Al-Sanusi's Prolegomena to Islamic Theology

Muhammad bin Yusuf al-Sanusi
Musa Furber (translation)
Paperback, 260 pages
9781944904272

Sharh al-Muqaddimat

Al-Sanusi's Sharh al-Muqaddimat is a commentary on his own al-Muqaddimat (Prolegomena), a work composed as a preparation for his Umm al-Barahin, establishing the logical and epistemological foundations required for the conduct of kalam: the typology of judgements, the categories of rational necessity, impossibility, and possibility, and the conceptual framework within which the divine attributes can be rigorously demonstrated. It is prolegomena in the strict sense - not prefatory remarks, but the premises without which the argument cannot proceed.

The thirty-three paragraphs are organised into eight sections. The first treats the typology of judgements - legal, customary, and rational - and their subdivisions, including the demand-forms of legal judgement, the stipulative category with its subdivisions of cause, condition, and impediment, and the three divisions of rational judgement into the necessary, the impossible, and the possible. Subsequent sections address volitional acts and the doctrine of acquisition; the varieties of shirk and the roots of disbelief and innovation; the classification of existent things; and the divine attributes of capability, will, knowledge, life, hearing, sight, and speech, closing with a definition of trustworthiness and a doxology.

The commentary is a masterclass in the scholastic method. Al-Sanusi parses each formula component by component, identifying genus and differentia and specifying what each clause includes and excludes. He grounds abstract categories in concrete examples drawn from jurisprudence and rational demonstration, and where the Prolegomena gestures toward a proof he sets it out in full. The polemical dimension is equally rigorous: the positions of the Mu'tazilah, the Jabriyyah, the Qadariyyah, the corporealists, and the dualists are presented with precision and systematically refuted. The treatment of shirk and disbelief expands into a rich taxonomy of historical communities and theological schools, and the discussion of the roots of disbelief develops into an epistemological account that constitutes a diagnosis of the errors the whole work is designed to forestall.

Readers who work through this commentary will find themselves equipped - in method, vocabulary, and argument - to engage with the Umm al-Barahin and al-Sanusi's own commentary thereon.