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Ian Richard Netton. Allah Transcendent: Studies in the Structure and Semiotics of Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Cosmology. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1994. xiii + 340 pp. including index. Paperback $29.95.
Reviewed by Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad
What do Sufism, Ismaelism and the falasafas have in common? Despite their differences, all depart from the Qur'an's uncompromising depiction of God as the willful Creator and Sustainer of all things by introducing the Neoplatonic doctrines into their cosmology. Using semiotic, structualist, and post-structualist tools, Ian Netton does an outstanding job of detailing how major representatives of these streams of medieval Islamic thought evolved away from what he calls the Qur'anic Creator paradigm and into emanationism.
Netton does not closely examine the Qur'anic Creator paradigm itself. As long as he is using it as a mere reference point for the study of philosophies that depart from it, this does not cause a problem, and he is able to develop wonderful insights into the development of Neoplatonic thought among Muslims. It is only when he seeks to draw conclusions about medieval Islamic thought that his failure to explore the meaning of the Qur'anic conception of the relationship of God to His Creation and the diversity of the views of those scholars who stood by that conception becomes a problem.
Until the point that Netton lays out his conclusion, Allah Transcendent is a tour de force. The careful organization and analysis which the author applies to the scholars and theories he does examine is stunning.
Netton begins with the emergence of Neoplatonism in the falasafas. First, we see al-Kindi writing about God in a new vocabulary adopted from a mixture of sources: Qur'anic, Mu'tazilite, Aristotelian, Neoplatonic, and Christian. As al-Kindi is the earliest of the philosophers analyzed by Netton, it is...