Ethics in Islam: Friendship in the Political Thought of al-Tawhīdī and his Contemporaries. by Nuha A. Alshaar (review)

Of the many illustrious figures of the Buyid period none is perhaps as intriguing, or as enigmatic, as Abū Hayyān al-Tawhīdī. We know all too little of his biography. He was probably born between 310/922 and 932 but whether in Baghdad, Shiraz, or Nishapur remains uncertain. From his works we know that he studied in Baghdad under such renowned scholars as the jurist and qādī Abū Hāmid al-Marwazī. He tells us that he was in Mecca in 353/964 and, in 366/976, at the court of the vizier Abū al-Fath Ibn al-'Amīd in Rayy—an unhappy experience that informs his scathing portrayal of that vizier, as of the Sāhib Ibn 'Abbād, in his Akhlāq al-Wazīrayn, one of his literary masterpieces. More significantly for the book under review, he was one of a wide circle of distinguished thinkers who helped to advance and reshape a brilliant and influential body of Islamic ethics. These included Abū Sulaymān al-Sijistānī al-Mantiqī, al-Tawhīdī's intellectual mentor, the Christian Aristotelian philosopher Yahyā ibn 'Adī (whose lectures he attended), his friend the historian and scholar Miskawayhī, as well as the several members of the Ikhwān al-Safā', with whose encyclopedic Rasā'il he was clearly familiar. (Indeed, it was through al-Tawhīdī's listing of these members in his Kitāb al-Imtā' wa'l-mu'ānasa that Samuel S. Stern was able to identify them by name (see his "New Information about the Authors of the "Epistles of the Sincere Brethren," Islamic Studies 4 [1964]: 405–428).

Fortunately, after his disappointing experience serving the two viziers, al-Tawhīdī was brought into the circle of the more genial vizier Ibn Sa'dān in Baghdad. He participated in the vizier's majālis and the two became fast friends. It was at the prompting of Ibn Sa'dān that al-Tawhīdī set about composing his Kitāb al-sadāqa wa'l-sadīq, the work on friendship that lies at the heart of Alshaar's excellent new study. As Ibn Sa'dān remarked in encouragement, "Discourse on friendship is sweet and the description of a helpful comrade is moving." This important work, which took its author decades to complete, has been relatively overlooked until now. This is a pity because, as Alshaar persuasively demonstrates, it provides a crucial key to al-Tawhīdī's ethical thinking. Moreover, it reveals that that thinking was not as unsystematic as had previously been claimed. Al-Tawhīdī's conception of friendship (sadāqa) is the linchpin that binds his various reflections on politics and ethics into a coherent whole. This is not to say that al-Tawhīdī was a systematic thinker after the manner of al-Fārābī or Ibn Sīnā—far from it. But it is a great part of Alshaar's achievement here to have shown that under the glittering prose style and the dazzling rhetoric there is a consistency and even a coherence to his ethical thought, scattered as it may appear. Al-Tawhīdī lived to an advanced age, dying in his nineties sometime around 414/1023. After the execution of Ibn Sa'dān in 375/985, his fortunes had changed for the worse. The last twenty years of his life were spent, apparently without a patron, in poverty and neglect. At the end of his life, in bitterness and despair, he made a bonfire of his writings. His own justification for this conflagration is given in his letter to the qadi Abū Sahl (included here in Alshaar's fine translation, pp. 146–147).

Ethics in Islam is easily the best...