Cet article comprend l’étude et l’édition du Versus de historia euangelica, un poème anonyme de 288 hexamètres léonins, qui relate l’histoire de la naissance du Christ, de son ministère et de sa crucifixion. En raison de la nature contradictoire et répétitive des récits évangéliques, le poète suit l’organisation du matériel biblique de l’ Historia scholastica de Pierre le Mangeur, dont l’achèvement en 1173 constitue le terminus post quem de la composition du poème. On peut appeler le style du Versus épigrammatique. (...) En fait, le poème dans son entier se lit comme une collection de brefs tituli indépendants qui pourraient être sortis de leur contexte et utilisés comme légendes pour des représentations figuratives appropriées. (shrink)

“Scaldic verses,” said Gabriel Turville-Petre, “can tell us little about the history of England, but the history of England may give us confidence in the authenticity of some scaldic verses.” A similar skepticism was voiced by Alistair Campbell.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“An Immoderate Taste for Truth”: Censoring History in Baudelaire’s “Les bijoux”E. S. Burt (bio)In May 1949, a French Court of Appeals reversed an 1857 decision condemning six poems from Les fleurs du mal for obscenity, in a signal case of a public lifting of a ban against some lyric poems. 1 Among the several interesting features of this case not the least is the decision to proceed against (...) the work in the first place. For lyric poetry does not appear an attractive target for censorship. Its subject matter and formalism remove it far enough from the experience of most readers that Gustave Flaubert, fresh from his troubles with the court over Madame Bovary, could express his surprise at the government’s attack: “This is new,” he wrote to Baudelaire, “this pursuit of a volume of verse.” While Flaubert’s comment was in point of fact inaccurate, he puts his finger on a problem worth considering. 2 Here we have a work that must seem naturally exempt from state intervention, by virtue of a deliberate retreat from risky political subjects, and it nonetheless did get censored by the state. Can anything be learned about “normal” state censorship from this exceptional case? [End Page 19]A key factor in the government’s decision to pursue the book, according to the prosecutor Pinard, was that these poems would prove accessible to a large audience: 3 “An immoral book that had no chance of being read or understood would not be pursued” [1208], he states. In his argument, as in the judgment by the court that the condemned poems “lead necessarily to the exciting of the senses by a coarse realism offensive to modesty” [1182], the assumption is that the work is extraordinarily available, its pictures immediately referable to ordinary experience. In the six condemned poems, language is judged to be not a veil but a tool, and a sex tool at that. “Despite an effort of style” [1182], the poetic situation—in most of the poems that of the boudoir—is painted in a language insufficiently flowery. 4A further interesting feature in the case is that when it comes up again, under DeGaulle’s Fourth Republic, the court summarily dismisses the 1857 judgment of coarse realism as just one possible interpretation, and a forced one at that. Instead, the 1949 court finds that the poems are self-referential, symbolic entities that do not represent ordinary experience:If some pictures, on account of their originality, were able to alarm some minds upon first publication and appeared to the first judges as offensive to morality, such an appraisal, attaching itself only to a realistic interpretation of the poems and neglecting their symbolic meaning, has proved to be of an arbitrary character, unratified by public opinion or by the judgment of the literary world.[St. John-Stevas 249]The shocking representations of 1857, outraging morality, are now understood to deliver the Wordsworthian “shock of mild surprise” by which we recognize the original work of art. In 1949, the poems are precious artifacts; their language is not realistic but symbolical; its sensuous forms reveal an inner, spiritual meaning.A crucial resemblance can be discerned between the actions taken by the two courts: both make their judgments in terms of a “reading pact,” a set of “artificial rules” [1206] that are presumed to govern reading and to have currency in the context. Les fleurs gets policed in the name of this generic purity, with the prosecutor Pinard calling “the judge... a sentinel who must not let the border be crossed” [1206] and the 1949 decision confirming the opinion of the literary world that the supposed transgression against public morality was in point of fact a transformation in the rules regulating the narrow confines of lyric poetry. 5This concern that texts be framed by a reading pact aimed at constraining their interpretation is worth considering in any discussion of censorship that wants to move from the level of pragmatics to that of theory. It leads to queries about the possibility of getting rid of state censorship entirely and about the state’s interest, as guardian and overseer of the archive, in the institutionalization and... (shrink)

Eric Cunnigham's exciting new book combines a new translation of the Chinese classic Daodejing with a synthetic interpretation of the Dao. It innovatively employs the interweaving perspectives of Anthroposophy and esoteric world history. Among the inspirations for this work's unique reading of the verses of the *Daodejing*is the speculation of contemporary esoteric scholars that the Yellow Emperor of Chinese mytho-history was actually a human incarnation of the spirit known elsewhere as Lucifer. This argument has been used to explain (...) the manner in which "demigods" introduced themselves to the earthly sphere in order to manipulate human history. This theory resonates with the theological claims of Genesis 6: the notion that fallen angels infiltrated the human world is a contributing element to numerous theories regarding the establishment of ruling classes and elite bloodlines in history. Cunningham considers these claims from the standpoint of esoteric history and evaluates them on the basis of their convergence with kindred concepts (such as Zen illumination, mysticism, and the simulation hypothesis), to show the operations and implications of Gnosticism in history. The book makes a bold case for this common thread in various "all is consciousness" theories of Mind, from Plato, through the ancient skeptics, to Daoism, Zen, and even to the idealism of the 1960s, leading to directly to postmodern theories of "digital consciousness." What philosophers are exploring today through such topics as virtual reality and digital simulation are presented as new ways of discussing the same contours of reality hinted at in the *Daodejing*. Rather than leading us to a more humanistic vision of reality, as the Daoist scholars traditionally maintain, this theory of mind may lie at the bottom of a systematic anti-humanist impulse that has operated throughout world history. (shrink)

In history, many conflicts have occurred in understanding and interpretation of the verses of the Qur'an. When details come up and when the opinions about the content of the subject are put forward, more conflicts occur in the interpretation of a verse even when it seems to be clear a first glance. Facts such as to whom the verse addresses, who is meant by the verse, in which time the verse has been descended and the (...) situations revealed by the verse, whether it has the same validity for everyone causes the deepening of the difference. While these conflicts sometimes bring diversity in interpretation, sometimes there may be opinions that cannot be reconciled with each other, which are quite disconnected from each other and reject each other radically. In the interpretation of the verse “There is None of You Who Will Not Pass Over It”, many different views have been put forward about who is meant in the verse, what the nature of the entry into hell is and who is within the scope of this verse. In the integrity of the Qur'an, the commentators have resorted to some evidence to solve the issue of how to locate the interpretation of this verse. Some said that this verse was only directed towards the disbelievers. Some have said that this verse is covering everyone, but the entry of believers to hell is a temporary entry and does not have the purpose of punishment. This study aims to reveal the conflicts that have arisen about the interpretation of the verse “There is None of You Who Will Not Pass Over It” (Wa In Minkum İllā Wāriduhā) and to evaluate these conflicts in the context of the semantic analysis of the verb w-r-d. Therefore, first of all, the etymological structure of the verb w-r-d was examined and the dictionary meaning of the word was revealed. Then, in order to determine the meaning of this word before the revelation, the meanings of this verb root in the poems of Jahiliyyah were tried to be determined. Then, the places where this verb stem is used in the Qurʾān are examined and the meanings in the contexts are pointed out. As the next step, the disagreements that have come up to date regarding the interpretation of the verse “There is None of You Who Will Not Pass Over” have been put forward. These conflicts have been addressed by frequently applying to the classical and modern tafsīr studies written until today, starting from the tafsir narrations from the first interlocutors of the Qurʾān. Further, these conflicts have been tried to be presented by classifying them within themselves. Subsequently, it has been tried to contribute to the interpretation of the verse by considering the data obtained from the semantic analysis of the verb w-r-d. Finally, the issue of why this verb root was preferred in this verse, which mentions that all people will go to hell without exception, has been discussed. (shrink)

