Bahāʾ al-dīn al-ʿĀmilī

Bahāʾ al-Dīn al-ʿĀmilī, known as Sheikh Bahāʾī, was a Twelver Shia scholar and polymath of Arab origin who flourished in Safavid Iran between the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. His career brings together religious learning, Islamic science and the patronage of an imperial court, which makes him a useful window onto the culture of that period.

He was born in 1547 near Baalbek, in Ottoman Syria, into a family from Jabal Amil. After the execution of his father's mentor in 1558, the family moved to Persia, first to Isfahan and then to Qazvin, the royal capital at the time. His father served as shaykh al-Islam in several cities under Shah Tahmasp I, charged with spreading Shiism among the population. Bahāʾī completed his studies in Isfahan and, after a four-year journey through Iraq, Syria and Egypt, returned to Iran. He died in Isfahan in 1621 but was buried in Mashhad, as he had wished.

His output was vast, with over a hundred treatises in Arabic and Persian on jurisprudence, logic, astronomy, mathematics and theology. In astronomy he tried to resolve problems in the Ptolemaic system and argued for the plausibility of the Earth's rotation, a view held by some Islamic astronomers before Copernican ideas spread in the Muslim world. His arithmetic textbook Khulāṣat al-ḥisāb was widely used for centuries. He showed a clear sympathy for Sufism, though he insisted that the sharia must be observed as a precondition for any mystical path.

His influence reached architecture as well: he is credited with a central role in planning Isfahan under Abbas I, although many of these attributions lack firm documentation. His students, among them Mulla Sadra, carried his legacy into Persian philosophy.