Muhsin Fayd Kashani

Works

• 1636The White Path: A Refinement of the Revival

  Shiʿi recension of al-Ghazali’s Revival of the Religious Sciences, completed in 1636: Fayd Kashani keeps the four quarters on worship, customs, what destroys and what saves, but removes what he regarded as foreign to Islamic teaching and unreliable hadith and adds reports from the Shiʿi imams.

Position

Fayd Kashani is on the map as one of the two leading students of Mulla Sadra and as an author who joined philosophy, mystical knowledge (ʿirfān) and the teachings of the Shiʿi imams into one picture of religious life. In works such as Hidden Words (Kalimāt-i maknūna) and The Eye of Certainty (ʿAyn al-yaqīn) he set out Sadra’s metaphysics and the mystical tradition in a form close to the Qur’an and the reports of the imams, including the doctrine of an intermediate world of images in which spiritual realities take on bodily form. His best-known work, The White Path (al-Maḥajja al-bayḍāʾ), completed in 1636, is a Shiʿi recension of al-Ghazali’s Revival of the Religious Sciences: it keeps the four quarters on worship, customs, what destroys and what saves and most of al-Ghazali’s ethical psychology, but removes chapters and hadith that Fayd regarded as foreign to Islamic teaching or unreliable and adds reports from the imams; it became a standard book of ethics among Shiʿi scholars. In hadith he brought together the four early Shiʿi collections in The Sufficient (al-Wāfī). In law he sided with the Akhbaris, who relied on the reports of the imams rather than on the reasoning of jurists, and he defended positions that were contested at the time, for instance on Friday prayer and on music. Together with ʿAbd al-Razzaq Lahiji, Sadra’s other son-in-law, he shows that the school of Isfahan did not end with Mulla Sadra.

Life & context

Muhammad ibn Murtada, known as Mulla Muhsin Fayd (or Fayz) Kashani, was born in Kashan in 1598 into a family of scholars and began his studies with his father, who owned a rich library. At about twenty he went to Isfahan and then to Shiraz to study hadith and law with Sayyid Majid Bahrani. Back in Isfahan he joined the circle of Shaykh Bahaʾi and studied philosophy with Mir Damad. From 1620/21 to 1628/29 he studied with Mulla Sadra in Qom, as he records in his autobiographical treatise Sharḥ-i ṣadr, and married Sadra’s daughter Zubayda. Later he led the Friday prayer in Isfahan, at a time when Shiʿi jurists disputed whether Friday prayer was permitted in the absence of the hidden imam. He wrote some one hundred and twenty works in Arabic and Persian, prose and poetry. He died in Kashan in 1680.

Further main works

• The Sufficient (al-Wāfī), a collection of the four early Shiʿi hadith books
• The Eye of Certainty (ʿAyn al-yaqīn)
• Hidden Words (Kalimāt-i maknūna)
• The Pure Commentary on the Qur’an (Tafsīr al-Ṣāfī)