Bahmanyār ibn Marzubān

status: Published onlin

Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind: Light and luminous being in Islamic theology

For theologians, to conceive of God in terms of light has some undeniable advantages, allowing a middle-of-the road position between the two extremes of thinking about God in terms of a purely disembodied, unfathomable, unsensible being, and of crediting Him with a body, possibly even a human(oid) body. This paper first reviews the reasons why God, in early medieval Islam, was never fully theorized in terms of light. It then proceeds to discuss light-related narratives in two major, late-medieval compilations of hadiths about the afterlife, by al-Suyuti (Ash’ari, Egypt, d. 1505) and al-Majlisi (Persia, d. 1699), suggesting that eschatology was the area in which God’s light continued to shine in Islam, and the backdoor through which a theology of light, in the thought of al-Suhrawardi (Syria, d. 1191) and his followers, made a triumphant re-entry into Islamic thought

Theology, Politics and Society: the Missing Link. Studying Religion in the Mamluk Period

The chapter focuses on a few problematic topics which have so far received little attention in contemporary scholarship on religion in the Mamluk period. In particular it tries to shed light on what the author describes as a missing link between theological production and its social and political significance, between theologians and society at large, between ideas about God and their relevance to people\u2019s lives. The article argues that exploring the link between society and theology may be a rewarding research enterprise. An attention to this link is generally missing in scholarship both on the intellectual and the socio-religious history of the Mamluk period. The paper identifies the reasons for this state of affairs and provides a sample of materials that proves that we do not lack the resources for pursuing research in this direction. The paper advocates an interdisciplinary approach where the efforts of experts in Islamic theology and historians interested in religion and society ought to merge