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Research Unit Intellectual History of the Islamicate World

Director Prof. Sabine Schmidtke

 

 

 

You are invited to learn more about the goals and achievements of the Research Unit in version 1.3 of our brochure. Either download it here (PDF 4.3 MB) or read on below.

 

You can further download our new brochure "Preserving Yemen’s Cultural Heritage - The Yemen Manuscript Digitization Project" by Sabine Schmidtke and Jan Thiele (2011)  here

 

The work of the Research Unit Intellectual History of the Islamicate World and its research areas

Executive Summary

In the medieval, late medieval and pre-modern world of Islam, Muslims, Jews and Christians constituted a unique cultural and intellectual commonality. They shared a language, Arabic (and at times Persian), which they spoke in daily life and which they also used for their theological, philosophical, legal and scientific writings. Moreover, they often read the same books, so that a continuous, multi-dimensional exchange of ideas, texts, and forms of discourse was the norm rather than the exception.

While this has been amply demonstrated for some selected periods and regions, scholars usually opt for a one-dimensional approach with an (often exclusive) focus on either Muslim, Jewish or Christian authors and their writings. In all three fields and for a variety of reasons, the scholarly investigation of the so-called rational sciences (theology, legal methodology, philosophy and related disciplines) beyond denominational borders is still in the beginning phase. This calls for an entirely new framework for innovative research that systematically crosses the boundaries between three major disciplines of academia and research, viz. Islamic Studies, Jewish Studies and the study of Eastern Christianity. This approach characterizes the work carried out at the Research Unit Intellectual History of the Islamicate World.

The following four major research areas have been pursued since 2003:

• Post-Avicennan Philosophy (1/2/3)

• Rationalism and Rational Theology in the Islamicate World and Counterreactions (4/5)

• Interreligious Controversies (6)

• Digitization of Yemeni manuscripts (7)

The specific projects within each research area as well as the research areas themselves are regularly revised and adapted according to the progress that has been achieved both within the Research Unit and in international scholarship. For a full list of research achievements see the final section.

 

Detailed Description of the Research Areas and the Current Projects:

(1) Critical Avicennism in the Islamic East of the 6^th/12^th century

The reception of the philosophy of Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna, d. 428/1037) in the Islamic and Christian West has been documented for some time. Less understood is the reception of Avicenna’s philosophy in the East of the Islamic world, where it happened on a much greater scale and proved much more momentous. Two hundred years after the death of Avicenna, major concepts of his philosophy had become an integral part of new philosophical schools and traditional disciplines.

Only rarely, however, was Avicenna’s philosophical system accepted wholesale. Especially during the 6^th/12^th century, thinkers approached and evaluated Avicenna from a number of directions. While they often retained the conceptual framework of Avicenna’s philosophy, they gave up or modified some of its central tenets. Thinkers did so for various reasons. Some attempted to resolve problems inherent to the Avicennan system. Others tried to integrate Avicennan ideas into hitherto non-philosophical contexts. This process and the philosophical concepts and positions resulting from this process will be termed “critical Avicennism”.

To better understand the formation of critical Avicennism, members of the Research Unit work on figures and writings from the 6^th/12^th century central to this process. They aim to draw the intellectual landscape of that period, to make important texts accessible, and to understand the modifications to central philosophical concepts in detail.

The works of the famous 12^th-century logician and philosopher ʿUmar b. Sahlān al-Sāwī in defense of Avicennan philosophy (Lukas Muehlethaler / Reza Pourjavady) illustrate the reaction to critical Avicennism and the modification of Avicennan tenets in its wake. Philosophical works of ʿUmar b. Sahlān, such as Nahj al-taqdīs, are being critically edited and made accessible through translation and analysis. In these works, ʿUmar b. Sahlān defends central Avicennan concepts against critique by al-Shahrastānī (d. 548/1153) and Abū l-Barakāt al-Baghdādī (d. 548/1153 ?).

The latter thinker, a Jewish philosopher who converted to Islam late in his life, provided in his Kitāb al-Muʿtabar the philosophically most profound critique of Avicennan philosophy in the 6^th/12^th century and became thus a central figure of critical Avicennism. Many aspects of the genesis of the Kitāb al-Muʿtabar, its contemporary reception, and its later impact are still unknown and deserve to be investigated in detail. A study of Abū l-Barakāt al-Baghdādī’s philosophical work and its reception (Lukas Muehlethaler) looks at how key concepts in Avicenna’s philosophy are transformed by Abū l-Barakāt and how the transformed concepts are taken up by Abū l-Barakāt’s contemporaries and later thinkers such as Shihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī (d. 587/1191) and Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210).

 

(2) Between Euphrates and Oxus: Philosophy and Science in the Eastern Lands of Islam (13^th through 16^th c. CE)

The spiritual and intellectual life in the ‘Euphrates-to-Oxus region’ from the death of Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī in 672/1274 to the beginning of what has come to be known as the “School of Iṣfahān” at the turn of the 17^th c. was dominated by the Peripatetic philosophy of Avicenna (d. 428/1037), the Illuminationist teachings of Shihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī (d. 587/1191), the philosophical mysticism of Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī (d. 638/1240), as well as rational theology in its Muʿtazilite and Ashʿarite brands. The vivid reception and creative amalgamation of these various strands of thought during the following centuries by Sunnites and Shīʿites alike (as well as by Jewish thinkers flourishing in these regions) gave rise to an intellectual richness and diversity in Iraq and Iran that is without precedent in the history of Islam. Yet these intellectual developments are still largely unstudied. The Research Unit’s current research projects related to this period aim to broaden our understanding of the rich philosophical/theological traditions between the 13^th and 16^th c CE. in the Euphrates-to-Oxus region. The approach taken is pioneering, not only in view of the dearth of scholarship on the subject but also by its combined approach of intellectual-philosophical analysis and social history.

