Islamic Milieu Research Articles

Developing the MathSci 21st app: Enhancing higher-order thinking skills assessment in mathematics and science education within an Islamic context

The innovation of digital assessment holds profound potential for enhancing educational quality. To measure higher-order thinking skills, intrinsic to effective problem-solving in science and mathematics education, and to cultivate digital literacy, a specialized platform is imperative. This study delineates the developmental trajectory of the MathSci 21st app, designed to assess mathematics and science proficiency within the Islamic context. Emphasizing the pivotal role of higher-level thinking skills in the contemporary landscape, the research method unfolds across distinct phases: Akker (preliminary research), prototype stage (prototyping), summative evaluation, and systematic reflection and documentation. This article confines its focus to preliminary research and prototype stages. The validation of the application prototype engaged a panel of ten experts, while a controlled trial encompassed 32 high school students and one educator. Utilizing observation sheets, questionnaires, and tests as research tools, comprehensive data analysis was executed employing both quantitative and qualitative methods. Research outcomes affirm the feasibility of the Prototype MathSci 21st app, an Android-based competency assessment tool characterized by its integrated and contextual dimensions. Android-based applications not only heighten efficiency and efficacy but also exhibit environmental conscientiousness by reducing paper usage. Additionally, their user familiarity augments acceptability. Significantly, the MathSci 21st app expedites assessment, empowering educators to provide prompt feedback and expedite future learning analysis. This study pioneers a digital assessment paradigm tailored to intricate higher-order thinking skills, thereby addressing critical educational imperatives in mathematics and science within the Islamic milieu.

Platonism in Service to the Ism???l? Im?m: The Case of Ab? Ya‘q?b al-Sijist?n? (d. 971 CE)

This short essay examines the Platonic thought of the Shī'ī Ismā'īlī scholar Abū Ya'qūb al-Sijistānī (d. 971 CE). By presenting his own teachings as the inner understanding of Islam, al-Sijistānī was able to challenge prominent scholarly claims to normative interpretation within the greater Islamic milieu. As students of Ismā'īlī thought know well, the intentions of the early Ismā'īlī thinkers cannot be simplistically reduced to an adaptation of Platonic metaphysics or a subversive reading of scripture. Rather, al-Sijistānī created a uniquely Ismā'īlī philosophical theology with its own soteriological aims and religious worldview, while working closely to demonstrate the leadership of the Ismā'īlī imam. When approached in this way, al-Sijistānī's project of constructing a synthesis between Platonism and religious traditions foregrounds the breadth of interpretive diversity within the classical Islamic intellectual traditions. By examining short excerpts on the nature of the soul and religion from al-Sijistānī's Ithbāt al-Nubūwwa (Prophecy's Proof), this essay demonstrates the text's instrumental use of Platonism in explaining the emergence of religion as understood by the early Ismā'īlī movement. Al-Sijistānī's own thoughts on the absolute transcendence of God and the Platonic principles of Intellect and Soul led him to new speculative conclusions that sharply contrasted with other major and competing interpretations of Islam. Chief among these was his belief that scripture had an inner meaning apart from its literal content, which could only be revealed by the imam and his representatives, who were thus the legitimate religious authorities for the Islamic community.

An Epistemic Defeater for Islamic Belief? Not So.

Abstract. This article seeks to outline how a Muslim believer can deflect a defeater for Islamic belief put forward by Erik Baldwin and Tyler McNabb. In doing so, it aims to reject the suggestion that an Islamic religious epistemology is somehow antithetical to a model of Reformed epistemology (RE) which is not fully compatible with Plantingian. Taken together with previous work on Islam and RE, the article not only aims to provide reason to think that Baldwin and McNabb’s proposed epistemic defeater for Islamic belief isn’t problematic, it also seeks to show how the concerns raised by Baldwin and McNabb over a Plantingian model of RE in Islamic milieu, are no longer tenable.

