Shahrastani, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Karim al-
Shahrastani, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Karim al- (Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Karim al-Shahrastani) (Tāj al-Dīn Abū al-Fath Muhammad ibn `Abd al-Karīm ash-Shahrastānī) (1076/1086-1153). Principal Muslim historian of religions in the Middle Ages. In his most famous work, a treatise on religions and sects, he passes in review all the philosophic and religious systems that he was able to study and classes them according to their degree of remoteness from Muslim orthodoxy. After the Muslim sects, the Mu‘tazila, the Shi ‘a and the Batiniyya, follow the Christians and the Jews, then the Magi and the Dualists, and finally the Sabaeans. The author then goes back to pagan antiquity and gives articles on the prinicipal philosophers and sages of Greece, and then gives an exposition of Arab scholasticism as a derivative from Hellenism; the last part of the book is devoted to the religions of India.
Shahrastani, the man who has been called the “principal historian of religion” in Asia during the Middle Ages, was born in Shahrastan, in the Khurasan area of Iran. Born Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Karim ash-Sharastani, Shahrastani offered a distinctive method of viewing the cultural interaction and conceptual development of world religions and philosophies within the Mediterranean, Southwest Asian, and South Asian world.
Little is known about Shahrastani’s early years. However, it is reported that he studied jurisprudence and theology, but his personal philosophical and religious allegiances are a matter of controversy. In addition to his masterwork, The Book of Religious and Philosophical Communities (Kitab al-Milal wa’l-Nihal), he wrote a Dual of the Philosophers and a respected work on theology, the Culmination of Demonstration in Scholastic Theology (Nihayat al-‘Iqdam). It is the first work, however, on which his present influence and reputation are based.
Shahrastani’s famous discussion of the scholastic theologians (mutakallimun) is based upon categorizations of schools and sub-schools with respect to their positions on a number of topical categories, including tawhid (the affirmation of divine unity) and qadar, the issue of divine predetermination versus human free will.
The affirmation of divine unity is codified in the Islamic shahada or testimony (itself encoded in the call to prayer and recited five times a day): “No God but God and Muhammad is his Messenger.” The common meaning of such affirmation is of course that there is only one Deity. To affirm any other deities is to be guilty of shirk (associationism), that is, the associating of other deities with the one God. To the theological mind, as demonstrated in case studies by Shahrastani, tawhid raised further questions. If there is only one Deity, how do the divine attributes in the Qur’an (seeing, hearing, knowing, having compassion) relate to the Deity? Are they part of the divine essence? If so, are we to imagine a multiplicity of powers (knowing, hearing, seeing) existing from all eternity, and would that not be a subtle form of shirk, asserting the existence of multiple, eternal powers? However, if the attributes are not part of the Deity’s essence, then does the Diety change? Is it in a state of not-hearing at one time, and hearing at another, subject to accident and contingency?
Shahrastani demonstrates no particular dogmatic answer, but illuminates, rather, how the debate among various schools led to more profound questions. Shahrastani also takes up Qur’anic references to a Deity that sees, hears, creates “with two hands,” and “sits on a throne.” Some groups, such as the Mu‘tazila, considered a literal interpretation of these images to be a form “likening” (tashbih) the Deity upon human characteristics, a procedure that would entail an anthropomorphic image just as idolatrous as idols made of wood and stone. They argued in favor of a figurative interpretation (ta’wil) that would explain how such figures of speech can refer to the one Divine Power.
Shahrastani shows us how the theological debate generated new positions, with some scholars arguing that attributes shared by humans (seeing, hearing, and so forth) are intrinsically anthropomorphic, and therefore affirming only those, such as power, knowledge, and will, which in their view belong to the Deity alone. Others argued that figurative interpretation is an “explaining away” of the Qur’anic text based upon the preferences of human rationalizing, and a stripping (ta‘til) from the Deity of the attributes it has affirmed for itself in its own word.
Shahrastani’s second theological category is divine predetermination (qadar). Several passages in the Qur’an emphasize the all-powerful nature of the Deity in a way that seems to preclude human will or choice; the Deity is said to “stop up the ears” of those who have rejected the Qur’anic message, for example. Other passages are urgent prophetic appeals to the hearer to choose the path of prophetic wisdom. If the response of the listener has already been predetermined by an all-knowing, all-powerful Deity, what is the status of such appeals? Is it fair or just for the Deity to then reward and punish humans on the basis of a decision made from all time by that Deity?
