Shia State Formation, the Isfahan School, and the Limits of Institutionalized Batin (907–1135 AH / 1501–1722 CE)
The Safavid state (907–1135 AH / 1501–1722 CE) constitutes the only sustained historical attempt to institutionalize the Shia batin tradition at the level of state formation. This paper examines the Safavid experiment through the SCRA zahir-batin framework, tracing its genuine achievements — the Isfahan School's philosophical output, the formation of a popular Shia identity across the Persianate world — against its structural failures.
Three figures define the Isfahan School: Mir Damad (d. 1041 AH / 1631 CE), whose doctrine of huduth dahri locates creation at the boundary of time and eternity; Mulla Sadra (979–1045 AH / 1571–1636 CE), whose asalat al-wujud, tashkik al-wujud, and harakat jawhariyya constitute the most systematic philosophical integration of Shia metaphysics; and Fayz Kashani (1007–1090 AH / 1598–1680 CE), whose Al-Wafi and Al-Mahajja al-Bayda' synthesize hadith transmission and Sufi ethics. The Khorasan-Indus corridor produced Dara Shikoh's Majma' al-Bahrayn (1655 CE) as a parallel integrative project.
Three structural failures undercut the experiment: Conditional Batin Tolerance (Nuqtavi suppression under Shah Abbas I); Usuli Instrumentalization (al-Muhaqqiq al-Karaki's na'ib 'amm doctrine subordinating juristic authority to dynastic legitimation); and the Imam's Absence (the state governed in the Hidden Imam's name while the Imam's occultation remained the permanent ground of all Shia constitutional legitimacy — a contradiction the state could manage but never resolve).
SCRA Verdict: Partial batin recovery — genuine but structurally incomplete.
The Safavid dynasty did not originate as a political movement. The Safaviyyeh Sufi order was founded in Ardabil (northwestern Persia) by Sheikh Safi al-Din Ardabili (650–735 AH / 1252–1334 CE), a disciple of Sheikh Zahid Gilani and a figure whose lineage, in the order's own genealogical tradition, traced back to Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib (A.S.) through Imam Musa al-Kadhim (A.S.). The order began as a Sunni Sufi brotherhood — the genealogical connection to the Imams was a later elaboration or, on some accounts, a recovery of a suppressed lineage — and underwent a gradual Shia transformation through the 14th and 15th centuries.
Pre-735 AH / 1334 CE: Safaviyyeh founded as Sunni Shafi'i Sufi order under Safi al-Din Ardabili. The order's silsila passes through Sheikh Zahid Gilani and is rooted in northern Persia and Azerbaijan.
c. 800–850 AH / c. 1400–1450 CE: Under Sheikh Junayd and Sheikh Haydar, the order becomes militantly Shia and assembles the Qizilbash tribal confederation (Turkmen tribes of Azerbaijan, Anatolia, and western Persia). The red headgear (taj) with twelve folds — the Qizilbash insignia — encodes devotion to the Twelve Imams in its material form.
907 AH / 1501 CE: Ismail I, aged fourteen, defeats the Aq Qoyunlu confederation at the Battle of Sharur and enters Tabriz. He immediately declares Twelver Shia Islam the state religion — the first time in Islamic history that a ruling dynasty made this declaration.
Shah Ismail I's declaration was an act of extraordinary political and theological audacity. The Persianate world was overwhelmingly Sunni. The Timurid courts had patronized Sunni and Sufi culture. The Ottoman Empire to the west was consolidating its own Sunni identity. Ismail's declaration transformed the Qizilbash devotion — which had reached the level of treating the Safavid sheikhs as quasi-divine — into a state institution. The Qizilbash veneration of Ismail as a semi-divine figure (some traditions attributed divinity to him directly) represented the zahir problem of the Safavid enterprise from its opening moment: the state was built on a popular devotionalism that exceeded Twelver theological orthodoxy.
The Safavid project began with a genuine batin impulse: a Sufi order with Alid lineage claims, a popular devotional culture centred on walayah, and a declared intention to reclaim political space for the House of the Prophet. The three structural failures examined in Section VII are not external impositions on this project — they are the endogenous contradictions within it.
