舍赫拉斯塔尼

作品

• 1127宗教与哲学教派之书

  分两部分的概览：持有启示经典的群体——穆斯林、犹太人、基督徒、琐罗亚斯德教徒和二元论者——以及依自己意见行事者，其中有从泰勒斯到普罗克洛的希腊哲学家、阿拉伯哲学家（首推阿维森纳）和印度诸宗教；各种学说先以其自身术语陈述，再作评判。

• 约1140年与哲学家的角力

  针对阿维森纳的论战，原计划分七个“回合”，写成了五个：论存在的划分，论必然存在者的存在与独一，论真主的知识，以及论世界的永恒；纳西尔丁·图西在一个世纪后作了回应。

立场

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.

生平与背景

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.

其他主要作品

• 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