Overview

A Sufi scholar’s philosophical interpretation of the names of God The Divine Names is a philosophically sophisticated commentary on the names of God. Penned by the seventh-/thirteenth-century North African scholar and Sufi poet ʿAfīf al-Dīn al-Tilimsānī, The Divine Names expounds upon the one hundred and forty-six names of God that appear in the Qurʾan, including The All-Merciful, The Powerful, The First, and The Last. In his treatment of each divine name, al-Tilimsānī synthesizes and compares the views of three influential earlier authors, al-Bayhaqī, al-Ghazālī, and Ibn Barrajān. Al-Tilimsānī famously described his two teachers Ibn al-ʿArabī and al-Qūnawī as a “philosophizing mystic” and a “mysticizing philosopher,” respectively. Picking up their mantle, al-Tilimsānī merges mysticism and philosophy, combining the tenets of Akbarī Sufism with the technical language of Aristotelian, Neoplatonic, and Avicennan philosophy as he explains his logic in a rigorous and concise way. Unlike Ibn al-ʿArabī, his overarching concern is not to examine the names as correspondences between God and creation, but to demonstrate how the names overlap at every level of cosmic existence. The Divine Names shows how a broad range of competing theological and philosophical interpretations can all contain elements of the truth. A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

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9781479826124

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Reviews

""Al-Tilimsani’s eloquent and profound commentary on the Divine Names is a masterpiece of this important genre of Islamic theological literature, bridging theoretical and practical discussions and containing brilliant accounts of the nature of language, humanity, the cosmos, the Divine, and the various relationships amongst them. Casewit’s lucid translations convey the compelling combination of intellectual depth and aesthetic beauty that characterizes the original work. In addition to providing important contextualization for the work, Casewit’s book is the first major study of ʿAfif al-Din al-Tilimsani in English, introducing this profoundly original Sufi thinker, poet, and student of Ibn al-ʿArabi to a general audience."" -- Oludamini Ogunnaike, Associate Professor of African Religious Thought, UVA

Al-Tilimsani’s eloquent and profound commentary on the Divine Names is a masterpiece of this important genre of Islamic theological literature, bridging theoretical and practical discussions and containing brilliant accounts of the nature of language, humanity, the cosmos, the Divine, and the various relationships amongst them. Casewit’s lucid translations convey the compelling combination of intellectual depth and aesthetic beauty that characterizes the original work. In addition to providing important contextualization for the work, Casewit’s book is the first major study of ʿAfif al-Din al-Tilimsani in English, introducing this profoundly original Sufi thinker, poet, and student of Ibn al-ʿArabi to a general audience. -- Oludamini Ogunnaike, Associate Professor of African Religious Thought, UVA

Author Information

ʿAfīf al-Dīn al-Tilimsānī (Author) ʿAfīf al-Dīn al-Tilimsānī (d. 690/1291) was a North African scholar and Sufi poet who studied under the influential Andalusian mystic Ibn al-ʿArabī. He is the author of several commentaries, the most important of which is The Divine Names. Yousef Casewit (Edited and Translated by) Yousef Casewit is Associate Professor of Qurʾanic Studies at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He is the author of The Mystics of al-Andalus: Ibn Barrajān and Islamic Thought in the Twelfth Century.

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