Islamic Law in Circulation: Shāfiʿī Texts across the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean By KooriaMahmood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization), xvi + 450 pp. Price HB £105.00. EAN 978–1009098038.

The Mamluk Sultanate: A History By PetryCarl F. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), xix + 358 pp. Price PB £22.99. EAN 978–1108456999.

The study is based on the author’s first-hand experiences with Muslim residents of Old Delhi. It examines how Muslim responses to their circumstances enable the.

For better or worse, deliberately or accidentally, the title of this volume is very obviously a derivative of that of Suraiya Faroqhi’s Making a Living in the O.

This publication offers an edition and introduction to a remarkable Sufi text from sixteenth-century Central Asia. The work is remarkable not only on account of.

Recent studies on the philosophy of Avicenna have traditionally focused on his metaphysics, his psychology, and his influence on subsequent philosophers within.

In late eighteenth-century West Africa, cycles of increasing violence and slave raiding sparked a desire for new modes of political organization. In the Sahel a.

The study of Sufism, the mystical aspect of Islam, known as taṣawwuf to those closer to the sources and practices, has come a long way since Richard Eaton compl.

This article is a first step in a project to study the influence of the Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ in the Ottoman world. We argue that, at least from the end of the fourteenth century until well into the second half of the sixteenth, the knowledge presented in the encyclopedic Rasāʾil was a conspicuous scholarly source for the Ottoman cultural milieu, especially at the dynastic court, and played a significant role in forming their epistemological perspective. This argument is developed with reference (...) to three universal histories: (1) in Turkish, the İskendernāme (Book of Alexander) of Taceddin İbrahim İbn Hızır Ahmedi (d. 1413) written between the last quarter of the fourteenth century and the first quarter of the fifteenth; (2) in Arabic, the Naẓm al-sulūk fī musāmarat al-mulūk (The ordering of ways for the conversation of kings) by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Bisṭāmī (d. 1454), a prominent intellectual and expert in occult sciences, protégé of Sultan Murad II (r. 1421–44, 1446–51); (3) in Persian, the first volume of Shāhnāmā-yi Āl-i ʿUsmān (Book of kings of the house of ʿUsmān) by the Sufi intellectual and litterateur Fethullah Çelebi (d. 1561/62), better known by his pen-name ʿArif. The choice of these three histories enables us to mark the time period for the influence of the Rasāʾil, stretching it (in both directions) further than is accepted in present scholarship. These histories enable us also to draw attention to the proximity to the Ottoman dynasty of the cultural milieu attuned to the Rasāʾil, and highlight the relationship between history and knowledge that is central both for the texts under study here and the Rasāʾil. (shrink)

Islamic legal studies continues to be a productive field in combination with Middle Eastern history. Ever wider conceptions of ‘Islamic law’ and ‘law’ itself ha.

In 1909 in the Russian city of Kazan a Tatar printing house published a small verse hagiography titled Manaqib-i piran-i ʿazizan, devoted to the Sufi saints of.

Towards the end of his life, the French theorist and philosopher René Girard (1923–2015) published a series of conversations titled Battling to the End in which.

The Umayyad Mosque of Damascus is an in-depth analysis of one of the main sacred buildings of the Islamic world. It focuses on the Umayyad phase of the building.

In his commentary on the Light Verse (Q. 24:35), the Andalusian mystic and Qurʾān exegete Abū al-Ḥakam Ibn Barrajān (d. 1141) presents the blessed tree (al-shajara al-mubāraka) not simply as a terrestrial olive tree in Syria or even as a mystical allegory, but as the ultimate locus of divine disclosure and the highest metaphysical entity in the cosmos that subsumes the world of creation. This article assesses the originality of Ibn Barrajān’s contribution to the heavenly tree motif by examining his (...) unique mystical and exegetical theories informing his ontological reading of the blessed tree, including the concept of the ‘reality upon which creation is created’ and the ‘universal servant’. In addition to analysing the internal logic of Ibn Barrajān’s discourse, this article explores the larger interpretive themes recurrent across exoteric, Sufi, and philosophical interpretations of the Light Verse up to the twelfth century that the author may have had access to in al-Andalus, including the treatises of the Brethren of Purity (Ikhwān al-ṣafā) and Biblical sources. Finally, this article highlights how Ibn Barrajān weaves the Qurʾānic good tree (al-shajara al-ṭayyiba) and the lote tree of the furthest boundary (sidrat al-muntahā) into his overarching understanding of the blessed tree. It also considers how his reading may have contributed to later readings by Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240) and some of his intellectual heirs. (shrink)

