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 Topic: Qur'anic studies today

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  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #870 - June 05, 2016, 12:46 PM

    Has the change from Roman to Arabic numerals anything to do with the success of Islam in the 600's?

    that is an interesting  point moi., I wonder about the  origins Arabic language and Arabic Numerals., Sure languages  around the planet are not static .. they borrow and grow from each other languages that may be due to folks  culturally closer yet different in their languages..

    Do not let silence become your legacy.. Question everything   
    I renounced my faith to become a kafir, 
    the beloved betrayed me and turned in to  a Muslim
     
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #871 - June 05, 2016, 04:08 PM

    They are actually Indian numerals, one of the great contributions of the wonderful Indian mathematical tradition. 

    An artifact of the transmission of ancient culture/science to Europe through Islam is that the monumental contributions of Indians/Persians/Syriac Christians got overwritten and attributed to "Arabs."

    Much of what we think of as the "Islamic golden age" was really the flowering of Persian-Indian-Syriac culture within a climate of Arab political patronage.
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #872 - June 05, 2016, 11:05 PM

    Hence why I mentioned systems rather than the religion itself.
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #873 - June 06, 2016, 02:25 AM

    I read up on it, and I'm surprised that is was so slow to spread.

    The system was invented in India at least a couple of hundred years (or four?) pre-Mo, and yet the first Middle Eastern description seems to be the Persian mathematician Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī in 825.

    It only spread to Europe in the middle ages (Moors in the 11th century and Fibonacci, year 1200), and for some uses, roman numerals are still used today (clock faces, dating and the like).

    It is incredible that it can be so slow to change. To be honest, roman numerals stink!
    Even simple calculations are complicated compared to a positional decimal system.
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #874 - June 06, 2016, 02:35 AM

    People learn maths as very young children and it's harder to make adults learn new ways of doing something that basic. There are Egyptian ways of doing several calculations that are at least as simple as the ways we do them now, and were refined over millennia; but these ways require unlearning our habits. (David Reimer, Count like an Egyptian).

    Also when Romans (or Greeks, who have their own hideous numeric system) had to do calculations, they used an abacus and didn't bother jotting down sums on paper, which was very expensive anyway.

    So Roman numerals were just used for display purposes, and no-one saw an immediate need to replace them. Inertia won.
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #875 - June 07, 2016, 01:43 AM

    Devin Stewart reviews Carlos A. Segovia, The Quranic Noah and the Making of the Islamic Prophet:
    http://enochseminar.org/review/10026

    Comments have a response by Segovia.
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #876 - June 07, 2016, 10:13 AM

    ^
    Quote from: Carlos Segovia
    ....
    my first field of specialisation was the philosophy of religion, from which I turned a few years ago – after examining the works of several Islamic philosophers like Avicenna and Mulla Sadra with an eye put on their interpretation of scripture – to study the history of religious ideas in early Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and their intertwinings. And it was, from very early on, the almost complete lack of theoretical sophistication exhibited by many modern quranic scholars – in contrast to their biblical counterparts – what puzzled and challenged me to approach the Qur’ān with a hyper-critical lens.

    By “lack of theoretical sophistication” I mean, for instance, the refusal to admit the authorship and explore the editorship of the quranic corpus, i.e. the notion that its constituting Grundschriften have no author(s) and were never edited; or, similarly, the presumption that the Qur’ān was preserved by oral tradition despite its numerous scribal markers.
    ....
    following Wansbrough, I take the Qur’ān to be a multilayered collection of independent texts. Yet in my opinion this does not need to be proved, as it is quite patent. To merely consider the Noah narratives, why would anyone write seven different but overlapping versions of the same story within the same document? Of course, one may fancy that a single prophet delivered them as successive speeches on different occasions, but the view that there is a single voice behind all such narratives – if there is a voice rather than a pen behind them – remains too speculative, as we have no indication thereof. Now, the same reasoning can be applied to the whole corpus, which comprises more than 6,000 verses of which only 4 (all arguably later interpolations) mention Muḥammad by his own name. The burden of the proof, therefore, lies on those scholars who, following the Muslim tradition, envisage the document as being unitary.
    ....

