Sabine Schmidtke
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Sabine Schmidtke is Professor of Islamic Intellectual History in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6181-5065.
For a full curriculum vitae and list of publication, see here.
For my Collection of Manuscript Surrogates (the list is continuously being expanded), see here.
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For my recent monograph The Beginnings of Shi’i Studies in Germany: Rudolf Strothmann and His Correspondence with Carl Heinrich Becker, Ignaz Goldziher, Eugenio Griffini, and Cornelis van Arendonk, 1910 through 1926, see here.
For current events and scholars in Near and Middle Eastern Studies at the School of Historical Studies, see here.
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Recent Submissions
- A Manual of Zaydī Muʿtazilī Dogmatic Texts from Early Sixth/Twelfth-Century Iran(Shii Studies Review (Brill), 2023)MS Riyadh, Maktabat Malik Fahd al-Waṭaniyya 748 is a multitext volume copied by al-Ḥasan b. Muḥammad b. Aḥmad b. ʿAlī Ibn Abī l-ʿAshīra in 552/1157 in Ṣaʿda. It consists of doctrinal texts by Zaydī and Muʿtazilī authors, invariably Iranian. The codex is the only known extant witness of all but two of the tracts it includes (the exceptions being Ismāʿīl b. ʿAlī b. Ismāʿīl al-Farrazādhī’s K. Taʿlīq al-Tabṣira and Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan al-Dāʿī al-Ḥasanī’s K. Ḥaqāʾiq al-aʿrāḍ wa-aḥwālihā wa-sharḥihā), and two of its tracts, K. al-Nasīm fī l-uṣūl by one Abū Jaʿfar and K. Muhaj al-ʿulūm by Muʿādh b. Abī l-Khayr al-Hamadhānī, are not even attested in the relevant biobibliographical sources. This study includes critical editions of the doctrinal tracts included in the majmūʿa as well as an additional tract preserved in a related codex that was apparently also copied by Ibn Abī l-ʿAshīra (MS Milan, Ambrosiana, ar. E 462). The edited tracts include Abū l-Faḍl al-ʿAbbās Ibn Sharwīn’s K. al-Wujūh allatī taʿẓumu ʿalayhā l-ṭāʿāt ʿinda llāh, his K. al-Yāqūta, and his Ḥaqāʾiq al-ashyāʾ, ʿAbd al-Jabbār al-Hamadhānī’s Ḥudūd al-alfāẓ, Ibn al-Dāʿī’s K. Ḥaqāʾiq al-aʿrāḍ wa-aḥwālihā wa-sharḥihā, the extant part of the K. al-Nasīm fī l-uṣūl, K. Muhaj al-ʿulūm, by Muʿādh b. Abī l-Khayr al-Hamadhānī, fragments of two theological summae by unidentified Zaydī scholars, and collections of doctrinal definitions of uncertain authorship.
51 - Building Bridges: Ignaz Goldziher and His Correspondents. Islamic and Jewish Studies around the Turn of the Twentieth Century(Brill, 2024)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.
61 23 - Literary Snippets: Colophons Across Space and Time(Gorgias Press, 2023)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.
50 16 - Byzantium from a Global Perspective II: Byzantium and the Islamicate World(2023-06)Within the format of the Mainz History Talks, a series of three workshops organized by the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) and the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz (JGU) with the overarching title “Mainz-Princeton Symposia: Reflections on Byzantium from a Global Perspective” will take place from 2022 to 2025. These Mainz-Princeton Symposia will seek to situate conceptions of Byzantium within a “global” context by examining the relevance of Byzantium, with each of the three gatherings dedicated to a specific regional or chronological milieu and reflecting upon Byzantium from a global perspective. As a culture and polity geographically spanning three continents and chronologically bridging Antiquity and the Renaissance, Byzantium meant entirely different things to its neighbors at different points in its history. Moreover, beyond examining actual connections between Byzantium and other cultures, leading experts of various disciplines participating in these conversations will be called upon to reflect upon Byzantium and to describe what is Byzantium’s relevance in a general sense as a foil or a point of reference for them, for their approach to global history and their fields more broadly. The second of these three workshops, which will take place from June 28th to 30th, 2023 on the grounds of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, will focus on Byzantium and the Islamicate world. The invitees represent a broad swathe of Byzantine Studies as well as fields touching upon the history of the premodern Middle East. Among other questions, the workshop participants will examine to what extent Byzantium can be understood as part of a broader premodern history of the Islamicate world, even though, despite the empire’s manifold political and cultural connections with that region, it is more often associated with western Latin Europe as well as the Slavic world. Other queries which the gathering’s attendees will attempt answer is what extent does Byzantium figure within conceptions of the premodern Islamicate world, in the sense of a shared cultural space, and what form future cooperation between Byzantine Studies and fields covering the premodern Middle East should take and to what degree disciplinary boundaries are here justified or rather a hindrance.
