In fact...

In fact, his commentaries amount to a considerable size and have been edited and published by Muhammad Khwajawi in 7 volumes as Tafsir al-qur’an al-karim, which will be discussed below. Sadra’s Qur’anic commentaries are of particular importance for they are written from the point of view of his philosophy, i.e., ‘transcendent wisdom’ (al-hikmat al-muta’aliyah), giving one of the finest examples of philosophical and mystical exegesis.

This aspect of Sadra’s works has been largely ignored, and consequently there are only a few short essays we can mention on the subject in European languages.[^24] Sadra has also written a mystico-philosophical commentary on the famous Shi’ite book of hadith Usul al-kafi compiled by Kulayni. As in his Qur’anic commentaries, Sadra deals with various sayings of the Prophet and Shi’ite Imams to bring out their philosophical significance.

His commentary on the Usul al-kafi is titled Kitab al-‘aql wa’l-jahl (“The Book of Intelligence and Ignorance”), in which he interprets many sayings of the Imams within the context of such metaphysical issues as the primacy of being (wujud), God’s Names and Attributes, and bodily resurrection. In writing these glosses, Sadra seems to be particularly interested in showing the intrinsic relation between two sources of knowledge, viz., transmitted-religious and intellectual-philosophical.

Mulla Sadra’s most important works that have gained him numerous honorific titles, however, are in the field of intellectual sciences, particularly in traditional metaphysics and philosophy. Although a great majority of these works have been published due to the single-handed and indefatigable efforts of Sayyid Jalal al-Din Ashtiyani and, more recently, Muhammad Khwajawi, we are far from having a complete list of Sadra’s works critically edited and published.

The following bibliography will give a detailed discussion of these works. Sadra’s philosophical works occupy a special place in the annals of Islamic intellectual history. Without claiming to be exhaustive, we can highlight three aspects of this immense corpus. The first point concerns the historical period in which Sadra composed his works. Sadra was a contemporary of Descartes, and is considered to be one of the peaks of the post-Avicennan Islamic philosophy.