Sajjad Rizvi
Biographic Data
| ID | 3663136 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sajjad Rizvi |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sajjad |
| FAMILY NAME | Rizvi |
| SIGNATURE | RIZVI S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Exeter |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5443-3237 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 61 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 22 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 61 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
The Essence of Reality”
Decolonising Islamic Intellectual History
Historians are in the business of engaging with actualities but also with possibilities, thinking and experiencing what we can be, what we may discern, and what we can sense and whence we come to understandings of the past. Just as the past may entail a number of actual and possible worlds that conform to our constructions, whether indexical or evaluative, similarly the possibilities of the future are ‘pluriversal’, multiple, interdependent, and …
Inscribing Persian in the Arabic Cosmopolis
Scholarly discourse on the Persianate tends to focus on the influence of Persian in Iran and further east, and often occludes the way in which the Persian language is inflected and present in the Arabic cosmopolis further west. Similarly, the formation of ‘Islamic classics’ and scholarly genres including exegesis tends to ignore the role of Persian works (and texts produced in a Persianate context). Through a case study of Qur’ānic exegesis in Pe…
Shiʿi Theology and Polemics between Iran and India
Connected intellectual history is one of the modes in which we can consider the ways in which ideas, theologies and even polemical exchanges travel between different geographical and political milieux. In this case study, I examine the theology and polemics of Saiyed Nūrollāh Šūštarī between his birth and intellectual formation in eastern Iran and his career and eventual death at the Mughal court. I indicate how his polemical works played a role …
Titelseiten
Considering Divine Providence in Mullā Ṣadrā Šīrāzī (d. 1045/1636)
Despite the extensive work on the Safavid thinker Mullā Ṣadrā Šīrāzī (d. 1045/1636) nowadays in metropolitan academia, certain areas of philosophical and theological concern remain understudied, if studied at all – and even then, there is little attempt to consider his work in the light of philosophical analysis. We know of a venerable philosophical tradition of analysing the question of providence as a means for examining questions of creation (…
The Challenge of Evil in Islamic Thought
The challenge of evil to rational Abrahamic religions has clearly been articulated in modern philosophy of religion predicated on the incompatibility of the omnipotence, omnibenevolence, and omniscience of God with the existence of evils. Even within the Islamic theological and philosophical traditions, there is a venerable history of theodicies and defences of a good God and the efficacy of human free will. That is the context in which we wish t…
Philosophy in Early Safavid Iran
Philosophy in Early Safavid Iran: Najm al-Dīn Maḥmūd al-Nayrīzī and His Writings. By Reza Pourjavady. Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Science, vol. 82. Leiden: Brill, 2011. Pp. vii + 224. $136
Interpreting Avicenna
Interpreting Avicenna: Critical Essays. Edited by Peter Adamson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. xi + 300. $99, £55
Knowledge in Later Islamic Philosophy
Knowledge in Later Islamic Philosophy: Mullā Ṣadrā on Existence, Intellect and Intuition. By Ibrahim Kalin. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. xxii + 315. $74, £45
Islamic Philosophy, Science, Culture, and Religion
Islamic Philosophy, Science, Culture, and Religion: Studies in Honor of Dimitri Gutas. Edited by Felicitas Opwis and David Reisman. Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Science, vol. 83. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Pp. xii + 493. $221, €161
Tradition and Islamic Philosophy
The reception of Mullā Ṣadrā in South Asia began soon after his death through the dissemination and commentary culture on his Sharḥ al-Hidāyah that was adopted into the Dars-e Niz̤āmī pedagogy in the eighteenth century. However, the modern reception of his thought in Urdu has been somewhat removed from that initial scholastic engagement. I examine four modalities of this reception: translation of his major work the Asfār ; analytic engagement by …
Introduction
An Avicennian Engagement with and Appropriation of Mullā Ṣadrā Šīrāzī (d. 1045/1636)
Recent scholarship on Avicenna and Avicennism has tended to focus on the spread and dissemination of his ideas in the early centuries. However, the later readings and contestations of Avicennism especially from the Safavid period onwards have been broadly neglected. In this paper on the most important philosopher of eighteenth-century Iran, Mahdī Narāqī, I provide a case study of the enduring significance of Avicennism, but one which has been tra…
Reversing the Gaze? Or Decolonizing the Study of the Qurʾan
