Resources in Arabic and Islamic Studies – serie

Aron Zysow's 1984 PhD dissertation, 'The Economy of Certainty,' remains the most important, compelling, and intellectually ambitious treatment of Islamic legal theory (usul al-fiqh) in Western scholarship to date. It continues to be widely read and cited, and remains unsurpassed in its incisive analysis of the fundamental assumptions of Islamic legal thought. Zysow's important work is published here in full, for the first time, with updated references, further reflections by the author, and with the addition of a nine-page Foreword by Robert Gleave. Zysow argues that the great dividing line in Islamic legal thought is between those legal theories that require certainty in every detail of the law and those that will admit probability. The latter were historically dominant and include the leading legal schools that have survived to our own day. Zahirism and, for much of its history, Twelver Shi'ism, are examples of the former. The well-known dispute regarding the legitimacy of juridical analogy is only one feature of this fundamental epistemological division, since probability can enter the law in the process of authenticating prophetic traditions and in the interpretation of the revealed texts, as well as through analogy. The notion of consensus in Islamic legal theory functioned to reintroduce some measure of certainty into the law by identifying one of the competing probable solutions as correct. Consequently, consensus has only a reduced role in those systems that reject probability. Another, more radical, means of regaining certainty was the doctrine that regarded the legal reasoning of all qualified jurists on matters of probability as infallible. The development of legal theories of both types was to a large extent shaped by theology and, most significantly, by Mu'tazilism, and subsequently by Ash'arism and Maturidism.

The publication of The Formation of the Sunni Schools of Law, Ninth-Tenth Centuries C.E., first as a University of Pennsylvania doctoral dissertation in 1992, and subsequently as a monograph in 1997 (Studies in Islamic Law and Society, Brill), established Christopher Melchert as a pre-eminent scholar of the history of Islamic law and institutions. Through close readings of works on fiqh, meticulous unpacking of data in biographical dictionaries, and careful attention to curricular, pious, pedagogical, and scholarly practices, Melchert has subsequently illuminated the processes and procedures that undergirded the development of Islamic movements and institutions in the formative period of Islam. The present volume brings together sixteen of his articles, including those considered his most important as well as ones that are difficult to access. Originally published between 1997 and 2014, they are arranged chronologically under three rubrics - hadith, piety and law. The material is presented in a new format, updated by Melchert where appropriate, and indexed. The appearance of these articles together in a single volume makes this book a highly significant and welcome contribution to the field of classical Islamic Studies.

The "inquisition" (Mihnah) unleashed by the seventh Abbasid caliph, 'Abdallah al-Ma'mun (r. 813-833), has long attracted the attention of modern scholars of the intellectual, political, and religious history of the early Abbasid era. Historians have seen it as the key to a wide array of puzzles and problems in early Islamic history.In this incisive study, John Nawas subjects the various proposed explanations of these events to a sober and searching analysis and, in the process, presents a new interpretation of al-Ma'mun's political and religious policies, contextualized against the background of early Abbasid intellectual and social history.Appended to the volume is a reprint edition of Walter M. Patton's Ahmed ibn Hanbal and the Mihna (Leiden 1897), which still has much that is useful for modern scholarship, including one enormous additional benefit; it contains most of the relevant passages in Arabic from the primary sources

Sibawayhi, a non-Arab, was the first to write on Arabic grammar and the first to explain Arabic grammar from a non-Arab perspective.  Both Sibawayhi and his teacher al-Farahidi made the earliest and most significant formal recording of the Arabic language. This book argues that the science of Arabic grammar owes its origins to a set of methods developed independently to form the Islamic legal system, not to Greek or other foreign influence. These methods and criteria were adapted to create a grammatical system brought to perfection by Sibawayhi in the late second/eighth century. It describes the evolution of the new science of grammar, and makes detailed comparisons between the technical terms of law and grammar to show how the vocabulary of the law was applied to the speech of the Arabs. It also sheds light on Sibawayhi's method in producing his magisterial Kitb. This is a corrected version, with considerable Addenda, of Michael G. Carter’s 1968 Oxford doctoral thesis, Sibawayhi's Principles of Grammatical Analysis.

Some thirty years have passed since the original publication of M. M. Ahsan's Social Life Under the Abbasids, but it remains an invaluable resource for the study of the material culture of Abbasid life in the ninth and tenth centuries.Ahsan arranges his material thematically-costume, food, housing, hunting, indoor and outdoor games, and festivities and festivals. Moreover, that arrangement together with the eclectic mix of citations, also give readers a taste of what it is like to browse through the many kinds of adab works that are Ahsan's main sources, including, among numerous others, anecdotal, biographical, culinary, geographical and literary texts.

No Western scholar has contributed as much to the study of modern Arabic narrative as has Roger Allen. His doctoral dissertation was the very first Oxford D.Phil. in modern Arabic literature, completed in 1968 under the supervision of Mustafa Badawi. That same year, he took a position in Arabic language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania, the oldest professorial post in Arabic in the United States. Roger Allen has been phenomenally prolific: fifty books and translations, two hundred articles and counting-on Arabic language pedagogy, on translation, on Arabic literary history, criticism and literature. He is also one of the most decorated and acclaimed translators of Arabic literature. The present volume brings together sixteen of Roger Allen's articles on modern Arabic narrative, with a focus on genre, translation and literary history, and features analyses of the works of Rashid Abu Jadrah, Bensalem Himmich, Yusuf Idris, Naguib Mahfouz, and Tayeb Salih.

