The Divine Names: A Mystical Theology of the Names of God in the Qurʾan

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 Akbari 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. Cover 1 Series Editors 3 Letter from the General Editor 4 Title Page 6 Copyright 7 Table of Contents 8 Acknowledgments 10 Introduction 12 Note on the Text 21 Notes to the Introduction 27 The Rules of Logic 30 The Introduction 36 The First Discussion: On the Quiddity of Logic, and Proof of the Need for It 36 The Second Discussion: On the Subject of Logic 38 The First Treatise: On Simple Terms 40 The First Section: On Expressions 40 The Second Section: On Simple Meanings 44 The Third Section: On Universals and Particulars 48 The Fourth Section: On Definitions 54 The Second Treatise: On Propositions and Their Valuations 56 The Introduction: On Defining the Proposition and Its Primary Divisions 56 The First Section: On the Categorical Proposition 56 The Second Section: On the Divisions of the Hypothetical Proposition 66 The Third Section: On the Valuations of Propositions 70 The Third Treatise: On Syllogism 84 The First Section: On Definition and Division of Syllogism 84 The Second Section: On Mixes of Modalized Premises 92 The Third Section: On Connective Syllogisms with Hypothetical Premises 94 The Fourth Section: On the Repetitive Syllogism 98 The Fifth Section: On Matters Appended to the Syllogism 100 The Conclusion 104 The First Discussion: On Syllogistic Matters 104 The Second Discussion: On the Parts of the Sciences 110 Notes 112 Glossary 114 Tables 118 Figures 124 Appendix 1: Names of Propositions 142 Appendix 2: Propositional Forms 143 Appendix 3: Examples of Quantified Hypothetical Propositions 158 Appendix 4: Contradictories for Modalized Propositions 159 Bibliography 161 Further Reading 169 Index 172 About the NYUAD Research Institute 192 About the Typefaces 193 Titles Published by the Library of Arabic Literature 194 About the Editor–Translator 200