Weighing Knowledge: Humanity, Modernity, and Ṣafī ʿAlī Shāh's Mīzān al-maʿrifah

This article studies the influence of late Qajar cultures of politics and ethics upon a Sufi theory of knowledge. It argues that Mīrzā Ḥasan Iṣfahānī (known in Sufi circles as Ṣafī ʿAlī Shāh) performed the role of public intellectual in his treatise on knowledge and ethics Mīzān al-maʿrifah (The Sca...

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主要作者: Ames, Robert Landau (Author)
格式: 電子 Article
語言:English
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出版: Brill [2018]
In: Journal of Sufi studies
Year: 2018, 卷: 7, 發布: 1/2, Pages: 165-194
Further subjects:B Niʿmat Allāhiyya
B Qajar period
B Ṣafī ʿAlī Shāh
B Epistemology
B Modernity
B Iranian history
B Sufism
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實物特徵
總結:This article studies the influence of late Qajar cultures of politics and ethics upon a Sufi theory of knowledge. It argues that Mīrzā Ḥasan Iṣfahānī (known in Sufi circles as Ṣafī ʿAlī Shāh) performed the role of public intellectual in his treatise on knowledge and ethics Mīzān al-maʿrifah (The Scale of Knowledge). I propose that the text's ethical directives actually serve to dictate the conditions under which a particularly modern subject can claim knowledge. Being someone who knows does not mean being someone who has access to data; it means being someone who can look, and act, as a knower should. Humanity is book's titular "scale of knowledge," but, in that text, to truly be human entails the cultivation of virtue and the correct performance of one's role, as coded in norms of class, profession, and gender, norms conveyed within many of the text's explanatory analogies.
ISSN:2210-5956
Contains:Enthalten in: Journal of Sufi studies
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1163/22105956-12341312