  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #877 - June 07, 2016, 02:16 PM

    Holland comments that one of the first bits of evidence of the existence of Islam is a receipt with a date on it of 50.

    I do not know what numeric system was used to write that, but I think it is important to try and work out what if anything much was different about these particular raiders, or is the vast majority of it myth  written by the victors to explain their success.

    When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.


    A.A. Milne,

    "We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #878 - June 07, 2016, 02:18 PM

    I mean, were they really apocalyptic, and introduced a new calendar as a way of counting down to the day of judgement?

    When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.


    A.A. Milne,

    "We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #879 - June 07, 2016, 03:27 PM

    At a guess the calendar sounds more political, counting from when they launched their own state rather than from the beginnings of Greek rule in the region (AD dating hadn't really come into use at this point).
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #880 - June 07, 2016, 03:56 PM

    In the beginning the dating was the year of the "arabs", arabs under different denominations (see Kerr´s article: https://www.academia.edu/2629114/Islam_Arabs_and_the_Hijra

    But the Syrians also called the arabs Tayaye. Does anyone know which geographical region was assigned to the "tayaye"? Does it correspond with a known city?
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #881 - June 07, 2016, 04:24 PM

    ^Jan Retsö on the use of 'tayaye': https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=pUepRuQO8ZkC&pg=PA98&lpg=PA98&dq=tayyaye+arabs&source=bl&ots=6nwzOy-x1u&sig=B_PSS-YU8us7fdiooAZjHrngaKU&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiQ55LFqJbNAhUILsAKHd7mAW4Q6AEIGjAA#v=onepage&q=tayyaye%20arabs&f=false
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #882 - June 07, 2016, 05:45 PM

    Thanks Zeca,

    M. Penn showed in his video that  also the earliest Syriac sources  (mid 7C) called the new conquerers Tayaye. Would the heartland of these conquerers then not most likely be around the Syrian desert (=Jan Retso´s localisation of the Tataye)? These Tayaye must have had their initial homelands somewhere serving as a recruitment "reservoir" of soldiers...

    Is it likely that with Tayaye the Mecca region would have been meant?

    Isnt it unlikely that the "Syriac" inhabitants of the region wouldn´t know where these people came from and just "misnamed" them?
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #883 - June 07, 2016, 11:09 PM

    Philip Jenkins reviews Penn's Envisioning Islam and When Christians First Met Muslims

    http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/2015/sepoct/among-hagarenes.html?paging=off
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #884 - June 08, 2016, 02:38 PM

    Gabriel Said Reynolds reviews Hoyland's In God's Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire

    https://www.academia.edu/25986168/Review_of_R._Hoyland_In_God_s_Path_The_Arab_Conquests_and_the_Creation_of_an_Islamic_Empire_
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #885 - June 08, 2016, 04:24 PM

    Fred Donner's take on the Islamic era/calendar: https://remmm.revues.org/7085
    Quote
    The dating era that we usually call the “Islamic” or “hijra” era, beginning in the year 622 CE, provides another interesting example of an effort to project “Islamic” values back to the beginning of the Believers’ movement through creative re-naming. For the historian, there are two very striking facts about this era or dating system. The first fact is that we find it already in place at a very early time in the history of the community. There are quite a number of actual documents from the first “Islamic” century that provide an exact date as part of the document’s text—these include papyri, inscriptions, and, above all, thousands of coins minted by the leaders of the Believers’ movement or by their subordinates. Some of these documents are astonishingly early, including some early papyri dating to the year 22 (Bell, 1928). This fact obviously has very important implications for our understanding of the nature of the early Believers’ movement. In recent years some scholars have argued that Islam first emerged as the consequence not of an organized movement of some kind, but as the result of a series of fortuitous accidents: the collapse of the great empires, the conquest of parts of their territory by uncoordinated tribes of Arabian nomads, etc. (Sharon 1988; Nevo and Koren, 2003; Popp 2005). But it is difficult to defend the idea that the expansion of Muḥammad’s community was some kind of “accident,” that is, that is was the consequence of a haphazard series of unrelated events, in light of the existence of a uniform system of dating, which implies that there was some kind of central ideology underlying the movement. The mere existence of a single, new dating system does not tell us what this ideology may have been—perhaps it was related to apocalypticism?—but it does support the contention that the expansion was the result of some kind of coordinated movement.

