[Forthcoming in Encyclopædia of Islam 3, ed. Kate Fleet et al., Leiden: Brill, 2007-] Ibn Turka Ṣāʾin al-Dīn ʿAlī b. Muḥammad Turka Iṣfahānī Khujandī (770–835/1369–1432), or Ibn Turka, was the foremost occult philosopher of Timurid Iran and aspiring imperial ideologue to a series of early Timurid rulers; his systematisation of lettrism (ʿilm al-ḥurūf) as universal neopythagorean science informed celebrated developments in Persianate philosophy, astronomy, historiography, literary practice and theory of empire through at least the eleventh/seventeenth century. Life, works and thought Ibn Turka is the most prominent member of the venerable Turka family of Isfahani scholars and judges, from whom he inherited the position of Shāfiʿī chief judge of Isfahan and Yazd. Their name, meaning “Littleturk,” commemorates the family’s origins in Khwarazmshahid-Seljuq Khujand. (On other members of the Turka family see Eichner and Quiring-Zoche; for a full biography and study of Ibn Turka see Melvin-Koushki, Quest.) His grandfather, Ṣadr al-Dīn Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad Turka (fl. early 8th/14th c.), was a noted philosopher of the Ilkhanid period and close friend to the vizier-scholar Rashīd al-Dīn Ṭabīb (d. ca. 718/1318); he was among the first to attempt to synthesise peripatetic and illuminationist philosophy with that of Ibn ʿArabī (d. 638/1240)—a project his grandson Ṣāʾin al-Dīn pursued even more influentially. This synthesising ethos, of course, defines post-Mongol Islamic philosophy generally, and especially its culmination in Safavid Iran. As a major systematiser and promoter of Ibn ʿArabian philosophy, modern scholarship has typically styled Ibn Turka a key transitional thinker linking Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī (d. 672/1274) and Mullā Ṣadrā (d. 1045/1636) (e.g. Nasr, 209–10; Cooper, 591). Indeed, his Tamhīd al-Qawāʿid (“Clarifying the Principles”), a commentary on his grandfather’s Qawāʿid altawḥīd (“Principles of divine unity”), treating of absolute existence (al-wujūd al-muṭlaq), is a masterpiece of Ibn ʿArabian-Avicennan-Suhravardian synthesis, and remains an integral part of Shiʿi seminary curricula even today. On the strength of this synthesis, ʿAllāma Ṭabāṭabāʾī (d. 1981) ranked Ibn Turka’s importance within Islamic intellectual history as equal to that of Fārābī (d. after 330/942) and Suhravardī (d. 587/1191) (Ṭabāṭabāʾī, 5:282–4; cf. Āshtiyānī; JavādīĀmulī; Kabīr; Ziai, 413–15). Yet Ibn Turka’s stated project was not simply to synthesise, but to transcend. In true early modern millenarian fashion, he sought to create a new lettrist physics-metaphysics that would render Avicennan and Suhravardian philosophy obsolete: letter-number as coincidentia oppositorum and hence sole basis for a universal, monist science (ʿilm al-tawḥīd), the intellect’s only vehicle of return to the One. He flatly rejects, that is, both the peripatetics’ existence (wujūd) and the illuminationists’ essence (māhiyya) as illegitimate—because terminally dualist— categories of metaphysical analysis, replacing them with the mathematical letter (ḥarf), identical to the illuminationists’ light (nūr). The cosmos is thus constellated not by tashkīk al-wujūd, the transcendental modulation of being (a concept first cast in semantic terms by Naṣīr al-Dīn 1 Ṭūsī in his seminal commentary on Ibn Sīnā’s (d. 428/1037) Ishārāt (“Pointers”)), but by the transcendental modulation of the letter as uncreated, all-creative light (tashkīk al-ḥarf), gradually emanating down from the One in extramental (ʿaynī), mental-mathematical (lubābī iḥṣāʾī), spoken-aural (kalāmī) and finally written-visual (kitābī) form (Melvin-Koushki, Grammatology; idem, Challenge). It is in view of his revolutionary challenge to and subversion of mainstream Arabic philosophy that Muḥammad-Taqī Dānishpazhūh (d. 1996) hailed Ibn Turka the “Spinoza of Iran” (Dānishpazhūh, 312; for a critique see Zarrīnkūb, 142). This radical project culminated in