Mirrors for princes, in general, give advices to the rulers about the subtleties of political art. Another aim of these books is to define and explain the administration of the state and the duties of rulers based on experience. In consequence of this they reflect the practical ethics of the period in which they were written. As such, they resemble practical handbooks written for rulers. Another point regarding the mirrors for princes works in which the political understanding of the era (...) can be observed is that they generally use sacred texts in order to prove the political legitimacy or invalidity of the power, as well as the rightfulness or the unlawfulness of the claims to the throne. Evidences from the Qurʾān and the ḥadīth literature was almost always used to support such advocated opinions. In fact, during the Middle Ages when religion and politics were considered coupled, it was unthinkable that religious elements should not be included in the works of state administration. The important point here is that the verses and ḥadīths were sometimes removed from their contexts and interpreted and explained in a way to support the ideology of the author or the ruler whom the author presented his work. In this study, we will try to reveal the subjects in which the verses and ḥadīths used in the mirrors for princes, which is a genre that has emerged within the Islamic culture and civilization. Thus, we aim to prepare a background for the future studies, which will focus on a specific verse or ḥadīth.Summary: The first political splits in Islamic history occurred immediately after the death of prophet Muḥammad. These differences were resolved by the agreement of the majority of Muslims on Abu Bakr's name. Until the second half of the rule of the third caliph ʿUthmān, Muslims came together around the unifying power of the idea of conquest. Nevertheless, substantially as a result of economically based problems the period of tranquility in Islamic society came to an end and was replaced by disputes. Disputes turned into conflict and ultimately seperation fused with the massacre of ʿUthmān in the capital Medina turned into a big fire with the Battles of the Camel and Ṣiffīn, the emergence of Khārijīs, the formation of the Shia and the deepening of the intellectual divisions after the all of these. Islamic history has witnessed a clash of different religious views and beliefs. along with deepening of intellectual disagreements as a result of political debatesIn the Islamic political thought, especially the first two centuries process was formed around the views of the jurists, muḥaddiths and theologians. The first sources used by those who tried to justify their opinion in the differences of opinion experienced during this period were the Qurʾān and ḥadīth literature which Muslims accepted as the determining factor in all their acts. The views based on the Qur'an and the hadiths, which are the two main sources of Islamic religion, had been used to influence the people, legitimize the actions and refute the claims of the opponents. On the other hand the sort who gave direction to political thought changed and political thought adhered a new path with Turks and Persians served as bureaucrats and soldiers and took an active position in the state. Especially Persians carried the culture of advice to Islamic thought, which is the product of both Greek and Hind civilization. Such books had brought in the İslamic society with translation movements began in the Umayyad period and peaked with the Bayt al-Ḥikma in the Abbasid period. Together with these books, the ideas of these civilizations on ideal state administration, politics and morality were recognized by Muslim scholars.These type of works, which are famous in terms of Islamic thought as mirrors for princes, have been written by Muslim scholars since the middle of the eighth century. Mirrors for princes are political, moral and religious content books that gives the rulers practical advice to maintain their power in accordance with the religious orders and prohibitions, and to the consent of Allāh’s who grant them this authority and people which appointed for their administration. Mirrors for princes are mostly theoretical books since they are mostly focused on what should be. In addition, since they are written for names that currently hold power, they are centered on how the rulers can maintain and increase their power and with which practices the state will maintain its existence for a longer period. The basic point of political thought and political interpretation are concepts and definitions. When the concept meaning of a word is mentioned, it is generally considered that there is a general definition. However, the concepts reflect the meaning that the user assigns to him in the context of his thoughts, perceptions, criticisms, explanations and analyzes. Concepts such as fair, honest, brave, hero, beautiful, rich, good and clean express what the person imposes on the meaning. In other words, everyone’s experience determines the content of the concept so far. The meaning of the concepts varies with the age and its user of that concept. Even concepts such as justice, merit and consultation can change meaning in different periods and geographies. The concepts, which are often used to facilitate understanding, are sometimes used to judge, to mold or mislead the interlocutor. In this context, it is imperative to enter the mind of the user in order to make concept analysis.In Islamic civilization, the principles of management are explained with concepts. The idiosyncrasies that Muslims expect from an ideal ruler are defined as justice, consultation, merit, trust and legitimacy and a broad corpus has been written about the concepts related to the administration, especially those mentioned. One type of this corpus is mirrors for princes.In Islamic history, there are many Mirrors for princes who are written in different time periods by names coming from different geographies and different backgrounds. Although the advice given in Mirrors for princes indicate a great similarity to each other, the preferred arguments and examples in the foundation of the counsel are different. While the persons in active politics mostly based their opinions on political arguments, scholars with scientific tradition supported their advices with religious arguments.Verses are the leading religious elements highlighted in Mirrors for princes. While explaining the concepts and emphasizing the importance of the advices, many verses have been exploited. Some verses are used only by one author, while some verses are the subject of their work by many authors. In the same way, ḥadīths and the sentences accepted as ḥadīths were also used to reinforce the emphasis and meaning. At this point, sometimes the context of the verses and ḥadīths were not taken care of. In this study, we aim to address the use of religious elements.In the literature, different opinions have emerged about who is ülü’l-emr and the limits of obedience to ülü’l-emr that used describe the names of senior executives and leaders of society. The reason for the difference is that each sect or religious school provides an interpretation on the basis of grounding its own views in explaining the verse. Justice is the most emphasized concept among the advices given to the rulers in mirrors for princes. Justice, which is shown as the most important feature of a sovereign, has been regarded as extremely important for the state to existences until the Doomsday. In addition, justice has been described as the most important condition for the maintenance of the state/sovereign authority. Consultation was important to make the right decision.Verses and ḥadīths were used in the explanations about the personal characteristics of the sovereign. Some features such as being compassionate, keeping promise, controlling anger, patience, honesty, blessing, extravagance, self-esteem, break a promise, revoke a promise and arrogance have become the subject of politics. When the mirrors for princes are considered as a whole, it is seen that religion and state are considered as inseparable twin brothers, taken one step further the understanding that accepts religion and the world as brothers especially is a product of the old Persian tradition. In this understanding, religion was accepted as the root and was given the duty of its patronage to political authority. It is seen that in the Mirrors for princes verses and ḥadīths hold a significant amount. As the reason for this can be said that along with religion takes place on the basis of morality, the authors of the Mirrors for princes, which put deep meanings on the relationship between religion and the state in the period that we are dealing with, consider both institutions to be complementary and integrative. (shrink)

The history of the mushaf, which began with the collection of the verses of the Qur'an in the era of Hazrat Abu Bakr, holds a significant place in terms of the science of qiraat and the methodology of tafsir. It is not possible to say that the subject, which is the focus of Western researchers especially to prove their thesis that the Qur’an is the human word, is popular in our country. At this point, in this study prepared with (...) the aim of contributing to the field, tafsir introductions and mushaf history issues were examined. Many of the tafsir works provide valuable information about the history of the mushaf. In this direction, one of the important works of tafsir, Garāib al-Qur'ān, Tafsīr al-Khāzin, Jawāhir al-ḥisān, Fath al-rahmān Rūh al-meānī, Tafsīr al-Marāgī and Tafsīr al-hadīs were analyzed. They constitute the basis of our research because they contain rich information about its history and have not yet been examined in this respect. In this regard, the introductions of the aforementioned commentary works are examined under headings created according to the subjects. First of all, the issue of turning the Qur’anic verses into mushafs during the period of Hazrat Abu Bakr is discussed, and then the principles observed in the mushaf copying activity in the Hazrat Osman period, how many companions were in the commission, the number of mushafs that were copied and sent to the leading towns of the period, and who made the surah arrangement in the mushafs are examined. In addition, information shared about the official mushaf rules and whether these rules must be taken as a basis in the writing of the mushafs is included. Finally, within the context of personal companions’ mushafs, the study delves into the claims, accusations, and debates surrounding the mushafs with Hazrat Osman. (shrink)

In verse twelve of the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu makes a curious claim about the five flavors; namely that they cause people not to taste or that they jade the palate. The five flavors are: sweet, sour, salt, bitter and spicy or hot as in 'heat'. To the Western mind, the claim, 'The five flavors cause them [persons] to not taste,' is counterintuitive; on the contrary, the presence of the five flavors in a dish or in a meal (...) would expand or enhance the senses and the palate, i.e., taste would be augmented by the five flavors. So what is the plausible meaning of the Taoistic claim? To answer this question, I look very briefly at the history of the doctrine of the five flavors and the history of Chinese cuisine. Lao Tzu probably has Confucian feasts in mind in making such a claim, but other interpretations are discussed. (shrink)

Cassius Dio's fragmentary Roman History 15 contains an account of Archimedes’ role in defending Syracuse during the Roman siege of 213–212 b.c., incorporating a legendary tale about a solar reflector Archimedes constructed to burn Roman warships, and including details of his death when the city fell. The textual basis of this famous episode depends on two derivative twelfth-century works: Zonaras’ Epitome of Histories (9.4–5) and Tzetzes’ Chiliades (2.35). After clarifying the present state of enquiry, this paper introduces two new (...) witnesses, overlooked by editors of Dio and extensive scholarship on Archimedes, and assesses their value for reconstructing Dio's text. Comparative analysis of corresponding Dio-derived material in Tzetzes’ Carmina Iliaca and Hypomnema in S. Luciam, especially verbal correspondences with Zonaras’ Epitome, demonstrates that they are independent and, sometimes, superior witnesses to Dio's wording and content, reflecting Tzetzes’ selective use of the Roman History in different verse and prose compositions over several decades. The study considers editorial implications for this section of Dio's work and general characteristics of Tzetzes’ writings as repositories of testimonia and fragments. (shrink)

One of the divine quotations narrated from the timeline of Qur’ānic revelation is seen as a word of Prophet Mohammad in the 30th verse of the surah of al-Furqān. It’s observed that the speaker of this verse is Prophet Mohammad and he complains to God about his tribe which neglects the Qur’ān. In the present study, semantic structure and the meaning area of the phrase “mahjūr”, which is the key word in this verse, the meaning of it (...) in the timeline of Qur’ānic revelation and the interpretations attributed to it in the following centuries are traced. Likewise by examining Qur’ānic exegesis chronologically and investigating the interpretations of the exegetes on the relevant verse, it’s tried to see the semantic breaking points, changes and transformations regarding this verse in the historical process. Finally, the approaches of the exegetes who interpreted this verse in terms of the method of maqāsidī tafsir or the principle of teleological interpretation are determined. The approaches detected in this respect are first explained in a descriptive style, and then they’re evaluated in an analytical point of view. The findings and conclusions we reached in this study are as follows: As stated by the majority of exegetes, especially Qatāda, al-Zamakhsharī, Ibn Atiyya, Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī and al-Sa‘ālibī, the aforementioned verse belongs to the Prophet Mohammed in terms of both wording and meaning. It hasn’t been determined that there’s a conflict about the pertaining of this word to him. According to this hadith quoted in surah al-Furqān, the Qurayshi polytheists made unwarranted objections to the Prophet and the divine instructions that he brought, his heart was narrowed in the face of their attitude towards the Qur’ān, and for these reasons he complained about his tribe to God. It can be said that this meaning seen in Mecca in the tenth year of his prophethood, namely, insulting the Qur’ān, abandoning it, and denying the themes in it, also includes Muslims after the revelation period. Accordingly, it can be thought that the aspect and situation of not acting on the provisions of the Qur’ān and not thinking about its verses are also valid for the interlocutors of the next period. In this direction, when we look at the history of tafsir, it has been determined that the exegetes who interpreted this verse in terms of teleological interpretation asserted different approaches. It was seen that al-Zamakhsharī, al-Rāzī, Abū al-Barakāt al-Nasafī, al-Bikā‘ī, Kamālpasazāde, Sayhzāda and Ibn ʻĀshūr interpreted this complaint of the Prophet by associating it with the coming of punishment. Therefore, in compliance with them, this verse aimed to threaten all the interlocutors, especially the Quraysh. On the other hand, it has recognized that Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyah, Ibn Kathir, Bursavī and Sayyid Qutb evaluated this verse in the context of the types and ways to abandon the Qur’ān. Thus, they interpreted the relevant verse in terms of maqāsidī tafsir in a way that would cover both the first addressees of Qur’ānic revelation and other interlocutors in the following periods. In a nutshell, it can be considered that not endeavoring to understand and interpret the Qur’ān, or keeping it away from family and social life, law, understanding of earning and spending, not referring to it in such matters, or giving up living a life pursuant to it, are some of the routes and sorts of abandonment of it for Muslims. (shrink)

This article offers an interpretation of lawyers’ reactions to verse judgments, being judicial decisions rendered in rhymed poetry form. While, in recent history, there has been an unexplained break in the close historical connection between poetry and law, some judges nevertheless continue to render their judicial decisions in verse. This has met strong criticism from fellow judges, inevitably, but also from lawyers. However, there is no evidence in academic writing of anyone attempting to explain why lawyers are (...) having these reactions. Endeavouring to fill that void, this research employs hermeneutics to offer an interpretation of lawyers’ reactions to verse judgments. The article analyses the varied opinions uncovered in five qualitative interviews with lawyers of different backgrounds, and contends that a movement of poetry back towards its utilitarian origins would see lawyers change their reaction to verse judgments, instead viewing them as an appropriate form of judicial expression. (shrink)

FOR hundreds or even thousands of years posterity saw in Aristotle only the impersonal intellectual majesty of the philosophical system. When awakening humanism began everywhere to seek in the works of the classic writers the impress of their personality, this new interest met in Aristotle with the most stubborn resistance. His was a very different case from that of Plato or Demosthenes. The few notices preserved of his life and person remained in merely external relation to the body of his (...) works. In recent times we have begun, however, to discern the intellectual history of the man Aristotle, and in this regard his relations to Plato naturally acquire special significance. In the various phases of his life these relations took various forms; but in view of late gossip about the pupil's ingratitude to the master, it is as well to say that never was Aristotle^s attitude to Plato other than one of the deepest possible veneration. It has a special psychological fascination to see how this veneration expressed itself at the time when Aristotle found himself committed to philosophical opposition to his master; and it is significant that the only documentary proofs of Aristotle's attitude that we possess belong to these years. Evidently his veneration found this compensating expression when he was forced to publish his philosophical critisma. (shrink)

