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The School of Abbasid Studies, originally founded as a co-operative venture by scholars at the Universities of St Andrews and Glasgow in Scotland during the 1980s, is a joint enterprise involving the Universities of St Andrews, Cambridge and Leuven. It aims to promote, foster and cultivate the academic study of the Abbasid dynasty. This book is a volume of sixteen papers delivered by a distinguished array of leading scholars at a meeting of the School of Abbasid Studies at the University of Cambridge in July 2002. It provides a fully contemporary insight into the cutting edge of Abbasid Studies, and includes works ranging from Arabic philosophy and jurisprudence to religious, intellectual and institutional history, literature and grammar. The contents of the volume are divided into three principal foci of interest (Institutions and Concepts, Figures, and Archaeology of a Discipline), and the work is accomplished by a substantial introduction by the editor.
In The Birth of Indology as an Islamic Science Mario Kozah closely examines the pioneering contribution by Bīrūnī (d. ca. 1048) to the study of comparative religion in his major work on India. Kozah concludes that a process of Islamisation is employed through a meticulous systematization of Hindu beliefs into one “Indian religion”, preceding by almost a millennium the earliest definitions of Hinduism by nineteenth-century European Orientalists. This formulation of Hinduism draws on Bīrūnī’s interpretation of Yoga psychology articulated in the Kitāb Bātanjal, his Arabic translation of the Yoga-Sūtra of Patañjali. Bīrūnī’s Islamic reading of Hinduism relies on certain common denominators that he identifies as being of fundamental importance. In the case of Hinduism he identifies metempsychosis as its unifying banner.
"The Book of Charlatans is a comprehensive guide to trickery and scams as practiced in the thirteenth century in the cities of the Middle East, especially in Syria and Egypt"--
This book is the first of two volumes that aim to produce something not previously attempted: a synthetic history of Muslim responses to the Bible, stretching from the rise of Islam to the present day. It combines scholarship with a genuine narrative, so as to tell the story of Muslim engagement with the Bible. Covering Sunnī, Imāmī Shī'ī and Ismā'īlī perspectives, this study will offer a scholarly overview of three areas of Muslim response, namely ideas of corruption, use of the Biblical text, and abrogation of the text. For each period of history, the important figures and dominant trends, along with exceptions, are identified. The interplay between using and criticising the Bible is explored, as well as how the respective emphasis on these two approaches rises and falls in different periods and locations. The study critically engages with existing scholarship, scrutinizing received views on the subject, and shedding light on an important area of interfaith concern.
"Arabic hunting poetry from the Abbasid era, by renowned poet Ibn al-Mutazz"--
Cognate Infinitives have been identified and described as productive linguistic features within Arabic language and along the Semitic continuum. However, their full range of function remains largely unstudied in the spoken varieties of Arabic. This study proposes a new grammatical model for the analysis and description of Cognate Infinitives in Lebanese Arabic that accounts for this feature’s semantic, informational, affective and social functions. It suggests that Cognate Infinitives function as focus markers and are efficient communicative tools for a variety of attention management actions as well as for ‘face’ management strategies. The findings of this study therefore replace the omnipresent notion of “adverbial emphasis” with a definition of “focus” that comprises both informational and affective factors.
A portrait of the Arab enlightenment and its key figures, Ibn Sina and Biruni. In The Genius of Their Age, S. Frederick Starr brings to vibrant life an age when Muslim scientists and philosophers from Central Asia anticipated the Western renaissance of science by half a millennium.
Questions and answers from two great philosophers Why is laughter contagious? Why do mountains exist? Why do we long for the past, even if it is scarred by suffering? Spanning a vast array of subjects that range from the philosophical to the theological, from the philological to the scientific, The Philosopher Responds is the record of a set of questions put by the litterateur Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī to the philosopher and historian Abū ʿAlī Miskawayh. Both figures were foremost contributors to the remarkable flowering of cultural and intellectual life that took place in the Islamic world during the reign of the Buyid dynasty in the fourth/tenth century. The correspondence between a...
Patristic Literature in Arabic Translations explores the Arabic translations of the Greek and Syriac Church Fathers, focusing on those produced in the Palestinian monasteries and at Sinai in the 8th–10th centuries and in Antioch during Byzantine rule (969–1084). These Arabic translations preserve patristic texts lost in the original languages. They offer crucial information about the diffusion and influence of patristic heritage among Middle Eastern Christians from the 8th century to the present. A systematic examination of Arabic patristic translations sheds light on the development of Muslim and Jewish theological thought. Contributors are Aaron Michael Butts, Joe Glynias, Habib Ibrahim, Jonas Karlsson, Sergey Kim, Joshua Mugler, Tamara Pataridze, Alexandre Roberts, Barbara Roggema, Alexander Treiger.
"Poems and tales of a literary forefather of the United Arab Emirates"--