Jalal al-Din Davani

Jalal al-Din Muhammad ibn As'ad Davani was born in 830 AH (1426/27) in the village of Davan near Kazerun, in the Iranian province of Fars. His father, Sa'd al-Din As'ad, was the qadi of the Kazerun district and a pupil of the renowned al-Sayyid al-Sharif al-Jurjani. The family traced its descent to the first caliph, Abu Bakr, and Davani accordingly also signed his works with the nisba al-Siddiqi.

He first studied grammar, logic and law with his father, then moved to Shiraz, where he read theology, philosophy, logic, legal theory and hadith with Muhyi al-Din Gushkinari, Humam al-Din Gulbari, Safi al-Din Iji and other scholars. His first work, glosses on the Qur'an commentary of al-Baydawi, dates from 1449, and by his thirties he was already one of the leading scholars of Shiraz.

In the 1460s Mirza Yusuf, governor of Fars and son of the Qara Qoyunlu ruler Jahan Shah, made him sadr, head of the province's religious administration, but Davani soon gave up the post. In the autumn of 1467 he accompanied Jahan Shah on his campaign against the Aq Qoyunlu ruler Uzun Hasan; after Jahan Shah's defeat and death he went to Tabriz, where he wrote “Shawakil al-hur”, a commentary on Suhrawardi's “Temples of Light” (1468). Back in Shiraz, he taught at the Begum Madrasa, also known as Dar al-Aytam.

In Shiraz Davani grew close to Sultan Khalil, Uzun Hasan's son and governor of Fars, at whose request he wrote in Persian, for Uzun Hasan, the treatise “Lawami' al-ishraq fi makarim al-akhlaq” (about 1474–1475), which became famous as the “Akhlaq-i Jalali”. Drawing on Nasir al-Din Tusi's “Akhlaq-i Nasiri”, its three parts deal with personal ethics, the running of the family and household, and the government of the city and the state. In his “Arz-nama” he described, as an eyewitness, the review of troops and officials that Sultan Khalil held in 1476. Sultan Ya'qub, who came to the throne in 1478, made him chief qadi of Fars; later Davani opposed that ruler's centralising reforms.

His reputation spread well beyond Iran. He dedicated several works to the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II and received gifts from him, and the Ottoman scholar Mu'ayyadzade Abd al-Rahman came to Shiraz to study with him for several years. To Sultan Mahmud I of Gujarat he dedicated “Unmudhaj al-ulum”, a survey of the sciences, and a treatise on justice. His glosses on the Samarkand scholar Ali Qushji's commentary on Tusi's “Tajrid al-i'tiqad” set off a long dispute with Sadr al-Din Dashtaki of Shiraz, the two answering each other with one set of glosses after another.

In the turmoil of the last years of the Aq Qoyunlu state, after 1497, the governor of Fars, Qasim Beg Purnak, confiscated Davani's property. He left Shiraz and lived in Lar and on the island of Jarun in the Strait of Hormuz, where he wrote his commentary on the creed of Adud al-Din al-Iji, “Sharh al-Aqa'id al-Adudiyya” (1499). He died in 908 AH, in the autumn of 1502, near his home village and was buried at Davan, where his mausoleum still stands.

Davani wrote many works in Arabic and Persian on theology, philosophy, logic, ethics, Qur'anic exegesis and law, as well as Persian poetry. He sought to bring Ash'ari theology together with Suhrawardi's philosophy of illumination and the mysticism of Ibn Arabi. The “Akhlaq-i Jalali” circulated widely in Iran, the Ottoman Empire and India, where it was lithographed many times; manuscripts and lithographed copies are also kept at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Uzbek Academy of Sciences.