Sayyid Ḥaydar Āmulī's Risālah naqd al-nuqūd fī maʿarifat al-wujūd: A Philosophical Study and Provisional Translation
Open AccessWhile Sayyid Ḥaydar Āmulī (d. after 1385) is recognized as one of the most important Shīʿī thinkers of the period following the Mongol conquests, existing scholarship tends to reduce his intellectual contributions to a synthesis of Sufism with Twelver Shīʿī esotericism. This approach fails to consider his innovative philosophical contributions, which are most evident in his Risālah naqd al-nuqūd fī maʿarifat al-wujūd (Summary Treatise on the Knowledge of Being). Here Āmulī discusses the nature of existence—a topic of interest for both Peripatetic philosophers (that is, followers of Avicenna) and Akbarian Sufis (i.e., followers of Ibn ʿArabī)—and focuses on three facets of existence qua existence: firstly, its absoluteness and self-evidence; secondly, its unity and necessity; and thirdly, its manifestation and multiplicity. While the treatise has been treated as a faithful recapitulation of Akbarian rather than Avicennian ontology, in fact Āmulī draws on both traditions to construct his own metaphysics. The Summary Treatise is thus a characteristic example of Islamic philosophical development in the postclassical period, during which time the disciplines of philosophy, dogmatics, and mysticism began to borrow conceptual elements from each other. Āmulī’s reconciliatory metaphysical project is a key step in the development of Shīʿī metaphysical thought between ʿAllāmah Ḥillī (d. 1325) and Ṣadr al-Dīn Shīrāzī (Mullā Ṣadrā) (d. 1640).
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