first chapter - oxford academic

The Formation of Post- Classical Philosophy in Islam. Frank Griffel, Oxford University Press. © Frank Griffel 2021. DOI: 10.1093/ oso/ 9780190886325.003.0002

First ChapterKhorasan, the Birthplace of Post- Classical

Philosophy, a Land in Decline?

Post- classical Islamic philosophy developed during the sixth/ twelfth cen-tury in the Iranian province of Khorasan and in regions such as Transoxania, Khwārazm, Jibāl, and Ghūr that bordered on it. It developed out of the work of two major thinkers of the region: Avicenna and al- Ghazālī. The latter was born in Ṭābarān- Ṭūs, one of the scholarly centers of Khorasan, where he also taught at the end of his life. Avicenna grew up in Transoxania but spent most of his adult life in the cities of western Iran, in Jurjān (Gorgan), Isfahan, Hamadan, and Rayy (Tehran). We are told that with the second generation of his students, the study of his philosophy moved to Khorasan, from where it spread further.1 The most western point of the development of post- classical Islamic philosophy is Baghdad, where al- Ghazālī spent a number of important years and where Abū l- Barakāt al- Baghdādī was active. Only after reaching a mature stage in the works of Fakhr al- Dīn al- Rāzī did post- classical Islamic philosophy move out of the Iranian region to upper Iraq (Mosul), Syria, Egypt, and Anatolia.

Historians of philosophy are aware that a proper understanding of intellectual traditions without knowledge of their context is impossible. One will not un-derstand intellectual history without knowing general history, and unfortunately the history of the eastern Islamic world in the sixth/ twelfth century is not at all well known among Western readers.2 Philosophy does not generate in books. The books that we read are the material remnants of a process that involved studying, thinking, debating, and disputing. Philosophy needs an advanced pro-cess of division of labor where the philosophers are relieved from the burden of immediate economic reproduction. Good philosophy needs exchanges with other philosophers. It requires meeting points where not only friends with sim-ilar opinions come together but also adversaries who challenge each other’s ideas. These and other conditions for the successful pursuit of philosophy exist first of all in societies with a high degree of urbanization. In our case, these were the cities of Khorasan and its neighboring provinces. Their economic foundation

1 See below p. 37, 183–84. 2 Paul, Lokale und imperiale Herrschaft, 78– 88, produces a comprehensive review of Western liter-ature available on the history of the Islamic East during the sixth/ twelfth century.

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26 Post-Classical Philosophy in Its Islamic Context

lay in the rich agricultural production of their surrounding countryside— often oases maintained by extensive irrigation— and in trade.3

Richard W. Bulliet has shown how the rich trade community of Nishapur, one of the four big cities of Khorasan, cooperated with its scholars and supported their activities.4 Traders and scholars often belonged to the same families. At the bottom of this system of public patronage lay the collective endeavor of a rich bourgeoisie of traders to satisfy their desire for education and for prestige— often vis- à- vis other cities of the region. Islamic education transfers prestige through a direct relationship between teacher and student where the reputation of the master is transferred to the novice. Collectively, cities like Nishapur made efforts to attract the most reputed teachers. Islamic scholarship, however, is highly time- consuming. It took many years to reach even the lowest level of accomplishment and expertise in the scholarly establishment of Khorasan.5 Only members of rich families had the time and resources to master the Islamic sciences. The scholars of Nishapur, for instance, were all part of the “patriciate,” as Bulliet calls it. These were rich merchant families who held positions as certified public witnesses, marrying usually other insiders of this class. Having a member of the exclusive teaching profession among one’s kin was a mark of distinction to which most pa-trician families in cities such as Nishapur aspired.6

The economic foundation of the individual philosophers who will be studied in this book was threefold: paid teaching activity, the practice of medicine, and patronage from rulers. These three sources of income were often combined. Abū l- Barakāt al- Baghdādī, for instance, benefited from the generous patronage of the Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad and was also employed as one of their court physicians. Fakhr al- Dīn al- Rāzī received rich patronage for switching his alle-giance from the court of the Khwārazmshāhs to that of the Ghūrids. Once he had moved to the Ghūrid lands, his new masters built a madrasa for him in Herat where he was expected to teach. There was also the possibility to make money just from producing books. Since the third/ ninth century there existed in Islamic societies a profession that combined several sources of income that related only to book production. Shawkat Toorawa and others call these people “bookmen.” Toorawa explains that “the availability of paper, the rise of a middle class seeking education, and the growth of a lay readership, meant that one could support one-self as a teacher, tutor, copyist, author, storyteller, bookseller, editor, publisher or any combination of these.”7 These professions could be pursued without recourse

3 Bosworth, The Ghaznavids, 149– 57. 4 Bulliet, Patricians, 20– 59. 5 Ephrat, A Learned Society, 101– 24, describes what it took to enter the ranks of the ʿulamāʾ and how one could advance to its higher career stages. 6 Ibid., 47– 60. 7 Toorawa, Ibn Abī Ṭāhir Ṭayfūr, 123.

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Khorasan, a Land in Decline? 27

to a court or indulgence of a patron. We are told, for instance, that the philoso-pher Ibn Sahlān al- Sāwī made his income from producing copies of Avicenna’s Fulfillment (al- Shifāʾ). This information comes in the context of his asceticism as he chose this humble job rather than dependence on patronage.

The madrasa System

Among the three principal sources of income for philosophers in the sixth/ twelfth century, teaching proved to be the least profitable. Al- Ghazālī famously denounced teachers who were in that business to become rich— or just to make a living. He regarded knowledge as a commodity that should be generously given to those in need of it. The teacher should not expect any monetary reward from his students and certainly should not be motivated by monetary gains.8 The di-rect transfer of money from a student to a teacher was frowned upon. Such a restriction created obvious problems for a society where the transmission of knowledge from teacher to student is an important source of competency and prestige. The answer to this conundrum came in the form of the madrasa.

Developed in the cities of Khorasan, the madrasa was adopted by the Seljuq state at the middle of the fifth/ eleventh century.9 A madrasa is an institution of higher education that is supported by a steady flow of income generated from real estate that individuals or the state gave to the madrasa. Founding a madrasa in-volved the construction of a suitable building, the endowing of either agricultural land or urban real estate, and the setting up of the institution’s several functions. For small madrasas that were created by rich individuals, the latter meant little more than supplying a teacher with the means of living for him and his family. Larger madrasas in big cities supported the teachers as well as the students. They had imposing buildings with high upkeep. These institutions often had a library and also a copying workshop as well as paper production facilities. Later, in the seventh/ thirteenth century, there were madrasas connected to observatories that conducted important research in the natural sciences.

George A. Makdisi suggests that in the madrasa we have one of the nuclei out of which eventually the modern university system has grown.10 The key differ-ence between a university and a madrasa is, according to Makdisi, the latter’s limitation to just a few select subjects of instruction, namely those directly

8 al- Ghazālī, Iḥyāʾ ʿ ulūm al- dīn, 1:94.3– 4/ 1:207.10– 11: “The second duty of the teacher is to follow the example of the lawgiver and not to ask for a wage when he is teaching, and accept neither reward nor thanks.” See Bell, “A Moslem Thinker,” 35; Guenther, “The Principles of Instruction,” 24– 25. 9 Makdisi, Rise of Colleges, 31– 32; G. Makdisi and J. Pedersen in EI2, art. “Madrasa,” 5:1126; Bulliet, Patricians, 47– 49, 70– 74, 250– 55. 10 Makdisi, Rise of Colleges, 224– 40.

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connected to an education in Islamic law. Makdisi believes that the rational sciences, and with that rationalist theology (kalām) and philosophy, were not taught at Sunni Muslim madrasas.11 That view, however, can today no longer be sustained. Since the days of Makdisi’s work between the 1960s and the 1980s, when Islam was considered “nomocratic and nomocentric,”12 many sources have become available that inform us about the study of the rational sciences at madrasas. Already in 1994, Michael Chamberlain concluded that the know-ledge studied in the madrasas of sixth/ twelfth and seventh/ thirteenth centuries Damascus was little different from that transmitted elsewhere in the city. Scholars developed their expertise in many fields, among them medicine, theology, math-ematics, and the natural sciences. “[E] ven though many scholars were learned in law,” Chamberlain concludes, “. . . the assertion that the madrasas were a form of higher education intended to produce specialists in law is both overstated and in some cases directly contradicted by the evidence.”13 Since then many studies have contributed to debunking Makdisi’s thesis that madrasa teaching was lim-ited to Qurʾanic studies, fiqh, and the disciplines immediately serving the latter (tafsīr, qirāʾāt, ḥadīth, etc.).14 In 2002, for instance, Sonja Brentjes looked at evi-dence for Makdisi’s thesis and thoroughly rejected it.15 In 2006, Gerhard Endress studied the transmission of expertise on Avicennan philosophy at madrasas in the Islamic East.16 The biographies of the scholars looked at in this book con-tribute to rejecting Makdisi’s view. Fakhr al- Dīn al- Rāzī, for instance, had his own madrasa in Herat, and although we have in the case of this institution— as in all other cases of this period— no information about what exactly was taught there, he wrote books in philosophy that show distinct signs of being composed for formal education in a teacher- student setting.17 We are certain that at least one of his students, the otherwise unknown Fakhr al- Dīn ibn al- Badīʿ al- Bandahī (d. 657/ 1258– 59), taught theology and Avicennan philosophy (al- falsafa wa- l- naẓar) at madrasas in Damascus and thus triggered the ire of the city’s tradition-alist community.18 Today there can be no doubt that philosophers benefited from the madrasa system just as scholars in Islamic jurisprudence and ḥadīth studies did. They did so, however, in a different way: whereas one could get a senior teaching position at a madrasa on account of one’s expertise in jurisprudence

11 Makdisi, “Muslim Institutions of Learning,” 37; idem, Rise of Colleges, 296– 304; idem, “Non- Ashʿarite Shafiʿism,” 241, 246– 47. 12 Makdisi, “L’islam hanbalisant,” (1975): 76, Engl. trans., 264: “car l’islam est avant tout nomocratique et nomocentrique.” 13 Chamberlain, Knowledge and Social Practice, 85– 86, and more generally 82– 87. 14 Makdisi, Rise of Colleges, 84, lists what he calls “the Islamic sciences”: tafsīr, qirāʿāt, ḥadīth, uṣūl al- fiqh, fiqh, and uṣūl al- dīn. 15 Brentjes, “On the Location”; eadem, “The Prison of Categories,” 139– 45. 16 Endress, “Reading Avicenna in the Madrasa.” 17 See below pp. 324–25. 18 Abū Shāma, al- Dhayl ʿ alā l- rawḍatayn, 202.10– 13.

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or ḥadīth studies, expertise in philosophy alone would have hardly achieved that. If the philosophers who form the subject of this book worked at madrasas they did so because they had also expertise in other subjects that were part of the religious sciences in Islam. Trying to distinguish between achievements in the religious and the more philosophical sciences, however, is illusory. Fakhr al- Dīn al- Rāzī’s accomplishments in theology and Qurʾan commentary were built upon his thorough engagement with philosophy and the method he developed therein. The generous offers he received from the Ghūrid dynasty— which even-tually included the building of a madrasa in Herat— were ultimately caused by his thorough engagement with the tradition of falsafa even if the Ghūrid rulers themselves did not wish to promote philosophy or were even unaware of Fakhr al- Dīn’s philosophical accomplishments.

Unfortunately, no description of a madrasa curriculum from this period has survived. Information about the subjects taught there remains circumstantial, drawn from narrative sources, endowment deeds, or library catalogues. Even that kind of information is very rare and available only for later periods. Two li-brary catalogues from the century after the one we are focusing on have survived, one from a small and insignificant library at Kairouan in Tunisia, and the cata-logue of the much more important Ashrafiyya library in Damascus.19 The latter was not a madrasa, as it lacked provisions for students, but served a number of teaching institutions in Damascus. Endowed by the Ayyubid ruler al- Malik al- Ashraf, the Ashrafiyya library was created after his death in 635/ 1237 and housed within his mausoleum. It received books from the stock of al- Ashraf ’s personal collection and the one he inherited from earlier rulers of Damascus.20 Situated in the Kallāsa neighborhood, a district with many madrasas just north of the Umayyad mosque, the library was public in the sense that its books were avail-able for reading, teaching, and copying in nearby educational institutions. The great mosque itself provided space for teaching the library’s books.21 Konrad Hirschler analyzed a catalogue of this institution, written in the 670s/ 1270s.22 Among the 2,138 books in the library we find works on medicine, astronomy, philosophy, and other rational sciences next to a much larger quantity on the religious sciences, on poetry, and on history. The librarian(s) who created this catalogue grouped books into fifteen subject categories, two of which represent fields within the so- called ancient sciences (al-ʿulūm al- awāʾil).23 About 12% of the library’s book titles fall into this category. More informative is the fact that

19 MS Raqqāda, Centre d’Études de la Civilisation et des Arts Islamiques 289 and MS Istanbul, Süleymaniye Yazma Eser Kütüphanesi, Fatih 5433, foll. 246a– 270a. For information on these two cat-alogues, see Hirschler, Medieval Damascus, 5– 6, 16– 53. 20 Hirschler, Medieval Damascus, 16– 53. 21 Ibid., 91– 95. 22 Ibid., 5. 23 Ibid., 64– 80.

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Avicenna is well represented in the library, with eleven of his works from both his medical and philosophical corpus, including his major philosophical ency-clopedia, The Fulfillment (al- Shifaʾ).24 The library held two collective volumes with “rare advice from the philosophers” (nawādir al- ḥukamāʾ) as well as a small number of works by (or based on) Socrates, Plato, or Aristotle.25 Al- Ghazālī is one of the best- represented authors in the catalogue, with thirty books, including his Doctrines of the Philosophers (Maqāṣid al- falāsifa), a faithful report of Avicenna’s teachings in logic, metaphysics, and the natural sciences.26 Remarkably, this work was, like another of his books on logic, put into a subject category together with works used in fiqh, suggesting that these two philosophical works were used for teaching jurisprudence.27 In his analysis of the catalogue, Hirschler stresses the diversity of the library holdings and its inclusion of distinctly rationalist and philosophical works. “In contrast to both the traditional view of the madrasa as part of a Sunni ‘orthodox’ revival,” writes Hirschler, “. . . its shelves were equipped with material that discussed a distinctly rationalist way of approaching theolog-ical questions.”28

The Niẓāmiyya madrasas— which stand at the beginning of the spread of the madrasa— still existed at the middle of the sixth/ twelfth century and contributed to an important network of state- sponsored institutions of higher learning.29 Named after the Shāfiʿite vizier Niẓām al- Mulk (d. 485/ 1092), who initiated the system, they were established in all major cities of the Seljuq Empire.30 A ma-drasa could provide a steady source of income for teachers of logic as well as Islamic law or theology (kalām). These teachers could then also engage in the natural sciences or philosophical theology (ilāhiyyāt). Madrasas also provided a network of academic exchange, where scholars would mingle. We read about a scholar meeting a colleague at that- and- that madrasa in that- and- that city. Yet only bigger madrasas would provide that kind of service. Whereas Makdisi’s sug-gestion that madrasa instruction was limited to religious subjects has now been disproven for the whole of madrasa education in the sixth/ twelfth century, it may still hold true for smaller institutions in towns and minor cities, if only for the practical reason that teachers in the rational sciences were not as numerous as those in the religious subjects. The bigger madrasas were maintained by large

24 Ibid., 113, 397 (#1471). 25 See, e.g., ibid., 214 (#515), 305 (#1143), 328 (#1214), 337 (1233b), 360 (#1292b). 26 Ibid., 113, 273 (#940). 27 Ibid., 273 (#940), 275 (#950). Both are in subject category number 3. 28 Ibid., 122. 29 The first Niẓāmiyya madrasa was established around 450/ 1058 in Nishapur (Bulliet, Patricians, 73n37). The Niẓāmiyya in Baghdad, the flagship of the system, was founded in 457/ 1065 and began its activity two years later (Glassen, Der mittlere Weg, 50, 66). 30 al- Subkī, Ṭabaqāt al- shāfiʿiyya al- kubrā, 4:313, lists cities in which Niẓāmiyya madrasas where built: Baghdad, Balkh, Nishapur, Herat, Isfahan, Basra, Merv, Āmul (in Ṭabaristān), and Mosul.

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endowments whose steady income drew talent away from smaller institutions. Like other institutions they were affected by economic crises and a lack of public security. The network of Niẓāmiyya schools, for instance, suffered from the col-lapse of the Seljuq state at the mid- sixth/ twelfth century. The Niẓāmiyya ma-drasa in Nishapur, the very first of its kind, was destroyed in the tumultuous events of 548/ 1153, never to be rebuilt.31 But since these madrasas had endowed wealth they were able to survive without direct stipends from the government. Most Niẓāmiyya madrasas continued to exist after the fall of the Seljuq state. In Merv, Balkh, and Herat, they functioned at least until the destruction caused by Mongol- led troops in the early seventh/ thirteenth century.32 In Baghdad, the Niẓāmiyya received a thorough renovation in 504/ 1110– 11 and 580/ 1185, and subsequently a new library building in 589/ 1193.33 The Niẓāmiyya madrasa in Baghdad existed long into the Īl- Khānid period (early eighth/ fourteenth cen-tury) and the one in Herat— the one used longest— even into post- Timurid times (tenth/ sixteenth century).34

One of the most prolific chroniclers of the activities at madrasas during the late sixth/ twelfth and the seventh/ thirteenth centuries was the historian Kamāl al- Dīn Ibn al- Fuwaṭī (d. 723/ 1323). Born in Baghdad and enslaved during the Mongol conquest, he came to the attention of the philosopher Naṣīr al- Dīn al- Ṭūsī (d. 672/ 1274), who freed him and worked with him at the influential ma-drasa observatory of Maragha, where Ibn al- Fuwaṭī eventually served as head librarian. Later in his life he held the same position at the Mustanṣiriyya madrasa in Baghdad, one of the very few examples from this period where the building has survived. Ibn al- Fuwaṭī wrote a biographical dictionary of the great men in history and of his era.35 Unfortunately, less than half of that work has come down to us. In this fragment he provides information on a great number of scholars whom he met and whose fame had reached him. In the preserved part, Ibn al- Fuwaṭī mentions the names of more than sixty different madrasas.36 His is the

31 See below pp. 49–50. 32 That is when the Nizāmiyya in Merv seemed to have disappeared. 33 Hartmann, an- Nāṣir li- Dīn Allah, 199– 200; G. Makdisi and J. Pedersen in EI2, art. “Madrasa,” 5:1127. The Niẓāmiyya in Baghdad also suffered from a fire in 510/ 1116– 17; see Ibn al- Athīr, al- Kāmil, 10:366– 67. 34 On Baghdad: Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, Tuḥfat al- nuẓẓār, 2:108; Engl. trans. 2:332; Wüstenfeld, Academien der Araber, 28– 29; Talas, La madrasa Nizamiyya et son histoire, 64, 73, 76– 77; on Herat: Allen, Catalogue of the Toponyms and Monuments of Timurid Herat, 135. 35 On Ibn al- Fuwaṭī’s life, see Muṣṭafā Jawād in the introduction to the Damascus edition of Talkhīṣ majmaʿ al- ādāb, 1:9– 40; DeWeese, “Cultural Transmission and Exchange,” 12– 13. 36 That is the number of madrasas in the index of places of Muṣṭafā Jawād’s incomplete edi-tion of Ibn al- Fuwaṭī’s Talkhīṣ majmaʿ al- ādāb fī muʿjam al- alqāb (see the index in the Damascus ed., 4:1205– 42). In his study on the city of Nishapur, Bulliet mentions more than thirty different madrasas (Patricians, 286– 87). For a list of more then twenty madrasas that were founded in Baghdad during the sixth/ twelfth and seventh/ thirteenth centuries, see Ephrat, A Learned Society, 21– 25.