The beginning of this epoch, which coincides with the Mongol conquest of Baghdad in 1258 CE and the ensuing split of the subsequent intellectual developments of the Euphrates-to-Oxus region and the lands to its West, is marked by the work of the Twelver Shīʿite polymath Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī, who through his philosophical writings initiated a revival of Avicennan philosophy and, at the same time, integrated philosophical notions into the (Muʿtazilite) doctrinal thought of Twelver Shīʿism. Moreover, Ṭūsī was highly esteemed by the Mongol ruler Hülegü (r. 1256–65 CE) at whose order he established the observatory at Marāgha in Azarbayjan which became for a period of about fifteen years an important intellectual centre attracting astronomers and philosophers alike. At the same time, Suhrawardī’s Illuminationism emerged as one of the dominant strands of Islamic philosophy. It was the Jewish philosopher Ibn Kammūna (d. 683/1284–5), a contemporary of Ṭūsī based in Baghdad, who initiated the broad reception of Suhrawardī’s philosophical writings through his commentary on the latter’s K. al-Talwīḥāt which was widely received in Muslim (and to a lesser extent Jewish) circles. Ibn Kammūna’s Muslim contemporary Shams al-Dīn al-Shahrazūrī (d. after 687/1288) commented on Suhrawardī’s Ḥikmat al-ishrāq and his Talwīḥāt and had composed an extensive philosophical encyclopaedia, al-Shajara al-ilāhiyya, which became very popular about one century later. Quṭb al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī (d. 710/1311), the third early commentator of Suhrawardī, was heavily dependent on the works of both Ibn Kammūna and Shahrazūrī, and yet his writings later on often eclipsed those of his two older contemporaries in fame and influence. Ibn ʿArabī’s philosophical mysticism spread in the Eastern lands thanks to the writings of his disciples and later followers, most importantly his disciple and son-in-law Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī (d. 673/1274). In the following centuries these different intellectual perspectives gradually began to be amalgamated with the two main strands of traditional rational theology, viz. Muʿtazilism and Ashʿarism, culminating in the philosophy of Shams al-Dīn al-Ḥusaynī al-Astarābādī (“Mīr Dāmād”, d. 1040/1631), Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī (“Mullā Ṣadrā”, d. 1050/1640) and other representatives of the so-called “School of Iṣfahān” during the 17^th and 18^th c CE. In view of the much more developed state of research on the philosophical developments prior to Ṭūsī as well as on the “School of Iṣfahān”, the Research Unit is focussed in this project on the intermediary three (13^th through 16^th CE) centuries.

One of the most important centres of intellectual thought during the earlier part of this epoch was Baghdad (13^th and 14^th c. CE), followed by Marāgha where Ṭūsī’s observatory was located, and Tabrīz, which for some decades of the 13^th c. served as the official capital of the Mongol empire, and subsequently mainly Shīrāz, the principal intellectual centre during the second half of the 14^th and during the 15^th c. The thriving intellectual activities in Baghdad during the decades following the Mongol conquest (1258 CE) and the fact that most of the leading intellectuals of the time were patronized by the powerful family of the Chief Minister (ṣāḥib dīwān) Shams al-Dīn al-Juwaynī (d. 683/1284) challenge the commonly held assumption of historians that the Mongol conquest of the Eastern lands of Islam had caused not only severe material devastation, but also an extinction of intellectual wealth. Apart from Ibn Kammūna, who held a high-ranking bureaucratic position as is indicated by his honorific title “ʿIzz al-Dawla” (“pride of the state”) and who was patronized by various members of the Juwaynī family and of the powerful Dawlatshāh clan, the philosopher/logician Najm al-Dīn al-Kātibī (d. 675/1277) dedicated some of his writings to Sharaf al-Dīn Hārūn, one of the sons of Juwaynī. Moreover, not only the famous Shīʿite court favorite Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī, but also other Twelver Shīʿite intellectuals of the time enjoyed the patronage of powerful administrative officials, as was the case with the philosopher/theologian Maytham al-Baḥrānī (d. 699/1300), who dedicated several of his writings to ʿAlāʾ al-Dawla ʿAṭāʾ Malik al-Juwaynī (d. 683/1284).

The significance of Tabrīz as a cultural centre during the 14^th c. CE is indicated by a precious one-volume-library copied between 1321 and 1323 (“Safīna-yi Tabrīz”). Towards the end of the 14^th c. and during the transitional and politically unstable epoch of the post-Mongol era, Shīrāz emerged as the leading intellectual centre of the Euphrates-to-Oxus region. It was already between 1335 and 1353 that the leading Ashʿarite theologian of the time, ʿAḍud al-Dīn al-Ījī (d. 757/1356), was active in Shīrāz, and in 1377–78 the philosopher ʿAlī b. Muḥammad al-Jurjānī (d. 815/1413) moved to this city, where he started teaching at the Dār al-Shifāʾ madrasa.

Two generations later, the two rivals Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Dashtakī (d. 902/1497) and Jalāl al-Dīn al-Dawānī (d. 908/1502) represent the apex of the philosophical activities in Shīrāz. They attracted a large number of students from the neighbouring regions and far beyond, among them numerous renowned scholars from the Ottoman lands (e.g., Muʾayyadzāde ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Efendī), who in turn brought the Iranian philosophical tradition to the Ottoman lands and even to India. Moreover, as was the case with most intellectuals of the 13^th and 14^th c., the philosophers of Shīrāz entertained close relations with the various rulers, as can be learned from the numerous dedications of their works, and in many cases occupied high positions at court and/or the administration themselves. The close interaction between intellectuals, rulers, and the highest administrative echelon is one of the major characteristics of the entire period under investigation. Among the students of Dawānī and Dashtakī, who lived and wrote during the emergence of the Safavid dynasty when Shīʿism was imposed as the official religion in Iran, mention should be made of Mīr Ḥusayn al-Maybudī (executed 909/1504), Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Khafrī (d. after 931/1525), Ḥājjī Maḥmūd al-Nayrīzī (d. after 942/1536), Dashtakī’s son, Ghiyāth al-Dīn al-Dashtakī (d. 948/1542), and Kamāl al-Dīn Ḥusayn al-Ilāhī al-Ardabīlī (d. 949/1543). Even before the rise of the Safavids, some of the philosophers of Shīrāz can safely be identified as Twelver Shīʿites, such as Ḥājjī Maḥmūd al-Nayrīzī.

Additional centres of intellectual life with a strong Twelver Shīʿite representation were al-Ḥilla (e.g., Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Kāshī, d. 755/1354) and the various shrine cities in Iraq (Baghdad, Najaf, Karbalāʾ), Mashhad in Iran (e.g., Ibn Abī Jumhūr al-Aḥsāʾī, d. after 906/1501), as well as Bahrayn, most of which have been neglected by modern scholars or even completely escaped their attention. The current research project of the Reseach Unit therefore sheds new light on the nature of migration of Twelver Shīʿite scholars from Jabal ʿĀmil (Lebanon) to Iran and their subsequent role in establishing Twelver Shīʿism in Safavid Iran (as against the local religious scholars), which is a controversial subject in modern scholarship.

