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Theme Changer

 Topic: Random Islamic History Posts

 (Read 191540 times)
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  • Random Islamic History Posts
     Reply #390 - July 19, 2017, 09:39 AM



    Nur Sobers-Khan - The Shahnameh as propaganda for World War II

    http://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2013/05/the-shahnameh-as-propaganda-for-world-war-ii.html
  • Random Islamic History Posts
     Reply #391 - July 24, 2017, 08:23 AM

    Thread on the origins of monotheism: https://mobile.twitter.com/SethLSanders/status/889003332018110464
  • Random Islamic History Posts
     Reply #392 - July 24, 2017, 08:30 AM



    Peter Webb on Ibn Qutaybah - When Arabophones weren’t Arabs: Ibn Qutaybah and identity formation during the early period of Islam

    https://arablit.org/2017/07/24/when-arabophones-werent-arabs-ibn-qutaybah-and-identity-formation-during-the-early-period-of-islam/amp/
    Quote
    Peter Webb, a lecturer in Arabic literature and culture at the University of Leiden, is author of Imagining the Arabs: Arab Identity and the Rise of Islam (2016), and editor-translator of the entertaining second part of the Library of Arabic Literature’s The Excellence of the Arabs, “Excellence of Arab Learning.”

    In our two-part discussion with the translator of the first half, Sarah Savant ... we talked about the challenges of translating Ibn Qutaybah, his central place in Western scholarship, and his apparent incapacity for humor.

    In this first part of a two-part discussion, Webb speaks talks about the construction of Arab identity during the early period of Islam, the importance of translating Ibn Quataybah, and why this book should be interesting to those who study medieval history.

    Quote from: Peter Webb
    ....
    when Ibn Qutaybah was writing, the elites of the caliphate were really dropping the whole notion that we need to be proper Arabs, and the idea that kinship with Arabs was related to legitimate political authority.

    What was more at stake at this point was more of a cultural question. Which was: Looking back, over the three-hundred-year history that they were aware of in the ninth century, they knew there had been a Persian Empire, and a Byzantine Empire—which they called the Romans—and that the Arabs were a people somewhat apart from this, in Arabia.

    The conquest had happened, Islamization had occurred, and then a cultural question came: Which of these ancestors of our Iraqi civilization were better? And a number of the people who had written before Ibn Qutaybah had made an argument that maybe the Persians were superior—that they had been militarily defeated by the Muslim conquerors, but that they’d had a greater civilization and culture.

    This is an important point. Because if the Persians were greater, does that mean we should drop some of the things that come along with Arabness? Does that mean that Islam was an outsider religion? What they needed to try to do, in response, was articulate a system where they could be proud of the Islamic heritage and not have to look down on Arabs culturally.

    The solution was: If we conceptualize the Arabs not as necessarily ourselves, but as this imagined community in pre-Islamic Arabia, and if we think about them as a people who have a peculiar culture and peculiar kinds of knowledge that are separate and independent from all other civilizations, then there’s no point in comparing them to the Persians or the Byzantines. Because what the Arabs were good at was separate from what the Persians or what the Byzantines were good at.

    Therefore, you can’t look down on the Arabs anymore, because you’re not comparing like to like. Now, what you can say is that these were a worthy people who participated in knowledge and learning. They didn’t necessarily have the same book culture or urban culture that the Persians and the Byzantines had. But they had their own good culture. Then they came in and brought Islam, and now we are all proud beneficiaries of this.
    ....
    What the book does, somewhat deftly, is say that the Arabs had a very learned culture before Islam. This learned culture was different from all the other civilizations, but it was certainly not inferior. And in fact, you could make the point that it was superior, in terms of their knowledge of language, their knowledge of natural phenomena, their poetry.

    They articulated a sense of Arab culture around an idealized Bedouin community. And that, which was then attached to Islam, became the stereotype of the Arabs ever since. That’s one of the interesting legacies of the book, because today it’s very common for people to associate Arab identity with the desert, and we do that because we trace the genealogy of our thinking about Arabs, and it goes back many hundreds of years, to early Europeans who read books like this one, that were adamant that Arab culture was a Bedouin thing.

    So these Bedouin stereotypes have been much embedded in our thinking, thanks to the fact that we’ve read these kinds of books—that were creating a Bedouin stereotype relevant to ninth-century urban Iraqis.
    ....
    I think people who are interested in the idea of Arab identity should look at this book because Arab identity is a big topic, but what’s intriguing is that people are very quick to see the constructedness and the weird contours of Arab identity in the modern era, but we kind of assume that in the old days, Arabs were Arabs, and they were desert people.

