Scholarship between Europe and the Levant: Essays in Honour of Alastair Hamilton, eds. Jan Loop and Jill Kraye (Leiden: Brill, 2021) (original) (raw)
Related papers
2006
I will explore the emergence of Arabic studies in western Europe between the sixteenth-century Reformation and nineteenth-century Imperialism. There is scant research on the history of Arabic studies in early modern Europe aside from Johann Fück’s Arabische Studien (1955), because previous scientific efforts in the field seemed insignificant after the pioneering work of scholars such as Antoine Silvstre de Sacy (1758–1838) and Gustav Flügel (1802–1870). Moreover, research on European Orientalism has focused on the perception of Arabs and Islam within the context of French and British Near East politics, following the lead of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1979). My starting point is the observation that the theoretical discourse of Arabic studies still appears to be largely independent of that in French, English, or Germanic studies. The continued methodological autonomy seems to reflect that neither sixteenth-century Humanists nor nineteenth-century philologists were interested in the Arabic language. While Anthony Grafton has explored how the Humanist approach to editing developed from the goal to recover the Latin and Greek heritage of antiquity, Bernard Cerquiglini has analyzed how nineteenth-century philology became the scientific methodology for editing the first literary documents written in the European vernaculars. Latin, however, was continually taught, even throughout the Dark Ages. In contrast, Thomas Erpenius (1584–1624) published the first Arabic grammar (1617), and only in the seventeenth century did European libraries begin to collect systematically Arabic literature. But the marginal position of Arabic within European university curricula is salient. During the Middle Ages Muslims and Christians competed for territory in Spain, southern Italy, Asia Minor, and the Levant, and since the Reformation, both Protestants and Catholics had relied on Islam as the prime example for spotting false prophets and Antichrists. I will use the chapter on Islam in the Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peoples du monde by Bernard Picart (1673–1733) to examine the role of Islam in the Enlightenment discourse on idolatry. My analysis will demonstrate that religious intolerance among Christians shaped their perceptions of diverse Muslim societies from the Balkans to the Indian peninsula. I will argue that nineteenth-century Arabic studies remained distant from the modern methodological developments in the field of philology because Europeans did not encounter an Arab nation state with Arabic as its national language. Knowledge of Arabic was relevant for theological research on the Scriptures, but not for the recovery of the literary heritage of the modern national languages.
Historian, 2018
Masarra (d. 931) in his Mysticism and Philosophy in al-Andalus (2013). Both provide a larger context for Ibn 'Arabī as well. Cosmology is one side of the coin, epistemology the other. Like others who upheld similar worldviews, Ibn Barrajān believed that this divine presence in the world allowed humans intellectual and spiritual ascent. He described this as "crossing" ("i'tibār"), which was achieved through contemplation. God had provided humans with the book of nature as well as with the Qur'an to that end. Ibn Barrajān considered these all encompassing and perfectly arranged, which had repercussions for his Qur'anic hermeneutics. Unlike most other scholars, he rejected the principle that later surahs abrogate earlier ones in cases of conflict. And yet, he developed strategies of hierarchy and harmonization within the Qur'an and between the Qur'an and reports about Muhammad's sayings and deeds (hadīth), the second important normative source in the Islamic tradition. Remarkably, the Bible, too, served Ibn Barrajān as an authoritative source rather than a target for religious polemics. Unlike many other Muslim scholars, Ibn Barrajān did not regard the hereafter as wholly transcendent. (In his Paradise and Hell in Islamic Traditions [2015], Christian Lange made a similar case for a larger group of Muslim scholars, challenging the conventional impression of predominant transcendence.) He considered this world an outgrowth of the hereafter and believed that recognizing connections allowed for future predictions. Ibn Barrajān famously predicted the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem from the Crusaders in 1187. Ibn Barrajān's epistemology had political implications. He disagreed with scholars of the Maliki legal school who had formed an entente with the Almoravid state. The powers that be also feared that any assumptions of divine immanence might entail claims of authority. In 1141, Ibn Barrajān was deported to Marrakech where he died in jail. The Mystics of al-Andalus offers a thorough, wide-ranging, well-written, and amply documented study of a prolific, influential, and original mystical author. It contributes to a picture of a distinctive and creative Andalusi intellectual tradition.
Medieval Arabic Historiography: Authors as Actors
Medieval Arabic Historiography is concerned with social contexts and narrative structures of pre-modern Islamic historiography written in Arabic in seventh and thirteenth-century Syria and Eygpt. Taking up recent theoretical reflections on historical writing in the European Middle Ages, this extraordinary study combines approaches drawn from social sciences and literary studies, with a particular focus on two well-known texts: Abu Shama’s The Book of the Two Gardens, and Ibn Wasil’s The Dissipater of Anxieties. These texts describe events during the life of the sultans Nur-al-Din and Salah al-Din, who are primarily known in modern times as the champions of the anti-Crusade movement. Hirschler shows that these two authors were active interpreters of their society and has considerable room for manoeuvre in both their social environment and the shaping of their texts. Through the use of a fresh and original theoretical approach to pre-modern Arabic historiography, Hirschler presents a new understanding of these texts which have before been relatively neglected, thus providing a significant contribution to the burgeoning field of historiographical studies. Reviews: (11) Journal of the American Oriental Society 130/4 (2010), Reuven Amitai; (10) MESA Review of Middle East Studies 44/1 (2010), Eric Hanne; (9) British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 37/2 (2010), Bruno De Nicola; (8) Orientalische Literaturzeitung 105/1 (2010), Axel Havemann; (7) Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 160/1 (2010), Albrecht Fuess; (6) The American Historical Review 114/3 (2009), Tarif Khalidi; (5) Bulletin of SOAS 72/2 (2009), Yehoshua Frenkel; (4) Al-Masaq: Islam and the Medieval Mediterranean 20/2 (2008), Amira K. Bennison; (3) Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies 82/3 (2007), Fred M. Donner; (2) The Muslim World Book Review 28/1 (2007), Fozia Bora; (1) Sehepunkte 7 (2007), Kurt Franz.