,All¯ama al-H. ill¯ı und seine Handlungstheorie

Abstract

In her article, Sedigheh Khansari Mousavi takes up the question of human free will and discusses it using the example of the theory of action of the Islamic Shiite scholar ʿAllāma al-Ḥillī (d. 1325) and his treatise Istiqṣāʾ an-naẓar fī l-qaḍāʾ wa-l-qadar. But before discussing this work in more detail, she gives a brief historical overview of various Muslim schools of thought and kalām schools by introducing their respective methodologies and positions on the theory of action and discussing the debate on »divine predestination and human free will« that took place in this context. She then takes a closer look at the »kalām school of al-Ḥilla«, whose most prominent representative and pioneer was ʿAllāma al-Ḥillī and which, according to the author, united two currents within the Imamite kalām, namely the rational current of the kalām school of Baghdad and the text-oriented current of the school of Qum. Both currents also come together in the thought and work of ʿAllāma al-Ḥillī and shape his writing Istiqṣāʾ an-naẓar fī l-qaḍāʾ wa-l-qadar, in which he attempts to solve the much-discussed problem of the theory of action with the help of a rational and text-oriented line of argument. In this way, he confronts a theological topic with philosophical methods, as, according to the author’s account, Abū al-Ḥasan al-ʿĀmirī (d. 992) had done before him with his work Inqāḏ al-bašar mina l-ǧabr wa-l-qadar, so that here theology and philosophy, and thus revelation and reason, are not seen as opposites, but as two mutually confirming paths that pursue the same goal, namely to discover divine truth.