Shafaqna English- Christian Jambet (born April 23, 1949, in Algeria) is a French philosopher and graduate of comparative theology. He teaches and conducts research in philosophy and theology at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (School for Advanced Studies).
According to Shafaqna, during his student years, Jambet was full of political fervor and was influenced by the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the May 1968 events in France. He was a member of Maoist groups known as the Union of Communist Youth. However, he later became disillusioned with the fate of Maoism in China and France, which paved the way for his sudden break from revolutionary and organized political activism.
During this period, he had a decisive encounter with Henri Corbin, the French Shia scholar and the founder of the “Iranian Islam” theory, which led him to abandon the idea of “changing the world” in Marxist fashion in favor of “interpreting the world” through the lens of Shia mystical philosophy.
Since then, Jambet has followed Corbin’s intellectual path and has pursued a scholarly career studying Islam and Shiism. He has taught Islamic philosophy at the Paris Business School and the Institute of Iranian Studies at Paris 3–Sorbonne Nouvelle University. He has published numerous articles on manners, traditions, sects, literature, architecture, philosophy, and even poetry in the Islamic world. He has edited and published works by Louis Massignon and Henri Corbin and has translated texts from Persian and Arabic into French, including collections of poems by Jalal al-Din Rumi and Forough Farrokhzad.
One of his main interests in Shia studies is research and publication on Mulla Sadra, and he can be considered the most active Mulla Sadra scholar in the French-speaking world.
In The Act of Being: The Philosophy of Revelation According to Mulla Sadra (2002), Jambet explores Mulla Sadra’s particular view of revelation and its realization within the hierarchy of existence. In Divine Authority: Islam and the Political View of the World (2016), by discussing the concept of authority and the distinction between outward (apparent) and inward (inner) authority according to Mulla Sadra, he presents religion not as a model for external domination but as a spiritual practice for uncovering hidden meanings and a guide for inner freedom. In The End of Everything: Quranic Eschatology and the Philosophy of Mulla Sadra (2017), he provides a French translation of Mulla Sadra’s treatise Hashr al-Ashya’ and examines Mulla Sadra’s spiritual and inward understanding of apocalyptic events, rejecting a purely physical interpretation of this period.