The Making of the Medieval Middle East

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Tannous
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Conversion To Islam ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Millennium ◽  
Muslim Communities ◽  
The Middle Ages

In the second half of the first millennium CE, the Christian Middle East fractured irreparably into competing churches and Arabs conquered the region, setting in motion a process that would lead to its eventual conversion to Islam. This book argues that key to understanding these dramatic religious transformations are ordinary religious believers, often called “the simple” in late antique and medieval sources. Largely agrarian and illiterate, these Christians outnumbered Muslims well into the era of the Crusades, and yet they have typically been invisible in our understanding of the Middle East's history. What did it mean for Christian communities to break apart over theological disagreements that most people could not understand? How does our view of the rise of Islam change if we take seriously the fact that Muslims remained a demographic minority for much of the Middle Ages? In addressing these and other questions, the book provides a sweeping reinterpretation of the religious history of the medieval Middle East. The book draws on a wealth of Greek, Syriac, and Arabic sources to recast these conquered lands as largely Christian ones whose growing Muslim populations are properly understood as converting away from and in competition with the non-Muslim communities around them.

Miguel de Unamuno und Antero de Quental Iberische Religionskritik, einbrechende Moderne und die Tragik des Verlustes

2007 ◽  
Vol 59 (4) ◽  
pp. 311-330
Author(s):  
Steffen Dix
Keyword(s):  
Iberian Peninsula ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Miguel De Unamuno ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Catholic Religion ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
The Middle Ages

AbstractIn recent years the study of local religious histories, especially in Europe, has gained in prominence. Because of the encounters between different cultural traditions in the Middle Ages and the voyages of discovery, the religious history of the Iberian Peninsula became one of the most complex in Europe. This article focuses on one portion of this history around the turn of the 19th/20th century, and in particular on two attempts to blame the Catholic religion for the general crisis in Spain and Portugal at the start of the modern era. These two forms of critiquing religion are illustrated by the examples of Miguel de Unamuno and Antero de Quental, whose writings were characteristic of the typical relationship between religion and intellectuals in this period. Not only were the Spanish philosopher and the Portuguese poet influential on their own and later generations, but they are also truly representative of a certain tragic ”loss“ of religion in the Iberian Peninsula.

scholarly journals History and Policy of Translating Poetry: Azerbaijan and Its Neighbors

2014 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 310-329
Author(s):  
Hamlet Isaxanli1
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Poetic Translation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Different Cultures ◽  
The Middle Ages

Throughout the history of civilization the art of translation has existed as a bridge that connects different cultures. The article focuses on the history of poetic (and other) translations in the Middle East and territories abutting Azerbaijan from the Middle Ages to the 20th century. It also explores the practice of translating holy books and its influence on the region, as well as the tradition of nezire, or writing a new book under the inspiration of an original one rather than simply translating the original. The second part of the article discusses the history of poetic translation into and from the Azerbaijani language, especially translation work from Abbas Sehhet and Samad Vurghun, two renowned translators in Azerbaijani history. Finally, important aspects of the art of translating poetry are reviewed and analyzed, such as poetic forms and metaphors, rhythm and rhyme schemes, and the style of the text. The article concludes by making the point that poetry should indeed be translated; however, translators must take many factors into account in their work so that the target text reflects as much as possible the beauty of the original.

scholarly journals Why Was the New Testament Translated into Hebrew?

Open Theology ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eran Shuali
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
New Testament ◽  
The State ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Short Overview ◽  
Hebrew Language ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
History Of ◽  
State Of Israel ◽  
The Middle Ages

AbstractAfter offering a short overview of the history of Hebrew translations of the New Testament from the Middle Ages to our time, this article focuses on the purposes of the different translations as reflected in what has been written and said about them by the translators themselves and by other people involved in their dissemination. Five such purposes are identified: 1. Jewish polemics against Christianity in the Middle Ages. 2. Christian study of the Hebrew language. 3. The quest for the Hebrew “original” of the New Testament. 4. The mission to the Jews. 5. The needs of the Christian communities in the State of Israel. Concluding remarks are then made regarding the way in which Hebrew translations of the New Testament were perceived throughout the ages and regarding the role they played.

