A Twelfth-Century Controversy on Mānkdīm’s Taʿlīq Sharḥ al-Uṣūl al-khamsa: Zaydis Debating Accidents, Attributes, and Optics

In this article, we present a so far unstudied epistolary exchange between two sixth/twelfth-century Zaydis from Yemen on Mānkdīm’s famous Taʿlīq Sharḥ al-Uṣūl al-khamsa.

In the text, which survives in a unique manuscript, al-Ḥasan al-ʿUdharī raises objections against passages from the proof for the createdness of the world and from the chapter on beatific vision in the Taʿlīq, touching upon issues related to accidents (aʿrāḍ), attributes (ṣifāt), and sense-perception. Al-ʿUdharī’s objections are refuted by al-Ḥasan al-Raṣṣāṣ, who was possibly his teacher. The debate is of interest for studying the sixth/twelfth-century Zaydi reception of Muʿtazili teachings, as is evident, but it also serves as a valuable testimony to the Zaydi engagement with other intellectual traditions, including proponents of Greek-derived logic and Ashʿari arguments against Muʿtazili theories. Our article first situates the text and its arguments in its historical and intellectual context, then offers an English translation, and concludes with a critical edition of the epistolary exchange.

One of the most important systematic accounts for the study of the doctrines of the Bahshami branch of Muʿtazilism is Taʿlīq Sharḥ al-Uṣūl al-khamsa by al-sharīf al-Mustaẓhar bi-llāh Qiwām al-Dīn Abū l-Ḥusayn Aḥmad b. al-Ḥusayn b. Abī Hāshim al-Ḥasanī al-Qazwīnī, sometimes referred to in historical sources as Ibn al-Aʿrābī, and much better known as Mānkdīm Sheshdīw (d. ca. 425/ 1034). Since its 1965 publication in the edition of ʿAbd al-Karīm ʿUthmān, the text has been repeatedly reprinted and productively used by many modern scholars of Muʿtazili and specifically Bahshami theology. In line with the text’s attribution among the majority of scholars in the 1960s and 1970s, ʿUthmān had published the text as ʿAbd al-Jabbār al-Hamadhānī’s (d. 415/1025) Sharḥ al-Uṣūl al-khamsa. In an 1979 article on the Taʿlīq Sharḥ al-Uṣūl al-khamsa, Daniel Gimaret rectified this erroneous attribution along with other confusions of previous scholars regarding the work’s textual relationship to other Muʿtazili works. He demonstrates that the text published by ʿUthmān is in fact Mānkdīm’s recension of or commentary on ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s Sharḥ al-Uṣūl al-khamsa, which in turn is the latter’s autocommentary on his own Uṣūl, rather than a commentary on other homonymous Muʿtazili works….

Bibliographic Information

Thesis Title: A Twelfth-Century Controversy on Mānkdīm’s Taʿlīq Sharḥ al-Uṣūl al-khamsa: Zaydis Debating Accidents, Attributes, and Optics

Author(s):  Hassan Ansari & Jan Thiele

Published in: Shii Studies Review, 23 Dec 2024

 Language: English

Length: 29 Pages

A Twelfth-Century Controversy on Mānkdīm’s Taʿlīq Sharḥ al-Uṣūl al-khamsa