his K. al-Mafāḥiṣ, or Book of inquiries, the first summa of Islamic neopythagoreanism and centerpiece of Ibn Turka’s oeuvre. Therein he pointedly revives and updates the neopythagorean, occult-scientific platform of the fourth/tenth-century Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ by recasting it in purely lettrist—i.e., Ibn ʿArabian—terms (on Ibn ʿArabian lettrism see Gril). Unlike the original Brethren of Purity, however, Ibn Turka and his lettrist confraternity did not labour in anonymity, but rather constituted an intellectual network comprising some of the most prominent men of letters and imperial ideologues of the era and spanning the Mamluk, Timurid and Ottoman realms via Cairo, its pivot. During his fifteen-year sojourn in the Mamluk capital (ca. 795–810/1393–1408), Ibn Turka became the protégé and khalīfa (“deputy”) to the east of Sayyid Ḥusayn Akhlāṭī (d. 799/1397), Tabrizi Kurdish lettrist-alchemist, personal physician to al-Malik al-Ẓāhir Barqūq (r. 784–801/1382–99) and rumored messiah, who was responsible for training some of the most influential occultists of the early ninth/fifteenth-century Persianate world (see Gāzurgāhī, 189). (His nisba likely refers to both Akhlāṭ, the Kurdistani city, and akhlāṭ, the four humours.) Niʿmatullāhī hagiographical sources aver that Ibn Turka did so at the instance of the eminent sufi shaykh Shāh Niʿmat Allāh Valī (d. 834/1431), also a committed Ibn ʿArabian lettrist (Aubin, 70). Akhlāṭī’s khalīfa to the north was the infamous Shaykh Badr al-Dīn of Simavna (executed ca. 823/1420), like his Isfahani peer a jurist-judge and Ibn ʿArabian ideologue, but unlike him anti-imperialist: Badr al-Dīn’s millennarian proposal to the Muslim and Christian peasants of Rumelia for a radically ecumenical communism and armed resistance to oppressive overlords inspired a major rebellion (khurūj) that shook the still unstable Ottoman state in 819/1416. Less flamboyant, but ultimately far more influential, was Badr al-Dīn’s associate ʿAbd alRaḥmān al-Bisṭāmī of Antioch (d. 858/1454), whose encyclopedic lettrist and apocalyptic works came to be embraced as the basis for Ottoman eschatological, occult-scientific imperialism throughout the first half of the tenth/sixteenth century (Fleischer). Where al-Bisṭāmī favoured a traditionist, compilatory approach focused on lettrist praxis, however, especially that associated with the Ifriqiyan sufi-mage Aḥmad al-Būnī (d. btw. 622–30/1225–33), Ibn Turka was philosophically systematising, focusing rather on Ibn ʿArabian lettrist theory. But both were staunchly committed to developing lettrist platforms in support of their respective Ottoman and Timurid dynastic patrons’ imperial claims; and Ibn Turka’s own lettrist works were in elite demand from Istanbul to Samarkand and Delhi, and students came to him from every corner of the Persianate world, as he himself reports (Melvin-Koushki, Challenge, 248). Justly, then, did the members of this interimperial network of ardently neopythagoreanising occult scientists address one another in their writings and correspondence as ikhwān al-ṣafāʾ wa-khullān al-wafāʾ: the New Brethren of Purity (Fazlıoğlu; Fleischer; Binbaş, Networks; Melvin-Koushki, Quest). 2 The remarkable success of Ibn Turka’s neopythagorean-imperialist project was largely posthumous, however; his own career was fraught with frustration and difficulty. This was due in the first place to the politically turbulent nature of the early Timurid period, as Amir Temür’s (r. 770–807/1369–1405) sons and grandsons competed over the Iranian-Transoxanian core of the vast but unstable empire of that dread Muslim Lord of Conjunction (ṣāḥib-qirān). The fortunes of individual dynasts and governors were often quickly reversed, and those of their scholarly patronees—including Ibn Turka—by extension. Takfīrism accordingly became rampant as a means of capitalising on such professional uncertainty: denouncing one’s rivals to the sultan often proved an effective