Presentation

Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Karim al-Shahrastani (d. 548/1153) is considered a major intellectual representative of the Seljuq period. Towards the end of his life Shahrastani began writing a Qur’anic commentary, the Mafatih al-asrar. This work strongly confirms the brilliant radicalism of Shahrastani’s more private religious views. It is a comprehensive (jami‘) commentary which discusses each verse under a series of headings, from lexicography (‘ilm al-lugha) to conventional transmitted exegesis (tafsir bi’l-ma’thur), to higher interpretations (ta‘wil). The latter sections – titled the ‘arcana of the verses’ (asrar al-ayat) by the author – develop a systematic hermeneutic of the Qur’an which reveals the scripture’s deep underlying intelligibility and self-consistency. The key principles of this system of interpretation are fully discussed by Shahrastani in his lengthy introduction to the commentary. A number of Western scholars, notably Guy Monnot and Diane Steigerwald, argue that the body of ideas in question is strongly influenced by Fatimi Isma‘ili doctrine, thus supporting what a number of contemporaries claimed about Shahrastani : that he harboured a private sympathy for ‘the people of the mountain fortresses’. The upshot of this appears to be that, just as Sufism formed the esoteric complement of Shafi‘i and Ash‘ari communal affiliations in the case of a figure like Ghazali, some kind of Isma‘ili gnosis formed a similar complement to the same affiliations in the case of Shahrastani. In this paper I explore the body of hermeneutical concepts in question, based on Shahrastani’s introductions to his commentary and on his exegesis of Surat al-Fatiha.

(Source : Oxford University Press)