Arabic Studies Commons^™

A Gift For The Emperor DawāʾIr Al-ʿUlūm Wa-Jadāwil Al-Ruqūm, A Mediaeval Graphic Encyclopaedia Of The 19th Century, Juan Acevedo, Inês Bénard Da Costa

Abdou Filali-Ansary Occasional Paper Series

The recent discovery of a 19th-century Arabic manuscript in the Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon, initiated a period of intense collaboration between the Museum and the Faculty of Sciences, University of Lisbon, culminating in the 2023–24 exhibition ‘Power of the Word V: Circles of Knowledge.’ The first part of this article describes the manuscript, while the second part looks at its contents, a striking visual encyclopaedia, mostly from Safavid sources, entitled Tuḥfat al-Khāqān: Dawāʾir al-ʿUlūm wa-Jadāwil al-Ruqūm (A Gift for the Emperor: Circles of Sciences and Tables of Numerals). Its sections range from cosmogony and alphanumeric cosmology to geography, geomancy and the …

The Religious Groups Of Mecca And Medina In The Sixth And Seventh Centuries Ce, Ilkka Linstedt

Abdou Filali-Ansary Occasional Paper Series

Ancient and modern urban centres have been important loci for encounters between individuals of different identities. In this article, I present Mecca and Medina as multi-religious towns in the pre-Islamic and early Islamic periods of the sixth and seventh centuries ce. Mecca was a very small town, but the Kaaba shrine there served as a regional pilgrimage site that drew people from different faith communities. Medina was a larger settlement with a significant Jewish population. Jews, Christians and others (‘pagans’) lived in both towns. Some of these ‘others’ had also adopted some of the basic ideas of monotheism, although they …

The Beautiful Game On A Muslim Pitch: How Football And Religion Are Shaping Identity And Society, Aaron W. Hughes, Leif Stenberg

Exploring Muslim Contexts

Examines how football and religion act together to shape both identity and society in Muslim contexts.

This book showcases how football and religion are becoming increasingly interlinked in Muslim contexts in order to interact with and influence both identity and society. The first part of the volume is devoted to issues of identity, showing how football aids in its construction, maintenance and subversion. The second part reveals the deep-rooted connections between football and political and religious establishments by demonstrating how these organisations frequently use the game to disseminate or propagate their larger messages.

Altogether, the contributors reveal how football has …

Studying Hadith Commentaries In The Digital Age, Aslisho Qurboniev, Gowaart Van Den Bossche, Maroussia Bednarkiewicz

Faculty & Staff Publications

In this essay we reflect on the challenges involved in corpus building for hadith studies as well as the advances already made. We specifically focus on the Open Islamicate texts Initiative (OpenItI), a large, academically curated corpus of arabic texts sourced from various online libraries. this corpus is continuously vetted and expanded by scholarly contributions. We discuss its advantages for computational macro-analysis and for more traditional close reading, and survey recent research in digital hadith studies as an example of the possibilities of computational macro-analysis, we focus on assessing the output of the software ‘passim’, which has identified millions of …

Querying The Past: Automatic Source Attribution With Language Models, Ryan Muther, Mathew Barber, David Smith

Faculty & Staff Publications

This paper explores new methods for locating the sources used to write a text by 昀椀ne-tuning a variety of language models to rerank candidate sources. These methods promise to shed new light on traditions with complex citational practices, such as in medieval Arabic where citations are ambiguous and boundaries of quotation are poorly defined. After retrieving candidates sources using a baseline BM25 retrieval model, a variety of reranking methods are tested to see how effective they are at the task of source attribution. We conduct experiments on two datasets—English Wikipedia and medieval Arabic historical writing—and employ a variety of retrieval- …

The Objectives Of Islamic Law: The Promises And Challenges Of The Maqāṣid Al-SharīʿA, Walid Ghali

Faculty & Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Legal Translation In A Political Context: The Trick Of Choosing Between Alternatives In Translating Electoral Terms, Zakia Deeb

Abdou Filali-Ansary Occasional Paper Series

Legal electoral terminology is a specialist subject within the broader legal language discourse. When translating into Arabic, even basic electoral terms can be translated differently in different Arab countries for various reasons due to different sources of inspiration. Most legal electoral terms have a variety of alternative equivalents within the relevant linguistic field or semi-legal domain. This paper discusses such alternatives while presenting problems related to the existing resources in the field. Data collected from the 2012 election of members of the Libyan General National Congress are analysed to test the consistency in selecting from these alternatives. Furthermore, material presented …

Islamic And Middle East Area Studies Librarianship, Walid Ghali, Waseem Farooq, Paul Auchterlonie, Arnoud Vrolijk

Abdou Filali-Ansary Occasional Paper Series

The three papers collected here are based on a seminar on Islamic Studies Librarianship held on 31 January 2019 at the Aga Khan Library (AKL), in conjunction with the Aga Khan University Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations (AKU-ISMC). Curators, area studies directors, and collection librarians, who are currently involved in this field, gathered to discuss common challenges and to identify strategic areas for collaboration.

Secularism In The Arab World: Contexts, Ideas And Consequences, Aziz Al-Azmeh, David Bond

In Translation: Modern Muslim Thinkers

Explores secularism and secularisation in Arab societies since the mid-19th century.

This book is a translation of Aziz al-Azmeh’s seminal work Al-'Ilmaniya min mandhur mukhtalif that was first published in Beirut in 1992. Both celebrated and criticised for its reflections on Arab secularisation and secularism in the modern history of the Arab World, it is the only study to date to approach its subject as a set of historical changes which affected the regulation of the social, political and cultural order, and which permeated the concrete workings of society, rather than as an ideological discussion framed from the outset by …

Introduction: A Legacy Of Raised Expectations, Leif Stenberg, Christa Salamandra

Book Chapters / Conference Papers

No abstract provided.

Naqshbandiyya In Damascus: Strategies To Establish And Strengthen The Order In A Changing Society, Leif Stenberg

Book Chapters / Conference Papers

No abstract provided.

The Revealed Word And The Struggle For Authority: Interpretation And Use Of Islamic Terminology Among Algerian Islamists, Leif Stenberg

Book Chapters / Conference Papers

No abstract provided.