ABSTRACT
In this chapter I explore the circumstances that led to the final brutal phase ofʿAyn al-Quḍāt’s short life. It is imperative, I am convinced, that we have a clear understanding of the political circumstances that surrounded the final days of ʿAyn al-Quḍāt’s life. Without a full grasp of these political circumstances, the ex post facto mystification of ʿAyn al-Quḍāt’s life and thought tend doubly to mystify that death. There were rather specific circumstances that surrounded ʿAyn al-Quḍāt’s death, and with a fairly accurate picture we can begin to make sense of his final demise. There is no need to mystify, glorify, or martyrologize that death, as has been the case ever since that tragic event. Those were particularly treacherous times for a maverick intellectual, a man of independent and autonomous judgments in matters of ideas and realities, relentlessly, as he was, in search of a voice he could trust and call his own.
