Asfār means journeys.
In the Islamic philosophical tradition—most famously articulated in Mullā Sadrā’s al-Asfār al-Arbaʿa—knowledge is not understood as accumulation, but as passage. One does not simply learn; one travels. The self is not a container of ideas, but a being in motion, passing through degrees of awareness, responsibility, and reality.
Asfār Worlds takes this understanding seriously.
Across civilizations, worlds were once known to unfold in degrees: the sensible, the imaginal, the intelligible; the visible and the invisible; the near and the far. These were not metaphors. They were modes of reality, each demanding a different form of attention and a different discipline of inhabitation. Architecture, poetry, ritual, and philosophy did not merely describe these worlds—they oriented human life within them.
Today, much of this has become difficult to say.
Imagination is often reduced to fantasy.
Presence is dismissed as subjective experience.
Wisdom is treated as abstract knowledge.
Transcendence is either privatized or denied.
Entire dimensions of reality—once central to how humans understood themselves and the worlds they inhabited—are now rendered marginal, symbolic, or unreal. What remains is a flattened landscape of meaning, where knowledge is measured but rarely transformative, and space is designed but seldom orienting.
This platform is not an attempt to restore a lost past, nor to reject the contemporary world. It is an effort to reopen pathways of orientation—to ask how wisdom traditions, especially those shaped by hikmah al-ishrāq (Illuminationist Philosophy) and hikmah al-mutaʿāliyah (Transcendent Philosophy), might still speak to architecture, art, and lived experience today.
Asfār Worlds unfolds through four interrelated domains:
Wisdom
Wisdom here is not information, nor moral instruction. It is a way of becoming—an alignment of knowing, being, and action. This section gathers philosophical reflections, historical lineages, and conceptual foundations drawn from Islamic thought and its wide constellation of intellectual and cosmological encounters—across worlds of light, imagination, and being. It asks how knowledge shapes the soul, and how the soul, in turn, shapes the worlds it inhabits.
Presence
Presence names a mode of knowing that does not proceed by distance or representation. It is knowledge by nearness—ʿilm al-hudūrī—in which one stands before what is without attempting to master it. Here, architecture is approached not as expression or spectacle, but as a discipline of orientation: a way of training attention, duration, and ethical staying.
Imagination
Imagination is not illusion. It is a real domain of encounter—the ʿālam al-mithāl, the imaginal world—where meanings take form and forms carry truth. This section explores imagination as a bridge between worlds, drawing from Illuminationist philosophy, mystical traditions, artistic practices, and cross-cultural cosmologies that refuse the collapse of imagination into fantasy.
Transcendence
Transcendence is not escape. It is not elsewhere. It is the deepening of orientation toward what exceeds the self without negating the world. This domain asks how architecture, art, and practice can remain open to what cannot be fully grasped, represented, or resolved—without turning transcendence into projection or spectacle.
These domains are distinct, but they are not separate. They are stages of attention, not compartments of knowledge. While readers may enter Asfār Worlds from any point, the journey is most fully experienced when it unfolds gradually—moving from wisdom, through presence, into imagination, and finally toward transcendence.
Asfār Worlds is not a manifesto, nor a school, nor a closed system. It is a living archive, a reflective practice, and an invitation. It brings together philosophy, architecture, art, and lived experience in order to ask a simple but demanding question:
How might we learn to inhabit the world differently—more attentively, more responsibly, and more truthfully—than our present habits allow?
The work here is slow by necessity. It unfolds through reading, writing, building, listening, and staying. It assumes that wisdom cannot be rushed, that presence cannot be engineered, and that imagination requires care.
Asfār is not about arriving.
It is about learning how to travel—between worlds, within worlds, and through the self—without losing orientation.