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5.0 out of 5 stars
Masterful Grasp of Islamic philosophical theology., June 28, 2007
Arabic Theology, Arabic Philosophy: From the Many to the One: Essays in Celebration of Richard M. Frank edited by James E. Montgomery (Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta: Peeters) The final sentence of the last scholarly work by Professor Richard M. Frank to have been published runs:
Ontology and logic are not separable the one from the other.'
This remarkable statement concludes an incisive and authoritative exposition of the term hukm, plural ahkäm, in the writings of the classi¬cal Ash`arite masters, the architects of the formal theological system posterior to the eponym's death in 324/935 and prior to the floruit of al-Ghazali. It forms one panel of a triptych of remarkable surveys of Ash`arite ontology, stemming from the final stages of Professor Frank's professional career, the others being The As'arite Ontology: I. Primary Entities, and The Non-Existent and the Possible in Classical Ash`arite Teaching. These works are characterized by scrupulosity in the record¬ing of source references, subtlety and ingenuity in the exposition of ideas, and an astonishing sensitivity to the systematic implications and supple delimitations of Classical Arabic as a formal language for the speculative exploration of existence. Taken together they represent one of the most sustained endeavours to-date by any scholar to penetrate the formidable formalism of this system, predicated upon a reluctance to establish philosophical reasoning as an autonomous principle of theolog¬ical speculation, a reluctance inherited from al-Ash'ari's refusal to com¬mit himself on a number of questions or to subject the godhead to an over-reductive analysis.
The prize of this formidable intellectual exercise is the sentence quoted above, in which 'logic' is to be understood as 'the formal and technical language of the classical Ash`ariya', for whom being was uni¬vocal and ontology was truly nominalistic, deriving the impetus for their speculations from al-Ash'ari's construction of 'a formal method based on the Arab grammarians' analysis of predicative sentences' which are
Divided into three categories: (1) those that assert the existence of only the subject itself (al-nafs, nafs al-mawsuf); (2) those that assert the existence of an 'attribute' (sifah, ma`na) distinct from the 'self' of the subject as such; and (3) those that assert the existence of an action (fi `l) done by the subject.
We can trace this trajectory in Professor Frank's scholarship right back to his first encounter with the Kalam and his reluctance to acquiesce in its characterization as an apologetic exercise in hair-splitting quibbling and logic-chopping, combined with that remarkable moment tournant captured so brilliantly in 1981 when he demonstrated the full ontological implications for speculative theology of the system developed by the Arabic grammarians.'
Professor Frank's contribution to the Ash`ariya alone would render the scholarly world deeply indebted to him. But of course, his legacy does not end there, for he has devoted the same considerable energies to the formative first centuries of the Kallam as a formal system, with par¬ticular emphasis on the emergence of the Mu'tazila and the school's first theological acme in the teachings of Abu 'Ali and Abu Hashim al-Jubbal; has been among the first scholars fully and systematically to make use of the publication of sections of al-Mughni of Cadi `Abd al-Jabbar; has made al-Ash`ari the object of a number of studies spanning some thirty years; has established the influence of Kalam thinking on the theories of the falasifa; and has subjected to the most searching and penetrating scrutiny al-Ghazali's cosmological and doctrinal affiliations, reading this influential thinker against the grain of his own reception his¬tory, in a manner that is not only controversial but refreshing and liber¬ating -- whatever the rights and wrongs of Professor Frank's al-Ghazali, few will have brought such an impressive array of erudition to bear on his writings and paid him the greatest of all scholarly compliments, that of taking another thinker's thoughts seriously. And this is to say nothing of the works on the Syriac tradition and the Greek into Arabic transla¬tion movement. Indeed, an overview of his scholarly achievement will
be greatly facilitated by the initiative, under the editorship of Professor Dimitri Gutas of Yale, to publish, as part of the Variorum Collected Studies Series, three volumes of Professor Frank's major articles under the general heading Texts and Studies on the Development and History of Kalam.
In all of his studies on the Arabic-Islamic tradition, when once we have recognised the courage and enterprise demonstrated in embarking upon his study of the tradition of the Kalam; have celebrated the moral and intellectual integrity of his conviction that this tradition was any¬thing but meaningless; have valued his repeated efforts to resist the appeals of approximation to Western theological traditions, especially when he has pointed to his own lack of success in such resistance --there is one feature which looms large and which I find irresistible: the prominent attention paid to the `arabiya, to Classical Arabic. It is hard to read a piece by Professor Frank without being deeply impressed by his command of the `arabiya, and without, in fact, having one's own knowl-edge thereof enhanced, challenged, revised or deepened. It is for this reason that I have chosen the principal title of this volume, Arabic The¬ology, Arabic Philosophy, with its slightly jarring repetition -- for this is a theology (more customarily referred to as Islamic) which we should fail to appreciate, should we close our mind's eye for even one second to the `arabiya in which it is housed.
Contents: James E. MONTGOMERY, Editor's Introduction
Richard M. FRANK, Ya Kalam
Monica BLANCHARD and James E. MONTGOMERY, Richard M Frank, A Bibliography
Qur'an
James A. BELLAMY, Seven Qur'anic Emendations
James E. MONTGOMERY, The Empty Hijaz
Paths to al-Ash'ari
Henri HUGONNARD-ROCHE, Le vocabulaire philosophique de l'etre en syriaque d'apres des texts de Sergius de Reg`aina et Jacques d'Edesse
Cristina D'ANCONA, The Arabic Version of Enn. IV 7[2] and its Greek Model
Roshdi RASHED, Greek into Arabic: Transmission and Translation
Al-Ash'ari and the Kalam
Abdelhamid 1. SABRA, Kalam Atomism as an Alternative Philo¬sophy to Hellenizing Falsafa
Wilferd MADELUNG, Abu 1-Husayn al-Basri's Proof for the Exis¬tence of God
Daniel GIMARET, Un chapitre inédit de la tadkira d'Ibn Mattawayh sur les illusions d'optique et autres singularités de la vision oculaire
Christian Falsafa
Sidney H. GRIFFITH, Yahya b. `Adi's Colloquy On Sexual Absti¬nence and the Philosophical Life
Avicenna and Beyond
Dimitri GUTAS, Imagination and Transcendental Knowledge in Avicenna
Michael MARMURA, Avicenna's Critique of Platonists in Book VII, Chapter 2 of the Metaphysics of his Healing
Gerhard ENDRESS, Reading Avicenna in the Madrasa. Intellectual Genealogies and Chains of Transmission of Philosophy and the Sciences in the Islamic East
Al-Ghazali. on Causality
Therese-Ann DRUART, Al-Ghazali's Conception of the Agent in the Tahafut and the Iqtisad: Are People Really Agents?
Jon McGINNIS, Occasionalism, Natural Causation and Science in al-Ghazali
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