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Provides an unusual history of an important institution promoting Islamic scholarship in Britain, The Gibb Memorial Trust
Elias John Wilkinson Gibb (1857-1901) was a Scottish Orientalist who was born and educated in Glasgow. After studying Arabic and Persian, he developed an interest in Turkish language and literature, especially poetry, and in 1882 he published Ottoman Poems Translated into English Verse in the Original Forms. This was a forerunner to the six-volume classic presented here, A History of Ottoman Poetry, published in London between 1900 and 1909. Gibb died in London of scarlet fever at the age of 44, and only the first volume of his masterpiece appeared before his death. His family entrusted to his friend Edward Granville Browne (1862-1926), a distinguished Orientalist in his own right who had ma...
Murtada al-Zabidi was a Humanist scholar and a Muslim, whose twelfth-century writings are here examined in the context of their geographical and historical setting. The period when Zabidi was writing saw a shift in the balance of power from the Muslim empires to the Western world, reflected in the stories he told of his travels from India on to Cairo, across vast distances and coming across an extraordinary range of people. The five chapters in this work look at various aspects of Zabidi's life and times, the first one focusing on his life and career and forms a background to studies of his work. The second looks at Zabidi's writing and publishing and the third at his notes on his friends, teachers, students and acquaintances. Chapter four assesses his two largest works; his Arabic lexicon and his commentary on Gazzali's Ihya . Finally, chapter five explores his second major literary achievement, his large commentary on Gazzali's Ihya ulum al-din .
One of the problems pervading the study of medieval Islamic technology is the lack of surviving technical treatises. Tradition tended to be handed down by example and by word of mouth, and apprenticeships could last for decades. Fortunately, however, occasional treatises do exist. The treatise "On swords and their kinds" was written by the 9th century Muslim philosopher Ya'qub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi. This work was commissioned by a powerful patron of scholarship, the Abbasid caliph Mu'tasim, and the content of the treatise presumably reflects the ruler's general interest in his army and its equipment, and his specific interest in the technical aspects of sword production. In this work, Kindi dis...
Takhyil is a term from Arabic poetics denoting the evocation of images. It has a broad spectrum of connotations throughout classical philosophical poetics and rhetoric, and it is closely linked to the Greek concept of phantasia. This volume is comprised of annotated translations of key texts on this topic from major philosophers and literary theoreticians, including Alfarabi (al-Farabi), Avicenna (Ibn Sina), Averroes (Ibn Rushd), and 'Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani. In her preface, the classicist Anne Sheppard relates takhyil to Greek poetics, and in his introduction, Wolfhart Heinrichs traces the development of the term in the Arabic tradition. The second part of the book contains eight studies on takhyil and various aspects of image-evocation and how it relates to musical theory, literary criticism and rhetoric. The opening essay is by Katrin Kohl, a specialist in European poetics, who places takhyil in the wider context of poetic universals.
The story of texts and ideas from ancient Greece passing through a monolithic Islam enroute to Christian Europe is now being reconsidered. In this book, classicists and other scholars point out some of the many paths of transmission of thought. Their topics include Greek myth and Arabic poetry at Qusayr 'Amra, the multi-lingual and multi-confessional maze of Islamic medicine, and memories of Egypt in medieval Venice.
This substantial and largely unknown Persian chronicle of the reign of Shah 'Abbas I (1587-1629) exists in a unique manuscript, recently discovered in the Library of Christ's College, Cambridge. Its author, Fazl-Allah Khuzani Isfahani, member of an important bureaucratic family, provides an insider's account of this crucial period in Persian history, with a wealth of detail about the central and provincial administration and much information not found in other sources. Shortly after the succession of Shah Safi I, Fazl-Allah left for India, where he continued to work on his chronicle. So far, three volumes of the Afzal al-tawarikh have come to light, covering the reigns of Shah Isma'il, Shah ...
English translation with introduction and notes of the account by the Venetian Michele Membre of a visit to the Safavid court, written in the 16th century.
Renowned as great centres of learning, the cities of Baghdad and Isfahan were at the heart of the Islamic 'age of science'. Their distinct cultural voices inspired a unique historical dialogue, which finds new expression in Baghdad and Isfahan: A Dialogue of Two Cities in an Age of Science, the story of how knowledge was transmitted and transformed within Islamic lands, and then spread across the globe. Charting the history of Baghdad and Isfahan from 750 to 1750, Elaheh Kheirandish draws on the voices of court astronomers, mathematicians, scientists, mystics, jurists, statesmen and Arabic and Persian translators and scholars. Telling the story of the rise of Baghdad and the decline of Isfah...