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sianJPerso-Islamic philosophy. The two volumes, while reprinting a fair amount of material (some of which is of dubious quality), do present much new material to the reader. They do facilitate teaching and understanding, as long as they are used carefully and critically. The Anthology is thus a major contribution and once it is complete (in five or six projected volumes), it will no doubt transform the way in which we perceive and study philosophical traditions in Persia.
Sufi Commentary: Formative and Later Periods Alexander Knysh The Oxford Handbook of Qur'anic Studies Edited by Muhammad Abdel Haleem and Mustafa Shah, 2020
and Keywords This chapter examines the growth of the Muslim allegorical-mystical (Sufi) exegetical tra dition from its inception in the eighth century CE, through its 'classical period' in the tenth-eleventh centuries, to its fruition in the late Middle Ages. Special attention is given to the major Sufi exegetes of Sunni persuasion and the hermeneutical techniques that they employed to explore the esoteric (batin) aspects of the Qur'an and to demonstrate the superiority of their divinely inspired exegesis (taʾwīl) to the exoteric, historical-philo logical, moral-ethical, and legal commentary (tafsīr) of non-Sufi theologians. The differ ences between 'moderate' and 'bold' types of Sufi exegesis are highlighted alongside the two distinctive schools of mystical exegesis, the Akbari, going back to Ibn [al-]'Arabi (d. 638/1240), and the Kubrawi associated with Najm al-Din Kubra (d. 618/1221). Sufism: an Overview SUFISM (Ar., taṣawwuf), an ascetic-mystical movement in Islam, emerged in Iraq under the early Abbasids (the first half of the third/ninth century). Its competitors in the provinces were later subsumed under the title 'Sufism'. By the fifth/eleventh century, Sufi leaders (shaykhs) had produced a substantial body of normative oral and literary lore that became the source of identity and building bricks for Sufism's followers of the Middle Ages and beyond. With the emergence of the first Sufi 'brotherhoods', or 'orders' (ṭuruq; sing. ṭarīqa) in the sixth/twelfth century, Sufism became part and parcel of the religious, social, and political life of Islamic societies. In the modern epoch, Sufism was harshly crit icized by Muslim modernists, fundamentalists, and leftists as a relic of the past, responsi ble for perpetuating idle superstitions, social inactivity, and senseless rituals. Neverthe less, it has managed to survive this critical onslaught and to remain relevant to the life of Muslim communities worldwide (Knysh 2010 and 2017).
The period between the ninth and twelfth centuries in the development of the Sufi movement in Islam infrequently attracts scholarly study. The lack of textual evidence and the apparent unreliability of the available materials are among the major reasons for this. Hagiographies, which are our main sources, have long been regarded in a negative light, and their value for our understanding of the early history of Sufism is held in doubt. More recently, however, a new scholarly voice has begun to reclaim the historical value of hagiographies.1 There is a crucial need to go beyond what can be seen as a " macro-oriented " method of grouping the names of the figures whose activities contributed to the appearance of Sufism, during the early medieval centuries. Scholarship on Sufism should shift its focus onto the " micro-oriented " achievements of each individual figure in order to reconstruct, as far as the available material allows, the social, religious and interpersonal realities. Around the teachings and life stories of early Sufi personalities, " a wide spectrum of subsidiary subjects are dealt with concerning customs, social practices and historical development of ideas in Sufism " , as was asserted by Radtke and O'Kane in reference to Meier's monograph on Abū Saʿīd Abū al-Khayr (d. 1049).2 Studying the distinct modes of religiosity of different personalities in their particular socio-intellectual contexts will enable us to effectively reappraise early Sufism as the constituting of individual fragments and interpersonal dynamics, and later on to set out from a more stable starting point in order to understand the general development