Eschatology, Psychology, and Imagination in Mullā Ṣadrā Shīrāzī’s Commentary on the Ḥadīth of Awakening

Abstract

This article examines the most salient aspects of the commentary upon the well-known ‘ḥadīth of awaken- ing’ by the famous Safavid philosopher, Mullā Ṣadrā Shīrāzī. In the context of his commentary upon this tradition, Ṣadrā discusses the nature of ima- ginal forms and provides a general explanation of how death is a type of awakening. He then goes on to tackle a problem in the history of Islamic philoso- phy concerning the modality of rewards and pun- ishments in the Afterlife. Here, Ṣadrā challenges some of the eschatological views of Shihāb al-Dīn Suhrawardī, while drawing upon both Ibn ʿArabī’s teachings on imagination and his own philosophical genius to systematically demonstrate how, in the fi- nal analysis, our bodily deaths mark an awakening to the reality of our selves on the plane of imagination.