Ibn Turka

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.

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.

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.