Must we be pluralists? Some History

It seems as if alongside the question of violence and its legitimacy (and inevitability) the question of how religions relate to each other and tolerate the other has become one of the key issues of the day. Christian theologians for some time have been formulating a theology of religions, ranging from thorough pluralists to outright exclusivists. John Hick openly has espoused a radical form of pluralism predicated upon a Kantian distinction between the noumenal Real (or God as we normally call her) and a plethora of phenomenal 'reals', lived and historically embedded religions that seek to make sense of God. Since we can never know God as such, the ineffable mystery, we need to effect a humility before the unknown and hence forgo the certainty that often affect fundamentalist forms of faith. In our time when diversity and pluralism are clearly seen as moral goods - a position with some qualification with which I broadly agree - even some of the traditional institutions try to embrace change and come unstuck; one thinks of the odd situation somewhat recently of the Vatican endorsing a more pluralistic, far further than Vatican II form of universal salvation that even embraces atheists in their final destiny (and one feels a certain indignation on the part of atheists being dragged kicking and screaming into the Kingdom of Heaven), and almost immediately afterwards pulling back in favour of the comfort of extra ecclesiam nulla salus - the equivalent of a Muslim exclusivist's 'you will burn but that doesn't mean we cannot get along' form of 'ethical engagement'. 

Mohammad Khalil's Islam and the Fate of Others: the Salvation Question, a revised version of his Michigan doctoral dissertation, is a timely and modest work that deserves to be widely read, not just by those in Islamic studies and theology but also by those interested in current politics. It is modest because it downplays how radical his historical findings are whilst being quite aware of the significance of his case studies for our contemporary debates. Our everyday obsession with religion and politics that has punctuated life at least since 9/11 means that we often are asked about the nature of belief and its implications not least for the afterlife. The basic assumption that many people hold is that Islam (which Islam? who speaks for it?) is both a supercessionist and exclusivist faith, denying the validity of other traditions, not least the Abrahamic ones that went before and certainly denying the possibility of salvation and success in the afterlife for those who are not Muslim. However, while such a view may arise out of a simple and literalist reading of some scriptural texts, Khalil’s aim is to demonstrate that the scholarly and theological actuality over time is not so simple – and in fact, even some of the figures cited by proponents of violence and exclusion in the contemporary period do not fit the stereotype. Furthermore, such a view of Islam as a monolithic, exclusionary faith begs the question of how one might go about defining a Muslim. Some of these rather difficult questions are neatly sidestepped - one wishes for a more ambitious and bold Khalil sequel that will engage this. 

Khalil’s strategy is to interrogate many of the assumptions that we may hold including how we define our terms. One may argue that the very language of salvation and the question reveals a Protestant (or Western Christian) bias: the question arises as a response to the need to overcome the original sin in which all the children of Adam are born. Many Western Christian responses therefore develop the tripartite theory of final destination: exclusivists insist that salvation is only and only through Christ and the Church, inclusivists attempt to find space for the salvation of others through mechanisms such as arguing that godly people from other faiths will find salvation through the holy spirit acting through them, and pluralists defend the salvation of others. One might ask whether these three options are exhaustive and to what extent they extend to the study of all religious traditions. Since we cannot entirely re-invent our language of religion, at element of genuflection towards these categories is inevitable. Khalil argues that in fact within Islamic discourses there are notions of salvation and success in the afterlife that do not require us to accept the doctrine of original sin; furthermore, Islamic theologies recognise that the beginning of humans is a good and positive place in the presence of the divine and hence the end desired is a return to that primordial space. Khalil argues that the question of the final destination of non-Muslims (and indeed of different types of Muslims) is important because it reveals much about the nature of God and the nature of the afterlife. Two key sets of questions in this context are: how can a merciful God damn for all eternity those who refuse to believe in him and his communication to them? What does that say about Islamic notions of mercy? How does one square mercy with the basic consensus that some will be in paradise and some in hell in the afterlife? Second, if salvation is potentially universal because the Islamic kerygma is universal, then why do scriptural texts only identify some groups of people as the saved in the afterlife? Does soteriology actually reveals serious tensions between universalist claims and exclusivist realities in Islam? On one point, Khalil is very clear: one cannot distinguish ethical interaction from views on final destination – it is certainly problematic to damn the other for eternity and yet insist that such an opinion should not obviate harmonious co-existence!