    Reading pre-modern texts about Arabness is quite important to help us see where this identity came from, how Arab identity was constructed. It’s important to open up the pre-modern period to more inquiry about the roots of Arab identity. The stereotypes we hold about Arabs today are directly relatable to books like these. So the more we know about them, and the more we understand about why they were created, the better we can appraise Arabness as an identity today.

    The book should also be interesting to  people who study medieval history of the rest of the world, because this was a time, in the post-Roman world, in which the identities of the modern European nations — the Franks, the Anglo Saxons, and even German identities — were being constructed in Europe. It’s really at the same time that Arabness was being constructed in the Middle East, so from a comparative perspective of the birth of modern nations, this book would be very helpful to people who know a lot about how Anglo Saxon identity was constructed, for instance. I think it would probably be very intriguing for them to look at how Arabness was being constructed.

    I think medievalists in general might otherwise take the idea of Arab identity as something fixed. But we’ll see, in this sort of book, that it was anything but. The same sort of processes that were happening in Europe were going on in the East as well.

  • Random Islamic History Posts
     Reply #393 - July 24, 2017, 01:26 PM

    (Clicky for piccy!)

    Nur Sobers-Khan - The Shahnameh as propaganda for World War II



    http://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2013/05/the-shahnameh-as-propaganda-for-world-war-ii.html

    that is nonsense and very imaginative with little relevance to 2nd worldwar..  did she(Nur Sobers-Khan) really that ?

    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
     
  • Random Islamic History Posts
     Reply #394 - July 29, 2017, 10:37 PM

    Hassan Farhang Ansari - Patricia Crone’s Contribution to Iranian Studies

    https://www.ias.edu/ideas/2017/ansari-iranian-studies
  • Random Islamic History Posts
     Reply #395 - July 30, 2017, 01:28 AM

    re Farhang Ansari's article,
    Quote
    While traditional scholarship has focused on the cosmopolitan centers and elitist circles among the ethnic Iranian population during the ʿAbbāsid period (and beyond), Crone opted in addition to this for another, entirely different, approach to studying the “two centuries of silence.” She followed the lead of Ghulām Ḥusayn Ṣadīqī in his Ph.D. dissertation of 1938, “Les mouvements religieux iraniens aux IIe et IIIe siècles de l'Hégire,” but went well beyond Ṣadīqī’s pioneering work. Instead of focusing only on the elites, Crone studied the various rebel movements that, according to her view, were led by formerly acculturated Iranian natives who, in their disappointment of being unable to gain recognition in the eyes of the Arab conquerors, turned to their past, its culture, and its religious and societal values. The majority among them did not originate in the urban cosmopolitan centers of Iran but rather in rural areas, this being another unusual focus of Crone’s work. It is this approach that renders her work highly original.

    Zarrīnkūb's "Two Centuries of Silence", which as zeca (I think) and I noted above is translated into English now, had studied those rebel movements as well. It's just that Zarrīnkūb was engaged in an Iranian nationalist project and not a scholarly one.

    UPDATE: https://www.councilofexmuslims.com/index.php?topic=30822.msg867041#msg867041. Not "above"; different thread.
  • Random Islamic History Posts
     Reply #396 - August 03, 2017, 06:42 PM

    Alan Mikhail - The moment in history when Muslims began to see dogs as dirty, impure, and evil

    https://qz.com/1038116/the-moment-in-history-when-muslims-began-to-see-dogs-as-dirty-impure-and-evil/

    But see the comments from Sean Anthony here: https://mobile.twitter.com/mizan_project/status/893153739313471488
  • Random Islamic History Posts
     Reply #397 - August 03, 2017, 11:07 PM

    Quote from: Sean Anthony link=twitter.com/shahanSean/status/893170012999036928
    1/ Sorry to say, but the article's claim that negative attitudes towards dogs r modern is quite ignorant. Just read Mālik’s Muwaṭṭaʾ.

    Once again I call shenanigans on Twitter quotes here because I still don't have Twitter (or Gab etc).

