Join us as we celebrate the release of Ahmed al-Rahim’s book The Creation of Philosophical Tradition. A signing will follow. This event will be free and open to the public.
About the book: How was the Islamic philosophical tradition created? What role does biography play in the formation of Muslim intellectual history? Professor al-Rahim’s monograph analyzes the lives and works of post-Avicennan philosophers, tracing the development of the Avicennan tradition from the eleventh to the fourteenth century. A detailed investigation of the genres of Arabic literary biography in the book’s first section outlines the construction of philosophical authority and the relationship of Sunni and Shiʿite Islam to Aristotelian logic and philosophy. The second section presents fourteen biobibliographical studies along with an inventory of the works of Avicenna’s immediate disciples and their succeeding generations, all of whom together continually reinvented Avicennan philosophical heritage in the Islamic world.
Ahmed H. al-Rahim is an associate professor of Islamic Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. His teaching and research cut across the centuries of Islam, spanning the Arabic reception history of Aristotelian philosophy during Islam’s “dark ages,” the development of Islamic ethics in the Middle Ages, and the ideologies of political Islam in the modern Near East.