122. Karen Armstrongthroughout the Muslim world. Mir Dimad (d. 1631) and his
pupil Mulla Sadra (d. 1640) founded a school of mystical phi-
losophy at Isfahan, which Majlisi did his best to suppress.
They continued the tradition of Suhrawardi, linking philoso-
phy and spirituality, and training their disciples in mystical
disciplines which enabled them to acquire a sense of the alam
al-mithal and the spiritual world. Both insisted that a philoso-
pher must be as rational and scientific as Aristotle, but that he
must also cultivate the imaginative, intuitive approach to
truth. Both were utterly opposed to the new intolerance of
some of the ulama, which they regarded as a perversion of re-
ligion. Truth could not be imposed by force and intellectual
conformism was incompatible with true faith. Mulla Sadra
also saw political reform as inseparable from spirituality. In
his masterpiece Al-Afsan al-Arbaah (The Fourfold Journey), he
described the mystical training that a leader must undergo
before he could start to transform the mundane world. He
must first divest himself of ego, and receive divine illumina-
tion and mystical apprehension of God. It was a path that
could bring him to the same kind of spiritual insight as the
Shii imams, though not, of course, on the same level as they.
Ayatollah Khomeini (1902-89) was profoundly influenced by
the teachings of Mulla Sadra, and in his last address to the Ira-
nian people before his death he begged them to continue the
study and practice of irfan, since there could be no truly Is-
lamic revolution unless there was also a spiritual reformation.
Mulla Sadra was deeply disturbed by a wholly new idea
that was gradually gaining ground among the ulama of Iran,
and which would also have fateful political consequences in
our own day. A group who called themselves Usulis believed
that ordinary Muslims were incapable of interpreting the
basic principles {usul) of the faith for themselves. They
should, therefore, seek out one of the learned ulama and fol-
low his legal rulings, since they alone had the authority of the