Sabine Schmidtke

İslâm düşünce geleneğinin temel disiplinlerinden olan kelâm, Batılı İslâm araştırmalarının da her zaman başta gelen ilgi alanlarından biri olmuştur. Başlangıçtan Günümüze İslâm Kelâmı, bu alakanın günümüzde geldiği yeri göstermesi açısından en kapsamlı ve en yeni çalışmadır. Seleflerinin önyargılı bakışlarından nispeten daha arınmış bir eser olarak ön plana çıkan bu çalışma, kırka yakın araştırmacının ortak emeğinin bir ürünüdür. Kelâm araştırmalarının günümüzdeki durumunu ortaya koyduğu gibi gelecek araştırmalar için de yeni yönelimler öneren eser, beş ana bölümde hem tarihsel hem de problematik olarak kelâm disiplinini bütün yönleriyle ele alarak okuyuculara kuşatıcı bir bakış açısı sunmaktadır.

The scholarship of Ignaz Goldziher (1850-1921), one of the founders of Islamic studies in Europe, has not ceased to be in the focus of interest since his death. This volume addresses aspects of Goldziher’s intellectual trajectory together with the history of Islamic and Jewish studies as reflected in the letters exchanged between Goldziher and his peers from various countries that are preserved in the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and elsewhere. The fourteen contributions deal with hitherto unexplored aspects of the correspondence addressing issues that are crucial to our understanding of the formative period of these disciplines.

Alanlarında yetkin 28 yazarın kaleme aldığı 30 makaleden oluşan İslam Felsefes: Filozoflar ve Eserler, giriş niteliği taşıyan diğer metinlerden birkaç noktada ayrılıyor. İlkin, bu derlemenin özgün dertlerinden biri olarak, Grekçe felsefe dünyasıyla Arapça felsefe dünyasının terimler, kavramlar ve bunların alımlanışı üzerinden karşılaştırılmasına şahit oluyoruz. İkinci olarak, bu derleme 9.yüzyıldan 20. yüzyıla kadar, yani Kindî’den Allame Tabâtabâî ve Zeki Necib Mahmud’a kadar; Tanrı’nın bilgisinin kapsamından ve felsefece yaşamanın ilkelerinden tutun da Hume’un nedensellik eleştirisiyle uğraşan bir mollaya kadar uzanıyor. Böylece okur "İslam dünyasındaki felsefe”nin veya "İslam hâkimiyetindeki bölgede yapılan felsefe”nin hayali veya varsayımsal sonunu sorgulama imkânı buluyor. Üçüncü olarak, her bölümün yazarı, ele aldığı düşünürün genel biyografik ve çağın entelektüel, siyasal manzarasını sunduktan sonra, incelenen düşünürün bir metnine, genellikle söz konusu düşünürün başyapıtı sayılan metne odaklanıyor. Böylece okura, eleştirel bir gözle didik didik edilmiş bir metnin çözümlenmesi üzerinden düşünürlerin zihin dünyasına giriş fırsatı sunuluyor. Son olarak, metinlerde yer alan uzun alıntıların her biri, çevirmen tarafından özgün dilinden, yani genel olarak Arapça özgün metinlerden çevrilmiş bulunuyor. Derlemedeki metinlerden Arapça yazılmamış olanlarsa istisna kabilinden; Nâsır-ı Hüsrev’in Farsça, Muhammed İkbal’in İngilizce ve Ali Sedad Bey’in Osmanlı Türkçesiyle kaleme aldığı metinler.