There are two main reasons why scholarship has so far mostly neglected this important epoch of Islamic intellectual thought. Since the Medieval Latin reception of Muslim philosophers had ended with Averroes, Western students of Islamic philosophy were for a long time unaware of the intellectual richness of the post-Avicennan traditions of the East. Moreover, among the main literary genres of the various intellectual disciplines during this epoch were commentaries and supercommentaries, glosses and superglosses and other marginalia on a number of highly popular works, such as Ṭūsī’s Tajrīd al-iʿtiqād, ʿAbd Allāh al-Baydāwī’s (d. 716/1316) Ṭawāliʿ al-anwār and Sirāj al-Dīn al-Urmawī’s (d. 683/1284) Maṭāliʿ al-anwār. This literary output was prematurely judged as being the result of intellectual stagnation that is unworthy of studying. It was a slow and reluctant process that led modern scholars to accept that this genre had to be viewed as “the functional equivalent of today’s periodical literature in the research, where new findings were made public”, to use a formulation coined by George Saliba.

The study of the intellectual developments in the Eastern lands during the post-Avicennan era was initiated by Henri Corbin (d. 1978) who corrected the long-held view that philosophical activities in the Islamic world had ended with Averroes. Corbin’s starting point was the writings of Suhrawardī, the founder of philosophical Illuminationism, and his critical editions of the latter’s writings are still authoritative today. Moreover, he was also one of the first to take an interest in the later intellectual traditions of the Islamic East. While his numerous critical editions are still valuable, his analytical accounts need to be read with caution as these are marred with misinterpretations.

Subsequent generations of Western and Iranian scholars have mostly focussed on the so-called “School of Iṣfahān” and particularly its most renowned representative, Mullā Ṣadrā, whereas little has been done to advance the knowledge on the intellectual activities in the Euphrates-to-Oxus region during the 13^th through the 16^th c. CE. Some brief surveys were published that mostly lament the lacunae rather than providing new insights. On a select number of prominent figures, such as Ibn Kammūna, Shahrazūrī, Quṭb al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī, Dawānī, Nayrīzī and Ibn Abī Jumhūr, some few indepth studies have been carried out, mostly by members of the Research Unit; these are complemented by investigations devoted to contributions of scholars of the time to the exact sciences. Moreover, critical editions of some few texts have been published by Iranian scholars, while others have published bibliographical studies on certain representatives of the “School of Shīrāz”. These studies provide first glimpses of the richness as well as the immense complexity of the intellectual traditions of this epoch. Despite these scattered advances, our knowledge of this important epoch of Islamic intellectual thought remains limited and modern scholarship is still far from being able to draw even a rough map of the intellectual traditions of this period.

The Research Unit aims to broaden our understanding of the intellectual traditions of this period by studying it comprehensively from a double angle, viz. an intellectual-philosophical analysis combined with a social history approach, aiming to trace in detail the intellectual activities of the philosophers/theologians, to locate them within the larger map of the intellectual strands of the time, and to identify at the same time the respective social networks and settings that provided the social framework for these intellectual activities. These aims are achieved by simultaneously studying the philosophical/theological literature of which the majority is accessible in manuscript only, as well as those literary genres that are relevant for the reconstruction of the respective networks and social settings. The transmission and reception processes can only be gleaned from notes such as copyist’s colophons, ownership statements and other notes that testify to the transmission of the respective works by the teachers and students named in them, which demands a detailed codicological analysis of a critical mass of manuscripts, to be found primarily in the public and private libraries of Iran and of Turkey, as well as in some of the Western libraries.

The two primary starting points are the works of the first generation of commentators of Suhrawardī and their later reception, as well as the principal representatives of the so-called “School of Shīrāz”, to be complemented by other circles and centres such as those represented by Nūr Allāh al-Shūshtarī (d. 1019/1610) and those to be found in places such as Tabrīz and others. This is complemented by a detailed analysis of the philosophical/theological curriculum of the time – again through close investigation of the extant manuscript tradition of the intellectual literature that was produced during the epoch under investigation (thus also including earlier texts that were still studied at the time), as well as by cross-references to other literature that is to be found in the writings under investigation.

The literary genres relevant for the reconstruction of the social settings comprise the following:

First and foremost the so-called “licences to transmit” (ijāzas) that were in the periods and region under investigation frequently issued by teachers to their students, and that provide information on the when and where of the respective instruction, about the curriculum that has been taught and about the educational background of the teacher who issues this type of documents.

Secondly, in the introductions to their works, the respective authors usually provide information on the motives for composing these works, mentioning in particular the persons to whom the work is dedicated. Thus they provide reliable information on the patronage relations that are characteristic for this period. This type of information allows for conclusions on the social settings of transmitting knowledge and practicing intellectual sciences during the period under investigation.

A third genre of literature can provide additional information, viz. biographical dictionaries. However, this type of source often gives a retrospective perspective and was composed with a clear agenda. This genre thus cannot always be taken to represent historical fact and has to be used with extreme caution. The two approaches – intellectual analysis and social history – are closely related to each other and the results of the two approaches will immediately complement each other.

 

(3) Philosophy in Iran during the Ṣafavid and Qajar Periods

During the Ṣafavid period (1502–1736 CE), Iranian philosophy was characterized by two main strands, one following the thought of Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī (“Mullā Ṣadrā”, d. 1050/1640), the other following that of Rajab ʿAlī al-Tabrīzī (d. 1080/1669). While much scholarly attention has been paid over the last decades to the renowned Mullā Ṣadrā, Rajab ʿAlī al-Tabrīzī has so far mostly escaped scholars’ attention. One of the projects of the Research Unit (Ahmad Reza Rahimi Riseh) is therefore concerned with his philosophical œuvre and its reception. Five of his works have been preserved in manuscript. In addition to this, the writings of his numerous students are another source for the reconstruction of his thought. The most important of his students are Muḥammad Rafīʿ Pīrzādeh (d. first half 12^th/18^th c.), ʿAlī Qulī Qaračaġāy Khān (d. after 1091/1680), Qawām al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Rāzī (d. 1093/1683), Mullā Ḥasan al-Lunbānī (d. 1094/1683), Mullā ʿAbbās al-Mulawī (d. after 1101/1690), Muḥammad b. Mufīd (“Qāḍī Saʿīd al-Qummī”, d. 1107/1695), Muḥammad Ismāʿīl b. Muḥammad Bāqir al-Kh^wātūnābādī (d. 1116/1704) and Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Fattāḥ al-Tunkābunī (“Fāḍil-i Sarāb”, d. 1124/1712). The project aims at reconstructing Rajab ʿAlī al-Tabrīzī’s biography, providing a detailed inventory of his writings with descriptions of all preserved manuscripts, a study of his students and their writings, and an analysis of his philosophical thought in comparison with that of his contemporary Mullā Ṣadrā.

