1st Edition
The Attributes of God in Islamic Thought Contemplating Allah
The debate over Allah’s attribute—the “nature” and the inner articulation of Allah—is one of the focal debates in the intellectual history of Islam. This edited collection aims to highlight and examine some aspects of this debate in their original context, based on the relevant primary literature.
By showing that even an apparently self-evident concept such as Allah, which lies at the heart of every reading of Islam, is highly ambiguous and polysemous, the chapters also emphasise the plurality that has always existed in Islamic thought. Through highlighting the philosophical and theological reflections on the concept of Allah, the results of this study challenge the juristic reading of Islam, in which Allah’s function consists mainly in providing a detailed plan for the human life and also rewarding or punishing the ones who deviates from it. The book also attempts to demonstrate the relevance and the actuality of the tradition and to stress its contemporaneity.
This volume makes a significant part of the intellectual tradition of Islam accessible for students and scholars of Islamic theology, Islamic philosophy, Islamic studies and the like, as well as providing a secondary source for teaching on the debate in question.
Part 1: Allah of the Philosophers
1. Dancing with the Devil or Chanting with Angels?: al-Rāzī’s Employment of Philosophical Arguments in Discussion of Divine Attributes
Mehmet Fatih Arslan
2. The Ineffable and the Process of Its Determination: Ṣadr al-Dīn Shīrāzī’s Considerations on the Origin
Mansooreh Khalilizand
3. Divine Love in Medieval Islamic Philosophy: Some Stages in the History of an Attribute
Colin Fitzpatrick Murtha
4. Divine Simplicity, the Deus Revelatus, and the Divine Names in the Philosophical Theology of Mullā Ṣadrā Shīrāzī (1571–1636)
Sajjad Rizvi
Part 2: Allah of the Theologians
5. Abu al-Hudhayl al-‘Allāf on Divine Simplicity
Abdulhakeem Yousuf Alkhelaifi
6. Does the Attribute “Baqāʾ” Exist?: Sunni Theologians on God’s Persistence
Angelika Brodersen
7. Nūr al-Dīn al-Ṣābūnī and the Divine Attributes: Māturīdī Kalām in a Nutshell
Angelika Brodersen
8. Is There an Elephant in Our Presence That We Cannot See?: A Deep Dive Into Bahshamiyya Attributes Discourses
Alnoor Dhanani
9. The Omnipotence (al-qudra) and the Will of God (al-irāda) in the Theology of Sayf ad-Dīn al-Āmidī
Ahmed Husić
10. Constructing the True Islam: The Wahhābī Scholar Ibn ʿUthaymīn (d. 2001) on the Divine Attributes and the Path of the Pious Ancestors (Salaf)
Mohammad Gharaibeh
11. Divine Will and Anthropopathism in Muʿtazilī Theology: Abū ʿAlī and Abū Hāshim al-Jubbāʾī
Mehmet Emin Güleçyüz
12. God as a Paradigm of the World: Ismāʿīl Gelenbevī on Divine Knowledge
Kutlu Okan
Biography
Mansooreh Khalilizand is a research fellow at the Department of Philosophy of Freiburg University in Germany. She is currently working on the philosophy of the 17th-century Iranian philosopher Ṣadr al-Dīn Shirāzī. Her research interests include metaphysics, ontology and epistemology in Islamic philosophy, and Islamic feminism.
