Strategy and imagination in a Mughal Sufi story of creation

2012 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muzaffar Alam
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Sanskrit Text ◽  
Islamic Tradition ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One ◽  
Different Order ◽  
The Prestige

This article examines a seventeenth-century text that attempts to reconcile Hindu and Muslim accounts of human genesis and cosmogony. The text, Mir’āt al-Makhlūqāt (‘Mirror of Creation’), written by a noted Mughal Sufi author Shaikh ‘Abd al-Rahman Chishti, purportedly a translation of a Sanskrit text, adopts rhetorical strategies and mythological elements of the Purāna tradition in order to argue that evidence of the Muslim prophets was available in ancient Hindu scriptures. Chishti thus accepts the reality of ancient Hindu gods and sages and notes the truth in their message. In doing so Chishti adopts elements of an older argument within the Islamic tradition that posits thousands of cycles of creation and multiple instances of Adam, the father of humans. He argues however that the Hindu gods and sages belonged to a different order of creation and time, and were not in fact human. The text bears some generic resemblance to Bhavishyottarapurāna materials. Chishti combines aspects of polemics with a deft use of politics. He addresses, on the one hand, Hindu intellectuals who claimed the prestige of an older religion, while he also engages, on the other hand, with Muslim theologians and Sufis like the Naqshbandi Mujaddidis who for their part refrained from engaging with Hindu traditions at all.

Temporality and Truth

2013 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 377-389 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel W. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Continuous Variation ◽  
Pure Form ◽  
The Other ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One ◽  
Time Image ◽  
Positive Light

This paper examines the intersecting of the themes of temporality and truth in Deleuze's philosophy. For the ancients, truth was something eternal: what was true was true in all times and in all places. Temporality (coming to be and passing away) was the realm of the mutable, not the eternal. In the seventeenth century, change began to be seen in a positive light (progress, evolution, and so on), but this change was seen to be possible only because of the immutable laws of nature that govern change. It was not until philosophers such as Bergson, James, Whitehead – and then Deleuze – that time began to be taken seriously on its own account. On the one hand, in Deleuze, time, freed from its subordination to movement, now becomes autonomous: it is the pure form of change (continuous variation) that lies at the basis of Deleuze's metaphysics in Difference and Repetition (and is explored more thematically in The Time-Image). As a result, on the other hand, the false, freed from its subordination to the form of the true, assumes a power of its own (the power of the false), which in turn implies a new ‘analytic of the concept’ that Deleuze develops in What Is Philosophy?

Paradoxes of Christian Solitude in the Seventeenth Century

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Louis Quantin
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Religious Discourse ◽  
The Other ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Moral Dimension ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Status ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
The One

AbstractIn seventeenth-century religious discourse, the status of solitude was deeply ambivalent: on the one hand, solitude was valued as a setting and preparation for self-knowledge and meditation; on the other hand, it had negative associations with singularity, pride and even schism. The ambiguity of solitude reflected a crucial tension between the temptation to withdraw from contemporary society, as hopelessly corrupt, and endeavours to reform it. Ecclesiastical movements which stood at the margins of confessional orthodoxies, such as Jansenism (especially in its moral dimension of Rigorism), Puritanism and Pietism, targeted individual conscience but also worked at controlling and disciplining popular behaviour. They may be understood as attempts to pursue simultaneously withdrawal and engagement.

A Historical Whodunit: The So-Called “Kano Chronicle” and its Place in the Historiography of Kano

1994 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 127-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Hunwick
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
The Other ◽  
The North ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One

