at Harvard?’’ They did not understand my situation and needs. Even myown family did not understand why I spent so much time studying afterfinishing my formal education. But I wanted to be able to becomecompetent in the lecture of traditional texts. Lecture means ‘‘reading’’ inLatin, and for me it meant the reading of a text in the original sense ofthe word. In order to be a good teacher in our philosophical tradition,you have to have a master. You have to have a continuity of the master-disciple relationship and be able to master the oral tradition that accom-panies the written text. That experience of real masters helped me agreat deal. I am still a student of Islamic philosophy, but at least I havehad this experience and training.

R.J.: And you were transmitting this to your students at the same time.S.H.N.: That is right. I have taught my students on several levels overthese fifty years. One is the formal classes in the university and one isprivate lessons, or what is called dars-e kha!rej (outside lessons), which Igave in Iran, usually Sufi texts such as L!ah!ı j!ı ‘s Sharh: -i gulshan-i ra!z

85 andalso in the United States, where I have had a number of choice studentswho have become quite advanced. Here I have taught among otherworks al-H: ikmat al-‘arshiyyah and Kita!b al-masha!‘ir86 of Mull!a S: adr!a tothem using the original Arabic text with my own commentaries given inEnglish.

HENRY CORBIN

R.J.: Now, among the other great philosophical figures whom you metin the late fifties and sixties in Iran was Henry Corbin, who was at thattime the director of the French Institute for Iranian Studies in Tehran.What was the contribution of Corbin to your Islamic thought and yourphilosophical thought in general?S.H.N.: I would not say that he made a contribution to my philosophi-cal thought, but I learned a lot from him as far as the subjects of hisscholarship were concerned. He wrote on certain philosophers, as Ialready mentioned, such as on Ibn S!ın!a (especially on his OrientalPhilosophy,87 which I think is one of the most ingenious studies inIslamic philosophy), and of course there are both his edited texts andanalyses of Suhraward!ı and several other philosophers; I benefited fromall these scholarly works. But as far as my philosophical position is con-cerned, I was not influenced by Corbin. In fact, we complemented eachother rather than agreeing totally on everything. I had already come to

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know very well the writings of Corbin while I was in the United Statesbefore returning to Iran. As I told you, when I was writing my Ph.D.thesis in 1957 and 1958, I made extensive use of the writings of Corbinas far as Ibn S!ın!a was concerned. When I came to Iran in 1958, veryearly that fall I met Corbin, and of course he realized my interests. Webecame good friends, and he asked to see my Ph.D. thesis, which wasthen in manuscript form, and I gave him a copy of it. He was elated byit and wanted to get it published immediately in the Bollingen Series atthe Princeton University Press, but the Harvard University Press foundout and said, ‘‘No, we would like to do it ourselves,’’ and finally pub-lished it88 although it took them a few years to bring it out.

Anyway, Corbin and I began immediately to discuss matters ofmutual interest. At first, there was a certain friction between us, becausehe was opposed to the position of Gu"enon and the traditionalistperspective in general, which was mine. At the same time, however, hehimself was really the reviver of many aspects of traditional philosophy.Once he made a few harsh criticisms including personal attacks and Ibecame angry. His attack during a meeting we had at the InstitutFranco-Iranien was not against Gu"enon but against Burckhardt,89 whowas a very close personal friend of mine. So I got up and left the Insti-tute. Then Stella Corbin, his wife, called me up and apologized thatCorbin had said these things. She said, ‘‘No, please, come. He wants tosee you.’’ In any case, after that episode, I always took great care not todiscuss such matters with him and so did he. I understood his idiosyn-crasies and avoided matters that he disliked.

From the doctrinal point of view, we continued to disagree on manymatters as things went on. I must add that over the years he becamemore and more aware of the significance of traditional writings. I shallnever forget that in the sixties Teilhard de Chardin90 had become verypopular, and Corbin was very angry with his whole approach towardstheology and philosophy. At that time, Frithjof Schuon had written inthe footnote of one of his books, Comprendere l’Islam,91 that this kind oftheology proposed by Teilhard de Chardin is the surrender of theologyto the microscope, and he made a very severe criticism of him, whichelated Corbin. He said, ‘‘I am going to quote this footnote in one of mywritings, but that is going to cost me membership in the Acad"emie deBelles Lettres in France,’’ and that is exactly what happened. This showsyou what kind of prejudice existed against traditionalists in academiccircles in France at that time. Corbin also added, ‘‘la vie est trop court,’’meaning ‘‘life is too short’’ to care about the consequences of his action.

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He definitely had sympathy for Schuon’s writings. I also presented someof his books to Frithjof Schuon92 and Titus Burckhardt, and they boththought that Corbin had discovered many important aspects of thetraditional universe.

