Tradition and Islamic Philosophy: Some Recent Urdu Publications on Mullā Ṣadrā


The reception of Mullā Ṣadrā in South Asia began soon after his death through the dissemination and commentary culture on his Sharḥ al-Hidāyah that was adopted into the Dars-e Niz̤āmī pedagogy in the eighteenth century. However, the modern reception of his thought in Urdu has been somewhat removed from that initial scholastic engagement. I examine four modalities of this reception: translation of his major work the Asfār; analytic engagement by a philosophy doctorate; triumphalism in the literary sphere; and responses to the intellectual challenge of the West by a Shiʿi seminary student. I attempt to show that these varied receptions are indicative of trends and developments in the modern intellectual history of Pakistan.

of public reason, to articulate a need for philosophy, and to think that through in an existentialist and post-colonial search for authenticity and possibility in contemporary Pakistan are critical to the works on Mullā Ṣadrā produced in Urdu in recent years. But before we analyze the uses of the Safavid philosopher in modern Pakistan, we need some context in which to locate them.
Within South Asia, at least since the eighteenth century, reception of the works and thought of Mullā Ṣadrā has taken on different forms. The first is the incorporation of the natural philosophy section of his commentary on the Hidāyat ul-Ḥikmah (Guidance in Philosophy) of Aṡīr ud-Dīn al-Abharī (d. 1265) into the pedagogy of the Dars-e Niz̤ āmī associated with the scholar from Lucknow in Mughal service, Mullā Niz̤ ām ud-Din Sihālvī (d. 1748).5 This section was first published in Lucknow in 1262/1846 and reprinted numerous times from Lucknow and Delhi, often with one or another famous gloss.6 By contrast, the number of manuscripts of the text in Iran is far smaller, with the first lithograph being produced in Tehran in 1313/1896. The adoption of this text speaks to the popularity of Avicennian physics in North India.7 There are over one hundred extant glosses in Arabic on the text; the earliest glosses on the Sharḥ ul-Hidāyah were already being written in the late seventeenth century by Pīr Muḥammad Jaunpūrī (d. c. 1085/1674) and Qāẓī ʿIṣmatullāh Lakhnavī (d. 1113/1701). The latter is extant in one codex at the Khuda Bakhsh Library in Patna.8 The first sustained engagement with Mullā Ṣadrā's thought in India, albeit not in the form of a commentary, was in the theological corpus of Sayyid ʿAlī Ḳhān Madanī (d. 1120/1709), the famous scion of a Shirazi family, who lived in Hyderabad in the Deccan (via Medina) and wrote prolifically in Arabic. Sometimes he cites Mullā Ṣadrā directly and sometimes he does so indirectly by quoting one of his illustrious philosophical forebears from the Dashtakī family.9 After that stage, in which the engagement with Mullā Ṣadrā was mainly in the scholastic mode of the Arabic commentary tradition, the embrace of his thought by modernist thinkers, in Urdu and in English, in the colonial period was noticeable and brought his ideas to the attention of the literary classes, not least as they grappled with aspects of their literary and intellectual heritage. The first history of philosophy in Urdu, which appeared in 1879, the Mirʾāt ul-Ḥukamāʾ yā Guldastah-e Farang (Mirror of Philosophers) by Sayyid Imdād Imām "Aṡar" (1849-1934), a prominent notable of Patna, was more an attempt to bring the contributions of European philosophy-especially the "direct realism" of Thomas Reid (1710-1796) and Sir William Hamilton (1788-1856), as well as the later idealism of the British universities-to the world of the Dars-e Niz̤ āmī-trained ʿulamā.10 Because of his importance to the history of literature and linguistics through his work Kāshif ul-Ḥaqāʾiq yā Bahāristān-e Suḳhan, first printed in Bihar by Star of India Press in 1877, his philosophical work became known.11 Imām mentions Mullā Ṣadrā very briefly and in an indexical manner. 9 Subūt, Fīlsūf-e Shīrāz dar Hind (Tehran: Intishārāt-e Hirmis, 2001), 13-20. 10 Sayyid Imdād Imām "Aṡar," Mirʾat ul-Ḥukamā yā Guldastah-e Farang (Patna: Ṣubḥ-e Ṣādiq Press, 1879). Both Reid and Hamilton were occupied with studying the nature of the mind and its relation to the cosmos. Direct realism, or "common sense realism," is identical to the more recent exposition of "naïve realism" that posited a world of mindindependent objects that we can access through our sense-perception. Imām's work was followed by the forays into Islamic intellectual history by Shiblī Nuʿmānī (1857-1914), who described the circles of the study of philosophy in Lucknow as the "Cambridge of India," and then the influential dissertation of Muhammad Iqbal , The Development of Metaphysics in Persia, awarded a doctorate in Munich in 1908.12 Other figures of this period familiar with philosophy such as ʿAbd ul-Mājid Daryābādī , who had a BA in Philosophy from Canning College, Lucknow, and an MA in Philosophy from Aligarh Muslim University, turned his attention more to the reception of Anglophone psychology than to any attempt to disseminate the teachings of Mullā Ṣadrā.13 Iqbal was the first to write about Mullā Ṣadrā in English and to bring his thought to the attention of modernists in South Asia and beyond. There was not much direct engagement with Mullā Ṣadrā-more with his later commentator Hādī Sabzavārī (1797-1873), revealing Iqbal's relative comfort with Persian in comparison to Arabic. Yet the work reveals a stage in Iqbal's quest for an existentialist and personalist philosophy for which he treats Mullā Ṣadrā's "unity-in-diversity" metaphysics as a stage in both Persian thought and Platonism that aligns with forms of German idealism.14 It is perhaps a truism that since all intellectual history is presentist, the ways in which Iqbāl instrumentalizes Mullā Ṣadrā are clearly in light of his contemporary concerns.
Although Iqbal's modernist philosophical work was in English, he influenced thinkers in both English and Urdu. In the former category were the leading philosophers of post-independence Pakistan: Mian Mohammed Sharif (1893-1965), Chaudhury Abdul-Qadir  and Khalifah Abdul-Hakim (1894-1959). Sharif had studied philosophy at Aligarh before partition and then did his PhD in analytic philosophy with G.E. Moore   and Ishrat in particular remain in print and are popular. If one considers one important snapshot of philosophy in Pakistan-the volume published in 1998, edited by Naeem Ahmed, professor of philosophy at the University of Punjab-one sees the coming together of those wishing to instrumentalize the intellectual traditions (from Mullā Ṣadrā to Iqbāl) for their modernist agendas, as well as those attempting to bridge analytic and Islamic philosophy, alongside others with no desire to take the traditions seriously.18 The philosophical scene in Pakistan is not simply pitting "traditionalists" defending the Dars-e Niz̤ āmī's approach to the Islamic philosophical tradition against modernist analytic philosophers, but rather constituted by a spectrum of positions motivated by, though transcending, this binary. Glimpses and citations of Mullā Ṣadrā are therefore found in a variety of writings in Urdu literary culture, not least among commentators and critics such as Muḥammad Ḥasan ʿAskarī . Although he resisted the use of Mullā Ṣadrā in the attempted existentializing mode of Iqbāl, his increasing alignment with the monism of Ibn ul-ʿArabī and the philosophical interests of the scholastics, such that he defined the Urdu literary tradition in those terms, placed him among the literary figures who engaged Mullā Ṣadrā as an essential part of the authentic Islamic, Sufi traditions of Northern India.19 This confluence of Sufism, scholasticism and modernism-further enhanced with postmodernism-is evidenced in the work of the contemporary critic Nāṣir ʿAbbās Nayyar, which somehow recalls the work of Arabic literary figures like Adonis (b. 1930).20 Thus Mullā Ṣadrā becomes part of that tradition of authentic culture that is engaged and appropriated for the needs of contemporary discourse. His work is used to contribute an Islamic element in the construction of an authentic postmodern perspective. The contemporary reception of Mullā Ṣadrā in Urdu is based on these two pillars: the scholastic traditions and the (post-)modernist, literary engagements with philosophy. Furthermore, because the intellectual classes who engage in the  The work that is relevant here is the Urdu translation of the first journey on the metaphysics from al-Ḥikmah al-Mutaʿāliyah fī-l-Asfār al-ʿAqliyyah al-Arbaʿah (The Higher Philosophy of the Four Journeys of the Intellect) of Mullā Ṣadrā Shīrāzī by a team led by Sayyid Manāz̤ ir Aḥsan Gīlānī . Mullā Ṣadrā's major work maps the different branches of philosophymetaphysics, theology, epistemology, psychology and so forth-onto the four journeys of the human rational soul "traveling" first to God then back to creation. It is the metaphysics of Mullā Ṣadra which was contested and debated in the years after him not least in North India from the eighteenth century. Gīlānī had studied the rational disciplines (maʿqūlāt) including logic and philosophy for seven years (1909)(1910)(1911)(1912)(1913)(1914)(1915)(1916)  Two parts of volume one on metaphysics were published in 1941 and apparently the second journey (on the natural philosophy) was translated, but was not, to my knowledge, published.27 The famous Islamist thinker Abu-l-Aʿla Maududi  was also based at the translation bureau at Osmania and claims, in 1932, to have been involved in the translation of a work that he describes as "the most difficult Arabic text in philosophy," although the published There is no evidence that any further volumes were published. Given the