Asad Q. Ahmed
University of California, Berkeley
Palimpsests of Themselves: Commentaries and Glosses in Post-Classical Islam
Asad Q. Ahmed's lecture aims to provide a genre-specific theoretical framework for understanding the question of Muslim dynamism and decline in post-classical rationalist disciplines. The field of Islamic Studies has been developing a general consensus over the past few years that, after al-Ghazālī, the tradition of ma'qulāt (encompassing, philosophy, logic, astronomy, etc.) continued to thrive. Yet how the developments in this area are to be assessed and narrated in terms of their own standards has not yet been fruitfully laid out in the field.
Ahmed's talk, based on the introduction to a forthcoming monograph, presents certain features of post-classical commentaries and glosses as a means of understanding the process of post-classical philosophy in Islam. The arguments are generally grounded in an examination of the highly-influential logic text, Sullam al-ʿulūm, and its many commentaries and glosses.
Asad Q. Ahmed is Associate Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in early Islamic social and religious history and post-classical Muslim intellectual history. He is also interested in Arabo-Islamic philosophy and theology, with a special focus on logic and epistemology. Ahmed is the author of The Religious Elite of the Early Islamic Hijaz and Avicenna's Deliverance: Logic (2011). His forthcoming book, on commentaries and glosses, is called Palimpsests of Themselves.