When in the first half of the 18th century, the German protestant theologian Johann Jakob Brucker (1696â1770) wrote his Historia critica philosophiae, a monumental five-volume work on the history of philosophy, he showed a keen interest in Fakhr al-DÄ«n al-RÄzÄ« (d. 606/1210). Informed by an entry on him in Leo Africanusâ miscellaneous report on âsome famous people among the Arabs,â he included a two-and-a-half-page long portrayal of Fakhr al-DÄ«n RÄzÄ« in the 200 pages of his third volume that covers the history of Arabic philosophy. âAmong the Arab philosophers who Leo Africanus also greatly praises,â writes Brucker, âis Ibnu El-Chatib Rasi, a famous philosopher and theologian of great repute, and a distinguished preacher of his age.â1 Bruckerâs source, Leo Africanus (d. ca. 1550), was a North-African Muslim captive whose real name was al-Ḥasan b. Muḥammad al-WazzÄn, and who, after being introduced to the court of Pope Leo X (r. 1513â21), mingled with Renaissance scholars highly interested to learn more about Arabic philosophy.2 It is unclear, however, to what extent Leo wrote his reports based on his memory or on Arabic written sources that might have been available to him. In the printed version of his article on RÄzÄ«, Leo jumbles the AshÊ¿arite theologian and philosopher, who lived in Iran and Central Asia during the 6th/12th century, together with another scholar who was known as Ibn al-Khaá¹Ä«b, namely LisÄn al-DÄ«n b. al-Khaá¹Ä«b (d. 776/1374) from Granada in Spain.3 Leo, who was himself born in Granada and who grew up in Fez in Morocco, was familiar with the life and works of LisÄn al-DÄ«n b. al-Khaá¹Ä«b, a writer and politician who was also a close friend of the historian Ibn KhaldÅ«n (d. 808/1406). Johann Jakob Brucker was understandably confused as to how the Ibnu El-Chatib in Leoâs book, who was born in Rayy in Persia and who seemed to have had a full career as philosopher and theologian in the Islamic East, could also have been involved in the dynastic intrigues of the Naá¹£rid Emirate of Granada and written books on that cityâs history. Either Leoâs memory faltered, Brucker assumed, or the preserved text of the entry on Fakhr al-DÄ«n in his Libellus de viris quibusdam illustribus apud Arabes is incomplete and corrupt. The inconsistencies in this entry led Brucker to conclude that Leo âjumbled together the ill-disposed fragments of informationâ on two scholars with a similar name.4 Indeed, Leoâs text makes little sense and may have suffered from the intervention of a copyist or a compiler who combined two different entries on two different scholars that both went by the name âIbn al-Khaá¹Ä«b.â5
Despite the confusion about Fakhr al-DÄ«nâs real contributions to the history of Arabic and Islamic philosophy, the entry in Bruckerâs Historia critica philosophiae is a witness to the interest that scholars of the 18th century in Central Europe had in thinkers like Fakhr al-DÄ«n al-RÄzÄ«.6 Had Brucker also consulted Barthélemy dâHerbelotâs (1625â95) Bibliotheque Orientale, which was published 1697 in Paris, he would have learned that this Ibnu El-Chatib Rasi was one of the most influential ShÄfiÊ¿ite scholars, âwho added the knowledge of the foreign sciences to those of Mohammedanism, and who preached eloquently in Arabic and in Persian.â7
