Historical Studies

This article offers a contribution to the study of polemics between Muslims and Jews in the Middle Ages. It presents an annotated translation of the extant fragments of a reply by an unknown Jew to the polemical tract Ifḥām al-Yahūd in which the mathematician Samawʾal al-Maghribī (d. 570/1175), who converted to Islam in 558/1163, virulently attacks his former religion. Samawʾal'stract had a significant impact both on later Muslim polemicists and on Jewish thinkers, who defended their religion against his strictures. The unique manuscript of the anonymous refutation, written in Judaeo-Arabic, is part of the Firkovitch collection kept at the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg. It is included in a codex that also contains an incomplete version, in the same hand, of Samawʾal al-Maghribī's tract. While the codex can be tentatively dated to the fourteenth century and was presumably written in Egypt, we cannot know with any degree of certainty when and where the refutation itself was composed, nor whether the unknown author had access to a complete copy of Samawʾal's work. Although at times the author quotes Ifḥām al-Yahūd verbatim, paraphrases and indirect references to Samawʾal's arguments are more common. In order to contextualize the unknown author's counterarguments, we provide a running commentary, including quotations of the passages from Ifḥām al-Yahūd that are being refuted.

The present volume—the first of its kind—deals with takfīr: accusing one´s opponents of unbelief (kufr). Originating in the first decades of Islam, this practice has been applied intermittently ever since. The nineteen studies included here deal with cases, covering different periods and parts of the Muslim world, of individuals or groups that used the instrument of takfīr to brand their opponents—either persons, groups or even institutions—as unbelievers who should be condemned, anathematized or even persecuted. Each case presented is placed in its sociopolitical and religious context. Together the contributions show the multifariousness that has always characterized Islam and the various ways in which Muslims either sought to suppress or to come to terms with this diversity. With contributions by: Roswitha Badry, Sonja Brentjes, Brian J. Didier, Michael Ebstein, Simeon Evstatiev, Ersilia Francesca, Robert Gleave, Steven Judd, István T. Kristó-Nagy, Göran Larsson, Amalia Levanoni, Orkhan Mir-Kasimov, Hossein Modarressi, Justyna Nedza, Intisar A. Rabb, Sajjad Rizvi, Daniel de Smet, Zoltan Szombathy, Joas Wagemakers.

This volume represents the state of the art in research on the controversial Muslim legal scholar, theologian and man of letters Ibn Ḥazm of Cordoba (d. 456/1064), who is widely regarded as one of the most brilliant minds of Islamic Spain. Remembered mostly for his charming treatise on love, he was first and foremost a fierce polemicist who was much criticized for his idiosyncratic views and his abrasive language. Insisting that the sacred sources of Islam are to be understood in their outward sense and that it is only the Prophet Muḥammad whose example may be followed, Ibn Ḥazm alienated himself from his peers. As a result, his books were burned and he was forced to withdraw from public life. Contributors are: Camilla Adang, Hassan Ansari, Samuel-Martin Behloul, Alfonso Carmona, Leigh Chipman, Maribel Fierro, Alejandro García Sanjuán, Livnat Holtzman, Samir Kaddouri, Joep Lameer, Christian Lange, Gabriel Martinez Gros, Luis Molina, Salvador Peña, Jose Miguel Puerta Vilchez, Rafael Ramón Guerrero, Adam Sabra, Sabine Schmidtke, Delfina Serrano, Bruna Soravia, Dominique Urvoy, Kees Versteegh and David Wasserstein.

Jewish-Muslim Intellectual History Entangled unearths forgotten textual materials that once belonged to the library of the Karaite community in Cairo and that were eventually abandoned in their synagogue’s storeroom, or geniza. Consigned to oblivion for centuries, a great many of these manuscripts were sold in the second half of the nineteenth century by Abraham Firkovitch to the National Library of Russia in St Petersburg, where they remained inaccessible to most scholars until the end of the Cold War. The texts from the former Karaite library of Cairo cover almost the entire spectrum of medieval literary genres and scholarly disciplines. In spite of their origin in the Jewish community, they include copies in Hebrew and Arabic characters of works by Jewish, Muslim and sometimes Christian authors. Regardless of their poor material condition—which is typical for geniza manuscripts—the fragmentary remains of the Karaite library are invaluable sources for historians of the Middle East: in many cases, they provide unique access to an otherwise lost body of literature from the medieval Islamicate world. The present volume includes fragments of five texts by adherents of the Muʿtazila, a school of rational theology that emerged in the eighth century CE and that was soon declared heretical by a majority of Muslim scholars. The five texts include Karaite copies and recensions of works by Muslim authors, notably ʿAbd al-Jabbār al-Hamadhānī and ʿAbd Allāh b. Saʿīd al-Labbād, as well as original Jewish Muʿtazilī treatises. The collection is concluded by an anonymous Rabbanite refutation of the highly influential polemical tract against Judaism, entitled Ifḥām al-yāhūd. All texts are edited here for the first time. This collection of previously unknown texts offers unprecedented insights into the intellectual crossroads between Muslims and Jews of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East.

The present volume deals with Muslim perceptions and uses of the Bible in its wider sense, comprising the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament and the New Testament, albeit with an emphasis on the former scripture. While Muslims consider the earlier revelations to the People of the Book to have been altered to some extent by Jews and Christians and abrogated by the Qurʾān, God’s final dispensation to humankind, the Bible is at the same time venerated in view of its divine origin, and questioning this divine origin is tantamount to unbelief. These different approaches to the biblical text, with their inherent contradictions, are discussed in twenty-one previously published and updated articles. Some of these were individually authored by Camilla Adang or Sabine Schmidtke, while others were co-authored. After a series of contributions surveying Muslim attitudes to the Bible, representative authors from the medieval Sunni and Shiʿi traditions are discussed. An important place is reserved here for two of the earliest Muslim compilations of presumed biblical predictions of the Prophet Muḥammad: Aʿlām (or Dalāʾil) al-nubuwwa by Ibn Qutayba and Kitāb al-Dīn wa-l-Dawla by Ibn Rabban al-Ṭabarī (both 3rd/9th century), which had a major impact on later authors, Sunni and Shiʿi alike. The final section of this book is concerned with the polemical works of a number of Ottoman scholars, who adduced material from the later Jewish exegetical tradition. The appearance of these interconnected studies in a single volume makes this book a welcome contribution to the fields of Religious Studies in general, and Islamic Studies in particular.