ufayl, Hayy Ibn Yaqzān, 160.1. Ibn ufayl, Hayy Ibn Yaqzān, 160.
1. Citing Kneale and Kneale’s passage in The Development of Logic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), from Boethius in the sixth century to Abelard in the twelfth, Majid Fakhry remarks, “Historians of medieval and pre-medieval philosophy have tended to take it for granted that, indeed, philosophical learning, including Aristotelian logic, had completely disappeared following the death of the Roman consul and author of the Consolation of Philosophy,” ignoring the contributions, among others, of Fārābī. “Al-Fārābī’s Contribution to the Development of Aristotelian Logic,” in Fakhry’s Philosophy, Dogma, and the Impact of Greek Thought in Islam, chapter 3; and see Shukri Abed, Aristotelian Logic and the Arabic Language in Alfārābī.
2. See Goodman, Jewish and Islamic Philosophy: Crosspollinations in the Classic Age.
3. See Fārābī, Fī Ta
sīl al-
a
ādah, 45–49 and 39; cf. NE VI 12, 1144a 36; VI 5, VII 10; Rhet. I 6, 1362a 16–21. In Republic VI 495 Plato worries that the philosophically talented will forsake philosophy as they mature, leaving her “forlorn and unwed,” as they themselves “live an unreal and alien life, while other unworthy wooers rush in and defile her.” He calls the weakling pretenders to philosophy manikins and adds an almost Dickensian vignette “of a little bald headed tinker who has made money and just been freed from bonds and had a bath and is wearing a new garment and has got himself up like a bridegroom and is about to marry his master’s daughter, who has fallen into poverty and abandonment.” The alien life of the philosopher beguiled away from philosophy is his loss and the loss to society of the chance of his leadership (for which he had shown his propensity even in boyhood). The perversion in entrusting philosophy to the “manikin” is that he has no capability for leadership but squanders what intellect he has in making philosophy a cunning little craft deserving of its reputation as mere jargon mongering.
4. Plato uses similar language about a ship’s pilot at Republic VI 488E; and cf. VI 485–86 and NE VI 10, 1142b 20–22.
5. Fārābī, Fī Tasīl al-a ādah, 29–34.
6. Ibid., 44 with 29–37. For Fārābī’s ideas on imagination and assent, see Deborah Black, Logic and Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics in Medieval Arabic Philosophy, 185, 221–35; Salim Kemal, The Poetics of Alfarabi and Avicenna, 89–138.
7. Fārābī, Fī Ta
īl al-a ādah, 36.
8. Ibid., 28–30.
9. Ibid. 40; Aristotle, Pol. I 8, 1256b, 20–25.
10. Fārābī, Fī Taīl al-a ādah, 37. Cf. Kraemer, “On Maimonides’ Messianic Posture”; Butterworth, “Al-Fārābī’s Statecraft.”
11. Fārābī, Fī Taīl al-Sa ādah, 36–37.
12. Ibid., 44.
13. Ibid., 29–30, 38–39.
14. Ibid., 45–47.
15. Ibid., 45; cf. Aristotle, Pol. I 2, 1252b 24–27; Maimonides Guide I 20, 26, 36, 46, 47, 57; Goodman, Rambam, 52–119.
16. See S. H. Nasr, Three Muslim Sages (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), 16, for these traditions; cf. Netton, Al-Fārābī and his School, 4–6.
17. Cf. the discussions of Fārābī’s politics in Charles Butterworth, “Rhetoric and Islamic Political Philosophy”; Galston, Politics and Excellence; Parens, Metaphysics as Rhetoric.
18. See EI 6.872.
19. Abu 
l- Alā Mawdūdī, Islamic Law and Constitution, ed. and trans Kurshid Ahmad (Lahore: Islamic Publications, 1967), 148; and Charles Adams, “Mawdudi and the Islamic State,” in John Esposito, ed., Voices of Resurgent Islam, 99–133.
20. See Abdulaziz Sachedina, “Ali Shariati: Ideologue of the Iranian Revolution,” in Esposito, 191–217.
21. See EI 9.328.
22. Sachedina, “Ali Shariati,” 200.
23. Ibid., 200.
24. Ghazālī, Munqidh, ed., Jabre, 10–11, trans. Watt, 20–21. For a contemporary effort to recapture Ghazālī’s outlook, see Bakar, The History and Philosophy of Islamic Science.
25. Sayyid Qu
b, quoted in Robert Worth, New York Times, October 13, 2001.
26. Qutb, quoted in Worth, New York Times.
27. Ghazālī, Ihyā XXXV. See the new translation by David Burrell.
28. Qub, quoted in Yvonne Haddad, “Sayyid Qutb: Ideologue of Islamic Revival,” in Esposito, 82.
29. Haddad, 81.
30. Ibid., 81.
31. Ikhwān al-
afā, Animals vs Man, 193–96.
32. Cf. Hamoud al-Shuabī, a Saudi sheikh, in the winter of 2001, when America’s campaign against the Tālibān regime was at its height: “It is the duty of every Muslim to stand up with the Afghan people and fight against America.” It is apostasy even to pay taxes or sustain allegiance to a government that opposes the methods or the aims of a bin Laden: “There is no difference between someone who approves of the war [against terrorism] or supports it with money and one who is actively fighting.” Embattled Islam is set against the world: “Everyone who supports America against Islam is an infidel, someone who has strayed from the path of Islam.” Douglas Jehl, “For Saudi Cleric, Battle Shapes Up as Infidel vs. Islam,” New York Times, December 5, 2001.
33. Deut. 30:12; cf. J. Sanhedrin 22a, B. Baba Metzia 59b: “Even a voice from heaven proves nothing; the law of Sinai commands us to decide according to the majority” (citing Exod. 23:2), B. Yevamot 40a; B. Gittin 10b; Tosefta Sota, 15.10. God is said in the Talmud to rejoice when scholars win an argument by using the principles of the Law to depart from too superficial an understanding of its apparent dicta: “My children have triumphed over Me!”
34. Abdulaziz Sachedina, “Militancy, Peace and Islam,” lecture delivered at Vanderbilt University, November 12, 2001.
35. Salman Rushdie, “Yes, This is about Islam,” New York Times, November 2, 2001.
36. Fazlur Rahman, Islam (1966. Reprint. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1968), 34.
37. See Goodman, Jewish and Islamic Philosophy, 134–43.
38. See Iyā XXXV bayān 2, (Cairo, 1312 A. H.) 4.188–91, following Makkī, Qūt al-Qulūb II 1 (Cairo, 1310 A. H.) 2.4. For Ghazālī’s critique of causality, see Goodman, “Did Ghazālī Deny Causality?”
39. See Norman Hammond, “Cultural Terrorism,” The Wall Street Journal, March 5, 2001.
40. Barry Bearak, “Over Protests, ālibān Say that They Are Destroying Buddhas,” New York Times, March 4, 2001.
41. Tim Weiner, “Seizing the Prophet’s Mantle,” New York Times, December 7, 2001,
42. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Islam in Modern History, 32.
43. See pp. 197–99, this volume.
44. Cantwell Smith, 41. According to Emmanuel Sivan, bin Laden’s deepest influences are from Abd Allah Azzam, a Palestinian killed by a car bomb in 1989, and Safar al-Hawali, a Saudi militant-both “steeped in the writings of Sayyid Qub.” See Worth, New York Times, October 13, 2001.
45. The Qurānic statute (5:42) is not adequately mitigated by the use of local anesthetics. The ālibān were especially brutal in applying this and the other sanctions mentioned here, but everywhere that they have been applied their severity has led to corruption of the judicial process. This is an area where legal fictions are called for, to allow mending of the fabric of Sharīa law. Raising the evidentiary and procedural bar, a response already seen in the Qurānic shift from two to four witnesses in cases of adultery, is not sufficient.
46. Saad Eddin Ibrahim was arrested in the summer of 2000, along with twenty-seven associates. He was charged with treason and espionage for supporting the registration of women voters and calling for judicial supervision of Egyptian elections.
47. Jan Nattier, The Candragarbha-Sutra in Central and East Asia: Studies in a Buddhist Prophecy of Decline (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1988); John Ronald Newman, The Outer Wheel of Time: Vajrayāna Buddhist Cosmology in the Kālacakra Tantra (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1987).
48. Ikhwān al-afā Animals vs Man, 202; cf. chapter 4, this volume note 157.
49. As Mohammed Arkoun remarks, “The philosophical literature of the 4th century A.H. brings within reach the premises of a humanism centered on man. But insofar as this new outlook was dependant on particular socio-political conditions, its success could only be uncertain, and its survival precarious.” L’Humanisme Arabe au IVe/Xe Siècle, 356.
1. See Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (1962. Reprint. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966); Totemism, trans. R. Needham (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), 62–66, 77, 80–82, 89; L. E. Goodman, In Defense of Truth, chapter 8.
2. Moby Dick, or the Whale (1851) chapters 55–57 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 268–79.
3. See L. E. Goodman, God of Abraham, 13–19.
4. See Y. Kawabata, The Existence and Discovery of Beauty (Tokyo: Mainichi, 1969). I thank Valdo Viglielmo for the anecdote.
5. See ED X and God of Abraham, chapter 5. Saadiah’s ethics is pluralistic in seeking a proper blend among mutually irreducible values (prima facie goods), but it is not radically pluralistic: It does not hold all ends intrinsically equal or incapable of being judged against one another. Saadiah follows Plato in seeing that radical pluralism is mere rudderlessness. The monisms he rejects all treat relative, partial goods as absolutes. Even renunciation and asceticism fail as monisms. Maimonides makes Saadiah’s diverse goods coordinate, subordinate, or superordinate parts of a single good; see “Eight Chapters” 5, “On Devoting the Powers of the Human Soul to a Single End.”
6. Maysir was a gambling game of the Jāhiliyya in which a slaughtered beast was butchered into ten parts of quite different value and distributed by the drawing of notched arrows. As in the modern game of craps, some of the arrows signified good or bad luck. There were pagan overtones in the play, perhaps survivals of the use of arrows in divination. When there were fewer than seven players, someone had to buy the parts not assigned to one of the seven notched arrows. If that person won twice in a row, he was to donate his winnings to his following. Other winners might donate what they won to the poor. Hence, according to some commentators, the Qurānic (2:219) concession of benefits in maysir. See EI 6.923.
7. See Ibn ufayl’s 
ayy Ibn Yaq
ān, 142–44; 
ujwīrī, Kashf al-Majūb, 111: “There is no chastisement in Hell more painful than being veiled from God. . . . And in Paradise there is no pleasure more perfect than not being veiled. Similarly (as in the rabbinic sources), profession of God’s unity at the time of death assures entry into Paradise: Bukhari 3:49, Muslim 1:43, Ibn Hanbal 1:65, 69, 374, 382, 402, 407, 425; and (qualifiedly) in Tirmidhī 38:17. Cf. Wensinck, Handbook. Wensinck’s system of citation for adīth is adopted here.
8. See Hamadhānī’s Ahwaz Encounter and Basra Encounter, in the Maqāmāt. Kueny, The Rhetoric of Sobriety, 102, speaks of Umayyad khamriyyāt as “a form of protest against the prohibition of wine.” She adds (105) that the preservation of pre-Islamic poetry allowed Muslims to participate vicariously in vinous and other now forbidden pleasures. The participation was hardly always vicarious.
9. See Bukhārī 56:37, 58:1, 64:12,17,27; 81:7,52; Muslim, Sahī, 12:121–3, 43:30–31, 53:6–7; Tirmidhī 34:26, 35:28; Nasāī 23:8; Ibn 
anbal 2:539, 3:7; ayālisī 2180.
10. Jā
i
, The Epistle on Singing-Girls, § 32, 38.
11. See Charles Pellat, El 7.872–73.
12. See Goodman, In Defense of Truth, chapter 1; for the Prophet’s toe: Mishkāt XXIV ix 1, Robson, 2.1000.
13. Muslim, Sahī 41:7–9. tr. Siddiqi, 4.1220–1, nos. 5609–11; Bukhārī 78:92; Abū Dāūd 40:87: Tirmidhī 41:81; Ibn Māja 33:42; Dārimī 19.71; Ibn anbal 1:175, 177, 181, 2:39. 96.
14. For the legitimacy of poetry in defense of Islam, see Ibn anbal 3:456,460; cf Mishkāt, 2.1001. Bukhārī transmits hadīths stating that there is magic in eloquence, wisdom in poetry. Other adīths take a more judicious stance: Poetry “is speech; what is good in it is good, and what is bad is bad “Mishkāt, 2.1004. It is not our purpose, of course, to attempt to use the adīth literature to fathom the attitudes of Muhammad toward poetry. On this subject that literature is more a battlefield for later writers than a quarry of prophetic intentions. What matters for our inquiry is that poetry, in one of the most proliferated and participatory elaborations of Islamic ideals in the Arabic language, has become problematic—that eloquence can be condemned along with obscenity as “two branches of hypocrisy” (Mishkāt, 2.1002) while modesty and inarticulacy are praised—that poetry is in need of defense, since it is seen as a vehicle of secular (autonomous) values.
15. Mishkāt, 2.1000–4; cf. Tirmidhī 41:69, Ibn Māja 33:41.
16. See Mishkāt, 2.1000; Muslim, Saī tr Siddiqi, 4.1220, nos. 5602–8. Ibn Isāq Sīrat Rasūl Allāh, trans., A. Guillaume, The Life of Muhammad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955) 169–70, Arabic 243–45. The lines said to have been sung by Muammad’s followers as they worked expressed an otherworldly theme. The Prophet reportedly altered the word order, dispersing the rhyme and meter; Guillaume, 229.
17. Tarif Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, 3–4.
18. See Peter Chelkowski, Taziye: Ritual and Drama in Iran (New York: New York University Press Press, 1979); Jalal Asgar, A Historical Study of the Origins of the Persian Passion Plays (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1970); and Matthew Arnold’s classic “The Persian Passion Play,” in Essays in Criticism, First Series (New York: Macmillan, 1883) 1.223–64. And see New York Times, July 15, 2002, p. B-1, for notice of recent performances of Taziye at Lincoln Center.
19. For the opposition to representational art, see Mishkāt, 2.940–43.
20. See, for example Keith Critchlow, Islamic Patterns—an Analytical and Cosmological Approach (New York: Schocken, 1976).
21. For the customs of the Īd, see Gustave von Grunebaum, Muhammadan Festivals, 34–35, 58–59, 63–65. On the Great Festival, designed to replace Yom Kippur, there is a sacrifice (Qurān 22:33–38), but fasting is forbidden: “In Lane’s day popular entertainment had invaded some of the cemeteries,” where “families visit the tombs of their relatives.” “Women stay throughout the day and may even spend the night in the cemetery, especially if the family possesses a private and enclosed burial ground with a house that is equipped for just these occasions.” The solemnity of this “festival of the dead” contrasts with and complements the atmosphere Lane observed: “many swings and whiligigs are erected, and several large tents; in some of which, dancers, reciters (of popular romances), and other performers, amuse a dense crowd of spectators.” The mixture of obsequies with carnival release matches what is found in the O-bon of Japan and in many festivals of European provenance. Yom Kippur itself has been followed by secular festivities in both ancient and recent times, and Lent seems incomplete without Carnival.
22. Bukhārī 13:2–3, 25, 56:81, 63:46; Muslim, aīh 8:16–17; Nasāī 19:34. 37.
23. Abū Dāūd 40:52; Ibn Hanbal 2:8, 38; cf. Zayd b. Alī no. 1001, Ibn anbal 2:165, 172, 4:259; Tayālisī, p. 221.
24. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790) § 53, translated by W. S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 199–200.
