This article is an attempt to construct a new approach to and narrative of early Ottoman conquests in Thrace in the 1360s and 1370s. It argues that the so-called second capital of the Ottomans, Adrianople (Edirne), was conquered three times through a detailed evaluation of known, neglected, or unknow sources. The second conquest was almost certainly by frontier lords who conquered the city for their own interests. At the same time, the article challenges the unilinear rise paradigm within the Ottoman (...) studies. It showcases that, in the given period, the political arena between Ottomans, Byzantines, and other Turkish lords was open to various contingencies and dominated through constant negotiations among various parties. The practices of conquest, loss, and reconquest by those various parties determined the color of struggles not only in the case of Adrianople but also various other Thracian towns. The article finally sheds light on the role of a suppressed group of frontier lords who had their own political claims and agenda, betimes contrary to the Ottoman center. In the final analysis, this is an attempt to understand how new historical reconstructions may open up ways to conceptualize the political and social nature of the region in this period. (shrink)

The article asserts that verses 124–130 in the second sūrah of the Qurʾān (al-Baqara/“the Cow”) alludes to the biblical precept (Genesis 17) but presents the practice as a custom that has no special virtues, and certainly not those the Jews ascribed to it. It then claims that circumcision is identified as one of Abraham’s trials, which are mentioned in the Qurʾān and thus part of early Islam, and that this idea did not arise in the Middle Ages.

The article concerns the medieval history of the strategic city al-Raqqa, situated at the junction of the Balīkh and Euphrates Rivers. After an overview of the city’s middle Islamic history, gathered from Islamic textual sources and archaeological finds, it focuses on the city’s history during the fifth/eleventh century, which is also its most obscure period, on which the textual sources are silent and archaeological finds are scanty. Eleventh century al Raqqa is revealed through several documents from the Cairo Geniza, which (...) tell the story of the al- Lādhiqī family, whose members occupied leadership positions in the local Jewish community and around. Through the saga of the al-Lādhiqīs, some light is shed on the dimorphic rule exercised by the Bedouin tribe of Banū Numayr on the city and on the local Jewish community and the ways it integrated in the city and in the wider network of Jewish communities. (shrink)

In the 5th/11th century in Cairo, Imam Ḥamza, the founder of the Druze faith, abrogated the entire substantive laws, including the Islamic one. And yet, four centuries later, Druze jurists in the mountainous regions of Syria developed their own legal doctrine. This essay explores the evolution of Druzism from an esoteric doctrine according to the Ismāʿīlī vision to a madhhab (doctrinal school of law) using the prism of gender (in)equality. Through a close reading of the Imam’s epistles in the Ḥikma (...) (i.e., the Druze canon of scripture) and Druze law treatises from the 9th/15th century, I show how premodern Druze jurists were influenced particularly by Shāfiʿī and Mālikī law. Although they remained faithful to the strict gender equality articulated in their sacred book, Druze jurists established a gender hierarchy in marriage and permitted wife beating based on Q 4:34. They however expounded an original doctrine of zinā (adultery): despite their construction of femininity as inferior and irrational, and their assumption of women’s intellectual deficiency, Druze jurists considered nonconsensual marriage as well as nonconsensual sex in marriage to be crimes of zinā. I argue that Druze jurists developed rules that enforced sexual equality but simultaneously conformed to their patriarchal vision of society to maintain the social cohesion of their religious community, clans, and extended families, all of which provided local networks for informal conflict resolution. (shrink)

This article explores the long-contested question about the role of individual judgement vis-à-vis the authority of tradition in the interpretation of the Qurʾān. It focuses on the notion of al-tafsīr bi-l-raʾy – interpretation of the Qurʾān by “personal opinion” – and offers an insight into medieval Muslim debates over the legitimacy of this type of exegesis, its alleged prophetic disapproval, and the scope and conditions of its use. Based on the Sunnī tafsīr works from the 3rd/9th to the 6th/12th centuries, (...) the article examines how in the course of these debates Muslim authors negotiated the meaning of al-tafsīr bi-l-raʾy. Against the view that it encompassed any interpretation beyond tradition-based tafsīr, their reinterpretations of the term implied that philological, juridical, and Ṣūfī tafsīr could not be categorized as al-tafsīr bi-l-raʾy, thereby narrowing the meaning of this concept and broadening the scope of legitimate exegesis and interpretative authorities in Sunnī tafsīr tradition. (shrink)

