Download or read book Ideas Images and Methods of Portrayal written by Sebastian Günther and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2005-05-01 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of collected studies in classical Arabic literature and Islam opens a window into the fascinating world of medieval Muslim scholarship. It explores issues in the intellectual heritage of Islam, which have universal appeal and are, therefore, of interest to both specialist and non-specialist readers alike.
Download or read book Defending the People of Truth in the Early Islamic Period written by Sandra Toenies Keating and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2006 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains the apologetical writings of Ab? R?'i?ah al-Takr?t? (+ c. 835) devoted to the defense of the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation, and the proof of the Christian religion in response to Muslim critics of his time.
Download or read book Arabic Literary Salons in the Islamic Middle Ages written by Samer M. Ali and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2010-11-15 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arabic literary salons emerged in ninth-century Iraq and, by the tenth, were flourishing in Baghdad and other urban centers. In an age before broadcast media and classroom education, salons were the primary source of entertainment and escape for middle- and upper-rank members of society, serving also as a space and means for educating the young. Although salons relied on a culture of oral performance from memory, scholars of Arabic literature have focused almost exclusively on the written dimensions of the tradition. That emphasis, argues Samer Ali, has neglected the interplay of oral and written, as well as of religious and secular knowledge in salon society, and the surprising ways in which these seemingly discrete categories blurred in the lived experience of participants. Looking at the period from 500 to 1250, and using methods from European medieval studies, folklore, and cultural anthropology, Ali interprets Arabic manuscripts in order to answer fundamental questions about literary salons as a social institution. He identifies salons not only as sites for socializing and educating, but as loci for performing literature and oral history; for creating and transmitting cultural identity; and for continually reinterpreting the past. A fascinating recovery of a key element of humanistic culture, Ali’s work will encourage a recasting of our understanding of verbal art, cultural memory, and daily life in medieval Arab culture.
Download or read book The Life and Times of Ab Tamm m written by Abū Bakr al-Ṣūlī and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2015-12-01 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A robust defense of a poetic genius Abū Tammām (d. 231 or 232/845 or 846) is one of the most celebrated poets in the Arabic language. Born in Syria to Greek Christian parents, he converted to Islam and quickly made his name as one of the premier Arabic poets in the caliphal court of Baghdad, promoting a new style of poetry that merged abstract and complex imagery with archaic Bedouin language. Both highly controversial and extremely popular, this sophisticated verse influenced all subsequent poetry in Arabic and epitomized the “modern style” (badīʿ), an avant-garde aesthetic that was very much in step with the intellectual, artistic, and cultural vibrancy of the Abbasid dynasty. In The Life and Times of Abū Tammām, translated into English for the first time, the courtier and scholar Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn Yaḥyā al-Ṣūlī (d. 335 or 336/946 or 947) mounts a robust defense of “modern” poetry and of Abū Tammām’s significance as a poet against his detractors, while painting a lively picture of literary life in Baghdad and Samarra. Born into an illustrious family of Turkish origin, al-Ṣūlī was a courtier, companion, and tutor to the Abbasid caliphs. He wrote extensively on caliphal history and poetry and, as a scholar of “modern” poets, made a lasting contribution to the field of Arabic literary history. Like the poet it promotes, al-Ṣūlī's text is groundbreaking: it represents a major step in the development of Arabic poetics, and inaugurates a long line of treatises on innovation in poetry. A bilingual Arabic-English edition.
Download or read book The Rise of the Arabic Book written by Beatrice Gruendler and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The little-known story of the sophisticated and vibrant Arabic book culture that flourished during the Middle Ages. During the thirteenth century, Europe’s largest library owned fewer than 2,000 volumes. Libraries in the Arab world at the time had exponentially larger collections. Five libraries in Baghdad alone held between 200,000 and 1,000,000 books each, including multiple copies of standard works so that their many patrons could enjoy simultaneous access. How did the Arabic codex become so popular during the Middle Ages, even as the well-established form languished in Europe? Beatrice Gruendler’s The Rise of the Arabic Book answers this question through in-depth stories of bookmakers and book collectors, stationers and librarians, scholars and poets of the ninth century. The history of the book has been written with an outsize focus on Europe. The role books played in shaping the great literary cultures of the world beyond the West has been less known—until now. An internationally renowned expert in classical Arabic literature, Gruendler corrects this oversight and takes us into the rich literary milieu of early Arabic letters.
Download or read book Philosophers Sufis and Caliphs written by Ali Humayun Akhtar and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-09 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What was the relationship between government and religion in Middle Eastern history? In a world of caliphs, sultans, and judges, who exercised political and religious authority? In this book, Ali Humayun Akhtar investigates debates about leadership that involved ruling circles and scholars of jurisprudence and theology. At the heart of this story is a medieval rivalry between three caliphates: the Umayyads of Cordoba, the Fatimids of Cairo, and the Abbasids of Baghdad. In a fascinating revival of Late Antique Hellenism, Aristotelian and Platonic notions of wisdom became a key component of how these caliphs debated their authority as political leaders. By tracing how these political debates impacted the theological and jurisprudential scholars and their own conception of communal guidance, Akhtar offers a new picture of premodern political authority and the connections between Western and Islamic civilizations. It will be of use to students and specialists of the premodern and modern Middle East.
