Joseph Schacht and German Orientalism in the 1920s and 1930s (2018).pdf (original) (raw)
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German orientalism. The study of the Middle East and Islam from 1800 to 1945
Culture and Religion, 2010
Ursula Wokoeck’s book is a dissertation written at the School of History, Tel Aviv University. Known by her articles on Ibn Khaldun, Theodor Noeldeke, and Middle Eastern modernity, this historian researched the development of Middle Eastern studies as part of a wider discipline: Oriental studies, then still a minor discipline at the faculty of philosophy within the modern German university system. After the introduction, she shows in eight chapters how the modern German universities regarded the Middle East and treated modern Oriental studies. Wokoeck investigated the differentiations in Sanskrit and Semitic languages and the emergence of Assyriologie and Islamic studies. She offers insights into political factors in the Third Reich and draws basic conclusions. The overviews with the names of scholars at universities are most valuable. The author illuminates how the new discipline of Oriental studies and the institutional separation between faculties of theology and philosophy emerged. In her conclusions, she points out the supporting role of the German Oriental Society–the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft–toward the scholars since 1845. In addition to this self-organized support, the German Empire developed a growing practical need to equip its diplomats with basic skills in foreign languages since the 1871 German Reich.
Introduction: Scholarly Personae in the History of Orientalism, 1870–1930
Scholarly Personae in the History of Orientalism, 1870-1930, 2019
What, if anything, did "professional identity" mean to European Orientalists in the decades around 1900? What did it take for them to be a professor, Privatdozent, or non-academic researcher in the field of Oriental studies? What talents, virtues, or skills did this require? Also, how were these skills and virtues acquired or molded, especially but not only in educational practices, and what positive or negative models were invoked in contexts of socialization? If the models that Dozy and Fleischer had embodied came to be regarded as old-fashioned, what alternative models did Snouck, Hartmann, and Goldziher put in their place? And how were these different understandings of what it meant to be an Arabist, Egyptologist, or Sinologist related to professional identities in other areas of the Geisteswissenschaften, not to mention the emerging social sciences?
Arab Berlin: Dynamics of Transformation, ed. Hanan Badr, Nahed Samour, 2023
The chapter examines the life and works of Ḥasan Tawfīq al-ʿAdl (1862-1904), one of the first native tutors of Arabic at the Seminar für Orientalische Sprachen in Berlin. A graduate of al-Azhar and Dār al-ʿUlūm, he spent five years in Berlin, teaching German orientalists, diplomats, and government translators. He engaged in the study of pedagogy, and became a prolific author and translator, researching and composing works on child pedagogy, physical education, Arabic literary history, and the etymology of colloquial Egyptian Arabic. The chapter outlines his biography, examines his role at the Seminar für Orientalische Sprachen and gives an overview of his writings, situating them in their wider intellectual contexts.
2023
Rudolf Strothmann (b. 1877, d. 1960) played a pioneering role in the scholarly exploration of Shīʿī Islam in Western, and in particular German, scholarship. Between 1910 and 1923, he published a number of pathbreaking studies on the Zaydiyya, consulting primarily the recently purchased collections of Yemeni Zaydī manuscripts in Berlin. At the same time, and to the extent that this was possible in view of the lack of relevant sources in Germany and the rest of Europe, Strothmann began to delve into Twelver Shīʿī literature, an endeavour which culminated in his 1926 monograph, Die Zwölfer-Schīʿa: Zwei religionsgeschichtliche Charakterbilder aus der Mongolenzeit, a portrait of the two prominent seventh/thirteenth-century Imāmī scholars Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī (d. 672/1274) and Raḍī al-Dīn ʿAlī b. Mūsā Ibn Ṭāwūs (d. 664/1266). During the later decades of his life, Strothmann primarily focussed on various strands of Ismāʿīlism. His rich published work testifies to his erudition and versatility and continues to form an important point of departure for scholars working on different aspects of Shīʿism in the early twenty-first century. In addition, Strothmann’s use of the manuscript treasures of Berlin State Library between 1908 and 1926 reflects his evolution as a scholar during those years. This study examines the earlier decades of Strothmann’s life and his formation as a theologian and a scholar of Semitic languages and Islamic culture. Moreover, it sheds light on his scholarly work during the 1910s through his correspondences with Carl Heinrich Becker, Ignaz Goldziher, Eugenio Griffini, and Cornelis van Arendonk, of which an annotated edition is provided.
Dissertation, 2020
This dissertation traces how European “oriental studies” emerged from a sustained encounter with an earlier Ottoman intellectual tradition. In the seventeenth century, books acquired in cities like Istanbul or looted from Ottoman Europe formed the basis of many of the first major collections of Islamic manuscripts in non-Ottoman Europe, and Western European scholars who specialized in the study of Islamic texts worked mostly from sixteenth and seventeenth-century Ottoman commentaries, dictionaries, translations, and bibliographies, often with the help of Muslim scholars. “World Literature in Practice” builds on a broad survey of Islamic manuscripts from early modern German collections to reconstruct the scholarly practices of orientalists and their collaborators. Examining their notes and marginalia, it uncovers an early chapter in the history of world literature during the two centuries before Goethe coined the term, as Ottoman letters became the foundation of orientalist literature. Three chapters follow the strands of this encounter from the early seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century. Chapter one looks at the first orientalist readers of Saʿdī’s Gulistān, a work of classical Persian literature which orientalists discovered through its various Turkish and Arabic commentaries and translations. Chapter two follows the formation of diplomatic language schools founded to train interpreters for work in the Ottoman Empire, and the generations of diplomat-orientalists they educated. Chapter three examines how orientalists collected and organized information from Islamic manuscripts in the decades after the formation of major manuscript collections in the second half of the seventeenth century, culminating in the work of Johann Jacob Reiske. A conclusion looks broadly at the transformation of orientalist practices over the early modern period.