al-Bāqillānī

Abū Bakr Muhammad ibn at-Taiyib al-Bāqillānī ( Arabic أبو بكر محمد بن الطيب الباقلاني, DMG Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn a-Ṭaiyib al-Bāqillānī ; † 1013 ) was an Islamic theologian who popularized the teaching system of Abū l-Hasan al-Ashʿarī and developed his own teaching on the Koran .

Life

Al-Bāqillānī spent the first part of his life in Basra and Baghdad and was invited from there to participate in the theological discussions at the court of the Buyid- Emir Adud ad-Daula (r. 949-983) in Shiraz ; In 982 he was sent on a diplomatic mission to the Byzantine Empire in Constantinople . The rest of his life he spent in Baghdad, where he temporarily held the office of Qadi . While most of the other theologians who followed al-Ashʿarī's system of teaching were Shafiites , al-Bāqillānī belonged to the Maliki teaching, which is particularly widespread in North Africa. This enabled him to contribute particularly well to popularizing Ash'arite teaching in these areas.

Works

• Al-Bāqillānī's most important dogmatic treatise is his Kitāb at-Tamhīd ("Book of Introduction"). In it he exposes himself to asch'aritischer view with the teachings of other religions ( Zoroastrianism , Christianity, Brahmanism , Judaism) and other Islamic denominations (Korporealisten, Mu'tazila , Shiites ) apart and tried to refute it. His own dogmatic system is based on the teaching of al-Ash'ari, the only difference being that he emphasized the reality of the divine attributes more strongly.
• His treatise Iʿǧāz al-Qurʾān (“The inimitability of the Koran”) was also of great importance . In doing so, he introduced the concept of Koranic inimitability , which had been developed by the Muʿtazilites, into Sunni theology.
• Al-Bāqillānī developed his special teaching on the Koran in the book al-Inṣāf fī-mā yaǧib iʿtiqādu-hū wa-lā yaǧūzu ǧahlu-hū ("The balanced judgment of what one must believe and not ignore"). In it he maintained the Ashʿaritic position of the eternal existence of the Koran, but stated that this only referred to the meaning ( maʿnā ) of the Koran, but not to its linguistic realization. He derived this from sura 14: 4 , where it is stated that God allows his messengers to speak to their people in the language that they understand. From this he concluded that only the unchangeable meaning of the divine message behind these different linguistic realizations could be primordially eternal.
• At-Taqrīb wa-l-iršād , systematic treatise on the Usūl al-fiqh . The short version of the text was edited in 1998 in three volumes.

literature

• Johan Bouman: Le conflit autour du Coran et la solution d'al-Bāqillānī . Amsterdam 1959.
• E. Chaumont: "Bāqillānī, theologies ash'arite et juriste malikite, contre les legistes a propos de l'ijtihad et de l'accord unanime de la communaute" in Studia Islamica 79 (1994) 79-102.
• GE von Grunebaum: A tenth-century document of Arab literary theory and criticism. The sections on poetry of al-Bâqillânî's Iʿjāz al-Qurʾân . Chicago 1950.
• RJ McCarthy: al-Bāqillānī In: Encyclopaedia of Islam . Second edition. Vol. 1, pp. 958-959.
• MJ McDermott: “A debate between al-Mufīd and al-Bāqillānī” in Recherches d'islamologie: Recueil d'articles offert à Georges C. Anawati et Louis Gardet par leurs collègues et amis . Peeters, Louvain, 1977. pp. 237-246.
• G. Monnot: “La réponse de Bāqillānī aux dualistes” in Recherches d'islamologie: Recueil d'articles offert à Georges C. Anawati et Louis Gardet par leurs collègues et amis . Peeters, Louvain, 1977. pp. 247-260.
• Rudi Paret : The position of al-Bāqillānī in the teaching of the Koran in Rudi Paret (Ed.): The Koran . Darmstadt 1975. pp. 417-425.
• Sabine Schmidtke : “Early Ašʿarite Theology: Abū Bakr al-Bāqillānī (d. 403/1013) and his Hidāyat al-mustaršidīn,” in Bulletin d'Etudes Orientales 60 (2011) 39-72.
• W. Montgomery Watt, Michael Marmura: The Islam II. Political developments and theological concepts. Stuttgart u. a. 1985. pp. 395-399.

supporting documents

1. ↑ See Watt / Marmura 397.
2. ↑ See Paret: Al-Bāqillānī's position in the teaching of the Koran . 1975, p. 424f.