Download or read book World Philology written by Sheldon Pollock and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-05 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philology—the discipline of making sense of texts—is enjoying a renaissance within academia after decades of neglect. World Philology charts the evolution of philology across the many cultures and historical time periods in which it has been practiced, and demonstrates how this branch of knowledge, like philosophy and mathematics, is an essential component of human understanding. Every civilization has developed ways of interpreting the texts that it produces, and differences of philological practice are as instructive as the similarities. We owe our idea of a textual edition for example, to the third-century BCE scholars of the Alexandrian Library. Rabbinical philology created an innovation in hermeneutics by shifting focus from how the Bible commands to what it commands. Philologists in Song China and Tokugawa Japan produced startling insights into the nature of linguistic signs. In the early modern period, new kinds of philology arose in Europe but also among Indian, Chinese, and Japanese commentators, Persian editors, and Ottoman educationalists who began to interpret texts in ways that had little historical precedent. They made judgments about the integrity and consistency of texts, decided how to create critical editions, and determined what it actually means to read. Covering a wide range of cultures—Greek, Roman, Hebrew, Arabic, Sanskrit, Chinese, Indo-Persian, Japanese, Ottoman, and modern European—World Philology lays the groundwork for a new scholarly discipline.
Download or read book Andalus and Sefarad written by Sarah Stroumsa and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An integrative approach to Jewish and Muslim philosophy in al-Andalus Al-Andalus, the Iberian territory ruled by Islam from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries, was home to a flourishing philosophical culture among Muslims and the Jews who lived in their midst. Andalusians spoke proudly of the region's excellence, and indeed it engendered celebrated thinkers such as Maimonides and Averroes. Sarah Stroumsa offers an integrative new approach to Jewish and Muslim philosophy in al-Andalus, where the cultural commonality of the Islamicate world allowed scholars from diverse religious backgrounds to engage in the same philosophical pursuits. Stroumsa traces the development of philosophy in Muslim Iberia from its introduction to the region to the diverse forms it took over time, from Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism to rational theology and mystical philosophy. She sheds light on the way the politics of the day, including the struggles with the Christians to the north of the peninsula and the Fāṭimids in North Africa, influenced philosophy in al-Andalus yet affected its development among the two religious communities in different ways. While acknowledging the dissimilar social status of Muslims and members of the religious minorities, Andalus and Sefarad highlights the common ground that united philosophers, providing new perspective on the development of philosophy in Islamic Spain.
Download or read book Classical Arabic Humanities in Their Own Terms written by Beatrice Gruendler and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2008 with total page 649 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume brings together approaches to different elements of Arabic-Islamic civilization, mainly in the areas of linguistics, literature, literary theory, and prosody, but also including religion, ritual, economics, and zoology. Contributions also touch upon the adjacent areas of the Old Iranian, Persian, Greek and Byzantine written traditions. Some take as their points of departure specific Arabic words (cat, giraffe) or morphemes; others explore literary genres, subgenres (oration, ode, macaronic poem, travel narrative) or figures within them (the trickster, the devil). Cultural concepts such as wishing, gift-giving or discourse are treated, as are aspects of broader phenomena, such as the role of gender in dream interpretation or the relative merits of luxury goods and mass-produced commodities.
Download or read book Akhb r Ab Tamm m written by Muḥammad ibn Yaḥyá Ṣūlī and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2015-12 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A robust defense of a poetic genius Abū Tammām (d. 231 or 232/845 or 846) is one of the most celebrated poets in the Arabic language. Born in Syria to Greek Christian parents, he converted to Islam and quickly made his name as one of the premier Arabic poets in the caliphal court of Baghdad, promoting a new style of poetry that merged abstract and complex imagery with archaic Bedouin language. Both highly controversial and extremely popular, this sophisticated verse influenced all subsequent poetry in Arabic and epitomized the “modern style” (badīʿ), an avant-garde aesthetic that was very much in step with the intellectual, artistic, and cultural vibrancy of the Abbasid dynasty. In The Life and Times of Abū Tammām, translated into English for the first time, the courtier and scholar Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn Yaḥyā al-Ṣūlī (d. 335 or 336/946 or 947) mounts a robust defense of “modern” poetry and of Abū Tammām’s significance as a poet against his detractors, while painting a lively picture of literary life in Baghdad and Samarra. Born into an illustrious family of Turkish origin, al-Ṣūlī was a courtier, companion, and tutor to the Abbasid caliphs. He wrote extensively on caliphal history and poetry and, as a scholar of “modern” poets, made a lasting contribution to the field of Arabic literary history. Like the poet it promotes, al-Ṣūlī's text is groundbreaking: it represents a major step in the development of Arabic poetics, and inaugurates a long line of treatises on innovation in poetry. A bilingual Arabic-English edition.
