Mir Damad 1561 – 1631

Mir Damad, the Master of the Damad, was an Iranian Twelver Shia philosopher and the founder of the School of Isfahan that would culminate in his pupil Mulla Sadra. Working in dialogue with Avicenna and Suhrawardi, he developed an original metaphysics of perpetual creation, in which existence emanates from God in a stretch of metaphysical time distinct from both eternity and ordinary measured time. His Qabasat is the principal text of his system. He served as a leading scholar at the Safavid court of Shah Abbas the Great and was buried at Najaf.

Mir Damad — Sayyid Muhammad Baqir Husayni Astarabadi, called Mir Damad ('the master son-in-law' for his marriage into the Safavid clerical aristocracy) — was born in 1561 at Astarabad on the Caspian and grew up at Mashhad, the great Shi'i shrine city of eastern Iran. He studied jurisprudence, theology, and philosophy at Mashhad and Qazvin, and from around 1597 settled at Isfahan, where he taught throughout the long reign of Shah Abbas I.

His writings include the Qabasat (Firebrands), the ethical Sirat al-mustaqim (The Straight Path), the Khulsat al-malakut on the angelic world, mystical poems under the pen-name Ishraq, and several treatises on theological and juridical questions. As the leading philosopher of the Safavid capital and as the teacher of Mulla Sadra, Sayyid Ahmad Alawi, and Mulla Shamsa Gilani, he stands at the head of the great philosophical school of Isfahan.

Mir Damad sought to reconcile the Avicennan tradition with the illuminationism of Suhrawardi and with Twelver Shi'i theology; his most original contribution was the doctrine of huduth dahri, the temporal-and-yet-eternal origination of the world, intended to safeguard divine voluntary creation against necessitarian readings of the Avicennan eternity of the world. He died at Najaf in 1631 while accompanying Shah Safi I on pilgrimage.