The core of Khalil’s argument comprises four chapters on four thinkers over the ages who have addressed the question – and along the way he considers other views not least of contemporary Muslim academics especially in religious studies who have ventured to answer it as well. He does not spend much time justifying his selection – Ghazālī, Ibn ʿArabī, Ibn Taymiyya and Rashīd Riḍā – although he does say that they are all representative of major traditions and well known to Muslims across the world. So his selection is based on how different Muslims in the present see their traditions, and not based on those views that may or may not be the most intellectually and spiritually satisfying or rigorous. Each chapter is therefore a careful study in intellectual history paying close attention to text, and including along the way some other kindred thinkers whose example is cited in modern times – for example, the chapter on Ibn ʿArabī includes a short section on Mullā Ṣadrā (d. 1635), the famed Iranian Shiʿi thinker popular in Iranian scholastic circles. The first chapter on Ghazālī considers his works and concludes that he is a thinking inclusivist who considers damnation to be the exception. Despite being a Sufi – and the debate about what constitutes Ghazālī’s ‘real’ views – Khalil does not consider him to be a ‘closet universalist’. What is clear is that Ghazālī allows for the salvation of non-Muslims (and his definition of Muslim and heresy is one best followed through examining Frank Griffel’s work). In this way, Khalil’s work complements Sherman Jackson’s study of Fayṣal al-tafriqa and Moosa’s work on Ghazālī’s liminal theology. An excursus in this chapter considers the inclusivism of the Indian Sunni thinker Shāh Walī Allāh (d. 1762). While useful to find historical calques, this is a missed opportunity. Ghazālī as one would expect discusses other Abrahamic faiths – Khalil might have used Shāh Walī Allāh to consider the question of the salvation of non-Abrahamic believers such as Hindus and Buddhists which would have been a meaningful question in his Indian context. Being an Abrahamic inclusivist or pluralist is not the same as being an inclusivist or pluralist as such. What one does find in Shāh Walī Allāh that is of interest – echoing an earlier position of al-Bīrūnī and finding consonance in many modern inclusivists such as Muṭahharī (d. 1979) whom he mentions elsewhere is the notion that those who are stupid or ignorant of God’s message to them are absolved from the implications of their incorrect choices in this world. Muṭahharī's scheme clearly distinguished between the incapable (and unaware) and those who are perfectly cognisant of the truth but stubbornly deny it and hence live up to the name of kāfir. 

The second chapter on Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240) presents him as a quasi-universalist – and it is no accident that the most eloquent Muslim arguments in favour of universalism articulated by William Chittick and Reza Shah-Kazemi are grounded in an interpretation of his work. Ibn ʿArabī’s supercessionism is not in question; however, his insistence upon mercy for all is critical. In fact, the controversy over Ibn ʿArabī has much to do with his position on salvation not least because of his argument that punishment in hellfire is not eternal even if residing in the hellfire is eternal. This issue of eternity in the hellfire, with the concomitant question of whether Pharoah’s conversion to faith as he was drowning in the Red Sea was genuine and accepted by God, became the forum for serious debate in medieval and modern Islam. The excursus in this chapter is on Mullā Ṣadrā. While his espousal of Ibn ʿArabī’s position on the non-eternity of punishment is quite clear, much of the presentation of his ideas here, drawing upon Muhammad Rustom’s recent work are questionable. Mullā Ṣadrā’s Sufism is not so clear – without some clear definition of what that means – and he did not suffer opposition as presented here. One also wonders if the non-eternity of punishment means a universalism of final destination. The question is thus not resolved with respect to Mullā Ṣadrā.

