Abdal Hakim Murad - The Cambridge Companion to Islamic Theology

136 Nader El-Bizri
the Fundamentals of Religion (Abkar al-afkar fıus _
ul al-dın), 38 a text that
impacted upon the intellectual development of another Ash‘arite thinker,
‘Abd al-Rah _
man al- Ijı (d.1355). For instance, Ijı’s Stations in the Science
of Theology (Kitab al-Mawaqif fı ‘ilm al-kalam), which constituted a
Summa Theologiae ofitsera,andwasprincipallybasedonRazı’s Harvest
and Āmidı’s Novel Thoughts, continued to be used until modern times as
a textbook of theology at al-Azhar University in Cairo. Furthermore, al-
Sayyid al-Sharıf ‘Alı ibnMuh _
ammad al-Jurjanı (d.1413) wrote an influential
commentary (sharh _
)on Ijı’s Stations, while reinforcing his own
theology with falsafa. Al-Jurjanı was also a challenger of the theological
authority of al-Taftazanı (d.1390), a student of Ijı who combined
Maturıdism and Ash‘arism in developing the anti-Mu‘tazilite arguments
of the Sunnı traditioninkalam, particularly in the course of his commentaries
on the legacy of Najm al-Din al-Nasafı (d.1142). 39 Taftazanı
argued that the divine words were uncreated, and that they resided in the
divine essence, even though they are written in the volumes, preserved in
the hearts, heard by the ears and recited by the tongues. The Qur’an as
God’s speech is also uncreated (ghayr makhluq), while its enunciation
(lafz _
iyya) is not eternal. He moreover affirmed that divine speech is not
of the genus of letters and sounds, and is rather one of eight divine attributes
(s _
ifat) from all eternity besides omniscience (‘ilm), power (qudra),
life (h _
ayat), hearing (sam‘), sight (bas _
ar), will (irada) and creation (khalq:
differing in this from the customary kalam theses by adding khalq to the
other seven attributes). 40
hermeneutics and god’s essence and
attributes
God’s words find expression in language by virtue of which they are
communicatively preserved in the supplements of writing and recitation:
‘‘Read! In the Name of thy Lord’’ (96:1). However, the divine words,
which are expressed phonetically and graphically, are not necessarily
appropriated by the anthropocentric nature of language, nor are they
readily measurable by its grammatical-logical criteria. Religiously, the
divine words are not semantically exhausted; their meaning remains
open to indeterminate interpretations, without being reduced to a univocal
sense, either in literal readings, or in the esoteric folds of allegory
or metaphor. The revealed word finds its trace in a language that acts as
a supplemental image to what is eternal. By their concealed character,
and their withdrawal from anthropocentric appropriation, the divine
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