Shahrastānī (d. 548/1153) was best known as an authority in the Ashʿarī school of Sunnī orthodoxy and for his world survey of religious and philosophical doctrines. His later works bear out what some of his contemporaries had claimed, that he secretly inclined to “the people of the mountain fortresses” or the Nizārī Ismāʿīlīs. The doctrines and interpretations of this movement of radical esotericists from the eastern part of the Muslim world in his period are seen in his systematic interpretation of the Qurʾān. This text, Keys to the Arcana, survives in a unique manuscript which has only recently come to scholarly attention. The comprehensive commentary, which he never completed, analyses each verse of the scripture from multiple angles (transmitted exegesis, lexicology, rationale of the verse-sequence, narratives etc.), ending with the arcana (asrār). Mayer’s translation is focused on this last rubric that runs through the commentary where our author interprets the verses within a framework of Ismāʿīlī Neoplatonism, using ideas like the ‘God beyond being’, lettrism, angelology, the manifestation of transcendental realities in certain human individuals, and the immanence of the eschaton in human life. Mayer’s translation is accompanied by an introduction in eight sections that constitutes a study in its own right. The book is the second volume of a three-volume translation of the arcana sections of Shahrastānī’s commentary.
Note on transliteration and abbreviations
Translator’s Introduction
- Preliminary
- Shahrastānī’s theory of prophecy and his ontology of revealed scripture
- Applications of the fundamental dyads
- The hermeneutic of eschatological verses
- Parallelism in the hermeneutic of verses on the ancient Israelites
- The Ṣābiʾa in Shahrastānī’s scriptural interpretation and religious worldview
- Shahrastānī’s diabology
- Summary and conclusion
Notes to the Translator’s Introduction
The Translation
Notes to the Translation
Bibliography
Index of Qur’anic citations
Index
Toby Mayer is a Senior Research Associate in Qur’anic Studies at The Institute of Ismaili Studies, London. After completing his undergraduate degree in Indian Studies at the University of Cambridge, he went on to study Medieval Arabic thought at the University of Oxford, where he wrote his doctoral thesis on the Book of Allusions (Ishārāt) by the major Persian philosopher Ibn Sina. Until 2003 Dr Mayer was a lecturer in Islamic Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, where he taught courses in Islamic philosophy and mysticism. He has also worked for Al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation and on various documentary film projects in India, Indonesia and other parts of the Muslim world. His publications include a critical edition and translation of Shahrastānī’s Kitāb al-Muṣāra‘a, entitled Struggling with the Philosopher: A Refutation of Avicenna’s Metaphysics (2001) in conjunction with Professor Wilferd Madelung, and in 2009, Keys to the Arcana, Shahrastānī’s esoteric commentary on the Qur’anMuslims believe that the Holy Qur’an contains divine revelations to the Prophet Muhammed received in Mecca and Medina over a period of 23 years in the early 7th century CE. More: A translation of the Commentary on Sūrat al-Fātiha.