Scholarly Milieu Research Articles

Transcultural Mediterranean in the History of Chinese Travelogues: Oumei manyou riji as a Case Study

Chen Yifu 陳一甫 (1869–1948) and his son Chen Dayou 陳達有 (exact dates unknown) are the authors of a rare travelogue, Oumei manyou riji 歐美漫遊日記 [Diary of a journey in Europe and the United States]. The text is a fundamental milestone in the late Qing and Republican era odeporic production. As much as the father and son were well-known in the scholarly milieu of the epoch, they were in the first place entrepreneurs, not literati or diplomats, unlike most of the authors of previous travelogues of this historical phase. The focus of this article is the representation of the Mediterranean portion of the Chens’ travels, particularly the description of relics both as cultural finds and as comparison examples. By highlighting fresh elements and representations that the authors’ backgrounds involved, the article aims to assess if and to what extent the Mediterranean was perceived in Oumei manyou riji as a “transcultural space,” as defined by David Tomas, and what new research perspectives this provides for the study of late Qing and Republican era odeporic production.

The Ottoman Approach to Scientific Classification in Tafsir History: A Study of Taskopruluzade Ahmad Efendi’s ‘Miftâhu’s-Saâde’

This study presents an analytical investigation of the historical aspect of tafsir within the Ottoman tradition, as found in the literary composition "Miftāhus-Sa'âda," which was authored by Taskopruluzade (d. 968/1561). This work holds a significant role in the classification of knowledge, serving as the foundational underpinning for the establishment of scientific traditions within the Ottoman Empire. Through the lens of this work, the historical narrative of tafsir is recontextualized to align with the scientific framework inherent in the Ottoman tradition, thus imparting a distinctive character to the realm of Qur'anic interpretation during the Ottoman Empire's tenure. Employing historical research methodologies encompassing heuristics, verification, interpretation, and historiography, this investigation critically examines the history of scientific classification, a bedrock for shaping the taxonomy of categorized disciplines within their respective contexts. The research delves deeply into the composition of "Miftâhu’s-Saâde," offering a comprehensive perspective on the evolution of tafsir history. The findings of this research underscore that, in the process of Science Classification congruent with the scientific ethos of the Ottoman Empire, Taskopruluzade, within "Miftâhu’s-Saâde," undertakes three pivotal tasks. Firstly, he evaluates classical tafsir works through the lens of scientific classification norms entrenched in the Ottoman tradition. Secondly, these appraised tafsir works are juxtaposed with others, facilitating the establishment of benchmarks and taxonomies that wield considerable influence in guiding the trajectory of tafsir history. Thirdly, a comprehensive exploration ensues into the interplay between interpretive works and the activities of interpretation. The implications of this discourse offer a substantive contribution, deepening the comprehension of tafsir history and the classification of knowledge within the scholarly milieu of the Ottoman Empire.

God Spatially Above and Spatially Extended: The Rationality of Ibn Taymiyya’s Refutation of Faḫr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s Ašʿarī Incorporealism

Abstract Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328) wrote his tome Bayān talbīs al-ǧahmiyya to refute Ašʿarī kalām theologian Faḫr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s (d. 606/1210) argument in Taʾsīs al-taqdīs that God is not corporeal, located, or spatially extended. Bayān talbīs al-ǧahmiyya is the largest known refutation of kalām incorporealism in the Islamic tradition, and al-Rāzī’s Taʾsīs al-taqdīs was apparently the most sophisticated work of its kind circulating in Ibn Taymiyya’s Mamlūk scholarly milieu. Ibn Taymiyya in Bayān talbīs al-ǧahmiyya deconstructs al-Rāzī’s rational arguments and explicates an alternative theology of God’s relation to space. Translating his understanding of the meaning of the Qurʾān and the Sunna into kalām terminology and drawing on Ibn Rušd’s (d. 595/1198) Aristotelian notion of place as the inner surface of the containing body, Ibn Taymiyya envisions God in Bayān talbīs al-ǧahmiyya as a very large indivisible and spatially extended existent that is above and surrounds the created world in a spatial sense.

