Shaikh Ishraq and Mulla Sadra on the Qualified Muslim Ruler

A Muslim ruler has the highest position in an Islamic government over him nobody rules. A Muslim ruler, Shaikh Ishraq and Mulla Sadra argue, is the vicegerent of Allah on the earth. Since divine providence demands that the His vicegerent be present on the earth at all times, factually, there must be qualified people to rule over the earth each at every time. A close look into Shaikh Ishraq’s view suggests that an Islamic ruler in the majority of cases ought to be a prophet and must be perfect in his three faculties of rationality, imagination and sensation. In the minority cases, he says, the ruler can be a person in the highest taste of divinity and his unique gift in intellect makes him superior to rule. Mulla Sadra follows Shaikh Ishraq in that the ruler ought to be one individual person in his qualifications in the majority of cases and in the qualifications of a prophet. Nonetheless, since he introduced Imam as the qualified ruler after the prophet, in the minority of cases, Mulla Sadra holds, due to his knowledge of things the seen and the unseen, Imam deserve to be the ruler. He considers Imam’s knowledge of the unseen as the central qualification, though.