Résumé en français L’intégration de la région africaine au sein de l’Empire musulman fut l’occasion pour de nombreux historiens, géographes et autres érudits de s’intéresser à ces contrées, d’écrire une histoire de sa conquête et, par la suite, de dresser un tableau plus large qui englobait les aspects sociaux ou économiques de la région. Dans le présent travail, nous avons réalisé une enquête sur le Patrice Grégoire à travers les témoignages des récits arabes. Cette recherche est fondée sur un recensement (...) de ces mentions et une analyse de leur contenu. L’objectif majeur est de comprendre l’apport de cette catégorie de textes à un épisode particulier de la conquête arabe de l’Afrique du Nord. (shrink)

The dating of Islamic traditions has so far remained dependent on internal analyses of the hadith corpus. However, a comparison between this corpus and documentary sources appears possible. Invocations engraved on rocks during the first three centuries of Islam can be compared with those attributed to the earliest authorities of Islam. The new method I propose, based on an analysis of lexical convergences between inscriptions and hadith, allows to approach the time when traditions were first put into circulation and to (...) study the process whereby invocatory formulas were incorporated into the sunna and attributed to various authorities. In this way, it becomes possible to identify a historically plausible lexical nucleus in prophetic hadith and to understand how, by means of transmitters that I call “hubs,” ancient non-prophetic traditions became prophetic. (shrink)

Edition and study of P.Vindob. A.Ch. 36616, a literary paper fragment from 3rd/9th-century Egypt. The fragment contains a tradition that depicts ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib (d. 40/661) performing a four-rakʿa prayer and reciting a special supplication on the 15th of the month of Rajab. The tradition is only known from noncanonical Shīʿī ḥadīth collections. Situating it in a broader historical context, the paper provides a glimpse on the Shīʿī presence in Egypt as well as the sanctity of the month of (...) Rajab in Sunnī and Shīʿī literatures. This tradition, in conclusion, presents an early evidence for the observances of the month of Rajab in general and the middle of the month in particular in the local Shīʿī community in pre-Fatimid Egypt. (shrink)

At the end of the twentieth century, the Ayatollah Marʿashī Najafī Library acquired a fourteenth-century manuscript of munshaʾāt previously held in a private collection. This composite multitext manuscript contains about two hundred letters sent by or to officials of the Rūm Saljūq sultanate in the thirteenth century. The letters include official and private correspondence as well as decrees of nomination. They are all in Persian. This article is a first study of the codicological features, structure, and contents of this manuscript. (...) It suggests a production process that unfolded in several stages over a period of seventy years, from the reign of Ghiyāth al-Dīn Kay-Khusraw II to the second decade of the fourteenth century. The Marʿashī manuscript expands considerably the volume of documents available on Saljūq Anatolia during the beginning of Mongol period. It is poised to become a major source on the political history of the period and will also help to understand the integration of Anatolia into the Persianate sphere. (shrink)

Both Islamic and Jewish thought display a sensitivity to the treatment of texts, particularly sacred texts. This article investigates Muslim debates on how to dispose of worn-out sacred texts. It argues that these debates were rooted in the precedent formed by the reported destruction of noncanonical copies of the Qurʾān by the third caliph ʿUthmān, and they featured various preferred and rejected methods of text disposal, including burning, washing, shredding, and burying. By the thirteenth century CE, these debates had yielded (...) a robust theorization of worn-out texts as analogous to human corpses and thus deserving of respectful burial. (shrink)

In much of the existing research concerning Aljamiado literature, we can observe attempts to assign individual texts or even the whole corpus unequivocally to a Spanish or Arabic/islamic tradition. However, these attempts fail to adequately address the specificities of these texts and sometimes actively obscure important connections. This can be shown through an analysis of the Coplas del Alhichante de Puey Monzón, a pilgrimage narrative in verse from the sixteenth century that has so far mostly been seen as a continuation (...) of the Arabic riḥla. This paper provides an overview of the history, past research and editions, and poetical form of the text, as well as a proposed date for its production, followed by a detailed analysis concerning its possible function which serves as a basis for comparing it to pilgrimage narratives from the Arabic/islamic tradition and its Spanish/christian counterparts. Contrary to what is usually assumed, the Coplas have more in common with the latter than with Arabic riḥla texts. They can therefore be interpreted as a product of a cultural “contact zone” as defined by Mary Louise Pratt. Rather than merely trying to preserve their Islamic heritage and passively receiving Christian influence, Mudéjares and Moriscos actively participated in contemporary developments in Spanish literature and used them for their own ends. (shrink)

