Journal of Islamic and Muslim Studies

The near-total neglect in modern Western scholarship of ʿAfīf al-Dīn Sulaymān b. ʿAlī al-Tilimsānī (d. 690/1291) is as baffling as it is regrettable. A prolific mystical author and gifted poet, he not only studied with both the leading luminary of later Sufism Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī (d. 638/1240) and his stepson Ṣadr al-Dīn Qūnawī (d. 673/1274) but was himself the son-in-law of the firebrand “monist” Sufi Ibn Sabʿīn (d. 669/1258). Though a fellow student under Qūnawī of the renowned poet Fakhr al-Dīn al-ʿIrāqī (d. 688/1289) as well as other Ibn ʿArabian scholars such as Saʿīd al-Dīn al-Farghānī (d. 699/1300) and Muʿayyad al-Dīn al-Jandī (d. 688/1289), he also studied hadith under Imām al-Nawawī (d. 676/1277). None other than Ibn Taymiyyah (728/1328) lambasted him for disbelief while nevertheless confessing the exceptional quality of his verse. And though hailing from Morocco, he even learned Persian in Konya during the time of Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (672/1273) and most likely made his personal acquaintance. Indeed, it seems incomprehensible how a figure so uniquely positioned in his world as Tilimsānī could have remained without an entire article devoted to him in the Encyclopaedia of Islam.¹

With his new edition and translation of Tilimsānī’s Maʿānī al-asmāʾ al-ilāhiyyah (“Meanings of the Divine Names”), Yousef Casewit has therefore [End Page 77] rendered a major service to the field of Islamic Studies and the broader reading public alike by making a complete translation from the author available for the first time in a Western language, along with the first introduction to his life in English.² A general readership will now ascertain easily how both this treatise and its author exemplified multiple intersecting intellectual, religious and social currents during a period of singular transition and change in Islamic history. Like some better-known luminaries of Islam’s textual heritage such as Ibn Khaldūn (d. 808/1406), or Ibn ʿArabī whom he knew personally, Tilimsānī was one of many emigres from the Maghrib seeking the relative stability of the central lands of Islam beginning in the early 13th century. Like Ibn ʿArabī, he combined a polymath’s command of the various Islamic sciences including grammar, lexicography, logic, theology, Qurʿanic commentary, philosophy, and hadith with a mystical vision of staggering depth and an uncommon background of personal experience that only a lifetime of both inward and outward travel could bring. And like so many other works emerging from the climate of intellectual experimentation for which his era is now known, Tilimsānī’s Maʿānī is a testament to the ceaseless originality of Islamic thought especially in the face of novelty and diversity, weaving together multiple pre-existing schools of thought within its genre, with careful arguments and clearly defined terms.

But part of what makes Tilimsānī’s Maʿānī exceptional, and Casewit’s work on both the treatise and its author so valuable, is that its discussions of metaphysics, cosmology and the spiritual path begin, according to Tilimsānī, where even the most advanced Sufi treatises typically end. Or, in his own words, “the starting point of this breath is Sufism, and its end point is beyond recognition” (p. 3). Put in terms of the “Four Journeys,” a major concept of later Sufism that the author himself was the first to outline, Tilimsānī writes explicitly for those who have completed the first two: from the world to annihilation in God, and in God from annihilation to subsistence in Him. Rather than address those who lack...