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1
RECONSTRUCTING NĪSĀBŪRĪ'S
EARLY EDUCATION
Nishapur during Nīsābūrī's early years
In Nishapur, probably around 1270, al-Hasan ibn Muhammad ibn al-Husayn Nizām al-Dīn al-A‘raj al-Nīsābūrī was born to a Shiite family that came originally from Qom, in what is now Iran.1 Nishapur2 was the principle town of the province of Khorasan (in present-day Iran) and it enjoyed an illustrious history during the early centuries of Islam through the eleventh century that has attracted the attention of modern scholars.3 The Seljuqs made Nishapur their first capital, and it benefitted from irrigated agriculture and trade.4 With an earthquake in 1145, plunder by the Ghuzz in 1154–5, and then another earthquake in 1209, the city's fortunes went into a decline. The Mongols’ 1221 invasion sealed Nishapur's fate; it never regained its earlier prominence.5 Among subsequent tragedies, Nishapur was devastated by an earthquake in either 1268 or 1270, and then by another in 1280, in which 10,000 reportedly died.6 If it was not the dominant city that it once had been, it nevertheless remained a center of culture. It continued as a site of mints for Mongol currency from 660 AH (1261–2) until 703 AH (1303– 4).7 In the fourteenth century, Ibn Battūta would praise its numerous schools and report that the city was called “Little Damascus” due to its gardens, water, fruits, and beauty.8
The Mongol invasions shocked the Islamic world at the time. Exaggerated death tolls in the histories written at the time reflect the momentousness of the Mongol conquests.9 As the Mongols were non-Muslims, the rapidity and ease of the conquests challenged Islamic conceptions of history.10 Chingiz Khān (Gengis Khān), enthroned in 1206, attacked Transoxiania in 1219, and by 1221 controlled all of Khorasan, including Nishapur. After conquering much of Central Asia, Chingiz Khān returned to Mongolia and died in 1227. Chingiz Khān's son Toluy was in charge of subduing Khorasan. Chingiz Khān's grandson Hülegü, the father of the Ilkhanid successor dynasty to Chingiz Khān, conquered Baghdad in 1258.11 Nishapur became a provincial capital, ruled by Ilkhanid governors. Military defeats at the hands of the Mamlukes meant that the Mongols would not expand to the west after 1260.12
When Hülegü died in 1265, he was succeeded by his son Abaqa (r. 1265– 82). Abaqa was succeeded by Tegüder Asmad (1281–4), Arghūn (1284–91), Geikhatu (d. 1295), and Ghāzān (1295–1304). During the early part of Nīsābūrī's lifetime, the viceroy of Khorasan was Arghūn (d. 1291), who, due to his interest in science, made the acquaintance of Nīsābūrī's teacher Qutb al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī.13 Due in part to the shared Mamluke foe, the Ilkhanids enjoyed relations with the popes,14 and Ghāzān's son Öljaytü (1304– 16) was baptized before converting to Islam.15 Indeed, before Ghāzān converted to Islam, Buddhism was the only other religion besides Christianity that had any success against the background of the Ilkhanids’ Shamanism.16 The Mongols’ less than wholehearted embrace of Islam did not sit well in Islamic sources.17
Of all the actions that the Ilkhanid Mongols took, the one that was most important for facilitating the intimate connection between science and religion characteristic of Nīsābūrī's career occurred, most likely, before his birth. It was the construction of the observatory at Marāgha (near Tabriz) in Azerbaijan soon after Hülegü's conquest of Baghdad.18 Hülegü, who patronized scientists, granted his advisor, the scientist, theologian, jurist, and philosopher Nasīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī (d. 1274), the post of minister. Ṭūsī became the director of the observatory and staffed it with scientists from as far away as China. In a notable step, Ṭūsī used income from a religious endowment, a waqf, for the observatory.19 Ṭūsī's financial maneuver reflected an acceptance of science as an area of study fit for a religious scholar and Ṭūsī became a figure of immense importance in Nīsābūrī's intellectual development. Ṭūsī was Nīsābūrī's intellectual grandfather, the teacher of Qutb al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī (d. 1311), Nīsābūrī's best-known teacher. The observatory endured after Ṭūsī's death and Ghāzān had hoped to build an even better one near Tabriz.20 Marāgha facilitated the scientific work of these scholars who were also adept in religious matters.
As the story of Nīsābūrī's intellectual development unfolds, he will take a place within a then-emerging tradition of religious scholarship that nevertheless accepted knowledge, such as science and philosophy, that had its origins in earlier, non-Islamic civilizations. Linking this tradition of religious scholarship to any one sect or intellectual tradition of Islam would be inappropriate. Öljaytü's own religious vacillations ensured that a variety of religious ideas circulated at the Ilkhanid court.21 Nīsābūrī's own work contained references to the various currents present in that intellectual ferment.
