‘Repenting’ for past transgression is so integral to the millennial traditions of the world that it seems redundant to remind the reader of their mutual dependency. Unfortunately, pride of place has not translated into very many studies in English on the concept and role of tawba—that is to say, beyond the psychology and ethics of what to academics usually passes for ‘religion’ and ‘spiritual experience’.

Not surprisingly, Professor Atif Khalil ascribes the perfunctory attention paid to this vital concept to certain preconceived notions about ‘religion’, in particular. These notions arise from what I would describe as an atypical conception of ‘religion’, the self-same homogenising conception that documentary history inseverably traces back to the western branch of medieval Christianity. Despite decades of criticism and correctives, such explanatory paralysis in the face of diversity continues to ail the study of ‘religion’, philosophical history, and so many other subject-areas. It has certainly narrowed, not broadened, the semantic range of complex concepts like ‘tawba’ that should otherwise be guiding our understanding.

Khalil goes a long way in remedying the situation, parsimoniously and in his usual fluent style, with this the first ‘full-length’ and, I should add, linguistically savvy study of the concept (see below). The linguistic side of his arguments, in fact, lends his approach a certain realism, linguistics being one of the most enduring features of the Islamic tradition. The author's informative endnotes and extensive bibliography (separated into primary and secondary sources) will likely delight the attentive reader.

The evidence Khalil amasses from the giants of early taṣawwuf—e.g., Ibrāhīm b. Adham, ʿAbd Allāh b. al-Mubārak, Dhū’l-Nūn al-Miṣrī, Sarī al-Saqaṭī, Junayd al-Baghdād, Sahl al-Tustarī and Abū Saʿīd Aḥmad al-Kharrāz, spanning roughly the eighth and eleventh centuries—shows them stipulating the conditions necessary for repentance. There is more than one method for establishing these conditions, however, and he prudently avoids pegging any set of conditions to the act of repentance as such. All these expositors wrote about ‘tawba’ almost exclusively in a didactic vein, rather than toward the demonstrative rigour demanded by the falāsifa. The point is that ‘tawba’, on the one hand, could never be reduced to a mere cog in man's relation to God, let alone to a cosmic monstrosity like ‘The Great Chain of Being’ popularised by the philosophising American writer, Arthur Oncken Lovejoy. On the other, it implicated more than just a ‘psychological’ feeling of contrition. In short, the early ‘Sufis’ saw in tawba ‘a life-transforming alteration’, as Khalil puts it. They never intended it either as part of a mechanical process or merely as an expression of ephemeral sensations of wellbeing.

In view of the concatenate character of his subject-matter, Khalil also eschews overspecialisation in the presentation of the quantitative evidence. By ‘quantitative’, however, he simply means “how much they might have addressed the concept under study” (p. 4)—namely, the measure of the source-authors’ interest in the subject.

My few minor criticisms aside (e.g., concerning common English terms and other marginal points,Footnote ¹ which anyway are ritually unavoidable in monographs that begin as doctoral dissertations), he is surefooted in every discussion on the semantic universe of the Return (rujūʿ), which he calls tawba's ‘principal lexical sense’ (p. 7). It is within the comprehensive scope of this Return that our concept was subsequently developed from Ṣadr al-Dīn Qūnawī (d. 1274) to Fayḍ Kāshānī (d. 1680), Mullā Ṣadrā's student (almost half of whose Al-Rujūʿ ilā ʾAllāh [‘The Return to God’] covers the concept of ‘tawba’, its semantic connections with other concepts, and its scriptural supports).

After a general introduction, where he disentangles ‘tawba’ from certain misapprehensions of it, he begins in earnest with ‘The Semantics of Tawba’, the first part. It contains the longest chapter, which focuses on the ‘internal structure’ and ‘semantic field’ of the concept in the Qurʿān. And he displays the same flair revealing the dynamics of the concept as does in the second part, where he brings out—among other things—the stylistic, methodological and doctrinal differences separating the source-texts under consideration. While long, the first two chapters are lucidly argued—seasoned scholars and novices alike will profit immensely from them. He maintains his pace till the last chapters, where the tricky subjects of the stations and states of realisation of tawba are handled.