Murray Last obliquely suggests that [the “Kano Chronicle”] is best regarded as a rather free compilation of local legends and traditions drafted in the mid-seventeenth century by a humorous Muslim rationalist who almost seems to have studied under Levi-Strauss.The danger lies in being carried away by one's own ingenuity.The question of the authorship and date(s) of writing of the so-called “Kano Chronicle” (KC) and hence how historians should evaluate it as a source, have intrigued students of Kano (and wider Hausa) history since the work was first translated into English by H. R. Palmer in 1908. Palmer himself had the following to say:The manuscript is of no great age, and must on internal evidence have been written during the latter part of the decade 1883-1893; but it probably represents some earlier record which has now perished….The authorship is unknown, and it is very difficult to make a guess. On the one hand the general style of the composition is quite unlike the “note” struck by the sons of Dan Hodio [ʿUthmān b. Fūdī, Abdulahi and Muḥammad Bello, and imitated by other Fulani writers. There is almost complete absence of bias or partizanship…. On the other hand, the style of the Arabic is not at all like that usually found in the compositions of Hausa mallams of the present day; there are not nearly enough “classical tags” so to speak, in it…. That the author was thoroughly au fait with the Kano dialect of Hausa is evident from several phrases used in the book, for instance “ba râyi ba” used in a sense peculiar to Kano of “perforce.” The original may perhaps have been written by some stranger from the north who settled in Kano, and collected the stories of former kings handed down by oral tradition.

“To engraft ourselves on foreign stocks”: Byron’s Poetics of Acculturation

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Schoina
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Mary Shelley ◽  
The Other ◽  
Local Culture ◽  
Crossing Over ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One ◽  
Culture Acquisition

Abstract Considering the largely unacknowledged connection between Byron and Mary Shelley on the logistics which pertain to the experience of crossing-over cultures, this paper investigates the notion of authentic Italianisation as exemplified in their related texts, and discusses its problematics in the context of the dominant themes and preoccupations in Romantic culture. Thus, on the one hand, my paper examines how the Romantic anticipation of being immersed in local culture and of “going native” is articulated – or rather, performed – by Byron himself, by considering specific rhetorical strategies and figures of filiation he used to ground his relationship to Italian place. More specifically, I contend that although Byron’s polymorphic identification to Italian place is constructed in the imagination, it is also grounded in time- and space-bound actions and involves a structure of social relations. On the other hand, the paper delineates how Byron’s idiosyncratic immersion into Italianness is theorised by Mary Shelley and counted on as a model of second culture acquisition.

scholarly journals The contradictory duals: The meaning and the term: الثّنائيّات الضّدّيّة: الماهيّة والمصطلح

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Khaled Abd alazaiz Hassan
Keyword(s):  
Arabic Language ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
The Other ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One ◽  
Classical Arabic ◽  
Internal Texture ◽  
The Prestige

The presence of existence on the binaries, was a feature of the main that left nothing but a problem for its features, and literature one of them; we find the diodes have intersected the joints, and formed its internal texture, and showed its purposes and themes in a striking way to the recipient who felt the beauty and beauty of rhythms and images express. Classical Arabic is characterized among all other semiotic languages; It's characteristics ate unique to them which reflected the prestige and ability for expression. Amongst these Fixed characteristics in Arabic language there is the contradictory duals. In this study, I tried to trace the terms "binary" and "contrast": language and language, and the approach between them to arrive at a single integration, forming another term " contradictory duals", and its role in the literary text on the one hand and on the receiver on the other hand.    

Robert Baron’s Metaphysica generalis on the Nature of Free Judgment

2020 ◽  
pp. 127-139
Author(s):  
Alexander Broadie
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
The Other ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Notable Feature ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One ◽  
The Right

This chapter expounds the concept of ‘judgment’, a concept deployed by seventeenth-century Scottish philosophers in their philosophy of mind. Close attention is paid to the discussion on judgment in the Metaphysica generalis of Robert Baron, where he addresses the idea of judgment as a free act. A notable feature of Baron’s treatment of judgment is his contrast between, on the one hand, the logician’s concern with judgment as a bearer of truth in inferences in which canons of inference are deployed that ensure that if the judgments serving as premises are true then so also must be the judgment drawn as a conclusion from those premises; and, on the other hand, a judgment that is passed by an arbiter, a person agreed upon by two parties in dispute who undertake to accept the judgment he makes as to which party is in the right.