The Safavid declaration produced an immediate strategic problem: there were virtually no qualified Shia fuqaha (jurists) in Persia capable of running the religious institutions of a Shia state. The heartlands of Shia jurisprudence lay outside Safavid territory — in Jabal Amil (southern Lebanon/Syria) and Bahrain. The solution was importation.
al-Muhaqqiq al-Karaki (al-Muhaqqiq al-Thani)
d. 940 AH / 1534 CE — Jabal Amil (Syria/Lebanon) → IsfahanAli ibn Abd al-Ali al-Karaki was the most eminent Shia jurist of his generation, trained in the tradition of Jabal Amil. Shah Ismail I and Shah Tahmasp I both invited him to Persia, and al-Karaki served as the effective head of the Safavid religious establishment. His risala establishing the jurisprudential basis for the Safavid state is among the most consequential documents in Shia political theology.
Al-Karaki's central jurisprudential contribution to Safavid state formation was the elaboration of the na'ib 'amm (general deputy) doctrine. In classical Shia theology, the na'ib khass (specific deputies) were the four intermediaries of the Minor Occultation (260–329 AH / 874–941 CE) who communicated directly with the Hidden Imam. After the Major Occultation began in 329 AH / 941 CE, the possibility of specific deputyship ended. Al-Karaki's doctrine held that qualified jurists — the fuqaha — exercise na'ib 'amm (general deputyship) of the Hidden Imam during the Major Occultation: they are collectively authorized to perform functions that the Imam would perform if present.
Al-Karaki extended the na'ib 'amm authorization to include: (1) leading Friday prayers (salat al-jum'a), which classical Shia theologians had held to be suspended during the occultation; (2) collecting and distributing the khums tax; (3) pronouncing judicial rulings with full binding authority; (4) — most consequentially — providing religious legitimation to the Shah as the temporal executive of the na'ib 'amm's authority.
The structural consequence: the na'ib 'amm doctrine made the Safavid state jurisprudentially coherent, but it did so by binding the jurists' authority to the dynastic framework. The jurists legitimized the Shah; the Shah provided the institutional platform for the jurists. This mutual dependence — what the paper identifies as Usuli Instrumentalization — would constrain the independence of Shia jurisprudence for the duration of the Safavid period and beyond.
The na'ib 'amm doctrine should be distinguished carefully from Khomeini's later wilayat al-faqih (1970): al-Karaki's doctrine grants the jurists religious authority exercised alongside and through the Shah's temporal authority; it does not grant the jurists supreme executive political power over the state. Nonetheless, the seed of the claim that jurists hold comprehensive deputyship over the Imam's prerogatives was planted in the Safavid period.
The genuine achievement of the Safavid experiment was not political or jurisprudential. It was philosophical. The transfer of the capital from Tabriz to Isfahan under Shah Abbas I (r. 996–1038 AH / 1588–1629 CE) coincided with a flowering of Shia philosophical theology with no precedent in Islamic history. Three figures define it.
Mir Damad (Muhammad Baqir Damad)
c. 960–1041 AH / c. 1561–1631 CE — IsfahanMir Damad — "Teacher of the Third Teacher" — held the chair of philosophy in Isfahan and was the direct teacher of Mulla Sadra. His major contribution was the doctrine of huduth dahri (temporal origination): the world is originated, but at the level of the dahr — the eternal present that stands above time — rather than within sequential time (zaman). This allowed Mir Damad to reconcile Avicennan necessitarianism with Quranic creationism without collapsing either into the other.
Zahir-batin significance: huduth dahri locates the moment of creation at precisely the boundary between the absolute divine realm and the temporal world — the barzakh between Absolute and manifest. The doctrine gives philosophical precision to the Shia metaphysics of Imamic mediation.
Mulla Sadra (Sadr al-Din Muhammad Shirazi)
979–1045 AH / 1571–1636 CE — Shiraz → Qom → Isfahan → KahakMulla Sadra constitutes the summit of the Isfahan School and the most systematic philosophical achievement in the Shia tradition. His al-Hikma al-Muta'aliya fi'l-Asfar al-'Arba'a (The Transcendent Wisdom in the Four Journeys) integrates three prior traditions — Avicennan Peripatetic philosophy, Suhrawardi's Illuminationist philosophy (ishraq), and Sufi gnostic metaphysics ('irfan) — into a single unified system grounded in three signature doctrines:
The Imam as 'Aql Fa''al (Active Intellect): Mulla Sadra's most consequential contribution to SCRA framework: the Imam functions, in the Sadrian system, as the 'aql fa''al — the Active Intellect that mediates between the divine realm and the human intellect. Access to genuine philosophical knowledge is not possible except through the Imam's mediation. This makes the Imam not merely a political or jurisprudential authority but an ontological condition of intellectual actualization. The wali is the condition of possibility for the philosopher.