Early Islamic Differentiation from Judaism: Three Additional Case Studies

In this article, I elaborate on an earlier paper concerning a relatively neglected aspect of the relationship between Islam and Judaism - differentiation from Judaism - by providing three examples from the early Islamic era: instituting the leap year, testifying against adulterers, and punishing perjurers. In all three, the Qurʾān suggests that the Jewish practice is not to be observed. In the first two, the Islamic tradition differentiates from Jewish practice by enacting what it considers more lenient rules of behavior (a course of action considered important in many Islamic sources); this suggests the possibility of a Rabbinite Jewish presence in the foundational Islamic milieu, one that, in Islamic eyes, had to be countered. In the third case, however, the Islamic tradition establishes a more stringent rule, as is rarely done. Here, the purpose of differentiation appears to have been the need to avoid assimilation with the Jews.

Turning religion from cause to reducer of panic during the COVID-19 pandemic

Muslim communities in the village facing the COVID-19 Pandemic attempts to find refuge from the plague and hope for survival. However, this led to more caution, which may lead to xenophobia. Via ethnography, this study unmasks the xenophobic attitude. This research discusses the root causes of panic in the community so that remedies can be implemented. The research attempts to explain, from a socio-anthropological viewpoint, how people and religious groups in the village perceive the pandemic of COVID-19 based on their belief in their faith and in the science. The research takes place in Cigagak village, an area of approximately 7000 m2 on the outskirts of Bandung of West Java of Indonesia. This study examines the selected respondents (20 respondents as the samples) from about 190 inhabitants (as the population) who had close ties to managing places of worship (mosques) and public places. This study utilises a collaborative self-ethnographic method and qualitative analysis. The influence of COVID-19 has moved to new exclusive and disintegrating practices from the inclusion-cohesive religious tradition. Therefore, this study tries to find out ways on how to reduce exclusive perception and religious practices to a minimum level and how to disappear xenophobia. Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic, inclusive awareness and actions were re-established, and even social cohesiveness was fostered. This study concludes that in its deep conviction nature, theology can change exclusive behaviour to be inclusive if it is based on the religious principles that are raised in response to human events. In this case, the Muslim community in a village can change the fear of COVID-19 pandemic to be a reducer of the panic based on the support of the religious doctrines.Contribution: This article used a collaborative self-ethnography with a religious socio-anthropological viewpoint. This study could help to solve social problems through theological convergence in Islamic milieu, especially that of the government’s formal Islamic organisation and organic Islamic leaders of the society.

The Qur’ān as a Source for Contemporary Islamic Environmental Ethics

Since the surge of interest in environmental problems in the 1960s the world has seen a growing concern for such issues which – from its outset – has been voiced by, among others, religious actors. This paper analyses a selection of contemporary texts on the environment and the current ecological crisis which originated in the Islamic cultural milieu, and addresses the specific problem of their relation to the ethical view of nature in the Qurʼān. To that end, the first section of the study attempts to investigate the ethical view of nature within the Qurʼanic revelation, drawing on the outline of the Qurʼanic ethical world view as well as the methodology for the study of the ethico-religious concepts in the Qurʼān devised by Toshihiko Izutsu. The second part of the study compares this view with the actual interpretation of the Qurʼanic text in contemporary ethical deliberations. The study thereby attempts to show both the differences between the ethical view of nature in the Qurʼān and its contemporary perceptions articulated by the Islamic environmental ethical discourse and the common links which enable Muslim authors to seek answers to the questions of the day in the sacred scripture of Islām.

