How was the use of violence against Muslims explained and justified in medieval Islam? What role ... more How was the use of violence against Muslims explained and justified in medieval Islam? What role did state punishment play in delineating the private from the public sphere? What strategies were deployed to cope with the suffering caused by punishment? These questions are explored in Christian Lange's in-depth study of the phenomenon of punishment, both divine and human, in eleventh-to-thirteenth-century Islamic society. The book examines the relationship between state and society in meting out justice, Muslim attitudes to hell and the punishments that were in store in the afterlife, and the legal dimensions of punishment. The cross-disciplinary approach embraced in this study, which is based on a wide variety of Persian and Arabic sources, sheds light on the interplay between theory and practice in Islamic criminal law, and between executive power and the religious imagination of medieval Muslim society at large.
What were the ideological foundations and ritual expressions of Seljuq power? How did the learned... more What were the ideological foundations and ritual expressions of Seljuq power? How did the learned classes and the state feel about each other? How was social space organised? What was the relationship between nomads and settled peoples? Split into three parts, this collection of essays addresses questions like these about life during the Seljuq period. Part 1 follows the gradual transformation of the Seljuqs into a powerful dynasty and their concepts of political legitimisation. Part 2 examines social history, particularly with regard to the 'ulama' and the urban populations. Part 3 explores how religious thought, jurisprudence, belles-lettres and architecture developed under the Seljuqs.
This exploration of the role of violence in the history of Islamic societies considers the subjec... more This exploration of the role of violence in the history of Islamic societies considers the subject particularly in the context of its implementation as a political strategy to claim power over the public sphere. Violence, both among Muslims and between Muslims and non-Muslims, has been the object of research in the past, as in the case of jihad, martyrdom, rebellion or criminal law. This book goes beyond these concerns in addressing, in a comprehensive and cross-disciplinary fashion, how violence has functioned as a basic principle of Islamic social and political organization in a variety of historical and geographical contexts. Contributions trace the use of violence by governments in the history of Islam, shed light on legal views of violence, and discuss artistic and religious responses. Authors lay out a spectrum of attitudes rather than trying to define an Islamic doctrine of violence. Bringing together some of the most substantive and innovative scholarship on this important topic to date, this volume contributes to the growing interest, both scholarly and general, in the question of Muslim attitudes toward violence.
Bart Jaski, Christian Lange, Anna Pytlowany and Henk van Rinsum (eds), The Orient in Utrecht: Adriaan Reland (1676-1718), Early Modern Humanist, Philologist and Scholar of Religion. 515 pp. Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2021
The celebrated Iraqi littérateur, al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 255 AH/869 CE), devotes a long section of his opu... more The celebrated Iraqi littérateur, al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 255 AH/869 CE), devotes a long section of his opus magnum, The Book of the Living, to the topic of “sensation among the various classes of living things”. Further observations about the wondrous qualities of the human and animal sensorium are also found elsewhere in The Book of Living and in other of his works. This article traces al-Jāḥiẓ’s sensory theory in its epistemological and ethical dimensions, by pulling together key passages on the five senses from al-Jāḥiẓ’s oeuvre. The article argues that al-Jāḥiẓ develops a characteristic sensory style that is marked not so much by his desire to elevate sight above hearing, or human rationalism over animal sensualism, but rather by his erudite conoisseurship of the natural world and by his deep and measured appreciation of the phenomenon of synaesthesia. Given al-Jāḥiẓ’s exalted status in Arabic literary history, his moderate sensory style constitutes an important paradigm on which later thinkers active in the Islamic world could build.
A collection of Qur'an citations discovered in the works of fifty-five jurists, segmented according to the chapter (sūrah) number of the Qur'an. Each segmented file contains a table with the exact verse number, the string quoted by jurists, the title in which the citation appears, the original internet source from which the data has been mined, and the context of the citation. Qur'an citations have been annotated in the latter column with HTML tags for better discoverability and further data parsing. Please note that the files need to be imported with UTF-8 encoding (due to the tables containing Arabic text).