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kind of book that will likely prove to be a rich mine for information on post- classical Islamic philosophy, yet it has not been studied much. Among the almost six thousand biographies that Ibn al- Fuwaṭī preserved is, for instance, that of a scholar called Kamāl al- Dīn Aflāṭūn ibn ʿAbdallāh (d. 669/ 1270– 71). Either his parents must have foreseen his later passion or he adopted the Arabized name of Plato, Aflāṭūn. He was one of the many people, writes Ibn al- Fuwaṭī, who approached Naṣīr al- Dīn al- Ṭūsī at the madrasa in Maragha to study with him. His talents, however, were not sufficient to do advances studies or research (taḥṣīl). Aflāṭūn spoke incomprehensibly, wore a Mongol hat, and may have come from as far as India. He was passionate about philosophy (ḥikma) and read all its books. Naṣīr al- Dīn delegated his teaching to Ibn al- Fuwaṭī, who grudg-ingly obliged but honored Aflāṭūn with a sympathetic description of his manners and demeanors.37

This example for the teaching of philosophy within the madrasa system comes from the second half of the seventh/ thirteenth century, a period that is beyond the scope of this study. Yet philosophy was a subject that scholars at the Niẓāmiyya madrasas were already interested in and that was pursued right from the beginning of that institution. One often cited piece of evidence is the popu-larity of a philosophical book by one of Avicenna’s students that was removed from the library at the Niẓāmiyya madrasa in Nishapur some time before 475/ 1082.38 With al- Ghazālī’s push for the study of logic and the rational sciences, philosophy became a field that was studied at institutions such as the Niẓāmiyya madrasas, where his thought was influential. During the sixth/ twelfth century, however, philosophy was by no means limited to the madrasa. Philosophers such as al- Lawkarī and Abū l- Barakāt al- Baghdādī had no contact with the madrasa system. Yet it adapted to the madrasa system and developed the kind of texts that could be studied there. Although we know very little about the pedagogy of madrasa education in this period, we can deduce which kinds of books enjoyed success there.39 These insights allow us to infer the conditions that made them successful.40 Determining the techniques that these books employ will be an im-portant part of this study.41

37 Ibn al- Fuwaṭī’s Talkhīṣ majmaʿ al- ādāb (ed. Tehran), 4:131. He is not in the Damascus edition of the book. On the underused merits of Ibn al- Fuwaṭī’s Talkhīṣ majmaʿ al- ādāb, see DeWeese, “Cultural Transmission and Exchange.” 38 al- Bayhaqī, Tatimmat Ṣiwān al- ḥikma, 95– 96. The book was removed by Jamāl al- Mulk, the eldest son of Niẓām al- Mulk, who died in 475/ 1082 (cf. C. E. Bosworth in EI2, 8:72a). 39 On the little we know from direct sources, see Talas, La madrasa Nizamiyya et son histoire, 39– 40. 40 Makdisi, The Rise of Colleges, 99– 152, pursues a similar strategy in order to determine the “methodology of learning” at madrasas of this period. 41 See pp. 508–16 below.

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The Cities of Khorasan and Its Surrounding Provinces

Before we arrive at that stage, we need to understand the context of the forma-tion of post- classical philosophy in Islam. Thus far, the cities of Khorasan have not been part of the history of philosophy. Nishapur, Ṭabārān- Ṭūs, Merv, and Herat are names that scholars of Islamic theology might be familiar with, but as places of philosophical activity they still need to be discovered. The same applies to Bukhara and Samarkand in Transoxania as well as Gurgānj in Khwārazm and Fīrōzkōh in Ghūr.

Existing works on an earlier period of the history of philosophy of this re-gion mistakenly assume that Khorasan was the name of the whole of the Islamic East. Some assume, for instance, that Avicenna’s “eastern philosophy”— a label he uses in one of his books— refers to Khorasan.42 Avicenna, however, had no relation to Khorasan proper. It has already been mentioned that he was born in Transoxania and spent most of his life in Jurjān and western Iran (Jibāl and Irāq al- ʿajamī). Bert Fragner argues that the territorial concept of “Iran” (Īrān- zamīn) emerged only in the Īl- Khānid period.43 Before, there was a significant cultural difference between western Iran and Khorasan, not the least because, unlike western Iran, Khorasan was heavily populated by Arab settlers. Historic Khorasan— which is not identical with the modern Iranian provinces that in-clude that name— stretched over the northeast corner of the Iranian high plateau and included the oasis of Merv and the desert- like lowlands that surround it.44 In the south it bordered on the less significant Qūhistān province and the Dasht- i Kavir desert. In the east it was limited by the Hindukush mountain range in central Afghanistan, whose western slopes still formed part of Khorasan.45 Its

42 Gutas, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition, 140n41; idem, “Ibn Ṭufayl on Ibn Sīnā’s Eastern Philosophy,” 222– 23n1+2; idem, “Avicenna’s Eastern (‘Oriental’) Philosophy,” 159n1. See also Reisman, The Making of the Avicennan Tradition, 193n92. Pines, “La ‘Philosophie Orientale’ d’Avicenne,” 15– 16, says that Ismāʿīlite authors of the time associate mashriq, “the land of the east,” with Khorasan. Yet Pines also clarifies that the label mashriqiyya (eastern) refers to Bukhara in Transoxania— and not necessarily to Khorasan— or, in a very general way, to all lands east of Baghdad. 43 Fragner, “The Concept of Regionalism,” 352, and idem, “Ilkhanid Rule and Its Contributions,” 72– 73. In the latter article, Fragner reviews the development of the historical term “Iran,” clarifying that the Ilkhanid notion is built on an earlier Sasanian understanding of Iran as Īrānshahr. This is confirmed by Fakhr al- Dīn al- Rāzī, al- Maṭālib al- ʿāliya, 8:78.12, who mentions in passing the histor-ical “Īrānshahr,” where all people were Zoroastrians, i.e., clearly referring to Sasanian Iran. 44 Le Strange, Lands of the Eastern Caliphates, 382, clarifies the geographical meaning of “Khorasan” and its borders. There is also, in some Western literature on Arabic philosophy, a misun-derstanding of Khorasan’s western borders. Wakelnig, A Philosophical Reader, 4, for instance, identi-fies Rayy as a city of Khorasan. It is, however, part of Jibāl, the high plateau of western Iran. 45 In today’s political divisions, historic Khorasan includes the three Iranian provinces North , Razavi, and South Khorasan, almost all of Turkmenistan (excluding its most eastern and north-eastern regions), as well as the provinces Herat, Badghis, Faryab, Jowzjan, and Balkh in western Afghanistan.

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northern border was the Amu Darya River— known in the West by its Greek name, Oxus— separating it from Transoxania. In the far north Khorasan bor-dered on Khwārazm, the fertile river delta that the Amu Darya formed before its water opened out into the Aral Sea.46 Khwārazm was a river oasis, surrounded by desert and steppe. Transoxania— or in our sources “what is beyond the river” (mā warāʾ al- nahr)— was the rich agricultural region of Bukhara and Samarkand, the ancient Sogdiana (Ṣoghd), as well as the land north of it up to the Syr Darya River (Jaxartes). The fertile Ferghana Valley, which is most easily accessible from the region of Samarkand, was sometimes included in Transoxania. Khwārazm and Transoxania are divided by a three- hundred- kilometer (two- hundred- mile)- wide desert today known as the Qızılkum, the desert of “Red Sand.”

During the sixth/ twelfth century, Khorasan’s main cities were Nishapur (today in Iran), Merv (in Turkmenistan), Herat, and Balkh (both in today’s Afghanistan). These were also known as the four quarters (singl. rubʿ) of Khorasan.47 Among these four cities, only Herat survived as a major settlement into the modern pe-riod.48 Up to the seventh/ thirteenth century, Khorasan also supported a great number of midsize cities, such as Isfarāyīn, Sabzawar- Bayhaq, Ṭābarān- Ṭūs and Nūqān- Ṭūs (out of which grew the city of Meshed), Sarakhs, Mayhana, Abiward, Nasa, Merv- i Rudh, and Tirmidh. Khorasan’s prosperity resulted from its cen-tral position on the so- called Silk Road as well as the relative abundance of rain that falls on its higher ground and the slopes of the Hindukush. Labor- intensive irrigation systems of qanāt collected water resources in the more mountainous regions and led them toward denser populated agricultural land and the cities.

Among the historic cities of Khorasan, Nishapur is the one we know best. Important studies by C. E. Bosworth, Richard W. Bulliet, and Heinz Halm have focused on the city and its scholarly community.49 Nishapur was a key hub in the network of trade connections known as the Silk Road. During the sixth/ twelfth century, this did not mean that traders from Nishapur reached as far as China. They probably did not. Yet Chinese luxury goods were traded in Nishapur via a network that connected the city with Transoxania, Turkic- speaking areas in Shīnjāng (Xinjiang), and subsequently with cities in China. Of greater economic importance, however, were the connections with cities closer to Khorasan, Transoxania, and western Iran.

46 For the borders of what Rocco Rante considers “Greater Khorasan,” see his “ ‘Khorasan Proper’ and ‘Greater Khorasan,’ ” 12. At the time of writing, the Aral Sea has almost completely disappeared, with the sole exception of a lake in its former northern part, fed by the Syr Darya. The Amu Darya no longer discharges its waters into the Aral Sea. 47 Le Strange, Lands of the Eastern Caliphate, 382. 48 Today, Nishapur has again a population of c. 200,000. In the early 1970s, it was only at 30,000 (Bulliet, Patricians, 5), suggesting that earlier in the twentieth century it was a small town. 49 Bosworth, The Ghaznavids, 145– 202; Bulliet, Patricians; idem, “Medieval Nishapur”; idem, Islam, index; Halm, Ausbreitung, 42– 70; idem, “Wesir al- Kundurī”; le Strange, Land of the Eastern Caliphate, 383– 88.

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Nishapur hosted numerous madrasas that played an important part in the ed-ucation of many of the philosophers discussed in this book. The city was ʿUmar al- Khayyām’s place of birth as well as final rest.50 ʿUmar ibn Sahlān al- Sāwī was active here, while Majd al- Dīn al- Jīlī as well as Fakhr al- Dīn al- Rāzī studied in Nishapur. All these philosophers will be introduced later in this book. Richard W. Bulliet estimates that Nishapur had a population of 160,000 to 220,000 during this period.51 The historian and geographer Yāqūt (d. 626/ 1229) visited Nishapur twice around 614/ 1217, shortly before a Mongol- led army would de-stroy much of it.52 At the time of Yāqūt’s visits Nishapur had successfully recov-ered from a crisis. It had suffered two strong earthquakes in 540/ 1145 and 605/ 1208. Marauding Turkish troops had plundered it twice in 548/ 1153 and again a year later. These events were followed by civil unrest (fitna) caused by the tradi-tional animosity between Shāfiʿites and Ḥanafites. Yāqūt witnessed the effects of these events, but he also saw a strong economic recovery. The city was more pros-perous than before, because, says Yāqūt, it was “an entry- gate (dihlīz) to the east and caravans cannot avoid it.”53 The tumultuous events of the mid- sixth/ twelfth century led to Nishapur’s old city center being abandoned when most of its inhabitants moved to the former suburb of Shādyākh. The latter was newly for-tified and by the end of the sixth/ twelfth century was regarded as the new city.54 This new Nishapur was for Yāqūt “a mighty city, full of momentous buildings, a treasure trove of righteous people, and a well- spring of scholars.”55

Nishapur’s recovery, however, was only short- lived; its splendor disappeared in the Mongol- led invasion. In the fall of 617/ 1220 a small advance force of Chinggis Khan’s (d. 624/ 1227) armies appeared at Nishapur’s city walls. The city submitted to Mongol authority, but a few months later, when false rumors of Muslim vic-tories began to circulate, Nishapur revolted against the Mongols. In spring 618/ 1221, a contingent of the Mongol army under the command of Chinggis Khan’s youngest son, Toluy (d. c. 630/ 1232), was sent to subjugate the big cities of Khorasan. Reinforced by Turkish soldiers from regions that the Mongols had al-ready taken, Toluy commandeered a large army when he confronted Nishapur in April of that year. During an earlier attack of a smaller expedition force the year before, an arrow had killed the Mongol commander Toghachar, Chinggis Khan’s son- in- law, exposing Nishapur now to the full retaliation of Toluy’s army.

50 Today, ʿUmar al- Khayyām’s modern mausoleum is together with that of Farīd al- Dīn al-ʿAṭṭār’s (d. c. 586/ 1190), erected in the ninth/ fifteenth century, Nishapur’s most impressive monument. 51 Bulliet, Islam, 135; idem, “Medieval Nishapur,” 87– 88. This is roughly the number of inhabitants the city has today. Peacock, Great Seljuk Empire, 302, reminds us, however, how unreliable estimates such as these are. 52 Sellheim, “Neue Materialien,” 97– 100. 53 Yāqūt, Muʿjam al- buldān, 4:858.11– 12; Peacock, Great Seljuk Empire, 297. 54 Yāqūt, Muʿjam al- buldān, 3:227.20, 231.6. 55 Ibid., 4:857.2– 3.

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Refusing to accept appeals for mercy, Toluy stormed the city and had scores of citizen murdered.56 Toluy’s sister, Toghachar’s widow, presided over the massacre, which lay the city to waste “in such a manner,” writes the historian al- Juwaynī, “that the site could be ploughed upon.”57 Nishapur’s destruction and the mas-sacre of its inhabitants “down to the cats and dogs”58 appears as one of the most devastating events in the reports that contemporaries have written of the Mongol conquest of eastern Iran.59 Among the victims was the philosopher Quṭb al- Dīn al- Miṣrī, one of the master students of Fakhr al- Dīn al- Rāzī.60

All major cities of Khorasan, Transoxania, and Khwārazm— the three most important provinces where post- classical Islamic philosophy developed— suffered severely under the attack of Mongol- led armies during the seven years that followed 616/ 1219.61 Urban life and urban culture— the bedrock of philo-sophical activity in Muslim societies— took a severe blow in the Muslim East. The formation of post- classical Islamic philosophy was a major accomplishment of the cities of Khorasan, Transoxania, and Khwārazm before this crisis of urban life. The crisis, however, led not to a quick death of the still nascent tradition of post- classical philosophy in Islam but rather to its wider dissemination into re-gions further west in the Islamic world.

One of the biggest cities of Khorasan that played an important role in the his-tory of Islamic philosophy was Merv. It, however, completely disappeared and is today no more than an inaccessible field of ruins in Turkmenistan. Whereas other vanished cities in the region, such as Babylon, Persepolis, and even Nishapur, have captured the Western imagination through their ruins— both in stone and in writings— this has not yet happened in the case of Merv. The city, however, deserves a closer look if only because it has not been given much atten-tion in Western literature.

The historian al- Bayhaqī reports that Avicenna’s philosophy was first intro-duced to Khorasan via the city of Merv. Avicenna himself was active in western Iran, where he died in 428/ 1037 in Hamadan. “The philosophical sciences spread in Khorasan,” writes al- Bayhaqī, “from [the activity] of al- Lawkarī.”62 He had studied with Bahmanyār ibn al- Marzubān (d. 458/ 1066), one of Avicenna’s direct students. After his return to his hometown, Merv, al- Lawkarī taught a number of important students there. This must have happened in the last two or three

56 Toghachar was killed in November 617/ 1220. On the Mongol conquest of Nishapur, see Jackson, The Mongols, 80, 158; Barthold, Turkestan, 423– 24, 438, 446– 47; al- Juwaynī, Tārikh- i jahān- gushā, 1:133– 40; Engl. trans. 169– 78. 57 al- Juwaynī, Tārīkh- i jahān- gushā, 1:140; Engl. trans. 177. 58 Ibid. 59 Yāqūt, Muʿjam al- buldān, 3:231; Ibn al- Athīr, al- Kāmil, 12:256– 57. 60 See below. p. 301. 61 al- Juwaynī, Tārīkh- i jahān- gushā, 1:118; Engl. trans. 151. 62 al- Bayhaqī, Tatimmat Ṣiwān al- ḥikma, 120.

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decades of the fifth/ eleventh century. We do not know whether al- Lawkarī was connected to a teaching institution in Merv. From information about those he schooled, however, we can deduce that he ran a successful philosophical semi-nary that attracted novices from his hometown as well as from faraway places. Al- Lawkarī’s students were prominent members of the city’s scholarly commu-nity. The most important philosopher of the sixth/ twelfth century from Merv, however, was Sharaf al- Dīn al- Masʿūdī (d. c. 590/1194), who lived three gener-ations later and who was the author of the earliest preserved commentary on Avicenna’s Pointers and Reminders (al- Ishārāt wa- l- tanbihāt).63

In the first half of the sixth/ twelfth century, Merv was the political cap-ital not only of Khorasan but also of bordering regions that were ruled by the Seljuq Sultan Sanjar (d. 552/ 1157). His court was an important center of em-ployment and patronage for philosophers such as ʿUmar al- Khayyām and Tāj al- Dīn al- Shahrastānī (d. 548/ 1153). In geographical literature, Merv is often— mistakenly— identified with the modern city of Mary in Turkmenistan. That, however, is a Russian foundation of the late nineteenth century. Both places lie

Figure 2 Merv, aerial photograph of its ruins with the mausoleum of Sultan Sanjar (reg. 490– 552/ 1097– 1157). Photograph courtesy of Gai Jorayev, UCL Institute of Archaeology.

