Ayyubid Historiography and Literature

"""This book, the first volume of a planned three-volume project, is a pioneering survey of the Galenic doctrine of the critical days. It presents the first scholarly edition of Galen’s De diebus decretoriis (Critical Days; Arabic: Kitāb ayyām al-buḥrān) since 1825, and the first English translation and detailed study of the same in modern times. In establishing the Arabic text, I have paid careful attention to both Arabic and Greek textual traditions. Moreover, I have inferred readings of the (non-extant) Greek manuscript used by the Arabic translator, which are included in a Greco-Arabic apparatus for use in preparing the Greek edition of this treatise (see next paragraph). In addition to the customary commentary wherein philological and conceptual issues are discussed, I have included a detailed historical and cultural Introduction.

This volume presents the first edition of the Arabic translation, by Hunayn ibn Ishāq, of Galen’s Critical Days (De diebus decretoriis), together with the first translation of the text into a modern language. The substantial introduction contextualizes the treatise within the Greek and Arabic traditions. Galen’s Critical Days was a founding text of astrological medicine. In febrile illnesses, the critical days are the days on which an especially severe pattern of symptoms, a crisis, was likely to occur. The crisis was thought to expel the disease-producing substances from the body. If its precise timing were known, the physician could prepare the patient so that the crisis would be most beneficial. After identifying the critical days based on empirical data and showing how to use them in therapy, Galen explains the critical days via the moon’s influence. In the historical introduction Glen Cooper discusses the translation of the Critical Days in Arabic, and adumbrates its possible significance in the intellectual debates and political rivalries among the 9th-century Baghdad elite. It is argued that Galen originally composed the Critical Days both to confound the Skeptics of his own day and to refute a purely mathematical, rationalist approach to science. These features made the text useful in the rivalries between Baghdad scholars. Al-Kindī (d.c. 866) famously propounded a mathematical approach to science akin to the latter. The scholar-bureaucrat responsible for funding this translation, Muhammad ibn Mūsā (d. 873), al-Kindī’s nemesis, may have found the treatise useful in refuting that approach. The commentary and notes to the facing page translation address issues of translation, as well as important concepts."""

Writing under the pen name of Lactantius, a Christian author alleges that the descriptions of human embryonic development as mentioned in the Qur’an had been plagiarised from the writings of ancient Greek physicians. Such writings are said to have been transmitted to the Prophet Muhammad through his companion al-Harith bin Kaladah, who is said to have studied medicine at an old medical school in Jundishapur (southern Persia) where instruction in all of the Greek disciplines could be obtained. This essay investigates the accusation that al-Harith bin Kaladah was the source of the Prophet’s medical knowledge.

(Book website: https://www.peterlang.com/document/1062267)

For so long, scholarship in the West has argued that the memory of Saladin, the renowned, twelfth-century Kurdish-Muslim ruler, along with the memory of the Crusades, was “all but forgotten” in Islamic history prior to the onset of the modern period. Although recent studies have slowly begun to overturn this thesis, however, research on the topic so far has continued to neglect the many accounts on Saladin’s reign and the Crusades found in late medieval and early modern Arabo-Islamic historiography. This lacunae in scholarship is even more compelling considering that the sources dating from the early sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries reveal a rich record of Saladin’s achievements; the sources also include numerous reports on other major Muslim figures who fought the Crusades, such as the Zengid ruler Nūr al-Dīn and the famous Mamlūk sultans Baybars and Qalawūn. Therefore, the present study will posit the hypothesis that Saladin’s reign and accomplishments, along with the history of the Crusades in the region, were etched into the historical memory of the Muslim world long after the end of the epoch. It will advance this thesis by exploring the much-neglected Arabo-Islamic historiographical sources dating from the early sixteenth to late eighteenth centuries, such as the universal chronicles, biographical dictionaries, and other historiographical genres. Based on this explorative survey, the study will further advance the emerging thesis that the memory of Saladin was not neglected after his death, but, rather, the Kurdish sultan’s career, along with the Age of the Crusades in general, left a lasting impression on the Islamic Near East during the late medieval and early modern period.