means of climbing the scholarly or bureaucratic hierarchy (on the similar politicisation of takfīr in the contemporary Mamluk Sultanate see Levanoni). The same period saw an upswell of messianic sufi movements, including the openly politically and doctrinally anarchic Ḥurūfiyya, who were to be a thorn in the side of the Timurid state for decades—and pretext for Ibn Turka’s persecution, inquisition and exile (on this movement see Bashir). Upon his conquest of Fars in 789/1387, Temür had relocated many of its scholars and artisans to his capital Samarkand, including the Turkas. There Ṣāʾin al-Dīn continued his education under his elder brother Ṣadr al-Dīn, whom Temür appointed qadi of the imperial capital; his warm friendship with Qāḍīzāda Rūmī (d. 835/1432), the great astronomer and second director of Ulugh Beg b. Shāhrukh’s (r. 811–53/1409–49) Samarkand Observatory, dates to this period of studentship together. The younger Turka then left for Cairo at his brother’s instance, where he mastered Shāfiʿī jurisprudence and hadith studies under leading scholars like Sirāj al-Dīn alBulqīnī (d. 805/1403). But it was Akhlāṭī’s mentorship that proved transformative—as well as the patronage of Akhlāṭī’s patron Barqūq: the Mamluk “Manifest King” would seem to have been one of the first post-Mongol Muslim rulers to experiment with forms of millennial sovereignty on an explicitly occult-scientific basis. The series of lettrist treatises Ibn Turka was to write for Timurid dynasts after his return to Iran in ca. 810/1408 therefore reflects and articulates this new, specifically Cairene scientific-imperial ethos. (The same ethos alarmed the very conservative Ibn Khaldūn (d. 808/1406), a fellow member of Barqūq’s court, inspiring his lengthy fideist anti-occultism and anti-lettrism polemic in the Muqaddima (Gardiner, 317–19; Melvin-Koushki, Defense).) Indeed, both formally and theoretically, Ibn Turka’s gorgeous Arabo-Persian oeuvre as a whole inaugurates a distinctive hybrid Mamluk-Timurid ornate literary culture that was to be much appreciated by eastern patrons seeking to compete with or draw on the prestige of Cairo. Ibn Turka’s first Timurid patron, however, was a tragic figure. Iskandar Sulṭān b. ʿUmar Shaykh (r. 812–17/1409–14), Temür’s grandson and initially favored successor, established a culturally brilliant court in Shiraz and then Isfahan, and for his heavy patronage and personal mastery of the (occult) sciences—especially lettrism and astronomy-astrology (ʿilm al-nujūm)—was styled by Ibn Turka a new breed of saint-philosopher-king, caliph-sultan of the physical (ṣūrī) and spiritual (maʿnavī) realms both. (It is no accident that the most gorgeous of the two Islamicate illuminated horoscopes to have survived is Iskandar’s (Caiozzo).) But Iskandar lost the contest for control of Iran to his uncle Shāhrukh (r. 811–50/1409–47), a far more conservative, sunnising ruler after the Seljuq model, who made Herat the Timurid capital; the latter was de3 cidedly less enthusiastic about Ibn Turka’s lettrist imperialism. An ambitious early modern sovereign was thus bested by a late medieval one (Binbaş, Networks; idem, Experimentation; Melvin-Koushki, Empire). Nevertheless, it was for this would-be second Alexander that Ibn Turka wrote his first lettrist treatise, titled simply R. Ḥurūf (“On the letters”), and began his landmark Book of inquiries. During this period he also revised his major commentary on Ibn ʿArabī’s Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam—the first and only of the host of such to feature frequent lettrist excursuses. With the execution in 818/1415 of his ill-starred, star-devoted patron, who had appointed him chief judge of Isfahan, Ibn Turka sought to retire from public life, and devoted himself to writing; he completed his magnum opus in 823/1420, revising and expanding it in 828/1425. But his rising scholarly fame soon attracted trouble. In ca. 825/1422 jealous rivals denounced him to Shāhrukh, accusing him of