The main point of difference that I had with Corbin concerned thequestion of orthodoxy, which I interpret to mean not only formal andexterior orthodoxy, but also intellectual, metaphysical, and esotericorthodoxy. Of course ortho-docta means to have the correct doctrine orknowledge of things. It means to possess the truth. In his youth, Corbinhad had certain negative experiences vis-!a-vis Catholic authorities, whichhad caused him to convert to Protestantism and to call himself hetero-dox, although what Corbin was talking about was at the heart of theorthodoxy of Shi‘ism. We never came to an agreement over this issue. Iwas, however, in agreement with Corbin’s criticism of the point of viewof not only Western orientalism but also of modern Western philosophyin its disregard for the higher levels of reality and especially the imaginalworld, about which he wrote so much, especially in his very importantbook written in 1956, L’Imagination cr"eatrice dans le soufisme d’Ibn ‘Arabı#.93 Iwas, of course, in accord with him on this subject.

Teaching with Corbin

Corbin and I formed a kind of team, practically speaking, and I‘‘made use’’ of his presence in the following way: Corbin was a Frenchman, and the modernized circles in Iran were not interested in what‘All#amah T: ab#at:ab#a’#ı with a turban on his head was saying in Qom, butthey would listen if somebody from France spoke of traditional teach-ings. I ‘‘made use’’ of him as much as possible in this context. Corbinhimself also wanted to be used in that way to further the cause of thestudy of traditional philosophy in contemporary modern circles in Iranamong people who had been educated in the West or influenced byWestern thought. Needless to say, I also had the same goal in mind.Corbin was not only interested in making Islamic philosophy well knownin the West, but was also very much interested in the restoration ofIslamic philosophy in Iran. He always talked about bringing back to lifeIslamic philosophy in Iran itself and met often with traditional Persianscholars. Often we attended these meetings together, and so we formed,as I said, a kind of team. We also taught together for some fifteen yearsa seminar in Islamic philosophy at Tehran University to achieve the goalwe both had in mind.

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R.J.: Together?S.H.N.: Together, and it went like this. Corbin would usually choose aphilosophical text. For example, for several years it was the commentaryof Mull!a S: adr!a upon the Us:u!l al-ka!f ı!of Kulayn!ı,

94 which is a philosophi-cal masterpiece to which no one in the West had paid attention beforeCorbin. The text of Mull!a S: adr!a is an incredible work, which was nevercompleted. Corbin in fact compared it to The Art of the Fugue of JohannSebastian Bach, which was also left incomplete in the middle of a fugue,but which is nevertheless a very remarkable work. Corbin would first readthe text of Mull!a S: adr!a in French and then provide his own commentary.

R.J.: In French.S.H.N.: Yes, in French, and then I would translate his words intoPersian and add a commentary of my own; this would continue forsome time. Then there would be questions and answers. As you know,Corbin was almost completely deaf and that is why the way he spokeFrench was very difficult to understand, and also the terminology thathe used was not easy.

I will never forget that when we wanted to inaugurate the seminar, allthe dignitaries of the Faculty of Letters came. Sadighi and Mahdavi didnot like very much what was going on. They were too positivistic in theirphilosophical approach, but they did come, as did also Ali Akbar Siassiwho was then dean. Of course Siassi was one of the masters of theFrench language of his generation in Iran, and he thought that he knewFrench perfectly well. When the two-hour session finished he said,‘‘Dr. Nasr, how in the world did you translate Corbin into Persian? I didnot understand anything he was saying.’’ I said, ‘‘Corbin speaks inFrench, the angels understand him, then they transmit it to me in Persian,and then I express it in Persian to the audience,’’ and we all laughed.These seminars were important because many people, including all ofour own advanced students in the field of philosophy, graduate students,some of whom I have already named, such as Purhusayni, Davari,Davudi, and Mujtabavi, would be present along with many other people.

R.J.: Was it open to the public?S.H.N.: It was open actually to the students and professors of theFaculty of Letters, and professors such as Isa Sepahbodi and MehdiMohaghegh would be often present, and later Shayegan joined us. Butalso a number of people from outside the Faculty were also given per-mission to attend. So it was really a remarkable event in the Iranian

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cultural scene and had a major impact upon the teaching of Islamicphilosophy in a comparative mode, as comparative philosophy East andWest, you might say. Later on, when I became dean of the Faculty, I ofcourse continued to emphasize very much the importance of this kindof study. In addition, as I have already mentioned, Corbin and I wouldmeet with ‘All!amah T: ab!at:ab!a’!ı every other week during the fall whenCorbin was in Tehran. Furthermore, I would meet him privately almostevery week during the fall session, sometimes two or three times a week,and we would carry out joint intellectual and scholarly projects.

Projects with Corbin

First of all, I translated one or two essays of his into Persian in the latefifties and early sixties. Then one day he said, ‘‘The goal of my life was toedit in a critical manner the works of Suhraward!ı, and I will not be ableto complete the project by myself. Therefore, I want to ask you a greatfavor. I will put all the manuscripts that I have assembled over the yearsin your hands. Why do you not edit the Persian works of Suhraward!ı, theshorter works?’’ And he added that he wanted to have included in thisvolume a text that was in Arabic, the Risa!lat al-abra!j (Treatise of Constella-tions). He said, ‘‘I had already edited it in my youth in Istanbul. You cango over them and add them to the others, which are all in Persian.’’ Isaid, ‘‘All right,’’ but I did not know what I was getting into. The task ofediting these works and publishing them95 took the next ten years of mylife. It was a monumental task, a really monumental task. I received somenew manuscripts from Istanbul and other places. In several cases it wasonly with the help of the Arabic text that I could establish the Persiantext in question, because the manuscript of the latter was so faulty. Theediting of these treatises was one of the major achievements of my life inthe domain of the resuscitation of Islamic philosophy.