Different areas of scholarship: Islamic sciences and philosophical sciences
Inasmuch as in this book I try to identify themes common to different areas of Nīsābūrī's scholarship, I obviously assume a distinction between religious studies on one hand and science and philosophy on the other. More specifically, I assume that one should distinguish the traditional, Islamic sciences and their ancillaries, from the philosophical sciences that had origins in earlier civilizations. This division was neither rigid nor immutable; I introduce it in order to bridge it later in the book. The Islamic sciences were disciplines such as Qur'ān, Sunna, and Islamic jurisprudence ( fiqh), that focused on and built upon Islam's revelations.22 Sciences propaedeutic or ancillary to the Islamic sciences, such as Arabic grammar and lexicography, which Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1407) termed the Arabic sciences, assisted the scholar in absorbing the Islamic sciences. The philosophical sciences (e.g. astronomy, philosophy) originated in the pre-Islamic civilizations of ancient and Hellenistic Greece, India, and Persia. Greek, Sanskrit, and Pahlavi texts were first translated into Arabic during the Umayyad Caliphate and in great quantities during the Abbasid Caliphate.23 The standing of the Islamic sciences and their ancillaries, due to their centrality in religious scholarship, was more secure than that of the philosophical sciences, and the first step of Nīsābūrī's career was the study of Arabic and the Qur'ān. But those first steps in the Islamic sciences would be essential for his later achievements in all areas of learning.
Reconstructing Nīsābūrī's early education to 1300
Nīsābūrī provided only a few sentences in his magisterial Qur'ān commentary (Gharā’ib al-Qur'ān wa-raghā’ib al-furqān [GQ hereafter]) regarding the place of the memorization of the Qur'ān in his early education. The bio-bibliographical sources say nothing on this topic. The rest of this chapter thus depends on what we can deduce and infer from the contents of his work. In order to reconstruct Nīsābūrī's early education, we need to define when it could have occurred. Nīsābūrī's earliest work with a certain date of completion is his commentary on Ṭūsī's recension of the Arabic translations of Ptolemy's (fl. ca. 125–50) Almagest,24 entitled Sharḥ Taḥrīr al-Majisṭī (The Commentary on the Recension of the Almagest).25 This text is very helpful for reconstructing Nīsābūrī's early education.26 Astronomers had translated the Almagest into Arabic by the beginning of the ninth century, and it proved to be the most influential Greek text for Islamic astronomers. Two different Arabic translations survive, and there is evidence for two others.27 Sharḥ Taḥrīr al-Majisṭī was a commentary on Ṭūsī's recension (Tahrīr) of the Almagest translations of Ḥajjāj and Ishāq-Thābit.28 Nīsābūrī completed his Sharḥ Taḥrīr al-Majisṭī in 1305. Fortunately, all of the MSS that I examined, including the Tunis autograph MS, provide colophons for the end of each chapter. Because Nīsābūrī completed the first chapter on the second of Jumādā al-ākhar of 703 AH (January 11, 1304), I define the period of Nīsābūrī's early education to cover the period from his birth to 1300, by which point he must have begun to study the Almagest. Therefore, the contents of the earliest chapters of Sharḥ Taḥrīr al-Majisṭī reveal much about what Nīsābūrī would have had to have learned before beginning to study the Almagest in any serious depth.
Early education in the Islamic sciences
Nīsābūrī hailed from what is now Iran; there is no evidence that he was a native speaker of Arabic. In order to compose a commentary on the recension of the Arabic translations of the Almagest, he would have had to learn Arabic. Translations from Arabic into Persian did eventually occur,29 but the most important texts in all of the philosophical sciences, both in general and for Nīsābūrī's own education, were in Arabic. Proficiency in Arabic was also fundamental for anyone interested, as Nīsābūrī was, in religious texts.30 Arabic instruction commenced with Arabic script and with the memorization of the Qur'ān, a prerequisite for further educational advancement. Nīsābūrī noted, at the beginning of GQ, that he had been studying the Qur'ān since his youth (min ibbān al-ṣabā), and had memorized it early on. He pursued, he added, knowledge of the meanings of the text.31 Further proficiency in Arabic would be necessary not only to pursue the traditional subjects of law, tafsīr (exegesis of the Qur'ān), and kalām (speculation into the nature of God), but also to study the philosophical sciences.
Nīsābūrī mastered two texts on Arabic language well enough to compose commentaries on them. The first, and the one which led to Nīsābūrī's well-known commentary (Sharḥ al-Shāfiya), was al-Shāfiya of Ibn al-Ḥājib (d. 1249). This was a text on morphology. He most likely composed this text sometime after 1307–8.32 The second text on Arabic that Nīsābūrī mastered was Miftāh al-‘ulūm (The Key of the Sciences) of al-Sakkākī (d. 1229), whose title itself advertised the importance of Arabic rhetoric to other fields of knowledge.33 His commentary on this text he likely composed after 1304, and, in fact, after 1311, because Shīrāzī did not complete his own commentary on Miftāh al-‘ulūm until 1301.34 Within those texts, Nīsābūrī evinced familiarity with al-Kitāb (The Book) of Sībawayhi (d. ca. 796), an early text on Arabic grammar which owed its existence, in part, to the need for non-Arab bureaucrats to learn Arabic.35
GQ contains clues not only for why Nīsābūrī began to study Arabic, but also for why he began to study the philosophical sciences. GQ incorporates a great deal of material adopted from Shāfi‘ī jurisprudenc...
