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التراجم | العصر الأموي | الأمويون 750-661 | عهد الإمارة الأموية 929-756.

The principal aim of this study is to examine the use of charity as a factor of political legitimation by the ruling elite of al-Andalus in the Umayyad period. Accordingly, it explores the degree to which charity was an instrument in the hands of the authorities, and the manner in which this strategy was decisive in the process of consolidating power. In a broader sense, this analysis enables us to deepen our knowledge of the political elite in al-Andalus and to elucidate how charitable attitudes reflected a particular conception of power.

The study explores the Udhrî ghazal as a classical literary phenomenon in the Arabic poetry; and it seeks to correlate it with Plato’s theories of love in The Symposium. The issues the study raises are: history of the Udhrî love, factors leading to its emergence, impact of Islam on the Udhrî poets, and stages of the Udhrî narrative based on classical Arabic poetry and prose. The study controverts the claims associating the Udhrî ghazal with Islam due to the profound discrepancies between Islamic teachings and the practices and behaviors of the Udhrî poets. It as well reviews the theories of love Plato introduces in the Symposium for the purpose of estimating their manifestations in classical Arabic prose and impact on the Udhrî ghazal. The beginnings of Udhrî love go back to the pre-Islamic era during which poets, such as Antara Al-Absi, frequently combined the motif of chaste love with other related topics in their poems. Yet, the Udhrî ghazal flourishes in the Umayyad age during which poets tackled Udhrî love as an autonomous motif and subgenre. The study further questions the various possible factors, i.e. political, religious, environmental and social, modernists believe have led to the evolution of the Udhrî ghazal in the Islamic age and the Umayyad age.   

  In a recent article, Petra M. Sijpesteijn, a recognized authority on early Islamic papyri, presented a hitherto unknown 2nd/8th- or early 3rd/9th-century papyrus containing a report on the subject of prayer attributed to the second caliph 'Umar (d. 23/644). Her analysis of the papyrus led her to conclude that it reveals \"fundamental insecurities about the basic conceptions of some Muslim practices\"; that \"primary Muslim religious rituals were still being discussed at this early period\"; and that Muslims at this time \"were unsure about how to execute the most basic religious obligations.\" These are weighty theses: not only is prayer the core ritual of Islamic religious practice, but it also played an enormously significant sociopolitical role in early Islam. Here, Shamsy discusses some remarks on Sijpesteijn's Papyrus.

One mission of Ibn Kathir's Kitab al-Bidaya wa-l-Nihaya fi al-Taʾrikh (The Book of the Beginning and the End in History) is to provide a Sunni answer to a generally ʿAlid-legitimizing corpus of early Islamic historical accounts. Part of the 13th- and 14th-century movement that sought to rehabilitate the image of Syria and the otherwise reviled Umayyad dynasty (r. 661–750), Ibn Kathir's grand work of history cleverly reframes the early Islamic narrative to fit into what he considers a more “properly” Sunni framework than his sources provided. This article focuses on Ibn Kathir's presentation of the shūrā, the council appointed by ʿUmar and charged with choosing from among its six members his successor. It identifies the literary tools Ibn Kathir employed and offers a framework for his strategy of employing them. Whether through narrative aside or criticism of other historians, Ibn Kathir's recasting of a pro-ʿAlid grudge story as an Umayyad apologetic highlights moments of sectarian contention and emphasizes the evolution of Sunni opinion on ʿAli and ʿUthman.