The Qur’an was formed into the book and took the name muṣḥaf during the caliphate of Abu Bakr. Naturally, this muṣḥaf, recorded with the script of the period, was subjected to various arrangements over time in terms of its script and form. Activities such as the dots that help to separate letters from each other, lines that make the movements specific, the intervals (fāṣila) separating the verses from each other and the punctuations can be mentioned among them. In this article, (...) it is discussed when, by whom and for what reason the verse numbers were formed for the first time as separate digits, either in the interlude marks that were added to the muṣḥaf over time and used to separate the verses from each other or at the beginning or end of the verses. In this context, the aim is not to discuss the issue of determining the number of verses, but try to reveal the date and purpose of writing the numbers of the Qur’anic verses, the number of which is already known, in the muṣḥaf. In the research, carried out by data collection, analysis and evaluation method, some of accessible manuscripts and printed muṣhafs will be reviewed and the history and historical background of the writing of verse numbers in the muṣḥaf will be tried to be explored. As a result, it has been achieved that Abraham Hinckelmann was the first person who added the number of all verses to muṣḥaf in 1694. (shrink)

The elegy flared into existence, commanded the cultural stage for several decades, then went extinct. This book accounts for the swift rise and sudden decline of a genre whose life span was incredibly brief relative to its impact. Examining every major poet from Catullus to Ovid, Subjecting Verses presents the first comprehensive history of Latin erotic elegy since Georg Luck's. Paul Allen Miller harmoniously weds close readings of the poetry with insights from theoreticians as diverse as Jameson, Foucault, Lacan, (...) and Zizek. In welcome contrast to previous, thematic studies of elegy--efforts that have become bogged down in determining whether particular themes and poets were pro- or anti-Augustan--Miller offers a new, "symptomatic" history. He asks two obvious but rarely posed questions: what historical conditions were necessary to produce elegy, and what provoked its decline? Ultimately, he argues that elegiac poetry arose from a fundamental split in the nature of subjectivity that occurred in the late first century--a split symptomatic of the historical changes taking place at the time. Subjecting Verses is a major interpretive feat whose influence will reach across classics and literary studies. Linking the rise of elegy with changes in how Romans imagined themselves within a rapidly changing society, it offers a new model of literary theory that neither reduces the poems to a reflection of their context nor examines them in a vacuum. (shrink)

This paper addresses the relation between explicitation and translation expertise in the rendition of nominalisation and participles in the legal Qurʾānic verses specific to purification and prayer. It uses a corpus-based method: _The Qurʾānic Arabic Corpus_. The paper argues that most of the expert Qurʾān translators explicitate in rendering nominalisation and participles in the legal verses specific to purification and prayer into English in the said corpus. They explicitate in the form of both addition and specification with varying degrees as (...) the former is adopted twice as much as the latter. The paper claims that most explicitations specific to the rendition of nominalisation and participles in the legal Qurʾānic verses peculiar to purification and prayer in the corpus have been superfluous, albeit justifiable. This may confirm the relation between explicitation and translation expertise in _The Qurʾānic Arabic Corpus_ in the sense that although the meaning of nominalisation and/or participles is wholly translated into English, the Qurʾān translators still explicitate through addition or specification to further facilitate the comprehension process. This paper offers a baseline for examining explicitation exercised on nominalisation and participles in the legal Qurʾānic verses particular to purification and prayer, which may have implications for future studies conducted on the same topic in other similar legal contexts. (shrink)

Whatever we choose to call Beckett’s series of disjunctive and repetitive paragraphs , Ill Seen Ill Said surely has little in common with the short story or the novella. Yet this is how the editors of the New Yorker, where Beckett’s piece first appeared in English in 1981, evidently thought of it, for like all New Yorker short stories, it is punctuated by cartoons and, what is even more ironic, by a “real” poem, Harold Brodkey’s “Sea Noise” . Notice that (...) the reader immediately knows—or is supposed to know—that Brodkey is a poet and Beckett a fiction writer, not only because “Sea Noise” is designated a poem in the issue’s table of contents, but also because its placement on the page, framed by white space, distinguishes it from Ill Seen Ill Said, which is printed in standard New Yorker columns. Yet if we examine the sound structure of Brodkey’s poem, we find that the rhythm of recurrence is, if anything, less prominent here than in the Beckett “prose.” The four stanzas are of irregular line length ; the stress count ranges from one to five ; rhyme occurs only once, at the end of the poem ; and alliteration and assonance are not marked. Unless we assume that poetry is defined by the sheer decision of its maker to lineate the text, or unless we want to call “Sea Noise” a poem because it is built around a single extended metaphor , there is no rationale for the classification the New Yorker has implicitly adopted.4The meaning of this classification is worth pondering, for it represents, in microcosm, the orthodoxy of every major literature textbook and literary history as well as of most classrooms in the United States and Britain, which that Beckett is a writer who, like the young Joyce or the young Faulkner, wrote in his dim youth some negligible, clotted lyric poems but whose real work belongs to drama and fiction. As such, we don’t teach Beckett in our poetry courses or include him in discussions of contemporary poetry and poetics. The index of any major book on the subject—say, Robert Pinsky’s The Situation of Poetry—will bear this out. And yet the irony is that contemporary poets are increasingly using forms that cannot be properly understood without the example of Beckett’s astonishing “lyrics of fiction”—to use Ryby Cohn’s apt term5—or, as I shall call them, his “associative monologues.” Perhaps, then, it is time to rethink our current procedures of canon making. In what follows, I shall use Ill Seen Ill Said as an example.4. Contemporary prosodists, perhaps because they must account for the difficult case of free verse, generally do equate verse—and hence implicitly the poem—with lineation. For example, Charles O. Hartman, in his recent Free Verse: An Essay in Prosody , observes that, difficult as it is to define the word “poetry” “rigorously and permanently,” verse can be distinguished from prose quite readily:Verse is language in lines. This distinguishes it from prose…. This is not really a satisfying distinction, as it stands, but it is the only one that works absolutely. The fact that we can tell verse from prose on sight, with very few errors…indicates that the basic perceptual difference must be very simple. Only lineation fits the requirements. [P.11]But, as I have just shown in the case of Beckett and Brodkey, what looks like verse may sound like prose and vice versa. The “basic perceptual difference” between the two is surely not as simple as Hartman suggests. I discuss this question from a somewhat different angle in “The Linear Fallacy,” Georgia Review 35 : 855-69.5. See Ruby Cohn, Back to Beckett , chap. 5, “Lyrics of Fiction.”. (shrink)

Romantic, po st- Revolutionary French historiography can be described as "ancient verses on new ideas." The "new history" of this period, with its antiquarian nature, shared more with its predecessors than its practitioners acknowledged. Historical and legal scholars of the Restoration belonged to a long intellectual tradition of a shared hermeneutical "community of interpretation," based on common origins, though not necessarily goals. A belief in the historical grounding of knowledge and judgment united Restoration historians and legal scholars to their (...) predecessors. Debate over the origin of private property, the central human right advanced in the Napoleonic Code, united the two sorts of scholars, who examined the origins of the right of private property in the context of the history of laws, both Germanic and Roman. The establishment of private property proves to rest on the logic of feudalism, ironically overthrown in the Revolution while providing continuity in historiography before and after. (shrink)

The book is written on purpose of Indian Academy for higher classes on English and British Literature. As personally found being a teacher that majority of students are incapable on setting and developing an answer on context of the chapter. It is hurt to say the sweetness of Classic Literature is exactly not teaching properly at Indian Academy on English and British Stories. Students , concerning at my place on context of the aforesaid book, only are gulping in India the (...) matter rather to understand the history on Literature. (shrink)

The purpose of the paper is to analyse the translation into English and Korean of the old Polish criminal law terminology used by Adam Mickiewicz in his renown poem entitled “Master Thaddeus, or the Last Foray in Lithuania: A Nobility’s Tale of the Years 1811–1812, in Twelve Books of Verse” Mickiewicz (Pan Tadeusz czyli ostatni zjazd na Litwie. Historia szlachecka z roku 1811 i 1812 we dwunastu księgach wierszem). The research methods used encompass the analysis of parallel texts of (...) the poem. The authors first selected the fragments of the poem containing criminal law terminology. Next analysed two translations into English (Biggs in Master Thaddeus, or the last Forey in Lithuania—by Adam Mickiewicz, an Historical epic poem in XII books, translated from the original by Biggs, with a Preface by W.R. Morfill, M.A. and Notes, by the translator and Edmond Naganowski, Trübner et Comp, London, 1885 and MacKenzie in Adam Mickiewicz. Pan Tadeusz or the Last Foray in Lithuania. A Tale of the Gentry in the Years 1811 and 1812 translated into English verse with Introduction by Kenneth R. Mackenzie, Polska Fundacja Kulturalna, Londyn, 1990) and one into Korean Cheong et al. (『판 타데우시』 [Pan Tadeusz] Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul, 2005). The findings reveal that the terminology under scrutiny in the majority of cases must be considered obsolete and legal system-bound. Mickiewicz (1834) referred to the laws binding Poles under the Third Lithuanian Statute (Wilno, 1774). Therefore, the translators had to face the challenge of deciphering the appropriate meanings and finding equivalents sufficiently conveying them. (shrink)