Taking as the starting point, Majid Daneshgar’s Studying the Qurʾan in the Muslim Academy , I argue that the political and intellectual contexts for the study of Islam and indeed the Qur’an cannot be ignored whether the study is conducted in the “Western” or the “Muslim” academy. The construction of the categories of religion and scripture arise out of practices of colonialist knowledge; positionality of the author cannot be eliminated from the i…
Precarious belongings
These two rich collections of articles under review represent two types of methodology for the study of the ‘problem’ of sectarianism or the lived experience of being a minority in the Middle East
The Making of a Marjaʿ
Anyone considering the question of religious authority among the contemporary Shiʿa not least in Iraq will recognize the paramount significance of Ayatollah Sīstānī, described as the most important marjaʿ in the world. This paper examines the phenomenon of marjaʿiyya , considers how one becomes a marjaʿ , and traces the rise of Sīstānī to the pre-eminent position that he now holds and juxtaposes his model of leadership with other modern Shiʿi mod…
Words of Power
The study of Islamic intellectual history, while existing in pockets of scholarshipbefore, has increasingly become a dominant aspect of the study of Islam.We have moved from some piecemeal approaches to the classical period to amore carefully nuanced and thick understanding of the middle period, thatcritical time from the wane of the Abbasids to the rise of the Gunpowder Empires.In particular, the “Chicago school” has expended a great deal of eff…
Controversies in Formative Shiʿi Islam
Research into the formative period of Shiʿi Islam has come a long way inthe last couple of decades. This welcome development has been inspired,in particular, by the work of Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi, whose main insighthas been to posit that “ancient” Shiʿism is marked precisely by thosedoctrines and positions that the later rationalizing tradition rejected as “extreme”(ghulūw). This particular form of heretication and othering made sense once the …
The meaning of the word. Lexicology and Qurʾanic exegesis
Anyone who has spent any time with the exegetical traditions of scripture in Islam cannot fail to notice that much ink is spilt on matters of how to read, how to parse and how to explain meaning ba
The Shiʿi Imamate. A Fatimid interpretation
Striving in the path of God
Does jihad always mean holy war? Is sacred violence inherent to the Islamic faith or a historical contingency of the early period? Have recent apologists with their insistence that Islam is normati
Shiʿi Interpretations of Islam
Shiʿi Interpretations of Islam: Three Treatises on Theology and Eschatology." British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 44(3), pp. 471–472
Epistles of the Brethren of Purity
Al-Ghazālī’s moderation in belief. Al-Iqtiṣād fī al-i ʿ tiqād
Al-Ghazālī’s moderation in belief. Al-Iqtiṣād fī al-iʿtiqād." British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 44(1), pp. 149–150
Cosmopolitans and Heretics
Cosmopolitans and Heretics: New Muslim Intellectuals and the Study of Islam Carool Kersten London, Hurst & Co., 2011. Pp. xvi + 324, bibliography, index. £25.00 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-84904-129-4 F
Reversing the Gaze? Or Decolonizing the Study of the Qurʾan
Taking as the starting point, Majid Daneshgar’s Studying the Qurʾan in the Muslim Academy , I argue that the political and intellectual contexts for the study of Islam and indeed the Qur’an cannot be ignored whether the study is conducted in the “Western” or the “Muslim” academy. The construction of the categories of religion and scripture arise out of practices of colonialist knowledge; positionality of the author cannot be eliminated from the i…
Striving in the path of God
Does jihad always mean holy war? Is sacred violence inherent to the Islamic faith or a historical contingency of the early period? Have recent apologists with their insistence that Islam is normati
Only the Imam Knows Best” The Maktab-e Tafkīk's Attack on the Legitimacy of Philosophy in Iran
Philosophy, as an intellectual discipline emerging from Hellenism, had an ambiguous and disputed role in the theology and apologetics of Islam and continues to be contentious. In this article, I examine the arguments over the legitimacy of philosophy between the philosophical school of Mullā Ṣadrā (d. c . 1635), dominant in the present Shiʿi seminary in Iran, and its detractors in the maktab-i tafkīk who insist that knowledge of reality and the f…
Faith Deployed for a New Shiʿi Polity in India
While Shiʿi Islam and its imperial expressions were known in the Deccan sultanates from the sixteenth century and expressed in court-sponsored production of theology, it was only in the eighteenth century that Shiʿi political theology emerged in North India in the new state of Awadh. In this paper, I argue that one can discern in the theology of Sayyid Dildar ʿAli Nasirabadi (d. 1820) a clear attempt at forging a new Shiʿi theological dispensatio…
