Bøger udgivet af Gibb Memorial Trust

This volume, focusing on legal education and its place in classical and medieval Islamic civilisation, comprises eight articles written in honour of Professor George Makdisi (1925-2002), seven of them by his former students at the University of Pennsylvania (William Granara, Sherman Jackson, Gary Leiser, Joseph Lowry, Christopher Melchert, ...

New translation and commentary on the scandalous and often 'racy' 11th century tale of a Baghdadi party-crasher in Isfahan.

The description of his mission to the court of the Shah Tahmasp I of Persia by the Venetian Michele Membre is one of the most informative as well as one of the most individual of the few European accounts of 16th century Persia.

This description of the province of Fars, was written around the beginning of the 12th century A.D. The author cites his qualifications for it "I was well acquainted with the present condition of the people of Fars ... being well versed also in the events of their history and exactly acquainted with the story of their kings and rulers." This is a reprint of the edition of 1952.

Facsimile edition of a treatise on Alishir Navai Ghiyath ad-Din b. Humam ad-Din Muhammad, known as Khvandmir . The Makarim al-Akhlaq is a panegyric biography of Khvandmir's patron 'Ali Shir Nava'i, famous as the greatest of Catagay poets. Persian text.

Written in the middle of the 12th century for a member of the Ghurid family of Bamiyan (in modern Afghanistan) the Four Discourses are concerned with four professions necessary at the Prince's court, those of scribe, poet, astrologer and physician.

'Osman Aga was the son of an Ottoman officer settled in the town of Temeschwar, in the West of present-day Rumania. Entering the army in his turn he was taken prisoner by the Austrians and most of his autobiography is concerned with the eleven years he spent in captivity and his eventual escape in 1699.

This sixteenth century biographical dictionary of Ottoman poets with comments on their style and examples of their work was one of Gibb's principle sources for Ottoman poetry in its most flourishing period. Turkish text.

This volume contains an edition and translation of the extant epistles of AbA l-Qasim b. Muaammad al-Junayd. Al-Junayd was an influential holy man and spiritual thinker who lived in Baghdad in the ninth century. His writings are marked with many of the features of the tradition that later became known as Taa'GBPawwuf, Islamic Mysticism. Later Sufis acknowledged him as shaykh al-mashayikh, the Sheikh among Sheikhs, and as tawAs al-fuqaraE?, the Peacock among the Men of Poverty.Al-Junayd's epistles, addressed to private individuals, are often based upon interpretations of key passages from the QurE?an. He argues forcefully that the mystic lives again in union with God after the mystic has passed away (fanaE?). He was one of the first writers in Arabic who tried to express the ineffable and give such expressions the linguistic and intellectual substance of the Islamic theology he had so little fondness for. According to him, the theologians were masters of the quibble, and in their obsession with minutiae forgot about the true experience of the divine. In his epistles, al-Junayd seeks to fashion and explore an Arabic capable of describing accurately the mystical experience without indulging in extravagance or excess. Yet the Arabic that he wrote in furtherance of his spiritual aims is not easy. It is allusive, tinged with poeticisms, and is characterized by paradox. A.H. Abdel-Kader has successfully translated these difficult writings, which represent an important early document in the history of Islamic Mysticism and spirituality and ninth century religious sentiment.

Throughout his distinguished career devoted to the study of Arabic language and literature, Geert Jan van Gelder sustained a particular interest in humour and irreverence: in mujun, broadly understood as literary expressions of indecency, encompassing the obscene, the profane, the impudent, and the taboo.

The diverse studies presented in this volume recount the production, understanding and organisation of Muslim literature, both in the Muslim world and Western Europe.

This volume explores the immense achievements of the 'Abbasid age through the lens of Mediterranean history.