Dominion Built of Praise: Panegyric and Legitimacy among Jews in the Medieval Mediterranean by Jonathan Decter

Reviewed by: Dominion Built of Praise: Panegyric and Legitimacy among Jews in the Medieval Mediterranean by Jonathan Decter Michael Rand Jonathan Decter. Dominion Built of Praise: Panegyric and Legitimacy among Jews in the Medieval Mediterranean. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 387 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419001016 Jonathan Decter's book on panegyric focuses on that part of the medieval Hebrew literary tradition that represents a special Jewish subtype within the larger framework of medieval Arabo-Islamic poetry and adab. It joins a number of other works that deal with Jewish poetry and literature more generally against the background of the Arabic context—chief among these, perhaps, Ross Brann's Compunctious Poet (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). Together, these books provide nuanced insights into the workings of Hebrew poetics from the Spanish Golden Age and into later developments in Iberia, Provence, the eastern Mediterranean (especially Egypt), and Iraq. Decter and Brann are both students of Raymond Scheindlin, himself a Hebraist and Arabist, and I do not think that it would be an exaggeration to say that their work is evidence of a robust American tradition of philologically rooted literary research in Golden Age Hebrew poetry that is profoundly informed by a full command of the Arabic matrix from which it sprang. Decter provides a systematic and methodologically well-grounded overview of his topic: performance contexts of Jewish panegyric (chapter 1); panegyric as gift (chapter 2); panegyric tropes (humility, generosity, eloquence, etc.; chapter 3); regionalism as reflected in panegyric (i.e., Spain versus the eastern Mediterranean; chapter 4—for this topic see also the recently published U. Kfir, A Matter of Geography [Leiden: Brill, 2018]); ethical considerations in the composition and consumption of panegyric (chapter 5); hyperbole and sacral imagery in panegyric (chapters 6–7); the evolution of the panegyric tradition in the Christian Mediterranean (chapter 8); and panegyric by Jewish poets for non-Jewish recipients, including some Arabic examples and one in Castilian, as well as a Hebrew poem showing troubadour influence (chapter 9). Throughout, Decter's discussions are based on copious examples—in English translation—drawn both from the relevant poetic corpora as well as from medieval discussions of [End Page 200] literary criticism (reaching back, as relevant, to Aristotle). The result is an integrated treatment of a topic that constitutes a major (though not a particularly exciting—at least not to modern tastes, as Decter stresses in several places) component of the Golden Age Hebrew poetic tradition. As Decter passes freely and seamlessly between Hebrew panegyric and the world of Arabic poetics whence it sprang, he succeeds in establishing that the former is in large part a confessionally and linguistically specialized extension of the latter. Another, equally fundamental, notion that runs like a red thread through the book is the idea that Jewish panegyric is a Mediterranean phenomenon, that is, it is not a literary mode restricted to the formal Hebrew qas.ida poetry of Spain, but also takes in the eastern offshoots of the Golden Age poetic tradition, and in fact pervades medieval Jewish social exchanges in the Mediterranean littoral as mediated through other literary genres, in particular the epistolary. Thus, he succeeds in drawing a clear connection via the panegyric mode between material that is traditionally treated as poetic-literary on the one hand, and as documentary on the other. The notion of an interface between these two categories is, of course, not radically new, but what is new here is its incorporation as the principle guiding a holistic treatment of an important aspect of medieval Hebrew literary and social culture. Against the background of the embeddedness of Jewish panegyric in a dominant Arabo-Islamic matrix, Decter's concluding chapter on instances of boundary-crossing—Jewish panegyric for gentile recipients—is particularly intriguing. By highlighting the incorporation of Jewish-Hebrew references to referents existing within the prevailing Islamic (or Christian) milieu, it simultaneously underscores the degree to which the Hebrew tradition had in fact become an organic semiotic unity—that is, praise for non-Jews could be the occasion for introducing new elements referring to the external culture. This may be compared with Arabo-Muslim panegyric addressed to a Jewish recipient. The two examples...