Rigidity Versus Openness in Late Classical Islamic Law: The Case of the Seventeenth-Century Palestinian Muftī Khayr al-Dīn al-Ramlī

1998 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haim Gerber
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
The Other ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
The West ◽  
Scholarly Literature ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Over Time

AbstractIn this study I reexamine some well-known generalizations about Islamic law prior to the impact of the West, e.g., the contention that Islamic law became increasingly closed, based more and more on blind imitation. My examination of the fatwā collection of the seventeenth-century Palestinian Muftī Khayr al-Dīn al-Ramlī suggests that increasing closure never took place. On the one hand al-Ramlī faithfully continues the tradition of his classical predecessors, or, in other words, he practices taqlīd by obligating himself to earlier authorities. On the other hand, his fatwās convey a sense of openness, flexibility, and liveliness. These characteristics are concretized in some of the major terms that he uses: ijtihād, or free discretion of the jurist in areas of the law that remained open; iṣtiḥsān, or relaxation of formal rules; and ʿurf, or local customary law, which, by definition, is changeable over time. In my view, the flexibility of Islamic law has been underemphasized in the scholarly literature, and hence it is on this factor in particular that I have chosen to concentrate.

Medicine and the Inquisition in Portugal (Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries): People and Books

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 92-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hervé Baudry
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Overwhelming Majority ◽  
The Other ◽  
Medical Professionals ◽  
Medical Practitioners ◽  
Significant Percentage ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One

Abstract The Tribunal of the Inquisition was established in Portugal in 1536. This paper deals with three aspects concerning medicine in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Portugal: the institution and its members, the medical practitioners, and the books. On the one hand, doctors were necessary to carry out specific duties in the life of the Inquisition. On the other hand, a significant percentage of the victims of the Inquisition were medical professionals, the overwhelming majority being New Christians accused of Judaism. Finally, as did the Roman and Spanish Inquisitions, the Portuguese Holy Office looked after the censorship of books, many of which dealt with medical matters.

‘An Honourable and Elect Lady’: The Faith of Isabel, Lady Bowes

1999 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 407-419
Author(s):  
Christine M. Newman
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Family ◽  
The One

The Bowes of Streatlam, in the bishopric of Durham, were notable on two counts in the later part of the sixteenth century. On the one hand, they were highly regarded for their uncompromising loyalty to the Crown, an attachment which was to bring them disastrously close to the brink of financial ruin under the parsimonious Elizabeth, who repeatedly failed to reimburse and compensate them for activities undertaken in her name. On the other hand, the family was particularly noted in the religiously conservative north for its staunch adherence to the Protestant faith. The seeds of this Protestantism were in evidence from the earliest years of the Reformation, but it was given greater definition and inspiration by the example of Elizabeth Bowes, the ardent adherent and later mother-in-law of the Scottish reformer John Knox. Yet, if Elizabeth was the first, she was certainly not the only uncompromisingly Protestant matron in the Bowes family during this period. Towards the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century the second wife of her grandson Sir William Bowes was to assume Elizabeth’s spiritual mantle, thereby reinforcing still further the family’s attachment to the Reformed faith.

The Isomorphism of Space, Time and Matter in Seventeenth-century Natural Philosophy

2011 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 296-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carla Rita Palmerino
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Space Time ◽  
The Other ◽  
General Tendency ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Acceleration And Deceleration ◽  
The One ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
The Way

AbstractThis article documents the general tendency of seventeenth-century natural philosophers, irrespective of whether they were atomists or anti-atomists, to regard space, time and matter as magnitudes having the same internal composition. It examines the way in which authors such as Fromondus, Basson, Sennert, Arriaga, Galileo, Magnen, Descartes, Gassendi, Charleton as well as the young Newton motivated their belief in the isomorphism of space, time and matter, and how this belief reflected on their views concerning the relation between geometry and physics. Special attention is paid to the fact that most of the authors mentioned above regarded rarefaction and condensation, on the one hand, and acceleration and deceleration, on the other hand, as analogous phenomena, which consequently had to be explained in similar terms.

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