Of Piety and Heresy

This book examines and contextualizes Ab mid Muammad Ghazzls (d. 505/1111) fierce response to antinomian and freethinking currents in twelfth-century Persia. Seyed-Gohrab offers a translation of Ghazzls treatise on antinomians, and one of his religious rulings (fatwa) on the topic. Both were written after Ghazzls intellectual crisis in 488/1095, when he voluntarily withdrew from his position as a Professor at the prestigious Nimiyya College in Baghdad. He determined to live an ascetic life, devoting all his attention to God. In this period, Ghazzl wrote his masterpieces in Arabic and Persian. Seyed-Gohrab shows that these two less-known works shed new light on the motivation for Ghazzl's major works. The book depicts Ghazzls Persian intellectual context, and the tumultuous political period in which a strong literary and Sufi antinomian trend emerged from the social periphery to become central to literary activities at the Saljuq court. The book also treats Ghazzls Persian poetry, offering original insights into Ghazzls contemporary, the celebrated polymath Umar Khayym (d. about 525/1131), whose transgressive quatrains are interpreted as a response to a suffocating religious context.