Eichner, Heidrun
Senior Fellow: April–August 2021
Research Project: Islamic Theology
Heidrun Eichner’s project investigates reconfigurations of arguments regarding the validity of prophecy as a source of knowledge in early modern Islamic authors. Arguments questioning the authority of prophets have been discussed in the classical tradition of Islamic theology for centuries. For some authors, this is a merely academic discussion of a stock of arguments and an intellectual exercise inherited from tradition, whereas for others, these arguments are used as an important tool in their engagement with contemporary debates. The focus of the project will be on how inspiration as a source of authority is negotiated in such constellations and how this relates to arguments from the theological tradition in a narrower sense. A starting point will be early modern mystical texts from the Ottoman empire (eighteenth century onwards), where Māturīdite traditions convey an attitude to inspiration that clearly stands in conflict with how al-Ghazālī’s influential mystical writings frame inspiration as a source of knowledge from an Ashʿarī point of view. Additionally, the transformations of this attitude will be followed through the commentary literature that evolved around it.
Heidrun Eichner holds a chair of Islamic studies at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen.