Baba Afdal

Afdal al-Din Kashani (d. 1213/4 CE), known to his students affectionately as "Baba" (or "Papa") Afdal, "was one of the few Islamic philosophers to write almost entirely in [his native] Persian." This was a departure from the standard practice of his day which employed Arabic as the language of scholarship and technical philosophy. Baba Afdal's contribution to the Islamic intellectual tradition consists in making his "synthesis of Neoplatonic-Aristotelian and Sufi ideas intelligible to a wider audience, many of whom would have found the uncompromising and sometimes unwieldy technical precision of Arabic philosophical texts forbidding."

The "overriding concern" of Baba Afdal's body of work was "how to achieve salvific knowledge of the self (dhat, huwiyya) by means of rational inquiry and ethical cultivation. When one realizes one's own everlasting self as intellect (khirad, 'aql)--according to Baba...a kind of radiance from God--one perfects or actualizes one's own nature."

In line with much Hellenistic philosophy, Baba Afdal regarded "the human being as a microcosm of the universe" which, he held, "contains within itself all the lower levels of existence, i.e., all the actualized potentialities presupposed by its own living soul. The actualization of human existence (wujud) in particular--which Baba Afdal characterizes as 'finding' (yaftan) rather than just 'being' (budan)--consists in the full self-awareness of the intellect. It is through this perfection of self-knowledge that the soul awakens from its forgetfulness and separates itself from the body in preparation for death. But on a macrocosmic level, it is through the flowering of the human being (as a microcosm) that the potentialities of the universe as a whole can ultimately be actualized and the return or ascent of creation to God can be effected."

Baba's "epistemology of the self" appears to anticipate the key insight of Existentialism (existence precedes essence) and democratizes the Sufic (and Rabbinic) notion of the abdal or "hidden saint" for whose sake the universe continues to exist--though, in the case of Baba's ontology, the progress of the individual on the path to perfection is part and parcel of the perfection of the cosmos itself.

"What makes Baba Afdal's thought particularly interesting and compelling is its eminently practical conception of philosophy [falsafa] as a way of life, aimed at salvific self-realization and the perfection of our nature, and the stylistic verve and clarity with which he presents this project. Apart from Baba Afdal's many philosophical works, he is highly regarded for his poetry, also in Persian."

Quoted material from the entry on Afdal al-Din Kashani in Peter S. Groff, Islamic Philosophy A-Z (Edinburgh, 2007).