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Abstract
This is the first of a two-part article that aims at discussing the creation of medical madrasas for Muslims in 7th/13th-century Damascus. This part briefly examines the relationship between medical practitioners and rulers, especially in the Ayyubid period, and studies a number of works written by religious scholars and physicians —often addressed to their patrons—, in which they tackled problems affecting the practice of medicine and its scientific status. I particularly focus on the polemics against pietistic groups who adhered to the doctrine of tawakkul (reliance on God), the emergence of the genre of “prophetic medicine”, and the denunciation of those physicians who impugned the universality of medical principles. This article will provide a wide contextualisation for the discussion of the phenomena that lead to the creation of medical madrasas, which will be analysed in detail in the second part.
The notable and distinguished adīb and theologian of the third/ninth century, al-Jāḥiẓ, is usually not associated with the study of ḥadīth. On the contrary, he has frequently been considered a vitriolic critic of the experts on traditions and some of his works have even been interpreted as a demolition of the science of ḥadīth. However, a careful reading of his writings reveals a quite different picture. In this article, al-Jāḥiẓ’s treatises on the imamate — and especially the most extended one, the Kitāb al-ʿUthmāniyya — will be scrutinised and discussed in the light of the author’s acquaintance with the tradition of legal hermeneutics as described in al-Shāfiʿī’s Risāla.
Abstract
The most famous piece of the collection of Rasāʾil written by the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ is probably the animal fable included in Epistle 22, known in its English translation as “The Case of the Animals versus Man before the King of the Jinn.” The complexity and thematic richness of the work allows multiple readings and it has often been interpreted as a fable denouncing cruelty against animals. The abrupt ending of the work recognising the superiority of men, however, seems to contradict the ecological spirit that animates the debate. This article approaches this contradiction from a narratological point of view. Together with the genre of animal fables, especially the Kalīla wa-Dimna, the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ rely heavily on the tradition of the qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ to recreate a setting that would have evoked in the educated audiences both the descriptions of the pre-Adamite era, where animals were free and had the ability to speak, and the consequences of the creation of Adam and his preordained fall. The recognition of these parallelisms and other proleptic clues creates a gap between the expectations of the characters and those of the readers, which can be interpreted as dramatic irony.
Abstract
The distinction between the process of spatial and socioeconomic totalization of the planet and the multiplicity of forms of being-in-the-world remains one of the core conceptual discussions regarding our global times, and, more concretely, the cultural forms and institutions within the infrastructure of world literature. This essay reads Irmgard Emmelhainz’s El cielo está incompleto. Cuaderno de viaje en Palestina (2017) to engage on the question of the geopolitical world in world literature criticism. El cielo está incompleto is a hybrid work in which Emmelhainz constructs a parallel between her personal engagements with peoples and places in Ramallah and the ways in which violence and securitization in the occupied territories of the West Bank conform a geopolitical paradigm of territoriality, with effects in the U.S.-Mexico border and other latitudes. The article studies Emmelhainz’s book, her dialogue with the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard and the way her concept of the world intersects with the one put forward by theorists like Eric Hayot and Pheng Cheah. In doing so, the article discusses Emmelhainz’s account the transition between the idea of the world tied to anticolonial solidarity in the 1960s with contemporary forms of the world under neoliberalism, as well as the paradoxes between the idea of the world in literature and politics, and the cultural infrastructures that sustain it.