Khalil Andani
Dr. Khalil Andani is Assistant Professor of Religion at Augustana College. He holds a PhD, MA, and MTS degrees in Islamic Studies from Harvard University, where he was an SSHRC Doctoral Fellow (2014-2019). He specializes in Qur’anic studies, in Islamic intellectual history of theology & philosophy, Sufism, Ismailism, and most recently in global Islamic philosophy of religion. His book project is a history of the theologies and conceptions of Revelation in Islam, with special attention to the concepts of kitab, wahy, tanzil, verbal and non-verbal inspiration, and hermeneutics in the Quran, Hadith, Tafsir, Sunni Kalam, Imami Shiism, Shi'i Ismaili thought. HIs PhD dissertation won the 2020 Best Dissertation of the Year from the Foundation for Iranian Studies.
Khalil’s publications include articles in Zygon, Journal of Sufi Studies, Oxford Journal of Islamic Studies, the Journal of Islamic & Muslim Studies, Religion Compass, The Routledge Companion to the Quran, The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Philosophy, and Deconstructing Islamic Studies. He has forthcoming articles in European Journal of Analytic Philosophy, From the Divine to the Human, Oxford Handbook of Islamic Reform, A Guide to Sufi Literature, and Global-Critical Philosophy of Religion (ed. Knepper) and two older articles in Sacred Web (ed. Ali Lakhani).
Khalil is also a Chartered Professional Accountant (CPA) and completed Bachelor of Mathematics (BMath) and Master of Accounting degrees at the University of Waterloo (2008).
Khalil regularly presents at academic and non-academic conferences. He convened the 2021 International Ismaili Studies Conference. Khalil is currently the Co-Chair of the Methodology & Hermeneutics Unit of the International Qur’anic Studies Association and Steering Committee member of the new Constructive Muslim Thought Seminar in the AAR.
Khalil’s publications include articles in Zygon, Journal of Sufi Studies, Oxford Journal of Islamic Studies, the Journal of Islamic & Muslim Studies, Religion Compass, The Routledge Companion to the Quran, The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Philosophy, and Deconstructing Islamic Studies. He has forthcoming articles in European Journal of Analytic Philosophy, From the Divine to the Human, Oxford Handbook of Islamic Reform, A Guide to Sufi Literature, and Global-Critical Philosophy of Religion (ed. Knepper) and two older articles in Sacred Web (ed. Ali Lakhani).
Khalil is also a Chartered Professional Accountant (CPA) and completed Bachelor of Mathematics (BMath) and Master of Accounting degrees at the University of Waterloo (2008).
Khalil regularly presents at academic and non-academic conferences. He convened the 2021 International Ismaili Studies Conference. Khalil is currently the Co-Chair of the Methodology & Hermeneutics Unit of the International Qur’anic Studies Association and Steering Committee member of the new Constructive Muslim Thought Seminar in the AAR.
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Papers by Khalil Andani
In doing so, I first critique the popular Kalam Cosmological Argument of William Lane Craig and Andrew Loke and the Modal Contingency Argument of Plantinga, Joshua Rasmussen, and Alexander Pruss. I argue that both arguments fall short in establishing the existence of a God who is truly distinguished from other ontological items.
I then analyze contemporary formulations of God as Unconditioned Reality and demonstrate that premodern Islamic Neoplatonic traditions, including Ismāʿīlī, Avicennian, and Akbarī Sufi
metaphysics, conceptualize God as an absolutely simple Unconditioned Reality. Next, I present a deductive argument for the existence of a single, absolutely simple, non-corporeal, eternally timeless, transcendent, and unbounded Unconditioned Reality as the eternal originator of all conditioned realities. In doing so, I engage with the objections to divine simplicity by Joseph Schmid, Nicholas Wolterstoff, and Gregory Fowler.
I then argue that absolute divine simplicity entails the idea that God creates by necessity and that the first creation or first conditioned reality is a single perfect creation. Finally, I conclude by observing how certain premodern Muslim and modern neoclassical Christian theologies do not comport with the concept of Unconditioned Reality and address popular objections to absolute divine simplicity from neoclassical theists.
theology based on the philosophical thought of the most prominent Ismāʿīlī Muslim Neoplatonic philosopher-dāʿīs—Abū Yaʿqūb al-Sijistānī (d. ca. 361/971), Ḥamīd al-Dīn al-Kirmānī (d. ca. 412/1021), al-Muʾayyad al-Shīrāzī (d. 470/1077), Nāṣir-i Khusraw (d. 462/1070), ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Shahrastānī (d. 548/1153), and Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī (d. 672/1274).
My primary purpose is to demonstrate the logical coherence and metaphysical merits of Ismāʿīlī apophasis both as a viable Islamic expression of tawḥīd and as an intellectually compelling formulation of classical theism (also called divine simplicity) in the contemporary philosophy of religion.
