Imāmī Qurʾān Exegesis in the Classical Period: The Case of al-ʿAyyāshī (d. c. 932)

Every Muslim confession from its earliest times tended to define itself with respect to its tradition through its hermeneutical engagement with scripture. While there are debates about the nature of the development of the genre of exegesis and the stages that it took, drawing upon not just aspects of the tradition in which the Prophet and his companions and family were said to have engaged the word of God, but also the development of certain disciplines of the humanities such as grammar and morphology, history, linguistics, logic, theology, and philosophy among others. Certainly we can say that features of early exegeses were the following: a concern to define how the language of the holy writ ought be be understood linguistically and the extent to which it ought be be read figuratively, the scope of meaning and cognitive content that was being conveyed in the texts, a recourse to the direct positions and readings of authorities from the time of the Prophet and his immediate circles and successors on the meaning of the text, and finally a desire to vindicate one's confessional position and assert its normatively as the tradition in the Qurʾan itself. 

Within the Imāmī (Twelver) Shiʿi tradition as it developed in the earliest period, most of the exegeses tended to identity the verses of the Qurʾan with the family of the prophet, their opponents, and their followers, reading the scripture as a revelation that mapped out the unfolding of divine providence. This remained the case even when there were disputes over what constituted a canonical 'reading', orthography and articulation of the language and especially when there were claims that what had by the 4th/10th century been defined as the canonical readings and orthography of the Qurʾan were not in conformity to the words conveyed by the Prophet and preserved faithfully by ʿAlī and his family - the Imams succeeding the Prophet. Already back in 1999, Meir Bar-Asher had published a study of classical Imāmī exegesis and its features.

With respect to that period we can point to the following extant exegeses:

1) The exegesis attributed to Abūʾl-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. Ibrāhīm b. Hāshim al-Qummī (d. c. 307/920). He was an important source for the hadith compiler and narrator Abū Jaʿfar al-Kulaynī (d. 329/941). There is some debate on whether this text actually is the work of al-Qummī. al-Nadīm in his al-Fihrist mentions the following works of al-Qummī: Nawādir al-Qurʾan, Kitāb al-Manāqib, Kitāb Ikhtiyār al-Qurʾān (wa-riwāyatuhu), and Kitāb Qurb al-isnād. So no explicit mention of a tafsīr work. al-Shaykh Abū Jaʿfar al-Ṭūsī (d. 460/1067) does mention such a work. 

Majlisī also describes it as well known:

This is perhaps the best known of the classes Imāmī exegeses with a strong authorial voice that often comments on the reports; it is also uncompromisingly Shiʿi, condemning the opponents of the Prophet and the Imams (which has led to the self-censorship exercised by some of the editors of the text). The text is widely attested in the manuscript tradition; the best edition is that produced under the supervision of Sayyid Muḥammad Bāqir al-Muwaḥḥid al-Abṭaḥī in Muʾassasat al-Imām al-Mahdī and published in three volumes in Qum; this text is available here.

An important strand of the text is the exegesis on the authority of Abūʾl-Jārūd Ziyād b. Mundhir al-Hamadhānī (d. after 150/767), a Kufan companion of Imām al-Bāqir and later Zaydī authority. In the introduction, the author discusses the intimate relationship between the Qurʾan and the family of the Prophet as bearers and guarantors of the tradition. He then goes on to discuss various aspects of the verses: the clear and the figurative, the intertextuality, the apparent revealed words and their interpretation, the polemics (against dualists, polytheists, incomplete monotheists, anthropomorphists and others), the praise of the Imams and the rejection of their opponents, moral exhortations, and so forth arranged in 41 categories of verses. 

2) The exegesis of Furāt b. Furāt al-Kūfī (fl. 4th/10th century): little is known about him but he seems to have been a contemporary of the two Ṣadūqs, the father Abūʾl-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. Bābawayh (d. 329/940), and his more famous son Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad b. ʿAlī Ibn Bābawayh (d. 381/991); Amir-Moezzi also says that he is presented as a student of the Zaydī exegete al-Ḥibarī whom we discuss a bit later. A number of the reports go through the chain of the Hāshimī family of reports as well as through key narrators from the time of the 'minor occultation' after the death of al-Imām al-Ḥāsan al-ʿAskarī in 874 which is often also described as the period of 'confusion' (ḥayra) in Shiʿi sources. Furāt does not seem to have been known to the classical biographical tradition but by the Safavid period become well-known. He is usually not cited as his exegesis is partial and most of the narrations on the meaning of verses cited from Imāms al-Bāqir and al-Ṣādiq are found in other sources; but still Muḥammad Bāqir Majlisī (d. 1110/1699) in his famous exposition of the Shiʿi tradition in the introduction to his mammoth Biḥār al-anwār (Seas of Light) describes it as trustworthy and important source for the tradition, from whom al-Ṣadūq narrated as well as the (probably Sunni) exegete al-Ḥākim al-Ḥaskānī (d. 490/1096), author of Shawāhid al-tanzīl.

