ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Mulla Sadra's Seddiqin Argument For the Existence of God Conclusion The Seddiqin Argument, as an argument for proving the existence, attributes and acts of God, is not much known by Western philosophy, what assumes there are three or four important sets of arguments for the existence of God, namely the ontological, the cosmological, the teleological and perhaps the moral.

This can be because of the assumption in the view of Western thinkers that Islamic philosophy came to an end with the death of Averroes and/or it ceased to exist with what was written by Ghazzali (1058-1111) against philosophical thinking in his important and influential book, namely Tahafut al-Falasifat. In reality, what came to an end was only the first phase of the whole history of Islamic philosophy.

With the death of Averroes, Islamic philosophy ceased to be alive for the West, but this does not mean that it ceased to be alive for the East. In fact, Islamic philosophy did not develop in all Muslim countries after Ghazzali and Averroes especially among Sunni Muslims; and in the Arabian areas there was no longer a large interest in developing philosophy.

Since these Muslims were the majority and had more relations to the West, the assumption that there were no new philosophical views in Muslim countries grew in the West. This assumption was an obstacle between Islamic philosophy and Western philosophy and impeded active relation between their ideas. In fact, the truth of the matter is that a kind of philosophy which deserves to be regarded as typically and characteristically Islamic developed not so much before the death of Averroes as after.

This typically Islamic philosophy arose and matured in the periods subsequent to the Mongol invasion, until in the Safawid period in Iran it reached the apex of vigorous creativity. This peculiar type of Islamic philosophy which grew up in Iran among the Shiites has come to be known as hikmat or theosophy (lit. "wisdom"). We can trace the origin of the hikmat back to the very beginning of the above-mentioned second phase of the history of philosophy in Islam.

Hikmat is structurally a peculiar combination of rational thinking and Gnostic intuition, or, we might say, rationalist philosophy and mystical experience. The most famous and important philosophers of this second phase of Islamic philosophy is Mulla Sadra.