Peter Mandaville’s edited volume is a welcome addition to discussions on Wahhabism’s place in international relations, given how widely Wahhabism is misundersto.

Marijn van Putten’s Quranic Arabic is an illuminating and highly original addition to important scholarly articles on the study of Qurʾānic linguistics and the.

It is a testament to the continuing importance of Leïla Temime Blili’s Sous le toit de l’Empire: La Régence de Tunis, 1535–1666. Genèse d’une province ottomane.

The history of science of the premodern Islamic world was traditionally focused on what has been called the ‘golden age’, which fortuitously occurred before the.

One of the great themes of colonial expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is the interaction between the legal systems of the colonial powers and.

In 1914, a madrasa teacher wrote a letter to the Ministry of Interior Affairs demanding the state prohibit all acts ‘incompatible with Islam’ including the oper.

V. L. Ménage, who died in 2015, was Lecturer and then Professor at the University of London’s School of Oriental & African Studies from 1955 until 1983, and.

This is a curious book. It appears at times not so much as a work of scholarly history and more as a manifesto of some sort of intellectual gnosticism. The auth.

The Quran Beheld came out auspiciously in the month of the Qurʾān, Ramadan 1443 (April 2022). This carefully crafted, 2.25kg (5lb) leatherbound muṣḥaf in the ca.

This article analyses Ibn Taymiyya’s neglected commentary on ʿAbū al-Qāsim al-Qushayrī ’s Epistle on Sufism (al-Risāla al-Qushayriyya fī ʿilm al-taṣawwuf), in which he wages several intellectual battles simultaneously: with Ashʿarī theologians of earlier centuries, such as al-Qushayrī himself; with his Ashʿarī contemporaries like Ibn Jahbal al-Kilābī; and with advocates in Damascus and Cairo of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s monistic teachings. Ibn Taymiyya deploys a set of historical and discursive arguments rooted in the early Sufi historiography to argue that both Ashaʿrīs and monistic-minded (...) Sufis do not have a rightful claim to the heritage of the early Sufi authorities. In the struggle to define ‘Islamic orthodoxy’, Ashaʿrīs and Ḥanbalīs evince two radically different approaches to Sufi sayings. Al-Qushayrī and Ibn Jahbal affirm the harmony between Sufi utterances and the rational proofs of speculative theology (kalām), while, in stark contrast, Ibn Taymiyya accentuates their ascetic-mystical connotations. This Ḥanbalī–Ashʿarī debate comprised two conflicting attitudes to the notion of ‘Muslim sainthood’ (wilāya): the Ashʿarīs insisted that early Sufi saintly figures (awliyāʾ) mastered the principles of kalām in order to explain the nature of God to different classes of the Muslim community, while Ibn Taymiyya believed that this type of theological reasoning undermined the very foundations of the spiritual teachings of the early Sufis and retarded the spiritual growth of those who undertook the Sufi path. These polemical exchanges demonstrate that Sufi figures, concepts, images, and texts became central to the articulation of theological arguments during the early Mamluk sultanate. (shrink)

As the editor informs us in his Acknowledgements, most of the essays included in this collection stem from a pair of conferences held at the University of Michi.

This is a most welcome reissue of Davidson’s highly praised book, first published in 1987. The combination in a single book of arguments for the existence of Go.