The spread of Muʿtazilī and Zaydī religious thought in Yemen (8th/14th through 12th/18th centuries).

What is it about?

The article offers the first and most comprehensive survey of Zaydī-Muʿtazilī kalām treatises studied by Yemenite Zaydīs from the 8th/14th to the 12th/18th century. The survey is based on a detailed inventory of Zaydī-Muʿtazilī and Sunnī sources quoted in the margins of ms. Munich, Bavarian State Library, Cod. arab. 1294, containing ʿAbd Allāh b. Muḥammad al-Najrī's (d. 877/1473) K. Mirqāt al-anẓār, which became a major textbook of systematic theology for several centuries. Besides, the paper describes the structure and very rich reception history of Ibn al-Murtaḍá's (d. 840/1436-37) al-Baḥr al-zakhkhār and Ghāyāt al-afkār, gives an account of Zaydī scholars who studied with Sunnī teachers and engaged with the later Ashʿarite tradition, discusses Sunnī-Ashʿarī commentaries on and refutations of Zaydī theological manuals (e.g. al-Quwayʿī's (d. 1068/1658) pseudonymic Kitāb al-Nibrās) and their Zaydī counter-refutations (e.g. Kitāb al-Iḥtirās ʿan nār al-Nibrās).

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Why is it important?

The article presents for the first time the understudied, original and abundantly rich literature of theologico-philosophical thought produced by the Zaydī branch of Shīʿism in Yemen from the 8th/14th to 12th/18th centuries. In contrast to the early reception of Bahshamī kalām among the Zaydīs in Yemen during the 6th/12th and 7th/13th centuries, which has been the focus of numerous studies over the last few decades, the subsequent periods remain largely unexplored. The manuscript sources of this period provide a window into an important moment in the history of Muslim kalām. They are remarkable for their intellectual vitality, their engagement with and critical reception of multiple rival intellectual traditions and contemporaneous scholarly trends and the accordingly dense network of intertextualities they display. The article represents the first step toward filling this lacuna in the intellectual history of the Islamic world in general and of Yemen in particular.