63 On Sharaf al- Dīn al- Masʿūdī, see below pp. 231–39.

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in the large oasis that is formed by the Murghab River. It flows down the slopes of the Hindukush into Khorasan and eventually trickles away into a desert that is today known as the Qarakum (Black Sand). The Merv oasis was once a place of almost marvelous fertility.64 Excavations brought to light a network of irrigation canals, which led archaeologists to conclude that the region was “far more fertile than in the present day, and supported extensive agriculture.”65

The Murghab River that feeds the Merv oasis is not navigable, and before the arrival of railways, caravans were the only means to reach the city. They were, in fact, the source of Merv’s prosperity. The city held a central position in the trade network of the Silk Road. Although an ordinary map may not reveal the centrality of Merv in that network, one that includes mountain ranges as well as deserts surely will. For caravans trying to avoid traveling through long patches of dry desert or over high mountain ranges, going through the Merv oasis was the only way to pass from Iran to Central Asia and China. Archaeological evi-dence together with written sources attest that a close network of caravanserais and ribāṭs existed that helped traders get through the desert regions surrounding Merv.66 Traders and goods on the Silk Road network tended to avoid cities where taxes and custom were too high or prices inflated. Merv, however, was hard to go around and hence was able to benefit from both.

The city was already a center of cultural and political activity as early as the second millennium bce. It was the alleged home of Zoroaster and the most impor-tant city in the eastern part of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Its proper name, Royal Merv (Merv- i Shāhijān),67 derives from the fact that it was the seat of kings since its earliest times. The city was well established when Antiochos I Soter (reg. 280– 261 bce), the second king of the Seleucid dynasty of successors, diádochoi to Alexander the Great, expanded it in the third century bce.68 Merv was a major center during the Sasanian Empire and the place where its last king, Yazdegerd III, fled after the Arabs had expelled him from his capital, Ctesiphon. Here he died in 30/ 651.69 When the Arabs conquered Merv soon after, two million dirhams were paid in tribute, the largest sum received by the new Muslim rulers.70

64 Le Strange, Lands of the Eastern Caliphate, 402– 3. It was also known for its unhealthy climate (cf. Peacock, Great Seljuk Empire, 305), probably due to malaria, which receded when the irrigation canals were no longer maintained. In the modern period the area is known for its healthy dry climate and became famous for its spas. 65 Wordsworth, “Merv on Khorasanian Trade Routes,” 53. 66 Wordsworth, “Merv on Khorasanian Trade Routes.” 67 To distinguish it from the much smaller Marv- i Rūdh (“Merv on the River”), 250 kilometers (150 miles) upstream on the Murghab. 68 On pre- Islamic Merv, which was referred to in Greek sources as Margiana, see J. Wiesehöfer and B. Brentjes in Der neue Pauly, 7:884; 8:13. 69 al- Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh, ser. 1, 2872– 84. For a history of Merv in the Muslim period, see Kennedy, “Medieval Merv.” 70 al- Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh, ser. 1, 2888; Christensen, Decline of Iranshahr, 189.

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Merv remained an important center during Muslim rule and was the starting point of the Abbasid Revolution of 129/ 747. Abū Muslim, the leader of that re-bellion, began a new era in the city with the construction of a second fortified settlement next to the ancient one. This second settlement became the Merv we deal with in this book. It is today known as the ruins of Soltan- Gala (from Arab. qalaʿa). By the sixth/ twelfth century, the older city (today known as Gävür- Gala, “the Pagan Fortress”) had probably been abandoned. Soltan- Gala had an almost rectangular shape, with city walls on four sides that were two and three kilometers long. These walls were renewed under Seljuq rule and are still extant, albeit in ruins. Inside the walls today hardly anything stands except for the one building that dominated Merv’s skyline in the second half of the sixth/ twelfth century: the mausoleum of Sultan Sanjar.71 Already in 1881, a Western visitor remarked that, “with the exception of the mausoleum of the Sultan . . . there is not now one brick remaining upon another.”72 In the sixth/ twelfth century, however, there were all the elements of an Iranian Muslim city, with its bazaars, madrasas, mosques, an inner fortress (an ark), and a palace at the city center. Water from the irrigation canals would run through the city. The historian Yāqūt, who spent most of his life in Syria, was enthusiastic about Merv and its inhabitants, so much so that he decided to stay and spend three years living there and doing re-search.73 He quotes an earlier historian from its rival Nishapur who had to admit that Merv even surpassed the advantages of his home city. “Were it not for the great catastrophe and destruction that befell that place with the coming of the Mongols,” Yāqūt writes, “I would not have left before I died.”74 After his return to Mosul in 617/ 1220, Yāqūt wrote a long and very eloquent letter to his friend, the historian of philosophy Ibn al- Qifṭī, where he describes Merv in the most marvelous terms: “How numerous were its learned men and how delightful what they did with their ink?! How many religious scholars were there, whose con-duct put crowns on the heads of Islam?! The monuments of their scholarship are inscribed in the scrolls of time and their contributions to the betterment of this life and of religion are well recorded and have spread to all parts of the world.”75

71 In the sixth/ twelfth century, Sultan Sanjar’s mausoleum was the most important landmark of Merv. Its visible green dome, so Yāqūt says, guided caravans toward the city from as far as the dis-tance of a day’s journey (Muʿjam al- buldān, 4:509.6– 7). 72 O’Donovan, The Merv Oasis, 2:250. 73 Sellheim, “Neue Materialien,” 97– 98. See also Yāqūt’s autobiography in Ibn al- Qifṭī, Inbāh al- ruwāt, 4:86– 98, 92– 93. 74 Yāqūt, Muʿjam al- buldān, 4:509.11– 12. Yāqūt’s entry on Merv in translated by Hugh Kennedy in Herrman, Monuments of Merv, 125– 26. 75 Ibn al- Qifṭī, Inbāh al- ruwāt, 4:94.7– 9; see the same passage in Ibn Khallikān, Wafāyāt al- aʿyān, 6:135.8– 10. Cf. the English translation in Browne, Literary History, 2:431. Yāqūt’s letter to Ibn al- Qifṭī, written in 617/ 1220– 21, right after his return from Khorasan, is preserved in Ibn al- Qifṭī, Inbāh al- ruwāt, 4:86– 98, and from there copied in full by Ibn Khallikān, Wafāyāt al- aʿyān, 6:129– 38. The two versions, however, offer different readings. In this passage, for instance, Ibn al- Qifṭī’s sentence is

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Yāqūt was particularly attracted to the city’s libraries and its scholarly commu-nity. He studied with important teachers, among them members of the famous al- Samʿānī family of religious scholars and historians.76 Even more important for him was the abundance of books in the city. In his letter to Ibn al- Qifṭī he writes, “There, one found books in the sciences and in the belles- lettres as well as folios full of chapters with interesting things that distract the visitor from the land and its inhabitants and even make him neglect good friends and neighbors.”77 In his geographical dictionary, Yāqūt offers an equally enthusiastic account of Merv and describes its libraries in greater detail. “When I left the city,” he writes, “there were ten endowed libraries of the kind that I have seen few elsewhere.”78 The major Friday mosque of the city had two public libraries donated by rich benefactors that each held ten thousand volumes and more. One, the ʿAzīziyya

Figure 3 Merv, mausoleum of Sultan Sanjar, built around the middle of the sixth/ twelfth century. Photograph courtesy of Gai Jorayev, UCL Institute of Archaeology.

set in the past, while Ibn Khallikān has present tense. The later lament of Merv’s destruction at the hands of the Mongols, however, clarifies that Yāqūt talks about a situation that has, by the time of writing, disappeared.

76 On the al- Samʿānī family and its most important member, the historian Abū Saʿd ʿ Abd al- Karīm (d. 562/ 1166), see Halm, Ausbreitung, 85– 87; two articles by R. Sellheim and W. C. Chittick in EI2, 8:1024– 25. 77 Ibn al- Qifṭī, Inbāh al- ruwāt, 4:92.9– 11; Ibn Khallikān, Wafāyāt al- aʿyān, 6:134.4– 6. 78 Yāqūt, Muʿjam al- buldān, 4:509.13– 14.

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Library, was a donation of ʿAzīz al- Dīn ʿAṭīf al- Rīḥānī, a wine merchant and book collector who boasted that in 545/ 1150– 51 he was able to buy in Isfahan a rare full copy of Avicenna’s book Fair Judgment (al- Inṣāf)— probably the only one that ever existed. He took it to his library in Merv.79 Several madrasas, including Merv’s famous Niẓāmiyya madrasa, had libraries that were available to scholars. Without attempting to offer a full survey, Yāqūt mentions five madrasas which had major libraries and one in a Sufi convent. All these libraries were easily ac-cessible and Yāqūt could borrow from them. At times he had up to two hundred volumes at home, so precious that all of them together would fetch two hundred gold dinars. “Most of the things [you can read] in this book and in my other ones were collected in those libraries.”80

Again, much of this perished just months after Yāqūt left. In 617/ 1221 Toluy’s army appeared before Merv, which refused to surrender. The Mongol- led forces quickly overcame its defenses and razed the city. “This happened on a day which was the first of the year 618 (25 Feb. 1221),” a chronicler writes, “and the last in the lives of most of the inhabitants of Merv.”81 A few months later, when rumors of a Muslim rebound spread, the remaining inhabitants rose against the Mongols and had to endure a second and finally a third slaughter.82 It took many years after its destruction in 618/ 1221 before Merv was slowly rebuilt. The restored Merv was, however, no longer one of Khorasan’s important cities. Merv was, in part, restored under Timurid rule, but it never regained its former strength in scholarship. The city was moved to a much smaller fortified site south of the old space.83 The new town, though, has been continuously inhabited and is today known as Bayramaly.84 The Merv of the sixth/ twelfth century, however, is best described as a large field of ruins on the northern edge of that town.

Earlier histories of Arabic and Islamic philosophy made the Mongols respon-sible for its assumed end after the classical period. That is certainly wrong, first of all because philosophy did not end with the arrival of the Mongols. Mongol rule, meaning the rule of the Īl- Khānid dynasty over Iraq and Iran (656– 735/ 1258– 335), brought an acceleration of patronage for philosophers. Naṣīr al- Dīn

79 al- Bayhaqī, Tatimmat Ṣiwān, 56.2– 4. On the connection between ʿAzīz al- Dīn al- Fuqqāʿī al- Rīḥānī and the ʿAzīziyya Library in Merv (mentioned in Yāqūt, Muʿjam al- buldān, 4:509.15), see M. Shāfiʿ in his edition of al- Bayhaqī, Tatimmat Ṣiwān, 194. The name of the donor in Yāqūt (al- Zanjānī) should probably be corrected. 80 Yāqūt, Muʿjam al- buldān. 4:509– 10; le Strange, Lands of the Eastern Caliphate, 401– 2. 81 al- Juwaynī, Tārīkh- i jahān- gūshā, 1:125; Engl. trans. 160. 82 Kennedy, “Medieval Merv,” 38– 40; Barthold, Turkestan, 447– 49; al- Juwaynī, Tārīkh- i jahān- gūshā, 1:119– 32; Engl. trans. 153– 68. 83 Today this site is known as Abdylla Han Gala, named after the Shaybānī Uzbek ruler ʿAbdullāh Khān (d. 1006/ 1598). 84 This new city became known as Bayram- ʿAlī when Bayram ʿAlī Khān unsuccessfully defended it against the Uzbek rulers of Bukhara, who destroyed it in 1785 (O’Donovan, The Merv Oasis, 2:241). In 1887 the newly arrived Russians founded a city here that earned a good reputation as a spa and attracted visitors from all over the Russian Empire and later the Soviet State.

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al- Ṭūsī, for instance, became a high- ranking official at the court of the first Īl- Khānid ruler, Hülegü, and could funnel significant state resources into his sci-entific and philosophical projects. It is also important to understand that the events after 616/ 1219 in Transoxania and Khorasan, which brought so much destruction to its cities, were not, as earlier historians had often seen, the on-slaught of wild barbarians onto a culturally superior citizenry. Chinggis Khan was an experienced army leader and politician who skillfully exploited internal divisions within Muslim societies. When he arrived at the northern border of the Islamic world, he commanded much smaller forces than those of his first Muslim opponent, the Khwārazmshāh.85 The Mongols were able to provide a po-litical vision and unified leadership to groups of pastoralists who had long lived in and around Transoxania, Khwārazm, and Khorasan. The “Mongol invasion” was one of the most momentous events among many in a centuries- long struggle between nomads and populations who led a sedentary and urban life. The urban populations, however, were not defenseless pawns in the clutches of an absolute military force held by pastoralists. It is remarkable how often the inhabitants of Merv, for instance, who seemed to become fewer and fewer with every incident, opted for armed revolt against their nomad victors.

Even the most sober assessment of the Mongol conquest,86 however, must admit that the destruction of life and property in Khorasan was at an unprec-edented scale and had left many cities, if not devastated, at least suffering from vast destruction. Again, such destruction was not the result of bloodthirsty hordes of wild barbarians but rather the result of a deliberate strategy on the part of the Mongols. Their problem was that of every premodern conqueror: cities were so heavily defended and well supplied that they could hardly ever be taken. Conquering these cities required long and costly sieges that all too often ended in failure, spoiling all future plans for a successful conquest of the land. The Mongols arrived with a new tactic to break the formidable defenses of the cities they encountered. When their advance troops reached a city, they would offer terms to its inhabitants in order to motivate a peaceful turnover of power, albeit with high ransom and the danger of plunder by the main army. Usually this was hardly enough to motivate the citizens to open their gates. The Mongol- led armies, however, deliberately displayed unprecedented acts of violence to show what consequences those cities would suffer if they rejected this offer of “friendship” (Mongol īl). Cities that closed their gates or rebelled after letting the Mongols enter suffered plunder, destruction, murder, and the enslavement of their population. One reason these acts were committed was to spread fear and terror among the inhabitants and the decision- makers in the cities. Whoever

85 Barthold, Turkestan, 404. 86 For that, see, e.g., Morgan, The Mongols, 64– 73, or Jackson, The Mongols, 153– 81.

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learned of the costs involved in becoming an enemy of the Mongols, so this strategy went, would be strongly encouraged to engage in negotiations for a rela-tively peaceful surrender. Even where that was not the case, the Mongols’ strategy would encourage dissent among the defenders of a given city, leading some of them to break ranks and make side deals with the Mongols that would lead to the opening of a single gate, a small side door, or at least a tunnel that could allow a Mongol advance into the city.

The unprecedented level of violence that arrived with the Mongols was at least to some degree part of a psychological warfare with which the Mongols tried to achieve what earlier generations of pastoral conquerors such as the Oǧuz Turks of the early fifth/ eleventh century did not accomplish: the military con-quest of fortified cities. This strategy was successful but also costly. It meant the destruction of vast resources and of the country’s tax base. Among the many urban institutions that suffered tremendously in the years after 616/ 1223 were those devoted to higher learning. Many madrasas and schools in Khorasan and Transoxania were destroyed and many teachers were killed or enslaved. We know, however, that some institutions of higher learning prevailed. It has already been mentioned that the Niẓāmiyya madrasa in Herat, for instance, continued into the post- Timurid period. After a few decades, Mongol efforts to rebuild the country and its scholarly community would kick in. About thirty years after their conquest, the Mongols began to endow new madrasas in cities like Bukhara.87 In fact, any visitor of Bukhara today will be impressed by the great number of mar-velous madrasa buildings, all of them from the post- Mongol period. Whereas urban life, higher education, and the proliferation of highly advanced scholar-ship that Yāqūt so raved about— today one would say “academic excellence”— took a severe hit in the years 616– 23/ 1219– 26, the Mongol conquest of those years was hardly the game- changer that earlier generations of scholars in Islamic studies had assumed it to be. Urban life rebounded— albeit slowly— and so did the scholarly community. Still, it remains true that Khorasan suffered more than other parts of the Muslim lands that were conquered by the Mongols, such as Baghdad or Syria. This circumstance had a profound effect on the proliferation of post- classical philosophy in the early seventh/ thirteenth century. This dissipa-tion happened, however, after its formation in the century before.

The First Half of the Sixth/ Twelfth Century: Seljuq Rule

In the past, when Western observers looked at the political history of the Middle East in the sixth/ twelfth century, they hardly got past the coastline of the Levant

87 See below pp. 75–76.

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with its several Crusader states and the interaction with their neighbors. The pe-riod of formation of post- classical Islamic philosophy was also that of the Second Crusade— with its brief siege of Damascus in 543/ 1148— and of the Third Crusade. The latter was a reaction to the decisive defeat of the Crusader states at the Battle of Ḥaṭṭīn and the subsequent Muslim reconquest of Jerusalem in 583/ 1187. These events have next to no bearing on the formation of post- classical philosophy in Islam and will appear only in passing.88

It is more important— and maybe also more difficult— to get at least an over-view of the political history of Iraq, Iran, and Central Asia during the sixth/ twelfth century. The developments described in this book begin in the cities of Khorasan and move from there to Baghdad, Maragha, Rayy, Gurgānj, Bukhara, Samarkand, Fīrōzkōh, and others— mostly cities in provinces that surround Khorasan. At the beginning of the sixth/ twelfth century, when our study sets in, this whole region was part of the Great Seljuq Empire, which at this point in time was split into a western part, governed from Isfahan, and an eastern part, governed from Merv.

Historians divide the era of Seljuq rule into three periods.89 First is the pe-riod of conquest (c. 415– 47/ c. 1025– 55) when pastoralist Turks crossed the Amu Darya River and entered Khorasan. In a decade- long process they estab-lished a state that was ruled by a family confederation— the Seljuqs— who man-aged to unite a coalition of several tribal units after their move from the steppes of Central Asia to more fertile agricultural land further south. The second pe-riod was that of consolidation and centralization, which began with the ar-rival of a Seljuq army under Ṭoghril Beg (reg. 431– 55/ 1040– 63) at Baghdad in 557/ 1055 and ended with the death of his great- great- nephew Muḥammad Tapar (ibn Malikshāh) in 511/ 1118.90 This was the period also referred to as the Great Seljuqs, with the powerful sultans Alp Arslan (reg. 455– 65/ 1063– 73) and Malikshāh (reg. 465– 85/ 1073– 92) at its center, both served by Niẓām al- Mulk as their vizier. The death of Malikshāh led to a prolonged struggle for succession that ended when his younger son, Sanjar, became the supreme sultan of both the eastern and the western halves of the Seljuq Empire. Sanjar was the last of the Great Seljuq sultans and his reign marked the beginning of the third period (511– 90/ 1118– 94), which is characterized by the localization and finally the

88 Rulers and scholars in Iran of the sixth/ twelfth century showed no interest in the Crusades. Even the Abbasid caliphs, such as al- Nāṣir (reg. 575– 622/ 1180– 225), for instance, “displayed a strong disinterest in the policy of the Ayyubids, who were engaged with the Crusaders” (Hartmann, an- Nāṣir li- Dīn Allāh, 99). 89 Lange, Justice, 4, based on Hodgson, Venture of Islam, 2:12, 21, 53. 90 Glassen, Der mittlere Weg, 142, regards the year 485/ 1092 when both Malikshāh and Niẓām al- Mulk died as the watershed between the Seljuqs as a “Great Empire” (Großmacht) and a later par-ticularization and provincialization. She seems to agree with this periodization, however, when she writes that “the centrifugal tendencies that became present with Malikshāh’s death spread fully after the death of Muḥammad ibn Malikshāh (511/ 1118).”