    I am looking at Shaybāni's Muwaṭṭaʾ. In it I find a rule that one may kill a wild (or rabid) dog with no repercussions: 5.17.426-7. Otherwise I find an 'Umarid rule that one may eat the catch of a hunting-dog: 8.16.657. And here is 17.39.933, Mālik < Sumayy < Abu Salih al-Sammām < Abu Hurayra <
    Quote from: the Messenger of Allah (saw)
    While a man was walking on the road he became terribly thirsty and then he found a well, and so he climbed down into it and drank. Then he came out and found a dog panting, eating the soil from thirst. So he said, 'this dog is as thirsty as I was,' and so he climbed down into the well and filled his leathern sock [sic], held it tight in his mouth until he had climbed out and gave the dog to drink. Allah accepted his action and forgave him.


    On the one hand, I can allow that Mālik didn't much like dogs himself, using one here as a case for the general principle of being a good person who is kind to animals, even dogs. But elsewhere I gather that the first Hanafis and the family of  'Umar had no problem with dogs.
  • Random Islamic History Posts
     Reply #398 - August 04, 2017, 05:30 PM

    Mizan Journal volume 2 issue 1: The Evolution and Uses of the Stories of the Prophets

    http://www.mizanproject.org/journal-issue/the-evolution-and-uses-of-the-stories-of-the-prophets/
  • Random Islamic History Posts
     Reply #399 - August 07, 2017, 09:54 AM

    Forthcoming book

    Nikolay Antov - The Ottoman "Wild West": The Balkan Frontier in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

    https://www.amazon.com/Ottoman-Wild-West-Fifteenth-Sixteenth/dp/1107182638
    Quote
    In the late fifteenth century, the north-eastern Balkans were under-populated and under-institutionalized. Yet, by the end of the following century, the regions of Deliorman and Gerlovo were home to one of the largest Muslim populations in southeast Europe. Nikolay Antov sheds fresh light on the mechanics of Islamization along the Ottoman frontier, and presents an instructive case study of the 'indigenization' of Islam - the process through which Islam, in its diverse doctrinal and socio-cultural manifestations, became part of a distinct regional landscape. Simultaneously, Antov uses a wide array of administrative, narrative-literary, and legal sources, exploring the perspectives of both the imperial center and regional actors in urban, rural, and nomadic settings, to trace the transformation of the Ottoman polity from a frontier principality into a centralized empire. Contributing to the further understanding of Balkan Islam, state formation and empire building, this unique text will appeal to those studying Ottoman, Balkan, and Islamic World history.

  • Random Islamic History Posts
     Reply #400 - August 08, 2017, 11:43 AM

    Imitation Islamic dirham issued by the Khazars: https://mobile.twitter.com/caitlinrgreen/status/894321475548831744
  • Random Islamic History Posts
     Reply #401 - August 08, 2017, 12:31 PM

    Imitation Islamic dirham issued by the Khazars: https://mobile.twitter.com/caitlinrgreen/status/894321475548831744


    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
     
  • Random Islamic History Posts
     Reply #402 - August 11, 2017, 08:46 AM

    Palimpsests from St Catherine's Monastery: https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/536313/
  • Random Islamic History Posts
     Reply #403 - August 12, 2017, 09:10 AM

    David Vishanoff - A Critical Introduction to Islamic Legal Theory: a critical edition, English translation, and new commentary on Imām al‑Ḥaramayn al-Juwaynī’s Leaflet on the Sources of Law (Kitāb al‑Waraqāt fī uṣūl al‑fiqh)

    http://waraqat.vishanoff.com
  • Random Islamic History Posts
     Reply #404 - August 14, 2017, 09:22 PM

    Frank Griffel - Contradictions and Lots of Ambiguity: Two New Perspectives on Premodern (and Postclassical) Islamic Societies. Review Article of Shahab Ahmed's "What is Islam?" and Thomas Bauer's "Die Kultur der Ambiguität."

    https://www.academia.edu/34191619/Contradictions_and_Lots_of_Ambiguity_Two_New_Perspectives_on_Premodern_and_Postclassical_Islamic_Societies._Review_Article_of_Shahab_Ahmeds_What_is_Islam_and_Thomas_Bauers_Die_Kultur_der_Ambiguität._
  • Random Islamic History Posts
     Reply #405 - August 16, 2017, 08:09 AM

    Fighting Nazis – Middle Eastern and Islamic Style: https://cmes.uchicago.edu/page/cmes-comments
  • Random Islamic History Posts
     Reply #406 - August 20, 2017, 04:51 PM

    Thread on the overthrow of Mossadegh (Iran, 1953): https://mobile.twitter.com/_chloi/status/899073567731597313

    Also this on clerical involvement in the coup: http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/06/20/64-years-later-cia-finally-releases-details-of-iranian-coup-iran-tehran-oil/amp/
    Quote
    Beyond final proof of CIA involvement, there’s another very interesting takeaway in the documents, said Abbas Milani, a professor of Iranian studies at Stanford University: New details on the true political leanings of Ayatollah Abol-Ghasem Kashani, a cleric and leading political figure in the 1950s.