This is very much a tradition based exegesis with reports and little by way of authorial commentary and intervention. While there are a few manuscripts of the text, mainly late, the standard edition by published in 1990 in Qum by Muḥammad al-Kāẓim in two volumes with the important editorial decision to change the order of the material to conform to the order of the Qurʾanic suras; but it is still partial missing at least 16 full suras as well as many verses within the remaining ones.

The text itself can be found here.

3) The exegesis of Muḥammad b. Ibrāhīm al-Kātib al-Nuʿmānī (d. 360/971), a disciple of al-Kulaynī and author of a well known set of reports on the occultation (Kitāb al-Ghayba). This text is actually a set of reports from ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib extant in Biḥār al-anwār of Majlisī (90 odd pages in volume 90). 

4) The exegesis of Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-Ḥusayn b. al-Ḥakam al-Ḥibarī (d. 286/899) is the earliest extant one and the author was probably a Zaydī from Kufa. It was cited by Imāmī authors perhaps partly because its main transmitter was the Imāmī Abū ʿUbayd Allāh Muḥammad b. ʿImrān al-Marzubānī (d. 384/994). It is a broadly thematic work entitled Tanzīl al-āyāt al-munzala fī manāqib Ahl al-bayt or Mā nazala min al-Qurʾān fī Amīr al-muʾminīn. This latter title is also attested for a work by the Shiʿi narrator and historian Ibrāhīm b. Muḥammad al-Thaqafī (d. 382/896) but that work does not seem to be extant. The text is relatively short. Amir-Moezzi places it within the genre of what he considers to be a 'personalised commentary' or exegesis focused on particular individuals, and as such constitutes an early form of 'Shiʿi esotericism'. 

al-Ḥibarī explains this through recourse to the famous narration from ʿAlī on the four parts of the Qurʾan:

5) The partial exegesis attributed to al-Imām al-Ḥasan b. ʿAlī al-ʿAskarī (d. 260/874), the eleventh Imam. This 4th/10th century text only covers the first two suras of the Qurʾan. 

Like the other early exegeses it contains traditions and focuses very much on the importance of and love and devotion for (walāya) the family of the Prophet and dissociation (barāʾa) from their opponents. The two narrators of the exegesis - Abū Yaʿqūb Yūsuf b. Muḥammad b. Ziyād and Abūʾ-l-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. Muḥammad b. Sayyār - are reported to have been Shiʿi from the Zaydi area of Ṭabaristān and are unknown to the early Shiʿi biographical tradition; hence most scholars from Ibn al-Ghaḍāʾirī onwards (including al-ʿAllāma al-Ḥillī) reject its attribution to the eleventh Imam. Also while it is similar to other classical Imāmī exegeses it is not cited by any of them. Majlisī mentions the text as reflective of the tradition. 

6) The exegesis narrated from al-Imām Jaʿfar b. Muḥammad al-Ṣādiq (d. 148/765), the sixth Imam. Now there are two texts known by this name: one is a famed Sufi work edited by Paul Nwyia and cited by Abū ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Sulamī (d. 412/1021) and translated by Farhana Mayer. 

And as Böwering has shown this work presents an impeccably Shiʿi chain of narration. However, there is another far more extensive work that is similar to al-Qummī and others and which survives in around seven codices mainly dating from the 15th century in India (with one copy in Istanbul as well). Often the text is given with a narration from al-Kātib al-Nuʿmānī. For example, one codex that I consulted some time ago is MS Būhār (now in the National Library in Kolkata) Arabic 13 with some 309 folios dated 15 Jumāda II, 1019/September 1610. This works extensive. Its incipit has the following:

حكي عن جعفر بن محمد أنه قال: كتاب الله على أربعة أشياء: العبارة والإشارة واللطائف والحقائق. فالعبارة للعوام والإشارة للخواص واللطائف للأولياء والحقائق للأنبياء.

