Caterina Bori | Università di Bologna (original) (raw)

Books by Caterina Bori

Quote as: Salvatore Armando, Babak Rahimi, and Roberto Tottoli (eds). 2018. The Wiley Blackwell H... more Quote as:
Salvatore Armando, Babak Rahimi, and Roberto Tottoli (eds). 2018. The Wiley Blackwell History of Islam. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.

[You'll find the Introduction and my two co-authored Chapters in the section 'Book Chapters and Intros' by scrolling down my main academia webpage]

A theoretically rich, nuanced history of Islam and Islamic civilization with a unique sociological component. This major new reference work offers a complete historical and theoretically informed view of Islam as both a religion and a sociocultural force. It surveys and discusses the transformation of Muslim societies in different eras and various regions, providing a broad narrative of the historical development of Islamic civilization.
This text explores the complex and varied history of the religion and its traditions. It provides an in-depth study of the diverse ways through which the religious dimension at the core of Islamic traditions has led to a distinctive type of civilizational process in history. The book illuminates the ways in which various historical forces have converged and crystallized in institutional forms at a variety of levels, embracing social, religious, legal, political, cultural, and civic dimensions. Together, the team of internationally renowned scholars move from the genesis of a new social order in 7th-century Arabia, right up to the rise of revolutionary Islamist currents in the 20th century and the varied ways in which Islam has grown and continues to pervade daily life in the Middle East and beyond.
This book is essential reading for students and academics in a wide range of fields, including sociology, history, law, and political science. It will also appeal to general readers with an interest in the history of one of the world’s great religions.

The book is dedicated to the making of Ibn Taymiyya’s image in Egypt and Syria during the 14th an... more The book is dedicated to the making of Ibn Taymiyya’s image in Egypt and Syria during the 14th and 15th century with particular attention to sources produced in both countries in that period, but focusing primarily on 14th century Syria.
The purpose of this book is to identify the factors that shaped the making of Ibn Taymiyya’s early biographical tradition; to identify the literary and religious topoi that lay behind the creation of his biographical narratives and to propose a reassessment of Ibn Taymiyya’s personality and of his impact on the social, political and religious life of his time.

This volume of The Muslim World gathers together a number of studies dedicated to the issue of re... more This volume of The Muslim World gathers together a number of studies dedicated to the issue of reception in relation to Ibn Taymiyya. Reception is here broadly intended to be interpreted in a variety of ways, ranging from simple reading and transmission, to
accommodation and adaptation, rejection and refutation. In one way or another, it
implies some form of engagement, either on Ibn Taymiyya's part with the scholarship of
his predecessors, or his legacy after his death. In Griffel and Hoover's articles reception is not about who read and engaged with Ibn Taymiyya after his death, and how and why this was done - which is the topic of the other articles - but about Ibn Taymiyya's reception of his own work within subsequent writings, and his own engagement with the theological thought of his predecessors. The remaining five contributions (Bori, Dayeh, Adem, Zouggar and Sheikh) tackle the reception of some of Ibn Taymiyya's works or ideas from after his death to the beginning of the 17th century.

This book examines Ibn Qayyim al-Ğawziyyah's contributions to several fields of Islamic knowledge... more This book examines Ibn Qayyim al-Ğawziyyah's contributions to several fields of Islamic knowledge. The articles are meant to offer new insights on his legal and theological thought, while revealing his views on a wide range of subjects.
The book also offers a fresh reading in the biographical sources on Ibn Qayyim al-Ğawziyyah, and suggests some new trajectories for future research.
The articles featured in this volume portray Ibn Qayyim al-Ğawziyyah as a systematic theologian and scholar, who strives to integrate highly theoretical discussions with practical aspects of everyday life.
A Scholar in the Shadow is the first comprehensive academic treatment of Ibn Qayyim al-Ğawziyyah's legal and theological thought. The book attempts to decipher the appeal of Ibn Qayyim al-Ğawziyyah to modern Muslims and others
interested in early medieval Islam, while highlighting Ibn Qayyim
al-Ğawziyyah's contributions to Islamic thought.

Papers by Caterina Bori

Cromohs , 2022

Cromohs's last issue is now out! It includes an interview with Konrad Hirschler, a critical refle... more Cromohs's last issue is now out!
It includes an interview with Konrad Hirschler, a critical reflection on the use of Islam in modern historiography on the Mediterranean, a thematic section on the modern lives of Toledo Yeshu, and much more.
Please check it out!

