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Sean W. Anthony Profile picture
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12 Nov, 5 tweets, 4 min read
Precious photos of the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus taken in 1862 by the famous landscape photographer Francis Bedford (1815-1894), some 3 decades before the a devastating fire nearly destroyed it in 1893, digitized and made available courtesy of @RCT
rct.uk/collection/sea…
There's a lot more at the website, including the dashing portraits of 'Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza'iri (1808-83) below, for the exhibit, "Cairo to Constantinople," here: rct.uk/collection/the…
And, yes, if you can't tell, I've been reading Alain George's incredible book on the mosque which has one of Beford's photos on the cover
press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book…
Viewing Bedford's photo (right) the transept beside Kreswell's later photos (left), taken in 1926, really show the transformation.
Another 19th-century photograph of the mosque by Francis Frith, likely take sometime between 1850 and 1870
collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O215398/d…

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More from @shahanSean

Sean W. Anthony Profile picture
22 Sep
It's said that the Umayyads’ governor of Iraq, al-Ḥajjāj ibn Yūsuf al-Thaqafī, denied that al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī was the Prophet’s progeny because he only recognized patrilineal lineage and discounted matrilineal descent. When in public al-Ḥajjāj thus declared, “Ḥusayn is not...
the progeny of the Prophet,” the renowned scholar of the Qurʾan, Yaḥyā ibn Yaʿmur, protest, “O emir, you lie!”
Irate, al-Ḥajjāj turned to him and said, “Then bring forth a proof of what you say from God’s Scripture, or else I shall kill you.” Yaḥyā replied, ...
“Thus says the Almighty, «And from [Abraham’s] progeny are David, Solomon, Job, … Zechariah, John, and Jesus » (Q. Anʿām 9:84-85). Thus does God Almighty proclaim that Jesus is from progeny of Abraham [read إبراهيم for آدم] via his mother.”
Read 4 tweets
Sean W. Anthony Profile picture
22 Jul
It's been a while since I've written a 🧵, but someone recently asked me whether or not there is a connection between the famous ḥadīth about the prostration of the sun in the Ṣaḥīḥ of al-Bukhārī and a passage in the Alexander Legend. Here’s my attempt at a cogent answer …
First, let’s look at the ḥadīth. Abū Ḏarr al-Ġifārī reports that he was at the mosque with the prophet at sundown, and unprompted the prophet asked,
“Abū Ḏarr, do you know where the sun sets?” “God and his messenger know best,” he replied. He answered, ...
“[The sun] proceeds until she prostrates (tasğuda) beneath the Throne; she asks permission, and permission is granted her. But soon [the sun] shall prostrate and it will not be accepted, and she shall seek permission but shall not receive it. It will be said to her, ...
Read 11 tweets
Sean W. Anthony Profile picture
24 Jun
An attempt to define the word millah/religion by the philosopher Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī (d. 951) from his Kitāb al-Millah,
"Religion is comprised of creeds and deeds determined and bounded by certain conditions which the founder prescribes for the collective. By seeking ...
to have [the collective] put [the creeds and deeds] into practice, he aims to attain his specified goal for them or through them. The collective might be a kin group, it might be a city or region, and it might a great nation or many nations."
Later on, he addresses ...
the issue of millah vs. dīn (take heart, even he has trouble). He says:
"The words millah and dīn are nearly synonymous with one another – so too the words sharīʿah/law and sunnah/custom. These two merely indicate and apply to the majority of determined deeds from the 2 parts...
Read 5 tweets
Sean W. Anthony Profile picture
19 Jun
Nice visualization of the different colors attested for the kiswah of the Kaaba over time.
What the kiswah actually looked like in the early days is uncertain. Here’s a few interesting traditions from the Muṣannaf of Ibn Abī Shaybah (d. 235/849)
[1] “Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq reported from an elderly woman from Mecca that she said, 'When [ʿUthmān] Ibn ʿAffān was killed,...
I was 14 yrs old.' She continued, 'I had seen the House when it had no kiswah except for the red felt wrap cast over it and the white fabric and the woolen wrap and whatever thing that hung down covering it. I saw it neither gold nor silver was on it.'
Read 7 tweets
Sean W. Anthony Profile picture
17 Jun
Abū Bakr al-Bayhaqī’s Ḥayāt al-anbiyāʾ baʿd wafātihim (Eng. The Lives of the Prophets after Deaths) is an interesting little book. I wonder: How many studies have been done of either this book or the history of this belief?
ia800606.us.archive.org/30/items/waq38…
By "this belief" I don’t mean istighāthah but, rather, that in some way prophets are alive in their graves and undecaying and whether or not this was ever squared with reality of the actual fate of their corpses
I just remembered @Adam_Bursi 's great article which delves into this
academia.edu/36681319/A_Hol…
Read 4 tweets
Sean W. Anthony Profile picture
7 Jun
Apropos Goldziher and Schacht on hadith, I think that rereading both is really in order. For me, Schacht's views seem unsustainable in light of later publications and discoveries (Motzki's Anfänge is good on this), but Goldziher's fundamental outlook and approach, ...
albeit not all his conclusions, still remain largely valid. Goldziher's views on hadith are really not a rejection of Muslim hadith lit but rather a reaction to orientalists' credulous acceptance of hadith. He cites Reinhart Dozy (d. 1883) as a foil to his own views. Dozy says...
"I am constantly surprised, not that some false passages are in the tradition (since this results from the nature of such things), but that it contains so many authentic parts (according to the most rigorous critics, half of Bukhari merits this qualification) and that, ...
Read 4 tweets

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