DâHerbelotâs Bibliotheque Orientale was by far the most advanced Western resource on all things in the Orient at its time and it was a model for many later encyclopedias of the Enlightenment era. Like them, however, it was not written in Latin but in French, the new language of research in the early modern period, and therefore probably not available to Brucker. The Bibliotheque Orientale features a relatively extensive article on âRazi,â where it lists his year of birth (543 AH) â slightly incorrectly, as he was born a year later â and his year of death (606 AH), according to the Muslim calendar. It also provides a sketch of RÄzÄ«âs life and deals in great detail with a key event therein, namely the âsolemn disputeâ he had in FÄ«rÅ«zkÅ«h in 591/1195. DâHerbelot got his information about what we today call the âfitna of FÄ«rÅ«zkÅ«hâ from a manuscript copy of Ibn al-AthÄ«râs history, still our best source on the disputation and the following riots.8 DâHerbelotâs article stretches over a full column of a dense folio page and includes a brief worklist. Several books of Fakhr al-DÄ«n, such as his Muḥaṣṣal afkÄr al-mutaqaddimÄ«n wa-l-mutaʾakhkhirÄ«n, as well as a work titled Uṣūl al-dÄ«n, existed in the Royal Library in Paris and are listed here with reference to the manuscriptsâ numbers.9 DâHerbelot even notes one of the features of Fakhr al-DÄ«nâs Åuvre that has attracted much attention in the most recent literature on him. He reports from Ibn al-AthÄ«r that RÄzÄ«âs adversaries in the fitna of FÄ«rÅ«zkÅ«h accused him of being âa philosopher, meaning according to the language of the Alcoranists [= KarrÄmites], an unbeliever.â Yet the first question discussed in his book titled Uṣūl al-dÄ«n, dâHerbelot reports correctly from the manuscript at the Royal Library, is directed against the eternity of the world. Whereas his KarrÄmite detractors in the fitna of FÄ«rÅ«zkÅ«h claimed that his teachings are of the same ilk as those of Aristotle, Avicenna, and FÄrÄbÄ«, writes dâHerbelot, it appears from his Uṣūl al-dÄ«n, âthat this author was not as Aristotelian as his enemies wanted us to believe, in order to discredit him.â10 The relationship of RÄzÄ«âs Aristotelianism, or rather his Avicennism, and his work as an AshÊ¿arite Muslim theologian is still something that puzzles us today.
The one-column entry on âRaziâ is not even the full extent of knowledge that dâHerbelot conveys on Fakhr al-DÄ«n. Earlier in his dictionary RÄzÄ«âs Muḥaṣṣal gets its own entry â which is cross referenced in the article on the author â as does al-KÄtibÄ« al-QazwÄ«nÄ«âs (d. 675/1276 or 693/1294) well-known commentary on that book, al-Mufaṣṣal fÄ« sharḥ al-Muḥaṣṣal. The title Muḥaṣṣal afkÄr al-mutaqaddimÄ«n wa-l-mutaʾakhkhirÄ«n is translated quite correctly as âSentimens des Metaphysiciens, ou Docteurs Scholastiques tant anciens que modernes,â and it is characterized as a work by âthe most famous scholastic scholar of the Musulmans,â Fakhr al-DÄ«n al-RÄzÄ«.11
If we were asked about the most famous scholastic thinker in Christianity, then many today as in the days of dâHerbelot would point to Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274). DâHerbelot did not exaggerate when he put RÄzÄ« on a level with the great Dominican âdoctor angelicus.â Fakhr al-DÄ«n was one of the most influential authors of what we identify as the madrasa era of Islamic intellectual history, an era we now also refer to as post-classical Islam. Johann Jacob Brucker and Barthélemy dâHerbelot were quite aware of RÄzÄ«âs great influence and his importance, because they wrote at a time when those madrasas were still functioning and when they educated many students. With the beginning of the colonial era in the Middle East, however, madrasa education would be pushed to the margins and other, Western forms of knowledge reproduction were privileged. For the Western knowledge of leading figures of the madrasa era â or of the post-classical period in Islamic intellectual history â the colonial era often meant a loss rather than an increase of information.
