such as Mus ̣lih ̣ al-Dīn
al-Lārī and Ḥabīb Allāh al-Bāghnawī, were much influenced by al-Dawānī’s philosophical thinking
and were indeed self-proclaimed intellectual disciples of al-Dawānī. Both al-Lārī and al-Bāghnawī
left Iran to settle elsewhere as the socio-political milieu in Iran could no longer accommodate the
presence of Sunni thinkers. Al-Lārī entered the service of the Mughal court, where he was warmly
received, then moved to Constantinople in 1560, during the reign of sultan Suleiman the Magnificent
(r. 1520–66). Bāghnawī became persona non grata after the death of Shah Ismāʿīl II (r. 1576–8),
forcing him to move to India. On al-Lārī, see R. Pourjavady, ‘Mus ̣lih ̣ al-Dīn al-Lārī and His Sample
of the Sciences’, Oriens 42 (2014), 292–322. On Bāghnawī, see K. Fleet, G. Krämer, D. Matringe, J.
Nawas, D. J. Stewart (eds), Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE, s. v. ‘Bāghnawī, Ḥabīballāh’ (R.
Pourjavady), accessed 31 May 2023 http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_24272.
Second, later Safavid historians, such as Muh ̣ammad Amīn al-Astarābādī (d. 1626), for instance,
portray al-Dawānī and his intellectual disciples as the last major Ashʿari current in Iran after the
arrival of the Safavids: al-Fawāʾid al-madanīya, ed. R. al-Arākī (Qum, 2003), 500. Third, another
indication that Ashʿari activity in its later form was on the decline at the turn of the fifteenth century is
found in a statement of Sammākī, a student of Mans ̣ūr al-al-Dashtakī, who described his teacher’s
teacher, Sạ dr al-Dīn al-Dashtakī, as the ‘one who defeated the Ashʿari theologians’ in a way to
suggest the Ashʿari presence was no longer in Iran. See Fakhr al-Dīn al-Sammākī, Tafsīr āyat
al-kursī, ed. ʿA. R. Bahārdūst, Āfāq-i Nūr 9 (2009), 439, 444. Fourth, the later intellectual disciples of
S ̣adr al-Dīn al-Dashtakī, such as the already mentioned al-Khafrī, al-Nayrīzī, and al-Sammākī,
known for the opposition to Ashʿari philosophising, singled al-Dawānī out as the last major Ashʿari
figure in Iran, rarely if ever acknowledging the existence of post-Dawānī Ashʿari thinking worth
attending to. Fifth, a recent study has shown that al-Dawānī, insofar as he was a philosophising
Ashʿari thinker, was one of the last major luminaries of this tradition in Iran. Philosophising Ashʿaris
in post-Dawānī Iran were, as argued by Ghulām Ḥusayn Ibrāhīmī Dīnānī, few and far in between:
Jalāl al-Dīn Davānī fīlsūf-i zawq al-taʾalluh (Tehran, 2012), 431ff.
97
For a detailed offering of the Shiraz Circle’s philosophical refutations of Ashʿari kalām, see my
forthcoming monograph on the subject, Echoes of Late Antiquity.
153
Ahab Bdaiwi
and time again [by my father]. And because he laboured hard to obscure and
hide [his views], few [ideas of his] became known. When he did make
manifest his views, we proceeded to tackle them by way of refuting them. It is
for this reason that [you find] our glosses scattered in parts. Then, after a lapse
of time, as appeared in his [discussion] on the soul and matter, came
expressions that contained repugnant considerations and abhorrently oblique
words. We thus saw it fit to expose him and make clear our view concerning
what he said.98
Returning to the issue of religion and philosophy, at first glance, I was not
much given to the most recent findings of Gutas in his highly provocative article
on paraphilosophy, where he casts aspersions on the nature of philosophy in the
world of Islam after Ibn Sīnā, but I have in recent times came to see merit in his
some of his conclusions. Gutas employs a history of science approach, with
science defined as open-ended inquiry based on unhindered use of reason,
constant dialogue in the form of interrogative discussions, and study of the
underlying principles of reality. For Gutas, the Islamic philosophical scene after
Ibn Sīnā fell short of doing proper philosophy, or science as the ancients saw it,
largely thanks to the invasive encroachment of religion. Paraphilosophy, the
appellation chosen for the ‘new genre of writing’, notes Gutas, ‘was neither
philosophy, that is, science’, because ‘it violated all the basic principles of what
historically had meant to do science, which was the open-ended rational
investigation of all reality’.99 The takeaway, then, is that paraphilosophy is a
demoted rank, partly rational but reliant on suprarational modes of inquiry and
aimed towards religious doctrine and predetermined theses.100
One cannot but admit that the case Gutas makes is not without some merit.
The philosophy we find in the Shiraz Circle was geared towards religion in the
sense that it sought to confirm predetermined religious commitments and to argue
not too infrequently in favour of Shiʿi doctrines. G. Endress was on partly point
when he stated that philosophy after Ibn Sīnā was ‘reduced to an instrument of
religious hermeneutic’.101 But, as always, the matter is more subtle. The debate
98
̣
Al-Dashtakī, ‘Taʿlīqāt’, in Musannafāt, 2:629, 632.
99
D. Gutas, ‘Avicenna and After: The Development of Paraphilosophy’, in A. al-Ghouz (ed.),
Islamic Philosophy from the 12th to the 14th Century (Bonn, 2018), 43. Worth mentioning that Gutas
works in the spirit of the inimitable Cambridge historian of ancient science G. Lloyd. See G. Lloyd,
Magic, Reason, and Experience: Studies in the Origins and Development of Greek Science (London,
1999).
100
J. Cooper follows a similar line of argument when he separates the strand of ancient
philosophy that was rational and free from religious and theurgic influences, and the strand infused
with religious themes and magic. Cooper labels the turn towards religion as ‘spiritual tension’ and
‘spiritual anxiety’ which was partly a response to the emergence of Christianity in Late Antiquity. See
Cooper, The Pursuit of Wisdom, 21ff.
101
G. Endress and J. Aertsen, Averroes and the Aristotelian Tradition (Leiden and Boston, 1996)
apud D. Gutas, ‘Avicenna and After’, 42.
154
between post-classical thinkers such as Abū l-Barakāt al-Baghdādī and Sharaf

