Iasinstitute for Advanced Study Islamic Thought Beyond Denominational Borders Challenges and Perspectives for a Comprehensive Approach
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IASInstitute for Advanced Study Islamic Thought Beyond Denominational Borders Challenges and Perspectives for a Comprehensive Approach BY SABINE SCHMIDTKE vation can be made for Turkish scholarship, whose representatives he disciplines of Arabic and Islamic Studies have undergone a increasingly value, rediscover, and study their own Islamic heritage— T major paradigm shift over the past two decades. For most of the this after nearly a century of almost complete neglect of the Ottoman twentieth century, the majority of scholars in past. The rise of Salafi Islam had a similar these fields focused primarily on the limited effect, generating an ever-growing apprecia- materials available in print, taking manuscript tion of the Islamic religious heritage, including materials into consideration only by way of manuscripts (of the right sort only, of course). exception. During the latter part of the twenti- Another important factor to completely eth century, methodological considerations change the fields of Arabic and Islamic Stud- were often at the forefront of the discussion, in ies is the digital revolution and the new an attempt to relate to and catch up with the technological possibilities it offers to pre- theoretical discussions in other disciplines serve, disseminate, and explore manuscript such as history, sociology, or anthropology. sources. The unprecedented accessibility of Today, there is a growing awareness completely new primary materials in nearly among scholars of Near Eastern Studies of unlimited quantities now allows scholars to the vast and mostly still unexplored manu- enter unexplored fields of research—and in script collections in countless public and pri- many cases to define such fields from vate libraries in the Middle East, Central Asia, scratch. In all disciplines of learning, schol- the Indian subcontinent, Eastern and Western ars are acutely aware that what we possess Europe, and North America, and, therefore, now represents only a fraction of the Islamic of the many glaring lacunae in research. We literature that has been preserved. Against can say without any exaggeration that the the background of this new awareness of number of so far untapped textual sources what remains to be done and the increased can be estimated at several hundred thousand availability of primary materials, a growing works and fragments of works. number of scholars of Islam are nowadays Other than was still the case some twenty returning to basic research and solid philo- or thirty years ago, philology, which can be Kitāb al-Tabṣira fī ʿilm al-ḥisāb, a mathematical treatise logical work in its widest sense. As a result of al-Muẓaffar b. Yaḥyā al-Maghribī, copied in Yemen in broadly defined as the study of literary texts, of these developments, we are witnessing a 1673. MS Berlin, State Library, Glaser 40 © Staatsbiblio - the establishment of their original form, and thek zu Berlin PK, Fotostelle (with kind permission) period of extraordinary and constant dis- the analysis of their meaning in their respec- coveries and breakthroughs in all disci- tive intellectual contexts, is again on the rise, with a growing num- plines of Near Eastern Studies. ber of specialists engaging in producing critical text editions and The paradigm shift I just described, therefore, started primarily covering entirely new ground on the basis of so far neglected man- within the Islamic world and was partly prompted by the political uscript treasures. developments in the region and the ensuing rise of religious con- There are many causes that prompted this shift. A major factor sciousness over the previous decades. However, the resulting schol- was no doubt the growing importance of religion evoking an increas- arly awareness often stops short at religious borders, disregarding ing awareness for religio-cultural heritage in defining one's own non-Islamic sources and even non-orthodox Islamic sources: schol- identity. The Islamic Revolution of 1979/80, for example, resulted in arly engagement embedded in a predefined cultural-religious con- a growing interest among the scholars of Iran in their own religious text rarely comes without narrowly defined ideological objectives heritage, including its vast collections of Arabic and Persian manu- and constraints. The fact that the disciplinary borders in Western, scripts. Over the past thirty years, hundreds of catalogues have been especially European, academia between Islamic Studies, Jewish produced covering by now all major Iranian collections. The Shii Studies, and the study of Eastern Christianity are traditionally rigor- Zaydis of Yemen also undertook enormous efforts to save their own ous is an additional