Next to nothing is known in modern scholarship about the rich philosophical tradition in Iran during the Qajar period (1794–1925 CE). One of the current projects of the Research Unit (Reza Pourjavady / Sabine Schmidtke) is therefore to edit a collective volume devoted to this period. Each chapter will treat one key thinker of the period and will be written by a leading Western or Iranian experts in the field, Chapter One: Shaykh Aḥmad al-Aḥsāʾī (by Hassan Ansari); Chapter Two: Mullā Muḥammad Mahdī Narāqī (by Reza Pourjavady); Chapter Three: Mullā ʿAlī Nūrī (by Sajjad Rizvi); Chapter Four: Mullā Hādī Sabzavārī (by Fātima Fanā); Chapter Five: Āqā ʿAlī Mudarris Zunūzī (by Mohsen Kadivar); Chapter Six: Mīrzā Abū l-Ḥasan Jilva (by Encieh Barkhah); Chapter Six: Lithograph Editions of Philosophical and Theological Works in Qajar Iran (by Reza Pourjavady / Sabine Schmidtke). The publication of the volume is envisaged for 2012.

 

(4) Rationalism and Rational Theology in the Islamicate World

Rationalism has been a salient feature of Muslim theological thought from the earliest times. The disputed issue of authenticity notwithstanding, a small corpus of texts is extant in which doctrinal issues such as free will versus determinism are dealt with in a dilemmatic dialogue pattern. The display of the dialectical technique in these texts testifies to the use of reason in the formulation of and argumentation for doctrinal issues from a very early period onwards. Despite the fact that rationalism had its opponents throughout Islamic history, it continued to be one of the mainstays of Muslim theological (and legal) thought, and it is only in the wake of modern Islamic fundamentalism that rationalism has become marginalized and threatened as never before.

The Muʿtazila was the earliest “school” of rationalist Islamic theology and one of the most important and influential currents of Islamic thought. Muʿtazilites stressed the primacy of reason and free will and developed an epistemology, ontology and psychology which provided a basis for explaining the nature of the world, God, man and the phenomena of religion. In their ethics, Muʿtazilites maintained that good and evil can be known solely through human reason. The Muʿtazila had its beginnings in the 8^th century and its classical period of development was from the latter part of the 9^th until the middle of the 11^th century CE. The movement gradually fell out of favour in Sunni Islam and had largely disappeared by the 14^th century. Its impact, however, continued to be felt in Shīʿī Islam where its influence subsisted through the centuries. Moreover, modern research on the Muʿtazila from the beginning of the 20^th century onwards gave rise to a renaissance of the Muʿtazilite notion of rationalism finding its expression in the so-called “Neo-Muʿtazila”.

Second in importance in the use of rationalism was the theological movement of the so-called Ashʿariyya, named thus after its eponymous founder, Abū l-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī (d. 324/935). Ashʿarī and his followers aimed at formulating a via media between the two dominant opposing strands of the time, Muʿtazilism and traditionalist Islam. Methodologically, they applied rationalism in their theological thought as was characteristic for the Muʿtazila while still maintaining the primacy of revelation over that of reason. Doctrinally, they upheld the notion of ethical subjectivism as against the ethical objectivism of the Muʿtazila. On this basis, they developed their own theological doctrines. Within the Sunni realm at least, Ashʿarism proved more successful and enjoyed a longer life than Muʿtazilism, yet, like Muʿtazilism, Ashʿarism was constantly challenged by traditionalist opponents rejecting any kind of rationalism.

The various strands of rational Muslim theological thought within Islam are closely related to each other as they were shaped and re-shaped in a continuous process of close interaction between its respective representatives. This also holds true for other theological schools that were less prominent in the central areas of the Islamic world, such as the Māturīdiyya (named thus after its eponym Abū Manṣūr al-Māturīdī, d. 333/944) which was heavily indebted to traditional Ḥanafite positions and to Muʿtazilite thought alike, but whose centre was in the North-East of Iran so that it has made relatively little impact. Of considerable importance is also the Ibāḍiyya that reacted in many ways to Muʿtazilism.

What has been stated about the close interaction between the various strands of thought within Islam equally applies to the relations of Islam with other religions that were most prominently represented in the medieval world of Islam, viz. Judaism and Christianity. Here, similar phenomena of reciprocity can be observed. Jews, Christians, and Muslims had Arabic as their common language and therefore naturally shared a similar cultural background. Often reading the same books and all speaking and writing in the same language, they created a unique intellectual commonality in which an ongoing, constant exchange of ideas, texts, and forms of discourse was the norm.

There is a near-consensus among contemporary scholars that the Muslim dialectical technique of kalām can be traced back to similar patterns of dilemmatic dialogue that were characteristic for the Christological controversies raging in 6^th century Alexandria and, more importantly, 7^th century Syria. Moreover, Muslim theologians devoted much thought and energy to a critical examination and refutation of the views of Christianity and (to a lesser extent) Judaism, as is evident from the numerous polemical tracts written by them against these religions. While the majority of refutations against Christianity by early Muslim theologians are lost, there are a few extant anti-Christian texts from the 9^th century that give a good impression of the arguments that were employed. Moreover, many of the earliest treatises in defense of Christianity in Arabic are preserved, and it is evident that their authors were well acquainted with Muslim kalām techniques and terminology. Given the basic disagreements between Muslim and Christian theological positions, such as the Muslim notion of divine unicity (tawḥīd), which is incompatible with the Christian understanding of trinity and incarnation, any kind of far-reaching adoption of any of the Muslim school doctrines by Christian theologians was out of question. The most intensive reception of Muslim kalām can be observed among Coptic writers of the 13^th and 14^th centuries.

Judaism proved much more receptive to basic Muslim doctrinal notions such as divine unicity than was the case with Christianity, and it was Muʿtazilism in particular that was adopted to varying degrees from the 9^th century onwards by both Rabbanite and Karaite authors, so that by the turn of the 11^th century a “Jewish Muʿtazila” had emerged. Jewish scholars both composed original works along Muʿtazilite lines and produced copies of Muslim Muʿtazilite books, often transcribed into Hebrew characters. The influence of the Muʿtazila found its way to the very centres of Jewish religious and intellectual life in the East. Several of the Heads of the ancient Rabbanite Academies (Yeshivot) of Sura and Pumbedita (located by the 10^th century in Baghdad) adopted the Muʿtazilite worldview. By contrast, Ashʿarite works and authors had been received among Jewish scholars to a significantly lesser degree and in a predominantly critical way.

Muʿtazilism had also left its mark on the theological thought of the Samaritans. It is not clear whether Samaritans (whose intellectual centres between the 9^th to the 11^th centuries were mainly Nablus and Damascus) had studied Muslim Muʿtazilite writings directly or whether they rather became acquainted with them through Jewish adaptations of Muʿtazilism. The majority of Samaritan theological writings composed in Arabic still await a close analysis.

