الشهرستاني

الأعمال

• 1127الملل والنحل

  عرض في قسمين: أهل الكتب المنزلة – المسلمون واليهود والنصارى والمجوس والثنوية – وأصحاب الآراء، ومنهم الفلاسفة اليونان من طاليس إلى برقلس، والفلاسفة العرب، وفي مقدمتهم ابن سينا، وأديان الهند؛ تُروى العقائد بمصطلحاتها هي قبل أي حكم.

• نحو 1140مصارعة الفلاسفة

  سجال ضد ابن سينا خُطط في سبع «جولات»، كُتبت منها خمس: في تقسيم الوجود، وفي وجود واجب الوجود ووحدته، وفي علم الله وقِدم العالم؛ وأجابه نصير الدين الطوسي بعد قرن.

الموقف

Al-Shahrastani is on the map as the author of the classic Arabic survey of religions and philosophies and as an Ashʿarite critic of Ibn Sina who also absorbed much of his thought. The Book of Religious and Philosophical Sects first sets out its method: each doctrine is reported as its adherents state it, without refutation, and the communities are ordered by their relation to revelation – those with a revealed book (Muslims, Jews, Christians), those with something like a book (Zoroastrians, Manicheans), and those who follow their own reasoning, from the Sabians and the Greek sages from Thales to Proclus to the Arabic Peripatetics, the pre-Islamic Arabs and the schools of India. Its long section on Ibn Sina is a careful summary, and the work became a main source for later Muslim and, from the nineteenth century, European scholarship on the history of religions. In “The Furthest Steps in Theology” he set out Ashʿarite theology in twenty questions while discussing the philosophers’ objections; in “Struggling with the Philosopher” he attacked Ibn Sina directly: the division of being into necessary and possible is unclear, the proof that the Necessary Existent is one fails, the account of God’s knowledge falls short, and the eternity of the world is not shown. Wilferd Madelung has argued that behind these objections stands an Ismaili theology of a God beyond being and non-being. Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, a century later, defended Ibn Sina point by point in Wrestler’s Downfall.

الحياة والسياق

Abu l-Fath Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Karim al-Shahrastani was born in Shahrastan, a town in Khurasan north of Nasa in present-day Turkmenistan, in 1086 or, by another report, 1076. He studied law and Ashʿarite theology in Nishapur with pupils of al-Juwayni, among them Abu l-Qasim al-Ansari. In 1116 he made the pilgrimage and then taught for three years at the Nizamiyya college in Baghdad. Back in Khurasan he served the Seljuq court at Merv, where the vizier Nasir al-Din Mahmud al-Marwazi was his patron; to him he dedicated the Book of Religious and Philosophical Sects (1127–28). Contemporaries suspected him of Ismaili leanings, which his late, unfinished Qur’an commentary “Keys of the Secrets” and a sermon preached in Khwarazm support. He died in his home town in 1153.

أعمال رئيسة أخرى

• The Book of Religious and Philosophical Sects (Kitāb al-milal wa-l-niḥal, 1127–28)
• The Furthest Steps in Theology (Nihāyat al-iqdām fī ʿilm al-kalām)
• Struggling with the Philosopher (Muṣāraʿat al-falāsifa)
• Keys of the Secrets and Lamps of the Righteous (Mafātīḥ al-asrār wa-maṣābīḥ al-abrār), unfinished Qur’an commentary