The first section of this study will demonstrate that Ismāʿīlīs employed natural theology to prove the existence of God and that their belief in God was rooted in rational argument. The second section focuses on how Ismāʿīlīs articulate the transcendence of God above the physical and spiritual realms through a dual negation that is consistent with the rules of logic. The third section focuses on how Ismāʿīlīs articulate divine simplicity or the absolute oneness of God by negating all attributes from Him through another type of dual negation, which is based on the Neoplatonic semantics of scalar predication. The fourth section deals with the controversial Ismāʿīlī idea that God is beyond existence and non-existence. The fifth and final section shows how Ismāʿīlī apophatic theology still accommodates positive predications about God when they are understood as metonymic descriptions as opposed to literal ones.
the field, as Ismāʿīlī studies progresses at a staggering pace. At the same time, however, a tendency best described as “academic-polemic” continues to hamper academic treatments of select Ismāʿīlī topics, particularly the historical origins of the Fatimid Caliphate and the career of Aga Khan I in colonial India. This is evident in how certain authors simply mirror or
privilege anti-Ismāʿīlī polemical narratives in an uncritical manner while marginalizing or omitting important historical evidence that contravenes their arguments. Second, Ismāʿīlī studies as a field takes for granted the existence of an intelligible entity called “Ismāʿīlism” as its ostensible object of study but there is yet to be a critical interrogation of the origins, construction, and problems with “Ismāʿīlism” as a category of analysis. I show that Ismāʿīlism is either explicitly or implicitly being defined as a sectarian religious ideology
consisting of one or more essentialist doctrines, centered on allegiance to and recognition of the religious authority of the Ismāʿīlī Imams . As employed by many scholars, Ismāʿīlism is a reified sui generis entity, somehow transcending history and manifesting through various instances or “species” of historical Ismāʿīlī movements, communities, and theologies. I show
that Ismāʿīlism presently conceived as an analytical and taxonomical category fails to cohere with many examples of historical Ismāʿīlī phenomena and needs to be reconceptualized.
Both Twelver Shiʿi and Ismaili Shiʿi Muslims revere a specific lineage of descendants of the Prophet Muhammad through his daughter Fātima al-Zahrā and his cousin ʿAli b. Abi Tālib as his divinely appointed successors and as infallible leaders possessing comprehensive spiritual authority, divinely inspired knowledge, and intercessory functions in which they mediate the spiritual relationship between human beings and God. For the Twelvers, the Imam of the current age, a lineal descendant of Musā b. Jaʿfar al-Sādeq, has been in occultation (ghayba) for some 1,200 years; for many Twelvers, this Hidden Imam is generally represented by the Twelver jurists and clerics. For the Ismailis, the Imam of the time is a living descendant of Ismāʿil b. Jaʿfar al-Sadeq, who is either present and directly accessible to his community (as Aga Khan IV for the Nizāri Ismāʿilis) or concealed and represented through the mediation of his authorized da‘is (for the Tayyibi Ismailis). This doctrine of the Imamate, which revolves around the issue of rightful spiritual and temporal leadership in Islam, presupposes certain models of epistemology, theology, cosmology, and anthropology that ground the spiritual status of the Imams. Meisami’s book focuses precisely on these background concepts underlying the doctrine of the Imamate as understood by al-Kirmānī and Mullā Ṣadrā within the Fatimid and Safavid contexts respectively.
Ismailism. Religion Compass 10/8 (2016): 191–206, DOI 10.1111/rec3.12205 and A Survey of Ismaili Studies Part 2: Post‐
Fatimid and Modern Ismailism. Religion Compass 10/11 (2016): 269–282. DOI: 10.1111/rec3.12222
Muslim perspectives were articulated in the tenth and eleventh century when Isma‘ili philosophy underwent a great flowering. But there is reason to believe that such perspectives, due to their pluralistic, ecumenical and esoteric outlook, can play a great role in the modern age towards opening further doors of understanding and recognition between the faiths of Christianity and Islam."
Conference Presentations by Khalil Andani
This paper focuses on the religious authority of His Highness Prince Karim al-Husayni Aga Khan IV, the successor of Aga Khan III and present Imam of the Ismaili Muslims. Recent scholarship (Daftary et al. 2011; Poor 2014) has only focused on the present Aga Khan’s leadership as manifested through his institutional work in the Aga Khan Development Network. Andani argues that the religious authority of the Ismaili Imam today is “ritualized” through contemporary Ismaili practices, such as the daily Ismaili prayer (Du‘a), rituals of spiritual purification, and the charismatic event known as didar. On the basis of Wade T. Wheelock’s theory of ritual as a set of “situating” speech acts that communicate archetypes and fundamental values, Andani demonstrates how Ismaili Tariqah rituals (as described in public academic literature) situate the Imam as the possessor of a divinely-ordained authority, known as walayah in Shia Islam, which corresponds in part to the Weberian type of charismatic authority. Specifically, these rituals portray the Ismaili Imam as a medium for God’s blessings, the spiritual father and mother of his disciples, and the locus of manifestation (mazhar) of a primordial spiritual reality called the Light (nur) of the Imamat.