The Stations of Theology

Introduction

ʿAdud al-Din al-Iji’s “Stations of Theology” (al-Mawāqif fī ʿilm al-kalām), dedicated to the Inju ruler Abu Ishaq of Shiraz in the mid-fourteenth century, is a summa of Ashʿari theology in six “stations”: preliminaries and the theory of knowledge, general matters of being, accidents, substances, God, and the “transmitted” topics of prophecy, the afterlife and the imamate. Al-Iji integrates the concepts of the philosophers into theology, sets out their arguments at length – often in Ibn Sina’s form – and then answers them; his theory of knowledge takes over Fakhr al-Din al-Razi’s discussion from the Muḥaṣṣal almost unchanged. With al-Sharif al-Jurjani’s commentary of 1405 the Stations became the summit of the kalām curriculum in Ottoman, Persian and Indian madrasas. Josef van Ess translated and commented on its first book (1966).

Connections

Taken up in

• Commentary on the Stations1405 · al-Sharif al-Jurjani

More works by Adud al-Din al-Iji

• 1355The ʿAdudi Creed