Gottes Wesen – Gottes Wirken

While the art of editing an Arabic text as part of one’s doctoral training seems to have disappeared from British academia, it is salutary to note that the situation in Germany remains healthier. The book under review makes a major contribution to our study of Islamic intellectual history and particularly the development of philosophical traditions in the early Safavid period precisely because it provides us with a careful bio-bibliography and critical edition of two key texts. Thus far, Shams al-Din al-Khafri (d. 1535) is best known in the secondary sources as a creative theoretical astronomer, mainly through the efforts of George Saliba, who has studied his al-Takmilah fi sharti al-tadhkirah carefully in part as an assessment of the later reception of the scientific thought of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (d. 1274) expressed in his al-Tadhkirah fi [ilm al- hay’ah. That al-Khafri also wrote on matters of philosophy and philosophical theology demonstrates the abiding connection between theoretical approaches to science and philosophy well into the early modern period, an approach continued in the next generation with Baha’ al-Din al-[Amili (d. 1621). However, it was also the work of Henry Corbin and Seyyed Hossein Nasr who alerted us to the philosophical significance of al-Khafri as part of the ‘school of Shiraz’ that predated and influenced the more dramatic ‘school of Isfahan’. It was the short treatise of al-Khafri entitled On the Four Journeys that directly influenced the schema of the magnum opus of Mulla Sadra Shirazi (d. 1645) and there is also plenty of evidence of the metaphysics of al-Khafri similarly influencing the later thinker. In terms of the textual production presented here, Saatchian’s editions should be read alongside her earlier edition of al- Khafri’s marginalia on the metaphysics section of the Sharti al-jadid li’l-Tajrid which was published back in 2003, as well as Reza Pourjavady’s edition of his short Risalah fi maratib al-wujud published in 2005, and two short theological works on the exegesis of the Throne Verse of the Qur’an and a collection of Prophetic dicta.