The Attributes of God in Islamic Thought: Contemplating Allah

Mansooreh Khalilizand
Paperback, 274 pages
9781032571591

The debate over Allah’s attribute—the “nature” and the inner articulation of Allah—is one of the focal debates in the intellectual history of Islam. This edited collection aims to highlight and examine some aspects of this debate in their original context, based on the relevant primary literature.

By showing that even an apparently self-evident concept such as Allah, which lies at the heart of every reading of Islam, is highly ambiguous and polysemous, the chapters also emphasise the plurality that has always existed in Islamic thought. Through highlighting the philosophical and theological reflections on the concept of Allah, the results of this study challenge the juristic reading of Islam, in which Allah’s function consists mainly in providing a detailed plan for the human life and also rewarding or punishing the ones who deviates from it. The book also attempts to demonstrate the relevance and the actuality of the tradition and to stress its contemporaneity.

Contents
Part 1: Allah of the Philosophers

1. Dancing with the Devil or Chanting with Angels?: al-Rāzī’s Employment of Philosophical Arguments in Discussion of Divine Attributes
Mehmet Fatih Arslan

2. The Ineffable and the Process of Its Determination: Ṣadr al-Dīn Shīrāzī’s Considerations on the Origin
Mansooreh Khalilizand

3. Divine Love in Medieval Islamic Philosophy: Some Stages in the History of an Attribute
Colin Fitzpatrick Murtha

4. Divine Simplicity, the Deus Revelatus, and the Divine Names in the Philosophical Theology of Mullā Ṣadrā Shīrāzī (1571–1636)
Sajjad Rizvi

Part 2: Allah of the Theologians

5. Abu al-Hudhayl al-‘Allāf on Divine Simplicity
Abdulhakeem Yousuf Alkhelaifi

6. Does the Attribute “Baqāʾ” Exist?: Sunni Theologians on God’s Persistence
Angelika Brodersen

7. Nūr al-Dīn al-Ṣābūnī and the Divine Attributes: Māturīdī Kalām in a Nutshell
Angelika Brodersen

8. Is There an Elephant in Our Presence That We Cannot See?: A Deep Dive Into Bahshamiyya Attributes Discourses
Alnoor Dhanani

9. The Omnipotence (al-qudra) and the Will of God (al-irāda) in the Theology of Sayf ad-Dīn al-Āmidī
Ahmed Husić

10. Constructing the True Islam: The Wahhābī Scholar Ibn ʿUthaymīn (d. 2001) on the Divine Attributes and the Path of the Pious Ancestors (Salaf)
Mohammad Gharaibeh

11. Divine Will and Anthropopathism in Muʿtazilī Theology: Abū ʿAlī and Abū Hāshim al-Jubbāʾī
Mehmet Emin Güleçyüz

12. God as a Paradigm of the World: Ismāʿīl Gelenbevī on Divine Knowledge
Kutlu Okan