Matthew Melvin-Koushki

This dissertation takes as its point of departure two key insights: first, that millenarian, universalist forms of thought were ubiquitous in late medieval and early modern intellectual history, whether in the Islamicate heartlands or Renaissance Europe; second, that the occult sciences (al-ʿulūm al-gharība) were far more integral to such universalist projects than has previously been acknowledged. I therefore focus my inquiry on Ṣāʾin al-Dīn Turka Iṣfahānī (1369-1432), the foremost occult philosopher of early Timurid Iran, whose lettrist or kabbalistic thought (ʿilm al-ḥurūf) constitutes the centerpiece of his universalist project. Most notably, this type of occult philosophy—referring as it does to the neoplatonic-neopythagorean quest to comprehend the cosmos using all available means, whether rational or mystical, scientific or magical, in concert—precisely exemplifies the ‘will to synthesis’ that characterizes so much of later Islamicate intellectual history.

Ibn Turka was hardly exceptional in this regard; recent research suggests that he was the leader of a circle of thinkers based in Isfahan and Yazd, which included such heavyweights as Sharaf al-Dīn Yazdī (d. 1454) and Qāżīzāda Rūmī (d. 1432). This Isfahan Circle, moreover, was but the eastern branch of a vast extra-establishment network of intellectuals propagating from Cairo to Anatolia on the one hand and western Iran (and from thence Central Asia and India) on the other, and calling themselves, cryptically, the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ. The pivot of this network was Sayyid Ḥusayn Akhlāṭī (d. 1397), occultist and wonderworker at the Mamluk court in Cairo, who proclaimed a new era of human development through the retrieval and open promulgation of the occult sciences. Ṣāʾin al-Dīn presents himself as simply the systematizer of Akhlāṭī’s teachings, and was received as such in the later lettrist tradition.

Despite his importance, however, half of Ṣāʾin al-Dīn’s oeuvre remains in manuscript—including, predictably, his lettrist works, assumed to be the most marginal component of his thought. Ironically, it is precisely the fact that Ṣāʾin al-Dīn has been acclaimed since the 19th century as an important synthesizer of peripatetic-illuminationist philosophy and mystical theory linking Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240) with Mullā Ṣadrā (d. 1640) that led to his marginalization in the literature; by effectively obscuring the occultist tenor of his larger project, such acclaim abstracts it from its historical context and robs it of its animating virtue. The burden of the present study is therefore to remedy this neglect by presenting and contextualizing the central lettrist component of Ṣāʾin al-Dīn’s thought on the basis of his unpublished lettrist works, with particular attention to his magisterial K. al-Mafāḥiṣ or Book of Inquiries, a summa of intellectual lettrism.

Following a presentation of Ṣāʾin al-Dīn’s biography and religio-historical context in Chapter 1 and an annotated list of his writings (some 45 Persian and Arabic works in total) in Chapter 2, the central chapters of Part 1 of this study investigate various aspects of his universalist lettrist project, with particular reference to peripatetic-illuminationist philosophy on the one hand and Sufism on the other. Chapter 7 consists largely of translated sections from the Mafāḥiṣ; Part 2 of this study is devoted to editions and/or translations of five of his minor lettrist treatises.

A running theme in Ṣāʾin al-Dīn’s works is invidious comparison of lettrism and philosophy: the faux-universal concepts of philosophical speculation notwithstanding, only the letter encompasses all that is and is not, all that can and cannot be; it alone is the coincidentia oppositorum; hence lettrism is the only truly universal science. I argue that Ṣāʾin al-Dīn’s unprecedented lionization of lettrism vis-à-vis philosophy represents a specifically intellectual form of the science distinct from its originary gnostic-messianic and Sufi strains. Indeed, it is typically—and erroneously—assumed that the Hurufi movement of Fażl Allāh Astarābādī (d. 1394) defines later Islamicate lettrism; as an example of popular gnostic-messianic-Sufi lettrism, rather, that movement’s vigor testifies to the religio-cultural valency of lettrism in Iran at all levels. I further argue that lettrist theory informs the ornate literary practice of the period, as may be seen in Ṣāʾin al-Dīn’s status as vaunted stylist of Persian prose.

Far from being fringe thinkers, Muslim lettrists of Ṣāʾin al-Dīn’s stripe saw themselves as both advancing human knowledge of the cosmos and demonstrating the miraculous inimitability of the Quran as the clearest transcript of divine Speech in history. Ibn Turka’s significance within late medieval intellectual history centers precisely on his status as one of a panoply of late medieval and early modern thinkers to understand reality in textual terms, to be driven by the prospect of decoding and recoding the twin Books, the Quran and the cosmos.