Within the field of Islamic Studies, scientific research of Muslim rational theology is a comparatively young discipline, as a critical mass of primary sources became accessible only at a relatively late stage. Muʿtazilite works were not widely copied and few manuscripts have survived. So little authentic Muʿtazilite literature was available, that until the discovery of a significant number of Muʿtazilite texts in the late 1950’s in Yemen, Muʿtazilite doctrine was mostly known through the works of its opponents.

The study of Jewish Muʿtazilism began a century ago with the works of S. Munk (1859) and M. Schreiner (1895). Schreiner and Munk, however, were not aware of the primary sources to be found among the various Genizah materials that have been discovered and retrieved during the second half of the 19^th century in Cairo by a number of scholars and manuscript collectors. Thirteen of the Muʿtazilite manuscripts found in the Abraham Firkovitch collection (taken from the Genizah, or storeroom, of the Karaite Synagogue in Cairo) were described in detail by A.J. Borisov in an article published in 1935. Additional landmarks in the study of Jewish Muʿtazilism were H. A. Wolfson’s Repercussions of the Kalam in Jewish Philosophy (1979) and G. Vajda’s works on Yūsuf al-Baṣīr, particularly his edition of Baṣīr’s al-Kitāb al-Muḥtawī on the basis of a manuscript from the Kaufmann collection in Budapest (1985). On the basis of Borisov’s descriptions of the Firkovitch Muʿtazilite manuscripts and from fragments in the British Library, H. Ben-Shammai was able to draw additional conclusions regarding the identity of some of the Muʿtazilite materials preserved by the Karaites.

In 2003, the “Muʿtazilite Manuscripts Project Group” was founded by the head of the Research Unit intellectual history of the islamicate world, Sabine Schmidtke, and by the Director of Research, Center for the Study of Judeo-Arabic Culture, Ben Tzvi Institute (Jerusalem), David Sklare, in order to assemble and identify as many Muʿtazilite manuscript materials as possible from Jewish as well as Shīʿī repositories. Although much has been achieved over the past years, major textual resources still remain unexplored. Among the documents to be found in the various Genizah collections, the material that originated in the Ben Ezra Genizah (Cairo) and is nowadays mostly preserved in the Taylor-Schechter collection at Cambridge University Library (and other libraries in Europe and the USA) is until now still largely unidentified and only rudimentarily catalogued. A systematic study of all Muʿtazilite fragments renders the reconstruction of many more so far lost Muʿtazilite (Muslim and Jewish) writings possible. As such, this Genizah material significantly supplements the extensive findings of the manuscript material found in the Firkovitch Collection (St. Petersburg), which likewise has so far only partly been explored.

It is only during the last years that the vast holdings of the various private and smaller public libraries of Yemen are being made available to the scholarly community. While some of these materials have been used for various publications by members of the “Muʿtazilite Manuscripts Project Group”, the majority still awaits close study. This also applies to the development of Muʿtazilite thought among the Zaydites from the 12^th century CE onwards.

The study of Samaritan literary activities in Arabic in general and of Samaritan Muʿtazilism in particular is still very much at the beginning. The only relevant text that has been partly edited and studied is the Kitāb al-Tubākh by the 11^th century author Abū l-Ḥasan al-Ṣūrī, who clearly shares the Muʿtazilite doctrinal outlook.

While modern research on the Muʿtazila has begun relatively late, research on Ashʿarism started already in the 19^th century, due to the fact that more manuscripts of Ashʿarite texts are preserved in European libraries than Muʿtazilite ones. Major landmarks in the 20^th century were the publications of R. J. McCarthy in 1953 and 1957. Additional advances in recent decades were made by the numerous studies of M. Allard, R. M. Frank and D. Gimaret. In addition to the efforts by Western scholars, many scholars in the Islamic world have also contributed significantly to the research of this movement. This progress notwithstanding, many desiderata remain in the scholarly investigation of the Ashʿariyya, particularly with respect to the earlier phase of the movement. Among the most spectacular findings by a member of the Research Unit were two so far completely unknown manuscripts of the opus magnum by the important Ashʿarite theologian Abū Bakr al-Bāqillānī, Hidāyat al-mustarshidīn in Russia and Uzbekistan.

Approximately all extant writings of the first generation of Christian mutakallimūn writing in Arabic have been edited and (partly) translated, and modern scholars, such as S. H. Griffith and D. Thomas, have studied them in detail. Likewise, all of the few extant anti-Christian writings by Muslim rational theologians have been published in critical editions. By contrast, much work still needs to be done on the vast corpus of Coptic Christian writings (13^th and 14^th c. CE), only few of which have so far been published in critical editions, let alone studied. It is this corpus that still needs to be made available in critical edition and to be studied in order to locate them within the “whirlpool” of intellectual activities in the medieval world of Islam.

Within the field of theological rationalism in the medieval world of Islam between the 10^th and the 13^th centuries CE beyond and across denominational borders, all major desiderata have been identified and are being addressed in a number of projects in the framework of the ERC Project “Rediscovering Theological Rationalism in the Medieval World of Islam”. Among the most important ongoing projects within this field are

the Oxford Handbook of Islamic Theology (editor: Sabine Schmidtke) that will comprise some forty contributions by internationally renowned scholars in the field, among them all team members of the Research Unit. The publication of the Handbook is envisaged for 2013.

Another more specific though at the same time groundbreaking project of the Research Unit is the Handbook of Muʿtazilite Works and Authors that has been accepted for publication by Brill (Leiden) (editor: Gregor Schwarb). The work which is close to completion will discuss in detail some 500 representatives of Muʿtazilism (Sunnis, Twelver Shīʿīs, Zaydīs and Jews), together with detailed inventories of their respective theological writings and extant manuscripts.

Closely related to this is another project focusing on later Zaydī theological thought in Yemen since the 13^th century CE until today (Hassan Ansari / Sabine Schmidtke / Jan Thiele). In addition, Sabine Schmidtke is currently editing a “Special Issue devoted to Zaydism” for the peer-reviewed journal Arabica: Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies/Revue d’études arabes et islamiques, that is published by Brill, Leiden. The publication is envisaged for 2012.

Another major study currently being prepared within the Research Unit is devoted to Coptic theological literature during the 13^th and 14^th centuries CE and specifically the Coptic reception of earlier theological writings of Ashʿarite theologians (Gregor Schwarb / Zeus Wellnhofer).

