Cordovan Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad Ibn Masarra (d. 319/931) is one of the earliest Andalusians to have sought to delve deep into divine knowledge by rational means and through a direct mystical experience. He therefore represents a divergence when regarded from the perspective of the religious sciences accepted in Umayyad Al-Andalus, based exclusively on chains of transmission. During Ibn Masarra’s lifetime, his contemporaries already held contradictory opinions about him. Ibn Ḥārith al-Khushanī, a contemporary of Ibn Masarra, noted: “People are divided over him. One group believes that he attained the level of an imām in terms of both knowledge and asceticism because of his mastery in science and his sincerity in asceticism; while the other group accuses him of innovations in faith (bidaʿ).” These contradictory opinions about him as a person continued to exist across time. The vast majority of primary sources considered Ibn Masarra to be a “mubtadiʿ,” or innovator, whereas Sufis from the late Almohad period and thereafter regarded him as “one of the greatest seekers of the spiritual path in terms of knowledge, spiritual states, and revelations,” in the words of Ibn ʿArabī (d. 638/1240). Though the primary sources already give conflicting views of Ibn Masarra, later scholarship has offered even more different interpretations of his intellectual legacy, based on the differing value which they place on the primary sources and the various works attributed to Ibn Masarra.

In his presentation, held as part of the event series “Semblances of Cordoba: the Umayyad era in the first person,” Bellver will be taking a closer look at the problems surrounding the interpretation of Ibn Masarra as a historical figure, also delving further into his thought and influence, in order to clarify the role played by the rational sciences during the Umayyad Caliphate of Cordoba.

José Bellver earned his PhD in Arabic Philology from the University of Barcelona (2007) is a senior scientist at the Centro Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) School of Arab Studies (EEA) in Granada. He has been a post-doctoral researcher at Boston College (Theology Department), the University of Barcelona (History of Philosophy Department), Universität Würzburg/Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Munich, and the Université Catholique de Louvain (Institut des Civilisations, Arts et Lettres). He is also a technical engineer in telecommunications and a senior electronics engineer.

His main research interests focus on the intellectual history of Islam, particularly in the fields of Sufism, theology, philosophy and the history of science in Al-Andalus. Some of his recent articles include “From Ashʿarism to waḥda muṭlaqa in Andalusī Sufism: A Survey of Historical Sources on the Shūdhiyya,” found in Studia Islamica; “Looted Libraries and Legitimation Policies: Ptolemy, the Library of al-Arawšī and the Translation Movement in Toledo,” in Arabica; and “The Beginnings of Rational Theology in al-Andalus: Ibn Masarra and his Refutation of al-Kindī’s On First Philosophy,” in Al-Qanṭara.

Bellver is currently preparing monographs on the early intellectual history of Al-Andalus, in which he discusses authors such as Ibn Masarra and Maslama b. Qāsim al-Qurṭubī.