Camilla Adang – författare

The articles brought together in this volume deal with Muslim perceptions and uses of the Bible in its wider sense, including the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament as well as the New Testament, albeit with an emphasis on the former scripture. While Muslims consider the earlier revelations to the People of the Book to have been altered to some extent by the Jews and the Christians and abrogated by the Qurʾān, God's final dispensation to humankind, the Bible is at the same time venerated in view of its divine origin, and questioning this divine origin is tantamount to unbelief. Muslim scholars approached and used the Bible for a variety of purposes and in different ways. Thus Muslim historians regularly relied on biblical materials as their primary source for the pre-Islamic period when discussing the creation as well as the history of the Israelites and the prophets preceding Muhammad. Authors seeking to polemicize against Jews and Christians were primarily interested in the presumed biblical annunciations of Muhammad and his religion and / or in perceived contradictions and cases of internal abrogation in the Bible. These various concerns resulted from and had an impact on the ways in which Muslim authors accessed the scriptures.

Abū ʿAlī Muḥammad Ibn Khallād al-Baṣrī was a distinguished disciple of the Muʿtazilī theologian and founder of the Bahshamiyya, Abū Hāshim al-Jubbāʾī (d. 321/933). He is reported to have written a theological summa, Kitāb al-Uṣūl, as well as an autocommentary. None of the works of Ibn Khallād has come down to us directly, although substantial portions of his Kitāb al-Uṣūl and/or Sharḥ al-Uṣūl have reached us embedded in the Kitāb Ziyādāt Sharḥ al-Uṣūl by the Zaydī Imām al-Nāṭiq bi-l-ḥaqq Abū Ṭālib Yaḥyā b. al-Ḥusayn b. Hārūn al-Buṭḥānī (d. 424/1033). The present volume contains an editio princeps of the text of the Ziyādāt, based on what seems to be a unique manuscript, owned by Leiden University Library (Cod. Or 2949 [= Arab 2307]).

The present volume—the first of its kind—deals with takfīr: accusing one´s opponents of unbelief (kufr). Originating in the first decades of Islam, this practice has been applied intermittently ever since. The nineteen studies included here deal with cases, covering different periods and parts of the Muslim world, of individuals or groups that used the instrument of takfīr to brand their opponents—either persons, groups or even institutions—as unbelievers who should be condemned, anathematized or even persecuted. Each case presented is placed in its sociopolitical and religious context. Together the contributions show the multifariousness that has always characterized Islam and the various ways in which Muslims either sought to suppress or to come to terms with this diversity.With contributions by: Roswitha Badry, Sonja Brentjes, Brian J. Didier, Michael Ebstein, Simeon Evstatiev, Ersilia Francesca, Robert Gleave, Steven Judd, István T. Kristó-Nagy, Göran Larsson, Amalia Levanoni, Orkhan Mir-Kasimov, Hossein Modarressi, Justyna Nedza, Intisar A. Rabb, Sajjad Rizvi, Daniel de Smet, Zoltan Szombathy, Joas Wagemakers.