al-Dīn al-Masʿūdī over the issue of prime matter in Avicennan physics is one of
many examples that should help us resist the urge to adopt uncritically the claim
of Endress.102 While I cannot speak specifically to the Baghdādī-Masʿūdī debate,
I can say, at least as far as the Shiraz Circle and the later Ashʿari mutakallimūn in
Iran are concerned, their engagement with Avicennan doctrines rested, in part, on
an interpretative prejudice anchored in sectarian motivations – even when they
discussed seemingly innocuous topics unconcerned with religion. Dashtakī the
father was the first person in Shiraz to compose glosses on Qūshchī’s com-
mentary,103 which were completed circa 1474.104 The second set of glosses were
completed in 1482.105 The glosses remain in manuscript but taken together
they span more eight hundred folios. There are instances – many, in fact – that
reveal Dashtakī’s religious predisposition. But there is also plenty of original and
open-ended inquiry venturing into metaphysics, epistemology, and noetic, includ-
ing a lengthy discussion on the modality of mental existence, for instance.106
While the epistemological motivations of the Shiraz philosophers did indeed
attend to religious considerations and displayed unwavering commitment to
theism, such methodological orientation and mode of knowing on their part is
anything but counterfeit philosophy, to borrow a phrase from Jari Kaukua’s
response to Gutas.107 I stand in firm opposition to any characterisation of the
Shiraz Circle as paraphilosophers, if one insists on a hard Gutasian conception
of philosophy as open-ended and rational inquiry into reality, among other
things. Most historians of philosophy, intellectual historians, and historians
of other persuasions would be hard-pressed to find ancient, medieval, or even
modern philosophers who jettisoned their religious, political, social, or any
other background assumptions that informed, directed, influenced, inspired, or
102
See A. Shihadeh, ‘Avicenna’s Corporeal Form and Proof of Prime Matter in Twelfth-Century
Critical Philosophy: Abū l-Barakāt, al-Masʿūdī and al-Rāzī’, Oriens 42 (2014), 364–96.
103
The Tajrīd is a significant Twelver-Shiʿi Creed written in philosophical diction. In the
post-Mongol period, it became the central canon of philosophical theology and the subject of great
many commentaries (shurūh ̣), super-commentaries (sharh ̣ al-shurūh ̣), glosses (h ̣awāshī), and
super-glosses (h ̣awāshī al-h ̣awāshī). Two commentaries, however, stood out: the Tasdīd al-qawāʿid fī
sharh ̣ Tajrīd al-ʿaqāʾid by Shams al-Dīn Mah ̣mūd al-Is ̣fahānī (d. 1345), known as al-Sharh ̣ al-qadīm
(The Old Commentary) in scholarly nomenclature, and the al-Sharh ̣ al-jadīd ʿalā al-Tajrīd (The New
Commentary) penned by ʿAlā al-Dīn ʿAlī al-Qūshchī (d. 1474).
104
Bdaiwi, Echoes of Late Antiquity; ʿA. Khūyī, Kitāb-shināsi-i tajrīd al-iʿtiqād (Qum, 2003),
91–2.
105
The famous rivalry between al-Dashtakī and al-Dawānī was played out in a number of
rebuttals and counter-rebuttals written in the form of glosses and super-glosses upon al-Qūshchī’s
al-Sharh ̣ al-jadīd. In the manuscript tradition, these exchanges are grouped in the same majmūʿa and
are known as al-T ̣abaqāt al-Jalāliyya [al-Dawānī] wa l-S ̣adriyya [al-Dashtakī].
106
See al-Dashtakī, Al-Ḥāshiya ʿalā al-sharh ̣ al-jadīd li l-tajrīd. The work survives in a number
of extant Iranian manuscripts: MS 1755 Tehran; MS 1327 Yazd; MS 101 Mashhad; MS 1365 Tehran;
MS 1424 Mashhad; MS 2499 Qom; MS 102 Mashhad; MS 1756 Tehran; and MS 1116 Tehran.
107
J. Kaukua, ‘Post-Classical Islamic Philosophy – A Contradiction in Terms?’, Nazariyat 6
(2020), 19.
155
Ahab Bdaiwi
oriented – directly or otherwise – their function as philosopher. The scientifica-

