al-Shahrastānī on al-Naẓẓām: the denial of the indivisible part and the leap (Haarbrücker 1850)

Companion source

Source: Internet Archive abulfathmuhamma00unkngoog; local OCR excerpt .txt, lines 3429–3785 of the archive’s _djvu.txt, retrieved 2026-09-08. The Arabic text is Cureton’s 1846 edition, archive 10218710bsb, not stored. Metadata: Abū al-Fatḥ Muḥammad al-Shahrastānī, Kitāb al-Milal wa-l-niḥal (twelfth century), German translation by Theodor Haarbrücker, Religionspartheien und Philosophen-Schulen, vol. 1 (Halle, 1850), section “3. Die Naẓẓāmīya”, about pp. 53–60. Extraction: archive.org OCR of an 1850 Antiqua printing; transliterations are damaged. Rights: public domain.

Source digest

The section reports that al-Naẓẓām agreed with the philosophers in denying the indivisible part and first proposed the leap when confronted with the objection that an ant walking from one edge of a rock to the other traverses what has no end: it traverses partly by walking and partly by leaping, illustrated by a rope on a beam in a well. This is the Arabic kalām form of the cut question, where the atomists keep indivisible parts and time-atoms and al-Naẓẓām keeps infinite divisibility at the cost of a leap. For this project, it is the discrete counterpart of the finite-speed bridge, in which a body is refined by cuts yet crosses a divisible interval.

Passage anchors

• Archive lines 3549–3575: the denial of the indivisible part, the ant objection and the leap.
• Archive line 3429: the section heading.

Coverage and limits

Reading level passage for the leap paragraph on OCR text; metadata for the remainder of the section.