In addition, critical editions of a number of seminal theological works from both Ashʿarite and Muʿtazilite thinkers are currently being prepared: Abū Bakr al-Bāqillānī’s Hidāyat al-mustarshidīn (Omar Hamdan / Sabine Schmidtke), al-Juwaynī’s al-Shāmil fī uṣūl al-dīn (Hassan Ansari / Sabine Schmidtke), Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s Nihāyat al-ʿuqūl fī dirāyat al-uṣūl (general editor: Lukas Muehlethaler), a Karaite recension of ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s al-Mughnī fī abwāb al-tawḥīd wa-l-ʿadl (Omar Hamdan / Sabine Schmidtke / Gregor Schwarb), ʿAbd al-Jabbār al-Hamadānī’s al-Muḥīṭ (Omar Hamdan / Gregor Schwarb), Sahl b. al-Faḍl al-Tustarī’s Kitāb al-Īmā (Gregor Schwarb), the complete theological writings of the Yemeni Zaydi theologian al-Ḥasan al-Raṣṣāṣ (Sabine Schmidtke / Jan Thiele), and al-Ḥākim al-Jishumī’s encyclopaedic work Sharḥ ʿuyūn al-masāʾil (Hassan Ansari / Sabine Schmidtke).

 

(5) Counterreactions

Although the Muʿtazila and the Ashʿariyya originated in the Eastern part of the Islamic world, their influence – especially that of the latter – was felt also in North-Africa and Islamic Spain (al-Andalus). Among the staunchest opponents of these two currents of rational theology was Abū Muḥammad Ibn Ḥazm (d. 456/1064) who was a representative of the Ẓāhirī or literalist approach to the sacred scriptures and who categorically rejected all theological speculation. This resulted in a series of works in which he vehemently polemicized against the teachings of both Muʿtazilites and Ashʿarites. The Research Unit (Sabine Schmidtke, in collaboration with Maribel Fierro and Camilla Adang) is finalizing a reference work devoted to the Ẓāhirī thinker Ibn Ḥazm, entitled Ibn Ḥazm of Cordoba: Life and Times of a Controversial Thinker, that has been accepted for publication in the Brill series “Handbuch der Orientalistik”. The majority of contributions were presented during an international conference held in Istanbul in 2008 (funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation). The sections that will be covered in the volume are “Life and Times of Ibn Ḥazm”, “Legal Aspects”, “Ẓāhirī Linguistics”, “Art and Aesthetics”, “Theology, Philosophy and Ethics”, “Intra- and Interreligious Polemics”, “Reception and Impact on Medieval and Modern Muslim thought”.

Another project (Sophia Vasalou) focuses on the theology of the Hanbalite scholar Taqī al-Dīn Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328). Ibn Taymiyya represents an important case both in terms of the history of the changing relationship of Ḥanbalite theologians – traditionally distrustful of the methods of reason – to other theological schools, but also in terms of evolving accounts of the relationship between reason and revelation. In this context, Ibn Taymiyya’s view of ethics and the sources of moral knowledge holds particular significance. Ibn Taymiyya seeks to articulate a new via media between existing approaches to the nature of value which would transcend both Muʿtazilite and Ashʿarite configurations. Influenced both by his extensive readings of kalām as well as his wide-ranging interests in falsafa, Ibn Taymiyya articulates a view that presents itself as a revised Muʿtazilism, claiming that reason delivers knowledge of the values of human actions. This claim involves a revised understanding of reason that brings it into close relationship with a new epistemological idiom, that of human nature or fiṭra, which places a new accent on the role of desire (as against reason) in the knowledge of good and evil. This thesis is accompanied by substantial modifications that seek to uphold divine alterity and omnipotence, which Ashʿarite theologians had perceived to be undermined by ethical rationalism. In this configuration, the notion of welfare or maṣlaḥa comes to occupy a crucial role. The deeper motivations of Ibn Taymiyya’s new synthesis are rooted in an understanding of theology in which theological doctrines are understood and assessed in terms of their pragmatic, or better said, “spiritual”, ends. The interest of this new theological approach lies not only in the way it allows us to refine our history of a theological debate that played an important part in Islamic theological self-understanding. Given the wide diffusion of Ibn Taymiyya’s legacy in the modern era, it can also enable to construct the prolegomena for a history of contemporary theological developments.

 

(6) Interreligious Controversies

The relations between the Muslim majority and the members of religious minorities (Jews and Christians) in the central lands of the Ottoman Empire and in Iran received a series of new stimuli from the 15^th and 16^th centuries CE onwards, which were reflected in intensified encounters in the intellectual, literary, and social spheres.

The most important momentum in the Ottoman Empire for a new social and intellectual flourishing of the Jews in particular was the immigration of Jewish exiles from the Iberian Peninsula in the aftermath of the Spanish Reconquista of 1492. In Safavid and early Qajar Iran (ca. 1500–1850 CE), it was the increasing presence of Christian, initially mainly Catholic, missionaries that constituted the main catalyst. From the 19^th century onwards they were joined by Protestant missionaries, mainly from Britain. In the Ottoman Empire, where native Christians of different denominations were numerous, the foreign missionary effort seems to have had less of an impact than in Iran. On the other hand, the Jewish communities in the latter country did not experience the same kind of renaissance enjoyed by their coreligionists in the Ottoman lands.

Most studies of the social position of Jews and Christians in both above-mentioned areas are based mainly on writings produced by members of the minority groups, which often results in a one-sided picture. A systematic and comprehensive discussion of materials documenting the Muslim perception of the non-Muslim minorities is still largely absent. One type of source that has hitherto been insufficiently explored is Muslim polemical and apologetical literature. In more than one respect, this genre of writings can supply information about the intellectual as well as the social position of the religious minorities. The arguments used, the events and persons referred to (even if at times only obliquely), as well as the literary sources quoted allow us to draw conclusions concerning the position of the respective minority. Moreover, the statements with which the Muslim authors preface or justify their works, the multiplication of polemical and apologetical tracts and the proliferation of copies of these same tracts, inform us about the socio-historical contexts in which these texts were written and subsequently reproduced.

Muslim apologetical and polemical literature against other monotheistic religions from the first six centuries of the Islamic era has been relatively well studied. However, existing research repeatedly raises the contention that in subsequent centuries this type of literature had little new to offer and that relatively few such tracts were being produced to begin with, so that further scholarly occupation with this field would yield few results. This contention is based on a mere lack of information on the relevant material that can be encountered in libraries in present-day Turkey, Iran and India. With regard to Iran, where private and public collections of manuscripts are relatively well catalogued by now, it is clear that a wealth of hitherto unexplored manuscript material is available which can shed important new light on the relations between the Muslim majority and the religious minorities under its rule. In the case of Turkey, where the process of cataloguing manuscripts is in a less advanced stage, chance finds of isolated manuscripts have already revealed that a systematic search for, and study of, polemical and apologetical materials is a worthwhile undertaking. Moreover, many libraries in India (holding considerable collections of polemical works in Persian from 17^th century onward) and Europe (among them in particular the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana in Rome) have important holdings in this field which so far remain untapped. So far, well over three hundred relevant texts have been located, and as the project progresses, numerous additional texts are likely to be discovered.