25. Étienne Gilson, Forms and Substances in the Arts, 182–83.
26. Gilson, Forms and Substances in the Arts, 78.
27. Ni
ām al-Dīn al-Awliyā apud Amīr Hasan’s Fawāid al-Fuād, quoted in Bruce Lawrence, Notes from a Distant Flute, 29.
28. Ibn Abī Dunyā, Dhamm al-Malāhī, translated by James A. Robson in Tracts on Listening to Music (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1938). A. Shiloah notes that musical instruments are called malāhī in contexts that emphasize the root sense of play. The philosophers, Kindī, Fārābī, and Ibn Sīnā, in a more neutral turn of phrase, call them ālāt or ālāt al-ghinā, that is, instruments, or musical instruments—or alāt al-
arab, stirring instruments, if they wish to highlight the emotional impact of music. Shiloah ascribes to the influence of Ibn Abī Dunyā the rather insistent use of the more loaded terminology in legal contexts. When later authors tried to nuance or roll back what they saw as overly extreme prohibitions, they tended to single out stringed instruments and flutes of a type associated with art music as belonging to the class whose destruction was obligatory. Al-Nābulusī (d. 1731) goes further, arguing that what is banned is not any specific type of instrument, but the use of instruments for mere entertainment, as distinguished from spiritual elevation-which is, by definition, quite the opposite of distraction. See “Malāhī,” EI 6.214–16.
29. See Tirmidhī 46:17; Zayd b. Alī no. 1001–04; Ibn anbal 2:165, 172; 3:449, 4:259; ayālisī no. 1221.
30. See chapter 2 in this volume.
31. See El 8.1018–20, 10.210–11.
32. See Bruce Lawrence, Notes from a Distant Flute, 25–26, and Ni
ām al-Dīn al-Awliyā, Morals for the Heart, translated by Bruce Lawrence (New York: Paulist Press, 1992).
33. Amīr asan Sijzī (d. 1336), quoted in Lawrence, Notes from a Distant Flute, 40; cf. pp. 41, 48, 54 for further examples of defense of the samā.
34. For Islamic norms about seriousness, see Charles Pellat, EI 2.536–37, “Djidd wa l-Hazl.” Pellat notes that despite the unease with mockery and the call to gravity, there is no outright prohibition of joking in the Qurānic text. Ghazālī “declares jocularity to be forbidden and blameworthy,” yet tolerates “a moderate joke,” and al-Ishbīhī, who follows a chapter on the prohibition of wine with another on the prohibition of jokes “does not fail to quote favorable traditions at greater length and to repeat a certain number of droll anecdotes.” Here, as always, the great ally of secularity is the functional autonomy of ideas, which can often work its way in behalf of the human spirit. The Prophet himself jested, and, despite the juridical prohibitions, which some authorities considered absolute, Medina was the seat of a school of humorists, “who helped raise the amusing anecdote (nādira) to the rank of a literary form.”
35. Henry Farmer, s.v. Ghinā, EI 2.1073.
36. Abdu l-Wāhid al-Marrākushī, History of the Almohades, Arabic text, ed. R. Dozy (1881; Reprint. Amsterdam: Oriental Press, 1968), 172.
37. See Charles Pellat, “
ayna,” EI 4.820–24; Henry Farmer, “Ghinā,” EI 2.1072–75. Farmer remarks: “Human nature, being what it is, could not accept the bigoted ruling of the pious, and so there arose, in addition to the privately owned 
ayna or singing-girl, the professional musician (mughannī), the first recorded being 
uways (10/632–92/711).” Farmer also remarks on the prevalence of work songs: “Ibn Djinnī (d. 392/1006) has said that the drawer of water will go on working as long as the radjaz chant continues. The water carrier, the boatman, the weaver, the gleaner, and even the women of the tent or household sang at work just as they do today.”
38. See Jāi, The Epistle on Singing-Girls.
39. O. Wright, Mūsīī, EI 7.681–88.
40. See E. Wiedemann, “utb al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī” EI 5.547–48.
41. See Robson, Tracts on Listening to Music, 1–13.
42. See Ghazālī, “Book of the Laws of Listening to Music and Singing, and of Ecstasy,” Iya Ulūm al-Dīn, trans. D. B. MacDonald, JRAS (1901): 195–252, 705–48; (1902) 1–28. In El 8.1019, J. During remarks on the preference for the tambourine and bamboo flute (nāy), or for chanting unaccompanied by an instrument.
43. See Ghazālī, Munqidh, trans. Watt, 25–26, 54–55; cf. the treatise ascribed to Amad al-Ghazālī, ed. J. Robson in JRAS (1938), and EI 2.1041 and 8.841.
44. Ghazālī, “On Listening to Music,” 227.
45. Abū l-Kalām Āzād, Ghubar-i-Kabīr, ed. Malik Ram, 283. I am indebted to Mohammed Adeel for this passage and for translating it for me from the Urdu.
46. See Hidāya III 558; cf. Nawāwī, Minhaj, 200.
47. See Ghazalī, On Listening to Music, 201, for Shāfiī’s seriousness. We shall return to music in chapter 2, but our present concern is with the interplay of the sacred and the secular.
48. For the translation, see Watt, Companion to the Qurān, 88.
49. See Yedida Stillman, Arab Dress, 23
50. See Mishkāt 21. Paradise is for ascetics: Tirmidhī 36:3; its chief denizens are the poor: Ibn 
anbal 1:234, 359; 2:173, 297, 4:429, 437, 443, 5:209 f.; Tayālisī nos. 833, 2759.
51. Stillman, Arab Dress, 22.
52. Muslim, 
ahī, trans. Siddiqi, 1.277–8; Bukhārī 8:14–15, 10:93, 77:19; Abū Dāūd 2:157, 162, 31:8; Nasāī 9:12, 20; Ibn Māja 29:1; Ibn anbal 6:172, cf. Bukhārī 77:93. Other traditions have the Prophet advising the faithful that God is pleased when they show His favor by wearing fine clothes, or arguing that signet rings are only for persons of authority. Yet the preference discovered in the sunna for white or striped clothing, modest, simple, even somewhat austere (but not uncomfortable or unwholesome) had a powerful impact on sumptuary practice—and accentuated and assigned a clearer meaning to ostentation in dress. Cf. Mishkāt, 2.915–19; Tirmidhī 35:39; Ibn anbal 3:439.
53. Thaālibī lists Korah (Qārūn) as the first person to wear his robes long and trail them on the ground, also the first to wear scarlet and the first to practice alchemy. See Latāif al-Ma ārif, trans. Bosworth, 41.
54. Mishkāt, 2.912–13, and 915.
55. Muslim, aī, 37:1–4, trans., Siddiqi, 3.1139, nos. 5126–8; Dārimī 9:25; cf. Bukhārī 23:2, 67:71, 70:29; 74: 27–8, 77:25, 27,45; Ibn anbal 1:321, 5:275; Abū Dāūd 25:17, Tirmidhī 24:10; Nasāī 21:53, 48:106,110; Ibn Māja 30:17.
56. Na
ībī, a Mutazilite disciple of Abū Abdallāh al-Barī, who was himself a student of the famous Jubbāī, is portrayed by Tawīdī as a profligate (and his master as a spy, graced with the sobriquet al-Jual, the dung beetle). Tawīdī tells of hearing Naībī ironically praise the Qurānic paradise, where there is nothing to do but enjoy food, drink, and erotic pleasures. Wouldn’t they grow bored and depressed in this bestial condition, the Mutazilite is said to have asked. The Christian translator Naīf al-Rūmī (tenth century), called al-Qa, the priest, quotes a philosopher who held that three worldly pleasures cloy: food, drink, and coupling; three do not: perfume, clothing, and music. See Kraemer, Humanism, 133, 186.
57. Yedida Stillman, Arab Dress, 31. The countertradition comes from Ibn Sad, K. al-
abaqāt al-Kabīr, ed. E. Sachau, J. Lippert et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1908), 29; cf. Tirmidhī, Sunan, K. al-Istidhān wa l-Ādāb, bab 87 (Beirut: Dar al-Fikr, 1983).
58. Stillman, Arab Dress, 120–37.
59. Ibn Khaldūn, Muqaddimah, 3.36, trans, after Rosenthal, 66.
60. Stillman, Arab Dress, 131.
61. Ibid., 128–33.
62. Ghazālī, Munqidh, 56; cf. Ghazālī, Fadā’i, 24; and see Goodman, Jewish and Islamic Philosophy: Crosspollinations, 136. Cf. Sufyān al-Thawrī’s complaint (716–778) on the secular uses of sacred learning: “We have become mere commodities to the worldly. . . . A man becomes our disciple to get a name as such and convey our learning. Then he gets appointed a governor or chamberlain or steward or tax collector and says, ‘Thawrī related to me.’” Ibn Abbād al-Rundī (d. 1320), Al-Rasāil al-
ughrā, ed., P. Nuwiyya (Beirut, 1941) 41, quoted in Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, 25.
63. Stillman. Arab Dress, 158.
64. A. Rugh, Reveal and Conceal: Dress in Contemporary Egypt (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1986) 5; cf. Nesta Ramazani, “The Veil—Piety or Protest?” Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies 7 (1983): 36; Nilüfer Góle, The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996) 5; Stillman, Arab Dress, 158–59.
65. Stillman, Arab Dress, 111
66. S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 4.194; Stillman, Arab Dress, 110–111.
67. The smallest patch of Paradise is worth more than the world: Bukhārī 56:6, 59:8, 81:2, 51; Tirmidhī 20:17; Ibn Māja 37:39; al-Dārimī 20:108; Ibn anbal 2:315, 438, 482–23, 3:141, 153, 207, 264, 433 f. 5:330, 335, 337–39. The least share in jihād bestows a claim upon Paradise: Tirmidhī 20:17–18, 21,26; Ibn anbal 2:524 Cf. Pascal’s Wager.
68. Kathryn Kueny, The Rhetoric of Sobriety.
69. Al-Ashā, quoted in F. Harb’s translation, by Kueny, Sobriety, 94.
70. See Qurān 16:66–69; Kueny, Sobriety, 10.
71. Qurān 22:2, Kueny, Sobriety, 14.
72. Qurān 76:14–21, 56:18–19, 37:45–47.
73. Kueny, Sobriety 15–17.
74. Ibid., 65–66.
75. Ibid., 67–80.
76. See Qurān 11:106 ff. 22:19 ff., 25:11 ff., 38:57 ff., 40:46 ff., 43:74 ff., 56:41 ff., 78:21 ff. The Ikhwān al-Safā’ count some seven hundred verses promising reward in the Hereafter and, for every verse of promise, a corresponding threat or admonition. See The Case of the Animals versus Man, 200–201. “Paradise and Hell were presented to me, and I have never seen the good and evil as today. Had you known, you would have wept more and laughed less.” Muslim, Saīh, 4 1257, no 5823.
77. Qurān 3:184, 24:36–37, 25:43 ff., 79:37–39, 83:14, 102:1–2.
78. Ibn ufayl, 
ayy Ibn Yaqzān, Goodman, 154; cf. Epictetus Enchiridion 13; Philo, ad Deut. 21:15–17 in Sacr. 19 ff. and the adīth: “God has not put two hearts in you.” Cf. Qurān 4:129: “Ye will not be able to deal equally between your wives, however much ye wish.” See also Nasāī Qisāma 14, Tirmidhī, Nikā, 42, and the modernist discussion of Muammad Abduh, trans, in Helmut Gatje, The Qurān and its Exegesis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). For other examples of the structural symmetry of this world and the next almost as objects of exchange’ “This world is the dungeon of the faithful and the Paradise of the miscreant,” Muslim, Saī, 53:1, Tirmidhī 34:16; Ibn Māja 37:3; cf. Ibn Hanbal 2:197, 323. 389, 485; “Satiation in this world means hunger in the next,” Tirmidhī 35:37.
79. See Majid Khadduri, War and Peace in the Law of Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1955) 44–6: “The ultimate aim of Islam was, of course, to win the whole world. . . . The Muslim law of nations recognizes no other nation than its own, since the ultimate goal of Islam was the subordination of the whole world to one system of law and religion . . . rules for foreign relations, accordingly, were the rules of an imperial state which would recognize no equal status for the other party (or parties) with whom they happened to fight or negotiate. . . such a law of nations was not based on mutual consent or reciprocity.” Cf. 51–54, 59, 63–5: “The possibility of a defeat is dismissed [by al-Māwardī] as if entirely nonexistent,” 134. Khadduri compares Roman Imperial, medieval Christian, and twentieth-century Marxist-Leninist ideas. He remarks (81) that the Qurānic standard (8:62) makes “no distinction between offensive and defensive purposes.” For jihād as an expansionist struggle, consider the usage of the adīth: “Whether he has engaged in jihād in God’s path or remained in the land in which he was born,” Mishkāt, 1.806; cf. 807, also 813–15.
80. Cf. Khadduri, War and Peace 69, 141–42; cf. 91 for the use of “chivalrous poetry” on the battlefield Mishkāt 1.816, contrasts the fighter who seeks God’s favor, obeys the commander, gives up valuable property, aids his comrade, and avoids mischief with one who fights boastfully and without good discipline. The latter undercuts his claim to divine requital, even though Qurān and adīth are generally unequivocal in their promises to mujāhidīn. See Khadduri 61–62, 105.
81. Ikhwān al-Safā, Animals versus Man, 193–96.
82. Cf. Abd al-Qādir al-Jilānī (d. 1166), “On Struggling with the Self,” in John Williams, Themes of Islamic Civilization, 281–22. Self-conquest is traditionally the Greater Jihād. The Ikhwān al-afā offer a distinctive critique of Islamic militancy when they propose that military jihād is a political, and thus a secular, rather than religious institution. Miskawayh’s history relates how the Buwayid Rukn al-Dawla was mercilessly shaken down by an army of Khursanian raiders who demanded the entire land tax of his provinces to make war against the Byzantine and Armenian enemy. Jihād, they urged, trumped all other purposes of state. When their demands for money and for forces to support their campaign were declined, they began to rob people in the street and strip them of their possessions and even their turbans, in the name of “commanding what is right.” See Miskawayh, Tajārub, 5.235–36.
83. See Goodman, God of Abraham, chapter 5.
84. Trans. Goodman, 100–101.
85. Ibn Qutayba agrees that Imru al-Qays was the first to use the theme of the abandoned encampment.
86. See Goodman, “Jewish and Islamic Philosophies of Language.”
87. For an evocative analysis of the themes of the qasīda and the basis of their unity, see Hamori, On the Art of Medieval Arabic Literature, 6–30.
88. Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art (London: Murray, 1957) 300–301.
89. See Ignaz Goldziher’s landmark essay, “Muruwwa and Din” in Muslim Studies, 1. 11–44. Citation of pre-Islamic poetry to clarify Qurānic usage was well established by the ninth century and is attested earlier. See Wansbrough, Quranic Studies, 97–98; Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, 86.
90. See G. E. von Grunebaum, A Tenth Century Document of Arabic Literary Theory and Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950), repr. in Lichtenstadter, Introduction, 322–39.
91. Bāqillānī, translated after von Grunebaum, 68–69; Lichtenstadter, Introduction, 330–31.
92. In one adīth (Ibn anbal 2:228), Imru al-Qays himself is seen leading the poets to Hell.
93. In Lichtenstadter, Introduction, 337; cf. 332–29.
94. For the warrior’s reward: Bukhārī 56:2, 57:8, 97:28; Muslim, aī 33:103–4; Ibn Dāūd, Sefer Ha-Qabbalah 15:9; Tirmidhī 20:1, Nasāī 25:14; Ibn Māja 24:1.