Digital humanities has a venerable pedigree, stretching back to the middle of the twentieth centu... more Digital humanities has a venerable pedigree, stretching back to the middle of the twentieth century, but despite noteworthy pioneering contributions it has not become a mainstream practice in Islamic Studies. This essay applies humanities computing to the study of Islamic law. We analyze a representative corpus of works of Islamic substantive law (furūʿ al-fiqh) from the beginnings of Islamic legal jurisprudence to the early modern period (2nd/8th-13th/19th c.) using several computational tools and methods: text-reuse network analysis based on plain-text annotations and html tags, clustered frequency-based analysis, word clouds, and topic modeling. Applying machine-guided distant reading to Islamic legal texts over the longue-dureé, we study (1) the role of the Qurʾān, (2) patterns of normative qualifications (aḥkām), and (3) the distribution of topics in our corpus. In certain instances the analysis confirms claims made in the scholarly literature on Islamic law, in other instances...
Digital humanities has a venerable pedigree, stretching back to the middle of the twentieth centu... more Digital humanities has a venerable pedigree, stretching back to the middle of the twentieth century, but despite noteworthy pioneering contributions it has not become a mainstream practice in Islamic Studies. This essay applies humanities computing to the study of Islamic law. We analyze a representative corpus of works of Islamic substantive law (furūʿ al-fiqh) from the beginnings of Islamic legal jurisprudence to the early modern period (2nd/8th-13th/19th c.) using several computational tools and methods: text-reuse network analysis based on plain-text annotations and html tags, clustered frequency-based analysis, word clouds, and topic modeling. Applying machine-guided distant reading to Islamic legal texts over the longue-dureé, we study (1) the role of the Qurʾān, (2) patterns of normative qualifications (aḥkām), and (3) the distribution of topics in our corpus. In certain instances the analysis confirms claims made in the scholarly literature on Islamic law, in other instances it corrects such claims.
How was the use of violence against Muslims explained and justified in medieval Islam? What role ... more How was the use of violence against Muslims explained and justified in medieval Islam? What role did state punishment play in delineating the private from the public sphere? What strategies were deployed to cope with the suffering caused by punishment? These questions are explored in Christian Lange's in-depth study of the phenomenon of punishment, both divine and human, in eleventh-to-thirteenth-century Islamic society. The book examines the relationship between state and society in meting out justice, Muslim attitudes to hell and the punishments that were in store in the afterlife, and the legal dimensions of punishment. The cross-disciplinary approach embraced in this study, which is based on a wide variety of Persian and Arabic sources, sheds light on the interplay between theory and practice in Islamic criminal law, and between executive power and the religious imagination of medieval Muslim society at large.
What were the ideological foundations and ritual expressions of Seljuq power? How did the learned... more What were the ideological foundations and ritual expressions of Seljuq power? How did the learned classes and the state feel about each other? How was social space organised? What was the relationship between nomads and settled peoples? Split into three parts, this collection of essays addresses questions like these about life during the Seljuq period. Part 1 follows the gradual transformation of the Seljuqs into a powerful dynasty and their concepts of political legitimisation. Part 2 examines social history, particularly with regard to the 'ulama' and the urban populations. Part 3 explores how religious thought, jurisprudence, belles-lettres and architecture developed under the Seljuqs.
This exploration of the role of violence in the history of Islamic societies considers the subjec... more This exploration of the role of violence in the history of Islamic societies considers the subject particularly in the context of its implementation as a political strategy to claim power over the public sphere. Violence, both among Muslims and between Muslims and non-Muslims, has been the object of research in the past, as in the case of jihad, martyrdom, rebellion or criminal law. This book goes beyond these concerns in addressing, in a comprehensive and cross-disciplinary fashion, how violence has functioned as a basic principle of Islamic social and political organization in a variety of historical and geographical contexts. Contributions trace the use of violence by governments in the history of Islam, shed light on legal views of violence, and discuss artistic and religious responses. Authors lay out a spectrum of attitudes rather than trying to define an Islamic doctrine of violence. Bringing together some of the most substantive and innovative scholarship on this important topic to date, this volume contributes to the growing interest, both scholarly and general, in the question of Muslim attitudes toward violence.