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rapid disintegration of Seljuq power. The very last ruler of the Seljuq dynasty was Ṭoghril III ibn Arslan- Shāh, who managed to hold out in the region of Hamadan and Isfahan until he was defeated and killed in 590/ 1194 by the then much more powerful Khwārazmshāh. Seljuq authority over Khorasan, however, had already ended in 548/ 1153.91

In the first half of the sixth/ twelfth century, Sanjar’s court in Merv was an im-portant center of patronage.92 Poets of Persian literature flocked to Merv just as much as religious scholars and scientists. Sanjar himself was an outspoken admirer of al- Ghazālī, whom he had supported during the controversy over his rationalist teachings.93 Already in 490/ 1097, when he was still a teenager, Sanjar was appointed governor (malik) of the eastern part of the Seljuq Empire— essentially Khorasan, Khwārazm, and Transoxania— over which he would rule for the next fifty- six years. After the death of his half- brother Muḥammad Tapar, Sanjar was the most senior member of the Seljuq family confederation and also claimed nominal authority over the western part. In 511/ 1118 he became the great sultan (al- sulṭān al- muʿaẓẓam) of the Seljuq Empire. Sanjar was the ruler over a vast empire that stretched from Iraq to the borders of India. While he ruled directly over the central regions— most importantly Khorasan— the more peripheral provinces he controlled indirectly through governors or vassals, such as the Qarakhanids of Transoxania, the Kākūyids of Yazd, and the Ghaznawids in central Afghanistan. These were often dynasties that had a much older pedigree than the Seljuqs themselves.94 Sanjar’s authority remained largely unchallenged until the late 1130s, when the Qara Khitay appeared in Transoxania.

The Qara Khitay, also known by their Chinese name, Xi Liao or Western Liao, were a non- Muslim dynasty of Turks or maybe Mongols that had come under Chinese cultural influence.95 Originally from Manchuria in the northeast of China, from where they were expelled, their leader Yelü Dashi (d. 1143) built a new empire on China’s western border that stretched roughly from the Amu Darya or Oxus River in the south to the Altai Mountains in the north— an area that became known in the sixth/ twelfth century as Turkistān. Yelü Dashi appears in the Muslim sources as the Gürkhān, a title also applied to his successors.96 The center of Qara Khitay rule was the fertile Yeti- Su region— today known by its Russian name, Semiryechye— the “land of the seven rivers,” on the border of

91 On the history of the Seljuqs in the sixth/ twelfth century, see Bosworth, “Political and Dynastic History,” 119– 202, and idem, art. “Sandjar” in EI2, 9:15– 17; Lambton, “Internal Structure”; Sevim and Bosworth, “The Seljūqs and the Khwarazm Shahs”; Barthold, Turkestan, 319– 32. 92 Browne, Literary History, 2:297– 363. 93 See my earlier work Al- Ghazālī’s Philosophical Theology, 53– 55 and Garden, The First Islamic Reviver, 17– 19, 143– 46, 163– 67. 94 Paul, “Sanjar and Atsız,” 83– 85. 95 On their Mongol character, see Morgan, The Mongols, 41, 43– 44; Jackson, The Mongols, 55. 96 On the origin of this title, see Biran, Empire of the Qara Khitai, 1. Two Gürkhāns of the sixth/ twelfth century were females; see Jackson, The Mongols, 106.

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today’s Kazakhstan with Kyrgyzstan. From here the Qara Khitay advanced into Transoxania, which belonged to the Seljuq sphere of influence. The resulting battle happened in September 536/ 1141 in the steppe of Qaṭwān halfway be-tween Samarkand and the Syr Darya. The Seljuqs suffered a resounding defeat and had thousands of casualties. Sultan Sanjar’s troops included forces from many of his vassals in eastern Iran, and his rout affected people from the whole region.97 Sanjar himself escaped just barely, but members of his court, including one of his wives, were captured. Among the casualties of that day was the phi-losopher al- Īlāqī. He had been part of the entourage of ʿAlāʾ al- Dīn ibn Qumāj, a high officer in the Seljuq army whose father held a military appanage (iqṭāʿ) near Balkh.98 After being captured, the Gürkhān witnessed al- Īlāqī’s execution on the battlefield together with that of other notables.99 The background of this act of violence is unknown, particularly since al- Īlāqī’s patron, despite being captured himself, survived after his family paid a hefty ransom of one hundred thousand dinars.100 Al- Īlāqī may have somehow angered the Qara Khitay, or his execution may have been part of the negotiations over the ransom. By murdering one of their coveted scholars and physicians, the Qara Khitay may have wished to show the Qumāj family how serious they were in their threat to kill one of them.101

Whereas the Qara Khitay were not known to have patronized any of the philosophers dealt with in this study— their non- Muslim background may have prevented this— their victory over the Seljuqs allowed another dynasty to rise in power, whose court would become one of the most important patrons of this period: the kings (Pers. shāh) of Khwārazm. After the Battle of Qaṭwān, Sanjar’s rule was severely weakened. The Seljuqs lost influence over Transoxania and Khwārazm, whose local rulers now became vassals of the Qara Khitay. This change greatly benefited the Khwārazmshāh Atsız (reg. 521– 51/ 1127– 56), whose own quarrel with Sanjar preceded the Battle of Qaṭwān.102 It has already been mentioned that Khwārazm was a well- irrigated and rich agricultural re-gion where the delta of the lower Oxus bordered on the Aral Sea. The local Anūshtiginid dynasty, which enjoyed strong support from Khwārazm’s popula-tion, descended from a Turkish slave commander. He had begun as a governor of the Seljuqs at the turn of the sixth/ twelfth century. Like many members of the Seljuq elite, the Anūshtiginids had adopted Iranian- Islamic culture. At the

97 Biran, Empire of the Qara Khitai, 43. 98 On the Qumāj family, see ibid., 45, 51, 140; Paul, Lokale und imperiale Herrschaft, 184– 93; Ibn al- Athīr, al- Kāmil, 10:158, 180, 348; 11:57, 107, 116– 18. 99 al- Bayhaqī, Tatimmat Ṣiwān, 125– 26, 204– 5; al- Ḥusaynī, Zubdat al- tawārīkh, 187; Engl. trans. 65– 66. 100 Paul, Lokale und imperiale Herrschaft, 186. 101 Another explanation focuses on al- Īlāqī’s lineage as a descendent of Muḥammad— a sayyid; see al- Ḥusaynī, Zubdat al- tawārīkh, 187; Engl. trans. 66. 102 See Jürgen Paul’s article “Atzıs b. Muḥammad b. Anūshtigin,” in EI3, and idem, “Sanjar and Atsız.”

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beginning of his reign, Atsız was a faithful vassal of Sanjar and took part in his campaigns. What precisely caused their falling- out is unknown, but we see Sanjar in the fall of 533/ 1138 conducting a punitive expedition toward Khwārazm. Several more would follow, and these deepened the enmity between the Seljuq sultan and the Khwārazmshāh as well as the resilience of the latter’s power base in Khwārazm. After the Battle of Qaṭwān the Khwārazmshāh Atsız paid an an-nual tribute to the Qara Khitay but acted as an independent ruler. Benefiting from Sanjar’s defeat, he attacked Khorasan and plundered Merv in the fall of 536/ 1141, just a month after the Battle of Qaṭwān, and then Nishapur in the spring of the year after.103 The Khwārazmshāhs would soon become the most powerful force in the region, replacing the Seljuqs after their final defeat.

The event that led to the end of Seljuq power in Khorasan is remarkable for reasons other than just dynastic history. Sanjar entered into a dispute with Turkish tribesmen who had recently moved from the steppes beyond the Syr Darya to Khorasan. These tribally organized Turkmen appear in our Arabic and Persian sources as ghuzz, a calque of the Turkish word oǧuz, describing their tribal confederation and also the branch of the Turkish language they spoke.104 These were both the same as that of the Seljuq Turks, which made dealing with them complicated. The fact that these new ghuzz were not very different from the Seljuq troops who had crossed the Amu Darya during the preceding century led to certain expectations of privileges, among them to be subject to Sanjar directly and not to his local iqṭāʿ- holders. The holders of the local iqṭāʿ around Balkh, where the ghuzz had settled, happened to be the Qumāj family, the former pa-trons of the philosopher al- Īlāqī. They insisted on their authority as local lords. The unfolding conflict led to several, increasingly severe battles and to the deaths of ʿAlāʾ l- Dīn ibn Qumāj and his father. When Sanjar decided to mount a pu-nitive expedition upon the ghuzz, he overestimated his power— other sources say he was let down by his Turkish generals— and was defeated in 548/ 1153. The ghuzz took Sanjar prisoner and paraded him in humiliating circumstances in a cage. Three years later he would escape and reach his capital, Merv. He was un-able, however, to reestablish power in Khorasan and died, age seventy- one, in 552/ 1157.105

More important is the effect Sanjar’s downfall had on the urban culture of Khorasan. After his defeat, the ghuzz were able to overtake Merv and Nishapur,

103 Paul, “Sanjar and Atsız,” 98– 103. 104 Cl. Cahen, art. “Ghuzz,” in EI2, 3:1106– 10; al- Kāshgharī, Dīwān lughāt al- turk, 40–41; Engl. trans. 1:101– 2. On the meaning of oǧuz in connection the early Seljūq history, see Peacock, Early Seljūq History, 17– 27, 47– 57. 105 On Ibn Qumājs’s and Sanjar’s conflict with the ghuzz and its aftermath, see Paul, Lokale und imperiale Herrschaft, 166– 71, 188– 93; Ibn al- Athīr, al- Kāmil, 11:176– 82; Bosworth, “Political and Dynastic History,” 151– 57; Biran, Empire of the Qara Khitai, 51– 52; Bulliet, Patricians, 76– 81; Barthold, Turkestan, 329– 31.

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two centers of scholarly activity, and plunder their riches. These cities had seen plunder before— most notably in 536/ 1142 at the hands of the Khwārazmshāh— but on those occasions, the stealing was part of dynastic disputes that focused on the household of the ruler and the property of the cities’ elite. The difference between these two sackings of Merv can be illustrated by the example of the phil-osophical scholar al- Ḥasan al- Qaṭṭān, a student of al- Lawkarī. After the sack of 536/ 1142 he accused Rashīd al- Dīn al- Waṭwāṭ, a high- ranking administrator at the Khwārazmshāh’s court and an author of epistles on logic, of having plun-dered books from his library. Al- Waṭwāṭ defended himself in eloquent Arabic prose against al- Ḥasan al- Qaṭṭān’s accusation and used the occasion to heap scorn on him.106 When in 548/ 1153, the ghuzz sacked Merv, al- Ḥasan al- Qaṭṭān was among those who were murdered. “They seized him as they did with many,” writes the historian al- Ṣafadī (d. 764/ 1363), “and when they got these people they abused them.” Al- Ḥasan al- Qaṭṭān had dirt shoveled in his mouth until he died.107

In 536/ 1142 scholars may have lost their possessions; in 548/ 1153 they lost their lives. The Turkmen overran the cities of Khorasan and pillaged the pop-ulation. The intensity of their hostility toward the Seljuq state led them to target its officials as well as the local elites who cooperated with it. Scholars and philosophers, who in other circumstances often managed to stay out of vio-lent politics, were among those who were picked out by the ghuzz. Ibn al- Athīr reports that after taking first the outer city of Nishapur and returning a year later to take also its citadel— the traditional refuge of its population in times of crisis— the ghuzz dragged out those sheltering in a prominent mosque and burned its li-brary.108 Our sources mention at least fifty- five prominent scholars who perished during the crisis.109 The most important ones for our context were Muḥammad ibn Yaḥyā al- Janzī (d. 549/ 1154), a famed student of al- Ghazālī and his successor at the Niẓāmiyya madrasa in Nishapur,110 and the philosopher al- Ḥasan al- Qaṭṭān from Merv, who had two students in Ṭūs who were also killed.111 Even the death of the famed doxographer and philosopher al- Shahrastānī, which is recorded for Shaʿbān 548/ November 1153, may be connected to the turmoil cre-ated by the ghuzz, although the sources make no mention of this. The same may apply to the lesser known philosopher Ibn al- Ṣalāḥ (also: Ibn al- Sarī) who died

106 al- Juwaynī, Taʾrīkh- i jahān- gushā, 2:6– 7; Engl. trans. 280– 81; al- Waṭwāṭ, Majmūʿat rasāʾil, 2:18– 27. 107 al- Ṣafadī, al- Wāfī, 12:141. On al- Ḥasan al- Qaṭṭān see also pp. 188–89. 108 Ibn al- Athīr, al- Kāmil, 11:117; Bulliet, Patricians, 76– 79; Bosworth, “Political and Dynastic History,” 153. 109 See the names mentioned in Köymen, Büyük Selçuklu İmparaturluǧu tarihi, 2:430– 45; Bosworth, “Political and Dynastic History,” 154; Bulliet, Patricians, 77– 80. 110 On him, see Griffel, Al- Ghazālī’s Philosophical Theology, 74– 77. 111 See below p. 188, note 65.

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that year.112 The Niẓāmiyya madrasa of Nishapur, founded around 450/ 1058, was destroyed and never rebuilt.113 Urban bandits (ʿayyārūn) and local riffraff (awbāsh) joined the pillaging, and long- established enemies of the Seljuqs such as the Ismāʿīlites in Qūhistan attacked their territory.114 Bulliet calls these events “the end of the patriciate” in Nishapur.115 This might be too much of an exagger-ation given the city’s strong economic recovery in later years of the sixth/ twelfth century.116 Bulliet points out that the cities in landlocked Khorasan relied on a steady flow of food supplies that tested the premodern efficiency of agricultural production as well as means of transportation. The Khorasanian cities were more vulnerable to famine than metropolises where rivers allowed tapping into ag-ricultural regions further away. This weakness, paired with the labor- intensive irrigation system of the qanāt, could turn any shortage of workforce into a food supply crisis.

Unlike seventy years later, during the Mongol conquest of Khorasan in 616– 23/ 1219– 26, there was in 548/ 1153 and its aftermath no evidence of a loss or removal of the workforce from the agricultural economy. Still, the fragility of food- supply chains in Khorasan meant that marauding nomads could easily disrupt the system. Bulliet concludes that together with the social strife (fitna) of warring factions within the cities, a famine followed on the heels of the breakdown of the Seljuq state. Among those fighting were the two traditional antagonists in Nishapur, the Ḥanafites and the Shāfiʿites.117 Such local warfare, however, seems to have been a short- lived phenomenon.

Our sources, written mostly by scholars who were invested in the concept of a strong central state, paint the aftermath of Sanjar’s defeat in 548/ 1153 as a devastating event for urban culture in Khorasan. Earlier generations of modern historians closely followed their portrayal and concluded that there was a demise of scholarly activity in Khorasan from the middle of the sixth/ twelfth century, beginning seventy years before the Mongol- led invasion. This assumed decline ushered in a period of gradual movement of scholars away from Khorasan and Transoxania to Iraq, Syria, and Egypt. Bulliet, for instance, estimates that after the upheavals of the mid- sixth/ twelfth century, the population of Nishapur had shrunk to 15% of what it had been at its peak around 390/ 1000.118 He also points out that while historians have long agreed that thousands of Iranians fled their homeland after the Mongol- led invasion, “the economic fragility of Iran’s

112 On him, see below pp. 246–47. 113 Bulliet, Patricians, 255. 114 Bosworth, “Political and Dynastic History,” 154; Lange, Justice, 244. 115 Bulliet, Patricians, 76– 81. 116 See above, pp. 34–37. 117 Bulliet, Patricians, 77– 79; idem, Islam, 133– 36, 141; Lambton, “Internal Structure,” 274. 118 Bulliet, Islam, 141.

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cities prompted many Iranians to emigrate long before the Mongols appeared on the horizon.”119 This migratory movement began already in the mid- sixth/ twelfth century and became stronger in the following decades. Since Bulliet suggested this in 1994, others have added data on the movement of scholars from Iran to the countries around the Mediterranean.120 In fact, several biog-raphies of such diverse intellectuals as Yaḥyā al- Suhrawardī (d. 587/ 1191), Ibn al- Ṣalāh al- Shahrazūrī (d. 643/ 1245), and Bahāʾ al- Dīn Walad (d. 628/ 1231), the father of Jalāl al- Dīn Rūmī (d. 672/ 1273), can be interpreted as lending support to this thesis. All of them studied in the cities of Iran, but after graduating from its institutions they did not stay there— at least not for long. Years before 616/ 1219 they left Iran for the intellectual centers of Syria and Anatolia. This cre-ated the impression that when Chinggis Khan’s armies entered Transoxania and Khorasan and destroyed many of its cities, they met an urban culture that had already been weakened by the plunders of 548/ 1153 and the partial destruction of Khorasan’s urban elites.121

That impression, however, is decidedly wrong. We already read Yāqūt’s enthu-siastic descriptions of scholarly life in Merv and Nishapur, dating to the eve of the Mongol invasion. Yāqūt also visited Gurgānj and Herat, two cities that likewise left a strong impression on him. In fact, his descriptions of these two cities use the same kind of hyperbole, so that it must have been difficult for him to decide which of the two was more magnificent. “I visited Gurgānj in the year 616 [1219– 20],” writes Yāqūt, “right before the Mongols took it and destroyed it; and I don’t know if I ever saw a city more magnificent (ʿaẓīm) than this one, with more wealth, and in a better condition.” He arrived half a year later in Herat: “When I was there in 617 [1220], I couldn’t remember a city in Khorasan that was more splendid (jalīl) than this and more magnificent, more imposing, more beautiful, and more populous.”122 In addition to its many gardens with fountains, Herat was also filled with scholars and learned people.

119 Ibid., 151. 120 Hillenbrand, “Rāvandī”; Marlow, “A Thirteenth Century Scholar”; Madelung, “The Westward Migration,” 48– 55; idem, “The Spread of Māturīdism,” 141, 149. In a very general way Cahen, “L’émmigration persane,” already discussed the subject in 1977. Further evidence can be found in Sourdel, “Les professeurs de madrasa,” 114. Peacock, Great Seljuk Empire, 287– 97, receives Bulliet’s suggestion with caution. 121 This argument is most forcefully made by Tor, “The Eclipse of Khurāsān.” 122 Yāqūt, Muʿjam al- buldān, 2:54.13– 14, 4:958.18– 19. See also his description of Khwārazm (2:470– 86). Sellheim, “Neue Materialien,” 98, dates Yāqūt’s visit to Herat to 616/ 1219, before he came to Gurgānj, but the many testimonies about seeing Herat and surrounding places in 617/ 1220 (collected by Sellheim, 98– 99n15) cannot all be wrong. Wüstenfeld, who is quoted there, was probably right in his assumption that Yāqūt traveled from Gurgānj up the Oxus River to Balkh and from there to Herat. This would have been in the first months of 617/ spring 1220. From Herat he rushed down the road to Merv and Nishapur and arrived via Jibāl in northern Iraq before the year 617 was out.

