The renaissance of Shi'i Islam began in the 9th/15th century when the Ismailis experienced the Anjudan revival and Twelver Shi'i traditions were also renewed. This renaissance gained further strength when the Safavids succeeded in establishing a state in the early decades of the 10th/16th century, making Ithna'ashari Shi'i Islam their official religion. The chapters in this open access book represent the most recent scholarship on the intellectual and spiritual life of the age and discuss what prepared the ground for its appearance as well as its achievements. Although the political and artistic developments of the Safavid era of the 10th-12th/16th-18th centuries have been extensively studied, the complexities of the different groups, movements and strands of thought in the renaissance of Shi'i Islam still remain largely unexplored. The major themes that characterised the Shi'i renaissance are explored, including: popular reactions to messianic movements; the development of legal theories and concepts; the investigation of theological and philosophical problems, above all by the 'School of Isfahan'; Shi'i-Sufi interactions and intra-Shi'i relations; the collection of Shi'i hadith and its application in Shi'i exegesis; and the interplay between political considerations and religious beliefs. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by The Institute of Ismaili Studies.

Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938) was one of the most influential modernist Islamic thinkers of the early twentieth century. His work as a poet, politician, philosopher, and public intellectual was widely recognized in his lifetime and plays a major role in contemporary conversations about Islam, modernity, and tradition. God, Science, and Self examines the patterns of reasoning at work in Iqbal's philosophic magnum opus, arguably the most significant text of modernist Islamic philosophy, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam. Since its initial publication in 1934, The Reconstruction has left scholars in a quandary: its themes appear eclectic, and its arguments contradictory and philosophically perplexing. In this groundbreaking study, Nauman Faizi argues that the keys to demystifying the contradictions of The Reconstruction are two competing epistemologies at play within the work. Iqbal takes knowledge to be descriptive, essential, foundational, and binary, but he also takes knowledge to be performative, contextual, probabilistic, and vague. Faizi demonstrates how these approaches to knowledge shape Iqbal's claims about personhood, God, scripture, philosophy, and science. God, Science, and Self offers an original approach to interpreting Islamic thought as it crafts relationships between scriptural texts, philosophic thought, and scientific claims for modern Muslim subjects.

Late antique Corinth was on the frontline of the radical political, economic and religious transformations that swept across the Mediterranean world from the second to sixth centuries CE. A strategic merchant city, it became a hugely important metropolis in Roman Greece and, later, a key focal point for early Christianity. In late antiquity, Corinthians recognised new Christian authorities; adopted novel rites of civic celebration and decoration; and destroyed, rebuilt and added to the city's ancient landscape and monuments. Drawing on evidence from ancient literary sources, extensive archaeological excavations and historical records, Amelia Brown here surveys this period of urban transformation, from the old Agora and temples to new churches and fortifications. Influenced by the methodological advances of urban studies, Brown demonstrates the many ways Corinthians responded to internal and external pressures by building, demolishing and repurposing urban public space, thus transforming Corinthian society, civic identity and urban infrastructure. In a departure from isolated textual and archaeological studies, she connects this process to broader changes in metropolitan life, contributing to the present understanding of urban experience in the late antique Mediterranean.

T. M. Rudavsky presents a new account of the development of Jewish philosophy from the tenth century to Spinoza in the seventeenth, viewed as part of an ongoing dialogue with medieval Christian and Islamic thought. Her aim is to provide a broad historical survey of major figures and schools within the medieval Jewish tradition, focusing on the tensions between Judaism and rational thought. This is reflected in particular philosophical controversies across a wide range of issues in metaphysics, language, cosmology, and philosophical theology. The book illuminates our understanding of medieval thought by offering a much richer view of the Jewish philosophical tradition, informed by the considerable recent research that has been done in this area.

This is a textual and contextual study of an early Arabic mirror for princes. 'Mirrors for princes' offer advice to rulers on the ethical and practical aspects of statecraft. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach to an early Arabic mirror, the 'Counsel for Kings' of Pseudo Mawardi, this study evokes the mentality of the distinctive environment - the border region of eastern Iran - in which, it is argued, the text originated. Exploring the 'Counsel for Kings' as the product of a specific cultural milieu at a particular historical moment, as a substantial and influential work of Arabic literature, and as a critical commentary on the political and social conditions of the author's time, this book restores this multi faceted mirror for princes to history. The first volume in this two part study covers the literary, cultural, political and historical contexts and their confluence in Pseudo Mawardi's Nasihat al muluk. The second volume gives direct access to a substantial portion of the text through translation and commentary.

