Language Error from Western Scholar Perspectives

Oriental mysticism, religion, and science are all intertwined with literature; while proven to be fantastic for many scholars, this intermixture has made it challenging to extract mystical concepts from poetry. This difficulty has been one of the earliest sources of conflict between Oriental literary scholars, religious figures, and mystics. The situation becomes more complex should one attempt to compare Oriental mysticism with its Occidental counterpart. Arguably, the first Western scholar who conducted such a rigorous comparison was Sir William Jones (1746–1794), a linguist, translator, and poet who was also a Supreme Court Judge in Calcutta. His fascination with Persian mystical poets such as Rumi (1210-1273), Sadi (1210-1292), and Hafez (1315-1390) drove him towards Sufism. Due to his understanding of Persian mysticism and culture, Jones became one of the best interpreters of Indo-Persian literature. His works, founded on his fascination with Persian language and literature, gained him the title of ‘Persian Jones’ and established his international reputation as an Orientalist. Jones’s publications highly impacted Romantic scholars, developing sympathetic representations of the Orient in the period’s literature. Jones’s works, letters, Persian manuscripts, and the annotations he made on them have not been examined for his Persian mystical studies before this thesis. Therefore, this PhD research will investigate his works and library on Sufism and his comparative study of mystical schools. It intends to analyse Jones’s findings in his comparative mystical studies and elaborate on his understanding of Sufism. This thesis investigates his essays, letters, and annotations in various texts; such texts are mainly available in the Royal Asiatic Society archives and the British Library’s India Office Records and Private Papers. Moreover, in some cases, Jones has altered his English translations of Persianate Sufi texts; these alterations will be examined and compared with the original texts to demonstrate Jones’s rationale behind them. This research will pursue the accuracy of Jones’s interpretation of Sufism and Hinduism. In addition, it examines his development of the interpretations of Oriental mysticism, which he presented to eighteenth-century Europe. The findings of this research will contribute to the growing literature on Orientalism and shed a brighter light on the works of Sir William Jones and Indo-Persian literature and mysticism.

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Western Christian Contacts with Buddhism, c.1050–1350

Studies in Church History ◽

10.1017/s0424208400050129 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 51 ◽

pp. 80-91

Author(s):

Bernard Hamilton

Keyword(s):

Middle Ages ◽

Western Europe ◽

Eleventh Century ◽

Latin Translation ◽

Clement Of Alexandria ◽

Western Scholar ◽

Mongol Empire ◽

The Buddha ◽

Contemplative Life ◽

Latin Version

The existence of Buddhism was known to some people in the Graeco-Roman world. Writing about two centuries after the birth of Christ, Clement of Alexandria recorded: ‘Some of the Indians obey the precepts of Buddha, whom, on account of his extraordinary sanctity, they have raised to divine honours.’ No Latin translation was made of this part of Clement’s work, and nothing was known of Buddhism in Western Europe in the early Middle Ages. In 1048 an anonymous Western scholar living in Constantinople made a Latin translation from the Greek of a story called Barlaam and Ioasaph, which was wrongly attributed to John of Damascus (d. c.75o).This appeared to be a saint’s life: it told how the Indian prince Ioasaph had renounced the world and embraced an austere ascetic life under the direction of the hermit Barlaam. In fact, this was a life of Prince Gautama, the Buddha. This version had originated in the kingdom of Bactria and had been translated into Arabic and later into Georgian, from which the Greek version was made in the early eleventh century. In the process of transmission the text had been Christianized. Prince Ioasaph, who renounced earthly glory to lead the contemplative life, fitted easily into the pattern of Christian hagiography, and his life proved popular because of its exotic setting in the Indies. During the Middle Ages the Latin version was translated into most Western languages, but Western people remained ignorant of Buddhism until the rise of the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth century made it possible for them to travel to central and eastern Asia.