    The second striking fact about this era or dating system, however, is really just as revealing for the historian: it is that most of the early datings provide only the year (or day, month, and year), but do not provide the name of the era itself. That is, a document will say simply something like, “This was written in the year 55,” without any indication of the era—year 55 of what. Later Islamic tradition, of course, claims that these dates are in what we usually call the “hijra era,” that is, that the era commemorates the prophet Muḥammad’s hijra or emigration from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE. This event marked the moment when the Believers’ movement first assumed the status of an autonomous political community, and would indeed be a very appropriate starting-point for the community of Believers’ dating system. But the fact remains that none of the early documents—no single one—uses the term hijra to designate the era. A very few, however, do designate the era, but using another term: a papyrus in the Louvre, for example, refers to “the year 42 min qaḍâ’ al-mu’minîn”, “in the jurisdiction of the Believers” (Râġib, 2007), and a few others with this terminology are found in Vienna. This provides us with further documentary confirmation that the members of the community founded by Muḥammad at first thought of themselves as “Believers,” and that for a half-century at least they viewed their government as being a manifestation and application this concept of righteous Belief. But the question then becomes: when did the association of this era with the hijra, rather than with the Believers’ movement, begin? One simply does not find the term “years of the hijra” used in documents from the first “hijra” century, and the learned papyrologist Yûsuf Râghib has suggested to me that it may not really begin to appear in papyri until the third century “of the hijra” (personal communication, 2008). It is all the more striking that the era is not linked to the word hijra until so late, since it has been suggested that the term hijra was used in the early community to refer to military service (Crone, 1994); this is presumably why the Believers are first referred to by some seventh-century Greek and Syriac sources as hagarenoi and mhaggrâyē, derived from the Arabic muhâjirûn, “those who make hijra.” It seems, then, that in this case, too, we have an example of a later attempt to associate a well-established practice—the practice of dating—with the prophet Muḥammad (through his hijra). Renaming the era as that of the hijra enhanced the legitimacy of the practice of dating itself, and of the community and state that was associated with the practice, in terms that were “Islamic”—that is, tied to the prophet and Qur’ân—but in this case, perhaps just as important, the renaming helped efface the memory of the more ecumenical nature of the early community as a “Believers’ movement.”

  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #886 - June 08, 2016, 07:37 PM

    Would going back to the oldest source on hijra (that is the Quran) and have a new look at the reading of the rasm, in a comparative study with other semitic languages, be a step too far for most scholars? Could this shed some light on the enigma?
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #887 - June 08, 2016, 08:01 PM

    Not really.  There's not much lack of clarity over the semantics of hijrah ... it clearly refers to an act of leaving or departure.  The problem is determining what that leaving/departure refers to.  The root is used 31 times in the Qur'an:

    http://corpus.quran.com/qurandictionary.jsp?q=hjr#

    Almost always the concept is used in a context of believers who are leaving their homeland in order 'to fight for Allah,' as part of a militant expansion, which is quite consistent with how it seems to have been used in the earliest historical references (as Donner says), and quite inconsistent with the idea that it originally designated the migration of a small group of peaceful monotheists from Mecca to Medina.

    For me, the hijrah has always been the single least plausible central element of the traditional biography of Muhammad--used to explain why the corpus strangely shifts from a powerless, peaceful, passive, timeless context to a much more specific contemporary context in which joining in jihad is a consuming obligation.  The hijrah biographical device does not make a lick of sense on its face, and has no support in the Qur'an itself (which seems completely oblivious to a supposed epochal mass exodus of a Meccan community) or the historical record.

