Changes in the methodology of the historical sciences make them more vulnerable to unjustifiable speculations being passed off as scientific results. The integrity of historical science is in peril due the way speculative and often unexamined causal assumptions are being used to generate data and underpin the identification of correlations in such data. A step toward a solution is to distinguish between plausible and speculative assumptions that facilitate the inference from measured and observed data to causal claims. One way to (...) do that is by comparing these assumptions against a well-attested set of aspects of causation, such as the so-called “Bradford Hill Criteria”. The BHC do not provide a test for causation or necessary and sufficient conditions for causation but do indicate grounds for further investigation. By revising the BHC to reflect the needs and focus of historical sciences, it will be possible to assess the cogency of methods of investigation. These will be the Historical Sciences Bradford Hill Criteria. An application to one area in historical science is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the HSBHC, namely biogeography. Four methods are assessed in order to show how the HSBHC can be used to examine the assumptions between our data and the causal biogeographical processes we infer. (shrink)

Discussions of surface pattern in Islamic art resonate within broader tensions about the role of figural representation in communicating meaning. The question of whether geometric pattern communicates—whether it functions as a language without a code—reflects broader tensions about the relationship between secular and spiritual communication. Poised between discussions of modernism and Islam, the attribution of linguistic capacity to geometry serves as a measure for the possibility of abstracting pure reason from the religious roots of representationalism. This paper explores this question (...) in four parts. First, it examines the articulation of geometric meaning in Islamic discourses. It then explores European discussions of geometry between language and ornament poised between a search for universal reason and universal spiritualism, both in modernist painting and in modern exhibitions. The final section the expressive capacity of artistic responses to historical Islamic isometric geometries in the adaptive reuse of historical Iranian arts as contemporary abstraction in the sculptures of Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian and in the popular transformation prints of M. C. Escher. It argues that the frequent recognition of intrinsic meaning in geometry, expressed in both premodern Islamic and modern secular interpretations, undermines art historical expectations of theorization as a necessary intermediary for communication. Geometry thereby functions as a language without a code. (shrink)

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] a book or a movie or a poem comes precisely at the moment that one needs it. As any reader knows, this is a moment of profound communion, a rare moment in which we can feel less alone in our world and more together in our thoughts. This is the feeling that filled me as I (...) read Shahab Ahmed’s What is Islam? This is the book that I have been looking for. I wanted to thank the author for having finally brought such a book into the world, but he had just died. As I read it, I wanted to engage him in debate, ask him questions, think and rethink the issues he raises, but he is gone, and I instead turn to... (shrink)