The history of the Vedanta school is well known since the time of Sankaracarya on, and its prehistory before Sankara is quite obscure. However, from the time of compilation of major Upanisads to Sankara there is a period of thousand years, and the tradition of Upanisads was not lost; there appeared many philosophers and dogmaticians, although their thoughts are not clearly known. The author has made clear the details of the pre-Sankara Vedanta philosophy, utilizing not only Sanskrit materials, but (...) also Pali, Prakrit (Jain), as well as Tibetan and Chinese sources. In this respect this is quite a unique work. For this work the author was awarded the Imperial Prize by the Academy of Japan. Some sections of this work were already published in Indian as well as European and American journals in English. This work is a complete English translation of the entire book. The English translation was done with the financial aid by the Harvard-Yenching Institute, and the final touch was given by Mr. Trevor Leggett, the British writer, who is well-versed in Sanskrit as well as in Japanese. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Parmenides: The Road to Reality A New Verse Translation RICHARD MCKIM introduction i. In the history of Presocratic Greek philosophy, the poetry of Parmenides seems to loom up suddenly out of the blue like a spectral mountain peak. Depicting a vision of ultimate reality that transcends the sensory world, his towering verse manifesto revolutionized both how philosophers thought and what they thought about, with profound repercussions (...) that still reverberate today. Parmenides has not, however, been well served by his English translators. He wrote poetry and yet is almost always translated into prose. His poem describes a divinely inspired revelation and yet is persistently translated as if it were an exercise in deductive logic. His Greek can be strange and difficult but is never unintelligible, which is more than can be said for the Anglo-gibberish his translators too often force him to speak. Too many subscribe to the misguided notion that a “literal” translation, as close as possible to word-forword, best represents the original. In fact, the painful English that results, so far from being faithful to the Greek, actually betrays it, creating the obscurities it purports to reflect. Parmenides ’ reputation for being hard to understand is largely his translators’ fault, not his. I’ve undertaken to make amends by translating his poem as a poem, in a loose English approximation of the same meter. My goal is to capture some of what gets lost in prose—to mirror, however dimly, the vital role of poetic form in shaping Parmenides’ vision. The demands of meter make literal translation impossible—not at all a bad thing— while paradoxically freeing the translator to be more faitharion 27.2 fall 2019 ful. I’ve tried to use this freedom to demonstrate that Parmenides is not the obscurantist would-be logician of so many other translations but a philosopher who thinks in poetry, and whose thought is as clear and accessible as it is astonishing. ii. parmenides was a citizen of Elea, a Greek colonial town on the west coast of the ankle of Italy’s boot. Born around 515 BCE, he was an older contemporary of Socrates, who was born in 470 (according to Plato, the two men met when Parmenides was sixty-five). Several other so-called Presocratics were active even later—Democritus for one was Socrates’ junior by a decade. But the label is still useful: while Socrates reoriented philosophy toward moral values and politics, the later Presocratics maintained their predecessors’ focus on physics and cosmology. Their project was to account for the physical workings of the universe—its origins, its elements, and the forces or laws that govern its behavior— without falling back on the gods of traditional myth. But Parmenides splits their story in two. Before him, Presocratics took the reality of the sensory world for granted— a world of multiplicity and variety, motion and change, becoming and passing away. Parmenides radically rejected this assumption. The sensory world, he declared, is an illusion. What really exists is what he calls “being,” whose true nature can be perceived only by the mind. And by clearly perceiving what being must be like, the mind perceives that it can’t be anything like the world as our senses perceive it. Being is the exact opposite of the sensory world in every respect. It is timeless, motionless, changeless and imperishable, an eternal and indivisible One. After Parmenides, the reality of the sensory world needed defending. Subsequent Presocratics had to explain, at a minimum, how it could circumvent his ban on multiplicity and motion. Most notably, he provoked Leucippus and Democri106 parmenides: the road to reality tus into developing their theory of atomism—that the universe consists entirely of atoms in a void. Atoms are microscopic Parmenidean beings insofar as they’re indivisible, indestructible and immutable, but they can be infinite in number, they can move, collide and combine, thanks to the roominess of the infinite void, defined as the absence of being. Never mind that Parmenides ruled out the existence of such an absence—by inspiring atomism, he became, in his otherworldly way, the unwitting godfather of modern physics. As for metaphysics, it may be debatable whether he arrived at the idea... (shrink)

The first comprehensive examination of the debate between Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojève on the subject of philosophy and tyranny. On Tyranny remains a perennial favorite, possessing a timelessness that few philosophical or scholarly debates have ever achieved. On one hand, On Tyranny is the first book-length work in Leo Strauss’s extended study of Xenophon, and his “Restatement” retains a vivacity and directness that is sometimes absent in his later works. On the other, “Tyranny and Wisdom” is perhaps the most (...) succinct yet fullest articulation of Alexandre Kojève’s overall political thought, and it presents what may be the most uncompromising alternative to Strauss’s position as a whole. This volume contains for the first time a comprehensive and critical examination of the debate from scholars well versed in the thought of Strauss, Kojève, Hegel, Heidegger, and the end of history thesis. Of particular interest will be the appendix, which offers for the first time Kojève’s unabridged response to Strauss, a response previously available only from the Fonds Kojève at Le Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Accessible to students and scholars alike, this volume works equally well in the classroom and as a resource for more advanced research. (shrink)

The aim of this study is to determine the criticism to Mushabbiha and Mujassima on the basis of al-Faṣl fī l-milal wa-l-ahwāʾ wa-l-niḥal whose writer is Ibn Ḥazm (d. 456/1064), one of the eminent scholars of the Andalusian civilization. In this work, Ibn Ḥazm gives systematic information about the non-Islamic religions as well as the sects emerging under the Islamic roof, criticizing the views of religion and religious sects from various perspectives. In doing so, he approached the views of the (...) sects with his identity as a kalam theologian, and he made his critics in the light of classical conception of the Ahl al-Sunnah. Ibn Ḥazm pointed out that Mushbbiha and Mujassima had an anthropomorphic understanding of God, and emphasized that this understanding does not correspond with the belief in monotheism. He strongly emphasizes that God is one and nothing is equal to Him.Summary: Islamic Civilization of Andalusia was the most important representative of Islam in the West and enlightened Europe for centuries, has made important successes in science-technic, art and literature. Also made improvements on other areas such as religous and philosophical knowledge, in these eras raised important Islam scholars who made important contributions to those areas. One of those scholars undoubtedly is Ibn Ḥazm who was born in Andalusia (d. 456/1064). The aim of this paper is to analyze and determine Ibn Ḥazm’s critiques on Mushabbiha and Mujassima, based on Ibn Ḥazm’s thought found in his al-Fasl,who was one of the leading scholars of Anatolia civilization and played an important role in development of Islam thought nearly in all areas by his precious writings.Ibn Ḥazm, in his work gives systematic information on sects under Islamic thought and beliefs and religions out of Islam, their relations and differences with Islam, which he accepts as one and unchangeable, and analyzes them gives in an analytic, defensive and rejective method, puts them under critique. In other words, with his theologian identity and dialectical method, under the Sunnī classical tradition, he criticizes other sects’ thoughts. Ibn Ḥazm used a very sharp language and rough method in his critiques. This kind of attitude was symbolized by a traditional saying “Ibn Ḥazm’s language is sharper than Hajjāj’s sword”. As it very well known in the Qurʾān, oneness (tawhīd) was emphasized very much, God does not look like anything ever created, and does not have any resemblance or sameness with anything, in order to eliminate polytheist (shirk) belief. On the other hand, in some verses representations and resemblances were used that does not seem in line with oneness (tawhīd). This problem which seems to be contradiction at first sight has been subject to many debates of how that can be solved. In the center of discussion informing attributes (revealed attributes) that drive people to comparison (tajsīm) and anthropomorphism (tashbīh) that recall humanly attributes if they are understood in artificial meanings. In history of Islamic thought, in order to understand those kind of attributes, in their artificial meanings or their changed and decided meanings (ta’wīl), has been subject to discussion and to understand the attributes different methods have been used. One of these method which is the main subject of this paper is tajsīm and tashbīh method and was accepted by Mushabbiha and Mujassima. They take informing attributes artificial meanings as base and were against the changing of the meaning. As a natural conclusion of this, they resemble God to the created and asserted God has concrete parts such as hand, face, eye, leg, etc. In his work al-FaṣlIbn Ḥazm mentions ideas of Mushabbiha and Mujassima, and criticized whether it is appropriate for Sunnah or not. His critique against these sects are mostly based on the informing attributes being taken as visual attributes in nasses, where as a result the God imagination turns to be anthropormorphist imagination. According to Ibn Ḥazm, the verses “… He does not resemble anything…” (Ṣūra 42/11) and “He is not equal to anything” put forward the onlyness and soleness of God and they do not give attention to this and try to prove the attributes fall into anthropormorphism (tashbīh) and corporealisim (tajsīm). Ibn Ḥazm believes and says that their God imagination is not in line with oneness (tawhīd) understanding and puts the verses into the center. In his critiques he emphasizes God’s oneness, he does not have pair, not resemble anything, does not have equal and tried to explain how his attributes should be understood. In this respect, in qualification of God his main principle was exploitation (tanzīh) and asserts that humanly attributes (face, eye, foot) in their visual understandings cannot be attributed to God and tried to prove that names like object (jism), accident (symptoms), substance (ore) he cannot be put into qualification. Ibn Ḥazm’s consideration of nass through an exterior perspective, his criticism of Mushabbiha and Mujassima, who take visual attributes as principles, and his re-interpretation (ta’wīl) of some nass whenever necessary may be seen as a contradiction but it is consistent in his system. Because he is not definitely against re-interpretation (ta’wīl) but he rejects re-interpretation without proof, he accepts ta’wīlthat comes from nasses and rational necessity with a proof. From this perspective if there is an occasion a word’s meaning in the Qurʾān that needs understanding different from its written meaning and there is a proof for that, he sees this a requirement for re-interpretation (ta’wīl). He practically used this theory of him in informing attributes. As a result, in attributes of God, he follows the madhhab of the Salaf (predecessors), where as in informal attributes and their understanding, he uses ta’wīlmethod and takes the path of Halaf (successors). By this way, he departed from the madhhab of the Salaf and created his own method. In this context while he was criticizing anthropormorphist and corporealist methods. Also he defended that since comprehension of God is not possible without re-interpretation of these attributes, it is necessary. He explained these attributes in verses with their dictionary meanings and related verses, with appropriate Arabic grammar and God’s greatness. From that perspective Ibn Ḥazm’s Salafī and artificial understandings, we cannot say he is from Salafī which rejects rationale and explanation all together. In addition to that when necessary in informal attributes he uses ta’wīland uses reason and the function he put upon reason, shows his position against sect like Mushabbiha and Mujassima who underestimates the value of reason. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION The most remarkable feature of the character of the Persian people is their love of Metaphysical speculation. Yet the inquirer who approaches the extant literature of Persia expecting to find any comprehensive systems of thought, like those of Kapila or Kant, will have to turn back disappointed, though deeply impressed by the wonderful intellectual subtlety displayed therein. It seems to me that the Persian mind is rather impatient of detail, and consequently destitute of that organising faculty which gradually works (...) out a system of ideas, by interpreting the fundamental principles with reference to the ordinary facts of observation. The subtle Brahman sees the inner unity of things; so does the Persian. But while the former endeavours to discover it in all the aspects of human experience, and illustrates its hidden presence in the concrete in various ways, the latter appears to be satisfied with a bare universality, and does not attempt to verify the richness of its inner content. The butterfly imagination of the Persian, flies half-inebriated as it were, from flower to flower, and seems to be incapable of reviewing the garden as a whole. For this reason, his deepest thoughts and emotions find expression mostly in disconnected verses (Ghazal), which reveal all the subtlety of his artistic soul. The Hindu, while admitting, like the Persian, the necessity of a higher source of knowledge, yet calmly moves from experience to experience, mercilessly dissecting them, and forcing them to yield their underlying universality. In fact the Persian is only half-conscious of Metaphysics as a system of thought; his Brahman brother, on the other hand, is fully alive to the need of presenting his theory in the form of a thoroughly reasoned out system. And the result of this mental difference between the two nations is clear. In the one case we have only partially worked out systems of thought; in the other case, the awful sublimity of the searching Vedanta ... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rushdie’s Dastan-e-Dilruba: The Satanic Verses As Rushdie’s Love Letter to IslamFeroza Jussawalla (bio)Meheruban likhoon ya dilruba likhoon hyran hoon ke apke khat me kya likhoonYe mera prempatr padh kar ke tum naraz na hona ke tum meri zindagi ho ke tum meri bandagi ho[Should I address you as respected one Should I address you as beloved one I am so distraught about how I should address youWhen you read (...) my love letter You should not be disappointed Because you are my life and you are my “life’s work”]—Popular Hindi film song from Raj Kapoor’s Sangam (1964) [my translation]Salman Rushdie has been classified as a postcolonial 1 writer whose fiction depicts the hybrid nature of postcolonials in their migrations and movements, their merging and mixing. Rushdie has variously been called a “Third World Cosmopolitan” [Brennan, Salman Rushdie viii], a “metropolitan intellectual,” and “a hybrid” but most often a [End Page 50] “postcolonial,” because of his “birth” as a “Midnight’s child”—a child born as India was gaining independence at midnight on 14 August 1947 2 —his subsequent education in England, and the making of his home in metropolitan London. Such a perspective is eurocentric and does not provide complete answers to Rushdie’s complex works or the complicated response to his work. For the very hybridity that Rushdie manifests results from his being not only a “post-British” colonial but also a “post-Mughal” colonial.The British were not the only colonizers of India. In fact, Indian historians have traditionally identified several waves of colonization. Journalists Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre best summarize the two major waves of colonization as follows:Hinduism itself had been brought to India by the Indo-European hordes descending from the North to wrest the subcontinent from its ancient Dravidian inhabitants.... The faith of the Prophet had come much later, after the cohorts of Genghis Khan and Tamurlane had battered their way down the Khyber Pass to weaken the Hindus’ hold on the great Gangetic Plain. For two centuries, the Moslem Mogul emperors had imposed their sumptuous and implacable rule over most of India, spreading in the wake of their martial legions the message of Allah, the One, the Merciful.[Freedom at Midnight 36]While the British were actually occupying India, post-Mughal colonialism in the form of Persian poetry, literature, and the general “sumptuousness” of its art and architecture held sway. The Persian language begot Urdu, often described by linguists as a “camp language” of the Muslim invaders of the Subcontinent. However, Persian, Arabic, and Hindi had come together to create a new language for the poetry, literature, arts, and in general the “high culture” of today’s Indian Muslims. Jawaharlal Nehru, in his definitive history of India entitled Discovery of India, wrote,The Mughals were outsiders and strangers to India and yet they fitted into Indian structure with remarkable speed and began the Indo-Mughal period.... Their dynasties became completely Indianized with their roots in India, looking upon India as their homeland, and the rest of the world as foreign.[236]A synthesis worked itself out: new styles of architecture arose; food and clothing changed; and life was affected and varied in many other ways.... The Persian language became the official court language and many Persian words crept into popular use.[237]Persian was the lingua franca of the incoming Muslims from AD 1193 onward, and Persian literature became the favored literature of India for approximately five centuries [Ali 3–4].It is in this tradition of post-Mughal Urdu high culture that Rushdie grew up. In a 1983 interview with Michael Kaufman, Rushdie said,My grandfather, my father’s father, was a good Urdu poet. My father is not a writer but he’s a very literary and literate man, a student of both Arabic and Persian Literature and of Western Literature. At Cambridge he was quite scholarly. So I grew up in an atmosphere of books. And both my parents, in their different ways, were very gifted storytellers. [End Page 51]My mother, in common with most Eastern women and perhaps even women of the West, was the... (shrink)

