Risalat al-Wilayah - The Return to Being

168 Pages·2020·3.532 MB·English

by  Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Tabatabai

z
f-
■
'
\2
The Return
5
to Being
«
>
i
/a -
s
?
■Ml
i
Translated by
Pggji fegy i Ziliutgro:
GffgiW: Ss®m iowvii
Introduced and annotated by
<L I
_
rr
dfe iijJjSfej vft(£ t@
<tyi«Tfes^ ««ii
(?tsjfe.% fife-
fiGasfe !«■
(U
)k<s? dhs @p@®> ®>
life-jf fejy
hnAfSKjm^ ©adtsgirf fiyd
dkfeggfei ©■, fiik
awfeiitesdgp'
fero i,x«* sfetw
a^iqsfefeigf
fl 1
•". asdjEfy
iiistolK. (5>r Sfeft dWfy a®i dbswit
ISBN 978 . 0
I
9 781904 063360
I
THE RETURN TO BEING
..
!
f
THE RETURN TO BEING
The Treatise on Friendship with God
Risalat al-Walayah
by
Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i
Translated by
Fazel Asadi Amjad
Mahdi Dasht Bozorgi
Introduced and annotated by
S. K. Toussi
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.
ISBN-10: 1-904063-36-5 (pbk)
ISBN-13: 978-1-904063-36-0 (pbk)
© ICAS Press, 2009
This edition first published in 2009
ICAS Press
133 High Road, Willesden, London NW10 2SW
www.islamic-college.ac.uk
Contents
Introduction Vll
S’. K. Toussi
The Return to Being
Preface 1
1 The Exterior of this Religion has an Interior: Its
True Form Contains Truths 3
2 The Esoteric Nature of the Religious Law
3 The Possibility for All People to Attain the Secrets
of the Unseen 29
4 The Way to Reach the Proved Possibility of
Perfection 4i
5 On What Man May Attain Through Perfection 83
Appendix 101
Glossary 109
Index 113

Introduction
‘Allamah Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i was
arguably one of the most influential Shi‘a thinkers of recent
times. He left behind over forty books and treatises in
various fields of Islamic thought. An example of his wide-
ranging scholarship can be seen in his Shi'ah dar Islam
(translated into English as Shi'a Islam). This work consists
of his clarifications and expositions about Shi‘a doctrine
and Shi'a history in response to the questions of the
theologian and philosopher, Henry Corbin.
'Allamah Tabataba’i will be remembered for his Al-
Mizan fi Tafsir al-Qur’an, his twenty-volume interpretation
of the Qur’an; but Tabataba’i also wrote more than twenty
treatises on topics in philosophy, mysticism, and logic. In
one of his particularly influential philosophical works,
Usul-i Falsajth va Ravish-i Rializm, Tabataba’i presents
significant philosophical ideas which later became the basis
of new ethical and epistemological doctrines. Murtada
Mutahhari - ‘Allamah Tabataba’i’s eminent disciple - in
his annotations to Usul-i Falsafih, masterfully interpreted
some of these principles and suggested some interesting
implications. 'Allamah Tabataba’i demonstrated his
devotion to Mulla Sadra’s transcendent philosophy in
particular through his annotation of nine volumes of
Sadra’s monumental work, Al-Hikmat al-Muta'aliyyah fi al-
Asfar al-Aqliyyat al-Arba‘ah\ his two philosophy textbooks,
Bidayat al-Hikmah and Nihayat al-Hikmah\ and his
philosophical discussions in Al-Mizan as well as the work
translated in the present volume.
Given the foregoing, much can be said about ‘Allamah
vii