Esoteric Hermeneutics of Qurʾan: Interpretive Freedom(s)

Unlike their philosophical contemporaries, the Brethren of Purity (Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’) (hereon the Brethren) cites the Qurʾān directly in almost every other paragraph of their fifty-one treatises. They were a ninth-tenth century Shīʾite philosophical movement from Baṣra, Iraq. Little is known about the actual group or its members, and their only remains are fifty-one treatises with two summaries. This paper argues that one of the reasons the Brethren employs the Qurʾān is to show how it can be used for theurgical purposes to physically free the body from pains. Following Gregory Shaw, Christian H. Bull, Brian Copenhaver, I argue that theurgy (literally Divine Acts) are “ritual elements that combines intellection (noêsis) that produces union with the divine.”[1] These ritual elements and actions can consist of magic, numerology, talismans, invocations, and prayers. 

Messianic interpretations of the Qurʾān and its hermeneutical manifestations (taʾwīl) remain underexplored. This paper examines the messianic reception history of the seemingly legal verse Q 17:33 in early Shīʿī exegetical sources. I demonstrate how second/eighth-century Shīʿī Imams, Muḥammad al-Bāqir (d. 114/732) and Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq (d. 148/765), reportedly interpreted maẓlūm (“the oppressed one”) in Q 17:33 as their martyred forefather, Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī (d. 61/680), and manṣūr (“the helped one”) as the Qāʾim/Mahdī from their progeny. The Qāʾim is depicted as defeating the Sufyānī, a descendant of Yazīd I (d. 64/683), in a conflict limited by the verse’s principle of “no excess.” I also show how the Imams align the Qāʾim’s eschatological events and locations with those of Ḥusayn’s final months. This early typological reading presents Ḥusayn as a prefiguration of the Qāʾim’s movement, offering deeper insight into the development of messianic interpretations of the Qurʾān.

Amīr Khusraw is one of the most famous poets from the Indian Subcontinent. A court poet of the Delhi Sultanate–one of the most important Islamic empires during the thirteenth century, Khusraw was at once a poet, Sufi, literary critic, linguaphile, and connoisseur of music. Khusraw played a central role in developing Indo-Persian aesthetics and poetics, laying the foundation for a distinct Indo-Persian literary heritage that remains alive in contemporary South Asia. Khusraw was deeply well versed in various Islamic intellectual sciences. This allowed him to not only creatively deploy from the literary and religious tradition(s) preceding him but also to synthesize them. Responding the the inimitability of the Qur’ān debate that explores the relationship between poetry and the Qur’ān, Khusraw penned a theoretical treatise titled Preface to the Full Moon of Perfection that creatively deploys tools from literary criticism and argues for poetry to be a source of wisdom. 

This paper presents is one of the first comparative textual studies of the “messianic” religious movements of late medieval Islam (ca. 1300-500), who are often assumed to have been isolated from intellectual traditions.  Scholars have thus compared these movements to the early (8th-9th c.) “extremist” Shiʿi sects, particularly because both viewed the Shiʿi Imams as divine figures.  However, taking the examples of the Hurufis and the Safavids, I show the belief in the Imam’s divinity among these later groups to have arisen from a particular indebtedness’ to a major point of Sunni dogma, the uncreated nature of the Qurʿan, which Shiʿi groups in turn commonly equate with the Imam.  Ironically, while their “extremist” belief in Imams’ divinity has invited these movements’ characterization as manifesting a “popular” Shiʿism unchanging throughout history, I show how it emerged from the highly connected, interconfessional intellectual milieu historically specific to late medieval Islam.