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Despite the crisis of urban life during the middle of the sixth/ twelfth cen-tury, Khorasan remained a cultural center and a place of strong scholarly activities. Here we can draw a parallel to Central Europe in the twentieth cen-tury. It witnesses at least two severe crises of urban life during the first half of that century— the First and the Second World Wars— of which the latter brought destruction to cities on a scale never seen before. Yet we would be wrong if we extended a diagnosis of economic and intellectual decline to the five decades that followed the Second World War. By 1975, most Central European countries had both strong economies and highly interesting cul-tural production. A similar scenario might have unfolded in Khorasan.123 The two sacks in 548/ 1153 and a year later, for instance, led in Nishapur to a relo-cation of the city center to its former suburb of Shādyākh. Moves like this were not infrequent as they had the positive side effect of leaving an area that was overcrowded with abandoned building material. This made it increasingly hard to access the water table. Centuries of mud- brick habitation and rubble piled up and gradually lifted the cities of Khorasan— an effect that led to the development of a so- called tell (artificial mount). A fresh start, just half a kil-ometer away, may have led to much economic stimulus. Archaeological work in Merv suggests that the destructions by the ghuzz were far less dramatic than their presentation in our written sources. The city remained a strong ec-onomic center right into the second quarter of the seventh/ thirteenth cen-tury.124 Yāqūt leaves no doubt that during the three years after 613/ 1216, when he stayed in Merv and worked on his books, the city was a robust hub of schol-arly life and higher education. The movement of scholars from Khorasan to Syria and Anatolia need not be a symptom for troubles in the East but should rather be seen as an indicator of new economic opportunities for scholars fur-ther west. After the mid- sixth/ twelfth century, the Ayyubids in Syria and the Rum- Seljuqs in Anatolia imported the madrasa system and promoted Sunni theology. Khorasan, with its continuous production of well- trained scholars, was the most natural place to satisfy this new demand for madrasa teachers, experienced administrators, and high- profile scholars at the courts. We will see that philosophy was no exception. Post- classical philosophy developed in the East and moved with the generation of Fakhr al- Dīn’s students to Syria, Egypt, and Anatolia.

123 Note, however, a caveat that Morgan, The Mongols, 69– 71, makes with regard to the Mongol conquest later: the destruction in World War II focused on cities, and “no amount of bombing of European cities will make it impossible to grow corn on a European field.” In Transoxania and Khorasan, at least during the Mongol conquest of 616– 23/ 1219– 26, the destruction affected the highly labor- intensive irrigation systems (qanāt) and hence diminished agricultural output over a long period. 124 Paul, Lokale und imperiale Herrschaft, 82.

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The Second Half of the Sixth/ Twelfth Century: Khwārazmshāhs and Ghūrids

Again, our sources may be at fault when earlier Western historians described the period between the fall of Sanjar and the arrival of the Mongol armies as lawless and chaotic. Some went so far as to compare this period to the horrors of the Thirty Years War in Central Europe in the mid- seventeenth century.125 One reason for the false impression of political decline is that the Muslim scholars, who wrote the history of this period, were mostly trained in jurisprudence. They lamented the fall of a centralized empire and could not appreciate the emergence of less pow-erful authorities on a more local level. Following Sanjar’s downfall and death, the military leadership of his army first tried to reestablish control but failed. The Seljuq army disintegrated into local forces under the authority of generals and commanders (singl. amīr). Some of them managed to create small principalities in Nishapur or in Rayy, for instance, where order was soon restored.126 Balkh, Merv, and Sarakhs came under the control of the ghuzz and remained so until they be-came part of the Khwārazmshāh’s empire around 575/ 1180. Balkh was ruled by ghuzz until the Ghūrids took it as late as 595/ 1198– 99.127 But the ghuzz also lost their violent edge. They made attempts to repeat the feat of the Seljuqs more than a century earlier and wished to turn their military success into the formation of a state. This required the cooperation of urban elites who were coveted. The ghuzz’s commanders, however, failed to unite under one leader and eventually submitted to the more powerful forces of both the Khwārazmshāhs and the Ghūrids.128 During the twenty- five years after the uprising of the ghuzz in 548/ 1153, Khorasan was a patchwork of city- states, ruled by ghuzz commanders or the remnants of the Seljuq army.129 In the western part of the former Seljuq Empire, in western Iran and in Iraq, Seljuq princes and their atabegs continued to be present.

Unlike the Seljuqs, the Khwārazmshāhs of the Anūshtiginid dynasty kept close alliances with the Turks of the surrounding steppes— who were by this time mostly Qıpchaq— and may also have been more suited to integrate groups such as the ghuzz of 548/ 1153 into their state.130 Atsız, who was the first Khwārazmshāh

125 Kermani, Der Schrecken Gottes, 93; Lange, Justice, 244– 45. 126 Bosworth, “Political and Dynastic History,” 154– 56. Nishapur was ruled by al- Muʾayyad Ay Aba (reg. c. 554– 69/ c. 1159– 74) and Rayy by Īnānj Sunqur (reg. 548– 61/ 1153– 65). Both were mili-tary slaves of Sanjar. 127 Paul, “Negotiating Transitions,” 53. 128 Bosworth, “Political and Dynastic History,” 187– 89. 129 Peacock, Great Seljuk Empire, 107– 10; Paul, “Who Makes Use of Whom?,” 138, 143. On the regional city- states in Khorasan during the mid- sixth/ twelfth century, see Paul, “Negotiating Transitions,” 53– 54. 130 On the Anūshtiginid Khwārazmshāhs and their policies, see Barthold, Turkestan, 323– 446; Sevim and Bosworth, “The Seljuqs and the Khwarazm Shahs”; Paul, “Who Makes Use of Whom?”; C. E. Bosworth in EI2, 6:1065– 68; idem, “Political and Dynastic History,” 140– 46, 185– 202; Özaydin,

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acting as an independent ruler, died in 551/ 1156 and was succeeded by his son Il Arslan. Like his father, he was officially a vassal of the Gürkhān of the Qara Khitay, but he increasingly interfered in the affairs of Khorasan and Transoxania. After his death in 567/ 1172 in a battle against the Gürkhān his two sons fought over his succession. The older brother, Tekish, had been governor of Jand at the northern border of the Khwārazmian reign, where the Syr Darya flows into the Aral Sea. His good relations with the surrounding Qıpchaq tribes created an ad-vantage over his younger brother, Sulṭān Shāh (d. 589/ 1193), who had taken con-trol of the capital, Gurgānj. It was Tekish who won approval from the Gürkhān, and with his help he conquered the throne in Gurgānj at the end of 567/ 1172 and expelled Sulṭān Shāh. The younger brother took control of the southern part of the Khwārazmian territories in Khorasan. For the next decade, the realm of the Khwārazmshāh remained divided between a northern part, ruled by Tekish (reg. 567– 96/ 1172– 1200), and a southern one, ruled by his younger half- brother, Sulṭān Shāh. The latter’s centers were Merv and Sarakhs, which he took from the ghuzz who had controlled it since the Seljuq’s collapse. Sulṭān Shāh’s reign reached west from there toward Abiward, Ṭūs, and Nasa. In the years around 576/ 1181, Sulṭān Shāh and Tekish fought over Nishapur, the scholarly center of southern Khorasan, which remained, however, with Tekish.131 A few years after Tekish took full control over that city in 583/ 1187, he installed his first- born son and heir apparent, Nāṣir al- Dīn Malikshāh (d. 593/ 1196– 97), as governor over Khorasan, residing in Nishapur. He was an important patron of Fakhr al- Dīn al- Rāzī, who a decade earlier had flocked to the court of Tekish in Gurgānj and found patronage there.132 In the summer of 585/ 1189, Tekish held a crowning ceremony at the summer pastures near Radhkān in Ṭūs, where he was enthroned as supreme sultan (al- sulṭān al- aʿẓam), demonstrating that he saw himself as successor to the imperial Seljuqs.133 Meanwhile, Sulṭān Shāh’s rule was reduced to the area around Sarakhs, foreshadowing his ultimate demise a few years later.

The court of the Khwārazmshāhs included members who were well versed in philosophy. The historian al- Nasawī (d. 647/ 1249– 50), who was an adminis-trator at that court, reports that one of the high- ranking officials whom he served around 616/ 1220 knew by heart Avicenna’s Pointers and Reminders (al- Ishārāt wa- l- tanbīhāt) as well as Fakhr al- Dīn al- Rāzī’s Compendium on Philosophy and

“Khorezm Shah State,” Horst, Staatsverwaltung; Kafesoǧlu, Harezmşahlar Devleti Tarihi. On the Khwārazmshāhs’s relation to the surrounding nomads, see Paul, “Sanjar and Atsız,” 88.

131 On Sulṭān Shāh’s reign in Khorasan, see Paul, Lokale und imperiale Herrschaft, 178– 81, and idem, “Forces and Resources.” 132 On Nāṣir al- Dīn Malikshāh and the manẓūmah by Fakhr al- Dīn al- Rāzī dedicated to him (in-cluding its edition), see N. Pūrjavādī, Dō mujaddid, 551– 64. See also Paul, “Negotiating Transitions,” 55; al- Juwaynī, Tārīkh- i jahān- gushā, 2:25, 30, 34– 35, 39. 133 al- Juwaynī, Taʾrīkh- i jahān- gushā, 2:26– 27; Engl. trans. 298.

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Logic (al- Mulakhkhaṣ fī l- ḥikma wa- l- manṭiq).134 The court in Gurgānj also em-ployed the most high- ranking politician among the philosophical scholars of the sixth/ twelfth century. Rashīd al- Dīn al- Waṭwāṭ was born around 480/ 1088 in Balkh or Bukhara and educated at the Niẓāmiyya madrasa in Balkh. He served as chief secretary (ṣāḥib dīwān al- inshāʾ) first under Atsız and then under his suc-cessor, Il Arslan. When Tekish took power in 567/ 1172, al- Waṭwāṭ was an elder statesman, who at eighty was carried on a litter (miḥaffa).135 Al- Waṭwāṭ was also an important litterateur, in both Arabic and Persian, and he is best known for his Persian rendering with commentary of a famous collection of One Hundred Proverbs (Miʾat kalima) by ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib.136 Al- Waṭwāṭ was renowned for his elaborate style of prose, to the extent that two collections of his letters have been preserved through the centuries.137 They include communications on behalf of his masters as well as private letters in both Arabic and Persian. Al- Waṭwāṭ, whose nickname “the bat” or rather “the swallow” (Arab. waṭwāṭ) was triggered by his small size, baldness, and fast talking, left thousands of verses in Persian, collected in a Dīvān.138 Much of his considerable œuvre still needs to be explored. In philosophy, he was engaged in discussions about logic with the two Transoxanian philosophers al- Masʿūdī and Ibn Ghaylān. Earlier, he had invited the physician and philosopher Abū l- Barakāt al- Baghdādī to move from the caliph’s court in Baghdad to Khwārazm, an offer the latter did not take up.139 Rashīd al- Dīn al- Waṭwāṭ died at a very advanced age either in 573/ 1177– 78 or 578/ 1182– 83.140

The Khwārazmshāh’s main rivals, both in the arena of politics as well as for the patronage of the most coveted philosopher, were the Ghūrids of central

134 al- Nasawī, Sīrat al- Sulṭān Jalāl al- Dīn, 127.6. The official was Nuṣrat al- Dīn Ḥamza ibn Muḥammad (d. c. 619/ 1222), who became a temporary ruler of Nasā in Khorasan after the break-down of the Khwārazmian state; on him, see P. Jackson, art. “al- Nasawī,” in EI2, 7:973– 74; Barthold, Turkestan, 449. 135 al- Juwaynī, Taʾrīkh- i jahān- gushā, 2:18; Engl. trans. 290. 136 al- Waṭwāṭ, Maṭlūb kull ṭālib min kalām ʿ Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib. The book is also known by its Persian title, Tarjamah- yi ṣad kalima. On the Arabic Miʾat kalima, a collection ascribed to al- Jāḥiẓ of prov-erbs ascribed to ʿ Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib, see the introduction and English translation by Tahera Qutbuddin in ʿ Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib, A Treasury of Virtues, xxix– xxxi, 222– 33. 137 The two collections are described in Horst, Staatsverwaltung, 11. The printed edition of al- Waṭwāṭ’s letters, Majmūʿat rasāʾil, is fed from the two collections, which remain in manuscripts. 138 A waṭwāṭ can be any small and lively animal, such as a swallow, a bat, or even a frog. Two episodes in al- Juwaynī, Taʾrīkh- i jahān- gushā, 2:9– 10, suggest that his contemporaries understood the waṭwāṭ in Rashīd al- Dīn’s laqab to refer to a swallow. 139 al- Waṭwāṭ, Majmūʿat rasāʾil, 1:64– 65. 140 On al- Waṭwāṭ, see Yāqūt, Muʿjam al- udabāʾ, 6:2631– 36; al- Bayhaqī, Tatimmat Ṣiwān, 166– 68; F. C. de Bois, art. “Rashīd al- Dīn Waṭwāṭ,” in EI2, 8:444– 45; N. Chalisova, art “Waṭwāṭ, Rašīd- al- Dīn,” in the online edition of EIran; Horst, “Arabische Brief der Ḫōrazmšāhs”; Brockelmann, GAL, 1:275– 76; idem, GAL Suppl., 1:486; Storey and de Blois, Persian Literature, 3:85– 87, 176– 78, 5:551– 54; Browne, Literary History, 2:330– 33; Kafesoǧlu, Harezmşahlar Devleti Tarihi, 5– 7; Rosenfeld and Ihsanoǧlu, Mathematicians, Astronomers, 186 (no. 489).

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Afghanistan.141 Ghūr is a relatively small and, prior to the sixth/ twelfth cen-tury, insignificant region in the high valleys of the Hari Rudh, Farah Rudh, and Helmand rivers. The only town in that region, Fīrōzkōh (today’s Jam), developed as late as the early sixth/ twelfth century.142 People spoke an Iranian dialect, al-though other ethnicities such as Turks or Afghans (Pashtuns) may have also been present.143 Difficult to access and without much revenue, Ghūr had often been bypassed by the major powers. After the Ghaznawids in the early fifth/ eleventh century, Sanjar was the first to wage major campaigns against the Ghūrids. These may have been an early reaction to the region’s increase in military prowess. The rapid rise of Ghūr as an imperial power happened in the mid- sixth/ twelfth cen-tury under the leadership of the Shansabānid family. Under ʿ Alāʾ al- Dīn Ḥusayn (reg. 544– 56/ 1149– 61), the Ghūrids broke out of their impenetrable valleys and around 546/ 1151 attacked the city of Ghazna, plundering and burning it.144 Al- Bayhaqī reports that the fire also reached the royal library, where the only full copy of Avicenna’s famed book [The Philosophy of] The Easterners (al- Mashriqiyyūn) had been kept. Later historians tell the story that more than a cen-tury earlier, the book was among the loot that Ghaznawid troops had carried away from Isfahan when they conquered and sacked that city in 425/ 1034.145 Avicenna was then a vizier to ʿ Alāʾ al- Dawla (d. 433/ 1041– 42), the Kākūyid ruler of Isfahan, and he fled the city with him, leaving parts of his library behind.146 The fate of Avicenna’s The Easterners occupied much attention among scholars of the sixth/ twelfth century. Al- Bayhaqī wrote about ten to fifteen years after the sack of Ghazna around 560/ 1165, “As for the Eastern Philosophy (al- Ḥikma al- mashriqiyya) in its entirety and the Throne Philosophy (al- Ḥikma al- ʿarshiyya), the Imām Ismāʿīl al- Bākharzī claims they were in the libraries of Sultan Masʿūd ibn Maḥmūd [reg. 421– 32/ 1031– 40] at Ghazna until these libraries were put to fire by al- Ḥusayn, King of Ghūr, and the Ghūrids and ghuzz in some month of the year 546 [1151– 52].”147 The sack of Ghazna in 546/ 1151– 52 does not yet mark the end of the Ghaznawid dynasty that more than a century earlier had opened up India for Islam. For now the Ghūrids were able to attack Ghazna but not yet rule it. It would take almost another forty years until the Ghūrids

141 On the history of the Ghūrids, see Bosworth, “Political and Dynastic History,” 159– 66, 197– 98; Jackson, “The Fall of the Ghurid Dynasty”; Nizami, “The Ghurids”; Barthold, Turkestan, 338– 53, 372– 74. 142 Nizami, “The Ghurids,” 177. 143 Ibid.; Bosworth, “Political and Dynastic History,” 161. 144 The sources vary regarding the exact date; see Bosworth, “The Ghurids in Khurasan,” 211. 145 Ibn al- Athīr, al- Kāmil, 8:211– 12; al- Ḥusaynī, Zubdat al- tawārīkh, 35; Engl. trans. 12. Both sources are also translated in Gutas, Avicenna and Aristotelian Tradition, 122– 23. 146 Gutas, Avicenna and Aristotelian Tradition, 133– 37. 147 al- Bayhaqī, Tatimmat Ṣiwān, 56.4– 7. Engl. trans. in Gutas, Avicenna and Aristotelian Tradition, 122. The original text has “malik al- Jibāl” instead of “malik al- Ghūr,” which is likely a copying mistake.

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replaced the Ghaznawids and the ghuzz both in Afghanistan and in Punjab. The Ghūrid rise was another effect of the Seljuq defeat at Qaṭwān in 546/ 1151. A year after that ʿAlāʾ al- Dīn Ḥusayn stopped payment of his tribute to Sanjar but failed in his attempts to capture the rich city of Herat in the lower valley of the Hari Rudh, right at the entrance to the land of Ghūr. ʿAlāʾ al- Dīn Ḥusayn was also the first Ghūrid ruler who adopted the title of grand sultan (al- sultān al- muʿaẓẓam), thus indicating his aspiration to succeed Sanjar and the Seljuqs. In 540/ 1145, ʿAlāʾ al- Dīn Ḥusayn had already installed his brother as a co- ruler in the northern part of his reign. After his death in 556/ 1161, the Shansabānid dynasty split into two and ultimately three branches. The main branch was al-ways in charge of Fīrōzkōh and the upper Hari Rudh Valley. The second branch ruled from Bamyan, a city today known for the large Buddha statues that were destroyed there in 2000. Despite being at an altitude of 2,500 meters (7,500 feet) and nested between two high mountain ranges, Bamyan lay on the main road that crossed the Hindukush range and was more accessible than Ghūr. After 569/ 1173, when they could establish firm control over Ghazna, the family set up a third branch there.

In the generation after ʿAlāʾ al- Dīn Ḥusayn, which was also the genera-tion under which the Ghūrid Empire reached its greatest expansion, the three branches were represented by Ghiyāth al- Dīn Muḥammad (d. 599/ 1203) in Fīrōzkōh, by his younger brother Muʿizz al- Dīn Muḥammad (d. 602/ 1206) in Ghazna, and by Bahāʾ al- Dīn Sām (d. 602/ 1206), a cousin, in Bamyan. They led the Ghūrid Empire in a family confederation much as the Seljuqs had done be-fore, with the brothers Ghiyāth al- Dīn and Muʿizz al- Dīn at its core. All three acted as patrons of philosophy.

