Sadraddin Muhammad Shirazi, who is considered the most significant philosopher of 17th-century Islamic philosophy and is known as Mulla Sadra, contributed novel theories to Islamic philosophy. Famous for his theories such as the Primacy of Being, the Gradation of Being, and Substantial Motion, Shirazi also tried to solve the problem of corporeal resurrection, which was a problematic issue in both philosophy and religion, by approaching it in a unique way.

Up to Shirazi’s time, no one had been able to provide a rational explanation for the religiously supported doctrine of corporeal resurrection; however, based on the principles of his philosophy, he was able to justify it and in this way put forward a new theory in Islamic philosophy. According to Shirazi, who regarded the spiritual resurrection supported by philosophers as insufficient and accepted resurrection as the unification of body and soul, the soul and body are parts of a single unity. In his view, it is not possible to separate them, as they are unified. The body, as a characteristic of the soul, may change because of its substantial motion; however, even if the properties of the body change, the soul will not be without a body in any realm.

The agent of the ethereal body, which is the embodiment of man’s deeds in this world, is the soul itself. According to Shirazi, imagination remains alive after the death of the physical body because it is abstract, and the soul imagines itself according to its substantive form. The afterlife body is not physical matter, but it is bodily, so it has dimensions. Nevertheless, from the point of view of philosophical identity, there is no difference between the earthly and ethereal bodies.