The Changing Landscape of (Political) Islam in Azerbaijan: Its Contextual Underpinnings and Future Prospects

By the time Azerbaijan became independent in 1991, it had spent seven decades subsumed into the militant atheism of the Soviet modernization project. Moreover, it emerged into the staunchly secular international context of Western modernity. These two factors combined with the tough reality of the country’s precarious geography to promise a sustained indigenous effort to desacralize the country’s political space and exclude religion from politics, a blueprint common to the modern world and one which Azerbaijani state and society have united to pursue over the course of the country’s independent existence. Yet the specific dynamics facing the country in the third decade of independence and the changing contours of its international engagements have been working to loosen up the latter formula, laying the groundwork for a quintessentially Azerbaijani pathway of statehood that will combine the nation’s historical embeddedness in an Islamic milieu with its century-old practical experience of modern policymaking.

The Third Treatise of Shaykh Abū al-Faraj ʿAbd Allāh Ibn al-Ṭayyib on Unity and Trinity

ABSTRACTThe article consists of a critical Arabic edition and English translation of the Third Treatise of Shaykh Abū al-Faraj ʿAbd Allāh Ibn al-Ṭayyib. The introduction provides a brief, general orientation to the treatise, discussing its relation to two other treatises by the same author and suggesting a chronology. The translation accompanies an article analysing the treatise titled: ‘Ibn al-Ṭayyib’'s Trinitarian Formulation in the Islamic Milieu’ (Kuhn, M. 2018. “Ibn al-Ṭayyib’s Trinitarian Formulation in the Islamic Milieu.” Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations 29 (2): 123–143).

The Festschrift Darkhei Noam: The Jews of Arab Lands ed. by Carsten Schapkow, Shmuel Shepkaru and Alan Levenson

Reviewed by: The Festschrift Darkhei Noam: The Jews of Arab Lands ed. by Carsten Schapkow, Shmuel Shepkaru and Alan Levenson Elisha Russ-Fishbane Carsten Schapkow, Shmuel Shepkaru, Alan Levenson eds. The Festschrift Darkhei Noam: The Jews of Arab Lands. Leiden: Brill, 2015. 273 pp. The Festschrift Darkhei Noam: The Jews of Arab Lands is a collection of impressive scholarship in celebration of historian Norman (Noam) Stillman, Schusterman/Josey Professor of Judaic History Emeritus at the University of Oklahoma. The volume, with a forward from the president of the university, doubles as a gesture of gratitude from Professor Stillman’s colleagues for the broad reach of his career as scholar of the Islamic world and Sephardic/Mizrahi [End Page 249] studies and for his lasting service as founding director of the Schusterman Center for Judaic & Israel Studies at the University of Oklahoma. In the words of the volume’s editors, “the articles reflect Noam’s broad range of interests,” from Jewish history, law, and culture in the medieval Islamic world to literary and musical production, as well as patterns of immigration and modernization in the Sephardic/Mizrahi orbit (4). As a tribute to the meticulous scholarship of the festschrift honoree, most contributors either document new frontiers of scholarship or provide fresh angles and methodologies on established fields of research. The first half is generally devoted to medieval matters and the second half largely to modern, although chapters 6 and 7 appear to have been reversed (thus chapters 1–5, and 7 constitute the medieval portion, while 6, and 8–12 cover modernity). Other editorial puzzles emerge in arrangement and selection, such as the decision to open the volume with a study of a fairly obscure exegetical theme in Sadducee and Karaite inheritance law (ultimately arguing that the latter did not take the hermeneutical path of the former), and closing with the only article in the collection that has no connection with the Islamic sphere, focusing on the post-Herzl activities of Max Nordau. Slightly jarring are the more mundane editorial oversights, such as recurring typographical errors in many of the chapters, but the quality of the scholarship outweighs these defects. Beyond the volume’s overarching concern with Jewish life and culture in the Islamic context, there are few self-evident thematic links between the essays. A handful of contributors touched on points of connection and tension in the Jewish-Islamic encounter, a theme at the forefront of Professor Stillman’s scholarly interests over the years. Reuven Firestone reexamines the Quranic polemic against Sabbath violators from the vantage point of the history of religions, positing a fresh methodological approach to scriptural polemic directed against established rival religions. In his reassessment of the medieval Islamic toponymy of the Holy Land, Jacob Lassner traces the diversity and development of the post-Quranic terminology for the region in Islamic sources through the tenth century. Although Lassner is mainly interested in technical considerations of the nuances of Arabic nomenclature, he concludes with the intentionally provocative assertion that historical scholarship may be used to counter the respective tendencies of Jews and Arabs in modern times “to declare ‘historic Palestine’ as their genuine homeland,” thus promoting “genuine scholarship above partisan sensibilities” (63). Mark Cohen’s contribution on the impact of Arab mercantile customs on geonic and Maimonidean jurisprudence, part of a larger project on the socioeconomic background of Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah, suggests a striking tendency of medieval Jewish legists of the Islamic milieu to accommodate and integrate mercantile practices prevalent among their gentile neighbors. Cohen documents the so-called “custom of the merchants” (pp. 88, 97) in Islamic legal and mercantile sources, but so too in Cairo Geniza letters. The documents of the Cairo Geniza, a significant interest of Professor Stillman’s own scholarly career, are also the focus of Renée Levine Melammed’s study on the challenges and unpredictability of the daily life of women in the medieval Mediterranean. Much like her predecessors in this field, including S. D. Goitein and [End Page 250] Joel Kraemer, Mellamed lets the documents and their colorful details take center stage, while acknowledging that they leave us with more questions than answers. Quite valuable are the five documents Mellamed...

