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

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.

2013 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 377-389 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel W. Smith

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?


2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Louis Quantin

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.


2012 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muzaffar Alam

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.


1936 ◽  
Vol 8 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 657-671 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Morgenstierne
Keyword(s):  

Khowar, the predominant language of Chitral and of the adjacent parts of the Gilgit district, is characterized on the one hand by a tenacious preservation of ancient IA. sounds, forms, and words, and on the other hand by the existence of a remarkably large number of foreign elements. According to Sir George Grierson, Khowar “in some essential particulars agrees rather with the Ghalcha languages to the north”. And, drawing attention to the fact that the Chitral valley was formerly inhabited by Kalashas, he expresses the opinion that the originally homogeneous Dardic population of Kafiristan, Chitral, and Gilgit “was subsequently split into two by a wedge of Khō invasion, representing members of a different, but related, tribe coming from the north [of the Hindukush]”. In whatever way one may be inclined to interpret the position there can be no doubt that Kho., when compared with the neighbouring Dardic dialects, presents many peculiarities which deserve our attention.


Author(s):  
ROBERT GHAZARYAN

Tegarama was one of the eastern lands of the Hittite Kingdom. In the geographic sense it is part of the Armenian Highland that is why its history is of special interest to us. Taking into account the fact that the Armenian people had considerable ethnic ties with the Upper Euphrates region, specialists have traditionally tended to identify “Home of Torgom” in the Trans Euphrates region together with the city Tegarama (Assyrian Til-Garimmu) mentioned from the 2nd millennium BC. “Home of Torgom” literally repeats Bet-Togarma mentioned in the Bible. The study of the history of the country of Tegarama is also important because in Armenian historiography, starting from Movses Khorenatsi, Armenian ancestor Hayk is called “Son of Torgom”, and the Armenian people - “People of Torgom”. Most of the researchers located Tegarama in the place of the present settlement Gyurun. By comparing the “Cappadocian”, Hittite and Assyrian sources, Tegarama can be located in the Upper Euphrates valley, on the right bank of the river, to the north of Kargamis, to the west of Isuwa, to the south of Upper Land and to the east of Kanes. The territory of Tegarama was not far from Nesa - one of the initial centers of the Hittites; and it was also one of the initial places of inhabitance of the Hittites. Tegarama also occupied a strategically important position. On the one hand it bordered on the country of Mitanni, on the other hand - on Isuwa. Thus, the country of Tegarama occupied a significant geographic position: on the one hand roads led from here to other western districts of the Armenian Highland, to Tsopk, and on the other hand - to Northern Syria and Northern Mesopotamia. It was also one of the spiritual centers of Hatti.


2021 ◽  
pp. 118-143
Author(s):  
Rumela Sen

This chapter shows how weak grassroots organizations in the gray zone of state-insurgency interface led to scrawny informal exit networks in the North, discouraging rebel retirement and restricting their reintegration. The differences with the South stem from the secret and semi-secret ties that northern rebels build with state agents like police, politicians, and bureaucracy on the one hand and various nonstate agents like mafias and businesses on the other hand. These ties, alongside distinctive caste/class dynamics and land relations in the North, induces dominance of perverse criminality and spews intense militancy in the North, which vitiates the gray zone of state-insurgency interface.


Author(s):  
Alexander Broadie

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.


1873 ◽  
Vol 21 (139-147) ◽  
pp. 399-402

1. Hitherto in our reductions we have summed up the spotted areas of the various groups occurring on the sun’s surface on any day, and have regarded their sum as a representation of the spot-activity for that day. It has occurred to us to see what result we should obtain by taking instead for each day the excess of the spotted area in the one solar hemisphere above that in the other. 2. On adopting this method, it soon became evident that during periods of great disturbance there is a tendency in spots to change alternately from the north or positive to the south or negative hemisphere, and vice versâ , the period of such change being about 25 days. When, on the other hand, the solar disturbance is inconsiderable, the spots do not present any such systematic oscillation.


1998 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haim Gerber

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.


Author(s):  
V. A. Moskvina

The article deals with the spells of one functional-thematic group recorded in the Middle Irtysh region. The features of existence of these spells in the regional tradition of the Middle Irtysh region and versification of their plots are re- vealed. The prevalence of spells in cause of a wrench in the two Northern districts of Omsk region is caused by the settle- ment of Belarusians in these places in the late XIX – early XX centuries. This suggests that the place of the exodus tra- dition of the spells from a wrench is in Belarus. The analysis of the plots of these spells confirms this assumption. The method of examining the Siberian plots is based on the systematization of structural elements of plots proposed by T. A. Agapkina and A. L. Toporkov which researchers call episodes. The article compares the episodes of the second Mersebourg spell in Belarusian spells with Siberian texts. The comparison shows that the language of this spells being subjected to Russification. On the one hand, this leads to the loss of some motives and formulas, i.e. the violation of the integrity of the plot, on the other hand, the rhythm of the text is enhanced, the rhyme appears. These processes open the way to the penetration of verbal components from other functional groups into the considered spells. As the result, one can observe the extension of ideas that this disease is not necessarily associated with the violation of integrity of the body.


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