Sabine Schmidtke - Böcker

The study of Islamic philosophy has entered a new and exciting phase in the last few years. Both the received canon of Islamic philosophers and the narrative of the course of Islamic philosophy are in the process of being radically questioned and revised. Most twentieth-century Western scholarship on Arabic or Islamic philosophy has focused on the period from the ninth century to the twelfth. It is a measure of the transformation that is currently underway in the field that, unlike other reference works, the Oxford Handbook has striven to give roughly equal weight to every century, from the ninth to the twentieth. The Handbook is also unique in that its 30 chapters are work-centered rather than person- or theme-centered, in particular taking advantage of recent new editions and translations that have renewed interest and debate around the Islamic philosophical canon. The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Philosophy gives both the advanced student and active scholar in Islamic philosophy, theology, and intellectual history, a strong sense of what a work in Islamic philosophy looks like and a deep view of the issues, concepts, and arguments that are at stake. Most importantly, it provides an up-to-date portrait of contemporary scholarship on Islamic philosophy.

Within the field of Islamic Studies, scientific research of Muslim theology is a comparatively young discipline. Much progress has been achieved over the past decades with respect both to discoveries of new materials and to scholarly approaches to the field. The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Theology provides a comprehensive and authoritative survey of the current state of the field. It provides a variegated picture of the state of the art and at the same time suggests new directions for future research. Part One covers the various strands of Islamic theology during the formative and early middle periods, rational as well as scripturalist. To demonstrate the continuous interaction among the various theological strands and its repercussions (during the formative and early middle period and beyond), Part Two offers a number of case studies. These focus on specific theological issues that have developed through the dilemmatic and often polemical interactions between the different theological schools and thinkers. Part Three covers Islamic theology during the later middle and early modern periods. One of the characteristics of this period is the growing amalgamation of theology with philosophy (Peripatetic and Illuminationist) and mysticism. Part Four addresses the impact of political and social developments on theology through a number of case studies: the famous mi?na instituted by al-Ma'mun (r. 189/813-218/833) as well as the mihna to which Ibn 'Aqil (d. 769/1367) was subjected; the religious policy of the Almohads; as well as the shifting interpretations throughout history (particularly during Mamluk and Ottoman times) of the relation between Ash'arism and Maturidism that were often motivated by political motives. Part Five considers Islamic theological thought from the end of the early modern and during the modern period.

Within the field of Islamic Studies, scientific research of Muslim theology is a comparatively young discipline. Much progress has been achieved over the past decades with respect both to discoveries of new materials and to scholarly approaches to the field. The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Theology provides a comprehensive and authoritative survey of the current state of the field. It provides a variegated picture of the state of the art and at the same time suggests new directions for future research.Part One covers the various strands of Islamic theology during the formative and early middle periods, rational as well as scripturalist. To demonstrate the continuous interaction among the various theological strands and its repercussions (during the formative and early middle period and beyond), Part Two offers a number of case studies. These focus on specific theological issues that have developed through the dilemmatic and often polemical interactions between the different theological schools and thinkers. Part Three covers Islamic theology during the later middle and early modern periods. One of the characteristics of this period is the growing amalgamation of theology with philosophy (Peripatetic and Illuminationist) and mysticism. Part Four addresses the impact of political and social developments on theology through a number of case studies: the famous miḥna instituted by al-Ma"mūn (r. 189/813-218/833) as well as the miḥna to which Ibn "Aqīl (d. 769/1367) was subjected; the religious policy of the Almohads; as well as the shifting interpretations throughout history (particularly during Mamluk and Ottoman times) of the relation between Ash"arism and Māturidism that were often motivated by political motives. Part Five considers Islamic theological thought from the end of the early modern and during the modern period.

The study of Islamic philosophy has entered a new and exciting phase in the last few years. Both the received canon of Islamic philosophers and the narrative of the course of Islamic philosophy are in the process of being radically questioned and revised. Most twentieth-century Western scholarship on Arabic or Islamic philosophy has focused on the period from the ninth century to the twelfth. It is a measure of the transformation that is currently underway in the field that, unlike other reference works, the Oxford Handbook has striven to give roughly equal weight to every century, from the ninth to the twentieth. The Handbook is also unique in that its 30 chapters are work-centered rather than person- or theme-centered, in particular taking advantage of recent new editions and translations that have renewed interest and debate around the Islamic philosophical canon. The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Philosophy gives both the advanced student and active scholar in Islamic philosophy, theology, and intellectual history, a strong sense of what a work in Islamic philosophy looks like and a deep view of the issues, concepts, and arguments that are at stake. Most importantly, it provides an up-to-date portrait of contemporary scholarship on Islamic philosophy.