As inheritors of the Ghaznawid Empire, the Ghūrids’ territorial ambitions took two directions: India and Khorasan. In India they campaigned in the Punjab and the Ganges Valley, capturing Lahore in 582/ 1186– 87 and Delhi in 589/ 1193. The Ghūrid conquest of northern India would become the nu-cleus of independent Muslim states on the subcontinent, led by former gen-erals of the Ghūrid and their “slave soldiers” (singl. mamlūk) of Turkish origin. In Khorasan, their plans clashed with those of the Khwārazmshāhs. The last decades of the sixth/ twelfth century saw a continuous state of war between these two empires over the possession of certain parts of Khorasan. Given that the high valleys of Ghūr open into the rich plains of eastern Khorasan with Herat at its center, this city together with Merv was the focus of Ghūrid ac-tivity in Khorasan right from the beginning. The Ghūrids briefly held Herat in 545/ 1150– 51 and again in 559/ 1174 but both times lost it again to ghuzz warlords.148 Only after he had consolidated Ghūrid power in the high lands

148 Bosworth, “The Ghurids in Khurasan,” 213.

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of Afghanistan could Ghiyāth al- Dīn take Herat in 571/ 1175– 76. Shortly af-terward the Ghūrids secured the province of Sijistān in the south of Herat. During the decade that followed, Khorasan was split between a Ghūrid east with Herat at its center and a western part with Nishapur and Merv, domi-nated by the Khwārazmshāhs. The Ghūrids tried to benefit from dynastic disputes between the two brothers Tekish and Sulṭān Shāh, and at least tem-porarily supported the latter in his revolt against the Khwārazmian center in Gurgānj. In 586/ 1190, however, Sulṭān Shāh, who managed to also raise sup-port from the Qara Khitay, clashed with the Ghūrids in battle and was reduced to a small area around Saraskhs.149 This led to a direct confrontation between the Ghūrids and the Khwārazmshāh Tekish. Both vied for support of the Qara Khitay, whose changing allegiance tipped the scale between the two powers. First, the Ghūrids were successful, and soon after the death of Tekish, they took all of Khorasan in the summer of 597/ 1201. The Khwārazmians consolidated, however, and immediately retook Nishapur as well as southern Khorasan. They gained Merv a few years later, in 599/ 1203.150 The next years proved de-cisive: in the fall of 601/ 1204, the Qara Khitay turned against the Ghūrids and routed their forces in a battle at Andkhūd that brought memories of Qaṭwān. The Khwārazmshāh seized the moment in 605/ 1208 to not only conquer all of Khorasan but also defeat the Ghūrids in their homeland. In 612/ 1215, the Khwārazmshāh took Ghazna and extinguished Ghūrid rule outside of India. The “Ghūrid interlude,” says Bosworth, had finally ended.151

The Khwārazmshāh who reaped the fruits of the Ghūrid demise was ʿAlāʾ al- Dīn Muḥammad (reg. 596– 617/ 1200– 1220), the son of Tekish, who as a young man had been educated in philosophy by Fakhr al- Dīn al- Rāzī. He wrote a di-dactic Persian poem (manẓūmah) on three branches of philosophy for ʿAlāʾ al- Dīn’s older brother Nāṣir al- Dīn Malikshāh. The latter had been appointed governor of Nishapur in 583/ 1187 but died ten years later, before he could take power from his father. When ʿAlāʾ al- Dīn entered Herat in 605/ 1208, he hon-ored his former teacher Fakhr al- Dīn greatly and seemed to have forgiven the philosopher’s defection from his father’s court (or that of his elder brother in Nishapur) to the Ghūrids. ʿAlāʾ al- Dīn Muḥammad was now the most powerful ruler in the Islamic East, controlling territories that ranged from Anatolia and Iraq to the border of India.

Before we leave the Ghūrids, we need to say a few words about their reli-gious policy. The remote region of Ghūr converted late to Islam, probably only

149 Paul, “Forces and Resources,” 610– 13. 150 On the Ghūrids and Khwārazmshāh’s struggle over Khorasan at the end of the sixth/ twelfth century, see Paul, “Negotiating Transitions.” 151 Bosworth, “Political and Dynastic History,” 166.

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a century before the events discussed here, and was from the beginning under a strong influence by the Karrāmiyya.152 The Karrāmiyya was a group that goes back to the activities of Ibn Karrām (d. 255/ 869) of Sijistān, who preached in Khorasan and in Ghūr. It combined positions from the Ḥanafite school of law with asceticism (zuhd) and a literalist approach toward the Qurʾan. The Karrāmites were well adapted to a region where Islam was practiced in many different ways by people who often had no command of Arabic. Unlike the Ashʿarites, who required an understanding of theological issues, pronouncing the shahāda was enough for the Karrāmites to count as a full Muslim.153 They also allowed the use of Persian in Islamic ritual practices.154 The Karrāmites were one of the most important religious groups in Khorasan until the end of the fifth/ eleventh century. Persecution by other Muslim groups, most impor-tantly the Ashʿarites and Shāfiʿites, caused their demise, and they are today no longer present.155 Few Karrāmite sources have come down to us that would allow a thorough study of the group’s theology. In the eyes of their enemies, Karrāmite theology was simplistic and anthropomorphist.156 The historian al- Jūzjānī (d. c. 664/ 1265) informs us that the brothers Ghiyāth al- Dīn and Muʿizz al- Dīn grew up as Karrāmites and at the outset of their careers followed the tenets of that group. At one point, however, Ghiyāth changed his madhhab and became a Shāfiʿite, creating serious tensions among the different branches of the Ghūrid dynasty.157

Bosworth wrote in 1968 that the Ghūrid leaders abandoned their sup-port of the Karrāmiyya and started adhering to the Shāfiʿite school, “with its greater prestige and intellectual reputation.”158 The attraction to Ashʿarism and Shāfiʿism went hand in hand with a desire to follow the Abbasid caliph al- Nāṣir in Baghdad, who promoted a traditionalist understanding of Islam and rejected Karrāmism— a sect that was largely unknown in Baghdad. The Khwārazmshāhs, on the other hand, were opposed, or at least paid little heed, to Abbasid authority. As their rivals, the Ghūrids were keen to continue the religious policy of the early Ghaznawids and they supported the Abbasid caliph.

152 Bosworth, “Early Islamic History of Ghūr.” 153 Zadeh, The Vernacular Qurʾan, 465; Griffel, Apostasie und Toleranz, 205– 15. 154 Zadeh, The Vernacular Qurʾan, 476– 77. 155 The year 489/ 1096, for instance, saw a violent riot of Shāfiʿites and Ḥanafites who attacked Karrāmite madrasas in Nishapur and Bayhaq, killing many of the students. Ibn al- Athīr, al- Kāmil, 10:171; Bosworth, “Rise of the Karāmiyyah in Khurasan,” 13; Griffel, Apostasie und Toleranz, 253– 54. 156 On Karrāmite theology, see Zadeh, The Vernacular Qur’an, 464– 503; Bosworth, The Ghaznavids, 185– 89; idem, art. “Karrāmiyya,” in EI2, 4:667– 9; idem, “Rise of the Karāmiyyah in Khurasan”; Massignon, Essay on the Origins, 174– 83; Rudolph, Al- Māturīdī, index; van Ess, Ungenützte Texte zur Karrāmīya; Zysow, “Two Unrecognized Karrāmī Texts.” 157 On the Ghūrid religious policy, see below pp. 287–90. 158 Bosworth, “Political and Dynastic History,” 162.

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Other Patrons: Qarakhanids, the Caliphal Court in Baghdad, and the Ayyubids in Syria

The goal of Chinggis Khan’s army in 616/ 1219, when it arrived at the northern border of the Islamic world, was the defeat and the conquest of the realm of the Khwārazmshāh. Their scorched- earth— or rather scorched- cities— strategy helped them achieve this far- fetched objective but left many places in Khorasan, Transoxania, and Khwārazm devastated and their inhabitants either dead or enslaved. The Mongol conquest of their homeland also dislodged the Khwārazmian army, and the unfolding brutality made it all but impossible to be dissolved and for its members to return to their civilian life. Consisting of a good part of Qıpchaq Turks and other pastoralists, the Khwārazmian army, known as the Khwārazmiyya, fought for several decades after its defeat by the Mongols in faraway places, such as western Iran, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. Even after the last shāh’s death in 628/ 1231 in a village in eastern Anatolia it continued to roam in northern Syria and the Jazira. After a resounding victory against the troops of the Ayyubid principality of Aleppo in 638/ 1240, the Khwārazmiyya roamed the countryside around the city. Soon its reputation became just as bad as that of the Mongols. The historian Ibn Wāṣil writes that “they took sheep, other animals, household goods as well as women and children, everything and everybody who could not escape. They committed atrocities with the womenfolk of the Muslims the likes not even the Mongols nor other infidels have committed.”159 In the summer of 642/ 1244, the Khwārazmiyya conquered Jerusalem from the Crusaders— the city’s second and final Muslim takeover from the Franks— and during autumn of that year destroyed a combined army of Crusader knights and Syrian Ayyubids at the Battle of Farbayā/ La Forbie.160 The Khwārazmiyya tipped the scales in a decades- long back- and- forth war of attrition between Muslim and European armies that took place since the Third Crusade began in 585/ 1189. Their intervention led to the collapse of Christian military power in Outremer. The Franks would never again be able to undertake offensive actions in Syria and Palestine. The Khwārazmiyya, however, did not benefit from this; after it had un-successfully attacked Damascus in the spring of 644/ 1246, it was annihilated by Ayyubid forces from Aleppo and Homs.161 Some remnants moved to Iraq and became part of the Mongol army that fought in the Battle of ʿAyn Jālūt 658/ 1260

159 Ibn Wāṣil, Mufarrij al- kurūb, 5:285.7– 9. 160 Ibid., 5:336– 39; Humphreys, From Saladin to the Mongols, 220– 21, 233– 34, 274– 76; May, Mongol Conquest, 137– 38. For the Arabic place name— often misidentified as Ḥarbiyya or Khirbiyya— see Yāqūt, Muʿjam al- buldān, 3:867. The place was in the vicinity of Gaza. 161 Ibn Wāṣil, Mufarrij al- kurūb, 5:358– 59; Humphreys, From Saladin to the Mongols, 286– 87; May, Mongol Conquest, 138.

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in Palestine.162 When that army lost against the Mamlūks of Egypt the Mongol- led expansion into the Muslim world was finally halted.

The Mongol conquest of eastern Iran and its aftermath are relevant insofar as they further promoted the movement of philosophical scholars from Khorasan and its surrounding provinces— where post- classical Islamic philosophy was formed— to Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Anatolia. The generation of students of Fakhr al- Dīn al- Rāzī was most important in this process. Fakhr al- Dīn had taught at a madrasa that the Ghūrid Ghiyāth al- Dīn Muḥammad had built for him in Herat. Shortly before his death in 606/ 1210, the city had fallen to the Khwārazmshāh ʿAlāʾ al- Dīn Muḥammad. The reunion with his former student and the great honor he received only strengthened Fakhr al- Dīn’s prestige. Whereas some of his students stayed in the Muslim East, most of them made their way to Iraq and Syria and found employment and support there.

Already Fakhr al- Dīn himself had received an important commission from the Ayyubid ruler of Damascus al- Malik al- ʿĀdil (reg. 592– 615/ 1196– 218), Saladin’s brother and successor. In 596/ 1199– 1200, al- Malik al- ʿĀdil sent Fakhr al- Dīn a thousand dinars for delivering a book on the figurative interpretation of the Qurʾan (Taʾsīs al- taqdīs) to Damascus and dedicating it to him. More than a hun-dred years later, the work would become a successful textbook of madrasa edu-cation, attracting much attention from the Damascene theologian Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/ 1328).163 The Ayyubids in Syria tried to avoid being left behind by the intellectual developments in Khorasan that both the Khwārazmshāhs and the Ghūrids promoted. They welcomed the students of Fakhr al- Dīn and gave them prominent positions. The historian Barhebraeus (d. 685/ 1286), who as a Jacobite Christian looked at these events from a certain distance, wrote that around 625/ 1228 many students of Fakhr al- Dīn had come to Syria and Egypt and become successful teachers and authors of books.164

If we follow the oftentimes sensationalist sources, a massacre had taken place at Fakhr al- Dīn al- Rāzī’s house in Herat when the city was sacked in 618/ 1221.165 Quṭb al- Dīn al- Miṣrī, Fakhr al- Dīn’s most prominent student, died during the Mongol conquest of Nishapur earlier that year. Those who had gone west, how-ever, thrived. Shams al- Dīn al- Khusrawshāhī (d. 652/ 1254) became al- Rāzī’s most successful student in Syria and Egypt. He instructed al- Malik al- Nāṣir Dawūd (d. 646/ 1248), the son of al- Malik al- ʿĀdil and later a ruler of Damascus

162 Jackson, The Mongols, 84. 163 Ibn Taymiyya wrote two voluminous refutations of that book: Bayān talbīs al- Jahmiyya and Darʾ taʾāruḍ al- ʿaql wa- l- naql. 164 Barhebraeus, Taʾrīkh mukhtaṣar al- duwal, 445. The passage is analyzed in Endress, “Reading Avicenna in the Madrasa,” 403– 8. 165 Griffel, “On Fakhr al- Dīn al- Rāzī’s Life,” 330– 31. On this event and al- Rāzī’s students, see also below p. 300.

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and of Kerak, “in the rational sciences,” which in this case almost certainly in-cluded philosophy.166 Another student, Tāj al- Dīn al- Urmawī (d. 655/ 1257– 58) went to Konya, the intellectual center of Anatolia, and benefited from the pa-tronage of the local Rūm- Seljuqs.167 The early centers of post- classical Islamic philosophy in Khorasan, Khwārazm, and Transoxania were replaced by new ones in Syria, Egypt, and Anatolia.

Two other important patrons of philosophers must be mentioned: the caliphal court in Baghdad and the Qarakhanids in Transoxania. The latter do not appear prominently in our sources, yet they were supporters of both Sharaf al- Dīn al- Masʿūdī as well as Ibn Ghaylān al- Balkhī. The Qarakhanids were a local dynasty of Turks who had moved to Transoxania in the late fourth/ tenth century. They replaced the Sāmānids, under whom Avicenna, for instance, had grown up and whose library he exploited in his youth.168

The Qarakhanids, also known as Ilek- Khāns, were the first dynasty of Turk pastoralists who would maintain their tribal structure even after they took con-trol of highly urbanized territories.169 The Qarakhanids had two centers of power, one in the East that covered parts of Shīnjāng (Xinjiang), Yeti- Su (Semiryechye), and the Ferghana Valley, and one in the West, largely identical with Transoxania. The eastern branch had always been more important, even though Arabic and Persian sources focus on the western branch in Transoxania.170 It remained in-dependent until the late fifth/ eleventh century, when the Seljuqs projected their power into that region and made the western branch their vassals.171 The Seljuqs maintained close ties with the Qarakhanids. They married their princesses and created long- lasting family connections of dynastic importance.172 All through the sixth/ twelfth century, the Qarakhanids managed to survive as a local dynasty ruling in Samarkand and Bukhara, first under the Seljuqs and then, after the Battle of Qaṭwān, under the Qara Khitay. Unlike the latter, they were Muslims, and like many Turkish dynasties of the time, they adopted Iranian- Islamic

166 On al- Khusrawshāhī, see Endress, “Reading Avicenna in the Madrasa,” 405– 6; Ibn Abī Usaibiʿa, ʿUyūn al- anbāʾ, 2:173– 74; Pouzet, Damas au VIIe/ XIIe siècle, 38, 202, 444; Chamberlain, Knowledge and Social Practice, 83n75, 84n76; Griffel, “On Fakhr al- Dīn al- Rāzī’s Life,” 339. 167 On him, see Ibn Abī Usaybiʿa, ʿ Uyūn al- anbāʾ, 2:30; al- Ṣafadī, al- Wāfī, 2:353. 168 On the early history of the Qarakhanids see Oda, “Which Is the Origin of the Karakhanids?” On Ibn Sīnā’s youth under the Sāmānids, see Lüling, “Ein anderer Avicenna.” 169 Paul, “The Karakhanids,” 71. Both names, Qarakhanid and Ilek- Khān, are foreign, coined by Western and by Arabic historians. The dynasty referred to itself as “Āl- i Afrāsiyāb” and “al- Khāqānī” (71). 170 Paul, “The Karakhanids,” 73. 171 Ibid. 172 Malikshāh’s influential wife, Terken Khātūn (d. 487/ 1094), was a Qarakhanid princess (Glassen, Der mittlere Weg, 144). On her attempt to push her son to power and her conflict with al- Ghazālī after Malikshāh’s death, see Griffel, Al- Ghazālī’s Philosophical Theology, 36– 37; Laoust, La politique de Ġazālī, 56– 64, 107– 14. After Sanjar’s capture 548/ 1153, his generals declared the Qarakhanid Maḥmūd ibn Muḥammad Khān (d. 559/ 1164), known as pahlavān al- sharq, his successor as sultan of the Eastern Seljuq Empire.

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Figure 4 Bukhara, minaret of the Kalān Mosque, 45 meters (149 feet) tall and erected around 520/ 1127 under the Qarakhanid ruler Muḥammad Arslan Khān (reg. 495– 523/ 1102– 29). Photograph by F. Griffel.

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culture. The Qarakhanids were also the first Muslim dynasty to promote works written in the Turkish language. Maḥmūd al- Kāshgharī, who around 467/ 1075 wrote the earliest book on Turkish languages and culture, was a member of the Qarakhanid ruling circles.173 In the second half of the sixth/ twelfth century, there was an intensification of intellectual activity and the Qarakhanid court be-came a center of patronage.174 Al- ʿAwfī (d. c. 630/ 1232), for instance, the author of the very first anthology of Persian poetry, began his career at the Qarakhanid court at Samarkand. He had been introduced by his uncle, a renowned physi-cian and also a philosopher at the court.175 The second half of the sixth/ twelfth century was also the period when the Qarakhanids supported the philosophers al- Masʿūdī and Ibn Ghaylān. During the latter decades of the century, their reign functioned as a buffer zone between the rising Khwārazmshāhs in the West and the Qara Khitay in the East, changing sides several times between these parties. The Qarakhanids’ run in history ended in 607/ 1210 when the Khwārazmshāh

Figure 5 Detail of the minaret of the Kalān Mosque in Bukhara. Photograph by F. Griffel.

173 al- Kāshgharī, Dīwān lughāt al- turk. Al- Kāshgharī wrote the book in Baghdad and dedicated it to caliph al- Muqtadī (reg. 467– 87/ 1075– 94). On al- Kāshgharī and his connection to the Qarakhanid ruling family, see the article by G. Hazai in EI2, 6:699– 701. 174 Karev, “From Tents to City,” 139– 43. 175 Al- Awfī, Lubāb al- albāb, 45.8, refers to his maternal uncle as malik al- aṭibbā ṣadr al- ḥukamā. See also J. Matīnī, art. “ʿAwfī, Sadīd al- Dīn,” in EIran, 3:117– 18.

