This volume examines the process through which a historical character named al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī was transformed into a myth by several groups in medieval Islam. Al-Ḥasan lived in the city of Basra, southern Iraq, and was famed for his piety, which attracted to him a large number of disciples who went on to play important roles in the formation of several religious trends. The literary corpus (sayings, stories and letters) ascribed to him has been used as a window into early Islamic religious and intellectual thought. But as this study shows, this corpus was largely forged...

This study--the first monograph devoted exclusively to al-Fārābī's cosmology--provides a new interpretation of this thinker's philosophical development through an analysis of the Greek and Arabic sources and a contextualization of his life and thought in the cultural and intellectual milieu of his time. It discusses key cosmological and metaphysical concepts articulated in his works, with a special focus on celestial causation, intellection, and motion. This book also examines al-Fārābī's cosmological method and particularly the connection between astronomy,...

Although the philosopher ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Baġdādī (1162 -1231) received an extensive education in the thought of Avicenna, he still journeyed long in search of true philosophy. It was in Cairo that he finally discovered a model of philosophical metaphysics rooted in Greek thought as set out in Kindian and Farabian writings. This volume is devoted to the study of Aristotle's Metaphysics and other Greek metaphysical writing gathered together by this Muslim philosopher to form a 'Metaphysical Science' in his Book of the Science of Metaphysics...

Through close study of Avicenna's statements and major works, Dimitri Gutas traces Avicenna's own sense of his place in the Aristotelian tradition and the history of philosophy in Islam, and provides an introduction to reading his philosophical works by delineating the approach most consistent with Avicenna's intention and purpose in philosophy. The second edition of this foundational work, which has quickened fruitful research into the philosopher in the last quarter century, is completely revised and updated, and adds a new final chapter summarizing Avicenna's philosophical project. It is...

In The Sufi Doctrine of Man, Richard Todd examines the life and thought of Ibn 'Arabī's chief disciple, Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī (13th century C.E.). Making use of manuscript sources, he analyzes and contextualizes Qūnawī's esoteric vision of the nature and purpose of human existence, a doctrine which incorporates core elements of Qūnawī's metaphysics, cosmology, psychology, and eschatology. Qūnawī's thought is placed in relation to Ibn 'Arabī's and that of the Ikhwān al-Ṣafā', and his interaction with the...

In this volume, Gabriella Elgrably-Berzin offers an analysis of the fourteenth-century Hebrew translation of a major eleventh-century philosophical text: Avicenna's Kitāb al-Najāt (The Book of Salvation), focusing on the psychology treatise on physics. The translator of this work was Ṭodros Ṭodrosi, the main Hebrew translator of Avicenna's philosophical writings. This study includes a critical edition of Ṭodrosi's translation, based on two manuscripts as compared to the Arabic edition (Cairo, 1938), and an appendix featuring the section on metaphysics. By...

Galen's impact on Islamic civilization, mainly on medicine but also on physics and philosophy, was enormous. His most important books were mediated through "summaries" which not only shortened, but in some cases also revised Galenic teachings. Several versions of these summaries exist, and their appreciation is critical for a proper understanding of the development of medieval science. This book presents the first editions, translations, and studies of the remaining summaries to On Critical Days. In Galenic theory, fevers develop towards a crisis which will determine the fate of a...

This work offers a critical analysis of the Sanskrit, Syriac and Persian sources in Rhazes' (d. 925 CE) Comprehensive Book (or al-Kitāb al-Ḥāwī), a hugely famous and highly unusual medico-pharmaceutical encyclopedia originally written in Arabic. All text material appears in full Arabic with English translations throughout, whilst the traceable Indian fragments are represented here, for the first time, in both the original Sanskrit and corresponding English translations. The philological core of the book is framed by a detailed introductory study on the transmission of...

Le Kitāb dā'irat al-aḥruf al-abjadiyya est un traite de magie pratique attribue a Hermes. Ce texte composite, qui ne peut etre date avec precision, est un ouvrage de magie basee sur la doctrine de la science des lettres ('ilm al-ḥurūf). Le present livre offre la premiere edition critique du texte, accompagnee d'une traduction annotee et d'une etude historique et philologique exposant les principes theoriques a la base des procedes decrits dans les recettes ainsi que des entites, objets et ingredients utilises (noms des anges invoques, types de...

Dieses Buch bietet eine textkritische Edition von Naǧīb ad-Dīn as-Samarqandīs (st. 619/1222) medizinischem Nahrungsmittellexikon Kitāb al-Aġḏiya wa-l-ašriba mit deutscher Übersetzung und einer Untersuchung zu den Inhalten des Werks und seinem Kontext innerhalb der arabischen Medizinliteratur. This book offers a critical edition of Najīb ad-Dīn as-Samarqandī’s (d. 619/1222) medical food encyclopedia Kitāb al-Aghḏiya wa-l-ashriba along with a German translation and a study on the contents of the work and its context within Arabic medical literature.