Philosophy in the Islamic world from the 9th to 11th centuries was characterized by an engagement with Greek philosophical works in Arabic translation. This volume collects papers on both the Greek philosophers in their new Arabic guise, and on reactions to the translation movement in the period leading up to Avicenna. In a first section, Adamson provides general studies of the 'formative' period of philosophy in the Islamic world, discussing the Arabic reception of Aristotle and of his commentators. He also argues that this formative period was characterized not just by the use of Hellenic materials, but also by a productive exchange of ideas between Greek-inspired 'philosophy (falsafa)' and Islamic theology (kalAE m). A second section considers the underappreciated philosophical impact of Galen, using Arabic sources to understand Galen himself, and exploring the thought of the doctor and philosopher al-RAE zAE", who drew on Galen as a chief inspiration. A third section looks at al-FAE rAE bAE" and the so-called 'Baghdad school' of the 10th century, examining their reaction to Aristotle's Metaphysics, his epistemology, and his famous deterministic 'sea battle' argument. A final group of papers is devoted to Avicenna's philosophy, which marks the beginning of a new era of philosophy in the Islamic world.

The volume brings together seventeen studies on Avicenna by Dimitri Gutas, written over the past twenty-five years. They aim to establish Avicenna's historical and philosophical context as a means to determining his philosophical project and the orientations of his thought. They deal with his life and works, his method, his epistemology, and his later reception in the Islamic world, ending with a programmatic essay on the state of the field of Avicennan studies and future agenda. Occasioned by issues raised in Gutas's monograph on Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition (whose second edition has just appeared), they form a substantive complement to it. For this reprint, a number of the essays have been reset and accordingly revised and updated. Provided with exhaustive indexes of names, places, subjects, and technical terms, the volume constitutes a new and major research tool for the study of Avicenna and his heritage. (CS1050).

Ibn Rushd, known to Christian Europe as Averroes, came from Cordoba in Spain and lived from 1126 to 1198. He is regarded as the last great Arab philosopher in the Classical tradition, and, under the patronage of the Almohad ruler Abu Ya'quib Yusuf, was a very prolific one. The Tahafut al-Tahafut, written not long after 1180, is his major work and the one in which his original philosophical doctrine is to be found. It takes the form of a refutation of Ghazali's Tahafut al-Falasifa (The Incoherence of the Philosophers), a work begun in 1095 which attacked philosophical speculation and declared some of the beliefs of the Philosophers to be contrary to Islam. Averroes sets his Aristotelian views in contrast with the Neo-Platonist ones attributed to the philosophers by Ghazali. Published in the UNESCO Collection of Great Works under the auspices of the Gibb Memorial Trust and the International Commission for the Translation of Great Works.

A unique introductory guide to the rich, complex and diverse tradition of Islamic philosophy.

"Islamic Philosophy A-Z" comprises over a hundred concise entries, alphabetically ordered and cross-referenced for easy access. All the essential aspects of Islamic philosophy are covered here: key figures, schools, concepts, topics, and issues. Articles on the Peripatetics, Isma'ilis, Illuminationists, Sufis, kalam theologians and later modern thinkers are supplemented by entries on classical Greek influences as well as Jewish philosophers who lived and worked in the Islamic world. Topical entries cover various issues and key positions in all the major areas of philosophy, making clear why the central problems of Islamic philosophy have been, and remain, matters of rational disputation.

This book will prove an indispensable resource to anyone who wishes to gain a better understanding of this fascinating intellectual tradition.

Icon of modern-day fundamentalist movements, firebrand religious purist, tireless polemicist against the intellectual schools of his time-the Ibn Taymiyya we know is a thinker we often associate with hard attitudes and dogmatic stances. Yet there is another Ibn Taymiyya that stands out from the pages of his work, the thinker who fashions himself as a master of the via media and as a defender of the harmony between human reason and the religious faith. The aim of this book is to shed fresh light on Ibn Taymiyya's intellectual identity by a close investigation of his ethical thought. Earlier Muslim thinkers debating ethical value had been exercised by a number of core questions. What makes actions right or wrong? How do human beings know it? And what is God's relationship to the evaluative standards discerned by the human mind? An investigation of Ibn Taymiyya's engagement with such questions has much to teach us about his intellectual program and particularly about the role of reason and the linchpin concept of human nature (fitra) within this program. It also has much to teach us about Ibn Taymiyya's relationship to the intellectual landscape of his time, bringing us up against a rich tapestry of ethical discussions unfolding within theology, philosophy and legal theory in the classical period. At the same time, a close reading of Ibn Taymiyya's ethics invites us to confront not only the content of his thought but its form, and more particularly those features of his writing that fracture our efforts to unify his thought.

Commonly known as the 'spiritual father of Pakistan', the philosophical and political ideas of Muhammad Iqbal shaped the face of Indian Muslim nationalism and the direction of modernist reformist Islam around the world. This volume brings together a range of prominent and emerging voices within American and European Islamic studies to share the latest developments on Iqbal's thought. They re-examine the ideas that lie at the heart of Iqbal's own thought: religion, science, metaphysics, nationalism and religious identity, and bring out many new connections between the 'Sage of the Ummah' and the greatest thinkers and ideas of European and Islamic philosophies.

