Inscribed by the author to his "nomodidaskalos"

Tholuck, Friedrich August Gottreu. Ssufismus sive theosophia Persarum pantheistica quam e mss. Bibliothecae Regiae Berolinensis Persicis, Arabicis, Turcicis [...].

Berlin, Ferdinand Dümmler (typis Haynianis), 1821.

8vo. XII, 331, (1), 40 pp. (appendix printed in Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish). Contemporary papered boards with ms. spine label.

 3,000.00

First edition.

Dissertation of the German theologian August Tholuck (1799-1877), a study of Sufism and oriental Pantheism composed because an illness prevented him at the time from accepting the chair of oriental languages and Old Testament exegesis at Dorpat. "Still worth reading" (Nicholson). While Schleiermacher criticised the work as untheological, the University of Jena accorded Tholuck an honorary doctorate in 1822 on the strength of his Persian studies. As professor of Old Testament studies in Berlin and Halle, Tholuck would go on to influence many American theologians, including the Methodist John Fletcher Hurst and Philip Schaff.

A contemporary inkstain to the first few pages. Inscribed by the author on the flyleaf: "Seinem innigst verehrten 'Nomodidaskalos en Kyrio' [Greek], der ihn zu Jesu wieß / der Vf." ("To his dearly beloved Instructor of Law in the Lord, who showed him the path to Jesus, from the author"). The recipient of this gift was likely the church historian Johann August Wilhelm Neander (1789-1850), in whose collection the volume was before the entire library was acquired by the American banker Roswell S. Burrows (1798-1884) for the Rochester Theological Seminary in New York (their printed shelfmark label of "Neander Library" on the front pastedown). A good copy.

References

ADB 38, 55. Herzog/H. XIX, 697. Nicholson, the Mystics of Islam, p. 76. OCLC 7436665.