Afḍal al-Dīn al-Kāshānī (Bābā Afḍal)

Abstract

Afḍal al-Dīn al-Kāshānī, known as Bābā Afḍal (d. ca 610/1213), was an Iranian philosopher and poet. Little is known about his life except that he had a lot of students and entertained relationships with princes. Although the term ‘Bābā ’ is often used in the Persian world to refer to a Sufi master, it cannot be affirmed that he was a Sufi in the narrowest sense. Yet, he is to be seen as a philosopher in the ancient sense, as both a professor and a spiritual guide. He wrote most of his works in Persian, probably with the intention of establishing Persian as a philosophical language alongside Arabic. Combining freely Peripatetic and Neoplatonic tendencies, he can hardly be classified as belonging to a specific school of though. All his concerns tend to the knowledge of the human soul or the “self” (khūd), and its progress towards perfection. He regarded self-knowledge as superior to all other sciences, being the unique access to immortality and eternity. In this respect, he set himself apart all other Muslim medieval philosophers and had some influence on the “philosophical renaissance” of the eleventh/seventeenth-century Safavid Iran.