{"product_id":"once-in-a-thousand-years-the-life-and-radical-mind-of-al-nazzam-9798195579524","title":"Once in a Thousand Years: The Life and Radical Mind of Al-Nazzam","description":"\u003cp\u003e • Author(s): Narin Hikma\u003cbr\u003e • Publisher: Independently Published\u003cbr\u003e • Publisher Imprint: Independently Published\u003cbr\u003e • BISAC: Islam - History\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHe wrote thirty-nine books. Every single one is gone.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhat remains is something harder to destroy than a book: a set of ideas so sharp, so honest, so relentlessly committed to following the argument wherever it leads, that twelve centuries of silence have not managed to extinguish them.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIbrahim ibn Sayyar al-Nazzam lived in ninth-century Baghdad at the absolute height of the Islamic Golden Age. He was the most brilliant student of the Mu'tazilite school - and then, inevitably, its most dangerous heretic. His greatest student, the writer al-Jahiz, called him simply: \u003ci\u003ea man who appears once in a thousand years.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eONCE IN A THOUSAND YEARS\u003c\/b\u003e tells the full story of this lost genius: where he came from, what he thought, why it threatened everyone, and what it means that his ideas refused to stay buried.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhat al-Nazzam argued - at a time when such arguments could end careers, erase legacies, and cost everything: \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThat matter is not made of atoms but is continuous and infinitely divisible - anticipating debates that would not recur in Western science for another eight centuries\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThat motion is not smooth but discontinuous - that objects leap through space in jumps, skipping intermediate points - a theory of startling originality\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThat God cannot do evil - not \u003ci\u003ewould not\u003c\/i\u003e, but \u003ci\u003ecould not\u003c\/i\u003e - because evil is a real category and the divine is genuinely bound by moral truth\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThat consensus is not evidence of truth - that a thousand scholars agreeing does not make a thing right\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThat the hadith traditions deserved the same rational scrutiny as any other human testimony\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThat the Quran's miracle lay not in its style but in its knowledge - in what it knew that no human being of its time could have known\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\u003cp\u003eEach of these positions made enemies. Together, they made al-Nazzam the most attacked, most refuted, and most carefully erased thinker of the early Islamic world - which is another way of saying: the one who had gotten closest to something his age was not ready to accept.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHis books were allowed to die. His school was absorbed and dissolved. His name became a warning in the encyclopedias of later scholarship: \u003ci\u003ethis is what happens when reason goes too far.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBut the questions he asked never closed. They are open now.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Independently Published","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":47882810458263,"sku":"9798195579524","price":1437.0,"currency_code":"INR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0666\/3471\/1191\/files\/9798195579524.webp?v=1781097220","url":"https:\/\/atlanticbooks.com\/products\/once-in-a-thousand-years-the-life-and-radical-mind-of-al-nazzam-9798195579524","provider":"Atlantic Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}