This task of editing critically philosophical texts is really a thanklessone, since most people, especially in the West, think that it is an easyprocess, scholars just editing books and putting them in your hand. Butof course it is in most cases very difficult. In any case, it is important tohave first of all the best manuscripts and then establish a critical editionbefore one begins to analyze a work. In the West today, you do not haveto worry about this matter, as far as modern philosophy is concerned.The works of Kant and Hegel and so forth have been critically editedsometimes several times, and now you can discuss these works on the

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basis of well-established texts. In our philosophical tradition, you firsthave to make the critically edited texts available.

R.J.: You knew already Suhraward!ı, I mean, you had already read him.S.H.N.: Yes. In the fifties and early sixties I had read mostlySuhraward!ı ‘s Arabic works such as H: ikmat al-ishra!q

96 and other workscontained in the two volumes that Corbin had brought out: the first inIstanbul, and the second in Tehran and Paris. But the Persian workswere not easily available. Kh!anb!ab!a Bay!an!ı of the National Library ofIran had brought out a couple of these treatises, but the few texts avail-able were scattered here and there, and furthermore they were for themost part faulty. I was, therefore, glad to edit the complete Persianworks because it was a major contribution to Persian literature as well asphilosophy in Iran. It was also an important step in creating greaterawareness among Iranians of their own past.

Immediately upon publication of these treatises, interest in themspread like wildfire. The titles of these treatises, such as Saf ı!r-e s ı!morgh(The Song of the Griffin) and ‘Aql-e Sorkh (The Purple Intellect) came to beused even by cinematographers and painters. It is unbelievable how itcaught on and what impact it had on the educated public in general.Corbin asked if I wanted him to write a French prolegomena for myvolume,97 as he had done for the other two volumes. I responded affir-matively, and then I wrote an extensive Persian introduction, and thework came out as an eight-hundred page book, which was then repub-lished by the Imperial Academy after I founded it.

This was a project that caused Corbin and me to meet every weekwhile the work was in progress and he was in Tehran. Corbin wouldalso consult with me about other projects. For example, when he wantedto begin cooperating with Sayyid Jalal al-Din Ashtiyani on theMuntakhaba!t-e h:ukama!-ye ela!hı! dar !I ra!n,98 which was to be a seven-volume work, he consulted with me, and it was I who introduced Cor-bin to Ashtiyani for this task and vice versa.

R.J.: You went to Mashhad?S.H.N.: Yes, I went to Mashhad and talked to Ashtiyani about theproject, but I must say that I had brought Ashtiyani to see Corbin inTehran years before, as Ashtiyani would come often to Tehran. I wentto Mashhad especially for this project, and Ashtiyani agreed to cooper-ate. Unfortunately, because of the death of Corbin the seven volumesthat were planned could not be realized, but four volumes did come

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out. I was involved in nearly every major project that Corbin was carry-ing out at that time. Of course I also published a M!elange for him, whichyou must have seen.

R.J.: Absolutely.S.H.N.: This is a very large volume and is a major work, one of the bestthings done on Corbin or for him. I asked the prime minister AmirAbbas Hoveida,99 who liked Corbin’s writings very much, to come to thecelebration on the occasion of the publication of the book. We had awonderful celebratory session for Corbin at Tehran University in whichthis book was presented to him. When I became the founding presidentof the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy, Corbin was then retiringfrom the Sorbonne, and I asked him to become one of our professors.So, he continued to come to Tehran for the last four years of his lifeunder the auspices of the Academy, being no longer formally associatedwith the Institut Franco-Iranien and no longer receiving a salary from it.

Corbin of course taught at the Academy, and this was an importantpart of the grand design I had for the Academy, which was to make it amajor center for philosophy East and West, where different currents ofphilosophy were to be taught alongside our own philosophy, PersianIslamic philosophy, which was at the heart of our program. I broughtboth Izutsu100 and Corbin to the Academy, and of course they played avery important role. Thanks to them and others, it was possible formany fine students to be trained there. The few years we had togetherwas really the golden age of the Academy. Izutsu and Corbin as well asmyself used to teach there along with many others, but we were thethree main teachers.

Corbin and Mull"a S: adr"a

I also must mention that Corbin’s attraction to Mull"a S: adr"a wascaused to a large extent by what I said to him, and I pushed him in thedirection of S: adrian Studies. The meetings with ‘All"amah T: ab"at:ab"a’"ıwere also of course very important in turning the attention of Corbin toMull"a S: adr"a, meetings that as already mentioned were also attended byme. Corbin in fact did not begin to write on Mull"a S: adr"a until after ourmeeting in 1958. All of the three major scholars who wrote on Mull"aS: adr"a in the West, that is Corbin, Izutsu, and Fazlur Rahman, everyoneof whom were much older than myself, were introduced to the world ofMull"a S: adr"a by me.

