Abdal Hakim Murad - The Cambridge Companion to Islamic Theology

160 David B. Burrell CSC
33. This assertion regarding the primary meaning of the term ‘‘agent’’
reflects the presumption in Ghazalı’s Ash‘arite milieu that identified
agency with the activity of creating.
34. For the sense of rid _
a, see Marie-Louise Siauve’s translation of the
Revival’s ‘‘Book of Love’’: Le Livre de l’amour, du désir ardent, de
l’intimité et du parfait contentement (Paris, 1986), pp. 247–68.
35. This is Ghazalı’s celebrated claim regarding the universe: that it is ‘‘the
best possible’’, a claim whose reception has been examined in detail by
Eric Ormsby, Theodicy in Islamic Thought (Princeton, NJ, 1984), with a
clarifying réprise in ‘‘Creation in Time in Islamic Thought with Special
Reference to Ghazalı’’, in David B. Burrell and Bernard McGinn, God
and Creation: An Ecumenical Symposium (Notre Dame, IN, 1990),
pp. 246–64. See also Frank, Creation, pp.60–1.
36. Burrell (tr.), Ghazalı on Faith in Divine Unity, p.276.
37. This is my way of acknowledging Richard Frank’s delineation of
Ghazalı’s extensive use of Avicenna (in his Creation and the Cosmic
System), while demurring from the necessitarian conclusions he draws
in ‘‘Currents and countercurrents’’, in Peter Riddell and Tony Street
(eds.), Islam: Essays on Scripture, Thought and Society: A Festschrift in
Honour of Anthony H. Johns (Leiden, 1997), pp. 113–34.
38. For a detailed treatment of Razı, complete with sources, see Gimaret,
Théories, pp.134–53.
39. al-Tafsır al-Kabır to 13:122, tr. in Fitzgerald, ‘‘Creation in al-Tafsır
al-Kabır’’, p. 99.
40. al-Tafsır al-Kabır to 9:159, tr. in ibid., p. 103; Gimaret,Théories, p.142.
41. al-Tafsır al-Kabır to 2:52, tr. in Gimaret, Théories, p.153.
42. For Suhrawardı, see John Walbridge and Hossein Ziai’s translation and
commentary, The Philosophy of Illumination (Provo, UT, 1999), as well
as Ziai’s study of this book, Knowledge and Illumination (Atlanta,
1990), and John Walbridge, Leaven of the Ancients: Suhrawardı and the
Heritage of the Greeks (Albany, 2000).
43. Arnold Davidson has translated key essays of Pierre Hadot in Philosophy
as a Way of Life (Oxford, 1995). John Walbridge suggests why Sufi
practices tended to eclipse natural philosophy as a path for understanding,
in his Leaven of the Ancients, pp.215–20.
44. Henry Corbin, Le livre des pénétrations métaphysiques (Teheran, 1964),
par. 42; see my comparative study, ‘‘Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) and
Mulla S _
adra Shırazı (1572–1640) and the primacy of esse/wujud in
philosophical theology’’, Medieval Philosophy and Theology 8 (1999),
pp. 207–19.
45. For Ibn ‘Arabı, see William C. Chittick, The Self-Disclosure of God:
Principles of Ibn al-‘Arabı’s Cosmology (Albany, 1998); for Shankara, see
Sara Grant, Towards an Alternative Theology: Confessions of a Nondualist
Christian, ed. Bradley Malkovsky (Notre Dame, IN, 2001).
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