Mulla Sadra’s epistemology is directly related to that...

Mulla Sadra’s epistemology is directly related to that Suhrawadi and the school of Illumination in general, a school in which distinction is made between conceptual knowledge (al-‘ibn al-busuli) and present knowledge (al-‘ibn al-buduri), forms of knowledge which are unified in the being of the possessor of knowledge on the highest level, a person whose Suhrawardi calls hakim muta’allih, literally a wise man, philosopher or theosophy who has become imbued with Divine Qualities and become “God-like”.

Conceptual knowledge is gained through concepts in the mind of that which is to be known whereas present knowledge implies the presence of the very reality to be known in the human intellect without the intermediary of mental concepts such as when one knows oneself, the intelligible or the divine realities. Such knowledge is illuminative and beyond the realm of ratiocination, but it is not without intellectual content.

Mulla Sadra accepted this ishraqi thesis, to which he added the significance of revelation as a foundational source of knowledge of a philosophical or theosophical order. The tradition of Islamic philosophy in Persia accepted fully this truth and awarded to Mulla Sadra the title of Sadr al-muta’allhin, that is, foremost among those who according to Suhrawardi belong to the highest category of possessors of metaphysical knowledge.

No higher title could be given to anyone in the context of the world view in which later Islamic Philosophy functioned.

In any case the grand synthesis of Islamic thought created by Mulla Sadra is based on the synthesis of these three ways of knowing through which he was able to integrate the earlier schools of Islamic schools into a unified world and create a new intellectual prospective known as alhikmat al-muta’aliyah which a number of leading scholars of Islamic philosophy who have written on him in European languages, such as Henry Corbin and Toshihiko Izutsu, have translated as the “transcendent theosophy” marks the birth of a new intellectual perspective in the Islamic world, one which has had profound influence during the later centuries in Persia as well as in Iraq and India, while the term alhikmat al-muta’aliyah had been used in a more general and less defined sense by a number of earlier Islamic thinkers such as Qutb al-Din Shirazi.