He discusses all those issues within their proper context of ‘return’, which he plainly assumes even where he leaves ‘return’ unmentioned. This return is essentially a return to God and thus implicates every aspect of man's life, not just the moment when a person faces the house of God in ritual prayer. However, a basic paradox—first broached at some point in Part I—comes to the fore in connection with man's relation to God. Tawba was once understood comprehensively as ‘an act of God’; it signalled (separately from the perspective of God's servant) a ‘divine initiative’, a forgiveness, an acceptance and ‘the return toward the human being in mercy and compassion’ (p. 14). Overspecialised scholars tend to excise this, the determining factor, from their discussions; whereas Khalil takes account of the reverse logic—as it were—necessary to contemplate a divine act like tawba, and one of its most effective expounders is the indomitable Sahl al-Tustarī (d. 896).

With respect to the ‘reward’, for instance, even ‘worldly loss was in fact a spiritual boon’ (p. 71). This is accurate if the reader avoids the semantic confusions caused by conflating ‘spirit’ (rūḥ) with anything approaching current English usage, particularly with words like ‘spirituality’, ‘spiritualism’ and their speculative trivia. This point deserves mentioning, because ‘rūḥ’ has its own pedigree in this vast learning tradition; without it, very little would be decipherable to us in paradox or in the interplay between ‘knowing and being’, as elsewhere the hukamāʾ (philosophers) were wont to say. Khalil himself uses various adjectival forms of ‘spirit’, but it would be pedantic of this reviewer to fault him for it, seeing as he is clear that the opposite of ‘spirit’ is the multiplicity of matter (any kind of materia, not just the physical kind). Hence, the self seeks egress through self-discipline and the purification of its faculties from the taint of materia and their dispersing effect. But this can constitute only the negative path—not quite what completes the journey—pending the divine munificence.

Basing himself on Sulamī and Qushayrī, further, Khalil explains that the hātif —a “common trope in Islamic hagiographical literature to provide spiritual counsel and guidance”—was said to appear as a kind of ‘voice’ stemming from some relation of experience (e.g., the antelope in relation to the hunter) (p. 63). This colourful trope sheds interesting light on another technical term, ‘voice’ (lisān; lit., tongue or mouthpiece), which has enjoyed near-synonymy with ‘intention’. To a pivotal thinker like Qūnawī, for example, who made functional use of the term ‘lisān’, something was ‘spirital’ (rūḥānī) insofar as it dominated its own relationship with the materia of its articulation. There is a subtle logical aspect to all this. But Qūnawī too was referring neither to a voice of vacuous entities nor to that of physical persons. The reader is well to keep this function in mind, because doing justice to the concept of repentance means, to Khalil, also reckoning the divine source of ‘tawba’ and, hence, ultimately a divine voice. Otherwise, in negative philosophical terms, nothing begins and ends only with ‘matter’ except the mere concept of primal matter.

Given the Qurʾanic origin and experientially driven complexity of ‘tawba’, it is hardly surprising that he should discuss the late Prof. Toshihiko Izutsu's contribution to interpretive methodology (ch. 2, pp. 23–5). There is little doubt that Izutsu's work as a whole marks an advance in the field of Islamic Studies. Although I find it a little too reliant on epistemological considerations, any reticence on my part seems inconsequential here too, since Khalil's musings on methodology are appropriately brief. He is simply trying to clear away the semantic clutter surrounding both tawba and its interconnections with other concepts—concepts like raḥma (mercy), which finds its own realisation among human beings, and iṣlāḥ (rectification, setting aright, etc.), istighfār/maghfira (seeking forgiveness, granting forgiveness), and so on. It is tempting to impose, for the sake of expediency, artificially constructed methodologies or to draw on stocks of anachronistic meanings that are extrinsic to the actual history of ‘tawba’ as a concept. Thankfully, Khalil proceeds toward his sources without splitting hairs interminably on extraneous issues, which still would not have taken him to what was really discussed in these sources and why.

Recapitulating his thinking and orientation, he writes that this work examines:

This ‘practical’ tawba contributes to confronting and overcoming the materiality of all things particular and personal: in short, what is of the nature of appearance. By the same token, then, Professor Khalil's object of study is not repentance as a mere psychological experience, much less as one of spiritual self-gratification, or even as a social phenomenon, but instead as whatever the civilisation itself that articulated it over fourteen centuries has determined for it. This is fundamental to any serious scholarly inquiry.

Khalil does not explicitly state the issues in quite in terms of civilisation, which reflect more this reviewer's own special interests. But his insights spare us the folly of trying to fit the greatest teachers of humankind inside an overwrought debate on modern dualisms like subjectivism and objectivism.