tion of ancient Aristotelianism by Gutas would surely draw heavy criticism from
historians of ancient philosophy (and science) who would, one would imagine,
point to the theistic and ritualistic pieties of Aristotle and Aristotelians in a way
that upsets Gutas’ narrow conception of philosophy.
That is not to say the Shiraz Circle failed to produce rationalistic theses that
operated in strict observance of the rules of logic and reasoned argument; on the
contrary, they levelled scathing critiques against the Sunni mutakallimūn precisely
because the latter, as they saw them, placed the epistemological efficacy of
scripture before that of reason. Yet, reason aside, both the Shiraz Circle and the
mutakallimūn of the post-classical period did not—and would not – eschew their
firm commitment to monotheism and sectarian theologies simply to appear
detached and scientific. That they were rigorously rational and formidable
purveyors of logical argument is true. And that they were pious religionists and
theologising thinkers is also true. The histories of science and religion are
entangled, intertwined, and as was often the case in pre-modern societies, sites of
complementarity rather than tension and opposition, as brilliantly shown very
recently by N. Spencer.108 Neither Aristotle, nor Ibn Sīnā, nor al-Ṭūsī, nor al-Rāzī,
and nor al-Dashtakī were philosophers and thinkers sine ira et studio, yet they
were analytic in their approaches (to use the term anachronistically) and aimed at
the truth and made truth-claims with arguments.
Occultism and Theurgy
There is a vulgar science and one which, I might say, crawls on the surface of
this earth…The other, my son, is truly wise, of which the vulgar form is an
illegitimate version masquerading under the same name: this one it is which
looks up to heaven, which speaks directly with the gods and shares in the
quality of those superior beings.109
The hour of doom is drawing near, and the moon is cleft in two. Yet
when they see a sign the unbelievers turn their backs and say: ‘Ingenious
magic’110
Occultism stands tall in the order of things in Late Antiquity. No longer tenable is
the view that magic is degenerate religion.111 For a while magic and, to a lesser
extent, occultism, were seen as terms of opprobrium ‘connoting the alien, suspect
108
N. Spencer, Magisteria: The Entangled Histories of Science and Religion (London, 2023).
109
Heliodorus apud Brown, The Making, 18.
110
Q 54.1–2 apud Brown, The Making, 19.
111
This new conceptual framework was adopted, for instance, in S. B. Noegel, J. Thomas and
B. M. Wheeler (eds), Prayer, Magic, and the Stars in the Ancient and Late Antique World
(Pennsylvania, 2003), 6ff.
156
rites of oriental Magi’.112 Magic and occultism were not just pervasive but deeply
inculcated in the social and intellectual fabric of the Late Antique world. The
challenge was, as shown by P. Brown, to separate the wheat (read: magic and
occultism) from the chaff (read: sorcery). The Quran verse above, typical of
Late Antique attitudes towards the suprarational, was not just a caution against
credulity, but as Brown puts it, ‘It was rather so that they [the believers] should
feel free to exercise a choice as to which wielder of super-natural power they
would acclaim as a holy man and which they would dismiss as a sorcerer’.113 The
apprehension had to do more with misshapen supernatural power than it did the
harnessing of the supernatural itself. The concern was the misapplication of
the supernatural – the very meaning of sorcery.114
Philosophy and religiosity went in tandem with occultism and magic. That is
not to say, however that the terms converge precisely onto similar meanings.
Rather, the ‘intellectual engagement with the occult was rooted in, or sought to
cohere with, the philosophical systems of Greco-Roman antiquity’.115 Naturally,
the intellectual of Late Antiquity found wisdom in the rational expositions of logic
and metaphysics, but, beyond the earthly realm, the Late Antique man looked to
suprarational manifestations of knowledge by turning to the heavens.116
The occultist, theurgic, and magical programme of Late Antique intellectuals
must be approached with caution. Not all of the prominent Late Antique
Neoplatonists cared for things occult, with Plotinus the most salient exception.
Here we must draw a distinction between the occult-magical and religious-
mystical. On the one hand, Plotinus was deeply religious. His philosophy has
been described as ‘more even than other philosophies of the first centuries of the
Christian era, not only a philosophy but a religion, a way for the mind to ascend to
God’.117 Yet on the other, Porphyry (d. 305) in his biography of Plotinus, is
explicit in stating that Plotinus did not care for occult disciplines, such as
astrology. Modern scholars do not hesitate to apply the mystic label to Plotinus,
given the presence of themes such as disembodiment and union in his philosophy,
but they do refrain from placing him in the rank of occultists and theurgists, that
is because Plotinus rationalises mystical practices, thereby rejecting the
extra-rationalism and mythical ritual that separates mysticism from occultism.118
112
P. Magdalino and M. Mavroudi, The Occult Sciences in Byzantium (Geneva, 2006), 12.
113
Brown, The Making, 19.
114
Ibid., 20.
115
Magdalino and Mavroudi, The Occult Sciences, 13.
116
Brown, The Making, 19.
117
A. H. Armstrong, Plotinus (New York, 1962) apud D. King, ‘Ancient Philosophy
Transformed’, 418.
118
This is the view adopted by D. King, ‘Ancient Philosophy Transformed’, 419. Worth pointing
is the fact that some modern scholars such as Llyod Gerson think Plotinus’ mysticism (termed
‘unphilosophical’) does not bear on his epistemological doctrines. See L. P. Gerson, Plotinus: The
Arguments of the Philosophers (London, 1994), 188.
157
Ahab Bdaiwi
Things took a turn, however, with Porphyry, the celebrated student and
biographer of Plotinus. Porphyry leaned towards the religious, but more explicitly
and audaciously than his teacher did. Students of later Platonism know well the
role Porphyry played in opening the floodgates to oracular activity. He debated the
mystical meanings behind oracular utterances and saw oracles as an important
source of truth in religion and philosophy.119 It was largely thanks to Porphyry
that Late Antique Neoplatonism was impregnated with mystical rites, oracular
activities, and other forms of divination which became significant and central to
later Neoplatonists.120 Oracles were symbols (σύμβολα) of the gods, they
functioned like revelation whose meaning and significance could only be
grasped by philosophical contemplation and rational insight.121
Following in Porphyry’s footsteps, Iamblichus (d. 325) and Proclus (d. 485),
whose impact on early Islam could hardly be overstated, left an indelible mark on
Neoplatonism when they weaved into the philosophical fabric of Late Antiquity
ritual magic and theurgic exercises. The transformations brought about by
Iamblichus should be located in the crisis of the fourth century CE which
witnessed the decline of traditional pagan culture. By 386, torrents of Christian
monks vandalised pagan temples in the countryside. But for Iamblichus, the
purges of the Christian faithful the symptom of a new disease. The ‘new ways’,
endless innovations and inventions of the Hellenes, Iamblichus complains in the
Di Mysterius, were quickly replacing the ‘old ways’, the principal nexus between
the inspired traditions of the gods and humanity.122
Determined to restore the ways of old, Iamblichus succeeded in making
enormous developmental strides steering Late Antique intellectualism closer in
the direction of cultic worship and theurgic religion.123 He drew a line in the sand
between theurgy and theology. Theology for him consisted in intelligent
expositions about the gods, a mere logos, whereas theurgy was the ‘work of the
gods’ and capable of elevating humans to divine rank. Iamblichus expressed
theurgy in Platonic terms to underscore the fact that for him theurgy fulfilled the
objective of philosophy as finding likeness to god, homoiōsis theō.124
119
C. Addey, Divination and Theurgy in Neoplatonism: Oracles of the Gods (Farnham, 2014), 1.
120
Porphyry penned two works dealing with divination and mystical interpretation of oracular
utterances, Philosophy from Oracles, which survives in forty-eight fragments (preserved in Christian
polemics, namely Augustine’s City of God and Eusebius’ Praeparatio Evangelica), and Letter to
Anebo. See C. Addey, Divination and Theurgy, 18ff.
121
C. Addey, Divination and Theurgy, 4.
122
G. Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus (Pennsylvania, 1995), 3ff.
123
There were reports that the young emperor Julian, infected by Iamblichean charm, entertained
the idea of establishing theurgy as a state religion, complete with priesthood, scriptures, and ethical
codes. See I. Tanaseanu-Döbler, Theurgy in Late Antiquity. The Invention of a Ritual Tradition
(Gottingen, 2013). On the religious-theurgical turn in post-Hellenistic philosophy, see P. Van
Nuffelen, Rethinking the Gods.
124
Ibid., 5.
158
Late Platonists were faithful to the ideal of likeness or assimilation to god, but
they differed on how this quest for likeness to the divine was possible for human
beings. In his commentary on the Phaedo, the Late Antique pagan philosopher
Damascius (d. after 538), usually called the last of the (Greek) Neoplatonists,
distinguishes two tendencies among late Platonists: the tendency of Plotinus
and Porphyry who believed assimilation to god is achieved by rational expositions
(i.e., philosophy), while Iamblichus and his later follower Proclus made the
argument for theurgic practice as the most apposite means for humans to become
divine-like.125 Iamblichus was as a matter of fact the ‘hierophant of a sacred
cult’.126
Proclus in particular criticised the view of Plotinus and Porphyry mainly
because for him the human soul is removed from the divine principles and
intelligible realm after descending completely into the human body. Theurgic
rites, not philosophical deliberation, are especially important for without them
the human soul cannot close the ontological chasm between mortal and divine. In
his On Hieratic Art, Proclus say as much when he compares theurgic exercise to
the theory of love, writing, ‘just as lovers move on from the beauty perceived by
the senses until they reach the sole cause of all beautiful and intelligible beings, so
too, the theurgists, starting with the sympathy connecting visible things both to
one another and to the invisible powers, and having understood that all things are
to be found in all things, established the hieratic science’.127 For Proclus and later
Neoplatonists, the power of theurgy is far greater and more efficacious than human
knowledge.128
Regardless of whether or not the Hellenes caved in following social and
political pressures forcing them to conform to the Christianised outlook of the
Roman empire in the fourth century, the new intellectualism of Late Antiquity
converged on common ideas, primary among them is (i) the idea that the truth was
contained in revealed and fixed religious text; (ii) a tradition made up of
interpretive and exegetical commentaries defining the norms of belief and life;
(iii) the ubiquitous presence religious doctrinaires as mediators between higher
truths and the rest of society; and (iv) a palpable sense of consecrated space and
sites for religious pilgrimage.129 The biography of Proclus is quite telling in this
regard, for it exemplifies the new Late Antique intellectualism. Proclus interests
were ‘riveted on the super-sensual world. His wakeful nocturnal hours were
spent in prayer, treating disease and composing hymns. In Alexandria he had
learned the Egyptian mysteries from the Orion; and the Greek from Hero and
125
E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2021 Edition), s. v. ‘Proclus’
(C. Helmig and C. Steel), accessed 13 January 2023 https://plato.stanford.
edu/archives/fall2021/entries/proclus/.
126
Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 6.
127
Translated in C. Helmig and C. Steel, ‘Proclus’.
128
C. Helmig and C. Steel, ‘Proclus’.
129
H. Inglebert, ‘Introduction’, 17.
159
Ahab Bdaiwi
Olympiodorus…He was intoxicated with love for the Primary Beings, and
had a regular nocturnal prayer-hour. He observed all kinds of worship – of
Nature, Funerary, of Philosophers, National, of Religions, Personal, Theurgic and
Memnonic’.130 Proclus performed prayers at dawn, noon, and sunset, as Muslims
two or three centuries later would do following the Qurʾānic prescription of daily
prayers.131
The Late Antique model of intellectualism, religious, occultist-theurgic, and
philosophical in equal measure, was inherited by the Shiraz Circle with some
modifications, going on to become the hallmark of Shiʿi intellectualism in late
medieval Iran. But we must take caution. Our Shirazi intellectuals could not, and
should not in fact, be pegged to a singular Late Antique intellectual current,
whether Aristotelianism or Platonism. This is because the medieval Muslims who
received and appropriated ancient knowledge did not pay excessive attention to
the school distinctions of antiquity. In their estimation (whether correctly or not is
beside the point) the ancient Greek philosophies did not come in distinct bundles
where the thought of Aristotle was palpably distinguishable from that of Plato;
rather, the ancients were viewed through, more or less, a singular lens that grouped
them together both conceptually and functionally.132
The tone of early Arabic philosophy was set by late ancient Neoplatonists and
Alexander of Aphrodisias.133 The former played a pivotal role in delineating the
frames of references and tendencies in the nascent falsafa system of knowledge.
The doctrines of Plotinus and Proclus gained wide currency under the assumed
130
K. S. Guthrie, Proclus’ Life, Hymns, and Works (North Yonkers, New York, 1925), 3. On
prayer in Late Antique philosophy, see D. Layne, ‘Philosophical Prayer in Proclus’ Commentary on
Plato’s Timaeus’, Review of Metaphysics 67 (2013), 345–68.
131
See Q 24.58 for example.
132
That is not to say the early Muslims could not discern atomistic distinctions within ancient
traditions of learning, rather they embraced the tone set by late ancient Neoplatonic adaptions of the
Greek corpus assimilated into early Islamic thought. The translation movement, spanning over two
centuries, was in the service of the centralised authorities that privileged theoretical and applied
knowledge of utility to the caliphal court. As Gutas has shown, support and patronage came from all
walks of Abbasid society: rulers, civil servants, military leaders, bankers, scholars, and merchants.
The corpus received from the eight to the end of the tenth century was based on the extant material
available throughout the Eastern Byzantine Empire and Near East. See D. Gutas, Greek Thought,
Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ʿAbbasid Society
(2nd–4th/5th–10th c.) (London, 1998), 1ff, 61ff. What must be kept in mind is that the Arabic
translations were themselves based on editions and translations that carried the presuppositions and
idiosyncrasies of the editor and translator as much as those of the original author. That is to say,
translations and editions underwent creative re-writings of the ‘original’ text under consideration,
yielding final products shaped in the image of the editor and translator and the communities they were
meant to serve. Gutas dubs this phenomenon the ‘translation complexes’. See Gutas, Greek Thought,
141ff. What we must not forget is that the Arabic Aristotle, Arabic Alexander, Arabic Proclus, and
Arabic Porphyry were shaped in the image of the translators, patron, or receptive society that required
them, or all of the above. See H. Lagerlund (ed.), Encyclopedia of Medieval Philosophy (Dordrecht,
2010), s.v. ‘Plotinus, Arabic’, ‘Porphyry, Arabic’, ‘Translations from Greek into Arabic’
(C. D’Ancona).
133
F. Rosenthal, Das Fortleben der Antike im Islam (Zurich, Stuttgart, 1965).
160
name of Aristotle.134 The fact that the works of the ancients were transmitted
piecemeal to medieval Baghdad (lasting two centuries) resulted in these
misattributions.
A corollary of this last fact is that in the later medieval periods of Islam the
close-up specificities of school and intellectual identities such as Platonism and
Aristotelianism were elided mainly because of the lapse of time and the trans-
formative creative processes that went into the Arabic editions and translations of
the early Greek corpus. Our objection is not against the labelling of the likes of
Dashtakī or Khafrī as philosophers in the Arabic Aristotelian tradition – which is
in fact fairly accurate – but rather with the singular or unitary labelling of these
thinkers in a way that diminishes their intellectual versatility and widely-cast nets of
intellectual pursuits. If Aristotelian and Avicennan open-ended rational inquiry
untainted by predetermined religious convictions is the criteria, then Gutas is right:
the Shiraz Circle could not qualify as philosophers. More appositely, perhaps, they
ought to be regarded as Muslim imitators and appropriators of Late Antique
intellectualism. Their interest in occult matters places them firmly in the
historiography of late antique philosophy where philosophers found refuge in
the occult, even if that broke with strict Aristotelianism. The inclusion of occult
science in the intellectual worldview of the Shiraz Circle does not, I contend,
belittle their rank as philosophers or proponents of rationality and science; rather,
their conception of philosophy not only tolerated the inclusion of occult, it
embraced and celebrated it as the way to do philosophy. Put differently, when
viewed through the scientific and perhaps excessively empirical reading of ancient
philosophy proffered by Gutas, the Shiraz Circle fail to impress as philosopher who
pursue open-ended and rational inquiry; but when measured by their own standards
and their own way of doing philosophy, the Shiraz Circle are true philosophers, in a
long line of philosophers going back all the way to late antiquity.
What, then, can say about the occultism and theurgic practice of the Shiraz
Circle? Broadly, the Shiraz Circle followed in the footsteps of the Late Antique
philosopher-occultist dispensation. As Muslims, and especially as Shiʿis,
Dashtakī and his students held on to an outlook which could accommodate the
belief that superhuman forces, whether God or human intercessors possessing
cosmic powers, could alter the course of events when invoked, either through
ritual or supplicatory prayer. Moreover, the power of divination to prognosticate
future events and gain information about things unseen was not only accepted as
philosophically and conceptually sound but ontologically and functionally
possible.135 A demonstrative example that shows the ardent commitment to
134
G. Endress, Proclus Arabus; Zwanzig Abschnitte aus der Institutio theologica in arabischer
Übersetzung (Beirut, 1973).
135
I fall back on the terms and conceptions set by Emilie Savage-Smith to help me problematize
magic, occultism, and theurgy in the Islamic world: Magic and Divination in Early Islam
(Burlington, 2004), xiii and passim.
161
Ahab Bdaiwi
occultism on the part of the Shiraz Circle is Mans ̣ūr al-Dashtakī’s instrumental
role in the invasion of Baghdad in 1508 using special occult prayers and
talismanic objects to end the life of a wayward governor.136 We must bear in mind
that the deployment of occultist powers for political utility has antecedent in
Late Antiquity. Just as Shah Ismāʿīl turned to Dashtakī to help him vanquish
his enemies, centuries before emperor Julian (r. 361–363 CE) fell back on the
Platonic and theurgic principles of Iamblichus when he sought to overcome his
wayward enemies, the ‘Galileans’ (i.e., the Christians).137
The suprarational propensities of the Shiraz Circle included the whole gamut
of magic, occultism, and theurgy. Held in high esteem was lettrism, as well as
talismanic prayers and divination. Generally, letter-magic describes a method-
ology of decipherment and manipulation of the mundane and supermundane.
Lettrism flourished in cultures that used alphabetical numerals (Greek, Syriac,
Hebrew, and Arabic).138 Letters lead to new vistas and function as keys to the
arcana. In the medieval imaginary of Islamic occultism, letter magic is a fruit born
of the early Shiʿi gnostic circles in southern Iraq closely affiliated to the archetypal
figures of Imāmī Shiʿism such as ʿAlī, Muh ̣ammad al-Bāqir, and Jaʿfar al-S ̣ādiq,
with some accounts pointing to ʿAlī as the primary occult magus of early Islam,
even attributing to him a book on occultist nature, the famous Kitāb al-Jafr
wa-l-jāmiʿa.139
Perhaps the first to use letter magic in a strictly (Shiʿi) religious context was the
controversial figure of al-Mughīra b. Saʿīd al-Bajalī (d. 737), who was reported to
have used letter magic to bring the dead back to life and restore sight to the
blind,140 and whose interconfessional views show similarities to the occult
136
Al-Shushtarī, Majālis, 2:232. The special prayers and talisman were supposedly written down
by Mans ̣ūr was based on his Qānūn al-saltana ̣ (lost), which is not listed among his works by anyone
except al-Shustarī.
137
Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 2.
138
Ibid.
139
Ibid. The Jafr attributed to ʿAlī is counted among other works of divination (such as the
Musḥ ̣af of Fātima)
̣ which taken together perfectly illustrate the uses of lettrism in early medieval
Islam and Shiʿi circles. For instance, reports attributed to Jaʿfar al-S ̣ādiq (the Muslim personality most
often associated with jafr) predicts that the Manicheans will reappear in the year 128, with another
claiming to divine the names of all future kings. See H. Modarressi, Tradition and Survival: A
Bibliographical Survey of Early Shiʿite Literature (Oxford, 2003), 19. On lettrism in early medieval
Shiʿism, see S. Wasserstrom, ‘The Moving Finger Writes: Mughīra b. Saʿīd’s Islamic Gnosis and the
Myths of its Rejection’, History of Religions 25 (1985), 1–29 and W. Tucker, Mahdis and
Millenarians: Shiʿite Extremists in Early Muslim Iraq (Cambridge, 2008), 52ff.
140
P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W.P. Heinrichs (eds),
Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, s. v. ‘al-Mug̲h̲īriyya’ (W. Madelung), accessed 31 May
2023 http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_SIM_5322. Medieval Shiʿi theologians and rijāl
scholars showed little patience for al-Mughīra’s extremist views. For example, the Shiʿi rijāl scholar
al-Kishshī considered him ‘mendacious’ and someone who ascribed false reports to al-S ̣ādiq. See
Muh ̣ammad b. al-Ḥasan al-Ṭūsī, Ikhtiyār maʿrifat al-rijāl: al-maʿrūf bi-Rijāl al-Kashshī, ed. J. Q.
al-Is ̣fahānī (n.d., 2006), 194–8.
162
traditions of antiquity,141 possibly after becoming acquainted with Aramaic

