Sprecher
Beschreibung
References to sources in pre-modern Islamic writings of all genres can be the cause of great frustration. In many cases, references are simply absent; in others, book titles are regularly ignored in favor of references to authors; furthermore, some references to authors are maddeningly oblique: ‘the Judge,’ ‘one of the Muʿtazila,’ ‘a certain Šāfiʿī [jurist],’ ‘one of the sons of our age,’ or even simply baʿḍu-hum ‘one of them.’ (On practices of citation in general, see Franz Rosenthal, The Technique and Approach of Muslim Scholarship, Rome, Pontificium Institutum Biblicum, 1947, pp. 41-44.) In other cases, references are not just insufficient, they are actively suppressed, mainly in order to engage in a form of plagiarism. This is a topic that has received sporadic attention in Arabic and Islamic studies but has not received systematic treatment. For example, Sarah Stroumsa has discussed unacknowledged quotations in philosophical literature. (“Citation Tradition: On Explicit and Hidden Citations in Judaeo-Arabic Philosophical Literature” in J. Blau and D. Doron (eds.), Heritage and Innovation in Medieval Judaeo-Arabic Culture: Proceedings of the Sixth Conference of the Society for Judaeo-Arabic Studies, Ramat-Gan: Bar Ilan University, 2000, 167-78). A well-known case is that of the two works titled al-Aḥkām al-sulṭāniyya by al-Māwardī and by Abū Yaʿlā al-Farrā’, the latter of which is a reworked version of the former. Mariam Sheibani has discussed in detail al-Furūq, by Maliki jurist Šihāb al-Dīn al-Qarāfī, which is mainly a reworked version of his Šāfiʿī teacher Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām’s work al-Qawāʿid. (“Innovation, Influence, and Borrowing in Mamluk-Era Legal Maxim Collections: The Case of Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām and al-Qarāfī,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, 140.4 (2020): 927-954). Zayn al-Dīn al-ʿĀmilī, a Twelver Shiite scholar from what is now southern Lebanon, published several works that drew extensively on Sunni works, to such an extent that they were over 90% verbatim replicas of their sources. His main goal was to produce similar works presentable to a Shiite audience. His manual on pedagogy, Munyat al-murīd, was based on a similar work by a Šāfiʿī contemporary Badr al-Dīn al-Ġazzī, al-Durr al-naḍīd. His work on backbiting and gossip was a reworked version of several chapters from al-Ġazālī’s Iḥkām ʿulūm al-dīn. His work on ḥadīṯ criticism was probably based on a Sunni commentary on al-Ǧurǧānī’s Muḫtaṣar on the same topic. (Devin J. Stewart, “Notes on Zayn al-Din al-Amili’s Munyat al-Murid fi Adab al-Mufid wa’l-Mustafid.” Journal of Islamic Studies (Oxford), 21.2 (2010): 235-70; idem “Zayn al-Dīn al-Āmilī’s Kashf al-Rībahan Aḥkām al-Ghībah and Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī’s Iḥyā’ `Ulūm al-Dīn.” Shii Studies Review 1 (2017): 130-50; Bekir Kuzudişli, “Şehîd-i Sânî’nin Bidâye’sinin Sünnî Hadis Üsûlu Kaynağı Neydi?: Tîbî’nin Hulâsa’sı Mı, Cürcânî’nin Muhtasar’ı Mı?” Dinbilimleri Akademik Araştırma Dergisi 20/2 (Eylül 2020): 509-550.)
This paper is an investigation of the suggestion by the twentieth-century biographer of the Shiite tradition, Muḥsin al-Amīn, that Zayn al-Dīn based his work Tamhīd al-Qawāʿid, a work on legal and grammatical maxims, on two works by the Egyptian Šāfiʿī scholar, ʿAbd al-Raḥīm al-Isnawī (d. 772/1370), al-Tamhīd fī taḫrīǧ al-furūʿ ʿalā al-uṣūl and al-Kawkab al-Durrī. It sets out to determine to what extent Zayn al-Dīn engaged in verbatim borrowing from these two works, what tactics, if any, he used to disguise the borrowing, such as rearranging chapters and sections of the work, whether he drew on other sources, and how he adjusted the content, which addressed the doctrinally marked topic of Islamic jurisprudence, for a Shiite audience.