37 7 - Imāmī Theological Thought during the Early Seventh/Thirteenth Century: Sālim b. Maḥfūẓ Ibn ʿUzayza (or ʿAzīza) and his K. al-Minhāj(Brill, 2023)MS Tehran, Malik 1650, includes not only one of the earliest witnesses of al-Miqdād b. ʿAbd Allāh b. Muḥammad al-Ḥillī al-Suyūrī’s (d. 826/1422–23) al-Anwār al-jalāliyya fī sharḥ al-Fuṣūl al-naṣīriyya, completed in 852/1448, but also the quotation of a portion of the otherwise lost K. al-Minhāj, a theological summa by the early seventh/thirteenth-century Imāmī scholar Sālim b. Maḥfūṭ Ibn ʿUzayza (or ʿAzīza) that was popular among Imāmī scholars of al-Ḥilla up until the ninth/fifteenth century. The present study discusses the scarce available data about Sālim b. Maḥfūẓ and the reception of his K. al-Minhāj, and it includes an editio princeps of the work’s portion that is preserved in Ms. Tehran, Malik 1650.
37 - Manuscript Treasures from Najaf in Carl Brockelmann’s Geschichte der arabischen Literatur(Brill, 2023)In the 1890s, Carl Brockelmann (d. 1956) embarked on what soon turned out to be a mission impossible—to compile single-handedly a bibliography of the entire extant Muslim literary tradition in Arabic language. The supplement volumes (published in 1937, 1938, and 1942), and the second edition (published in 1943 and 1949) that eventually replaced the original Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur, remain until today an indispensible tool for Arabists and Islamicists, especially for the mid-fifth/eleventh century and later, and this despite the volumes’ evident shortcomings, of which Brockelmann was well aware. Little is known about Brockelmann’s work mode during the decades between the publication of the original GAL and the late 1930s and 1940s, when he worked on the GALS and the second edition of the GAL. Access to the relevant primary and secondary material proved challenging, and it varied during Brockelmann’s career. The difficulties he encountered with consulting the relevant materials, were partly alleviated by the support Brockelmann received from colleagues. Among them, Hellmut Ritter, who was based from October 1926 on in Istanbul and had access to the rich manuscript holdings of the local libraries, was perhaps Brockelmann’s most important informant. However, the importance of Ritter’s contributions to the GALS and GAL goes beyond the manuscript holdings of the libraries in Istanbul. For the manuscript treasures of Najaf, for example, Ritter provided Brockelmann with two documents, a letter he had received in March 1936 from a young scholar of Najaf, ʿAlī al-Khāqānī (d. 1400/1979 or 1980), in which the latter described a selection of manuscripts in Najaf, and a handwritten catalogue by one Najafābādī, which Brockelmann had received a few months later from Ritter. Eventually, Brockelmann had access to volumes one and two of Āghā Buzurg al-Ṭihrānī’s (d. 1389/1970) al-Dharīʿa ilā taṣānīf al-shīʿa, his third important sources for the manuscripts of Najaf. The present study analyzes Brockelmann’s usage of these three sources.
36 - Wilferd Madelung Papers: An Inventory(2023)The Wilferd Madelung Papers were gathered on 24-25 February 2023 from Wilferd Madelung's former Oxford apartment (21 Belsyre Court, Observatory Street) and on 14 March 2023 from the Madelung family residence in River Forest, Illinois (547 Keystone Avenue). Over the course of 2023, the material was brought together and sorted, and the present, still incomplete, inventory reflects this arrangment. The remaining materials will be added over the coming months.
