Intellectual Life in the Hijaz before Wahhabism: Ibrahim al-Kurani's Theology of Sufism

Naser Dumairieh
Hardback, 330 pages
9789004499041

In Intellectual Life in the Hijaz before Wahhabism, Naser Dumairieh argues that, as a result of changing global conditions facilitating the movement of scholars and texts, the seventeenth-century Hijaz was one of the most important intellectual centres of the Islamic world, acting as a hub between its different parts. 

Positioning Ibrahim al-Kurani (d. 1101/1690) as representative of the intellectual activities of the pre-Wahhabism Hijaz, Dumairieh argues that his coherent philosophical system represents a synthesis of several major post-classical traditions of Islamic thought, namely kalam and Akbarian appropriations of Avicennian metaphysics. Al-Kurani's work is the culmination of the philosophized Akbarian tradition; with his reconciliation of Ibn ʿArabi’s ideas with Ashʿari theology, Ibn ʿArabi’s ideas became Islamic theology.

Contents:
Introduction: When All Roads Led to the Ḥijāz
1. The Seventeenth-Century Ḥijāz in Its Global and Local Context
2. Intellectual Life in the Ḥijāz in the Seventeenth Century
3. Ibrahim al-Kūrānī’s Life, Education, Teachers, and Students
4. Al-Kūrānī’s Works
5. Al-Kūrānī’s Metaphysical and Cosmological Thought
6. Al-Kūrānī’s Other Theological and Sufi Thought