Ghazālī’s Influence on Mullā Ṣadrā’s View of Causal Necessity and Freewill

Abstract

Muḥammad Ghazālī (d. 1111) influenced some of the key metaphysical teachings of Shia Safavid philosophers, most prominently, Mullā Ṣadrā Shīrāzī (d. ca. 1636). In this paper, I argue that Mullā Ṣadrā reads Ibn Sīnā (d. 1037) through the lens of Muḥammad Ghazālī’s Sufi Ashʿarism to offer a solution to the problem of freewill in the Islamic context. In his adaptation of causal necessity from Ibn Sīnā, Mullā Ṣadrā argues that “necessity” as a concept is co-extensional with “existence” because in reality all that is the case is necessarily so. On the other hand, all things including voluntary actions and will are only relatively existent since the only independent existence is that of God. I demonstrate that like Ibn Sīnā, Mullā Ṣadrā acknowledges the existence of a causal chain in which all intermediary causes including human freewill have causal power. But, similar to Ghazālī’s account, all human acts including voluntary ones are from God since in Mullā Ṣadrā’s universe freewill is a lower degree of God’s Will. For Mullā Ṣadrā, the acquisition of action by human beings in the case of voluntary actions, a notion that he adopts from Ghazālī, is the same as “acquiring” existence from God’s existence.