In this article, I examine al-Ghazālī’s methodological skepticism and its role in establishing foundational knowledge.Despite the considerable scholarly attention given to The Deliverance from Error (al-Munqidh min al-ḍalāl), the foundationalism present in it has received relatively limited investigation. Al-Ghazālī established the foundations of knowledge by taking his methodological skepticism to its logical conclusions. His engagement with the sources of knowledge, namely, taqlīd, sense perception, and self-evident truths form the cornerstone of his skepticism. To understand how al-Ghazālī finds deliverance from his skeptical impasse, and ultimately establish foundational knowledge, the concepts of “divine light” and fiṭra will be dis­cussed. Unlike Greek skepticism, al-Ghazālī’s skepticism was not a denial of the possibility of knowledge about the nature of reality, nor was it a denial of Muslim doctrine, but a methodological approach to establish the foundations of knowledge.

This paper investigates the doctrine of man’s essence and resurrection defended by the late Muʿtazilī Rukn al-Dīn b. al-Malāḥimī al-Khwārazmī (d. 536/1141). His anthropology combines substance reductionism and function organicism. Even though man is not a unitary substance additional to the sum of his atomic parts, the specific arrangement of parts we call “man” exhibits functions that are indivisible and irreducible (they are not sums of functions predicable of the indi­vidual parts). When it comes to resurrection, Ibn al-Malāḥimī abandons the recreation model, the standard view of the Muʿtazilīs, in favor of the reassembly model, which he claims to be adherent to the manifest meaning of the Qur’ān as well as capable of answering an objection concerning continuity of identity (there is no way to discriminate between the resur­rected individual and an equivalent copy). For Ibn al-Malāḥimī, the identity of the resurrected becomes unproblematic once we accept that the material parts of the body persist from the moment of death to that of resurrection: when exactly reassembled, such parts unequivocally identify the individual.

The twelfth-century narrative Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān by Ibn Ṭufayl recounts the life of Ḥayy, a feral man who teaches himself philosophy while living on a desert island. Ibn Ṭufayl gives two explanations of how Ḥayy came to the island. In one version, Ḥayy generates spontaneously on the island; in another, he washes up on the island as an infant. This paper attempts to resolve these contradictory narratives by appealing to a previously unexplored source text for Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, Sarāʾir al-nutaqāʾ by Jaʿfar b. Manṣūr al-Yaman. Sarāʾir is an esoteric Ismāʿīlī text in which the author uses stories about Adam and other prophets to elaborate a Neoplatonist-inspired theology. Jaʿfar distinguishes between Adam as a symbol of the atemporal origination (ibdāʿ) of all natural forms, and the corporeal Adam of Ismāʿīlī history. Due to narrative and conceptual similarities between Jaʿfar’s and Ibn Ṭufayl’s treatment of their protagonists, I argue that the two versions of Ḥayy’s nativity allegorize the duality of Neoplatonic cosmology. Spontaneous generation dramatizes the atemporal creation of the human form, whereas the infant Ḥayy’s landing on the island reinforces the philosophical belief in the eternity of species. Both Jaʿfar and Ibn Ṭufayl appeal to the Neoplatonic doctrine of emanation to reconcile the eternity of the physical world with belief in God’s creative agency. The resemblance of Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān to Sarāʾir prompts broader reconsidera­tion of Ismāʿīlī influence on non-Ismāʿīlī intellectual culture.

Ṣadr al-Sharīʿa al-Thānī al-Maḥbūbī (d. 747/1346) was the last major Māturīdī theologian of Transoxania. As he left no work of rational theology (kalām) proper, one of the chief sources of his theological thought is his book on legal theory, al-Tawḍīḥ fī ḥall ghawāmiḍ al-Tanqīḥ. Because the work served as a prominent reference for both legal theory and rational theol­ogy, an extensive commentary tradition on it emerged as it was transmitted from Transoxania to South Asia, Anatolia, and the Arab world. A distinctive subfield of this commentary tradition consisted of glosses devoted exclusively to one specific section of al-Tawḍīḥ. Revolving around the nature of good and evil, and intimately linked to the question of human free will, this part of Ṣadr al-Sharīʿa’s text came to be treated as a separate work, commonly referred to as al-Muqaddimāt al-arbaʿ (“The four pro­legomena”). Due to its role as a highly sophisticated refutation of late Ashʿarī doctrine on human volition, al-Muqaddimāt al-arbaʿ eventually developed into a prime source for later Māturīdī scholars in their discussion of human volition and related topics.

