A Study of Qāḍī Sa’īd Qummī’s View of the Soul

Qāṣī Sa’īd Qummī was a philosopher and mystic in the 11th century AH (17th century) and a prominent figure of the Islamic wisdom. Like many other Muslim philosophers, he maintains that the soul is an immaterial substance, but his main disagreement with other philosophers is that, in his view, the soul never fully loses its existential connection to the body even after death, and a portion of the elemental material body always remains with the soul even posthumously, and the resurrection in the afterlife occurs with that bodily portion. Thus, contrary to philosophical theories, he takes the resurrection to be bodily and elemental. In this paper, I seek to study his views about the soul-body problem, its implications, and some serious conflicts within his philosophical speculations that have occurred because of different principles he adopts. I conclude that he has undergone different periods of thinking, in each of which was influenced by theological (Kalāmī), philosophical, or mystical principles, and thus, in each period, he maintained views that were in conflict with his previous line of thinking.