Studien zur Geschichte und Kultur des islamischen Orients

Based on interviews and field research, the authors explore the sets of ideas Arab tribespeople from Ras Al-Khaimah had about tribe and community; social and economic networks, and jural contracts for livelihoods and profits; their uses of their environments; the moral relations of credit, debt and labour; ruling; economic and political transformations; and ideas of regional history where conflicts were regarded as disputes over sets of ideas, and informal accounts of tribal and local histories.
Their lively descriptions and explanations of life before oil portrayed tribal societies whose relationships were moral rather than political and were between jurally equal persons. All lived from their own resources; 'wealth' was material self-sufficiency; 'riches' the richness of social relationships. Political arenas were decentralised and underpinned by common cultural and moral values.
Published sources give a wider context to these ideas and events which show the great complexity and differing perspectives of 'life before oil' in the Gulf.

The subjects of this volume are views and perceptions of the “other” (i.e. strangers, enemies or curiosities) within the Islamic world, as well as in the interplay between the Islamic and non-Islamic worlds. More than 20 contributions describe conceptions and contingencies of the other from very different perspectives, so arriving - with reference to Islam - at insights into the complex problems of the “other.” The studies are dedicated to Professor Gernot Rotter.

In this volume the history of Islamic sects is analysed as a literary genus in its own right. It consists of three sections: the first deals with structural constants in the texts such as the arrangement, or the number and classification of the “sects.” The main section describes the most important works and authors from the 8th to the 19th century. Finally, the central concepts - “religion,” “sects,” “orthodoxy,” etc. - are considered and the historical background of the literary development examined in more detail. It turns out that the “heresies” were rather “confessions” which can be understood as proof of the pluralistic structure of the Islamic community.

This book deals with various manifestations of charity or giving in the contexts of the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim societies in Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages. Monotheistic charity and giving display many common features. These underlying similarities reflect a commonly shared view about God and his relations to mankind and what humans owe to God and expect from him. Nevertheless, the fact that the emphasis is placed on similarities does not mean that the uniqueness of the concepts of charity and giving in the three monotheistic religions is denied. The contributors of the book deal with such heterogeneous topics like the language of social justice in early Christian homilies as well as charity and pious endowments in medieval Syria, Egypt and al-Andalus during the 11th-15th centuries. This wide range of approaches distinguish the book from other works on charity and giving in monotheistic religions.

The present volume produced in honour of the turcologist Petra Kappert (Hamburg) concentrates on the subject of social upheavals. The papers range widely, historically from the beginnings of the Ottoman Empire up to the present day, geographically from Persia to the Caucasus and from there to Berlin today, and thematically the volume offers an impressive variety of subjects from history, philology, literature and cultural studies to the philosophy of law, sociology and politics.

This work deals with concepts of time in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry and in the Koran, placing them in relation to Hellenistic conceptions of time in Late Antique poetry. The analysis shows that just as in the much earlier field of Greek poetry, so too in Old Arabic verse time is seen as an inescapable power. The Arabic concept for endless time, dahr, is revealed to be the Arabic equivalent of the Greek concept aión. In the Koran the power of time is denied completely and replaced by the absolute power of God, which is described with the help of Hellenistic conceptions of time. The research suggests the existence of an Arabic Hellenism, in the context of which Islam came into being.

Despite the historical and contemporary significance of the Sharia, it has not yet been possible to solve the puzzle of its origins. Whereas previous research has postulated a greater or lesser degree of endogenous Islamic development, the present study reaches a different conclusion, namely that at the end of the 8^th century Muslim state lawyers in Baghdad codified an Islamic “Imperial Law”, oriented strongly towards Roman-Byzantine law. It is part of an Islamic-Byzantine context, and can only be explained against this intercultural background.

Presented in six principal analytic chapters with supporting appendices, this book explores the role of Islam in precipitating Europe’s twelfth century commercial renaissance. Employing the classic analytic techniques of economics, Gene Heck determines that medieval Europe’s feudal interregnum was largely caused by indigenous governmental business regulation and not by shifts in international trade patterns. He then proceeds by demonstrating how Islamic economic precepts provided the ideological rationales that empowered medieval Europe to escape its three-centuries-long experiment in “Dark Age economics” ― in the process, providing the West with its archetypic tools of capitalism. While treatises such as Maxime Rodinson’s excellent book, Islam and Capitalism, document the capitalistic nature of the Islamic economic system, in applying modern economic method to medieval orientalist historiography, this work is unique in capturing both the evolution and the impact of the system’s role in forging medieval history.

Islam prides itself on being “the religion of facility”. Muslim sources are unanimous in assigning to Judaism the role of counterweight in this regard, pronouncing it a system of “burdens and shackles” by which the Jews “oppressed their souls”. This neat polarity both fueled, and was the product of, a fascinating reciprocal process: at the same time that sharī'a was being created in the negative image of halakha, halakha was being retroactively re-imagined by Muslim jurists and exegetes as the antipode of sharī'a .

Although scholarly studies of the intertexture of Islam and Judaism abound, few have touched upon the Muslim tradition’s perception and utilization of Jewish law, and none has done so in depth. This book aims to fill that lacuna and further our understanding of the age-old embrace and grapple between the two faiths.

The authors of this volume examine the relations between state law (colonial and post-colonial), Islamic law and common law in the Islamic world. The geographical scope of the twenty papers extends from Muslim Andalusia and North Africa across Osman South-Eastern Europe, the Yemen, Iran, Afghanistan, the Northern Caucasus and Central Europe to Uighuria (China) and Indonesia. Particular emphasis is placed on the Muslim societies of the Russian Empire and the former Soviet Union, the rich regional legal traditions of which have hitherto been largely ignored in the general discussion about legal pluralism. The comparative approach reveals numerous parallel developments in the different regions. Furthermore, the articles give insight into the differing methods and approaches employed by legal anthropologists, Islamists, historians and lawyers in East and West.

Medieval Arab historiography is essentially a matter of compilation. Using the representative corpus of reports on the Zang uprising, Franz examines the compilation of chronicles in its three aspects: compiling (as a process of selecting, ordering and textualising material), compilation (the resultant individual text) and the process of compilations (as the succession of various stages in transmission). He develops comprehensive evaluative criteria and with them creates a basis for clear recognition of the significance of authorship, individuality of texts, and disciplinarity for the long neglected compilatory chronicle tradition. His emphasis on the tension between the kernel of the historic event and the intertextual redefinition of the subsequent records opens up a new perspective for the literary and historical investigation of the primary sources.

The Qur’an is an orally composed poetical text which Muslims have always known mainly in the form of oral recitation. Western scholarship however has hardly ever read it as literature, on account of the inaccessibility of its structure, and instead has used it mainly to mine theological or legislative statements. Angelika Neuwirth brings order to this supposed chaos by demonstrating meaningful compositional structures for the Makkan suras of the Qur’an. This 2^nd edition has been extended to include a new study which examines the suras as pointing to a historical development in the preaching of the Qur’an and the formation of a community.

This title from the De Gruyter Book Archive has been digitized in order to make it available for academic research. It was originally published under National Socialism and has to be viewed in this historical context. Learn more here.

This title from the De Gruyter Book Archive has been digitized in order to make it available for academic research. It was originally published under National Socialism and has to be viewed in this historical context. Learn more here.