This is nowhere more evident than in the case of Fakhr al-DÄ«n al-RÄzÄ«. Whereas Brucker and dâHerbelot made strong efforts to gather facts and insights about him, those efforts ceased almost entirely during the 19th century. In their bibliography of academic publications concerned with Fakhr al-DÄ«n al-RÄzÄ«, which we find here in print, Damien Janos and M. Fariduddin Attar have found less than a handful of contributions from the 19th century. As far as I know, the German scholar Richard Gosche (1824â89) has a short remark at the end of his monographic article on GhazÄlÄ«, where he briefly compares RÄzÄ«âs al-MabÄḥith al-mashriqiyya with GhazÄlÄ«âs MaqÄá¹£id al-falÄsifa.12 Gosche relied in his knowledge about RÄzÄ« on ḤÄjjÄ« KhalÄ«faâs (d. 1068/1657) bibliographical encyclopedia Kashf al-áºunÅ«n, which was already the main source for Barthélemy dâHerbelot, as well as on a manuscript of al-MabÄḥith al-mashriqiyya in the Prussian Royal Library in Berlin. Manuscript catalogues, particularly Wilhelm Ahlwardtâs monumental 10-volume catalogue of the manuscripts in the Berlin library, provide the most valuable information on RÄzÄ« and his works throughout the 19th century.13
For Western intellectual historians of Islam at the turn of the 20th century, Fakhr al-DÄ«n was of no interest. He belonged to the group of âepitomistsâ (Kompendienschreiber), dealt with briefly in Tjitze de Boerâs (1866â1942) History of Philosophy in Islam. The book was published in German in 1901 and it treats the likes of Fakhr al-DÄ«n in a brief chapter, right after GhazÄlÄ«. Were his book about education, writes De Boer, this group of scholars who worked at madrasas âwould necessarily have a larger space assigned,â but given that he writes a history of philosophy, âwe shall dismiss it in a few words.â14 On the one hand, De Boer acknowledges that GhazÄlÄ« did not destroy philosophy but rather integrated it into the Muslim mainstream, to the extent that âgeneral culture too had adopted an element of philosophical learning.â On the other hand, De Boer bemoans a lack of freedom in Muslim societies of this time that led to âa general decay of civilization.â Literary production became stagnant and the same was true for philosophy. After Avicenna, âno one felt called upon to come forward with independent views [and] the day had come for abridgements, commentaries, glosses, and glosses upon glosses.â15 So brief are De Boerâs remarks in this chapter that he neglects to name any of those who followed Avicenna and GhazÄlÄ«. Fakhr al-DÄ«n al-RÄzÄ«âs name does not appear.
Such lack of attention somewhat changed when in 1905 RÄzÄ«âs Muḥaṣṣal afkÄr al-mutaqaddimÄ«n wa-l-mutaʾakhkhirÄ«n appeared in a Cairo print.16 The German Privatdozent Max Horten (1874â1945) was one of the first scholars who took notice of this publishing event and who analyzed the book in at least three of his publications.17 Hortenâs work, however, did not yet create a breakthrough, for if we look at the first edition of the Enzyklopaedie des IslÄm, which was published in four volumes (plus supplement) during the years 1908 to 1938, we find that it lacks an article on Fakhr al-DÄ«n al-RÄzÄ«. The editors must have envisioned it because it is announced to appear under âRÄzÄ«â in one of the earlier volumes.18 Other priorities must have prevailed, however, and when one looks through the third volume covering the letters L to M, which was published in 1936, there is no entry on him.