The third chapter considers Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), the bête-noire of Islamic studies. Surprisingly, he turned out to be a universalist, accepting the non-eternity of punishment in hell (even if he opposed most of the metaphysics that justified it in Ibn ʿArabī). His student Ibn Qayyim followed him in this position. The excursus in this chapter is quite revealing because it demonstrates one of the pitfalls of Islamic studies and the need to address questions such as whether Islam advocates the salvation of others. Academics who are not Muslims and indeed not Muslim theologians often take it upon themselves to pronounce upon what constitutes a good Muslim or what the position is of Islam on a certain matter. The case that Khalil considers is the dispute between the Aḥmadī Mohammad Ali in his translation of the Qurʾan and James Robson, a professor and Qurʾan specialist at the University of Manchester in the early part of the twentieth century.

The final chapter on Rashīd Riḍā, the ‘founding’ figure of modern Salafī thought reveals a figure who advocates ‘interim inclusivism, ultimate universalism’. He tries to iron out historical difference and unsurprisingly advocates the position of Ibn Qayyim. In this chapter, Khalil considers some modern views – exclusivism thus turns out to be associated with Islamist thought not least Sayyid Quṭb (which will not surprise many although some may dispute it), many neo-traditionalist Muslims find their position along a spectrum of inclusivist positions, and pluralism attracts the likes of Farid Esack, Abdulaziz Sachedina and Abdol Karim Soroush (it is interesting that many advocates of pluralism in the contemporary period seem to come from a Shiʿi background but this is not discussed by Khalil). There is no excursus here – but the discussion of modern views fulfils that structural role in this chapter.

Two major points that one can take from the study are not only that Islamic discourses and theological traditions are diverse and multiple, and often eschew monolithic singular interpretations, but also that scripture despite the claims of some is neither clear nor unequivocal of some key issues such as those of eschatology and soteriology. A concomitant conclusion is that positions on salvation are not simply summarised as scripturalists favour exclusivism and Sufis favour pluralism. The book does need a conclusion – Khalil could have drawn together the conclusions of the study and also reflected upon what this entails for our contemporary discussions not least in current inter-faith contexts. In a sense, his edited volume Between Heaven and Hell(Oxford, 2013) does precisely that taking into consideration modern discussions across the spectrum. It would be fruitful reading this latter work as a companion alongside Khalil’s book. One problem with the discussions is that given the question being posed about non-Muslims, Khalil does not consider salvation in terms of Muslims: many of the thinkers that he considers may well have been more magnanimous to others than to those who also claimed to be Muslims. Ghazālī and Ibn Taymiyya anathemised different group of Shiʿi Muslims (and Ibn ʿArabī and Riḍā were not exactly philo-Shiʿi either) and thus one wonders in what sense one can safely describe them as universalists. Clearly for many Sunni thinkers in the past (and present) extra congregationem nulla salus holds true (ʿalayka bi-l-jamāʿa if you prefer). Nevertheless, Khalil has produced an excellent scholarly work that should be the starting point for those interested in Islamic discourses on salvation and one looks forward to further more theologically creative works that wish to take the debate further. 

It seems to me that any further debates which will arise from the Khalil book and collection need to start a process of rethinking: not only whether the tripartite options drawn from Christian theology of religion is adequate, but also how we might wish to distinguish between three types of problems: how do we reconcile rival truth claims? how do we allow for the salvation of different traditions with different accounts of truth and soteriology? and how we live and engage with each other ethically knowing that we hold different values dear to ourselves? Epistemology, soteriology, and ethics - those remain the big questions. And that requires not just a nuanced and fresh approach to Islamic philosophy but a careful reading of the scriptural accounts - after all the function of revelation is to bring the human close to and onto the path to the divine. 

