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Author:
Abstract
The article investigates the social and cultural practices of Sira production and consumption in the later Middle Period. It probes into the place held by Sira regarding the veneration of the Prophet, especially in relation to Hadith. Its first part shows that in the Middle Period Sira was intended as a vast literary repository characterized by fluidity of format, diverse social fruition, and plurality of practices in transmission and consumption. It was a literary field characterized by narrative malleability and creativity, for which there was popular demand and scholarly dedication.
The life and work of the Šāfiʿī scholar and Hadith expert Ibn Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Dimašqī (d. 842/1438), in particular his Ǧāmiʿ al-āṯār fī l-siyar wa-mawlid al-muḫtār (The Compilation of Traditions on the Life and Birth of the Chosen One) occupies the second part of the article. Here, Ǧāmiʿ al-āṯār is taken as a written exemplification of the tight relationship between Sira, Hadith and devotion to the Prophet typical of the period, of 14th-15th century Damascus in particular.
Overall, the article argues that the intended meaning and use of a text as rich as Ǧāmiʿ al-āṯār can be fully grasped only when we put it in close conversation with the Hadith culture and veneration for the Prophet of the time. It suggests the existence of a pervasive “Sira culture” binding people in a relationship of meaning to their shared memories of the life of the Prophet. Such culture was nurtured by remembrance of the Prophet’s excellency and life milestones. It aimed at cultivating salvific feelings of love for the Prophet that would assure believers a secure place in the Afterlife.
In:
Arabica
Abstract
This study introduces and analyzes proximal and distal singular demonstratives in fourteen varieties of Musandam Arabic, a little-documented dialect group located on Musandam Peninsula in northern Oman and neighbouring areas of the United Arab Emirates. Following an overview of the dialect group in its regional context, the study provides a description of singular demonstratives from the point of view of phono-logy, morphology, and geographical distribution. The study then focuses on two salient features found in several of the varieties under investigation: gender distinction based on consonantal alternation (d-based masculine forms vs t-based feminine forms); and gemination of the feminine t-element. While the former is attested, albeit rarely, in other Arabic dialects, the latter is unheard of. In the last section of the article, some hypotheses are put forward as to how these forms could have developed from a historical point of view, in light of data from different Arabic and Semitic varieties. While the gemination of the t-element is best regarded as a Musandam-internal innovation, the d : t consonantal alternation reinforces the putative historical link between south-western Arabia and Oman.
In:
Arabica
Author:
Abstract
Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328) wrote his tome Bayān talbīs al-ǧahmiyya to refute Ašʿarī kalām theologian Faḫr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s (d. 606/1210) argument in Taʾsīs al-taqdīs that God is not corporeal, located, or spatially extended. Bayān talbīs al-ǧahmiyya is the largest known refutation of kalām incorporealism in the Islamic tradition, and al-Rāzī’s Taʾsīs al-taqdīs was apparently the most sophisticated work of its kind circulating in Ibn Taymiyya’s Mamlūk scholarly milieu. Ibn Taymiyya in Bayān talbīs al-ǧahmiyya deconstructs al-Rāzī’s rational arguments and explicates an alternative theology of God’s relation to space. Translating his understanding of the meaning of the Qurʾān and the Sunna into kalām terminology and drawing on Ibn Rušd’s (d. 595/1198) Aristotelian notion of place as the inner surface of the containing body, Ibn Taymiyya envisions God in Bayān talbīs al-ǧahmiyya as a very large indivisible and spatially extended existent that is above and surrounds the created world in a spatial sense.
In:
Arabica
Author:
Abstract
This article traces juristic debates on the ethics of masturbation from the formative period of Islamic law to the early nineteenth century. I document the appearance of discussions of the practice in the earliest extant sources and explore how masturbation figures in the Sunnī and Šīʿī ḥadīṯ corpora with attention to regional patterns of dissemination. I also address the terminology used by jurists and point to material in encyclopaedias, adab and other works where relevant, and include some comparative observations from other cultures. My overall findings include the fact of clear regional patterns of opinion across the amṣār (garrison cities) in the early period and an unmistakable increase in “conservatism” on sexual matters with the consolidation of the legal schools (maḏāhib), as well as a clear distinction between Sunnī and Šīʿī views on the practice. I conclude by attempting to explain the relatively low visibility of masturbation in legal sources and to account for the doctrinal shift more generally.
