Keys to the Arcana II

Shahrastānī (d. 548/1153) was best known as an authority in the Ashʿarī school of Sunnī orthodoxy and for his world survey of religious and philosophical doctrines. His later works bear out what some of his contemporaries had claimed, that he secretly inclined to 'the people of the mountain fortresses' or the Nizārī Ismāʿīlīs . The doctrines and interpretations of this movement of radical esotericists from the eastern part of the Muslim world in his period are seen in his systematic interpretation of the Qurʾān. This text, Keys to the Arcana, survives in a unique manuscript which has only recently come to scholarly attention. The comprehensive commentary, which he never completed, analyses each verse of the scripture from multiple angles (transmitted exegesis, lexicology, rationale of the verse-sequence, narratives, etc.), ending with the arcana (asrār). Mayer's translation is focused on this last rubric that runs through the commentary where our author interprets the verses within a framework of Ismāʿīlī Neoplatonism, using ideas like the 'God beyond being', lettrism, angelology, the manifestation of transcendental realities in certain human individuals, and the immanence of the eschaton in human life. Mayer's translation is accompanied by an introduction in eight sections that constitutes a study in its own right. The book is the second volume of a three-volume translation of the arcana sections of Shahrastānī’s commentary.