ṣūfīgarī (lit. “sufi bias,” here presumably code for Hurufism); he was duly summoned to Herat for inquisition. On this occasion Ibn Turka was successful in clearing his name, and Shāhrukh granted him the judgeship of Yazd. This was to be the first inquisition of three, however; and the third—immediately on the heels of the Hurufi assassination attempt against Shāhrukh in 830/1427—proved disastrous. Accused of Hurufi sympathies, a number of prominent scholars and sufis, including the charismatic shaykh Qāsim-i Anvār (d. 837/1434), Shāh Niʿmat Allāh Valī’s khalīfa, were banished from the imperial capital (Binbaş, Anatomy). Ibn Turka himself was imprisoned, tortured, stripped of his position and property, and finally exiled. He spent the remaining years of his life seeking redress from Shāhrukh and patronage among the notables of Mazandaran, Gilan and Azarbayjan, writing treatises on various philosophical and theological topics to this end; his important manual of logic, K. al-Manāhij (“Book of methods”), written in Natanz for his son Muḥammad, dates to this period (see El-Rouayheb, 145). Having finally received a promise of reinstatement from the Timurid sultan, Ibn Turka returned to Herat—where he died, still in limbo, in 835/1432, a martyr to his lettrist cause. But Ibn Turka remained prolific in the face of intrigue, inquisition and catastrophe—some 45 Persian and Arabic works survive, 16 of them on lettrism, together with a body of correspondence (for an annotated list see Melvin-Koushki, Quest, ch. 2)—, and never abandoned his project of creating a lettrist platform for Timurid saint-philosopher-kingship as first modeled by Iskandar. He is in fact the first author in the high lettrist tradition to ignore the injunctions to secrecy long standard in occultist circles, and forcefully reiterated by Ibn ʿArabī, his model; breaking definitively with precedent, Ibn Turka promulgated the science among ruling elites by writing a series of accessible and attractive Persian manuals on the same. His Suʾl al-mulūk (“Query of kings”), for example, a comprehensive treatment of applied lettrism written for Shāhrukh at the instance of the latter’s son Bāysunghur (d. 837/1433), analyses the name of this Timurid royal mujaddid (messianic “renewer”) to argue for the whole of the ninth Islamic century as a Shahrukhid dispensation. While the treatise’s dedicatee seems to have remained unmoved, Bāysunghur himself, a great patron of the book arts and master calligrapher, was considerably more receptive; Ibn Turka’s surviving correspondence with the prince-governor suggests a warm and intimate relationship. Among other important lettrist treatises written during this period of relative professional stability (825–29/1422–26), Ibn Turka accordingly dedicated to him a remarkable Persian philosophical romance and lettrist mirror for princes, Munāẓara-yi bazm u razm (“Debate of 4 feast and fight”), which repurposes the venerable sword vs. pen (al-sayf wa-l-qalam) trope to theorise Timurid universal empire as the historical manifestation of the coincidentia oppositorum, as proved by lettrist analysis (taḥqīq). Significantly, this represents the first theorisation of Islamic imperialism in terms of Ibn ʿArabian tawḥīd, the science of “making-one/One.” Equally significantly, a similar lettrist-astrological platform forms the theoretical core of Sharaf al-Dīn ʿAlī Yazdī’s (d. 858/1454) much-imitated ornate Persian history of Temür, the Ẓafarnāma (“Book of conquest”), completed in ca. 832/1429; the celebrated Timurid dynastic historian, litterateur and mathematician was Ibn Turka’s student and closest friend, as well as fellow protégé of Akhlāṭī, and fully committed to the same occult-scientific imperialist project. (On Ibn Turka and Yazdī as the two most prominent intellectuals of Shahrukhid Iran see Dawlatshāh, 340; on Yazdī’s life and work see Binbaş, Networks.) Likewise addressed to Shāhrukh and Bāysunghur were Ibn Turka’s famous apologies (Nafthat