Given the proliferation of commentarial works in the post-Ghazālian era of Islamic intellectual history, the close study of individual commentaries has recently become a key schol­arly concern. To take us beyond the necessarily generalizing categories presented by Dimitri Gutas when he first charted the territory of this genre, an approach is needed that involves narrow textual analysis without neglecting the broader context in which a work is authored. Among the works that were initially taken by Gutas as evidence of the “mainstream Avicennism” of their authors is Sayf al-Dīn al-Āmidī’s (d. 631/1233) Kashf al-tamwīhāt fī sharḥ al-Ishārāt wa-l-tanbīhāt, in which he sets out to critique Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s (d. 610/1210) commentary on Ibn Sīnā’s Pointers and Reminders. In this article, I study the work from three perspectives. Firstly, I consider the con­tents of the Kashf, in terms of both the scope and the nature of its interaction with al-Rāzī’s first-order commentary on the Ishārāt. Secondly, I calibrate the findings of my textual analysis with materials taken from the accounts of al-Āmidī’s biographers, showing that these sources are mutually interpre­tive. Thirdly, I analyze the Kashf from within the context of his broader corpus. Together, I argue, these three perspec­tives contribute to a more nuanced understanding of what it means to describe al-Āmidī’s Kashf as a work of Avicennism.

Before the popularization of the printing press, the circula­tion of commentarial texts across regional borders, especially of Islamic texts outside of the Middle East, remains largely unexplored. This article focuses on the movement of Islamic manuscripts in the Indian Ocean world, from South and East Africa to South and East Asia. Together with merchants, sail­ors, travelers, and commodities, the books also traveled long distances, replete with ideas, stories, dreams, myths, norms, manners, and emotions. What was the role of manuscripts in the expansion of Islam into the premodern oceanic world and in religio-cultural exchanges between central Islamic lands and the larger world? What sorts of books did people access, read, and use, and what did the circulation of these texts imply? I address these questions with a broad focus on the oceanic littoral and Islamic manuscripts and a specific focus on one of the ports and a legal commentary. Based on this analytical exercise of zooming-out and zooming-in between macro- and micro-maritime textual histories anchored in the sixteenth century, I argue that the citations of specific manuscripts reveal the prominence of a transregional circula­tion of certain texts, along with their contextual cultures of reading, writing, producing, and circulating commentaries.

This paper centers its analysis around the remarkable work of the transdisciplinary commentary al-Minaḥ al-quddūsiyya, written by the Algerian scholar Aḥmad al-ʿAlawī (d. 1934). Although they are incredibly rare in the Islamic textual tradi­tion, transdisciplinary commentaries are commentaries that are written in a discipline different from that of the base texts upon which they build. In the case of the Minaḥ, al-ʿAlawī wrote his text as an entirely Sufi commentary upon Ibn ʿĀshir’s (d. 1040/1631) al-Murshid al-muʿīn, a didactic poem that is often categorized as a work of Mālikī fiqh. Through an examination of the text of the Minaḥ and the biography of its author, this paper aims to uncover why al-ʿAlawī wrote his commentary and what his ideological assumptions were that allowed him to approach Ibn ʿĀshir’s Murshid in such a novel manner.

Followers of Ibn ʿArabī are considered to constitute an “Akbari” school of thought. The use of the term ‘school’ assumes some sort of cohesion, but the nature of this has been little studied. I argue that adherents found a substitute for the in-person study sessions (sing. majlis) that were common among Sufis, by identifying Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam with Ibn ʿArabī. Thus they were able to establish a direct connection with their preferred master by reading and commenting on this book. By placing their own commentary among other commentar­ies on the Fuṣūṣ, they created a bookish majlis; a dialogue with their master and other students similar to an in-person majlis. Whether conscious or subconscious, this idea became prevalent: no real organization such as a Sufi order came to be, but instead we have dozens and dozens of direct commen­taries. Making Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam an icon for Ibn ʿArabī became, at times, so strong as to turn the book into an idol or effigy.