Forgery and Memory at the End of the First Millennium

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Levi Roach
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Collective Identities ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Millennium ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Middle Ages

This book takes a fresh look at documentary forgery and historical memory in the Middle Ages. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, religious houses across Europe began falsifying texts to improve local documentary records on an unprecedented scale. As the book illustrates, the resulting wave of forgery signaled major shifts in society and political culture, shifts which would lay the foundations for the European ancien régime. Spanning documentary traditions across France, England, Germany and northern Italy, the book examines five sets of falsified texts to demonstrate how forged records produced in this period gave voice to new collective identities within and beyond the Church. Above all, the book indicates how this fad for falsification points to new attitudes toward past and present — a developing fascination with the signs of antiquity. These conclusions revise traditional master narratives about the development of antiquarianism in the modern era, showing that medieval forgers were every bit as sophisticated as their Renaissance successors. Medieval forgers were simply interested in different subjects — the history of the Church and their local realms, rather than the literary world of classical antiquity. As a comparative history of falsified records at a crucial turning point in the Middle Ages, the book offers valuable insights into how institutions and individuals rewrote and reimagined the past.

The Teaching of Corpus Languages in Higher Education

2020 ◽  
pp. 193-213
Author(s):  
Vega María García González
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Language Teaching ◽  
Learning Goals ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Linguistic Group ◽  
Liturgical Language ◽  
The University ◽  
The Middle Ages

Late Eastern Aramaic (Syriac) is one of the main languages of the Aramaic linguistic group. During the Middle Ages, it became the liturgical language of the Christian communities that arose in the Near and Middle East. Its scholars wrote a large amount of literature and implemented a movement for the translation of Greek theological and scientific works. The extent of Arabic after the Muslim conquest led to the gradual disuse of Late Eastern Aramaic. However, today it still remains a communication and liturgical language in several churches. The aim of this chapter is to offer an overview of Late Eastern Aramaic (Syriac) language teaching at the University of Salamanca, including a summary of the learning goals and a description of the approach and method followed. It is preceded by a brief introduction to the tradition of the studies about this language.

Carolingian renaissance

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Marenbon
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Northern Europe ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Cultural Revival ◽  
Gregory Of Nyssa ◽  
History Of ◽  
Maximus The Confessor ◽  
Pseudo Dionysius ◽  
The Middle Ages

The ‘Carolingian renaissance’ is the name given to the cultural revival in northern Europe during the late eighth and ninth centuries, instigated by Charlemagne and his court scholars. Carolingian intellectual life centred around the recovery of classical Latin texts and learning, though in a strictly Christian setting. The only celebrated philosopher of the time is Johannes Scottus Eriugena, but the daring Neoplatonic speculations of his masterpiece, the Periphyseon (On the Division of Nature) are not at all characteristic of the time and are based on Greek sources (Pseudo-Dionysius, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor) generally unknown to his contemporaries. The mainstream of Carolingian thought is important for the history of philosophy in three particular ways. First, it was at this time that logic first started to take the fundamental role it would have throughout the Middle Ages. Second, scholars began to consider how ideas they found in late antique Latin Neoplatonic texts could be interpreted in a way compatible with Christianity. Third (as would so often again be the case in the Middle Ages), controversies over Christian doctrine led thinkers to analyse some of the concepts they involved: for instance, the dispute in the mid-ninth century over predestination led to discussion about free will and punishment.