<بسم> عن جعفر بن محمد قال: الباء بقاؤه والسين أسماؤه والميم ملكه...

and the explicit:

عن جعفر بن محمد في قوله: <قل هو الله أحد...> قال: يعني أظهر ما تريده النفوس بتأليف الحروف. فإنّ الحقائق مصونة عن أن يبلغه وهم أو فهم. وإظهار ذلك بالحروف ليهتدي بها من <القي السمع> وهو إشارة إلى غائب. والهاء هو تنبيه على معنى ثابت والواو إشارة إلى الغائب عن الحواس و<الأحد> الفرد الّذي لا نظير له لأنه هو الّذي أحدّ الآحاد.

Another copy is MS Khuda Bakhsh 1460 which is around 232 folios with more text on each and dating from the 18th century. 

7) Finally, we have the exegesis of Abūʾl-Naḍr Muḥammad b. Masʿūd al-ʿAyyāshī al-Samarqandī (d. 320/932) (according to Bar-Asher), which has recently been published in three volumes as a dual text edition, translated by Nazmina Dhanji and edited by Wahid Amin. It has been published by the Al-Mahdi Institute.

Wahid Amin presents the short preface that introduces the text and its significant as a Shiʿi tafsīr biʾl-maʾthūr and for its abiding importance, even cited in the major modern exegesis of ʿAllāma Ṭabāṭabāʾī (d. 1981), al-Mīzān fī tafsīr al-Qurʾān, perhaps the most widely used Shiʿi exegesis. He then tells us that they are using the Arabic text produced by the Muʾassasat al-Biʿtha that draws on the following MSS: Kitābkhāna-yi Dastghayb (not Dastghīb) in Shiraz copied in 1091/1681, MS Āstān-e Quds-e Rażavī Mashhad 180, 1490 and 7513 all copied much later in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While one does not expect what is mainly a translation project to produce a new critical edition, some further consideration of the manuscript tradition would have been useful. According to the Fankha catalogue, the earliest extant manuscripts in Iran are MS Markaz-e Iḥyāʾ in Qum 2622 and 2623 both dating from the 11th/17th century; the Dastghayb manuscript is MS Kitābkhāna-ye Millī 567/tā52. Another acephalous manuscript from Āstān-e Quds (MS 1490) is dated as 1154/1741 and not 1348/1929 as cited in the edition. 

This preface is then followed by an introduction by the expert on classical commentary - Meir Bar-Asher. He presents the author and his exegesis as exemplifying what he describes as pre-Buwayhid Imāmī exegesis that is characterised by discussions on the reading and the question of the falsification of the text (on which ʿAyyāshī clearly rejects such a position), on the importance of the Imams in the scripture and as sources of its proper interpretation, and the importance of the exoteric as well as the esoteric. In many ways it represents a summary of the positions that he laid out in his classical study on Imāmī exegesis that I mentioned before. While he mentions that there are no dates given for ʿAyyāshī, I am somewhat confused about how he arrived at the death date that he chooses although it is plausible given what we know of the generations preceding and then succeeding him. 

Majlisī famously also described the text as one of the foundational works of the tradition and one that was well known to the classical tradition:

ʿAyyāshī was supposedly a Sunni narrator from Samarqand who then moved to Kufa and Baghdad where he trained with those narrating from al-Imām ʿAlī al-Riḍā. His exegesis only covers the first eighteen suras (up to sūrat al-Kahf); however, it is cited extensively by al-Ṭabrisī (d. 548/1154) in his Majmaʿ al-bayān and by Sayyid Ibn Ṭāwūs (d. 664/1266) which suggests that a full version was available. However, by the time of Majlisī it was curtailed as a partial commentary as attested in the extant manuscripts in Iran. The standard modern edition replicated the full version transmitted in manuscript with the additions reconstructed from the later exegetical citations. 

ʿAyyāshī's exegesis engages in a number of polemics: against Sunni detractors with the zeal of a convert, against the Muʿtazila especially on the question of the impeccability of the prophets (and there is some suggestion he may have been Muʿtazilī before), against the extremists on the integrity of the Qurʾanic text as it was with people (so against taḥrīf), and emphasising the importance of the central theme of the special knowledge of the Imams. It is also very clearly Shiʿi: the straight path to God mentioned in the first sura is ʿAlī.

