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Nineteenth-century philologist and Biblical critic William Robertson Smith famously concluded that the sacred status of holy places derives not from their intrinsic nature but from their social character. Building upon this insight, Mecca and Eden uses Islamic exegetical and legal texts to analyze the rituals and objects associated with the sanctuary at Mecca. Integrating Islamic examples into the comparative study of religion, Brannon Wheeler shows how the treatment of rituals, relics, and territory is related to the more general mythological depiction of the origins of Islamic civilization. Along the way, Wheeler considers the contrast between Mecca and Eden in Muslim rituals, the dispersal and collection of relics of the prophet Muhammad, their relationship to the sanctuary at Mecca, and long tombs associated with the gigantic size of certain prophets mentioned in the Quran. Mecca and Eden succeeds, as few books have done, in making Islamic sources available to the broader study of religion.
The articles in this volume are concerned with the literary responses of the Syriac communities in the Middle East to the drastic political changes of the 7th and 8th centuries, in particular the Persian occupation of the eastern provinces of Byzantium under Khusrau II, and the Islamic conquests and Umayyad rule. Several studies discuss the influential Syriac works concerning Alexander the Great written shortly after AD 628, which present the Byzantine emperor Heraclius as a new Alexander; attention is given to their polemical and propagandistic functions, and to their influence on early apocalyptic texts which respond to the Arab conquests and 'Abd al-Malik's religious propaganda at the end...
Preliminary Material -- Introduction -- The Structure and construction of 1 P 2: 4-10 -- Ex. 19: 6: The History of its transmission and interpretation (OT-NT) -- The Unity of Verses 6-10 -- Verses 4-5 and the election and holiness of the book-body of the faithful -- CH. 2: 4-10 In the general context of 1 P -- Summary and Conclusions -- Abbrevations -- Bibliography -- Index of proper names -- Index of Passages.
European and English courtly culture and history reappraised through the prism of the court as theatre. In the past half-century, court history has lost the air of frivolity that once relegated it to the margins of serious historical study and has rightfully taken a central part in the study of European states and societies in the age of personal monarchy. Yet it has been approached from so many different angles and appropriated to so many different models that it can be hard to put all our new understandings together to achieve a proper perspective on the functions of the court as a whole. This collection of essays uses the idea of the court as a stage for social and political interaction t...
Between Memory and Power intends to demonstrate that a robust culture of historical writing existed in 2nd/8th century Syria, and to offer new methodological approaches to access this now lost history, torn between memory and oblivion. By studying the making of Umayyad heroes or Abbasid origins-myths, this book aims to reveal the successive meanings granted to Syrian history, and to identify the various layers of historical writing and rewriting during the first centuries of Islam. Taken together, these elements make possible a history of meanings of the very space of Syria, articulated around power and its expression, which grants a clear coherence to the period, extending well beyond the dynastic caesura of 132/750.
Preliminary material /Editors L'EAU, SA VIE, ET SA SIGNIFICATION DANS L'ANCIEN TESTAMENT -- L'EAU, CONDITION DE FERTILITÉ ET DE VIE /Editors L'EAU, SA VIE, ET SA SIGNIFICATION DANS L'ANCIEN TESTAMENT -- LA MÉTÉOROLOGIE /Editors L'EAU, SA VIE, ET SA SIGNIFICATION DANS L'ANCIEN TESTAMENT -- LES EAUX TERRESTRES /Editors L'EAU, SA VIE, ET SA SIGNIFICATION DANS L'ANCIEN TESTAMENT -- L'HOMME ET L'EAU /Editors L'EAU, SA VIE, ET SA SIGNIFICATION DANS L'ANCIEN TESTAMENT -- LA MER /Editors L'EAU, SA VIE, ET SA SIGNIFICATION DANS L'ANCIEN TESTAMENT -- LA PROVENANCE DE L'EAU SUR LA TERRE /Editors L'EAU, SA VIE, ET SA SIGNIFICATION DANS L'ANCIEN TESTAMENT -- SUPERSTITIONS, RITES, ÉLÉMENTS CULTUELS E...