Fayz Kashani (Mulla Muhsin Kashani)
1007–1090 AH / 1598–1680 CE — Kashan → IsfahanSon-in-law of Mulla Sadra and the Isfahan School's transmitter to the hadith sciences. His Al-Wafi — a massive compilation of the four canonical Shia hadith collections with commentary — represents the integration of hadith scholarship with the philosophical and irfani achievement of the School. His Al-Mahajja al-Bayda' (The White Path) is a Shia reworking of al-Ghazali's Ihya' 'Ulum al-Din, reclaiming the ethical and spiritual dimensions of Islamic practice from a Shia irfani standpoint.
Fayz Kashani represents the School's attempt to work at all three registers simultaneously: philosophical theology (Sadrian), hadith transmission (Al-Wafi), and lived spiritual ethics (Al-Mahajja). This integration — rarely achieved in the history of Islamic thought — is the Isfahan School's deepest contribution to the SCRA framework.
The Isfahan School produced, for the first time in Islamic intellectual history, a comprehensive philosophical system in which: (1) existence itself is ontologically primary and admits of degrees; (2) the world is in continuous ontological renewal; (3) the Imam is the active condition of intellectual actualization; and (4) hadith transmission, philosophical theology, and spiritual ethics are integrated rather than in tension. This is the partial batin recovery that the SCRA framework identifies as the Safavid period's genuine achievement — and it is substantial.
The Safavid state's tolerance of batin expression was always conditional — bounded by its usefulness to the dynastic project. Two episodes reveal the structural limit with precision.
The Nuqtaviyya were a heterodox movement originating with Mahmud Pasikhani (d. c. 830 AH / 1427 CE) in northern Persia. Their doctrines included cyclical cosmology, transmigration of souls, a reinterpretation of religious law as allegorical, and — most provocatively — the claim that the cycle of prophetic religion was ending and a new dispensation was beginning. Several significant figures in the Safavid intellectual and artistic establishment were Nuqtavis or Nuqtavi sympathizers.
Under Shah Abbas I, the Nuqtavis were suppressed in two waves (c. 1594 and 1601 CE). The suppression was not merely theological: Shah Abbas used a Nuqtavi astronomer's prophecy that he would be replaced by a non-Safavid king to temporarily abdicate the throne in favour of a Nuqtavi figure, then had the pretender executed, discrediting the movement and eliminating a politically significant heterodox network simultaneously. The theatrical quality of the suppression reveals its character: the state managed batin expression instrumentally — tolerating it while useful, suppressing it when it threatened dynastic legitimacy.
The deepest jurisprudential fracture within Safavid-period Shia Islam was the Usuli-Akhbari controversy. The two schools represent opposed positions on the epistemological basis of Shia jurisprudence during the Occultation:
Led by al-Muhaqqiq al-Karaki and later by Wahid Bihbahani (1116–1205 AH / 1704–1791 CE). Position: qualified jurists (mujtahids) exercise independent juristic reasoning (ijtihad) and are the authoritative interpreters of Shia law during the Occultation. Lay Shia must follow a living mujtahid (taqlid). The Safavid state was built on Usuli foundations.
Associated with Muhammad Amin Astarabadi (d. 1036 AH / 1627 CE) and his Al-Fawa'id al-Madaniyya (1031 AH / 1622 CE). Position: only the transmitted reports (akhbar) of the Imams constitute valid jurisprudential sources; rational ijtihad by jurists is an innovation. Every Shia can and should access the Imams' reports directly. The Akhbari school was strongest in Bahrain and the Atabat.
The Akhbari challenge threatened the Safavid religious establishment at its foundation: if ijtihad is invalid and taqlid of living jurists unnecessary, the juristic apparatus al-Karaki had constructed — and the authority it lent to the Shah — collapses. The controversy was not resolved during the Safavid period. It reached its decisive resolution only after the Safavid collapse, when Wahid Bihbahani definitively reasserted Usuli dominance at Karbala in the mid-18th century — a resolution that shaped Shia jurisprudence to the present.
