Quote by Roy Mottahedeh

“The really significant way in which Sufism survived, however, was in the individualistic and highly philosophical form called erfan, mystical “knowledge.” The domestication of mysticism among the Shiah mullahs was largely the achievement of Mullah Sadra, although when he died in 1640 he probably had more mullah detractors than mullah admirers. He was a man who, after a formal madreseh education and informal study with the leading Shiah divines of his time, withdrew to a village near Qom to spend fifteen years of ascetic devotion and self-purification until he achieved the “direct” vision of the intelligible world. To see directly the reality of the world that philosophy revealed indirectly was to see through “illumination.”

Quote by Roy Mottahedeh