The three volumes are beautifully produced: the Arabic text is on the right and the English translation on the left, and adequate annotation is provided on sources. 

The indices are also quite an excellent tool. One can imagine using the text used profitably for research as well as for teaching - the very absence of serious translations of Shiʿi materials makes it rather difficult to teach students more broadly in religious studies. And in that sense this is also the first major translation of a classical Shiʿi exegesis. If we want to be read Shiʿi texts and incorporating them into a more holistic study of the early and classical period, such works are essential. From my perusal, the translations are quite excellent, rigorous and careful, and the Qurʾan itself has been rendered (as far as it fits the exegesis) from the existing translations of Abdel-Haleem and ʿAli-quli Qara'i. 

Like the other early exegeses, ʿAyyāshī presents us with a series of narrations on the verses - and they are not exhaustive atomistic glosses on every single verse anyway. The introduction that precedes arranges narrations in a selective presentation of major themes: on the virtues of the Qurʾan (faḍāʾil al-Qurʾān), on the use of the Qurʾan as a standard to judge and verify hadith (tark al-riwāyāt allatī bi-khilāf al-Qurʾan), the famous idea of the four parts of the Qurʾan:

the Qurʾan being revealed in seven aḥruf, the importance of the Imams being mentioned in the Qurʾan and their knowledge of the proper (esoteric and exoteric) interpretation (taʾwīl) of it, and a final set of condemnations about the polemical use of the Qurʾan: against those who gloss the word of God according to their own whims and fancies and those who use it in vain disputation. 

The Imāmī exegetical tradition provides us with a number of insights about the nature of the text, its readings and its reception. As such better understanding of the tradition - and especially of this classical period that was later revived in the Safavid period excavation of narration based exegesis - is critical for a fuller intellectual history of the ways in which Muslim scholars over the centuries made sense of the text. Of course, there will always be the haters - for one I remember a review of the Anthology of Qurʾanic Commentaries volume I that was edited by Feras Hamza and myself that claimed the nefarious intention on our part to question and marginalise 'Sunni orthodoxy'; while such an intention would be an important element of decolonising the study of Islam, it was far from what we wanted to show. 

If anything tafsīr does indeed narrate a story of reception and understanding that existed on the horizons of each exegete's training and experience. The question of 'truth' is somewhat quite different; that does not mean that the exegetes did not think they were engaged in a quest for truth or that they did not believe that the narrations that they cited stemmed from the Imams. Furthermore, the plurality of readings are also retained from the earliest such exemplars. One is minded to think of the famous reports on the esoteric and exoteric aspects of the revelation, the scope of the verses and their 'points of rising' that are cited in the earliest Sufi and Shiʿi exegeses. For the serious scholar, the pseudo-scholarly gatekeepers of orthodoxy are really neither here nor there. 

Greek Intellectual Heritage in Arabic: Some Notes on ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Badawī Part II

I first came across Badawī in 1996 as the editor of the famous 'Theologia Aristotelis' or Uthūlūjiyā, the text produced in the Kindī circle in Baghdad by Ibn Nāʿima al-Ḥimṣī based on paraphrases of sections of Enneads IV-VI of Plotinus (d. 270), an edition that was first published through the French Institute in Cairo in 1955 and remains the main edition that we use. I bought it in a (probably pirated but quite excellent and well bound in leather) edition produced by Intishārāt-i Bīdār a small outfit run by Muḥsin Bīdārfar himself a muḥaqqiq in Gozarkhān in Qum, a shop that opened (or at least used to) for a short time before Zuhr prayers and before Maghrib prayers. 

This was called Aflūṭīn ʿind al-ʿArab and included the edition with a useful introduction on the manuscripts as well as tables of correspondence to the Enneads and a Greek-Latin-Arabic glossary. 

The standard study on this is the Arabic Plotinus of Peter Adamson, his Notre Dame PhD dissertation published first in 2002 by Duckworth and then reprinted in 2017 with Gorgias. 

The ERC funded project of Cristina D'Ancona entitled Greek into Arabic on the text has yet to produce a new critical edition - although she has herself produced an excellent one on the first chapter of the text with an Italian translation and commentary. 

