Al Milal Wan Nihal Pdf Download
Arnau Cyr
Manuscript; Kitab al-milal wa al-nihal (Book of religious and philosophical sects) by Abu al- Fath Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Karim al-Shahrastani; Arabic in black naskhi script; 212 folios; standard page: 1 column, 20 lines of text.
Binding: The manuscript with an envelope flap is bound in brown leather over paper pasteboards; the lower and upper cover both have a border of multiple fillets.
The closest Arabic term for heresiography in Islam is al-milal wa al-nihal, literally meaning "religions and sects." The origin of this phrase is unclear and both words, despite occurring separately in the Quran, do not seem to appear together as a technical term before the tenth century. Shahrastani (d. 1153), one of the most famous medieval heresiographers, argues that milal (sing., milla) refer primarily to the parameters of a shared social or communal set of beliefs, whereas its synonym din more closely approximates what we would today call "religion." Other sources, however, do not make such a sharp differentiation between these two terms. In one of its earliest usages, that by Abu Bakr al-Khwarizmi (d. c. 977), it is employed to denote religions other than those of ahl al-kitab (i.e., "the people of the Book," meaning followers of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity). The first time the phrase is employed in a title is in the Kitab almilal wa al-nihal of al-Baghdadi (d. 1037). Other Arabic terms used in Islamic heresiographical literature to designate heretics include zandaqa ("free-thought," or "atheism") and ilhad ("heresy," or "heterodoxy").
The Muslims were extremely interested in documenting the religious beliefs and doctrines of other groups. They did so, however, not as dispassionate scientists or academics, but often as legal scholars, whose main job was to delineate and establish the beliefs, and thus legal status, of other religious groups in order to determine both their taxation rates and rights under Islamic law (sharia). The basis for all their categories of comparison, then, was not necessarily meant to be scholarly or anthropological in its own right, but rather it was grounded in the traditional sources of Islam (e.g., Quran, hadith). Yet, both the breadth and depth of the taxonomies that the Muslim heresiographers created were impressive. According to Gustave von Grunebaum, "in their books on sects, or comparative religion, the research acumen of the Muslims shows at its best." Precisely because so much of the milal wa al-nihal literature deals with the collection and subsequent listing of the beliefs of others, many modern scholars frequently refer to this genre as a genealogical precursor to the modern history of religions.
Steven Wasserstrom locates the origins of this technical genre of literature in the eighth and ninth centuries, when Muslims increasingly encountered other, rival, monotheisms in a highly "disputational, polemic, apologetic, and sectarian milieu." Despite the ambiguity surrounding the origins of milal wa al-nihal as a technical term, the literature associated with it seems to be predicated on the following hadith, in which the Prophet proclaims: "The Jews are divided into seventy-one sects, the Christians into seventy-two; my community will be divided into seventy-three sects." This tradition seems to be the proof text for all subsequent attempts to document and delineate the various heretical groups.
Another famous heresiographer was the aforementioned Shahrastani, who wrote the Kitab al-milal wa al-nihal, which, in his own words, proposed to present "the doctrinal opinions of all the world's people." Like the work of Ibn Hazm, Shahrastani is interested not only in documenting the various religious groups both in his day and before, but also in examining the various doctrines of the philosophers. Shahrastani divides his book into two parts, with the first dealing with revealed religions that base their obedience on a book (e.g., Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians), and the second examining the doctrines that are of purely human origins (e.g., the Sabians, philosophers, and the pre-Islamic Arabians).
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