About the Book
Religious and Intellectual Diversity in the Islamicate World and Beyond is a collection of essays in honor of Sarah Stroumsa, an eminent scholar who through the years has embodied and advanced the possibility of collaboration across borders. The volume is presented to her by scholars working on the study of the intellectual history of the Middle Ages, the intercultural contact and migration of knowledge in the Islamic world, and many other topics.
Contributors: Binyamin Abrahamov, Camilla Adang, Anna Ayse Akasoy, Aleida Assmann, Jan Assmann, Meir M. Bar-Asher, José Bellver, Menachem Ben-Sasson, Haggai Ben-Shammai, Glen W. Bowersock, Rémi Brague, Godefroid de Callataÿ, Jonathan Decter, Michael Ebstein, Hussein Fancy, Carlos Fraenkel, Gil Gambash, Robert Gleave, Miriam Goldstein, Frank Griffel, Jaakko HämeenAnttila, Steven Harvey, Warren Zev Harvey, Meir Hatina, Geoffrey Khan, Gudrun Krämer, Ehud Krinis, Y. Tzvi Langermann, Daniel J. Lasker, Reimund Leicht, Gideon Libson, Menachem Lorberbaum, Maria Mavroudi, Jon McGinnis, Omer Michaelis, Yonatan Moss, David Nirenberg, Sari Nusseibeh, Olaf Pluta, Meira Polliack, James T. Robinson, Marina Rustow, Sabine Schmidtke, Gregor Schwarb, Ahmed El Shamsy, Mark Silk, Uriel Simonsohn, Daniel De Smet, Josef Stern, Guy G. Stroumsa, Sara Sviri, Alexander Treiger, Roy Vilozny, Ronny Vollandt, Elvira Wakelnig, Paul E. Walker, David J. Wasserstein, Tanja Werthmann, Dong Xiuyuan, Arye Zoref.
Table of Contents:
a. Tabula Gratulatoria
b. Preface
c. Sarah Stroumsa: List of Publications
d. Sabine Schmidtke, Questioning ... Sarah Stroumsa
History, Society and Religion
1. Gil Gambash, Between Ribāṭand Cabotage: The Coastal Economy of the Southern Levant in Late Antiquity
2. Aleida Assmann, Addiction to Books: Jewish Monotheism, Media Revolutions, and Cultural Memory
3. Paul E. Walker, The Birth of New Messianic and Prophetic Movements under the Fatimids
4. Marina Rustow, A Letter from a Fatimid Official Recycled by ʿAlī b. Sulaymān for Qirqisānī Extracts: RNL Yevr.-Arab. I 1986
5. Uriel Simonsohn, The Subversion of Gender Hierarchies in Ṣaḥābī Dialogues
6. Meir Hatina, Between the Pulpit and the Battlefield: Contested Notions of Religious Authority in Modern Sunni Thought
7. Jan Assmann, Job Looks Back: Religion Beyond the Age of Faith
Al-Andalus and Sefarad
8. José Bellver, The Reception of Ibn Masarra into Sufism
9. Godefroid de Callataÿ, Reconsidering the Influence of the Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ on Ibn al-Sīd al-Baṭalyawsī’s Kitāb al-Dawāʾir
10. Camilla Adang, The man who fled from Ibn al-Naghrīla
11. David J. Wasserstein, Avot in al-Andalus
12. Michael Ebstein, Intellectualism and Anti-Intellectualism in al-Andalus: Muḥyī l-Dīn Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 638/1240) Versus Ibn Ṭufayl (d. 581/1185)
13. Ehud Krinis, Interpreting Judah Halevi’s Kuzari: Leo Strauss, Shlomo Pines, and Beyond
14. Benyamin Abrahamov, Happiness (Saʿāda) in Ibn al-ʿArabī’s Thought
15. Hussein Fancy, The Aragonese Almohads, the Almohad Aragonese
Maimonides and the Maimonidean Dynasty
16. Carlos Fraenkel, Philosophy as a Way of Life in Maimonides
17. Warren Z. Harvey, Maimonides on God as Intellect
18. Frank Griffel, Two Divergent Schools in Sixth-/Twelfth-Century Arabic Philosophy and Maimonides’ Seventh Reason for Contradictions in Books
19. Y. Tzvi Langermann, Choosing Truth over Facts: Maimonides Finesses the Problem of Divine Attributes
20. Reimund Leicht, From Knowledge (ʿIlm) to Intellect (ʿAql): On a Remarkable Terminological and Conceptual Shift in Maimonides’s Thought
21. Menachem Lorberbaum, Maimonides' Conception of ʿAvodah
22. Josef Stern, Maimonides’ Dream Argument and the Certainty of Prophecy
23. Steven Harvey, The Perplexing Case of the Missing Happiness in Maimonides’ Guide
24. Gregor Schwarb, ʿAlī ibn Ṭaybughā’s Commentary on Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah, Sefer ha-Maddaʿ, Hilkhot Yesodei ha-Torah I–IV, a Philosophical “Encyclopaedia” of the Fourteenth Century
25. Sara Sviri, R. Abraham Maimonides’ Sufi-Inspired Commentary on the Practice of Solitude and Psalms 84 and 101
The Whirlpool at Work: Ideas and Practices
26. Yonatan Moss, Who Invented Writing? Changing Answers to a Rarely Asked Question among Biblical Readers of the First Millennium
27. Menahem Ben-Sasson, An Interreligious “Encounter” in Four Visions of Daniel
28. Dong Xiuyuan, The Enigma of the Brahmins: On Sarah Stroumsa’s Study of the Barāhima
29. Ronny Vollandt, The (Syro-)Hexapla in Arabic: An Editio Princepsand Translation of al-Ḥārith b. Sinān’s Introductory Tractate
30. Haggai Ben-Shammai, New Fragments of al-Qirqisānī’s Defense of Rational Speculation
31. Robert Gleave, Jews and Christians in Twelver Shīʿī Jurisprudence: Kitāb al-Khilāf of Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan al-Ṭūsī (d. 460/1067)
32. Mark Silk, Three Rings, Twelve Shields, a Thousand Drawings: The Value of Facsimiles in Religious Epistemology
33. Gideon Libson, Core and Shell: On the Close Relationship between Ancient Halakhah and Sharīʿa and the Gulf that Emerged between Them
34. Tanja Werthmann, Neoplatonic Variations on a Pre-Socratic Theme: Transposing a Material Element into the Intelligible Realm
35. Daniel J. Lasker, Jewish Anti-Christian Polemics in Islamic Countries and the Unchanging Nature of the Jewish Critique of Christianity
