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The Piety of Learning testifies to the strong links between religious and secular scholarship in Islam, and reaffirms the role of philology for understanding Muslim societies both past and present. Senior scholars discuss Islamic teaching philosophies since the 18th century in Nigeria, Egypt, the Ottoman Empire, Central Asia, Russia, and Germany. Particular attention is paid to the power of Islamic poetry and to networks and practices of the Tijāniyya, Rifā‘iyya, Khalwatiyya, Naqshbandiyya, and Shādhiliyya Sufi brotherhoods. The final section highlights some unusual European encounters with Islam, and features a German Pietist who traveled through the Ottoman Empire, a Habsburg officer who converted to Islam in Bosnia, a Dutch colonial Islamologist who befriended a Salafi from Jeddah, and a Soviet historian who preserved Islamic manuscripts. Contributors are: Razaq ‘Deremi Abubakre; Bekim Agai; Rainer Brunner; Alfrid K. Bustanov; Thomas Eich; Ralf Elger; Ulrike Freitag; Michael Kemper; Markus Koller; Anke von Kügelgen; Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen; Armina Omerika; Amidu Olalekan Sanni; Yaşar Sarikaya; Rüdiger Seesemann; Shamil Sh. Shikhaliev; Diliara M. Usmanova.
In Muḥammad ʿAbduh and his Interlocutors: Conceptualizing Religion in a Globalizing World, Ammeke Kateman offers an account of Muḥammad ʿAbduh’s Islamic Reformism in a context in which ideas increasingly crossed familiar geographical, religious and cultural frontiers. Presenting an alternative to the inadequate perspective of “Westernization”, Kateman situates the ideas of Muḥammad ʿAbduh (Egypt, 1849-1905) on Islam and religion amongst those of his interlocutors within a global intellectual field. Ammeke Kateman’s approach documents the surprising pluralism of ʿAbduh’s interlocutors, the diversity in their shared conceptualizations of religion and the creativity of ʿAbduh’s own interpretation. In this way, the conceptualizations of ʿAbduh and his contemporaries also shed light on the diversified global genealogy of the modern concept of religion.
The distinguished position of the seventeenth-century Ḥijāz attracted Sufis from across the Islamic world, making it the largest Sufi center of that era, with more than forty Sufi orders active during the Ottoman period. Most of the region’s many scholars were associated with Sufism and affiliated to these orders; their lives and Sufi activities more broadly were documented by one of their number, al-ʿUjaymī, in two texts. These texts, critically edited here for the first time, constitute some of the best evidence for the character of spiritual life in the Ḥijāz during the seventeenth and early eighteenth century.
Adab is a concept situated at the heart of Arabic and Islamic civilisation. Adab is etiquette, ethics, and literature. It is also a creative synthesis, a relationship within a configuration. What became of it, towards modernity ? The question of the "civilising process" (Norbert Elias) helps us reflect on this story. During the modern period, maintaining one's identity while entering into what was termed "civilisation" (al-tamaddun) soon became a leitmotiv. A debate on what was or what should be culture, ethics, and norms in Middle Eastern societies accompanied this evolution. The resilient notion of adab has been in competition with the Salafist focus on mores (akhlāq). Still, humanism, poetry, and transgression are constants in the history of adab. Contributors: Francesca Bellino, Elisabetta Benigni, Michel Boivin, Olivier Bouquet, Francesco Chiabotti, Stéphane Dudoignon, Anne-Laure Dupont, Stephan Guth, Albrecht Hofheinz, Katharina Ivanyi, Felix Konrad, Corinne Lefevre, Cathérine Mayeur-Jaouen, Astrid Meier, Nabil Mouline, Samuela Pagani, Luca Patrizi, Stefan Reichmuth, Iris Seri-Hersch, Chantal Verdeil, Anne-Sophie Vivier-Muresan.
This book offers a fresh perspective on the re-emergence of a classical literary genre, showcasing a fusion of tradition and innovation. It examines the cultural dynamics that shape the development of Arabic maqāma in Nigeria. The maqāma, a genre traditionally associated with the MENA region, experienced a revival and gained relevance among contemporary Nigerian writers. Through meticulous exploration and in-depth interviews, this groundbreaking research offers invaluable insights into the process of adaptation and evolution of the maqāma, witnessing its transformation into a thriving literary tradition. It thus unravels a vibrant, yet overlooked, chapter in African Arabic literary culture, redefining our understanding of its globalizing nature.
How have practices and imaginaries of sensing been religiously engaged and contested by Muslims? How do contemporary Muslim practices and debates concerning religious sensing relate to historical precedents? Analysing examples dealing with contemporary Sufism and Muslim religious oratory, this book explores how the senses have been engaged and contested in Muslim religiosity. Combining the research fields of Islamic Studies, anthropology of Islam, material religion and sensory studies, this book covers a range of materials, including writings by Muslim religious authorities, ethnographic material, audio recordings and videos. Focusing on Western contexts, this book provides an innovative approach by foregrounding the piety practices of Western Muslims. Synthesising existing research with his own original analyses, Simon Stjernholm provides a fresh perspective on Islamic tradition, religiosity and sensing.
In Arabic and Islamic studies, the subject of variance in general and that of textual variation in particular has not been investigated exhaustively so far. In the present book the variation in texts of the “closed transmission” will be studied, focusing on a small corpus of didactic and model poems, with a view to establishing what degree of text stability and change was allowed by the medium manuscript. Categories of variance (relating to work-titles, text, number of verses and their sequence, page-layout, context) and the means of controlling them in the manuscripts of the poems are identified and detailed descriptions of the copies are given. The monograph also includes a presentation of some major traits of the cultural background to the study of Arabic didactic poetry and of its dissemination in which memorization has played a crucial role. The intended readers,editors and other users of manuscripts, are helped to acquaint themselves with the methods employed in the manuscripts to control variation and they are given an overview of the large spectrum of Arabic didactic poetry and of its place in the traditional culture of learning in Islamicate societies.
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