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Description of  The Divine Names: A Mystical Theology of the Names of God in the Qur an (Library of Arabic Literature)

147982612X epub A Sufi scholars philosophical interpretation of the names of God The Divine Names is a philosophically sophisticated commentary on the names of God. Penned by the seventh-/thirteenth-century North African scholar and Sufi poet Aff al-Dn al-Tilimsn, The Divine Names expounds upon the one hundred and forty-six names of God that appear in the Quran, including The All-Merciful, The Powerful, The First, and The Last. In his treatment of each divine name, al-Tilimsn synthesizes and compares the views of three influential earlier authors, al-Bayhaq, al-Ghazl, and Ibn Barrajn. Al-Tilimsn famously described his two teachers Ibn al-Arab and al-Qnaw as a philosophizing mystic and a mysticizing philosopher, respectively. Picking up their mantle, al-Tilimsn merges mysticism and philosophy, combining the tenets of Akbari Sufism with the technical language of Aristotelian, Neoplatonic, and Avicennan philosophy as he explains his logic in a rigorous and concise way. Unlike Ibn al-Arab, his overarching concern is not to examine the names as correspondences between God and creation, but to demonstrate how the names overlap at every level of cosmic existence.