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The Triumph of Mercy: Philosophy and Scripture in Mullā Ṣadrā . By Mohammed Rustom. pp. 243. New York, SUNY Press, 2012.

At the dawn of the modern age, S. adr al-Dı̄n al-Shirāzı̄ (d. 1640) stood at the pinnacle of an unparalleled civilisation that already spanned more than a millennium and nearly the entire “known world”. His corpus of writings throws a revealing light on the long procession of thinkers with whom he continued to dialogue—Ibn ʿArabı̄, Qūnawı̄, Suhravardı̄, Ghazāl̄ı, Rāzı̄ and the ubiquitous mutakallimūn, in the main. Dr Mohammed Rustom gives us a flavour of the complexity in this rather unassuming volume without straying from what he set out to accomplish (cf. p. 33): “explain, through a textual and analytical examination of one of S. adrā’s tafsı̄r works, the manner in which philosophy and scripture interact with each other in his thought” (p. 4). S. adrā meant to produce a full-fledged tafs̄ır (Qur’ānic exegesis) but composed sixteen separate texts, all told, compiled and published as the multi-volume Tafsı̄r al-Qur’ān al-kar̄ım. Dr Rustom wisely concentrates on his commentary on the Qur’ān’s opening chapter, Tafsı̄r Sūrat al-fātih. a (TSF). Far from diminishing the value of his analysis, this restriction enables him to probe more effectively why S.adrā approached scripture in the way he did. This is the most important of a series of questions the author poses throughout this well-disciplined study, which incidentally spares us the customary thesis-style “review of the literature”; the author discusses his secondary sources in the main body of the book where he can more gainfully assess them. S. adr al-Dı̄n Qūnawı̄ (d. 1274), Ibn ʿArabı̄’s most important expositor, had composed an exegesis of his own on Sūrat al-fātih. a entitled Iʿjāz al-bayān. Rustom gives the gist of S. adrā’s borrowings from this highly influential work, which contains a now-classic introduction. There, Qūnawı̄ made extensive use of Arabic linguistic concepts with a view to developing—in kindred spirit with S. adrā and Ibn ʿArabı̄, Qūnawı̄’s teacher and stepfather—a sort of exegetical grammar1 based on the Qur’ān, which he took as the selfsame divine act of creation. Linguistics is not properly philosophy, but his reputation rested squarely on the imporant technical refinements resulting therefrom. It certainly proved conducive to what Rustom calls, with Prof. William Chittick, a “rapprochement” between the scripture-based language of Ibn ʿArabı̄ and the technical discourse of Peripatetic Islamic philosophy (p. 39). This distinction is now too neat to stand on its own, but it is germane to the enduring rivalries that separated different approaches to the question of knowledge and existence. Rustom submits that TSF was probably written after S. adrā had finished his late and all-important Mafāt̄ıh. al-ghayb, an original version of which formed part of al-Asfār, S. adrā’s magnum opus, as well as a major textual source for TSF. Miftāh. 1, in particular, deals with “the nature of revelation and the different levels of the descent of God’s Word and its correspondence to the inner layers of man’s soul” (p. 10), where S. adrā lays down his basic exegetical principles. The author is convinced that the Mafāt̄ıh. , which literally means “keys” in Arabic, offers us “the keys . . . to the hermeneutical perspective S. adrā adopts in his Qur’ān commentaries” (p.14). In fact, S. adrā’s exegetical writings “mark the first time . . . that a philosopher had undertaken such a wide-scale commentary upon the Qur’ān” (pp. 2–3). Rustom easily debunks the notion they might be mere glosses designed to justify S. adrā’s mystico-philosophical stances on “Qur’ān’s dicta.” The Tafs̄ır as a whole, he assures us, was clearly not an afterthought to philosophy, as it points to the core of S. adrā’s very approach to “philosophy,” which Rustom qualifies as Qur’ānic.