The core
Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī (1571–1640), known as Mulla Sadra, is arguably the most original philosopher in the Islamic tradition since Ibn Sīnā — and the least known in the Sunni world. Working in Safavid Iran, he developed a philosophical system called al-ḥikma al-muta’āliyah (transcendent theosophy) that synthesised Aristotelian philosophy, Avicennan metaphysics, Sufi illuminationism, and Shi’i theology into a unified vision of reality.
His central insight — the one that makes his philosophy genuinely revolutionary — is the primacy of existence(aṣālat al-wujūd) over essence (māhiyyah). Before Mulla Sadra, the dominant position in Islamic philosophy (following Ibn Sīnā) was that essences are primary: things are what they are because of their essences, and existence is something added to essence. Mulla Sadra reversed this: existence is primary, and essences are derivative. A horse is not a pre-existing essence that “receives” existence; it is an act of existing that manifests a particular form. Being comes first; what a thing is flows from the fact that it is.
Substantial motion
The most radical consequence of this reversal is Mulla Sadra’s doctrine of substantial motion (al-ḥaraka al-jawhariyyah). Aristotle and the entire Islamic peripatetic tradition held that change occurs only in the accidental properties of things — their colour, position, size — while their substance remains constant. Mulla Sadra argued that substance itself changes. The world is not a collection of fixed essences undergoing superficial modifications; it is a process of continuous becoming in which beings constantly intensify or diminish in their degree of existence.
This means that being itself admits of degrees. A stone exists, but less intensely than a plant; a plant exists, but less intensely than an animal; an animal exists, but less intensely than a human being; and the human soul, through spiritual development, can ascend to higher degrees of existence — becoming more real, more itself, as it approaches the divine source of all being. This is the gradation of being (tashkīk al-wujūd): not a static hierarchy but a dynamic continuum along which entities move.
The journey of the soul
Mulla Sadra’s metaphysics transforms the traditional Islamic concept of the soul’s journey. The soul does not merely acquire new knowledge or purify existing character; it undergoes an ontological transformation — it becomes a different, more intensely existing being. “The soul is bodily in its origination and spiritual in its subsistence,” he wrote. It begins as a material entity and, through intellectual and spiritual development, intensifies to the point of becoming an independent intellectual substance — capable of surviving the body’s death not because it was always immaterial (as Plato supposed) but because it has become immaterial through its own developmental process.
In the Islamic tradition
Mulla Sadra’s philosophy represents the culmination of a thousand-year dialogue within Islamic thought. He drew on the peripatetic tradition of Ibn Sīnā, the illuminationist philosophy of Suhrawardī, the mystical metaphysics of Ibn ’Arabī, and the theology of the Shi’i Imams — weaving these strands into a system that is greater than any of its sources.
In the Shi’i world, Mulla Sadra’s influence is immense. His philosophical system has been taught continuously in Iranian seminaries for four centuries and remains the dominant framework for philosophical theology in Shi’i Islam. The Iranian Revolution’s ideologues — including Ayatollah Khomeini, who was a trained Sadrian philosopher — were deeply shaped by his thought, though they applied it in ways he could not have anticipated.
In the Sunni world, Mulla Sadra is almost unknown — a casualty of the sectarian divide that has fragmented Islamic intellectual life. This is a significant loss. His doctrine of substantial motion — the idea that beings develop, change, and intensify in their very substance — is one of the most philosophically productive ideas in the Islamic tradition, and its resonances with process philosophy, evolutionary thought, and developmental psychology are striking.
Iqbal did not engage extensively with Mulla Sadra in his published works — his philosophical interlocutors were primarily Western (Bergson, Nietzsche, Whitehead) and classical Islamic (al-Ghazali, Ibn ’Arabī, Rumi). But the structural parallels are remarkable. Iqbal’s vision of the self as a centre of experience that develops through creative activity, intensifying in its reality as it grows — this is recognisably Sadrian, whether or not Iqbal was conscious of the parallel. Both thinkers share the conviction that reality is not static but developmental, and that the human being is a being whose very substance is in motion — becoming more or less real depending on how they live.
Why this matters
Pakistan’s intellectual culture is almost entirely unaware of Mulla Sadra — and this ignorance reflects a broader problem. The Islamic philosophical tradition is treated as a historical curiosity rather than a living resource. The assumption — in both secular and religious educational institutions — is that philosophy in the Islamic world ended with al-Ghazali or, at best, with Ibn Rushd. Everything after is either “mere mysticism” or “Shi’i theology” — categories that effectively quarantine some of the most rigorous and original philosophical thinking the tradition has produced.
Mulla Sadra’s idea that being itself can intensify — that a human being can become more real through spiritual and intellectual development — has consequences for everything Tadreej cares about. If khudi is real, then the self is not a fixed entity that remains the same regardless of what it does. It is a process — a becoming that can move in the direction of greater reality or lesser reality. The person who cultivates their intellect, their character, their capacity for creative action is not merely improving themselves in the way that a student improves their grades. They are becoming more real — more fully existing, more intensely present in the world.
This is a metaphysics that takes human development seriously — not as a metaphor but as an ontological fact. And it is a metaphysics that the Islamic tradition produced from its own resources, without borrowing from the West. Recovering it — making it available to a new generation of Pakistani thinkers who have been taught that Islamic philosophy ended in the twelfth century — is part of what Tadreej means by the recovery of intellectual heritage.
Connections
Related pages
Appears in
Lecture V (throughout)
Further reading
- Sajjad Rizvi, Mulla Sadra and Metaphysics (Routledge)
- Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Sadr al-Din Shirazi and His Transcendent Theosophy
- Muhammad Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, Lecture V