Monographs in Arabic and Islamic Studies – serie

Abu cAbd al-Rahman Muhammad b. al-Husayn al-Sulami (d.412/1021) lived in the 3rd and 4th century AH / 9th and 10th century CE. He was born in the city of Nishapur, one of the most renowned cities in the Islamic world. He was part of a line of earlier Sufi figures who attempted to defend the cardinal tenets of Sufism from accusations of heresy. However al-Sulami's surpassed his predecessors by amassing a corpus of antecedent mystical dicta from the architects of Islamic mysticism and substantiating them with transmission channels (isnad) or grounding them in a core teaching of the Prophet Muhammad. This study demonstrates that al-Sulami was an accomplished mystic. It outlines his life and times and surveys in full all his works as far as they can be identified. Moreover, the important sources that shaped the development and impression of his thinking and modality of transforming the ego-self (nafs) are presented in detail bringing together earlier and current academic scholarship on him.

In Raf' al-Malam 'an al-A'imma al-A'lam Ibn Taymiyya pursues the argument as to why a mujtahid might depart from directly acting upon textual evidences. This forms the basis of his discussion regarding the causes underlying disagreements found among Muslim scholars in general and their holding differing legal opinions and proffering divergent arguments in support of those opinions. In this work, Ibn Taymiyya calls for tolerance and understanding of the conclusions arrived at by eminent Muslim scholars. Additionally, he insists that even if a scholar was to err in their judgement, it should not be assumed that they intentionally ignored textual evidence as there could be various reasons for what others consider to be a departure from textual evidences. Hence, according to Ibn Taymiyya, such scholars should not be seen as blameworthy and liable to punishment but rather they should be revered as scholars who exercised their right of ijtihad. Thus, even if such a scholar was thought to have erred, there would most certainly be a methodological reason behind such a departure, rather than an intentional contradiction of the relevant textual evidences. Additionally, Ibn Taymiyya asserts that liability for the punishment depends on the existence of certain conditions and the non-existence of impediments and he affirms that reaching certainty in this regard is almost impossible as this is clearly a very complex and complicated process. In this work it is evident that Ibn Taymiyya benefited from various traditions of learning in which he excelled, including jurisprudence, Hadith and philosophy and hence produced a remarkable work which has proved relevant from the time it was authored about eight centuries ago until our present day. This work contains the Arabic text Raf' al-Malam 'an al-A'imma al A'lam and its translation.

This book aims to explore the theory of love in the writings of the Great Andalusian Sufi Sheikh, Muhyi al-Din Ibn 'Arabi (558-638/1165-1240). It begins by examining Divine and human love as found in the works of many Sufi masters that preceded Ibn 'Arabi, and then turns to the views of Ibn 'Arabi himself. The Sufis from the early centuries of Islam (9th-10th) sometimes defined love as their "religion," by which they meant, their way to God. Ibn 'Arabi not only expanded on these earlier Sufi theories, but also detailed his own original insights. He openly declared the primacy of love over all else and argued that love is the dynamic force behind creation. The present study is focused primarily on outlining the importance of Divine love in Ibn 'Arabi's thought, which is accomplished through an in-depth reading and a close textual analysis of selected works on Divine love in several of his key works including: The Interpreter of Longings (Turjuman al-Ashwaq), The Ringstones of Wisdom (Fusus al-Hikam), and The Meccan Openings (al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya). The approach taken in Love in the Teachings of Ibn 'Arabi demonstrates the centrality of love in Ibn 'Arabi's worldview. Additionally, the monograph offers certain interpretive keys to help unlock the meanings embedded in the imagery and symbolism of Ibn 'Arabi's unique language.

This monograph is dedicated to the analysis of hadiths for the purpose of reconstructing the process of variant generation. Medieval authors seemingly did not devote many pages to the question of textual variation, certainly because they had little interest in the question of how individual hadiths were historically formed. Several contemporary researchers have shown interest in the issue of textual variation in hadith. They agree that many hadiths were reformulated since their initial circulation and aim to trace the process of reformulation with regard to individual hadiths. Methodologically, the most successful is the isnad-cum-matn analysis proposed by Harald Motzki and Gregor Schoeler. This method consists of determining whether a correlation lies between the transmission process of a hadith, obtained from the analysis of isnads (chains of transmission), and its textual development, obtained from the examination of its matn (text), sometimes complemented by biographical sources. However, despite the existence of many excellent studies based on this method, presenting the general pattern of variant generation with accuracy is far from being achieved. This study, which contains four chapters, seeks to precisely reconstruct the process of variant generation by analyzing isnads from various quantitative perspectives, in addition to using the isnad-cum- matn analysis.

Sadr al-Din Qunawi (d. 1274) is arguably the most important thinker of the generation following the main founders of medieval philosophy--al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, Ibn 'Arabi and Suhravardi--and before Mulla Sadra. Yet, almost nothing of his writings has been translated into English. In this influential work he independently explores speech (divine and human) as the unfolding relationality of knowing and being. This is the first annotated translation of his magnum opus The Limits of Discursive Interpretation. The Translator's introduction and notes shed a detailed light on the linguistic sources of Qunawi's lexicon. The Introduction also summarizes the key ideas of the book and explains their significance to philosophy. In Part One Qunawi begins by arguing that the failure of theoretical proofs to establish the reality of a thing does not itself disprove that reality. He elucidates the canons of thinking in relation to 'tasting' (experience) and the question of the 'realities of things' where knowing and being unfold dynamically from their 'root' in divine hiddenness and manifestation. He goes on to detail the concepts and the rules of relational subordination that govern these realities according to rootedness and mutual distinctions. Many of these tools are derived from linguistics, which the translator brings to bear on Qunawi's work for the first time. They enable him to transform the narrow sense in which Ibn Sina declared man incapable of grasping the realities of things. In the end, according to Qunawi, without a proper understanding of rootedness as the source of the realities' mutual distinctions, thinking remains relational, unequal to the thinking subject's goal of self-realization and incapable of fully rendering the real (not to be confused with empirical facticity) without folding back on itself. In Part Two he details the semiology by which, not only the contents of the Qur'an but, primarily the ontological dimensions of God's speech are disclosed as the veiling and unveiling, exteriorization and interiorization of being.

Ṣadr al-Dīn Qūnawī (d. 1274) is arguably the most important thinker of the generation following the main founders of medieval philosophy—al-Fārābī, Ibn Sīnā, Ibn ʿArabī and Suhravardī—and before Mullā Ṣadrā. Despite this, almost nothing of his writings has been translated into English though critical Arabic editions of his major writings have been published.Iʿjāz al-bayān, his magnum opus, explores some key questions in philosophy, among which is speech (divine and human) in the unfolding of knowing and being. In this influential work, Qūnawī lays forth in detail the principles and semiological tools for interpreting the opening chapter of the Qur’ān, the Fātiḥa. Widely known as the epitome of the Qur’ān, the Fātiḥa was also understood to indicate the divine ‘opening’, the ‘beginning’ of being’s unfolding. Far from a mere analysis of concepts or epistemology, his philosophical ‘exegesis’ is about the self-identical unfolding of speech from the hidden secrecy of the divine source, from which flows God’s creative command, Be!The doubt that Ibn Sīnā expressed concerning the human capacity to know the ‘realities of things’ manifested in this unfolding—namely, the letters, words, sentences and meanings of the divine writ of being—by dint of man’s faculties was critical to Qūnawī’s dynamic understanding of what a plenary knowledge of anything must be.This is an authoritative edition of the Arabic text with an Editor’s Introduction in English and Arabic explaining the mechanics and publication history behind the edition and concisely summarizing the book’s contents.