The dehumanisation of women has been recorded in world history. In religions one can easily find interpretations that tend to be discriminatory against women. This research aims to see the humanisation of women in the Tafsir Faidh Ar-Rahman by Kiai Sholeh Darat towards the position of women in Islam. This research is a library research. Data collection was done through documentation. Furthermore, the data were analysed qualitatively by a descriptive method. The results of the study showed that. The humanisation (...) of women in the Tafsir Faidh Ar-Rahmân by Kiai Sholeh Darat on the position of women in Islam is; he emphasised that women have an equal position with men. In terms of inheritance, Kyai Sholeh Darat wanted flexibility in understanding the verse regarding the portion of inheritance 2:1 so that the provisions can adapt according to the situation. In certain contexts, women may get the same share as men. Contribution: The thoughts of Kiai Sholeh Darat have contributed to being one of the references in looking at women’s issues in Islam objectively. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Anthony Close THE EMPIRICAL AUTHOR: SALMAN RUSHDIE'S THE SATANIC VERSES HOBBES, comparing the author ofan action to the owner ofgoods, asserts, "And as the right of possession, is called dominion; so the right of doing any action, is called authority" (Leviathan, Book I, chap. 16). My purpose in this essay is to apply this Hobbesian maxim to the relation Author/Text, expanding somewhat Hobbes's notion of authority. I presuppose that (...) in our day-to-day dealings with our fellow men, we envisage each others' acts as exhibiting purpose and commitment, which make them ours in more than the platitudinous sense that we performed them. By virtue of that, they confer on us a privileged, though clearly not unchallengeable, authority in saying what they are and what they are for. Such, in effect, is the position reached by Austin in How to Do Things with Words, and it broadly corresponds to that of various philosophical writings on human action—by Anscombe, Davidson, and Melden.1 To be sure, we may legitimately consider human behavior from other viewpoints (e.g., structuralist, anthropological, psychoanalytical, Marxist) trained on its unconscious presuppositions. Yet, insofar as such theorizing fails to acknowledge the priority of the Hobbesian perspective, it will seem perverse for a reason that has been well put by Charles Taylor. Precisely because history is made up of purposeful activity, Taylor argues, we need to explain historical patterns in a way that is "intelligible in relation to conscious action" even though they may not "issue from conscious action."2 By this criterion much of our modern literary theory is defective. A vivid measure of the deficiency is provided by the furor over Salman Rushdie's TL· Satanic Verses, culminatingin thefatwa pronounced against Philosophy and Literature, © 1990, 14: 248-267 Anthony Close249 him by the Ayatollah Khomeini in February 1989. I take it that for anyone vocationally committed to the practice or study ofliterature and to the cause of freedom of expression, the defense of Rushdie cannot be a matter of indifference. Nor can one be indifferent to the chasm of misunderstanding that separates Rushdie and his apologists from the novel's Muslim opponents. I believe that these two causes—defending Rushdie and bridging the chasm—can be reconciled by offering better explanations ofhis novel in place ofcrude denunciations or, from some non-Muslim quarters, smug and knowing dismissals. Yet, as we shall see, the task of explanation could be considered hamstrung by our modern poetics. I was reminded ofHobbes's textby Rushdie's lucid and cogent defense of his novel in TL· Independent (London, February 4, 1990). Against the accusations that he had deliberately reviled the Islamic faith, he argued as follows. Though TL· Satanic Verses, like many novels that Rushdie esteems, is a work of radical dissent, questioning, and reimagining, it is motivated by a spirit of serious inquiry rather than debunking derision. More particularly, it reflects a determination that underlies all Rushdie's work: "to create a literary language and literary forms in which the experience offormerly-colonised, still-disadvantaged peoples might find full expression." He continues: "It is written from the very experience of uprooting, disjuncture and metamorphosis... that is the migrant condition, and from which, I believe, can be derived a metaphor for all humanity.... [It] celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelisation and fears the absolutism of the Pure." Note the insistence on how these themes flow direcdy from Rushdie's own experience. Two days after the publication of this article, Harold Pinter gave on Rushdie's behalf a lecture on the relationship of literature to religion and society at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. In this lecture, Rushdie articulated a Bakhtinian view of the novelist's function: to dramatize ironically and noncommittally the clash of voices, languages, and ideologies in a world without gods and without traditionsanctioned truth. Rushdie referred specifically, I think, to a species of postmodernist novel which we may dub "palimpsest history";3 the species includes Rushdie's works, García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Carlos Fuentes's Terra Nostra... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:506 BOOK REVIEWS signified by bread and wine (39). Schoot sums up the concept of mysterium operative here by saying that it is "something hidden, voiced truly but inadequately, spiritually signified by the Old Testament and now fulfilled in Christ and the sacrament of the eucharist" (38). Despite the meticulous scholarship displayed in this work, students of Aquinas's theological epistemology and christology may well be struck by what seem (...) to be gratuitous harmonizations between theology and christology (the parallel between the analogy of being and the communicationem idiomatum, making the hypostatic union paradigmatic in the naming of God), the overwhelming weight given to the signification/supposition distinction, and the seeming reduction of the principles of christology to linguistic rules. In addition, the complex and often turgid style serves to obfuscate certain important questions, such as Aquinas's understanding of Christ's esse. Is Aquinas being forced into a theological mold that he himself would not recognize? Dominican School ofPhilosophy and Theology Berkeley, California EDWARD L. KRASEVAC, 0.P An Introduction to the History of Exegesis, vol. III: St. Augustine. By BERTRAND DE MARGERIE, S.J. Petersham, Mass.: St. Bede's Publications, 1993. Pp. xi+ 169 (paper). Unfortunately, today many scholars and general readers neglect the work of the Fathers of the Church. One often hears that the writings of the Fathers have become less relevant or less important because there has been so much progress in Scripture studies and because the Fathers did not really try to find out what the inspired writer meant to say-for they relied on allegory. St. Augustine's exegesis poses a particular difficulty in terms of its reliance on allegory. Augustine was strongly influenced by the allegorical exegesis of bishop Ambrose and recounts in his Confession.5 (VI, iv, 6) how he used to hear Ambrose teaching in his sermons, as though he were most diligently teaching a rule: "The letter kills, but the spirit gives life." Father de Margerie admits that Augustine did indeed suffer from "excessive allegorism" (126), but he insists that this is no reason to give up entirely on Augustine. Instead, with keen scholarly analysis he shows that, in spite of some defects, Augustine did in fact give us some really fine work in Scripture study. Father de Margerie stresses that according to Augustine the purpose of all Scripture is to teach love: "... the plenitude and the end of the Law and of BOOK REVIEWS 507 all the sacred Scriptures is the love... of a Being which is to be enjoyed and of a being that can share that enjoyment with us" (20; from De Doctrina Christiana, I, xxv, 39). This love is taught even at the beginning of Scripture: "... on a subjective level, Moses wrote for the love of all men" (30). But how could this be? "It seems to us nowadays that Augustine failed to perceive adequately the progressive nature of the disclosure of religious truths by the God who revealed them" (30). Father de Margerie responds to this objection by pointing out that given the belief that Moses had been given a transient, "face to face vision of the Divine being... and that this experience was granted him precisely in favor of the universal Church," it makes sense to assume that "the prophet and maker of the old Law received knowledge, during this vision and through divine revelation, of how future interpretation of the Law he was issuing-like that which Jesus was to issuewould extend even to enemies the love of one's neighbor" (31). Augustine was led to this view in the light of the varied interpretations being proposed in his own time for Genesis (48). Father de Margerie admits that "Augustine himself limits the scope of his theory concerning the plurality of literal meaning to a few rather exceptional verses of scripture" (65). Augustine believed, however, that Moses had received most remarkable gifts: I cannot think that Moses Your most faithful servant was given by you lesser gifts than I should have wished and longed to have for myself if I had been born at the same time as he.... I should have wished that you would grant me such a skill in... (shrink)

