Intellectual History of the Islamic World

This dissertation is an intellectual and social history of the Banū ʿAlawī sāda of Yemen’s Hadhramaut valley, charting the evolution of their Sufi scholarly tradition from their early tenth-century origins, with the migration of their famed ancestor Imām Aḥmad b. ʿIsā (d. 345/956) from Basra, Iraq, to Hadhramaut up to the emergence of their major spiritual authority of the late-sixteenth century, Shaykh Abū Bakr b. Sālim (d. 992/1583). While there exists a rich number of historical and anthropological studies focusing on the Banū ʿAlawīs’ large diasporic communities across the vast Indian Ocean region and on the social and political history of Hadhramaut of the last two centuries, the sāda’s premodern history and the early evolution of their Sufi tradition remains relatively understudied and poorly understood, with lingering concerns surrounding the dearth of reliable historical materials on their formative history in Hadhramaut.This study attempts to fill this general lacuna in the literature by closely re-examining the academic concerns surrounding the reliability of existing historiographical materials, mostly in the genre of hagiographic biographical works (manāqib), among other primary sources, so as to provide a more comprehensive and multifaceted account of the sāda’s intellectual and social history in the valley. It begins by surveying the early settlement of the sāda in Hadhramaut, offering a more comprehensive account of the emergence of their Sufi ṭarīqa under al-Faqīh al-Muqaddam Muḥammad b. ʿAlī (d. 653/1255) in the twelfth century. The study moves on to consider the wider socio-political developments in Yemen and Hadhramaut that led to the emergence of the sāda as an influential scholarly stratum of peacemakers and political mediators in Hadhrami society. In addition to these developments, the study also surveys the distinctive textual, ritualistic, and geographic features that informed the consolidation of the sāda’s spiritual praxis and Sufi habitus by the early-fifteenth century, leading to the development of a uniquely Hadhrami Sufi tradition.Finally, this study offers a more thorough appraisal of Hadhramaut’s cultural and intellectual efflorescence under the first Kathīrī sultanate between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, which witnessed a considerable output of scholarly writings in the fields of historiography, Islamic law, and Sufism, paying special attention to the sāda’s emerging intellectual and spiritual canon. In surveying the works and backgrounds of the major ʿAlawī spiritual authorities of this period, this dissertation argues for the need to re-evaluate the current academic understanding of Bā ʿAlawī Sufism. Far from being the product of an intellectual and cultural backwater where the ‘high’ works of philosophical Sufism were rarely studied, the sāda’s spiritual tradition, and Hadhrami Sufism more generally, was in fact well-integrated within the wider intellectual and spiritual currents of western Yemen and the Hejaz, exhibiting a significant engagement with philosophical Sufism (Sufi ḥaqāʾiq) and a considerable assimilation of the mystical thought and doctrine of its foremost classical authority, Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī. These findings suggest the need for further studies to better revise and nuance our current academic understanding of the Bā ʿAlawī tradition and its significant contributions to the premodern intellectual history of Yemeni and Hejazi Sufism

From the attached ISAR Symposium Program and Abstract Booklet:
"In this talk I will address various findings of ongoing research on the nature and origins of early Ottoman argumentation theory as evidenced by certain works and connections of Molla Fenârî (d. 834/1431). In so doing I will first review a number of scholarly contexts and links confirming Molla Fenârî’s involvement with two prominent strains of dialectical theory: (1) what might be called “proto-ādāb al-baḥth,” meaning juristic dialectic (jadal / khilāf) in the line of Burhān al-Dīn al-Nasafī (d. 687/1289), his predecessors, and commentators; and (2) early ādāb al-baḥth in the line of Shams al-Dīn al-Samarqandī (d. 722/1322) and commentators. I will then turn to what may be the only surviving, significant, and direct source for Molla Fenârî’s argumentation theory: the qiyās-oriented dialectic he outlines in his Fuṣūl al-Badāʾiʿ fī Uṣūl al-Sharāʾiʿ. Although belonging to a third prominent strain of dialectical theory—i.e., the qiyās-oriented objections outlined in uṣūl al-fiqh treatises—this remarkable chapter manifests the synthetic and innovative contributions of an early, influential Ottoman dialectician fully immersed in contemporaneous trends. At the very least, we can say that Molla Fenârî was a contributor to and conduit for both juristic dialectics and the ādāb al-baḥth in early Ottoman contexts."

Quṭb al-Din Shīrāzī (1236-1311 AD), the Persian polymath had great contributions to the fields of philosophy, mathematics, medicine, astronomy, music, literature, and Islamic studies. He lived during the Ilkhanid kingdom in Iran. He wrote an autobiography in the preface of his medical manuscript, al-Tuḥfa al-Sa'dīya. He discussed his views on science and then, he explained his life story, in particular his education and contribution to science. He mentioned the reasons that led him to write al-Tuḥfa al-Sa'dīya, his main medical work. As a great polymath, he traveled to many countries, and his words cleared the scientific atmosphere of the 14th century AD. Also, he directly introduced his teachers and their abilities and works. Furthermore, scientists who worked on the Canon of Medicine had commentaries on this book, which were comprehensively introduced in this autobiography.

This book studies the complex relationship of religion to modernity, arguing that modernity should be understood as the consequence, not the cause, of the new intellectual landscape of the 19th century. The lens of Islamic Modernism is used to uncover the underlying epistemology  and methodology of historicism that penetrated the Middle East and South Asia in this period, forcing and enabling a recalibration of the definition, nature, function and place of religion. We see that Muslim Modernists engaged in a sophisticated project of theological reform designed to marry their twin commitments to religion and modernity; they were in conversation with European scholarship and Catholic Modernism but, more importantly, with their own complex Islamic traditions.

The present edited volume offers a collection of new concepts and approaches to the study of mobility in pre-modern Islamic societies. It includes nine remarkable case studies from different parts of the Islamic world that examine the professional mobility within the literati and, especially, the social-cum-cultural group of Muslim scholars (ʿulamāʾ) between the eighth and the eighteenth centuries. Based on individual case studies and quantitative mining of biographical dictionaries and other primary sources from Islamic Iberia, North and West Africa, Umayyad Damascus and the Hejaz, Abbasid Baghdad, Ayyubid and Mamluk Syria and Egypt, various parts of the Seljuq Empire, and Hotakid Iran, this edited volume presents professional mobility as a defining characteristic of pre-modern Islamic societies.

This book studies the complex relationship of religion to modernity, arguing that modernity should be understood as the consequence, not the cause, if the new intellectual landscape of the 19th century. The lens of Islamic Modernism is used to uncover the underlying epistemology and methodology of historicism that penetrated the Middle East and South Asia in this period, forcing and enabling a recalibration of the definition, nature, function and place of religion. Muslim Modernists engaged in a sophisticated project of theological reform designed to marry their twin commitments to religion and modernity; they were in conversation with European scholarship and Catholic Modernism, but more importantly, with their own complex Islamic traditions. This book provides a new framework for conceptualizing the relationship between Western and non-Western modernities. It demonstrates that Islamic Modernists adopted intellectual frameworks that first emerged in Europe, then deployed them to ar...