The Lost Cameo, the Vanished Statue of the Emperor and Constantine as a New Alexander

The aim of this paper is to propose a reinterpretation of the meaning of the lost colossus of Constantine the Great from the Forum of his name in Constantinople, in the light of the iconography of the emperor on the cameo from the cathedral in the Pomeranian town of Cammin. Although the gem was lost during the last war, it is known to us thanks to archival photographs and the plaster cast housed at Göttingen University. On this basis, Gerda Bruns associated the jewel with the statue of Constantine on the porphyry column in the New Rome, and her identification has since been widely accepted by the scholarly milieu. In recent years one has been able to observe growing popularity of this interpretation among researchers, who however refrain in their studies from pointing to the consequences of such a reconstruction of the statue’s form.
 The author of this paper points out that Constantine purposefully chose the iconographical type of Alexander-ktistes as a model for his own representation in order to allude to his great predecessor and the founder of a number of cities which bore his name. The iconography of the statue became then a part of the programme of the celebrations arranged on the occasion of the dedication of Constantinople, in which numerous references to Alexander played the key role. This new understanding of the colossus, placing its significance within the frames of political propaganda, better matches the actual historical circumstances and the ruler’s attitude towards Christendom than traditional interpretations which recognised the statue as Helios or Apollo, and thus introduced an incoherence — difficult to explain — in Constantine’s attitude towards the new religion. This cumbersome question, which baffled the inquisitive minds already in the Constantinople of the Byzantine era, will be considered unsubstantial if we correctly interpret the monument on the Forum solely in the political and propagandistic context.

Two Cartographic Elements in Galvaneus Flamma’s Cronica Universalis

In his Cronica universalis Galvaneus Flamma refers to two cartographic artifacts. The first is a diagram of the winds placed within a cosmological frame, which lists the names of the winds in accordance with both “scientific” tradition and seafaring experience; this diagram intertwines two sources of knowledge, as would be expected in a scholarly milieu receptive to the suggestion of geographical practice. The other is a mappa Ianuensis, i.e. a map drawn in Genoa or kept in Genoa at the time, which Galvaneus mentions three times in his work; according to Galvaneus’s mentions, this map depicted the entire globe, and was much more extensive than a portolan chart. Both elements bring new light about the author’s geographical interests and sources, and add some small tiles to the mosaic of fourteenth-century cartography.

The Hebrew Orient: Palestine in Jewish American Visual Culture, 1901-1938 by Jessica L. Carr

