Contemporary Ancients

After Mulla Sadra, nothing significant has occurred in so-called Islamic philosophy; though even that was not particularly significant. Over the past four centuries, hundreds of important philosophical treatises have emerged in the West, many of which remain difficult for us to understand and digest. Medicine, economics, psychology, social sciences, physics, and so on—these require a separate elegy. We vainly imagine that we can leap over these four centuries and land in the twenty-first century. We are at least four hundred years away from the twenty-first century. We have not yet emerged from the tenth or even the eighth century AH. We still shuttle between existence and essence; we still suppose that philosophy is the enemy of mysticism, mysticism the enemy of jurisprudence, jurisprudence the enemy of law, law the enemy of the citizen, and all enemies of one another; the lives and property of human beings still hold the same value for us as they did during the Mongol invasion; we still regard law and legal methods as we do the legal stratagems in usury; we still see life as an opportunity to prove our own righteousness, not as a space for living and resting; we still would not trade a single hair of ancient texts and our old heritage for all the new sciences; we still see the world as a stranger furtively eyeing our assets; still and always we seek God in our own beliefs; we still suppose that the individual exists for society, society for ideals, and ideals for running and never arriving; we are still thinking of inventing something rounder than the wheel or swifter than it for our worn-out carts; we still console ourselves that economic poverty is not a sign of intellectual poverty; we still have not believed that, in the words of the great Ferdowsi, ability lies in knowledge, not in clamor and bluster. Those they call contemporary ancients, that is us.

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Contemporary Ancients

Author: Reza Babaei | 95/12/3

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