    In the Islamic Republic, clerics are always the good guys. Kashani has long been seen as one of the heroes of nationalism during that period. As recently as January of this year, Iran’s supreme leader praised Kashani’s role in the nationalization of oil.

    Kashani’s eventual split from Mossadegh is widely known. Religious leaders in the country feared the growing power of the communist Tudeh Party, and believed that Mossadegh was too weak to save the country from the socialist threat.

    But the newly released documents show that Kashani wasn’t just opposed to Mossadegh — he was also in close communication with the Americans throughout the period leading up to the coup, and he actually appears to have requested financial assistance from the United States, though there is no record of him receiving any money. His request was not previously known.

    On the make-or-break day of Aug. 19, “Kashani was critical,” said Milani. “On that day Kashani’s forces were out in full force to defeat Mossadegh.”

  • Random Islamic History Posts
     Reply #407 - September 09, 2017, 10:46 AM

    Arietta Papaconstantinou - 'Egypt’, in The Oxford handbook of late antiquity

    https://www.academia.edu/2225586/_Egypt_in_The_Oxford_handbook_of_late_antiquity_ed._Scott_F._Johnson_New_York_and_Oxford_2012_195-223
  • Random Islamic History Posts
     Reply #408 - September 10, 2017, 05:07 PM

    Interview with Peter Adamson - The best books on Philosophy in the Islamic World

    https://fivebooks.com/interview/peter-adamson-philosophy-islamic-world/
  • Random Islamic History Posts
     Reply #409 - September 12, 2017, 12:37 PM

    Interview with Peter Adamson - The best books on Philosophy in the Islamic World

    Peter Adamson Philosophy of Islamic world


    Good stuff ..good stuff there dear zeca ., Not sure why  dr. Aadamson   selected   This book   as the
    Quote
    “best book about this figure, Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, who died in 1210.He was extremely influential.”


    does his work supersedes Quran or any hadith collections??

    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
     
  • Random Islamic History Posts
     Reply #410 - September 12, 2017, 01:49 PM

    ^Clearly it doesn't. Peter Adamson explains his use of the words 'Islamic world' in the interview. My thoughts were similar in choosing the thread title - 'Islamic history' in the sense of the history of societies under Muslim rule rather than just the history of the religion itself.

    Quote from: Peter Adamson
    As soon as you have the massive expansion of the Islamic caliphate in the generations following the death of Mohammed, you have this enormous empire that stretches from Spain in Europe all the way to central Asia. The borders fluctuate: they lose Spain after a while, and it’s not even mostly under one single ruler. Much later, in the period that is the same timeframe as early modern Europe, you have a fracturing into three large empires: the Ottoman Empire, the Safavid Empire in Iran, and the Mughal Empire in India.

    But, to me, that’s all the Islamic world. Roughly speaking, if the local authorities are Muslim, then it’s the Islamic World. This defines a very clear context for philosophy and it turns out that that is, more or less, a good way of thinking about a certain philosophical culture.

    There is actually a word, ‘Islamicate,’ which was invented to refer to the same idea. So, the Islamic world would be the Islamicate. Some people have even suggested saying ‘Islamicate philosophy’, but I resist that because I don’t think that ‘Islamicate’ is a word that most people know. Still, when I say ‘Islamic world’ what I mean is what all these other scholars mean by ‘Islamicate’.

  • Random Islamic History Posts
     Reply #411 - September 12, 2017, 03:09 PM

    ^Clearly it doesn't. Peter Adamson explains his use of the words 'Islamic world' in the interview. My thoughts were similar in choosing the thread title - 'Islamic history' in the sense of the history of societies under Muslim rule rather than just the history of the religion itself.


