Historiography and the “Substitution of States” in Quṭb al-Dīn Ashkiwarī’s Maḥbūb al-qulūb – Muhammad Fariduddin Attar

If ḥikma is the highest form of knowledge an individual may attain, its transmission across nations and languages represents the embodiment of divine wisdom within the historical order of things. Quṭb al-Dīn Ashkiwarī (d. between 1088/1677–1095/1684), a Safavid thinker and doxographer, seems to have had this view in mind when composing Maḥbūb al-qulūb (The Heart’s Beloved), a work on the “history of philosophy,” where he writes about the preservation and transmission of divinely ordained wisdom (ḥikma) among the prophets, philosophers, sages, and scholars of the pre-Islamic and Islamic periods. This paper argues that one of Quṭb al-Dīn’s signature approaches in compos- ing and structuring this work is inspired by a well-known Sufi technique of soul-craft- ing, namely, the deliberate and methodical substitution of blameworthy traits of char- acter with praiseworthy ones—the “substitution of states” (tabdīl al-aḥwāl). Using the biographical entries on four Muslim philosophers (al-Fārābī, Avicenna, al-Suhrawardī, and Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī), I show how this approach allows Quṭb al-Din to embrace an ecumenical vision of philosophical knowledge within a historical perspective—a vision that embraces diverging strands of Islamic thought without having to negate or minimize the real differences that exist between the personalities embodying ḥikma, their respective subjectivities, and their historical agency.