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Discussions on the Influence of the Judeo-Christian Culture on Hadiths

The Journal of Rotterdam Islamic and Social Sciences ◽

10.2478/jriss-2013-0009 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 1 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Özcan Hıdır

Keyword(s):

18Th Century ◽

Christian Tradition ◽

Islamic World ◽

Early Islam ◽

Christian Culture ◽

Western Scholar ◽

Biblical Texts ◽

Muslim Scholars ◽

Islamic Literature

AbstractAlthough it is difficult to determine the first Western scholar to claim the influence of Judaic culture on hadiths or tried to relate hadiths to the biblical texts, the Frenchman Barthelmy d’Herbelot (d. 1695) was the first orientalist to claim that many chapters in the hadith literature, including al-kutub al-sitta, were borrowed from the Talmud.The ideas and claims of some Western scholars such as Alois Sprenger, Ignaz Goldziher, Georges Vajda, and S. Rosenblatt up to the end of the 18th century led to many discussions that were defended and developed with new arguments by many Western scholars. Nowadays, the reflection of these claims in the Islamic world has become a serious hadith problem. In addition to the role of the conversion movement in the early Islam and the first Jewish converts to Islam, the non-Arabs known as almawālī, especially in the Ummayad period, and poets like Umayya ibn Abi al-Salt of the Jāhilliya period, who were believed to have read the early holy books, and preachers, are the most important factors playing a role in this influence. This study attempts to analyze the claims, opinions, and factors from the perspectives of the Islamic literature and Muslim scholars’ views towards the Jewish‐Christian tradition.

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The Tax Censuses and the Decline of the Serf Population in Imperial Russia, 1833-1858

Slavic Review ◽

10.2307/2496712 ◽

1979 ◽

Vol 38 (3) ◽

pp. 403-425 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Steven L. Hoch ◽

Wilson R. Augustine

Keyword(s):

Death Rate ◽

Birth Rate ◽

Population Data ◽

One Dimension ◽

Demographic Development ◽

Imperial Russia ◽

System A ◽

Considerable Controversy ◽

Western Scholar ◽

The Subject

The demographic development of the serf population in imperial Russia, particularly its rate of natural growth during the thirty years preceding the emancipation in 1861, has been the subject of considerable controversy. On the basis of data from the tax censuses (revizii), abolitionists sontended that the serf population was dying out, implying that the death rate consistently exceeded the birth rate. Many Soviet historians and demographers have subsequently advanced this view, seeing a demographic crisis as one dimension of the collapse of the feudal serf system. A Western scholar, Professor Daniel Field, has recently lent his support to this interpretation. But was serfdom so socially oppressive or economically stifling as to affect natural population growth adversely? Other contemporary statisticians and later historians—either less opposed to serfdom or more skeptical about the accuracy of population data—have avoided the issue.

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The Search for God's Law

American Journal of Islam and Society ◽

10.35632/ajis.v11i4.2444 ◽

1994 ◽

Vol 11 (4) ◽

pp. 579-582

Author(s):

Yusuf Talal DeLorenzo

Keyword(s):

American Oriental Society ◽

The World ◽

Western Scholar

When one works in the field of Shari'ah studies, a field widelyperceived as holding little excitement (for those who pursue careers init and for those who don't), one rarely encounters a book that sendsone into the poetic ecstasy of a Keats, for example, on the occasion ofhis first looking into Chapman's Homer. Nonetheless, in any intellectualenterprise there are joys that perhaps only the initiated, so tospeak, may truly share. In fact, in the field of Shari'ah studies, as inmany of the fields related to the study of classical Islamic disciplines,the esoteric delights to be tasted these days are many, particularly inview of the continual stream of carefully edited works from theclassical period ... especially when so many of them were believedlost, eaten by worms in some dreary desert setting or sent tumblingtoward eternity in the bloody waters of the Tigris when Baghdad wasoverrun by Mongol hordes. But, to return to the present, it is certainlynot everyday that something really significant happens in the field. InThe Search for God's Law, that significant something has happened.Less than a decade ago, a distinguished western scholar lamentedin the Journal of the American Oriental Society that "despite the greatinterest shown in U$iil al fiqh by Orientalists throughout the world, nogeneral and systematic work dealing with this most important Islamic ...