Cyber Review of Modern Historiography, 2022

Cromohs's last issue is out! It includes an interview with Konrad Hirschler, a critical reflecti... more Cromohs's last issue is out!
It includes an interview with Konrad Hirschler, a critical reflection on the use and misuse of the category 'Islam' in modern historiography, a thematic section on the modern lives of Toledot Yeshu and much more.

Rivista degli Studi Orientali 95/4, pp. 24-34, 2022

Conclusive or clue? Reading unexpected silences in our sources CATERINA BORI 1. Acoustically sing... more Conclusive or clue? Reading unexpected silences in our sources CATERINA BORI 1. Acoustically singular (i.e. the absence of sound) and epistemologically multiple, the silences in and of our sources bear a variety of meanings. 1 These meanings are inextricably intertwined with various elements: the literary genre of the written evidence, its intentions or purported function, and the relationship we establish with it, that is, the ways we interrogate and assess it, what we expect from it and search for in it. This relationship is strangely symbiotic, albeit asymmetrical. That is, we depend on the evidence and the evidence in turn depends on us. 2 And yet our witnesses cannot write about us, whereas we do write about them. 3 This article is meant to offer a brief reflection on the function and use of silence in historical investigation. Since my main focus is literary evidence, the silence I am concerned with consists of unspoken-or more, precisely, unwritten-words. 4 Essentially, the point I wish to make is that, whether deliberate or not, the unexpected silence we sometimes find in the sources we investigate ought not to be considered necessarily (or primarily) conclusive evidence or proof of a given absence (argumentum e/ex silentio). 5 On the contrary, unexpected silence is always and necessarily 1 See CALASSO, Introduction to this volume for a distincion between 'silences of the sources' and 'in the sources'.

is a historian of manuscript cultures with a focus on Arabic North Africa and West Asia in the pr... more is a historian of manuscript cultures with a focus on Arabic North Africa and West Asia in the pre-print era. He combines social and cultural history to study what meanings different social strata and milieux ascribed to written artefacts and for what purposes they employed such artefacts. His work has focused in particular on reconstructing vanished libraries. This has led to a strong interest in the question of artefacts' trajectories and provenances. In recent years, he has become increasingly interested in the materiality of the written word. As a result, he strives to develop cross-disciplinary initiatives among various disciplines in the humanities as well as between humanities and natural sciences.

Denis Gril, Stefan Reichmuth, Dilek Sarmis (eds), The Presence of the Prophet in Early Modern and Contemporary Islam. Vol. 1., 2021

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

Bethany J. Walker and Abdelkader Al Ghouz (eds.), History and Society during the Mamluk Period (1250–1517). Studies of the Annemarie Schimmel Institute for Advanced Study III., 2021

merchants, Bedouin, and hungry peasants frequently travelled this route, which connected Egypt wi... more merchants, Bedouin, and hungry peasants frequently travelled this route, which connected Egypt with Syria and towns with the countryside, in the waning years of the Mamluk Sultanate. Knowledge and goods, as well, flowed along this remote artery of transport. This final volume of the ASK Working Papers is dedicated to these themes of transmission, migration, change, and renewal.

Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya fī iṣlāḥ al-raʿī wa-l-raʿiyya is a very famous book. Al-Siy... more Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya fī iṣlāḥ al-raʿī wa-l-raʿiyya is a very famous book. Al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya is also a complex work that displays a variety of meanings cohabiting rather harmoniously. The generic and synthetic nature of this treatise, together with Ibn Taymiyya’s controversial legacy, has opened the way to many different claims of what the treatise is about. To some extent, the purpose of the present paper is simple. I intend to present and discuss the contents of Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya through a close reading of the text that will take into account two different editions of it so far unnoticed by Western scholars. By so doing, I hope that some of the prevailing ideas about what al-Siyāsaal-sharʿiyya fī iṣlāḥ al-raʿī wa-l-raʿiyya is can be complemented by new perspectives. In particular, I shall argue that the common view that the book is about the coercive power of the state as in punishment, jihad and public order is to be partially revisited and that pursuing a study of the text’s manuscript tradition is an urgent scholarly task. By focusing on the existence of different versions of Ibn Taymiyya’s treatise on siyāsa, the present paper also raises questions about their possible meanings.

