Afdal al-Din Kashani

Afdal al-Din Kashani, known as Baba Afzal (died about 1213 or 1214), was a Persian poet and philosopher who joined philosophical argument to poetic expression, composing some five hundred quatrains on spiritual transcendence and self-knowledge that place him among the finest practitioners of the robai form. In philosophical prose, only Suhrawardi is judged his equal for the period. His major prose works are the Arz-nama, a systematic treatment of spiritual perfection arranged in four ascending stages, and the Javedan-nama, his most explicitly Islamic work and the only one of his writings, aside from his letters, to engage extensively with the Quran and Prophetic tradition; some fifty four further prose works of his survive. His philosophy centers on the idea that to know oneself is to know the everlasting reality that is consciousness, and that to know it is to be it, a position that binds epistemology to ontology in the claim that human self-awareness is what allows the universe to reach its full actualization.