Shahrastani quotes Wasil, the most famous theologian of the Mu‘tazilite School of theology, who rejected divine predetermination:
It is not possible for [God] to will for [God’s] servants what is in disagreement with [God’s] command -- to control their action and then to punish them for what they did.
Later, he quotes ‘Amr as asking, “Does he predestine me to do something and then punish me for it?” For the Mu‘tazilites, the Deity is all-wise (hakim) and therefore must act in the interests of his creatures and with justice (‘adl). Human beings have an innate capacity for understanding justice, right and wrong, without which they could not receive prophetic revelation in the first place. For their opponents, such statements are denial of divine power and knowledge; what the Deity does is, by nature, just -- the Deity cannot be held accountable to fallible human understandings of what is just; and what the Deity imparts by way of revelation is in fact the only knowledge of right and wrong, and the only understanding of justice available to humankind.
Ironically, and confusingly, those who rejected divine predetermination (qadar) were called by the epithet the qadariyya. Those who affirmed predetermination were called the compulsionists (jabriyya). Those who appealed to the interpretations of the earliest companions of the prophets and rejected the theological attempt to apply formal human reason to such questions were called the traditionalists (salaf), but even this group finally accepted a form of theological discourse to defend their original anti-theological stance.
Another major group was called the attributionists (sifatiyya). This group originally sprang from the position of the theological al-Ash‘ari, who vehemently maintained both the literalness of the attributes and the reality of divine predetermination. However, his school, the Ash‘arites, later tried to walk a middle ground on both issues and came to be the most widely accepted theological school in Islam. Some spoke of divine conditions (ahwal), which would be neither divine attributes eternally one with divine substance nor accidents that would prevail upon the Deity. In the area of divine predetermination, Shahrastani suggests that they tried to walk that middle ground by speaking of the Deity as creator of all acts, and of human beings as “acquiring” the power of the act at the moment of participation in it.
The Ash‘arite School later was considered the “orthodoxy” among some writers, and some considered Shahrastani to be of that school. However, although he was willing to give his opinion, what makes Shahrastani’s work reflective of a great thinker is not his argument for any particular position, but rather his ability to expound positions in such a way as to bring out the centrality of key theological issues and show how the Islamic tradition shaped itself around the effort to resolve those issues.
Shahrastani’s treatment of cosmology is particularly important. In his discussion of the pre-Socratic philosophers he outlines what we might call “neo-pre-Socratic Islamic thought,” that is, the construction of the pre-Socratics by Islamic thinkers who then formed “schools” around them. Although much of the thought is consonant with what we know of Thales, Empedocles, and other pre-Socratics, it carries a new emphasis, with more thematic unity based upon more continued return to the question of the primal element “receptive of all forms.” It is difficult to know, given the lack of other testimony, how much of the thematic unity is due to the Islamic schools themselves and how much is the work of Shahrastani.
Shahrastani also brings us the critical texts of the anonymous figure known as the “Greek Master” (al-shaykh al-yunani), texts that turn out to be the most radically apophatic passages of Plotinus, passages attempting to express the inexpressible. Shahrastani thus demonstrates that in addition to the more Aristotelian school of Islamic Plotinian thought centered around the “Theology of Aristotle,” there was a more mystically inclined school that focused on those Plotinian passages placing ultimate reality beyond the the categories of being altogether.
Perhaps Shahrastani’s most brilliant essay is that on the Sabaeans of Harran. Harran, the ancient city near the upper Tigris, was an early Islamic center of alternative philosophies, from the Hermeticists (devoted to Agathodaemon, Asclepius, and Hermes), to those following elaborate ritual calendars. Shahrastrani places the Harranians in a debate with the hanifs. The word hanif was used in early Islam to refer to monotheists, particularly the pre-Islamic monotheists of Arabia. For example, Abraham was considered the archetypal hanif.
The Harranians outline a cosmos made up of concentric spheres inhabited by spirits -- by ruhaniyat --, and the goal of philosophy is either to ascend through the spheres to encounter the spirits, or to draw the spirits down into temples on Earth. From the spirits one receives true inspiration. The hanifs counter that the true bearers of truth are the prophets, who are, as in the mi ‘raj account of Muhammad’s ascent through the Heavens, the guardians of the various Heavens.
