This book is a constructive theological work that builds on the Māturīdī tradition of kalām, which is one of the main schools of Sunnī theology in Islam. It advances scholarship in three main respects. First, it provides a detailed treatment of the system of Abū Manṣūr al-Māturīdī (d. 333/944), a Ḥanafī theologian from Samarqand. This includes discussion of his epistemology, ontology, natural theology, and his treatment of the divine nature and several key attributes: omniscience, wisdom, creative action and speech. Second, the book analyses the development of the Māturīdī tradition after the lifetime of al-Māturīdī and into the classical period. There is a focus on unearthing underappreciated material from his immediate successors in Samarqand, as well as explaining the changes that emerge in the classical school, especially through its dialogue with Ashʿarism. Third, the book draws on the resources of the Māturīdī tradition to develop an original contemporary Islamic theology. This aspect pays special attention to the phenomenological tradition founded by Edmund Husserl, and to contemporary analytic philosophy of religion and Christian philosophical theology. The result is a unique proposal for a renewed Islamic theology that seeks a creative synthesis between the premodern Islamic tradition and elements of modern thought.
The companion Ibn Masʿūd (d. 32/652–653) has long been recognised for the variance of his Qur'anic qirāʾa (‘reading’, or ‘recitation’) from the canonical ʿUthmānī codex. His reading continued to enjoy popularity for at least a century within Kufa, the place of origin for much of the Ḥanafī madhhab's jurisprudential corpus. This article analyses Masʿūdian variants with legal implications in the doctrine of the early jurist Ibrāhīm al-Nakhaʿī (d. 96/715), the seminal writings ascribed to Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan al-Shaybānī (d. 189/805), as well as the furūʿ and uṣūl works of key Ḥanafī figures from the fourth/tenth and fifth/eleventh centuries: al-Jaṣṣāṣ (d. 370/981), al-Qudūrī (d. 428/1036–1037) and al-Sarakhsī (d. 483/1090). Close study of these figures’ use of Masʿūdian variants indicates that while their non-canonicity demanded a compelling solution, their quasi-Qur'anic status presented opportunities within the arena of juristic debate. Furthermore, the manner in which they were ultimately accommodated within the practical and theoretical toolkit of the Ḥanafī school illustrates broader developments in its epistemology of revelation, abrogation and transmission.
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