Insider and Outsider Sources: Late Antique Arabia (original) (raw)
2015 - Pre-Islamic South Arabia and its Neighbours: New Developments of Research
2015
Depuis leur création en 1997, les Rencontres Sabéennes ont vocation à réunir annuellement les spécialistes de l’Arabie méridionale préislamique et des régions voisines, archéologues et épigraphistes, afi n de présenter l’avancée des recherches récentes dans la discipline. Chaque année, un thème privilégié est proposé sur lequel les participants sont invités à se pencher. À l’occasion des 17e Rencontres sabéennes, qui se sont tenues à Paris les 6, 7 et 8 juin 2013, ce thème fut « La religion dans l’Arabie préislamique : territoires du sacré et espaces sacrés ». Au moment où la situation ne permet plus de conduire de travaux de terrain en Arabie du Sud et où la communauté scientifique se consacre à la synthèse d’un corpus épigraphique et archéologique abondant, les religions arabiques préislamiques apparaissent comme l’une des clés de compréhension de ces sociétés et comme un élément-clé dans la définition des identités locales. Ce thème était motivé par une question principale : dans quelle mesure les cultes et pratiques religieuses structurent-ils le paysage et la société de l’Arabie préislamique ? Cette question se déclinait autour de plusieurs registres : origine des panthéons arabiques ; lien entre forme architecturale, divinité et entité territoriale ; rôle du pèlerinage dans la définition des identités ; extension géographique des cultes voués aux différentes divinités de l’Arabie préislamique ; conséquences de l’émergence des pratiques monothéistes sur les temples païens ; ruptures et continuités entre pratiques préislamiques et islamiques. Dans ce volume, outre les chapitres qui portent sur ces questions, plusieurs contributions sont consacrées à l’actualité de la recherche en Arabie méridionale et sur son pourtour. C’est ici l’occasion pour plusieurs spécialistes yéménites qui continuent à oeuvrer sur le terrain de présenter les résultats de travaux inédits. En dépit des circonstances diffi ciles, nous ne pouvons que saluer leur ténacité dans la poursuite de leurs activités de recherche.
Review: Arabs and Empires before Islam, ed. Greg Fisher
English Historical Review, 2019
Arabs and Empires before Islam, edited by Greg Fisher (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2015; pp. xxvii + 580. £120; pb. [2017] £30). One of the responses to the revisionist scholarship on early Islam of the seventies and eighties has been a reinvigorated engagement with the pre-Islamic Arabian Peninsula. The revisionists focused their attention on the Islamic tradition and on
ARABI: Arabs Recount Arabia Before Islam Part I
Introduction: Story before History Handling the sources of Arabic historiography on Pre-Islamic Arabia Himyar Dynasty Inventions and inventiones of the Arabic-Islamic Tradition about the sequence of the Himyar dynasty Tales 1. The legacy of Saba' 2. The birth of Abu Karib As'ad al-Kamil 3. Why Bilqis, instead of a man, ruled over Himyar? 4. The four kings and their sister Abda'a 5. The story of king Yusuf Du Nuwas Bibliographical references Table
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 2002
over many centuries in dialogue and controversy. The former and, to a degree, the latter, were particularly important and fruitful during the early centuries of Islam and during the days of the latter's expansion, geographical, scholastic and theological. It is precisely these issues which are clarified in this book, a selection of papers from the Third Woodbrooke-Mingana Symposium on Arab Christianity and Islam (September 1998) on the theme of 'Arab Christianity in Bila : d al-Sha : m (Greater Syria) in the pre-Ottoman Period'. The content focuses on aspects of Syrian Christian life and thought during the first millennium of Islamic rule. The series of Symposiums was held in Woodbrooke College, Selly Oak, Birmingham, a most appropriate venue, since the Iraqi priest Dr Alphonse Mingana (1878-1937), who had brought to Woodbrooke College an important collection of Syrian and Arabic Christian manuscripts, had temporarily lived there. His collection is referred to on p. 191 in a chapter by Lucy-Anne