syncretists that emerged from Christian occultism, or Jewish-Aramaic (speakers of
the Babylonian Talmud), or Pagan-Aramaic.142
Convinced that letters correspond to realities beyond the earthly realm,
Mughīra averred that the Arabic alphabet letters correspond to godly limbs; for
instance, the eye of God corresponded to the letter ʿayn, an idea which again
echoes the antecedents of Late Antiquity, in this case bearing similarity to the
view of Marcos the Magician (fl. second century AD), namely that the Greek
alphabet constituted the body of the Supreme Wisdom, with the head
corresponding to alpha, the back to delta, etc.143
Leading the charge, Dashtakī the father authored at least four works on
occultism and specifically lettrism. His Risāla fī tah ̣qīq al-h ̣urūf (Treatise on the
Verification of Lettrism). Like his Late Antique and medieval predecessors,
Dashtakī embraced the broad understanding of ʿilm al-h ̣urūf to include a range of
occult disciplines such as metaphysics, cosmogony, physics, alchemy, magic, and
numerology.144 In another work, known as Risālat al-zubur wa-l-bayyināt
(Treatise on Letter Permutations), Dashtakī makes a strong case for the occult
tradition of al-zubur and al-bayyināt where, using Quran 16.44 as prooftext, an
argument is made to decipher the numerical values of divine names invoked in
order to precipitate divine intervention in times of need and in the midst of
calamity. The divine names of God in the Quran possess active properties and may
be invoked to hasten divine succor like warding off hunger and poverty. The
process starts with taksīr, the separating the letters of a name or word and spelling
out the abjad (letter names) in full (e.g., Ah ̣mad alif-h ̣āʾ-mīm-dāl).145 The
separated first letters in the full letter names is known as the zubur while the
remaining is called the bayyināt.146 Selected divine names are assigned numerical
value based on a pre-set table of corresponding letters and numerals.147 In the end,
the separated letters and values assigned to them form the magic squares of
spiritual invocation which can only performed in strict observance of astrological
considerations such as operating during the favourable aspects of Jupiter or
Venus.148
141
Tucker, Mahdis and Millenarians, 52ff.
142
S. Wasserstrom, ‘The Moving Finger Writes’, 5. I thank S. Rassi for pointing out that there is
no direct evidence for a late antique Syriac lettrist tradition. The evidence is attested rather late, as in
the case of Ignatius bar Wahīb: ‘From Greco-Syrian to Syro-Arabic Thought’, 556–7.
143
Tucker, Mahdis and Millenarians, 61.
144
Bdaiwi, Echoes of Late Antiquity.
145
Melvin-Koushki, ‘Early Modern Islamicate Empire’.
146
On this science, see Yūsuf Najafī Gīlānī, Bayān al-ayāt dar ʿilm-i zubrūbīnāt (Rasht, 1912).
147
For example, the letter alif is assigned numerical value 1, bāʾ = 2, tāʾ = 3, and so on and so
forth.
148
M. Melvin-Koushki, ‘World as (Arabic) Text: Mīr Dāmād and the Neopythagoreanization of
Philosophy in Safavid Iran’, Studia Islamica 115 (2019), 358ff.
163
Ahab Bdaiwi
Two other occult works by Dashtakī bring into sharp focus the example of
Late Antique intellectualism in medieval Islam, especially when occultism is
fused with rational philosophical expositions but presented in confessional and
religious garb. Such syncretism is perhaps one of the salient features of the world
of Late Antiquity and its later echoes in the writings of the Shiraz Circle. The two
works of Dashtakī, entitled Istikhrāj asāmī al-aʾimma bi-h ̣isāb al-abjad
(Extracting the Names of the [Shiʿi] Imāms Alphabetically) and Ithnā ʿashariyya
(written in Persian), mark the first attempt in medieval Islamic history to argue
in favour of the Twelve Imams as the legitimate and rightful successors (awsiyāʾ)̣
of the Prophet Muh ̣ammad in occultist language predicated on lettrism
theories – and not in the diction typical of theological argument and h ̣adīth-
based scriptural reasoning.149
Beyond lettrism, highly popular occult art of geomancy found favour with the
Shiraz Circle too, particularly with Shams al-Dīn al-Khafrī. Known in Arabic as
ʿilm al-raml (lit. ‘the science of the sand’), geomancy was practiced widely in
medieval Muslim societies, surpassed only by astrological divination and
oneiromancy.150 Properly speaking, geomancy makes attempts to divine the
future and to prognosticate fateful events where deliberative decision fails to
engender decisiveness. It is pragmatic and detail-oriented and targets every entity
in the sublunary realm. As such, it was used precisely for deliberative decision,
not after the fact. E. Savage-Smith describes the process as follow: divination is
‘accomplished by forming and then interpreting a design, called a geomantic
tableau, consisting of 16 positions, each occupied by a geomantic “figure”. The
figures occupying the first four positions were determined by marking 16
horizontal rows of dots on a piece of paper or a dust board (takht), a tablet covered
with fine sand on which numerical or other calculations could be made and then
easily erased. Each row was examined to determine if it contained an odd or even
number of dots, and it was then represented by one or two dots. The first four lines
of dots determined the first figure, the second four lines the next, and so on. Each
of the four figures in a vertical column of four marks, each mark consisting of
either one or two dots. From these four figures the remaining twelve positions in
the tableau are produced according to set procedures’.151
While post-Enlightenment Europe showed little tolerance for geomancy,
in the Muslim world, especially in Iran after the twelfth century, geomancy came
to enjoy wider reception among intellectuals and philosophers. Geomancers,
as Matthew Melvin-Koushki shows, were precious commodities and instruments
of power in the imperial and regional courts of Ottoman and Persianate
149
Neither work is published. There is one surviving copy of the Istikhrāj (MS 976/8, Mashhad)
and two copies of the Ithnā ʿashariyya (MS 7424 Tehran and MS 2145/2 Tehran). For similar lettrist
and occultist writings in Mans ̣ūr al-Dashtakī, see al-Shushtarī, Majālis, 2:232; al-Khwānsārī,
Rawd ̣āt, 7:170.
150
E. Savage-Smith, Magic and Divination, 148.
151
Ibid.
164
societies.152 Its enduring appeal to the scholarly community, including philoso-

