USC Graduate Program by Matthew Melvin-Koushki
Web by Matthew Melvin-Koushki
The online home of the international workshop Islamic Occult Studies on the Rise. https://islamic... more The online home of the international workshop Islamic Occult Studies on the Rise. https://islamicoccult.org
Book Projects by Matthew Melvin-Koushki
Manuscript in preparation
Manuscript accepted for submission to Brill's Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Science series, Au... more Manuscript accepted for submission to Brill's Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Science series, August 2017
Manuscript accepted for submission to Brill's Iran Studies series, June 2018
Edited Volumes by Matthew Melvin-Koushki
https://brill.com/view/title/57186
Dissertation by Matthew Melvin-Koushki
This dissertation takes as its point of departure two key insights: first, that millenarian, univ... more 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.
http://dissertationreviews.org/archives/2426
Popular Articles by Matthew Melvin-Koushki
ESSWE Newsletter 13, no. 2 (Winter 2022)
Psyche, 26 May 2021
https://psyche.co/ideas/magic-helped-us-in-pandemics-before-and-it-can-again
Journal Articles & Book Chapters by Matthew Melvin-Koushki
In Translating Esotericism, ed. Wouter J. Hanegraaff and Mriganka Mukhopadhyay, special issue of ... more In Translating Esotericism, ed. Wouter J. Hanegraaff and Mriganka Mukhopadhyay, special issue of Correspondences 11, no. 1 (2023): 103-12
In Maribel Fierro, Sonja Brentjes and Tilman Seidensticker, eds., Rulers as Authors in the Islamic World: Knowledge, Authority and Legitimacy (Leiden: Brill, 2024)
The successors of Amir Temür (r. 1370-1405), supreme Lord of Conjunction (ṣāḥib-qirān), developed... more 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?
Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi Society 73 (2023): 53-75
Ibn ʿArabī’s Allusions of the Quran in the World of Man, a minor and as yet little-studied work o... more 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
Special roundtable issue, ed. Justin Stearns and Nahyan Fancy, History of Science 61, no. 2 (2023... more Special roundtable issue, ed. Justin Stearns and Nahyan Fancy, History of Science 61, no. 2 (2023): 166-72
In Routledge Handbook on the Sciences in Islamicate Societies: Practices from the 2nd/8th to the ... more In Routledge Handbook on the Sciences in Islamicate Societies: Practices from the 2nd/8th to the 13th/19th Centuries, ed. Sonja Brentjes (New York: Routledge, 2023), 328-39
In Islamic Thought and the Art of Translation: Texts and Studies in Honor of William C. Chittick ... more In Islamic Thought and the Art of Translation: Texts and Studies in Honor of William C. Chittick and Sachiko Murata, ed. Muhammed Rustom (Leiden: Brill, 2023), 150-77
Maria Subtelny festschrift, ed. Mahdi Tourage, Iran Namag 6, nos. 3-4 (2021): 282-326
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USC Graduate Program by Matthew Melvin-Koushki
Web by Matthew Melvin-Koushki
Book Projects by Matthew Melvin-Koushki
Edited Volumes by Matthew Melvin-Koushki
https://brill.com/view/journals/arab/64/3-4/arab.64.issue-3-4.xml
Dissertation by Matthew Melvin-Koushki
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.
Popular Articles by Matthew Melvin-Koushki
Journal Articles & Book Chapters by Matthew Melvin-Koushki
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?
Keywords: jazz philosophy, tafsir, lettrism, astrology, imperial occultism, coincidentia oppositorum
https://brill.com/view/journals/arab/64/3-4/arab.64.issue-3-4.xml
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.
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?
Keywords: jazz philosophy, tafsir, lettrism, astrology, imperial occultism, coincidentia oppositorum
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.
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.
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/760667 .
My original essay is here:
https://www.academia.edu/41490499/Magic_in_Islam_between_Religion_and_Science .
Salvatore Armando, Babak Rahimi, and Roberto Tottoli (eds). 2018. The Wiley Blackwell History of Islam. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.
[You'll find the Introduction and my two co-authored Chapters in the section 'Book Chapters and Intros' by scrolling down my main academia webpage]
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