Volume 91, Issue 2

Abstract: Abstract: One the earliest non-Islamic testimonies to the existence of the Prophet Muḥammad can be found within the Byzantine apologetic tract known as the Doctrina Iacobi nuper baptizati . Frequently dated by modern historians to as early as July 634 CE, the tract curiously asserts that the prophet who had appeared “among the Saracens” claimed to possess “the keys to paradise.” This essay investigates this claim and the prevalence of the “keys to paradise” motif in late-antique Christian literature and the early Islamic tradition to provide a new evaluation of the text’s place in and importance to the historiography of Islamic origins.

Abstract: In the introduction of this paper, I briefly present population control in Early Islamic Egypt and show how tax payers were supposed to apply for safe conducts if they want to travel outside their fiscal districts. The main part of the article is devoted to the edition of the oldest Arabic safe conduct (P. Cambridge UL Inv. Michaelides A 112). The document dates from the time of the financial director Usāma ibn Zayd.

Abstract: Shīʿī resistance to the authority of the Companions and the proliferation of Imāmī theological alternatives to Sunnī authority after the fifth century AH prompted Sunnī scholars to adopt an expansive definition of ʿadālat al-Ṣaḥāba , based on a hermeneutical principle ( taʾdīl ) developed by proto- and early Sunnīs that bestowed a degree of trustworthiness or “uprightness” on all the Companions such that, theoretically, the ḥadīth they transmitted could be considered probative, or of legal value. While never universally accepted by all later Sunnī scholars as necessarily connoting unassailable personal integrity, the notion of ʿadāla was nevertheless emphasized in an enormous range of Sunnī theological and ḥadīth works and especially in Companionate biographical compilations throughout the Middle Ages. From the mid-fifth century AH onward, Sunnī biographers reinterpreted the collective probity and uprightness of the Companions in biographical compilations; works which expanded in both scope and content to become an integral aspect of competing articulations of community and authority in the sectarian atmosphere of the later Middle Ages.

Abstract: This paper, a study in Arabic historical and bio-bibliographical literature, traces the role and importance of the historian al-Madāʾinī’s (d. ca. 228/843–844) students and tradents in the transmission of his historical material (khabars). The article discusses the question to what extent the “audited transmission model” of Gregor SCHOELER is applicable to al-Madāʾinī and his circle. The implications of this study concern the whole Arabic historiography of the second–dthird/eighth–ninth centuries.

Abstract: All Muslims have non-Muslim ancestors, in the Middle Ages often very few generations back in their genealogies. Despite its central importance for the formation of all Islamic societies, conversion to Islam is difficult to study. The principal reason is a lack of source material because few converts wished to advertise a non-Islamic background, together with the difficulty in recognizing and studying the sources that we have. Here a probable convert to Islam in North Africa or al-Andalus of the fifth/eleventh century is identified, using entries in the medieval Arabic biographical dictionaries. The identification is based on the man’s name and genealogy, whose elements are deconstructed and studied in the context of Arabic-Islamic onomastic behavior and of the character of the names it contains. Lāwī b. Ismāʿīl b. Rabīʿ b. Sulaymān was probably of Jewish background. Both the material and the methodology offer possible new ways to study this important process.

Abstract: Ibn Ḫawāz Mandād was a controversial representativ of the Iraqian school of Mālikism in the middle of the the 4/10 century. IGNAZ GOLDZIHER mentioned him for the first time as one of the opponents of kalām in his time. In the Mālikī school of law he is mentioned as author of a Kitāb Aḥkām al-Qurʾān in which he discussed the juridicial principles of the Coran. The first pages of the second part of this lost book have been discovered in the Library of the Great Mosque of Qairawān and will be presented here with a short commentary of the preserved text.

Abstract: Among the Persian historiographical works written in the Ottoman Empire, the Hasht bihisht (The Eight Paradises) is probably the most important and is often considered a milestone in the development of Ottoman historiography. The first purpose of this article is to provide detailed descriptions of the three oldest extant manuscripts of the work, which Mehmed Şükrü (in his article in Der Islam more than eighty years ago) states are the autographs. These manu-scripts are Esad Efendi No. 2197, Nuruosmaniye No. 3209, and Ayasofya No. 3541. The second purpose of this article is to examine the possibility of the existence of the “original wording” of the work. This article addresses the question of whether we need a critical edition of the work, or we already have the “original wording.”