A militant Marxist atheist and a "Radical Orthodox" Christian theologian square off on everything from the meaning of theology and Christ to the war machine of corporate mafia. "What matters is not so much that Zizek is endorsing a demythologized, disenchanted Christianity without transcendence, as that he is offering in the end (despite what he sometimes claims) a heterodox version of Christian belief."-John Milbank "To put it even more bluntly, my claim is that it is Milbank who is effectively guilty of heterodoxy, ultimately of a regression to paganism: in my atheism, I am more Christian than Milbank."-Slavoj Zizek In this corner, philosopher Slavoj Zizek, a militant atheist who represents the critical-materialist stance against religion's illusions; in the other corner, "Radical Orthodox" theologian John Milbank, an influential and provocative thinker who argues that theology is the only foundation upon which knowledge, politics, and ethics can stand. In The Monstrosity of Christ, Zizek and Milbank go head to head for three rounds, employing an impressive arsenal of moves to advance their positions and press their respective advantages. By the closing bell, they have not only proven themselves worthy adversaries, they have shown that faith and reason are not simply and intractably opposed. Zizek has long been interested in the emancipatory potential offered by Christian theology. And Milbank, seeing global capitalism as the new century's greatest ethical challenge, has pushed his own ontology in more political and materialist directions. Their debate in The Monstrosity of Christ concerns the future of religion, secularity, and political hope in light of a monsterful event-God becoming human. For the first time since Zizek's turn toward theology, we have a true debate between an atheist and a theologian about the very meaning of theology, Christ, the Church, the Holy Ghost, Universality, and the foundations of logic. The result goes far beyond the popularized atheist/theist point/counterpoint of recent books by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and others. Zizek begins, and Milbank answers, countering dialectics with "paradox." The debate centers on the nature of and relation between paradox and parallax, between analogy and dialectics, between transcendent glory and liberation. Slavoj Zizek is a philosopher and cultural critic. He has published over thirty books, including Looking Awry, The Puppet and the Dwarf, and The Parallax View (these three published by the MIT Press). John Milbank is an influential Christian theologian and the author of Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason and other books. Creston Davis, who conceived of this encounter, studied under both Zizek and Milbank.

In his "New York Times" bestseller "What Jesus Meant," Garry Wills offered a fresh and incisive reading of Jesusa teachings. Now Wills turns to Paul, whose writings have provoked controversy throughout Christian history. Upending many common assumptions, Wills argues eloquently that what Paul meant was not something contrary to what Jesus meant. Rather, the best way to know Jesus is to discover Paul. In this stimulating and masterly analysis, Wills illuminates how Paul, writing on the road and in the heat of the moment, and often in the midst of controversy, galvanized a movement and offers us the best reflection of those early times.

From Greco-Roman Antiquity through to the European Enlightenment, philosophy and religious thought were inseparably interwoven. This was equally the case for the popular natural or 'pagan' religions of the ancient world as it was for the three pre-eminent 'religions of the book', namely Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The lengthy and involved encounter of the Greek philosophical tradition - and especially of the Platonic, Aristotelian, and Neoplatonic strands of that tradition - initially with the Hellenistic cults and subsequently with the three Abrahamic religions, played a critical role in shaping the basic contours of Western intellectual history from Plato to Philo of Alexandria, Plotinus, Porphyry, Augustine, and Proclus; from Aristotle to al-Farabi, Avicenna, al-Gazali, Aquinas and the medieval scholastics, and eventually to Meister Eckhart and Nicholas Cusanus and such modern philosophers and theologians as Richard Hooker, the Cambridge Platonists, Jacob Boehme, and G. W. F. Hegel to name but a few. The aim of the twenty-four essays comprising this volume is to explore the intellectual worlds of the three Abrahamic religious traditions, their respective approaches to scriptural hermeneutics, and their interaction over many centuries on the common ground of the inheritance of classical Greek philosophy. The shared goal of the contributors is to demonstrate the extent to which the three Abrahamic religions have created similar shared patterns of thought in dealing with crucial religious concepts such as the divine, creation, providence, laws both natural and revealed, such problems as the origin of evil and the possibility of salvation, as well as defining hermeneutics, that is to say the manner of interpreting their sacred writings.

This collection of essays highlights that, despite its history of conflict, Bosnia and Herzegovina has a real enthusiasm for comparative philosophy. It illustrates the role of this type of philosophy in Bosnian culture and links it with developments in other parts of the world and other cultures.Part One consists of essays that have appeared, in slightly revised versions, in a number of journals and books that focus on relevant resources introducing this field in our region and especially Bosnia and Herzegovina, while Part Two consists of interviews with prominent scholars outside of this country.The book examines the challenges confronting the teaching of comparative philosophy within the university-level philosophy curriculum in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the surrounding countries in the Balkans, a part of the world where multicultural societies are the norm. Facing the twenty-first century, these confluences and cross-currents are increasingly gaining importance, especially in this region, with a comparativism of ethnocentrism and multiculturalism becoming a way of challenging stereotypes.