The study of Indian philosophy

Ever since my graduate days - and especially since the World Congress of Philosophy back in Boston in 1998 - I've had an interest in Indian philosophy - a sophisticated set of traditions, and a field of study from which those of us writing on Islamic philosophy can learn much. Since those days, first reading the works of the major figures such as the late Bimal Matilal (d. 1991), Jitendra Mohanty and Jay Garfield, and then benefitting from an excellent colleague at Bristol and specialist (perhaps the leading one anywhere) on Buddhist Philosophy Paul Williams, I've enjoyed and learnt much from the work of Jonardon Ganeri, now Professor of Philosophy at Sussex. Ganeri's work on Philosophy in Classical India is a great model for a textbook in philosophy and those writing such works on Islamic philosophy should pay attention: history is important for the context, but any such presentation needs to be problem-based and really address the question of the nature of philosophy, how it can conceived by its practitioners and its role in the society and culture.
One of Ganeri's recent works (he's quite prolific!) is his study of philosophy in early modern India - The Lost Age of Reason. Here is an excellent recent review. The main observation I took from this work was how best to study these texts, how to engage in the history of philosophy. Along the way Ganeri offers one of the best critiques of conventionalist approaches to texts (the 'Cambridge school'), as well as astute comments on the nature of commentary and its productive and creative nature - a point noticed by a number of recent studies on later Islamic philosophy, especially one significant article by Robert Wisnovsky. He also shows how interest in philosophy brought together people of different traditions - and certainly much recent work on Mughal and related Persianate cultures in South Asia demonstrates how rulers appropriated traditions and gathered thinkers at court.
His more recent work on selfhood and subjectivity is of great interest as I try to make sense of the noetics of Mullā Ṣadrā and after. His earlier work The Concealed Art of the Self examined notions of selfhood and epistemology in Indian philosophies (a review is here), while most recently - or actually forthcoming - his new book on The Self is one which I await and I will hopefully post some comments on it later. The former ties his approach to the recent trend towards considering philosophy as a way of life, no doubt somewhat inspired by the revival of the work of the late Pierre Hadot (d. 2010). Another recent work of his Identity as Reasoned Choice engages with some of the debates that arise from the South Asian context - another participant in that has been Akeel Bilgrami.
But returning to the work on early modern India. The intersection of some Muslim philosophies (one thinks of schools of Sufism such as the followers of Ibn ʿArabī and the ishrāqī school of illuminationist philosophy brought to India by students of Jalāl al-Dīn Davānī [d. 1502] and Fatḥullāh Shīrāzī [d. 1589]) interacted with the Yoga, Vedanta, and arguably the Navya Nyaya traditions. In the book, Ganeri discusses Dārā Shikoh, the Mughal prince whose works comparing the school of Vedanta with that of Ibn ʿArabī led to the writing of a classic work such as Majmaʿ al-baḥrayn (the Confluence of the Two Seas, i.e. Sufism and Vedanta). Dārā's circle included a number of significant figures - such as his scribe Chandar Bhan Brahman (d. 1663?) who seems to have been one of the first Indians to write on ishrāqī philosophy - and he continued the project of his great-grandfather Akbar in encouraging the translation of Sanskrit texts into Persian - in his case the Upanishads. That cultural project is now the subject of study of a new initiative at Paris called Perso-Indica.
Tying into the Sanskrit Knowledge-Systems project and the whole idea of making sense of what colonialism changed in the Asian world, any serious study of later Islamic philosophy needs to have a more joined up approach and look at trends in related cultures and epistemological productions in the Islamic east. Specialists in the study of Islamic intellectual history in South Asia need to engage more vigorously with Indian traditions of thought and argumentation - and I need to go back and continue studying Sanskrit!

Maʿrifat - Quite a good programme

From Iranian TV
Two-part programme on ʿAllāma Ṭabāṭabāʾī (d. 1981) - here is a website dedicated to him; with Ghulām-Ḥusayn Ibrāhīmī Dīnānī - professor at Tehran University and a former student at the hawzeh in Qum. Here is his website. Dīnānī is quite the philosopher celebrity - though, of course, not innocent of politics - I first met him back in 1995 and he kindly gave me a copy of his published dissertation Qavāʿid-e kullī-ye falsafī in 3 volumes. Later, I read his wonderful Shuʿaʿ-yi andīsha va shuhūd on Suhravardī which is probably the best study on that philosopher. More recently, I've been reading his study of Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī - Fīlsūf-e guftagū.

including a discussion on the famous Tehran sessions with Corbin

There are programmes also on concepts such as nūr or light:

or on wujūd or being:

unity and multiplicity:

and the important epistemological issue of knowledge through acquisition (ḥuṣūl) or through presence (ḥuḍūr):

This programme includes the proof for the existence of God (burhān al-ṣiddīqīn) which represents Mullā Ṣadrā's modification of Avicenna's famous proof from contingency:

On being as self-evident, lacking definition:

New trends in the social history of Sufism

Hitherto, collective studies on medieval Sufism have tended to suffer from some basic shortcomings: they have focused on mystical ideas devoid of any serious contextualisation, or upon a particular order, or a region, or have even attempted to discern an Arab or simply Persianate essence to the phenomena of Sufi practice and thought. Many of these studies have also been characterised by an ahistorical approach to the subject of inquiry. Those which have exhibited a historical approach have tended to assume that Sufi practice in the medieval period shifts from the establishment of orders and their dominance to a gradual decline into the colonial and imperial period. However, a number of recent works try to engage seriously with the historical contextualisation of Sufi movements as well as the construction of hagiographies. The present volume of papers makes at least two major contributions: first, it brings together a series of studies from the Ottoman and Indian worlds rarely combined in the same volume – and partly, no doubt, due to the fact that Curry’s research has hitherto focused on the Halveti order in the Ottoman realm and Ohlander’s on the Suhrawardī order not least in India; and second, it engages with some of the major themes in the historical study of medieval Sufism from the rise of the orders through to the cusp of the colonial period, in particular focusing on the relationship with political power, the conundrum of the ‘court of the Sultan versus the court of the Sufi shaykh’, initially raised masterfully in the Indian context by the late Simon Digby. It also complements a number of more recent studies on Sufism that demonstrate the actual agency that Sufis have deployed and make sense of doctrine rooted in social, intellectual and cultural contexts. Broadly, one can also discern a Persianate flavour in the volume that accounts for elements of cultural continuity from Turkey to India. 

The editors themselves locate these studies within two key contemporary contexts – critical insofar as history remains very much the domain of how the present makes sense of the past in the light of its own concerns and prejudices. The first is the current debate over violence and jihad and whether Sufism provides the required ‘moderate’, non-violent and ecumenical face of the religion to be bolstered against the extremists, a policy that in itself is problematic given the history of antipathy, hostility, and violence towards Sufism exhibited by the violent Salafī tradition that has spawned al-Qaeda and its cognates. One way to understand the role of Sufism within the current landscape therefore requires an understanding of how Sufis have engaged with power and violence in the past – and how the very notion of constitutes Islam has been and remains contested. Such a study can provide useful correctives to misguided attempts at promoting a 'peaceful, non-violent' and other-worldy Sufism as a bulwark against violent extremism. The second frame is the desire to provide a fuller history of Sufism and society in the pre-modern period, especially in the few centuries leading up to the colonial period, and to produce a richer account by considering different cultural and geographical contexts.

The chapters are then arranged into four sections of three papers each. The first on historiography attempts to reconsider and re-evaluate the sources that we have for the history of Sufism. Auer’s paper on the Delhi Sultanate questions the very fissure between religious and political conceptions of authority and power. A couple of key questions remain: is the relationship also a discourse about legitimation, and to what extent should we consider some of these chronicles are discursive constructions of elite life that do not allow us to hear the subaltern speak? A corollary could also investigate whether tales of baraka and karāma are always currency within elite discursive negotiations? But the article whets the appetite and suggests a more serious reading of Auer's recent book on the sultanate. Ohlander interrogates trans-regionalism and the assumption of the relative isolation of the Indo-Muslim context by examining the sources on the famous Suhrawardī Shaykh Bahāʾ al-Dīn Zakarīyāʾ (d. 1268). One additional point in favour of transregionalism and the transmission of networks and lineages associated with key figures and spaces in India is the basic question of property and patronage. It is no accident that much of the elite (including Sufi) immigration into India in the late medieval and early modern period was associated with the desire to acquire power and wealth, since India was relatively far richer in resources than anyone else in the Persianate world. Exchange and negotiation at shrines was not just about the spiritual currency of baraka. Foley discusses the network around the Naqshbandi Shaykh Khālid (d. 1827) as a means to question the use of some theoretical approaches relating to modernization and social movement theory that are sometimes deployed in the study of more recent Sufism. His paper is an important marker that frames the upper temporal limit of the scope of the study and raises the interesting question of the nature of Sufism in societies on the brink of modernity and colonization.