The philosophical energies of the Safavid moment did not remain within Persia. The Khorasan corridor connected Isfahan's intellectual culture to the Mughal courts of the Indian subcontinent, producing a remarkable parallel integrative project. The Deccan sultanates — Bijapur, Golconda, Ahmadnagar — provided additional centres where Shia court culture and Sufi intellectual synthesis coexisted.
Dara Shikoh (Dara Shukoh)
1024–1069 AH / 1615–1659 CE — Mughal court, DelhiCrown Prince of the Mughal Empire, eldest son of Shah Jahan, and the most serious student of comparative mystical theology in early modern South Asian history. A disciple of Mian Mir (Qadiri Sufi chain) and Mullahshah Badakhshi, Dara Shikoh produced a series of works attempting systematic integration of Sufi 'irfan with Hindu Vedantic philosophy:
Majma' al-Bahrayn (1065 AH / 1655 CE) — "The Meeting of Two Seas" — is his most significant work for the SCRA framework. The title invokes Quran 18:60 (the meeting point of Moses and Khidr) and articulates Dara Shikoh's core argument: the mystical tradition of Islamic 'irfan and the Vedantic tradition of advaita are two expressions of the same primordial metaphysical reality. The work proceeds through systematic terminological comparison, demonstrating that key concepts — wujud/Brahman, 'ilm/ chit, the human soul as divine breath — map onto each other with a precision that, for Dara Shikoh, could not be coincidental.
From the SCRA zahir-batin framework, Dara Shikoh's project represents the identification of a common batin underlying two apparently distinct zahir traditions. The Indus Basin Studies (SCRA WP-13 and WP-14) develop this argument in full: the common ground is not coincidence but the Covenant of Alast (Quran 7:172) — all souls encountered the Haqiqa Muhammadiyya before their dispersion into different civilizational forms. Dara Shikoh was recovering, philosophically, what Sultan Bahu and Bulleh Shah articulated devotionally. His execution by Aurangzib (1069 AH / 1659 CE) on charges of apostasy represents a paradigmatic instance of the Ba'alist Capture mechanism applied to cross-traditional batin synthesis: the zahir-without-batin eliminating the batin-oriented integrative project.
1135 AH / 1722 CE: Afghan (Ghilzai) forces under Mahmud Hotaki defeat the Safavid army at the Battle of Gulnabad and besiege Isfahan for seven months. The Safavid court capitulates. Shah Sultan Husayn surrenders the crown to Mahmud Hotaki. The Safavid state effectively ends, though members of the dynasty contest power for two more decades.
1135–1148 AH / 1722–1736 CE: Nader Qoli (later Nader Shah Afshar) expels the Afghans and attempts to restore Safavid authority, eventually deposing the last Safavid claimant and declaring himself Shah in 1148 AH / 1736 CE. Nader Shah attempts — unsuccessfully — to reconcile Sunni and Shia through the so-called "Ja'fari school" proposal, revealing the degree to which the Safavid religious settlement remained fragile even at its apparent peak.
Post-1135 AH: The collapse of Safavid Isfahan triggers a major migration of Shia scholars to the Atabat (the holy shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala in Ottoman Iraq). This migration has a paradoxical consequence: the Shia scholarly establishment escapes Safavid state dependence and reconstitutes itself in Ottoman-controlled territory, outside any Shia sovereign framework. The independence this provides will enable the Usuli-Akhbari resolution.
Wahid Bihbahani (Muhammad Baqir Bihbahani, 1116–1205 AH / 1704–1791 CE) is the pivotal figure in post-Safavid Shia jurisprudential history. Based at Karbala, Bihbahani systematically dismantled Akhbari influence at the Atabat, rehabilitated ijtihad, and established Usuli dominance over the Shia scholarly establishment in a form that has persisted to the present. His willingness to declare Akhbaris unbelievers (kafir) — an extraordinary jurisprudential aggression — reveals the institutional stakes of the controversy.
