Abstract This article analyses the reception history of the creedal chapter of Ibn Abī Zayd al-Qayrawānī’s (d. 386/996) Risāla , a text that has generated more than 200 commentaries over the past millennium. Ashʿarī and Salafī scholars have been engaged in an intellectual tug-of-war over the creedal affiliation of the text and its author, each seeking to connect it with their respective traditions. Despite the scale of the Risāla corpus, Western academic scholarship has paid little attention to it. This study traces its reception through three phases: an initial indeterminate phase (375/985–421/1031), a long Ashʿarī phase (421/1031–1414/1993), and a recent surge of Salafī commentary-writing (1414/1993–present). The commentaries serve as case studies to compare the ways in which both factions attempt to build a textual tradition. Their commentary activity on the passage on divine elevation ( fawqiyya ) is used to elicit salient epistemological and hermeneutical underpinnings.
Abstract This article examines the persistent yet unstable entanglement between sultanic authority and the miraculous in the Ottoman Empire. It argues that kerâmet was never a routine attribute of kingship but a selective mode of political communication activated at moments of crisis and transformation. By situating the Ottoman experience within a wider Eurasian field of sacral kingship, it reconstructs a longue durée genealogy of kerâmet from early dynastic memory to the age of print. Drawing on hagiographies, chronicles, epigraphy, and official newspapers, it shows that miraculous claims tended to cluster when established bases of legitimacy were strained, yet just as readily receded when coercion or bureaucratic competence could suffice. Rather than a Weberian oscillation between rational-legal and charismatic authority, the study identifies a flexible “grammar” of sacral kingship, in which Ottoman sultans modulated the miraculous—invoking it when useful, withholding it when dangerous, and thereby expanding the repertoire of imperial legitimacy.