The encyclopediaâs editors must have understood this desideratum, because when in the late 1930s and early 1940s the two Dutch scholars Arent Jan Wensinck (1882â1939) and Johannes Hendrik Kramers (1891â1951) compiled the one-volume Handwörterbuch des Islam from articles that appeared earlier in the much longer Enzyklopaedie des IslÄm, Kramer himself wrote the missing entry on Fakhr al-DÄ«n al-RÄzÄ«.19 This article is, however, relatively short and with just under one page comes nowhere near the five-page-long contribution on GhazÄlÄ«, for instance. Still, Kramerâs article of 1941 is the first encyclopedic treatment of Fakhr al-DÄ«n al-RÄzÄ« after dâHerbelotâs in 1697. It foreshadows the much longer entry on him in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, New Edition, published in 1963, now also stretching over almost five encyclopedia pages. Its author Georges C. Anawati (1905â94) was one of the earliest intellectual historians of Islam after the likes of dâHerbelot who understood the importance of RÄzÄ« and who devoted to him the attention that he deserves. Like his predecessor three centuries earlier, Anawati informs his readers about RÄzÄ«âs life and also focuses on the fitna of FÄ«rÅ«zkÅ«h. He provides an annotated worklist that, like that of dâHerbelot, is incomplete and where, just like there, RÄzÄ«âs Muḥaṣṣal draws the most attention.20 Elsewhere Anawati wrote more extensively about RÄzÄ«âs life and about the Muḥaṣṣal.21
With the generation of Anawati, who was active during the third quarter of the 20th century and who trained many important intellectual historians of Islam, begins the slow academic discovery of RÄzÄ«. The true flowering of studies on him, however, still had to wait for another quarter of a century, because it is only in the 1990s and then in the first decade of the 21st century that we see the first Western monographs on RÄzÄ« together with a general increase in the number of studies.22 From one day to the next, however, this wellspring turns into a flood. The publication of RÄzÄ«âs al-Maá¹Älib al-Ê¿Äliya in 1987, a text of which there are hardly any manuscripts in European libraries, led to increased interest in its author.23 Anawati does not mention al-Maá¹Älib al-Ê¿Äliya in his EI2 article of 1963, yet since it came out in print it has replaced the Muḥaṣṣal as the work that draws the most attention. Finally, with the opening of many manuscript libraries in Istanbul to foreign researchers in 2002, more and more texts became accessible that are not yet available in print.
Today, the field of RÄzÄ« studies is one of the strongest sub-fields in Islamic studies, with contributions on his philosophy, his theology, his ethics, as well as on his works in fiqh and its method, in the natural sciences, and in the occult sciences. We have become keenly aware that RÄzÄ« was one of the most important intellectuals of Islamâs post-classical period and, in fact, a thinker who set patterns for much of what we regard as characteristic for this period. As a philosopher he was instrumental in the establishment of the genre of ḥikma; as a theologian he was the creator of the order in which subjects are dealt with in kalÄm textbooks of madrasa education; in fiqh he argued for maá¹£laḥa as a productive source of law; in the genre of QurʾÄn commentary, he went way beyond the text and included rational and scientific explanations of its meaning and examples for its daily usefulness; and in the occult sciences, he introduced teachings from Indian and so-called á¹¢abian sages into what became a widespread Muslim understanding of the paranormal and the uncanny. These are just a few examples of the places in post-classical Muslim culture where Fakhr al-DÄ«n al-RÄzÄ« not only left an imprint, but where he was the originator of major new developments. For at least three centuries after his death, RÄzÄ« remained the reference point in a great number of sciences in Islam. His importance is illustrated, for instance, by his frequent appearance in many chapters on different sciences in Ibn KhaldÅ«nâs Muqaddima.
This bibliography, with its 1100 entries, is a testament to the importance of Fakhr al-DÄ«n al-RÄzÄ« and to the research on him. Bibliographies like this one are common in other fields of research in the humanities, and even more so in the social sciences, as well as in STEM fields. They were also quite common in the earlier days of Oriental studies, when even the books displayed in the Oriental reading rooms of major research libraries were listed in publications.24 The late 20th century witnessed the elaboration of major bibliographies that focus on publications in particular languages.25 Since then, however, bibliographies have unfortunately become rare. Comprehensive topical bibliographies remain today a desideratum to which selective online tools such as the Oxford Bibliographies series are no substitute.26 With the exception of Jules Janssensâ bibliographies on Avicenna27 â which are to some degree a model for this book â there are no recent bibliographic reference works devoted to the various subfields of Islamic intellectual history.
The goal of the present work is to list all modern academic publications that deal with any aspect of Fakhr al-DÄ«n al-RÄzÄ«âs life and Åuvre. Damien Janos and M.F. Attar have helpfully categorized the publications related to RÄzÄ« into different subjects, so that readers may get a clear overview of the research that has been done in a specific subfield of RÄzian studies. This listing is in itself a monumental task, and one can only wish that such inventories be conducted for other major thinkers in Islam. Other comparable endeavors to what Damien Janos and M.F. Attar have done here would enrich our field and increase the productivity and quality of future work on the history of Islamic thought.
