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Struggling with the Philosopher:
A Refutation of Avicenna's Metaphysics
Wilferd Madelung and Toby Mayer
Synopsis
Taj al-Din Abu'l-Fath Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Karim
al-Shahrastani (d. AH 548/1153 CE) is mainly
known in Islamic intellectual history for
two great contributions. Firstly, he is famous
for his monumental study of religious communities,
the Kitab al-Milal wa'l-Nihal. This work,
widely appreciated in medieval Islam, continues
to inspire admiration for the scope of its
inquiry and non-polemical style.
A fully annotated French translation of the
book by Gimaret, Monnot and Jolivet was recently
sponsored by UNESCO (Livre des religions
et des sects. Peeters: 1986, 1993).
Secondly, al-Shahrastani is well-known as
one of the main authorities on Sunni theology
as formulated within the Ash'ari school.
He taught Ash'ari theology at the famous
al-Nizamiyya Madrasa in Baghdad, and developed
it in works like his Kitab Nihayat al-Iqdam
fi 'Ilm al-Kalam. In particular, al-Shahrastani
expounded the school of "neo-Ash'arism"
which had been ushered in by al-Ghazali,
and which was distinguished from the earlier
Ash'arism by its more pronounced philosophical
tendency.
In Struggling with the Philosopher (Kitab
al-Musara'a), al-Shahrastani is concerned
to refute a number of key aspects of the
metaphysics of the great Persian philosopher
Abu 'Ali Ibn Sina (d. AH 428/1037 CE). Ibn
Sina's extraordinary achievements in Islamic
philosophy had a major impact on Islamic
thought through the AH 6th/12th CE century,
and there is evidence that the influence
of his worldview was even felt beyond the
intellectual classes. This inevitably called
forth a reaction, and a series of critiques
of his metaphysics was produced by Muslim
thinkers beginning with al-Ghazali's Incoherence
of the Philosophers. Al-Shahrastani's Struggling
with the Philosopher is to be broadly aligned
with such refutations. For example, it contains
brilliant a priori arguments against Ibn
Sina's teaching that the world is beginningless,
akin to those found in al-Ghazali's earlier
attack.
However, careful scrutiny of al-Shahrastani's
work shows that it is not simply driven by
a concern to defend Sunni Ash'ari theology
against Ibn Sina, as are most of the other
critiques. Instead, the book surprisingly
suggests a Shi'i intellectual context. Notably,
it was commissioned by an 'Alid patron, Abu'l-Qasim
'Ali ibn Ja'far al-Musawi of Tirmidh, contains
encomia which are clearly Shi'i in tone and
even argues for the imamate. And this is
not all. It is arguable that the doctrine
al-Shahrastani espouses as the ideal answer
to Ibn Sina's philosophy is specifically
Ismaili in inspiration. While the author
does not refer to Ismailism explicitly, preferring
to use euphemisms such as the "Hanifi
revelation" (al-shar' al-hanifi), it
is demonstrable that the latter amounts to
a characteristically Ismaili theology.
A large part of Struggling with the Philosopher
is dedicated to bringing out the contradictions
in Ibn Sina's concept of God as the "Necessary
Existent' (wajib al-wujud). As al-Shahrastani
points out, Ibn Sina insists that for something
to be intrinsically necessary, it must be
absolutely simple. Composition, even of a
"conceptual" order, implies contingency,
since the thing in question will then become
dependent on its subsidiary elements and
perhaps also on an agent to put them together.
In particular, God's identity becomes a composite
of two elements: (1) the pseudo-genus existence,
held in common with contingents, and (2)
a differentia which is needed to mark God
off from contingents within existence. Thus,
according to al-Shahrastani, Ibn Sina's concept
of God as the Necessary Existent flagrantly
contradicts his insistence on divine simplicity.
For al-Shahrastani, the way out of this absurdity
is to elevate God above existence or, as
he carefully presents in the text, the answer
is to treat existence as a purely equivocal
term - so that attributing God with "existence"
has nothing in common with attributing contingents
with existence. In essence, this amounts
to the radical theology familiar from Ismaili
philosophers like al-Kirmani, al-Sijistani
and Nasir Khusraw, according to whom God
is so absolute in His transcendence that
He is even beyond the categories of "being"
and "non-being". In all this, Struggling
with the Philosopher testifies to the accuracy
of the allegations of al-Shahrastani's contemporaries
that, notwithstanding his public Ash'arism
and Shafi'ism, he was drawn to the "people
of the mountain fortresses", i. e.,
the Ismailis. It can be added to other works
of his such as the Majlis, and his Qur'an
commentary, the Mafatih al-Asrar wa Masabih
al-Abrar, all of which add up to a crucial
body of evidence that this major medieval
Muslim intellectual embraced Ismaili teachings.
This volume is the second monograph in the
Ismaili Texts and Translations Series of
The Institute of Ismaili Studies. .
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