Portrait of an Eighth-Century Gentleman: Khālid ibn Ṣafwān in History and Literature, written by Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila

2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 429-432
Author(s):  
Geert Jan van Gelder
Keyword(s):  
Eighth Century ◽  
History And Literature

Brahmi legends on Umayyad Fulus: Interrogating local minting practices and numismatic transculturation in Gandhara (ca. 750 CE)

Afghanistan ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 153-165
Author(s):  
Waleed Ziad
Keyword(s):  
Base Metal ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Unusual Feature ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Contact Zones ◽  
Confessional Identity ◽  
Derivatives Of

This paper concerns a historically significant find of copper derivatives of Umayyad post-reform fulus from Gandhara, probably minted in the mid-eighth century under Turk Shahi sovereignty (c. 667–875). The coins share an unusual feature: two Brahmi aksharas on an Umayyad AE prototype, inversely oriented to a partially-corrupted Arabic legend. These base metal coins represent perhaps the only known caliphal imitative varieties issued by moneyers beyond the eastern limits of Umayyad and Abbasid sovereignty. They have the potential to inform our understanding of the complex relationship between political authority, confessional identity, and coin typology in late antiquity – particularly within early “Hindu”– “Muslim” contact zones. Moreover, they provide invaluable clues into the circulatory regimes of Umayyad coinage.

Adam Smith and Rousseau

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
History And Literature ◽  
Edinburgh Review

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith are two of the foremost thinkers of the European Enlightenment, thinkers who made seminal contributions to moral and political philosophy and who shaped some of the key concepts of modern political economy. Among Smith’s first published works was a letter to the Edinburgh Review where he discusses Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. Smith continued to engage with Rousseau’s work and to explore many shared themes such as sympathy, political economy, sentiment, and inequality. This collection brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of Adam Smith and Rousseau scholars to provide an exploration of the key shared concerns of these two great thinkers in politics, philosophy, economics, history, and literature.

The Beginnings of Islam in Afghanistan

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arezou Azad
Keyword(s):  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Political System ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Religious Context ◽  
Early Islam ◽  
History Of ◽  
Initial Conversion ◽  
The Way

Covering the period from 709 to 871, this chapter traces the initial conversion of Afghanistan from Zoroastrianism and Buddhism to Islam. Highlighting the differential developments in four regions of Afghanistan, it discusses the very earliest history of Afghan Islam both as a religion and as a political system in the form of a caliphate.  The chapter draws on under-utilized sources, such as fourth to eighth century Bactrian documents from Tukharistan and medieval Arabic and Persian histories of Balkh, Herat and Sistan. In so doing, it offers a paradigm shift in the way early Islam is understood by arguing that it did not arrive in Afghanistan as a finished product, but instead grew out of Afghanistan’s multi-religious context. Through fusions with Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, early Abrahamic traditions, and local cult practices, the Islam that resulted was less an Arab Islam that was imported wholesale than a patchwork of various cultural practices.

Poetic Trespass

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lital Levy
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Prose Poetry ◽  
Old World ◽  
History And Literature ◽  
Political Boundaries ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
Emile Habiby ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

A Palestinian-Israeli poet declares a new state whose language, “Homelandic,” is a combination of Arabic and Hebrew. A Jewish-Israeli author imagines a “language plague” that infects young Hebrew speakers with old world accents, and sends the narrator in search of his Arabic heritage. This book brings together such startling visions to offer the first in-depth study of the relationship between Hebrew and Arabic in the literature and culture of Israel/Palestine. More than that, the book presents a captivating portrait of the literary imagination's power to transgress political boundaries and transform ideas about language and belonging. Blending history and literature, the book traces the interwoven life of Arabic and Hebrew in Israel/Palestine from the turn of the twentieth century to the present, exposing the two languages' intimate entanglements in contemporary works of prose, poetry, film, and visual art by both Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel. In a context where intense political and social pressures work to identify Jews with Hebrew and Palestinians with Arabic, the book finds writers who have boldly crossed over this divide to create literature in the language of their “other,” as well as writers who bring the two languages into dialogue to rewrite them from within. Exploring such acts of poetic trespass, the book introduces new readings of canonical and lesser-known authors, including Emile Habiby, Hayyim Nahman Bialik, Anton Shammas, Saul Tchernichowsky, Samir Naqqash, Ronit Matalon, Salman Masalha, A. B. Yehoshua, and Almog Behar. By revealing uncommon visions of what it means to write in Arabic and Hebrew, the book will change the way we understand literature and culture in the shadow of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

Goddess on the Frontier

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Bryson
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Yunnan Province ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Religious Identities ◽  
Local Identities ◽  
Frontier Region ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Ethnicity And Gender ◽  
Shifting Identities

This book follows the transformations of the goddess Baijie, a deity worshiped in the Dali region of southwest China’s Yunnan Province, to understand how local identities developed in a Chinese frontier region from the twelfth century to the twenty-first. Dali, a region where the cultures of China, India, Tibet, and Southeast Asia converge, has long served as a nexus of religious interaction even as its status has changed. Once the center of independent kingdoms, it was absorbed into the Chinese imperial sphere with the Mongol conquest and remained there ever since. Goddess on the Frontier examines how people in Dali developed regional religious identities through the lens of the local goddess Baijie, whose shifting identities over this span of time reflect shifting identities in Dali. She first appears as a Buddhist figure in the twelfth century, then becomes known as the mother of a regional ruler, next takes on the role of an eighth-century widow martyr, and finally is worshiped as a tutelary village deity. Each of her forms illustrates how people in Dali represented local identities through gendered religious symbols. Taken together, they demonstrate how regional religious identities in Dali developed as a gendered process as well as an ethno-cultural process. This book applies interdisciplinary methodology to a wide variety of newly discovered and unstudied materials to show how religion, ethnicity, and gender intersect in a frontier region.

After Chalcedon

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian E. Daley, SJ
Keyword(s):  
Eighth Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
The Third ◽  
John Of Damascus ◽  
Perceived Impact ◽  
Orthodox Theology ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Maximus The Confessor ◽  
Severus Of Antioch

The Council of Chalcedon’s definition of the terms in which Nicene orthodoxy should conceive of Christ’s person remained controversial. Leontius of Byzantium argued for the correctness of the Council’s formulation, especially against the arguments of Severus of Antioch, but suggested that more than academic issues were at stake: the debate concerned the lived, permanently dialectical unity between God and humanity. In the mid-seventh century, imperially sponsored efforts to lessen the perceived impact of Chalcedonian language by stressing that Christ’s two natures were activated by “a single, theandric energy,” also remained without effect: largely because of the monk Maximus “the Confessor”, who argued that two complete spheres of activity and two wills remained evident in Christ’s life. Maximus’s position was ratified at the Lateran Synod and at the Third Council of Constantinople. The eighth-century Palestinian monk John of Damascus incorporated these arguments into his own influential synthesis of orthodox theology.

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