Usui al-Din (The Fundamentals of the Faith).

• Author: Gaiser, Adam

Usui al-Din (The Fundamentals of the Faith). By TIBGHURIN B. 'ISA AL-MALSHUTI. Edited by 'AMR KHALIFA ENNAMI and translated into English by TREVOR LE GASSICK. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ, 2020. Pp. (Eng.) 115, (Ar.) 102. $82.80, [euro]68.

Trevor Le Gassick offers an easily readable translation of 'Amr Ennami's critical edition of the medieval creed ('aqida, but also usul al-din here and in several manuscripts of the text) of the North African Ibadi scholar Tibghurin b. Dawud b. 'Isa al-Malshuti (d. latter half of the fifth/eleventh or early in the sixth/twelfth century). Both the English translation and the Arabic text are welcome additions to the growing corpus of available Ibadi materials, and will stand alongside the translations by Pierre Cuperly and Valerie Hoffman in making Ibadi theological materials accessible to a wider audience. Moreover, al-Malshuti's creed remains one of the more important medieval theological tracts from the North African Ibadi community of Jabal Nafusa (present-day Libya), having been the subject of several commentaries and glosses.

The backstory of this edition is nearly as interesting as the text itself, wrapped as it is in the loss of a great mind to the atrocity of authoritarianism. The capable Ibadi scholars at Centre Ibadica in Paris began to inquire after al-Malshutl's text, which had sat neglected for forty years, when they read the transcript of a talk given in 1977 by Ennami, a Libyan scholar of tremendous importance to the field of Ibadi studies. In the transcript, Ennami claimed to have completed a translation and edition of the work in conjunction with University of Michigan Professor of Arabic Literature Trevor Le Gassick, and that this was near to publication. Yet no publication could be found in the late 201 Os. Following up on this lead, Paul Love contacted Le Gassick in 2016 to ask after the text and inquire into the story of his relationship with Ennami (about which Love wrote a blog post). Eventually locating the work, Le Gassick provided a typewritten manuscript to Ibadica to be proofed and corrected. Thus, nearly fifty years after Ennami edited an edition of al-Malshuff's 'aqida for the appendix to his 1971 dissertation, forty-three years after its near-but-not publication with Le Gassick in 1977, and thirty-six years after Ennami's senseless torture and murder on the order of Qaddhafi in 1984, the work of these two friends finally saw the light of publication. Le Gassick's foreword offers...