Also in the same year, 1955, he published an edition of various Neoplatonic texts in Arabic (al-Aflāṭūnīya al-muḥdatha ʿind al-ʿArab) including the influential Liber de Causis (fīʾl-maḥḍ al-khayr), which was to be more significant in the Latin medieval tradition through its translation. the text was based on the Arabic Proclus and related elements.  

At the same time, the editions of the Arabic Aristotle appeared:

The Arabic Aristotle (Arisṭū ʿind al-ʿarab) was published in 1947 by Dār al-nahḍa al-Miṣrīya (reprinted by the Kuwaiti government in 1978), and it contained book lambda of the Metaphysics as well as some of the famous commentarial glosses including Avicenna on book lambda from his non-extant Kitāb al-inṣāf (which has now been published with a French edition by Marc Geoffroy, Meryem Sebti and Jules Janssens by Vrin in Paris in 2014),

and his glosses on the Theologia Aristoteles also from the non-extant Kitāb al-inṣāf (which are forthcoming in an edition and French translation by Meryem Sebti, Daniel de Smet and Jules Janssens). These glosses were translated by Georges Vajda back in 1951.  Other important texts were various works of Alexander of Aphrodisias and the famous correspondence of Avicenna entitled al-Mubāḥathāt that was later edited and published by Muḥsin Bīdārfar in 1992. There is a slightly revised edition of this correspondence by Bīdārfar within the new Collected Works project of the Iranian Academy of Philosophy. 

The logic (Manṭiq Arisṭū) was published in 3 volumes in Dār al-nahḍa al-Miṣrīya in 1948, and reprinted by the Kuwaiti government in 1980. This was the complete organon: the Categories (Māqūlāt) translated by Isḥāq ibn Ḥunayn (c. 830-910), De interpretatione (fīʾl-ʿibāra) also rendered by Isḥāq ibn Ḥunayn, Prior Analytics (al-Qiyās) rendered by Theodorus (who seems to be unknown), Posterior Analytics (al-Burhān) translated by Abū Bishr Mattā ibn Yūnus (c. 870-940) based on Isḥāq's Syriac translation, Topics (al-Jadal) rendered by Abū ʿUthmān al-Dimashqī (d. c. 912), Sophistical Refutations (al-Sūfisṭīqā) in a team effort (consecutive drafts refined over generations) of Ibn Nāʿima, Yaḥyā ibn ʿAdī (893-974) and Abū ʿAlī ʿĪsā Ibn Zurʿa (943-1008). 

Since it was common in late antiquity to include the Poetics and the Rhetoric in the organon (and place the Isagoge of Porphyry as an introduction to the corpus), he published an edition of the Rhetoric (fīʾl-khiṭāba) in 1959 (reprinted in Kuwait in 1979), and on the Poetics (fīʾl-shiʿr) in 1953 along with the commentaries of Fārābī, Ibn Sīnā and Ibn Rushd (reprinted in 1973).

On the discussion of why the Poetics and the Rhetoric were considered as part of the organon see the classic study of Deborah Black. Two years ago this useful study on the history of the Poetics appeared in Tehran by Sayyid Maḥmūd Yūsuf-i Sānī.

Later Rafīq ʿAjam and Gérard Juhāmī produced a new edition of the organon in the 1990s in two volumes, excluding the Poetics and the Rhetoric:

The De Anima was published by Dār al-nahḍa al-Miṣrīya in 1954 in the translation of Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq (809-873) along with some of the short commentaries. This was also reprinted in Kuwait in 1980. We know also from Rudiger Arnzen's work that there were other translations of the Greek and also paraphrases including one prominent one into Persian by Afḍal al-Dīn Kāshānī (d. c. 1209).

The De Caelo (fīʾl-samāʾ) appeared in 1961. 

The Physics (al-Ṭabīʿa) appeared in 1965. 

On the nature of Animals (Ṭibāʿ al-ḥayawān) came out in 1977. 

The Arabic de partibus animalium appeared in 1978. 
[I cannot say more about these works as they are in my office and I do not have access to them]

One of the critical elements of the corpus was the recognition of the importance of the commentators on Aristotle and even the realisation that some of those works were only extant in Arabic - this was Shurūḥ ʿalā Arisṭū mafqūda fīʾl-yūnānīya published by Dār al-Mashriq in Beirut in 1972, mainly Alexander of Aphrodisias and Themistius.