The successors of Amir Temür (r. 1370-1405), supreme Lord of Conjunction (ṣāḥib-qirān), developed a distinctive form of saint-philosopher-kingship without precedent in Islamic history. Most notably, as part and parcel of their universalist-imperialist quest to transcend binaries political (caliphate vs. sultanate) and epistemological (ẓāhir vs. bāṭin) in equal measure, they fashioned themselves absolutist astrocrats, capable of talismanically marrying heaven to earth, by means of a personal mastery of astronomy-astrology. Of manifest political utility, the science of the stars had attracted the perennial interest of ruling elites since antiquity, to be sure; but these Timurid rulers were the first to pursue it within an explicitly lettrist-neopythagorean framework—whence the dual astrological-lettrist platform undergirding Timurid claims to imperial universalism, which definitively timuridized the very title ṣāḥib-qirān; and whence the mathematization of astronomy by the members of the Samarkand Observatory, a revolutionary development much feted by historians of science. Thus institutionalized, this same (occult-)scientific platform remained an effective means of performing a specifically Timurid mode of sovereignty throughout the Persianate world until at least the mid-17th century, and especially in Mughal India.

This article discusses the personal scientific output and patronage programs of two Timurid philosopher-kings: Iskandar Sulṭān b. ʿUmar Shaykh b. Temür (r. 1409-14), hugely ambitious (if soon foiled) patron of the sciences of stars and letters, who authored the preface to a state-of-the-art manual of mathematical astronomy (and perhaps the manual itself), the Sultanic Compendium (Jāmiʿ-i Sulṭānī); and his more successful cousin Ulugh Beg b. Shāhrukh b. Temür (r. 1409-49), founder of the Samarkand Observatory and Madrasa complex and co-author of the crucial New Sultanic Star Tables (Zīj-i Jadīd-i Sulṭānī), who was hailed by his astronomer and lettrist patronees as messianic sultan-scientist (al-sulṭān al-faylasūf). Intriguingly, while the intellectual-imperial projects of both men are indeed unprecedented in the Islamicate context, they may be said to islamicize—perhaps consciously—the classical model of Archytas (Arkhūṭas, d. 347 BCE), ruler of the powerful Greek city-state Tarentum and leading pythagorean philosopher, who too was a mathematician-astronomer king. Nor do they seem to have had true successors: no subsequent Turko-Mongol Perso-Islamic sovereign is known to have personally authored scientific texts in the quest to mathematize the cosmos.

Nevertheless, the model established by Iskandar Sulṭān and Ulugh Beg ensured that astronomy-astrology and lettrism in particular would continue to be heavily patronized by subsequent Timurid, and Indo-Timurid, dynasts (as well as their Safavid and Ottoman competitors). This includes in the first place Emperor Akbar’s grandson Shāhjahān (r. 1628-57), self-proclaimed Second Lord of Conjunction (ṣāḥib-qirān-i sānī), who commissioned upon his accession the Zīj-i Shāhjahānī, an updated and corrected version of Ulugh Beg’s star tables of two centuries prior; tellingly, it features the first preface in the Arabo-Persian astronomical tradition to be explicitly lettrist in tenor. The same feature is shared by the preface to the Supreme Secret (Sirr-i Akbar), a much-celebrated Persian translation of the Upanishads, the first, by Shāhjahān’s son Dārā Shukūh (d. 1659), concordist author of a number of other works. This famed but ill-starred saint-prince, who was executed by his more politically and militarily astute brother Awrangzēb after a failed succession bid, did prefer sufism to astral science; but his casting of Hindu tawḥīd in lettrist terms was similarly calculated, I argue, to signal his performance of Timurid sovereignty.

Such authorial evidence suggests that the neopythagorean worldview of our royal actors must be taken far more seriously than it has been to date; that they held the cosmos itself to be a mathematical text to be riddled by scientists of stars and letters alone explains the contours of their remarkable intellectual-imperial projects. And if the world is indeed a text, it also demands to be written, preferably in marble: may we thus not style Shāhjahān himself author of the unparalleled cosmographical logogriph (muʿammā)—which poetical genre was made a mainstay of lettrist practice precisely by Timurid scholars—that is the Tāj Maḥal?

Ibn ʿArabī’s Allusions of the Quran in the World of Man, a minor and as yet little-studied work of 1205, epitomizes his jazz philosophy more generally. Its rhymed prose also playfully riffs on and encodes as riddle the two occult sciences that would become the core of the Akbarian imperial-scientific legacy throughout the early modern Persianate world in particular: lettrism and astrology. To open this gorgeous, gnostic, visionary exegesis to comparative study, over a third is translated here, with emphasis on its astro-lettrist stylings.