Reviewed by: The Hebrew Orient: Palestine in Jewish American Visual Culture, 1901-1938 by Jessica L. Carr Mira Katzburg-Yungman (bio) The Hebrew Orient: Palestine in Jewish American Visual Culture, 1901-1938. By Jessica L. Carr. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2020. 299 pp. Jessica L. Carr's highly analytic book aims at understanding Jewish Americans' self-image from the beginning of the twentieth century up to the Second World War through their visual culture of the "Hebrew Orient," the term she uses for Jewish Americans' view of Palestine. The author assumes that the self-image is well reflected through viewing others and aims to explore multiple self-images and identities, particularly in terms of cultural and gender identities. A broad systematic introduction depicting the analytic approach of the author explains the aims, major terms, and concepts used in the book. It is here that the term "visual culture" is defined as "everything that the eye can see, as well as mental processes brought at the moment of seeing" (13). The book is full of illustrations, photographs, and other images presented and analyzed in depth. Chapter 1, "'The Orient' as Jewish Heritage" discusses the book's key term "Hebrew (or Jewish) Orient" in vast detail. The author highlights the "Hebrew Orient" as a tool to reveal American Jews' cultural self-image through viewing their understanding of their "Hebrew Oriental" Jewish heritage and the contemporary inhabitants (pioneers, Mizrahim, and Arabs) of Palestine. This is the raison d'être of the author's preference for using the term Hebrew Orient rather than Palestine. Carr acknowledges her inability to include all Jewish American groups of the time under examination (1901-1938) and consequently decided to choose five representatives, or case studies. The book's chapters are constructed accordingly: Chapter Two explores the Orientalist visual culture of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA—initially, the Federation of American Zionists) as reflected in its publications. The third chapter explores the visual culture of the "Hebrew Orient" of the Reform National Federation of Temple Sisterhood (NFTS) through the lens of the NFTS's chapter conferences, yearbooks, letters, posters, and newsletters. Here and in other places in the book the author exceeds her declared aim and reaches additional valuable conclusions. In this case she analyzes among other things how the organization's women "created a new space for themselves in the practice of Reform Judaism without challenging traditional roles of men" (25). Chapter Four focuses [End Page 203] on the vision of (Ashkenazi) Jewish heritage as reflected in the Jewish Encyclopedia (1901-1906). Chapter Five next focuses on the popular arena to explore "how Jewish Americans transformed historical Jewish narratives into popular forms at the 1933 'Century of Progress World's Fair' in Chicago" (26). Finally, Chapter Six addresses the visual culture of Hadassah, the Women's Zionist Organization of America. Similar to many other gender scholars, Carr views gender analysis as leading "to a better understanding of both women and men" (16). To reach such an understanding, she explores two Zionist organizations, the male-led largest organization, the ZOA, and Hadassah, the major American women's Zionist organization. The non-Zionist American organizations are also represented by male and female representatives: the NFTS and the scholarly milieu of the Jewish Encyclopedia, although in different years. However, while the other Jewish groups of the time may have their own representation within the groups explored in the book, most of the Yiddish-speaking immigrants — a very large sector at the time — has no representation, although the Yiddish press could have been used quite easily. The reason might be the author's view of them as immigrants, not fully Jewish Americans. Nevertheless, the book fulfills its author's promise to bring a rich and varied panorama of envisioning the "Hebrew Orient" by various Jewish groups. It also shows how various Jewish identities and self-images are reflected through their visual culture. In doing so the author shows, for example, how Hadassah women's self-image as "modern westerners" is reflected through the organization's images. In the same vein the author's analysis demonstrate how the Jewish Encyclopedia's scholars aspired to integrate the Orient into the...

Design and Development of Citizen Surveillance and Social-Credit Information System for Bangladesh

Most of the areas of Bangladesh face a wide range of threats, ranging from terrorism and civil unrest to kidnapping, rape and murder. To reduce the impact of these threats, it is critical for the authorities to capture real-time information onwhat is happening in and around the city. Therefore, there is a growing requirement for utilizing the new and emerging technologies to make our cities safer. The development of the monitoring system in the technological field has become a blazing topic in the milieu of scholars and AI techniques have become an essential part of the future era. With the help of AI & deep learning, we can evaluate the social behavior (Action Recognition) of people, and by implementing the social credit score system, we can mark the citizen’s activities & analyze them. To detect and recognize the actions of a human we used YOLOV2 architecture and also incorporated the SQL database (SQLite) to record the social credit score. A citizen can visualize their credit score from an HTML based website.

The Digital Humanities in the Czech Republic

This paper is devoted to the issue of Digital Humanities (DH) in Czech literary studies. Over the last decade, various methods primarily connected with DH have had a substantial impact on the development of numerous areas of the humanities. In Czech literary studies, this impact is visible only from 2017 onwards, when official discussion between Czech scholars about the topic was initiated. The recent development of this tradition is the main reason why DH have not gained as strong position in Czech literary studies as they have abroad. However, there exists a tradition of the use of so-called exact methods in literary studies in the Czech scholarly milieu, and this tradition serves as an important domestic source for the full development of DH in Czech literary studies. While these exact methods are examined in the paper, its main purpose is to introduce two contemporary Czech DH projects in literary studies – the first being the Corpus of Czech Verse and the second the Corpus of Czech Prose, the latter of which currently serves as a base for a subject-project on Prague Fictional Topography. These two projects can be viewed as representatives of the situation and role of DH in contemporary Czech literary studies.