    Only in Qur'anic Studies would such a transition within a corpus still be interpreted biographically.
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #888 - June 10, 2016, 05:41 PM

    A couple superb new book reviews by Guillaume Dye, in French.  The first one is particularly interesting and spicy.

    https://www.academia.edu/26038946/compte-rendu_de_Catherine_Pennacchio_Les_emprunts_%C3%A0_lh%C3%A9breu_et_au_jud%C3%A9o-aram%C3%A9en_dans_le_Coran

    https://www.academia.edu/26038977/compte-rendu_de_Gideon_Avni_The_Byzantine-Islamic_Transition_in_Palestine._An_Archaeological_Approach
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #889 - June 12, 2016, 07:52 AM

    The Taʾwīlāt ahl al-sunna of al-Māturīdī, an exegete contemporaneous with al-Ṭabarī, is now available in three editions; we have no excuse for not consulting it. But the issue is not merely a matter of inspecting yet another of the Qur'an commentaries available. Rather, as will become apparent in this article, we have in the work of al-Māturīdī a fundamental early work that will revolutionise how we understand the development of the genre of tafsīr in medieval Islam. Recognising the central significance of the Taʾwīlāt will allow us to incorporate it as a major source alongside al-Ṭabarī, and will have profound implications for how we have been studying al-Ṭabarī and tafsīr as a whole. Tafsīr seen through the Taʾwīlāt al-Qurʾān looks different; it was pursued differently and speaks to a manner of doing tafsīr that al-Ṭabarī pretended did not exist. Al-Ṭabarī’s work must be read alongside al-Māturīdī’s: only then will we be able to fully grasp the significance of what al-Ṭabarī achieved. When read in this light, al-Ṭabarī is shown to be far more ideological, far more radical in his work, than we have hitherto realised. He was not gathering the Sunnī collective memory so much as reshaping it. Therefore, his work should be regarded as a representative of one particular type of tafsīr activity, rather than as the epitome of mainstream Sunnī Qur'an interpretation.

    https://www.academia.edu/26017706/Rereading_al-%E1%B9%ACabar%C4%AB_through_al-M%C4%81tur%C4%ABd%C4%AB_New_Light_on_the_Third_Century_Hijr%C4%AB
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #890 - June 12, 2016, 10:25 AM

    Not really.  There's not much lack of clarity over the semantics of hijrah ... it clearly refers to an act of leaving or departure.  The problem is determining what that leaving/departure refers to.  The root is used 31 times in the Qur'an:

    http://corpus.quran.com/qurandictionary.jsp?q=hjr#

    Almost always the concept is used in a context of believers who are leaving their homeland in order 'to fight for Allah,' as part of a militant expansion, which is quite consistent with how it seems to have been used in the earliest historical references (as Donner says), and quite inconsistent with the idea that it originally designated the migration of a small group of peaceful monotheists from Mecca to Medina.

    For me, the hijrah has always been the single least plausible central element of the traditional biography of Muhammad--used to explain why the corpus strangely shifts from a powerless, peaceful, passive, timeless context to a much more specific contemporary context in which joining in jihad is a consuming obligation.  The hijrah biographical device does not make a lick of sense on its face, and has no support in the Qur'an itself (which seems completely oblivious to a supposed epochal mass exodus of a Meccan community) or the historical record.

    Only in Qur'anic Studies would such a transition within a corpus still be interpreted biographically.


    Maybe the military service idea is correct?  What did the afghani rebels against the soviets call themselves?  Is Islam actually a military sect - the concept of assassin and the practice of ISIS would seem to support that idea, with the concept of the religion of peace becoming classic propaganda?  The Quran as a propaganda device?

    When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.


    A.A. Milne,

    "We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #891 - June 12, 2016, 10:28 AM

    The dating then becomes explicable as many other militarily minded folk use similar devices - year zero.

