A New Terminus Ad Quemfor Umar al-Suhrawardi's Magnum Opus

摘要

Attending to the chronological sequence of an individual author's works is a sine qua nonof contemporary literary biography, one of the single most important descriptive elementsthat the critic should attend to in evaluating the oeuvre of any one writer. It is inconceivable,for example, to comment upon the works of Dostoevsky without knowing that he wroteCrime and Punishment before The Brothers Karamazov, and that his writing of the latterwas completed after the sudden death of his young epileptic son Alyosha in May of 1878.It is printing, of course, which makes this easy. However, as with many premodern authorswhose oeuvre comes to us solely in manuscripts, establishing a bio-bibliographical chron-ology of the written works of medieval Muslim authors can be a frustrating task, if not anexercise in futility. At the same time, when the occasional bio-bibliographical datum doespresent itself in the manuscript record, one is well advised to take note. This is especially truein the case of unusually productive writers whose individual works might give the appear-ance of a certain development or refinement of thought over time, but whose significance isunclear in the absence of at least a rough bio-bibliographical chronology in which suchapparent developments may be situated.' Ibis is of even more significance in the case ofindividuals whose biographies are particularly well known, such as the eminently publicseventh/thirteenth-century Sufi master of Baghdad, and eponym of one of the earliest Sufituriqa-lineages, Shihab al-Din Abu Hat's (Umar al-Suhrawardi (539-632/1145-1234).2