Badawī was one of the first to provide editions of the text of Proclus and Philoponus on the nature of the eternity of the cosmos that played a major role in the philosophical and theological debates in the ʿAbbāsid period and after. 

He also produced editions of the commentaries on Aristotle by Ibn Rushd as well as Ibn Sīnā's version of the Posterior Analytics, and on the Rhetoric by Ḥāzim al-Qarṭajannī in Cairo in 1961 and reprinted thereafter. 

As he has done for Plotinus early on, he published a volume of the corpus of Plato in 1973 - Aflāṭūn fīʾl-islām. This was the fruit of his year spent in Tehran and was published by the branch of the McGill Institute of Islamic Studies. 

Another result of that year was his edition of the Ṣiwān al-ḥikma of Sijistānī (d. c. 1000) that appeared in 1974, an important source for the history of philosophy and its conception in Arabic. 

This related interest in the history of philosophy also produced a very influential text - Ādāb al-falāsifa of Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq that was published in 1985. 

Much later in his life, during his time in Kuwait, he wrote some works summarising his contribution such as Transmission de la philosophie grecque au monde arabe published by Vrin in Paris in 1968, 

and Histoire de la philosophie en islam in two volumes published by Vrin in Paris in 1972, 

[This work broadly ignored the post-classical work of Corbin and others and hence very much remained within the context of looking at philosophy up to Averroes]

His intellectual vigour and interests are further indicated by translations of literary works: Cervantes' Don Quixote and Goethe's Faust and West-östlicher Diwan. 

There are plenty of other works such as on the nature of Platonic forms in Islamic philosophy, on the conception of history, the thought of Ibn Sabʿīn, Ibn ʿArabī, Ibn Sīnā and many more which would require yet another post.

To do justice to the contribution of Badawī (even when one wishes to be critical of his editions, his conceptualisation and his historical vision) one would need a thorough research project to look at what he published, why he published it and to what end: did he have a vision of the nature of the tradition and how the 'Islamic' and the 'Greek' came together? Of course, elements of his memoirs and other writings give us a sense of that: that Sufism came together with Heideggerian existentialism, and in the quest for cultural authenticity the desire to recover the Arabic Aristotelian (and even the Neoplatonic) heritage. Unlike later historians and philosophers (foremost among whom is obviously Muḥammad ʿĀbid al-Jābirī) who engaged with that tradition, he was not dismissive of the Neoplatonic as some 'conspiracy' to deprive Arabs of their rationality. 

Thus his career reflects various concerns of the emergence of modern Arab thought after or perhaps at the end of what Hourani famously called the 'liberal age' about the conception of philosophy that brought together tradition and the modern, the concern for the colonial subject emerging into the post-colonial space with new optimisms for the future articulation of individual subjectivity and cultural authenticity, the forging of a new liberal nationalism predicated on the dignity of the person, the liberal education, and the emergence of the culture wars to come between liberals, nationalists, and Islamists. Given the centrality of Egypt - and of Cairo University in particular - the contemporary Arab intellectual history, the story of Badawī is very much about the ebbs and flows of Arab philosophy and its dissemination into Iraq, the Levant and elsewhere, as well as its agonies and discontents after 1967.  

Heidegger, Sufism and the Greek Intellectual Heritage in Arabic: Some Notes on ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Badawī Part I

The Egyptian existentialist philosopher ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Badawī (1917-2002) is well known to students of Islamic philosophy especially those interested in the Greek intellectual heritage in Islam. In this post, I examine elements of his biography and contribution to the dissemination of the thought of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) in Arabic as well as his contributions to the study of Sufism, the Arabic Aristotle and much beyond. 

Heidegger in the later period became known also through the work of Charles Malik (1906-1987), the Christian Lebanese philosopher who had studied with him in Freiburg in the 1930s. 

Badawī came from a well to do family in Upper Egypt and studied in Cairo in the 1930s and 1940s at the Egyptian University (as it was called from 1908), later Fuad I University from 1940 (later Cairo University from 1952) which at that time hosted a number of significant European thinkers, attracted by the ambitious new university which encouraged its Egyptian students to study abroad as well and also taking advantage of the situation in Europe in which scholars went into exile to avoid the restrictions and persecutions of the Nazis. Important figures teaching at the university then included the literary figure and later Minister of Education Ṭāhā Ḥusayn (1889-1973) and the novelist Naguib Mahfuz (1911-2006).

