Jalal al-Din al-Dawani

Works

• c. 1475Jalalian Ethics

  Persian work of practical philosophy written for the Aq Qoyunlu court: ethics, the household and the state, after the model of al-Tusi’s Nasirean Ethics but with more Qur’anic and Sufi material; it was widely read in Iran, India and the Ottoman lands.

• c. 1480Shapes of the Houris: Commentary on the Temples of Light

  Commentary on Suhrawardi’s short treatise The Temples of Light: body and soul, the Necessary Existent and the hierarchy of lights, prophecy and the return of the soul, read in the light of Ibn Sina’s philosophy; Ghiyath al-Din Dashtaki answered it with a counter-commentary.

Position

Al-Dawani is on the map as a leading philosopher of the school of Shiraz, which in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries kept philosophy, theology and Illuminationism in close conversation. Much of his thought took shape in a long rivalry with Sadr al-Din Dashtaki, carried on in letters and in competing glosses on ʿAli al-Qushji’s commentary on Nasir al-Din al-Tusi’s Abstract of Theology (Tajrīd al-iʿtiqād). One subject was the Liar paradox, to which both wrote separate treatises: al-Dawani argued that “What I am saying now is false” is not a statement at all, because it does not imitate any relation in reality. In metaphysics he held that existence in the strict sense is God alone, while everything else is “existent” by its relation to that existence – a view that Dashtaki accused of mixing philosophy and Sufism; later literature calls it the “taste of deification” (dhawq al-taʾalluh), and Mulla Sadra took it up in an early work before moving beyond it. Whether al-Dawani was simply an ontological monist is disputed. His commentary on Suhrawardi’s Temples of Light read the Illuminationist hierarchy of lights through Ibn Sina, and Ghiyath al-Din Dashtaki answered it with a counter-commentary. His Jalalian Ethics (Akhlāq-i Jalālī) reworked al-Tusi’s Nasirean Ethics – ethics, household and state – with more Qur’anic and Sufi material and became a model for later Persian and Ottoman works, including Kınalızade’s Ethics of Ali. His commentary on al-Iji’s ʿAdudi Creed remained in use for centuries; the young Muhammad Abduh wrote a supercommentary on it in 1876.

Life & context

Jalal al-Din Muhammad ibn Asʿad al-Dawani was born in 1426 or 1427 in Davan near Kazerun in Fars, the son of a judge. He studied with his father and then in Shiraz, where his first work, a commentary on al-Baydawi’s Qur’an commentary, is dated 1449. In the 1460s he briefly served as head of religious affairs for the Qara Qoyunlu governor of Fars and accompanied Jahan Shah on the campaign against Uzun Hasan, which ended in Jahan Shah’s defeat in 1467. He soon entered the service of the victorious Aq Qoyunlu and became chief judge of Fars under Yaʿqub Beg. He dedicated works to the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II and to rulers in India and grew rich from their gifts, but in 1498 or 1499 his property was confiscated. He spent his last years in small towns south of Shiraz and died in 1502; he was buried in Davan.

Further main works

• Shapes of the Houris: Commentary on Suhrawardi’s Temples of Light (Shawākil al-ḥūr)
• Old and New Glosses on al-Qushji’s commentary on al-Tusi’s Tajrīd al-iʿtiqād
• Commentary on al-Iji’s ʿAdudi Creed (Sharḥ al-ʿAqāʾid al-ʿAḍudiyya)
• Treatise on the paradox of the irrational root (the Liar paradox)