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Corbin and Religion

Corbin and I also had a lot of personal human contacts and commoninterest in various spiritual and intellectual matters, and I knew him verywell on the human level. For example, we went together for ziya!rat101 ofJ!am-i kar!an, the site associated with the Twelfth Imam near the holy cityof Qom. He considered himself a ‘‘Shi‘ite,’’ although I think that henever formally converted to Shi‘ism. But he was inwardly converted toit. He always used to say, ‘‘nous Shi‘ites’’ that is, ‘‘we Shi‘ites.’’ We alsospoke about intimate, spiritual subjects together, about inner visions andmatters like that, which I do not want to discuss here.

R.J.: What kind of man was Corbin, I mean, personally? I mean, did hepractice his religion?S.H.N.: That is a very good question. As I said, Corbin had been origi-nally Catholic but converted to Protestantism because of the limitationput by his Catholic teachers upon his study of mysticism in which hewas intensely interested. He was attracted to the study of mysticismsince his youth, and so he began to study early in his life 16th- and17th-century Lutheran mysticism and theosophy, and then he was led tothe study of Islam and specially Suhraward!ı. He discovered throughSuhraward!ı the Shi‘ite Persian world, which he felt was his spiritualhome. He had a very deep, personal attachment to the Twelfth Imam aswell as to the other Shi‘ite Imams. It was unbelievable to observe thelove he had for the Shi‘ite Imams as if he were a very pious Shi‘ite; butat the same time, he was a French intellectual but not like figures suchas Gu"enon and Schuon who embraced Islam formally and practicedwhat they preached in the sense that when they said you have to followa tradition they themselves followed one. They got up in the morningand said their prayers but Corbin did not practice Islam on the formallevel. I never saw Corbin formally perform nama!z or something like that,but I definitely did see him pray. He was a religious man in the sensethat he not only believed in God but also prayed to Him.

In addition, I think that Corbin was given a kind of divine gift ofbeing able to be in contact with the angelic world. He was a kind of her-meneut of the angelic world in that he had a natural inclination towardsthat world and the ability to interpret its message for us. He was a kindof natural visionary. Whenever he looked at things, he looked behindthem, not only at them. He always looked for the inner sense of things.That is what drew him to esoteric Shi‘ism, and Sufism, to all of the

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Persian sages and to spiritual hermeneutics, to the idea of ta’wı!l,102

which is at the heart of Corbin’s whole worldview. The idea that the real-ity of things is not exhausted by their outer face was an evident truthfor Corbin. He combined in himself a remarkable synthesis that is quiterare in the modern West, that is, the synthesis of philosophical rigor anda very strong mystical inclination. Corbin was a very serious philosopher.There is no doubt about it. He viewed all the texts he was studying inPersian and Arabic as a mystical philosopher and not as a philologist ora historian. He was a major thinker, and his significance is that in mod-ern times, he was practically the first European orientalist in the field ofIslamic studies who was also a keen philosopher, in the traditional senseof the term.

Corbin and Islamic Philosophy

R.J.: Is not that amazing being at the same time an orientalist and aphilosopher?S.H.N.: Not necessarily so. Look at, for example, the case of IndianStudies. People such as Heinrich Zimmer103 and also Mircea Eliade, whowrote on Hinduism—these men were not only scholars of religion, theywere really also philosophers, and you also have scholars like them in thefield of Buddhism. In the case of Islam, it is in a sense a tragedy thatmost of the people who have come to the field of Islamic studies havedone so either through philology of Arabic and Persian and/or history.Rarely have they been also philosophers. Often they have been mission-aries at first who have hated Islam and have wanted to prove it false.There have been of course exceptions as we see in the case of H.A.R.Gibb. I am not saying that Corbin is the only philosophically mindedIslamicist; but he was perhaps the only European scholar who was bothan outstanding philosopher and a major Islamicist. Max Horten,104 forexample, who was a German philosopher and Islamicist in the early 20thcentury, studied from the philosophical point of view the books of Mull!aS: adr!a and those of Suhraward!ı even at that time when nobody had heardabout them in the West. He wrote that large book on the debate betweenT: !us!ı and Fakhr al-D!ın R!az!ı. Yes, he was also a philosophically mindedIslamicist, but he was not a major philosopher.

I think that Corbin in a sense is the beginning of a very important phe-nomenon coming at a time when modern philosophy in the West, whichhad developed after the Renaissance and had inbred within itself, beingvery sure of itself and rejecting every other philosophy, whether it be

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Indian, Islamic, or Buddhist, began to crumble in the middle of the 20thcentury and is doing so more and more now. There are now many West-ern philosophers who are looking over the borders of the West in otherplaces. In America you have dozens of them, professional philosopherswho are interested in Hinduism, Buddhism, Neo-Confucianism, and soforth. Corbin opened this door for the Islamic world. So many peoplewho had studied Islam, because of the long contact of Islam historicallywith the West, which did not exist in the case of Hinduism, Buddhism,Taoism, and Confucianism, were and are still to some extent dealing withIslam only as a social order and often as a military and political threat.