In the history of İslāmic thought, Māturīdī is a famous scholar both in the field of kalām and tafsir. Being approved by Māturīdī, the distinction of tafsir and ta’wīl, which makes possible to take the comments made about the verses into sistematic framework, is quite important. There is an important information both about content of the distinction approved by Māturīdī and the main reasons that necessiated this distinction in the introduction of Samarqandī’s Sharh at Ta’wīlāt. From this information, it (...) is understood that the distinction of tafsir and ta’wīl had dated back to older time than Māturīdī and previous scholars dealed with the problem that necessiated this distinction and Māturīdī inherited this distinction from his predecessors. Information in the Sharh at Ta’wīlāt reveals that according to Māturīdī the companions had made interpretation (ta’wīl) in addition to tafsir and the explanations made by certain evidences is tafsir too. Therefore this information gives us the opportunity flexing the acceptance of the idea “tafsir, is dedicated to the companions, ta'wīl is dedicated to fuqaha (jurists)” and asserting that companions and scholars made both tafsir and ta’wīl. In this paper, we will research whether the distinction tafsir and ta’wīl regarded by Māturīdī completely belonged to his or not and content of the distinction and its reasons. We will also analyze this distinction according to examples in the Ta’wîlāt. Summary: An important distinction is made between the concepts of tafsir and ta’wīl in the short preface of Māturīdī's tafsir, and this distinction is particularly prominent in contemporary tafsir studies. Because from the point of view of the value they carry, the explanations for these differences and concepts express the legitimacy of the following mufassirūn (writers of a commentary on the Qur’an) to be able to perform tafsir, as well as the value of the explanations found in tafsir literature in terms of certainty. In Ta'wīlāt, tafsir is described as the precise determination of what is intended. Determination of what is exactly intended in verse/wording is bound to certainly know the conditions under which it was revealed. Because they are the first to be addressed directly and they witnessed the context, the tafsir is only for the companions (ṣaḥābah pl. aṣḥāb). On the other hand, ta’wīl is not a definite determination of what is intended, but rather it is explained as putting the possibilities forward. In this case, ta’wīl is dedicated to the scholars after the companions. When we look at the other tafsir sources that include his views, it can be understood that this brief information in the preface of the tafsir which survived to our day is partially incomplete. Samarqandī's Sharhu’t-ta'wīlāt is the most important of these sources. According to the information here, Māturīdī states that some scholars distinguish tafsir and ta’wīl from each other. In these distinctions, tafsir is either described in relation to a definitive statement or in relation to being familiar with the conditions of revelation, while ta’wīl is described as extracting meanings from the verses and making possible meanings without claiming certainty. These explanations show that the distinction between tafsir and ta’wīl in Ta'wīlāt's preface was mainly based on the period before Māturīdī. These statements, which Māturīdī transmitted from some scholars in the beginning of Sharhu’t-ta'wīlāt, were then transmitted by Omar al-Nasafī, Mahāyimī and Molla Husrev. In some sources, it was also transmitted that similar explanations were made by scholars such as an-Nadr b. Shumayl, al-Hussein b. Fadl al-Bacelī and Ibn Durayd before Māturīdī.Some explanations of Māturīdī in Ta'wīlāt enables the theory of tafsir-ta’wīl to be understood at a wider level. When the examples are examined, it is observed that Māturīdī exhibited two types of attitude against the tafsir of the companions. He states that one of these is that if the transmission is true, what is intended is exactly what is stated in the narrated. The second is that he sometimes does not accept these explanations and suggests additional opinions. The reason he refuses is that sometimes he does not find the transmission reliable, and sometimes he thinks that companions performed ta'wīl. If this is the case, the dedication of ta’wīl to those coming later should not be absolutized. Because the companions can perform both tafsir and ta’wīl. The examples in Ta'wīlāt clearly reveal what areas tafsir, which is defined as a definite statement, covers. According to this, first, tafsir is related to the field of “invisible” about the past and the future. Secondly, its meaning and practice is only about the information of the “statement” about the issues that can be revealed by the Prophet (pbuh). In the third aspect, it is related to “revelation” information reporting the context in which the verses descended. In the beginning of Sharhu’t-ta'wīlāt, Māturīdī says that the explanations made based on the definitive evidences such as mutawātir (repetition; narration reported by large number reporters) and ijmā (consensus) also fall under the category of tafsir. However, it is also necessary to add intellectual evidence to these evidences. Because intellectual evidence is also important in the epistemology of Māturīdī. In fact, the truthfulness of nass (text) is primarily based on intellectual evidence. First, the issues of theology are proven by certain intellectual evidence, and then, on the basis of this, the meanings expressed by the nass acquire the value of certainty and truthfulness. With the definitive acceptance of reason in theology, what some nass express confirm each other and are used as evidence in the process of interpretation. Therefore, since some of the intellectual evidence, ijmā and mutawātir news provide definitive information, explanations based on them are also seen as tafsir. Considering the fact that the above-mentioned evidence was also used by those coming after the companions, it can be concluded that tafsir can be performed by not only the companions but also those coming after them. In this case, it should be accepted that tafsir is not performed only by the companions, and that the succeeding mufassirūn can also perform tafsir as well as ta’wīl. When we look at the examples based on these evidence, there are two different situations in Ta'wīlāt. The first is that Māturīdī sometimes has views on evidence based on mutawātir and ijmā and sometimes suggests different opinions from the assumptions that he said there was ijmā in particular. Because these evidences are certain, it is understandable that he remains bound to them. However, as a possible reason for his opposition to ijmā, it can be said that he thinks only the following generations enter the scope of ijmā. Because, according to Samarqandī, Māturīdī's objection to such information does not seem possible, since ijmā of the companions in a matter is accepted. Although he sometimes said that there was ijmā, the reason why no such ijmā was mentioned in other tafsir sources and sometimes, it may be considered that he did not respect other views in the face of ijmā as a reason for including different views or it may be thought that he was unaware of the different views that were transmitted. The second remarkable situation is that according to Māturīdī, intellectual evidence, in particular, can reveal only the “knowledge of existence” of the issues related to theology. Māturīdī thinks that their nature cannot be certainly known, and that the explanations made regarding their nature are only ta’wīl. For this reason, he firmly rejects the interpretation of the khabarī attributes about Allah in accordance with the idea of tashbīh and tajsīm (anthropomorphism). (shrink)

On the History and Transmission of Lacanian Psychoanalysis addresses key questions about the history and transmission of Lacan's work in North America through discussions with experienced psychoanalysts (who are also trained psychiatrists, psychologists, and psychotherapists). Chris Vanderwees presents conversations with clinicians about their psychoanalytic formation and about the development of Lacanian psychoanalysis in North America over the past several decades. With oral narrative brought out through the technique of free association, then transcribed and annotated, each discussion is a (...) trace of Vanderwees' encounter with each clinician and the result of collaborative efforts involving speech, writing, translation, and transmission. The conversational tone makes these discussions accessible not only for those already well-versed in Lacan's thinking, but also for anyone discovering his work for the first time. The range of contributions spans both French and English-speaking Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Complemented by On the Theory and Clinic of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, this book of conversations conveys the diversity of historical and pedagogical perspectives on theory and practice as inspired by Lacan's system of thought. It will be of great interest to all psychoanalytic practitioners as well as academics and scholars of psychoanalysis. (shrink)

Edward Conze suggested that the first two chapters of the Ratnaguṇa (hereafter “the 41 verses”) were the earliest Mahāyāna text. Yet the origin of the verses and their relationship with other prajñāpāramitā texts have been murky. Through five levels of analysis, this research argues that the 41 verses were most likely the verse section of the Sūtra of Mahā-prajñāpāramitā Pronounced by Mañjuśrī Bodhisattva (SMPMB) and later became independent and expanded. The five levels of analysis are as follows. First, the (...) Mahāyāna origin narratives, the Mahāyāna sutras, and ancient Indian Buddhist art all point to Mañjuśrī as the most likely architect of the prajñāpāramitā doctrine. Second, as an early Mahāyāna text, the SMPMB’s narrative shows that Mañjuśrī pronounced prajñāpāramitā and the Buddha sanctioned it. Third, the Tibetan Ratnaguṇa bears the line “Homage to Holy Mañjuśrī” in its beginning, and the text is usually found in conjunction with “The Recitation of Mañjuśrī’s Attributes.” Lexical items also show high parallelism between the 41 verses and the SMPMB. Fourth, a semantic intertextual analysis demonstrates full and complete intertextuality between the two texts. That is, the two texts can fully annotate each other. Finally, a content analysis of the references to the “one four-line verse” (yi si ju ji 一四句偈) in Mahāyāna texts indicates that it is most likely a corrupted reference to the 41 verses. The research further notes that intertextuality between the 41 verses and other prajñāpāramitā sutras cannot provide explanations for the observations in the above analysis, thus excluding alternative explanations. Finally, the research notes that how to attain wisdom deliverance was a widely explored subject from the Buddha’s time to the early schools. Mañjuśrī’s prajñāpāramitā doctrine is the most sophisticated interpretation of the Buddha’s teaching on “see things as they really are” and thus constituted the foundation of early Mahāyāna Buddhism. (shrink)

This paper will examine the sanskrit short-poem Āta ṅkavādaśataka written in 1988 by the famous indian pandit Vagish Shastri. Although composed in a language that is 2500 year old, the Century deals with one of the most dramatic events in contemporary indian history: sikh nationalist terrorism. The poet provides both a socio-political interpretation as well as a mythological-theological one, managing to combine a traditional approach with a pronounced ideological awareness. We will both supply information on the social and historical (...) background of the phenomenon, and discuss the poetic qualities of the work. Special attention will be given to linguistic, metrical and rhetorical features, which link this contemporary composition to classical kāvya poetry. (shrink)