In:
Studi Magrebini
Author:
Abstract
The extent to which the diacritic layer (taškīl) of the Arabic writing system is employed in modern typeset text differs considerably between genres and individual texts, with many in-between forms not aptly captured by the traditional binary categories of “vowelled” and “unvowelled” text. This article is the first to present a theoretical account of this variation applicable to modern typeset Standard Arabic. It is suggested that diacritics serve three basic functions: facilitation of reading comprehension; facilitation of prescriptively correct diction; and to evoke associations with other texts. Six modes of diacritization in modern typeset text are identified and related to data on rates of diacritization from a corpus of electronically published books. Further lines of research based on this framework are suggested.
In:
Arabica
Author:
Abstract
The past few decades have witnessed a proliferation of theories on the origins of Islam which have called into question long-held scholarly axioms. One such axiom is the traditional date of 632 CE for the death of the prophet Muḥammad, which some scholars have now sought to redate to after the beginning of the Muslim conquests on the basis of the evidence of non-Muslim sources. The present contribution aims to demonstrate that the prima facie disharmony between these sources and Muslim accounts of Muḥammad’s life and the conquests is a product of the reading imposed on both sets of data, which primarily has to do with the fact that, more often than not, modern scholarship unsuspectingly operates within the rigid framework of the classical periodisation of early Islamic history. Therefore, a revision of either the traditional date of Muḥammad’s death or the starting date of the conquests based on this evidence is uncalled for.
In:
Arabica
Author:
Abstract
K. al-Ḥujjah ʿalā ahl al-Madīnah by Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan al-Shaybānī (d. 189/804-5) is a witness to the state of the regional school of Medina before it had been absorbed by (survived only in) the Mālikī personal school. Schacht asserts that each regional school had its characteristic authorities among the Followers, and the Ḥujjah confirms that, sometimes appealing to Kufan Followers against Medinese, sometimes complaining that the Medinese are not staying loyal to their own Medinese Followers. Sometimes also the Ḥujjah testifies to Mālik’s pre-eminence among the Medinese of his time, sometimes by appealing to him as ‘your faqīh’, with whom the Medinese ought to agree but do not, but mainly as their pre-eminent traditionist. Schacht observed that Shaybānī adduced hadith more often than Abū Yūsuf, and the Ḥujjah often adduces hadith in its arguments against the Medinese. Most often, however, it adduces logical consistency against Medinese positions. Altogether, it suggests that personal schools evolved out of regional by accentuation of the personal element already present in the tradition of regional authorities. By adducing hadith from a wider range of authorities than the Muwaṭṭaʾ, it implicitly argues that Ḥanafi law is superior because it represents the jurisprudence of the whole Empire, not just one centre.
In:
Studia Islamica
The ʿĀmirid Regency c. 970-1010 AD
Author:
In Articulating the Ḥijāba, Mariam Rosser-Owen analyses for the first time the artistic and cultural patronage of the ‘Amirid regents of the last Cordoban Umayyad caliph, Hisham II, a period rarely covered in the historiography of al-Andalus. Al-Mansur, the founder of this dynasty, is usually considered a usurper of caliphal authority, who pursued military victory at the expense of the transcendental achievements of the first two caliphs. But he also commissioned a vast extension to the Great Mosque of Cordoba, founded a palatine city, conducted skilled diplomatic relations, patronised a circle of court poets, and owned some of the most spectacular objects to survive from al-Andalus, in ivory and marble. This study presents the evidence for a reconsideration of this period.
The ʿĀmirid Regency c. 970-1010 AD
Author:
In Articulating the Ḥijāba, Mariam Rosser-Owen analyses for the first time the artistic and cultural patronage of the ‘Amirid regents of the last Cordoban Umayyad caliph, Hisham II, a period rarely covered in the historiography of al-Andalus. Al-Mansur, the founder of this dynasty, is usually considered a usurper of caliphal authority, who pursued military victory at the expense of the transcendental achievements of the first two caliphs. But he also commissioned a vast extension to the Great Mosque of Cordoba, founded a palatine city, conducted skilled diplomatic relations, patronised a circle of court poets, and owned some of the most spectacular objects to survive from al-Andalus, in ivory and marble. This study presents the evidence for a reconsideration of this period.