Major results of this project have already been published over the past years. At present, the following projects are being addressed by various members of the Research Unit (Dennis Halft / Reza Pourjavady / Sabine Schmidtke):

After a careful study and comparison of the manuscripts encountered in Iran, India and Turkey, as well as additional manuscripts from European libraries, a chronological and diachronical inventory of polemical and apologetical arguments will be made, always keeping in mind the different religious, political and intellectual environment in the respective areas studied. A number of particularly relevant texts will be singled out for closer study, viz. those that most clearly reflect social and political factors as the catalysts for the writing of polemical and apologetical tracts, as well as others that were particularly influential and served as points of departure for later authors. These key texts will subsequently be edited and translated, and prepared for publication. In addition to a series of text editions, we will publish a catalogue of polemical and apologetical texts and arguments, modelled upon Heinz Schreckenberg’s Die christlichen Adversus-Judaeos-Texte und ihr literarisches und historisches Umfeld (Frankfurt a/M., 1982–1997, 3 vols.).

It was particularly during the early 17^th century that European missionaries found a favourable climate to promote the Catholic faith in the Safavid Empire. Welcomed by the Shāh in his capital Isfahan, the missionaires held disputations with Shīʿī scholars on Christian and Islamic doctrines. From these disputations arose an extensive Muslim polemical literature in Persian refuting Christian beliefs that has been little studied so far. Among these Shīʿī scholars Sayyid Aḥmad ʿAlawī (d. between 1054/1644 and 1060/1650), a well-known disciple of Shaykh Bahāʾī (d. 1031/1622 or 1032/1623) and Mīr Dāmād (d. 1041/1631), composed five polemical writings against the Christian doctrine, namely Lawāmiʿ-i rabbānī dar radd-i shubha-yi naṣrānī (about 1031/1621–22), Lughaz-i Lawāmiʿ-i rabbānī (about 1031/1621–22), Miṣqal-i ṣafāʾ dar tajliya u taṣfiya-yi Āyina-yi ḥaqq-numā (about 1032/1622–23), Risāla dar radd-i dībāca ka ʿālim-i Naṣāra ka muṣannif-i Kitāb-i Āyina-yi ḥaqq-numā ast baʿd az dīdan-i Kitāb-i Miṣqal dar radd-i Āyina-ash (after 1032/1622–23) and Lamaʿāt-i malakūtīya (before 1034/1625). In ʿAlawī’s treatises, which came down to us in about 40 manuscripts in different recensions, the representative of the so-called School of Isfahan brings forward both theological and philosophical arguments by Illuminationists as well as Peripatetics with strong references to Sufi thought in refutation of the concepts of Trinity and Incarnation and in support of the Muslim faith. Based on a comprehensive discussion of the manuscript copies and the author’s Arabic literary sources, the project (Dennis Halft) aims to analyze Sayyid Aḥmad ʿAlawī’s theological and philosophical thinking regarding Christianity on the vast intellectual background of his time. The wide diffusion of copies of ʿAlawī’s treatises with an apparent Wirkungsgeschichte on later refutations as far as India points to the significance of his thinking in a period of transition from Arabic to Persian polemical writings during the 17^th century CE. Combining different approaches of Islamic as well as Comparative Religious Studies, the project proposes to make a contribution to the study of the perception of Christianity by Shīʿī Muslims and of the interdependence of Christian-Muslim thinking.

During the Qajar period a number of comprehensive polemic tracts against Judaism were composed, mostly by converts or their descendants. Most of this material is preserved in Iranian libraries only and therefore beyond reach of most Western scholars, while Iranian scholars often hesitate to work on these materials. Among these texts is Maḥḍar al-shuhūd fī radd-i yahūd by Ḥājjī Bābā b. Muḥammad Ismāʿīl Qazwīnī Yazdī, who was the son of a Jewish convert to Islam, that was completed on 6 Ramaḍān 1211/5 March 1797. The book consists of seven comprehensive chapters (bāb), most of which are further subdivided into sections (faṣl). It repletes with Biblical materials adduced to prove the prophet Muḥammad’s annunciation in the Bible, discusses in detail the earlier prophets on the basis of biblical, pseudo-biblical and later Islamic materials, and treats likewise in details Christianity and the correct perception of Jesus Christ. As such, the work which is impressive in its detailedness and variety of materials it contains, shares characteristics with a variety of literary genres well known from earlier periods – most importantly the famous genre of the dalāʾil al-nubuwwa, works detailing the proofs for the prophethood of Muḥammad, and the genre of interreligious polemics. Although the text is not unknown to the scholarly community, it has not been analyzed so far as regards its sources, the materials and arguments it contains or its reception among later readers – Muslim and Jewish alike. Its popularity and significance is evident from the comparatively high number of preserved manuscripts. The text has been published twice on the basis of a single manuscript respectively, first in the 1960ies by Aḥmad al-Ḥusaynī on the basis of a manuscript held in Yazd (Yazd: Kitābkhāna-yi Vazīrī, 134-[/196-]) and again in 2000 by Ḥāmid Ḥasan Navvāb on the basis of one of the manuscripts held in Qum (Qum: Ḥuẓūr, 1378[/2000]). None of these qualifies as a critical edition, for apart from the narrow manuscript basis the editors lacked the required philological ability to treat the numerous Hebrew quotations contained in the text with sufficient justice. Moreover, no attempt was made to analyze the intellectual background of the author and to trace his sources. We have been able to trace so far eleven manuscript copies of the text in Iranian libraries (Tehran: Dānishgāh, Majlis, Malik Millī, Millī; Yazd: Kitābkhāna-yi Vazīrī; Qum: Kitābkhāna-yi Āyat Allāh Nūrī, Markaz-i iḥyāʾ-i mīrāth-i Islām; Tabrīz: Kitābkhāna-yi Thiqat al-islām) and more may come to light in European libraries. Within the Research Unit, a critical edition of the text will prepared, together with an indepth analysis of its sources, in order to be able to locate the text on the larger map of interreligious exchanges during the pre-modern and, more specifically, Qajar period of Iranian history.

