Theology from a medieval Muslim cosmologist

Razi, Fakhr al-Din Muhammad ibn 'Umar al-. Kitab Lawami' al-bayyinat sharh asma' Allah ta'ala wa-al-sifat.

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A very early 14th century manuscript by the Iranian theologian and pioneer of conceptual cosmology and inductive logic, Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (1150-1209 CE), copied less than a century after the author's death. The treatise is the "Kitab Lawami' al-bayyinat", a work on the Islamic creed and the Names of Allah; it is one of al-Razi's lesser-known works.

Barely known in the West, al-Razi was a famed theologian, passionate alchemist, and one of the finest minds in the medieval world on topics of theoretical physics and cosmology, where he trailblazed concepts which would not be widely entertained for centuries. Criticizing Aristotle and even occasionally Ibn Sina (Avicenna), he rejected the concept of a single universe rotating around the Earth and described instead the possibility of a multiverse, and of infinite void space beyond our own Universe. He also posited that the Classical philosophers were correct and some of his fellow theologians wrong, and that the Universe was temporally infinite, without beginning and end in time (something of a 12th century Steady State theory). However, al-Razi and his contemporaries saw no tension between his religion as a devout Muslim and his philosophical cosmology; indeed, his theology and his cosmology were one and the same, part of a continuous examination of Creation.

The present manuscript is a good and quite early example of one of his theological works, copied by a scribe known as Sayf al-Katib ("the writer's sword"), Ahmad ibn Uthman ibn Muhammad al-Samarqandi.