Nasir al-Din Tusi and Fadhil Miqdad on the Meaning of Divine Names through the Lens of Ibn Sina’s Doctrine on the Attributes of Necessary Being

Abstract

Nasir al-Din Tusi, the pioneer of the “Philosophical Rationality” movement within the theological-philosophical school of Ḥillah, emphasized the examination of “first philosophy,” the effects of which could be seen in the more specific problems of theology. This study explains the problem of the meaning of Divine names in some works of Nasir al-Din Tusi and Fazil Miqdad, for which they adopted an apophatic approach under the influence of Ibn Sina. According to the rule of the “impossibility of abstracting two concepts from a simple reality,” Ibn Sina believed in the conceptual synonymy of Divine attributes. In response to the possible objection regarding the different meanings of God’s attributes in theological propositions, he proposed a threefold strategy: negation of opposing meaning, addition to the creature, or a synthesis of both. Nasir al-Din Tusi has not explicitly referred to Ibn Sina's conceptual synonymy theory; however, he has implicitly adopted his threefold strategy in Al-Fusul al-Nasiriyya. Tusi organized his discussion not around the meaning of Divine attributes, but around the “meanings of God's names,” categorizing Allah as the “name of essence” separately and expanding Ibn Sina's framework into a fourfold schema within his own theological-philosophical discourse. Subsequently, Fazil Miqdad, in Al-Anwar al-Jalaliyya, elucidated Tusi's framework with simplified language, addressing certain ambiguities. Tusi's apophatic perspective, as expounded by Miqdad, suggests that the multiplicity of God's names does not entail a plurality of attributes in His essence, thereby maintaining compatibility with the simplicity of Divine essence.

Keywords

• ibn sina
• the name of the essence
• apophatic theology
• fazil miqdad
• meaning of divine names
• positive meaning
• negative meaning
• nasir al-din tusi