In his memoirs, Badawī mentioned that at school he had already taken an interest in literary and intellectual matters and voraciously read articles by Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, as well as the journalists ʿAbbās Maḥmūd al-ʿAqqād (1889-1964) and Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal (1888-1956). 

ʿAqqād left him cold and uninspired, Haykal evoked a nationalist fervour, but it was Ḥusayn's work that excited him and propelled him to the life of the mind. Already by the end of his elementary schooling he had encountered some work of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in Arabic translation, and later Pascal. At the Saʿīdīya school in Cairo, he completed his secondary schooling, learning English, French and German and further developing his love for literature and philosophy. He mentions reading in 1932 the Primer of Philosophy of Angelo Solomon Rappaport (1871-1950, first published in London in 1904) in the translation of Aḥmad al-Amīn (1886-1954), a professor of literature at the University. 

And he also starting reading Avicennian logic in a primer by ʿAbduh Khayr al-Dīn. At school, because at the time philosophy was studied alongside psychology (and this was the case in many places and an influence perhaps of the 'American' school), his teacher was Shafīq al-ʿĀṣī who obtained his doctorate from Vienna University in 1930 and hence was the conduit for the first interests in German philosophy. He also in that period began to read some Islamic philosophy, with works such as Maqāṣid al-falāsifa of Ghazālī (d. 1111) and al-Najāt of Avicenna (d. 1037) but as he himself acknowledged, these did not inspire an interest in Islamic philosophy as such. 

He did his BA in Philosophy at the Faculty of Letters from 1934 to 1938 developing knowledge of French as well as Latin. He mentioned other teachers such as Amīn al-Khulī (1895-1966) famous for his literary approach to the Qurʾan (and later an influence on the reformist thinker Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd (1943-2010), but he singled out Ṭāhā Ḥusayn's classes especially on pre-Islamic poetry. He also began classes in Avicennian logic with Shaykh Muṣṭafā ʿAbd al-Rāziq (1885-1947), the brother of ʿAlī ʿAbd al-Rāziq (1888-1966) and student of Muḥammad ʿAbduh (1849-1905). ʿAbd al-Rāziq had been Shaykh al-Azhar and then took up a chair in philosophy at the University. 

One of the logic texts that he studied was al-Baṣāʾir al-Naṣīrīya of ʿUmar b. Sahlān al-Sāwī (d. c. 1143), a text that ʿAbduh had also been fond of teaching and whose critical approach to Avicenna influenced Suhrawardī (d. 1191) and maybe even Ibn Taymīya (d. 1328).

ʿAbd al-Rāziq also taught the Muqaddima of Ibn Khaldūn (1332-1406). Badawī extensively discusses the deep and extended commentary that he provided in his classes; at the same time he became aware of critiques of Islamic philosophy and its 'decadence' articulated by Ernest Renan (1823-1892) and others. Rather unusually in Sufism, ʿAbd al-Rāziq signalled his distaste for monistic Sufism by teaching al-Ṣūfīya waʾl-fuqarāʾ of Ibn Taymīya. In 1937, he made way as chair of the department to André Lalande (1867-1963) and in the following year became Minister of Religious Endowments. 

In 1936, Alexandre Koyré (1892-1964) came to Cairo on a sabbatical from Paris [he had previously come in 1932], and Badawī attended his classes first on the history of medieval philosophy, so that he became acquainted with the work of the neo-Thomist (although he himself denied that label) Étienne Gilson (1988–1978), 

and later on the history of modern philosophy after Kant. Koyré also taught a class on the history of science taking in the likes of Galileo, Kepler and Copernicus. 

Other European philosophers teaching in Cairo at the time whose classes Badawī attended included Émile Bréhier (1876-1952), a Neoplatonist who wrote his PhD on Philo of Alexandria and who later succeeded Henri Bergson (1859-1941) to his chair at the Collège de France in Paris in 1945, and Louis Rougier (1889-1982) who taught epistemology and history of philosophy in Cairo from 1931 to 1936. 

In 1937, encouraged by Ḥusayn and Paul Kraus (1904-1944), who was then Professor of Semitic Languages, he went to Europe on a 'grand tour' taking in Italy, German and France.

