Between reason and revelation: twin wisdoms reconciled: an annotated English translation of Nāṣir-i Khusraw's Kitab-i Jami al-ḥikmatayn By
 Eric Ormsby
Publisher I.B. Tauris Pub Date 2012 Pub Location US Isbn 9781780761329 Course(s)
   21

Description

Jami‘ al-Hikmatayn (lit. Reconciliation of Two Wisdoms) was written by Nasir-i Khusraw Qubadiyani (394–481/1003–1088), the Isma‘ili poet, philosopher, and author. It aims at “finding solutions to religious issues and philosophical doctrines”. Nasir-i Khusraw states that in 462/1069, on his way from Egypt to Persia, ‘Ayn al-Dawlah Abu al-Ma‘ali ‘Ali ibn Asad, the ruler of Badakhshan, sent him a qasidah by Khwaja Abu al-Haytham Ahmad ibn Jurjani (fl. late tenth to early eleventh centuries) containing 91 questions on philosophy, logic, physics, syntax, and the religious sciences, and requested that he provide him with answers. And so, in his safe haven of Yumgan (in Badakhshan, present-day Afghanistan), Nasir wrote Jami‘ al-Hikmatayn, his last work, wherein he discussed with more precision and a simpler diction almost all the questions treated in his earlier work, Zad al-Musafirin. The book takes the form of a discussion between a philosopher and an Isma‘ili on a wide array of subjects, and each discussion ends with a reconciliation of the twain views. Eric Ormsby’s translation includes an introduction with a brief biographical account of Nasir-i Khusraw and a description of Jami‘ al-Hikmatayn as well as useful bibliography. The translation is beautifully worded but tends towards the literal, with frequent transliterations, and appears to rely on the 1953 French translation by Muhammad Mu‘in and Henri Corbin, which has also been criticised in some Persian works. In that regard, some of these explaining Jami‘ al-Hikmatayn or offering insight into the translation by Mu‘in and Corbin could be consulted if preparations are made for a second edition.