Compared to Muhammad ‘Abduh’s Risalat al-Tawhid, which has received massive scholarly attention, and been translated into several European languages, two more technically complex philosophical works by ‘Abduh remain in the shadows. This paper will place in intellectual-historical context the composition and subsequent publication of these two understudied philosophical works. The first – his Hashiyah on Jalal al-Din al-Dawani’s Sharh on the ‘Aqa’id ‘Adudiyyah of ‘Adud al-Din al-Iji – is a continuous and extended supercommentary that demonstrates ‘Abduh’s command over the long tradition of post-Avicennian philosophical theology. The Hashiyah was composed in 1876, when ‘Abduh was still a student, and served as a kind of doctoral dissertation, completed under the supervision of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. However, the book was not published until 1905, just before ‘Abduh’s death (or just after – there is some uncertainty), by al-Matba‘ah al-Khayriyyah in Cairo. The second philosophical work – his Ta‘liqat (alt. Ta‘aliq) on the Basa’ir Nasiriyyah fi ‘Ilm al-Mantiq of Ibn Sahlan al-Sawi – is a set of discontinuous and relatively brief glosses that reflect ‘Abduh’s attempt to return to the earliest phase of the tradition of post-Avicennian logic. Unlike Iji’s ‘Aqa’id ‘Adudiyyah, which served as the matn for dozens of subsequent commentaries and glosses, Sawi’s Basa’ir was an isolated text that received little attention from later commentators. ‘Abduh came across the Basa’ir in Beirut in 1886/1887, during his period of exile from Egypt, and he brought it back to Cairo, where he composed glosses on it with the intention of introducing the text into the Azhar curriculum. The Basa’ir was eventually published in 1898, by al-Matba‘ah al-Kubra al-Amiriyyah. What exactly were ‘Abduh’s motivations in composing these two works of commentary? To what extent do they show ‘Abduh engaging in the traditions of post-Avicenian philosophical theology and logic, and to what extent do they show him stepping away from those traditions? What were the precise reasons behind their publication by these particular presses at these particular times? Who exactly was involved in their edition and publication, and who was their intended readership? This paper will address these and related issues (including the recent challenges to ‘Abduh’s authorship of the Hashiyah) with the hope of shedding light on late-19th-century Arab modernist conceptions of the Islamic philosophical heritage.

The Arab scholars who worked to publish philosophical treatises in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are largely unknown, even among experts of Islamic philosophy in Western academe. This is partly due to the challenges of identifying editors who worked at a time in which editorial and philological conventions differed from today’s practices. This paper introduces three important Syrian editors (Tahir al-Jaza’iri, Abd al-Rahman al-Qasimi, and Mustafa al-Qabbani) who played important roles in the publication of works by Avicenna, Averroes, al-Akfani, and al-Ghazali - from identifying and locating relevant manuscripts to producing editions and securing publishers and the necessary funding. An appreciation of their contribution reveals an important element in the history of modern Arabic philology, and it sheds light on the functions that the discovery and popularization of these philosophical texts served for intellectual-activist visions of Arabic modernity.

Over the first two decades of the twentieth century, the multi-layered commentary (sharh, hashiya, etc.) was replaced as the principal medium through which philosophy was taught and written in Egypt by other textual forms, notably the historical survey and anthology. While the commentaries that had been studied at al-Azhar for centuries presented the defining questions, terminology, and authors of falsafa and hikma embedded within ongoing debates in various disciplines, the new Arabic philosophy surveys and anthologies presented a bygone heritage (turath) dominated by the philosophers of the classical era (eighth to twelfth centuries). These genres emerged in tandem with the institutionalization of philosophy as a distinct discipline in Egyptian educational and scholarly institutions. The 1908 founding of the Egyptian University with a humanities curriculum that included an “Arabic Philosophy and Ethics” course was a milestone in this process. The Egyptians recruited to teach this course over the nineteen-teens and twenties produced historical surveys that became models for scholarship on Arabic philosophy in Egypt thereafter. Meanwhile, publishing houses oriented around al-Azhar began printing anthology-like collections of treatises—by Ibn Sina, Omar Khayyam, Ibn ‘Arabi, al-Ghazali, al-Farabi, and others—that became important primary sources of for students and scholars. The Egyptian University professors’ surveys present historical narratives of Arabic philosophy familiar to Western readers that trace its development from the eighth-century translation movements through its classical flourishing, decline, and transmission to Europe. The surveys thus stress the tradition’s historical unity as a discipline connected to ancient Greek and modern European philosophy. The anthologies, conversely, stress its range, inner-diversity, and unity with the Arabic-Islamic sciences. Organized neither temporally nor thematically, these works represent Arabic philosophy with compilations of treatises in theology, medicine, mysticism, poetry, logic, law, and music that are all labeled works of falsafa/hikma. The different representations of Arabic philosophy forwarded by these two genres, I argue, crystallize competing universalisms which emerged through the nahdawi project of reviving the Arabic-Islamic heritage. While the survey portrays Arabic philosophy as a distinct yet integral chapter in the universal history of reason’s becoming through human history, the anthology renders it as an always-already universal reason inherent in the Islamic episteme. In addition to shedding light on a formative moment in the history of “Arabic philosophy” as a modern concept and field of study in Egypt, my analysis of these long-overlooked texts reveals the variety of the neo-classical revivalisms that animated the Nahda.