"This article explains the Isma‘ili Muslim understanding of the Qur’anic verses on the  Crucifixion, the meaning of the Crucifixion in Isma‘ili eschatology and the esoteric  exegesis (ta’wil) of the Cross, according to the Isma‘ili philosophers.  These Isma‘ili
Muslim perspectives were articulated in the tenth and eleventh century when Isma‘ili  philosophy underwent a great flowering.  But there is reason to believe that such  perspectives, due to their pluralistic, ecumenical and esoteric outlook, can play a great role in the modern age towards opening further doors of understanding and recognition between the faiths of Christianity and Islam."

This is a fascinating passage from al-Tawhidi (d. c. 1009) that I use in undergraduate education for some time now. I had prepared my own translation and together with my colleague Klaus Hachmeier from Berlin, who was a visitor at Yale in 2009, I decided to re-work that, polish it, and make it available in print. The passage offers an extremely lifely account of philosophical and theological debates  in Baghdad during the 10th century and on top of that also discusses important and interesting ideas. It includes, for instance, the famous passage in al-Tawhidi, where he tells us who wrote the Rasa'il Ikhwan al-Safa' and where he discusses the ideas of one of these authors, namely Abu Sulayman al-Maqdisi. Even more important than that, I would say, the passage also informs us about the ideas of the influential but little known philosopher Abu Sulayman al-Sijistani al-Mantiqi (d. c. 987) regarding the relationship between reason and revelation.

This article offers an edition, translation, and study of a hitherto unknown text about Ayyubid or early Mamluk Alexandria. The author, one Abū Khuzayma Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb, gives a short yet rich description of the city based as much on Alexandria’s real cityscape as on legends. The text treats famous monuments, such as the city’s lighthouse and the Column of the Pillars, as well as less well-known buildings, such as mosques, colleges, watchtowers, and gates. An analysis of the account leads to the conclusion that its author wrote the account in order to mobilize Muslims for the defense of the city against Frankish or Byzantine attacks on Alexandria or Egypt’s Mediterranean coast in general.

Arab Muslim historiography of the crusading era evokes the memory of earlier generations who struggled for the glory of Islam, reproducing the myths of the campaigns of the Prophet, the great conquests, and the martyrs of the Byzantine-Umayyad and early ʿAbbasid frontier. By highlighting continuity with the Islamic golden age, chroniclers served as propagandists for the counter-crusade and its leaders, contributed to the consolidation of the collective identity of the Muslims of Syria, and partook in a discourse of piety, typical of their age.

This study aims to provide a general-examined understanding of a specific “source text," or “sources excerpt," explaining the context and content of that text and its sources. It also provides a piece of brief information about the writer or historian, his method, his works, and his life, analyzing the text and its contextualization in connection with other works or events. This article endeavours to study and analyze the letter of 656/1258 addressed form Hulagu Khan (r. 654/1256- 663/1265) to al-Malik al-Nāṣir of Aleppo (r. 633-34/ 1235- 658/1260).  The Syrian cleric and scholar Ibn al-ʿIbrī (d.c.685/1286) was present at Aleppo during this time and had the precedence, among his Arab, Latin, Syrian and Persian contemporaries, to record such a letter in his unique Arabic chronicle Tārīḫ Muḫtaṣar al-duwal.  Therefore, this article studies the discourse of the writings and life of Ibn al-ʿIbrī, provides an examination for the context and content of the said letter and in which historical context it was written.  I propose to determine the Latin perception of Prester John in the figure of a Mongol ruler, especially Genghis Khan during the Fifth Crusade, and the late imagined perception in Hulagu Khan. Eventually, I analyze, contextualize, and interpret the letter and its historical context, comparing it with some (selective) contemporaneous and subsequent sources.

