[163:1] This would seem very much like the idea of the phenomenal Brahma of the Vedānta. The Personal Creator or the Prajāpati of the Vedānta makes the third step of the Absolute Being or the Noumenal Brahma. Al-Jīlī seems to admit two kinds of Brahma—with or without qualities like the Śamkara and Bādarayana. To him the process of creation is essentially a lowering of the Absolute Thought, which is Asat, in so far as it is absolute, and Sat, in so far as it is manifested and hence limited. Notwithstanding this Absolute Monism, he inclines to a view similar to that of Rāmānuja. He seems to admit the reality of the individual soul and seems to imply, unlike Śamkara, that Īśwara and His worship are necessary even after the attainment of the Higher Knowledge.
[167:1] Insān al-Kāmil, Vol. I, p. 40.
[169:1] Insān al-Kāmil, Vol. I, p. 48.
"We cannot kindle when we will
The fire which in the heart resides".
[171:1] Insān al-Kāmil, Vol. I, p. 8.
CHAP. VI.
LATER PERSIAN THOUGHT.
Under the rude Tartar invaders of Persia, who could have no sympathy with independent thought, there could be no progress of ideas. Ṣūfīism, owing to its association with religion, went on systematising old and evolving new ideas. But philosophy proper was distasteful to the Tartar. Even the development of Islamic law suffered a check; since the Ḥanafite law was the acme of human reason to the Tartar, and further subtleties of legal interpretation were disagreeable to his brain. Old schools of thought lost their solidarity, and many thinkers left their native country to find more favourable conditions elsewhere. In the 16th century we find Persian Aristotelians—Dastūr Isfahānī, Hīr Bud, Munīr, and Kāmrān—travelling in India, where the Emperor Akbar was drawing upon Zoroastrianism to form a new faith for himself and his courtiers, who were mostly Persians. No great thinker, however, appeared in Persia until the 17th century, when the acute Mulla Ṣadra of Shīrāz upheld his philosophical system with all the vigour of his powerful logic. With Mulla Ṣadra Reality is all things yet is none of them, and true knowledge consists in the identity of the subject and the object. De Gobineau thinks that the philosophy of Ṣadra is a mere revival of Avicennaism. He, however, ignores the fact that Mulla Ṣadra's doctrine of the identity of subject and object constitutes the final step which the Persian intellect took towards complete monism. It is moreover the Philosophy of Ṣadra which is the source of the metaphysics of early Bābism.
But the movement towards Platonism is best illustrated in Mulla Hādī of Sabzwār who flourished in the 18th century, and is believed by his countrymen to be the greatest of modern Persian thinkers. As a specimen of comparatively recent Persian speculation, I may briefly notice here the views of this great thinker, as set forth in his Asrār al-Ḥikam (published in Persia). A glance at his philosophical teaching reveals three fundamental conceptions which are indissolubly associated with the Post-Islamic Persian thought:—
1. The idea of the Absolute Unity of the Real which is described as "Light".