The Intellect in Mullā Ṣadrāǯs Commentary on the Uṣ”l al-kāfī Jari Kaukua Mullā Ṣadrāǯs ሺd. 1045 AH/1636) vast output consists of extended efforts in very different fields of knowledge. While perhaps most famous for his voluminous and original philosophical texts, his works on strictly religious genres, such as the methodological principles and practice of commenting on the Qurᦦan or the Shiᦧi traditions, are easily comparable to them in quantitative terms. This naturally arouses the question of the relation of the two branches of literary activity. Did Mullā Ṣadrā conceive of them as parallel pursuits equally worthy of, or indeed requisite for, an Islamic scholar? Or did he rather perceive them as hierarchically related, one serving as preliminary, foundational or instrumental to the other? And if that is the case, how and on what basis did he rank them? Western scholars have not studied Ṣadrāǯs religious writings with quite the same fervour as his philosophical works, but some progress has been made in recent years. A prominent early view, which stems from Corbin and Nasr, held that Ṣadrāǯs entire literary output is best conceived as an expression of ᦧirfān, a uniquely Iranian intellectual project in which philosophy is inseparable from mysticism and the practice of commenting on the Qurᦦan and the traditions with an especial view to their supposedly hidden meanings. Such an interpretation, of course, comes in various forms and with different emphases, but in general terms its representatives hold that Ṣadrāǯs thought was in equal measure a product of the influence of philosophical and religious texts, unified by the direct intuition that he often claims to have received from above. 1 I would argue, however, that a close reading of Ṣadrāǯs philosophical works does not unequivocally corroborate this interpretation. It is true that his philosophical writing is replete with appropriate quotes from the Qurᦦ an and the prophetic and Imamic traditions, but such material is often introduced towards the end of a given discussion, indeed as providing additional, even secondary corroboration for claims at which he has first arrived by means of an exhaustive analysis of rival theological or philosophical views, and through the use of exclusively rational arguments. In fact, from the point of 1 See, for example, Henry Corbin, En Islam iranien, Paris, 1971, IV, pp. 68–83; Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Ṣadr al-Dīn Shīrāzī and His Transcendent Theosophy: Background, Life and Works, Tehran, 1978, pp. 71–72.