History of Political Thought in Iran — Part 6: Henry Corbin and the Torch of Iranian Thought

The seminar approaches Henry Corbin through a dispute. Javad Tabatabai criticized Corbin’s account of Iranian intellectual continuity, particularly the image of a spiritual “torch” supposedly passed from Zoroaster through later philosophers and mystics. The seminar takes that criticism seriously but argues that Corbin’s project is misunderstood if it is judged only by the standards of linear intellectual history. Corbin was not simply trying to prove an uninterrupted chain of direct influence. He was interested in recurring structures of spiritual experience and philosophical imagination that appear in different periods through different vocabularies.

Corbin’s own intellectual formation is therefore important. He emerged from twentieth-century European philosophy and theology, worked with phenomenological and hermeneutic approaches, translated Heidegger, and encountered Suhrawardi through Louis Massignon. Corbin later described this encounter as the discovery of a spiritual homeland. His participation in the Eranos circle, in conversation with figures such as Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, Heinrich Zimmer, and Erich Neumann, further situates his work at the intersection of philosophy, religious studies, depth psychology, and the study of myth.

Suhrawardi stands at the centre of this intellectual world. Corbin’s idea of the mundus imaginalis—the imaginal world—is neither ordinary fantasy nor material reality. It names an intermediate mode in which spiritual forms can be experienced. The seminar relates this to phenomenological method. Instead of beginning by deciding whether a metaphysical experience is objectively true or false, one can ask how it appears to consciousness and what structure of meaning it discloses. Poetry, dream, myth, and visionary experience can then be studied as serious modes of human meaning rather than dismissed as defective versions of empirical knowledge.

A major part of Corbin’s project was also directed against the familiar Western narrative that philosophy in the Islamic world effectively ended with Averroes. Iran, he argued, sustained a philosophical tradition through Suhrawardi, Mir Damad, Mulla Sadra, and others, frequently in conjunction with illuminationist and mystical thought. In the seminar’s own interpretation, that continuity is linked with themes of free will, the irreducible individual, and direct relation to the sacred. Zoroaster, Bayazid Bastami, Hallaj, Suhrawardi, Hafez, and Rumi are treated as exhibiting a kind of family resemblance around sacred individuality. This is presented as a Corbinian and interpretive claim, not as a demonstrated linear genealogy.

The disagreement between Tabatabai and Corbin consequently concerns two different conceptions of history and rationality. Political and institutional history properly emphasizes chronology, context, rupture, and demonstrable transmission. A history of spiritual imagination may instead look for structures that recur across periods without requiring direct continuity in every link. Corbin’s value, in this reading, is that he supplied philosophical language for the poetic, illuminationist, and individual-centred dimensions of Iranian thought. His claims remain open to historical criticism, but the seminar argues that they should be criticized on terms adequate to the kind of question he was actually asking.