There still lingers in the minds of many people in the West memoriesof the Islamic period in Spain, the challenge of Islam to Christianity, theCrusades, the idea of Islam as ‘‘the religion of the sword,’’ all ofthe pseudo-imagery, all kinds of half-truths which had been cast upon theminds of Western people since Peter the Venerable ordered the transla-tion of the Quran into Latin a thousand years ago and even before. Thefact that Islam played a very important role in the Western philosophicaltradition and Western science is not emphasized enough in schools inEurope and America except in a dismissive manner. Few have wanted tostudy the Islamic intellectual and spiritual tradition in itself. Look, forexample, at Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy. It contains ashort chapter called ‘‘Arabic Philosophy,’’ which he treats only in relationto Western thought. In the medieval West, you could not study Westernphilosophy without knowing Averroes, without knowing Avicenna. Sopeople had to study them but they did not want to consider Islamicphilosophy in its own right, and this attitude has survived to this day.

It was a very big struggle for both Corbin and also myself to try toturn the attention of the Western public to the philosophical significanceof Islamic philosophy on its own terms. We tried to correct this histori-cal error and to seek to study the integral Islamic philosophical tradition,reading its texts not philologically but philosophically. So Corbin markedthe beginning of something very important. Today, we have many stu-dents even here in America interested in Islamic philosophy, although inAmerica students are less trained in philosophy than in ContinentalEurope where they study some philosophy in secondary schools, forexample the lyc!ee and the gymnasium in France and Germany. Neverthe-less, there are a number of students here who are doing their Ph.D.s inIslamic studies but who are seriously interested in philosophy and meta-physics and not just in philology, intellectual history, law, or poetry.There are also some students of this kind in Europe today. Corbin in a

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sense opened the door in the West to combining Islamic studies andphilosophy.

Before him, Louis Massignon, another great French orientalist, hadachieved the same to some extent for mysticism, and Louis Gardet105

for theology. Gardet was a Catholic theologian and at the same time anIslamicist who wrote many important books. Of course, Massignon wasa remarkable figure, not only an Arabist, but a Catholic mystic andthinker who was at the same time very well versed in Sufi mysticism andtouched by it personally, and who introduced Sufism seriously to theWest through his works on H: all!aj and others. Corbin achieved that taskfor later Islamic philosophy, but he met immediately with great resistancefrom several quarters—first of all, from the Catholic scholars of Islamicphilosophy. They looked with disdain upon Corbin for having leftCatholicism. Furthermore, having been trained in a narrow understand-ing of ‘‘Arabic philosophy’’ ending with Averroes, they did not want toaccept the integral tradition of the Islamic philosophy that has had itsmain home over the centuries mainly in Persia with some branches inIndia and the Ottoman world and that has continued to this day.

Corbin also met resistance from mainstream Western philosopherswho did not want to consider seriously another branch of the tree thathad produced the tradition of Western philosophy. This is the result ofthe absolutization, you might say, of Western thought in modern timesculminating with Hegel, an idea that is still very strong in the West. Ifyou accept that from the heritage of Abraham, Plato, and Aristotlethere grew another branch of the tree of philosophy that producedpeople who were as important philosophically as Descartes but differedcompletely from him while being his contemporaries, that reality woulddestroy that absolutization of Western thought and the Eurocentrismthat lies at the heart of the Western paradigm created in the Renais-sance. That is why it is easy for most scholars in the West to studyRamanuja or some neo-Confucian philosopher such as Chu-Hsi as seri-ous philosophy, but to study a figure in the 17th century from Persiatalking about Plato and Aristotle within the context of a monotheisticrevelation, as have our philosophers, is quite something else. It is verydifficult for Western scholars to accept these figures as serious philoso-phers, because to do so means that the West has to rethink its ownhistoriography of philosophy and its own philosophy of the history ofphilosophy. Therefore, it is a philosophical challenge to which theWestern philosophical establishment has reacted for the most partthrough rejection.

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Then there is the third factor that has come from modern Arabnationalism. The Arab nationalist interpreters of Islamic philosophy haveclung to the Western category of ‘‘Arabic philosophy,’’ which had a com-pletely non-nationalistic meaning in the European Middle Ages. Thesenationalists do not want to hear of the Persian connections of laterIslamic philosophy. They have continued to call Ibn S!ın!a an Arab, butthey know that we cannot call M!ır D!am!ad an Arab by any stretch ofthe imagination. So Corbin met a lot of resistance from that corner andso have I. Corbin rendered a very great service to the integral traditionof Islamic philosophy by opening the door to the study of later Islamicphilosophy, with its main home in Persia.

