Philosophers, Sufis, and Caliphs

Ali Humayun Akhtar is an Assistant Professor at Bates College, Maine. He is also the Robert M. Kingdon Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Akhtar holds a Ph.D. in History and Middle Eastern Studies from New York University.

• List of figures; Acknowledgments; Introduction: politics, law, and authority in the Abbasid and Fatimid; Part I. Philosophical Caliphs and their Impact on the Scholars: 1. Rival caliphs in Baghdad and Cairo; 2. A third caliphate in Cordoba; 3. Political reform among the later Abbasids; Part II. Philosophical Sufis among Scholars and their Impact on Political Culture: 4. Sufi metaphysics in the twelfth century; 5. A new political model and its Sufi; 6. The transformation of caliphal politics; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

'Ali Humayun Akhtar's Philosophers, Sufis, and Caliphs explores the interface and interplay between Sufism, philosophy, and politics in the medieval Islamic world. Examining diverse fields in the history of ideas - from metaphysics to politics, cosmology to psychology, and Sufism to philosophical theology - Akhtar examines how scholarly religious authority affected and was affected by political leadership between the tenth and twelfth centuries. The extensively researched chapters on the Spanish Sufi metaphysicians … are particularly valuable for placing their thought in the context of the dialectic of scholars with local monarchs and emirs.' Leonard Lewisohn, Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter