Weighing Knowledge

This article studies the influence of late Qajar cultures of politics and ethics upon a Sufi theory of knowledge. It argues that Mīrzā Ḥasan Iṣfahānī (known in Sufi circles as Ṣafī ʿAlī Shāh) performed the role of public intellectual in his treatise on knowledge and ethics Mīzān al-maʿrifah (The Scale of Knowledge). I propose that the text’s ethical directives actually serve to dictate the conditions under which a particularly modern subject can claim knowledge. Being someone who knows does not mean being someone who has access to data; it means being someone who can look, and act, as a knower should. Humanity is book’s titular “scale of knowledge,” but, in that text, to truly be human entails the cultivation of virtue and the correct performance of one’s role, as coded in norms of class, profession, and gender, norms conveyed within many of the text’s explanatory analogies.