In 1934 the New York Public Library (NYPL) purchased a sizable collection of 250 volumes of Arabic manuscripts through the fund for Semitic literature that had been provided by Jacob Heinrich Schiff. Ms New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division, Arabic Manuscripts Collection, Volume 51985A, a facsimile of which is included in the present publication, belongs to the Shīʿī material among the collection. It is a multitext volume of 269 leaves which in its present form comprises seven individual works. It is hoped that the present facsimile edition will enable and encourage scholars to delve into the materials it contains.

Iranian libraries hold only few manuscripts that testify to the extended and intensive Muʿtazilite past in the various centers of Zaydi scholarship in the Caspian region, in Ḫurāsān, and in Rayy. Among the few Muʿtazilite Zaydi works preserved in the libraries of Iran is a miscellany held by the library of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Shiraz (ʿAllāma Ṭabāṭabāʾī Library). The maǧmūʿa, a facsimile of which is included in the present publication, was written between 673/1274-75 and 676/1277 and contains doctrinal works by Imāmi and Zaydi theologians from both Iran and from Yemen. Most of the codex consists of a theological summa, a taʿlīq that had been composed or transcribed by one Abū Ṭāhir b. ʿAlī al-Ṣaffār which was based on the Kitāb al-Uṣūl by Abū ʿAlī Muḥammad b. Ḫallād al-Baṣrī, the distinguished disciple of the Muʿtazilite theologian and founder of the Bahšamiyya, Abū Hāšim al-Ǧubbāʾī (d. 321/933), with an unknown number of commentary layers in between.

This volume brings together contributions by scholars focussing on peritextual elements as found in Middle Eastern manuscripts: dots and various other symbols that mark vowels, intonation, readings aids, and other textual markers; marginal notes and sigla that provide additional explanatory content akin to but substantially different from our modern notes and endnotes; images and illustrations that present additional material not found in the main text. These elements add additional layers to the main body of the text and are crucial for our understanding of the text’s transmission history as well as scribal habits.

This companion volume to Literary Snippets: Colophons Across Space and Time (Gorgias Press, 2023) gives examples of colophons (and their translations) from the Ancient Near East up to the pre-modern world, in Akkadian, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, and Persian.

This book focuses on aspects of Islamic thought in Iran and Yemen, and other regions of the Middle East, from the ninth to the fifteenth century CE, through a close study of manuscript materials.The book's seventeen chapters are arranged under five rubrics: Mu'tazilism, Zaydism in Iran and in Yemen, Twelver Shi'ism, Mysticism, and Bibliographical Traditions.The appearance of these studies together in a single volume makes this book a significant and welcome contribution to the field of classical Islamic Studies.

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.

Hedwig Klein was a brilliant scholar of Islam whose life and career were tragically cut short by the Holocaust. Born in Antwerp in 1911 and raised in Hamburg, Klein studied at the University of Hamburg under Rudolf Strothmann, Walter Windfuhr, Arthur Schaade, and others from 1931 until 1935. In 1937, she earned the highest possible grades for her oral exams and her doctoral dissertation, an edition of a historical Ibāḍī text. But her dream of an academic career was shattered in 1938 when she was barred from receiving her doctoral degree on account of being Jewish. As the grip of Nazism tightened, Klein’s life took a tragic turn. She secured a visa for India in 1939 and left Hamburg, but her hope of escape was cruelly dashed when her ship was ordered to return to Germany because of the imminent outbreak of World War II. Trapped in Hamburg, Klein found herself without prospects for survival or escape. For a few months in 1941–42, she worked on the Harrassowitz project to compile a dictionary of modern Arabic, but her fate was sealed. On July 11, 1942, Klein was deported to Auschwitz, where she was likely murdered upon arrival. In 1947, five years after her death, she was awarded the doctoral degree she had been denied. On August 10, 1951, she was officially declared dead.Klein’s story has sparked renewed interest since the early 2000s. This interest has focused on her involvement in the Harrassowitz dictionary project, eventually published as Hans Wehr’s Arabisches Wörterbuch für die Schriftsprache der Gegenwart, and on the dictionary’s alleged connection to efforts to produce an authorized Arabic translation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.Drawing on archival material from Germany, Israel, Belgium, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the United States, Switzerland, and elsewhere, this study uncovers Klein’s biography, including her family background, her upbringing, and her contribution to scholarship, in order to honor her legacy and address misconceptions about her work. It also reconstructs the early history of Wehr’s dictionary and Klein’s contribution to it in great detail to demonstrate that the dictionary project was unrelated to earlier endeavors to translate Mein Kampf into Arabic.

