ḤILLĪ, AL-

ḤILLĪ, AL- (ah 648–726/1250–1326 ce), more fully Jamāl al-Dīn Abū Manṣūr al-Ḥasan ibn Yūsuf ibn ʿAlī ibn al-Muṭahhar, known as ʿAllāmah ("great scholar" or "sage") al-Ḥillī after Hillah, a great center of Shīʿī learning in southern Iraq; hence, a number of famous scholars are known as al-Ḥillī.

Al-Ḥillī studied first with his father and then with his famous maternal uncle, Najm al-Dīn Abū al-Qāsim Jaʿfar ibn Saʿīd al-Ḥillī, known as "the Foremost Scholar" (al-Muḥaqqiq al-Awwal), as well as with a number of other Shīʿī and Sunnī scholars. His mentor in philosophy and theology was the controversial astrologer, theologian, and philosopher Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī (d. 1274).

Al-Ḥillī wrote in all the religious and rational sciences, as well as in biography, Arabic grammar, and rhetoric. He was the first to apply the scientific study (ʿilm ) of the ḥadīth ("traditions") to Shīʿī tradition, and his methodology remains normative in Shīʿī ḥadīth scholarship. The method, however, earned him the hostility of the Akhbārī scholars, who accepted all the traditions in the four Shīʿī ḥadīth collections as sound.

The majority of al-Ḥillī's works, numbering over one hundred, or according to some accounts five hundred, have been lost. Among his ten published works, all of them standard textbooks in jurisprudence and theology, is Sharḥ Tajrīd al-Iʿtiqād, a commentary on Tajrīd al-Iʿtiqād (Divesting the creed [of all details]), a Shīʿī creed by Ṭūsī. This commentary has superseded all other works on Shīʿī dogmatics. Al-Ḥillī's treatise Al-bāb al-ḥādī ʿashar (The eleventh chapter) is an important creed and has been translated into English. It was appended to another of his important works, Minhāj al-ṣalāḥ fī ikhtiṣār al-Miṣbāḥ (The Proper way to abridge The Lamp ), an abridgement of Abū Jaʿfar Ṭūsī's Miṣbāḥ al-mutahajjid (The lamp of the vigilant [in the night prayers]).

Around 1305 al-Ḥillī traveled to Persia, where he engaged in many debates with leading Sunnī scholars. Under his influence the eighth Il-khanid sultan of Persia, Öljeitü Khudā-Banda, who had been first a Christian, later a Buddhist, and then a Ḥanafī Sunnī Muslim, was converted to Twelver Shiism. Under Öljeitü the names of the twelve Shīʿī imams were inscribed on mosques, and coins were struck in their names. Thus for the first time, however briefly, Twelver Shiism was officially recognized as the state religion of Iran.

ʿAllāmah al-Ḥillī, a contemporary of Ibn Taymīyah and other noted Sunnī scholars, was both admired for his great learning and attacked and vilified as a leading and influential Shīʿī scholar. He was honored by being buried at Najaf in the shrine of ʿAlī, the first Shīʿī imam (and not, as William M. Miller, Dwight M. Donaldson, and S. Husain Jafri mistakenly assert, in Mashhad, Iran: "al-Mashhad al-Ghurawī" is an honorific title for the shrine of ʿAlī in Najaf). Al-Ḥillī's tomb in Najaf is well known and often visited by pilgrims.

Bibliography

The best general works for information on al-Ḥillī are Edward G. Browne's A Literary History of Persia (London, 1924; reprint, 1978), vol. 3, pp. 356 and 406, and vol. 4, p. 54; and Dwight M. Donaldson's The Shiʿite Religion: A History of Islam in Persia and Irak (London, 1933), especially pages 268–269 and 296–297. Al-Ḥillī's Eleventh Chapter has been translated by William M. Miller as Al-Bābu al-Ḥādi ʿAshar: A Treatise on the Principles of Shīʿite Theology (London, 1928).

Mahmoud M. Ayoub (1987)