The Qur'an is the sacred book of Islam. For Muslims it is the word of God revealed in Arabic by the archangel Gabriel to the Prophet Muhammad, and thence to mankind. Originally it was delivered orally: traditional sources indicate that Muhammad always recited his message. He was a preacher; he delivered good news; and he warned; thus, the Qur'an is a collection of sermons, exhortations, guidance, warnings and pieces of encouragement. This new translation is unique. The result of decades of study of the text, of the traditional Muslim authorities and of the works of other scholars, special thought has been given to what the text would have meant to its original hearers. The traditional verse structure has been maintained, and where necessary verses have been further divided into sections to indicate where there are natural points for pause, and to emphasize the original oral nature of the text. This is the first translation of the Qur'an to adopt such an approach. The oral nature of the text presents problems for the translator, for recitation frequently gives the text a dimension that does not come across in silent reading. Some previous translators have introduced bridging phrases drawn from past commentators, resulting in interruptions to the flow of the text. Alan Jones's approach underlines the need for a sympathetic response to the oral and aural structures of the Arabic of the Qur'an. An introductory note to each sura provides some background material on the contents of the sura and its dating, and the notes are kept to a minimum. The translation is preceded by a brief Introduction describing the religion and culture of the Arabian peninsula, and the land and its peoples, in the years before Muhammad's birth. There is an account of his life: his early years in Mecca, the hijra, the migration to Medina, and his years there. And there is an account of the Qur'an and the transmission of the text. Alan Jones is a specialist in early Arabic literature, and the author of Early Arabic Poetry, two books of translations and commentary on pre-Islamic poetry. He has been a lecturer and teacher of Arabic at Oxford University for 43 years; now retired he is at work on a commentary to accompany this new translation of the Qur'an. A Festschrift, Islamic Reflections, Arabic Musings was published by Oxbow on behalf of the Gibb Memorial Trust, in his honour.

A three volume set of Nicholson's translation of Rumi's famous poem on Islamic mysticism.

First annotated English translation from Persian of the 13th-century local history of the famed city and province of Balkh (Afghanistan).

Ibn Rushd, known to Christian Europe as Averroes, came from Cordoba in Spain and lived from 1126 to 1198. He is regarded as the last great Arab philosopher in the Classical tradition, and, under the patronage of the Almohad ruler Abu Ya'quib Yusuf, was a very prolific one. The Tahafut al-Tahafut, written not long after 1180, is his major work and the one in which his original philosophical doctrine is to be found. It takes the form of a refutation of Ghazali's Tahafut al-Falasifa (The Incoherence of the Philosophers), a work begun in 1095 which attacked philosophical speculation and declared some of the beliefs of the Philosophers to be contrary to Islam. Averroes sets his Aristotelian views in contrast with the Neo-Platonist ones attributed to the philosophers by Ghazali. Published in the UNESCO Collection of Great Works under the auspices of the Gibb Memorial Trust and the International Commission for the Translation of Great Works.

A much-needed study of pre-Islamic poetry from Arabia, that fills a key gap in understanding not only the history of Arabian poetry, but also of Arabian ethos and ideology. What emerges is a complex, stylized discourse which reflects a distinctive cosmology.

Translation and analysis of a rare Russian survey of the khanate of Shirvan, now Azerbaijan, after its annexation by Russia in 1820.

The Hudud al-'Alam, written in AD 982 for a Prince of Guzganan (located in the North West of modern Afghanistan), is a geography covering the whole known world and one of the earliest works of Persian prose. It was designed to accompany a map and, though the product of cabinet scholarship rather than original observation, it preserves much material from earlier compositions which are lost and shows originality in its organization. A facsimile edition of the unique MS, which came to light in Bukhara in the late 19th century, was published in Russia in 1930 by Barthold but it was left to Minorsky to make the data widely accessible by his English translation and his extensive commentary, which analyses the work's position in the early Islamic geographical tradition and identifies and discusses the places mentioned in the light of a wealth of other information. V. Minorsky was a former Professor of Persian in the University of London and his other translations include Tadhkirat al-Muluk, A Manual of Safavid Administration in this series.