Ibn Taymiyya: Receptions (14th-17th Century). Special Issue of the Muslim World., 2018

The present article sheds light on pre- or early-modern spaces of reception of Ibn Taymiyya's tho... more The present article sheds light on pre- or early-modern spaces of reception of Ibn Taymiyya's thought (that is from the late 14th to the early 17th century). In the course of this study, I survey Taymiyyan disseminations in transregional perspective and discuss evidence of the reception of Ibn Taymiyya between the second half of the 14th century up to the early 17th century in different regional contexts and intellectual environments. The materials presented here are not meant to be exhaustive. Tracing and making sense of all the pre-/early-modern trajectories of Ibn Taymiyya's reception go beyond the effort of a single - even if long - essay, but the occurrences that surface here are - I think - representative of an important feature of this reception: namely, its heterogeneity and selectivity.

Casuistry, the practice of resolving moral problems by applying a logical framework, has had a mu... more Casuistry, the practice of resolving moral problems by applying a logical framework, has had a much larger historical presence before and since it was given a name in the Renaissance. The contributors to this volume examine a series of case studies to explain how different cultures and religions, past and present, have wrestled with morality's exceptions and margins and the norms with which they break. For example, to what extent have the Islamic and Judaic traditions allowed smoking tobacco or gambling? How did the Spanish colonization of America generate formal justifications for what it claimed? Where were the lines of transgression around food, money-lending, and sex in Ancient Greece and Rome? How have different systems dealt with suicide?

Casuistry lives at the heart of such questions, in the tension between norms and exceptions, between what seems forbidden but is not. A Historical Approach to Casuistry does not only examine this tension, but re-frames casuistry as a global phenomenon that has informed ethical and religious traditions for millennia, and that continues to influence our lives today.

Quote as: Salvatore Armando, Babak Rahimi, and Roberto Tottoli (eds). 2018. The Wiley Blackwell H... more Quote as:
Salvatore Armando, Babak Rahimi, and Roberto Tottoli (eds). 2018. The Wiley Blackwell History of Islam. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.

[You'll find the Introduction and my two co-authored Chapters in the section 'Book Chapters and Intros' by scrolling down my main academia webpage]

A theoretically rich, nuanced history of Islam and Islamic civilization with a unique sociological component. This major new reference work offers a complete historical and theoretically informed view of Islam as both a religion and a sociocultural force. It surveys and discusses the transformation of Muslim societies in different eras and various regions, providing a broad narrative of the historical development of Islamic civilization.
This text explores the complex and varied history of the religion and its traditions. It provides an in-depth study of the diverse ways through which the religious dimension at the core of Islamic traditions has led to a distinctive type of civilizational process in history. The book illuminates the ways in which various historical forces have converged and crystallized in institutional forms at a variety of levels, embracing social, religious, legal, political, cultural, and civic dimensions. Together, the team of internationally renowned scholars move from the genesis of a new social order in 7th-century Arabia, right up to the rise of revolutionary Islamist currents in the 20th century and the varied ways in which Islam has grown and continues to pervade daily life in the Middle East and beyond.
This book is essential reading for students and academics in a wide range of fields, including sociology, history, law, and political science. It will also appeal to general readers with an interest in the history of one of the world’s great religions.

The book is dedicated to the making of Ibn Taymiyya’s image in Egypt and Syria during the 14th an... more The book is dedicated to the making of Ibn Taymiyya’s image in Egypt and Syria during the 14th and 15th century with particular attention to sources produced in both countries in that period, but focusing primarily on 14th century Syria.
The purpose of this book is to identify the factors that shaped the making of Ibn Taymiyya’s early biographical tradition; to identify the literary and religious topoi that lay behind the creation of his biographical narratives and to propose a reassessment of Ibn Taymiyya’s personality and of his impact on the social, political and religious life of his time.

This volume of The Muslim World gathers together a number of studies dedicated to the issue of re... more This volume of The Muslim World gathers together a number of studies dedicated to the issue of reception in relation to Ibn Taymiyya. Reception is here broadly intended to be interpreted in a variety of ways, ranging from simple reading and transmission, to
accommodation and adaptation, rejection and refutation. In one way or another, it
implies some form of engagement, either on Ibn Taymiyya's part with the scholarship of
his predecessors, or his legacy after his death. In Griffel and Hoover's articles reception is not about who read and engaged with Ibn Taymiyya after his death, and how and why this was done - which is the topic of the other articles - but about Ibn Taymiyya's reception of his own work within subsequent writings, and his own engagement with the theological thought of his predecessors. The remaining five contributions (Bori, Dayeh, Adem, Zouggar and Sheikh) tackle the reception of some of Ibn Taymiyya's works or ideas from after his death to the beginning of the 17th century.