The second section on landscapes considers how Sufism shapes the moral, intellectual and physical landscape and how one frames the study of Sufism in medieval society. Anjum’s piece is an ambitious attempt to understand how hierarchies of spirituality were constructed from the formative period and then challenged and interrogated later as visions of authority and reality were diversified following the Mongol invasions. The focus in the chapter is on Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 1351) as the liminal exemplar between Sufism and reforming anti-Sufism. However interesting the attempt (and rather lacking in actual detailed consideration of evidence), it is pretty much impossible to provide a total account for the relationship of diverse visions of spirituality to their socio-political contexts throughout the totality of the history of Islam. Yurekli’s chapter looks at the key centres of Sufi agency, namely the tombs of saints, and demonstrates the distinction of the Ottoman sphere in which there was greatest scholarly resistance to Sufism and hence the nature of the sacred space of the tomb quite different from the rest of the Persianate world. Bukhari focuses on a specific case of patronage by the Mughal princess Jahānārā (d. 1681) and how her contribution was an attempt to inscribe her own literary and spiritual presence into some of the major Sufi spaces in India, not least at the shrine of the founding shaykh at Ajmer, Khwāja Muʿīnuddīn Chishtī.

The third section shifts to doctrine and praxis and shifts in the Mamluk and Ottoman worlds. Ingalls examines the evolution of the Sufi fatwa and the move towards accommodation such that by the sixteenth century the scholarly culture of Cairo was far more sympathetic to both Sufi thought and practice than before. Yildirim considers Qizilbash spirituality, another major lacuna in the historiography, and its relationship to the futuvvat literature and the transition to Shiʿi affiliation in Anatolia. Ambrosio examines the later history of one of the most important Sufi orders, the Mevlevi, but focuses on its later manifestations and their interaction with the broadly anti-Sufi, puritanical movement of the Kazizadelis. The final section entitled negotiations considers how Sufis negotiated the social reality of their time and context. Emre examines the Sufi Ibrahim-i Gulşeni (d. 1534) within the context of the transition from Mamluk to Ottoman Cairo. Curry considers the relationship between the prominent Halveti shaykhs in Istanbul and the Ottoman court of Murad III (d. 1595). The final chapter by Nyazioğlu studies the role of dreams in the major Ottoman text Şaka’iku ‘n-nu‘maniyye. A number of the contributors to the volume are young and creative scholars suggesting that the future of the intellectual and socio-cultural history of Sufism is bright and one expects much to emerge to transform the field.

Overall, there are more papers that deal with the Ottoman context than any other. It would have been useful to see more papers on the Central Asian contexts – and at some point, more studies need to emerge on Sufism and society in Africa, in the Indian Ocean system and others. Further research is also desirable, given our contemporary concerns, on issues of Sufism and gender, community, individuality, and not least magic and rationality. One would also like to see a discussion of how Sunni and Shi‘i affiliations flowed and intersected with Sufism in the period – Yildirim is the only one which touches indirectly upon that – especially given the fundamental shifts in the Naqshbandi, Dhahabi and Ni‘matullahi orders that emerged from the onset of the Ottoman and Safavid empires with distinction theological identities. But this volume does present a gradual step toward a richer understanding of the history of Sufism and ought to be read alongside others; most importantly it demonstrates the efficacy and facility of using theory to elucidate the social contexts and roles of Sufism. 

Continuity of the Logical Tradition

There is an ancient debate over whether logic is an instrument of scientific inquiry and explanation, or whether it is an actual branch of philosophy, and each of the sides of the debate drew upon Aristotle to support their position. Even when both logic and the range of philosophical disciplines came into the world of Islam, this debate continued and found champions on each side. Whatever one’s position on the question, and its seems that the philosophers (the falāsifa) favoured the study of logic as a integral aspect of linking together the mental world of ideas with the world of language and extra-mental reality (influenced as they were by the approach of Porphyry’s Isagoge a work that linked the study of the Aristotelian organon to his Metaphysics by providing a theory for how words, thoughts and extra-mental 'things' related to one another), once theologians such as al-Ghazālī (d. 1111) had naturalised the study of logic (through works like Miʿyār al-ʿilm) as a key standard for training in fiqhī reasoning, logic (manṭiq) remained a central feature of the curricula of the seminaries. Even today the traditional Shiʿi seminaries in Iran and Iraq drawing upon the mixed curriculum of scriptural and rational disciplines (al-manqūlāt wa-l-maʿqūlāt) and the Sunni seminaries based on the dars-i niẓāmī established in north India in the eighteenth century continue to teach manṭiq and indeed privilege it as a pinnacle of rational learning. Khaled El-Rouayheb’s book, based upon his British Academy funded post-doctoral fellowship at Cambridge, therefore needs to be read within the intellectual history of the course of philosophy in Islam. 

