Volume 86, Issue 2

The reign of the ῾Abbsid caliph al-Mu῾taṣim (833842) is usually recognized among historians for its military character with the recruitment of new Turkic troops, the foundation of Smarr᾿ as a new capital, and the campaign against ᾿Ammriyya. Chronicle accounts about al-Mu῾taṣim, however, also hold potential as a topic for narrative criticism. This article analyzes the little examined use of military history for literary and allusive purposes by medieval narrators. The overall accomplishments of al-Mu῾taṣim were dramatized in the classical texts within a matrix of tensions that permeated his reign, including: the caliph's backing of the Miḥna while undertaking jihd against the Byzantines and the Khurramiyya, his sudden reversal for the fortunes of al-Afshn in spite of the latter's military skill, and the lingering mistrust between the ῾Alids and the ῾Abbsids, Persian officials and the Arab leadership. The article shows how the narratives of Ṭabar in particular display a careful construction which deployed these various dimensions as objects for readership reflection to varying degrees of criticism or support.

Early Islamic social structure has been characterised as one of equality and its urban forms as ones with little differentiation as typified by Medina. However, it seems that unlike Medina ( Madnat al-Nab ) the City of the Prophet, the form of newly established Islamic cities, such as Baghdad and Samarra (founded ca. 1.5 centuries after the Prophet) account for changes in the structure of Islamic society and reflect the introduction of a class society. The main focus of this research is, therefore, to examine whether establishment of such cities may be an indication of transition from equality to the hierarchical social system and urban structure in the Islamic era. The present paper also attempts to show how the pre-Islamic social system and urban spaces had been affected by Islamic thought following prevalence of Islam and invasion of cities by Arab Muslims, and how much this influence had reflected on the form and spatial structure of the converted and newly-established cities.

Nine maps of the manuscript Bnf. ar. 2221 of al-Idrs's Nuzhat al-mutq give us one of the few examples of the use of geographical coordinates on the Islamic medieval maps. The longitude and the latitude of 34 places are written with the numerical value of the letters ( abad notation). Their examination shows that they belong to al-Idrs's work but that they were copied in this manuscript as an iconographical element. Furthermore, these coordinates are in majority new and original, and they throw light on al-Idrs's new and unknown source.

This article is intended to illustrate that the hermeneutics of al-Ghazzl influenced Ibn Rushd in a certain degree. One can come across a number of contexts in the works of Ibn Rushd such as Taḥfut al-taḥfut, Faṣl al-maql and al-Kashf , in which he criticizes al-Ghazzl in relation to the interpretation of religious texts. However, one can notice that Ibn Rushd is deeply influenced by the views of al-Ghazzl on the matter of hermeneutics, especially concerning the definition of interpretation, the categorization of the ambiguous wordings in the religious texts as well as the classification of the groups of people authorized to fulfill the task of interpretation. In fact, Ibn Rushd's threefold graduation of people as the masses , the theologians , and the demonstrative people was masterminded and introduced by al-Ghazzl. In addition, it is from al-Ghazzl and from his interpretation of the 125 th verse of Srat al-Naḥl that Ibn Rushd borrowed the suggestion that as regards the interpretation of religious texts, each of these three groups should adopt one of the three methods described as rhetorical, dialectical, and demonstrative. Another important context where Ibn Rushd is clearly under the influence of al-Ghazzl is the issue how the lawful method of interpretation is to be applied to the religious texts. Regarding this issue, he took up al-Ghazzl's fivefold categorization of being as essential existence, sensual existence, imaginative existence, mental existence and analogical existence, suggesting to interpret the religious texts on the basis of this categorization.

Claiming different conceptions of the Kulturgeschichte , Max Weber and Ignaz Goldziher have deeply marked their respective disciplines and have even played a leading role against their contemporary cultural and scientific temptations. They had mostly had the merit of safeguarding the full autonomy of the religious reality, mostly against Marxism (Weber) and against the New School of Islamic studies (Goldziher). But these two scholars were also distinguished by their skepticism regarding the new science, that is sociology, that Weber wanted to strictly define among the Kulturwissenschaften and against which Goldziher wanted to protect the Islamwissenschaft . However, if Weber had sometimes lost in his approach to Islam, Goldziher, who stayed in a classic conception of categories as basic as those of asceticism, for example, or Beruf , had remained away from Weberian concerns of religious relationships with modernity. Obviously these two scholars would have won a lot about each other.