al-maṣdūr I and II (“Tubercular expectoration”)) and statements of creed. Written in the wake of his second and third inquisitions in Herat, these documents are exceptional instances of autobiographical candor: they offer an invaluable first-person window onto the intellectual and political ferment that made scholarly life in the Timurid Empire so fraught. Therein Ibn Turka mounts a strong defence of both his orthodoxy and that of leading Timurid sufis, while emphatically distancing his project from theirs, and execrating the appearance of such perversions as Hurufism (for a summary see Melvin-Koushki, Quest; on anti-Hurufi polemic see Mir-Kasimov). Nor was this mere defensive rhetoric: in several Persian treatises, including R. Shaqq-i qamar u bayān-i sāʿat (“On the splitting of the moon and the Last Hour”) and R. Anjām (“The conclusion”), he draws a sharp distinction between sufism and lettrism, and elevates the latter to the status of supreme science, patrimony of the Imams (especially ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib and Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq) and the ancients (especially Solomon, Pythagoras and Plato) in equal measure, culmination of the whole of prophetic and intellectual history. Ibn Turka’s radically new hierarchicalisation of the religious and rational sciences—in ascending order: traditionism, theology, peripateticism, illuminationism, sufism, lettrism— epitomises his millenarian ethos more generally, simultaneously perennialist and progressivistsupersessionist. In his final creedal statement, moreover, written after 832/1429, the Isfahani sage presents himself as a second Abū Ḥāmid Ghazālī (d. 505/1111) or Fakhr al-Dīn Rāzī (d. 606/1209)—and argues for a new form of (occult-)scientific Sunnism. To the same end, he also cultivated the patronage of Ulugh Beg, sultan-scientist (al-sulṭān al-faylasūf) extraordinaire, by dedicating to him an Arabic Sharḥ al-basmala; this lengthy, philosophically dense lettrist work opens by declaring Shāhrukh’s son the ultimate Timurid philosopher-king for whose advent he had long been waiting. (Qāḍīzāda Rūmī’s effusive letter thanking him for a copy is extant.) That Ibn Turka completed his K. al-Mafāḥiṣ the same year, 1420, that construction of the Samarkand Observatory began is equally telling (Melvin-Koushki, Quest). Legacy and modern receptions Within early modern Western intellectual and imperial history more broadly, Ibn Turka thus stands rather precise cognate to contemporary and later European Renaissance thinkers— 5 infinitely better studied—like Nicholas of Cusa (d. 1464), Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (d. 1494), Giordano Bruno (d. 1600) and especially John Dee (d. 1608), similarly a neopythagoreanising occultist and first theoretician of global British empire. But Doctor Littleturk came to wield considerably more influence than his Christian kabbalist peers, and over a vaster geographicalcultural expanse—the Persian cosmopolis as a whole. The great early modern Turko-Mongol Perso-Islamic empires, Mughal, Safavid and Ottoman, adopted and adapted the specifically Timurid model of occult-scientific, Ibn ʿArabian imperial universalism and millennial sovereignty he pioneered (Melvin-Koushki, Empire; on its Indo-Timurid iterations see Moin); and his cosmological argument for world as mathematical text likewise became a key component of High Persianate culture. It spurred, most notably, his astronomer colleagues at the Samarkand Observatory to undertake their epochal mathematisation of astronomy, whose later heirs were Copernicus, Kepler and Newton (Melvin-Koushki, Powers). And it inspired Yazdī, who worked for a time at the observatory, to invent a new form of neopythagorean historiography—this in direct monist challenge to their rival Ibn Khaldūn’s dualist theory of dynastic cycling—that would be eclectically employed by Aqquyunlu, Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal court historians over the next two centuries (Melvin-Koushki, Defense). Similarly, Yazdī’s definitive theorisation of the muʿammā or logogriph as lettrist technique presaged its emergence as a major vehicle of elite social interaction in the persophone world, such that we should speak of a hegemonic muʿammā culture (Melvin-Koushki, Quest; Binbaş, Networks). This culture is epitomised by Emperor Shāhjahān’s (r. 1037–68/1628–57) Tāj Maḥal, that masterpiece of Indo-Timurid architecture and mathematical model of paradise, which is precisely designed to be cosmologically riddled. Ibn Turka’s unprecedented valorisation of writing over speech also provided a theoretical basis for the burgeoning of book culture and visual culture throughout the early modern Persianate world. His tashkīk al-ḥarf scheme explicitly structures, for example, both Abū l-Faḍl ʿAllāmī’s (d. 1011/1602) famous theorisation of Mughal painting and Aḥmed Taşköprüzāde’s (d. 968/1561) watershed Arabic encyclopedia of the sciences (Melvin-Koushki, Grammatology). It is thus unsurprising that this thoroughgoing scientist of letters has been accounted by the literary historian Muḥammad-Taqī Bahār (d. 1951) the greatest stylist of ornate Persian prose of the ninth/fifteenth century, indeed the first writer to marry literary (adabī) style to scientific (ʿilmī) content (Bahar, 3:223–34, 352–3). He is also the first to regularly quote Ḥāfiẓ (d. ca. 792/1390) in his works, and was teacher to Kātibī Turshīzī (d. 839/1436), a leading poet of the Shahrukhid period (Dawlatshāh, 384; Melvin-Koushki, Quest). Ibn Turkian lettrism, in short, became a primary mode of early modern Islamic philosophical and imperial theory and scientific, historiographical and literary praxis alike. It was explicitly embraced as such by later leading lights like Jalāl al-Dīn Davānī (d. 908/1502), illuminationist philosopher and Aqquyunlu imperial ideologue, and Mīr Dāmād (d. 1040/1631), intimate of Shah ʿAbbās the Great (r. 995–1038/1587–1629) and founder of the so-called School of Isfahan, who spearheaded the dramatic antiquarian-perennialist, neoplatonic-neopythagorean turn that defines Safavid philosophy (Melvin-Koushki, World). For positivist, religionist, colonialist, orientalist or traditionalist reasons of their own, by contrast, Ibn Turka’s modern receptions have elided the central lettrist and imperialist thrust of his project, thereby reducing a consciously 6 revolutionary, millenarian thinker to an undifferentiated middle term between more feted— because less obviously occultist—Ilkhanid and Safavid philosophers. A partial exception is Hossein Ziai, who emphasises the political tenor of Ibn Turka’s work; but he styles it rather the origin of the modern Shiʿi doctrines of vilāyat-i faqīh, rule by jurist, and marjaʿ-i taqlīd, jurist as total authority to be emulated (Ziai, 413–15). Following Henry Corbin (d. 1978), some intellectual historians have even transmogrified this deeply imamophilic but staunchly Sunni occult philosopher into a Shiʿi sufi (Corbin; Nasr, 209–10; cf. Lewisohn). Yet contemporary sufi rivals like ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī (d. 898/1492), similarly concerned to “de-occultise” the Ibn ʿArabī tradition, rather blasted Ibn Turka and Yazdī as failed sufis (Bākharzī, 106–7). Such polemics notwithstanding, his status as preeminent early modern authority on occult-scientific neopythagoreanism remained intact in Iran through at least the high Qajar period, when Mullā ʿAlī Nūrī (d. 1246/1830), that great reviver of Sadrian philosophy, avidly glossed Ibn Turka’s Book of inquiries—the first Western manifesto to successfully call for the mathematisation of the cosmos. Editions and translations of Ibn Turka’s works Ten of his Persian and Arabic lettrist treatises are edited and translated in Matthew MelvinKoushki, The lettrist treatises of Ibn Turka. Reading and writing the cosmos in the Timurid Renaissance (forthcoming), which includes a bio-bibliographical survey of his oeuvre