I.B. Tauris in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies
The essays collected here reflect the great esteem in which Professor Hermann Landolt, Professor Emeritus of Islamic Thought at the Institute of Islamic Studies of McGill University and Senior Research Fellow at The Institute of Ismaili Studies, is held by his colleagues and students around the world.
This publication not only reflects the scholarly interests of Hermann Landolt in philosophy, Sufism and Shiʿism, but also takes a timely and refreshing look at the Islamic traditions of mysticism, philosophy, theology, historiography, and intellectual debate generally from earliest times to the twentieth century, in a series of diverse and stimulating approaches. As such, they are a corrective to the current alienating discourse on Islam which portrays it as a source of extremism and fanatical violence. A true warrior here is one whose struggle is for a more perfect understanding and experience of the world as the creation of a just and merciful God.
The essays, by an impressive list of scholars and experts, deal with Islam’s inner life as considered by some of its greatest representatives – intellectual personalities such as Ibn ʿArabī, al-Ghazālī, Kirmānī, Najm al-Dīn Kubrā, al-Qādī al-Nuʿmān, al-Rāzī, Ibn Sīnā and Suhrawardī. New source material is also presented, analysed and translated.
Acknowledgements
Note on the Transliteration and Abbreviations
List of Contributors
1. Introduction
Todd Lawson
2. Bibliography of the Works of Hermann Landolt
Todd Lawson
PART 1: Classical Islam
3. The ‘Five Limbs’ of the Soul: A Manichaean Motif in Muslim Garb?
Karim Douglas Crow
4. Narrative Themes and Devices in al-Waqidi’s Kitāb al-maghāzī
Donald P. Little
5. The Rise and Decline of Taqiyya in Twelver Shiʿism
Lynda Clarke
6. Walāya according to al-Junayd (d. 298/910)
Ahmet T. Karamustafa
7. L’importance du Traité de l’harmonie d’l-Farabi: ses visées politiques
Fabienne Pironet
8. Philosophy of Religion in al-Fārābī, Ibn Sīnā and Ibn Ṭufayl
Paul E. Walker
9. Revisiting Religious Shiʿism and Early Sufism: The Fourth/Tenth-Century Dialogue of ‘The Sage and the Young Disciple’
James Winston Morris
10. Al-Qāḍī al-Nuʿmān and the Concept of Bāṭin
Bulbul Shah
11. The Concept of Knowledge according to al-Kirmānī (d. after 411/1021)
Faquir Muhammad Hunzai
12. An Early Ismaili View of Other Religions: A Chapter from the Kitāb al-Iṣlāḥ by Abū Ḥātim al-Rāzī (d. ca. 322/934–935)
Shin Nomoto
13. An Ismaili interpretation of Ibn Sīnā’s Qaṣīdat al-Nafs
Wilferd Madelung
14. Āyat al-Nūr: A Metaphor for Where We Come From, What We Are and Where We Are Going
Soraya Mahdi Hajjaji-Jarrah
PART 2: Medieval Islam
15. Reading al-Ghazālī: The Case of Psychology
Peter Heath
16. Stories of Aḥmad al-Ghazālī ‘Playing the Witness’ in Tabriz (Shams-i Tabrīzī’s interest in shāhid-bāzī)
Nasrollah Pourjavady
17. Reason (ʿaql) and Direct Intuition (mushāhada) in the works of Shihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī (d. 587/1191)
Roxanne Marcotte
18. Al-Suhrawardi on Body as Extension: An Alternative to Hylomorphism from Plato to Leibniz
John Walbridge
19. Miʿrāj al-kalima: de la Risāla Qushayriyya aux Futūḥāt Makkiyya
Michel Chodkiewicz
20. Al-Shahrastānī’s Contribution to Medieval Islamic Thought
Diana Steigerwald
21. The Pertinence of Islamic Cosmology: Reflections on the Philosophy of Afḍal al-Dīn Kāshānī
William C. Chittick
22. The Sciences of Intuition and the Riches of Inspiration: Najm al-Dīn Kubrā in Jāmī’s Nafaḥāt al-uns
Elizabeth Ross Alexandrin
23. Two Narratives on Najm al-Dīn Kubrā and Raḍī al-Dīn ʿAlī Lālā from a Thirteenth-Century Source: Notes on a Manuscript in the Raza Library, Rampur
Devin DeWeese
24. Ibn Sīnā and Meister Eckhart on Being
Etin Anwar
25. La Vision de Dieu dans l’Onirocritique Musulmane Médiévale
Pierre Lory
26. The Spiritual Journey in Kubrawī Sufism
Leonard Lewisohn
27. Notes on the Transmission of Mystical Philosophy: Ibn ʿArabi according to ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Shaʿrānī
Richard J. A. McGregor
PART 3: Pre-Modern Islam
28. Shāh Ṭāhir and Nizārī Ismaili Disguises
Farhad Daftary
29. Some Notes on Shaykh Aḥmad Sirhindī and the Problem of the Mystical Significance of Paradise
Abdollah Vakily
30. The Naqshbandī Mujaddidī Sufi Order’s Ascendancy in Central Asia Through the Eyes of Its Masters and Disciples (1100s–1200s/1600s–1800s)
Sajida S. Alvi
31. ‘Le combatant du taʾwīl’. Un poème de Mollā Ṣadrā sur ʿAlī (Aspects de l’imamologie duodécimane IX)
Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi
32. Fayḍ al-Kāshānī’s Walāya: The Confluence of Shiʿi Imamology and Mysticism
Shigeru Kamada
PART 4: Modern Islam
33. The Faith of Pharaoh: A Disputed Question in Islamic Theology
Eric Ormsby
34. The Eight Rules of Junayd: A General Overview of the Genesis and Development of Islamic Dervish Orders
Bernd Radtke
35. Symphony of Gnosis: A Self-Definition of the Ismaili Ginān Tradition
Shafique N. Virani
36. The Attitude of the ʿUlamāʾ towards the Government in Nineteenth-Century Iran, Ahmad Kazemi Moussavi
37. Traditional Philosophy in Iran with Reference to Modern Trends
Mehdi Mohaghegh
38. Traces of Modernisation and Westernisation? Some Comparative Considerations concerning Late Bukhāran Chronicles
Bert G. Fragner
‘Magisterial... Profound’
– Robert Dickson Crane, The Muslim World Book Review
Todd Lawson is Professor of Islamic Thought at the University of Toronto in the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations. He has published numerous articles to academic journals on the interpretation of the Qurʾan and other subjects in Islamic studies.