scholarly journals Self-​Revision and the Arabic Historical Tradition: Identifying Textual Reuse and Reorganization in the Works of al-​Balādhurī

2020 ◽  
pp. 9-30
Keyword(s):  
Textual Reuse ◽  
Historical Tradition

Self-Revision and the Arabic Historical Tradition: Identifying Textual Reuse and Reorganization in the Works Of Al-Balā Dhurāi

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-30
Author(s):  
Ryan J. Lynch
Keyword(s):  
Late Antique ◽  
Textual Reuse ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Historical Material ◽  
Historical Tradition ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Textual Traditions ◽  
Early Islamic ◽  
Islamic Institutions

While there is growing historiographical analysis of the reuse of circulating narrative materials in medieval books from various textual traditions, there have been fewer studies of the late antique and early medieval periods that have considered the process of authorial self-revision. This is especially the case with early Arabic/Islamicate texts. This study is a discussion of the historical material that is reused in the two surviving Arabic works of the Muslim author al-Balādhurī (d. ca. 892 CE/279 AH), material which appears in his Kitāb Futūḥ al-buldān (The Book of the Conquest of Lands) and that was apparently reused in his Ansāb al-Ashrāf (The Lineage of Nobles). In discussing how al-Balādhurī recycled this information and emplotted it in verbatim and near-verbatim forms, it shows how shifting the location of these shared traditions demonstrates the different goals of his two books and also showcases his work as an author: in the former, he places an emphasis on the creation of early Islamic institutions; in the later, he eulogizes the character and qualities of Islam's earliest leaders. Additionally, all of the reused material discussed here was identified through computer meditated analysis, so this study also highlights how the tools of the digital and computational humanities demonstrate immense promise in enhancing and expediting the research of scholars across the medieval globe.

The Necessity and Ways of Legitimation of Large-scale Private Property in Russia: Raising a Problem

2007 ◽  
pp. 4-26
Author(s):  
G. Yavlinsky
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Negative Consequences ◽  
Specific Nature ◽  
Considerable Part ◽  
Russian People ◽  
National Importance ◽  
Historical Tradition ◽  
Special Rules ◽  
Economic Assets

Results of privatization campaign in 1990’s continue to meet strong opposition from a very considerable part of Russian people and authorities actually refuse to consider the rights of private owners legitimate and not subject to violation. One of the reasons for this, besides historical tradition, is a specific nature of Russian privatization of 1990’s. The article brings to discussion a set of measures aimed at overcoming its negative consequences. While insisting on the need to honor all previous government obligations and commitments, the paper proposes a one-time special tax (windfall tax) to be levied on those who benefited most from privatization deals that were not just and fair, and special rules to be set for the use and sale of economic assets of national importance. The author also considers possible ways to legitimize private property, as well as chances to achieve а broad public consensus on this issue in Russia.

Financial Folly and Spain’s Black Legend

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mauricio Drelichman ◽  
Hans-Joachim Voth
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Military Power ◽  
Great Flexibility ◽  
Loan Contracts ◽  
Historical Tradition ◽  
Black Legend ◽  
Contractual Obligations ◽  
The Relationship

This epilogue argues that Castile was solvent throughout Philip II's reign. A complex web of contractual obligations designed to ensure repayment governed the relationship between the king and his bankers. The same contracts allowed great flexibility for both the Crown and bankers when liquidity was tight. The risk of potential defaults was not a surprise; their likelihood was priced into the loan contracts. As a consequence, virtually every banking family turned a profit over the long term, while the king benefited from their services to run the largest empire that had yet existed. The epilogue then looks at the economic history version of Spain's Black Legend. The economic history version of the Black Legend emerged from a combination of two narratives: a rich historical tradition analyzing the decline of Spain as an economic and military power from the seventeenth century onward, combined with new institutional analysis highlighting the unconstrained power of the monarch.