Keywords: jazz philosophy, tafsir, lettrism, astrology, imperial occultism, coincidentia oppositorum

That Safavid Iran was scene to a boom in the occult sciences (ʿulum-i gharība) is now beginning to be acknowledged by specialists; what has yet to be appreciated is the extent to which that boom represented a smooth and conscious continuation of Mamluk, Aqquyunlu, Ottoman and especially Timurid Sunni precedent. In particular, lettrism (ʿilm-i ḥurūf), developed by the Pythagoreanizing, imamophile New Brethren of Purity as universal imperial science, was embraced by leading Safavid thinkers and doers as a primary Sunni means of Shiʿizing Iran. This occult continuity is epitomized by the oeuvre of Maḥmūd Dihdār Shīrāzī "ʿIyānī" (fl. 1576), the most prolific Persian author on lettrism of the sixteenth century and teacher to Shaykh Bahāʾī (d. 1621) himself. His Unveiling Secrets (Kashf al-asrār) -- a passionate prosimetric paean to Imam ʿAlī as cosmic principle in strictly Akbarian-Būnian terms, like Rajab al-Bursī's (d. after 1410) work before it -- is contextualized and translated here as a case in point.

This comparative case study takes up the examples of two Twelver lettrists, who together became two of the most important occultist authorities of the high Safavid period: al-Ḥāfiẓ Rajab al-Bursī (d. after 1410) and Maḥmūd Dihdār Shīrāzī (fl. 1576). Their projects are intimately connected, and can only be historiographically explained in tandem. Yet the first has been celebrated in the literature as a passionate, semi-extremist Twelver mystic, and the second—a sober, experimentalist Twelver occult scientist—totally elided. Nor has any study to date identified both authors’ primary point of scholarly reference: the New Brethren of Purity network of imperial Timurid and Ottoman Pythagoreanizing occultists radiating from late Mamluk Cairo, capital of the lettrist renaissance to which they were consciously heir. To correct such elisions and imbalances, we must forswear the persistent scientistic-cum-religionist dogma that vanishes lettrism and other mainstream occult sciences into the wastebasket, apolitical category that is “mysticism,” thus exiling much of Safavid intellection from early modern history of philosophy, of science and of empire. For al-Bursī, taking a page from his contemporaries the New Brethren, is the first Shiʿi author to draw directly on Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240) and Aḥmad al-Būnī (d. btw. 1225–33) both, the two foremost Sunni lettrists of the later Islamicate scholarly tradition, representing lettrist theory and lettrist praxis respectively; and Dihdār—the most prolific Persian author on practical Būnian lettrism of the sixteenth century, and hence immediate inspiration for the al-Bursī cult of the next—provides us an invaluable window onto how Safavid philosophy was actually imperially, occult-scientifically practiced, as well as the evolution of the Western grimoire tradition as a whole.

An early nineteenth-century Perso-Arabic manual of prayer, Hidden Gems and Treasured Pearls provides an invaluable window onto the theory and practice of Twelver Shiʿism in Qajar Iran. Unlike prayer manuals more popular today, it presents its discipline strictly as a subset of lettrist or kabbalist magic, a tried and true form of mind technology. And by featuring a wide range of medieval and early modern authorities, Shiʿi and Sunni alike, from Aḥmad al-Būnī and Rajab al-Bursī to Mīr Dāmād and Shaykh Bahāʾī, Hidden Gems reconstructs a golden age of Safavid occultism. Its author, Mullā Muṣṭafā b. Muḥammad Hādī Khūʾī-Yazdī (d. after 1255/1839), was one of the most prominent and prolific students of Shaykh Aḥmad al-Aḥsāʾī (d. 1241/1826), putative eponym of the Shaykhiyya, the pietistic Twelver reformist movement credited with giving rise to the Babi and then Bahaʾi movements in turn. This prayer manual is thus both a codification of Shaykhi devotional practice and an exercise in Qajar-Safavid cultural remembrance—acts whose ramifications continue to the present. By the same token, its experimentalist tenor makes it an instructive entry in the Islamicate and Persianate history of technology on the eve of the colonial era.

More than any other object of historical and anthropological study, Islamicate occult science cuts to the quick of what it means to be modern, to be Western, to be scientific. Yet nowhere else are 19th-century colonialist metaphysics and materialist cosmology more firmly entrenched. The piecemeal, truncated study of “Magic in Islam” to date has thus of-ten been pursued in service of either scientistic or religionist agendas, whereby magic can only ever be failed science or apolitical religion, and Islam can never be the West; Islamic Magic as simply Western and often imperial Science-and-Religion is thereby utterly disappeared from historiographical purview. And even those Islamicist historians of science and historians of religion who eschew ideology in favor of rigorously empirical philology, the majority, have tended to favor outsider, polemical discourses over insider, practitioner ones, and “classical” sources over “postclassical,” resulting in bizarre historiographical distortions and the disenchanting sanitization of Islamicate societies past and present. This manifesto therefore proposes a way out of this dire epistemological and ethical bind. To re-store Islamic Magic to its rightful place in Western intellectual and cultural history, especially history of science, we must take far more seriously the panpsychist cosmology on which it is predicated, and realize that our own reflexive materialism commits us willynilly to a colonialist agenda that is, ironically, both antireligious and antiscientific.

