Mulla Sadra Corner
Brief Profile
Sadr al-Din Muhammad ibn Ibrahim ibn Yahya al-Qawami al-Shirazi, known variously as Mulla Sadra, Sadr al-Muta'allihin was born in Shiraz in central Iran in ah 979-80 H/ 1571-2 AD. He studied in Isfahan before retiring for a number of years of spiritual solitude and discipline in the village of Kahak, near Qum. Here he completed the first part of his major work, the Asfar (The Four Journeys). He was then invited by Allah-wirdi Khan, the governor of Fars province, to return to Shiraz, where he taught for the remainder of his life. He died in Basra in 1050 H/ 1640 AD while on his seventh pilgrimage on foot to Mecca.
Vision
Thus, Islamic College Jakarta believes that the contempary world is meeting some more complicated challenges which demands deep concern, evaluated sight, reflective wisdom and profound religious thoughts from the Islamic world. Mulla Sadra’s thoughts were among the outstanding. Yet, his thoughts are not as familiar and popular than those Western scholars to Indonesian althought Indonesia has the greatest Muslim population in the world. One of the greatest philosophers from the Islamic world, who, remarkably, came not from the Medieval Islamic period, but from what so-called the beginning of autumn season of Islamic Civilization.
Mission
In its ultimate analysis the balance between the particular and the general is that between the soul and the mind. All that the Muslims achieved was stamped by that balance. The flowering of genius in Medieval Islamic was due to the immense impetus given when clarity and power of thoughts were added to their faith and great spiritual force. That union made all the plain expression of the significant; the mosques in its sacred elegance; the outstanding jewellers of the words; the spirit of curiosity with the spirit of their tawhid faith. It made the Muslims as lovers of knowledge and of beauty; it enabled them to hold fast both to the things that are seen and to the things that are not seen, in all they have left behind for us, science, philosophy, religion and art.
But since the days of Medieval Islamic balanced view has been the rarest of achievements. The contemporary world has taken outright the way of the soul, nor the way of the mind, but wavered between the two, giving adherence now to one, now to other, never able finally to discard either yet powerless to reconcile their claims.
Since the nineteenth-century, Western scholars such as Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Adam Smith, had a profound influence on our contempary thoughts. Their thoughts are very influental to our living today, whether we accept it or not we live in the world that is now based upon their worldview. The nineteenth-centry Western metaphysical ideas had all been emptied of their true metaphysical content through a long process of secularization. Nietschze represent their thoughts when he spoke of the “death of God.”