This book examines Ibn Qayyim al-Ğawziyyah's contributions to several fields of Islamic knowledge... more This book examines Ibn Qayyim al-Ğawziyyah's contributions to several fields of Islamic knowledge. The articles are meant to offer new insights on his legal and theological thought, while revealing his views on a wide range of subjects.
The book also offers a fresh reading in the biographical sources on Ibn Qayyim al-Ğawziyyah, and suggests some new trajectories for future research.
The articles featured in this volume portray Ibn Qayyim al-Ğawziyyah as a systematic theologian and scholar, who strives to integrate highly theoretical discussions with practical aspects of everyday life.
A Scholar in the Shadow is the first comprehensive academic treatment of Ibn Qayyim al-Ğawziyyah's legal and theological thought. The book attempts to decipher the appeal of Ibn Qayyim al-Ğawziyyah to modern Muslims and others
interested in early medieval Islam, while highlighting Ibn Qayyim
al-Ğawziyyah's contributions to Islamic thought.

Cromohs , 2022

Cromohs's last issue is now out! It includes an interview with Konrad Hirschler, a critical refle... more Cromohs's last issue is now out!
It includes an interview with Konrad Hirschler, a critical reflection on the use of Islam in modern historiography on the Mediterranean, a thematic section on the modern lives of Toledo Yeshu, and much more.
Please check it out!

Cyber Review of Modern Historiography, 2022

Cromohs's last issue is out! It includes an interview with Konrad Hirschler, a critical reflecti... more Cromohs's last issue is out!
It includes an interview with Konrad Hirschler, a critical reflection on the use and misuse of the category 'Islam' in modern historiography, a thematic section on the modern lives of Toledot Yeshu and much more.

Rivista degli Studi Orientali 95/4, pp. 24-34, 2022

Conclusive or clue? Reading unexpected silences in our sources CATERINA BORI 1. Acoustically sing... more Conclusive or clue? Reading unexpected silences in our sources CATERINA BORI 1. Acoustically singular (i.e. the absence of sound) and epistemologically multiple, the silences in and of our sources bear a variety of meanings. 1 These meanings are inextricably intertwined with various elements: the literary genre of the written evidence, its intentions or purported function, and the relationship we establish with it, that is, the ways we interrogate and assess it, what we expect from it and search for in it. This relationship is strangely symbiotic, albeit asymmetrical. That is, we depend on the evidence and the evidence in turn depends on us. 2 And yet our witnesses cannot write about us, whereas we do write about them. 3 This article is meant to offer a brief reflection on the function and use of silence in historical investigation. Since my main focus is literary evidence, the silence I am concerned with consists of unspoken-or more, precisely, unwritten-words. 4 Essentially, the point I wish to make is that, whether deliberate or not, the unexpected silence we sometimes find in the sources we investigate ought not to be considered necessarily (or primarily) conclusive evidence or proof of a given absence (argumentum e/ex silentio). 5 On the contrary, unexpected silence is always and necessarily 1 See CALASSO, Introduction to this volume for a distincion between 'silences of the sources' and 'in the sources'.

is a historian of manuscript cultures with a focus on Arabic North Africa and West Asia in the pr... more is a historian of manuscript cultures with a focus on Arabic North Africa and West Asia in the pre-print era. He combines social and cultural history to study what meanings different social strata and milieux ascribed to written artefacts and for what purposes they employed such artefacts. His work has focused in particular on reconstructing vanished libraries. This has led to a strong interest in the question of artefacts' trajectories and provenances. In recent years, he has become increasingly interested in the materiality of the written word. As a result, he strives to develop cross-disciplinary initiatives among various disciplines in the humanities as well as between humanities and natural sciences.

