Commentary on the Stations

Introduction

Al-Sharif al-Jurjani completed his “Commentary on the Stations” (Sharḥ al-Mawāqif) in Samarqand in April 1405 and dedicated it to the Timurid prince Pir Muhammad. It is a running commentary on al-Iji’s Stations of Theology that explains every phrase, supplies missing steps, corrects the author where his reasoning seemed weak and adds discussions of its own on logic, natural philosophy and metaphysics. In it the philosophical theology in the tradition of Fakhr al-Din al-Razi reached its most systematic form. For centuries the Commentary was the summit of the kalām curriculum in Ottoman, Persian and Indian madrasas and attracted its own glosses; the Ottoman scholar Katip Çelebi later complained that it had been dropped from the madrasa course as “philosophy”.

Connections

Builds on

• The Stations of Theologyc. 1350 · Adud al-Din al-Iji

More works by al-Sharif al-Jurjani

• c. 1400The Book of Definitions