Islam and the Fate of Others
This is a timely and modest work that deserves to be widely read, not just by those in Islamic studies and theology but also by those interested in current politics. The basic assumption that many
Philosophy as a way of life in the world of Islam
The work of the late Pierre Hadot has transformed our understanding of the practice of philosophy, especially in the pre-modern world. This article interrogates how we approach the study of later Islamic philosophy, especially the thought of the Safavid sage Mullā Ṣadrā Shīrāzī (d. 1635), and considers whether the method proposed by Hadot is applicable to this intellectual tradition. While there is much to be gained from the application of a cogn…
Political mobilization and the Shi'i religious establishment (marja'iyya)
Journal Article Political mobilization and the Shi'i religious establishment (marja'iyya) Get access SAJJAD RIZVI SAJJAD RIZVI 1Senior Lecturer in Islamic Studies at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 86, Issue 6, November 2010, Pages 1299–1313, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2346.2010.00944.x Published: 03 November …
An Islamic Subversion of the existence‐essence distinction? Suhrawardi's visionary hierarchy of lights 1
The distinction between existence and essence in contingent beings is one of the foundational doctrines of medieval philosophy. Building upon Neoplatonic precursors, thinkers such as Avicenna and Aquinas debated its nature. However, one Islamic philosopher, who had an enormous influence on the development of philosophical discourse in Iran, subverted the traditional Peripatetic vision of reality and disputed the ontological nature of existence. T…
Roots of an Aporia in Later Islamic Philosophy
La distinction entre l'existence et l'essence des etres contingents est une doctrine fondamentale de la philosophie medievale. Fonde sur la distinction logique d'Aristote entre la chose et le fait de son existence, Avicenne affirma la distinction comme preuve pour la contingence radicale de la creation. Mais il y a un philosophe, qui exerca une grande influence sur la tradition philosophique en Perse, qui rejeta la conception traditionnelle de la…
Reconsidering the Life of Mullā Ṣadrā Shīrāzī (d. 1641)
A Primordial e pluribus unum ? Exegeses on Q. 2
Students of natural theology have for centuries debated the religious progress of humankind. In the idyll of the Garden of Eden and in our earliest generations, they ask, did we believe in God? Or even gods? Has humankind evolved from pagan precursors to rational monotheism? Or did primordial monotheism lapse into paganism thus requiring the divine light of revelation to guide humanity back to the one true God? This paper focuses on three contemp…
Mulla Sadra and Causation
A central assumption in this essay, in terms of both historical development and methodological approach, is that later Islamic philosophy is characterized by a shift from a substance-based metaphysics to a processoriented metaphysics. Defenders of substance metaphysics often focus on the nature of causation to attack process metaphysics. If there is no substance or substratum for process, then how can events have any causal nature? If neither cau…
Etan Kohlberg, Shī c ism
Yohanan Friedmann, Tolerance and Coercion in Islam
Shahzad Bashir, Fazlallah Astarabadi and the Hurufis
The Existential Breath of al-rahmān and the Munificent Grace of al-rahīm
It has become commonplace to observe that every exegete brings to his commentary his own skills, preunderstandings and preconceptions about the text. Thus, when one reads a commentary from a particular perspective one expects to find the discipline and method of the exegete explicit in his work. This is especially true of philosophical and mystical commentaries on the Qur'an. The current paper considers the case of the tafsīr of the famous Persia…
‘Ali Quli Qara’i, The Qur'an With a Phrase-by-Phrase English Translation
Paradise of Submission
Journal Article Paradise of Submission: A Medieval Treatise on Ismaili Thought. A New Persian Edition and English Translation of Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī's Rawḍa-yi taslīmEdited and translated by S. J. Badakhchani Get access Paradise of Submission: A Medieval Treatise on Ismaili Thought. A New Persian Edition and English Translation of Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī's Rawḍa-yi taslīmEdited and translated by S. J. Badakhchani (London: I. B. Tauris Ltd. in association…
Between Time and Eternity
The problem of time and creation exercised the ancients and remains a live issue in the philosophy of religion. In Islamdom, the arguments often pitted theologians (mutakallimūn) against philosophers, the former insisting that scriptural accounts entailed a belief in a volitional God choosing to create the cosmos ex nihilo in time, while the latter considered the notion of a cosmos coming into being at a certain point in time a logical absurdity.…
Rahim Acar, Talking about God and Talking about Creation
The Formation of the Classical Tafsir Tradition