Late antique scholars and medievalists who work on manuscripts as primary sources are very much familiar with the art of the colophon. But the history of the colophon dates back much further than late antiquity, to ancient history when scribes in ancient Mesopotamia chiseled colophons on cuneiform tablets as early as the third millennium BCE. At their inception, colophons were writing production records: who wrote what, when and where? Ancient colophons even provide statistics: how many lines were written in a particular work? As we enter late antiquity, colophons take on a life of their own and begin to acquire literary properties—snippets but nevertheless literary objects. They developed into an art form with distinctive formulaic phraseology. In some traditions, scribes began to record historical events that occurred just before or during the production of a manuscript, events that otherwise would be lost to history. Readers and users also began to insert colophons in existing manuscripts, creating a plethora of colophon types. How are we to approach the study of colophons and what can they tell us about communities at large, or about individual scribes? And what of the colophon itself as an object? One can drill into its text as any other piece of literature, studying various aspects of its literary style and function, as well as linguistic features that distinguish colophon texts from the main text found in a manuscript. This is particularly interesting in multilingual environments, or when the scribe’s mother tongue is connected to the primary text of the manuscript in a diglossic relationship. Here, the colophon is an essential linguistic source into how the scribe’s native tongue interacts with the higher literary register of the manuscript text. This edited volume brings together scholars from various disciplines to study colophons in various languages and traditions across space and time. Whatever you would like to get out of colophons, we hope that there will be at least one paper here that will draw your attention. If not, there are enough literary snippets quoted to keep you entertained.

Most scholars who employ manuscripts in their research tend to focus on the literary content itself. But what about the role of the scribe who typically remains at the periphery of research? How can we, in the words of the NT textual critic James Royse, “virtually look over the scribe’s shoulder” to understand the process by which our manuscripts were produced? Moreover, manuscripts often contain far more material than the words that form their primary texts: dots and various other symbols that mark vowels (in the case of Semitic languages), intonation, readings aids, and other textual markers; marginal notes and sigla that provide additional explanatory content akin to but substantially different from our modern notes and endnotes; images and illustrations that present additional material not found in the main text. These extratextual (or peritextual) elements add additional layers to the main body of the text and are crucial for our understanding of the text’s transmission history as well as scribal habits. The volume brings together contributions by scholars scholars focussing on such extra-, peritextual elements as found in Middle Eastern manuscripts written in Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, Persian and other languages, to study the individuals who produced our manuscripts and how they shaped the transmission of literary texts they copied.

Who speaks for Islam? To whom do Muslims turn when they look for guidance? To what extent do individual scholars and preachers exert religious authority, and how can it be assessed? The upsurge of Islamism has lent new urgency to these questions, but they have deeper roots and a much longer history, and they certainly should not be considered in the light of present concerns only. The present volume – grown out of an international symposium at the Free University, Berlin in 2002 – is not so much concerned with religious authority, but with religious authorities, men and women claiming, projecting and exerting religious authority within a given context. It addresses issues such as the relationship of knowledge, conduct and charisma, the social functions of the schools of law and theology, and the efforts on the part of governments and rulers to organize religious scholars and to implement state-centred hierarchies. The volume focuses on Middle Eastern Muslim majority societies in the period from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, and the individual papers offer case studies elucidating important aspects of the wider phenomenon. Individually and collectively, they highlight the scope and variety of religious authorities in past and present Muslim societies.

This volume complements the selections of Wilferd Madelung’s articles previously published by Variorum (Religious Schools and Sects in Medieval Islam, Religious and Ethnic Movements in Medieval Islam and Studies in Medieval Shi'ism). The first sections contain articles examining intellectual and historical aspects of Mutazilism, the Ibadiyya, Hanafism and Maturidism, Sufism and Philosophy. The final group of articles focuses on aspects of early Muslim history. A detailed index completes the volume.

This volume complements the selections of Wilferd Madelung’s articles previously published by Variorum (Religious Schools and Sects in Medieval Islam and Religious and Ethnic Movements in Medieval Islam). The first articles here examine legal and political aspects of early Shīʿism. The following studies relate to doctrinal views of the Zaydī imāms al-Qāsim b. Ibrāhīm al-Rassī and al-Nāṭiq bi-l-Ḥaqq and to Zaydī attitudes to Sufism. The final group focuses on the Ismāʿīliyya, their social and political history and aspects of their religious thought. A detailed index complete the volume.