95. Martyrs of Islam, among their rewards, can expect seventy-two wives from the ranks of the ūr: Tirmidhī: 20:25, cf. Ibn Māja 24:16, Zayd b. Alī no. 855, Ibn anbal 4:131, 200. Another structural symmetry: For martyrs slain by People of the Book, one adīth doubles the rewards: Muslim, aīh 15:8.
96. Ibn Māja 24:16; Ibn anbal 2:297, 427 f.; cf. Numbers Rabbah XI 7, trans., J. J. Slotki (London: Soncino, 1961), 442. The ridicule of mortal wives is expansive in the dialogues proposed in the ninth century Ismāīl b. Hayyān.
97. See Ibn Makhlūf, Kitāb al-Ulūm al-fākhira fī l-na
ar fī l-umur al-Ākhirah (Cairo, 1317 A.H.) 2:129. The use of rhyming titles in works of divinity is a small but characteristic touch marking the symbiosis of worldly charm with otherworldly intent.
98. Tirmidhī and Ibn Māja, from Abū Miqdam ibn Madī, quoted in Williams, Themes of Islamic Civilization, 259; and see EI s.v. “ūr.”
99. Charles Wendell, “The Denizens of Paradise,” Humaniora Islamica 2.29–59; Josef Horovitz, “Das koranische Paradies,” Scripta Universitatis atque Bibliothecae Hierosolymitanarum, Orientali et Judaica 1 (1923): 1–16, and “Die paradiesischen Jungfrauen im Koran,” Islamica 1 (1925): 543.
100. Asín Palacios, Islam and the Divine Comedy, 59–60, 70, 130–35.
101. See Northrup Frye, The Secular Scripture, 80, 173; 70. Balkafa is the restriction of inquiry made prominent in Islam by Amad b. anbal, from the Arabic bi-lā kayf, “not asking how.” See Wensinck, Muslim Creed, 85–86 and p. 64 in this volume.
102. Asín, Islam and the Divine Comedy, 55–56, 135. One recalls Soeur Sourire’s “Dominique,” popular in the 1960s, where saint’s companions in Paradise include “Platon, Goethe, Mallarmé”-one humanist’s harrowing of Hell.
103. See Henri Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabī (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969) 105–75; cf. my review, IJMES 2 (1971): 278–90.
104. Introducing his translation of The Mystical Poems of Ibn al-Fāri
, A. J. Arberry writes:
Here I would merely stress the close relationship between the images of profane and sacred love in Sufi literature. This correspondence is underlined by Ibn al-Fāri
in the free use he makes of quotations from or references to earlier, non-mystical poets . . . one ode is in effect composed in emulation of a poem by al-Mutanabbī . . . in another a qasīda of al-Buturī is recalled . . . the listener, already keyed up emotionally by the erotic imagery employed, and the passionate excitement of the mystical exercises, will surely have thrilled to recognize familiar lines and phrases torn from their original contexts and given a new and heightened significance in the transformation of material into spiritual beauty. (10–11)
The thrill may not always have been grateful; the effect can border on parody.
105. See Arberry, ed., The Mystical Poems of Ibn al-Fāri 81–5; Hamori, On the Art of Medieval Arabic Literature, 47–77.
106. See EI 3.790–99. H. A. R. Gibb calls Ibn azm’s K. al-Fi
al fī l-Milal wa l-Ahwā wa l-Nial the first known survey of comparative religion. He credits Islamic pluralism for stimulating such work; Arabic Literature, 114–15. But Ibn azm’s aim is to narrow not widen the range of options. He urges monotheism, Islam, and Zāhirism, refuting all other theories and schools. The Shīite, Murji’ite, Khārijite, and Mutazilite sects are treated as products of a Persian reaction to the pure spirit of Arab Islam. The four major Islamic legal schools are treated so harshly that few modern scholars express surprise at Ibn azm’s persecution or the burning of his books within his lifetime. Ibn Hazm himself was not of Arab or of Muslim background. He was the grandson of a Spanish convert who fabricated for himself the pedigree of a Persian mawlā family. His oeuvre includes a work on the merits of Andalusia and another on the genealogies of the Arabs. Like many another legitimist and romanticizer of authentic national genius, his relation to the nation of whom he spoke was more notional than genetic. His own powerful genius, in fact, was highly personal. Wensinck accurately calls him a “die hard,” but his style had and has many followers. One who need not fear their zeal might admire his scope and penetrating analytic intelligence. The attention to detail and drive for comprehensiveness of his writings typify the best of Arabic learned writing and make the Book of Religions and Sects worthy of Gibb’s encomium: “valuable and original.” Asharī’s impressively dispassionate Maqālāt al-Islāmiyyīn, by contrast, is purely a doxography, and it deals exclusively with Islamic theses.
107. Thaālibī’s witty catalogue essay Laā if al-Ma ārif (trans. Bosworth, 38) cites the devil as the first person to use qiyās, logical (or analogical) inference. He quotes Sufyān b. Uyayna and others, who ascribed to Iblīs the boastful inference that he, Satan, was better than Adam, being created from fire rather than earth. Whether the objection was to modus ponens or to analogical reasoning, there is some irony in the story, since the inference Sufyān draws from it, that one should beware of qiyās depends on both—analogy to generalize the case, and modus ponens to move from the generalization to the warning.
108. Ibn azm, The Ring of the Dove. For Ibn azm on impossibility, see K. al-Milal wa l-Nial (Baghdad: Muthanna, no date) 2.180–3. Ibn Arabī himself followed the 
āhirī madhhab in law. He incorporated Ibn azm’s concept of the āhir or external into his system as a counterpart to the inward dimension of the bāin or esoteric, against which Ibn azm had campaigned.
109. Gibb, Arabic Literature, 114. Gibb seems to ascribe Ibn azm’s work on love to a youthful phase in his thinking, as if it represented some separate current from his legal and theological work. The mood has surely changed but theologically the agenda is consistent.
110. Von Grunebaum, Medieval Islam, 256
111. Ibn azm, The Ring of the Dove, 17–18.
112. See Ibn al-Fāri, The Mystical Poems, 40–41.
113. Ibn al-Fāri, 45–50, cf. 77–78.
114. Ibn azm, The Ring of the Dove, 18. Ibn azm draws a leaf from the pages of the moderns here. Ibn Bassām, a Baghdad poet, lampooned a local singer whose favorite poetic measure was the Qifā nabki that opens the Mu allaqa of Imru al-Qays as well as another of his elegies. The sharp-tongued epigramist dubbed the singer “Goat’s Beard” and wrote lines urging him to “cut it short”—“may God not have mercy on Imru al-Qays.”
115. See Goldziher, The āhirīs, 24, 27–29, 104, 205–6; for a paradigmatic permission based on literalism, 40–41. Mundhir b. Saīd al-Ballūī (878/9–966), chief justice of Cordoba, who introduced āhirism into Spain, was a poet and an admirer of the love poetry of Umar b. Abī Rabīa. His student Amad b. Muammad al-Jasūr (931/2–1011), also a poet, is acknowledged by Ibn azm as his teacher; Gustave von Grunebaum JNES 11 (1952): 237.
116. See J. N. Bell, Love Theory in Later Hanbalite Islam, 26, cf. III. Ibn Dāūd’s adīth is a structural transformation of R. Gebihah’s gloss of Joshua 15:22 apud R. Ashi, Gittin 7a: “Whoever has cause of resentment against his fellow and holds his peace, He that abides for aye shall espouse his cause.”
117. See George Makdisi, “Ibn Taymiyya: A Sufi of the Qadiriyya Order,” AJAS 1:118–29, for Ibn Taymiyya’s own Sufi activities. The thrust of his efforts is clear in the tenor of his alliance with Abū l-Abbās al-Wāsitī, whom he called the Junayd of his age. Al-Wāsiī was, under Ibn Taymiyya’s influence, a moderating force in Sufism, a polemicist against pantheistic doctrines and a defender in Ibn Taymiyya’s struggle with other Sufis. He was also the teacher of Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya; Bell, 93.
118. Bell, Love Theory, 46–50, 56–60 ff., 84–91.
119. Ibid., 92–93.
120. Ibid., 97–100.
121. Ibid., 135–36.
122. Ibid., 100, 117; for Ibn al-Qayyim’s differences with Ibn azm, cf. 112.
123. Ibid. 136–38.
124. Giffen, The Theory of Profane Love among the Arabs, 40.
125. Bell, Love Theory, 183.
126. Giffen, Profane, 48.
127. See Ibn al-Nafīs, Al-Risālah al-Kāmiliyya, trans. Meyerhof and Schacht, 61, 65; cf. my review in Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 51 (1969): 219–21.
128. See Bell, Love Theory, 22, 182–3.
129. R. B. Serjeant, South Arabian Hunt, 6–9, 23, 31, 36, 38–39, etc.
130. Ibid., 14.
131. Ibid., 14, 19–20.
132. Their nonretractile claws, cranial shape, and loping stride, it is said, ally cheetahs with the canines. They are convergent with the cats by evolution, but closer genetically to the greyhound. See F. Viré, “Fahd,” EI 2.738–43.
133. Franz Rosenthal, The Herb; cf. my review in Middle East Journal 28 (1974) 86–87.
134. Charles Pellat, “al-Djidd wa l-Hazl,” EI 2.536.
135. It was T. E. Lawrence who said that there is no Arab art of parody. But he said it in introducing an anecdote about a jape of his own.
136. James Monroe, Hamadhānī, 31–37. M. C. Lyons gathers the materials of the Arabic popular story cycle in The Arabian Epic: Heroic and Oral Story-telling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). He ascribes Antar’s failure “to produce sympathy or interest in the West,” to his “monotonous invincibility.”
137. If the son’s appearance only a day after his father’s marriage is anachronism, it counts, as Monroe (p. 34) points out, as “a deliberate parody of sīra.” Otherwise, Bishr’s first bride was a “single mother.” As Frye notes, “realistic displacement is closely related to parody”; see The Secular Scripture, 37. Bishr’s willing acceptance of the boy as his own, by whichever bride, is matched only by Peter Sellars’ Inspector Cluzot, who blandly informs the court that his wife’s furs and jewels were of course attainable on a police inspector’s salary, since she is very careful with the housekeeping money. Bishr’s yielding to his son is a motif echoed in Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer’s Night. But the whole maqāma revels in ambiguity and incoherence like that used to mock the whodunit genre in Murder by Death.
138. The Balkh Encounter.
139. Mawālī are the converts to Islam from non-Arab populations, who sought social standing by affiliation as “clients” to Arab tribes.
140. Richard Ellmann, writing in Punch, April 17, 1985.
141. In the Lion Encounter and the Ru
āfa Encounter, respectively.
142. See Martin Green, Children of the Sun (New York: Basic Books, 1976), on the subject of uproarious, uncontrollable laughter and the practice of hoax, practical joking, fancy dress, costumes, disguises and of course, parodies.
143. A parallel from Hebrew belles lettres may help make the point. Some of the tales in Harīzī’s Takemoni are outright imitations of Hamadhānī. But chapter 22, “The Arab Astrologer,” tells a different sort of tale: A group of wild and headstrong Jewish youths test an itinerant astrologer, who is making an appearance in the city gates. When, the young men ask, will release come to the children of the oppressed race? Having no answer, the astrologer creates a diversion by angrily exposing the questioners as Jews who have impugned the authority of the state, by seeming to call for its apocalyptic overthrow. The youths are beaten by the mob and dragged before a magistrate, whose liberality and patience save their lives. He quietly frees them the next day. But the question remains unanswered: How long must the oppressed race suffer? And the subtext remains unspoken: That Israel will remain in durance as long as worldly natures rule the world. On the surface readers see that astrology has no answers for life’s deepest mysteries. But below the surface, the message is that Israel’s exile is among those mysteries, a question that has no answer. Liturgically, philosophically, even historically, that is a thesis that cannot be spoken. But the frame tale allows it to be understood, unvoiced.
144. Thaālibī, Laā’if al-Ma ārif, 63.
145. See p. 148, in this volume.
146. A Mamluk Boccaccio is found in the K. al-Zahr al-Anīq fī Lubūs wa l-Ta nīq, The Book of Delicate Blooms on Courting and Kissing, by Alī al-Baghdādī (fl. 1340–50). The author was among those charged with clearing up the estates of victims of the Black Death. His twenty-five bawdy stories of sly and deceiving women masks its intent under a flimsy veil of misogynist moralism. As modern critics remark, the moralism is a perfunctory and cosmetic passport for satire, often aimed at historic personages and the mores of the age, from hashish eating to fornication of all sorts. The work seems more to celebrate than deprecate the wiles of its women characters, typically at the expense of their boorish, concupisent, stupid, and avaricious menfolk. There’s more Breughel than Bosch here. See Robert Irwin, “Alī al-Baghdādī and the Joy of Mamluk Sex,” in Kennedy, ed., The Historiography of Islamic Egypt, 45–57.
147. Iliad 6:-232–36, tr. Richard Lattimore (Chicago. University of Chicago Press, 1951).
148. Northrup Frye, The Secular Scripture, 65, borrowing the taxonomy from Dante.
149. The Taxing Woman movies from Japan use a revenue agent’s inquiries to strip away the outward shell of false respectability and even sanctity that hides much crime and ugliness. The more conventional murder mysteries of the Erie Stanley Gardner or Agatha Christi variety use murder investigations in the same way: infidelities, blackmail, embezzlements, and betrayals come to light, often readily confessed, in the exigency of response to more serious charges. In this way the mystery becomes a vehicle of social commentary, often banal (since it trades upon, flatters, and indulges “what everyone knows”). Hamadhānī can be more incisive, since some of what he has to say would not more typically be said.
150. For nomadism as a kind of compulsive response to unstable times, Kraemer, Humanism, p. 24. Kraemer cites Robert Mandrou, Introduction to Modern France 1500–1640: An Essay in Historical Psychology, translated by R. E. Hallmark (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1976) 208–18; cf. 235–42 for other manifestations of instability.
151. See Bosworth, Banū Sāsān, 38–42, where many other ruses of beggars are cited, including false and self-inflicted mutilations, and ghazī speeches like those that Hamadhānī echoes. One Ibrāhīm b. Muammad al-Bayhaqī (fl. early tenth century) praises the beggar’s carefree life in his K. Maāsin wa l-Mawsāwī. The literature tells of a man who won gifts in 942 from Ikhshīd in Egypt by claiming that his amputated hand had been miraculously restored; see Mez, Renaissance of Islam, 31. In present day Gujrat, in Pakistan, a Sufi shrine offers healing with the aid of deformed women called chuchas, whose small heads and severe retardation are thought to mean that they are touched God. Criminals, well into the twentieth century, are reported to have used metal bands or masks to retard cranial growth to produce the deformity in kidnapped healthy children, sending these and other maimed victims out to beg. See New York Times, October 28, 2001.
152. Abdelfattah Kilito, Les Séances: Recits et codes culturels chez Hamadhani et Hariri (Paris: Sindbad, 1983) 248–59. The Margoliouth-Pellat article on arīrī in EI 3.221–22 speculates on the identity of the historic Abū Zayd, but that seems to me to miss the point. Authors often have a model in mind, but characters remain artifacts of fiction, and the closest model for arīrī’s work was the Maqāmāt of Hamadhānī. arīrī, as Robert Irwin points out, cited as a precedent for his fictional devices the Qurān’s resort to legends, which, like his own stories, had a moral purpose. Kennedy, ed., Historiography, 53.