phers, astronomers, mathematicians, and elevated status among the ruling elite
can be explained by the fact that after the eleventh century geomancy was
classified as a mathematical ‘science’. Moreover, by the sixteenth century geo-
mancy gained further prestige recognised increasingly as an essential discipline
forming part of the quadrivium syllabi, sitting alongside the other three subjects
of philosophy, mathematics, and metaphysics.153
Hardly known to modern scholarship is the fact that it was thanks in large part
of the labours of the Shiraz Circle that geomancy gained new and elevated
intellectual status: where in Safavid Iran it came to be viewed as integral to the
mathematical disciplines and the natural science. Of particular significance here is
Shams al-Dīn al-Khafrī, at once a capable geomancer and astronomer. Khafrī
wrote eight works on astronomy and mathematics most of which remain in
manuscript form. In astronomy he is said to have written a voluminous com-
mentary on the astronomical work of al-Ṭūsī, namely al-Tadhkira fī ‘ilm al-hayʾa
(Memento in Astronomy), which al-Khafrī entitled al-Takmila fī sharh ̣
al-tadhkira (The Complement to the Explanation of the Memento).154 George
Saliba points out that, the Takmila was a complement to another commentary
written by Sharīf al-Dīn al-Jurjānī and as such it was intended as a critique
of Ptolemaic astronomy. Al-Khafrī authored another work on astronomy
entitled Muntahā al-idrāk fī madārik al-aflāk,155 which is a commentary on
Qutḅ al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī’s al-Tuh ̣fa al-shāhiyya. According to al-Khafrī, this
commentary was the first of its kind on the Tuh ̣fa.156 In mathematics, al-Khafrī
wrote a set of glosses upon al-Ṭūsī’s Tah ̣rīr-i Uqlīdis (Summary of Euclidian
Principles), under the title Taʿlīqa bar Tah ̣rīr-i Uqlīdis,157 and another work
̣ ah ̣kām-i jafrī,158 and the shorter treatise Risāla
lettrism entitled Risāla dar usūl-i
159
dar raml.
In these sets of works, al-Khafrī sets out to blur the lines separating natural
science, mathematics, and divinatory arts like geomancy. The astronomer ventures
into the world of mathematics and occultism with ease and without having to
recalibrate his epistemological compass. The seen, unseen, and conceptual thus
collapse into a singular, interconnected unitary whole empowering the adept in
152
M. Melvin-Koushki, ‘Powers of One: The Mathematicalization of the Occult Sciences in the
High Persianate Tradition’, Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 5 (2017), 153–4 and passim.
153
Ibid., 180–1.
154
G. Saliba, ‘A Sixteenth-Century Arabic Critique’, 17; F. Saatchian, Gottes Wesen-Gottes
Wirken: Ontologie und Kosmologie im Denken von Šams-al-Dīn Muh ̣ammad al-Ḫafrī (Berlin, 2011),
56–7.
155
F. Saatchian, Gottes Wesen-Gottes Wirken, 55.
156
Ibid.
157
This work is known by another variant title as Fī l-zāwiya (On Angles).
158
F. Saatchian, Gottes Wesen-Gottes Wirken, 53.
159
M. Melvin-Koushki, ‘Powers of One’, 187.
165
Ahab Bdaiwi
the terms set by worldly ambitious but, as the Shiraz Circle strenuously pointed
out, in service to higher religious truths. The result thus expands the purview of
epistemology beyond reason and empirical observation, only to now include
suprarational modes of arriving at the unknown, which was seen as empirical by
definition, as the Shiraz Circle argued strenuously. The intellectualism of the
Shiraz Circle is a precise cognate to the Late Antique models in which
supra-rationalism as a mode of inquiry becomes a more successful rival to
ratiocination. Be that as it may, it would be hardly fair to discard sceptically the
abilities of scientists of the calibre of al-Khafrī to produce original theses simply
because their quest for discovery was motivated by religion and informed by
suprarational elements. Al-Khafrī, a ‘planetary theorist of the highest rank’,160 for
one believed he solved the most vexing problems of medieval astronomy and
planetary motion, as the title of one work of his attests (Risālat h ̣all mā-lā yunh ̣al
min masāʾil al-hayʾa = Treatise on Solving the Unsolvable Problems in
Astronomy), a fact he was all too ready to proclaim in his writing, as seen for
instance in the introduction of the Takmilah, where he states:
I included in it [i.e., the Takmila] the useful lessons ( fawāʾid) that I had
̣̣
discovered (istanbattuhu) in the books of others together with those additions
that I extracted from my own lazy intellect. These are principles through
which difficult problems can be resolved, and methods through which one
can uncover the difficulties that proved impossible for those endowed with the
final grasp for the comprehension of the celestial spheres (dhawī nihāyāt
al-idrāk fī dirāyat al-aflāk), especially in the matters of latitude and
prosneusis, regarding which all that was said before proved to be either
impossible and inapplicable.161
Granted, al-Khafrī was more than a standard-issue mathematician and sci-