As Shahrastani unfolds the argument, he demonstrates a fundamental tension in classical Islamic thought between the spiritualists (those who see the goal of philosophy as having become more spiritual -- or, as in the case of Ibn Sina [Avicenna], more intellectual) and the humanists (those who see the goal as having become more human and who see the intermediaries of truth as the human prophets). Sharastani thus helps us in understanding the symbolic significance of every detail of the cosmos of concentric spheres, the identity of the guardians of the spheres, the way in which human beings can rise through the spheres, the test by which they are tried at each sphere, and the ultimate arrival at the divine throne. This paradigm, which is fundamental not only to medieval Islam, but to medieval Judaism and Christianity as well (and which, indeed, served as one of the meeting places and places of contest among the three traditions) has a coded system of values that, through his debate format, Shahrastani helps to make explicit.
The analysis of theological debates about the unity of the Deity and divine predetermination, the philosophical cosmology of the pre-Socratics (as reconstructed in Islamic philosophy), the mystical dimension of Islamic Plotinian thought, and the symbolic cosmology of the heavenly spheres and their guardians are only some examples of Shahrastani’s contributions. In these cases, and throughout his masterwork, Shahrastani uses a categorization of schools to demonstrate how central questions, dilemmas, and symbols become the matrix for the development of ever more sophisticated versions of Islamic thought.
Al-Shahrastani was an able and learned man of great personal charm. The real nature of his thought is best referred to by the term theosophy, in the older sense of "divine wisdom". However, al-Shahrastani was certainly not totally against theology or philosophy, even if he was very harsh against the theologians and the philosophers. As he explained in the Majlis, in order to remain on the right path, one must preserve a perfect equilibrium between intellect (`aql) and audition (sam`). A philosopher or a theologian must use his intellect until he reaches the rational limit. Beyond this limit, he must listen to the teaching of Prophets and Imams.
His works reflect a complex interweaving of intellectual strands, and his thought is a synthesis of this fruitful historical period. In his conception of God, Creation, Prophecy, and Imama, al-Shahrastani adopted many doctrinal elements that are reconcilable with Nizari Isma'ilism. The necessity of a Guide, belonging both to the spiritual and the physical world, is primordial in his scheme since the Imam is manifested in this physical world.
Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Karim al-Shahrastani see Shahrastani, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Karim al-
The Principal Historian of Religion see Shahrastani, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Karim al-
Tāj al-Dīn Abū al-Fath Muhammad ibn `Abd al-Karīm ash-Shahrastānī see Shahrastani, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Karim al-
Shahrastani, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Karim al- (Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Karim al-Shahrastani) (Tāj al-Dīn Abū al-Fath Muhammad ibn `Abd al-Karīm ash-Shahrastānī) (1076/1086-1153). Principal Muslim historian of religions in the Middle Ages. In his most famous work, a treatise on religions and sects, he passes in review all the philosophic and religious systems that he was able to study and classes them according to their degree of remoteness from Muslim orthodoxy. After the Muslim sects, the Mu‘tazila, the Shi ‘a and the Batiniyya, follow the Christians and the Jews, then the Magi and the Dualists, and finally the Sabaeans. The author then goes back to pagan antiquity and gives articles on the prinicipal philosophers and sages of Greece, and then gives an exposition of Arab scholasticism as a derivative from Hellenism; the last part of the book is devoted to the religions of India.
Shahrastani, the man who has been called the “principal historian of religion” in Asia during the Middle Ages, was born in Shahrastan, in the Khurasan area of Iran. Born Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Karim ash-Sharastani, Shahrastani offered a distinctive method of viewing the cultural interaction and conceptual development of world religions and philosophies within the Mediterranean, Southwest Asian, and South Asian world.
Little is known about Shahrastani’s early years. However, it is reported that he studied jurisprudence and theology, but his personal philosophical and religious allegiances are a matter of controversy. In addition to his masterwork, The Book of Religious and Philosophical Communities (Kitab al-Milal wa’l-Nihal), he wrote a Dual of the Philosophers and a respected work on theology, the Culmination of Demonstration in Scholastic Theology (Nihayat al-‘Iqdam). It is the first work, however, on which his present influence and reputation are based.
Shahrastani’s famous discussion of the scholastic theologians (mutakallimun) is based upon categorizations of schools and sub-schools with respect to their positions on a number of topical categories, including tawhid (the affirmation of divine unity) and qadar, the issue of divine predetermination versus human free will.