The popular Islamic formula known as the ḥawqala is first attested in Ḥadīth and other written sources from around the eighth century CE. A similar formula is Q: 18.39b. Some scholars in the first Islamic centuries were concerned that the non-Qurʾānic ḥawqala would be more venerated than Q: 18.39b or confused with it. In this essay, I suggest in what respect the ḥawqala is related to Q: 18.39b. I argue that the ḥawqala is perhaps influenced by Zech: 4.6b and its (...) Syriac version. Past scholars have noted the similarity between the ḥawqala and Zech: 4.6b, but the exact relation between these two phrases has not been fully explored. I therefore discuss the linguistic and thematic similarities between both phrases and note some Islamic traditions in which the ḥawqala is said to be of Biblical provenance. By this, I show that there is good reason to suspect that the ḥawqala is partly influenced by Zech: 4.6b and its Syrac version, and that this probably occurred at an early stage in the development of Islam when Jewish scripture was more regularly consulted as a means of confirming Islamic revelation. (shrink)

Interest in esoteric and mystical aspects of Islam in present-day Russia and its Soviet and tsarist predecessors is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon. The article starts with a critical discussion of Aleksandr Dugin’s interpretations of Sufism in his ambitious intellectual project Noomachia: Wars of the Intellect [and] Civilizations of Borderlands. The author then compares Dugin’s conceptualizations of Sufism with those of several Russian writers who lived in the second half of the nineteenth century and whose portrayal of Sufism and its (...) followers is similar to Dugin’s in some important respects. These ideologically driven constructions of Sufism stand in sharp contrast to the self-consciously objective scholarly ones that emerged in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century within the Russian academic and teaching institutions specializing in Eastern religions, languages, and cultures. The author argues that Russian academic conceptualizations of Sufism mirrored those of the fin-de-siècle German Islamology and then proceeds to examine the profound changes in Russian attitudes to Sufism, and Islam generally, after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the rise of the Soviet state that based its legitimacy on the Marxist-Leninist concept of history with its pervasive atheism, materialism, and emphasis on class struggle. It shaped Soviet-era academic and nonacademic approaches to Sufism until the mid-1980s, when Soviet scholars began to question the Marxist-Leninist certainties of the previous six decades. (shrink)

In this paper we will show how Qurashī patrilines and marriage records can be statistically analysed to generate an estimate of the tribe’s size at the time of Muḥammad. By extension this will also give us an estimate for the population size of Mecca. We will begin by using the marriage data preserved in a genealogical work to identify a cohort of adult Qurashī male contemporaries of Muḥammad. We will then divide this cohort into men who had brothers versus those (...) who did not. It will be shown that this ratio is exactly what we would expect if we were modelling a complete population and therefore it cannot be a sample. With this in place we can extrapolate the number of women and dependants that would have been linked to each man, giving us an estimate of the tribe’s size in the period. Supplementing this with selected historiographical data will give us the population size of Mecca. The resulting findings raise a series of questions concerning Qurashī origins that will then be addressed by applying a similar methodology to the eras before Muḥammad’s. This will illuminate the manner and timing of the emergence of the Quraysh as a distinct entity. (shrink)

This article examines the tafsīr on the Qurʾānic verses pertaining to suicide, qatl al-nafs. The majority of exegetical discussions on suicide center on Moses and originate from his command to the Banū Isrāʾīl in Q 2:54, uqtulū anfusakum, which can be interpreted as “kill yourselves” or “kill one another.” On the basis of etymology and historical context, commentators associate this passage with Q 4:29 and 4:66. Another such passage, Q 2:84, which outlaws bloodshed, is also associated with the Banū Isrāʾīl, (...) in a different context. Adding Q 18:6 and Q 2:195 to the list of verses under consideration, this article traces interpretations of self-destruction from early works of tafsīr down to the late fourteenth century. Though the Qurʾānic attitude toward suicide is notoriously ambiguous, by examining the various grammatical constructions and interpretations given to these verses, one is able to establish trends and motivations in exegesis. The discussions of suicide, and condemnations where appropriate, focus on the motivation and intention of the individual rather than the act itself. Obedience to God, the nature of his commands, and the well-being of the community of believers also emerge as some of the key ethical issues in the commentaries. (shrink)