Corbin and Heidegger

R.J.: But how did he actually turn from his interest in phenomenologyand Heidegger, whom he knew, to Mull!a S: adr!a and Suhraward!ı ? Did heever talk about that with you?S.H.N.: Oh yes, he talked about that issue often. He had actually metHeidegger both personally and through his books before he ‘‘met’’Suhraward!ı and Mull!a S: adr!a and figures like them. As I have alreadysaid, Mull!a S: adr!a comes later and Suhraward!ı earlier in the life of Cor-bin. Corbin said that he was always interested from his youth, evenbefore he went to meet Heidegger, in the inner meaning of things, andfor him phenomenology had always meant the unveiling of the innermeaning of things, that is, kashf al-mah: ju!b,

106 which is a special under-standing of phenomenology that accepts the reality of the noumenonbehind the phenomenon and the possibility of knowing this noumenalreality. For him phenomenology is the science of going from the phe-nomena to the noumena and rejecting the Kantian view of denying tohuman intelligence the possibility of knowing the noumena. So when hespoke of phenomenology, it was a very special understanding of itthat he had in mind, very close to our perspective of ta’wı!l and kashfal-mah: ju!b as the unveiling of the z: a!hir, in order to reach the ba!t: in

107 asour philosophers have taught.

Now, Corbin had gone to see Heidegger mainly because of his inter-est in phenomenology as Corbin understood it and also because of hisgreat interest in being, in the whole question of ontology. As you know,he translated Heidegger into French, but he was not totally happy withHeidegger’s philosophy, which did not fulfill his spiritual needs, youmight say. He did not become a complete Heideggerian as some have

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claimed. So Corbin was still a man looking for philosophical answers.He set out to study Oriental languages to this end. He was very good inlearning to read languages but not to speak them because of his deaf-ness. He decided to learn how to read Arabic, Persian, and Pahlavibecause from a young age he was looking actually for another world, foranother way of seeing things.

Corbin Discovers Islamic Philosophy in Persia

Corbin told me that the turning point of his life philosophically camewhen one day he was sitting at the Sorbonne in a class of Massignon.Massignon knew Corbin’s interest in both Islamic philosophy andHeidegger and the German school of Existenz Philosophie (existentialphilosophy, which must not, however, be simply identified with Frenchexistentialism) and was also fully aware of his student’s interest in bothspirituality and philosophy in general. At the end of the class, Massignonpulled out of his bag an old book and gave it to Corbin, saying, ‘‘This iswhat you are looking for.’’ The book was the lithograph edition of theH: ikmat al-ishra!q of Suhraward!ı, the old bazaar edition published in theQajar period in Tehran, which is very rare now but which in fact waswidely used before Corbin brought out his critical edition of this book.Even afterwards this edition has continued to be used with its commen-tary by Qut:b al-D!ın Sh!ır!az!ı108 in the margin. Corbin said that he tookthe book home. By that time he had already learned Arabic and hisArabic was pretty good. He said, ‘‘I began to read this book. My wholelife changed and I realized that what I was really looking for was thisphilosophical tradition, and not only Heidegger.’’ He alludes to thisquestion in the French introduction, which he wrote to the Kita!b al-masha!‘ir of Mull!a S: adr!a. This introduction is the most important workthat Corbin has written on comparative ontology. It is short, but it isprofound and an important text.

He discussed the question of existentialism with me personally andalso in the seminars we used to teach together at Tehran University; it istoo bad that there are no tapes from that time. He was much more criti-cal of French existentialism than he was of Existenz Philosophie. OnceCorbin said, ‘‘Existence for these [existentialist philosophers bothFrench and German] leads to death, whereas in the philosophy of Mull!aS: adr!a and Persian Islamic philosophy, existence leads to transcendence;death always leads to higher levels of being.’’ It is that discovery thatchanged Corbin’s worldview completely. As I told you in the story of

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our going to Sainte Odile, Corbin was not that much interested inHeidegger in the latter part of his life, after he had discovered the laterIslamic philosophy of Persia.

R.J.: Can one say that Corbin was the last true philosopher of Persia?S.H.N.: No, no, first of all, he was not Persian.

R.J.: I know, but . . .S.H.N.: Again, no, because first of all there are several notable Persianphilosophers after Corbin. For example, there is Mehdi Ha’eri109 whowas a first-rate philosopher in the tradition of Islamic philosophy closerto the Ibn S!ın!a school than to the school of Mull!a S: adr!a, a remarkablelogician and thinker and an epistemologist. In his Knowledge by Presence hechallenges Wittgenstein and Russell on the important question of knowl-edge by presence or ‘ilm-i h:ud: u!r ı!,

110 his position coming from the tradi-tion of Suhraward!ı and others. I can mention also Ashtiyani and the two!Amul!ıs.111 There are also a number of younger Persian philosopherssuch as Gholam Hossein Ebrahimi Dinani and Gholamreza A‘vani.Corbin died some thirty years ago, while all of us, people like myself,who consider ourselves to be rooted in the Islamic philosophical tradi-tion and are thinking philosophically about various subjects, are still aliveand belong to that tradition. So, I would not use the word last for Cor-bin. Rather, he is the first, I would say, European ‘‘Persian philosopher.’’