153. See Bruce Lawrence’s introduction to Morals for the Heart, 22; Notes from a Distant Flute, 24. As Lawrence remarks, Niām al-Dīn’s stature was enhanced by his association with the great poets and historians of his day.
154. Abduh suppresses the story that constitutes most of the second half of the Ruāfa Encounter, as Prendergast puts it “on grounds of decency”; and Prendergast follows suit, but the story is intact in the MSS and translated in Khawam’s French version.
155. Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken, 1971), 78–141. Cf. my essay in JAL 19 (1988): 27–39.
156. Scholem, Messianic, 80.
157. Ibid., 80, 89.
158. Carl Petry in Hugh Kennedy, ed., The Historiography of Islamic Egypt, 170, and Karen Barkey, Bandits and Bureaucrats: The Ottoman Route to State Centralization (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 170.
159. See Mez, Renaissance, 67 n. 8. Mez remarks that the tablets, placed before the faithful so that their foreheads might touch them at each prostration, were still being sold in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
160. See Ibid., 31
1. For the translation movement, see my chapters in the Cambridge History of Arabic Literature, vols. 1 and 2, 1984, 1990.
2. See al-Asharī, Maqālāt al-Islāmiyyīn.
3. For the stand off between Stoic and Peripatetic ideas about logic, see Goodman, In Defense of Truth, chapter 1.
4. For the nature of Qurānic discourse and its exegesis, see Wansbrough, Quranic Studies; for the life and thought of the Prophet, Tor Andrae, Mohammed, the Man and his Faith.
5. See Qurān 53:19–30, the locus of the famous Satanic verses; cf. 22:52–54. Commenting on the Qurānic mention of Allāt, Manāt, and al-Uzza, three pagan goddesses with shrines near Mecca, Watt writes: “The story is that when these verses were first recited, Muammad was anxious to win over the pagan Meccans, and failed to notice when Satan introduced two (or three) further verses permitting intercession at these shrines. This story could hardly have been invented and gains support from sura 22 v. 52/1. At length Muammad realized the substitution, and received the continuing revelation as it now is in the the Qurān.” Watt, Companion to the Qurān, 245.
6. In the Qurān commentary published by the Saudi Royal office of The Presidency of Islamic Researches, Iftā’, Call and Guidance, 371–72, ad Qurān 6:100, we read: “Both the Qurān and the 
adīth describe the Jinn as a definite species of living beings. They are created out of fire and, like man, may believe or disbelieve, accept or reject guidance. The authoritative Islamic texts show that they are not merely a hidden force, or a spirit. They are personalized beings who enjoy a certain amount of free will and thus will be called to account.”
7. The credo known as Waīyat Abī anīfa, dated to ca. 825, affirms the uncreated Qurān; a letter of the caliph Ma’mūn from 833 rejects that doctrine as a vulgar and irrational confusion. But the tenet of faith was not without sophistication. For the old credo made careful use of the type/token distinction in identifying just what it was that was uncreated: not the individual copies or utterances or memories of the text, but God’s word itself. See A. J. Wensinck, The Muslim Creed, 77–78, 127, 151; J. R. T. M. Peters, God’s Created Speech; 2–5, 278–402. As Peters explains, the idea of the uncreated Qurān is not unrelated to Islamic notions of predestination, since it seems to require the predetermination at least of all the events mentioned in the scriptural text. Shīites may have favored Mutazilism in part because the doctrine of an uncreated Qurān left the future open and allowed for the possibility that not every event in history was a direct realization of God’s will.
8. Wensinck (Muslim Creed, 86) sees God’s word exalted in Ibn azm’s eternal Qurān and but downgraded in the created Qurān. I think that appraisal accepts a bit too dutifully Asharī’s polemical account; see K. al-Ibāna an Uūl al-Diyāna (Hyderabad: Dāirat al-Maārif al-Nizāmiyya, 1903), 33 ff., translated by Walter C. Klein (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1940), 47: “They [the Mutazilites and other voluntarists] maintain the createdness of the Qurān, thereby approximating the belief of their brethen among the polytheists, who said, ‘it is merely the word of a mortal’ (Qurān 74:25).” The actual stance of the Mutazilites was a reaction against attempts to make the Logos a person of the Trinity. The traditionalists were less worried about such ploys but eager to give cosmic stature to God’s word. The issue certainly helped them to define their differences with the Mutazilites and thus to create a sense of (embattled) orthodoxy. But note Fārābī’s qualifications to the immutability of words, as opposed to principles. For Fārābī and Asharī are contemporaries.
9. Brannon Wheeler, Applying the Canon in Islam, 1.
10. Ibid., 13.
11. Ibid., 14–15.
12. See Goodman, God of Abraham, 203–10.
13. See Goodman, Avicenna, 123–49.
14. Majid Fakhry, Ethical Theories in Islam, 13; cf. Toshihiko Izutsu, Ethico-Religious Concepts in the Qurān, 207–11.
15. I render alā ubbihi, in keeping with the traditional Islamic understanding, as “out of love for Him,” rather than, “however cherished” as in Arberry.
16. Izutsu, Ethico-Religious, 184.
17. See for example Isaiah 58.
18. Izutsu, Ethico-Religious, 65–67, 76–83.
19. Ibid., 53, 58–63; cf. 45–52, 55–58, which cites numerous poetic expressions of the Jāhiliyya ethos.
20. Ibid., 86–104.
21. See Ibid., 108–16.
22. Ibid., 119–55.
23. See Watt, Free Will and Predestination in Early Islam. For the Qurānic backgrounds to kalām discussions of responsibility and accountability, see Hourani, Reason and Tradition in Islamic Ethics, 23–48 and Fakhry, Ethical Theories in Islam, 14–21.
24. See Joseph Schacht, Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence, 58–81 and Wensinck, Concordance et Indices de la Tradition Musulmane.
25. We cited many of these in chapter 1, in exploring the interactions of the sacred and the secular.
26. As Reuben Levy showed in The Social Structure of Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), 194, the Muslim ideas of ma rūf and munkar, the acceptable and unacceptable, build on ancient foundations. It does no good to gloss these ideas etymologically in terms of what is familiar, “approved” or accepted (see Fakhry, Ethical Theories in Islam, 12). For neither the pre-Islamic norm nor the Qurānic command urged people to do what was accepted but rather what was acceptable. If there was a moral revolution in Islam it was about what was and was not acceptable. Cf. Izutsu, Ethico-Religious, 213–17.
27. Michael Cook, Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought, 6, gives numerous citations for the adith, from collections including Ibn Hanbal, Ibn Māja, Bukhārī, Tirmidhī, Nasā’ī, and others.
28. Ibid., 8–10.
29. Robert Worth, “The Deep Intellectual Roots of Islamic Terror,” New York Times, October 13, 2001.
30. Cook, Commanding Right, 87–97.
31. Ibid., 98–100.
32. Ibid., 101.
33. Ibid., 101–3.
34. Ibid., 139–41.
35. See Victor Makari, Ibn Taymiyyah’s Ethics, 140; Cook, Commanding Right, 153.
36. Makari, Ethics, 141.
37. Ibid., 127–31.
38. Cook, Commanding Right, 153–55.
39. Ibid., 165–92.
40. New York Times, August 7, 2001.
41. Cook, Commanding Right, 344.
42. Ibid., 345–46.
43. See Ibn Abdūn, in John Williams, ed., Themes of Islamic Civilization.
44. Sarakhsī was stripped of his wealth, beaten, imprisoned, and left to die in disgrace. See Franz Rosenthal, Ahmad b. at-Tayyib as-Sarahsi (New Haven: AOS, 1943), 23–25. The historian Maqrīzī was also a mutasib; see p. 197, this volume.
45. See George Hourani, Islamic Rationalism: the Ethics of Abd al-Jabbar, and my review in The Middle East Journal 25 (1971): 543–45.
46. Hourani defends Mutazilite objectivism as a pertinent reading of the Qurān, Reason and Tradition in Islamic Ethics, 15–48; cf. 67–108; Fakhry, Ethical Theories in Islam, 14–58.
47. For the political overtones and undertow of kalām discussions, see Watt, The Formative Period of Islamic Thought, and EI 4.368–72.
48. See Watt, The Formative Period of Islamic Thought, 304–6.
49. See Eric Ormsby, Theodicy in Islamic Thought.
50. See Goodman, God of Abraham, 240–42.
51. Dennis Overbye, “How Islamic Scholars Won and Lost the World Lead in Science,” New York Times, October 30, 2001; cf. Pervez Hoodbhoy, Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality (London: Zed Books, 1991).
52. Saadiah’s critique of Asharism and adaptation of Mutazilism emerges brilliantly in his exegesis of the Book of Job; he assigns the Asharite view, that God may do as He pleases, to the as yet unenligthened Job. See Saadiah’s Book of Theodicy.
53. See Asharī, K. al-Luma, 93.
54. Asharī’s vivid exposition of his theory of action is contained in his Kitāb al-Luma. For Ghazālī’s inference that one cannot pry open a man’s heart to test his sincerity, see Iyā Ulūm al-Dīn, xxxv 2 (Cairo, 1967), 4.305–6.
55. For Sufi theory and practice, see ujwiri, Kashf al-Majūb; J. S. Trimmingham, The Sufi Orders in Islam; for inbisāt, R. C. Zaehner, Mysticism, Sacred and Profane.
56. Ghazālī, Iyā, 4.305.
57. See Margaret Smith, Al-Muhasibi; A. H. Abdel-Kader, Al-Junayd.
58. Qūt al-Qulūb (Sustenance for Hearts) (Cairo: Mustafa al-Bābī al-alabī and Sons, 1961) 2.7, correcting the text according to the edition of 1310 A.H., 2.4. As Massignon remarks, Ghazālī copied “whole pages” of Makkī’s work in the Ihyā; see EI 1.153.
59. See Goodman, Crosspollinations, chapter 3.
60. For the history of philosophy in Islam, see Majid Fakhry’s A History of Islamic Philosophy, and Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Oliver Leaman, eds., History of Islamic Philosophy.
61. See Kindī’s “Essay on How to Banish Sorrow” and cf. p. 127, this volume.
62. See Goodman, Crosspollinations, chapter 2.
63. See Kraemer, Humanism and Philosophy; Roy Mottahedeh, Loyalty and Leadership; Adam Mez, Renaissance.
64. Thaālibī writes: “The Arabs used to call every delicately or curiously made vessel and such like, whatever its real origin, ‘Chinese,’ because finely-made things are a specialty of China. The designation ‘china’ has remained in use to this day for the celebrated type of dishes. In the past, as at the present time, the Chinese have been famous for the skill of their hands and for their expertise in fashioning rare and beautiful objects. The Chinese themselves say, ‘Except for us, the people of the world are all blind—unless one takes into account the people of Babylon, who are merely one-eyed.’” Latā’if al-Maārif, 141
65. Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, 171. And see Arkoun, Contribution.
66. Richard Walzer and Hamilton Gibb, Akhlāq, EI 1.325–29. Fakhry calls Miskawayh’s book “the most important ethical treatise of Islam.” Ethical Theories in Islam, 130.
67. Ansari, The Ethical Philosophy of Miskawayh, 16–17.
68. See Mohammed Arkoun, L’Humanisme Arabe au IVe/Xe Siècle, 63–64; Kraemer, Humanism, 20.
69. See Ansari, Miskawayh, 18.
70. Arkoun, L’Humanisme, 67–68.
71. Miskawayh, Tajārub, 5.237.
72. See Arkoun, L’Humanisme, 68–70.
73. Miskawayh, Tajārub, 5.431–32.
74. For Miskawayh’s history, see pp. 199–201, this volume.
75. F. E. Peters, Allah’s Commonwealth, 535. For Miskawayh’s career, 503–34.
76. See Goodman, Avicenna, 39, 51.
77. See Everett Rowson’s introduction to Āmirī’s K. al-Amad alā l-Abad in A Muslim Philosopher on the Soul and its Fate, 5.
78. See al-Āmirī, K. al-Amad alā l-Abad; Arkoun, L’Humanisme, 44.
79. Peters, Allah’s Commonwealth, 542.
80. In 932 Mattā debated the grammarian al-Sīrāfī (d. 979) over linguistic relativism versus universality in logic. Yayā pursued the matter in his Making Clear the Distinction, 38–50, 181–93. See Kraemer, Humanism, 110–14; Margoliouth, “The Discussion”; Mahdi, “Language and Logic”; Tawīdī, K. al-Hawāmil wa-l-Shawāmil, 265–66.
81. See Yayā b. Adī, Tahdhīb al-Akhlāq, ed. Muhammad Kurd Ali in Rasāil al-Bulaghā’. 3d ed. (Cairo: 1946), 517–18. The passage is quoted in Kraemer, Humanism, 115. Ibn Adī reveals here the ethical implications, or roots, of monopsychism.
82. Cf. Fārābī, Kitāb al-
urūf, 77–80; Walzer, Greek into Arabic, 33, 222; Kraemer, Humanism, 10, 115.
83. Saadiah, the contemporary of Abū Bishr, bridges the gap between an ethics of tendencies and an ethics of acts by the rabbinic expedient of making one’s ultimate salvation depend on the general tenor of one’s acts. See ED III Exordium, V 1, 4, IX 8.
84. NE V 6, 1134a17–23.
85. NE I 7, 1098a17–19; cf. Maimonides: “Every one of us is capable of growing as righteous as Moses or as wicked as Jeroboam.” Mishneh Torah, Laws of Repentance, V 1.2.
86. Indeed, Walzer and Gibb remark that “there are no specifically Christian ideas” to be found in Yayā’s Fī Tahdhīb al-Akhlaq; EI 1.328.
87. Ian Netton writes tentatively, “One may be forgiven for wondering whether Yayā’s pessimism about human nature does not reflect in some way the Christian theologians’ doctrine of original sin.” Al-Fārābī and His School, 59. But, if so, reason has become the immanent Logos.
88. Yayā b. Adī, Tahdhīb al-Akhlāq, On the Refinement of Character, ed. G. F. Awad (Cairo: al-Mabaa al-Miriyya al-Ahliyya 1913) 15–20, 55 ff.; Kraemer, Humanism, 101.
89. Miskawayh, Tahdhīb al-Akhlāq, 48; Miskawayh hedges (46–47) on whether these elements of the personality are properly called separate souls or faculties—quite rightly, since Plato, in the end, withdraws the idea that they are inevitably separate, allowing for their unity in an integrated personality; see Republic X 611.
90. See Kraemer, Humanism, 147. Ghazālī has it that God’s unity is “a bottomless and shoreless sea,” Iyā 35 bayān 2; cf. Plotinus’ image of the soul as unbounded, a net encompassing the sea, Enneads IV 3.9.11.
91. Kraemer, Humanism, vii.
92. Bosworth, Introduction to Thaālibī, 15.
93. Clifford E. Bosworth, in his introduction to The Laā’if al-Maārif of Thaālibī, 15.
94. Cf. Franz Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant, 284–87, 320.
95. Kraemer, Humanism, vii.
96. See Peters, Allah’s Commonwealth, 538. Miskawayh, was, after all, an expert on blended flavors. In his medical capacity he is credited with two works on diet—the one on cooking and another on beverages. See Ansari, Miskawayh, 20.
97. Miskawayh, Tahdhīb al-Akhlāq, 1, cited parenthetically in what follows, by page numbers in Constantine Zurayk’s translation, The Refinement of Character.
