Hadi Sabzawari

Works

• 1845Commentary on the Versified Treatise

  Al-Sabzawari’s own commentary, completed in 1845, on his didactic poem on logic and philosophy: in rhymed Arabic verse and prose explanation it sets out Mulla Sadra’s philosophy – the primacy and gradation of being, substantial motion, the soul and its return – and has been the basic textbook of philosophy in Iranian seminaries ever since.

• c. 1869Secrets of Wisdom

  Persian summary of philosophy and theology written at the request of Nasir al-Din Shah: the beginning and end of things and the knowledge of the self, with an account of the virtues; Muhammad Iqbal presented its doctrines of light, shadow and darkness in 1908.

Position

Sabzawari is on the map as the philosopher who made Mulla Sadra the master thinker of Iranian philosophy in the nineteenth century. His didactic poem on logic and philosophy, with his own commentary completed in 1845 (Sharḥ-i Manẓūma), sets out Sadra’s system in rhymed Arabic verse: the primacy of existence over essence, existence as one reality with grades of intensity from God to matter, substantial motion, the soul and its return to God. Short enough to memorise and dense enough to need a teacher, it became and has remained the basic textbook of philosophy in Iranian seminaries and has been commented on many times; Toshihiko Izutsu and Mehdi Mohaghegh edited and translated its metaphysics. Sabzawari also wrote glosses on Sadra’s Four Journeys and on Ibn Sina’s Healing, a commentary on difficult verses of Rumi’s Masnavi, and mystical poems under the pen name Asrār, “secrets”; he held that philosophy must be completed by asceticism and inner purification. At the request of Nasir al-Din Shah he wrote the Persian Secrets of Wisdom (Asrār al-ḥikam). In 1908 Muhammad Iqbal presented its doctrine of light, shadow and darkness in The Development of Metaphysics in Persia as a sign that philosophy was still alive in Iran, though he dated him wrongly to the eighteenth century. Through his students and their students, Sadra’s philosophy reached the scholars of Qom and Tehran in the twentieth century.

Life & context

Mulla Hadi Sabzawari was born in 1797 in Sabzevar in Khorasan into a family of land-owning merchants. After his father’s early death he was brought up by a cousin, who took him at ten to Mashhad. He then went to Isfahan, still the centre of philosophy in Iran, and studied for some eight years with Mulla ʿAli Nuri and Mulla Ismaʿil Isfahani, the leading teachers of Mulla Sadra’s philosophy, concentrating on the Four Journeys and The Divine Witnesses. After teaching in Mashhad and a pilgrimage to Mecca (1832–33) he settled in Sabzevar, where he taught philosophy for the rest of his life in a madrasa that drew students from all over Iran. The orientalist Edward Browne reported that he secretly left money in the rooms of needy students. Nasir al-Din Shah visited him on a journey to Mashhad. He died in Sabzevar in 1873.

Further main works

• Glosses on Mulla Sadra’s Four Journeys (al-Asfār)
• Commentary on difficult verses of Rumi’s Masnavi
• Collected poems (Dīwān-i Asrār)