 

(7) Digitization of Yemeni Manuscripts

The size of the Arabic manuscript holdings of the many public and private libraries of Yemen makes it among the most important collections in the world. Estimated at 50,000 manuscripts, the holdings of these libraries rival those of the National Library of Egypt, the Süleimaniye Library of Istanbul, or the Majlis Library of Tehran. Equally intriguing is the character of these libraries’ collections, a product of Yemen’s unique geography and history, and the nature of its scholarly communities. From as early as the 3^th/9^th century, traditional scholars in Yemen’s inaccessible northern mountainous highlands (al-Yaman al-aʿlā), particularly in the Zaydī communities, developed lines of intellectual inquiry which had fallen into oblivion in other regions of the Islamic lands. Mostly due to their isolation, these communities preserved extremely ancient materials, including works in every major field of classical and pre-modern Islamic literature – the Qurʾānic sciences, history, biographical dictionaries, encyclopaedia, geography, tradition (ḥadīth), legal methodology (uṣūl al-fiqh), theology (kalām/uṣūl al-dīn), rhetoric, grammar, lexicography, belles-lettres, astronomy, medicine and mathematics. Yemen’s southern and central regions (al-Yaman al-asfal and al-Yaman al-awsaṭ), by contrast, were predominantly inhabited by Shāfiʿites who preserved a very different kind of religious tradition. Moreover, due to the relative accessibility of the southern and central regions of Yemen, these areas were subjected over the centuries to different rulers, in contrast to Yemen’s northern regions that were under continuous Zaydī rule. In addition to these two antagonistic religious strands, Ṭayyibī Ismāʿīlīs have at times also featured prominently in the history of Yemen and Yemeni libraries have preserved some precious manuscripts of this intellectual tradition.

While economic hardship, social and political instability, poor storage conditions, and the sale of manuscripts to private collectors from the Gulf States put these collections at risk for the past five decades, a new threat has appeared in recent years that makes immediate attention to these collections imperative. As many of these libraries are preserved by families belonging to the Zaydī branch of Islam, Salafī extremists ideologically opposed to Shīʿism have targeted these collections for destruction. In some cases, they have purchased collections from library owners who suffered great economic hardship in the villages in northern Yemen, only to destroy them.

The preservation and dissemination particularly of the mostly unknown Zaydī theological and legal literature that is preserved in Yemen will significantly promote research on an understudied school of Shīʿism, grant access to sources that were not maintained elsewhere, and underscore the fact that a rationalist epistemology continued in Islamic thought for a longer period than is generally recognized. It is significant that in recent times, Muslims interested in advocating a vision of Islam that is fully compatible with the modern world have recently turned to theological rationalism of the Muʿtazilites as a source of authority for their reform. The preservation, dissemination and study of these rich manuscript materials will thus have an immediate impact on several fields of scholarship in the humanities in addition of the reform agenda of Muslims today.

In 2009, the German Foreign Office in cooperation with Freie Universität Berlin launched the ambitious project “Preserving Yemen’s Cultural Heritage: The Yemen Manuscript Digitization Project” with the ultimate aim of digitizing the holdings of most so far unexplored private libraries in Ṣanʿāʾ and its vicinity over the next five years. The project is run by the IZbACF in collaboration with the Freie Universität Berlin (“The Muʿtazilite Manuscripts Project” and “ERC Project: Rediscovering Theological Rationalism in the Medieval World of Islam”). Digital images and metadata, created in Ṣanʿāʾ, will be housed both at the IZbACF and Freie Universität Berlin and will be made available to researchers working on Yemeni intellectual history in either Ṣanʿāʾ or Berlin.

In addition to this, the Yemen Manuscript Digitization Initiative (YMDI) was launched in 2010, a collective of research librarians and leading scholars of classical Islam, Middle Eastern history, and Arabic Literature under the direction of David Hollenberg (University of Oregon). Its mission is to preserve the Arabic manuscripts in the private libraries of Yemen. YMDI’s partner institutions, Princeton University Library and Freie Universität Berlin, recently received an NEH/DFG Enriching Digital Collections grant. Technicians from the IZbACF in Yemen are currently digitizing the codices of three private libraries in Yemen. These digital images will be virtually linked to Yemeni manuscripts in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin and Princeton University Library, uploaded to the Princeton University Digital Library, and made freely available on the World Wide Web.²⁸

You can download our new brochure "Preserving Yemen’s Cultural Heritage - The Yemen Manuscript Digitization Project" by Sabine Schmidtke and Jan Thiele HERE

 

International Cooperations

The team members of the Research Unit intellectual history of the islamicate world have excellent working relations with a variety of international institutions and scholars in the Middle East, in Europe and the US. In Turkey, long-lasting relations have been established with scholars working on related topics at Yildiz Technical University, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences (Prof. M Sait Özervarli) and at ISAM Center for Islamic Studies (Dr. Harun Anay¹³) and Marmara Unversity (Prof. Osman Gazi Özgüdenli), all in Istanbul, and at Uludag Universitesi Ilahiyat Fakultesi in Bursa (Dr. Kadir Gömbeyaz¹⁴, Dr. Veysel Kaya¹⁵). In Yemen, the team members are working in close cooperation with the Imām Zayd b. ʿAlī Cultural Foundation (IZbACF) / Muʾassasat al-Imām Zayd b. ʿAlī al-thaqāfiyya, Ṣanʿāʾ.¹⁶ In Iran, the Iranian Institute of Philosophy¹⁷ and the Written Heritage Research Centre¹⁸, Tehran, should be mentioned. In Uzbekistan, the Research Unit is cooperating with the al-Biruni Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan. Good working contacts with the King Faisal Centre for Research and Islamic Studies¹⁹ in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and the Jumʿat al-Mājid Reseach Center in Dubai have been established over the past years. The Research Unit is also connected to the joint Israeli-Palestinian research project Intellectual Encounters: Philosophy and Science in the World of Medieval Islam²⁰ in Jerusalem/al-Quds.

In the West, the Research Unit is closely cooperating with the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University in Montreal where Prof. Robert Wisnovsky and Prof. Jamil Ragep have initiated “The Post-classical Islamic Philosophy Database Initiative” (PIPDI),²¹ with Prof. Asad Q. Ahmed of Washington University in St. Louis, as well as Prof. Ahmet T. Karamustafa and Prof. John McGinnis of the University of Missouri, who coordinate the Mellon Sawyer Seminar “Graeco-Arabic Rationalism in Islamic Traditionalism: The Post-Classical Period (1200-1900 CE)”, with Prof. Mohammed Ali Amir-Moezzi,²² Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris, with Prof. Maribel Fierro, Instituto de Lenguas y Culturas del Mediterráneo y Oriente Próximo. Grupo de Estudios Arabes - Derecho, Filología, Historia (GEAR-DEFIHIS), CSIC (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas-Spanish National Research Council), Madrid,²³ with the European Research Council Project “IMPAcT – From Late Medieval to Early Modern: 13^th to 16^th Century Islamic Philosophy and Theology”, Oriental Institute, University of Oxford, directed by Dr. Judith Pfeiffer,²⁴ with Prof. Khaled el-Rouayheb, Islamic Intellectual History, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University,²⁵ with Prof. David Hollenberg, University of Oregon,²⁶ and Prof. Bernard Haykel and Dr. David Magier, Princeton University and Princeton University Library on The Yemeni Manuscripts Digitization Initiative (YMDI).²⁷

 

 

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