19th Century · Arabic

Risālat al-Wāridāt

Muḥammad ʻAbduh

ʻAbduh's earliest treatise, composed in his twenties under the influence of Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī and fair-copied in Shaʻbān 1290: a metaphysics of existence, knowledge and the divine that moves between the theologians, the Sufis and the philosophers, set out as a series of wāridāt — things that 'come upon' the mind. It is the philosophical work of a man known almost everywhere else as a reformer of institutions. The 1925 Manār printing, edited by his student Rashīd Riḍā, closes it with Riḍā's own postscript and binds a second work after it: al-ʻAqīdah al-Muḥammadīyah, composed in Jumādā II 1294, carried here as the volume's last four chapters.