Bart Jaski, Christian Lange, Anna Pytlowany and Henk van Rinsum (eds), The Orient in Utrecht: Adriaan Reland (1676-1718), Early Modern Humanist, Philologist and Scholar of Religion. 515 pp. Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2021
The celebrated Iraqi littérateur, al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 255 AH/869 CE), devotes a long section of his opu... more The celebrated Iraqi littérateur, al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 255 AH/869 CE), devotes a long section of his opus magnum, The Book of the Living, to the topic of “sensation among the various classes of living things”. Further observations about the wondrous qualities of the human and animal sensorium are also found elsewhere in The Book of Living and in other of his works. This article traces al-Jāḥiẓ’s sensory theory in its epistemological and ethical dimensions, by pulling together key passages on the five senses from al-Jāḥiẓ’s oeuvre. The article argues that al-Jāḥiẓ develops a characteristic sensory style that is marked not so much by his desire to elevate sight above hearing, or human rationalism over animal sensualism, but rather by his erudite conoisseurship of the natural world and by his deep and measured appreciation of the phenomenon of synaesthesia. Given al-Jāḥiẓ’s exalted status in Arabic literary history, his moderate sensory style constitutes an important paradigm on which later thinkers active in the Islamic world could build.
A collection of Qur'an citations discovered in the works of fifty-five jurists, segmented according to the chapter (sūrah) number of the Qur'an. Each segmented file contains a table with the exact verse number, the string quoted by jurists, the title in which the citation appears, the original internet source from which the data has been mined, and the context of the citation. Qur'an citations have been annotated in the latter column with HTML tags for better discoverability and further data parsing. Please note that the files need to be imported with UTF-8 encoding (due to the tables containing Arabic text).
Digital humanities has a venerable pedigree, stretching back to the middle of the twentieth centu... more Digital humanities has a venerable pedigree, stretching back to the middle of the twentieth century, but despite noteworthy pioneering contributions it has not become a mainstream practice in Islamic Studies. This essay applies humanities computing to the study of Islamic law. We analyze a representative corpus of works of Islamic substantive law (furūʿ al-fiqh) from the beginnings of Islamic legal jurisprudence to the early modern period (2nd/8th-13th/19th c.) using several computational tools and methods: text-reuse network analysis based on plain-text annotations and html tags, clustered frequency-based analysis, word clouds, and topic modeling. Applying machine-guided distant reading to Islamic legal texts over the longue-dureé, we study (1) the role of the Qurʾān, (2) patterns of normative qualifications (aḥkām), and (3) the distribution of topics in our corpus. In certain instances the analysis confirms claims made in the scholarly literature on Islamic law, in other instances...
Digital humanities has a venerable pedigree, stretching back to the middle of the twentieth centu... more Digital humanities has a venerable pedigree, stretching back to the middle of the twentieth century, but despite noteworthy pioneering contributions it has not become a mainstream practice in Islamic Studies. This essay applies humanities computing to the study of Islamic law. We analyze a representative corpus of works of Islamic substantive law (furūʿ al-fiqh) from the beginnings of Islamic legal jurisprudence to the early modern period (2nd/8th-13th/19th c.) using several computational tools and methods: text-reuse network analysis based on plain-text annotations and html tags, clustered frequency-based analysis, word clouds, and topic modeling. Applying machine-guided distant reading to Islamic legal texts over the longue-dureé, we study (1) the role of the Qurʾān, (2) patterns of normative qualifications (aḥkām), and (3) the distribution of topics in our corpus. In certain instances the analysis confirms claims made in the scholarly literature on Islamic law, in other instances it corrects such claims.
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A collection of Qur'an citations discovered in the works of fifty-five jurists, segmented according to the chapter (sūrah) number of the Qur'an. Each segmented file contains a table with the exact verse number, the string quoted by jurists, the title in which the citation appears, the original internet source from which the data has been mined, and the context of the citation. Qur'an citations have been annotated in the latter column with HTML tags for better discoverability and further data parsing. Please note that the files need to be imported with UTF-8 encoding (due to the tables containing Arabic text).
A collection of Qur'an citations discovered in the works of fifty-five jurists, segmented according to the chapter (sūrah) number of the Qur'an. Each segmented file contains a table with the exact verse number, the string quoted by jurists, the title in which the citation appears, the original internet source from which the data has been mined, and the context of the citation. Qur'an citations have been annotated in the latter column with HTML tags for better discoverability and further data parsing. Please note that the files need to be imported with UTF-8 encoding (due to the tables containing Arabic text).