Murtada al-Zabidi was a Humanist scholar and a Muslim, whose twelfth-century writings are here examined in the context of their geographical and historical setting. The period when Zabidi was writing saw a shift in the balance of power from the Muslim empires to the Western world, reflected in the stories he told of his travels from India on to Cairo, across vast distances and coming across an extraordinary range of people. The five chapters in this work look at various aspects of Zabidi's life and times, the first one focusing on his life and career and forms a background to studies of his work. The second looks at Zabidi's writing and publishing and the third at his notes on his friends, teachers, students and acquaintances. Chapter four assesses his two largest works; his Arabic lexicon and his commentary on Gazzali's Ihya . Finally, chapter five explores his second major literary achievement, his large commentary on Gazzali's Ihya ulum al-din .

Islam as a cultural, intellectual, and religious venture appears in the popular imagination as a monolithic entity. Orientalists of the traditional ilk have tended to describe it in essentialist terms, whilst many fundamentalist Muslims themselves promote their construction of a pure and unadulterated Islamic past, to which they strive to return by purging foreign or unauthentic elements from their religion. Next to these attempts, another more traditional view sees the influence between the Western and the Islamic world in linear and teleological terms. Knowledge was transmitted, so to speak, from Alexandria to Baghdad, and hence to Toledo and Paris. The present volume challenges both these concepts regarding the development of Islamic cultures. To do justice to the complexity of structures within which the Muslim Middle Ages unfolded, it approaches the questions of interaction and influence through a novel conceptual framework, that of crosspollination. Instead of telling the story of the transmission of Western works from Greece via Islam into the Latin world, a number of case studies highlight the plurality of encounters between Islam and other adjacent cultures.

The first of three volumes of the English translation of Rumi's great poem on Muslim mysticism.

One of the problems pervading the study of medieval Islamic technology is the lack of surviving technical treatises. Tradition tended to be handed down by example and by word of mouth, and apprenticeships could last for decades. Fortunately, however, occasional treatises do exist. The treatise "e;On swords and their kinds"e; was written by the 9th century Muslim philosopher Ya'qub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi. This work was commissioned by a powerful patron of scholarship, the Abbasid caliph Mu'tasim, and the content of the treatise presumably reflects the ruler's general interest in his army and its equipment, and his specific interest in the technical aspects of sword production. In this work, Kindi discusses the difference between iron and steel, distinguishes different qualities of sword blade, and different centres of swordsmithing. He refers to the Indian Ocean trade in steel ingots and to the distinctive character of European swords of the period. He includes technical terms used by the makers, and distinguishes swords by their physical features - form, measurements, weight, watered pattern, sculptured details, or inlaid ornaments. This publication includes the text and a translation of Kindi's treatise, and a detailed commentary on the work. The volume also includes a translation of Friedrich Schwarzlose's work on swords, which is based on the hundreds of references to swords in early Arabic poetry. Written in German, this extraordinary compendium of information was first published some 120 years ago; this volume makes it available again, and for the first time in English.

A study of the tradition and practice of early Arabic poetry, this book provides an investigation of the multiple versions of early poems that exist in various Abbasid collections.

In early Arabic poetry, poets mostly speak in the first person - a point which sets their tradition apart from most other civilisations.

This text, which antedates the crystallization of the Schools of Fiqh and presents a view of the relation between the Qur'an and Sunnah diverging from that of Shafi'i is of relevance to studies of the Qur'an and the formation of Islamic jurisprudence.

Muwaffaq al-Din Ibn Qudama (1147-1223) was an ascetic, jurisconsult and traditionalist theologian of the Hanbali school mainly resident in Damascus. His Tahrim al-Nazar is an attack on the rationalist views of the earlier jurist of Baghdad, Ibn 'Aqil (d. 119).

Poems of 'Abid and 'Amir are found in other works but the 11th-century MS in the British Library on which this edition is based is unique. Both are tribal poets of the Jahiliyyah, the period before Islam.

In this treatise Ibn Rushd (Averroes) sets out to show that the Scriptural Law (shar') of Islam does not altogether prohibit the study of philosophy by Muslims, but, on the contrary, makes it a duty for a certain class of people, those with the capacity for "demonstrative" or scientific reasoning.

First of three volumes comprising a critical edition of the earliest manuscripts of Rumi's great poem, the Mathnawi , one of the great works of Muslim mysticism.