Doctrinal Instruction in Early Islam: The Book of the Explanation of the Sunna by Ghulām Khalīl (D. 275/888)

This pioneering study casts important new light on key issues in the development of dogmatic instruction in early Islam, as it examines the creed written by the Basran and Baghdadi Sunni preacher Ghulām Khalīl (d. 275/888). It includes a critical edition of the Arabic text and an English translation of what appears to be one of the earliest statements of religious beliefs in Islam. In particular, this book argues convincingly that this influential text was authored by the ninth century Ghulām Khalīl rather than the Hanbali preacher of Baghdad, al-Barbahārī - a claim repeatedly made by modern scholars, both Western and Eastern. The present publication broaches multi-layered themes with the aim of specifying the parameters of this ＂Muslim Creed＂ in terms of the composite relationship between its content and its origin. In addition, it tackles the important question of what may have led modern Salafis to embrace the doctrinal positions of this particular statement of belief and practice and, perhaps more importantly, to pursue its ＂institutionalization＂ as a religious orthodoxy.

Maher Jarrar (PhD 1989 from the University of Tübingen) is Professor at the American University of Beirut, both at the Civilization Sequence Program and at the Department of Arabic. In 1996 and 2011 he was a Visiting Professor at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University and in 2002-2003 a Fellow in the working group Modernity and Islam at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. He has published numerous books and articles in the fields of Islamic studies, Arabic literature, and literary criticism. Sebastian Günther (Ph.D. (1989, University of Halle-Wittenberg) is Professor and Chair of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Göttingen. He has published extensively on the intellectual and religious history of Islam, including Roads to Paradise: Eschatology and Concepts of the Hereafter in Islam (co-edited with T. Lawson, Brill 2016) and Die Geheimnisse der oberen und und der unteren Welt: Magie im Islam zwischen Glaube und Wissenschaft (co-edited with D. Pielow, Brill 2018).