Reconstructing the Higher Thought of Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Shahrastānī (d. 548/1153): Eclecticism or Intellectual Synthesis?

In the course of his career Shahrastānī engaged at a high level in Ashʿarism, Avicennism and Ismailism. His heresiography, the al-Milal wa’l-Niḥal, is a largely neutral account of religious and philosophical teachings on a global scale, and his Nihāyat al-aqdām fī ʿilm al-kalām is a thorough presentation of Neo-Ashʿarī dogmatic theology. Three distinct works then constitute a window into what may be considered his ‘higher thought’, namely, his Muṣāraʿat al-Falāsifa, his Majlis-e maktūb-e munʿaqad dar Khwārazm (Khwārazmian sermon), and his incomplete Qurʾan commentary. In these we may see a world of ideas that, taken overall, provide a new view of his intellectual positioning. Encompassing fields as diverse as cosmology, the philosophy of time, the philosophy of action, prophetology, eschatology, noetics, etc., the reader discerns aspects of all Shahrastānī’s intellectual influences:  Ashʿarism, Avicennism and Ismailism. Do these cohere and form a unity, an ultimate Shahrastānian philosophy, or are they simply an eclectic mélange?  

Biographical note

Dr Toby Mayer is Senior Research Associate at the the Institute of Ismaili Studies. After completing his studies at Cambridge (BA/MA) and Oxford Universities (MPhil. and DPhil.), Toby taught at SOAS, University of London before joining IIS. He worked with the late Professor Wilferd Madelung on Shahrastānī’s Muṣāraʿat al-Falāsifa (IB Tauris and IIS, 2001), on Ibn al-Walīd’s Ismaili interpretation of the Qaṣīdat al-Nafs attributed to Avicenna (IB Tauris and IIS, 2016), and Maslama al-Qurṭubī’s Rutbat al-Ḥakīm (forthcoming). The second of three volumes of his translation and study of Shahrastānī’s Qur’an commentary will shortly be published (Oxford University Press in association with IIS, 2025).