as a whole. Recent editions: Madārij al-afhām, ed. Najīb Māyil Haravī, Tehran 1394 Sh./2015; Chahārdah risāla-yi fārsī, ed. Sayyid Maḥmūd Ṭāhirī, Qom 1391 Sh./2012; Sharḥ-i Naẓm al-durr, ed. Akram Jūdī-Niʿmatī, Tehran 1384 Sh./2005; Sharḥ Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam, ed. Muḥammad Bīdārfar, 2 vols., Qom 1420/2000; Sharḥ-i ḥadīth-i nuqṭa, ed. ʿAlī Farrukh, Mīrāth-i Ḥadīth-i Shīʿa 1 (n.d.), 173–90; K. al-Manāhij fī lmanṭiq, ed. Ibrāhīm Dībājī, Tehran 1376 Sh./1997; ʿAql u ʿishq, yā Munāẓarāt-i khams, ed. Akram Jūdī-Niʿmatī, Tehran 1375 Sh./1996; Sharḥ-i Gulshan-i rāz, ed. Kāẓim Dizfūliyān, Tehran 1375 Sh./1996; Aṭvār-i thalātha, ed. Ḥusayn Dāvūdī, Maʿārif 9/2 (1371 Sh./1992), 171–203; R. Anjām, ed. Ibrāhīm Dībājī, Nashriyya-yi Dānishkada-yi Adabiyyāt u ʿUlūm-i Insānī-yi Dānishgāh-i Tihrān 97–98 (Spring-Summer 1356 Sh./1977), 154–81; Tamhīd al-Qawāʿid, ed. Sayyid Jalāl al-Dīn Āshtiyānī, cmt. Muḥammad Riḍā Qumshaʾī and Mīrzā Maḥmūd Qummī, Tehran 1396/1976; R. Inzāliyya, ed. Sayyid ʿAlī Mūsavī Bihbahānī, Aḥvāl u āthār-i Ṣāʾin al-Dīn Turka-yi Iṣfahānī, bi inḍimām-i Risāla-yi Inzāliyya-yi ū, in Collected papers on Islamic philosophy and mysticism, ed. Mehdi Mohaghegh and Hermann Landolt (Tehran 1349 Sh./1971), 97–145. Other sources ʿAbd al-Vāsiʿ Bākharzī, Maqāmāt-i Jāmī. Gūsha-hā-yi az tārīkh-i farhangī u ijtimāʿī-yi Khurāsān dar ʿaṣr-i Taymūriyān, ed. Najīb Māyil Haravī, Tehran 1371 Sh./1992; Abū l-Faḍl ʿAllāmī, Āʾīn-i Akbarī, ed. H. Blochmann, 2 vols. (Calcutta 1969–72), 1.1:111–12; Jean Aubin, Majmūʿa dar tarju7 ma-yi aḥvāl-i Shāh Niʿmat Allāh Valī Kirmānī, Tehran 1956; Jalāl al-Dīn Davānī, Tahlīliyya. Sharḥi lā ilāh illā Llāh, ed. Firishta Furūzanda, Tehran 1373 Sh./1994; Dawlatshāh Samarqandī, Tadhkirat al-shuʿarā, ed. E. G. Browne, Tehran 1382 Sh./2003; Kamāl al-Dīn Ḥusayn Gāzurgāhī, Majālis al-ʿushshāq. Tadhkira-yi ʿurafā, ed. Ghulām-Riḍā Ṭabāṭabāʾī Majd, Tehran 1375 Sh./1996; Mīr Dāmād, Jadhavāt u mavāqīt, ed. ʿAlī Awjabī, Tehran 1380 Sh./2001; Muḥammad Ḥusayn Ṭabāṭabāʾī, al-Mīzān fī tafsīr al-Qurʾān, 20 vols., Qom 1971–74; Aḥmed Taşköprüzāde, Miftāḥ alsaʿāda wa-miṣbāḥ al-siyāda, 3 vols., Beirut 1985. Studies The only monograph-length study of Ibn Turka and his oeuvre to date is Matthew MelvinKoushki, The quest for a universal science. The occult philosophy of Ṣāʾin al-Dīn Turka Iṣfahānī (1369-1432) and Intellectual Millenarianism in Early Timurid Iran, PhD diss., Yale University 2012; a revised version is forthcoming as Matthew Melvin-Koushki, Occult philosophers and philosopher kings in early modern Iran. The life and legacy of Ibn Turka, Timurid lettrist. Cited studies by the same author: Matthew Melvin-Koushki, World as (Arabic) text. Mīr Dāmād and the neopythagoreanization of philosophy in Safavid Iran, in Philosophy and the Intellectual Life in Shīʿī Islam, ed. Sajjad Rizvi (London 2017), forthcoming; Matthew Melvin-Koushki, In defense of geomancy. Šaraf al-Dīn Yazdī rebuts Ibn Ḫaldūn’s critique of the occult sciences, in Islamicate occultism. New perspectives, ed. Matthew Melvin-Koushki and Noah Gardiner, special issue, Arabica 64/3–4 (2017), forthcoming; Matthew Melvin-Koushki, Early modern Islamicate empire. New forms of religiopolitical legitimacy, in The Wiley-Blackwell history of Islam, ed. Armando Salvatore, Roberto Tottoli and Babak Rahimi (Malden 2017), 353–75; Matthew Melvin-Koushki, Powers of one. The mathematization of the occult sciences in the High Persianate tradition, Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 5/1 (2017), 177–99; Matthew Melvin-Koushki, Of Islamic grammatology. Ibn Turka’s lettrist metaphysics of light, al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 24 (2016), 42–113; Matthew MelvinKoushki, The occult challenge to messianism and philosophy in early Timurid Iran. Ibn Turka’s lettrism as a new metaphysics, in Unity in diversity. Mysticism, messianism and the construction of religious authority in Islam, ed. Orkhan Mir-Kasimov (Leiden 2014), 