Before the year 2000 the range of Muʿtazilite kalām texts available in print was limited to a handful of key sources, for the most part works by the chief judge of Rayy, Abū l-Ḥasan ʿAbd al-Jabbār b. Aḥmad al-Hamadhānī (d. 415/1024–25) and his students, written between the middle of the fourth/tenth and the middle of the fifth/eleventh century. Because of the paucity of available sources most studies on Muʿtazilite doctrine convey the misleading and deplorable impression that this so-called “late Muʿtazilism” represents a self-contained and quasi-fossilized rigid system of thought. Attempts to consider these texts in a diachronic perspective are few and far between.
In 2003 S. Schmidtke (Berlin) and D. E. Sklare (Jerusalem) founded the “Muʿtazilite Manuscripts Project Group” with a view to expanding significantly the prevalent corpus of available texts and incorporating hitherto neglected sources, first and foremost texts of Zaydī and Jewish provenance. The two publications reviewed here are both products of this research group which is now part of the recently inaugurated Research Unit on Intellectual History of the Islamicate World at the Freie Universität Berlin.
The first publication is an edition of MS Cod. Or. 2949, Leiden University Library. This manuscript contains the Kitāb Ziyādāt Sharḥ al-Uṣūl by the Zaydī Imām al-Nāṭiq bi-l-ḥaqq Abū Ṭālib Yaḥyā b. al-Ḥusayn b. Hārūn al-Buṭḥānī (d. 424/1033) in a recension of one of his students. The text is ultimately based on the Kitāb al-Uṣūl and its Sharḥ, both written by Abū ʿAlī Muḥammad Ibn Khallād al-Baṣrī (d. c. 340/951–2), an eminent student of Abū Hāshim al-Jubbā’ī (d. 321/933). Internal evidence suggests that the Zaydī Imām had direct access to Ibn Khallād's books, while also making ample use of ʿAbd al-Jabbār's completion (takmila) and commentary (sharḥ) of these texts. While it is often difficult to distinguish between the multiple layers of the Ziyādāt, there is no doubt that it retained the overall structure of Ibn Khallād's K. al-Uṣūl. This is confirmed by two large manuscript fragments of another Taʿlīq on Ibn Khallād's Kitāb al-uṣūl, one preserved in the Great Mosque Library in Ṣanʿā’, the other in the British Library. The structure of K. al-Uṣūl differs significantly from later summaries of Muʿtazilite uṣūl, notably ʿAbd al-Jabbār's K. al-Uṣūl al-Khamsa or al-Sharīf al-Murtaḍā's (d. 436/1044) Jumal al-ʿilm wa-l-ʿamal and other propaedeutic digests of similar format. Even if these latter works eventually superseded the study of Ibn Khallād's K. al-Uṣūl, they did not do so immediately, and there is clear evidence that K. al-Uṣūl continued to be studied alongside these later texts throughout the fifth/eleventh century, regardless of its distinct and, as it were, obsolete structure. This is one of many reasons why this excellent edition will significantly advance our ability to read Muʿtazilite texts in a diachronic perspective.
The second publication, by Jan Thiele, is a revised version of the author's MA dissertation submitted at the Freie Universität Berlin in 2008. It contains a critical edition and annotated German paraphrase of K. al-Mu'aththirāt wa-miftāḥ al-mushkilāt by the sixth/twelfth-century Yemeni Zaydī scholar al-Ḥasan b. Muḥammad al-Raṣṣāṣ (d. 584/1188), whose pivotal role in elaborating and establishing a new Yemeni Zaydī school doctrine (the so-called Mukhtariʿa) has previously been explored by members of the Muʿtazilite Manuscripts Project Group.
The book opens with a short introduction summarizing the current state of research on the transfer of Muʿtazilite texts from northern Iran to Yemen during the sixth/twelfth century (pp. 1–7). The second chapter (pp. 8–61) on the textual and reception history of K. al-Mu'aththirāt surveys the study of this treatise through the centuries and offers a detailed overview of the 22 extant manuscripts (pp. 24–58). The reception history remains somewhat sketchy and disregards seminal works such as Aḥmad b. Yaḥyā l-Murtaḍā's (d. 840/1436–37) K. Dāmigh al-awhām fī sharḥ Riyāḍat al-afhām fī laṭīf al-kalām or ʿAbdallāh b. Muḥammad al-Najrī's (d. 877/1472–3) k. Mirqāt al-anẓār al-muntazaʿmin Ghāyāt al-afkār al-kāshif li-maʿānī Muqaddimat al-Baḥr al-zakhkhār. Both works are of paramount importance to our understanding of the historic context of ʿAlī b. Muḥammad al-Bukurī's (d. 882/1478) Miṣbāḥ al-ẓulumāt fī kashf maʿānī al-Mu'aththirāt (= Sharḥ al-Mu'aththirāt), the main commentary on al-Raṣṣāṣ‘ K. al-Mu'aththirāt. Questions such as why 90 per cent of the manuscript copies date from the ninth/fifteenth–eleventh/seventeenth centuries, and why the text vanished into oblivion and was no longer copied after the late 11th/17th century, are not addressed.
The survey of manuscripts offers many interesting insights. A translation of the colophons and ownership statements would probably have helped to avoid the misreading of the Arabic text on several occasions. Texts such as the colophon of MS Fondazione Caetani 318 (pp. 43 f.) or the talismanic use of Āyat al-Kursī on the title page of MS British Library Or. 6266 (pp. 41 f.) would require explanatory notes.
