A contemporary to Thomas Aquinas in Latin Catholic Italy, and with a parallel motivation to stabilize each his own civilization in its flux and storm, 'Abd Allah Baydawi of Ilkhan Persia wrote a compact and memorable Arabic Summation of Islamic Natural and Traditional Theology. With the same strokes of his pen he presented the Islamic version of the Science of Theological Statement, bafflingly called "Kalam" while familiarly embracing "Theology". Baydawi's Tawali'al-Anwar min Matal'al-Anzar (Rays of Dawnlight Outstreaming from Far Horizons of (...) Logical Reasoning), with Mahmud Isfahani's commentary, is a formidably clear logical and mental vision of mankind's final completion as a spiritual structure in Islam. Reality - in nature's Possible mode, in an apodictic Divine mode, and in humanity's heroic Prophetic mode - comprises man's Worldview and is the Theme of the Baydawi/Isfahani discourse. The Edifice of Man and Humanity's evanescent Evidence within it are both hugely arresting and moving. The print edition is available as a set of two volumes (9789004121027). (shrink)

ʿAbd al-Bāqī b. Qāniʿ was a traditionist and evaluator of transmitters, one of the founders of the genre of biographical dictionaries devoted to the Com- panions of the Prophet. Ibn Qāniʿ has not attracted much attention from scholars— only Khalīl Qūtlāy has authored a doctoral dissertation, now published in fifteen volumes, that comprises Ibn Qāniʿ’s Muʿjam al-ṣaḥāba. In this essay I argue that Ibn Qāniʿ and his contemporaries relied on the chains of hadith transmission to extract the names of (...) many Companions. My research also shows that in the eighth/ fourteenth century at least two presently lost biographical collections associated with Ibn Qāniʿ were in circulation: Kitāb al-Wafayāt, a catalogue of death dates of hadith transmitters, and Kitāb al-Tārīkh, an annalistic collection, which included many assessments of transmitter reliability. Ibn Qāniʿ’s unsophisticated methods of hadith criticism, although in line with third/ninth- and early fourth/tenth-century scholarly developments, incurred him some criticism from later hadith scholars. (shrink)

al-Juzʼ al-awwal. Dirāsāt fī al-manṭiq wa-falsafat al-ʻulūm -- al-juzʼ al-thānī. Dirāsāt fī al-manhaj wa-al-ʻilm al-ʻArabī.

Faylasū al-ʻArab: al-Kindī -- al-Muʻallim al-thānī: al-Fārābī -- al-Shāʻir al-ḥakīm: al-Mutanabbī -- Baṭalīmūs al-ʻArab: Ibn al-Haytham -- Shaykh al-Islām: Ibn Taymīyah.

al-juzʼ 1. Min alif ilá sīn. -- al-juzʼ 2. Min shīn ilá yāʼ.