absence of any preface explaining why the translation was undertaken, when it was commissioned or undertaken, and whether by a team or an individual, it is entirely possible that Maududi and others were involved in an early draft which was then reworked and edited by Gīlānī in a process that was completed in 1940 prior to publication. The translation itself is indicative of many works rendered into Urdu. While there is little doubt of the skill of Gīlānī as an Arabist, the work is more of a paraphrase than a translation. It makes a common choice-evident in the Persian translations of Javād Muṣliḥ (Professor of Philosphy at Tehran University and the first major, albeit partial, translator of the Asfār in the 1940s) and Muḥammad Ḳhvājavī (a prolific editor and translator who completed a multivolume translation in the 1990s)-not to translate technical terms but to retain them in Arabic such that it is only the verbal and other syntactical features The Osmania translation has recently been reprinted in Karachi in 2015 by an organization called Book Time based in Urdu Bazaar. It is not just an offset printing of the original Hyderabad edition, but has been newly typeset and published with a short, two-page introduction to Mullā Ṣadrā. For no obvious reason, it reproduces the colophon of part two of volume one from the Hyderabad printing but with the dates omitted, perhaps almost as if the origins of the translation in the Osmania bureau were being eradicated. Interestingly, the publisher on the flysheet makes this comment: The aim of Book Time is to publish high quality research. The books published under our auspices are not intended to hurt anyone's feelings or offend. Rather they are intended to change and revive the book market. Whenever an author writes a work, it represents his own research and thoughts which need not reflect nor agree with either your thoughts or beliefs or even ours and our institution's. Our intention is merely to publish works of quality research.34 Unfortunately, the preface tells us nothing about the translation nor does it mention the South Asian context or why this has been reprinted. Within the apologetic presentation, the publisher prefaces a short introduction to Mullā Ṣadrā which explains his "peerless" contribution to Islamic philosophy. His thought is said to consider knowledge in a holistic and transformative manner; holistic because it reconciles reason, revelation, and intuition transgressing the oppositions of the modernist turn; transformative because it locates knowledge within the connection between will, action, and the expression of the self.35 It is also clear that this preface is written by someone with a rather perfunctory knowledge of Mullā Ṣadrā's thought and legacy; there are significant errors, not least in the simple rendition of the names of his nineteenth-century commentators-for example, Zunūzī not Nunūzī, Nūrī not Ghaurī, Aḥsāʾī not Aḥṣāʾī. It is similarly not accurate to say that Mullā Ṣadrā suffered a decline before his nineteenth-century revival; rather it took some time for his approaches and arguments to supersede those of Avicenna in philosophy. It was through the efforts of those nineteenth-century commentators that it became the dominant school of philosophy. The translation itself-a shortcoming, of course, of the original effort in Hyderabad-is more of a paraphrastic nature than a precise rendition of the Arabic. Perhaps the main reason, alongside the use of technical Arabic terminology, is simply that a very literal translation would be unreadable and confusing; although again, to cite another example, this may already be the case. In the first section on the notion of first philosophy foundational to any type of human scientific inquiry, al-maʿārif allatī yuḥtāju ilāihā al-insānu fī jamīʿ al-ʿulūm is rendered as un maʿlūmāt aur maʿārif ke bayan meñ hai jin kī t̤ araf insān dunyā ke tamām ʿulūm o funūn ke samajhne meñ muḥtāj hai (in description of the information and sciences on which humans depend in understanding all the sciences and arts of the world). The translations thus tend to reorganise the Arabic (no doubt partly due to the syntactical differences between a Semitic and an Indo-European language) as well as paraphrase and gloss the original (sometimes by adding synonyms Rizvi Journal of urdu studies 1 (2020) 27-52 for emphasis).36 To take another example, in the second chapter of the first section, "the concept of existence is predicated of its individuals by modulation and not by univocity" is rendered vujūd kā mafhūm mushtarak hai aur apne tamām mā taḥat umūr par yih yaksānī aur tavāt̤ uʾ ke sāth nahīñ balkih tashkīkī t̤ aur par maḥmūl hai (the concept of existence is shared among its instances not by univocity or synonymy but by a modulated predication). Here a more accessible Urdu equivalent is added for univocity but not for modulation.