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Prophet Muhammad and His Western Critics

American Journal of Islam and Society ◽

10.35632/ajis.v18i2.2026 ◽

2001 ◽

Vol 18 (2) ◽

pp. 162-164

Author(s):

Ibrahim Kalin

Keyword(s):

Jesus Christ ◽

Central Place ◽

Main Argument ◽

The West ◽

The Bible ◽

Western Scholar ◽

Western Scholarship ◽

The Relationship

This book by the Pakistani scholar Zafar Ali Qureshi is devoted to animportant aspect of the relationship between Islam and the West.The image of the Prophet Muhammad (pbu) produced by western scholarsof Islam has determined, in many ways, the parameters of the relationshipbetween the two religions and the respective civilizations to which theyhave given rise. The main argument of Qureshi's extremely well-researchedbook is that the western scholarship bred by the centuries-oldChristian prejudices against Islam has tried to undermine the religious andintellectual basis of Islam by undermining the central place and authority ofthe Prophet of Islam. This strategy was in no way accidental, because theChristian conception of religion takes as the basis of the Divine revelationnot the revealed book, i.e., the Qur'an or the Bible, but Jesus Christ. Seenthrough the eyes of Christology, Islam could not be anything other than'Muhammadanism', and any scholarly treatment of it was bound to bebased on the figure of the Prophet of Islam. It was within this frameworkthat a number of historicist and materialist accounts were given to provethat the Prophet Muhammad was not an authentic prophet and that hismotives were basically political, tribal or economic.The number of books produced in this line of spurious scholarship isimmense, and Qureshi has carried out an immense survey of westernliterature on the life and personality of the Prophet. Although the authorspans through hundreds of books produced in the West, he focuses on thework of Rev. Montgomery Watt, the celebrated western scholar of Islam.The reason for this concentration is that Watt's two-volume work on the ...

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Membaca Metode Penafsiran Al-Qur’an Kontemporer di Kalangan Sarjana Barat Analisis Pemikiran Angelika Neuwirth

ULUMUNA ◽

10.20414/ujis.v18i2.854 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 18 (2) ◽

pp. 269-286

Author(s):

Lien Iffah Naf’atu Fina

Keyword(s):

Western Scholar ◽

Qur'anic Exegesis

This article examines Western scholar thoughts on methods of Qur’anic exegesis. It specifically analyzes Angelika Neuwirth’s thoughts as one of the leading western scholars on the Qur’an. She is considered the pioneer of academic-dialogic approaches to the Qur’an. She offers reading the Qur’an from the period of pre-canonization to conceive of the ways in which the Qur’an in the time of its revelation interacted with its surroundings. To understand this, she looks at relevant united verses as an integral unit that keeps important processes of communication during the lifetime of the Prophet. She concludes that these types of the verses are represented by the Meccan verses, not all verses of the Qur’an. Her study provides a new path in contemporary Qur’anic studies especially in the efforts to “revive” the codified Qur’an.

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An Introduction to Islam

American Journal of Islam and Society ◽

10.35632/ajis.v13i3.2306 ◽

1996 ◽

Vol 13 (3) ◽

pp. 417-420

Author(s):

Yasien Mohamed

Keyword(s):

Islamic Law ◽

Formative Period ◽

Modern World ◽

Religious Traditions ◽

Islamic Tradition ◽

Western Scholar ◽

Western Hegemony ◽

Muslim Scholars

David Waines, Islamic lecturer at Lancaster University, divides AnIntroduction to Islam into three parts. Part 1 deals with the Qur'an and theSunnah in the formative period, and part 2 is devoted to Islamic teachingsand practices, including separate chapters on Islamic law, theology, Sufism,and Shi'ism. The connecting thread in these first two parts is the ways inwhich Muslim scholars have explored "revelation and the experience oftheir Prophet, Muhammad" (p. 3). Part 3 treats Islam in the modern world,recounting the period over the last two centuries during which Muslimshave been challenged by western hegemony and have sought to establish amodem sense of Islamic identity.This is a comprehensive, wide-ranging, and up-to-date treatment ofIslamic history and culture. It is by no means the only recent introductionon Islam by a western scholar: Victor Danner's The Islamic Tradition: AnIntroduction (1988) deals with the Islamic intellectual and spiritual traditionwithin the context of other religious traditions. Frederick M. Dermy'sAn Introduction to Islam (1985) offers a comprehensive, simple account ofIslam, and Annemarie Schinunels' Islam: An Introduction is a concise and ...

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