ISBN: 9798195579524 - once in a thousand years: the life and radical mind of al-nazzam (1 Ergebnisse)

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Somewhere in your life there is a question you were taught to put down.You asked it once, and watched the faces around you change. You learned it was the kind of question that makes a person difficult. So you set it aside, and you have been walking around it ever since, half afraid that picking it up again would mean betraying your faith, your family, or the people you love.Twelve centuries ago, in the bead market of Basra, a boy named Ibrahim began picking up the questions everyone else had put down. He grew up to be al-Nazzam, the Stringer: a devout Muslim theologian who argued that God, being good, has no power to be cruel; that fire hides inside wood; that the agreement of a thousand men proves nothing; and that the doubter is closer to you than the denier. He sat with dualists and Christian physicians, argued with his own uncle for half a century, was answered, the commentators say, by the great wine poet of Baghdad in one of the most famous poems in Arabic, and was cursed for a thousand years by men who kept his words alive only to refute them. Almost nothing he wrote survives. His enemies kept the rest.This is a narrative biography, told the way a storyteller tells it by lamplight, of one of the boldest minds of the Islamic golden age and of the cities of argument that made him. It does not turn him into a modern skeptic in a turban; he questioned because he believed. It does not hide his sharp words, the reports of his drinking, or the movement that, at the height of its power, used the caliph's whip. Where the record is solid, the book says so. Where a scene is imagined, it tells you. Where the sources disagree, you get both versions and the name of every teller.- Discover how an honest question can be an act of faith rather than a betrayal of it- Learn to hold praise and blame in the same hand without letting either cancel the other- Walk the canals of Basra and the lamplit salons of Abbasid Baghdad, where the price of a camel and the justice of God were argued in the same afternoon- Weigh two accounts of one man's death, a drunken fall and a whispered prayer, and decide for yourself- See how a man's enemies, by hating him, kept his voice from disappearingThis is a book for anyone who was ever told to stop asking, and quietly kept the question.The question you put down was never a betrayal of what you love.Open the first page, and pick it back up.…