Fundamentally, the practice of the translation-and its reprint-begs the question of the amount of readership for the work. However, the simple fact that it exists and is available on the book market-in a quantity of copies far exceeding the original Hyderabad printing-will lead to an assessment of its impact and influence in the future. Will it be of scholastic or antiquarian interest, or revive a serious engagement with the maʿqūlāt tradition?

Triumphalism
The second modality of the reception of Mullā Ṣadrā's is the triumphalist championing of his thought as "relevant" for the contemporary world, particularly amongst the intellectual classes and literary culture of Pakistan. The work best representing this is Sayyid Mashkūr Ḥusain with the taḳhalluṣ Yād was a published poet, littérateur, and Professor of Urdu at Government College Lahore; he wrote extensively on the history of Urdu poetry.39 Within the context of his work on literature, intellectual contexts, and influences, he presents this essay on the relevance of Mullā Ṣadrā, which he locates in a comparison with Marx. Given the prominence of Marx among the leftleaning Pakistani intelligentsia, Yād's appropriation of Mullā Ṣadrā fits a broad response to the political and materialist intellectual challenge of Marxism. This mode of combating leftist thought became popular (partly through government support) in the 1980s. As a poet and literary critic writing on stylistics, especially the prose essay, Yād was known for his inclination to philosophy and the use of philosophical argument in literary analysis. According to Yād, both Marx and Mullā Ṣadrā were frustrated by the lack of a definitive philosophy and the plethora of speculatively futile metaphysics; however, their responses were different: the cacophony of philosophies led Marx to reject metaphysics and reduce philosophical inquiry to the material, while Mullā Ṣadrā recognized that the material was meaningless without the transcendent and the metaphysical-it was the higher intelligible world that gave meaning to this material world, but it was in search of a philosopher best able to explain it.40 Hence what is practicable is that for a Pakistani society which does not want to restrict its conception of existence to the material and the ephemeral, Mullā Ṣadrā provides a philosophy of being that explains the metaphysical foundations of our phenomenal reality without the need for the "descent of angels" to explain this to us.41 It is the existential focus of Mullā Ṣadrā's thought and his

Rizvi
Journal of urdu studies 1 (2020) 27-52 philosophical method that is relevant to our age.42 Yād highlights one methodological point and two key features of Mullā Ṣadrā's philosophy. On the former, he mentions that Mullā Ṣadrā presents a philosophy grounded and illuminated by the "light of faith" and a sincere spirituality.43 The religious and spiritualand hence practical-commitments of Mullā Ṣadrā are critical. The problem is that he suggests this makes his thought practicable for the average person (nārmal insān)-ignoring the philosopher's elitism. The potential aptitude for a person to perfect their rational soul is universal, but the vast majority of humans fail to do so and, besides, that would require seeking out a sage under whose guidance one would have to train. Still, the emphasis on religious commitment is an important insight and indeed a potential corrective for most who might be influenced by the analytic tradition, but, unfortunately, Yād does not substantiate it.
