Sadr Al-Din Shirazi and His Transcendent Theosophy: Back Ground, Life and Works- Seyyed Nasr

Although the classical view held in the West was that Islamic philosophy constituted a passing phenomenon and was merely a bridge between the late antiquity and the Latin high Middle Ages. gradually a wider perspective is becoming prevalent. Thanks to the writing:-. and expositions of a small number of scholars writing in Western languages.
The period during which over a millennium of Islamic philosophy was relegated to a short chapter entitled "Arabic philosophy" and inserted as a brief pause between "serious" periods of Western thought is now in many areas drawing to a close even if this change of view has not as yet become prevalent everywhere. The West has begun to become aware of other traditional civilizations as independent worlds worthy of con-
sideration in their own right rather than only as stepping-stones towards the foundation and development of the modern West. Other traditional intellectual universes have begun to reveal themselves to those qualified to perceive them in all their grandeur, inner unity and at the same time rich diversity. In modern times, the West first turned to the metaphysical heritage of India and the Far East, although they
arc farther removed from its own heritage than the Islamic world, but now gradually the same process is taking place in the case of Islam.

For eight centuries since the translators of Cordova made the works of Islamic philosophers accessible to the Latin West, the view was held that Islamic philosophy (which was called Arabic philosophy because of the language from which it was translated) consisted of the writings of a few men such as al-Kindi (Alkindus), al-Farabi (Alfarabius), lbn Sina (Avicenna), al-Ghazzali (Algazel) and Ibn Rushd (Averroes) who simply transmitted the philosophy of Aristotle and the Neoplatonists to the West adding little of their own.

It is now becoming an ever more widely recognized fact that the death of Averroes (595/1198), far from marking the end of Islamic philosophy, was simply the termination of one of its phases, and that for nearly eight centuries since Averroes wrote his famous commentaries upon Aristotle, Islamic philosophy has continued to possess a rigorous and rich life of its own centered mostly in Persia and the Indian sub-continent as the works of Sadr al-Din Shirazi (Mulla Sadra, c. 1571/2 – 1640) show.