Islamic Glass in the Making

The ancient glass industry changed dramatically towards the end of the first millennium. The Roman glassmaking tradition of mineral soda glass was increasingly supplanted by the use of plant ash as the main fluxing agent at the turn of the ninth century CE. Defining primary production groups of plant ash glass has been a challenge due to the high variability of raw materials and the smaller scale of production. Islamic Glass in the Making advocates a large-scale archaeometric approach to the history of Islamic glassmaking to trace the developments in the production, trade and consumption of vitreous materials between the eighth and twelfth centuries and to separate the norm from the exception. It proposes compositional discriminants to distinguish regional production groups, and provides insights into the organisation of the glass industry and commerce during the early Islamic period. The interdisciplinary approach leads to a holistic understanding of the development of Islamic glass; assemblages from the early Islamic period in Mesopotamia, Central Asia, Egypt, Greater Syria and Iberia are evaluated, and placed in the larger geopolitical context. In doing so, this book fills a gap in the present literature and advances a large-scale approach to the history of Islamic glass.

A Critique of Muḥammad Shahrūr's Views on the Qur’ān, the Ḥadīth Corpus, Sharīᶜah, and Early Islamic Scholarship

This article describes the life, education, and thoughts of Muhammad Shahrūr, whose discourse on Islam generated confusion and much in the way of polemical debate. His controversial bias favoured modernity, influenced by modern Western epistemology, traditions, and secularism. The author applies qualitative content analysis to select writings. The analysis unveils his position (s) in light of mainstream Islam and focusses on Shahrūr’s approach to Islamic religious thought via (1) theories of Non-Synonymity and Limit; (2) his view of the Ḥadīth and Sharīᶜah; (3) the status of Muslim women with regard to polygamy, dress code and feminism; (4) the law of inheritance; (5) western culture and civilization; and (6) evolution; democracy, nationalism and pluralism, etc.

Scientific Method in Late-Antique Paganism: The (Rational) Empiricism of al-Filāḥa l-nabaṭiyya (The Nabatean Agriculture)

The reputation of the late-antique or early Islamic al-Filāḥa l-nabaṭiyya (The Nabatean Agriculture) as an esoteric forgery has recently begun to shift and its value as a source for the study of early-Islamic or late-antique Near Eastern paganism has been restored. This article contributes to a further reinterpretation of the work by elucidating its value for the history of late-antique and early Islamic science. It argues that the work distinguishes between the epistemological categories of the rational and the marvelous and critically approaches both based on a rational empiricism which it shares with contemporary disciplines such as medicine and astrology. The concepts of experience (taǧriba) and reason (qiyās) are central to al-Filāḥa l-nabaṭiyya’s epistemology, and the work relies on observation and experiments, combined with methods of deductive and analogical reasoning to obtain applied botanical and agricultural knowledge. Al-Filāḥa l-nabaṭiyya also contains competing views regarding prophecy and astrological knowledge which are illustrative of epistemological debates within Pagan late-antique scholarship.

Armonización de calendarios en el mundo islámico primitivo como se refleja en Elementos de astronomía de al-Farghānī

This paper seeks to shed more light on calendrical knowledge in the first centuries of the Islamic era in which different administrative traditions fell under the control of a central government. Astronomy as a court-sponsored discipline in the Abbasid dynasty (132-656 AH/750-1258 CE), undertook the pivotal task of identifying and mastering various calendrical disciplines under the reign of the caliphs to make a centralized management feasible. In the first two centuries, the domination of the Arabic lunar calendar, whose significance lies in governing the Islamic yearly festivals and occasions, led to drastic disagreements with the annual planting cycles that were followed by the farmers. Accordingly, the official taxation system faced serious problems. The solution to which was the development of a well-established solar calendar. The large concern of the ninth-century Muslim astronomers for calendrical computations, acknowledges their integral participation in this executive challenge. The present study follows these practices through the lens of a ninth-century Arabic astronomical text, written by Aḥmad b. Muḥammad b. Kathīr al-Farghānī (Alfraganus in the west), known mainly as the Elements of Astronomy. The careful exploration of this text helps us achieve a broader image of time-keeping accounts in the early Islamic era and the need for calendrical conversions. Moreover, the author’s detailed report of the five existing calendars of the time (Arabic, Syriac, Byzantine, Persian and Egyptian) and their systems of nomenclature, opens an early window to the linguistic investigation of time-reckoning in the Islamic world. Este artículo pretende arrojar luz sobre los conocimientos calendáricos en los primeros siglos de la era islámica, en los que diferentes tradiciones administrativas quedaban bajo el control de un gobierno central. La astronomía, como disciplina patrocinada por la corte en la dinastía abasí (132-656 /750-1258), emprendió la tarea fundamental de identificar y dominar varias disciplinas calendáricas bajo el reinado de los califas para hacer viable una gestión centralizada. En los dos primeros siglos, el dominio del calendario lunar árabe, cuya importancia radica en la regulación de las fiestas y ocasiones anuales islámicas, provocó drásticos desacuerdos con los ciclos anuales de siembra que seguían los agricultores. En consecuencia, el sistema fiscal oficial se enfrentó a graves problemas, cuya solución fue el desarrollo de un calendario solar bien establecido. La gran preocupación de los astrónomos musulmanes del siglo IX por los cómputos calendáricos reconoce su participación integral en este desafío ejecutivo. El presente estudio sigue estas prácticas a través de la atenta lectura de un texto astronómico árabe del siglo IX escrito por Ahmad b. Muhammad b. Kathīr al-Farghānī (Alfraganus en occidente), conocido principalmente como los Elementos de Astronomía. La cuidadosa exploración de este texto nos ayuda a conseguir una imagen más amplia de los relatos sobre el tiempo en la primera época islámica y la necesidad de las conversiones calendáricas. Además, el informe detallado del autor sobre los cinco calendarios existentes en la época (árabe, siríaco, bizantino, persa y egipcio) y sus sistemas de nomenclatura, abre una posibilidad para la investigación lingüística de la relojería en el mundo islámico.