Volume 99, Issue 1

In this paper we will show how Qurashī patrilines and marriage records can be statistically analysed to generate an estimate of the tribe’s size at the time of Muḥammad. By extension this will also give us an estimate for the population size of Mecca. We will begin by using the marriage data preserved in a genealogical work to identify a cohort of adult Qurashī male contemporaries of Muḥammad. We will then divide this cohort into men who had brothers versus those who did not. It will be shown that this ratio is exactly what we would expect if we were modelling a complete population and therefore it cannot be a sample. With this in place we can extrapolate the number of women and dependants that would have been linked to each man, giving us an estimate of the tribe’s size in the period. Supplementing this with selected historiographical data will give us the population size of Mecca. The resulting findings raise a series of questions concerning Qurashī origins that will then be addressed by applying a similar methodology to the eras before Muḥammad’s. This will illuminate the manner and timing of the emergence of the Quraysh as a distinct entity.

The popular Islamic formula known as the ḥawqala ( lā ḥawl a wa-lā quwwat a illā bi-Llāh ) is first attested in Ḥadīth and other written sources from around the eighth century CE. A similar formula is Q: 18 (al-Kahf).39b ( lā quwwat a illā bi-Llāh ). Some scholars in the first Islamic centuries were concerned that the non-Qurʾānic ḥawqala would be more venerated than Q: 18.39b or confused with it. In this essay, I suggest in what respect the ḥawqala is related to Q: 18.39b. I argue that the ḥawqala is perhaps influenced by Zech : 4.6b ( lō be-ḥayil we-lō be-koʾaḥ kī im be-rūḥī ) and its Syriac version. Past scholars have noted the similarity between the ḥawqala and Zech: 4.6b, but the exact relation between these two phrases has not been fully explored. I therefore discuss the linguistic and thematic similarities between both phrases and note some Islamic traditions in which the ḥawqala is said to be of Biblical provenance. By this, I show that there is good reason to suspect that the ḥawqala is partly influenced by Zech : 4.6b and its Syrac version, and that this probably occurred at an early stage in the development of Islam when Jewish scripture was more regularly consulted as a means of confirming Islamic revelation.

This article examines the tafsīr on the Qurʾānic verses pertaining to suicide, qatl al-nafs . The majority of exegetical discussions on suicide center on Moses and originate from his command to the Banū Isrāʾīl in Q 2:54, uqtulū anfusakum , which can be interpreted as “kill yourselves” or “kill one another.” On the basis of etymology and historical context, commentators associate this passage with Q 4:29 and 4:66. Another such passage, Q 2:84, which outlaws bloodshed, is also associated with the Banū Isrāʾīl, in a different context. Adding Q 18:6 and Q 2:195 to the list of verses under consideration, this article traces interpretations of self-destruction from early works of tafsīr down to the late fourteenth century. Though the Qurʾānic attitude toward suicide is notoriously ambiguous, by examining the various grammatical constructions and interpretations given to these verses, one is able to establish trends and motivations in exegesis. The discussions of suicide, and condemnations where appropriate, focus on the motivation and intention of the individual rather than the act itself. Obedience to God, the nature of his commands, and the well-being of the community of believers also emerge as some of the key ethical issues in the commentaries.

Both Islamic and Jewish thought display a sensitivity to the treatment of texts, particularly sacred texts. This article investigates Muslim debates on how to dispose of worn-out sacred texts. It argues that these debates were rooted in the precedent formed by the reported destruction of noncanonical copies of the Qurʾān by the third caliph ʿUthmān, and they featured various preferred and rejected methods of text disposal, including burning, washing, shredding, and burying. By the thirteenth century CE, these debates had yielded a robust theorization of worn-out texts as analogous to human corpses and thus deserving of respectful burial.

At the end of the twentieth century, the Ayatollah Marʿashī Najafī Library (Qum) acquired a fourteenth-century manuscript of munshaʾāt previously held in a private collection. This composite multitext manuscript contains about two hundred letters sent by or to officials of the Rūm Saljūq sultanate in the thirteenth century. The letters include official ( sulṭāniyyāt ) and private ( ikhwāniyyāt ) correspondence as well as decrees of nomination ( taqrīrāt al-manāṣib ). They are all in Persian. This article is a first study of the codicological features, structure, and contents of this manuscript. It suggests a production process that unfolded in several stages over a period of seventy years, from the reign of Ghiyāth al-Dīn Kay-Khusraw II (d. 644/1246) to the second decade of the fourteenth century. The Marʿashī manuscript expands considerably the volume of documents available on Saljūq Anatolia during the beginning of Mongol period. It is poised to become a major source on the political history of the period and will also help to understand the integration of Anatolia into the Persianate sphere.

In much of the existing research concerning Aljamiado literature, we can observe attempts to assign individual texts or even the whole corpus unequivocally to a Spanish or Arabic/Islamic tradition. However, these attempts fail to adequately address the specificities of these texts and sometimes actively obscure important connections. This can be shown through an analysis of the Coplas del Alhichante de Puey Monzón , a pilgrimage narrative in verse from the sixteenth century that has so far mostly been seen as a continuation of the Arabic riḥla . This paper provides an overview of the history, past research and editions, and poetical form of the text, as well as a proposed date for its production, followed by a detailed analysis concerning its possible function which serves as a basis for comparing it to pilgrimage narratives from the Arabic/Islamic tradition and its Spanish/Christian counterparts. Contrary to what is usually assumed, the Coplas have more in common with the latter than with Arabic riḥla texts. They can therefore be interpreted as a product of a cultural “contact zone” as defined by Mary Louise Pratt . Rather than merely trying to preserve their Islamic heritage and passively receiving Christian influence, Mudéjares and Moriscos actively participated in contemporary developments in Spanish literature and used them for their own ends.

Interest in esoteric and mystical aspects of Islam in present-day Russia and its Soviet and tsarist predecessors is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon. The article starts with a critical discussion of Aleksandr Dugin ’s (b. 1962) interpretations of Sufism in his ambitious intellectual project Noomachia: Wars of the Intellect [and] Civilizations of Borderlands . The author then compares Dugin ’s conceptualizations of Sufism with those of several Russian writers who lived in the second half of the nineteenth century and whose portrayal of Sufism and its followers is similar to Dugin ’s in some important respects. These ideologically driven constructions of Sufism stand in sharp contrast to the self-consciously objective scholarly ones (to the extent that was possible) that emerged in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century within the Russian academic and teaching institutions specializing in Eastern religions, languages, and cultures. The author argues that Russian academic conceptualizations of Sufism mirrored those of the fin-de-siècle German Islamology ( Islamforschung ) and then proceeds to examine the profound changes in Russian attitudes to Sufism, and Islam generally, after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the rise of the Soviet state that based its legitimacy on the Marxist-Leninist concept of history with its pervasive atheism, materialism, and emphasis on class struggle. It shaped Soviet-era academic and nonacademic approaches to Sufism until the mid-1980s, when Soviet scholars began to question the Marxist-Leninist certainties of the previous six decades.