Frank Griffel
Yale University, New Haven
(Editorsâ note: The following footnote citations consist of a/ author, b/ section of the bibliography in which the entry appears, c/ date of publication, and d/ page number, if applicable. Full bibliographical references are given in those cases where studies are not listed in the bibliography.) Johann Jakob Brucker, Historia critica philosophiae, 2nd ed., 6 vols., (Leipzig: Widemanni et Reichii, 1766â67), 3: 113â15.
On Leo Africanus and his Libellus de viris quibusdam illustribus apud Arabes, see Dag N. Hasse, Success and Suppression. Arabic Sciences and Philosophy in the Renaissance (Cambridge [Mass.]: Harvard University Press, 2016), 45â52. We do not know under which circumstances or in which language Leo wrote this book, which exists only in Latin. The text was available in manuscript(s) and was first published by Johann Heinrich Hottinger in his Bibliothecarius quadripartitus (Zurich: Melchior Stauffacher, 1664), 246â94 (the entry on RÄzÄ« is pp. 280â84), and later once again in Johann Albert Fabricius. Bibliotheca graeca, 14 vols. (Hamburg: T.C. Felgineri, 1708â28), 13:259â98 (entry on RÄzÄ«, pp. 289â92). The entry on RÄzÄ«, however, seems incomplete in both prints. The text in Brucker, Historia critica philosophiae, 3:113â14, seems to quote passages that are missing in Hottingerâs and Fabriciusâ prints, suggesting that he worked from a more complete manuscript.
For LisÄn al-DÄ«n b. al-Khaá¹Ä«b, see Cynthia Robinson, in Essays in Arabic Literary Biography 1230â1850, ed. J.E. Lowry and D.J. Stewart (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2009), 159â74.
Brucker, Historia critica philosophiae, vol. 3, 115.
Hasse, Success and Suppression, 46, suggests that the jumbling together of two different entries is due to a copying mistake in the preserved Florentine manuscript of Libellus de viris.
Another important presentation of Arabic philosophy during this period is Wilhelm Gottlieb Tennemannâs (1761â1819), Geschichte der Philosophie, 12 vols. (Leipzig: Johann A. Barth, 1798â1819), which in its 8th volume (first part, 362â448) includes a presentation of Arabic philosophy that, however, does not mention Fakhr al-DÄ«n al-RÄzÄ«.
â(â¦) car, il avoit ajoûté la connoissance des Sciences étrangeres à celles du Mahometisme, & prêchoit fort éloquemment en Arabe, & en Persan,â Barthélemy dâHerbelot, Bibliotheque Orientale ou Dictionaire universel contenant generalement Tout ce qui regarde la connoissance des Peuples de lâOrient (â¦) (Paris: La Compagnie des Libraires, 1697), 712.
For the events of the fitna of FÄ«rÅ«zkÅ«h, see Griffel, 2/2021, 283â85.
âUṣūl al-dÄ«nâ is a copy of al-MasÄʾil al-khamsÅ«n fÄ« uṣūl al-kalÄm, see W.M. le Baron de Slane, Catalogue des manuscrits arabes de la Bibliothèque Nationale, 3 vols. (Paris, Imprimerie nationale, 1883â95), 1:240 (#1253). On the Paris MS of Muḥaṣṣal with commentary by al-KÄtibÄ« al-QazwÄ«nÄ« see ibid. 1:240 (#1254).
âpar où il paroist, que cet Auteur nâétoit pas si Aristotelicien que ses ennemis le vouloient faire croire, pour le décrediter,â dâHerbelot, Bibliotheque Orientale, 712.
âle plus fameux Docteur Scholastique des Musulmans,â dâHerbelot, Bibliotheque Orientale, 617. Cf. also the article on âMofassel,â 596.
Richard Gosche, âÃber Ghazzâlîs Leben und Werke,â in Abhandlungen der Königl. Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin (1858): 237â311, at 292, 310â11.
