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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books An Annotated Bibliography of the Works of Sadr Al-din Al-shirazi (mulla Sadra) With a Brief Account of His Life Sadra’s Works Mulla Sadra was a prolific writer and his extant corpus ranges from the monumental Asfar to treatises of a few pages. With the exception of his Sih asl and diwan of poetry in Persian, he wrote all of his works in Arabic. His style stands out as one of the most lucid and systematic forms of philosophical writing in Arabic.

As a general trait of his philosophy, Sadra weaves together the strictly logical discourse of the Peripatetic philosophers with the ecstatic language of the mystics. Very often we see Sadra bursting into various aphorisms, exhortations, and ecstatic exclamations, comparable only to the language of such figures as Ghazali and Ibn al-‘Arabi, after discussing a particular philosophical or cosmological problem in a rigorously analytical manner.

In cases where prose seems to fall short of conveying Sadra’s intended meaning, he does not hesitate to quote poetry both in Arabic and Persian. Sadra’s corpus spans the entire spectrum of traditional philosophy. Metaphysics, cosmology, ontology, epistemology, axiology, eschatology, psychology, and natural philosophy are treated in their traditional formats.

In addition to his purely philosophical works, Sadra has a lengthy yet incomplete commentary on the Qur’an and few other works on understanding the Qur’an and Shiite hadith. For purposes of classification, I shall divide Sadra’s works into two broad categories of transmitted and intellectual sciences. Sadra’s Qur’anic commentaries are the first works to come to our attention in the field of transmitted sciences.

Sadra is certainly not the first Muslim philosopher to write commentaries on the Qur’an. Ibn Sina wrote a short commentary on the famous light verse of the Qur’an (24:35), which describes God as the ‘light of the heavens and the earth’. With this commentary, Ibn Sina has initiated a new genre of philosophical exegesis soon to be followed by Ghazali and Suhrawardi. None of these philosophers, however, wrote extensive glosses over the Qur’anic verses.

In this sense, Sadra differs from his predecessors by giving a more prominent place in his writings to the verses of the Qur’an and the sayings of the Prophets and the Shi’ite imams.