heinous imperfection far below Him.56 At the root of the Sunni rejection of reading a concealed truth behind the Qur’an’s depictions of the Afterlife was the looming terror of the Ismaili Shiites and their ‘Inner’ (Batini) reading of Islam’s scriptures. Their sectarian and military threat to the Sunni caliphate was ever present in the many writings that Hujjat Al-Islam penned as a star professor in the vaulted halls of the Baghdad and Nishapur Nizamiyya madrasas, where he taught during his illustrious career. His own patron, the vizier Nizam Al-Mulk, fell before the dagger of an Ismaili
...more