Wilhelm Ahlwardt, Die Handschriften-Verzeichnisse der Königlichen Bibliothek zu Berlin. Verzeichnis der arabischen Handschriften, 10 vols. (Berlin: A.W. Schade, 1887â99). On the MS of al-MabÄḥith al-mashriqiyya, see 4:403â15 (#5064). Ahlwardt describes many works of RÄzÄ« in great detail, including, for instance, al-Sirr al-maktÅ«m (5:282â84, #5886).
De Boer 1/1901, 150; Engl. trans. De Boer 1/1903, 169.
De Boer 1/1901, 151; Engl. trans. De Boer 1/1903, 169â70.
RÄzÄ«, KitÄb Muḥaṣṣal afkÄr al-mutaqaddimÄ«n wa-l-mutaʾakhkhirÄ«n min al-Ê¿ulamÄʾ wa-l- ḥukamÄʾ wa-l-mutakallimÄ«n (Cairo: al-Maá¹baÊ¿a al-Ḥusayniyya al-Miá¹£riyya, 1323 [1905]). On this print, see Tritton 3/1965â66.
For an appraisal of Max Hortenâs contribution to RÄzÄ« studies, see Griffel 2/2021, 310â12.
Enzyklopaedie des IslÄm: Geographisches, ethnographisches und biographisches Wörterbuch der muhammedanischen Völker, edited by M.Th. Houtsma et al., 4 vols. and Ergänzungsband (Leiden, and Leipzig: E.J. Brill and O. Harrassowitz, 1913â38), 2:46; see also 3:1225â29. Cf. the English translation Encyclopaedia of Islam: A Dictionary of the Geography, Ethnography and Biography of the Muhammadan Peoples, ed. M. Th. Houtsma et al., 4 vols. plus Supplement (Leiden and London: E.J. Brill and Luzac & Co., 1913â38), 2:44; see also 3:1134â38.
Kramers 1/1941; and 1/1961 [1953] for the English translation.
Anawati 1/2012.
On the Muḥaṣṣal, see Gardet and Anawati 2/1948, 162â64 and index; on RÄzÄ«âs life, see QanawÄtÄ« [Georges Anawati] 2/1962.
For the earliest monographs in Western languages on Fakhr al-DÄ«n al-RÄzÄ«, see Ceylan 2/1996, Arnaldez 2/2002, Shihadeh 14/2006, and Jaffer 16/2014 in this bibliography.
RÄzÄ«, al-Maá¹Älib al-Ê¿Äliya min al-Ê¿ilm al-ilÄhÄ«, edited by Aḥmad ḤijÄzÄ« al-SaqqÄ, 9 parts in 5 vols. (Beirut: DÄr al-KitÄb al-Ê¿ArabÄ«, 1407/1987). There is a fragment of this book under Or. 9004 in the British Library, London, which, however, is miscatalogued.
See, e.g., Walter Gottschalk, Katalog der Handbibliothek der Orientalischen Abteilung. Preussische Staatsbibliothek (Leipzig: Harrassowitz, 1929).
Examples are Bibliographie der deutschsprachigen Arabistik und Islamkunde: von den Anfängen bis 1986 nebst Literatur über die arabischen Länder der Gegenwart, edited by Fuat Sezgin, 27 vols. (Frankfurt: Institut für Geschichte der Arabisch-Islamischen Wissenschaften, 1990â2006); Erika Bär, Bibliographie zur deutschsprachigen Islamwissenschaft und Semitistik vom Anfang des 19. Jahrhunderts bis heute, 3 vols. (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1985â91); Klaus Schwarz, Der Vordere Orient in den Hochschulschriften Deutschlands, Ãsterreichs und der Schweiz (Freiburg i.Br.: Klaus Schwarz, 1980).
Jules Janssens, An Annotated Bibliography on Ibn Sînâ (1970â1989) (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1991); idem, An Annotated Bibliography on Ibn SÄ«nÄ. First Supplement (1990â1994) (Louvain-la-Neuve: Collège Cardinal Mercier, 1999), and idem, An Annotated Bibliography on Ibn SÄ«nÄ. Second Supplement (1995â2009) (Temple [Ariz.]: ACMRS, 2017).