The third chapter (pp. 62–73) provides the reader with the doctrinal and historical background considered indispensable in situating and assessing al-Raṣṣāṣ’s account of the Bahshamī concept of “causation”/effectuation in his K. al-Mu'aththirāt. The chapter includes a brief outline of the Muʿtazilite doctrine of attributes, and reviews potential sources of K. al-Mu'aththirāt, i.e. Muʿtazilite texts written prior to al-Raṣṣāṣ which contain substantial discussions of concepts of “causation”/effectuation. This includes most notably a commentary on Ibn Mattawayh's K. al-Tadhkira fī aḥkām al-jawāhir wa-l-aʿrāḍ (available in a facsimile edition, Tehran 2006) and al-Ḥākim al-Jishumī's K. al-Ta'thīr wa-l-mu'aththir fī uṣūl al-dīn. In Thiele's view the clear and systematic exposition (ʿalā ṭarīqat al-ijmāl, 4:343) and the succinct style of K. al-Mu'aththirāt indicate “that the Yemenī Zaydiyya not only … adopted Bahshamī theology, but went on to systematically refine it” (p. 73).
The fourth and final chapter (“Paraphrase und Analyse”, pp. 74–134) forms the core of Thiele's study and is in many ways its most valuable contribution. Considering that the edition and annotated paraphrase are of similar length (57 and 61 pages respectively) it would have been convenient and beneficial to present the two blocks on facing pages. Keeping them apart might still be user-friendly if the paragraphs were numbered or if the margins or headers of each section offered frequent and unambiguous cross-references. With the present layout readers are incessantly preoccupied with flipping backwards and forwards, unless they have the foresight to add cross-references from the outset.
While the paraphrase is on the whole solid and occasionally even illuminating, there are a couple of issues that mar the positive impression. Thiele is well aware of the fallacy to (mis)interpret and (mis)translate kalām-terms in the way the philosophers who followed the Aristotelian legacy would have understood them. For this very reason he leaves key terms such as mu'aṯṯir, ʿilla and sabab untranslated, because all sensible translations would carry a whole set of connotations which are alien to the Bahshamite doctrine (incidentally, this also applies to the term “Kausalität” (“causation”, better: “effectuation”, ( used in the book's title). His judicious warnings notwithstanding, Thiele himself falls into this very trap by translating another key term, dhāt, as “Essenz” (essence). This translation distorts the definition of mu'aṯṯir, the term that stands at the very heart of K. al-Mu'aththirāt (“der mu'aṯṯir ist eine Essenz”, p. 81). In the context of Bahshamite ontology this translation is utterly inappropriate. This mistake is all the more astonishing as Thiele himself refers (p. 74, n. 1) to the scholarly literature that cautions against using this translation. Indeed, on the first pages of his paraphrase (pp. 74–6) Thiele correctly renders dhāt as “Entität” (entity), but then, on pp. 77 ff., inadvertently(?) switches to “Essenz”, as if essence and entity were synonyms. Entities have essences, but essence is not a further entity, even if it is specifically related to the entity whose essence it is. In the Bahshamite doctrine essence is understood as an attribute on whose account an entity (the thing itself) is distinguishable from any other entity (see p. 65). Attributes, however, are not entities and hence the constituents of “causation”/effectuation (mu'aththir, ʿilla, sabab), which themselves are entities, cannot be understood as essences. The implication of this mistranslation becomes apparent in a number of passages which in Thiele's paraphrasing is rendered meaningless or unintelligible. To give just one example: “Der Terminus sabab bezeichnet jede Essenz, die eine andere Essenz notwendig macht. Wird eine Essenz existent (mawǧūd) – wie hier durch die Wirkung des sabab – bedeutet dies nach bahšamitischem Verständnis, dass diese durch die Aktualisierung eines Zustands, nämlich des Zustands der Existenz, spezifiziert wird. Existenz ist also ein Attribut einer Essenz, die aber bereits Realität besitzt, während sie noch inexistent (maʿdūm) ist. Da der sabab als Ursache für die Existentwerdung einer Essenz definiert ist […]”. This is Bahshamite ontology turned upside down and it is hard to see how the core examples for sababs given by al-Raṣṣāṣ (iʿtimād, naẓar, kawn) could by hook or by crook be forced to correlate with Thiele's rendering of the definition of sabab (note that on p. 85 iʿtimād, which is a sabab, that is an entity, is said to be an attribute, that is not an entity!)
The critical edition of K. al-Mu'aththirāt is on the whole reliable and based on sound editorial principles (pp. 58–61). The use of group sigla would have been useful to make the three textual versions established in chapter 2 more visible. It would also have been ideal to edit al-Bukurī's Miṣbāḥ al-ẓulumāt alongside K. al-Mu'aththirāt. For Thiele as well as for the Zaydīs in Yemen, al-Bukurī's commentary constituted the most important auxiliary tool to elucidate the meaning of K. al-Mu’aththirāt.
For all the critical points raised in this review, Thiele has to be commended for furthering a more nuanced understanding of a hitherto insufficiently studied component of the Bahshamite doctrine and for reinforcing the value of Zaydī texts for an adequate appreciation of Muʿtazilite kalām along with its diachronic development. The shortcomings of this fine study make us realize to what extent the systematic study of kalām texts still is in the early stages of its development.