The two key features Yād highlights are the focus upon the soul as the true human self that in its perfect form is immaterial and hence transcends both the material and ephemeral, and the importance of the notion of being as a simple reality that is paradoxically both one and many.44 Methodologically, Yād is influenced by the Corbin-Nasr approach to Mullā Ṣadrā as a Sufi esotericist enamoured of the way of paradoxes-and yet the actual analysis of existence follows Rahman's presentation. 45 After brief chapters on Mullā Ṣadrā's life and works and a summary of his contribution, the bulk of the book presents the connected tripartite doctrine of existence, namely that (1) existence is an ontological foundation in extramental reality whereas essences are mental constructions through which we make sense of reality, (2) existence is a singular reality graded and modulated in levels of intensity, and (3) motion and flux is the basic dynamic of existence.46 A very short chapter on Mullā Ṣadrā's originality merely mentions later commentators who stress that feature of his thought, but adduces no evidence. The chapter on time mentions the point made by a number of modern interpreters, including Rahman, that time for Mullā Ṣadrā is relative and unreal. Remaining chapters then examine the nature of God and the nature of human knowledge without explicitly examining either the infallibilist epistemology of presential knowledge or the identity thesis whereby knowledge is the union of the intellecting subject and object that reverts back to Aristotle's 42  Journal of urdu studies 1 (2020) 27-52 Metaphysics book Lambda. Before that, we have two chapters on his conception of philosophy and on the Asfār; both are highly influenced by Perennialist thought and likely should have come at the beginning.47 The final two chapters deal with the eschatology of life after death and focus on Mullā Ṣadrā's argument about the world of the afterlife and the imagination of the soul recreating the body.48 He has an important insight here: because Mullā Ṣadrā has two concepts of the "world of images," one can easily be deceived into assuming that the afterlife is purely imaginal. In this life, the imaginal is the intermediate realm of ideas and images that lies between the higher intelligible and the lower sensible worlds, but with respect to our phenomenal reality is not "real." However, in the afterlife, the imaginal is productively real and full of life and the means whereby what is internalized in the mind and in the world of images is then externalized into the realities of the eschaton.
From the contents of the work (and here I will focus on the original printing) and the appended bibliography, it seems to be clear that Yād did not rely on the Arabic works of Mullā Ṣadrā or even their Persian or Urdu translations. He notes that he "saw" the works of the philosopher in the personal library of the famous Shiʿi Urdu ḳhat̤ īb ʿAllāmah T̤ ālib Jauharī in Karachi. It is also evident that Yād used four types of sources: introductory secondary works in English on Mullā Ṣadrā, most important among them being the monograph of the Pakistani modernist thinker Fazlur Rahman (1919-1988);49 general histories of Islamic philosophy including Iqbāl's famous doctoral dissertation and the history edited and published in 1966 by the eminent Pakistani philosopher and founder of the Pakistan Philosophical Association Mian Mohamed Sharif (1893-1965);50 the works of the Perennialist school such as Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Martin Lings, and William Chittick, who have done much to promote himself engaging with literary criticism, modern European philosophy, and, especially, leftist thought. It is a highly competent exposition of the thought of Mullā Ṣadrā based on the work of Rahman-and shares the paradoxes, ambiguities, and mistakes of that work. There is no attempt to link the study of Mullā Ṣadrā to the intellectual history of Muslims in South Asia (or the Dars-e Niz̤ āmī for that matter) and hence he is not championed in search of authenticity to a particular tradition. There is no conclusion and the fundamental postulation of the title is not established. In what way is Mullā Ṣadrā's philosophy practicable today in Pakistan for Yād's readers? In that sense, the championing of his thought remains merely rhetorical; Yād has not substantiated his opening claims.