The genre of the plague treatise, still little studied, testifies to the cultural transformations that swept western Eurasia after the Black Death apocalypse of the mid-fourteenth century, with recurrent outbreaks for centuries thereafter. Ottoman contributions to this genre are exemplary: they allow us to track the emergence of an imperial-scientific early modernity. This article presents the most comprehensive and innovative Islamicate plague treatise extant, Taşköprīzāde Aḥmed’s (d. 1561) Treatise on Healing Epidemic Diseases. Therein the celebrated Ottoman polymath makes a strong case, advanced by arguments both religious and rational, for occult science as the most empirical method for preventing and curing the plague. To this end, he devotes the theoretical first half of the treatise to a critique of fatalist scholars and sufis, who prefer tawakkul to tasabbub, or blind faith to “scientific method”; the practical second half is devoted to what he considers to be the most medically effective scientific discipline of his era, lettrism (ʿilm al-ḥurūf)—a Neopythagorean science encapsulating the new “cosmological imaginary” of Western early modernity generally, wherein the world was seen by many thinkers and doers as a mathematical and hence magically tractable text. Our distaste for occult science notwithstanding, Taşköprīzāde must here be named another early modern empiricist.

While the study of Safavid philosophy has burgeoned in recent decades, and its heavily Neoplatonic and antiquarian-perennialist tenor is widely recognized, few specialists have acknowledged its equally notable Neopythagorean turn. Due to endemic scholarly occultophobia, moreover, that the primary mode of applied Neoplatonic-Neopythagorean philosophy as a Safavid imperial way of life was precisely occult science has been ignored altogether, making impossible a history of its practice. To begin to fill both of these major lacunae, I here take Mīr Dāmād (d. 1631) as a representative case study: for the Third Teacher (muʿallim-i sālis) was largely responsible for this Neopythagoreanization of Safavid philosophy, and like his equally influential Safavid colleagues Shaykh Bahāʾī (d. 1621) and Mīr Findiriskī (d. 1640) famed down to the present as an occult scientist. He was likewise responsible for the remarkable transmogrification of Ibn Sīnā (d. 1037) himself—no booster of the occult sciences—into a Neopythagorean-occultist. To this end, the Astarabadi sage-mage espoused a peculiarly Timurid-Aqquyunlu brand of philosophical lettrism (ʿilm al-ḥurūf), developed first by Ibn Turka (d. 1432) and seconded by Davānī (d. 1502), in at least three of his many works; this includes in the first place Firebrands and Meeting Places (Jaẕavāt u mavāqīt), commissioned by Shah ʿAbbās I (r. 1587-1629), an ornate Persian summa of his philosophical system as whole. Davānī, of course, is known to be a major source for Safavid philosophy, though never yet as a lettrist; and Ibn Turka, foremost occult philosopher of Timurid Iran, has been almost entirely elided from the historiography to date. Most importantly for the purposes of his Safavid heirs, nevertheless, the latter in particular, an outspokenly Sunni imamophile, was responsible for systematizing and recasting lettrism in both Alid and perennialist terms in a way that made it immediately utilizable by Twelver Shiʿi scholars: simultaneously a patrimony of Pythagoras, chief disciple of the prophet-king Solomon, and ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib, sole vector of sacral power (walāya) during the Islamic dispensation—and hence epitome of occult-scientific, mathematical genius.
    The example of Mīr Dāmād thus suggests we cannot hope to understand the intellectual and religiopolitical history of Safavid Iran, its reverberations to the present or the nature of its continuity with Timurid-Aqquyunlu precedent without understanding the crucial role of occultism generally and lettrism specifically in the construction of a new Safavid imperial culture, and indeed in the transformative—and paradoxically perennialist and Sunnizing—Shiʿization of Iran. As for its place in Western intellectual history and history of science more broadly, facile colonialist-orientalist narratives of Islamo-Christianate rupture aside: Mīr Dāmād and his fellow neopythagoreanizing lettrists must now be restored to the master mathesis narrative, whereby scientific modernity is but the upshot of the (occult-)philosophical penchant, peculiar to early modern Western thinkers, for reading the world as a mathematical text.

Imperial grimoires—that is, manuals on various forms of magic and divination written for or commissioned by royal readers—proliferated across the early modern Persianate world, more than paralleling the grimoire boom in Renaissance Europe. In extreme contrast to their contemporary Latin or English cognates, however, far less imperial in tenor, these Persian occult-scientific manuals have been left almost wholly unstudied. This programmatic article diagnoses the colonialist-orientalist causes for this wild imbalance in comparative early modern Western intellectual and imperial historiography and outlines a philological way forward. Far from being evidence for “the superstition of the Moslem natives,” such manuals are an indispensable aperture onto precisely those processes—common to Islamdom and Christendom alike—by which we define Western early modernity: textualization, canonization, standardization, confessionalization, centralization, imperialization, bureaucratization, democratization and mathematization. Yet they also record the religiocultural and institutional divergences that so distinguish the Islamicate and especially Persianate experience of early modernity from the Latin Christianate. Historians of books, of science and of empire must therefore finally overcome the eurocentrism and occultophobia still endemic in these fields, and cease judging Islamicate imperial occultism by Christianate standards, or simply writing it out of history altogether.

