Browse results

You are looking at 1 - 9 of 9 items for :

  • Theology and World Christianity x
  • Middle East and Islamic Studies x
  • Upcoming Publications x
  • Just Published x
  • Search level: All x
Clear All
Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives in Turkey on the Understanding and Interpretation of the Qur’an
Author:
The Turkish market of Qur’anic translations and studies is exceedingly oversaturated. Critics find some of these lacking in proper hermeneutical judgment, impelling them to reflect on the conditions of judicious Qur’anic exegesis. These reflections have remained relatively unexplored in English academic literature. In Critical Hermeneutics, Çelik explores and compares the hermeneutical philosophies of three Turkish intellectuals, namely Alpyağıl, Cündioğlu, and Öztürk. By exploring their philosophical views on subjectivity and objectivity in the context of interpreting the Qur’an, Çelik draws major implications for reading the Qur’an in new and different ways.
No one mentions Syriac, – a dialect of the Aramaic language Jesus spoke –, without referring to Sebastian P. Brock, the Oxford scholar and teacher who has written and taught about everything Syriac, even reorienting the field as The Third Lung of early Christianity (along with Greek and Latin). In 2018, Syriac scholars world-wide gathered in Sigtuna, Sweden, to celebrate with Sebastian his accomplishments and share new directions. Through essays showing what Syriac studies have attained, where they are going, as well as some arenas and connections previously not imagined, flavors of the fruits of laboring in the field are offered.

Contributors to this volume are: Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Shraga Bick, Briouria Bitton-Ashkelony, Alberto Camplani, Thomas A. Carlson, Jeff W. Childers, Muriel Debié, Terry Falla, George A. Kiraz, Sergey Minov, Craig E. Morrison, István Perczel, Anton Pritula, Ilaria Ramelli, Christine Shepardson, Stephen J. Shoemaker, Herman G.B. Teule, Kathleen E. McVey.

Abstract

The 13th-century Tunisian author Aḥmad at-Tīfāšī describes in his work Mutʿat al-asmāʿ fī ʿilm as-samāʿ a system of melodic modes used in al-Andalus. This essay represents a preliminary attempt to situate at-Tīfāšī’s Andalusi modes within the broader historical development of medieval Arab modal systems and to explore their relationship to the modern modes of North Africa commonly referred to as Andalusi. This is, however, primarily an exploration of terminology or nomenclature rather than of the melodic characteristics of the modes themselves, since the sources examined here give little to no information about the internal features of the individual modes.

Full Access
In: Oriens
Author:

Abstract

This article traces the historical and intellectual origins of modern Turkish music theory in the late Ottoman period. It examines debates about music theory in the Ottoman Turkish press during the 1880s and 1890s, focusing particularly on the earliest publications of Raʾūf Yektā (1288–1353/1871–1935). The article shows how the modern Turkish theory of pitch was created by Yektā and his collaborators through the rediscovery of Arabic and Persian treatises associated with the Systematist school of mathematical music theory, which flourished between the seventh/thirteenth and ninth/fifteenth centuries. It argues that this project to bring Ottoman music into the modern “age of progress” was shaped by the ideals of both scientific positivism and Islamic modernism.

Open Access
In: Oriens
The series Documenta Coranica is dedicated to the study of history of the Qurʾānic text as manifested in manuscripts and other sources. Documenta Coranica publishes witnesses of the Qurʾān from the early period in the shape of facsimile, accompanied by transcription and a commentary. The series makes codices on parchment, papyri, inscriptions, variant readings and other relevant sources for the history of the Qurʾān, accessible to the academic public. The first volumes contain manuscript fragments from Sanaa (DAM 01-25.1, DAM 01-27.1, DAM 01-29.1), the manuscript Ma VI 165 (Tübingen), and the codex Or. 2165 of the British Library.

The series comprises two sections: Manuscripta contains facsimile editions of Qurʾānic manuscripts with a line-by-line transcript in Modern Arabic script on the opposite page and a commentary about codicology, paleography, variant readings and verse numbering explaining content and characteristics of each manuscript. Testimonia et Studia contains studies about material evidence for the history of the Qurʾān, as manifested on papyrus, stone and rock inscriptions etc., as well in exegetical, narrative and philological sources.

Documenta Coranica inscribes itself into a German-French cooperation: in the framework of the research project Coranica, 2011-2014, and Paleocoran 2015-2018, both funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Agence Nationale de la Recherche.
Author:

Abstract

Al-Fārābī conceived of music theory as a universal science of melody whose task is to determine the whole range of what is musically possible. It does not restrict itself to codifying the conventions of any particular musical idiom. In this, it is akin to logic – the universal science of all things thinkable, which does not reduce to the grammar of any given natural language.

Full Access
In: Oriens
Author:

Abstract

Starting from early Arabic sources, the absolute pitch of the Early Abbasid ʿūd is considered and related to evidence on pitch usage in Roman-period sources. Similar instruments, it is argued, must have existed already in late antiquity. Iconographic evidence takes us back to late Classical Greece, whose music would have provided especially fertile ground for designing such a lute. In contrast to the traditional tuning in fifths and fourths throughout, lutes with equidistant design had also existed for a long time, likely also on precursors of the ʿūd. The association of this style with the name of Manṣūr Zalzal must therefore be reassessed.

Open Access
In: Oriens
Author:

Abstract

The phrase “music is the nourishment of the soul” reflects a century-old complex of musical, medical, and astrological thinking; integrated notions of celestial and terrestrial harmony, humoral medicine and ethos theory that reach back to Ancient Greece. Adopted into Islamicate philosophy, those theories were combined with a modal system that amplified them. The present paper traces them in various Ottoman texts with the aim of understanding how concepts of music theory, astrology, medicine, and food interacted. A crucial question is whether music theory sources can be brought into a relationship with descriptions of musical (therapy) practices in hospitals.

Full Access
In: Oriens
Author:

Abstract

Samāʿ literature reveals a tension in premodern Islamicate societies. While musical practices were ubiquitous and practiced in many contexts, Islamic legal tradition regarded them with suspicion. Musical instruments occupied a central place in these discussions, perhaps, because as physical objects associated with what is otherwise in the non-tangible domain of sound they were seen as the quintessential manifestation of music. Udfuwī’s Imtāʿ is one of the most comprehensive works in the genre, and its chapter on instruments is unique in both the length and place it ascribes to percussion instruments. Udfuwī argues for their permissibility and stresses their social importance throughout history.

Full Access
In: Oriens