The present volume focuses on aspects of Islamic thought in Iran and Yemen, and other regions of the Middle East, ninth through fifteenth century CE, through a close study of manuscript materials. The book's sixteen chapters are arranged under five rubrics: Mu'tazilism, Zaydism in Iran and in Yemen, Twelver Shi'ism, Mysticism, and Bibliographical Traditions. The material included in the book has been published previously in a different version. The appearance of these studies together in a single volume makes this book a significant and welcome contribution to the field of classical Islamic Studies.
This surveys the philosophies of music of the most important thinkers in Islam between the 9th and the 15th centuries A.D. It covers topics ranging from the physics and aesthetics of sound, the nature of music, its place in the total scheme of things and in human life, the relation between music, astronomy, astrology and meteorology, the relation between music and human feelings character and behaviour, to the question of whether a good Muslim should be allowed to listen to music at all, and if so, to which type. The book traces the influence of Greek, in particular Pythagorean and Aristoxenian, thinking in Islam on this subject, and aims to provide a philosophically coherent statement of thinking of the Islamic writers concerned, a clarification of their central arguments, as well as a critical evaluation of their line of thought. The author introduces a wide range of material from manuscript sources, including much that has not been published before.
Renowned for its madrassas and archives of rare Arabic manuscripts, Timbuktu is famous as a great center of Muslim learning from Islam’s Golden Age. Yet Timbuktu is not unique. It was one among many scholarly centers to exist in precolonial West Africa. Beyond Timbuktu charts the rise of Muslim learning in West Africa from the beginning of Islam to the present day, examining the shifting contexts that have influenced the production and dissemination of Islamic knowledge—and shaped the sometimes conflicting interpretations of Muslim intellectuals—over the course of centuries. Highlighting the significant breadth and versatility of the Muslim intellectual tradition in sub-Saharan Africa, Ousmane Kane corrects lingering misconceptions in both the West and the Middle East that Africa’s Muslim heritage represents a minor thread in Islam’s larger tapestry. West African Muslims have never been isolated. To the contrary, their connection with Muslims worldwide is robust and longstanding. The Sahara was not an insuperable barrier but a bridge that allowed the Arabo-Berbers of the North to sustain relations with West African Muslims through trade, diplomacy, and intellectual and spiritual exchange. The West African tradition of Islamic learning has grown in tandem with the spread of Arabic literacy, making Arabic the most widely spoken language in Africa today. In the postcolonial period, dramatic transformations in West African education, together with the rise of media technologies and the ever-evolving public roles of African Muslim intellectuals, continue to spread knowledge of Islam throughout the continent.
Bringing together the expansive scholarly expertise of former students of Professor Michael Allan Cook, this volume contains highly original articles in Islamic history, law, and thought. The contributions range from studies in the pre-Islamic calendar, to the "blood-money group" in Islamic law, to transformations in Arabic logic.
Bringing together essays on topics related to Islamic law, this book is composed of articles by prominent legal scholars and historians of Islam. They exemplify a critical development in the field of Islamic Studies: the proliferation of methodological approaches that employ a broad variety of sources to analyze social and political developments.
The people who selected, edited, and published the new print books on and about Islam exerted a huge influence on the resulting literary tradition. These unheralded editors determined, essentially, what came to be understood by the early twentieth century as the classical written "canon" of Islamic thought. Collectively, this relatively small group of editors who brought Islamic literature into print crucially shaped how Muslim intellectuals, the Muslim public, and various Islamist movements understood the Islamic intellectual tradition. In this book Ahmed El Shamsy recounts this sea change, focusing on the Islamic literary culture of Cairo, a hot spot of the infant publishing industry, from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As El Shamsy argues, the aforementioned editors included some of the greatest minds in the Muslim world and shared an ambitious intellectual agenda of revival, reform, and identity formation. .
“Superb... A tour de force.” —Ebrahim Moosa “Provocative... Aydin ranges over the centuries to show the relative novelty of the idea of a Muslim world and the relentless efforts to exploit that idea for political ends.” —Washington Post When President Obama visited Cairo to address Muslims worldwide, he followed in the footsteps of countless politicians who have taken the existence of a unified global Muslim community for granted. But as Cemil Aydin explains in this provocative history, it is a misconception to think that the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims constitute a single entity. How did this belief arise, and why is it so widespread? The Idea of the Muslim World considers its origins and reveals the consequences of its enduring allure. “Much of today’s media commentary traces current trouble in the Middle East back to the emergence of ‘artificial’ nation states after the fall of the Ottoman Empire... According to this narrative...today’s unrest is simply a belated product of that mistake. The Idea of the Muslim World is a bracing rebuke to such simplistic conclusions.” —Times Literary Supplement “It is here that Aydin’s book proves so valuable: by revealing how the racial, civilizational, and political biases that emerged in the nineteenth century shape contemporary visions of the Muslim world.” —Foreign Affairs
Beginning in 1172, Judah ibn Tibbon, who was called the father of Hebrew translators, wrote a letter to his son that was full of personal and professional guidance. The detailed letter, described as an ethical will, was revised through the years and offered a vivid picture of intellectual life among Andalusi elites exiled in the south of France after 1148. S. J. Pearce sets this letter into broader context and reads it as a document of literary practice and intellectual values. She reveals how ibn Tibbon, as a translator of philosophical and religious texts, explains how his son should make his way in the family business and how to operate, textually, within Arabic literary models even when writing for a non-Arabic audience. While the letter is also full of personal criticism and admonitions, Pearce shows ibn Tibbon making a powerful argument in favor of the continuation of Arabic as a prestige language for Andalusi Jewish readers and writers, even in exile outside of the Islamic world.
The history of Islamic thought in the Middle Ages, the impact of Greek philosophy and science, and the formation of an own theological tradition, is a long and complex one. The articles in this volume dedicated to Hans Daiber, one of the pioneering scholars in this field, offer new insights from a variety of perspectives: philological, philosophical, and historical. The subjects range from Islamic philosophy and theology, over the history of science, the transmission into other medieval cultures to language and literature. In addition to their specific discoveries, they give an impression of the dynamics of medieval Islamic intellectual history as well as of the diversity of approaches needed to understand this dynamics.
