Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi

Who was Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi?

Ṣadr al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Isḥāq b. Muḥammad b. Yūnus Qūnawī [alternatively, Qūnavī or Qūnyawī] was one of the most influential thinkers in mystical or "Sufi" philosophy. He played a pivotal role in the study of knowledge—or epistemology, which in his context referred specifically to the theoretical elaboration of mystical/intellectual insight. He combined a highly original mystic-thinker, Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn 'Arabī, whose arcane teachings Qūnavī codified and helped incorporate into the burgeoning pre-Ottoman intellectual tradition, on the one hand, with the logical/philosophical innovations of Ibn Sīnā, on the other.

Though relatively unfamiliar to Westerners, the spiritual and systematic character of Qūnawī's approach to reasoning, in the broadest sense of the term, have found fertile soil in modern-day Turkey and Iran, not to mention Egypt, North Africa, the Balkans and elsewhere over the centuries.