    Quote
    The term Year Zero (Khmer: ឆ្នាំសូន្យ chhnam saun), applied to the takeover of Cambodia in April 1975, by the Khmer Rouge, is an analogy to the Year One of the French Revolutionary Calendar. During the French Revolution, after the abolition of the French monarchy (September 20, 1792), the National Convention instituted a new calendar and declared the beginning of the Year I


    Wiki

    When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.


    A.A. Milne,

    "We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #892 - June 12, 2016, 10:34 AM

    Has anyone asked if Islamic religious practices and beliefs have military advantages?  May they be understood as a form of basic training, like taichi?

    When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.


    A.A. Milne,

    "We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #893 - June 12, 2016, 04:04 PM

    Quote from: moi
    Has anyone asked if Islamic religious practices and beliefs have military advantages?

    I suppose these articles by Patricia Crone are relevant:

    The First-Century Concept of Hiğra

    'Jihad': Idea and History
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #894 - June 12, 2016, 05:04 PM

    The Taʾwīlāt ahl al-sunna of al-Māturīdī, an exegete contemporaneous with al-Ṭabarī

    That's a good article.

    I admit I've not used Maturidi (nor Muqatil) much; whenever I've had to crossreference something in Tabari the first place I've turned was Ibn Abi Hatim. Ibn Abi Hatim's tafsir is if anything even more isnad-heavy than Tabari's. The Abu Hatim family struck me as scholars of the ahl al-hadith in general; that was their "thing".

    Which makes me wonder why Ibn Abi Hatim bothered. Family honour? "Look at this upstart from a province that was full of pagans just a century ago, when my dad spent his life collecting all this stuff"?
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #895 - June 12, 2016, 05:12 PM

    Quote from: Ian David Morris
    3 volumes of Patricia Crone’s collected studies are now available as nauseatingly expensive e-books. Tell your library to get them.

    https://mobile.twitter.com/iandavidmorris/status/741943112478695424
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #896 - June 13, 2016, 09:48 AM

    Walid Saleh - The Etymological Fallacy and Quranic Studies: Muhammad, Paradise and Late Antiquity

    http://www.safarmer.com/Indo-Eurasian/Walid_Saleh.pdf

    Other articles by Walid Saleh

    http://utoronto.academia.edu/WalidSaleh

    Edit: From skimming through some of the articles he does seem oddly attached to traditional narratives. Some biographical and academic details here.
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #897 - June 13, 2016, 11:25 AM

    The link for that Walid Saleh article came from Tom Holland:
    Quote
    An odd thing about Islamic homophobia is that the quranic paradise promises the attentions of cupbearers who may well derive from Ganymede

    https://mobile.twitter.com/holland_tom/status/742248619085025280

    https://mobile.twitter.com/iandavidmorris/status/742276132842659840

    For discussion of Ganymede, and Greek pagan influence on the Qur'anic conception of paradise, see page 51 onwards of Saleh's article. This is worth reading even if you don't have an interest in Saleh's other arguments.
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #898 - June 13, 2016, 11:44 AM

    Crone discusses a soldier and his family moving to a garrison town, and the sifting of a conquered or to be conquered population into various categories of full fighting Muslims, part time and non Muslim tax payers.

    But this sounds like a critical military innovation towards a total war society.

    Has anyone looked at what feels like several iterations on Sun Tzu?

    When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.


    A.A. Milne,

    "We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #899 - June 13, 2016, 08:17 PM

    Carlos Segovia - Discussing/Subverting Paul: Polemical Re-readings and Competing Supersessionist Misreadings of Pauline Inclusivism in Late Antiquity: A Case Study on the Apocalypse of Abraham, Justin Martyr, and the Qur'ān

    http://www.academia.edu/1905994/Discussing_Subverting_Paul_Polemical_Re-readings_and_Competing_Supersessionist_Misreadings_of_Pauline_Inclusivism_in_Late_Antiquity_A_Case_Study_on_the_Apocalypse_of_Abraham_Justin_Martyr_and_the_Qurān_2014_Conference_Paper_Book_Chapter
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