This article investigates the emergence of the first commentar­ies on al-Ḥikam al-ʿAṭāʾiyya (ʿAṭāʾian Wisdoms), written by Ibn ʿAbbād of Ronda (d. 792/1390) and Aḥmad Zarrūq (d. 899/1494), from within their respective contexts. Particular focus is placed on how the tradition of commenting on the text was undertaken against the backdrop of the formation of the Sufi movements and concerns from the scholarly community. The formation of the Shādhiliyya coincides with these first commentaries on the Wisdoms, and hence, it is no coincidence that both scholars intensively discuss different types of Sufism in their works.To date, when scholars discuss Ibn ʿAbbād and Zarrūq, their respective roles in society and the evolving Sufi move­ments are emphasized, but their commentaries on the Wisdoms are neglected to a certain extent. In addressing this gap, this contribution offers observations concerning the permissibility of reading Sufi books, the commentary culture in Western (maghribī) Sufism, and the development of the Shādhiliyya movement, and provides an outlook on how al-Ḥikam al-ʿAṭāʾiyya later became part of the university curriculum.

This article examines Mughulṭāy b. Qilīj’s (d. 762/1361) al-Zahr al-bāsim fī siyar Abī al-Qāsim, a ḥāshiya (gloss, marginal notes) on ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Suhaylī’s (d. 581/1185) commentary on Ibn Isḥāq’s Sīra. Drawing on evidence from Mamlūk-era chronicles, biographical dictionaries, and commentarial introductions, it analyzes Mughulṭāy b. Qilīj as a historical figure and the context and content of his work. This is done in order to demonstrate how commentaries and glosses are deeply related to the schol­arly and cultural life of the period. These resources testify to the antagonistic relationship between Mughulṭāy and his opponents and to the ensuing rivalry between them. Hence, this article seeks to examine the correlation between his personality and the rationale for his commentary, to determine the reasons behind his choice of text to write a gloss on and his sustained and harsh criticism against al-Suhaylī and his scholarly legacy.

The Muqaddima of Ibn al-Ṣalāḥ on the science of Ḥadīth has attracted a large and complex commentary tradition. Its complexity lies in the fact that certain sorts of commentarial literature, such as abridgments (sg. mukhtaṣar), commentaries (sg. sharḥ), critical commentaries (nukat), and versifications (sg. manẓūma), were produced with a different focus across scholarly networks, locations, and time. Moreover, depending on the orientation of the scholarly networks that a commenta­tor belonged to, the commentaries show different degrees of intellectual loyalty to the base text. Some support the argu­ments of the base text and follow its structure closely, while others refute ideas and restructure the content. This article centers its analysis on two examples of commentaries on the Muqaddima. Its leading hypothesis is that social proximity or distance to Ibn al-Ṣalāḥ and the network of his close students determines the degree of moral obligation and intellectual loyalty to Ibn al-Ṣalāḥ and the base text. The commentaries of al-Nawawī and Ibn Jamāʿa demonstrate this relation clearly.

In this article, I explore the response of the Ashʿarī theologian Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210) to what can be called “the problem of the efficacy of petitionary prayers” (PEPP), namely the effectiveness of making supplications to God that involve a request for something. The key text I examine is al-Rāzī’s highly dense philosophical work al-Maṭālib al-ʿāliya min al-ʿilm al-ilāhī, in which he outlines his core objections to the efficacy of petitionary prayer and then addresses them directly. In section 1, I include a short historiography of specific English books on the topic of supplications (duʿāʾ) and consider the relevance of al-Rāzī’s response to the issue of their efficacy. In section 2, I outline the preliminaries necessary and relevant for understanding the discussion that follows. In section 3, I survey al-Rāzī’s view on personal prayers. In section 4, I exam­ine in detail al-Rāzī’s formulations of the arguments (from the Maṭālib) that constitute PEPP, with parallel discussions in his huge exegetical work Mafātīḥ al-ghayb. In section 5, I lay out al-Rāzī’s responses to PEPP from the Mafātīḥ in more depth, and draw on theological views from his other works to help support his arguments in the Maṭālib. In the conclu­sion, I evaluate al-Rāzī’s responses and the wider implications they have on a Muslim’s relation to and understanding of God.

The concept of nature (Gr. phúsis; Ar. ṭabīʿa) lies at the heart of classical physics. Seemingly small differences about nature can blossom into significant disagreements. The present study offers an exposition of certain neglected passages concerning ṭabīʿa in Ibn Sīnā’s al-Samāʿ al-ṭabīʿī(The Physics of the Healing). The pre­dominant view of ṭabīʿa is that it as an active principle, a concep­tion of nature that radically departs from Aristotle’s account of phúsis in Physics I-II. I dispute this interpretation by investigat­ing two neglected texts in the Physics of the Healing. First, these texts indicate that nature should be associated with matter and form (I, 6) and, second, they argue that failing to account for matter and form makes knowledge of nature incomplete (I, 9).