Once in a Thousand Years : The Life and Radical Mind of Al-Nazzam
Language: English
Published by Amazon Digital Services LLC - Kdp Mai 2026, 2026
- Softcover
- New
Seller: AHA-BUCH GmbH, Einbeck, GermanyAHA-BUCH GmbH
AbeBooks seller since August 14, 2006
Condition: New
£ 27.85
Quantity: 2 available
Add to basketItem description from seller
Neuware - Somewhere in your life there is a question you were taught to put down.You asked it once, and watched the faces around you change. You learned it was the kind of question that makes a person difficult. So you set it aside, and you have been walking around it ever since, half afraid that picking it up again would mean betraying your faith, your family, or the people you love.Twelve centuries ago, in the bead market of Basra, a boy named Ibrahim began picking up the questions everyone else had put down. He grew up to be al-Nazzam, the Stringer: a devout Muslim theologian who argued that God, being good, has no power to be cruel; that fire hides inside wood; that the agreement of a thousand men proves nothing; and that the doubter is closer to you than the denier. He sat with dualists and Christian physicians, argued with his own uncle for half a century, was answered, the commentators say, by the great wine poet of Baghdad in one of the most famous poems in Arabic, and was cursed for a thousand years by men who kept his words alive only to refute them. Almost nothing he wrote survives. His enemies kept the rest.This is a narrative biography, told the way a storyteller tells it by lamplight, of one of the boldest minds of the Islamic golden age and of the cities of argument that made him. It does not turn him into a modern skeptic in a turban; he questioned because he believed. It does not hide his sharp words, the reports of his drinking, or the movement that, at the height of its power, used the caliph's whip. Where the record is solid, the book says so. Where a scene is imagined, it tells you. Where the sources disagree, you get both versions and the name of every teller.- Discover how an honest question can be an act of faith rather than a betrayal of it- Learn to hold praise and blame in the same hand without letting either cancel the other- Walk the canals of Basra and the lamplit salons of Abbasid Baghdad, where the price of a camel and the justice of God were argued in the same afternoon- Weigh two accounts of one man's death, a drunken fall and a whispered prayer, and decide for yourself- See how a man's enemies, by hating him, kept his voice from disappearingThis is a book for anyone who was ever told to stop asking, and quietly kept the question.The question you put down was never a betrayal of what you love.Open the first page, and pick it back up.…
Seller Inventory # 9798195579524
- Title
- Once in a Thousand Years : The Life and Radical Mind of Al-Nazzam
- Author
- Narin Hikma
- Publisher
- Amazon Digital Services LLC - Kdp Mai 2026
- Publication year
- 2026
- Condition
- Neu
- Binding
- Taschenbuch
- Language
- English
- ISBN 13
- 9798195579524
- Item weight
- 376 grams
- Dimensions
- 229x152x15 mm
He wrote thirty-nine books. Every single one is gone.
What remains is something harder to destroy than a book: a set of ideas so sharp, so honest, so relentlessly committed to following the argument wherever it leads, that twelve centuries of silence have not managed to extinguish them.
Ibrahim ibn Sayyar al-Nazzam lived in ninth-century Baghdad at the absolute height of the Islamic Golden Age. He was the most brilliant student of the Mu'tazilite school — and then, inevitably, its most dangerous heretic. His greatest student, the writer al-Jahiz, called him simply: a man who appears once in a thousand years.
ONCE IN A THOUSAND YEARS tells the full story of this lost genius: where he came from, what he thought, why it threatened everyone, and what it means that his ideas refused to stay buried.
What al-Nazzam argued — at a time when such arguments could end careers, erase legacies, and cost everything:
- That matter is not made of atoms but is continuous and infinitely divisible — anticipating debates that would not recur in Western science for another eight centuries
- That motion is not smooth but discontinuous — that objects leap through space in jumps, skipping intermediate points — a theory of startling originality
- That God cannot do evil — not would not, but could not — because evil is a real category and the divine is genuinely bound by moral truth
- That consensus is not evidence of truth — that a thousand scholars agreeing does not make a thing right
- That the hadith traditions deserved the same rational scrutiny as any other human testimony
- That the Quran's miracle lay not in its style but in its knowledge — in what it knew that no human being of its time could have known
Each of these positions made enemies. Together, they made al-Nazzam the most attacked, most refuted, and most carefully erased thinker of the early Islamic world — which is another way of saying: the one who had gotten closest to something his age was not ready to accept.
His books were allowed to die. His school was absorbed and dissolved. His name became a warning in the encyclopedias of later scholarship: this is what happens when reason goes too far.
But the questions he asked never closed. They are open now.
"Synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
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