This book studies the legal reasoning of Mālik ibn Anas (d. 179 H./795 C.E.) in the Muwaṭṭa' and Mudawwana. Although focusing on Mālik, the book presents a broad comparative study of legal reasoning in the first three centuries of Islam. It reexamines the role of considered opinion (ra'y), dissent, and legal ḥadīths and challenges the paradigm that Muslim jurists ultimately concurred on a "four-source" (Qurʾān, sunna, consensus, and analogy) theory of law. Instead, Mālik and Medina emphasizes that the...

The Intensification and Reorientation of Sunni Jihad Ideology in the Crusader Period examines the important role of Ibn ʿAsākir, including his Forty Hadiths for Inciting Jihad, in the promotion of a renewed jihad ideology in twelfth-century Damascus as part of sultan Nūr al-Dīn's agenda to revivify Sunnism and fight, under the banner of jihad, Crusader and Muslim opponents. This jihad vision was exclusively centered on selected quranic verses and prophetic hadiths. Ibn ʿAsākir and other Sunni scholars in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Syria...

Al-Māturīdī (d. 944 CE), the prominent Hanafi scholar from Samarqand, succeeded in formulating a theological doctrine which is widely accepted in Sunni Islam to this day. The present volume which is a revised English translation of the German original published in 1997 examines his teachings by describing their principal characteristics and situating them in the history of kalām. Part one investigates the development of Hanafi thought in Transoxania before Māturīdī's time. Part two deals with the other religious groups (in particular the Mu'tazilites) which...

In al-Ḥīra: Eine arabische Kulturmetropole im spatantiken Kontext, Isabel Toral-Niehoff draws a vivid portrait of this Late Antique Arab metropolis, located on the frontier between Byzantium and Sasanian Iran. Based on new archaeological and textual evidence, this study documents al-Ḥīra's historical impact far beyond its well-known role in literary history and describes its creation of a distinctly Arabic urban cultural symbiosis that drew on neighboring civilizations. Al-Ḥīra's multicultural synthesis is shown to be a direct precursor to the emerging...

The reign of al-Muqtadir (295-320/908-32) is a crucial and controversial epoch in the history of the Abbasid empire. Al-Muqtadir's regime has traditionally been depicted as one of decline, when the political power of the caliphate and the lustre of its capital began to crumble. This book not only offers a substantial investigation of the idea and reality of decline, but also provides new interpretations of the inner workings of the court and the empire. The authors, four specialists of Abbasid history, explore the formal and informal power relationships that shaped politics at the court,...

As in many areas of pre-modern history, the study of medieval Islamic history has been critically hindered by the lack of available evidence. Unlike many parallel fields, however, the shortage of contemporary documentary evidence for medieval Islam has less to do with the survival of documents and archives as with their accessibility. A rich documentary legacy survives, but because of its inaccessibility and unfamiliarity to all but the most specialised scholars in the field, it has remained sadly underutilised. This volume contributes to the redressing of that problem. It collects papers...

Das vorliegende Buch widmet sich den Lebensumstanden und der Berufsethik der arabischen Arzte des Mittelalters. Auf der Grundlage zahlreicher biographischer, protreptischer, deontologischer und isagogischer Schriften untersucht Burgel verschiedenste Aspekte der medizinischen Ausbildung, der Berufsausubung und der Rolle von Arzten in der islamischen Gesellschaft. Besonderes Augenmerk gilt dabei der Bewahrung und Weiterentwicklung der antiken griechischen Berufsethik. Ein weiterer Schwerpunkt liegt auf den Wechselbeziehungen zwischen wissenschaftlicher Medizin und islamischer Religion. The...

La presente etude, L imamat et l Occultation selon l imamisme, Etude bibliographique et histoire de textes, concerne l evolution religieuse et historique du Hadith imamite autour de la constitution progressive et complexe des doctrines aussi fondamentales que l imamat et l Occultation. L annexe de ce travail comprend les textes en arabe de ces ecrits identifies et reconstitues a travers leurs citations. In his work, L imamat et l Occultation selon l imamisme, Etude bibliographique et histoire de textes, Hassan Ansari has attempted to reconstruct a number of doctrines related to...

What are the mechanisms of change and adaptation in Islam, regarded as a living organism, and how do they work? How did these mechanisms preserve the integrity of Muslim civilization through the innumerable hazards, divisions and devastations of time? From the perspective of history and intellectual history, this book focuses on a significant, though still largely under studied, aspect of this immense issue, namely, the role of mystical and messianic ferment in the construction and re-construction of religious authority in Islam. Sixteen scholars address this topic with a variety of...

Early Ibāḍī Theology presents the critical edition of six Arabic theological texts recently discovered in two manuscripts in Mzāb in Algeria dating from the middle of the 8th century. The texts were sent by their author, the prominent Kūfan Ibāḍī kalām theologian 'Abd Allāh b. Yazīd al-Fazārī to North Africa where he had a large following in the Ibāḍī community later known as the Nukkār. They constitute the earliest extant body of Muslim kalām theology and are vital for the study...