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.

This book examines the work of two major poets who wrote in the second half of the twentieth century, Yves Bonnefoy of France and the Syrian-born Adonis (born Ali Ahmed Saïd). In conducting close readings of key moments from their respective poetry, the author illustrates how both of these writers, in their own unique ways, construct poetry as a form of spiritual practice, that is, as a way of transforming both the poet's and the implied reader's ontological, perceptual and creative relationships with their internal and external worlds.

The Egyptian judge and man of letters, Ibn Abi al-'Id al-Sakhawi al-Maliki, who lived in Cairo and Medina in the ninth/fifteenth century and who practised charity his whole life, compiled a work titled the Hilyat al-kurama', literally "The Ornament of the Magnanimous." On Generosity comprises an introductory study of this work and its author, the first reliable and critical edition of the Arabic text, an annotated English translation, and glossaries designed to make the text more accessible to non-specialists.In Arabic-Islamic culture, generosity is held in the very highest regard and descriptions of charity, hospitality and largesse are consequently an important component of Arabic literature. A significant example of a flourishing genre devoted to generosity and a testament to the intense cultural and literary activity of the author's time, the Hilyat al-kurama' includes aphorisms, poems, and anecdotes about benevolent individuals whose generosity is exemplified by the gifts and money they lavished on others and by the many ways they provided aid to the needy. The lively examples of the liberality exhibited by everyone, from rulers to ordinary people, are intended to urge others to similar acts of generosity, charity and assistance.

Building on the comprehensive photographic and epigraphic documentation of the temple presented in The Temple of Ramesses II at Abydos volumes 1 (Wall Scenes) and 2 (Pillars, Niches and Miscellanea), volume 3 (Architectural and Inscriptional Features) offers a detailed analysis of the overall architectural layout and decorative programme of the temple and its symbolism. Of all the enormous monuments throughout Egypt and Nubia that Ramesses II (the Great; ca. 1279-1212 BCE) left behind, his temple at Abydos, built early in his reign, stands as one of his most elegant, with its simple architectural layout and dramatic and graceful painted relief scenes. Though best known for its dramatic reliefs depicting the battle of Kadesh, the temple also offers a wealth of information about religious and social life in ancient Egypt. It reflects, for example, the strenuous efforts of the early Ramessides to reestablish the Osiris cult in Egypt -- and particularly at Abydos -- in the aftermath of the Amarna period. This discussion approaches the religious history of the site through its archaeology, its inscriptions-both planned and secondary (graffiti)-and its situation in the complex religious landscape of Abydos. Of particular interest are the temple's role as a staging point for the great Osiris Festival and its procession, among the most important of all ritual events in the Egyptian religious calendar during the Ramesside period; the promotion of an active, unbound form of Osiris; and the evidence for important cult activities that took place on the rooftop of the temple, the presence of which is documented today by the staircase that accessed it from Court B.

The Restoration of Sunnism is a study of the early history of Islamic law schools (s. madrasa, pl. madāris) and their professors in late Fāṭimid and Aiyūbid Egypt (495-647/1101-1249). It describes the origin and spread of these institutions, their teachers, and their role in the religious life of Egypt. This work is a revised version of the author's 1976 University of Pennsylvania doctoral dissertation, which remains one of the most important works on the history of the premodern institution of the madrasa to date. Unlike many publications on the madāris in recent decades, which argue that medieval Islamic legal education was informal and lacked structure, the present work endeavours to detect the elements of structure and order in the institution of the madrasa and in its educational curricula and the practices associated with it. Leiser's ground-breaking work stands out for its attention to detail and to the political, economic, and religious background of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Egypt.

This study is an analysis of the behaviour of different individuals and groups at the Abbasid court--the centre of the largest empire in the world in the eighth-ninth centuries CE--during a period of political turmoil and governmental collapse, between the years 892 and 932. The study explores how individuals viewed themselves relative to their peers and competitors both within and outside their social/professional groups and at the strategies different individuals employed to cope with the increasing social and political instability. The book, which proceeds both chronologically and thematically, beginning with a period of revival and superior leadership and concluding with one of incompetence and regicide, is also an attempt to uncover individual and group dynamics relevant to the study of other periods, contexts, and courts.

Mohammad Fadel's scholarship on Islamic law and legal history ranges from medieval institutions and the history of Islamic legal interpretation to urgent problems relating to the modern reception and re-assessment of Islamic legal doctrine. Fadel's intellectual concerns focus primarily on the compatibility of the Islamic legal tradition with modern liberal political arrangements, but in his research and writing he also delves into the realm of premodern Islamic legal thought and institutions. His Rawlsian approach leads him to a political reading of the Islamic legal tradition, which he accomplishes by teasing out jurists' assumptions about politics, economics, and the domestic sphere. Fadel's readings of Islamic legal sources suggest that Islamic law remains relevant to a society in which legitimate disagreements over law and morality seem intractable. At the same time, from the Rawlsian perspective he adopts, Fadel reminds us that premodern Muslim jurists formulated Islamic law also under conditions of substantial controversy over matters of law and morality, as well as over questions of religion, politics, theology, and metaphysics. The studies gathered together in this volume adroitly illustrate Fadel's interest in Islamic law as a domain of Islamic political thought and as a framework that might be deployed in today's pluralistic and secularized societies.