Of Sand or Soil

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nadav Samin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Saudi Arabia ◽  
State Formation ◽  
Oral Narrative ◽  
Soil P ◽  
Lower Status ◽  
Historical Tradition

Why do tribal genealogies matter in modern-day Saudi Arabia? What compels the strivers and climbers of the new Saudi Arabia to want to prove their authentic descent from one or another prestigious Arabian tribe? This book looks at how genealogy and tribal belonging have informed the lives of past and present inhabitants of Saudi Arabia and how the Saudi government's tacit glorification of tribal origins has shaped the powerful development of the kingdom's genealogical culture. The book presents the first extended biographical exploration of the major twentieth-century Saudi scholar Hamad al-Jāsir, whose genealogical studies frame the story about belonging and identity in the modern kingdom. It examines the interplay between al-Jāsir's genealogical project and his many hundreds of petitioners, mostly Saudis of nontribal or lower status origin who sought validation of their tribal roots in his genealogical texts. Investigating the Saudi relationship to this opaque, orally inscribed historical tradition, the book considers the consequences of modern Saudi genealogical politics and how the most intimate anxieties of nontribal Saudis today are amplified by the governing strategies and kinship ideology of the Saudi state. Challenging the impression that Saudi culture is determined by puritanical religiosity or rentier economic principles, the book shows how the exploration and establishment of tribal genealogies have become influential phenomena in contemporary Saudi society. Beyond Saudi Arabia, this book casts important new light on the interplay between kinship ideas, oral narrative, and state formation in rapidly changing societies.

Varieties of Understanding

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Cognitive Resources ◽  
The World ◽  
Historical Tradition ◽  
Normative Considerations ◽  
Shed Light

According to a long historical tradition, understanding comes in different varieties. In particular, it is said that understanding people has a different epistemic profile than understanding the natural world—it calls on different cognitive resources, for instance, and brings to bear distinctive normative considerations. Thus in order to understand people we might need to appreciate, or in some way sympathetically reconstruct, the reasons that led a person to act in a certain way. By comparison, when it comes to understanding natural events, like earthquakes or eclipses, no appreciation of reasons or acts of sympathetic reconstruction is arguably needed—mainly because there are no reasons on the scene to even be appreciated, and no perspectives to be sympathetically pieced together. In this volume some of the world’s leading philosophers, psychologists, and theologians shed light on the various ways in which we understand the world, pushing debates on this issue to new levels of sophistication and insight.

The Frontiers of Memory: What the Marathas Remembered of Vijayanagara

2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 269-288 ◽  
Author(s):  
SUMIT GUHA
Keyword(s):  
Historical Memory ◽  
Southern India ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Historical Tradition ◽  
The Way

AbstractThe past two decades have seen a dramatic renewal of interest in the subject of historical memory, its reproduction and transmission. But most studies have focused on the selection and construction of extant memories. This essay looks at missing memory as well. It seeks to broaden our understanding of memory by investigating the way in which historical memory significant to one historical tradition was slighted by another, even though the two overlapped both spatially and chronologically. It does this by an examination of how the memory of the Marathi-speaking peoples first neglected and then adopted the story of the Vijayanagara empire that once dominated southern India.

Modular History: Identity Maintenance before Uyghur Nationalism

2012 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
pp. 627-653 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rian Thum
Keyword(s):  
Regional Identity ◽  
Local History ◽  
Identity Maintenance ◽  
Historical Texts ◽  
Identity Group ◽  
Manuscript Tradition ◽  
Alternative Type ◽  
Historical Tradition ◽  
Identity System ◽  
Southern Xinjiang

This paper investigates how a regional identity can be maintained in a nonmodern context, focusing on the case of southern Xinjiang in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The argument focuses on one aspect of this identity system, the popular historical tradition, arguing that its deployment through both manuscript technology and regional shrine pilgrimage contributed to the maintenance of Xinjiang's settled Turki identity group before the construction of the “Uyghur” identity. In the absence of a national history, separate histories of local heroes were linked together through custom anthology production and networked travel to shrines, yielding a modular historical tradition that accommodated local interests in regional narratives. Central to the operation of this system were community authorship in the manuscript tradition, the creation of a new genre for local history, and the publicly recorded circulation of pilgrims who heard performances of historical texts. This constellation of phenomena underpinned an alternative type of imagined community: a reasonably homogeneous, regional, writing-facilitated identity system flourishing in a nonmodern context.

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