The rhetoric of twentieth-century Damascene anti-Salafism

ABSTRACT The renowned Syrian ʿālim Shaykh Muhammad Sa’id Ramadan Al-Buti was one of the world's leading scholarly representatives of Sunni Islam in contemporary times. The written debates that occurred between the Damascene ʿulamā’, al-Buti, and the iconic Salafi scholar and ḥadīth scholar Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani constitute one of the most important and comprehensive intra-Muslim debates in the twentieth century, having helped to define a clear schism between the neo-traditionalist position and its presumed opposite: Salafism. This article suggests that the rhetoric of anti-Salafism needs to be studied further to better understand contemporary currents in modern Islamic intellectual history. The adversarial rift that crystallised in the thriving Shāmī scholarly milieu of the 1980s and 90s informed the existence of a distinct neo-traditionalist school both in the West and many parts of the Muslim world for the latter part of twentieth century and to this day. At the intersection of political competition, textual methodology and competing visions of heresy and history, Islamic neo-traditionalism represents a key contestant in the battle for religious authority in contemporary Islam under the secular nation-state. Between championing a constructed concept of a ‘tradition’ for modern times and those who seek to return to a pristine ‘true Islam’, a deadlock is inevitable.

The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri an the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition

The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri an the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition

The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri an the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition

The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri an the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition

Children and Religion in the Archaeological Record of Ancient Israel

AbstractThe current scholarly milieu has placed great interest in the topics of children and family household religion of ancient Israel; however, scholarship exploring the intersection of the two has not yet been undertaken. This article draws attention to children as vital participants in that domestic cult. Using theories of socialization and enculturation, the article explores how ancient Israelite children interact with the religion that surrounded them daily. This child-centered approach examines textual, archaeological, and ethnographical data and concludes that the process of enculturating ancient Israelite children with household religion produced children who were both passive and active participants in the domestic cult. In doing so, the article informs our knowledge of family household religion, while at the same time expanding our understanding of a child’s role within the Israelite household.

Problems of Development in Bangladesh: Causes and Remedies

The word development has become a blazing topic in the milieu of scholars, think tanks and civil society in Bangladesh for the last couple of years. Even some development experts claimed to modify the present development approaches in Bangladesh. The purpose of this paper is to identify the problems of the conventional development system in Bangladesh and to provide a model of development that will serve the people best. To address the aims of this study both qualitative and quantitative method is used. Where both the primary and secondary data used for this study, after analyzing the data, this paper argues that a number of flaws remain in conventional growth based development system in Bangladesh. Such as, not all growth is positive, an increase of personal income does not translate into well-being, and absence of inclusive development. In addition, the faults can eradicate by introducing freedom of choice. Because if the freedom of choice ensues then the inclusive development, human development, as well as good governance, would develop in Bangladesh.

Albrecht Dürer’s personal Underweysung der Messung

The article discusses the handwritten revisions and drawn additions by Albrecht Dürer in his own copy of the treatise on geometry, Underweysung der Messung (1525). Situating Dürer’s interest in mathematics within the scholarly milieu of Renaissance Nuremberg, the article addresses the shifts in style and content that Dürer proscribes and offers new perspectives on the artist’s relation to his own late work. The article concludes by displaying several drawings bound into the edition by Dürer that illustrate variations on perspectival apparatuses. These lesser known drawings illuminate the evolution of Dürer’s conceptualization of the dynamics between artist and subject, as well as the tools used to facilitate this interaction.

