The importance of any scholar can be justified with either of three arguments: They wrote many and important works, furthering one or even several disciplines; they taught many students who went on to become themselves important scholars; or people more generally benefited from their dispensation of helpful information. Ideally, a scholar would combine all of the above, which should reflect in them being appointed to influential positions in educational institutions. However, as today, so in the 16th century politics played a role in appointment processes, and often enough the person skillful in those could overcome someone more knowledgeable in the discipline to be taught.
Continue reading “Teaching and transmission in 16th-century Damascus”Visualizing female actors in Hadith networks with Palladio
Perhaps more than any other area of permodern Arabic literature, genres concerned with ḥadīth transmission offer themselves for a network approach. Even small collections provide a plethora of names and put them in relation to each other. Someone hears one tradition from someone and then relates it to someone else, thereby turning from a “target” in one relation to a “source” in the next. While the individual chain of transmission might only give diachronic relations, a survey of a larger number of chains might also unearth synchronic relations between transmitters. Continue reading “Visualizing female actors in Hadith networks with Palladio”
Ijāzas or Samāʿāt?
Almost a year ago, I first wrote about Ibn Ṭūlūn’s teaching certificates (ijāzāt) and made a somewhat loose promise:
I could identify five teaching certificates (ijāza) in Ibn Ṭūlūn’s handwriting. The four I have seen are between two and five pages long and were all written between 922/1516 and 943/1536. I hope to present all of them here in the near future.
In the meantime, one more item has received an entry and in March 2018 I finally got my hands on the final one I had not seen yet (I have uploaded the file to github like the others). It is part of a Majmūʿa kept at the library of the Baladiyya of Alexandria which I have already mentioned in a recent entry (“A whole Majmūʿa copied? MS Majāmīʿ 315”). Continue reading “Ijāzas or Samāʿāt?”
A teaching certificate
Teaching and audition certificates have become all the rage in the social history (of knowledge production) of the Medieval Middle East during the last decades. Ibn Ṭūlūn allegedly complained that he lost most of those he received from his teachers in the turmoil of of revolts and reconquests of Early Ottoman Damascus. Yet, some actually have survived and even been edited by Muḥammad Muṭīʿ al-Ḥāfiẓ under the title Nawādir al-ijāzāt wa-l-samāʿāt (Beirut 1998).
In turn, some certificates he issued in turn to his own students do survive as well, dispersed in manuscripts in Berlin, Istanbul, Alexandria and Princeton. So far, I could identify five teaching certificates (ijāza) in Ibn Ṭūlūn’s handwriting. The four I have seen are between two and five pages long and were all written between 922/1516 and 943/1536. I hope to present all of them here in the near future. Continue reading “A teaching certificate”