Occultism remains the largest blind spot in the historiography of Islamicate philosophy-science, a casualty of persistent scholarly positivism, even whiggish triumphalism.  Such occultophobia notwithstanding, the present article conducts a survey of the Islamicate encyclopedic tradition from the 4th-11th/10th-17th centuries, with emphasis on Persian classifications of the sciences (sg. taṣnīf al-ʿulūm), to demonstrate the ascent to philosophically mainstream status of various occult sciences (ʿulūm ġarība) throughout the post-Mongol Persianate world.  Most significantly, in Persian encyclopedias, but not in Arabic, and beginning with Faḫr al-Dīn Rāzī, certain occult sciences (astrology, lettrism and geomancy) were gradually but definitively shifted from the natural to the mathematical sciences as a means of reasserting their scientific legitimacy in the face of four centuries of anti-occultist polemic, from Ibn Sīnā to Ibn Ḫaldūn; they were simultaneously reclassified as the sciences of walāya, moreover, which alone explains the massive increase in patronage of professional occultists at the Safavid, Mughal and Ottoman courts in the runup to the Islamic millennium (1592 CE).  I argue that the mathematicalization, neopythagoreanization and sanctification of occultism in Ilkhanid-Timurid-Aqquyunlu Iran is the immediate intellectual and sociopolitical context for both the celebrated mathematization of astronomy by the members of the Samarkand Observatory in the 9th/15th century and the resurgence of neoplatonic-neopythagorean philosophy in Safavid Iran in the 10th/16th and 11th/17th, whereby Ibn Sīnā himself was transformed into a neopythagorean-occultist—processes which have heretofore been studied in atomistic isolation.

The imperial ideologies developed in the post-Mongol Persianate world represent both a break with Islamic precedent and a realization of the millenarian universalism inherent in Islam itself.  Early modern Muslim dynasts—styling themselves saint-philosopher-kings, millennial sovereigns and divine cosmocrators—combined Chinggisid, Persian and Islamic symbols of religiopolitical legitimacy in their quest for world domination, emblematized by Alexander the Great, Chinggis Khan and Amir Temür.  During this profoundly messianic era, sultans and saints thus competed for sacral power (walaya); securing access to this power became a driving concern of ruling and scholarly elites, whether by way of sufism, occultism or Alidism, and often eclectic combinations of all three.  The present chapter surveys these new strategies of religiopolitical legitimation pursued between the 14th-17th centuries by the Timurid, Aqquyunlu, Safavid, Uzbek, Mughal and Ottoman Empires, constituent members of the vast Persian cosmopolis stretching from the Balkans and Anatolia in the west to China and India in the east.

As Derrida charged, Plato’s famous declaration of speech’s superiority to writing would seem to have resonated with inheritor cultures similarly transitioning from orality to literacy, and especially the Islamicate; despite the explosion of writerly culture from the 8th century onward, Arabic scholarship continued to evince a categorical, if increasingly rhetorical, mistrust of writing. In the 14th century, however, as the age of encyclopedism dawned throughout the Islamicate heartlands, the superiority of writing to speech was formally and definitively asserted by Arabic and Persian encyclopedists, including most prominently Ibn al-Akfānī (d. 1348) of Mamluk Egypt and Shams al-Dīn Āmulī (d. 1352) of Ilkhanid Iran. It is hardly coincidental in this connection that the same century also witnessed the burgeoning popularity among scholarly and ruling elites of lettrism (ʿilm al-ḥurūf), kabbalah’s coeval cognate—the occult science that posited the cosmos itself as a text to be read, even rewritten. Synthesizing these literary and occult-scientific currents, in the early 15th century a circle of Muslim neopythagoreanizing lettrists—chief among them Ibn Turka of Isfahan (d. 1432)—developed the first formal metaphysics of writing.
    This article analyzes Ibn Turka’s unprecedented valorization of writing over speech in terms both epistemological and ontological, as well as the sociocultural ramifications of this move throughout the post-Mongol Persianate world. Letter-number, he argued, is a form of light eternally emanated from the One; hence vision, that faculty of light, must be the sense most universal; hence visible text must be the form of the One most manifest. In support of this thesis, he synthesized the Avicennan-Ṭūsian doctrine of the transcendental modulation of being (tashkīk al-wujūd) with its illuminationist upgrade, the transcendental modulation of light (tashkīk al-nūr), to produce his signature doctrine of tashkīk al-ḥarf: letters of light as uncreated, all-creative matrix of the cosmos, gradually descending from the One in extramental, mental, spoken and finally written form. Far from being a peculiar intellectual rabbit trail of no enduring significance, I argue that Ibn Turka’s lettrist metaphysics of light was embraced by subsequent thinkers in Iran as the most effective means of conceptualizing and celebrating Islamicate writerly culture; these include the famed philosophers Jalāl al-Dīn Davānī (d. 1502) and Mīr Dāmād (d. 1630), founder of the so-called school of Isfahan. Nor was its influence limited to Aqquyunlu-Safavid philosophical circles; I further argue that Ibn Turka’s system informed the explosion of Persianate book culture more generally, and by extension Persianate visual culture, from the early Timurid period onward. A telling example in this context is the emergence of the album preface as a new genre of art history-theory in early Safavid Iran, a phenomenon that has been well feted and studied by art historians; but they have wholly elided high lettrism as the genre’s most immediate philosophical context. This principle may be extended to the Persian cosmopolis as a whole: two of the most seminal discourses on writing developed in the Ottoman and Mughal contexts, by Taşköprüzāde (d. 1561) and Abū l-Fażl ʿAllāmī (d. 1602) respectively, are demonstrably Ibn Turkian.
    Like Derrida was to do half a millennium later, in sum, early modern Muslim lettrists inverted Plato’s speech-writing hierarchy; unlike Derrida, for whom writing can have no ontological edge, they put forward a profoundly humanistic neopythagorean ontogrammatology as core of the philosophia perennis—and that so trenchantly that it served to shape Islamicate intellectual and aesthetic culture alike for centuries. The modern ideologues of East-West rupture notwithstanding, moreover, I propose this cosmology as a major node of Islamo-Christianate cultural continuity even to the present.