entist, his views were avant-garde and surpassed the innovations of his
contemporaries. Saliba says as much when he stated in that al-Kharfī transformed
the conceptions and methodological function of mathematics through ‘an
innovative departure from the classical conception of mathematical methods
and their role in mathematical astronomy’, coming ‘closest to the modern
conception of the role of mathematics in science in general, which also redefines it
as a descriptive language of scientific processes’.162
It is this mathematical context where we should locate al-Khafrī’s occultism
especially his writings on geomancy. The Risāla dar raml, written in Persian,
160
G. Saliba, ‘A Sixteenth-Century Arabic Critique’, 32–3.
161
Translated in G. Saliba, ‘A Sixteenth-Century Arabic Critique’, 17–18.
162
G. Saliba, ‘Ḵafri, Šams-al-Din’, Encyclopaedia Iranica online (https://www.iranicaonline.
org/articles/kafri, accessed 13 January 2023).
166
frames occultism in terms evocative of Late Antique Neoplatonism and ancient

science, stating:
Inasmuch as the subject of this science is the dots and the 16 figures [they form
which] populate 16 cells (buyūtāt), it is necessary to explain the nature and
associations (mansūbāt) of each. The methodology (vad ̣ʿ) of this science is
based on correspondence (munāsabat); thus because the world of generation
and corruption (ʿālam-i kawn u fasād) is composed of four elements (ʿanāsir), ̣
̣ fard) are first arranged like so, ⁞, with each standing
four single dots (nuqta-yi
for a given element. The first dot is called fire (ātash), the second air (bād), the
̣
third water (āb), the fourth earth (khāk). And because the natures (tabāyiʿ) of
these elements are each composed of two qualities (kayfiyyat), each of these
four dots may be doubled like so, ⁞⁞. This figure is known as Populus
̣
( jamāʿat), while the first is known as Via (tarīq). Because Via is the simplest
of the figures it is called the Universal Intellect (ʿaql-i kull), and because
Populus features all possible dots it is called the Universal Soul (nafs-i kull).
Because the eight [composite] qualities of natures are lower than the four
elements and the elements lower than the [Universal] Intellect which occupies
the second degree (martaba) after God Most High, who occupies the first
degree of oneness (yakī), it is appropriate (munāsib) that fire be represented by
a single dot, air by two dots, water by four dots and earth by eight dots. This
arrangement is also referred to with the letters ABDḤ,163 with A assigned to
the first dot, B to the second, D to the third and Ḥ to the fourth … And because
the cells are 16 in number, or four times four according to the number of
natures, and the sum of the above numbers is 15, it is appropriate that the
Universal Intellect be assigned to the fifteenth cell, with the sixteenth cell
being assigned to the Universal Soul, the closest of contingent beings
(mumkināt) to the Universal Intellect immediately above it.163
Closely related to al-Khafrī’s reformulation of geomancy, expressed terms