The affirmation of divine unity is codified in the Islamic shahada or testimony (itself encoded in the call to prayer and recited five times a day): “No God but God and Muhammad is his Messenger.” The common meaning of such affirmation is of course that there is only one Deity. To affirm any other deities is to be guilty of shirk (associationism), that is, the associating of other deities with the one God. To the theological mind, as demonstrated in case studies by Shahrastani, tawhid raised further questions. If there is only one Deity, how do the divine attributes in the Qur’an (seeing, hearing, knowing, having compassion) relate to the Deity? Are they part of the divine essence? If so, are we to imagine a multiplicity of powers (knowing, hearing, seeing) existing from all eternity, and would that not be a subtle form of shirk, asserting the existence of multiple, eternal powers? However, if the attributes are not part of the Deity’s essence, then does the Diety change? Is it in a state of not-hearing at one time, and hearing at another, subject to accident and contingency?
Shahrastani demonstrates no particular dogmatic answer, but illuminates, rather, how the debate among various schools led to more profound questions. Shahrastani also takes up Qur’anic references to a Deity that sees, hears, creates “with two hands,” and “sits on a throne.” Some groups, such as the Mu‘tazila, considered a literal interpretation of these images to be a form “likening” (tashbih) the Deity upon human characteristics, a procedure that would entail an anthropomorphic image just as idolatrous as idols made of wood and stone. They argued in favor of a figurative interpretation (ta’wil) that would explain how such figures of speech can refer to the one Divine Power.
Shahrastani shows us how the theological debate generated new positions, with some scholars arguing that attributes shared by humans (seeing, hearing, and so forth) are intrinsically anthropomorphic, and therefore affirming only those, such as power, knowledge, and will, which in their view belong to the Deity alone. Others argued that figurative interpretation is an “explaining away” of the Qur’anic text based upon the preferences of human rationalizing, and a stripping (ta‘til) from the Deity of the attributes it has affirmed for itself in its own word.
Shahrastani’s second theological category is divine predetermination (qadar). Several passages in the Qur’an emphasize the all-powerful nature of the Deity in a way that seems to preclude human will or choice; the Deity is said to “stop up the ears” of those who have rejected the Qur’anic message, for example. Other passages are urgent prophetic appeals to the hearer to choose the path of prophetic wisdom. If the response of the listener has already been predetermined by an all-knowing, all-powerful Deity, what is the status of such appeals? Is it fair or just for the Deity to then reward and punish humans on the basis of a decision made from all time by that Deity?
Shahrastani quotes Wasil, the most famous theologian of the Mu‘tazilite School of theology, who rejected divine predetermination:
It is not possible for [God] to will for [God’s] servants what is in disagreement with [God’s] command -- to control their action and then to punish them for what they did.
Later, he quotes ‘Amr as asking, “Does he predestine me to do something and then punish me for it?” For the Mu‘tazilites, the Deity is all-wise (hakim) and therefore must act in the interests of his creatures and with justice (‘adl). Human beings have an innate capacity for understanding justice, right and wrong, without which they could not receive prophetic revelation in the first place. For their opponents, such statements are denial of divine power and knowledge; what the Deity does is, by nature, just -- the Deity cannot be held accountable to fallible human understandings of what is just; and what the Deity imparts by way of revelation is in fact the only knowledge of right and wrong, and the only understanding of justice available to humankind.
Ironically, and confusingly, those who rejected divine predetermination (qadar) were called by the epithet the qadariyya. Those who affirmed predetermination were called the compulsionists (jabriyya). Those who appealed to the interpretations of the earliest companions of the prophets and rejected the theological attempt to apply formal human reason to such questions were called the traditionalists (salaf), but even this group finally accepted a form of theological discourse to defend their original anti-theological stance.
Another major group was called the attributionists (sifatiyya). This group originally sprang from the position of the theological al-Ash‘ari, who vehemently maintained both the literalness of the attributes and the reality of divine predetermination. However, his school, the Ash‘arites, later tried to walk a middle ground on both issues and came to be the most widely accepted theological school in Islam. Some spoke of divine conditions (ahwal), which would be neither divine attributes eternally one with divine substance nor accidents that would prevail upon the Deity. In the area of divine predetermination, Shahrastani suggests that they tried to walk that middle ground by speaking of the Deity as creator of all acts, and of human beings as “acquiring” the power of the act at the moment of participation in it.
The Ash‘arite School later was considered the “orthodoxy” among some writers, and some considered Shahrastani to be of that school. However, although he was willing to give his opinion, what makes Shahrastani’s work reflective of a great thinker is not his argument for any particular position, but rather his ability to expound positions in such a way as to bring out the centrality of key theological issues and show how the Islamic tradition shaped itself around the effort to resolve those issues.