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executed the last of their line in Samarkand.176 Soon after that Transoxania be-came part of the Mongol Empire.

This fate would eventually also befall the Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad, albeit a generation after Khorasan and Transoxania. In 656/ 1258, the Mongol- led armies of Hülegü Khan (d. 663/ 1265) sacked Baghdad, murdered the caliph al- Mustaʿṣim (reg. 640– 56/ 1242– 58), and abolished the Abbasid caliphate. Before this dramatic end, however, the caliphate had enjoyed more than a century of steadily increasing political and military influence that also included patronage of scholars and philosophers.

One of the lowest points of caliphal power and standing came in 485/ 1092, when the Grand Seljuq Sultan Malikshāh, in a dispute with Caliph al- Muqtadī (reg. 467– 87/ 1075– 94), decided to expel him from Baghdad and replace him with a scion who combined the bloodline of the Abbasids with that of the Seljuqs. Only Malikshāh’s unexpected death that year prevented this from happening.177 The following decades saw a prolonged power struggle between Malikshāh’s sons and grandsons that diminished the might and prestige of the Seljuq sultanate. In the meantime, the caliphate benefited from stability in reign— in more than seventy five years after 487/ 1094 there were only four caliphs— and was able to raise its profile in the region. In 517/ 1123, Caliph al- Mustarshid (reg. 512– 29/ 1118– 35) mobilized the masses and played an active role in Baghdad’s defense against Arab tribes— a first since the Būyids had stripped the caliphate of mil-itary power almost two hundred years earlier. The caliph now began to recruit Turkish slave troops and install spies and intelligence agents in the land. In the following years, he would expand his tax portfolio and with it his ability to main-tain a standing army. Within a few years the caliph dared an open confronta-tion with the Seljuqs, and after several inconclusive fights in Iraq he marched in 529/ 1135 against Sultan Masʿūd ibn Muḥammad Tapar, one of the grandsons of Malikshāh. When he lost at the Battle of Day Marg outside Hamadan, he and his officials were captured and imprisoned, and the caliph subsequently murdered. In his entourage was the Jewish court physician and philosopher Abū l- Barakāt al- Baghdādī. There are various conflicting reports of the latter’s conversion to Islam; one of them says that he became a Muslim right after the Battle of Day Marg. Being captured together with his patron the Abbasid caliph, the Jewish doctor, it is assumed, could avoid execution only by embracing the religion of the victors.178 The defeat of Day Marg, however, was only a temporary setback

176 On the history of the Qarakhanids, see Bosworth, “Political and Dynastic History,” 148– 96; idem in EI2, 3:1113– 17 (“Ilek- Khāns”); Davidovich, “The Karakhanids”; Karev, “From Tents to City”; Barthold, Turkestan, index. 177 Hillenbrand, “1092,” 287; Glassen, Der mittlere Weg, 139– 43; Safi, Politics of Knowledge, 75– 76. 178 See below p. 207.

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for the caliphate’s resurgence. When Masʿūd died in 547/ 1152, Caliph al- Muqtafī (reg. 530– 55/ 1136– 60) seized the opportunity of a power vacuum at the Seljuq sultanate and expelled their military governor (shiḥna) and his police force from Baghdad.179 Soon after he seized the cities of al- Ḥilla and al- Wāsiṭ and extended caliphal power over almost all of Iraq south of Tikrit. Full independence was gained in 552/ 1157 when a Seljuq siege of Baghdad failed.180 This second caliphal state would last almost exactly a hundred years until 646/ 1258.

The increase in power for the caliphate did not always translate into pow-erful caliphs. The idea that caliphs delegated their power to other officials still held sway over the politicians of the sixth/ twelfth century and created influen-tial viziers and generals in the caliphal army. In the sixth/ twelfth century, the position of the majordomo (ustādh al- dār) or chamberlain, i.e., the head of the caliphal household who acted as a liaison between caliph and vizier, became par-ticularly powerful. Often, influential offices were held by successive members of one family, creating a hold on certain positions that could last for decades. The best example is the successive appointment of members of Niẓām al- Mulk’s family to the vizierate of almost all Seljuq rulers during the early sixth/ twelfth century.181 Important caliphal officials during the sixth/ twelfth century were Ibn Hubayra (d. 560/ 1165), a conservative Ḥanbalite who served for sixteen con-secutive years as vizier under al- Muqtafī and his successor al- Mustanjid (reg. 555– 66/ 1160– 70), and his contemporary, the majordomo ʿAḍud al- Dīn Ibn al- Muẓaffar (d. 573/ 1178).182 The latter was so powerful that he could remove the caliph when his policy went too much against his interests. In 566/ 1170, ʿAḍud al- Dīn colluded with Qaymaz (d. 570/ 1175), the most powerful general in the caliph’s Turkish slave army, and together they locked the ailing al- Mustanjid in his bath and waited until he had died either of his illness or of hunger. The plot had its desired effects, and the new caliph al- Mustaḍīʾ (reg. 566– 75/ 1170– 80) was installed only after he promised to grant Qaymaz even more power and also appoint ʿAḍud al- Dīn to the higher office of vizier. The sheer fact that we know about this through our sources means that ʿAḍud al- Dīn and Qaymaz could not have been very secretive about their murder.183

179 Ibn al- Athīr, al- Kāmil, 11:105– 6. 180 Ibn al- Jawzī, al- Muntaẓam, 10:168– 75; Tor, “Political Revival of the Abbasid Caliphate,” 311– 13. 181 Klausner, The Seljuq Vesirate, 44, 106– 7, 126n45; C. E. Bosworth, art. “Niẓāmiyya,” in EI2, 8:81– 82; al- Bayhaqī, Taʾrīkh- i Bayhaq, 76– 78. 182 On Ibn Hubayra, see Mason, Two Statesmen, 13– 66; G. Makdisi’s article on him in EI2, 3:802– 3; Leder, Ibn al- Ǧauzī und seine Kompilation, 31– 34. On ʿAḍud al- Dīn Ibn al- Muẓaffar, who is also known as Ibn al- Raʾīs, see W. Ahlwardt’s art. in EI2, 1:212; Ibn al- Athīr, al- Kāmil, 11:266. On al- Muqtafī’s reign, see Tor, “Political Revival of the Abbasid Caliphate.” 183 Ibn al- Athīr, al- Kāmil, 11:236, reports this and adds, “This is what I heard from more than one well- informed source.” Ibn al- Jawzī, al- Muntaẓam, 10:232– 33, who writes before Ibn al- Athīr, does not know about this murder plot.

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With the ascension of al- Nāṣir (reg. 575– 622/ 1180– 225) began a long period of continuity that would mark the highest point of caliphal power and reputa-tion since the days of Hārūn al- Rashīd and al- Maʾmūn in the early third/ ninth century. The Seljuq dynasty was reduced to a number of small principalities in western Iran. Even if they had combined their forces, they would not have matched the military power of the caliph. The religious policy of all caliphs during the sixth/ twelfth century paired a steady strengthening of tradition-alist Sunni Islam with increased toleration toward— and cooperation with— the Twelver Shiite majority in Baghdad and southern Iraq. One of the preferred means of caliphal policy was the futuwwa, fellowships of men acting as chivalric orders or fraternities. Al- Nāṣir brought them under his control and used them to strengthen his relations to other rulers, local dignitaries, and the populace. The futuwwas of the sixth/ twelfth century often resembled Sufi brotherhoods (singl. ṭarīqa). They would allow the caliph to pursue a conciliatory religious policy to-ward Sufism and Shiism and at the same time bind ordinary residents of Baghdad as well as the powerful to his office and his political ambitions.184

The conservative Sunni politics of al- Nāṣir resulted in a certain ambiguity to-ward the philosophical sciences. There were at his court public disputations on a variety of subjects, and although discussions on ḥadīth and fiqh predominated, there were also some on the “ancient sciences,” which included philosophy.185 An important councilor and a personal friend of al- Nāṣir was Abū Ḥafṣ ʿUmar al- Suhrawardī (d. 632/ 1234), not the famous philosopher by that name but the author of numerous works on Sufism and a leading figure of the Sufi move-ment.186 He also wrote a strongly worded polemic against the influence of the Greek sciences, Taking Advice from Our Imams in Uncovering the Greek Infamies (Rashf al- nasāʾiḥ al- īmāniyya wa- kashf al- fadāʾiḥ al- yūnāniyya).187 In the past he has therefore been regarded as an enemy of philosophy.188 The book is, on closer inspection, a reworking of al- Ghazālī’s Tahāfut al- falāsifa— or at least a polemic heavily influenced by that work— and like it, al- Suhrawardī’s book should not be understood as a rejection of all philosophy but rather as an appeal for a kind of thinking that is different from that of the falāsifa. Like al- Ghazālī, he may have been opposed to falsafa but not necessarily to

184 Hartmann, an- Nāṣir li- Dīn Allāh, 92– 108. On al- Nāṣir, see also A. Hartmann, art. “al- Nāṣir li- Dīn Allāh” in EI2, 7:996– 1003; Mason, Two Statesmen, 69– 140. 185 Hartmann, an- Nāṣir li- Dīn Allāh, 202. 186 On his life, see Ohlander, Sufism in an Age of Transition, 57– 136; Hartmann, an- Nāṣir li- Dīn Allāh, 233– 54. 187 The book is described with its table of contents in Ahlwardt, Handschriften- Verzeichnisse der Königlichen Bibliothek zu Berlin, 2:444 (# 2078). 188 Ritter, “Hat die religiöse Orthodoxie,” 137– 40; Hartmann, an- Nāṣir li- Dīn Allāh, 250– 52, and Hartmann’s comments in her art. “al- Suhrawardī” in EI2, 11:781; Shihadeh, “Religious Readings of Philosophy,” 421.

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philosophy.189 One of al- Suhrawardī’s letters to Fakhr al- Dīn al- Rāzī is pre-served, showing that he had an interest in his thought.190 In his rejection of falsafa, however, Abū Ḥafṣ did not shy away from savagery. He bragged, for in-stance, that with the authorization of the caliph, he had washed out ten volumes of Avicenna’s Fulfillment (al- Shifāʾ).191

There were several cases under the caliphate of al- Nāṣir where scholars were accused of studying the books of the falāsifa and following their teachings. These will be discussed in the third chapter of this first part. Most happened at the end of the sixth/ twelfth century, when the religious policy of the caliphate had taken a turn toward the conservative. Al- Nāṣir’s personal friendship with the Ḥanbalite Abū Ḥafṣ al- Suhrawardī is only one example of the influence of moderate Ḥanbalism at his court.192 The caliph himself was an active member of the community of ḥadīth scholars in Baghdad as well as a highly regarded trans-mitter of ḥadīth material. We should not assume, however, that earlier holders of the office had similar inclinations. With the exception of al- Nāṣir, there are no reliable studies of the religious policy of the Abbasid caliphs during the sixth/ twelfth century.193 We have, however, quite a number of contributions that ana-lyze the situation in the fifth/ eleventh century.194 That began with a conservative Ḥanbalite caliph— the long- reigning al- Qāʾdir (reg. 381– 422/ 991– 1031)— who used traditionalist sentiments among Baghdad’s Sunni populace to his benefit. Due to a conscious policy by the Seljuq state and its vizier Niẓām al- Mulk, how-ever, Ḥanbalism lost influence in Baghdad during the second half of the fifth/ eleventh century while Shāfiʿism and Ashʿarism grew. The Niẓāmiyya madrasa was a powerful institution, and during the last two decades of the century, its leaders— among them al- Ghazālī— had a significant influence on the caliphal court. We therefore tend to think of the caliphs of the first half of the sixth/ twelfth century as Shāfiʿite- minded rationalists who were surrounded by an en-tourage of courtiers and advisers who were educated at schools like the Baghdad Niẓāmiyya.

189 Al- Suhrawardī, Rashf al- nasāʾiḥ, 65, begins his book after the basmala: “al- ḥamdu li- Llāh al- munqidh min al- ḍalāl,” thus acknowledging al- Ghazālī’s influence. In the introduction to her edition of the book (24– 27), ʿ Āʾisha Y. al- Manāʿī discusses al- Ghazālī’s influence on Rashf al- nasāʾiḥ. 190 The letter is edited in N. Pūrjavādī, Dō mujaddid, 515– 7. On this correspondence, see Hartmann, an- Nāṣir li- Dīn Allāh, 237– 38; Ritter, “Philologika IX (Die vier Suhrawardī),” 38. 191 al- Suhrawardī, Rashf al- nasāʾiḥ, 86; Hartmann, an- Nāṣir li- Dīn Allāh, 255. 192 On Abū Ḥafṣ al- Suhrawardī and his influence, see Hartmann, an- Nāṣir li- Dīn Allāh, 233– 39; eadem, art. “al- Suhrawardī,” in EI2, 11:778– 82; R. Gramlich’s introduction in his German translation of al- Suhrawardī’s ʿ Awārif al- maʿārif (Die Gaben der Erkenntnisse). 193 The subject is touched upon, however, in Swartz, Ibn al- Jawzī’s Kitāb al- Qiṣṣāṣ, 25– 36; Leder, Ibn al- Ǧauzī und seine Kompilation, 15– 42; Mason, Two Statesmen, 13– 66. All three shed light on two periods when the caliphate pursued a Sunni traditionalist religious policy during the long vizierate of Ibn Hubayra (reg. 544– 60/ 1149– 65) and the caliphate of al- Mustaḍīʾ (reg. 566– 75/ 1170– 80). 194 Glassen, Der mittlere Weg; Makdisi, Ibn ʿAqīl; Nagel, Die Festung des Glaubens; Laoust, La politique de Ġazālī.

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Al- Nāṣir’s court at the end of the sixth/ twelfth century might not have been much different from that. In his day, even the most conservative and Ḥanbalī- minded administrators had studied kalām.195 Traditionalist hardliners, such as Ibn al- Jawzī (d. 597/ 1201), who criticized al- Ghazālī for his engagement with falsafa196 and who also polemicized against Sufis and Shiites, were in an isolated minority at al- Nāṣir’s court.197 Ibn al- Jawzī was most influential under the cal-iphate of al- Nāṣir’s father, al- Mustaḍīʾ (reg. 566– 75/ 1170– 80), when he was the head of five madrasas in the city. Al- Mustaḍīʾ began his caliphate as a puppet of his vizier ʿAḍud al- Dīn Ibn al- Muẓaffar and Qaymaz, the head of the Turkish army, who had plotted his father’s murder. The caliph gained power only by employing the time- tested policy of connecting himself with traditionalist circles that were influential among the Sunni half of Baghdad’s population. Ibn al- Jawzī was a successful traditionalist preacher who became an important element in the caliph’s strategy to regain power. Around 567/ 1172, Ibn al- Jawzī seems to have formally entered into the service of al- Mustaḍīʾ.198 He gave sermons to large crowds where he agitated on the caliph’s behalf. This strategy was successful, and in 570/ 1173, a popular Sunni uprising removed Qaymaz as head of the caliphal army and expelled him from Baghdad. Without this revolt the office of the caliph would have lost its recently recovered strength. Al- Mustaḍīʾ rewarded Ibn al- Jawzī by making him head of a special force designed to “uproot heresies” (izālat al- bidaʿ). This new police force was given the power to demolish the houses of assumed heretics and throw them into prison.199 Judged from Ibn al- Jawzī’s book The Cloaking of Iblīs (Talbīs Iblīs), which was written during this period, falsafa as well as philosophy of the kind that al- Ghazālī pursued was very much part of what Ibn al- Jawzī understood as heresy (bidʿa).200 Whether the new force, however, ever took action against philosophers is highly doubtful. It seemed more designed to strengthen the caliph’s political power and act against political opposition.201

195 Ibn Yūnis (d. 593/ 1196– 97), for instance, who as vizier and majordomo (ustādh al- dār) seemed to have been responsible for the persecution of falsafa- minded scholars in Baghdad, studied kalām (Hartmann, an- Nāṣir li- Dīn Allāh, 181). On divisions among Ḥanbalites of this time who fully rejected kalām and the mainstream that accepted it, see Swartz, A Medieval Critique of Anthropomorphism, 23– 27. 196 Griffel, Al- Ghazālī’s Philosophical Theology, 284. See also Swartz, A Medieval Critique of Anthropomorphism, 20n84. 197 Hartmann, an- Nāṣir li- Dīn Allāh, 176f., 186– 89. On Abū l- Faraj Ibn al- Jawzī, see Leder, Ibn Al- Ǧauzī und seine Kompilation, 15– 42; Swartz, Ibn al- Jawzī’s Kitāb al- Quṣṣaṣ, 17– 38; idem, A Medieval Critique of Anthropomorphism, 3– 32; Laoust, “Le Hanbalisme sous le Caliphat de Bagdād,” 112– 15. 198 Swartz, Ibn al- Jawzī’s Kitāb al- Quṣṣaṣ, 31. 199 Ibn al- Jawzī, al- Muntaẓam, 10:259.8– 12. 200 Laoust, Les schismes dans l’Islam, 241– 43. 201 On this period in Ibn al- Jawzī’s life, see Swartz, Ibn al- Jawzī’s Kitāb al- Quṣṣaṣ, 29– 34, 44– 45; Leder, Ibn al- Ǧauzi und seine Kompilation, 35– 37.

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Under Caliph al- Nāṣir, Ibn al- Jawzī was overshadowed by people like Abū Ḥafṣ al- Suhrawardī, who, compared to Ibn al- Jawzī, was a much more moderate Ḥanbalite, drawn to Sufism and eager to create reconciliation with Shiites and with rationalist Muslim thinkers. Daniella Talmon- Heller has remarked that in sixth/ twelfth- century Syria, where “moderate Ḥanbalism and Sufism became mainstream trends, members of the radical Ḥanbali and Ṣūfī traditions were la-beled as dissenters, and charged with theological error and impious conduct.”202 The same is true for Baghdad under the caliphate of al- Nāṣir. In 590/ 1194, Ibn al- Jawzī became himself the target of persecution. In the course of the affair around Rukn al- Dīn al- Jīlī and his rehabilitation— which will be discussed below203— Ibn al- Jawzī was arrested and exiled to al- Wāsiṭ, from where he could not return before 595/ 1199, shortly before his death.204 Abū Ḥafṣ al- Suhrawardī, on the other hand, thrived under al- Nāṣir. He was sympathetic to al- Ghazālī’s œuvre, particularly toward the kind of Sufism the latter had practiced and preached. Al- Suhrawardī’s own introductory work to Sufism, The Benefits of Intuitional Insights (ʿAwārif al- maʿārif), became a companion to al- Ghazālī’s Revival of the Religious Studies (Iḥyāʾ ʿ ulūm al- dīn) and has often been studied together with it.205

Caliph al- Nāṣir’s territorial ambitions in Iraq and western Iran brought him in conflict with the Khwārazmshāhs who penetrated this area from the east. They clashed not only on territory but also on religion. Al- Nāṣir regarded himself as the upholder and enforcer of an Islamic orthodoxy that was rooted in ḥadīth studies and in moderate Ḥanbalism. Unfortunately, there are no studies on the Khwārazmshāhs’ religious policy. On the one hand they continued the policy of the Seljuqs and supported Shāfiʿites and Ashʿarites.206 That, however, is not as significant a difference as it was during the fifth/ eleventh century, when the promotion of Ashʿarism met strong and sometimes violent opposition from the traditionalists.207 Greater antagonism to the caliph’s policy resulted from the fact that Khwārazm was one of the few regions where Muʿtazilism was still strong.

