Book Review 

Islamic Theology and Philosophy: 
Studies in Honor of George F. Hourani 

By Michael£. Marmura (ed.). Albany: State UniversityofNew lbrkPress, 

1984. 

Michael Marmura, the editor of this volume, has brought to his readers 
a valuable collection of highly respected authors, from van Ess and Frank to 

Anawati in part one, and from Makarem, Nasr, and Mahdi to Shehadi in part 
two. Each contributor to this seventeen-essay volume is an authority on his/her 

topic. Indeed, what we have here is a collection of essays in which by some 

of today 's most competent and respected lslamicists inform the readers of the 
results of their scholarly research into various aspects of their discipline and 
thereby producing a resounding tribute worthy of a scholar of the stature of 

George Hourani, to whom the volume is dedicated. 

To be sure, not only is this work written by experts, but it is also meant 

for the experts. The essays are thus quite naturally extremely narrow in scope 

and perspective and are also self-contained and therefore independent of each 
other. As a result, each essay is tightly packed, and reviewing this book would 

mean reviewing each essay separately. Alternatively, and this would be much 

more desirable, the reviewer can present a general account of the problematics 

of Islamic theology and philosophy in which each contribution coheres to form 
some kind of an overall picture. But, in fairness, this is the task of the editor, 

not of the reviewer. Thus one wonders why Marmura, given his standing in 
and familiarity with the field, did not write general introductory articles for 

each of the volume's two sections: "Islamic Theology" and "Islamic Philosophy." 

For example, it is not clear to the reader as to how and in what way van Ess's 

powerful analysis of a kalam anecdote is related to Frank's penetrating study 

of the kalam doctrine of bodies and atoms. For the reader, unless he/she 

possesses the same degree of expertise as the two authors, the only thing in 
common between them is that they both talk about the mutakallimun. Similarly, 

in more general terms, the reader legitimately wonders if there are any broad 
concerns, or if there are any shared methodological approaches, which bind 

all of those different Islamic philosophers whose thought forms the subject 

matter of the book's second part. These questions could have been dealt with 
in an editorial panorama. Indeed, one may argue that a general account is 

possible only after the basic data have been collected, and since much of the 

classical literature of Islam still lies unstudied, a survey article would be 

premature. But a survey need not be definitive - it can always be tentative. 



Book Reviews 267 

Notwithstanding this lacuna, all individual essays in this collection are 
models of first-rate scholarship. In his “Abu 1-Hudhayl in Contact,” for instance, 
van Ess gives his readers a new methodological model for the analysis of kahm 
literature, which in itself is no small task and represents a valuable addition 
to this field. Richard Frank, to take another example, is the first modern scholar 
who, in his “Bodies and Atoms,” analyzes two of the most complex and 
fundamental notions of the kaliim cosmology: the concepts, namely, of bodies 
and atoms. Frank‘s discerning eye discovers a conceptual distinction between 
those various terms found in the Ash’arite literature, all of which are generally 
rendered “body” - jasad, jirm, juththu, and jism. “Jim and juthhu, which 
are commonly rendered by ‘body’ are,” he tells us, “not equivalent to jism but 
to juwhar (an atom), while jism, which is normally rendered by ‘body’ is not 
taken to describe or name the corporeal objects we ordinarily call ‘bodies’. . I’ 
(p. 5 3 ) .  As for jasad, it is observed to be a standard term designating the human 
body. Evidently, Frank3 painstaking conceptual analysis constitutes a major 
advance in our understanding of kahm and, like van Ess, he is to be commended 
for his pioneering attempts to study the mutakallimiin in their own terms. 

A refreshing essay, entitled “Mdal al-Din Kashani and the Philosophical 
World of Khwaja Nasir al-Din Tusi,” comes from Seyyed Hossein Nasr. In this 
enlightening essay, Nasr not only gives a highly comprehensive account of an 
unstudied Muslim intellectual of the seventh-/thirteenth-century, but also 
expresses at the conclusion certain guiding thoughts concerning the study of 
the Islamic world in general. “To an eminent degree:’ he writes, ”Mdal al-Din 
represents a marriage between intelligence and piety, between submission to 
the Divine Will and knowledge ranging from the logical to the unitive. It is such 
a wedding within a unified vision that is so clearly needed for the Islamic world 
and it is the study of such a harmonious perspective within the Islamic tradition 
that can aid Western students of Islam most in gaining a better understanding 
of this tradition in its inward and integrating aspect” (p. 264). 

It is a happy coincidence that Shehadi, in his study of Ibn Khaldiin, has 
in effect heeded Nasr’s advice. “How can [Ibn Khaldiin] accept the mystical 
theory of knowledge with all its assumptions while he is committed to the 
scientific study of man?” asks Shehadi in his “Theism, Mysticism and Scientific 
History in Ibn Khaldun” (p. 265). In answering this question, he provides a 
highly integrated picture of Ibn Khaldiin, a picture in which the scientific is 
“wedded” to the mystical - precisely the kind of integration Nasr teaches. 

But these are only some of the learned writings with which this rich volume 
is packed. This volume contains, for example, three illuminating studies of 
different aspects of Ibn Sing’s thought, one of them by the editor Marmura 
himself. Then there is Muhsin Mahdi’s insightful essay entitled “Remarla on 
Avems’ Decisive Treatise.” Mahdi’s study will certainly please George Hourani 
as much as it enlightens other readers, for it is Hourani to whom we awe a critical 



268 The American Journal oflslamic Social Sciences 9:2 

and definitive edition of the Treatise. The older scholar must take delight in 
seeing a younger contemporary analyze and explain this text in such a competent 
fashion. 

While reading this volume one gets the uneasy feeling that at some stage 
it must have run into financial difficulties, for how else can one explain the 
total lack of diacritical marks in the transliteration of Arabic words and the 

absence of quotations in Arabic? This situation is all the more serious in view 
of the numerous proof errors and inconsistencies in the transliteration systems 
followed by its contributors (for example, Frank seems to transliterate initial 

hamzas while others do not). Much worse, a whole footnote (no. 5, p. 326) 

is missing from Shehadi's essay, and the copy which was sent to me does not 

contain pages 57-83! The book, it seems, was hurriedly put together. 

S. Nomanul Haq

Research Fellow, Harvard Univ.
Harvard Center for
Middle Eastern Studies
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Visiting Professor, Tufts Univ.
Medford, Massachusetts