Longing for Community: Church, Ummah, or Somewhere in Between? A Review Essay

January 2015 Michael Nazir-Ali, a citizen of both Pakistan and the United Kingdom, is president of the Oxford Centre for Training, Research, Advocacy and Dialogue (OXTRAD) and formerly was bishop of Rochester (U.K.) and Raiwind (Pakistan) and general secretary of the Church Mission Society. —oxtrad@gmail.com T book on the theme of Christian witness in Muslim settings contains contributions from some twenty missiologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and linguists. It spans a huge range of mission involvement spread over several continents, and there is much practical wisdom to be found here. We need to remember that these were addresses presented to a mixed conference, and therefore we should not demand too much academic rigor from them. The chapters concentrate heavily on the questions of effective evangelism, conversion, and discipleship, but there is little here about the social, economic, and political dimensions of Christian mission. Given the disciplines of many of the contributors, there is a somewhat uncritical use of the social sciences and their jargon, without a sufficient amount of theological rigor being brought both to the use of the social sciences and to the description of various missionary situations in which the contributors find themselves. A glaring omission is ecclesiology. Individual stories are well told and groups described, but often with little information regarding how the authors view the significance of the church for mission, in both its local manifestation and its universal nature. A few of the contributors are from a Muslim background, one of whom does mention the church as being significant for converts as they transfer from one community to another. As so often today, the phenomenon of conversion is considered from anthropological and sociological perspectives, but we need more on conversion’s spiritual and theological aspects, as well as the priority of the missio Dei in this and other areas of mission. The issue of continuity and discontinuity is a complex one and needs to be examined in all of its aspects, with both the positive (as praeparatio evangelica) and the negative (the lingering on of the undesirable) meriting due attention. It is indeed useful, as in one of the contributions, to tabulate both what has attracted converts to the new faith (a sense of God’s love, security, freedom, guidance, and so forth) and what has turned them away from their old way of life (such as empty ritual, inflexible law and customs, and distance from the divine). In the entirely laudable project of seeking to communicate the Gospel in an Islamic milieu, there is always the lurking danger of lapsing into a dhimmi mentality which assumes the validity and priority of an Islamic worldview and value system. Some of the great heroes of the faith, mentioned by the only Longing for Community: Church, Ummah, or Somewhere in Between? A Review Essay

Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam by Chouki El Hamel

246 BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS Mecca to establish “indirect rule” in areas they wished to control. But in a setting such as Iraq, where Sharif Faisal of Mecca was made king, it had no local roots. Western powers have since turned to an emphasis on democratic elections as the basis of authority, but this has contributed to conflict and chaos in such settings as Algeria, Libya, Egypt, and Iraq. In short, this is a book that should be of great value to the limited number of scholars who have a focus on the western Maghrib and al-Andalus in the period it covers, but it also presents ideas that can stimulate the development of interesting new perspectives on history and present day events in an area that spread from West Africa to the Middle East. ALLAN CHRISTELOW Idaho State University, Idaho, USA CHOUKI EL HAMEL, BLACK MOROCCO: A HISTORY OF SLAVERY, RACE, AND ISLAM. (CAMBRIDGE AND NEW YORK: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2013. PP. XIII, 331) Chouki El Hamel has written a valuable book of comparative importance. Although Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam focuses explicitly on Morocco, El Hamel engages scholarly discourse in the Atlantic world to unravel the silence surrounding the subjects of slavery, racial attitudes, discrimination and marginalization in the wider Islamic context. By interrogating the role of slavery in Moroccan society and by placing it within a wider historical and contemporary discourse, Black Morocco tackles racial stereotypes and other legacies arising from slavery in Moroccan society for centuries. The book begins by critically engaging the conventional scholarship and the local academic discourse depicting slavery in the Muslim context as ‘benign’ and holding the viewpoint that ‘slavery was not harsh in North Africa’ (p. 3). To debunk this approach, the book convincingly shows that probing the culture of silence that nourished racial stereotype is crucial in understanding the legacy of slavery in Moroccan and Muslim societies in generally. The author argues that ‘the history of slavery in Morocco cannot be considered separately from the racial terror of the global slave trade’ (p. 4). According to him, ‘For racial groups such as blacks in Morocco, the problems of slavery, cultural and racial prejudice, and marginalization are neither new nor foreign. Blacks in Morocco have been marginalized for centuries, with dominant Moroccan culture defining this marginalized group as “Abid (plural of Abs)”, meaning slaves’ (p. 4). Throughout the book, El Hamel makes a strong case that in order to critically understand the legacy of slavery in Moroccan society, one cannot rely solely on Islamic ideology as the key to explaining social relations. For El Hamel, relying BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS 247 solely on a religious viewpoint yields an inaccurate historical record of the people, institutions and social practices of slavery in northwest Africa. El Hamel divides the book into two parts consisting of eight chapters and a conclusion. In the first two chapters in Part One, before taking a critical examination of the practice of concubinage which had been justified in religious terms, he marshalled crucial textual sources that allowed him to trace its development within the institution of slavery from its early Islamic milieu as reflected in the Quran, the Hadith (Sayings and Deeds of the Prophet Mohammad), the process of expansion of Islam and the teachings of the various legal schools, especially the Maliki school in the Islamic Mediterranean. The second chapter advances El Hamel’s argument to unravel the root cause of racial prejudice and discrimination in Morocco. This chapter is important not only in its masterful unpacking of the historical and contemporary complexities of racial prejudice in the Moroccan and the wider context of Muslim societies but also its critique of European literature that in reference to plantation slavery in the Americas and the racist attitudes to black Africans in European and American societies misconstrues slavery and racial stereotypes in Morocco as benign. The second part of the book provides a historical and sociological grounding of the book. In chapter 3, the author chronicles the tale and dynamics of the trans-Saharan diaspora. Here, El Hamel is upfront in rightly correcting the popular misconception that all blacks in northwest Africa had been slaves...