247–76. Other cited studies: Sayyid Jalāl al-Dīn Āshtiyānī, intro. to Ibn Turka, Tamhīd al-Qawāʿid, ed. Sayyid Jalāl al-Dīn Āshtiyānī, cmt. Muḥammad Riḍā Qumshaʾī and Mīrzā Maḥmūd Qummī (Tehran 1396/1976), 1– 192; Muḥammad-Taqī Bahār, Sabk-shināsī, yā Tārīkh-i taṭavvur-i nathr-i fārsī, 3 vols., Tehran 1381 Sh./2002; Shahzad Bashir, Fazlallah Astarabadi and the Hurufis, Oxford 2005; İlker Evrim Binbaş, Intellectual networks in Timurid Iran. Sharaf al-Dīn ʿAlī Yazdī and the Islamicate republic of letters, Cambridge 2016; İlker Evrim Binbaş, Timurid experimentation with eschatological absolutism. Mīrzā Iskandar, Shāh Niʿmatullāh Walī, and Sayyid Sharīf Jurjānī in 815/1412, in Unity in di8 versity. Mysticism, messianism and the construction of religious authority in Islam, ed. Orkhan Mir-Kasimov (Leiden 2014), 277–303; İlker Evrim Binbaş, The anatomy of a regicide attempt. Shāhrukh, the Ḥurūfīs, and the Timurid intellectuals in 830/1426–27, JRAS 23 (2013), 391–428; Anna Caiozzo, The horoscope of Iskandar Sultān as a cosmological vision in the Islamic world, in Horoscopes and public spheres: Essays on the history of astrology, ed. Günther Oestmann, H. Darrel Rutkin and Kocku von Stuckrad (Berlin 2005), 115–44; John Cooper, From al-Ṭūsī to the school of Iṣfahān, in History of Islamic philosophy, ed. Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Oliver Leaman, 2 vols. (London 1996), 1:585–96; Henry Corbin, Typologie des spirituels selon Sâinoddîn ‘Alî Ispahânî (ob. 830/1427), in idem, En Islam iranien. Aspects spirituels et philosophiques, 4 vols. (Paris 1972), 3:233–74; Muḥammad-Taqī Dānishpazhūh, Majmūʿa-yi rasāʾil-i Khujandī, Farhang-i Īrānzamīn 14 (1345–6 Sh./1966–7), 307–12; Heidrun Eichner, Afḍal al-Dīn Turka, EI3; Khaled ElRouayheb, Relational syllogisms and the history of Arabic logic 900–1900, Leiden 2010; İhsan Fazlıoğlu, İlk dönem Osmanlı ilim ve kültür hayatında İhvanu’s-Safâ ve Abdurrahman Bistâmî, Dîvân: İlmî Araştırmalar 1 (1996), 229–40; Cornell H. Fleischer, Ancient wisdom and new sciences. Prophecies at the Ottoman court in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, in Falnama. The book of omens, ed. Massumeh Farhad and Serpil Bağcı (Washington 2009), 232–43; Noah D. Gardiner, Esotericism in a manuscript culture. Aḥmad al-Būnī and his readers through the Mamlūk period, Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan 2014; Denis Gril, The science of letters, in Ibn al-‘Arabi, The Meccan revelations, ed. Michel Chodkiewicz, tr. Cyrille Chodkiewicz and Denis Gril, 2 vols. (New York 2004), 2:105–219; ʿAbd Allāh Javādī-Āmulī, Taḥrīr-i Tamhīd al-Qawāʿid, Tehran 1372 Sh./1993; Yaḥyā Kabīr, Insān-shināsī (insān-i kāmil) dar maktab-i falsafī-yi ʿirfānī-yi Ṣāʾin al-Dīn Ibn Turka, Qom 1384 Sh./2005; Amalia Levanoni, Takfīr in Egypt and Syria during the Mamlūk period, in Accusations of unbelief in Islam. A diachronic perspective on takfīr, ed. Camilla Adang, Hassan Ansari, Maribel Fierro and Sabine Schmidtke (Leiden 2016), 185–88; Leonard Lewisohn, Sufism and theology in the confessions of Ṣāʾin al-Dīn Turka Iṣfahānī (d. 830/1437) [sic], in Sufism and theology, ed. Ayman Shihadeh (Edinburgh 2007), 63–82; Orkhan Mir-Kasimov, Takfīr and messianism. The Ḥurūfī case, in Accusations of unbelief in Islam. A diachronic perspective on takfīr, ed. Camilla Adang, Hassan Ansari, Maribel Fierro and Sabine Schmidtke (Leiden 2016), 189–212; A. Azfar Moin, The millennial sovereign. Sacred kingship and sainthood in Islam, New York 2012; Rosemarie Quiring-Zoche, Afżal-al-Din Torka, EIr; Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Islamic philosophy from its origin to the present. Philosophy in the land of prophecy, Albany 2006; ʿAbd al-Ḥusayn Zarrīnkūb, Dunbāla-yi justujū dar taṣavvuf-i Īrān, Tehran 1366 Sh./1987; Hossein Ziai, Recent trends in Arabic and Persian philosophy, in The Cambridge companion to Arabic philosophy, ed. Peter Adamson and Richard C. Taylor (Cambridge 2005), 405– 24. Matthew Melvin-Koushki 9