Volume 94, Issue 2

Abstract: The Twelver Shiʿite law of inheritance constitutes one of the most distinctive features of the legal system in comparison with Sunni law. Although there are major and even irreconcilable divergences between the Sunnite law of succession according to all four legal schools on the one hand and Twelver Shiʿite law on the other, no convincing explanations for this striking development within Islamic law itself, leading to two fundamentally distinct systems, have hitherto been put forward. The aim of this preliminary study is to call attention to several remarkable correspondences between the complex Iranian (Zoroastrian) law of succession, conceived to support the specific needs of aristocratic descent groups in the Sasanian period, and Twelver Shiʿite regulations, reflecting a very similar underlying concept of family ties and descent groups as a whole. The question is, whether these congruencies are purely coincidental or based on age-old social and traditional norms, which continued to be practised in the regions of the former Sasanian empire after the Islamic conquest. As Sasanian norms remained operative in customary law (now documented by Pahlavi legal documents from 8th century Tabarestān) during the formative period of Islamic law and the Sunnite regulations, being based to a large extent on pre-Islamic tribal law in Arabia, contrast sharply with the Shiʿite concept, it would be consistent to assume that certain precepts in the pre-Islamic Iranian system had an important impact on the development of the Twelver Shiʿite law of inheritance.

Abstract: The Dēnkard is the most exhaustive Pahlavi work ever produced in Zoroastrianism. Due to the large amount of information included in it , this body of work has often been referred to within the field of Iranian Studies as a ‘Zoroastrian Encyclopedia’. This article discusses two main points. First, it holds that it was not the intention of the Dēnkard ’s authors and editors to compose a Zoroastrian encyclopedia in the 9th and 10th centuries. By contrast, the independent texts which serve as the basis of this compilation deal with other religions or present a Zoroastrian apologetic. It also claims that the Dēnkard has not been perceived as an encyclopedia in later Zoroastrianism. Second, the article scrutinizes the editorial process that led to this book. It furthermore argues that the Dēnkard, in its current form, has been structured to resemble the Zoroastrian world history comprising nine millennia. This article aims, moreover, to show that the last three books of the Dēnkard aim to depict Zoroastrians as belonging to the People of the Book. The article finally argues that the Dēnkard should be considered entirely a theological apologetic within an inter-religious context, which was mainly carried by Muslim theologians.

Abstract: Muḥammad’s first wife Khadīja bint Khuwaylid belonged to a clan of the Quraysh tribe called Asad ibn ʿAbd al-ʿUzzā. This biographical detail is crucial in the analysis of the literary evidence about her and her family. Khadīja had a well-known paternal cousin who was Christian, namely Waraqa ibn Nawfal. Another paternal cousin of hers who was Christian, ʿUthmān ibn al-Ḥuwayrith, attempted on the eve of the hijra to gain control of Mecca. The Christian faith of the cousins belongs in the discussion of Muḥammad’s spiritual environment and his preparation for the Call to prophethood. After all, Muḥammad and Khadīja, both of whom were descendants of Quṣayy ibn Kilāb, were married for a quarter of a century and he must have known her family very well. During the long marriage she was his only wife and she gave birth to all of his children with the exception of Ibrāhīm whose mother was a Copt slave girl. A third paternal cousin of Khadīja who is of interest for us here was the son of a Jewish slave girl who belonged to Muḥammad’s uncle ʿAbbās. The article is dedicated to Professor Uri Rubin on the occasion of his retirement. The main points were presented on December 4, 2012 in the Tel Aviv University during a colloquium held in his honor.

Abstract: In Islam, the obligation to perform five ṣalāt -prayers at specific times of the day is commonly traced to the Ascension of the Prophet and the Descension of the angel Jibrīl, both reported in the sīra and the ḥadīth . In the sīra , which assumes a chronological order, a variant of the Descension story which describes in detail the exact prayer-times, conflicts with the Ascension story. This is especially the case in Ibn Hishām’s recension of Ibn Isḥāq’s Sīra , according to which Muḥammad received the obligation to perform five ṣalāt s daily after the five prayer-times had already been established during Jibrīl’s Descension. This article investigates (1) the origins and development of these traditions through a careful isnād analysis, taking into account certain narratological aspects of the tradition, and (2) attempts to explain the anomaly present in Ibn Hishām’s prophetic biography through a comparison of his chronology of events with that in other recensions or biographical traditions. It is established that the Ascension tradition dates back to the first Islamic century (contra Juynboll ), however, the detailed Descension tradition is half a century younger. Its late origin, legalistic purport, and the fact that it is absent in the other recensions of the same corpus, suggest it was not part of Ibn Isḥāq’s Prophetic biography, but a later insertion by one of its transmitters.

Abstract: This article explores the reasons why medieval Latin translators used the term Sufficientia to translate the title of Avicenna’s philosophical work, known in Arabic as al-shifāʾ and did not use instead terms like “healing” or “cure”, which are now frequently used. The article demonstrates that those medieval Latin translators may after all have had a better understanding of classical Arabic linguistic sources than they are usually credited for, and were thus fully justified to opt for the translation they used.

Abstract: Abū Šāma lived as an historian and a biographer in 7th/13th-century Damascus. Although he took care to transmit a fair copy ( mubayyaḍa ) of his Kitāb al-Rawḍatayn and the two other chronicles he wrote, drafts of his texts, containing additions and variants he did not authenticate, circulated and were later edited. We refer to these copies and editions as “floating texts”. Furthermore, we managed to reconnect two manuscript copies, kept in the British Library, which were made from the autograph of the  Kitāb al-Raw ḍ atayn . Ibn Ṣaṣarā, a famous Damascene qāḍī, copied the text together with Abū Šāma’s certificates of transmission ( iǧāza ). Afterwards, several scribes accurately transcribed these certificates as if they were part of the text. We therefore label them “fossils”.

Abstract: A comparison of the results of the computational analysis of the Taʾrīkh al-islām , al-Dhahabī’s 50-volume biographical collection, with brief statements that describe the rise and decline of cities and provinces of the Islamic world with the al-Amṣār dhawāt al-āthār , al-Dhahabī’s 4-folio epistle, suggests that al-Dhahabī had a solid grasp of the tremendous amount of biographical and historical data that he collected, and that his short epistle may be regarded as a missing analytical summary of the most ambitious historical project in the pre-modern Islamic world. In light of these results, we perhaps may think of al-Dhahabī as one of the earliest quantitative historians. Although we do not have conclusive evidence about how exactly al-Dhahabī worked with his data, the paper argues that all necessary mathematical, visual and ‘mechanical’ techniques that would facilitate data analysis already existed, and that al-Dhahabī and other premodern Islamic historians could have used them.

Abstract: Focusing on Cengiz Mehmed Geray, an idiosyncratic member of the ruling house of the Crimean Khanate, this article examines how a Crimean Prince became an active participant in the stormy politics of the Ottoman Empire and later of Europe, as a result of his distinguished Chinghisid pedigree, in the age of revolutions. The first section of this article discusses the place of the Geray and Chinghisid lineage within Ottoman imperial politics. The second section focuses on the period following the Gerays’ departure from Crimea. It illustrates how members of the family, although scattered throughout the Balkans, operated in the provincial and imperial politics of the Ottoman Empire in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The following section introduces Cengiz Geray and his turbulent life between the Ottoman and Russian Empires, and discusses how he became an actor in a revolutionary age. The last section is a short discussion on Chinghisid charisma in the early modern Europe, Russia and the Ottoman Empire.