Religious Dimensions of Classical and Contemporary Islamic Art

This paper focuses on the work of Egyptian Islamic contemporary artist Ehab Mamdouh who grew up in Saudi Arabia, then moved to Cairo, where he was exposed to religious, historical concepts and art forms, then came back to work in Saudi Arabia to observe the societal struggle raging between traditional and emergent concepts, and the influence of Islam and ideology thereon. The artist conveys a fundamental tenet of Islam, embodied by the five daily calls to prayer, replete with attributes borrowed from classical Islamic art but infused with the contemporaneity of modern art—all in the context of contemporary Islamic art. In Moqeem, Mamdouh replaces the abstract geometric elements of classical Islamic art with an abstract portrayal of the praying worshipper. Mamdouh’s artistic style merges the Islamic milieu of the artist’s upbringing in Saudi Arabia and Egypt with his deep knowledge of the region’s history and architectural heritage. Moqeem is a “veiled” extension of Islamic art, in accordance with the standards by which the latter was classified in the past, yet it is shaped by the cultural development of our society and by the intellectual growth that the artist experienced on an individual level. Through this work, Mamdouh incites us to think and wonder—the true mark of a successful visual artist today.

A Partnership Gone Bad: Business Relationships and the Evolving Law of the Cairo Geniza Period

Abstract Economic historians, beginning with Avner Greif, have looked to business letters from the Cairo Geniza to understand how medieval merchants in the Islamic Mediterranean organized business collaboration. They have noticed the prevalence of agency relations, which followed “informal” arrangements, unlike formal partnerships, which employed written contracts. This “method” was called ṣuḥba (“companionship”) in Arabic, and it entailed reciprocal exchange of favors between business “friends.” Much attention has been given to what Greif calls “private order” enforcement of agency contracts, whereby merchants belonging to a “closed” consortium reported instances of cheating or opportunism by a fellow merchant, in place of enforcement by religious courts. However, economic historians relying on the Geniza documents have paid inadequate attention to evolving Jewish law in the Islamic milieu. The present article, focusing on a mercantile dispute, brings evidence to show that Jewish legal scholars adopted a feature of Islamic judicial practice to strengthen their role in enforcement of informal agency contracts. In his Code, the Mishneh Torah, Maimonides put the final touches on this accommodation by incorporating agency into the law pertaining to contract enforcement among partners.

Materialien zur alten islamischen Frommigkeit * BY BERND RADTKE

For centuries, the historical roots of Sufism have been a matter of great interest to Muslims and non-Muslims, Sufis and non-Sufis alike. Behind this interest has often been the assumption that essence lies in origins. Those who noted parallels in other traditions, most notably Christian monasticism or Indian asceticism, often argued that these influenced Sufism. ‘Foreign’ legacies are also adduced by those who consider Sufism heterodox, while those who—with or without apologetic intentions—do not share this view, frequently stress that the phenomenon emerged in a distinctly Islamic milieu marked by deep piety. Thus, the predecessors of the Sufis were renunciants (zuhhād; recent scholarship tends to avoid the term ‘ascetics’), who were active in the collection and study of ḥadīth and involved in the development of Islamic law while staying away from more speculative tendencies, ranging from uṣūl al-fiqh to kalām and falsafa. The notion that essence lies in origins is nowadays held in general disrepute, and most scholars underline the geographical and historical heterogeneity of Sufism where the term ‘Sufi’ can mean very different things. A case in point is Ahmet Karamustafa's Sufism: The Formative Period, which carefully distinguishes several milieus (such as Baghdad, Khurasan, Central Asia) and trends that contributed to the emergence of Sufism. A particularly promising line of inquiry is the relationship between Sufis, zuhhād, nussāk and ʿubbād (‘pietists’) and their different ideas and practices associated with piety (e.g., their attitude to the world, to God, or to society). Important contributions in this field come from Christopher Melchert who has addressed such issues in a series of articles.