36. Rémi Brague, State and Time on 1 Samuel 8, 11–18
Philosophy in the Islamicate World and Beyond
37. Alexander Treiger, The Longer Theology of Aristotle, Book X.6-13: A Critical Edition and Translation
38. Sari Nusseibeh, Is “One” Unique?
39. Jon McGinnis, Timing Is Everything: God, Causation, and Temporal Atomism in Medieval Islam
40. Olaf Pluta, John Buridan on the Question of Immortality
41. Gudrun Krämer, “Time is Life”: Piety, Punctuality, and Productivity in Modern Islamic Discourse
Intellectual History in the Islamicate World
42. Anna Akasoy, Shahrazad’s Homiletic Stories: The Arabian Nights Reinterpreted
43. Geoffrey Khan, The Representation of the Tetragrammaton in the Medieval Karaite Transcriptions of Hebrew into Arabic Script
44. Miriam Goldstein, The Construction of Noah’s Ark according to Yaʿqūb al-Qirqisānī
45 Ahmed El Shamsy, “The Mushabbiha Are the Jews of the Umma”: On the History of a Heresiographical Label
46. Roy Vilozny, “We are ‘those firmly rooted in knowledge’” [Q 3:7]: Imāmī-Shīʿī Exegesis between Hermeneutics and Empiricism
47. Elvira Wakeling, Ibn al-Ṭayyib’s Prolegomena to Medicine: The Introduction to His Commentary on Galen’s On Sects
48. Meira Polliack and Arye Zoref, Can Love Survive Politics? King David as Ruler in the Biblical Exegeses of Yefet ben Eli and Don Isaac Abravanel
49. Jonathan Decter, King Solomon’s maqṣūra: The Royal Image in Yefet ben Eli’s Commentary on Kings
50. Meir M. Bar-Asher, A Dialogue of the Deaf: Ḥamīd al-Dīn al-Kirmānī’s Refutation of al-Ṭibb al-Rūḥānī by Abū Bakr al-Rāzī
51. Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila, Bīzhan and Manīzha, the Pleonastic -ā, and the Composition History of the Shāhnāma
52. James T. Robinson, Allegorical Readings of Qohelet 7:19 in Medieval Jewish Exegesis: The “Ten Rulers in the City” as Body Parts, Celestial Spheres, Psychic Faculties, or Internal and External Senses
On Modern Scholars and Scholarship
53. Daniel De Smet, Hermes and Simplicius in Ḥarrān: About Medieval and Modern Myths in the History of Philosophy
54. Sabine Schmidtke, Rudolf Strothmann’s Trip to the Middle East (1929/30): II. Yemen
55. David Nirenberg, Convivencia vs. Race: On the Dangers of Extracting Morality from History
56.Guy Stroumsa, A Paradigm Shift? Salomon Munk and Ernest Renan on Jewish and Arabic Philosophy
57. Maria Mavroudi, Historiographical Debates and Modern Political Considerations in Writing a Cultural History of the Holy Land: A Byzantinist’s Perspective
58.Glen W. Bowersock, A Vanished Deuteronomy
About the Author :
Sabine Schmidtke is a Professor of Islamic intellectual history in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. She has published on topics ranging from Shīʿism (Zaydism and Twelver Shīʿism), intersections of Jewish and Muslim intellectual history, Wissenschaft des Judentums, the Arabic Bible, and the history of the book and libraries in the Islamicate world. Her recent publications include The Beginnings of Shiʿi Studies in Germany: Rudolf Strothmann and His Correspondence with Carl Heinrich Becker, Ignaz Goldziher, Eugeneo Griffini, and Conrelis van Arendonk, 1910 through 1926 (2023), Al-Šarīf al-Murtaḍā’s Oeuvre and Thought in Context: An Archaeological Inquiry into Texts and their Transmission (2022) coedited with Hassan Ansari; Muslim Perceptions and Receptions of the Bible: Texts and Studies (2019), with Camilla Adang; and Traditional Yemeni Scholarship amidst Political Turmoil and War: Muḥammad b. Muḥammad b. Ismāʿīl b. al-Muṭahhar al-Manṣūr (1915–2016) and His Personal Library (2018).
Omer Michaelis is an Associate Professor at Tel Aviv University’s department of Jewish Philosophy and Talmud. Specializing in medieval Jewish thought and philosophy in the Islamicate world, he focuses on the dynamics of production, transmission and integration of knowledge in medieval Judaism, and its intersection with parallel processes in the Islamic culture. His recenct publications include Crisis Discourse and the Dynamics of Tradition in Maimonides' Oeuvre (Magnes Press) and Interiority & Law: Bahya ibn Paquda and the Concept of Inner Commandments (Stanford UP), published in 2023.