While it is a specific study of relational inferences (the central feature of the Aristotelian syllogistic), it is also a contribution to the continuing vibrancy of intellectual inquiry beyond the medieval golden age and in fact perpetuates the new approach to the study of Islamic philosophy that argues for an actual golden age of thought that was located in the early modern period – and here the insistence is upon Ottoman and Mughal logicians exemplifying this. It is therefore a challenge to the common notion of an intellectual decline, often associated with studies of Ottoman intellectual history. As a study of the history of logic in Islam, it builds upon and extends the earlier work of Nicholas Rescher (who famously argued that there is nothing to consider in post-fourteenth century logic, a point that El-Rouayheb disproves), and more recently, Tony Street, neither of whom really consider the post-classical or post-thirteenth century traditions. An important corollary of El-Rouayheb’s argument further Robert Wisnovsky’s insight about the vibrant nature of commentary culture in Islam, the focus now of a Mellon project directed by Jon McGinnis and Asad Ahmed at St Louis. A second corollary is to challenge the standard account now that philosophical inquiry came to an end in the Sunni seminary with Averroes but continued only in the Shiʿi seminaries until the present day: El-Rouayheb provides plenty of evidence for the vibrancy of logical thought in Sunni seminaries into the modern period – and as studies of the Indian madrasa will show, creativity in metaphysics and natural philosophy similarly continued into the colonial period.

The work is divided into seven chapters and a conclusion with a useful appendix charting the significant figures discussed in the book and a glossary of logical terms – essential given the lack of any serious consensus on how best to render the technical vocabulary, and useful even for those interested in metaphysical and philosophical theological works that extensively use the same terms. The progression through the work is chronological. The first chapter begins with the classical period from al-Fārābī to Suhrawardī, with a focus upon Avicenna, as he was the only one to deal with a classic anomaly of the syllogism of equality [A is equal to B, B is equal to C, therefore A is equal to C]. As in many other areas of philosophy, the later traditions of thought are responses to the pivotal contributions made by Avicenna. The second considers the development in the age of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī and Khūnjī (whose Kashf al-asrār El-Rouayheb recently edited and published in Tehran). The third moves onto the commentary culture both in North Africa and in the East leading up to the Mughal-Safavid period and establishes the fundamental school texts.  The fourth considers together the Christian-Arabic tradition, the Indian and the Iranian up until the twentieth century. The fifth and sixth chapters move to the Ottoman context, and focuses upon Gelenbevī and the logic of unfamiliar syllogisms, and the final considers whether the late Ottoman tradition was in decline. Much of the volume therefore is concerned with developments in Ottoman thought – and Asad Ahmed’s forthcoming work on logic in India will be a good complement to this study. Part of the focus on the Ottoman is ventured because of the author’s suggestion that it was in that tradition that one finds a more fruitful engagement with the syllogisms of equality than in the Iranian or the India. There is still much to do on logic in the Iranian and Indian East after the 14^th century as El-Rouayheb himself acknowledges, with the only serious work conducted specifically on the liar’s paradox (subhat al-jadhr al-aṣamm) by Ahad Faramarz Qaramaleki focusing upon the contribution of Shirazi philosophers of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries.

El-Rouayheb’s book makes a serious contribution to Islamic intellectual history, to our understanding of the course of Islamic philosophy, and to the debate about Ottoman decline. It accounts for a particular case study – and one could easily select another aspect of, for example, modal logic, or elements of metaphysics or even discussion about motion and time and trace them through history to demonstrate that the old myths about the unnatural position of philosophical inquiry in Islam really do need to be put to rest.