Koyré left for New York in 1938 and so after graduation, Badawī did his MA with Lalande (who primarily taught methodology) in metaphysics eventually writing on the problem of death in existentialism entitled Le Problème de la mort dans la philosophie existentielle in 1939, but not published until 1964. For his doctorate, once Koyré returned to Cairo in October 1940, he took over his supervision; although Badawī credited Lalande with his training in methodological rigour. All the while he had worked since 1938 ad a lecturer in the department. 

Koyré had a lasting impression: it was not only his rigour in the study of philosophy of science and his metaphysics, but also his work on the Protestant mysticism of Jakob Böhme (1575-1624) published by Vrin in Paris in 1929 as La philosophie de Jacob Boehme. Koyré was his main conduit for German philosophy and especially phenomenology as he had studied at Göttingen from 1908 to 1911 with Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) and the mathematician David Hilbert (1862-1943).

[Husserl did not think much of his dissertation so he did not get a doctorate and instead moved to Paris to study with Bergson and Lalande,  and later obtained his doctorate and later doctorat d'état in 1922 from the Sorbonne. He was later reacquainted with Husserl when he gave his lectures in Paris in 1929 on what became his Cartesian Meditations.]

Koyré was to write a preface to his published dissertation but he left in March 1941 for New York. Badawī complains that his dissertation and its publication was held up because of the envy of his peers and seniors since it would have been his third book. He eventually defended his dissertation in May 1944 and Ṭāhā Ḥusayn famously remarked that this was an event that heralded the birth of modern Arab philosophy - as reported in al-Ahram on 30 May 1944. His dissertation was on the notion of existential time (al-zamān al-wujūdī) that, influenced by Koyré brought together Heidegger's Dasein (that he rendered as annīya) with the Sufi notion of the Perfect human (al-insān al-kāmil) in the search for a subjectivity of the individual person and the quest for cultural authenticity. This was followed by a series of studies in existentialism as well as initial works on Sufism in the 1940s.

His first works were introductions to philosophers and philosophy which like his works in Heideggerian existentialism and Sufism was all published by Dār al-nahḍa al-Miṣrīya. The first publication in 1939 was a book on Friedrich Nietzsche followed by books on Schopenhauer in 1942, Plato in 1943 and Aristotle in 1944 as well as studies of the Greek intellectual heritage in Arabic in 1940 and on the Arabic translation movement (Rabīʿ al-fikr al-yūnānī) in 1943 and the spirit of Islamic thought on classical philosophy in 1949. 

He was appointed to a position at ʿAyn Shams University, eventually becoming the chair of philosophy in 1959. In the interim he spent 1956-1958 as cultural attaché in Switzerland. Although he was involved in drafting the 1952 constitution, he later became disillusioned by Nasser, moving to teach in Paris in 1967, followed by six years in Benghazi, an interim year 1973-1974 in Tehran  and a productive 1974-1982 at Kuwait University.

The Benghazi years are discussed in this work:

It was in Tehran that he encountered the circle of Henry Corbin - with whom he had been acquainted through his teacher in Cairo in the 1930s already since Bréhier, Massignon and others were mutual acquaintances. 

From then until his just before his death he lived and taught in Paris. On his return to Cairo in 2002, he lasted a few months. Much of the above account is taken from his memoirs published in 2000, which while at times are acerbic, are an essential guide to modern Arab intellectual history and the engagement with European thought. 

There is little doubt of the influence of Badawī - not just in the field of the study of the Greek intellectual heritage to which we will devote part II of this post - but also in the early stages of the reception of Heidegger in Arabic and of that metaphysical strand of existentialist phenomenology and its concern for being authentic. 

A small addendum. There are some useful studies of Badawī:
1) Elements of Yoav Di-Capua's excellent study of Arab existentialism basically defines him as a founding figure. Here is a good interview with him. And a good review of that book by Harald Viersen at FU Berlin. 


2) There is a useful Erlangen PhD dissertation from 2009 on him and on the concept of alienation that characterises his early political memoir Humūm al-shabāb published in 1946. 


3) There is also an excellent article in the volume on Heidegger in the Islamicate world by Sevinç Yasargil. 


Addendum II:
Here is a video from Arabiya TV programme Hādhā huwa from 1993: 

Another video from a few years ago from Nile Cultural channel with Gehan Seif al-din in conversation with two philosophers on him:

And one more useful video in memoriam from 2015: