Ajāʾib ve gharāʾib: Ottoman Collections of Mirabilia and Perceptions of the Supernatural
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Marinos Sariyannis
Abstract:
There is no word for the ‘supernatural’ in classical Ottoman, and one could argue that even the very notion is absent, as the notion of ‘nature’ is very near to that of ‘God’, and (as the latter is omnipotent) there is no extraordinary event that cannot be potentially true. The Ottomans would rather speak of the ‘marvelous’ or the ‘extraordinary’, which as mental categories played a major role in the medieval imagination both in East and West. As defined by al-Qazwīnī (1203–1283), author of a very well-known collection of mirabilia, there are ‘ordinary marvels’ (ʿajāʾib) and ‘extraordinary’ ones (gharāʾib); the first category has mainly to do with strange places, monuments, flora or fauna, while the second includes both the miracles of Prophets and saints and the works of demons, as well as magic, divination and other man-driven occult phenomena. The transition from more ‘medieval’-style authors, such as Yazıcıoğlu Ahmed Bîcan (d. after 1466), Aşık Mehmed (d. after 1598) or Cinânî (d. 1595) to more ‘scientific’ scholars like Kâtip Çelebi brings about a widening of the sources used with the addition of Western European works, considered more authoritative, rather than an abolishment of the supernatural element per se.
© De Gruyter
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- Christian Müller / Muriel Roiland-Rouabah (Hrsg.): Les non-dits du nom. Onomastique et documents en terres d’Islam. Mélanges offerts à Jacqueline Sublet
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- Torsten Wollina: Zwanzig Jahre Alltag. Lebens-, Welt- und Selbstbild im Journal des Aḥmad Ibn Ṭawq
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Titelseiten
- Articles
- Les cinq esprits de l’homme divin (Aspects de l’imamologie duodécimaine XIII)
- A Ḥadīth Fragment on Papyrus
- L’étoile, la chaîne et le Jugement. Essai d’interprétation d’un élément de décor dans la mosquée d’Ibn Ṭūlūn
- Drei Fragmente von arabischen Staatsbriefen (14. Jh) im Archivo de la Corona de Aragón/Barcelona
- Mamluk Historiography Outside of Egypt and Syria: ʿAlī b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Samhūdī and his Histories of Medina
- Ajāʾib ve gharāʾib: Ottoman Collections of Mirabilia and Perceptions of the Supernatural
- Reviews
- Bibliographie raisonnée zur arabischen Papyrologie: Neuerscheinungen 2013–2014
- Abdulrahman al-Salimi / Heinz Gaube (eds.): A New Collection Dedicated to Ibadism and Oman: A Review of the First Four Publications (2013–4)
- Gideon Avni: The Byzantine-Islamic Transition in Palestine: An Archaeological Approach
- George A. Bournoutian: From Tabriz to St. Petersburg: Iran’s Mission of Apology to Russia in 1829
- H.E. Chehabi / Vanessa Martin (eds.): Iran’s Constitutional Revolution. Popular Politics, Cultural Transformations and Transnational Connections
- Rachida Chich und Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen (Hrsg.): Le soufisme à l’époque ottomane, XVIe-XVIIIe siècle. Sufism in the Ottoman Era, 16th-18th Century
- Alice Hunsberger (ed.): Pearls of Persia. The Philosophical Poetry of Nāṣir-i Khusraw
- Paulina B. Lewicka: Food and Foodways of Medieval Cairenes. Aspects of Life in an Islamic Metropolis of the Eastern Mediterranean
- Christian Müller / Muriel Roiland-Rouabah (Hrsg.): Les non-dits du nom. Onomastique et documents en terres d’Islam. Mélanges offerts à Jacqueline Sublet
- Martin Nguyen: Sufi Master and Qurʾan Scholar. Abū’l-Qāsim al-Qushayrī and the Laṭāʾif al-ishārāt
- Valeria Piacentini Fiorani: Beyond Ibn Hawqal’s Bahr al-Fars. 10–13th Centuries AD: Sindh and the Kij-u-Makran Region, Hinge of an International Network of Religious, Political, Institutional and Economic Affairs
- Eric Tagliacozzo: The longest journey. Southeast Asians and the pilgrimage to Mecca
- Torsten Wollina: Zwanzig Jahre Alltag. Lebens-, Welt- und Selbstbild im Journal des Aḥmad Ibn Ṭawq
