For the past quarter-century substantial research has been done on the ‘House of Wisdom’ (Bayt al-?ikma) at the court of the early Abbasid caliphs up to and prominently including al-Ma’m?n (d. 218/833) (Balty-Guesdon 1992; Gutas 1998; Gutas & van Bladel 2009). At first sight, it might therefore appear foolhardy to propose yet another exploration of this seemingly all too well-trodden ground. Yet long-held misconceptions, by which the Abbasid office of recordkeeping and information, to suggest an alternative rendering, is cast as a center of Graeco-Arabic translation or more grandiosely, a kind of proto-academy of science have stubbornly withstood the challenge of even the most unambiguous evidence. Thus there would seem to be room for fresh scrutiny of the all too scant testimony provided by contemporaneous reports and secondary later narratives. It will be shown that whatever brief governed the presumed ‘House of Wisdom’ during its short existence, the activities associated with it and the—intermittent—caliphal support of them did not succeed in giving it exemplary character in collective memory. This bald assertion is derived from the witness of authors such as al-J??i?, ?unayn b. Is??q, al-Mas??d?, al-Muqaddas?, al-Nad?m, al-Qif??, and b. a. U?aybi?a. In addition to the evolving standard lexicon concerning ‘libraries,’ ‘salons,’ and ‘colleges,’ in which the Abbasid ‘House of Wisdom’ manifestly did not survive, the cumulative evidence provided by the writers just named supports the following conclusions: bibliophily, which gave rise to sizeable collections during the third and fourth/ninth and tenth centuries, was not restricted to courtly circles. It was wealthy administrators and professionals whose demand lead to the post-Ma’m?nid flowering of the rightly so-called translation movement. Finally, venues of scholarly exchange and debate and institutions of higher education developed at a considerable time-lag and independently of caliphal initiative. The rare attestations of ‘houses of wisdom’ in later sources refer to places in distant, barely apprehensible regions and periods.

The criteria by which to judge the “origin” of groups in pre-modern Islamic society constitutes a largely unresolved problem. Landmark studies of pre-modern groups' dynamics (Bulliet: 1972; Mottahedeh: 1980; Zaman: 1997), take for granted the stable influence of categories of actors with whom nascent groups interacted (e.g. ?ulam??, neighborhood associations, caliphs). This approach necessarily de-emphasizes the importance of simultaneous processes of differentiation from peers and generation of internal coherence that Stark (1997) identifies as crucial to the success of new groups. Breakthroughs in the study of networks, specifically on the property of “emergence”–wherein a characteristic lacking in individuals becomes measurable in their coordinated action–make identifying with greater accuracy a group’s “originary” moment possible. This paper argues that analysis of the isn?ds of 9th- and 10th-century works by Sufis provides a more accurate picture of the emergence of Sufism in Baghdad at the end of the 3rd/9th than previous studies. For the past half century, historians of early Sufism have largely relied on the reports in biographical works (al-Sulam?: 1953/1960; al-I?fah?n? 1932-6) to study the origin of Sufism, an event which occurred at a 100 year- and 1,000 mile-remove from these works’ authors (Melchert 1996, 2005, 2015; Karamustafa 2007). The publication over the past quarter century of a corpus of 9th- and 10th-isn?d-based works by Sufis, comprised of ?ad?th and Sufi-related akhb?r (al-Sayyid: 1988, 1989; Radtke: 2009), provides solidly documented evidence of associations that more than 1,200 Sufis and their affiliates maintained during the late-3rd/9th and early-4th/10th centuries. In the field of Islamic studies, the evidence of isn?ds has conventionally been relegated to issues of dating Prophet traditions (Motzki: 2005; Sadeghi: 2008). Haider (2011; 2013) has recently demonstrated the value of supplementing inter-group comparisons with information that is encoded in isn?ds for studying internal group dynamics. Following Haider, the encoded data the early Sufi corpus' isn?ds (records of transmissions, birth/death dates, etc.) is parsed in a relational database, and visualized using R Studio. When matched against an existing database of the simultaneous elaboration of élite ?ad?th-transmission network, this evidence will show: 1) precisely when a group of identifiably Sufi actors emerged through generating substantial internal coherence, and 2) precisely when the emergent group demonstrably broke the confines of the wider ?ad?th-tranmission network.

Medieval Syrian Nusayris have been the focus of Islamicists since the nineteenth century, but even today, despite the sizable number of articles, critical editions, and at least two complete monographs on them, our knowledge about their community remains meager. On the one hand, this is because of the nature of the original Nusayri sources, which contain few direct references to actual historical characters and events, mostly focusing on theological ideas. On the other hand, most of the hitherto available studies focus almost exclusively on the theological-cosmological content of these texts, paying no attention to the historical contexts in which these texts were produced and circulated. Essentialization, finally, is another feature of scholarship, plaguing not just the study of the Nusayris but of other groups as well: thus, some scholars assume the existence of a unified Nusayri community, while having virtually no information about the actual people who presumably constituted it, and relying solely on the existence of a number of texts with a distinct content. I will try to remedy these shortcomings by offering a case study of a 13th century theological dispute between a certain al-Shaykh al-Nashshabi with the representatives of various communities in several Syrian villages. The text narrates the content of the arguments between al-Nashshabi and his interlocutors, while presenting rare glimpses of the contexts in which these disputes occurred. Ostensibly, all of the sides in these debates appear to be “Nusayri,” but the disagreements between them on various theological minutiae are presented in very emotional terms, suggesting the existence of factions and groups among them. In my paper I will avoid the notion that all of these characters are members of a single “Nusayri community,” focusing, instead, on the historical contexts in which the differences between the disputants may be understood. It is my assumption that when two or more sides staunchly disagree about even the most seemingly abstract theological question, there must be more at stake than just the personal convictions of the disputants. Rather, such disagreements often reflect actual political or social tensions, and to be properly understood, they must be situated in the social-historical contexts in which they occur.

This study investigates the problem of the natural universal (kull? ?ab???) in the works of Mull? ?adr? (d. 1640). When the problem of universals made its way into the works of Islamic philosophers such as Avicenna, it was transformed into the problem of the natural universal (kull? ?ab???) since the latter identified three different types of universals, and dispute broke out as to whether or not the natural universal exist in the external world. For Avicenna as well as for Mull? ?adr?, the natural universal is none other than quiddity considered in an absolutely unconditioned manner. Attention has been paid to those who pointed to the impossibility of the external existence of natural universals. The deniers of natural universals in the extra-mental world argue that since individuals share contradictory properties, natural universals cannot be co-extensive with its particulars. At the heart of their argument lies the assumption that natural universals have numerical unity, which both Avicenna and ?adr? reject. However, the problem of natural universals was further transformed in the writings of ?adr? based on his doctrine of the primacy of being. The doctrine of the primacy of being states that it is wuj?d that reveals the real faces of entities, and not quiddity. After proving the validity of the primacy of being, ?adr? thus relegates the notion of quiddity to shadows, aspects, determinations etc. of being. Naturally, in such a philosophical system, the natural universal or quiddity qua quiddity becomes an “accidental existent”—something that requires wuj?d for its existentiation. Thus ?adr? strips the natural universal of its independent existence. Consequently, natural universals become post rem in the ?adrian perspective. However, ?adr? does not deny that natural universals exist in the external world. Rather, he reinterprets it in light of the primacy of being in which it exists by means of wuj?d and not independent of it.