Shahrastani’s treatment of cosmology is particularly important. In his discussion of the pre-Socratic philosophers he outlines what we might call “neo-pre-Socratic Islamic thought,” that is, the construction of the pre-Socratics by Islamic thinkers who then formed “schools” around them. Although much of the thought is consonant with what we know of Thales, Empedocles, and other pre-Socratics, it carries a new emphasis, with more thematic unity based upon more continued return to the question of the primal element “receptive of all forms.” It is difficult to know, given the lack of other testimony, how much of the thematic unity is due to the Islamic schools themselves and how much is the work of Shahrastani.
Shahrastani also brings us the critical texts of the anonymous figure known as the “Greek Master” (al-shaykh al-yunani), texts that turn out to be the most radically apophatic passages of Plotinus, passages attempting to express the inexpressible. Shahrastani thus demonstrates that in addition to the more Aristotelian school of Islamic Plotinian thought centered around the “Theology of Aristotle,” there was a more mystically inclined school that focused on those Plotinian passages placing ultimate reality beyond the the categories of being altogether.
Perhaps Shahrastani’s most brilliant essay is that on the Sabaeans of Harran. Harran, the ancient city near the upper Tigris, was an early Islamic center of alternative philosophies, from the Hermeticists (devoted to Agathodaemon, Asclepius, and Hermes), to those following elaborate ritual calendars. Shahrastrani places the Harranians in a debate with the hanifs. The word hanif was used in early Islam to refer to monotheists, particularly the pre-Islamic monotheists of Arabia. For example, Abraham was considered the archetypal hanif.
The Harranians outline a cosmos made up of concentric spheres inhabited by spirits -- by ruhaniyat --, and the goal of philosophy is either to ascend through the spheres to encounter the spirits, or to draw the spirits down into temples on Earth. From the spirits one receives true inspiration. The hanifs counter that the true bearers of truth are the prophets, who are, as in the mi ‘raj account of Muhammad’s ascent through the Heavens, the guardians of the various Heavens.
As Shahrastani unfolds the argument, he demonstrates a fundamental tension in classical Islamic thought between the spiritualists (those who see the goal of philosophy as having become more spiritual -- or, as in the case of Ibn Sina [Avicenna], more intellectual) and the humanists (those who see the goal as having become more human and who see the intermediaries of truth as the human prophets). Sharastani thus helps us in understanding the symbolic significance of every detail of the cosmos of concentric spheres, the identity of the guardians of the spheres, the way in which human beings can rise through the spheres, the test by which they are tried at each sphere, and the ultimate arrival at the divine throne. This paradigm, which is fundamental not only to medieval Islam, but to medieval Judaism and Christianity as well (and which, indeed, served as one of the meeting places and places of contest among the three traditions) has a coded system of values that, through his debate format, Shahrastani helps to make explicit.
The analysis of theological debates about the unity of the Deity and divine predetermination, the philosophical cosmology of the pre-Socratics (as reconstructed in Islamic philosophy), the mystical dimension of Islamic Plotinian thought, and the symbolic cosmology of the heavenly spheres and their guardians are only some examples of Shahrastani’s contributions. In these cases, and throughout his masterwork, Shahrastani uses a categorization of schools to demonstrate how central questions, dilemmas, and symbols become the matrix for the development of ever more sophisticated versions of Islamic thought.
Al-Shahrastani was an able and learned man of great personal charm. The real nature of his thought is best referred to by the term theosophy, in the older sense of "divine wisdom". However, al-Shahrastani was certainly not totally against theology or philosophy, even if he was very harsh against the theologians and the philosophers. As he explained in the Majlis, in order to remain on the right path, one must preserve a perfect equilibrium between intellect (`aql) and audition (sam`). A philosopher or a theologian must use his intellect until he reaches the rational limit. Beyond this limit, he must listen to the teaching of Prophets and Imams.
His works reflect a complex interweaving of intellectual strands, and his thought is a synthesis of this fruitful historical period. In his conception of God, Creation, Prophecy, and Imama, al-Shahrastani adopted many doctrinal elements that are reconcilable with Nizari Isma'ilism. The necessity of a Guide, belonging both to the spiritual and the physical world, is primordial in his scheme since the Imam is manifested in this physical world.
Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Karim al-Shahrastani see Shahrastani, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Karim al-
The Principal Historian of Religion see Shahrastani, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Karim al-
Tāj al-Dīn Abū al-Fath Muhammad ibn `Abd al-Karīm ash-Shahrastānī see Shahrastani, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Karim al-
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