13a Neoplatonism and the Qur’an: From Late Antiquity to Ismaili Hermeneutics

Chair: Nuha Alshaar

The term Neoplatonism is a modern neologism that modern scholars used to classify worldviews across multiple faith traditions that posit certain theological and cosmological claims about the nature of reality. These claims include the belief in an absolutely singular, simple, transcendent and ineffable God who is beyond all ontic predication as the source or ground of all reality and the existence of cosmic intermediaries or emanations (such as Intellects and/or Souls). Major schools of Islamic philosophy and mysticism subscribe to Neoplatonic ideas and structures; these include the Avicennian, Akbarī, Illuminationist, and Ismaili traditions. Muslim thinkers within these traditions offered distinctively Neoplatonic readings of the Qur’ān in which Qur’anic motifs, divine names, and symbolic objects are understood as descriptions of the Neoplatonic structure of reality. At first glance, these interpretations appear to be nothing more than eisegesis, as if Muslim Neoplatonic thinkers are merely imposing theological into the Qur’anic text. The four papers on this panel collectively argue that Neoplatonic readings of the Qur’ān are not as unusual as originally thought.