98. Cf. Miskawayh’s essay on pleasure, ed. Arkoun, 7–19, esp. 10–12; cf. Goodman, Jewish and Islamic Philosophy, 38–39.
99. Farābī, Mabādi Arā’, Fuūl.
100. The remark is offered as a paraphrase of Aristotle; see Sijistānī, Siwān, 333.
101. See Miskawayh, Kitāb Tartīb.
102. Dimitri Gutas, “Paul the Persian,” 232–33.
103. See W. F. R. Hardie, Aristotle’s Ethical Theory, 12–28, 336–57.
104. See Tūsī, The Nasīrian Ethics.
105. See Walzer, Greek into Arabic, 220–35; Abul Quasem, The Ethics of al-Ghazālī and “Al-Ghazālī’s Rejection of Philosophic Ethics”; Sherif, Ghazali’s Theory of Virtue.
106. See G. Hourani, Reason and Tradition in Islamic Ethics, 136.
107. See Ghazālī’s Mishkāt al-Anwār, The Light verse is quoted in the introductory chapter, p. 25.
108. Abul Quasem, “Al-Ghazālī’s Rejection,” 119–120
109. R. Walzer, in EI 1.328.
110. Sherif, Ghazālī, 72, and Ghazālī, Maqad.
111. See Goodman, Crosspollinations, 70–76.
112. Watt (in Muslim Intellectual, 67–68) argues that Ghazālī must have abandoned virtue ethics after experimenting with it in The Criterion of Action (Mizān al-Amal, lit., “The “Scale of Practice”)—a work whose authenticity he questions in whole or part. But cf. Wensinck, La Pensée, ch. 2. It is true that Ghazālī questions the universal adequacy of the model of virtue as choosing a mean between extremes. But so does Aristotle. Ghazālī also questions the adequacy of reason in locating the mean. But he never rejects the idea of the mean. His understanding that this idea is Qurānic undergirds his decision to make virtue ethics the backbone of the moral scheme of the Iyā. His insistence on grace should not blind us to his recognition that scriptural deontology is not an end in itself but a means to human felicity in this world and the next. Even at the height of his paeans to Sufi surrender, in the celebrated discussion of tawakkul or ultimate trust in God (Iyā XXXV), the core and kernel of piety is found not in specific behavioral acts but in what they reveal and foster in our hearts. Behaviors, whose paradigm is lip service to the demands of faith, are, as we have seen, the mere “husk of the husk.” But this manner of structuring values is virtue ethics, and its source in Ghazālī is Miskawayh’s Aristotelian reading of the Qurān.
113. See Sherif, Ghazali’s Theory of Virtue, 99.
114. Ibid., 185.
115. See Hamori, On the Art of Medieval Arabic Literature, 11, 23.
116. See Sherif, Ghazali, 183 and Ghazālī, Al-Maqad al-Asnā.
117. See Al-Munqidh min al-Dalāl, in The Faith and Practice of al-Ghazālī, 56.
118. Mohammed Arkoun, “Miskawayh,” EI 7.144.
1. Bashshār b. Burd, Diwān, ed. M. Tahir b. Ashur (Cairo: Matbaat Lajnat al-Talīf wa l-Tarjama wa l-Nashr, 1950–57), 1.242, l. 5
2. J. R. T. M. Peters, God’s Created Speech, 109.
3. Jāi, Tria Opuscula, ed. G. van Vloten (Leiden: Brill, 1903) 102 l. 12.
4. Dimashqī, Kitāb Nubat al-Dahr fī Ajāib al-Barr wa l-Bar, ed. A. F. Mehren (St. Petersburg: Académie Imperiale des Sciences, 1866), 78.
5. Ibn Rushd, TT, ed. Bouyges, 21 l. 6.
6. Aristotle, Kitāb al-āthār al-ulwīya, translated by Yayā ibn al-Birīq in the eighth century, ed. A.-R. Badawi (Beirut: Université Saint-Joseph, 1967), 92 l. 4.
7. Presidency of Islamic Researches, Holy Qurān . . . Commentary, 1148, n. 3421.
8. For Ghazālī’s reading of the Qurānic “Lā awla wa lā quwwa illā billāh!” (“No might and no power but in God”), see Iyā xxxv.2.1 (Cairo, 1310 A.H.) 4.200 ff.
9. Maimonides, Guide I 73, and Goodman, Rambam, 124–55.
10. Asharī, Kitāb al-Luma, 76–81.
11. See Aristotle, Metaphysics I 4, 985a 18.
12. Galen, Compendium Timaei Platonis, 3–5. The Arabic text derives from the work of unayn ibn Isāq, the Nestorian Christian translator of philosophical and medical works, who catalogues some 129 Galenic works that he and his immediate followers translated from Greek into Arabic, typically via a Syriac intermediary version.
13. Abd al-Jabbār, Muī 1.55–56; cf. J. R. T. M. Peters, God’s Created Speech, 112–13; Ghazālī, Jerusalem Letter, tr. Tibawi, 98–99. Juwaynī had proposed contingency as the basis of our knowledge of creation, and Ghazālī argued along those lines in Fadāi. al-Bāiniyya, 80–81, but seems to have abandoned the argument in view of its potential for an Avicennan, eternalist reading; see Juwaynī, K. al-Irshād, ed. Luciani, ch. 4 and pp. 2, 106. As Ghazālī explains, assuming the world to be eternal, there is no absurdity in an infinite succession of causes and effects; TF, Discussion 4, ed. Marmura, 80–81; Goodman, “Ghazālī’s Argument from Creation,” 75–77, and Avicenna, ch. 2, esp. p. 86.
14. Kindī, On First Philosophy, 73.
15. Kindī, “Essay on How to Banish Sorrow.”
16. Kindī, First Philosophy, 65.
17. Ibid., 67.
18. Ibid., 84.
19. See L. E. Goodman, “The Translation of Greek Materials into Arabic,” 482. Ptolemy flourished in second century Alexandria.
20. Rāzī, “Munāarāt,” in Opera, ed. Kraus, 308; Goodman trans., 96–97. For Rāzī’s philosophy, see Goodman, Crosspollinations, ch. 2.
21. Rāzī, “Munāzarāt,” in Opera, ed. Kraus, 309–10.
22. Ibid., 311–12.
23. See Goodman, “Rāzī’s Myth of the Fall of the Soul.”
24. See Rāzī, “Munāzarāt,” in Opera, ed. Kraus, 295–300.
25. See Fārābī, “Against John the Grammarian.”
26. See p. 151, this volume.
27. Alexander of Aphrodisias, De Anima, 88–89; Herbert Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, on Intellect, 20, 30. As we read in Fārābī’s Arā: “Alexander the Commentator, says that Aristotle’s view entails that the Active Intellect governs not just man but sublunary physical bodies too, with the support of the celestial bodies. For the celestial bodies impart only motion. The Active Intellect imparts the forms that orient those motions” (54); the translation here is my own.
28. Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, on Intellect, 45.
29. Ibid., 47–48; cf. 33.
30. Fārābī, Maqālah fī aghrā mā ba d al-tabīah, trans., in “Le Traite dal-Fārābī sur les buts de la Metaphysique d’Aristote,” Bulletin de Philosophie Médiéval 24 (1982): 43.
31. Fārābī, On De Interpretatione, 9, 98.
32. See Ibid., 9, and Goodman, “Al-Fārābī’s Modalities.”
33. For my own development of the idea of universal deserts, see On Justice, God of Abraham, and Judaism, Human Rights and Human Values.
34. See Goodman, Avicenna, chapter 2.
35. Like so much else in Avicenna, the approach came from Fārābī; in this case, from his distinction between what is contingent in itself and what is necessary in relation to its posited conditions. The relationship was first pointed out to me by my friend Alfred Ivry. See Fārābī On De Interpretatione, 9 and Goodman, “Al-Fārābī’s Modalities.”
36. Cf. Richard Frank; “It has long been recognized that while al-Ghazālī rejected some major theses of the Avicennan system he appropriated others. What we have seen on a closer examination of what he has to say concerning God’s relation to the cosmos as its creator, however, reveals that from a theological standpoint most of the theses which he rejected are relatively tame and inconsequential compared to some of those in which he follows the philosopher.” Creation and the Cosmic System: Al-Ghazālī and Avicenna (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1992) 86; cf. M. E. Marmura, “Ghazalian Causes in Intermediaries,” JAOS 115 (1995): 89–100.
37. See Ghazālī, Maqāid al-Falāsifa, 144–46. Ghazālī is not the wholehearted defender of naturalism and free will that Maimonides is. Theologically, Maimonides builds on Ghazālī’s work and moderates it. But what Maimonides seems to find most useful here is Ghazālī’s rejection of the extreme occasionalism that is sometimes equated with the Asharite position. Ghazālī has the objector to his first proposed response find in it muhālāt shanīa, that is, outrageous absurdities—material rather than formal absurdities, to be sure, but monstrous nonetheless. So when Ghazālī proposes an escape or way out (khalā) of these difficulties in his second proposed reply, he is not just calling them vilifications but charges of absurdity. The objections are not just name-calling but challenges that deserve a serious answer. Ghazālī seems to enjoy detailing them, and their content suggests why, for the objections echo Asharī’s account of the extreme occasionalism of Sālih Qubba and Abū usayn al-ālihī; see Maqālāt al-Islāmiyyīn 309–11, 406–7, and Goodman, “Did Ghazali Deny Causality?” Ghazālī wants to address the charge that extreme occasionalism renders nature and experience incoherent. He concedes that sheer voluntarism (as regards God) would leave one never knowing what to expect:
Someone who put down a book in the house might find when he returned that it had turned into a bright young servant lad going about his duties, or into an animal. Or if he left a servant at home, he would have to allow that he might have changed into a dog; or if he left ashes, they might turn into musk, or stone to gold, or gold to stone. If asked about any of these things one would have to say, “I have no idea what’s in my house right now. All I know is that I left a book there, but perhaps by now it’s a horse and has spattered my library with its dung and staling. I left ajar of water, but perhaps it’s turned into an apple tree. For God can do anything. And a horse need not be created from sperm, or a tree from seed, or from anything at all. And things might have been created that never existed before.” So one should be hesitant on seeing someone one had never laid eyes on before, if asked whether this person had a mother, and should answer: “It’s conceivable that one of the fruits in the market turned into a man and this is he. For God can do anything possible, and this is possible. So there’s no way of avoiding hesitation in such matters.”
Ghazālī’s second response avoids the difficulties of extreme occasionalism by relying on an Asharite appeal to divine custom. God gives us habits of mind that match His custom; and He can prepare prophets for exceptions to the familiar course of events. Ghazālī goes on to deny that God can do the impossible. Among his paradigm cases of the impossible: bilocation, the combination of black and white, and the transformation of one genus into another—the color black into a cooking pot. Most tellingly, Ghazālī concedes that even miraculous changes must pass through the stages of natural transformation (although God may accelerate those phases far beyond our normal expectations). All of these assertions acknowledge the embeddedness of logic in the fabric of nature. For Ghazālī accepts the idea that the characteristics of things come to them “through their principles,” the forms, whether imparted directly by God or by the angels (the Philosophers’ Form Giver). He draws the line by insisting that this (divine) imparting of forms must be volitional, not a matter of necessity. To all of this we must add that we can hardly fail to note how utterly ordinary Ghazālī’s views on causality and the theory of action become in most of the ethical contexts discussed in our chapter 2.
38. TF, Discussion 17.
39. See Goodman, Rambam, 183–204; God of Abraham, chapter 8.
40. Averroes wrote works specifically calling out Fārābī’s and Avicenna’s departures, respectively, from the logic and metaphysics of Aristotle; see Fakhry, History of Islamic Philosophy, 273.
41. Étienne Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, 80.
42. Fakhry, History, 349–50.
43. Franz Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant, 21.
44. Wan Mohd Nor Wan Daud, The Concept of Knowledge in Islam, 34.
45. “Heat and passion,” might better convey the force of the Arabic. The King Fahd Qurān renders: “The Unbelievers / Got up in their hearts / Heat and cant—the heat / And cant of Ignorance.” Arberry has: “When the unbelievers set in their hearts fierceness, the fierceness of pagandom.” As Watt notes in his Companion to the Qurān, ad loc., the verses are traditionally assigned to the time of the udaybiyya pact of 628, when the Prophet was testing his adversaries in Mecca by demanding entry to the city to offer sacrifice at the Kaba. For more on the term Jāhiliyya, see Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant, 33–35; Izutsu, The Structure of Ethical Terms in the Koran; Mohd, 76–79.
46. For the scriptural nexus, see Kassis, Concordance of the Qurān, 239–54.
47. The poets are Bishr ibn Abī Khāzim and Nābighah al-Dhubyānī, both of the latter half of the sixth century; see Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant, 14, 17.
48. Jacob Landau, A Word Count of Modern Arabic Prose (New York: American Council of Learned Societies, 1959), 70, s.v. akīm.
49. For a contemporary cognitivist/experiential account of Islamic mysticism, see Mehdi Ha’iri Yazdi, The Principles of Epistemology in Islamic Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992).
50. See Hamadhānī, Rasāil, ed. Yusra Abd al-Ghani Abdullah (Beirut: Catholic Press, 1987) and the discussion in Wadad al-Qadi, “Badī al-Zamān al-Hamadhānī and his Social and Political Vision,” in Mir, ed., Arabic and Islamic Studies in Honor of James A. Bellamy, 197–223.
51. Hamadhānī’s outlook as a critic is voiced in the Poesy Encounter, and spelled out at many places in the Rasāil.
52. Hamadhānī’s patrons at Rayy were the wazīr Sāib b. Abbād and the amīr, Fakhr al-Dawla, who took him on as tutor to his son. Sāhib, a Shīite and passionate Mutazilite, appointed the Sunnite Mutazilite Abd al-Jabbār as Qā
ī of Rayy. See Rowson, “Religion and Politics in the Career of . . . Hamadhānī,” 654.
53. In the career of Mamūd of Ghazna (r. 998–1030), worldliness contests the claims of the spiritual in military and political rather than literary terms. This ruthless conqueror assembled the largest of the many Islamic empires. Presenting himself as a champion of Islam, he prized the learning and the arts of this world but saw them not as ends in themselves but as means of self-aggrandizement. He executed and oppressed heretics and sectaries but also made sectarians his allies of convenience. He persecuted Mutazilites but also the orthodox scholar Ibn Fūrak, whom he may have poisoned when the learned traditionist seemed to press too closely the ruler’s Karrāmite allies. His blood-soaked campaigns carried the sword and banner of Islam deep into India. But many of his foot soldiers and elephant men were pagans, and his raids and pillaging against Shiites and Hindus were prompted more by rapacity than by any sincere religious faith. Booty from the temples of India enriched the mosques of Ghaznā—but also adorned the ruler’s palaces and sustained his bureaucracy and the powerful, multiethnic professional army that was the engine of his conquests. See C. E. Bosworth, EI 6.65 and The Ghaznavids.
54. Thaālibī, Laāif al-Maārif, 45, traces to the days of the Rāshidūn caliphs the first acts of bribery, graft, and oppression under Islam. The oppression, it was said, began with attendants’ shouting “get out of the road” when the caliph passed.
55. Ikhwān al-afā, Rasāil, 1.390–403.
56. For a generous survey of kalām and allied definitions and general descriptions of knowledge, see Rosenthal, Knowledge Trimphant, 46–69.
57. See J. R. T. M. Peters, God’s Created Speech, 40–104
58. For Abd al-Jabbār’s ethical intuitionism, see G. Hourani, Islamic Rationalism, 3, 22, 31–34. For a (somewhat subdued) Jewish parallel to the Mutazilite reliance on self-knowledge as an assurance of moral probity, see Saadiah’s Book of Theodicy, 128; cf. 229 n. 22, 292 n.11
59. For the Stoic plenum and Cartesian hydrostatics, see Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 84–89, 159–67, etc.
