Adud al-Din al-Iji

Works

• c. 1350The Stations of Theology

  Summa of theology in six “stations”: preliminaries and the theory of knowledge, general matters of being, accidents, substances, God, and prophecy and the afterlife; dedicated to the Inju ruler Abu Ishaq of Shiraz, it treats the philosophers’ doctrines at length before answering them and, with al-Jurjani’s commentary, became a core text of the madrasas.

• 1355The ʿAdudi Creed

  Short creed completed shortly before al-Iji’s death; through al-Dawani’s commentary and the glosses on it – among them Muhammad Abduh’s of 1876 – it remained a text of instruction into the twentieth century.

Position

Al-Iji is on the map as the author of the Stations of Theology (al-Mawāqif fī ʿilm al-kalām), the summa in which later Ashʿari theology took its standard form. Its six “stations” move from preliminaries and the theory of knowledge through general metaphysics – existence and non-existence, necessity and possibility, unity and multiplicity, cause and effect – and the doctrines of accidents and substances to God, prophecy, the afterlife and the imamate. Theology here is a science based on proof that has absorbed the concepts of the philosophers: al-Iji sets out their arguments at length, often in the form they had received from Ibn Sina, before he answers them, and his theory of knowledge takes over Fakhr al-Din al-Razi’s discussion of the foundations of knowledge almost unchanged. The work thus shows how, after al-Ghazali, philosophy continued inside theology rather than ending. Al-Iji defended the doctrines of the Ashʿari school – God’s attributes distinct from his essence, the human “acquisition” of acts created by God, the vision of God in the hereafter – and in his short ʿAdudi Creed he summed them up for teaching. Al-Jurjani’s commentary on the Stations (1405) made the work the summit of the kalām curriculum in Ottoman, Persian and Indian madrasas; al-Dawani’s commentary on the ʿAdudi Creed was still glossed by Muhammad Abduh in 1876. Josef van Ess devoted a study with translation and commentary to the theory of knowledge in the first book of the Stations (1966).

Life & context

ʿAdud al-Din ʿAbd al-Rahman ibn Ahmad al-Iji was born around 1281 in Ij, a town near Shiraz in Fars, into a family that traced its descent to Abu Bakr. He studied grammar and the rational sciences in Tabriz and is said to have studied with Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi. Under the patronage of the vizier Rashid al-Din he served as a judge at Sultaniyya, the Ilkhanid capital, and taught in the travelling school that accompanied the court. After the end of Ilkhanid rule he returned to Fars and worked under the Inju ruler Abu Ishaq of Shiraz, to whom he dedicated his Stations of Theology. He was known as the leading Shafiʿi jurist of the region and wrote on legal theory, Arabic rhetoric, ethics and theology. He died in 1355 near Ij.

Further main works

• Commentary on Ibn al-Hajib’s epitome of legal theory (Sharḥ Mukhtaṣar al-Muntahā)
• The Jewels of Theology (Jawāhir al-kalām)
• Treatise on Ethics (al-Akhlāq al-ʿAḍudiyya)