Prof. Dr. Konrad Hirschler: Archiving the past to manage the future: Time in Arabic documentary cultures

Time is a crucial concept to understand the life cycles of documents. Social actors produced various kinds of documentation with the expectation that they would serve some future need. Once a document ceased to have a legal function (the spouses mentioned in a marriage contract died, the house mentioned in a sale contract is sold on, the educational institution mentioned in an endowment deed vanished etc.) retaining this document becomes less crucial. Yet, even after documents had lost their legal functions, users might opt for retaining them for other purposes (memorial, aesthetic etc.). We thus see that the different users who engaged with documents did so with very different temporal horizons. This lecture thus asks how we can use ‘time’ as a category for the elusive topic of archival practices in a pre-modern society and how, in reverse, these archival practices might inform us about temporal concepts.

Prof. Dr. Hans Hinrich Biesterfeldt: Graeco-Arabic Ethics in Bits and Pieces

Aristotle’s tripartite set of “practical” philosophy – personal ethics, domestic economics (Arabic tadbīr al-manzil) and political theory – was widely received and ingeniously developed in Islamic ethical and political thought. One of the most popular and creative forms of reception was the short saying that would put political or ethical wisdom into a nutshell. The most common term for such a saying in Greek is apophthegma, in Arabic, ḥikma, plural form ḥikam. My talk will deal with four aspects of this genre: (1) a brief look at the history and scope of Arabic collections of sayings (called in Greek, gnomologia), (2) their relation to other forms of aphoristic wisdom (maxims on Sasanian statecraft, Arabic proverbs, ḥadīth, etc.), (3) theories of Arabic literary criticism on the esthetic function and societal value of the ḥikma, and (4) a presentation and analysis of a few Arabic Bits and Pieces on Time, Temporality, Memory and Hope.          

Prof. Dr. John McGinnis: Divine Simplicity: It is not as simple as you think

The notion of divine simplicity, the idea that God is not a composite of more basic features, is a hot topic, both in the sense that it is of intense interest in classical theism and that you can get burned if you are not careful when discussing it. For instance, if you say God is composed of more basic features, those features seem to be a cause of God, but God is not caused in any way. If you say that God has no basic features beyond being God, then it is not clear how to say God has power and knowledge and will and life, etc. at least in any way that we can understand, since these all seem to be very different features. In his lecture, McGinnis puts Ibn Sīnā, al-Ghazālī and Moses Maimonides into a dialogue on the metaphysical, linguistic and epistemic dimension of divine simplicity.

Dr. Sonja Brentjes: Time as a scientific practice

Time was important to many scientific practices in Islamicate societies. It was fundamental in the astral sciences, medicine, alchemy and natural philosophy. It served as a measure of diseases, eclipses or cooking processes, was captured by instruments and in tables and was a central concept for thinking about the universe as eternal or created. One of its units, the hour, was defined as a formal, abstract magnitude or depended on the course of the Sun. Other smaller or larger units dominated in calendars or astronomical handbooks. Technological limitations provided obstacles towards a more precise understanding of time as a cosmological and terrestrial magnitude, while religious prescriptions encouraged the invention of auxiliary functions for determining prayer times at different terrestrial latitudes. In my talk, I will pick out some of these scientific practices and reflect on their roles in specific societies or educational contexts.

Dr. Arezou Azad: A City and its Battle with Time: A Balkhī Perspective

Shaykh al-Islam al-Wa’iz al-Balkhī has left us with the earliest surviving local history of the famous city of Balkh which lay in the eastern hub of the Islamicate world, at the borders of the Hindu Kush mountains and Oxus River. The perspective on time by this 13th-century Balkhī is such that temporality is not seen in years, but in religious and political milestones that are presented in broadly chronological order. Textual presentation finds its expression in narratives of heroic acts by important individuals, most of whom (though not all) are men. The underlying narrative is that of a constant and everlasting struggle with time, which finally dissipates on the day of judgement. Time is retrospective; what happens in the future is already predetermined through past acts. This philosophical idea is refined in later Sufi writings. Shaykh al-Islam al-Wa’iz al-Balkhī makes a powerful statement on the inevitability of things that are predetermined by an imagined past, and provides the framework for the city’s future. We will consider some translated excerpts from the medieval Persian text, and draw conclusions on eastern Islamic perspectives and the conceptualisation of  time.

Dr. Raquel Ukeles: Is Time Universal or Particular? Islamic and Jewish Calendars as a Forum for Conflict and Convergence

One of the more remarkable aspects of time is its ability to unite and divide – on the one hand, time is objective, natural and universal; on the other hand, time is a construct designed to distinguish communities and set down boundaries. Using historical materials from the National Library's Islamic and Judaica collections, I will examine cases in which universal and particular times are in friction, and time becomes the locus of conflict within and among religious communities.  In the second half, I will share reflections based on my work to build a multi-religious calendar at the National Library.

Dr. Roman Seidel: Reflecting Now and Then. How Intellectual Encounters with(in) Islamic Philosophy matter

Islamic philosophy often appears to be the subject of historians alone. As an academic discipline in the Euro-American context the study of Philosophy seems to be largely characterized by a methodological divide between historical perspectives on the one hand and systematic perspectives on the other. Hence, thinkers from the Islamic World, their names and writings, not necessarily their ideas, are still almost entirely absent from contemporary ‘western philosophy’. With reference to notions of time articulated by thinkers such as al-Ghazālī or Mollā Ṣadrā my talk will question the clear cut distinction between historical and systematic approaches to philosophy in general as well as reflect upon layers of temporality in relation to intellectual Encounters with(in) Islamic Philosophy and what it might imply for current discussions on ‘Global Philosophy’.

Prof. em. Dr. Eric Ormsby: Conceptions of Time in Classical Sufism

“Sufis from the earliest period were concerned with time, not as a theoretical subject of inquiry (that would come later) but as a matter of spiritual and indeed, ethical discipline. I will discuss certain of their formulations and their implications with special regard for their emphasis on the present moment in its several dimensions. By contrast I will look briefly at some later speculations about time as elaborated by followers of Ibn ‘Arabi. Here too, for all their conceptual sophistication, a profound ethical concern is at work.”