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Arabic is the only living language to have been taught in Dutch higher education for more than four centuries. Practical usefulness, however, has been a prerequisite from the start. Knowledge of Arabic was to promote Dutch interests in the Muslim world, or to help refute Islam. As a cognate of Classical Hebrew, the study of Arabic served as an ancillary science to Biblical studies. Nevertheless, many Arabists such as Thomas Erpenius and Jacobus Golius rose to international distinction. With more than 110 colour illustrations from the Leiden Oriental collections, Arabic Studies in the Netherlands. A Short History in Portraits, 1580-1950 by Arnoud Vrolijk and Richard van Leeuwen will help the reader to gain insight into a fascinating aspect of Dutch intellectual history.
Teachers and Students: Reflections on Learning in Near and Middle Eastern Cultures. Collected Studies in Honour of Sebastian Günther contains essays on the developments, ideals, and practices of teaching and learning in the Islamicate world, past and present. The authors address topics that reflect – and thus honour – Sebastian Günther’s academic achievements in this particular area. The volume offers fresh insights into key issues related to education and human development, including their shared characteristics as well as their influence on and interdependence with cultures of the Islamicate world, especially in the classical period of Islam (9th-15th century CE). The diverse spectrum of topics covered in the book, as well as the wide range of innovative interdisciplinary approaches and research tools employed, pay tribute to Sebastian Günther’s research focus on Islamic education and ethics, through which he has inspired many of his students, colleagues, and friends.
In recent years, a growing interest in “oriental manuscripts” in all their aspects, including the extrinsic ones, has been observed. Research that focuses on holograph, autograph and authorial manuscripts in Arabic handwritten script has nevertheless been casual, although these manuscripts raise important and varied questions. The study of the working methods of authors from the past informs different disciplines: paleography, codicology, textual criticism, ecdotics, linguistics and intellectual history. In this volume nine contributions and case studies are gathered that address theoretical issues and convey different, disruptive perspectives. A particularly important subject of this bo...
In Medieval Muslim Historians and the Franks in the Levant seven leading scholars examine the historical writings of seven medieval Muslim historians whose works provide the core chronographical texts for reconstructing the events of the crusading period, 1097-1291. Each chapter examines the life of and influences on each historian, their overall writings, and their historical works related to the Crusades. Each historical text is examined for the current state of modern research, the sources and working method of the author, and its use and relevance for crusader studies and other fields of research. This volume will be of use to anyone studying the events of the Crusades, of Islamic History, or of Arabic Historiography in the medieval period. Contributors include: Frédéric Bauden, Niall Christie, Anne-Marie Eddé, Konrad Hirschler, Alex Mallett, and Françoise Micheau, Lutz Richter-Bernburg
From the Greeks to the Arabs and Beyond written by Hans Daiber, is a six volume collection of Daiber’s scattered writings, journal articles, essays and encyclopaedia entries on Greek-Syriac-Arabic translations, Islamic theology and Sufism, the history of science, Islam in Europe, manuscripts and the history of oriental studies. It also includes reviews and obituaries. Vol. V and VI are catalogues of newly discovered Arabic manuscript originals and films/offprints from manuscripts related to the topics of the preceding volumes.
The Dutch scholar Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857–1936) was one of the most famous orientalists of his time. He acquired early fame through his daring research in Mecca in 1884-85, masterly narrated in two books and accompanied by two portfolios of photographs. As an adviser to the colonial government in the Dutch East Indies from 1889 until 1906, he was on horseback during campaigns of “pacification” and published extensively on Indonesian cultures and languages. Meanwhile he successively married two Sundanese women with whom he had several children. In 1906 he became a professor in Leiden and promoted together with colleagues abroad the study of modern Islam, meant to be useful for...
In In the Name of God biblical scholars and historians begin the exciting work of deconstructing British and Spanish imperial usage of the Bible as well as the use of the Bible to counteract imperialism. Six essays explore the intersections of political movements and biblical exegesis. Individual contributions examine English political theorists' use of the Bible in the context of secularisation, analyse the theological discussion of discoveries in the New World in a context of fraught Jewish-Christian relations in Europe and dissect millennarian preaching in the lead up to the Crimean War. Others investigate the anti-imperialist use of the Bible in southern Africa, compare Spanish and British biblicisation techniques and trace the effects of biblically-rooted articulations of nationalism on the development of Hinduism's relationship to the Vedas. Contributors include: Yvonne Sherwood, Ana Valdez, Mark Somos, Andrew Mein, Hendrik Bosman and Hugh Pyper.
This book solves the long-standing mystery of a Christian monastery near Samarkand, seen and described by two Arab travellers in the tenth century.
Fakes and forgeries are objects of fascination. This volume contains a series of thirteen articles devoted to fakes and forgeries of written artefacts from the beginnings of writing in Mesopotamia to modern China. The studies emphasise the subtle distinctions conveyed by an established vocabulary relating to the reproduction of ancient artefacts and production of artefacts claiming to be ancient: from copies, replicas and imitations to fakes and forgeries. Fakes are often a response to a demand from the public or scholarly milieu, or even both. The motives behind their production may be economic, political, religious or personal – aspiring to fame or simply playing a joke. Fakes may be revealed by combining the study of their contents, codicological, epigraphic and palaeographic analyses, and scientific investigations. However, certain famous unsolved cases still continue to defy technology today, no matter how advanced it is. Nowadays, one can find fakes in museums and private collections alike; they abound on the antique market, mixed with real artefacts that have often been looted. The scientific community’s attitude to such objects calls for ethical reflection.
This volume brings together the leading experts in the history of European Oriental Studies. Their essays present a comprehensive history of the teaching and learning of Arabic in early modern Europe, covering a wide geographical area from southern to northern Europe and discussing the many ways and purposes for which the Arabic language was taught and studied by scholars, theologians, merchants, diplomats and prisoners. The contributions shed light on different methods and contents of language teaching in a variety of academic, scholarly and missionary contexts in the Protestant and the Roman Catholic world. But they also look beyond the institutional history of Arabic studies and consider the importance of alternative ways in which the study of Arabic was persued. Contributors are Asaph Ben Tov, Maurits H. van den Boogert, Sonja Brentjes, Mordechai Feingold, Mercedes García-Arenal, John-Paul A. Ghobrial, Aurélien Girard, Alastair Hamilton, Jan Loop, Nuria Martínez de Castilla Muñoz, Simon Mills, Fernando Rodríguez Mediano, Bernd Roling, Arnoud Vrolijk. This title, in its entirety, is available online in Open Access.