The divinatory art of geomancy (ʿilm al-raml), Arabic answer to the I Ching, was third in popularity only to astrology and oneiromancy throughout the premodern Islamo-Christianate world, and is still widely practiced today from Iran and Yemen to west Africa and Madagascar. Despite its ubiquity among scholarly and ruling elites, however, the reflexive scholarly elision of occultism from Islamicate intellectual and cultural history means that this science has been very poorly studied beyond its reception by Europe. This holds especially true for the early modern Persianate world: in the wake of the occultist renaissance that swept the Islamicate heartlands from the late 8th/14th century onward, geomancers emerged as influential fixtures at Mughal, Safavid and Ottoman courts, and geomancy, offering detailed knowledge of past, present and future, was widely lionized as a means for controlling history—yet the subject remains almost untouched. And despite its status as a mathematical occult science predicated on a neoplatonic-neopythagorean system and animated by the twin principles of correspondence and secondary causation, its importance to the history of science has likewise only been recognized in its European context. Extending the work of Emilie Savage-Smith, Marion B. Smith and others, I therefore provide the first survey, necessarily tentative, of the development of geomantic theory and practice in the persophone world from the 7th/13th century onward, when Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī (d. 672/1274) inaugurated a specifically Persianate geomantic tradition for the benefit of his Mongol patron Hülegü. With Ṭūsī as precedent, geomancy went on to exercise some of the best minds of the early modern Persianate world as a mainstream occult-scientific tradition, and enjoyed a crescendo of popularity in the 10th/16th century with the approach of the Islamic millennium. After sketching the development of the eastern geomantic tradition, then, I identify the philosophical-scientific reasons for its great vitality and cultural prestige down to the present, with particular attention to authors on geomancy like Luṭf Allāh Nīshāpūrī Samarqandī (fl. 812/1409), Sharaf al-Dīn Yazdī (d. 858/1454), Shams al-Dīn Khafrī (d. 942/1535) and Hidāyat Allāh Munajjim-i Shīrāzī (fl. 1001/1593), court geomancer to Emperor Akbar at the turn of the millennium.

The late 8th/14th century saw a renaissance of high occultism throughout Islamdom—a development alarming to puritan scholars. This includes Ibn Ḫaldūn, whose anti-occultist position in the Muqaddima is often assumed to be an example of his visionary empiricism; yet his goal is simply the recategorization of all occult sciences under the twin rubrics of magic and divination, and his veto persuades more on religious and social grounds than natural-philosophical. Restoring the historian’s argument to its original state of debate with the burgeoning occultist movement reveals it to be not forward-thinking but rather conservative, fideist and indeed reactionary, as such closely allied with Ibn Qayyim al-Ǧawziyya’s puritanical project in particular; and in any event, the eager patronage and pursuit of the occult sciences by early modern elites suggests that his appeal could only fall on deaf ears. That it also flatly opposed the forms of millennial sovereignty that would define the post-Mongol era was equally disqualifying. I here take Šaraf al Dīn ʿAlī Yazdī, Ibn Ḫaldūn’s younger colleague and fellow resident in Cairo, as his sparring partner from the opposing camp: the Timurid historian was a card-carrying occultist and member of the Iḫwān al-Ṣafāʾ network of neopythagorean-neoplatonic-monist thinkers then gaining prominence from India to Anatolia via Egypt. I further take geomancy (ʿilm al-raml) as a test case, since Yazdī wrote a tract in defense of the popular divinatory science that directly rebuts Ibn Ḫaldūn’s arguments in the Muqaddima. To set the stage for their debate, I briefly introduce contemporary geomantic theory and practice, then discuss Ibn Ḫaldūn’s and Yazdī’s respective theories of occultism with a view toward establishing points of agreement and disagreement; I also append a translation of Yazdī’s tract as a basis for this comparison.

