an-Nazzām

Abū Ishāq Ibrāhīm ibn Saiyār an-Nazzām ( Arabic أبو إسحاق ابراهيم بن سيار النظام, DMG Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm ibn Saiyār an-Naẓẓām ; died between 835 and 845) was a Muʿtazilite theologian and philosopher. He is considered to be the creator of his own theory regarding the miraculousness of the Quran , known as the Sarfa theory. An-Nazzam's works have been lost, except for a few fragments. Josef van Ess used these fragments to reconstruct his teaching system.

Life

An-Nazzām received his training in Basra , in large part from his maternal uncle Abū l-Hudhail , of whom he was adlatus ( ghulām ). On his father's side he came from a slave family and was maulā of a clan from the Arab tribal association of Bakr ibn Wā'il. After the caliph al-Ma'mun had moved his residence from Merw to Baghdad in 819 , he was given access to his court. At times he received a salary from the court that was so high that he could entertain others with it. Whether he received this salary as a theologian is not clear, however, since he was also a good poet and orator and could therefore also have been active in the position of entertainer. Al-Jahiz was one of his most important students at the theological level .

Teaching

Natural philosophy

On the level of natural philosophy turned to-Nazzām against the atomistic conceptions of his teacher Abū l-Hudhail. According to his theory, bodies do not consist of aggregates of the smallest particles, which are only held together by God's omnipotence, but of elements that interpenetrate and either become visible on the surface or remain hidden inside. With the changing concealment and appearance of certain bodies, he also explained the changes in temperature, consistency, etc.

Ash-Shahrastānī ascribes to-Nazzām the doctrine "that God created all existing things all at once as they now existed, metals, plants, animals and men, and that Adam 's creation did not precede the creation of his children is only that God has hidden a part of it in the other, so that the earlier and later being only comes from their emergence from the places of their concealment, not from their arising and their existence. " Ash-Shahrastānī states that an-Nazzām adopted this conception from the philosophers who taught concealment ( kumūn ) and emergence ( ẓuhūr ).

What was also striking about an-Nazzām's system of teaching was its anti-atomistic theory of movement. After that, movement must take place in the "jump" ( ṭafra ), since with an unlimited divisibility of the space it is inconceivable that the moving body touches every single point. Movement also played an important role ex negativo in his epistemology. He defined truth as "rest of the heart" ( sukūn al-qalb ). So the criterion for truth is subjective. Whether it corresponds to external reality was less important to him.

The concept of the mind ( rūḥ ) was also of major importance in his teaching system . In connection with the Platonic Pneuma concept , he imagined the spirit as a subtle body that mixes with the body like a gas and penetrates it right down to the fingertips, but at death breaks out of this connection and continues to exist independently. Disciples of an-Nazzām, among them Ahmad ibn Chābit , continued this thought and developed a theory of transmigration of spirits ( tanāsuḫ ) based on it.

According to Max Horten , an-Nazzām took over several elements of his system of natural philosophy from the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras . Saul Horovitz, however, said that he was influenced by stoic views and described him "as a representative of stoicism among the Arabs".

Doctrine of the Koran

One of the most striking elements in an-Nazzām's theological teaching system was his particular understanding of the miraculousness of the Koran. There was agreement among Muslim scholars that Mohammed's contemporaries were unable to counter the Koran with anything of equal value. However, while most scholars attributed this inability to the rhetorical qualities of the Koran, an-Nazzām said that contemporaries were only unable to respond to the Koran because God had prevented them from doing so. Abū l-Hasan al-Ashʿarī reports from him: “People would also have been able to compose and write (sc. The Koran) if God had not prevented them from doing so by creating an incapacity ( ʿaǧz ) in them. “The miraculous keeping of people by God is expressed in this statement with the Arabic verb afarafa . Therefore, the special will i'jaz -Teaching on-Nazzāms with the term shari'a ( shari'a , "turning away, holding"), respectively. Regarding linguistic qualities, an-Nazzām is said to have taught that they do not exceed ordinary human speaking skills. He was of the opinion that the real miracle in the Quran was the communication of hidden things ( al-iḫbār ʿan al-ġuyūb ).