Although some modern historians assume that Khwārazm was in its majority Muʿtazilite, that was probably never the case.208 Yāqūt reports that Khwārazm

202 Talmon- Heller, Islamic Piety in Islamic Syria, 225. 203 See pp. 125–27. 204 Swartz, A Medieval Critique of Anthropomorphism, 23– 27; idem, Ibn al- Jawzī’s Kitāb al- Quṣṣaṣ, 34– 36. 205 In the modern era, the two books are often printed together, a practice that began in 1872 when ʿAwārif al- maʿārif was first printed in the margins of al- Ghazālī’s Iḥyāʾ. On the book and its close con-nection to al- Ghazālī, see Ohlander, “A New Terminus Ad Quem.” 206 Halm, Ausbreitung, 88. A vizier of the Khwārazmshāh Tekish by the name of Masʿūd ibn ʿAlī Niẓām al- Mulk “the younger” (al- mutaʾakhkhir; d. 596/ 1199– 1200), “one of those who are strong partisans for Shāfiʿism” (al- Subkī, Ṭabaqāt, 7:297), founded a “Niẓāmiyya” madrasa in Khwārazm. 207 Glassen, Der mittlere Weg. 208 Meier, Die Fawāʾiḥ al- ǧamāl, 63, who quotes the modern historian of Iran Saʿīd Nafīsī (d. 1966) with that view.

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was in its majority a Sunni country.209 He also informs us of the introduction of a particular kind of Muʿtazilism— namely that of Abū l- Ḥusayn al- Baṣrī (d. 436/ 1044)— to Khwārazm, which happened in the second half of the fifth/ eleventh century, when the Muʿtazilite Abū Muḍar Maḥmūd ibn Jarīr al- Ḍabbī (d. 508/ 1115) went from Isfahan to Gurgānj and spent some time there.210 We should assume that Muʿtazilism itself was established much earlier in Khwārazm. Later, in the mid- sixth/ twelfth century, Rashīd al- Dīn al- Waṭwāṭ bragged in an invita-tion to Abū l- Barakāt al- Baghdādī about al- Ḍabbī’s connection to Khwārazm, suggesting that Muʿtazilism could count on some degree of support by the state.211 Indeed, leaders of the Muʿtazilite community such as the famous Qurʾan commentator and grammarian al- Zamakhshārī (d. 538/ 1144) enjoyed a high standing at the Khwārazmian court.212 We can assume that Muʿtazilism remained strong among Khwārazm’s scholars, at least until the early seventh/ thirteenth century and maybe even later.213 There is, however, no study yet that has combed through Ibn al- Fuwaṭī’s and other biographical dictionaries of this period to see how many Muʿtazilites from Khwārazm they knew. Ibn al- Fuwaṭī mentions, for instance, a less well- known scholar of Khwārazm who died in 645/ 1247– 48 and who was a student of the much better known Muʿtazilite al- Muṭarrizī (d. 610/ 1213). The scholar himself was the head of the Muʿtazilites in Khwārazm and known as “al- Zamakhshārī’s successor” (khalīfat al- Zamakhshārī).214 When Ibn Baṭṭūṭa visited Khwārazm around 735/ 1334, he reported that most of the scholars of the country were Muʿtazilites, although they did not profess this openly given that the Chinggisid sultan and his administration were Sunnis.215

In his conflict with the Khwārazmshāh Caliph al- Nāṣir sought an alliance with the Ghūrids, who, like their predecessors the Ghaznawids a few centuries ear-lier, were eager to become vicarious agents of caliphal policy. The rising military power of the Khwārazmshāh, however, made al- Nāṣir’s position more and more difficult. After his conquest of Ghūr and its dependencies, the Khwārazmshāh ʿAlāʾ al- Dīn Muḥammad accelerated his campaign against the Abbasid caliphate. Documents which the Khwārazmshāh found in the Ghūrid chancellery revealed

209 Yāqūt, Muʿjam al- buldān, 2:484.18, writes that at the end of each prayer, the people of Khwārazm used a formula to dissociate themselves from ʿ Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib. 210 Yāqūt, Muʿjam al- udabāʾ, 6:2685– 86, 2688. On al- Ḍabbī, see also al- Bayhaqī, Tatimmat Ṣiwān, 135– 36; 688; al- Yāfī, “Fī sīrat al- Zamakhshārī Jārallāh,” 368; and Madelung in his introduction to Ibn al- Malāḥimī, Kitāb al- Muʿtamad, vii. 211 See below p. 209. 212 See Rashīd al- Dīn al- Waṭwāṭ’s letters to him in his Majmūʿat rasāʾil, 2:28– 9, 59– 60. 213 Madelung, “The Spread of Mātūrīdism,” 115– 16; Goldziher, “Aus der Theologie des Fachr al- dīn al- Rāzī,” 219– 23; Kraus, “Les ‘Controverses’ de Fakhr al- Dīn Rāzī,” 188. 214 ʿAlāʾ al- Dīn Abū Ṭāhir Muḥammad ibn Mahmūd al- Tarjumānī; see Ibn al- Fuwaṭī, Talkhīṣ majmaʿ al- ādāb, 2:1098– 99/ 2:365– 66. On his teacher Burhān al- Dīn Abū l- Fatḥ (or: Abū l- Makārim?) Nāṣir ibn ʿAbd al- Sayyid al- Muṭarrizī, see Yāqūt, Muʿjam al- udabāʾ, 6:2741– 42; Ibn Khallikān, Wafayāt al- aʿyān, 5:369– 71. 215 Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, Tuḥfat al- nuẓẓār, 3:7– 8; Engl. trans. 3:543– 44; Halm, Ausbreitung, 101.

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that Caliph al- Nāṣir had incited the Ghūrids to wage war against Khwārazm. This, despite the fact that the caliph had sent a proper letter of installment to the Khwārazmshāh. ʿAlāʾ al- Dīn Muḥammad published these documents and had a panel of religious scholars decided that such a betrayal on al- Nāṣir’s part forfeited his right to the caliphate.216 The fatwā that these scholars wrote has not come down to us, but reports say it focused on the caliph’s failure to wage jihād and to suppress heresies. Another bone of contention was the caliph’s incarceration of members of his own family.217

One source singles out Fakhr al- Dīn al- Rāzī as the leader of the group of scholars who wrote this fatwā.218 That is not at all implausible and would ex-plain why the philosopher joined ʿAlāʾ al- Dīn Muḥammad on the arduous journey from Herat to Gurgānj shortly before his death. After the fatwā, the Khwārazmshāh was set to march against Baghdad, depose the Abbasid caliph, and replace him with a Shiite pretender to the caliphal throne from the line of ʿAlī and Ḥusayn. The ʿAlid pretender, who is known in our sources as ʿAlāʾ al- Mulk of Tirmidh, happened to be the man to whom Fakhr al- Dīn al- Rāzī gave his daughter in marriage. He was a high official and maybe even a vizier at the Khwārazmian court.219 At the end of his life, Fakhr al- Dīn had moved into the highest echelons of Islam’s political society.

In many, albeit not all cities under his reign, the Khwārazmshāh had the Friday prayer read in the name of the ʿ Alid counter- caliph ʿ Alāʾ al- Mulk.220 In the fall of 614/ 1217 the Khwārazmshāh prepared to march against Baghdad, but the cam-paign failed due to bad weather in the Kurdish highlands that separate Iran from Iraq.221 Soon after he came back to his homeland, the Khwārazmshāh learned that a Mongol- led army had arrived at his country’s northern border. It would eventually destroy his reign and that of many others. Observers in Iraq made a connection between what they saw as the horrors of the Mongol conquest and the Khwārazmshāh’s challenge to the Abbasid caliph. The historian Ibn al- Athīr (d. 630/ 1233), for instance, who wrote in Mosul in northern Iraq, ends his report of the Khwārazmshāh’s defiance of the house of Abbas with the words “Surely, it didn’t take long and those things happened to the Khwārazmshāh which we will relate and which one had never heard of, neither in olden nor in recent times.”222 Ibn al- Athīr died before he could witness how Hülegü Khan killed the last caliph

216 al- Juwaynī, Tārīkh- i jahān- gushā, 2: 96– 7, 120– 22; Engl. trans. 365, 390– 92. 217 Hartmann, an- Nāṣir li- Dīn Allāh, 81– 82, 207, 220. See al- Nasawī, Sīrat al- Sulṭān Jalāl al- Dīn, 16. 218 Rashīd al- Dīn Faḍlallāh, Jāmiʿ- i tavārīkh (trans. Thackston), 1:232. 219 On ʿ Alāʾ al- Mulk al- Tirmidhī, see below pp. 296–97. 220 This happened in 609/ 1212– 13. Ibn al- Athīr, al- Kāmil, 12:207; Ibn al- Fuwaṭī, Talkhīs majmaʿ al- ādāb, 2:1085/ 2:355; Özaydin, “Khorezm Shah State,” 123. 221 The campaign is discussed in Hartmann, an- Nāṣir li- Dīn Allāh, 82– 83. 222 Ibn al- Athīr, al- Kāmil, 12:207; similar in Abū Shāma, Dhayl, 100– 101.

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and abolished the caliphate. Al- Nāṣir’s great- grandson al- Mustaʿṣim (reg. 640– 56/ 1242– 58) was the last Abbasid caliph in that city.

The Mongol conquest of first Transoxania, Khwārazm, Khorasan, and the Ghūrid lands, then of Iran and lands further west was an event that filled Muslim observers with terror. Those who gathered information from refugees in the cities of Syria and Iraq where shocked by the sheer force of the Mongol- led troops and their swift military successes but mostly by the ruthlessness and coldblooded bru-tality with which they kidnapped and murdered civilians. The philosopher ʿ Abd al- Laṭīf al- Baghdādī (d. 629/ 1231) left one of the most vivid accounts of the Mongol conquest in a book that is unfortunately lost. Another historian, however, cites his description, which apparently began with the following introduction: “This is an account which swallows up [all] accounts, a report to throw [all other] accounts in the shade, a history to make [one] forget [all other] histories, a calamity that reduces [all other] calamities to insignificance, and a disaster that spilled over the earth and filled its length and breath.”223

It is hard to figure out what really took place during the years after 616/ 1219 in the Islamic East. Muslim historians produce casualty figures for individual cities that go into the hundreds of thousands and for whole provinces into the tens

223 ʿAbd al- Laṭīf al- Baghdādī as quoted in al- Dhahabī, Taʾrīkh al- Islām, vol. 601– 10 (#43), 26. The text is also in Cahen, “ʿAbdallaṭīf al- Baghdādī,” 125. See the English translation in Jackson, The Mongols, 20.

Figure 6 Mongol troops and their prisoners. Probably from a copy of Rashīd al- Dīn Faḍlallāh’s (d. 717/ 1318) Compendium of Chronicles (Jawāmīʿ al- tavārīkh), Tabrīz, first quarter of the eighth/ fourteenth century. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin— Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Orientabteilung, MS Diez A fol. 70, p. 19.

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of millions. These often obscure our perception. Peter Jackson reviewed the ev-idence we find in Muslim historical writings and concludes that the Mongols did not introduce a new kind of warfare. The Khwārazmshāh ʿAlāʾ al- Dīn Muḥammad, the Qara Khitay, and the Ghūrid ʿAlāʾ al- Dīn Ḥusayn— known as Jahānsūz, “the World- Burner”— reacted to a city’s defiance or disobedience in similar ways and ordered collective punishment in the form of its planned de-struction and the murder of a significant portion of its inhabitants. The Mongols, however, used this technique as a military strategy in a manner never seen before and with bewildering efficiency. Whereas the sources often portray the Mongols as savage and bloodthirsty barbarians, they, argues Jackson, “reacted in a much more rational manner to resistance than has often been supposed.” Their violence responded to “a gradation of offences on the part of the enemy”— or what they viewed as offenses, one must say.224 When one reads Ibn al- Athīr’s, al- Juwaynī’s, and Rashīd al- Dīn’s repeated descriptions of how conquered cities were divided and a single Mongol soldier would enter a neighborhood and kill his victims one by one, or how the inhabitants were let out of a city’s gates, divided into groups, and murdered by a single Mongol soldier— in one case ordering his victims to stay put while he went off to fetch his weapon— one cannot but think of similar reports that characterize modern genocides of the twentieth century.225 And al-though the Mongol conquest was far from a genocide of modern dimensions, contemporaries read these reports with a disbelief and incomprehension very similar to what we feel when we learn details about what happened in Eastern Europe during the Second World War. “This disaster,” wrote Ibn al- Athīr, “extends to all of Islam and to all its people.”226

The year 656/ 1258 has long been regarded as a watershed in Islamic history. It played a very important role in the various narratives of decline in the historiog-raphy of Islam. The fall of Baghdad to the Mongol- led armies of Hülegü Khan, the murder of the Abbasid caliph, and the end of the caliphate as a widely respected institution were, of course, decisive. With its six- day plunder and bloodshed, however, Baghdad was subject to much less violence than Nishapur or Herat, for instance, thirty- seven years earlier. These two cities were made early examples for what happened if one defied the Mongol victors. Whereas the destruction and the disruption of scholarly life in Khorasan and the Muslim East was long- lasting, already Hülegü himself and, after he had left Baghdad less than a month

224 Jackson, The Mongols, 180. 225 Ibn al- Athīr, al- Kāmil, 12:247 (Maragha), 250 (Baylaqān), 256– 57 (Merv and Nishapur), 326– 27 (Diyarbakr and the Jazīra); al- Juwaynī, Tārikh- i jahān- gushā, 1:126– 27, 140; Engl. trans. 161– 62, 177 (Merv and Nishapur); Rashīd al- Dīn, Jāmiʿ al- tawārīkh (trans. Thackston), 2:242 (Uṭrār), 497 (Baghdad). See also Jackson, The Mongols, 154, 157, 167. 226 Ibn al- Athīr, al- Kāmil, 12:258.8– 9.

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after the conquest, his governor ʿAṭā- Malik al- Juwaynī (d. 681/ 1286) made strong efforts to restore and rebuild Baghdad and its institutions of learning.227 The Mustanṣiriyya madrasa reopened a year after the “the event” (al- wāqiʿa), as Ibn al- Fuwaṭī put it.228 When Ibn Baṭṭūṭa visited Baghdad in 727/ 1327, both the Mustanṣiriyya as well as “the wonderful Niẓāmiyya madrasa” flourished, and with them many other schools.229 In a recent study Michael Biran shows that soon after the conquest, Muslims from the Mamluk lands came to study in Baghdad, where the libraries were well functioning.230 As far as Baghdad is con-cerned, the Mongol conquest neither introduced nor accelerated the decline of culture or civilization. The same is true for Muslim culture on a larger scale, par-ticularly if one looks at it as a whole. If urban life in Khorasan, Khwārazm, and Transoxania took a severe hit in this period, it continued and accelerated else-where. If the practice of philosophy suffered in those regions, it began to thrive in Syria, Egypt, and Anatolia. Even the crisis of cities in the eastern Iranian lands was temporary. If Nishapur and Ṭābarān- Ṭūs, for instance, almost disappeared in the wake of the Mongol- led conquest, Meshed (Mashhad) became a new center of the region and is now the biggest city in eastern Iran, with three mil-lion inhabitants. Balkh was replaced by the city of Mazar- i Sharif and Gurgānj by Khiva— both less than a day’s journey from their predecessors. Herat managed to survive and had the most glamorous period of its history still ahead of it during the Timurid and the post- Timurid eras.231

This is not to say that the Mongol conquest in the seventh/ thirteenth century can be neglected for the history of philosophy in Islam. Our sources show that it had very concrete effects. But it was not the complete game- changer that earlier historians, who were often driven by colonialist or nationalist narratives, tried to make of it.232 The political system of the post- Mongol period had already been es-tablished with the Seljuq state of the fifth/ eleventh century and it would not take long for the Mongols to fall into that pattern. It was Toluy’s Christian- Nestorian widow Sorqaqtani, Hülegü’s mother, who endowed the first new madrasa of the

227 The anonymous chronicle known as al- Ḥawādith al- jāmiʿa mentions several events: p. 362 (in 656/ 1258 Hülegü orders the rebuilding of the Caliphal Mosque after it burned down and reopens madrasas and ribāṭs), pp. 405– 6 (in 670/ 1272 al- Juwaynī orders the renovation of the Caliphal Mosque), p. 411 (in 672/ 1273– 74 Hülegü orders improvements in Tustar, al- Juwaynī goes there and appoints teachers at madrasas, one at the Niẓāmiyya there). 228 Ibn al- Fuwaṭī, Talkhīṣ majmaʿ al- ādāb, 2:818– 19/ 2:139; Jackson, The Mongols, 179. 229 al- madrasa al- Niẓāmiyya al- ʿajība; Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, Tuḥfat al- nuẓẓār, 2:108– 9; Engl. trans. 2:332. 230 Biran, “Libraries, Books, and the Transmission of Knowledge.” 231 Gammell, The Pearl of Khorasan, 67– 120. Merv is the one city that did not find a replacement, partly because its place in the midst of an oasis posed particular vulnerabilities. 232 Jackson, The Mongols, 3, reports that a Syrian government official “is quoted as claiming in the 1950s that the Mongol sack of Baghdad had put back by centuries the development of Islamic science and, by implication, its capacity to outstrip that of Western Europe.”

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post- Mongol conquest era in Bukhara.233 Since she died in 649/ 1252, this must have happened even before Baghdad fell. In 671/ 1272– 73, the wife of ʿ Aṭā- Malik al- Juwaynī endowed a new madrasa in Baghdad.234 Scholarship changed during this period, but again, it would be wrong to say that it declined. In the case of philosophy quite the opposite happened: the religious diversity that the Mongols introduced— particularly the relative strengthening of moderate Twelver Shiism vis- à- vis Sunnism— may have benefited the practice of philosophy in the two centuries after the period that we are looking at here. That, however, lies beyond the scope of this book and is a story that others must tell.

233 Ibid., 178, 313; al- Juwaynī, Tārīkh- i jahān- gushā, 1:84– 85, 3:9, Engl. trans. 108, 552– 53. 234 al- Ḥawādith al- jāmiʿa, 408– 9.

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