Theology and Society in the Second and Third Centuries of the Hijra. Volume 3

Josef van Ess, Emeritus Professor of Islamic Studies and Semitic Languages, University of Tübingen, Germany, has published widely on the History of the Islamic World; Islamic theology and philosophy, especially with respect to the formative period (8th-10th centuries) and the age of the Mongol conquests (13th-14th centuries); and Islamic mysticism. His most famous work is Theologie und Gesellschaft in 6 volumes (de Gruyter 1991-97), the first four volumes of which are now being published in English by Brill.Gwendolin Goldbloom (1969) has produced English translations of several books and a number of articles in the field of Islamic Studies, most of them originally published in German.

• The Unification of Islamic Thought and the Flowering of Theology1 Baghdad1.1 Local Tradition. Madāʾin1.2 Religious Policy Under al-Manṣūr and al-Mahdī1.3 The Rise of the Muʿtazila1.4 The Time Following the Fall of the Barmakids2 Divided Empire and Civil War2.1 The Uprising of Abū l-Sarāyā2.2 Ma‌ʾmūn and ʿAlī al-Riḍā2.3 Theologians with Ties to al-Ma‌ʾmūn. Thumāma b. Ashras2.4 The Anti-Caliphate of Ibrāhīm b. al-Mahdī2.5 Ma‌ʾmūn’s Return to Baghdad3 Al-Ma‌ʾmūn in Baghdad. The Flowering of Muʿtazilite Theology3.1 Ma‌ʾmūn’s Intellectual Profile. Intellectual Life at Court in Baghdad3.2 The Great Muʿtazilite Systematists3.3 The miḥnaSupplementary Remarks