By John Abdallah Nawas
The "inquisition" (Mihnah) unleashed by the seventh Abbasid caliph, 'Abdallah al-Ma'mun (r. 813-833), has long attracted the attention of modern scholars of the intellectual, political, and religious history of the early Abbasid era. Because this event, which began in 820 and stretched through the reigns of two of al-Ma'mun's successors, appears at a convergence of prominent currents in systematic theology, rationalist thought, theocratic politics, and nascent trends in Shiism and Sunnism, historians have seen it as the key to a wide array of puzzles and problems in early Islamic history. In this incisive study, John Nawas subjects the various proposed explanations of these events to a sober and searching analysis and, in the process, presents a new interpretation of al-Ma'mun's political and religious policies, contextualized against the background of early Abbasid intellectual and social history.
Appended to the volume is a reprint edition of Walter M. Patton's Ahmed ibn Hanbal and the Mihna (Leiden 1897), which still has much that is useful for modern scholarship, including one enormous additional benefit; it contains most of the relevant passages in Arabic from the primary sources.
Al-Ma’mûn, the Inquisition, and the Quest for Caliphal Authority
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Table of Contents
Series Editors' Preface
Foreword
Author's Preface
AcknowledgmentsChapter 1: Introduction
1.1 Aim of This Study
1.2. Previous Explanations of al-Ma'mun's Motives
1.3 The Approach of This Study
1.4 Sources
1.5 The Caliphates
1.6 The Sunnites and the Shi'ites
1.7 The Mu'tazilites
1.8 The Doctrine of the Createdness of the Qur'an
1.9 The MihnaChapter 2: 'Abdallah al-Aa'mun: His Life and Reign
2.1 Early Life
2.2 The Civil War
2.3 Al-Ma'mun's ReignChapter 3: The Mu'tazilism, the Shi'ism, and the 'Alid Hypotheses
3.1 The Mu'tazilism Hypothesis
3.2 The Shi'ism Hypothesis
3.3 The 'Alid HypothesisChapter 4: The Caliphal Authority Hypothesis
4.1 Modern Scholars' Formulations of This Hypothesis
4.2 The Argument of This Study
4.3. Al'Ma'mun's Vision of the Caliphate
4.4. The Mihna Letters
4.5. The Timing of the Mihna
4.6. The Strategic Value of the Doctrine of the Createdness of the Qur'an
4.7. Interrogated IndividualsChapter 5: Conclusion
Appendix 1: Chronological Information, by Genre, on the Compilers of the Sources Used
Appendix 2: Information on Those Interrogated
Appendix 3: Timetable of Key Events during al-Ma'mun's Reign
Bibliography
Index
William Patton, Ahmed ibn Hanbal and the Mihna (1897)