Moderate Critique
The third modality of reception is a critical engagement of Mullā Ṣadrā aimed at a learned readership including those trained in British analytic philosophy-the dominant mode of professional philosophy in Pakistani academia. This mode is evident in Ḳhiẓr Yāsīn's critical appraisal of Mullā Ṣadrā's philosophy of being in the form of the publication of his doctoral dissertation supervised at the University of Punjab by Professor Naeem Ahmad (b. 1946).55 He dedicates the work to Burhan Ahmad Faruqi , whose career was primarily a defence and promotion of the thought of the Mughal Sufi Aḥmad Sirhindī (1564-1624).56 Yāsīn works at the Iqbal Academy. From the bibliography, as well as the text, it is clear that his access to the works of Mullā Ṣadrā, Ibn ul-ʿArabī, and others is mediated by Persian translations although he also refers to the original Arabic texts, and that he is familiar with anglophone writings on the philosophers up to the 1990s. He also cites and engages the analytic tradition as well as elements of phenomenology (Husserl) and the philosophy of mysticism (Stace, James, and others). After thanking his supervisor and colleagues in his acknowledgements, Yāsīn notes that it is rare for a philosophy doctorate to be published as people tend to find it very difficult or assume that philosophy is opposed to religion, more so if the work defines itself as a critique since most people take critique to be negative.57 However, critique is essential to philosophy. The abstract then makes the subject of inquiry clear-in many ways it is a study of modulation of existence.58 Existence is a mental concept that is homonymously predicated of instances (the notion of ishtirāk-e maʿnavī); predication still has a focal sense hence it is a modulated concept-the concept is merely mentally posited and not a constituent of the individuality of the thing. Extra-mental existence, however, is the very thing that exists, and is arranged in a modulated ontology in which each "intensity" of existence presents itself as a dyad of existence and essence. In his introduction on Mullā Ṣadrā, which is broadly derivative, he signals that his analysis draws primarily on Rahman, Nasr, and Morris.59 In the introduction to the subject, he begins with a rather general reflection on philosophy as a search for singular origins-what is the basic stuff of reality and where do we come from? The Presocratics tended to ask this question, as did religious traditions.60 Mullā Ṣadrā's answer is simple-everything is existence and comes from existence (vujūd).61 The core of the thesis then investigates this in four stages: the concept of existence; that existence is a predicate and has reference in extra-mental reality; that existence is modulated; and, finally, the relationship between existence and essences. Unfortunately, there is no conclusion that ties things together. A bibliography is appended to illuminate the author's path to the subject, but as ever with Urdu publishing, no index.
Each chapter is well-structured with sections and a final summary (mā ḥaṣal). The first chapter traces the concept of the semantic idea of existence and its predication by modulation from Avicenna through to Mullā Ṣadrā and cites original texts to illustrate the points. The main thrust is to distinguish between the concept and reality of existence and to justify the modulated nature of the concept (on which he attempts a critique which was already considered in the Avicennian tradition).62 The second chapter on the fact that existence is all there is and that it is a real predicate is presented through ten "witnesses" from the work of Mullā Ṣadrā. This is what the tradition calls the " ontological priority" or the "actuality" of existence (aṣālat ul-vujūd, ʿainiyyat ul-vujūd).
Here he injects three objections that draw on Fazlur Rahman. First, if existence is considered to be ontologically prior and singular, but it also manifests itself in plurality, is there not a tension between monism and pluralism? Second,  75-78. is Mullā Ṣadrā's metaphysics not circular, since the notion that existence is prior is not actually argued, but based on the self-evident nature of existence? Third, there is a tension between whether essences have any reality whatsoever or whether they are the way in which an intensity of existence presents itself.63 These are not new objections and if the author had considered the tradition he would have encountered the responses that make clear that there is a certain coherence to the metaphysics as a system.
The third chapter moves onto a more detailed examination of modulation of existence (tashkīk ul-vujūd). He objects that it is odd to suggest that the secondary intelligible that is the concept of existence can be predicated by modulation since it does not have individuals as such; however, that is precisely how modulation as a semantic concept works in the Avicennian tradition. Second, he seems to think that the only way existence can be both a principle of commonality and difference is if one rethinks the Aristotelian categories and does not differentiate between quantity and quality. But the notion of intensity is another type of "more or less" and in effect the Aristotelian category theoryand hylemorphism, which considers entities to be dyads of form and matteris just not that important for Mullā Ṣadrā. It is also misleading to suggest that he thinks that non-existence, just like existence, is a modulated concept. It is not. If existence is a modulated pyramid or hierarchy of being, then the less intense degrees which are more contaminated and embodied forms of existence are not degrees of non-existence; they remain within the hierarchy of existence itself. Modulation to a large extent is the most objected concept in Mullā Ṣadrā's thought and there is more by way of objection that would have been possible.
