Sajjad Rizvi’s Review of Rustom, Inrushes of the Heart and Rustom (ed. and trans.), The Essence of Reality (Speculum, 2025)

In the quest for a thicker description of Islamic intellectual history in the middle period, not least on the intersections of philosophy, theology, and Sufism, there is a growing interest in the category of “philosophical Sufism,” or rather works of Sufi spirituality, exegesis, and metaphysics that engage other philosophical works and arguments and present them in relation- ship with Sufi ideas. Perhaps one of the most important figures of the twelfth century was ʿAyn al-Qud ̣ āt Hamadānī (d. 1131), an intriguing thinker engaged with the classics of philosophy, the reception of Avicenna (d. 1037), and the critiques of Avicenna articulated by Sufis and theologians like Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 1111) and his brother Ahmad (d. 1123, who was a teacher and spiritual master of Hamadānī). Thus far we have had little attention paid to Hamadānī: a few stray articles, a chapter in Omid Safi’s book on Seljuk intellectual history, an excellent but unpublished Paris dissertation by Salimeh Maghsoudlou that locates his thought within the philosophical and theological milieu, a couple of sparkling studies by Toshihiko Izutsu, a rather unusual book by Firoozeh Papan Matin that focuses on his “mystical” teachings and their reception in India, and a monograph by Hamid Dabashi that defies categorization. In this context, it is welcome to find these two volumes produced by Mohammed Rustom, one a translation of perhaps Hamadānī’s most important work into English, The Essence of Reality, and the other a sourcebook on his thought, Inrushes of the Heart, that follows the time-honored tradition in the study of Sufism (associated most particularly with William Chittick) of allowing the thinker to speak through copious translated passages (over 800 pas- sages, as the author says). Such a study allows the possibility of using the text for teaching—and thus supplementing the recent publication of the first volume on metaphysics and theology of Peter Adamson and Fedor Benevich’s The Heirs of Avicenna (2024)—which should certainly excite those interested in medieval thought and philosophy. The Essence was previously translated into English by Omar Jah as part of his McGill doctorate and published in Malaysia; Rustom acknowledges its excellence—but one would like to see a further justification for a new translation