60. Tirmidhī, quoted by Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant, 68.
61. Here I follow the old Oxford translation of J. A. Smith, which seems to me clearer than the Barnes version.
62. Posterior Analytics II 19, 100a 4–14; cf. Goodman, In Defense of Truth, ch. 5.
63. Plotinus, Risāla fī Ilm, ed. Abdurrahman Badawi in Plotinus apud Arabes (Cairo: Dirāsat Islāmiyya, 1955) 168; see Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes on the Intellect, 24.
64. See ad De Anima 430a 10–12, in “Philoponus” On Aristotle’s On the Soul 3.1–8, trans. William Charlton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), p. 114 § 30. Charlton ascribes this work not to Philoponus but to a later sixth century author, Stephanus of Alexandria. Our second citation comes from the commentary thought to be the work of Philoponus himself and preserved in Latin: Le commentaire de Jean Philopon sur le troisième livre du Traité de l’âme: Traduction de Guillaume de Moerbeke, ed., G. Verbeke (Louvain: Publications Universitaires de Louvain, 1966) P. 44 § 25.
65. See J. Finnegan, ed., “Texte arabe du Peri Nou d’Alexandre d’Aphrodise,” Melanges de l’Université Saint Joseph 33 (1956): 157–202, see 186–87, 189, 194, Jean Jolivet, L’Intellect selon Kindī (Leiden: Brill, 1971) 38.
66. See Kindī, Risāla fī l-Aql, ed. McCarthy, 122–24; trans. Jolivet, 1–6.
67. “Statement on the Soul Abstracted from the Book of Aristotle and Plato and other Philosophers,” Rasāil al-Kindī, ed. M. Abu Rida (Cairo: Dār al-Fikr al-Arabī, 1953) vol. 1, p. 273.
68. See Kindī, On First Philosophy, 106.
69. See Fārābī, Risāla fī l-Aql, ed. M. Bouyges (Beirut: Catholic Press, 1948); translated by Arthur Hyman in A. Hyman and James Walsh, eds. Philosophy in the Middle Ages (New York: Harper and Row, 1967) 215–221.
70. Fārābī, Arā, 52, 54; the translation here is my own.
71. Emil Fackenheim, Philip Merlan, and others have suggested that in his “Essay on Love,” Avicenna at least temporarily made an exception to his outspoken rejections of the doctrine of “union” (ittihād). But, as I showed in Avicenna, 163–72, the suggestion rests on a mistranslation. Avicenna does not endorse ittiād but resolves the Sufi references to such union in terms of his own preferred idea of contact, ittiāl.
72. See Nabil Shehaby, The Propositional Logic of Avicenna (a translation from the Shifā: al-Qiyās) (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1973), 54–55.
73. See Ibn Sīnā, K. al-Ishārāt wa-l-Tanbīhāt, trans. Goichon, 56–59; cf. John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, book III, Chapter viii.
74. Avicenna, Najāt, 36–37.
75. Avicenna, Shifā, 248. Avicenna glosses the Qurānic Light Verse in terms of the emanative epistemology of the Active Intellect in K. al-Ishārāt wa-l-Tanbīhāt, tr. Goichon, 324–26. The effect is at once to naturalize the idea of inspiration and to re-enchant the conception of human knowledge.
76. Ibn Bājjah, Ittiāl al-Aql bi l-Insān (Man’s Contact with the Intellect), ed. Fakhry in Opera Metaphysica, 156; see Goodman, Crosspollinations, 108–14; cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics Zeta 4, 1030b 9, where the reference is to Homer’s Iliad rather than abarī’s History.
77. Ibn Tufayl, ayy Ibn Yaqzān, tr. Goodman, 150–55.
78. Maimonides, Guide 174, ed. Munk 1.121b. Pines writes, ad loc, that Maimonides here supports the idea of “the Unity of the Intellect” But the reference to Ibn Bājjah and others of his ilk suggests that Maimonides actually accepts Ibn Bājjah’s and Ibn ufayl’s Avicennan thesis that individuality is preserved within that unity.
79. Thomas quotes Averroes as follows: “per rationem concludo de necessitate quod intellectus est unus numero, firmiter tamen teneo oppositum per fidem,” that is: “By reason I infer that mind is arithmetically one, of necessity, although I firmly hold the opposite by faith.” Quoted in Friedrich Ueberweg, History of Philosophy from Thales to the Present Time, translated from the fourth German edition by G. S. Morris (New York: Scribners, 1890) 1.415. That firm confession of faith, an instance of the notorious doctrine of double truth, is not, in this instance, an admission of hesitancy about the conclusions to which reason has led the mind. On the contrary, it is a bracketing of the traditional view and of the familiar notion of that there are many minds, a bold acceptance of the seemingly paradoxical conclusion, and a rejection of the Avicennan style of Neoplatonic reconciliation of diversity within unity that Averroes’s courtly sponsor Ibn ufayl had championed.
80. Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, on Intellect, 315.
81. Ibid., 323:
Averroes may at first have been unsure about the possibility of the human intellect’s having the active intellect as an object of thought and conjoining with it. His Epitome of Aristotle’s Metaphysics exhibits skepticism about the possibility. . . . By contrast, an appendix to the Epitome of the De anima, Averroes’s Long Commentary on the De anima, his Long Commentary on the Metaphysics, and his three opuscules on conjunction all affirm the possibility of the twin phenomena. . . . once his initial hesitation passes, he tenaciously upholds the possibility of conjunction in some form or another. If it were legitimate to speak of dogmas in Averroes, the possibility of conjunction with the active intellect would rank high on the list.
Borrowing arguments from Alexander of Aphrodisias, Themistius, and Ibn Bājjah, Averroes works his way to the conclusion that “a time must come when the material intellect finally strips away every facet of plurality,” that has linked it to the physical. Now individuality disappears, and all minds unite in a single thought, focused on the Active Intellect, which they become. See Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, on Intellect, 325–27. What Davidson takes as hesitancy on Averroes’s part Ivry reads as an artifact of the philosopher’s tendency “to present the views of philosophers he respects so well as to appear often to be in agreement with them.” He sees a firm commitment in Averroes:
Following a common tradition which has its origins in Alexander of Aphrodisias, the Agent Intellect is accepted without question by Averroes as a separate celestial substance, functioning as a kind of guarantor for the intelligible nature of all forms on earth, including, and especially, the rational or intelligent faculty in humans. That faculty appears to be innate to human beings, but is in fact on loan, as it were, from the Agent Intellect. . . . the material intellect, which represents the potentiality for rational thinking, and as such is the first expression of this faculty in an individual, is connected “incidentally” (bi l- ara) to the human soul, belonging “essentially” to the universal Agent Intellect. The material intellect is thus a temporary instantiation of that eternal and always actual intellect, our “first perfection”; even as the Agent Intellect is our ultimate perfection or “final form.”
Alfred Ivry, citing Ibn Rushd’s Middle Commentary on the De Anima in “Averroes’ Three Commentaries on De Anima,” 204–5.
82. Ibn Mutazz (861–908), quoted by Ghazālī, in Munqidh, 61, and in turn in Ibn ufayl, Hayy Ibn Yaq
ān, 96. The context, in both cases, is a hedging effort against the immanentism of drunken Sufism. The thoughts of Ibn Mutazz no doubt lay elsewhere. The poet, an Abbāsid pretender, was kept at a remove from power, writing poems of wine and love. He celebrated the restoration of Abbāsid fortunes when his cousin Mutaid became caliph. But when proclaimed caliph himself, after the dethroning of Muqtadir, he was abandoned by his guards and strangled. He is remembered in history as “caliph for a day.”
83. Ghazālī, Mishkāt al-Anwār, 118–19.
84. James W. Morris proposes that “all of Ibn Arabī’s writing (and the Futūāt in particular) are best seen as a single vast commentary on spiritual dimensions of the Qurān and adīth.” See Morris’s “Ibn Arabī’s ‘Esotericism’: The Problem of Spiritual Authority,” Studia Islamica, 71 (1990); and for case studies of Ibn Arabī’s method, “The Spiritual Ascenscion: Ibn Arabī and the Mirāj,” JAOS 107 (1987): 629–52; 108 (1988): 63–77.
85. Ghazālī, Munqidh, tr. Watt, 65–67, 80–81.
86. Ghazālī, Munqidh, ed. Jabre, 55.
1. See Margoliouth, Lectures on Arabic Historians.
2. See Franz Rosenthal, A History of Muslim Historiography, 19–20, 66. Baruch Halpern in The First Historians shows in detail how the prose narrative of Judges 4 is dependent on the poetry of Deborah’s Song, Judges 5. In a more general vein he also argues effectively against the dehistoricizing nisus of some versions of the notion that the Bible should be read as literature. He criticizes, as an artifact of the criticalstratigraphic method, the conception of a “redactor” whose only function seems to be to introduce inconsistencies, redundancies, and other apparent glitches into the scriptural text. The “redactor” in such a case, Halpern argues, becomes not just a bumbler but a mere convenience, a methodological wastebasket, into which unassimilated textual residues may be tossed.
3. This az, as placed here, is a particle about which volumes of homilies have been written. See, for openers, Judah Goldin, The Song at the Sea: Being a Commentary on a Commentary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971).
4. Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, 8; cf. note 115 below.
5. Besides Rosenthal, see W. Caskel, “Aijam al-Arab,” Islamica 3 (1931): 1–99; G. Widengren, “On the Early Prose Narratives in Arabic,” Acta Orientalia 23 (1955): 232–62.
6. Cyrus Gordon, “The Background to Jewish Studies in the Bible and in the Ancient East,” Shofar 12 (1991): 5.
7. Genesis 4:17 gives an alternative genealogy for Enoch and suggests that this culture hero was the first to build cities. The double genealogies for figures like Enoch and Lamech show how hard linearity is to establish and maintain.
8. See Rosenthal, Historiography, 22. The text of Genesis calls attention to the fact that Noah in Hebrew means rest and connotes contentment.
9. For the impact of Jonathan’s message warning David to flee, see my comments, In Defense of Truth, 137–38.
10. Margoliouth, Historians, 55. For efforts to penetrate partisan back-projections and detect the superimposed structures of preexisting topoi in Islamic historiography, see J. Wansbrough, The Sectarian Milieu; E. L. Petersen, Alī and Muāwiya in Early Arabic Tradition; Albrecht Noth, Quellenkritische Studien zu Themen, Formen und Tendenzen frühislamiser Geschichtsüberlieferung (Bonn: Selbstverlag des Orientalischen Seminars der Universität Bonn, 1973).
11. See Franz Rosenthal, ed., The History of al-Tabarī, vol. 1, From the Creation to the Flood (Albany: State University of New York, 1989), 370–71. Masūdī marks a similar watershed when he distinguishes, in effect, between sacred history and the events recorded in the annals of the nations of the world; see Shboul, Al-Mas ūdī, 125.
12. See William Graham, Beyond the Written Word, e.g., p. 4: “in most major religious traditions, sacred texts were transmitted orally in the first place and written down only relatively recently.” Yet a religious tradition will not become “major” as intended here, without the use of writing. Orality tends to the diffuse and variegated. It is writtenness that makes the Ten Commandments canonical and public, and publication that gives canonical status to L. Ron Hubbard’s works on Dianetics. Only compare the disarray of, say, the Branch Davidians. Mormon missionaries do work with individuals face to face, but the faith they spread is founded and kept uniform not by orality but by its scripture. Even the rather diffuse militia movement in the United States gains its sense of common identity, common grievance, and common strategy from widely circulated manuals, exposes, internet appeals, and works of fiction. A fortiori the plans of al-Qāida, and the rationales meant to give them warrant.
13. See Dunlop, Arab Civilization, 70.
14. E. L. Petersen, Alī and Mu awiya, 17–18.
15. See EI 10.910–13; A. A. Duri, The Rise of Historical Writing among the Arabs, 25–26. Even in his hadīths, Urwah is rather casual about isnāds. The demand for rigor here was not yet strenuous. On isnāds and unreliability, see Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena zur ältesten Geschichte des Islams, in Skizzen und Vorarbeiten (Berlin: Reimer, 1884–99) 6.4.
16. Duri, The Rise of Historical Writing among the Arabs, 27–29.
17. Ibid., 30.
18. See Joseph Schacht, “On Mūsā b. Uqba’s Kitāb al-Maghāzī,” Acta Orientaba 21 (1953) 288–300. The surviving fragments of b. Uqba’s work are translated in Guillaume’s rendering of Ibn Isāq, The Life of Muhammad, xliii–xlvii; cf. Franz Rosenthal, Historiography 130–31.
19. See Dunlop, Arab Civilization, 71;
20. Carl H. Becker, Papyri Schott-Reinhardt (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1906), vol. 1.
21. A rule for the use of hadīth materials ordains: “adīthū an banī Isrāīl, wala araja.” What is couched here as a permission of Israelite materials is sometimes taken to allow only stories about Israelites, rather than traditions borne by them; see Kister, Studies in Jahiliyya and Early Islam, 215–39.
22. George Vajda, EI 4.212. Omar Dashti’s In Search of Omar Khayyam, trans. L. P. Elwell-Sutton (London: Allen Unwin, 1971), finds that the canon of Omar Khayyam served similarly as a repository, in his case, of materials deemed suitably cynical.
23. Duri, Historical Writing, 30–32.
24. Gibb, “Tarikh,” in Studies on the Civilization of Islam, 109.
25. Duri, Historical Writing, 36. Amad ibn anbal rejected adīths reported by Ibn Ishāq precisely on the grounds of their use of the collective isnād: “I see him relating a single adīth on the authority of a group of people, without distinguishing the words of one from those of another” (Tanbīh 9.43). But Ibn anbal did accept Ibn Isāq’s authority for the maghāzī. See EI 3.811b, s.n. Ibn Isāq.
26. Numerous stories circulate as to the reasons for the rejection of Ibn Isāq’s book, ranging from his dallying with women in the back of the mosque to his seeking information from Fāimah bint al-Zubayr. But most of these have long been known to be canards. See EI 3.810–11; and for Khaybar, 4.1138–39.
27. Muir’s comments, from the introduction to his 1912 Life of Mohammad are quoted in Dunlop, Arab Civilization, 73. See chapter 2, note 5 in this book.
28. Margoliouth, Historians, 52, 83; EI 1.760; al-Nadīm, Fihrist 1.197; Rosenthal, Historiography, 89.
29. Duri, Historical Writing, 46, 154–55. Gibb (“Tarikh,” p. 112) notes that a caliphal history is ascribed to Ibn Isāq, but adds that “it seems to have been a short and summary work.”
30. See D. M. Dunlop, Arab Civilization, 79; Margoliouth, Historians, 82.
31. Dunlop, Arab Civilization, 73.
32. Duri, Historical Writing, 37–38.
33. Margoliouth, Historians, 92–94.
34. Dunlop, Arab Civilization, 73–76.
35. See Ursula Sezgin, EI 5.946–48, and for Mawilī, J. W. Fück, EI 4.110–11.
36. See Nadim, Fihrist, 79, 202, 220.
37. See Duri, Historical Writing, 56–57, EI 1.158.
38. Duri, Historical Writing, 47; cf. EI 7.1015.
39. For Ibn al-Kalbī see EI 4.495–96; for the anecdote, Ibn Abd Rabbihi (d. 940), Al-Iqd al-Farīd, ed. Ahmad Amin (Cairo: Lajnat al-Talīf wa l-Tarjama, 1940); cf. Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, 103.