    Off course that is a fact.,not only "that so-called Islamic history " is the history of many cultures around Arabian peninsula"  but the so called Islamic Scriptures themselves are the products of  many religious thoughts/rituals  of Arabian peninsula"

    unfortunately very few academicians air/write such views., If some one says that from so-called Islamic world..there and then ends their life  and their life works/contribution goes down the drain 

    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
     
  • Random Islamic History Posts
     Reply #412 - September 12, 2017, 04:43 PM

    Shahzad Bashir - On Islamic time: rethinking chronology in the historiography of Muslim societies

    http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hith.10729/full
    Quote
    This article argues that the academic representation of Islamic history as a single timeline, which was established in the nineteenth century and continues to predominate to the present, is a primary issue restricting fruitful readings of Islamic historical materials. Utilizing insights in thinking about history that favor multiple temporalities, I suggest that scholars in Islamic studies can expand the possibilities of their work by paying attention to the diversity of ways in which time is conceptualized within original materials. As illustrations for the rethinking I advocate, I provide readings of the structures and literary affects of three Persian works in different genres, produced circa 1490–1540 ce. I suggest that a foundational reorientation in the field of Islamic historiography has the potential to help us break out of binds identified in the critique of orientalism provided by Edward Said and others and would lead to better ways to approach developments in Muslim societies.

  • Random Islamic History Posts
     Reply #413 - September 13, 2017, 08:03 PM

    Sarah Bowen Savant - A Tale of 3 “Versions”

    http://kitab-project.org/2017/09/10/a-tale-of-3-versions/
    Quote
    Measuring variation in the early tradition

    In this first blog I begin with a discussion of what our methods might be able to show us about the early transmission of the written tradition. The case I take up involves the Muwaṭṭaʾ (“the well-trodden path”) of Imam Mālik b. Anas (d. 796), which is also a founding book for Islamic law and Prophetic tradition (Hadith).

    What follows is quite detailed. Not all blogs will ask as much of readers. But I think it is worthwhile to start with the early written tradition, where a lot of the debates and confusion lie. In particular, I am curious to probe how much variation there is between different transmissions of an author’s text...


    About the KITAB project: http://kitab-project.org/about/
  • Random Islamic History Posts
     Reply #414 - September 14, 2017, 10:58 AM

    Aaron Butts - Review of Jitse H. F. Dijkstra and Greg Fisher (eds.), Inside and out: Interactions between Rome and the peoples on the Arabian and Egyptian frontiers in Late Antiquity

    https://www.academia.edu/34538498/Review_of_Jitse_H._F._Dijkstra_and_Greg_Fisher_eds._Inside_and_out_Interactions_between_Rome_and_the_peoples_on_the_Arabian_and_Egyptian_frontiers_in_Late_Antiquity
  • Random Islamic History Posts
     Reply #415 - September 14, 2017, 08:31 PM

    SquareKufic - The Mosque al-Nuri in Mosul: what was lost

    https://squarekufic.com/2017/06/23/the-mosque-al-nuri-in-mosul-what-was-lost/amp/
    Quote
    It is a pity that you get the chance to talk about certain monuments only after that they are destroyed. Until yesterday, the general public did not know anything about the Mosque of Nur al-Din, and its minaret. ISIS has destroyed, once again, Middle Eastern heritage: the destruction of the Mosque of Nur al-Din has been interpreted by many as a clear sign of ISIS’s defeat in Mosul, as the last act, against the strenuous resistance of Mosul population: ISIS militia bombs the very same mosque where al-Baghdadi gave his notorious speech some 3 years ago, announcing the beginning of his Caliphate.

    The mosque and its minaret are then, of course, important for interpreting the current affairs, but for sure, their importance is also linked to the history of Iraq and Mosul, and its medieval heritage. And this is what I want to focus on: what has the world heritage lost in that bombing?
    ....


  • Random Islamic History Posts
     Reply #416 - September 15, 2017, 09:03 AM

    Afghan war rugs: https://mobile.twitter.com/RespectableLaw/status/907360800326774784
  • Random Islamic History Posts
     Reply #417 - September 16, 2017, 09:55 PM

    Arafat Razzaque - Who “wrote” Aladdin? The Forgotten Syrian Storyteller

    https://ajammc.com/2017/09/14/who-wrote-aladdin/
  • Random Islamic History Posts
     Reply #418 - September 24, 2017, 09:32 PM

    Peter Webb - Militant Islam between literature and pre-Islamic history

    http://www.leiden-islamblog.nl/articles/militant-islam-between-literature-and-pre-islamic-history

    Peter Webb's current project: https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/research/research-projects/humanities/epic-pasts-pre-islam-through-muslim-eyes
  • Random Islamic History Posts
     Reply #419 - October 05, 2017, 08:11 PM

    In Our Time on the emperor Constantine and the origins of imperial monotheism

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b096gjw0

    Thread: https://mobile.twitter.com/19Averil/status/915860552085393408
    Quote from: Averil Cameron
    Melvyn Bragg in In our Time on Constantine clearly bemused at how little we know for sure

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