Furthermore...

Furthermore, some of the most important figures like Sheikh Baha’ al-Din Amili, and Sayyid Ni‘matullah Jaza’iri, who played a vital role in the establishment of Shi‘ism in Persia, were Arabs from Amil near Damascus and Bahrain, two centres which had been preserving the Shi‘ah tradition for centuries.[^8] The Shi‘ahs have developed the Ja‘fari School of Law named after the sixth Imam, Imam Ja‘far al-Sadiq, as well as theology (Kalam) and other traditional studies, namely, language, history, hadith and commentary upon the Qur’an, jurisprudence (Fiqh) , principles of jurisprudence (Usul) ,[^9] theology,[^10] and Hikmat , this last being a combination of gnosis, theosophy, and philosophy which forms the main subject of our present study.

B. Hikmat The form of wisdom which has survived until today in the Shi‘ah world as Hikmat can neither be wholly identified with philosophy as currently understood in the West, not with theosophy which has unfortunately become identified in the English speaking world with pseudo-spiritualist movements, nor with theology.[^11] As developed in the Safawid period and continued to the present day, Hikmat consists of several threads knit together by the matrix of Shi‘ism.

The most important of these elements are the esoteric teachings of the Imams, especially as contained in the Nahj al-Balaghah by the first Imam ‘Ali, the ishraqi wisdom of Suhrawardi which contains in itself aspects of ancient Persian and Hermetic doctrines, the teachings of the earlier Sufis, especially the gnostic doctrines of ibn ‘Arabi, and the heritage of the Greek philosophers.

It is, therefore, not too surprising if many of the treatises on Hikmat begin with logic and end with ecstasy experienced in the catharsis (tajrid) and illumination of the intellect. They contain as a necessary basis some preparation in logic which they share with the Peripatetics (Masha’iyun), but instead of remaining bound to the plane of reason they use this logic as a springboard for their flight into the heaven of gnosis.

The group of sages who between the death of ibn Rushd, the so-called terminating point of Muslim philosophy, and the Safawids prepared the ground for the intellectual revival of the school of Ispahan are usually not much better known outside Persia than the Safawid sages themselves.