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" The Quest for a Universal Science: "
Matthew S. Melvin-Koushki
G. H. Boewering
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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1103810
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| Doc. No
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TLpq1037865600
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| Main Entry
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G. H. Boewering
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Matthew S. Melvin-Koushki
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| Title & Author
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The Quest for a Universal Science:\ Matthew S. Melvin-KoushkiG. H. Boewering
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| College
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Yale University
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| Date
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2012
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| student score
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2012
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Page No
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616
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| Abstract
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This dissertation takes as its point of departure two key insights: first, that millenarian, universalist forms of thought were ubiquitous in late medieval and early modern intellectual history, whether in the Islamicate heartlands or Renaissance Europe; second, that the occult sciences ( al-'ulum al-ghariba ) were far more integral to such universalist projects than has previously been acknowledged. I therefore focus my inquiry on S[dotbelow]a'in al-Din Turka Is[dotbelow]fahani (1369-1432), the foremost occult philosopher of early Timurid Iran, whose lettrist or kabbalistic thought ( 'ilm al-h[dotbelow]uruf ) constitutes the centerpiece of his universalist project. Most notably, this type of occult philosophy--referring as it does to the neoplatonic-neopythagorean quest to comprehend the cosmos using all available means, whether rational or mystical, scientific or magical, in concert--precisely exemplifies the 'will to synthesis' that characterizes so much of later Islamicate intellectual history. Ibn Turka was hardly exceptional in this regard; recent research suggests that he was the leader of a circle of thinkers based in Isfahan and Yazd, which included such heavyweights as Sharaf al-Din Yazdi (d. 1454) and Qazizada Rumi (d. 1432). This Isfahan Circle, moreover, was but the eastern branch of a vast extra-establishment network of intellectuals propagating from Cairo to Anatolia on the one hand and western Iran (and from thence Central Asia and India) on the other, and calling themselves, cryptically, the Ikhwan al-S[dotbelow]afa'. The pivot of this network was Sayyid H[dotbelow]usayn Akhlat[dotbelow]i (d. 1397), occultist and wonderworker at the Mamluk court in Cairo, who proclaimed a new era of human development through the retrieval and open promulgation of the occult sciences. S[dotbelow]a'in al-Din presents himself as simply the systematizer of Akhlat[dotbelow]i's teachings, and was received as such in the later lettrist tradition. Despite his importance, however, half of S[dotbelow]a'in al-Din's oeuvre remains in manuscript--including, predictably, his lettrist works, assumed to be the most marginal component of his thought. Ironically, it is precisely the fact that S[dotbelow]a'in al-Din has been acclaimed since the 19th century as an important synthesizer of peripatetic-illuminationist philosophy and mystical theory linking Ibn 'Arabi (d. 1240) with Mulla S[dotbelow]adra (d. 1640) that led to his marginalization in the literature; by effectively obscuring the occultist tenor of his larger project, such acclaim abstracts it from its historical context and robs it of its animating virtue. The burden of the present study is therefore to remedy this neglect by presenting and contextualizing the central lettrist component of S[dotbelow]a'in al-Din's thought on the basis of his unpublished lettrist works, with particular attention to his magisterial K. al-Mafah[dotbelow]is[dotbelow] or Book of Inquiries, a summa of intellectual lettrism. Following a presentation of S[dotbelow]a'in al-Din's biography and religio-historical context in Chapter 1 and an annotated list of his writings (some 45 Persian and Arabic works in total) in Chapter 2, the central chapters of Part 1 of this study investigate various aspects of his universalist lettrist project, with particular reference to peripatetic-illuminationist philosophy on the one hand and Sufism on the other. Chapter 7 consists largely of translated sections from the Mafah[dotbelow]is[dotbelow]; Part 2 of this study is devoted to editions and/or translations of five of his minor lettrist treatises. A running theme in S[dotbelow]a'in al-Din's works is invidious comparison of lettrism and philosophy: the faux-universal concepts of philosophical speculation notwithstanding, only the letter encompasses all that is and is not, all that can and cannot be; it alone is the coincidentia oppositorum; hence lettrism is the only truly universal science. I argue that S[dotbelow]a'in al-Din's unprecedented li nization of lettrism vis-à-vis philosophy represents a specifically intellectual form of the science distinct from its originary gnostic-messianic and Sufi strains. Indeed, it is typically--and erroneously--assumed that the Hurufi movement of Fazl Allah Astarabadi (d. 1394) defines later Islamicate lettrism; as an example of popular gnostic-messianic-Sufi lettrism, rather, that movement's vigor testifies to the religio-cultural valency of lettrism in Iran at all levels. I further argue that lettrist theory informs the ornate literary practice of the period, as may be seen in S[dotbelow]a'in al-Din's status as vaunted stylist of Persian prose. Far from being fringe thinkers, Muslim lettrists of S[dotbelow]a'in al-Din's stripe saw themselves as both advancing human knowledge of the cosmos and demonstrating the miraculous inimitability of the Quran as the clearest transcript of divine Speech in history. Ibn Turka's significance within late medieval intellectual history centers precisely on his status as one of a panoply of late medieval and early modern thinkers to understand reality in textual terms, to be driven by the prospect of decoding and recoding the twin Books, the Quran and the cosmos.
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Iran
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Language, literature and linguistics
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Millenarianism
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Philosophy, religion and theology
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Timurid
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Turka Isfahani, Sa'in al Din
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