In December 2008, His Highness Aga Khan IV – the 49th hereditary Imām of the Shi‘i Ismaili Muslims – established the Delegation of the Ismaili Imamat as an ambassadorial building in Ottawa, Canada.  The Delegation has been hailed as an “architectural masterpiece” due to its architecture’s imitation of the properties of rock crystal. In an address given at the Delegation’s foundation ceremony, the Aga Khan stated that the Delegation’s architecture “calls for translating concepts” from Ismaili Muslim history “for expressing both the exoteric and the esoteric.”  Later in a speech made at the opening ceremony of the Delegation, the Aga Khan noted how the building was an example of how “great architecture captures esoteric thought in physical form.”  This paper argues that the architectural design of the Delegation of the Ismaili Imamat, by ways of its numerical patterns and shapes, rock crystal-inspired features in relation to sunlight, and material composition, is an iconic representation of certain medieval Ismaili ideas of spiritual authority and hierarchy.  This will be demonstrated by analyzing the numerical patterns and shapes of the Delegation’s architectural form and highlighting their correspondence with medieval Ismaili doctrines of the “World of Faith” (‘ālam al-dīn).  The “World of Faith”, as envisaged in medieval Ismaili thought, refers to a cosmic hierarchy of “limits” (ḥudūd) – comprised of both celestial beings and human personalities (i.e. Prophets, Imams, and their representatives). The features of the Delegation’s rock crystal themed architecture - such as the interplay of transparency and translucency, its reflectivity and opacity before sunlight, and the subtle variations of its hues with different angles of view - convey a sense of contemplative mystery to the onlooker. This paper will show how Delegation’s architectural components – its jali screens, open atrium, rock crystal representations, upper glass dome, fibre class canopy, jali screen arrangements, and maple wood floor designs serve to respectively symbolize and represent the medieval Isma‘ili doctrinal concepts of zāhir, bāṭin, spiritual inspiration (ta’yīd), Prophecy and Imamah, ḥujjats (proofs), dā‘īs (missionaries), and sacred history/cyclical time. Medieval Isma‘ili thinkers such as Nāṣir-i Khusraw (d. 1088) associated each degree of spiritual hierarchy with a particular number (i.e. seven Imams, twelve ḥujjats, etc.) and such numerical configurations also characterize the Delegation’s architecture in a way that corresponds to the spiritual hierarchy in the World of Faith. Ismaili thinkers often employed the image of sunlight as an analogy for the divine inspiration that flows through the spiritual and material realms – an analogy exemplified by the Delegation’s rock crystal inspired designs through which sunlight illuminates the building’s interior. The material composition of the Delegation’s interior appear to be arranged in degrees of transparency and opacity – from the Delegation’s transparent glass dome and its translucent fibre glass to its opaque maple flooring – alluding to medieval Ismaili metaphysical notions of subtle (laṭīf) and dense (kathīf). In this way, the Delegation symbolically “maps out” the structure of the cosmic hierarchies and their interrelationship through divine inspiration as represented by the movement of sunlight through the building. Thus, the Delegation of the Ismaili Imamat through its unique architecture serves as an iconic and symbolic “cartography” of the medieval Ismaili Muslim conceptions of spiritual hierarchy and authority.

Abstract

This paper studies contrast among emphatic sounds in Classical Arabic. In Modern linguistics these emphatic sounds contrast with their non-emphatic counterparts. Classical Arabic scholars indicate contrast among the emphatic group. This paper examines two emphatic sounds, namely /D/ and /Z/. The aim of this paper is to prove that these two sounds contrast, distinguish meaning and affect neighbouring segments. This paper also discusses a possible near-allophonic case for these emphatic sounds. The phonological environment of these two sounds is investigated in terms of distinctive features with the attempt of providing natural classes of sounds. This paper studies contrast under Classical Generative Phonology and Distinctive Features Theory (Chomsky and Halle 1968). This paper shows that the two emphatic sounds /D/ and /Z/ are two separate phonemes and that respectively all natural classes of sounds occur in their environment, except for the natural class of approximants. Yet sounds that have the features [+high, -back] and [-high, +back] are more susceptible to emphasis spread. This paper finally retains that two consonants and two vowels emphasized when they occur in the environment of the emphatic sounds and that the emphatic spread is blocked leftward whenever the segment is [+high, -back]. These two emphatic sounds also appear in Near-complementary Distribution.

A class presentation at Harvard on the Isma'ili Muslim thought of Nasir-i Khusraw and his reconciliation of theology and philosophy in the text Jami' al-Hikmatayn. The presentation deals with the following themes: a) Contextualizing Isma'ili thought b) The life of Nasir-i Khusraw c) The Concept of Tawhid d) The Concept of Creation e) Human Intellect and Divine Authority.