The Realm of the Imām the Faṭīmids in the tenth century

1996 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 431-449
Author(s):  
Michael Brett
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Modern History ◽  
The Third ◽  
Islamic Tradition ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Middle Ages

Despite their period from the tenth to the twelfth century, at the height of the Middle Ages; despite their position in Egypt, at the centre of the civilization of the Near and Middle East; and despite their prominence as the third Caliphate of Islam, the Fāṭimids lack a satisfactory modern history of their dynasty. This is partly because of the length of their life, which covers the histories of so many hundreds of years; partly because of the span of their empire from North Africa to Egypt and Syria, stretching across the histories of so many regions; and finally because, at the level of Islam itself, their empire was divided between their dawla or state and their daՙwa or doctrine. The doctrine, which focused on the Fāṭimid Imām as the quṭb or pole of faith, gave the dynasty its peculiar strength and endurance. The failure of that doctrine to supersede the Islam of the schools, however, left the Fāṭimids increasingly isolated and ultimately vulnerable. Standing outside the mainstream of Islamic tradition, the dynasty's own version of its history was disregarded. Instead, its components passed out of their original context to be incorporated into the regional or universal histories of subsequent authors. Maqrīzī was alone in compiling his Ittiՙāẓ al-ḥunafā' as a history of the dynasty in Egypt, introduced by a miscellany of information on its origins and previous career.

Latin Christianity

2019 ◽  
pp. 105-149
Author(s):  
Joshua Bennett
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Religious History ◽  
The Other ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
The Middle Ages

This chapter considers the Victorian rehabilitation of the religious history of the Middle Ages, a period which symbolized for contemporaries the claims of Roman and Anglo-Catholicism to present-day obedience and acceptance. It draws particular attention to the importance of the liberal Anglican historian, Henry Hart Milman. Influenced by Leopold von Ranke, Milman challenged anti-Catholic denunciations of the papal Antichrist on the one hand, and reactionary eulogies to medievalism on the other, to depict the period instead as a progressive and autonomous age of ‘Latin Christianity’. It became increasingly common for religious liberals, and even conservative evangelicals and high churchmen, to echo Milman’s treatment of the Middle Ages as a providential training ground for modern individuality. The more secular appraisals of the period offered, in different ways, by William Lecky and George Gordon Coulton grated against Protestant attempts to integrate Catholicism into theologically driven understandings of the development of civilization.

scholarly journals Empire and Elites after the Muslim Conquest

2003 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-140
Author(s):  
Asma Barlas
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
History Of ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Truth Value ◽  
The One ◽  
The Middle Ages

Perhaps one would not expect a history of “Islamic rule” in the seventh andeighth centuries in what is now the Middle East to illuminate any contemporarydebate on Islam, in particular about whether there is an innate civilizationalclash between it and the (Christian) West. And yet this modeststudy manages to do that, if only tangentially and coincidentally, and if readwith some reservations.Cambridge historians are renowned for their preoccupation with elites,generally of provinces far removed from the centers of power, and hencetheir single-minded focus on the “politics of notables” of relatively minorlocalities. From such provincial concerns, however, emerge more universalclaims about, for instance, the nature of British colonial rule in India or ofIslamic rule in the Middle Ages. Chase Robinson, following this tradition,assesses – as “critic and architect” – the changing status of Christian andMuslim elites following the Muslim conquest of northern Mesopotamia.Three themes are implicit: the interrelationship of history and historiography,the effects of the Muslim conquest, and the nature of Islam. Thus, Iwill review it thematically as well. I should point out that I engage his workas a generalist, not as a historian, and that I am interested not so much in hisretelling of events as in the political meanings with which he endows them.(Re)writing History. To reconstruct a past about which there is such adearth of primary period sources is at best hazardous. For one, where documentssuch as conquest treaties exist, they have little truth-value, saysRobinson. He thus specifies that he is concerned less with their accuracythan with how they were perceived to have governed relations between localMuslims/imperial authorities, on the one hand, and Christians on the other.For another, conquest history in fact “describes post-conquest history.” Thusthe “conquest past” is a re-presentation of events from a post-conquest present,an exercise in which Christians and Muslims had an equal stake sincethe “conquest past could serve to underpin [their] authority alike.”Historians then must disentangle events from their own narration, or at leastrecognize the ways in which recording events also reframes them.Fortunately for him, says Robinson, his work was enabled by that of al-Azdi, a tenth-century Muslim historian. However, even as he admits that ...

History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ferdinand Gregorovius ◽  
Annie Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City ◽  
The Middle Ages
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