The History of Islam, which makes use of the Qur’ān, ḥadīth and many auxiliary sources, did not ignore the different elements that would shed light on the events of the periods it studied. At this point, the poem draws attention as an important source containing much data on the history of the prophets, sīrat, genealogy, and socio-cultural life. Umayya b. Abū l-Ṣalt (d. 8/630) is an important poet who has witnessed both the Jāhilī Period and the Islamic period, (...) and has poems containing the above-mentioned themes. There are different opinions about his belief status. In this context, there are discourses that consider him as Christian, Jewish, Hanīf, and monotheist. However, although it is a fact that Umayya was a ḥanīf in Jāhilī Period, his oppositional attitude with the advent of Islam is another fact. In the historical sources, there are many poems which are attributed to Umayya and contain different subjects. When these poems are examined, especially the poems that deal with the belief of oneness and the hereafter; it is seen that the creation of the world, the lives of past tribes and prophets, sīrat, some cultural elements, elegy, praise, and lineage were also handled by him. However, when the content and style of Umayya's poems, especially about the lives of the prophets, are examined, there are doubts as to whether these poems belong to him. For example, his poem about the story of Adam is as follows: “And they all prostrated to Adam by His permission / Only the damned, the sinner, and the expelled refused it /The Lord of the servants said to Iblis: / Get out of there fired, cursed and vilified.” When compared with the verses of the Qur'ān, it is seen that the information presented by Umayya about the story of Adam does not contradict with the information in the Qur'ān. “It is We Who created you and gave you shape; then We bade the angels prostrate to Adam, and they prostrate; not so Iblis; He refused to be of those who prostrate.” “(Allāh) said: "Get thee down from this: it is not for thee to be arrogant here: get out, for thou art of the meanest (of creatures).” In Umayya's poems, the story of Noah is discussed in with more details: “In the evening the flood was sent and the water overflowed. / There was no container to hold it. / He swims like an arrow seeking revenge. / And crossing the sea. / Everything began to speak with a miracle. / And the crow responded to the rooster's trust with treason. / After seven days the dove was sent / That; was unafraid of dangers and showed courage. / It was said, let's search the earth / Can you find a dry place with a water source in its furthest part? / Flew away fast. / Then he brought a cluster of black sticky mud on it.” In the poems of Umayya, in which he talks about the stories of the Prophet, many words and stories that the Arabs do not know are used. The story of the crow, rooster, and pigeon in this poem is one such example. It is said that Umayya was influenced by the old books and the words of the People of the Book in the story about the crow, the rooster, and the pigeon. Because, although there are differences in the details, it is seen that this issue is mentioned in the Torāh. Cevād Ali, who touches on this issue, states that “if it is true that these poems belong to him” and says that the available data is evidence that Umayya met with the People of the Book and knew the content of their books. While evaluating this issue, Behcet Abdulagafur referred to the 49th verse of the Surah Hūd and he emphasized two possibilities, pointing out that the story was not known to people before, including the Prophet Muḥammad: Umayya recited them from the Qur'ān and sang his poems according to the Qur'ān. However, this is a low probabilirty. Or, this poem does not belong to him and was later made up for him. He saw the second option more strongly and said that the poem did not resemble Umayya's style as a reason. The Prophet avoided a wholesale approach and evaluated Umayya's poems according to their content. Because while approving some of his poems, he also banned his poems that he sang as a lament for the polytheists killed in Badr, which did not comply with the Islamic understanding. The Prophet said about him: “His poetry became a Muslim, but his heart denied it.” Thus, while revealing that the content of Umayya's poems is generally suitable for Islam, he also stated that he was not a Muslim. At the same time, he banned his poems that were against Islam. (shrink)

This paper traces the history and meaning of the Greek proverb “Win but do not overwin”, first documented in Maurice′s Strategicon and cited thereafter in various contexts in Byzantine military and historical literature. The earliest manifestation of this proverb is identified as a verse of iambic trimeters preserved in the Γνῶμαι Μενάνδρου or Sententiae Menandri, witnessed in both the manuscript tradition and a fragmentary specimen inscribed on a fifth-/sixth-century ostracon. Older scholarship denied the antiquity of this monostichos on (...) linguistic and metrical grounds, but it is shown that there is no impediment to a possible origin in Attic drama, even if date and authorship remain elusive. Recognition of an additional prose variant in Socrates′ Historia Ecclesiastica points to a wider proverbial currency by the beginning of the fifth century at the latest. The study concludes with the conjecture that St. Paul may have had this proverb in mind when he wrote Epistle to the Romans, adducing arguments based on eccentric vocabulary and evidence for Paul′s limited acquaintance with moralising pagan literature. (shrink)

In the verse of Sūrah al-An'ām 6/38, "Nothing has we omitted from the Book" as it is stated in the 59th verse of the same sūrah, “Anything fresh or dry (green or withered) but is (inscribed) in a record clear (to those who can read)." has been commanded. In the verses of the an-Naḥl 16/44 and 89, it is stated that it was revealed to the Prophet to explain to people everything that was revealed to them. In this (...) meaning, there are other verses in the Qur'ān. Based on these and similar verses, according to some, the Qur'ān; it is a general source of information that anyone who has lost his camel's bridle as an allusion to all knowledge, all knowledge of those before him and those who will come until the Day of Judgment, can find it in the Qur'ān. On the contrary, according to some, it is useless to look for everything in the Qur'ān, which was sent for the guidance of man, happiness in this world and the hereafter, and it is necessary to look for things in line with his goals. From this point of view, the article focuses on the content of the thesis that there is knowledge of everything in the Qur'ān, in Turkish and Arabic websites, and it is tried to understand how the Qur'ān is portrayed as a source of information on these platforms. While doing this, a search was made on Google, one of today's popular and easy access to information platforms, by typing ‘Is there everything in the Qur'ān’. And the content in the first five rows, written and visual, was transferred to the study without falling into repetition. Among these, an evaluation was made based on the most read internet sites and it was seen that the general opinion was that there is everything in the Qur'ān. Content creators have often answered the question of how such a thing is possible, by analogy, in which all the information of a tree is stored in a kernel, a large bale of cotton takes up very little space when compressed, or -in an easy-to-understand analogy for today's people- huge amounts of memory cards are stored in tiny memory cards explained by compressing information. As proof of this, History in the Qur'ān, Technology in the Qur'ān, Astronomy in the Qur'ān and Mathematics in the Qur'ān, are just a few of the titles in this content. Again, according to those who think this way, it is another way of explaining the subject that the Qur'ān is secret and only those who have deepened in science and have certain competence can discover that secret when the time comes. On the other hand, there are also some who say that there is no knowledge of everything in the Qur'ān, even if it is a little. Despite the verses stating that nothing is missing in the book and that everything wet and dry is in the book, it is important how those who hold this view explain the subject. For example, the concept of kitāb is one of the words that have a wujūhāt (different meanings) when the whole of the Qur'ān is taken into account. Because, in various places in the Qur'ān, this word is used in the meaning of the Qur'ān, the lawh-i mahfūẓ, the written/obligatory and the book of deeds. In addition, even if the Qur'ān is meant, it has been stated that the wording here is common, not in the meaning that the knowledge of everything is in the Qur'ān, but in the sense that the things about guidance or in line with the goals of the Qur'ān can be found in it. As a matter of fact, there are other examples of this in the Qur'ān. Considering the context, there is no explicit or implicit presumption in the relevant verses that the Qur'ān is meant by the kitāb-ı mubīn (a revealed book). Therefore, the first period commentators and later commentators understood this expression not as the Qur'ān, but as the lawh-i mahfūẓ. Interestingly, some of the content producers of the website were able to claim that although the commentators expressed their views in writing or orally, the Qur'ān was meant by the kitāb-ı mubīn, and the preference for the lawh-i mahfūẓ needed explanation. As a result, it is understood that those who claim to have all the information in the Qur'ān actually understand the verses in question literally. If the Qur'ān has everything, it is the necessary consequence of this proposition that the Qur'ān will suffice for us without the need for anything else. In our opinion, it is an important contradiction that among those whose views are given, that they leave the method aside on this issue, even though they emphasize reason and method. This makes it very difficult to obtain healthy information about the epistemic value of the Qur'ān from the internet, which is a popular source of information, and to clarify the mind of ordinary people on this subject. (shrink)

Zosimus, after recording the foundation and immense growth of Constantinople, introduces a digression directed towards his purpose of justifying paganism against Christianity. ‘It has often indeed occurred to me to wonder how, when the city of the Byzantines has grown, so that no other can compare with it for prosperity and size, there was no prophecy delivered from the gods of our predecessors about its development to a better fortune. With this thought in mind I have turned over many volumes (...) of histories and collections of oracles, and with difficulty I happened upon one oracle said to be of the Sibyl of Erythrae or of Phaennis of Epirus. Nicomedes, the son of Prusias, put his confidence in this oracle, and interpreting it in an advantageous sense he took up war against his father, Prusias, at the persuasion of Attalus.’ Zosimus proceeds to quote twenty-one lines of hexameter verse, which have come down in a rather corrupt state, but of which the general sense is reasonably clear. They consist mainly of an obvious post eventum forecast of the Gallic invasion of Asia Minor in the third century B.C. (shrink)

The elements which every schoolboy learns on beginning Latin Verse Composition include a number of rules which seem arbitrarily designed to make the game harder. In hexameters, he is told, he must have a masculine caesura either in the third foot or in the second and fourth, and end normally with a disyllabic or a trisyllable; in pentameters he must end with a disyllabic; and in neither line may a single monosyllable stand at the end. Rarely, in my experience, (...) is any reason given him by way of redress, and he will search for one in vain in most of the school text-books, in introductions like Postgate's to Tibullus and Propertius, and in histories of Latin literature like Wight Duff's and Mackail's. This reticence may be due to the dissensions of experts on this subject and on the subject of Latin accentuation in general, but the theory that predominates in England, among those who hold a theory at all, explains so many of the phenomena that it deserves to be more widely and precisely known. The most detailed exposition of it is by E. H. Sturtevant, who summed up his analyses in a pair of articles in the Transactions of the American Philological Association in 1923–4. While his careful work is invaluable as marshalling the statistics and evidence, it errs on the side of excessive minuteness, and leaves room not merely for some additions, but for a different kind of treatment concerned less with bare statistics and more with poetic principles and historical development. Since Latin Verse Composition plays such an important part in English higher classical education, it seems desirable that a less technical and more accessible account should be available for English readers. Such an account I attempt to give here, keeping separate as far as possible the exposition and the consideration of the criticisms and rival theories that have been advanced. (shrink)

Repetition dynamically shaped important modes of thought and action in early modern British and European cultures. The centrality and often problematic ambiguity of repetition as they converge in ritual, routine, and regime, however, are rarely assessed accurately because repetition is often dismissed as quaintly primitive or embarrassingly visceral. Ritual, Routine, and Regime is a collection of essays that reveals varied meanings given to and created by repetition from a range of disciplinary perspectives. The contributors reveal repetition at work in evolving (...) definitions of the self and of the emotions, in political rhetoric used to assert a nation's history, in values ascribed to musical styles, in religious verse grounded in practices of prayer, in the aesthetics created by the poetry of work and by rhyme in general, in the recreation of British classics through French translations, and in the repeated but significantly varied sculpture of the portrait bust. Edited by Lorna Clymer, Ritual, Routine, and Regime juxtaposes early modern practices with twentieth- and twenty-first century theoretical accounts of the institutions of repetition. Providing a stimulating, new perspective on early modern culture, the collection describes repetition's often peculiar demands, its surprising gratifications, and its contested interpretations. (shrink)

