For theologians, to conceive of God in terms of light has some undeniable advantages, allowing a middle-of-the road position between the two extremes of thinking about God in terms of a purely disembodied, unfathomable, unsensible being, and of crediting Him with a body, possibly even a human body. This paper first reviews the reasons why God, in early medieval Islam, was never fully theorized in terms of light. It then proceeds to discuss light-related narratives in two major, late-medieval compilations of (...) hadiths about the afterlife, by al-Suyuti and al-Majlisi, suggesting that eschatology was the area in which God’s light continued to shine in Islam, and the backdoor through which a theology of light, in the thought of al-Suhrawardi and his followers, made a triumphant re-entry into Islamic thought. (shrink)

This paper challenges the traditional notions of ‘Monophysitism’ and ‘Nestorianism’ or ‘The Nestorian Church’. With regard to ‘Monophysitism’, it argues that two interpretations of the basic ‘Alexandrian’ Christological formula of the ‘one nature of the God-Logos incarnate’ need to be distinguished. One, according to which the individual properties of the two ‘natures’ of Christ were lost and mixed, and which can, indeed, be referred to as ‘Monophysitism’ – in contrast to another interpretation which insisted that the individual characteristics of the (...) two ‘natures’ were preserved and the ‘God-Logos incarnate’ remained consubstantial with human beings (homoousios hēmin). This second approach might be better referred to as ‘Miaphysitism’. Similarly, this contribution suggests that it seems necessary to differentiate between what Nestorius of Constantinople himself taught and what his opponent Cyrill of Alexandria imputed to him. When analyzing Nestorius’ own writings, it becomes clear that Nestorius neither challenged the true union between the God-Logos and the ‘Man’ nor assumed a time in which the ‘Man’ existed prior to his unification with the God-Logos. Therefore, Nestorius taught no ‘Nestorianism’ in the sense in which Cyrill of Alexandria introduced it. Likewise, the Christology of the Apostolic Church of the East is based on the views of Theodore of Mopsuestia. It is not before the 6th century that representatives of this Church discovered Nestorius as a martyr for the ‘orthodox belief’ who was persecuted by the Egyptian ‘Pharaoh’, just as had been John Chrysostom before him. Because of its loyalty to the Christology of Theodore of Mopsuestia, it seems rather fitting to abandon the inappropriate title ‘Nestorian Church’ – a polemical title that has been pinned on the ‘Church of the East’ by its theological opponents from the 6th century onwards. (shrink)

This volume discusses the origin and structure of the universe in mystical Islam (Sufism) and Islam's civilizational predecessors with special reference to parallel realms of existence and their interaction. Contributors address Sufi ideas about the fate of human beings in this and future life under three rubrics: (1) cosmogony and eschatology ("where do we come from?" and "where do we go?"); (2) conceptualizations of the world of the here-and-now ("where are we now?"); and (3) visualizations of realms of existence, their (...) hierarchy and mutual relationships ("where are we in relation to other times and places?"). Contributors are Christian Lange, Alexander Knysh, Noah Gardiner, Stephen Hirtenstein, Saeko Yazaki, Jean-Jacques Thibon, Leah Kinberg, Sara Sviri, Munjed M. Murad, Simon O'Meara, Pierre Lory, Mathieu Terrier, Michael Ebstein, Binyamin Abrahamov and Frederick Colby. (shrink)

The Epistle of Forgiveness or A Pardon to Enter the Garden, by Abū l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī, vol. 1: A Vision of Heaven and Hell Preceded by Ibn al-Qāriḥ’s Epistle. Edited and translated by Geert Jan van Gelder and Gregor Schoeler. Library of Arabic Literature. New York: New York University Press, 2013. Pp. xxxviii + 423. $40.