In Matthew Melvin-Koushki and Noah Gardiner, eds., Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives, special double issue of Arabica, 64/3-4 (2017), 287-693: 346-403

This study presents and intellectual- and literary-historically contextualizes a remarkable but as yet unpublished treatise by Ibn Turka (d. 1432), foremost occult philosopher of Timurid Iran:  the Munāẓara-yi Bazm u Razm.  As its title indicates, this ornate Persian work, written in 1426 in Herat for the Timurid prince-calligrapher Bāysunghur (d. 1433), takes the form of a literary debate, a venerable Arabo-Persian genre that exploded in popularity in the post-Mongol period.  Yet it triply transgresses the bounds of its genre, and doubly marries Arabic-Mamluk literary and imperial culture to Persian-Timurid.  For here Ibn Turka recasts the munāẓara as philosophical romance and the philosophical romance as mirror for princes, imperializing the razm u bazm and sword vs. pen tropes within an expressly lettrist framework, making explicit the logic of the coincidentia oppositorum (majmaʿ al-aḍdād) long implicit in the genre in order to ideologically weaponize it.  For the first time in the centuries-old Arabo-Persian munāẓara tradition, that is, wherein such debates were often rhetorically but never theoretically resolved, Ibn Turka marries multiple opposites in a manner clearly meant to be instructive to his Timurid royal patron:  he is to perform the role of Emperor Love (sulṭān ʿishq), transcendent of all political-legal dualities, avatar of the divine names the Manifest (al-ẓāhir) and the Occult (al-bāṭin).  This lettrist mirror for Timurid princes is thus not simply unprecedented in Persian or indeed Arabic literature, a typical expression of the ornate literary panache and genre-hybridizing proclivities of Mamluk-Timurid-Ottoman scientists of letters, and index of the burgeoning of Ibn ʿArabian-Būnian lettrism in late Mamluk Cairo; it also serves as key to Timurid universalist imperial ideology itself in its formative phase—and consciously epitomizes the principle of contradiction driving Islamicate civilization as a whole. 
        To show the striking extent to which this munāẓara departs from precedent, I provide a brief overview of the sword vs. pen subset of that genre; I then examine our text’s specific political-philosophical and sociocultural contexts, with attention to Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī’s (d. 1274) Akhlāq-i Nāṣirī and Jalāl al-Dīn Davānī’s (d. 1502) Akhlāq-i Jalālī on the one hand—which seminal Persian mirrors for princes assert, crucially, the ontological-political primacy of love over justice—and the Ẓafarnāma of Sharaf al-Dīn Yazdī (d. 1454), Ibn Turka’s student and friend, on the other.  In the latter, much-imitated history Amir Temür (r. 1370-1405) was definitively transformed, on the basis of astrological and lettrist proofs, into the supreme Lord of Conjunction (ṣāḥib-qirān); most notably, there Yazdī theorizes the Muslim world conqueror as historical manifestation of the coincidentia oppositorum—precisely the project of Ibn Turka in his Debate of Feast and Fight.  But these two ideologues of Timurid universal imperialism and leading members of the New Brethren of Purity network only became such in Mamluk Cairo, where lettrism (ʿilm al-ḥurūf) was first sanctified, de-esotericized and adabized; I accordingly invoke the overtly occultist-neopythagoreanizing ethos specific to the Mamluk capital by the late 14th century, especially that propagated at the court of Barqūq (r. 1382-99).  For it is this Cairene ethos, I argue, that is epitomized by our persophone lettrist’s munāẓara, which it effectively timuridizes.  To demonstrate the robustness of this Mamluk-Timurid ideological-literary continuity, I situate the Munāẓara-yi Bazm u Razm within Ibn Turka’s own oeuvre and imperial ideological program, successively developed for the Timurid rulers Iskandar Sulṭān (r. 1409-14), Shāhrukh (r. 1409-47) and Ulugh Beg (r. 1409-49); marshal three contemporary instances of the sword vs. pen munāẓara, one Timurid and two Mamluk, by the theologian Sayyid Sharīf Jurjānī (d. 1413), the secretary-encyclopedist Aḥmad al-Qalqashandī (d. 1418) and the historian Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1408) respectively; and provide an abridged translation of Ibn Turka’s offering as basis for comparative analysis.

