The Triumph of Mercy: Philosophy and Scripture in Mulla Sadra

摘要

At the dawn of the modern age, Sadr al-Din al-Shirazi (d. 1640) stood at the pinnacle of an unparalleled civilisation that already spanned more than a millennium and nearly the entire "known world". His corpus of writings throws a revealing light on the long procession of thinkers with whom he continued to dialogue-Ibn 'Arabl, Qunawi, Suhravardi, Ghazali, Razi and the ubiquitous mutakallimun, in the main. Dr Mohammed Rustom gives us a flavour of the complexity in this rather unassuming volume without straying from what he set out to accomplish (cf. p. 33): "explain, through a textual and analytical examination of one of Sadra's tafsir works, the manner in which philosophy and scripture interact with each other in his thought" (p. 4). Sadra meant to produce a full-fledged tafsir (Qur'anic exegesis) but composed sixteen separate texts, all told, compiled and published as the multi-volume Tafsir al-Qur'an al-karim. Dr Rustom wisely concentrates on his commentary on the Qur'an's opening chapter, Tafsir Surat al-fatiha (TSF). Far from diminishing the value of his analysis, this restriction enables him to probe more effectively why Sadra approached scripture in the way he did. This is the most important of a series of questions the author poses throughout this well-disciplined study, which incidentally spares us the customary thesis-style "review of the literature"; the author discusses his secondary sources in the main body of the book where he can more gainfully assess them.