Anglo-Saxon Prognostics: An Edition and Translation of Texts from London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius A.iii

Anglo-Saxon Prognostics: An Edition and Translation of Texts from London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius A.iii

FROM SCHOLARLY TO COMMERCIAL WRITING: GERMAN WOMEN TRANSLATORS IN THE AGE OF THE ‘TRANSLATION FACTORIES’

Women translators played an important role in the development from patronage to freelance work that took place between ca. 1820 and 1850. Whereas the majority of translators in the eighteenth century came from a scholarly milieu such as Luise Gottsched, in the first half of the nineteenth century many female authors were unmarried or divorced and translated for money. This transition is demonstrated through the example of the translation activities of Meta Forkel, née Liebeskind, Emilie Wille, a so far totally unknown woman translator, and Fanny Tarnow, who specialized in French ‘women’s novels’. In her adaptation of Lady Morgan’s novel ‘The Missionary’, Tarnow omitted most of the historical and ethnographical details in order to concentrate exclusively on the love story, thus corresponding to what was alleged female taste. It is characteristic for this development that women translators were also involved in critical controversies about the legitimacy of certain modes of translating.

On Research and Publication: the Specialty Society and its Scholarly Journal

On Research and Publication: the Specialty Society and its Scholarly Journal

Millmow on the Australian Response to the 1930s Depression

Alex Millmow's 'The Power of Economic Ideas' has been a long time coming and its contents are already well known to Antipodean historians of economic thought. The book is the result of Millmow devoting the lion's share of his working life to reconstructing the way in which Australian economists in the 1930s formed a coherent theoretical and policy framework to mitigate the social and economic dislocation that defined Australia's second great depression. We have been drip-fed its contents for a decade with a parade of sound articles by Millmow in the History of Economics Review (and elsewhere) and conference papers delivered (with his typical verve) at local HETSA meetings; earlier manifestations of the narrative circulated freely for some time via the now ubiquitous web-link; and the PhD manuscript on which the book is based won the 2005 bi-annual HETSA prize for best doctoral dissertation. Dedicated readers have vetted its hypotheses, countless referees have probed its archival credentials, speakers from the conference floor have shaved the more daring and speculative of its claims, and multiple examiners have carefully weighed and assessed its numerous protocol statements. The final issue of these slowly revolving cogs of, now dated, scholarly machinery - made positively antediluvian in the face of supervisors from nearby disciplines proudly pumping out phenomenologically-driven PhDs by the thousand (and, without shame, breathlessly adding 'do you know he completed it within two years of starting') - is remarkably free from even minor errors. The author, his supervisor (Selwyn Cornish), the institution that placed its imprimatur on the dissertation (ANU), the society creating the scholarly milieu for the evolution of the ideas lying therein (HETSA), and the publisher (ANU E-Press) should be proud of the final product (even if the last should have insisted on an index for a tome that entails a cast of thousands and tortuous events that ripple out in every direction). And if the undergraduate students under the charge of all of these people did not suffer in the process, this is how it should be.

Prolegomena to the Study of the Kurds

AbstractThe article presents a thorough review of nearly all relevant aspects of Kurdish Studies concerning the ethnic history, identity, religion, language, and literature of the Kurds. Elaborating upon the respective issues, the author makes extensive use of all available data and materials, including ancient and mediaeval, particularly those never previously examined with regard to related topics. The objective examination of most crucial problems of the field contributes to a better understanding of Kurdish prehistory, expanding, at the same time, the basic methodological concepts upon which further research should be grounded. Due to the politicised nature of Kurdological disciplines, many ideological elements of non-academic provenance, that have found their way into the scholarly milieu in recent decades and have become a constant set of stereotypes and clichés, have been highlighted in the paper.

The Greek Pentateuch and the Scholarly Milieu of Alexandria

The origins of the first translation of the Bible, the Greek Pentateuch, in the first part of the third century BCE, is still an enigma. Ancient and new theories try to explain this phenomenon without precedents in Antiquity. The author, after years of dedication to the study of the Septuagint and Hellenistic Judaism, proposes his own view of this particular issue. He call for a critical return to the narrative of the Letter of Aristeas inasmuch as it rightly describes the atmosphere of the Ptolemaic court and the scholarly milieu of the Library of Alexandria. The translators were cultivated Jews, bilingual intellectuals, expert in both Hebrew and Greek language and literature and in both religious traditions. It cannot be decided whether they were Alexandrian or they came from the circle of the Jerusalem temple in a period when Palestine was under Ptolemaic rule and the relations between Jerusalem and Alexandria were very easy-going.