Corbin and Imamology

R.J.: That is interesting. How did Corbin get concerned with the themesof Islamic thought such as imamology and prophetology, and how didhe relate them to the questions of the destiny of Western man?S.H.N.: Corbin was a person who was very deeply drawn by his natureearly in life to mysticism within the Christian tradition. Christ is himselfthe spiritual guide for the Christian mystics, although some also havehad human guides, especially in the Orthodox tradition. In Islam, youhave of course spiritual masters: the Sufi teachers, pı!rs, murshids,shaykhs,112 and most of those who follow the spiritual path have ahuman spiritual teacher. In Shi‘ism, however, there is the possibility ofguidance by the Twelfth Imam, and there are many Persian Shi‘ite mys-tics, although not by any means all, who have claimed that they havehad no human master but that their master has been the Twelfth Imam,because within the Shi‘ite world it is possible, with the grace of Heaven,

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for a person to have direct contact with the Twelfth Imam and to beguided spiritually in an initiatic way by him. I believe it is this aspectof Shi‘ism more than anything else that drew Corbin to the study ofShi‘ism and to the whole question of imamology.

Corbin wanted to have a spiritual guide but did not want to have ahuman guide. The whole ethos of this type of spirituality within Shi‘ismtherefore appealed deeply to him. I used to carry on debates with himon this issue all the time. I believe that Mull!a S: adr!a had a spiritualmaster, a human spiritual teacher, but Corbin always used to say ‘‘No,he is like M!ır D!am!ad; he is one of those people who was guided onlyby the Twelfth Imam.’’ He said that because he saw himself in that situa-tion. I know that, for example, ‘All!amah T: ab!at:ab!a’!ı had had a spiritualteacher when he resided in Najaf; I mean a human being of flesh andblood who guided him spiritually.

In fact you have in Islam several possibilities. First of all, you havethe possibility of regular Sufi orders, both Sunni and Shi‘ite, such as theQ!adiriyyah, Sh!adhiliyyah, Ni‘malull!ahiyyah et cetera, and then you havethe possibility of Sufi orders which are not formally organized and haveno distinct name. They are like what we see in the early centuries ofIslam when there were individual masters guiding a circle of disciples.This latter type has definitely existed among Shi‘ite and even Sunni‘ulama!’. Because of the opposition to Sufism that came at the end ofSafavid period in Persia, many of the Shi‘ite ‘ulama!’ were practicing Suf-ism without saying, ‘‘We are a member of this or that order.’’ The words:u!f ı!was not used, but initiation and spiritual guidance took place. Thistype included figures such as Bah: r al-‘ul!um or ‘All!amah T: ab!at:ab!a’!ı whohad an actual human teacher. And then there is in the Shi‘ite context thethird possibility, the possibility of direct contact with the Imam. Thefourth possibility is that of the Uways!ı way, the possibility of beingguided directly by Khid: r, a prophet mentioned in the Quran and identi-fied also by some with Elias.

All of these possibilities exist within the universe of Islamic spiritualitytaken as a whole, but Corbin was specially drawn to the possibility ofbeing guided by the Imam. ‘All!amah T: ab!at:ab!a’!ı, who performed spirit-ual practice his whole life in addition to writing on philosophy andtheology, was very well aware of that fact. He both praised Corbin’s lovefor the Imams and also was critical that Corbin was not willing to sub-mit himself personally to spiritual discipline. Anyway, I think that is thesecret of how Corbin became personally involved in the study of whathe called imamologie, proph"etologie, and similar subjects.

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Also, Corbin’s vision of revelation in its inward aspect related to theguidance of the Imam even led him to a kind of Christology which wasnot orthodox and traditional from either the Catholic or mainstreamProtestant point of view, but which was close in fact to Islamic Christol-ogy. It is in that vein that he studied the question of prophecy andprophetology, always tying revelation to inspiration, intuition, and illumi-nation. That is why he studied Suhraward!ı so avidly and used to refer tohim as his master.

T: ab!at:ab!a’!ı and Corbin

R.J.: Was ‘All!amah T: ab!at:ab!a’!ı as close to this idea of illumination ofSuhraward!ı as was Corbin?S.H.N.: Yes, but he was more attracted to Mull!a S: adr!a than toSuhraward!ı. I would say that Corbin was on the contrary more attractedto Suhraward!ı than to Mull!a S: adr!a, and even towards the end of his life,even after years of studying Mull!a S: adr!a, he continued to refer toSuhraward!ı as ‘‘notre maitre.’’

R.J.: So how did the dialogue between the two, I mean ‘All!amahT: ab!at:ab!a’!ı and Corbin, go on? I think there had to be something morethan a simple dialogue between two sides?S.H.N.: First of all, there was a great deal of congeniality from bothsides. The two were not identical in their thought, but there was certainlymuch common ground on many issues between them so that the dia-logue could have gone on for another fifty years. I will tell you somethingfrom each side. ‘All!amah T: ab!at:ab!a’!ı saw in Corbin two characteristicsthat attracted him especially so that he was willing to spend so much timein dialogue with him. One was that he saw in Corbin a Western scholarsympathetic to the cause of Shi‘ism, a person who could spread theteachings of Shi‘ism to the West, being a kind of porte-parole forthe expression of authentic Shi‘ite teachings in Europe. Secondly, and theother way around, he saw Corbin as a person who could inform him ofimportant ideas which were being discussed in the philosophical, reli-gious, and theological circles of the West at that time. Do not forget that‘All!amah T: ab!at:ab!a’!ı was always very much interested in what was goingon intellectually in the world at large, because he wanted to provideIslamic answers for the questions of the day. In contrast, my otherteacher, Ayatollah Qazw!ın!ı, was not like that at all. Of course in politicalmatters he was aware of what was going on in Iran, but he was rooted

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firmly within his world of S: adrian metaphysics and was not interested invarious philosophical ideas being discussed in modern Western circles.