Im Zentrum von Sabine Schmidtkes Arbeit steht die Untersuchung der Schleiermacherschen Soteriologie anhand des Zentralgedankens der 'lebendigen Empfänglichkeit', der erstmalig umfassend in seiner Relevanz sowohl für die Lehrstücke von Wiedergeburt und Heiligung als auch für das Gesamtverständnis der Glaubenslehre analysiert wird. Mit ihm gelingt es Schleiermacher, die offene und zugleich zentrale Frage evangelischer Dogmatik nach dem Verhältnis von menschlicher Tätigkeit und Empfänglichkeit in der Bekehrung, und damit zugleich hinsichtlich der Entstehung von Glauben, unter modernen Bedingungen einer anthropologisch-psychologisch fundierten Antwort zuzuführen. In der kritisch-vergleichenden Auseinandersetzung mit der reformatorischen und altprotestantischen Lehrbildung zeigt sich, inwiefern Schleiermachers Darstellung dem eigenen Anspruch gerecht wird, der Weiterentwicklung des 'protestantischen Prinzips' zu dienen.

Sabine Schmidtke rekonstruiert die wissenschaftliche Biografie Martin Schreiners (1863−1926), einem der prominentesten Schüler von Ignaz Goldziher und wichtigem Vertreter der "Wissenschaft des Judentums", von seiner Studienzeit in Budapest bis zu seiner produktiven Phase in Berlin.

Who speaks for Islam? To whom do Muslims turn when they look for guidance? To what extent do individual scholars and preachers exert religious authority, and how can it be assessed? The upsurge of Islamism has lent new urgency to these questions, but they have deeper roots and a much longer history, and they certainly should not be considered in the light of present concerns only. The present volume – grown out of an international symposium at the Free University, Berlin in 2002 – is not so much concerned with religious authority, but with religious authorities, men and women claiming, projecting and exerting religious authority within a given context. It addresses issues such as the relationship of knowledge, conduct and charisma, the social functions of the schools of law and theology, and the efforts on the part of governments and rulers to organize religious scholars and to implement state-centred hierarchies. The volume focuses on Middle Eastern Muslim majority societies in the period from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, and the individual papers offer case studies elucidating important aspects of the wider phenomenon. Individually and collectively, they highlight the scope and variety of religious authorities in past and present Muslim societies.

The Yemeni Manuscript Tradition contributes to the study of the manuscript codex and its role in scholastic culture in Yemen. Ranging in period from Islam’s first century to the modern period, all the articles in this volume emerge from the close scrutiny of the manuscripts of Yemen. As a group, these studies demonstrate the range and richness of scholarly methods closely tied to the material text, and the importance of cross-pollination in the fields of codicology, textual criticism, and social and intellectual history. Contributors are: Hassan Ansari, Menashe Anzi, Asma Hilali, Kerstin Hünefeld, Wilferd Madelung, Arianna D’Ottone, Christoph Rauch, Anne Regourd, Sabine Schmidtke, Gregor Schwarb and Jan Thiele.

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.

The volume contains critical editions of the extant parts of two hitherto unknown theological works by the Būyid vizier al-Ṣāḥib b. ʿAbbād (d. 385/925), who is well known to have vigorously promoted the teaching of Muʿtazilī theology throughout Būyid territories and beyond. The manuscripts on which the edition is based come from Cairo Geniza store rooms. They consist of two manuscripts for each of the two texts—testimony to the impact of al-Ṣāḥib’s education policy on the contemporaneous Jewish community in Cairo. The longer treatise of al-Ṣāḥib of ca. 350/960, possibly his Kitāb Nahj al-sabīl fī uṣūl al-dīn, appears to be the earliest Muʿtazilī work preserved among the Jewish community. The second, briefer treatise also contains a commentary by ʿAbd al-Jabbār al-Hamadānī (d. 415/1025).

