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The School of 'Abbasid Studies, originally founded as a co-operative venture by scholars at the Universities of St. Andrews and Glasgow in Scotland during the 1980s, is a joint enterprise involving the Universities of St. Andrews,... more
The School of 'Abbasid Studies, originally founded as a co-operative venture by scholars at the Universities of St. Andrews and Glasgow in Scotland during the 1980s, is a joint enterprise involving the Universities of St. Andrews, Cambridge and Leuven. It aims to promote, foster and cultivate the academic study of the 'Abbasid dynasty. This book contains the papers delivered by a distinguished array of leading scholars at a meeting of the School of 'Abbasid Studies at the Catholic University of Leuven from 28 June until 1 July 2004. It provides a fully contemporary insight into the cutting edge of 'Abbasid Studies.
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KULeuven. ...
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... In this saying [ascribed to'Urwa ibn al-Zubayr] the distaste for the non-Arab method of legal science mostly cultivated by mawàlì is ... data contained in the main database have been culled from about seven thousand biographical... more
... In this saying [ascribed to'Urwa ibn al-Zubayr] the distaste for the non-Arab method of legal science mostly cultivated by mawàlì is ... data contained in the main database have been culled from about seven thousand biographical entries, which we scrutinized in search of relevant ...
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The "inquisition" (Mihnah) unleashed by the seventh Abbasid caliph, 'Abdallah al-Ma'mun (r. 813-833), has long attracted the attention of modern scholars of the intellectual, political, and religious history of the early... more
The "inquisition" (Mihnah) unleashed by the seventh Abbasid caliph, 'Abdallah al-Ma'mun (r. 813-833), has long attracted the attention of modern scholars of the intellectual, political, and religious history of the early Abbasid era. Because this event, which began in 820 and stretched through the reigns of two of al-Ma'mun's successors, appears at a convergence of prominent currents in systematic theology, rationalist thought, theocratic politics, and nascent trends in Shiism and Sunnism, historians have seen it as the key to a wide array of puzzles and problems in early Islamic history. In this incisive study, John Nawas subjects the various proposed explanations of these events to a sober and searching analysis and, in the process, presents a new interpretation of al-Ma'mun's political and religious policies, contextualized against the background of early Abbasid intellectual and social history. Appended to the volume is a reprint edition of Walt...
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The term ṣāḥib sunna is frequently encountered in classical Arabic biographical dictionaries. In this article, I compare the group of Islamic religious scholars (ulama) identified as aṣḥāb sunna with comparable religious scholars who did... more
The term ṣāḥib sunna is frequently encountered in classical Arabic biographical dictionaries. In this article, I compare the group of Islamic religious scholars (ulama) identified as aṣḥāb sunna with comparable religious scholars who did not receive such a designation. The results show that the aṣḥāb sunna constituted a distinct group of Muslim religious scholars. I suggest that the formation of the aṣḥāb sunna was further prompted by the Miḥna initiated by the caliph al-Maʾmūn. The opposition of the aṣḥāb sunna to the Miḥna contributed to the development of the more elaborate formula ahl al-sunna wa-l-jamāʿa by which Sunnis define their creed.
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At some moment in time, the patronate system that had been introduced as a way to incorporate non-Arab Muslims into Arab society, allowed the client of a patron to have clients of his own. Using this phenomenon ofmawālīofmawālīas focal... more
At some moment in time, the patronate system that had been introduced as a way to incorporate non-Arab Muslims into Arab society, allowed the client of a patron to have clients of his own. Using this phenomenon ofmawālīofmawālīas focal point, this article pinpoints when changes in the patronate system occurred and sketches the process of islamization of society during the first four centuries of Islam.
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logical evidence on Indian Ocean port cities such as Aden, demonstrating how their role as entrepôts simultaneously connected them to and separated them from their hinterlands. Fortifications served the purpose of capturing trade and... more
logical evidence on Indian Ocean port cities such as Aden, demonstrating how their role as entrepôts simultaneously connected them to and separated them from their hinterlands. Fortifications served the purpose of capturing trade and taxes from their competitors in the Indian Ocean, rather than insulating the cities from the sea (p. 120). Yossef Rapoport’s study of a unique set of maps of the Mediterranean produced in the fifth/eleventh century in Fāt ̇ imid Egypt shows the degree to which military conflict between the Fāt ̇ imids and the Byzantine Empire at the time was linked to deeper commercial processes of competition and connection. Following Udovitch, Rapoport argues that “the expansion in international commerce along the [... ] Mediterranean was [... ] driven by thriving production centers and markets in the southern shores” (p. 183). The maps that accompany this chapter contain a wealth of naval intelligence reflecting a forgotten shared maritime culture that by the end of the century had been disrupted by the Crusades (pp. 207–8). In all of these studies, normative texts are juxtaposed with literary and archival material to reveal new particulars, or cases of micro-history, as much as they reveal subjectivities. The cumulative effect is to problematise the assumptions that usually govern our understanding of the Islamic past, in which rupture rather than continuity distinguished the Jāhilı̄ from the Islamic periods, hostility characterised relationships between Muslims and non-Muslims, and fear of the sea led to the eclipse of ports by their hinterlands. Although this volume is a tribute by former students to their teacher, it should serve as a guide to future students on the merits of solid historical scholarship.
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KULeuven. ...
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Nabije Oosten studies (OE).