Download or read book The Portrayal and Punishment of Terrorists in Western Media written by Christiana Spens and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-12-29 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how terrorists have been portrayed in the Western media, and the wider ideological and social functions of those representations. Developing a theory of scapegoating related to narrative closure, as well as an integrated, genealogical method of intervisuality, the book proposes a new way of thinking about how political images achieve power and influence the public. By connecting modern portrayals of terrorists (post-9/11) with historical and fictional images of villains from Western cultural history, the book argues that the portrayal and punishment of terrorists in the Western media implicitly perpetuates neo-Orientalist attitudes. It also explains that by repeating these narrative patterns through a ritual of scapegoating, Western media coverage of terrorists partakes in a social process that uses punishment, dehumanization and colonialist ideas to purge the iconic ‘villain’, so as to build national unity and sustain hegemonic power following crisis.
Download or read book Index Islamicus written by and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 818 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Teachers and Students Reflections on Learning in Near and Middle Eastern Cultures written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-01-08 with total page 861 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Teachers and Students: Reflections on Learning in Near and Middle Eastern Cultures. Collected Studies in Honour of Sebastian Günther contains essays on the developments, ideals, and practices of teaching and learning in the Islamicate world, past and present. The authors address topics that reflect – and thus honour – Sebastian Günther’s academic achievements in this particular area. The volume offers fresh insights into key issues related to education and human development, including their shared characteristics as well as their influence on and interdependence with cultures of the Islamicate world, especially in the classical period of Islam (9th-15th century CE). The diverse spectrum of topics covered in the book, as well as the wide range of innovative interdisciplinary approaches and research tools employed, pay tribute to Sebastian Günther’s research focus on Islamic education and ethics, through which he has inspired many of his students, colleagues, and friends.
Download or read book Zayd written by David S. Powers and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2014-05-08 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although Muḥammad had no natural sons who reached the age of maturity, Islamic sources report that he adopted a man named Zayd shortly before receiving his first revelation. This "son of Muḥammad" was the Prophet's heir for the next fifteen or twenty years. He was the first adult male to become a Muslim and the only Muslim apart from Muḥammad whose name is mentioned in the Qur'an. Eventually, Muḥammad would repudiate Zayd as his son, abolish the institution of adoption, and send Zayd to certain death on a battlefield in southern Jordan. Curiously, Zayd has remained a marginal figure in both Islamic and Western scholarship. David S. Powers now attempts to restore Zayd to his rightful position at the center of the narrative of the Prophet Muḥammad and the beginnings of Islam. To do so, he mines traces left behind in commentaries on the Qur'an, in biographical dictionaries, and in historical chronicles, reading these sources against analogues in the Hebrew Bible. Powers demonstrates that in the accounts preserved in these sources, Zayd's character is modeled on those of biblical figures such as Isaac, Ishmael, Joseph, and Uriah the Hittite. This modeling process was deployed by early Muslim storytellers to address two key issues, Powers contends: the bitter conflict over succession to Muḥammad and the key theological doctrine of the finality of prophecy. Both Zayd's death on a battlefield and Muḥammad's repudiation of his adopted son and heir were after-the-fact constructions driven by political and theological imperatives.
Download or read book Across the Worlds of Islam written by Edward E. Curtis IV and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2023-07-18 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Muslim people are found all over the world. Most live outside the Middle East, from Asia to the Americas. The vast majority of contemporary Muslims are not fluent in Arabic, and speakers of languages such as Persian, Urdu, and Turkish have made essential contributions to Islamic history and culture. However, typical courses on Islam tend to downplay areas beyond the Middle East, focusing on Arabic texts and elite theological and doctrinal arguments. This book offers an inclusive view of the diversity and complexity of the many worlds of Islam, investigating ethics and aesthetics as much as scriptures and theology. By paying attention to Muslims who are socially, culturally, doctrinally, or politically marginalized, it provides a comprehensive and all-embracing vision of the religion and its many interrelated communities. Contributors from a range of personal and intellectual backgrounds explore the capaciousness of Muslim identities, helping readers achieve a broader understanding of the past, present, and future of the Muslim world. This book includes communities such as the Nation of Islam and Alevi Muslims, and it goes beyond rituals like prayer and fasting to consider a wider array of practices, such as tattooing. Across the Worlds of Islam is at once student-friendly and cutting-edge, written with both introductory courses and general readers in mind. Examining Muslim identity and practice from the perspective of the margins, it offers nuanced portraits of Muslim life across geographic and sectarian divisions.
Download or read book Classical Islam written by Norman Calder and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This sourcebook presents more than sixty new translations of key Islamic texts. Edited and translated by leading specialists it illustrates the growth of Islamic thought from its seventh-century origins to the end of the medieval period.
Download or read book Exegetical Crossroads written by Georges Tamer and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-12-18 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The art of interpreting Holy Scriptures flourished throughout the culturally heterogeneous pre-modern Orient among Jews, Christians and Muslims. Different ways of interpretation developed within each religion not without considering the others. How were the interactions and how productive were they for the further development of these traditions? Have there been blurred spaces of scholarly activity that transcended sectarian borders? What was the role played by mutual influences in profiling the own tradition against the others? These and other related questions are critically treated in the present volume.
