Mulla Sadra

Sadr ad-Din Muhammad Shirazi, more commonly known as Mulla Sadra, was an Iranian Twelver Shi'i Islamic mystic, philosopher and theologian, born around 1571 or 1572 and died around 1635 to 1640, who led a cultural renaissance in Iran during the seventeenth century. According to the scholar Oliver Leaman, Mulla Sadra is arguably the single most important and influential philosopher in the Muslim world of the last four hundred years; though not its founder, he is considered the master of the Illuminationist school of philosophy, synthesizing many strands of Islamic Golden Age philosophy into what he called the Transcendent Theosophy. Mulla Sadra brought a new philosophical insight to the nature of reality and created a major transition from essentialism to existentialism in Islamic philosophy, though his existentialism concerned the existentialist cosmology of God rather than the individual, moral and social questions at the heart of later Western existentialism. His philosophy synthesized Avicennism, Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi's Illuminationist philosophy, Ibn Arabi's Sufi metaphysics and the theology of the Sunni Ash'ari school of Kalam within the framework of Twelver Shi'ism, and his main work, commonly known as the Four Journeys, attempts to reconcile Sufism with the Peripatetic philosophy of al-Farabi and Avicenna.