Bihbahani's Usuli victory, achieved outside Safavid territory and after the Safavid collapse, represents the jurisprudential inheritance of the Safavid period with its state-dependency removed. The Usuli jurist retains the authority al-Karaki constructed, but no longer within the constraint of Safavid dynastic legitimation. This structural liberation is what makes the later development of wilayat al-faqih (Khomeini, 1970) jurisprudentially possible: the next step after Bihbahani's consolidation is to extend the jurist's authority from religious to political domains — a step the Safavid state had never needed to take (the Shah filled that function) and Bihbahani himself did not take.
The Safavid experiment represents the most significant attempt at batin recovery in post-Imamic Islamic history. Its verdict is not simple failure — the Isfahan School's philosophical output is a permanent contribution to human metaphysics — but structured, endogenous failure: the limitations were built into the project's architecture at its founding and could not be overcome from within.
Conditional Batin Tolerance
The Safavid state tolerated batin-oriented expression — Sufism, heterodox philosophy, esoteric speculation — conditionally: precisely insofar as it served or did not threaten dynastic authority. The Qizilbash veneration of the Shah as quasi-divine was cultivated as a legitimating resource; the Nuqtavi movement, which threatened that same authority, was suppressed theatrically.
From the SCRA zahir-batin framework: authentic batin recovery requires that batin expression be valued intrinsically — as connection to the divine ground of reality — rather than instrumentally as a legitimation resource. The moment batin is permitted only conditionally, the condition becomes the operative principle and the batin is effectively captured even while apparently expressed. The Safavid state institutionalized batin within a zahir political container that remained fundamentally Ba'alist in structure.
Usuli Instrumentalization
Al-Karaki's na'ib 'amm doctrine was jurisprudentially innovative and, within its own terms, coherent. Its structural consequence, however, was the binding of the Shia juristic establishment to the Safavid dynastic project. The jurists legitimized the Shah; the Shah funded and institutionalized the jurists. This mutual dependence meant that the juristic authority being exercised was simultaneously claiming to act for the Hidden Imam and actually acting for the Safavid dynasty.
The SCRA Ba'alist Capture analysis identifies this as Sub-mechanism I (Institutional Capture) operating from within: the jurists were not captured by an external force but structurally incorporated into the dynastic zahir. The authority of the Imam's name was deployed to legitimate the Shah's power — a zahir-without-batin operation conducted by the jurists themselves, not their opponents.
The Imam's Absence — The Unresolvable Constitutional Ground
The deepest structural failure of the Safavid experiment is not political or jurisprudential — it is ontological. The Safavid state governed in the name of the Hidden Imam. The Hidden Imam's occultation is not merely an absence to be managed; in the SCRA framework, it is the permanent ontological fact that defines the entire post-Imamic period. The Imam's absence means that no state — however sincere its Shia commitments — can claim to exercise the Imam's authority without constitutively misrepresenting the nature of that authority.
Mulla Sadra's doctrine — the Imam as 'aql fa''al, as the ontological condition of intellectual actualization — makes this failure precise: the philosophical achievements of the Isfahan School were possible because the Imam's ontological function continued through the occultation; the political project of the Safavid state claimed to exercise the Imam's authority while the Imam's absence rendered that claim structurally unfillable. The Isfahan School and the Safavid court coexisted within the same historical moment but operated on different ontological registers — one attuned to the Imam's actual function, the other claiming to embody it politically.
Partial Batin Recovery — Genuine but Structurally Incomplete.
The Safavid experiment produced two genuine batin recoveries: (1) the Isfahan School's philosophical synthesis, which constitutes the most integrated Shia metaphysical system in Islamic intellectual history, and (2) the formation of a mass Shia identity across the Persianate world, converting a population from Sunni to Shia practice within a century — a civilizational transformation whose consequences persist.
But these achievements were structurally undercut by the three failures identified above. The state that enabled the Isfahan School also suppressed the Nuqtavis. The jurists whose scholarly independence produced Mulla Sadra were institutionally bound to the dynastic project by al-Karaki's doctrine. The philosophical recovery of the Imam's ontological function occurred alongside a political claim to exercise the Imam's authority that the Imam's own occultation rendered incoherent.
The Safavid experiment demonstrates that partial batin recovery at state level is possible — and that the structural conditions enabling that recovery also contain the seeds of its limitation. A state that institutionalizes the batin tradition retains the instruments of Ba'alist Capture within its own architecture. The fully authentic zahir-batin integration cannot be legislated, institutionalized, or dynastically transmitted. It is a matter of the Imam's presence — and the Imam is in occultation.