As already mentioned, ‘All!amah T: ab!at:ab!a’!ı carried out dialogue in theearlier period of his youth with the Marxists, and this shows that he wasinterested in what philosophical and even ideological problems modern-ized people were facing and the questions that they were asking. He feltdeeply that Islamic philosophy and thought had answers for all thosequestions. This was a major characteristic of ‘All!amah T: ab!at:ab!a’!ı thatbrought him close to Corbin.

As for Corbin, he also had several reasons for having intense interestin these dialogues. Firstly, ‘All!amah T: ab!at:ab!a’!ı was like an ocean ofknowledge from which a scholar could draw so easily. Of course Corbinwas a great scholar, but when he did have questions about some aspectsof Islamic thought, he would turn with assurance of being answered inan authoritative manner to ‘All!amah T: ab!at:ab!a’!ı, who would provide veryvaluable clarifications, give references, provide the meaning of certainverses of the Quran and matters like that. So, he served as a majorsource of traditional Islamic thought for Corbin.

Secondly, because of his own personal and scholarly interest in Shi‘-ism, Corbin wanted very much to establish dialogue with serious Shi‘itethinkers. He was not interested in carrying out dialogue with AhmadFardid, Yahya Mahdavi, and people like that who were his friends. Heknew them well, but they were for him European-trained Persian philoso-phers, and he could find plenty of people who thought like them in Franceand Germany. Why come to Tehran to have a dialogue with them? Rather,he wanted to have a dialogue with authentic representatives of Shi‘itethought, and he found the ideal solution in the person of ‘All!amahT: ab!at:ab!a’!ı. Mind you, he also had discussions with other people, includingSark!ar-i !Aq!a, the head of the Shaykh!ı branch of Shi‘ism. Corbin was alsointerested in that school and wrote much about it. The extreme form oflove for the Imams, which characterizes Shaykhism, was especially attrac-tive for Corbin. But no one else could provide what Corbin needed as did‘All!amah T: ab!at:ab!a’!ı. Therefore, the latter was for Corbin a perfect partnerfor dialogue.

Thirdly, Corbin was also doing the same thing as ‘All!amah T: ab!at:ab!a’!ı,but the other way around. Through ‘All!amah T: ab!at:ab!a’!ı, Corbin coulddiscover what was going on in Qom and other Iranian cities among reli-gious scholars and subjects that they were discussing.

One last element that united the two was the following: Both men,from different perspectives and for different reasons, were very much

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interested in the revival of traditional philosophy in Persia and its con-tinuation. Corbin was interested in this matter because he loved thisphilosophical tradition and did not want it to die out. He loved Iranand its culture and was deeply interested in its future. He always consid-ered Iran to be his spiritual and intellectual home. Concerning Iran hewould say, ‘‘Mon pays intellectuel’’ (‘‘my intellectual home’’) and he felt asmuch at home in Iran as he did in France and intellectually even moreat home in Iran than in his country of birth. He would always tell methat he felt more at home spiritually in Iran than anywhere else. Heknew that it was very important for the traditional culture of Iran tocontinue to survive, and at the heart of this culture was this vision ofthe universe, the vision of reality with which Persian philosophers,metaphysicians, theologians, and Sufis had dealt over the ages. There-fore, Corbin was interested in the revival and a new presentation ofIran’s intellectual tradition.

As for ‘All!amah T: ab!at:ab!a’!ı, he was also of course interested intenselyin this matter. He himself was a great reviver of Islamic philosophy inhis day, and this was the tradition to which he belonged. He consideredIslamic philosophy to contain the truth, and he wanted it to endure notonly for Iran but also for the whole world. I should also mention thatboth of them concentrated their attention upon myself as far as thisquestion was concerned because I was also deeply dedicated to the taskof the survival, revival, and presentation of the Islamic intellectual tradi-tion. They therefore both saw me as a valuable link between them, andan aid in their efforts to revive that tradition.

REVIVAL OF THE ISLAMIC INTELLECTUAL TRADITION

R.J.: And that was fruitful for you?S.H.N.: Yes, it was very fruitful for me for several reasons. Since youhave asked about this matter, I am obliged to talk about myself and whyit was fruitful for me. First of all, I joined this dialogue as soon as Ireturned to Iran when I was only twenty-five years old. It was the begin-ning of my professional career, and I learned a great deal from thesemeetings. I was then learning certain new ideas (for me) in Islamicphilosophy. Also, the question of comparative philosophical vocabularywas important to me. Of course my first European language is Englishand not French, which Corbin used, but it did not matter because Iknew French well enough, and especially the philosophical vocabulary Iknow as well as English.

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