redolent of Neoplatonic emanationist cosmology, is the Late Antique study of
astrology revived anew in the writings of the Shiraz Circle. Mans ̣ūr takes centre
stage especially his known penchant to blend historical writing and Qurʾānic
exegesis with horoscopic astrology and zodiacal associations. The medieval
Muslim imaginary of astrological divination and onomancy drew on elements
from a vast corpus from Late Antiquity within which were Hermetic literature,164
as well as from the streams of ideas belonging to Babylonian, Sasanian, and
Hellenistic traditions. Unsurprisingly, and infused perhaps with an element of the
163
Al-Khafrī, Risāla dar raml MS Tehran 3931/3, ff. 128–9 (translated in M. Melvin-Koushki,
‘Powers of One’, 188).
164
On the reception of Hermes, see K. Van Bladel, The Arabic Hermes: From Pagan Sage to
Prophet of Science (New York and Oxford, 2009).
167
Ahab Bdaiwi
fantastical, the historical sources point to the Shiʿi communities of southern Iraq as
the ones responsible for the diffusion of ‘Hermeticism’ in Islam,165 a term
considered problematic as shown recently.166 Some of these works were translated
into Arabic, such as Tetrabiblos, a second century CE polemical defence of
astrology by Ptolemy. Mans ̣ūr knew the Arabic Ptolemy well. He penned an
Arabic addendum to Ptolemy’s Almagest (al-majisṭ ī), ̣ another second century CE
work on astrology and also the famous companion volume to the Tetrabiblos.167
Astrology in Arabic is known as ʿilm al-nujūm (lit. ‘the science of the stars’).
One particular facet, known as judicial astrology, ʿilm ah ̣kām al-nujūm,168
attracted the attention of Dashtakī the son. Judicial astrology required knowledge
of mathematics. Its purpose, simply put, was to predict events based on the
celestial movement of certain star groups which involved calculations of the
positions of planets only then to produce diagrams and horoscopic charts.169
Judicial astrology served political, individual, theological-cosmological,
practical purposes, and scientific purposes. Imperial courts in the Muslim world
appointed astrologers who helped the ruling elite undertake important decisions,
such as whether or not to go to war,170 or to invade another region. This function
of astrology was known as ‘elections’ (ikhtiyārāt), something carried out by
Mans ̣ūr when requested by the Safavid ruler before important battles. Imperial
applications aside, individuals petitioned astrologers to help them overcome
personal affliction like curing ailments or finding a lost husband.171 Astrologers
were also called upon to help determine the prayer direction (qibla) of a mosque
or to put their knowledge of spherical trigonometry to good use by fixing
astronomical observatories, two functions which Mans ̣ūr performed during his
career. In 1521, while staying at the camp of Shah Ismāʿīl near Mount Sahan in
Azerbaijan, Mans ̣ūr was invited by the shah to lead the reconstruction efforts of
the Marāgha Observatory, that was built by al-Ṭūsī in 1259.172 Convinced that a
certain planetary alignment would bring worldly benefit, Mans ̣ūr advised the
Shah to delay the repair works by thirty years until the cycle of Saturn comes to a
full circle, which has an orbital period of approximately thirty years.173
165
Van Bladel, The Arabic Hermes, 19.
166
Ibid.
167
Bdaiwi, ‘Shiʿi Defenders of Avicenna’, 398; Ṭihrānī, Dharīʿa, 4:416; idem, T ̣abaqāt, 4:256.
168
Savage-Smith, Magic and Divination, xxxvi.
169
Ibid.
170
The sources relate a story where the caliph al-Maʾmūn (r. 813–33) consulted his personal
astrologer al-Fad ̣l b. Sahl (d. 818) on whether or not he should surrender to his brother al-Amīn. See
Ibn Ṭāwūs, Faraj al-mahmūm fī tārīkh ʿulamāʾ al-nujūm apud; G. Saliba, ‘A Sixteenth-Century
Arabic Critique’, 58.
171
See T. Şen, ‘Astrology in the Service of the Empire: Knowledge, Prognostication, and Politics
at the Ottoman Court, 1450s–1550s’, PhD thesis, University of Chicago, 2016, 36ff.
172
Bdaiwi, ‘Shiʿi Defenders of Avicenna’, 240; Rūmlū, Ah ̣san, 391; Qummī, Khulāsat, ̣ 1:296;
Fasāyī, Fārs-nāma, 2:98.
173
Rūmlū, Ah ̣san, 391–2; Qummī, Khulāsat, ̣ 1:296.
168
On the question of finding the qibla, when Karakī, acting as the supreme
mujtahid of the Safavid realm, ordered all prayer-leaders in western Iran and Iraq
to change the direction of the qibla, claiming that Timurid-era calculation method
was invalid as it was not carried out in accordance with Shiʿi fiqh,174 Mans ̣ūr
decided to issue a response in the form of an Arabic treatise, entitled Maʿrifat
al-qibla.175 In this work Mans ̣ūr argues that the proper method one must employ
to determine the direction of prayer should rely on astronomical tables and
mathematical calculations, a task which could be undertaken only by a person
skilled in these disciplines.176
While typically Arabic astrology is anchored in this worldly concerns, for
Mans ̣ūr and others in the Shiraz Circle, however, knowledge of astrology
correlates to theological insights and cosmological visions where temporality
breaks down, such as for instance the ability to see beyond present into the future
and the past, to learn of the pitfalls of past sinners, and safeguard against the
trickeries of Satan and demonic powers. The clearest elucidation of the wide
purview of astrology in the estimation of Mans ̣ūr is outlined in a little-known (and
never studied) treatise of his entitled Mirʾāt al-h ̣aqāʾiq wa-majlā al-daqāʾiq.177 In
the epilogue, Mans ̣ūr describes one of his mystical experiences and spiritual
visions on the last day of Rabīʿ I 895/21 February 1490, claiming to have
witnessed the ‘glowing oriental lights’ arising from the horizons which later
inspired him to write this work.178
Less occultist but undergirded by strong elements of the suprarational is the
tendency of the Shiraz Circle to interpret the fate of historical events through the
lens of horoscopic astrology using the techniques of natal astrology and
genethlialogy. These techniques were also rooted in the intellectual ethos of
Late Antiquity, and they were among the most popular type of divination in the
ancient world discussed in the Tetrabiblos of Ptolemy.179 Imitating the ancient
models, Mans ̣ūr invokes the horoscopes of his father and his father’s rival
al-Dawānī to prove the former’s inherent intellectual superiority to the latter. (A
physiognomical and a lettrist argument to the same effect are adduced too). We
learn that Dashtakī led a successful intellectual career in part because of received
propitious favours from the zodiacal constellation of Cancer and in another
174
R. Abisaab 2004, 18.
175
Al-Shushtarī, Majālis, 2:231; Ṭihrānī, Dharīʿa, 17:22.
176
On the Dashtakī-Karakī debate regarding the direction of the qibla in Iran, see Bdaiwi, ‘Shiʿi
Defenders of Avicenna’, 254–5.
177
According to Mans ̣ūr, this work was first completed on 30 Rabīʿ I 895/21 February 1490 but
̣
was modified later in 1494 whilst still in Shiraz. See al-Dashtakī, ‘Mirʾāt’, in Musannafāt, 1:75–132.
178
̣
Bdaiwi, ‘Shiʿi Defenders of Avicenna’, 330. Al-Dashtakī, ‘Mirʾāt’, in Musannafāt, 1:75ff.
Mans ̣ūr reads Shiʿi confessionalism in occult astrology in prologue when writes, ‘and blessings be
upon Muh ̣ammad’s progeny, the ones who lit the world of darkness with their spiritual lights’.
179
On the history of divination and genethlialogy in ancient times, see the 2018 edition of the now
classic A. Bouché-Leclercq, Histoire de la Divination dans l’Antiquité Vol. 4 (London, 2018).
169
Ahab Bdaiwi
because al-Dawānī failed to analyse his own name according to letter theory
which would have made known his slow-wittedness and imbecility:
Those who fail to understand [al-Dawānī’s intellectual deficiency] from the

