Since the writings of Shiblī Nuʿmānī and A. J. Wensinck in the early twentieth century, scholarship has often questioned the ascription of the creed al-Fiqh al-akbar II to the well-known theologian and jurist Abū Ḥanīfa (d. 150/767). But there has hitherto been little attempt to determine how and when this text entered the Hanafi theological tradition and who its true author was. In this article I show that until the early eighth/fourteenth century, theological and biographical works referring to al-Fiqh al-akbar (...) consistently mean the text written by Abū Muṭīʿ al-Balkhī (d. 199/814), which was later renamed al-Fiqh al-absaṭ. I then trace the entry of al-Fiqh al-akbar II into the mainstream tradition, showing that the key figure in its popularization was the legal theorist ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Bukhārī (d. 730/1329), who extensively quotes from the creed and attributes it to Abū Ḥanīfa. Finally, I propose that clues in the reception history and content of al-Fiqh al-akbar II corroborate the claim recorded in some texts that it was instead likely written by an obscure late fourth/tenth-century Hanafi scholar named Abū Ḥanīfa Muḥammad b. Yūsuf al-Bukhārī. (shrink)

Abū Manṣūr al-Māturīdī (d. 944), from Samarqand in Transoxiana, is the eponym of one of the main Sunnī theological traditions. As a practitioner of kalām (dialectical theology), al-Māturīdī’s approach was often at odds with those engaged in falsafa, the main Arabic philosophical discourse in the Islamic world. However, a close examination of al-Māturīdī’s surviving theological text, Kitāb al-tawḥīd, not only reveals influence in some issues from al-Kindī (d. 873), one of the earliest of the falāsifa, but also interesting philosophical positions (...) and arguments. In this chapter, I show that al-Māturīdī articulates a version of nominalism in which a given concrete particular (ʿayn) can be considered a bundle of its possessed qualities (ṣifāt), or as they would be termed today, tropes. He derives this understanding from experience of the world and applies it analogically to God to affirm substantive divine attributes. He also uses his theory of properties to argue against the concept nominalism of a Muʿtazilī opponent, likely Abū al-Qāsim al-Kaʿbī (d. 931). Al-Māturīdī’s philosophical side, albeit with its openly theological agenda, should be made more accessible to historians of philosophy. This chapter is one of the first attempts to treat al-Māturīdī seriously as a philosopher and to present his thought in a way that is relevant to contemporary debates in ontology and for comparison with other medieval traditions. (shrink)

Faraz A. Khan. An Introduction to Islamic Theology: Imām Nūr al-Dīn al-Sābūnī’s Al- Bidāyah fī usūl al-dīn: Introduction, Translation, Annotation and Appendices. Berkeley, CA: Zaytuna College, 2020. 482 sayfa. ISBN: 9780985565992.

This article intervenes in the debate over the noetic structure of empirical beliefs required for epistemic justification, focusing on the choice between internalist foundationalism and coherentism. Analysing the link between noetic structure and the introspective accessibility of essential justifiers, I argue that coherentism has greater doxastic plausibility than foundationalism. To deepen my account, I constructively develop ideas from the late-period Edmund Husserl to propose a first-order epistemological theory that I term ‘Lifeworld Coherentism’. I argue that, especially through the idea of (...) the epistemic agent’s ‘doxic horizon’, this theory can overcome some of the worries surrounding the introspective awareness of belief coherence. Finally, in order to extend the second-order dimension of the debate, I introduce ‘Tradition-Based Perspectivalism’, a meta-epistemological theory that Erik Baldwin uses to address concerns about the social grounding of epistemic theorising. Though supportive of Baldwin’s reading of Alasdair MacIntyre on this point, I argue that Tradition-Based Perspectivalism is a better fit to Lifeworld Coherentism as a first-order theory than to his own preferred Proper Functionalism. (shrink)

The Qur’an has been transmitted as both a written text and an oral recital. This has led to the development of a reading tradition that permits numerous different vocalisations to be made upon the basic skeletal text of the established ʿUthmānī codex. Ibn al-Jazarī chose ten early readers whom he felt were most representative of this tradition and whose readings are treated as canonical up until this day. One of these, the Kufan linguist al-Kisāʾī has been characterised in the literature (...) as more focused on the grammar of the Qur’an than his reader peers. This article explores al-Kisāʾī’s process of ikhtiyār when deciding between various possible readings. The sample for analysis consists of Kisāʾī’s tafarrudāt, the approximately fifty cases in which his reading differs from the other nine readers. By comparing his reading with the comments of early scholars of Qur’anic linguistics, especially his near-contemporary al-Farrāʾ, it is possible to construct a typology of the suspected principal reasons for al-Kisāʾī’s tafarrudāt. Not only are many of these based on grammatical preferences, but they demonstrate a significant degree of consistency. Furthermore, analysis of a cluster of readings with implications for the interpretation of the sharīʿa provides evidence for a subtle exegetical dimension to al-Kisāʾī’s work as a reader-grammarian. (shrink)