Sharia, Antinomianism, and Monist Cosmology
In this essay, I study interactions between Sharia, antinomian ideas, and the rise of monist cosmology (waḥdat al-wujūd) in the Perso-Islamic world in the 13th and 14th centuries. In this era, the Mongol invasions disrupted the established order and introduced tensions between nomadic steppe traditi...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
2026
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| In: |
Islamic law and society
Year: 2026, Volume: 33, Issue: 1/2, Pages: 1-27 |
| Further subjects: | B
Persianate Mongol world
B Monism B Antinomianism B Sharia |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | In this essay, I study interactions between Sharia, antinomian ideas, and the rise of monist cosmology (waḥdat al-wujūd) in the Perso-Islamic world in the 13th and 14th centuries. In this era, the Mongol invasions disrupted the established order and introduced tensions between nomadic steppe traditions and Islamic legal norms. Additionally, new antinomian groups such as the Qalandariyya and Haydariyya reportedly contravened various legal codes. At the same time, this was an intellectually groundbreaking era that saw the emergence of new ideas, including those of Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 638/1240). Against this background, Muslim intellectuals were compelled to rethink their cosmologies in light of the prevailing social, political, and intellectual developments. The current essay focuses on two thinkers, one Sunni and the other Shiʿi, who established monism as a distinct school of thought and demarcated its boundaries so that it would not be exposed to the "excesses" of antinomianism: ʿAzīz-i Nasafī (fl. 7th/13th century) and Sayyid Ḥaydar Āmulī (d. ca. 787/1385). Nasafī developed a peace-centered model of spiritual hierarchy to reduce tensions between the legalistic and spiritual aspects of Islam, while Ḥaydar Āmulī drew extensively on Neoplatonic concepts to formulate universal and correspondence-based hermeneutical models. These two thinkers, thus, developed innovative strategies to reconcile their pioneering monist cosmologies with Islam’s juristic core in the Persianate Mongol world. |
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| ISSN: | 1568-5195 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Islamic law and society
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1163/15685195-bja10075 |
