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Six kalām texts by ‘Abd Allāh b. Yazīd al-Fazārī
Early Ibāḍī Theology presents the critical edition of six Arabic theological texts recently discovered in two manuscripts in Mzāb in Algeria dating from the middle of the 8th century. The texts were sent by their author, the prominent Kūfan Ibāḍī kalām theologian ‘Abd Allāh b. Yazīd al-Fazārī to North Africa where he had a large following in the Ibāḍī community later known as the Nukkār. They constitute the earliest extant body of Muslim kalām theology and are vital for the study of the initial development of rational theology in Islam. The sophisticated treatment of the divine attributes in these texts indicates that this subject developed considerably earlier in Islamic theology than previously accepted in modern scholarship.

1 Ibadis on the Margins 1 On a chilly afternoon following the ʿaṣr prayer in late December 1761, Aḥmad b. Dāwūd, an Ibadi student from the region of Warjlān in what is today Algeria, put the finishing touches on the manuscript he had been copying. As he penned the final words

In: Journal of Islamic Manuscripts

1 Introduction 1 Recent studies have stressed the importance of European manuscript collections for Ibadi history, since they often contain works from North African countries collected in colonial times and nowadays difficult to find in their homeland. 2 The present article

In: Journal of Islamic Manuscripts
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Introduction In his 1970 article on the contents of several private libraries in the Maghrib, Libyan historian A.K. Ennami provided researchers with a list of otherwise unknown Ibāḍī manuscripts from throughout the region. 1 Ennami also pointed to the host of obstacles standing

In: Journal of Islamic Manuscripts
Author:

Introduction Maghribi Ibāḍī manuscript libraries represent rich archives for both the history of the Ibāḍī Muslim community and broader history of Northern Africa. Alongside the better-known manuscript collections of the Mzab valley in Algeria, a handful of family libraries on the

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In: Journal of Islamic Manuscripts
In Ibāḍī Texts from the 2nd/8th Century Abdulrahman Al-Salimi and Wilferd Madelung present an edition of fourteen Ibāḍī religious texts and explain their contents and extraordinary source value for the early history of Islam. The Ibāḍīs constitutes the moderate wing of the Kharijite opposition movement to the Umayyad and ‘Abbasid caliphates. The texts edited are mostly polemical letters to opponents or exhortatory to followers by ‘Abd Allah b. Ibad , Abu l-‘Ubayda Muslim b. Abi Karima and other Ibadi leaders in Basra, Oman and Hadramawt. An epistle detailing the offences of the caliph ‘Uthman is by the early Kufan historiographer al-Haytham b. ‘Adi. By their early date and independence of the mainstream historical tradition these txts offer the modern historian of Islam an invaluable complement to the well-known literary sources.