Iranian libraries hold only few manuscripts that testify to the extended and intensive Muʿtazilite past in the various centers of Zaydi scholarship in the Caspian region, in Ḫurāsān, and in Rayy. Among the few Muʿtazilite Zaydi works preserved in the libraries of Iran is a miscellany held by the library of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Shiraz (ʿAllāma Ṭabāṭabāʾī Library). The maǧmūʿa, a facsimile of which is included in the present publication, was written between 673/1274-75 and 676/1277 and contains doctrinal works by Imāmi and Zaydi theologians from both Iran and from Yemen. Most of the codex consists of a theological summa, a taʿlīq that had been composed or transcribed by one Abū Ṭāhir b. ʿAlī al-Ṣaffār which was based on the Kitāb al-Uṣūl by Abū ʿAlī Muḥammad b. Ḫallād al-Baṣrī, the distinguished disciple of the Muʿtazilite theologian and founder of the Bahšamiyya, Abū Hāšim al-Ǧubbāʾī (d. 321/933), with an unknown number of commentary layers in between.
About the Authors
Hassan Ansari earned his doctorate at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE) of the Sorbonne, Paris. He is currently a long-term member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His publications include Accusations of Unbelief in Islam: A Diachronic Perspective on Takfir (edited with. Camilla Adang, Maribel Fierro, and Sabine Schmidtke; Leiden, 2015), L’imamat et l’Occultation selon l’imamisme: Étude bibliographique et histoire des textes (Leiden 2017), and a critical edition of Ibn al-Malahimi’s Tuhfat al-mutakallimin fi l-radd ‘ala l-falasifa (Tehran 2008, with Wilferd Madelung).
Sabine Schmidtke is Professor of Islamic Intellectual History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She has published extensively on Islamic and Jewish intellectual history, as well as the Muslim reception of the Bible and its early translation history into Arabic.
Bibliographic Information
Title: The Zaydi Reception of Bahshamite Muʿtazilism Facsimile Edition of MS Shiraz, Library of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Shiraz (ʿAllāma Ṭabāṭabāʾī Library), majmūʿa 102
َAuthors: Sabine Schmidtke
Publisher: Gorgias Press LLC
Language: English
Length: 378 pages
ISBN: 978-1-4632-4029-5
Pub. Date: Apr 8, 2019