Religious and Intellectual Diversity in the Islamicate World and Beyond is a collection of essays in honor of Sarah Stroumsa, an eminent scholar who through the years has embodied and advanced the possibility of collaboration across borders. The volume is presented to her by scholars working on the study of the intellectual history of the Middle Ages, the intercultural contact and migration of knowledge in the Islamic world, and many other topics.Contributors: Binyamin Abrahamov, Camilla Adang, Anna Ayse Akasoy, Aleida Assmann, Jan Assmann, Meir M. Bar-Asher, Jos Bellver, Menachem Ben-Sasson, Haggai Ben-Shammai, Glen W. Bowersock, Rmi Brague, Godefroid de Callata, Jonathan Decter, Michael Ebstein, Hussein Fancy, Carlos Fraenkel, Gil Gambash, Robert Gleave, Miriam Goldstein, Frank Griffel, Jaakko HämeenAnttila, Steven Harvey, Warren Zev Harvey, Meir Hatina, Geoffrey Khan, Gudrun Krämer, Ehud Krinis, Y. Tzvi Langermann, Daniel J. Lasker, Reimund Leicht, Gideon Libson, Menachem Lorberbaum, Maria Mavroudi, Jon McGinnis, Omer Michaelis, Yonatan Moss, David Nirenberg, Sari Nusseibeh, Olaf Pluta, Meira Polliack, James T. Robinson, Marina Rustow, Sabine Schmidtke, Gregor Schwarb, Ahmed El Shamsy, Mark Silk, Uriel Simonsohn, Daniel De Smet, Josef Stern, Guy G. Stroumsa, Sara Sviri, Alexander Treiger, Roy Vilozny, Ronny Vollandt, Elvira Wakelnig, Paul E. Walker, David J. Wasserstein, Tanja Werthmann, Dong Xiuyuan, Arye Zoref.

Religious and Intellectual Diversity in the Islamicate World and Beyond is a collection of essays in honor of Sarah Stroumsa, an eminent scholar who through the years has embodied and advanced the possibility of collaboration across borders. The volume is presented to her by scholars working on the study of the intellectual history of the Middle Ages, the intercultural contact and migration of knowledge in the Islamic world, and many other topics.Contributors: Binyamin Abrahamov, Camilla Adang, Anna Ayse Akasoy, Aleida Assmann, Jan Assmann, Meir M. Bar-Asher, Jos Bellver, Menachem Ben-Sasson, Haggai Ben-Shammai, Glen W. Bowersock, Rmi Brague, Godefroid de Callata, Jonathan Decter, Michael Ebstein, Hussein Fancy, Carlos Fraenkel, Gil Gambash, Robert Gleave, Miriam Goldstein, Frank Griffel, Jaakko HämeenAnttila, Steven Harvey, Warren Zev Harvey, Meir Hatina, Geoffrey Khan, Gudrun Krämer, Ehud Krinis, Y. Tzvi Langermann, Daniel J. Lasker, Reimund Leicht, Gideon Libson, Menachem Lorberbaum, Maria Mavroudi, Jon McGinnis, Omer Michaelis, Yonatan Moss, David Nirenberg, Sari Nusseibeh, Olaf Pluta, Meira Polliack, James T. Robinson, Marina Rustow, Sabine Schmidtke, Gregor Schwarb, Ahmed El Shamsy, Mark Silk, Uriel Simonsohn, Daniel De Smet, Josef Stern, Guy G. Stroumsa, Sara Sviri, Alexander Treiger, Roy Vilozny, Ronny Vollandt, Elvira Wakelnig, Paul E. Walker, David J. Wasserstein, Tanja Werthmann, Dong Xiuyuan, Arye Zoref.

This volume represents the state of the art in research on the controversial Muslim legal scholar, theologian and man of letters Ibn Ḥazm of Cordoba (d. 456/1064), who is widely regarded as one of the most brilliant minds of Islamic Spain. Remembered mostly for his charming treatise on love, he was first and foremost a fierce polemicist who was much criticized for his idiosyncratic views and his abrasive language. Insisting that the sacred sources of Islam are to be understood in their outward sense and that it is only the Prophet Muḥammad whose example may be followed, Ibn Ḥazm alienated himself from his peers. As a result, his books were burned and he was forced to withdraw from public life.Contributors are: Camilla Adang, Hassan Ansari, Samuel-Martin Behloul, Alfonso Carmona, Leigh Chipman, Maribel Fierro, Alejandro García Sanjuán, Livnat Holtzman, Samir Kaddouri, Joep Lameer, Christian Lange, Gabriel Martinez Gros, Luis Molina, Salvador Peña, Jose Miguel Puerta Vilchez, Rafael Ramón Guerrero, Adam Sabra, Sabine Schmidtke, Delfina Serrano, Bruna Soravia, Dominique Urvoy, Kees Versteegh and David Wasserstein.