Primary Sources
Al-Karaki, Ali ibn Abd al-Ali (al-Muhaqqiq al-Thani). Rasa'il al-Muhaqqiq al-Karaki. Edited by Muhammad al-Hassun. 3 vols. Qom: Maktabat Ayatullah al-Uzma al-Mar'ashi al-Najafi, 1409 AH.
Fayz Kashani, Mulla Muhsin. Al-Wafi. 26 vols. Isfahan: Maktabat Imam Amir al-Mu'minin Ali, 1406–1412 AH.
Fayz Kashani, Mulla Muhsin. Al-Mahajja al-Bayda' fi Tahdhib al-Ihya'. 8 vols. Qom: Jama'at al-Mudarrisin, n.d.
Mir Damad (Muhammad Baqir Damad). Al-Qabasat. Edited by Mahdi Mohaghegh et al. Tehran: McGill University Institute of Islamic Studies and Tehran University Press, 1977.
Mulla Sadra (Sadr al-Din Muhammad Shirazi). Al-Hikma al-Muta'aliya fi'l-Asfar al-'Aqliyya al-Arba'a. 9 vols. Beirut: Dar Ihya' al-Turath al-Arabi, 1981.
Mulla Sadra. Al-Shawahid al-Rububiyya fi'l-Manahij al-Sulukiyya. Edited by Jalal al-Din Ashtiyani. Mashhad: Mashhad University Press, 1346 Sh/1967.
Mulla Sadra. Mafatih al-Ghayb. Tehran: Mo'assasah-ye Mutala'at va Tahqiqat-e Farhangi, 1363 Sh/1984.
Dara Shikoh (Dara Shukoh). Majma' al-Bahrayn. Edited by M. Mahfuz-ul-Haq. Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1929.
Astarabadi, Muhammad Amin. Al-Fawa'id al-Madaniyya. Qom: Mu'assasat al-Nashr al-Islami, 1424 AH.
Secondary Sources
Arjomand, Said Amir. The Shadow of God and the Hidden Imam: Religion, Political Order and Societal Change in Shi'ite Iran from the Beginning to 1890. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Babayan, Kathryn. Mystics, Monarchs, and Messiahs: Cultural Landscapes of Early Modern Iran. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Cole, Juan. Sacred Space and Holy War: The Politics, Culture and History of Shi'ite Islam. London: I.B. Tauris, 2002.
Corbin, Henry. En Islam iranien: Aspects spirituels et philosophiques. 4 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1971–1972.
Corbin, Henry. Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth: From Mazdean Iran to Shi'ite Iran. Translated by Nancy Pearson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.
Floor, Willem. Safavid Government Institutions. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2001.
Hambly, Gavin R. G., ed. Central Asia. New York: Delacorte Press, 1969.
Karamustafa, Ahmet T. Sufism: The Formative Period. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007.
Matthee, Rudi. The Safavid Dynasty. In Encyclopaedia Iranica. Online edition, 2008. iranicaonline.org.
Mazzaoui, Michel M. The Origins of the Safawids: Si'ism, Sufism, and the Gulat. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1972.
Moosa, Matti. Extremist Shiites: The Ghulat Sects. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1988.
Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. Sadr al-Din Shirazi and His Transcendent Theosophy: Background, Life and Works. Tehran: Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy, 1978.
Nasr, Seyyed Hossein, and Oliver Leaman, eds. History of Islamic Philosophy. 2 vols. London: Routledge, 1996.
Newman, Andrew J. Safavid Iran: Rebirth of a Persian Empire. London: I.B. Tauris, 2006.
Pourjavady, Reza, and Sabine Schmidtke. A Jewish Philosopher of Baghdad: 'Izz al-Dawla Ibn Kammuna (d. 683/1284) and His Writings. Leiden: Brill, 2006.
Rizvi, Sajjad. Mulla Sadra Shirazi: His Life and Works and the Sources for Safavid Philosophy. Oxford: Journal of Semitic Studies Supplement 18, 2007.
Savory, Roger. Iran under the Safavids. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
Stewart, Devin J. Islamic Legal Orthodoxy: Twelver Shiite Responses to the Sunni Legal System. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1998.
Walbridge, John. The Leaven of the Ancients: Suhrawardi and the Heritage of the Greeks. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000.