obstacle. Scholars still normally opt for a one- religious heritage through catalogues and editions. A similar obser- dimensional approach with an (often exclusive) focus on either Muslim, Jewish, or Christian authors, even when, as we shall see, ing for God and man alike, and, closely related to this, in the they all shared the same language. As a result, it has long been human responsibility and freedom of choice, as well as their insis- ignored (and often still is) that a comprehensive picture of the tence on the unicity of the Divine. intellectual history of the Islamic world can only be gained when As is the case with many aspects of Islamic religio-intellectual denominational borders are systematically disregarded. history, discursive theology in general and Muʿtazilite dialectical The sacred scripture of Islam, the Qurʾān, defines itself as the reasoning in particular were closely related in their evolution and ultimate, perfect link in a chain of progressive divine revelations and development to parallel phenomena among the followers of other is thus well aware of its generic link with the two earlier monotheis- religions that were present in the Muslim world. The earliest pre- tic religions, Judaism and Christianity. Not only did Muslims in the served manifestations of discursive theology, kalām in Arabic, in early period adopt and adapt Jewish and Christian notions as they Muslim circles can be traced back to the early eighth century. Char- had developed during late antiquity, Christians and Jews also acteristic features of Muslim dialectic argumentation were already played an active part throughout the present in seventh-century Syriac following centuries in the evolution Christological disputations. and development of Muslim thought. The methodological tools of dis- The linguistic situation of the cursive theology had also begun to Near and Middle East since the rise leave their mark on Jewish thinkers of Islam greatly facilitated intellectual writing in Arabic since the ninth interactions beyond denominational century, and it seems that it was borders. Moritz Steinschneider again the Christian kalām tradition (1816–1907), one of the founding that proved influential for the for- fathers of the modern scholarly study mation of Jewish medieval theolo- of Judaism and the Jews, has rightly gy. The earliest extant Jewish kalām remarked that the Arabic language by work is the Twenty Chapters of and large replaced Hebrew as the lan- Dāwūd b. Marwān al-Muqammaṣ, guage of the Jews of the Near and Nukat al-Mughnī, an anonymous (Karaite) recension of the theological summa a student of the Syrian-Orthodox Middle East during most of the Kitāb al-Mughnī fī abwāb al-tawḥīd wa-l-ʿadl by the Muʿtazilite ʿAbd al- theologian Nonnus of Nisibis, who Islamic age—an observation that Jabbār al-Hamadānī (d. 1025), MS St. Petersburg, National Library of Russia, RNL apparently flourished during the Arab.-Yevr. 381, ff. 47b–48a © National Library of Russia (with kind permission) holds also true for the majority of first half of the ninth century—so Christian communities living under Muslim rule. far the earliest theological summa in Arabic that we possess. The Indeed, from the eighth century onwards, socially-mobile Kitāb al-Amānāt wal-iʿtiqādāt—that is, The Book of Beliefs and Opin- Christians and Jews began to use Arabic not only for oral commu- ions—of the tenth-century Rabbanite Jewish scholar Saʿadya Gaon nication but also as their written language for religious, literary, (882–942) seems likewise to have been inspired by Christian theo- and scientific purposes. They increasingly composed and con- logical literature as well as Islamic models. sumed works in Arabic in virtually all disciplines of learning, The new tradition of Jewish rational thought that arose during besides their continued use of culturally distinctive literary and the ninth century was in its initial stage thus primarily informed liturgical writings in Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, Syriac, and Coptic. by Christian theological literature, with regard both to content as Moreover, Muslims, Jews, and Christians often read the same well as to methodology. Increasingly, specifically Muʿtazilite books, so that a continuous exchange of ideas, texts, and forms of Islamic ideas resonated among Jewish thinkers, many of whom discourse was the norm rather than the exception. The ensuing eventually adopted the entire doctrinal system of the Muʿtazila. process of knowledge formation was variegated and multidimen- The now emerging “Jewish Muʿtazila” dominated Jewish theolog- sional—Christian and Jewish writers influenced Islamic thought no ical thinking for centuries to come. less than Muslim authors left their imprint on Jews and Christians. The earliest attested Jewish compendium of Muʿtazilite thought is The Book of Blessing of the Karaite Levi ben Yefet,