Some reflections on the early discussion concerning the ṣifāt Allāh: ‘cross-fertilization and cooperation in the Islamic milieu’

Although it has fallen out of favour in contemporary theology, the activity of interreligious apologetics has historically allowed very difficult and controversial questions to be raised and examined within the parameters of a controlled intellectual environment. As an illustration of this phenomenon, this paper examines the thought of three scholars, Jahm ibn Ṣafwan, Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal, and Abū Rā'iṭa al-Takrītī, who were involved the debates of the eighth and ninth centuries concerning the divine attributes. They facilitated the encounter among different systems of thought, such as neo-Platonism, Christianity and Islam, creating the opportunity for both cross-fertilization and more precise articulation of individual doctrines. These Muslim and Christian intellectuals, while holding very different views of God and revelation, simultaneously saw themselves as engaged in a common project of formulating the foundation for society based on the will of God that had long-lasting effects.

Reminiscences of icons in the Qur'an?

The article assesses the possibility that icons and other religious pictures may have influenced some expressions and ideas found in the Qur'an. It does not discuss the nature or inspiration of the Qur'an, but focuses on the visual, artistic dimension of the relations between Christianity and the origins of Islam. The article considers what Christian images may have been known in the Arabian Peninsula at the time of Muhammad, how they may have been present in the pre- and early Islamic milieu, and whether they may in any way be reflected in the qur'anic text.

A Remnant Remaining: Armenians amid Northern Iraq's Christian Minority

AbstractNorthern Mesopotamia is the source for numerous ethnicities and religions. Each has played a role in forming a fragile, beautiful, yet sometimes painful cultural, religious and social montage in the region. Over the course of millennia, under numberless rulers and regimes, and through successive conflicts, many of these once historic majorities gradually faded into the ascending Arab and Islamic milieu. Within this ethnic and religious mosaic comprising Iraq, one finds a relatively large Christian community. Digging deeper still one discovers a small remaining remnant of Armenians. Long ago this ancient Christian people dominated the Armenian Highland, territory now located in Eastern Turkey. Historical evidence indicates an Armenian presence in Mesopotamia for well over several thousand years. With this as background, the paper is a brief consideration of the Christian minorities—chiefly the small Armenian community—located in Iraqi territory officially under the control of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), generally based on the author's field-work in Iraqi Kurdistan from December 2009 to March 2010.

Rebel between Spirit and Law: Ahmad Zarruq, Sainthood and Authority in Islam * By SCOTT KUGLE

In many ways a brave and personal book, Rebel between Spirit and Law explores the life and writings of Ahmad Zarruq, a native of Fes in Morocco, whom the author characterizes as a ‘juridical Sufi’, meaning someone who believed that an individual should be a jurist before becoming a Sufi and that the spiritual and juridical paths were symbiotic. The very important historical and doctrinal analyses of Zarruq's life and writings which the author gives are enwrapped by introductory and concluding references to the contemporary Islamic milieu and more particularly the employment of Zarruq's moderate juridical Sufism by the well-known American convert to Islam, Hamza Yusuf. From the point of view of the historian, this is extraneous and while it seems worth mentioning, its foregrounding in the introduction and first part of the book seems gauged to emphasize the relevance of the topic rather than functioning as an integral part of the story. Nonetheless, it is done with sincerity and does flag up the fact that moderate Islam, if that is the correct term, is not the invention of Western Muslims but an integral aspect of pre-modern Islamic praxis too.

"Their Intention Was Shown by Their Bodily Movements": The Baṣran Mu'tazilites on the Institution of Language

Following the initiative of Abū Hāshim al-Jubbā'ī, the Baṣran Mu'tazilites rejected the view of language, dominant till then in the Islamic milieu, according to which humanity had received it by way of divine revelation, and defended the position that language had arisen by means of a human convention. On the Baṣran understanding of this convention, the connection between words and things was effected by means of a momentous act of intention to assign a name, which was revealed to another through a bodily gesture or act of pointing. In considering the signifying powers of this bodily manifestation of intention, I discuss two points of difficulty, one internal and one external (grounded in Wittgenstein's critical framework) which beset the Baṣran Mu'tazilite account.