Command and Creation: A Shi'i Cosmolagical Treatise. A Persian Edition and English Translation of Muhammad al-Shahrastanis Majlis-i maktub.

• Author: Walker, Paul E.

Command and Creation: A Shi'i Cosmolagical Treatise. A Persian Edition and English Translation of Muhammad al-Shahrastanis Majlis-i maktub. Edited and translated by DARYOUSH MOHAMMAD POOR. London: I.B. TAURIS, in association with The Institute of lsmaili Studies, 2021. Pp. xvi + 135 (Eng.), 84 (Pers.).

Already by the middle of the nineteenth century Shahrastam's justly famous Kitab al-Milal wa-l-nihal (Book of religions and sects) had become widely known and recognized in modern scholarship about Islam. William Cureton published an edition of the Arabic text with the Society for the Publication of Oriental Texts (London, 1842-46) and Theodor Haarbrucher added a German translation, Religionspartheien und Philoso-phen-schulen (Halle, 1850-51). Noted then and later for its impartial foray into the history of religions, both of Islam and other faiths, its author earned especially high regard for his efforts. In 1934 Alfred Guillaume and Oxford University Press contributed also an edition and translation, The Summa Philosophiae of al-Shahrastani, of another work, a masterly exposition of Ash'ari theology (Nihayat al-aqdam ft 'ilm al-kalam). This second work amply confirmed its author's traditional place in the pantheon of Sunni authorities of this school, despite some complaints in the older Arabic record about his orthodoxy. A different view began to develop, at least in Iran, when not that long afterward Sayyid Muhammad Rida JalalT Nairn published for the first time a relatively short sermon by the author called Majlis-i maktub mun'aqid dar Khwarazm (The transcribed sermon in Khwarazm) the latest iteration of which by Daryoush Mohammad Poor is, in fact, the subject of this review. Jalali Na'ini, who has now published this text on three separate occasions, first issued it in 1942 as an appendix to an edition by him of a fifteenth-century Persian translation of Shahrastam's Milal wa-l-nihal. He would later include it in a study by him of its author, called Sharh-i hal wa athar-i Hujjat al-Haqq Abu al-Fath Muhammad b. 'Abd al-Karim b. Ahmad Shahrastani (Tehran, 1964). And then, yet again, Tehran 1990. In part because this text--the only one by Shahrastani in Persian--contains several key terms that it shares in common with Nizari lsmaili works, a possible connection seemed to point to an affiliation. When he first announced this work, Jalali Na'ini also knew of an unpublished Quran commentary by ShahrastanT wherein these same terms and concepts...