The final chapter deals with the problem of the relationship between existence and essence. Do essences actually exist? Are essences the essential accidents of existence, rendering them the true subject of metaphysics? Any distinction between existence and essence presumes that the two sides of the binary have some reality. But the way in which Mullā Ṣadrā and others in his tradition solve this is through recourse to the notion of the different modalities and conditions relating to essence.
Yāsīn's work is the most serious engagement with Mullā Ṣadrā, but despite the references in the bibliography and elsewhere there is little attempt to bring his thought into a serious dialogue with either analytic or continental traditions. It would have been useful to have seen a conclusion which would summarize exactly where Yāsīn thinks Mullā Ṣadrā goes wrong and what his critique is. As far as it is clear, most of the objections and critiques seem to come from the existing work of Rahman as well as those from the tradition of Iqbal. The objections also show how the divergence of the legacy of Mullā Ṣadrā, both the adoptive and the critical, is a major issue if one compares the South Asian reception to the Iranian one. Nevertheless, Yāsīn is writing as an insider within the academic circle of philosophy in Pakistan and hence addressing his (broadly favourable) critique to that particular audience, with an implicit call for that academy to embrace and teach Mullā Ṣadrā alongside other philosophers within the university curriculum.

Scholastic and Analytic Sadrianism
The fourth and final modality within the contemporary reception of Mullā Ṣadrā is the analyticizing examination of a particular concept in his thought. This is Sayyid Nāṣir Raẓā Zaidī's analysis of the proofs for the existence of God in the philosophy of Mullā Ṣadrā.64 The author is familiar with the Iranian secondary literature, including the seminarian work, and seems to be based in Karachi. Zaidī makes it clear in his introduction that there is a need for Muslims in South Asia to meet the intellectual challenge of the West through familiarity with their own philosophical traditions.65 Philosophy is central to human culture and expression and needs to be championed and embraced. Zaidi's conception of philosophy is an instrument of cultural struggle and conflict in which Iranian thinkers such as Mullā Ṣadrā and his modern commentators such as Sayyid Jalāl ud-Dīn Āshtiyānī (d. 2005), Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Mihdī Ḥāʾerī Yazdī (d. 1998), and Āyatullāh Javādī Āmulī are used to combat the threat of modernism, postmodernism, and other challenges to Islamic metaphysics and belief from western thought.66 Within this context, selecting the study of the proofs for the existence of God is an appropriate topic since in modern Iranian seminarian philosophy (of the school of Mullā Ṣadrā), the existence of God is both the ground for metaphysical inquiry and indeed the end of metaphysics as well. 67 The work comprises six chapters. He begins with an introduction to Mullā Ṣadrā's thought in general, which includes a consideration of his critics (Ẓiyā Journal of urdu studies 1 (2020) 27-52 ud-Dīn Durrī and Ṣāliḥī Māzandarānī) and the Persian and English secondary literature. It is clearly the best contextualising introduction to Mullā Ṣadrā available in Urdu.68 While acknowledging the "eclectic" and "synthetic" nature of Mullā Ṣadrā's thought and its reconciliation of Peripetatism and Illuminationism, Zaidī does point out the areas in which Mullā Ṣadrā diverges from these two schools. Some attempts to render concepts into English are misleading: he translates Ibn ul-ʿArabī's notion of ḳhalq-e jadīd as "creatio continua," but that is the term that the modern Christian traditions use to render occasionalism and it is clear from Ibn ul-ʿArabī's critique of the Ashʿarī tradition that he was no occasionalist. 69 Three chapters follow on different paths for proving the existence of God, drawing upon Mullā Ṣadrā's own classification as well as Naṣīr ud-Dīn Ṭūsī's from his commentary on Avicenna: the proof from motion; the proof from creation; and the proof from contingency, which is Avicenna's famous proof. The first of these chapters begins with arguments from motion in ancient philosophy from Anaxagoras to Aristotle's "unmoved mover" bringing things from potentiality to actuality as their final and efficient cause. 