This volume covers a relatively short span of time, rather less than the first three-quarters of the first century BC; but it was an age of profoundly important developments, with enduring consequences for the subsequent history of Latin literature. Original and innovative in widely differing ways as was the work of Lucretius, Sallust and Caesar in particular, the scene is dominated, historically, by two figures: Cicero and Catullus. Cicero was a politician and a man of affairs as well as (...) a man of latters, whose vast literary output reflects a range of intellectual interests unparalleled among surviving Roman writers; creator of a prose style the Quintilian regarded as synonymous with eloquence itself; and better known to us, from his letters, as a human being, than any other figure from classical antiquity. Catullus was a poet, single-mindedly devoted to fostering the tradition of learned Alexandrian poetry at Rome; the author of one slender volume of verse that has attracted more critical attention in proportion to its size than any other ancient poetry-book; and the lover of Lesbia. In these chapters it is shown how these, and other, Roman writers of genius continued the process of transforming their traditional Greek models into new and vigorous Latin forms, with lasting effects for oratory, historiography, and the higher genres of poetry. (shrink)

Medieval and early modern devotional works rarely receive serious treatment from philosophers, even those working in the subfields of philosophy of religion or the history of ideas. In this article, I examine one medieval devotional work in particular—the Middle High German image- and verse-program, Christus und die minnende Seele (CMS)—and I argue that it can plausibly be viewed as a form of medieval public philosophy, one that both exhibited and encouraged philosophical innovation. I address a few objections to (...) my proposal—namely, that CMS is neither public enough nor that it counts as proper philosophy—and I attempt to defend CMS’s public philosophical credentials in light of these objections. I conclude with a brief discussion of how devotional texts like CMS can help us do innovative public philosophy today. (shrink)

In this paper, I attempt to read the poetic principle behind the Tammuzi movement of modern Arabic poetry through the lens of speculative poetics. While speculative-poetic accounts of modern poetry, such as those provided by Allen Grossman, blazed new paths connecting poetry to personhood in modernity, their application to the development of modern poetry outside of Europe remains limited by their self-avowed focus on European history. This paper will outline a critical corrective to speculative poetics which, I argue, can (...) be of value in extending its domain of application to Arabic projects of poetic modernity, particularly the two tendencies of "free verse" and "commitment" poetry that emerged out of the Tammuzi movement. (shrink)

In Latin Hexameter Verse, his 1903 manual for composers of Latin hexameters which is still useful as a guide to Vergil's metrical and prosodic practices, S. E. Winbolt states that a hexameter ‘must not end with an adjective preceded by a noun with a similar short ending, e.g.…flumina nota’ unless the adjective is emphatic, ‘i.e. strongly distinctive, predicative or antithetical’. Whether or not his distinction between emphatic and non-emphatic adjectives in this position is wholly workable , Winbolt here rightly (...) detects a strong tendency in Vergil and other Latin poets towards avoiding endings of this general kind, which we can conveniently call the ‘Discordia taetra’ type after one of its earliest and best-known instances in the Annales of Ennius . The rarity of this type of line-ending is clear in Vergil; there are only 16 examples, regardless of whether the adjective is emphatic or not, in the 9890 lines of the Aeneid. Such a select and easily-defined phenomenon might prove a yardstick of some interest in the history of the Latin hexameter, for it seems to raise a number of questions to which the answers would be significant and useful. Is this type of ending avoided equally by all poets? Is there an increasing tendency to avoid it as time goes on? Is it associated with any particular genres of hexameter poetry? Do poets tend to use in it the same words or phrases as their predecessors? To discover the answers, this article will look at the ‘Discordia taetra’ phenomenon in Latin hexameter poetry, defining it as the instance where a noun ending in a short vowel is immediately succeeded by an adjective of similar ending and in agreement at the end of the hexameter, and where such a noun is not a substantivised adjective and such an adjective is neither predicative nor a participle. (shrink)

The Zaydī-Muʿtazilī interaction, which dates back to the early periods, increased when The Būyid vizier al-Ṣāḥib b. ʿAbbād invited Qāḍī ʿAbd al-Jabbār to Rayy and many Caspian Zaydī scholars studied with Qāḍī. Ibn Sharwīn, who is mentioned among the students of Qāḍī ʿAbd al-Jabbār and accepted as one of the Zaydī- Muʿtazilī scholars, is one of these names. The works of Ibn Sharwīn, who had writings in the field of kalām and fiqh, did not remain within the borders of the (...) Caspian and reached the Zaydīs of Yemen; one of these works is Ḥaqāʾiq al-ashyāʾ. Considering that, unlike other theological schools, there are not many works on the definitions of theological concepts in Muʿtazilī literature and -as far as is known- did not reach today, this treatise helps to understand better especially the terms in Zaydī- Muʿtazilī theology and the effects of Bahshamiyya on Zaydī thought. This work, edited and translated based on the only extant manuscript only manuscript found in Yemen and a previous publication, on the one hand, is important in understanding the point of view of Zaydī- Muʿtazilī thought on the disciplines of theology, jurisprudence, debate, history of Islamic sects, on the other hand, it is a helpful resource for understanding the terms used in the theory of aḥwāl, which is still an intricate issue. Ibn Sharwīn in his Ḥaqāʾiq al-ashyāʾ; explains over 150 terms in relation to cosmology such as substance, accident, line, surface, space; to ontology such as existing, non-existence, originated (muḥdath); to epistemology such as knowledge, creed, ignorance, doubt, skepticism, obligatory and acquired knowledge; to methodology such as evidence, madlūl, debate, and disputation; to fiqh such as sunnah, farḍ, mandūb, cause, command-prohibition, general-particular (ʿumūm-ḫuṣūṣ); to the history of sects such as ʿadliyya, compulsionists (mujbira) and qadarī; to divinity such as the oneness of God (tawhīd); to justice such as promise and threat (al-waʿd wa-l-waʿīd), good and evil, necessary and acquired, grace, compensation, repentance, major and minor sins; to the theory of al-aḥwāl such as attribute of the essence, determinant (muḳtaḍī), entail (muḳtaḍā), muṣaḥḥiḥ, cause. Describing ḥadd that corresponds to “definition” and ḥaḳīḳat that he used together with it as collectively exhaustive, mutually exclusive, Ibn Sharwīn defines knowledge, power, living (ḥayy), speech (kalām), speaker (mutakallim), permanent (bāqī) etc. in a way that is true for both God and human beings. While making these definitions, he draws on poems, linguistic usages and verses and divides the nouns into three parts at the end of his work, namely linguistic, religious and conventional (sharʿī and waḍʿī); in particular, he gives detailed information about metaphors and parts of truth. Another striking aspect of the work is the explanation of the meanings of the imperative mood which is included in the subjects of the Methodology of Fiqh. (shrink)

Medieval and early modern devotional works rarely receive serious treatment from philosophers, even those working in the subfields of philosophy of religion or the history of ideas. In this article, I examine one medieval devotional work in particular—the Middle High German image- and verse-program, Christus und die minnende Seele —and I argue that it can plausibly be viewed as a form of medieval public philosophy, one that both exhibited and encouraged philosophical innovation. I address a few objections to (...) my proposal—namely, that CMS is neither public enough nor that it counts as proper philosophy—and I attempt to defend CMS’s public philosophical credentials in light of these objections. I conclude with a brief discussion of how devotional texts like CMS can help us do innovative public philosophy today. (shrink)

Comparison of literary passages is a critical procedure much favoured by Gellius, and is the main theme in several chapters of his Noctes Atticae: ch. 2.23 is dedicated to a comparison of Menander's and Caecilius′ versions of the Plocium; 2.27 to a confrontation of passages from Demosthenes and Sallust; in 9.9 Vergilian verses are compared with their originals in Theocritus and Homer; parts of speeches by the elder Cato, C. Gracchus and Cicero are contrasted in 10.3; two of Vergil's verses (...) are again compared with their supposed models in ch. 11.4; a segment of Ennius′ Hecuba is contrasted with its Euripidean original in 13.27; Cato's and Musonius′ formulations of a similar sententia are confronted in 16.1; in 17.10 Vergil's description of Etna is compared to Pindar's; the value of Latin erotic poetry is weighed against the Greek in ch. 19.9, in which an Anacreontean poem and four Latin epigrams are cited; and finally in 19.11 a ‘Platonic' distich is set side by side with its Latin adaptation, composed by an anonymous friend of Gellius, though in this case no comparison of the poems is attempted. (shrink)

There are many narrations about the Stories of the Prophets in basic hadith, tafsir and historical sources. In addition to the Qur'an, some information about the stories of the prophets is contained in the Torah and the Bible. The stories of the Prophet were known to Jews and Christians before the advent of Islam. Even the Arabs of the jahiliyyah period had some knowledge about the parables. When the revelation about the stories of the Prophet was revealed, the polytheists were (...) extremely disturbed by it and "esâtîru'l-evvelîn" was used to describe these stories as the tales of the past tribes. Apart from the verses in the Qur'an about the stories of the Prophet, both the hadiths in the hadith sources and the narrations in the historical sources, some of this information was authentic information, while some of it consisted of fabricated information. Among these narrations, there are weak narrations such as Isrâiliyyât, as well as sound ones. It is important how the authors who wrote the works of Kasasu'l-Enbiyâ were affected by the hadiths in the main sources and whether they included these narrations in their works. Therefore, in this study, some hadiths related to the Stories of the Prophets in the Kitâbu'l-Anbiyâ section of Sahîhu'l-Bukhârî, which is one of the most important hadith works and accepted as the most reliable book after the Qur'an, were tried to be examined. In particular, some narrations that the authors of Kasasu'l-Enbiyâ's works were not included in their works, although they were mentioned in Sahîhu'l-Bukhârî, were discussed. In fact, there are many hadiths related to the subject in Sahihu'l-Bukhari. However, in this study, six narrations that were not mentioned by the authors of history, tafsir and Kasasu'l-Anbiya were mentioned. While referring to the aforementioned narrations, no analysis of the hadiths was made in order not to go beyond the scope of the subject and not to exceed the limits of the study. The reasons why these narrations are not references in the Kasasu'l-Anbiya literature are emphasized. Thus, these narrations, which are not mentioned in Kasasu'l-Enbiya's works but are mentioned in the Kitabu'l-Anbiyâ section of Sahîhu'l-Bukhârî, are examined and their source status for the stories of the Prophet is examined. (shrink)

The paper focuses attention on Jerome’s interpretation of Ps. 15,8 in Tractatus in psalmum 15. After an introduction dealing with the right way to translate the verse according to Hebraica veritas, which shows his philological skills, he reveals his exegesis. The opening and concluding parts of this exegesis follow closely the Origen’s Homily on Psalm 15, but the long central section about the righteous highlights the particularity of Jerome’s exegesis; he uses other interpretations of Origen’s, but subordinates them to (...) his own concerns to achieve original results. The study offers further proofs in favour of a proposal for dating this text. (shrink)