foregoing might understand it from further disciplines, including astrology.
Here there are two methods:
One: Inspecting their Ascendants, to determine who is most truthful: My
father’s Ascendant is in Cancer, and occupied by the Sun, and his Mercury,
non-combust, is applying to Jupiter, which is likewise conjunct Saturn in the
fifth house in Scorpio, with Saturn as lord of the ninth house – this
configuration indicating truthfulness. Likewise, such a conjunction between
two planets signifying knowledge indicates mastery of true sciences, as does
Mercury’s trine with Jupiter. As for Jalāl al-Dīn Muh ̣ammad’s Ascendant, it is
in Taurus, with Mercury in Scorpio conjunct Mars, and with Saturn, lord of
the ninth house, in Sagittarius in the eighth house. Such an association with
Mars indicates a propensity for lying and deviance – and of course
argumentativeness.
Two: Examining the nature of two individuals’ interaction in a specific
undertaking: here which planet governs that undertaking must be determined
with respect to both natives’ horoscopes, as to whether there is any positive or
negative aspect between them in that respect. And scholarly debate is of
course governed by Mercury. My father’s Mercury is in Cancer, applying to
Jupiter, in a positive relationship to Jupiter, the Moon and the Sun. That of
al-Dawānī is in Scorpio, conjunct Mars, hence taking on the [combative,
lying] nature of Scorpio and Mars. Comparing their two horoscopes in this
respect, Cancer has a hostile relationship with Scorpio, so the natives will
never agree on anything in matters scholarly. And since my father’s
well-aspected Mercury testifies to his absolute truthfulness, and al-Dawānī’s
badly aspected Mercury to his mendaciousness, the upshot of their
disagreement is clear. At the same time, it is true that al-Dawānī’s Martian
energy drives him to combativeness, such that he performs truthfulness if he
thinks it will help his argument.180
CONCLUDING REMARKS
It has been argued here that the echoes of Late Antique intellectualism
reverberated in late medieval Iran among a group of Muslim thinkers active in
the city of Shiraz and its environs. The Shiraz Circle as we came to call them were
Shiʿi Muslims. Their religious and intellectual productions coincided with the end
180
̣
Al-Dashtakī, ‘Kashf’, in Musannafāt, 2:985–7. I am grateful to M. Melvin-Koushki for his
translation of this technical passage.
170
of the Timurid period, a time rarely associated with Shiʿi scholarly production and
intellectualism. More significant perhaps is the fact that the Iranian cultural and
religious terrain started to witness some kind of Shiʿi renaissance before the advent
of the Safavids and before the rise of the Isfahan philosophers in the seventeenth
century. One of the key takeaways of the present article is that Shiʿi learned
traditions and classical texts were being studied and taught in Iran at a time when
we tend to associate Shiʿi centres of learning with the Arab regions.
Beyond the question of Shiʿi religious commitments, a recurring theme in the
writings of the Shiraz Circle is the continuity and reception of ancient wisdom. If
one is prepared to think of the long Late Antiquity then the Shiraz Circle present
us with a strong candidate to qualify as the most salient example of the Late
Antique way of things that finds expression in medieval Islam. The general mood
of doing things among Late Antique intellectuals especially those attuned to broad
and inclusive conceptions of philosophy, religion, and science is similarly found
in the variegated repertoire of the Shiraz Circle. The pursuit of knowledge is not
confined to one or two disciplines, nor is it hindered by strict subject boundaries.
On the contrary, the Shiraz Circle exert great effort to interrogate, explore, and
investigate all branches of knowledge, whether secular or religious and Islamic or
non-Islamic.
One thing is clear, at least in so far as the Shiraz Circle is concerned, the
shadow of Late Antiquity extended beyond the shores of the Mediterranean world
stretching all the way to western Iran, while its modes of intellectualism, anchored
in religious and philosophical modes of inquiry, continued to resonate well into
the fifteenth century, and beyond.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The research for the present article was funded by the Cook-Crone Fellowship.
I am grateful to Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge, for
offering me a one-year fellowship to work on my current project on the
monotheism and paganism in the Qurʾan and early Islam. I would also like to
express my profuse thanks to professors Mohammad A. Amir-Moezzi (École des
hautes études en sciences sociales), Sean Anthony (The Ohio State University),
Averil Cameron (University of Oxford), Dimitri Gutas (Yale University), Matthew
Melvin-Koushki (University of South Carolina), and Philip Wood (The Agha
Khan University) for their invaluable feedback and insightful comments on draft
versions of the present article. I am also immensely grateful for the wonderful and
learned feedback and criticisms of both anonymous reviewers. Their insights and
suggestions were most welcome.
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Late Antique Intellectualism in Medieval Islam: The Shiraz

Circle and the Revival of Ancient and Islamic Knowledge

Aristotle interpreted through the prism of late antique philosophers.5 Even if we

I am acutely aware of the impressionistic and loaded claims on offer;

Given the state of underdevelopment that our research is in, it seems to me

THE SHIRAZ CIRCLE

profound, and while modern scholarship is becoming increasingly aware of the

originally conceived theses, problematising the idea of originality as one that

Cassirer’s prescient words warn against tunnelled vision pursuits in search of

Dashtakī the Father

Born in 1424 in the district of Dashtak in Shiraz,21 Dashtakī hailed from a

endowment of the shrine that Dashtakī received instructions requiring him to

Dashtakī the Son

– To drive a wedge between philosophical Ashʿarism and Avicennan

LATE ANTIQUE INTELLECTUALISM

Islam…builds upon and preserves Christian-Antique Hellenism…A time will

thinkers. Their intellectual universe was vast, consisting of multi-coloured ﬁrma-

Intellectuals and Intellectualism

It will, however, of course, be understood that we only ascribe universal

spiritual trend of Idiorrhythmic or eremitic monasticism in fourth century CE

The wājib al-wujūd insofar as He is living (h ̣ayyan), knowing (ʿāliman),

In another instance that highlights the intertwining of religion and philosophy,

between post-classical thinkers such as Abū l-Barakāt al-Baghdādī and Sharaf

oriented – directly or otherwise – their function as philosopher. The scientiﬁca-

Occultism and Theurgy

traditions of antiquity,141 possibly after becoming acquainted with Aramaic

societies.152 Its enduring appeal to the scholarly community, including philoso-

Granted, al-Khafrī was more than a standard-issue mathematician and sci-

frames occultism in terms evocative of Late Antique Neoplatonism and ancient

Closely related to al-Khafrī’s reformulation of geomancy, expressed terms

Those who fail to understand [al-Dawānī’s intellectual deﬁciency] from the

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