40. Rosenthal, Historiography, 79, 508; Nadim, Fihrist, 250.
41. Shboul, Al-Mas ūdī, 231–32; Khalidi, Islamic Historiography, 23; Dunlop, Arabic Civilization, 117. Sijistānī’s paragraph on the wise sayings of Thucydides, is found in his Siwān al-ikma, § 133 in D. M. Dunlop’s edition of the Muntakhab (The Hague: Mouton, 1979), 84.
42. Rosenthal, Historiography, 138.
43. Ibid., 138.
44. Cf. Gibb, Arabic Literature, 59.
45. Gibb’s bias is evident when (p. 116) he traces the origins of Arabic universal history to Balādhurī, mentioning that he worked to a plan sketched out by Ibn Isāq. He speaks puristically of Ibn Isāq, acknowledging that he was a mawlā “of Mesopotamian origin” but insisting that “it would be absurd to look for any but the most indirect Persian influences in the conception” of his work, contrasting its “true Arabian” inspiration, with the fancies of Wahb (112), and neglecting to mention that Ibn Isāq’s scheme is rooted in the Qurān’s own biblical vision of history. Gibb disparages Persian, Syriac, Jewish, and Christian historical materials as filled with legends, that “found a way, under cover of Koranic exposition, into Arabic history” (117). He contrasts with these the spirit of adīth: “For, during its apprenticeship to the science of adīth, the native credulousness and romanticism of Arabic memories of the past had been schooled by a certain empiricism and respect for critical standards” (117). And he praises abarī for steering clear of such “intrusive elements”—excepting the Persian materials and the matter of adīth, and somehow overlooking his acknowledgment of abarī’s reliance on Wahb (109, 118).
46. See Rosenthal, Historiography, 137–38. “The Muslim chroniclers have much to say of the war on the frontiers; the Muslim geographers have ample information, probably drawn ultimately from secret service files, on the topography, administration, and strength of the enemy Empire, and even of the scandals of its court and capital. But at no time did they attempt to consult Greek historical sources, or to deal in a connected form with the history of the Greek Empire.” Bernard Lewis, “The Use by Muslim Historians of Non-Muslim Sources,” in Lewis and Holt, Historians, 181.
47. Rosenthal, Historiography, 76.
48. Ibid., 77.
49. Peters, Allah’s Commonwealth, 258, n. 33. For Romanus here we should probably understand Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus. Romanus I reigned 919–44, and Romanus II, 959–63. Constantine VII held the throne from 913 to 919 and again from 944 to 959.
50. Rosenthal, Historiography, 80–81.
51. Gibb, “Tarikh,” in Studies on the Civilization of Islam, 114.
52. Rosenthal, Historiography, 81.
53. See Gibb, “Tarikh,” in Studies on the Civilization of Islam, 115.
54. Ibid., 118.
55. The work seems to survive in rather garbled form, in the recension of the originator’s nephew, who was blind, see EI 3.927.
56. See Rina Drori, “Cultural Authority in the Making: ‘Expertise in Poetry,’ paper presented at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies, Jerusalem, summer, 1995
57. Petersen, Alī and Muāwyia, 17.
58. See Muhsin Mahdi, Ibn Khaldūn’s Philosophy of History, 134–35; Khalidi, Islamic Historiography, 48, 54.
59. Dunlop, Arab Civilizations, 84.
60. See the translation by P. K. Hitti and F. C. Murgotten, The Origins of the Islamic State (New York: AMS, 1968).
61. See EI 1.971b–972.
62. See Margoliouth, Historians, 50, 119.
63. Lichtenstadter, “Muslim Historiography,” in Introduction, 55.
64. Duri, Historical Writing, 63; Margoliouth, Historians, 116.
65. See Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, 60.
66. Ibid., 61.
67. For reflections on the historicity of the Esther story, see Carey A. Moore, The Anchor Bible Esther (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971).
68. Herodotus (I 12) cites Archilochus (fragment 14) for the mention of Gyges, much as the Biblical text cites ancient sayings and poetry as proof-texts. But to Archilochus, Gyges is a mere archetype of greed, lust for power, the misguided human desire to be divine, which Archilochus would make the foil of his own more modest appetites and less astral, if no less ardent passions. Plato, redirecting the older uses of the tale and perhaps egged on by dislike for current Lydian policy, turns the story of Gyges’s usurpation into an object lesson typifying the difference (long obscured by the Sophists) between external success and genuine virtue. Plato is stimulated not only by the tragic irony of Socrates’ virtue misrewarded by the Athenians but also by the benefactions Gyges left at Delphi (Herodotus, I 13), which underlie Plato’s allusions (Republic II 364) to the specious notion that wicked men can buy their way to good repute and a blessed life in the hereafter. Plato universalizes his response to demand a revision of religion and mythology at least as radical as the reforms he proposed for politics and society. Plato’s delegitimation of Gyges’s Lydian heirs is paralleled in a story retailed by Safadī on the failure of two cunning Mamluk power brokers to win the sultanate. Safadī pictures the two (speaking in colloquial Arabic!) acknowledging that neither is a true Mamluk, since both had been peddlars who had sold one another into that powerful caste of warrior slaves. See Nasser Rabbat in Hugh Kennedy, ed., Historiography of Islamic Egypt, 72. As Rabbat writes, Safadī spoke fluent Turkish but sought an air of familiarity by reporting the conversation in a rough and low-class Arabic, to convey an impression of familiarity and “to signify the uncouth and uncultivated” manners of the Mamluks, much as “Hollywood films have German, Asian, or Arab villains speak in broken English to show their villainy” (74). The high-flown literary expressions interspersed in the same fanciful dialogue, we might add, would have a comic effect, like the overcautious diction of the gangsters in Guys and Dolls.
69. Thus the Mu allaqa of Imru al-Qays, in section “Dunyā and Dīn” of chapter 1 of this book; and see Goldziher’s “Muruwwa and Din” in Muslim Studies, 1.11–44.
70. For the biblical uses of irony, see Edwin Marshall Good, Irony in the Old Testament (London: SPCK, 1965).
71. Acts 17:22–26. See the discussion in Merkley, The Greek and Hebrew Origins of our Idea of History, 28.
72. See Ikhwān al-afā, The Case of the Animals vs Man, tr. Goodman, 53, 54, 118, 124–25, 145, 197.
73. See God of Abraham, chapter 1.
74. See Peters, Allah’s Commonwealth, 348.
75. Rosenthal, Historiography, 80.
76. Lichtenstadter, “Muslim Historiography,” in Introduction, 52
77. See Peters, Allah’s Commonwealth, 258.
78. Khalidi, Islamic Historiography, 29.
79. See Margoliouth, Historiography, 125–26.
80. Jāi too combined a belief in the possibility of progress with an appreciation of the contributions of past civilizations: “We have attained greater wisdom than they, and those who come after will gain greater wisdom than we.” K. al-ayawān, 1.86, cited in Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, 108.
81. See D. M. Dunlop, Arab Civilization, 87–88.
82. See Margoliouth, Historians, 112.
83. Khalidi, Islamic Historiography, 126
84. Bīrūnī, like Saadiah and Dīnawarī, is critically interested in synchronizing historical data from diverse sources. Thus his use of Seleucid dates, which jibes with his expertise in astronomy, geodesy, matters calendrical, and cross-cultural. Rosenthal remarks,
The presentation of pre-Islamic history by Muslim historians. . . . met with the great technical handicap that the Muslims never invented a system of time-reckoning for the pre-Islamic period. . . . All references to other eras, such as that of the creation of the world or the Seleucid era, are merely incidental in Muslim literature and entered through the works consulted, which were either Christian works or works on chronology such as that of al-Bīrūnī. . . . Whenever a correlation of hijrah dates and pre-Islamic dates is attempted, as, for instance, in connection with the establishment of the lifetime of Galen, Christian influence is unmistakable (p. 90).
85. Duri, Historical Writing, 159.
86. Ibid., 69.
87. Margoliouth, Historians, 23–25, 61–62.
88. Khalidi, Islamic Historiography, 24; see also 82. Dīnawarī too keeps his Shīite sympathies out of his account of the Abbāsid revolution, perhaps hoping for a reconciliation of moderate Shīites with the Abbāsids. For he was employed by al-Muwaffaq, the energetic brother and vice-regent of Mu tamid. See Petersen, Alī and Muāwiya, 168–73.
89. See the State University of New York Press translation of its volumes, by many hands.
90. See Dunlop, Arab Civilization, 92.
91. Rosenthal, Historiography, 135.
92. See Margoliouth, Historians, 128, 130.
93. Ibid., 110.
94. The printed text runs to thirty volumes in the 1903 Cairo edition. For the story of the scale of the original project, see Margoliouth, Historians, 103.
95. See P. K. Hitti, History of the Arabs (London: Macmillan, 1956), 390–91.
96. F. E. Peters, Allah’s Commonwealth, 258.
97. Tabarī, Tarīkh al-Rusul wa l-Mulūk, ed. M. J. de Goeje (Leiden: Brill, 1879–1901) 1.6–7, translated here after Humphreys, Islamic History, 73–74, and Rosenthal, Historiography, 170
98. See Mahdi, Ibn Khaldūn, 135–36. Qiyās, reasoning, meant the syllogism in philosophy, and analogical argument in law. The fear was that it would prove suppositious and opinion-laden.
99. Bosworth reports that Tabarī’s “debates and altercations” with Abū Bakr M. b. Dāūd “took place on a level of courtesy and mutual respect.” But the Hanbalites were “belligerent and uncompromising.” That school, as Bosworth explains, “was at this time struggling to carve a niche for itself alongside the existing three main madhāhib and its advocates were pugnacious and often unscrupulous, being ready to whip up the mindless Baghdad mob”—although abarī himself had always regarded the founder of the school with respect and had come to Baghdad to study with him. His break with the anbalīs centered on his treating the founder as “essentially a adīth scholar and not a jurist.” But it declined into a dispute over a Qurānic verse that the anbalites held to reveal that the Prophet was seated literally on God’s throne. abarī discussed that view at length in his Qurān commentary and in the end seems to have rejected the authority of the tradition on which the literal interpretation rested. See EI 10–12. The militant anbalite preacher Barbahārī, who hounded the presumed heretics of Baghdad for twenty years, so persecuted Tabarī that he had to be buried secretly in the courtyard of his home; see Kraemer, Humanism, 61; Cook, Commanding Right, 116.
100. See Shboul, Al-Mas ūdī, 34.
101. Qifī, quoted in Rosenthal, Historiography, 81. Ibn Khallikān agrees with Qiftī’s estimate as to quality, calling abarī’s History the soundest and most reliable work of its kind. See Dunlop, Arab Civilization, 89.
102. Rosenthal, Historiography, 134–35.
103. F. E. Peters, Allah’s Commonwealth, 258.
104. abarī is perhaps aided in his quest for intellectual independence and objectivity as he understands it by his inherited wealth. His father, who had encouraged his scholarly proclivities from an early age was a wealthy land owner, and the son lived on the rents brought to him annually from his estates in abaristan. See Margoliouth, Historians, 16.
105. Ibn Bājjah, Opera Metaphysica, 155–73. The parallel argument in Aristotle mentions Homer, as we have noted. See chapter 3 of this book, note 76 and Goodman, Crosspollinations, 109–14.
106. See Khalidi, Islamic Historiography, 3
107. See Petersen, Alī and Muāwiya, 16.
108. Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, 73.
109. Ibid., 74.
110. EI 3.724; cf. Dunlop, Arabic Civilization, 129–30.
111. Lichtenstadter, “Muslim Historiography,” in Introduction, 55.
112. Margoliouth, Historians, 16.
113. See Fakhry, Ethical Theories in Islam, 16.
114. For Avicenna’s reports of his father’s Shīite interests and their intellectual impact, see Goodman, Avicenna, 12. Bosworth vouches for abarī’s orthodoxy in EI 10.12. Kraemer relates the suspicions lodged against the philosophers for Ismāīlī sympathies: Humanism, 87. Āmirī was a student of Balkhī’s, who was a geographer as well as a philosopher and himself a student of Kindī’s.
115. As John Wansbrough writes in the opening passage of Quranic Studies, 1:
Once separated from an extensive corpus of prophetical logia, the Islamic revelation became scripture. . . . By the very achievement of canonicity the document of revelation was assured a kind of independence, both of historical traditions commonly adduced to explain its existence and of external criteria recruited to facilitate its understanding. . . . Both formally and conceptually, Muslim scripture drew upon a traditional stock of monotheistic imagery, which may be described as schemata of revelation. . . . originally narrative material was reduced almost invariably to a series of discrete and parabolic utterances.
116. See Henry Malter, Saadia Gaon: His Life and Works (1921. Reprint. New York: Hermon Press, 1969), 171–73. For the earliest Greek efforts at synchronic history, see J. B. Bury, The Ancient Greek Historians (1908. Reprint. New York: Dover, 1958), chapter 1; and see Herodotus, II 145.
117. See the discussion in Rosenthal, Historiography, 139.
118. See Judah Halevi’s Kuzari, and my discussion in Leaman and Frank, History of Jewish Philosophy, 188–227; Ibn Dāūd, The Book of Tradition.
119. See Saadiah, The Book of Theodicy, 224, n. 1; 409, n. 7.
120. ED III 6, Saadiah, trans. Kafih, 130; trans. Rosenblatt, 155.
121. Makkot 10b, Shabbat 104a, Yoma 39a, Berakhot 7a, Sanhedrin 27b; Saadiah on Leviticus 26:39, at Job 21:19; cf. Proverbs 11:3, 11; Goodman, On Justice, 137–38. For “preambles,” see Plato, Laws 4.719–23. As Jowett summarizes the point: “The legislator will teach as well as command; and with this view he will prefix preambles to his principal laws.” Collected Dialogues of Plato, 4th ed., vol. 4, p. 53. For sanctions, see Plato, Laws 6.782–83, 7.793–94, 9.853–54.
122. It is in this vein that Eugene Garver reads Aristotle’s hoste paradeigmatos at Rhetoric I 5, 1360b 7–8: not, “for the sake of giving an example,” but “taken as an example,” or words to that effect. The point, as Garver reads the passage, is not that we are to consider happiness, or various notions thereof, for example, but that happiness is made an example in rhetoric, so that people, an audience, a public, can visualize the impact of the choices they must make. Thus the relevance of Aristotle’s remarks at the close of chapter 4:
It is useful, in framing laws, not only to study the past history of one’s own country, in order to understand which constitution is desirable for it now, but also to have a knowledge of the constitutions of other nations, and so to learn for what kinds of nation the various kinds of constitution are suited. From this we can see that books of travel are useful aids to legislation, since from these we may learn the laws and customs of different races. The deliberative speaker will also find the researches of historians useful. But all this is the business of political science and not of rhetoric.
Cf. Rhetoric I 8–9, and see the discussion in Eugene Garver, Aristotle’s Rhetoric: An Art of Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) 86–87.
123. For the birth of the Eisagoge literature as a genre, see F. E. Peters, Aristotle and the Arabs (New York: New York University Press, 1968), 79–87.
124. For Bīrūnī, see EI 1.1236–38.
125. Masūdī knows the work of Kindī and of his disciple Sarakhsī. He shows particular interest in their geographical ideas but cites their work on logic too. He also seems at points to echo Fārābī. As for Rāzī, whom he met and is said to have debated on the topic of cosmogony, Masūdī describes him as a Pythagorean, perhaps in reference to Rāzī’s atomism. He calls Fārābī’s disciple Yayā ibn Adī the only person he knew after Fārābī’s death who could really be relied upon in matters philosophical. See Shboul, Al-Mas ūdī, 42–43, 64.
