Of Piety And Heresy eBook

This book examines and contextualizes Ab mid Muammad Ghazzl’s (d. 505/1111) fierce response to antinomian and freethinking currents in twelfth-century Persia. Seyed-Gohrab offers a translation of Ghazzl’s treatise on antinomians, and one of his religious rulings (fatwa) on the topic. Both were written after Ghazzl’s intellectual crisis in 488/1095, when he voluntarily withdrew from his position as a Professor at the prestigious Nimiyya College in Baghdad. He determined to live an ascetic life, devoting all his attention to God. In this period, Ghazzl wrote his masterpieces in Arabic and Persian. Seyed-Gohrab shows that these two less-known works shed new light on the motivation for Ghazzl''s major works. The book depicts Ghazzl’s Persian intellectual context, and the tumultuous political period in which a strong literary and Sufi antinomian trend emerged from the social periphery to become central to literary activities at the Saljuq court. The book also treats Ghazzl’s Persian poetry, offering original insights into Ghazzl’s contemporary, the celebrated polymath Umar Khayym (d. about 525/1131), whose transgressive quatrains are interpreted as a response to a suffocating religious context.