256 27 - From Wissenschaft des Judentums to Wissenschaft des Islams: Eugen Mittwoch between Jewish and Islamic Studies(Mohr Siebeck, 2023)In the course of the nineteenth century, “Oriental studies” evolved as an independent academic discipline. While these developments primarily involved scholars who identified as Christians, Jewish scholars, too, adopted a critical historical/philological approach towards the Jewish literary tradition and its history, an approach that became known as Wissenschaft des Judentums. Although the close relationship between the Wissenschaft des Judentums and Oriental studies is widely recognized, far more scholarship has been produced on the earlier periods—up until the final decades of the nineteenth century—than on later periods of the Wissenschaft des Judentums—up until 1933. This study focuses on the Jewish orientalists who were trained in Berlin, the leading center of Oriental studies in Germany, shortly before or during the first decade of the twentieth century, and who also attended one of the local Jewish seminaries, the Hochschule or the Rabbinerseminar, two institutions with a critical number of faculty with a solid training in Semitica and Arabica. Unlike their Jewish predecessors, they were often more inclined towards Islamica than Judaica and they often replaced the ideals of the Wissenschaft des Judentums with those of Zionism. Their career paths also differed from those of earlier Jewish orientalists. In order to redress the neglect of this period in scholarship, and to allow for a prosopographic analysis of educational and career patterns, of opportunities, choices, and decisions, the respective scholarly trajectories need to be reconstructed for as many individual cases as possible. Focusing on these understudied figures will not only lead to a deeper understanding of Wissenschaft des Judentums during these later periods, but will also allow for a better grasp of the role of Jewish scholars and their contribution to the field of Oriental studies during the first half of the twentieth century. With this purpose in mind, the second part of this paper is devoted to one of the representatives of the later generation of Wissenschaft des Judentums, the Orientalist Eugen Mittwoch (d. 1942), who is credited with having initiated a new direction in Islamic studies within Orientalism.
97 28 - Rudolf Strothmann and the Beginnings of Zaydi Studies in Germany(leidenarabichumanitiesblog, 2023-03-12)
174 17 - YEMEN UNDER THE RULE OF IMAM YAHYA (1904-1948) A CRITICAL ASSESSMENT OF THE SOURCES(2023)YEMEN UNDER THE RULE OF IMAM YAHYA (1904-1948): A CRITICAL ASSESSMENT OF THE SOURCES WORKSHOP CONVENORS: Sabine Schmidtke (IAS Princeton), Marieke Brandt (ÖAW/AAS), Valentina Sagaria Rossi (IAS Princeton), Jan Thiele (CSIC Madrid) A workshop supported by the Gerard B. Lambert Foundation
396 171 - התיאולוגיה המעתזלית והשתקפותה בהגותם של יוסף אלבסיר וסהל (ישר) אלתסתרי(Tel Aviv: Goldstein Goren Diaspora Research Center, 2022)
72 18 - Scholarly Correspondences Among Orientalists during the Early and Late Modern Period as a Historical Source: A Series of Lectures(2023)The object of this lecture series is to bring together scholars and librarians engaged with collections of correspondences and/or include related projects that use appropriate digital tools to map and analyze such corpora. It is hosted by Sabine Schmidtke (NES@IAS) and María Mercedes Tuya (Digital Scholarship@IAS).
1535 560 - The David Thomas Gochenour Collection of Zaydi Yemeni Manuscripts(2022)In 1984, David Thomas Gochenour completed a study titled “The Penetration of Zaydi Islam into Early Medieval Yemen,” which was submitted as a doctoral dissertation to Harvard University in May 1984. It was followed by Gochenour’s study, “A Revised Bibliography of Medieval Yemeni History in light of Recent Publications and Discoveries,” published in volume 63 (1986) of Der Islam. Both publications constituted important landmarks in the scholarly exploration of Zaydism at the time—Gochenour’s doctoral dissertation was a first attempt to write a social history of Yemeni Zaydism during the medieval period, and his 1986 article provided a first comprehensive overview of the relevant historical sources, Sunni, Zaydi, and Ismāʿīlī, and the publication activities in Yemen at the time. Having spent a fair amount of time in Yemen himself, Gochenour was involved in direct conversation with some of the leading Yemeni historians at the time and he had access to some of the public and private libraries. During the preparation of his studies, Gochenour assembled a remarkable collection of manuscript surrogates, in microfilm as well as on paper. On 31 March 2022, D. Thomas Gochenour visited the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton NJ and donated at this occasion his collection to the library of the IAS. In doing so, he wishes to make the material accessible to scholarship. To facilitate this, I am presenting here an annotated list of the holdings of David Thomas Gochenour Collection, which can be accessed through the Historical Studies–Social Science Library of the Institute for Advanced Study. The material may be consulted by scholars by appointment in the Library. Selected items that are not accessible in digital form elsewhere, will also be digitized and made accessible through the Zaydi Manuscript Tradition Project (ZMT) that is jointly curated by the Institute for Advanced Study and Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML).