126. El 6.784b. Khalidi remarks, Islamic Historiography, 94: “The heritage of Greece in science and philosophy is more in evidence in the works of Masūdī than that of any other ancient nation. Masūdī had extensive knowledge of Greek works in the various branches of science and quotes these works frequently in his extant writings.” Masūdī himself lists eighty-five authors in the unusual bibliographic introduction to his Murūj al-Dhahab and notes that he does not mention the works consulted whose authors were anonymous. He does not bother to cite “the histories of asāb al-adīth, and the books on the biographies of transmitters of adīths (asmā al-rijāl) which were too numerous to be listed,” and he gives short shrift to the traditionists in his biographical/obituary notices as well, having little use for their methods and standards and less for their ideology. See Shboul, Al-Mas ūdī, 33, 37, 41.
127. For details on Masūdī’s topics, see Shboul, Al-Mas ūdī, 56–76.
128. Ibid., 69, 78, 82.
129. For Masūdī’s interest in habitats, see ibid., 65.
130. Khalidi, Islamic Historiography, 5–9.
131. See ibid., 100–101.
132. See ibid., 32.
133. For Masūdī’s travels, see Shboul, Al-Mas ūdī, 6–9; for his secondhand knowledge of Byzantium, 15. For Paris, Dunlop, Arab Civilization, 104
134. See ibid., Al-Mas ūdī, 74–75.
135. See ibid., 41, 56.
136. See ibid., 107. Masūdī specifies, for example, that he gathered information from Zoroastrian “mobedhs, herbedhs, and other knowledgeable men.” He shows familiarity with the Zendavesta and other Avestan texts, some of which appear to have been accessible to him in Arabic translation.
137. Ibid., 108.
138. Ibid., 98–99. Masūdī seems to know two or possibly three Arabic translations of the Hebrew Bible (ibid., 287). His testimony helps confirm the view that Saadiah composed his Arabic writings in Arabic rather than Hebrew characters.
139. For the title and focus of the Tanbīh, see ibid., 75–77. For its correction of errors, confusions and overly popular data in the earlier works, see ibid., e.g., 114–18.
140. Dunlop, Arabic Civilization, 107–8.
141. Shboul, Al-Mas ūdī, xxv.
142. Ibid., 72.
143. Dunlop, Arab Civilization, 101
144. His writings in jurisprudence, for example, included titles like Nam al-Adilla fī Uūl al-Milla (The Organization, or System, of Arguments on the Principles of the Religion) and Nam al-A lām fī Uūl al-Akām (The Organization of Guideposts on the Foundations of Judicial Rulings). See Shboul, Al-Mas ūdī, 57.
145. Ibid., 66.
146. See ibid., 70.
147. Translated after ibid., 80.
148. See Khalidi, Islamic Historiography, 34–35; and for Saadiah’s standards, L. E. Goodman, “Saadiah Gaon’s Interpretive Technique in Translating the Book of Job,” in D. M. Goldenberg, ed., Translation of Scripture (Philadelphia: Annenberg Research Institute, 1990), JQR supplement, 47–76.
149. Masūdī seems to know of the use of the compass, which Arab travelers gleaned from Chinese sailors as early as the eighth century. See EI 5.1168b-69a, s.v. Maghnāīs.
150. Khalidi, Historiography, 36–45. Ibn Khaldūn takes Masūdī to task for accepting 600,000 as the number of Moses’s fighting force, apparently not knowing that this is the biblical figure. He faults him again for offering no more than traditional genetic accounts (from Galen and Kindī) to explain the supposed levity of blacks—where Ibn Khaldūn himself will offer an environmental explanation. All in all, he finds Masūdī too dependent on his sources. But the brunt of the criticism arises in a demand for greater consistency: Masūdī should have hewn more strictly to the standards that he himself had set out.
151. The idea that revelation answers to a vital human need, of course, echoes a core Mutazilite thesis.
152. See Shboul, Al-Mas ūdī, 101. See chapter 2, note 6 in this book.
153. See Shboul, Al-Mas ūdī, 103, 113–19.
154. See Khalidi, Islamic Historiography, 85–87.
155. See R. Popkin, Isaac La Peyrère (1596–1676): His Life, Work, and Influence (Leiden: Brill, 1987), and my review, JHP 29 (1991): 131–35.
156. Masūdī finds in Ardashir the very model of Plato’s philosopher king, making him, indeed, Plato’s disciple; see Khalidi, Islamic Historiography, 22, 92; for the idealization of Sassanian Persia by Muslim writers, see E. I. J. Rosenthal, Political Thought in Medieval Islam, 75. The principles of centralized power and bureaucratized decision making that Masūdī idealizes are exactly what Aristotle rejects when he makes the Persian mode of government the antitype of his own ideal of free and independent poleis in which the citizens actively participate in the deliberative life of the body politic. In the Politics, a book that was not translated into Arabic, Aristotle gives religion an almost recreational role (See Politics VII 9, 1329a 26–34; 12, 1331b 4–6) and assigns to music, drama and the arts the ethos-building and sustaining functions that Plato had seemed (to Muslim authors from Fārābī to Ibn ufayl) to entrust to religion.
157. The Ikhwān al-afā gently parallel Masūdī’s ethnic typing when they describe their ideal man, in the passage quoted in the introduction of this book, p. 24. Cf. Condorcet’s notion that every era has its own intellectual virtue and has its own cultural contribution to make. Hegel combines the typing of ages with that of nations, urging that every civilization has its proper theme and era.
158. Masūdī is probably influenced by the cultic preoccupations of the so-called Nabataean Agriculture of Ibn Washiyya, which appeared in 904, if not by the stereotyping of Nabataeans as Syriac-speaking peasants.
159. See Shboul, Al-Mas ūdī, 120–22. For the tendency of writers to identify their own clime as the best, see Ikhwān al-Safā, The Case of the Animals vs Man, 120–21, 130. For the tendency to disparage “Nabataeans,” recall Hamadhānī’s punchline, cited in chapter 1 of this book, p. 71.
160. See Khalidi, Islamic Historiography, 89.
161. See ibid., 84–108, 116–19.
162. Shboul, Al-Mas ūdī, 114.
163. See Khalidi, Islamic Historiography, 60, 63; cf. 122.
164. See ibid., 70–71, 76–77, 107, 110–13, 128–31.
165. Sinān licensed some 860 physicians. His father was the famous Harrānian mathematician, philosopher and scientist Thābit b. Qurra (826–901), who came to Baghdad as a student of the Banū Mūsā, best known, perhaps, for their Book of Devices, with its designs for some one hundred ingenious machines. Thābit translated many works, including Apollonius’ Conies, now lost in the Greek original, and Nichomachus of Gerasa’s Introduction to Arithmetic. His pioneering mathematical astronomy placed theory ahead of observation, much as Sinān would do in history. See EI 10.428; 1.899, 7.640. unayn b. Isāq was another protege of the Banū Mūsā.
166. EI 5.330.
167. See Rosenthal, Historiography, 114–15.
168. EI 7.762.
169. Hamza al-Isfahānī wrote: “What Imru al-Qays was for the ancients, Abū Nuwās is for the moderns.” (MS Fāti
3773 fol. 7r, cited in EI 1.143b). See Hamori, On the Art of Medieval Arabic Literature; Khalidi, Islamic Historiography, 20–21.
170. Dunlop, Arabic Civilization, 114.
171. Ibid., 115–16.
172. Rosenthal, Historiography, 78–79; Peters Allah’s Commonwealth, 259.
173. R. Stephen Humphreys, Islamic History.
174. See ibid., 102–3.
175. Ibn Taghrī Birdī writes that Maqrīzī was so much the historian that his name became a byword. He does criticize his illustrious predecessor for occasional lapses of objectivity, as in blaming the sultan Barqūq for the introduction of three Mamluk disgraces: homosexuality, bribery, and sluggish markets—as though these were unknown earlier. See Amalia Levanoni, in Kennedy, ed., The Historiography of Islamic Egypt, 94, 102–3; cf. pp.104–5 for Maqrīzī’s sense of mission in exposing the abuses of his day. Maqrīzī’s disciple and shameless imitator Abū Hāmid al-Qudsī was often more down to earth, partly because of his keen spatial sense, architectural interests, and vivid pictorial representations of everyday realia, but partly because he was alienated from the elite ulama, who scorned him for his lack of subtlety and his tendency to borrow too freely from his sources; see Ulrich Haarmann in The Historiography of Islamic Egypt, 163–65.
176. See Maqrīzī Book of Contention and Strife, and Bosworth’s admirable introduction. For Maqrīzī’s historical writings, EI 6.193–94 and Dunlop, Arabic Civilization, 132–37.
177. Dunlop, Arabic Civilization, 135–36.
178. Maqrīzī’s analysis of these woes comes in his K. Ighāthat al-Umma bi-Kashf al-Ghumma, a Book in Succor of the Nation, Exposing its Distress, a work assembled in a single night, although, no doubt, from materials the author had at hand. See Dunlop, Arabic Civilization, 136.
179. Maqrīī, Book of Contention, 30.
180. Khalidi, Arabie Historical Thought, 171; and see D. M. Dunlop, Arabic Civilization, 123; Dominique Sourdel, Le Vizirat Abbaside le 749 à 936 (Damascus: Institut Français, 1959–60), 1.25; M. S. Khan “Miskawayh and Arabie Historiography,” JAOS 89 (1969): 710–30.
181. See Rosenthal, Historiography, 141–42.
182. See ibid., 30 ff.; cf. Maimonides, Guide I 2; and Aristotle, Poetics 9, 1451b 5; cf. 23, 1459a 22. Yet Aristotle does build the argument of his Politics from the matter of history, collated in such works of his as the Constitution of Athens.
183. C. E. Bosworth, in his introduction to The Laāif al-Ma’ārif of Tha ālibī, 12–13.
184. F. E. Peters, Allah’s Commonwealth, 534.
185. See, for example, the excursion into environmental racism that Miskawayh relies on, for want of a better anthropology, in K. Tahdhīb al-Akhlāq, tr. Zurayk, 42.
186. Kraemer, Humanism, 49 n. 54.
187. Miskawayh, K. Tajārub al-Umam, 4.30–36. Miskawayh’s treatment of the regime of Ibn al-Furāt is similarly pointed, but it points in the opposite direction.
188. See Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, 174–75.
189. Ibid., 171.
190. Margoliouth, Historians, 155.
191. Ibid., 151; EI 3.714.
192. EI 3.778a.
193. See EI 3.156a.
194. See Rosenthal, Historiography, 147.
195. See Ibn al-Athīr, al-Kāmil fī l-Ta rīkh, ed. C. J. Tornberg (Beirut: Dar Sadir, 1965–67).
196. Dunlop, Arabic Civilization, 120.
197. Boyle calls Rashīd al-Dīn “the first world historian.” The actual authorship of the work is disputed, since another scholar claimed it was plagiarized from him, and Rashīd al-Din clearly had assistance in compiling it; some portions were lifted bodily from the work of Juwaynī. See also D. O. Morgan, EI 8.443–44.
198. See Lewis and Holt, Historians of the Middle East, 183–84; Rosenthal, Historiography, 147–48.
199. See Arnold, Painting in Islam, 74–75, 93–94.
200. Dunlop, Arabic Civilization, 138; Fischel, Ibn Khaldūn in Egypt, 79.
201. Margoliouth, Historians, 1, 57. For the persistence of patterns described by Ibn Khaldūn, mutatis mutandis, into the modern era., see Ernest Gellner, “From Ibn Khaldūn to Karl Marx,” Political Quarterly 32 (1961): 386; Goodman, Crosspollinations, 236, n.108.
202. Rosenthal marks (Historiography, 89) a cyclical view of history in Arabic writing as early as Kindī; see Kindī’s Risālah fī mulk al-Arab, ed. O. Loth in Morgenländische Forschungen—Festschrift H. L. Fleischer (Leipzig, 1875 reprinted, Amsterdam: Philo, 1981); for other writers’ views on time and cyclicity, see Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, 118–22; Goodman, “Time in Islam.”
203. M. Talbi, EI 3.829.
204. As R. A. Nicholson writes, “No Muslim had ever taken a view at once so comprehensive and so philosophical; none had attempted to trace the deeply hidden causes of events, to expose the moral and spiritual forces at work beneath the surface, or to divine the immutable laws of national progress and decay.” A Literary History of the Arabs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957) 438–39. All the same, when it comes to the events of his own experience, the reign of Barqūq, he does not cite written sources but relies on firsthand knowledge, as Miskawayh had done.
205. R. Brunschvig, La Berbérie orientale sous les afsides des Origines à la fin du XV Siècle. (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1940–47), 2.385–93.
206. Qurān 12:111 calls the stories (qaās) of prior times a lesson (ibra) for those with hearts to understand, “no mere invented tale but confirmation of what stands before it, explicating all things, guidance and mercy to folk who believe.” For the general idea of ibra as a historical lesson, see Muhsin Mahdi, Ibn Khaldun, 68. For the parallels with biblical ideas of history, see Walter J. Fischel, “Ibn Khaldūn. On the Bible, Judaism and Jews,” Ignace Goldziher Memorial Volume 2.161; cf. L. A. Cook, Cambridge Ancient History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1924), 1.223; R. Flint, History of the Philosophy of History (Edinburgh: Blackwoods, 1893), 1.151–71.
207. Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, 222.
208. See Shboul, Al-Mas ūdī, 56.
209. Fischel, Ibn Khaldūn in Egypt, 71, 84–85, 93.
210. See Fischel, “Ibn Khaldūn on the Bible . . .”, 2.147–71; Ibn Khaldūn in Egypt, 109–55.
211. See p. 173, this volume; and see Fischel, Ibn Khaldūn in Egypt, 117–18; Dunlop, Arabic Civilization, 138. As Ibn Khaldun reports, Orosius was translated by the Christian “Qādī” of Cordova Qāsim b. Abagh in the reign of the Umayyad Caliph al-akam II al-Mustansir (d. 976).
212. For an extended elaboration of this theme, see Goodman, Crosspollinations, 201–39.
213. Khalidi, Islamic Historiography, 115; cf. 127, 133.
214. Translating after ibid., 129.
215. See Fischel, Ibn Khaldūn in Egypt, 88, 103.
216. See ibid., 98.
217. Readers of Umberto Eco should take note: Our medievals thought that the world could be read as a book; but I do not know of any who thought that it was a text.
218. See Fischel, Ibn Khaldūn in Egypt, 98–100; and see Franz Rosenthal’s Introduction to the Muqaddimah, lxiii.
219. See Khalidi, Islamic Historiography, 70–73. Ibn Khaldūn himself, however, is overwhelmed by the numbers of Tamerlane’s troops, which he saw at the siege of Damascus. Some estimate the number of his forces at 240,000 (including some 30,000 fighters), although others put the number as high as 800,000. Ibn Khaldūn declines an estimate but urges that one million would not be excessive.
220. Khalidi, Islamic Historiography, 77.
221. Meisami, Persian Historiography, 11.
222. Ibid., 11.
223. Ibid., 12.
224. See Fischel, Ibn Khaldūn in Egypt, 160.
225. Ibn Khaldūn, Muqaddimah, 1.173, 2.99, 134, 377; cf. Goodman, Crosspollinations, chapter 7. For Ibn Khaldūn’s delight in the efflorescence of civilization, witness his enthusiasm on arriving in Cairo in 1383; see Rosenthal, Introduction to the Muqaddimah, lviii.