Damascus Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

SAMER AKKACH ED., Letters of a SufiScholar: The Correspondence of 'Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi (1641-1731) Islamic History and Civilization, vol. 74 (Brill: Leiden and Boston, 2009). Pp. 560 (Arabic and English). $ 211.00 cloth.The monograph under review contains a critical edition of seventy-two letters received and written by the famous Damascene Sufiand polymath 'Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi (1641-1731). In the introduction, editor Samer Akkach describes al-Nabulusi's correspondents as "Arab and Turkish friends, colleagues, mystics, highranking officials, and individuals unknown to him, all residing outside Damascus in various cities of the region" (p. 1). The letters deal with a wide variety of issues, from the finer points of the Muslim creed, to God's role as the ultimate cause of natural causes and human actions, to the unitive/monistic metaphysics of Ibn [al-]'Arabi (d. 1240) and his school of thought, to holy war, to religious ethics, to the permissibility of certain substances (e.g., tobacco and coffee), and so on. To help the reader to locate al-Nabulusi's correspondents geographically, the editor provides a map and a list of "Places, Towns, and Correspondents" (pp. 75-78). The book is divided into the English text that contains the editor's introduction and summary of some of the letters and the Arabic part that features an Arabic version of the English introduction and a critical edition of the Arabic text of al-Nabulusi's letters. In what follows I will be quoting passages from the editor's English introduction to the book.One should point out that the letters were carefully assembled by the author himself under the title Wasa'il al-ta?qiq wa rasa'il al-tawfiq, which the editor translates as "The Means of Truth-Seeking and the Letters of Providential Guidance" (p. 1). This fact indicates that al-Nabulusi valued these letters enough to take the trouble of copying each one of them (either by his own hand or by hiring a scribe) and collecting them under one cover. The editor provides a helpful account of possible reasons for al-Nabulusi's concern for the preservation of the letters for his posterity as well as the culture of private correspondence in his age in general (pp. 21-31). He also describes the author's intellectual milieu and personal religious and philosophical predilections (pp. 32-34).For those familiar with Akkach's earlier works, especially his 'Abd al-Ghani a-Nabulusi: Islam and the Enlightenment (Oxford: Oneworld, 2007), this collection will serve as a documentary sequel of sorts. Its purpose, as I perceive it, is to marshal textual evidence in support of Akkach's understanding of the beginnings of an Islamic "enlightenment" and intellectual emancipation that he has detected in the intellectual legacy of some Muslim thinkers of the late Ottoman epoch ('Abd al-Ghani a-Nabulusi, pp. 69-75), including al-Nabulusi, Hajji Khalifa (1609-1657), Evliya Celebi (1614-1682), Ibrahim Muteferriqa (d. 1745), Ibrahim Haqqi (d. 1780), and 'Abd al-Mannan (d. after 1779). Akkach's musings about the Islamic variant of the European Enlightenment are not the primary subject of the present volume, but, it is worth mentioning here that Akkach has discovered signs of al-Nabulusi's broadmindedness and tolerance (conceivably, an intellectual attitude indicative of "enlightenment") in his advocacy of Ibn [al-]'Arabi's doctrine of the unity of being (wa?dat al-wujud), his defense of human free will versus divine predetermination of all events, as well as, somewhat more controversially, in his approval of the public consumption of tobacco and coffee. In regard to wa?dat al-wujud, Akkach seeks to demonstrate the subtlety of al-Nabulusi's interpretation of this doctrine as opposed to what he considers to be a much cruder and confrontational approach to it taken by Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328). As someone who has written at length about Ibn Taymiyya's criticism of Ibn [al-] 'Arabi's monism and its impact on the subsequent polemic over his intellectual legacy in my Ibn 'Arabi in the Later Islamic Tradition, (Albany, Suny Press, NY: 1999), chap. …