ABSTRACT
In this chapter I shall dwell primarily on the first extant text of ʿAyn al-Quḍāt, a treatise he called Zubdah al-Ḥaqā’iq (“The Best of Truth”). ʿAyn al-Quḍāt composed this book in 516/1122, when he was twenty-four years old. The Haqā’iq in the title is the plural of haqīqa, from the root ḤAQQ, meaning “truth.” Zubda means “the best,” “the selected,” “creme de la creme,” one might even say. The assumption is that there are certain truths one ought to know and that ʿAyn al-Quḍāt in this treatise is about to reveal not only those truths but the best of them, the most necessary to know. There is a decided sense of self-assured confidence, a boastful self-assertion one might even say, about this title. What could have gone through ʿAyn al-Quḍāt’s head when he gave this title to his treatise? Imagine a twenty-four-year-old man publishing a book with such a title in a city full of jurists, theologians, philosophers, scientists, mathematicians, and Sufis! This remarkable self-confidence is the most immediate and visible feature of Zubda. More than anything else, that self-confidence is evident in ʿAyn al-Quḍāt’s personal voice, his remarkable audacity in saying “T” against a vast and pervasive legacy of suppressing individual subjectivity. In order to signal the continued significance of that “I” and the mode of narrative it involves and sustains, I will have to make occasional references to post-Zubda writings, the very cast of their discourse anticipated by this remarkable text. The nature of that “I,” with its subjective placement and its rhetorical effacement, ought to be understood carefully before we can read Zubda, or any other text of ʿAyn al-Quḍāt, so thoroughly crafted around that self-cognitive agency.