While one may question the title of the book under review, there is littledoubt that Walid Saleh’s revised Yale doctoral dissertation is a major developmentin Qur’anic studies and, in particular, of the exegetical traditions inIslam. Al-Tha`labi was important, but remains neglected in the field. A Sunniauthor widely cited by Shi`i exegetes and polemicists, a traditionist who drew upon Sufi commentaries, and a Muslim thinker interested in pre-Isla…
The Nature of Time and Consciousness in Islam * by Habibuddin Ahmed
Publications in Islamic studies tend to be divided into two main camps: studies by scholars for scholars with the critical apparatus of metropolitan academia, and studies often in a rather didactic mode written by Muslim scholars for a broadly Muslim readership with a different set of criteria of acceptability. The present work under review is a rather ambitious work that seeks to transcend this divide and addresses itself to both academic specia…
Reason and Inspiration in Islam
Professor Hermann Landolt, emeritus professor of Islamic thought at McGill University, is arguably one of the most influential scholars of Islam in our time. A rigorous and nurturing supervisor who directed graduate research projects at McGill for over thirty years, his interests range across the ‘intellectual disciplines’ and the humanities in Islam. The book under review is a worthy festschrift offered by former students, friends and colleagues…
Gods and Humans in Islamic Thought
Although the title suggests a broad topic, the book under review, originally a doctoral dissertation submitted at the University of Birmingham, is quite narrowly focused upon the methods that three pivotal medieval Islamic thinkers propose for an understanding of the God–human relationship. The juxtaposition of these three thinkers could potentially yield interesting results and demonstrate the interconnected nature of intellectual inquiry in Isl…
Indian Sufism since the Seventeenth Century
Based on his doctoral dissertation submitted to the University of London,the present book is a wonderful study of the Sufis ofAurangabad (and, moregenerally, in the Deccan realms of Hyderabad’s Nizams) and their consequentlegacy in independent India. Green builds upon earlier research on theMuslim Deccan undertaken by Carl Ernst (Sufism at Khuldabad, which isadjacent to Aurangabad) and Richard Eaton (Sufis of Bijapur) and brings tothe fore insigh…
Knowledge Triumphant
Brill’s new “Classics in Islam” series, a systematic reprinting of some ofthe seminal works in Islamic studies that have been out of print fordecades, is a welcome initiative.As Dimitri Gutas, a former student, indicatesin his introduction, Rosenthal’s achievement in this monograph is outstandingwithin an exceptionally productive and influential career. It isalso somewhat unusual that a work first published over thirty years ago stillremains unsu…
The Act of Being
The English publication of Jambet's challenging work on the philosophy of Mullā Ṣadrā entitled L’Acte d’être (Paris: Fayard, 2000) is an exciting event. It signals a new maturity in the study of Islamic philosophy because it is an attempt by a philosopher (a Platonist at that) to make sense philosophically of Mullā Ṣadrā's vision and exposition of ontology as ‘revealed’ in the scripture and in Prophetic wisdom. The book does not reflect a merely …
Classical Arabic Philosophy
Ismailis in Medieval Muslim Societies ‐ By Farhad Daftary
Aristotle’s Rhetoric in the East
The Late Antique Aristotelian tradition inherited by the world of earlyIslam in the Near East considered the Rhetoric an integral part of one’straining in logic and reasoning. Thus far, however, there has been little academicinterest in it, apart from Deborah Black’s ground-breaking monographpublished some two decades ago and the recent edition in MarounAouad’s translation and study of Ibn Rushd’s commentary on it. Vagelpohl’srevised Cambridge di…
Le Reel et les realites
Journal Article Le Réel et les réalités: Mullā Ṣadrā Shīrāzī et la structure de la réalitéBy Cécile Bonmariage Get access Le Réel et les réalités: Mullā Ṣadrā Shīrāzī et la structure de la réalitéBy Cécile Bonmariage (Paris: Vrin, 2007), 352 pp. Price PB €48.00. EAN 978–2711619047. Sajjad H. Rizvi Sajjad H. Rizvi University of Exeter Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Islamic Studies, Volume 21, Is…
Sayyid Ni'mat Allāh al-Jazā'irī and his Anthologies
The paper examines an important Arabic anthology of literary material of mixed content, the al-Anwār al-nu'māniyya of Sayyid Ni'matullāh al-Jazā'irī (d. 1701) to ascertain its value as a source for intellectual and cultural history of the Safavid period. Al-Jazā'irī was a prominent transnational Shi'i intellectual who was born in the marshlands of Southern Iraq, a leading light of the Akhbārī movement of his time, and major scholar associated wit…
Islamic Studies and History (47 works) · Philosophy (47 works) · Theology (42 works) · Philosophy (36 works) · Islam (35 works) · Education and Islamic Studies (30 works) · Epistemology (26 works) · History (26 works) · History (25 works) · Medieval and Classical Philosophy (25 works)