70 The chain of causes considered and the need for that chain of motive beings to culminate in the mover who is unmoved is usually predicated on the notion that infinite chains of beings-"actual" infinites-do not obtain in ancient science. Zaidī presents the shortcomings of this mode of proving the existence of God from Avicenna through to Javādī Āmulī (without mentioning Averroes' defence), citing Aquinas' defence along the way.71 For Mullā Ṣadrā, the proof from motion is weak because it relies on a contingent notion and entity: motion only arises in contingency since it bears within it both the notion of potentiality and propensity.72 These cannot enter into the notion of God, who in this sense "real predicate."78 Zaidī also discusses the versions of the proofs in the work of Sabzavārī and T̤ abāt̤ abāʾī , and their attempts to modify and improve it. The real question that arises is whether this is in fact a proof, since it seems to rely upon an almost mystical intuition of the being of God. At the same time, it is somewhat odd that Zaidī goes on to compare it to the famous ontological argument of Anselm with which it shares little (and with the later versions and critiques of Descartes and Kant).79 He cannot leave it at mysticism, since the function of the book is to draw on philosophy to provide a response to contemporary intellectual challenges, at the heart of which is demonstrating the existence of God. He returns to the question of predication to defend the notion the existence does in fact refer, is a real predicate, and the proof relies upon the basic metaphysics of Mullā Ṣadrā: existence is ontologically fundamental, singular but modulated, and it can be directly intuited.80 Thus, the proof is located within the systematic coherence of Sadrian metaphysics.
A final appended chapter includes a full discursive listing of Mullā Ṣadrā's work, but it is neither critical (it includes pseudo-epigraphical works) nor does it add anything to the existing introductions to Mullā Ṣadrā. Zaidī seems to be writing for a bilingual readership, one that reads philosophy in English. Technical terms and names are often given with their English rendition as well, although they are not consistently rendered; for example, tashkīk ul-vujūd (modulation of existence) in one place is "graded unity of being" and in another "systematic ambiguity of being."81 It is also extremely annoying, given the baggage of the term, to see ḥikmah mutaʿāliyah rendered as "transcendent theosophy," but that is clearly the influence of Nasr.82 Throughout the chapters, we see Zaidī drawing on Javādī Āmulī's analytical and quite excellent seminarian's approach to proofs for the existence of God entitled Tabyīn-e Barāhīn-e Iṡbāt-e Ḳhudā, as well as comparisons to the arguments in philosophy of religion and in other traditions such as the quinque voces of Aquinas. Zaidī demonstrates his mastery of the text of Mullā Ṣadrā as well as the secondary literature and commentaries in Persian and English along with a decent grasp of the philosophy of religion and modern European philosophy (which may partly be derived from his reading of the Persian exegeses of the texts). As such it is a useful contribution in Urdu and seems to 78  bridge those interested in the intellectual contributions of the Shiʿi seminary with those seeking authentic Islamic alternatives to contemporary thought. In its understanding of the issues and the analytical nature of the presentationalthough it does not critique Mullā Ṣadrā at all-it is the best work on Mullā Ṣadrā in Urdu that one can find at present.
Apart from these works, there is some further evidence of interest in the philosophy of Mullā Ṣadrā, although it tends to be restricted to Shiʿi intellectuals such as Abbas Hussaini, Barkatullah Sinovi and Hasnain Naqvi. All three run highly competent Urdu and English blogs on Sadrian thought as well as convening a bilingual Shia Islamic Philosophy Facebook group.83 While a small handful of blogs, websites, and a few books might not constitute a real intellectual wave-certainly they pale in significance compared to the very many glosses and seminary teaching hours dedicated to Mullā Ṣadrā in the Dars-e Niz̤ āmī before independence-they nevertheless shed some light on elements of the pursuit of authenticity in the post-colonial state, particularly the desire to appropriate and adopt what they consider central and critical to their intellectual tradition. A fuller modern intellectual history of Pakistan and the "battle of ideas" since independence would require a much more extensive inquiry, interdisciplinary research, and would need to draw out the different modalities of philosophy and the life of the mind. But by adopting the study of Mullā Ṣadrā in Urdu as a heuristic device, we can still discern some contours of what constitutes philosophy in contemporary Pakistan, including its uses and abuses.