The history of Near and Middle Eastern Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study dates back to 1935, and it is the one area of scholarship that has been continuously represented at the Institute ever since, encompassing all four schools—Mathematics, Natural Sciences, Historical Studies, and Social Science. The volume opens with a historical sketch of the study of the Near and Middle East at the Institute, discussing luminaries such as Ernst Herzfeld, Henri Seyrig, Ernst Kantorowicz, Otto Neugebauer, Marshall Clagett, Clifford Geertz, Bernard Lewis, Glen Bowersock, Oleg Grabar, and Patricia Crone and their respective impact on the field. The second part of the volume, “Fruits of Scholarship,” consists of essays and short studies by IAS scholars, past and present—faculty, members, and visitors; mathematicians, social scientists, and historians—who are engaged in one way or another with the Near and Middle East in their scholarship. Their contributions cover fields such as the ancient Near East and early Islamic history, the Bible and the Qurʾān, Islamic intellectual history within and beyond denominational history, Arabic and other Semitic languages and literatures, Islamic religious and legal practices, law and society, the Islamic West, the Ottoman world, Iranian studies, the modern Middle East, and Islam in the West.

Zaydism, a branch of Shiʿi Islam dating to the eighth century CE, has historic roots in the Northern Highlands of Yemen and the Caspian regions of Northern Iran, and its literary tradition is among the richest within Islamic civilization. The most significant and by far largest collections of Zaydi manuscripts are housed by the many public and private libraries of Yemen, an endangered cultural heritage tradition, currently at risk due to the conflict and warfare in Yemen. Of great importance are also holdings of Yemeni manuscripts that are kept elsewhere. In view of the poor state of scholarship in the area of Zaydi studies, the challenges that result from the significant dispersal of the material are manifold. Yemeni Manuscript Cultures in Peril contributes to the history of books and libraries and their role in the scholastic culture in Yemen, past and present. The contributions brought together in this volume address a wide spectrum of aspects concerning Yemeni manuscript cultures, with some focusing on their history and present state within Yemen and others discussing the collections of manuscripts of Yemeni provenance in Europe and elsewhere. Contributors are: Hassan Ansari, Stefanie Brinkmann, Gabriele vom Bruck, Bernard Haykel, Brinkley Messick, Christoph Rauch, Anne Regourd, Valentina Sagaria Rossi, Karin Scheper, Sabine Schmidtke, Jan Thiele, Daniel Martin Varisco, Arnoud Vrolijk, and Zayd al-Wazir.

المرجع في تاريخ علم الكلام» هو عمل ضخم أصدرته جامعة أكسفورد، تَوفَّرَ على كتابته سبعة وثلاثون باحثًا، مع مقدمة مسهَبة بقلم زابينه شميتكه، التي قامت بتحريره. وقد كان الطابَعُ المرجعيُّ لهذا الكتاب هو الباعثَ لـ«مركز نماء للدراسات والبحوث» على نقله إلى العربية عبر ترجمة أنجزها الأكاديمي المعروف أسامة شفيع السيد، وحصل لقاءها على جائزة حمد للترجمة. يستقصي هذا الكتاب آخرَ ما انتهى إليه البحث العلمي الحديث في تطور علم الكلام، مقترحًا اتجاهات بحثية جديدة، كما يتضمن تأريخًا للمذاهب الكلامية المختلفة من قدرية، وجهمية، ومعتزلة، وأشعرية، وماتُريدية، وشيعة، وإباضية، وكرَّامية، وغيرها. وفي الكتاب أيضًا طائفةٌ من الدراسات التي تعالج قضايا كلامية معينة، كنظرية الأحوال لأبي هاشم الجُبَّائي، وفكرة الاقتران في نظرية السببية. ولم يقتصر الكتاب على تاريخ علم الكلام دون حاضره، بل قام برصد الاتجاهات الحديثة الرئيسة، ذات النزعة التجديدية، التي عرفت في العموم بـ«الكلام الجديد