In a recent issue of Āyīna-yi Pažūhish, there is a bibliographical article on a 15th century commentary on the works of al-ʿAllāma al-Ḥillī written by Najm al-Dīn Khiḍr b. Muḥammad al-Rāzī al-Ḥabalrūdī, which provides us with further evidence of the abiding and dominant nature of the theological school of al-Ḥilla in the pre-Safavid period as well as the uses of the shortish theological primer by al-Ḥillī entitled al-Bāb al-ḥādī ʿashar as a teaching text requiring glosses.
I first came across Ḥabalrūdī when I was writing an article on Sayyid Nūrullāh Shūshtarī (d. 1019/1610) and his polemics and I located the latter's work within cycles of polemics. In al-Ḥilla in 839/1435, he had written a work entitled al-Tawāḍīḥ (or al-Tawḍīḥ) al-anwār bi-l-ḥujaj al-wārida li-dafʿ shubhat al-Aʿwar (The Clarifying Lights through scriptural proofs warding off the objections of the One-Eyed) responding to the Ashʿarī anti-Shiʿi polemic al-Risāla al-muʿāriḍa fī-l-radd ʿalā l-rawāfiḍ (Refutation of the Rejectors) of Yūsuf b. Makhzūm al-Aʿwar al-Wāsiṭī. I then found a copy of the text in the British Library (Delhi Arabic 1953 - and there are copies of al-Aʿwar's works in manuscript there as well):
The text was published by the Marʿashī library in Qum and is available as a pdf here.
For a broader study of the ways in which Shiʿi scholars responded to polemics, it is worth reading Sayyid ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī (d. 1995) and his Mawqif al-shīʿa min hujūmāt al-khuṣūm.
We do not really know much about al-Ḥabalrūdī or even those to whom he missed licenses (ijāzāt). Ḥabalrūdī's family origins went back to Māzandarān although he seems to have been born and brought up in Najaf where he is said to have died - again some evidence for the importance of Najaf as a centre of Shiʿi learning for the school of al-Ḥilla in the Turkmen and Timurid periods. The famous bibliographer Āqā Buzurg al-Ṭihrānī suggested that his father Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad b. ʿAlī had been one of the students of Jamāl al-Din Abūʾl-ʿAbbās Ibn Fahd al-Ḥillī (d. 841/1437) in al-Ḥilla and in Najaf. Mīrzā ʿAbdallāh Afandī has an extensive entry on him praising his works in kalām especially but while identifying him as a contemporary of Jalāl al-Dīn Davānī (d. 908/1502) he also suggests that he was one of the court ʿulamāʾ of Shah Ismail the first Safavid ruler but there is no corroborating source for this.
One teacher of his whom we do know and which suggests that he first studied kalām, logic and philosophy in Shiraz is Sayyid Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad, the son of the renowned al-Sharīf ʿAlī al-Jurjānī. He was a well known teacher of the rational (as well as the occult) arts and famously rendered his father's Kubrā on logic into Arabic as Durrat al-manṭiq. In fact, the first work that Ḥabalrūdī wrote was a commentary Kāshif al-ḥaqāʾiq fī durrat al-manṭiq dated 823/1420.
He may well have encountered Davānī in Shiraz as well. He also wrote two further works on logic in that period: Jāmiʿ al-daqāʾiq and al-Qawānīn (although the latter does not seem to be extant).
He then seems to have moved to al-Ḥilla and Najaf, finally becoming the librarian at the shrine. There he began to write commentaries on the works of al-Ḥillī. Al-Taḥqīq al-mubīn fī sharḥ Nahj al-mustarshidīn was completed in 827/1424 in the Madrasa Zaynīya in al-Ḥilla. In 834/1430 he completed Jāmiʿ al-uṣūl fī sharḥ risālat al-fuṣūl of Ṭūsī in Najaf. Later he also wrote a short work on kalām Tuḥfat al-muttaqīn fī bayān uṣūl al-din which has been published:
There is also a good manuscript copy 8908 from the Majlis library in Tehran available online. Finally we have his commentary Jāmiʿ al-durar fī sharḥ bāb al-ḥādī ʿashar and its epitome Miftāḥ al-ghurar completed in 836/1432. There are plenty of extant copies of the epitome (over 70 in Iran and Iraq). Here is a still from MS Majlis 3150 of the latter:
Jāmiʿ al-durar itself is an extensive work and comes in a period in which there were a number of commentaries on al-Bāb al-ḥādī ʿashar. First there is the well known and published work of al-Miqdād al-Siyūrī (d. 826/1423) al-Nāfiʿ yawm al-ḥashr as well as the recently published commentary of the philosopher Ibn Abī Jumhūr al-Aḥsāʾī.
As is well known the original text of al-Ḥillī is divided into seven chapters: on the proof for the existence of God based on contingency (and the impossibility of an infinite regress of causes), on the positive attributes of God especially on knowledge and power (since they arise in many of the texts on the proof for the existence of God as significant corollaries), on negative attributes or the apophatic way of dealing with the divine nature, on divine justice and theodicy as well as an account of human agency, on prophecy, on the imamate, and on the return and the afterlife and eschatology. The section on the imamate just as the corresponding section in Ṭūsī's Tajrīd al-iʿtiqād and its commentaries tended to attract widespread commentary.
In Iran there are 6 manuscripts of the text including two from the lifetime of the author - MS Kitābkhāna-yi Gharb (Hamadan) 10343 and MS Marʿashī (Qum) 866. One hopes to see the edition of the text soon so that we can build up a better picture of the development of Imāmī kalām from the period of the initial school of al-Ḥilla and the work of Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī and his student al-ʿAllāma through to the further transformations in the Safavid period in the circle of Mīr Dāmād and Mullā Ṣadrā. Furthermore, given the recent judgments of Robert Wisnovsky and Tony Street that follow the earlier findings of Ahab Bdaiwi, it would be interesting to see the development of a Shiʿi school of logic, kalām and even Avicennism that culminated in the Shirazi thinkers in the immediate generation after Ḥabalrūdī. In that sense, Ḥabalrūdī becomes an important link in that chain from al-Ḥillī to the Dashtakīs through to the Iṣfahānī thinkers of the Safavid period.
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