Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi

Works

• 1295Commentary on the Philosophy of Illumination

  Commentary, completed in 1295, on Suhrawardi’s Philosophy of Illumination: Qutb al-Din explains Suhrawardi’s logic, his critique of the Peripatetics and his metaphysics of lights phrase by phrase, drawing on Shahrazuri’s earlier commentary, which his own supplanted; Mulla Sadra wrote glosses on it, and Henry Corbin began his study of Suhrawardi from a copy of it.

• 1306The Pearly Crown

  Encyclopedia of philosophy and the sciences in Persian, dedicated in 1306 to the ruler of a principality in Gilan: logic, philosophy, mathematics and astronomy, music and theology, written for a reader who did not know Arabic.

Position

Qutb al-Din is on the map as a scholar who carried the work of the Maragha school into several fields at once. In astronomy he wrote The Limit of Comprehension (Nihāyat al-idrāk, 1281) and The Royal Gift (al-Tuḥfa al-shāhiyya, 1284), which proposed planetary models that avoid Ptolemy’s equant; his five-volume commentary on the general part of Ibn Sina’s Canon tried to settle the questions that earlier commentators, among them Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, had left open. His Persian encyclopedia The Pearly Crown (1306) presented logic, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy and music for readers without Arabic. His most lasting philosophical work is the commentary on Suhrawardi’s Philosophy of Illumination, completed in 1295, which supplanted the earlier commentary of Shahrazuri. Qutb al-Din explains Suhrawardi’s logic, his critique of the Peripatetics and his metaphysics of lights, and stresses that Illuminationist knowledge rests on direct, intuitive presence that needs no definition; he identifies Suhrawardi’s “reality” of a thing with its quiddity. Through this commentary Suhrawardi was read in the following centuries: Mulla Sadra wrote glosses on it, and in the twentieth century Henry Corbin began his work on Suhrawardi with a copy of it. John Walbridge’s study The Science of Mystic Lights (1992) remains the standard account of his life and thought.

Life & context

Qutb al-Din Mahmud ibn Masʿud al-Shirazi was born in October 1236 into a family of physicians in Shiraz. He was trained in medicine by his father and after his father’s death took over his post as ophthalmologist at the Muzaffari hospital; with other teachers he studied Ibn Sina’s Canon of Medicine. Around 1262 he went to the new observatory of Maragha, where he studied Ibn Sina’s Remarks and Admonitions and astronomy with Nasir al-Din al-Tusi and also learned from Najm al-Din al-Katibi and the astronomer Muʾayyad al-Din al-ʿUrdi. He then travelled widely – to Khorasan, Qazvin, Isfahan, Baghdad and Konya – served as chief judge in Sivas and Malatya in Anatolia and in 1282 went to Egypt as envoy of the Ilkhan Ahmad Tegüder to the Mamluk sultan Qalawun. In his later years he taught Ibn Sina’s Canon and Healing in Syria and then lived in Tabriz at the Mongol court, where he died on 7 February 1311.

Further main works

• The Limit of Comprehension in the Science of the Heavens (Nihāyat al-idrāk, 1281)
• The Royal Gift on Astronomy (al-Tuḥfa al-shāhiyya, 1284)
• Commentary on the general part of Ibn Sina’s Canon (al-Tuḥfa al-saʿdiyya)