169 27 - Masʾala fī anna ijmāʿ ahl al-bayt ḥujja, Abī ʿAbd Allāh al-Ḥusayn b. Ismāʿīl al-Ḥasanī al-Jurjānī al-Shajarī(Mominoun Without Borders: Qism al-Dirāsāt al-Dīniyya, 2022)هذا المقال هو عبارة عن أحد فصول مجلة الدراسات الشيعية، المجلد السادس، Studies Shii 6 Review ،الصادرة عام 2022 ،ويُطلق على هذا الفصل عنوان عام، وهو »كنوز الشيعة في مكتبات أمريكا الشمالية وأوروبا«، من الصفحة 381-422 ،والذي نشرته دار بريل. ويُ ُ عنى هذا المقال بمسألة مهمة، للغاية، وهي بيان حجية إجماع أهل البيت عند الزيدية، حسب ما عالجها اإلمام الموفق باهلل الحسين بن إسماعيل الحسني الجرجاني الشجري، وهو )من علماء القرن الخامس الهجري/القرن الحادي عشر الميالدي(. وهذه المسألة قد تمت الكتابة فيها من قبل اإلمام الموفق باهلل، ومن ُ بعده. ولذا أحببت إيصال هذه المقالة للباحثين والقراء العرب، والمهتمين. ً، دراسة للمؤلف وللمخطوطة، ثم تبع ذلك تحقيق األطروحة، والموسومة ولقد تناولت هذه المقالة، بداية ُ بـ »مسألة في أن إجماع أهل البيت، عليهم السالم، حجة«. وقد شارك في إعداد هذا المقال: األستاذ الدكتور/ حسن أنصاري، وهو أستاذ متخصص في الدراسات التاريخية والفقه اإلسالمي وعلم الالهوت، ويعمل بمعهد الدراسات المتقدمة، ببرينستون نيوجيرسي، بالواليات المتحدة األمريكية. واألستاذة الدكتورة/ زابينه ً اشميتکه، وهي أستاذة في الدراسات التاريخية بمعهد الدراسات المتقدمة، ببرينستون نيوجيرسي. وأخيرا، الباحث / عمار جمعة فالحية زاده، وهو باحث مستقل. وهذه الترجمة العربية هي استمرار من المترجم لترجمة القيّم من الدراسات الدينية لتعريف القارئ ً العربي بما يتم من دراسات وأبحاث في مجال الدراسات اإلسالمية، واستمرارا في التعاون بين المترجم واألستاذ الدكتور: حسن أنصاري في ترجمة أعماله. فإن استحقت هذه الترجمة الرضا، فذلك من هللا، وإن كان من خطأ، فهو من المترج
238 31 - Medieval (and Premodern Muslim Scholars at Work: A Symposium in Honor of Etan Kohlberg(2022)A one-day symposium for Etan Kohlberg, eminent scholar and teacher, great friend and colleague, revolving around the topic of “Medieval (and Premodern) Muslim Scholars at Work”, evoking the title of Etan’s seminal monograph of 1992 on Ibn Ṭāwūs.
246 57 - "Medieval Imāmī Thought Collection"--Inventory(2022)The "Medieval Imāmī Thought Collection" comprises surrogates of the manuscript material that has been consulted during the preparation of Hassan Ansari and Sabine Schmidtke, Al-Šarīf al-Murtaḍā's Oeuvre and Thought in Context: An Archaeological Inquiry into Texts and their Transmission, 2 vols, Cordoba: UCOpress, 2022 (see also https://albert.ias.edu/handle/20.500.12111/6508). The Historical Studies–Social Science Library of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, kindly agreed to make available those surrogates under the file name "Medieval Imāmī Thought Collection." These may be consulted by scholars by appointment in the Library (https://www.ias.edu/library/hs).
123 34 - Shii Studies Review Volume 6 (2022)(2022)A refereed journal with an international editorial and advisory board, the Shii Studies Review provides a scholarly forum for researchers specializing in all fields of Shii studies. Issued twice a year, the journal publishes peer-reviewed original studies, critical editions of classical and pre-modern texts, and book reviews on Shii law, ḥadīth, Qurʾānic exegesis, philosophy, kalām, ritual and practices, classical and contemporary literature, and other aspects of the history of Shiism. It is dedicated to the study of Imami, Ismaili, Zaydi, and other other trends in Shii thought throughout history. Taking an expansive view of the richly variegated Shii traditions in both thought and practice and their cultural and social contexts, the Shii Studies Review makes a distinctive contribution to current scholarship on Shiism and its integration into the broader field of Islamic studies.
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