The Ottoman imperial ideology developed under Süleymān the Magnificent (r. 1520-66) was heavily occult-scientific in tenor, as is well known, and especially lettrist; less well known is the fact that Selīm the Grim (r. 1512-20) too patronized the kabbalistic science of letters (ʿilm al-ḥurūf) for purposes both ideological and military-strategic. Taking as representative example a short lettrist treatise ostensibly written by the acclaimed polymath-jurist Kemālpaşazāde Aḥmed (d. 1534) to urge his royal patron to invade Mamluk Egypt, this study traces the development of early Ottoman occult-scientific imperialist discourse on the basis of Mamluk-Timurid-Aqquyunlu precedent, which first incorporated pointedly lettrist arguments in support of competing claims to Islamic imperial universalism. Such is the immediate scholarly context in which Kemālpaşazāde’s curious little work is to be read—and constitutes, I argue, a new and distinctive form of neopythagorean historiography. The Ottoman lettrist imperialism that is such a definitive feature of the expansive and transformative Süleymānic era is thus a product of inner-Persianate scholarly circulation and competition between Egypt, Iran and Anatolia over the course of the equally transformative fifteenth century, and Selīm thus a key exponent of early modern Western imperial expansionism and experimentalism—and occult philosopher-kingship.

Medieval Persian imperial correspondence (tarassul) remains relatively untapped as a source of historiographical information, due in no small part to its stylized and ornate character. This ornateness, far from being merely an obstructive husk to the useful pith of data within, constitutes a rich source of information in its own right; indeed, the formal aspects of a given letter may significantly alter the ostensible sense of the text. This study examines as a representative case a fathnama sent by Uzun Hasan to Qaytbay on the occasion of the former’s victory over Sultan-Abu Sa‘id in 1469, here contextualized, translated and subjected to formal analysis with reference to contemporary insha’ manuals. For all its submissive rhetoric, the letter’s aggressive intent is shown to be activated by its formal structure, which strategically deploys Uzun Hasanid messianic symbolism to challenge the ascendancy of the Mamluk state.

Early modern Christian intellectual history was heavily neopythagorean and kabbalistic in tenor, as is now widely recognized, and scholarship on the major exponents of this trend, from Nicholas of Cusa and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola to John Dee and Johannes Kepler, has burgeoned in recent decades.  Some revisionist historians have even posited the great 15th-17th-century florescence of neopythagorean-kabbalist thought as a primary driver of the so-called Scientific Revolution—essentially a mathematical revolution—and hence “scientific modernity” as such.  That the intellectual history of the contemporary Islamic world was equally heavily so, however, is only beginning to be appreciated; the greater part of Islamic neopythagoreanism remains unstudied to a shocking degree.
    To help offset this gross imbalance in the literature, patently colonialist-whiggish in origin, the present chapter introduces the New Brethren of Purity, a vast network of highly mobile thinkers responsible for the renaissance of neopythagoreanism throughout the Islamic world from the turn of the 15th century onward.  Most notably, this network explicitly identified with, and sought to revive, the neopythagorean-occultist project of the original Brethren of Purity (Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ).  But unlike their anonymous and shadowy predecessors of 10th-century Iraq, whose project was somewhat marginalized by the rise to hegemony of Avicennan-illuminationist philosophy, the New Brethren of Purity were highly influential both intellectually and politically, and counted among their number some of the greatest movers and shakers of the era—with the remarkable consequence that early modern Islamic imperial ideologies (Timurid, Aqquyunlu, Safavid, Mughal, Ottoman) were far more explicitly neopythagorean-occultist than their Christian cognates, and Islamic science long more mathematical.
    For reasons of space, I focus my inquiry on the most important member of this network in the Persianate east, Ibn Turka of Isfahan (1369-1432).  This Timurid occultist’s project—strikingly similar to those of his Renaissance peers Cusanus and Pico but preceding theirs by decades—centered on the reformulation and philosophical systematization of lettrism (ʿilm al-ḥurūf), kabbalah’s coeval twin, as universal neopythagorean science; his magnum opus, the Book of Inquiries (K. al-Mafāḥiṣ), is best described as the first summa of Islamic neopythagoreanism.  Nor were the efforts of this self-styled Pythagoras redivivus in vain:  Ibn Turka’s work helped inspire both the celebrated mathematical turn in Arabic astronomy in the early 15th century—a basis for the Copernican revolution, as has recently been shown—and the thoroughgoing neopythagoreanism of Safavid philosophy, which embraced the Epistles of the first Brethren of Purity after centuries of neglect.
    Just as Christian (and Jewish) kabbalah emerged as the primary expression of neopythagoreanism in early modern Europe, in short, so too did lettrism in the vaster, wealthier and far more cosmopolitan contemporary Islamic world; and the disciples of Pythagoras dominated and shaped the philosophical-scientific discourses of Western early modernity as an Islamo-Christian whole.

A response to the editors' response to my review essay, in MRW 14/2, on Sebastian Günther and Dorothee Pielow, eds., Die Geheimnisse der oberen und der unteren Welt: Magie im Islam zwischen Glaube und Wissenschaft (Leiden: Brill, 2019). Their response is here:

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/760667 .

My original essay is here:

https://www.academia.edu/41490499/Magic_in_Islam_between_Religion_and_Science .