literature

Arabic sources

• Muḥammad aš-Šahrastānī : al-Milal wa-n-niḥal Ed. Aḥmad Fahmī Muḥammad. Dār al-Kutub al-ʿilmīya, Beirut, 1992. pp. 47-53. Digitized - German transl. Theodor Haarbrücker. 2 vols. Halle 1850–51. Vol. I, pp. 53-61. Digitized

Secondary literature

• Muḥammad ʿAbd-al-Hādī Abū-Rīda: Ibrāhīm Ibn-Saiyār an-Naẓẓām wa-ārāʾuhu al-kalāmīya al-falsafīya . Maṭbaʿat Laǧnat at-Taʾlīf wa-t-Tarǧama wa-n-Našr, Cairo, 1946. Digitized
• Josef van Ess : The Kitāb an-Nakṯ of the Naẓẓām and its reception in the Kitāb al-Futyā of the Ǧāḥiẓ: a collection of the fragments with translation and commentary . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen, 1972.
• Josef van Ess : Theology and society in the 2nd and 3rd centuries of the Hijra. A History of Religious Thought in Early Islam . Volume III. Berlin: De Gruyter 1992. pp. 296-419.
• Josef van Ess: Art. "Al-Naẓẓām" in The Encyclopaedia of Islam. New Edition Vol. VII, pp. 1057a-1058.
• Saul Horovitz: About the influence of Greek philosophy on the development of the Kalam . Schatzky, Breslau, 1909. pp. 8-33. Digitized
• Max Horten : "The doctrine of the Kumūn in Naẓẓām († 845). A contribution to the history of philosophy in Islam." in the journal of the German Oriental Society 63 (1909) pp. 774–792. Digitized

supporting documents

1. ↑ Cf. van Ess Theology and Society . 1992, p. 296.
2. ↑ Cf. van Ess Theology and Society . 1992, pp. 302f.
3. ↑ Cf. van Ess Theology and Society . 1992, pp. 335-342.
4. ↑ aš-Šahrastānī: al-Milal wa-n-Nihal . 1992, p. 50. - Dt. Übers. Haarbrücker p. 57.
5. ↑ aš-Šahrastānī: al-Milal wa-n-Nihal . 1992, p. 50. - Dt. Übers. Haarbrücker p. 57.
6. ↑ See van Ess Theology and Society . 1992, pp. 310-324.
7. ↑ Cf. van Ess Theology and Society . 1992, p. 380f.
8. ↑ Cf. van Ess Theology and Society . 1992, p. 369f.
9. ↑ Cf. van Ess Theology and Society . 1992, pp. 429-436.
10. ↑ Horten: "The doctrine of the Kumūn at Naẓẓām". 1909, pp. 776, 784f, 790, 792.
11. ↑ Horovitz: About the influence of Greek philosophy on the development of the Kalam . 1909, pp. 8, 33.
12. ↑ Cf. al-Ašʿarī: Maqālāt al-islāmīyīn wa-ḫtilāf al-muṣallīn . Ed. Hellmut Ritter. Istānbūl: Maṭbaʿat ad-daula 1929–1933. P. 225.
13. ↑ See Ess Theologie und Gesellschaft . 1992, p. 412f.
14. ↑ RC Martin: Art. "Inimitability" in Jane Dammen McAuliffe (ed.): Encyclopaedia of the Qur'an . 6 vols. Leiden 2001-2006. Vol. II, pp. 526-536. Here p. 532a.
15. ↑ Cf. al-Ašʿarī: Maqālāt al-islāmīyīn wa-iḫtilāf al-muṣallīn . Ed. Hellmut Ritter. Istānbūl: Maṭbaʿat ad-daula 1929–1933. P. 225.