Denis Gril, Stefan Reichmuth, Dilek Sarmis (eds), The Presence of the Prophet in Early Modern and Contemporary Islam. Vol. 1., 2021

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

Bethany J. Walker and Abdelkader Al Ghouz (eds.), History and Society during the Mamluk Period (1250–1517). Studies of the Annemarie Schimmel Institute for Advanced Study III., 2021

merchants, Bedouin, and hungry peasants frequently travelled this route, which connected Egypt wi... more merchants, Bedouin, and hungry peasants frequently travelled this route, which connected Egypt with Syria and towns with the countryside, in the waning years of the Mamluk Sultanate. Knowledge and goods, as well, flowed along this remote artery of transport. This final volume of the ASK Working Papers is dedicated to these themes of transmission, migration, change, and renewal.

Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya fī iṣlāḥ al-raʿī wa-l-raʿiyya is a very famous book. Al-Siy... more Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya fī iṣlāḥ al-raʿī wa-l-raʿiyya is a very famous book. Al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya is also a complex work that displays a variety of meanings cohabiting rather harmoniously. The generic and synthetic nature of this treatise, together with Ibn Taymiyya’s controversial legacy, has opened the way to many different claims of what the treatise is about. To some extent, the purpose of the present paper is simple. I intend to present and discuss the contents of Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya through a close reading of the text that will take into account two different editions of it so far unnoticed by Western scholars. By so doing, I hope that some of the prevailing ideas about what al-Siyāsaal-sharʿiyya fī iṣlāḥ al-raʿī wa-l-raʿiyya is can be complemented by new perspectives. In particular, I shall argue that the common view that the book is about the coercive power of the state as in punishment, jihad and public order is to be partially revisited and that pursuing a study of the text’s manuscript tradition is an urgent scholarly task. By focusing on the existence of different versions of Ibn Taymiyya’s treatise on siyāsa, the present paper also raises questions about their possible meanings.

Ibn Taymiyya: Receptions (14th-17th Century). Special Issue of the Muslim World., 2018

The present article sheds light on pre- or early-modern spaces of reception of Ibn Taymiyya's tho... more The present article sheds light on pre- or early-modern spaces of reception of Ibn Taymiyya's thought (that is from the late 14th to the early 17th century). In the course of this study, I survey Taymiyyan disseminations in transregional perspective and discuss evidence of the reception of Ibn Taymiyya between the second half of the 14th century up to the early 17th century in different regional contexts and intellectual environments. The materials presented here are not meant to be exhaustive. Tracing and making sense of all the pre-/early-modern trajectories of Ibn Taymiyya's reception go beyond the effort of a single - even if long - essay, but the occurrences that surface here are - I think - representative of an important feature of this reception: namely, its heterogeneity and selectivity.

Casuistry, the practice of resolving moral problems by applying a logical framework, has had a mu... more Casuistry, the practice of resolving moral problems by applying a logical framework, has had a much larger historical presence before and since it was given a name in the Renaissance. The contributors to this volume examine a series of case studies to explain how different cultures and religions, past and present, have wrestled with morality's exceptions and margins and the norms with which they break. For example, to what extent have the Islamic and Judaic traditions allowed smoking tobacco or gambling? How did the Spanish colonization of America generate formal justifications for what it claimed? Where were the lines of transgression around food, money-lending, and sex in Ancient Greece and Rome? How have different systems dealt with suicide?

Casuistry lives at the heart of such questions, in the tension between norms and exceptions, between what seems forbidden but is not. A Historical Approach to Casuistry does not only examine this tension, but re-frames casuistry as a global phenomenon that has informed ethical and religious traditions for millennia, and that continues to influence our lives today.

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 29, 2021

This bulky volume edited by Vanna Calasso and Giuliano Lancioni aims to investigate the various m... more This bulky volume edited by Vanna Calasso and Giuliano Lancioni aims to investigate the various meanings and uses of the expressions dār al-islām and dār al-ḥarb (commonly translated as 'the abode of Islam' and 'the abode of war') in a variety of sources, regions, and periods of the long and complex history of Muslim societies. These expressions, or better 'categories,' began to appear in late eighth-century legal discourse, when the Arab conquests had reached their peak; they were placed in circulation by jurists who were close to Baghdad, the center of the Abbasid caliphate.

عالم في الظلّ, 2022

This is the Arabic translation of : Caterina Bori and Livnat Holtzman (eds.), A Scholar in the ... more This is the Arabic translation of :
Caterina Bori and Livnat Holtzman (eds.), A Scholar in the Shadow, Oriente Moderno 1 (2010).
The translator is Amr Basiony.