Post

https://twitter.com/PhDniX/status/1484498586515746816

More from @shahanSean

Sean W. Anthony

@shahanSean

Dec 21

As noted by @IraniRoxanna, Khamenei is quoting one of the more misogynist passages from Nahj al-balāġah here, in Arabic: al-marʾah rayḥānah wa-laysat bi-qahramānah.
Personally, I don’t think ʿAlī actually uttered these words...

Why?
[1] It's strange forʿAlī to employ a word like qahramānah, a word borrowed into Arabic from Persian typically used in the Abbasid era to referred to an enslaved stewardess of a harem.
[2] The saying is attributed to other, later figures:

The one worth considering most seriously is Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, one of the fathers of Arabic literary prose. He’s a key figure for the transmission of Persian and Indian gnomologia into Arabic literature. See the excerpt from Ibn Qutaybah’s ʿUyūn al-aḫbār below.

Read 6 tweets

Sean W. Anthony

@shahanSean

Dec 10

Reading a new essay by Devin Stewart, "Ignoring the Bible in Qur’anic Studies Scholarship of the Late Twentieth Century" (2024). It's on the history of qur'anic studies scholarship in the 20th century and the place of biblical literatere therein. Some thoughts ...

Really it's an autopsy of what went wrong why the topic stagnated in qur'anic studies after WW2. He gives this example of Watt's revisions of Bell's Intro to the Qur'an as primary example of what changed. The language of the ToC speaks volumes.
scienceopen.com/hosted-documen…

I think people are too harsh on Watt, but his approach does strike me as minimizing and even censoring the rigorist, comparativist approach of older orientalist philology in favor of practicing scholarship as a way of making nice: For Watt (an Anglican priest) ...

Read 7 tweets

Sean W. Anthony

@shahanSean

Mar 4

Epigraphy can be dangerous! A quick tall tale from the Muʿjam al-buldān of Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī (d. 1229) about how an epigraphic discovery in Palmyra led to fall of the Umayyad caliphate…
The story is told by a grandson of Khālid al-Qasrī named Ismāʿīl. He recounts ...

how he accompanied the last Umayyad caliph Marwān II to defeat the rival claimant, Sulaymān ibn Hishām. He says:
“I was with Marwān, the last of the Umayyad tyrants, when he destroyed the walls of Palmyra. They rebelled against him, and he slaughtered them...

He sent the cavalry every which way to trample their corpses; the viscera of their flesh and bones splattered all over the horses’ hooves. He then razed the city walls. The demolition revealed to him a mighty trench. They removed a boulder from it and, lo, they found ...

Read 8 tweets

Sean W. Anthony

@shahanSean

Feb 8

A wonderful anecdote from Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī’s al-Imtāʿ wa-l-muʾānasah:
An agonistic/skeptic (mutaḥayyir) from 10th-century Sijistān was, “What leads you to still hold to the validity of your faith?” And he replies:
“A special quality nothing else has:...

I was born and reared in it. I imbibed its sweetness and grew fond of the customs of its adherents. I’d compare myself to a man who entered a lodge seeking shade from heaven’s brightness for an hour or so of daylight. The lodger brought him to one of its rooms without knowing...

or considering whether it was in good shape. All of a sudden a cloud appeared and a mighty downpour came. The room began to leak. He looked at the other rooms in the lodge but saw they too leaked; he even saw the courtyard of the building turned to muck.
So he decided to stay ...

Read 6 tweets

Sean W. Anthony

@shahanSean

Jan 28

In the early 1960s (?) the Egyptian scholar Muḥammad al-Bahī published a small tract called *Missionaries and Orientalists and their Stance towards Islam*. Though a mere 26 pages, it caught the attention of the German journal Die Welt des Islams, which...
archive.org/download/mbmsm…

published a review of it written by a Syrian scholar from Aleppo named Muḥammad Yaḥyā Hāshmī. The tract is interesting because it gives us a ‘pre-Saidian’ criticism of Orientalism from Egypt, and I think that one can encounter some familiar themes.
jstor.org/stable/1569728

Al-Bahī lists the aims of Western colonialism in the MidEast which he believes to be abetted by missionaries and, especially, orientalists. They are: to undermine Pan-Arabism and its cultural + historical bases, to nullify the spiritual values of Islam, to depict the Qur’an as...

Read 7 tweets

Sean W. Anthony

@shahanSean

Aug 21, 2023

Q. Naḥl 16:103 famously rebuts the accussation of Quraysh that the prophet Muhammad receives instructions from a man The verse is a good example of how a topos is created by the Qur'an that then generates many spurious stories in the tafsīr/exegetical literature ...

Let’s just look at the stories compiled by al-Ṭabarī (d. 923) to gain a glance how this process unfolds. Basically, all these stories attempt to answer a simple (and entirely extraneous) question: Who was this man who supposedly taught the prophet?

[1] Balaam
Mujāhid←Ibn ʿAbbās:
“The messenger of God ﷺ taught a smith in Mecca who spoke a non-Arabic tongue (or: Aramiac) whose name was Balaam. The polytheists noticed when the messenger of God ﷺ visited him and when he’d leave his home, they said, “Balaam is teaching him!”

Read 9 tweets

Share this page!

Enter URL or ID to Unroll

Sean W. Anthony

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

More from @shahanSean

Sean W. Anthony

Sean W. Anthony

Sean W. Anthony

Sean W. Anthony

Sean W. Anthony

Sean W. Anthony

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Send Email!