Hunt on leaves from an illustrated Syriac lectionary of the seventh/thirteenth century (pp. 185-202, including 12 figures). The helpful introduction by the editor, David Thomas, gives an overall comment upon the content of the volume, serves to make a comprehensive assessment of what each contribution offers to the themes and goals of the Symposiums, and indicates those which are most relevant to specialists in Oriental Christianity in the Fertile Crescent, and to Islamists. The Foreword, by Mor Gregorios Yuhanna Ibrahim, Syrian Orthodox Archbishop of Aleppo, makes an impassioned plea on behalf of Middle Eastern Christians. The eight essays within the volume can be divided into those which concentrate upon the structure, divisions and missions of the Oriental Christian churches of Syria during the Abbasid age and those which are immediately concerned with the problems which Islam, as a religion and a community of believers, presented to those Christians who, for centuries, had been established, widely accepted and were the fount of so much of the finest thought and culture which the Syrians had contributed over many centuries. Sidney Griffith's chapter on the sectarian and Christological controversies in Arabic, in third/ninth century Syria, succinctly summarizes, yet at the same time adds to, a number of his articles which were published in his Arabic Christianity in the monasteries of ninth-century Palestine, Aldershot, 1992. In the latter work, about the Arabic account of "Abd al-Ması : h 1 al-Najra : nı : al-Ghassa : nı : , is further examined, here, by a chapter devoted to the martyrdom of this superior of Mount Sinai, written by Mark W. Swanson (pp. 107-30). Seta B. Dadoyan's chapter on the Armenians in Syria between the fourth/tenth and sixth/twelfth centuries (pp. 159-83) adds enormously to the general picture conveyed by Edmund Schü tz in his 'Armenia: a Christian enclave in the Islamic Near East in the Middle Ages', in Michael Gervers and Ramzi Jibran Bikhazi (ed.) Conversion and continuity: indigenous Christian communities in Islamic lands, Toronto, 1990, pp. 217-36, reviewed in BSOAS /1, 128). The contributions to the study of the relationships between Islamic and Christian dialogue and controversy are at the heart of this collection. The reality of this controversy, in this age, was highlighted by Sir T. W. Arnold in his The preaching of Islam (London, 1935). Speaking of the controversial dialogues with 'Muhammadans' undertaken by St. John of Damascus and by Bishop Theodore Abu : Qurrah, Arnold quotes the bishop as saying, 'The thoughts of the Agarenes and all their zeal, are directed towards the denial of the divinity of God the Word and they strain every effort to this end'. This, and related controversies and major differences, are thoroughly debated and clarified in Barbara Roggema's, 'A Christian reading of the Qur'an: the Legend of Sergius-Bah 1 ı : ra : and its use of Qur'an and Sı : ra' (pp. 57-74) and Samir K. Samir's examination of the Prophet, as perceived by Timothy 1 and other Arab Christian authors (pp. 75-106). Relations at a personal level are examined by Lawrence Conrad on the writings of Ibn But 1la : n (pp. 131-58) and by David Thomas on Paul of Antioch's Letter to a Muslim friend and the Risa : la al-Qubrusiyya (pp. 203-22). All these contributions have a direct bearing on quranic studies. These contributions supplement, to a small degree, the general picture as is conveyed in such works as J. Spencer Trimingham's Christianity among the Arabs in pre-Islamic times, (London and Beirut: Longman, 1979). The interpretation of the Quran in the light of the scriptures of the earlier 'Peoples of the Book' is a subject which occurs on numerous pages and quotations in this volume. The publication is exemplary, crowned by a bibliography of eleven pages, including books and articles, on every aspect of the debates, citing examples from a wide range of European journals and also others published in Beirut, Cairo and Jerusalem, as well as in the United States. The index includes references from the Bible and the Quran. The spelling of proper names is consistent and carefully transliterated. Footnotes are printed at the foot of each page.