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"Islam History Poetry."
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Dante and Islam
Dante put Muhammad in one of the lowest circles of Hell. At the same time, the medieval Christian poet placed several Islamic philosophers much more honorably in Limbo. Furthermore, it has long been suggested that for much of the basic framework of the Divine Comedy Dante was indebted to apocryphal traditions about a \"night journey\" taken by Muhammad. Dante scholars have increasingly returned to the question of Islam to explore the often surprising encounters among religious traditions that the Middle Ages afforded. This collection of essays works through what was known of the Qur'an and of Islamic philosophy and science in Dante's day and explores the bases for Dante's images of Muhammad and Ali. It further compels us to look at key instances of engagement among Muslims, Jews, and Christians.
eBook
Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage
This book explores the threat of Christian conversion to Islam in twelve early modern English plays. In works by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Massinger, and others, conversion from Christianity to Islam is represented as both tragic and erotic, as a fate worse than death and as a sexual seduction.
eBook
Shared Memory and History: The Abrahamic Legacy in Medieval Judaeo-Arabic Poetry from the Cairo Genizah
The Cairo Genizah collections provide scholars with a profound insight into Jewish culture, history, and the deeply intertwined relationships between Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Among these treasures are often overlooked Arabic poetic fragments from the eleventh to fifteenth centuries, which illuminate the shared Abrahamic legacy. This paper explores mainly two unpublished poetic fragments written in Judaeo-Arabic (Arabic in Hebrew script), analyzing how they reflect a shared Jewish–Muslim cultural memory and history, particularly through the reverence for Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and other key figures central to both traditions across the medieval Mediterranean and Middle East. By situating these poetic voices within broader historical and cultural contexts, this study underscores the role of poetry in reflecting sociocultural and historical dimensions while fostering cross-cultural and religious coexistence. It demonstrates how poetry acts as a bridge between religion, history, and culture by revealing the shared Abrahamic heritage of Jews and Muslims within two Arabic poetic fragments from the Cairo Genizah.
Journal Article
Sufism and American Literary Masters
This book reveals the rich, but generally unknown, influence of Sufism on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature. The translation of Persian poets such as Hafiz and Sa'di into English and the ongoing popularity of Omar Khayyam offered intriguing new spiritual perspectives to some of the major American literary figures. As editor Mehdi Aminrazavi notes, these Sufi influences have often been subsumed into a notion of \"Eastern,\" chiefly Indian, thought and not acknowledged as having Islamic roots. This work pays considerable attention to two giants of American literature, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, who found much inspiration from the Sufi ideas they encountered. Other canonical figures are also discussed, including Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, along with literary contemporaries who are lesser known today, such as Paschal Beverly Randolph, Thomas Lake Harris, and Lawrence Oliphant.
eBook
Poetry as history: Maulana Muhammad Anwar Shopiani and the Ahl-i Hadith movement in Kashmir
The Ahl-i Hadith in South Asia has largely been studied as a textualist, puritan movement as a result of its exclusive emphasis on the Quran, Hadith sources, and connection with a variety of radical political and armed groups. In contrast, poetry has largely been associated with Sufi movements. This article questions this distinction and makes a historiographical intervention by examining the poetry of Maulana Muhammad Anwar Shopiani (d. 1940) in the Kashmiri, Persian, and Urdu languages. Through a close analysis of Shopiani's biography and poetry, the article complicates the hitherto available picture of the Ahl-i Hadith movement which Shopiani helped to take root in Kashmir. Doing so draws attention to the movement's novel literary aspect that engages with regional Sufi and sympathetic Hanafi thinking as well as with the broader Persianate literary traditions and transregional currents of revivalist thinking on the basis of the principle of taḥqīq, research. Even as Shopiani's message remains committed to a ‘factual’ iteration based upon Quran and Hadith sources, it is the concept of love, both in its spiritual and worldly manifestations, that emerges as central to his thought. It is through this that the paradox between the actual historical distance from Prophet Muhammad's time and the Ahl-i Hadith's ideological desire to revive that time by a literal enactment of the sunnah is resolved. In doing so, the article makes a methodological case for employing poetry as a source for writing an intellectual history from below which examines Islamic movements on their own terms.
Journal Article
Narratives of the Islamic conquest from medieval Spain
Exploring medieval literary representations of the Islamic conquest of Spain in 711, Hazbun discusses chronicles, epic and clerical poetry, and early historical novels. While material on the conquest of Spain is substantial, it is understudied and this book works to fill that gap.
eBook
A Unique Religious Landscape: Indian-Origin Vocabulary in Om-nāma, a 17th-Century Text in Persian
Om-nāma is a poem written in India in the 17th century. Its author was Banwalidas Wali, a protégé of the Mughal prince Dara Shikoh. It is a free adaptation of the much older Sanskrit treatise Yogavāsiṣṭha. However, while deeply rooted in the Indic tradition, Om-nāma extensively uses Islamicate imagery, especially from the realm of Sufism. In this article, we will analyze the terminology of Indic origin in Om-nāma, focusing on forms that interact ininterestingly with Islamicate (Perso-Arabic) vocabulary.
Journal Article
Can Muslims Drink? Rumi Vodka, Persianate Ideals, and the Anthropology of Islam
Shahab Ahmed’s What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (2016) challenges Islamic Studies scholars, (art) historians, and anthropologists to reconsider theoretical frameworks underpinning historical and ethnographic research. This article addresses Ahmed’s concerns that studies of Islam often conceptually privilege orthodoxy, by including drinking and intoxication as worthy of close attention in examining the history and the anthropology of Islam. The case of Wine Shop the Philosopher, run by a former Afghan refugee in The Hague and Amsterdam, is presented after establishing the comparative and interdisciplinary relevance of alcohol consumption in studies of Islam and Muslims. Ahmed’s conceptual framework is used and assessed in comparison with the wine shops’ contemporary pluralist reality by exploring the idealized boundaries of Persianate culture and Islam in dialogues between Persian-speaking interlocutors. It is argued that alcoholic drinks lend themselves to competing gastro-nationalisms and prompt ethnolinguistic tensions between and within groups with Turkish, Moroccan, Iranian, and Afghan backgrounds in the Netherlands. The focus on diverse, coexisting and clashing drink regimes, in conclusion, allows us to deconstruct dichotomies between sober Muslims and European drinkers, African and Asian believers and European unbelievers, and refugees and citizens.
Journal Article