Anna Akasoy

Anna Akasoy; Charles Burnett; Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim

The first encounters between the Islamic world and Tibet took place in the course of the expansion of the Abbasid Empire in the eighth century. Military and political contacts went along with an increasing interest in the other side. Cultural exchanges and the transmission of knowledge were facilitated by a trading network, with musk constituting one of the main trading goods from the Himalayas, largely through India. From the thirteenth century onwards the spread of the Mongol Empire from the Western borders of Europe through Central Asia to China facilitated further exchanges. The significance of these interactions has been long ignored in scholarship. This volume represents a major contribution to the subject, bringing together new studies by an interdisciplinary group of international scholars. They explore for the first time the multi-layered contacts between the Islamic world, Central Asia and the Himalayas from the eighth century until the present day in a variety of fields, including geography, cartography, art history, medicine, history of science and education, literature, hagiography, archaeology, and anthropology.

Anna Akasoy; Charles Burnett; Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim

Rashid al-Din (1274-1318), physician and powerful minister at the court of the Ilkhans, was a key figure in the cosmopolitan milieu in Iran under Mongol rule. He set up an area in the vicinity of the court where philosophers, doctors, astronomers, and historians from different parts of Eurasia lived together, exchanged ideas and produced books. He was himself involved in collecting, collating and editing these materials, and the substantial oeuvre that resulted is a gold-mine for anyone studying the transmission of knowledge across cultures. By bringing together contributions from the fields of the history of religion, medicine, science and art, this book examines the cultural dynamics of Rashid al-Din’s circle. It addresses questions such as: How were different or conflicting perceptions mediated? What were Rashid al-Din’s aims in gathering information about different religions and societies? To what extent does Rashid al-Din’s intellectual contribution represent something new and different from its individual components? Contents Introduction Birgitt Hoffmann Speaking about Oneself: Autobiographical Statements in the Works of Rashid al-Din Mika Natif Rashid al-Din’s alter ego: the Seven Paintings of Moses in Jami? al-tawarikh Kazuhiko Shiraiwa Rashid al-Din’s Primary Sources in Compiling the Jami? al-tawarikh; a Tentative Survey Judith Pfeiffer The Canonization of Cultural Memory: Ghazan Khan, Rashid al-Din, and the Construction of the Mongol Past Reuven Amitai Rashid al-Din as a Historian of the Mamluks Hodong Kim Reappraisal of the ‘Register of Chiliarchies’ in Jami? al-tawarikh Leigh Chipman A Tale of Two Doctors: Rashid al-Din and Qu?b al-Din al-Shirazi Vivienne Lo and Yidan Wang A Comparative Study of Rashid al-Din’s Tansuqnama and its Chinese Sources Anna Akasoy The Buddha and the Straight Path. Rashid al-Din’s Life of the Buddha: Islamic Perspectives Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim  Life of the Buddha, Some Tibetan Perspectives Ron Sela Rashid al-Din’s Historiographical Legacy in the Muslim World Christopher Atwood Mongols, Arabs, Kurds, and Franks: Rashid al-Din’s Comparative Anthropology of Tribal Society

Anna Akasoy; Guido Giglioni

While the transmission of Greek philosophy and science via the Muslim world to western Europe in the Middle Ages has been closely scrutinized, the fate of the Arabic philosophical and scientific legacy in later centuries has received less attention, a fault this volume aims to correct. The authors in this collection discuss in particular the radical ideas associated with Averroism that are attributed to the Aristotle commentator Ibn Rushd (1126-1198) and challenge key doctrines of the Abrahamic religions. This volume examines what happened to Averroes’s philosophy during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Did early modern thinkers really no longer pay any attention to the Commentator? Were there undercurrents of Averroism after the sixteenth century? How did Western authors in this period contextualise Averroes and Arabic philosophy within their own cultural heritage? How different was the Averroes they created as a philosopher in a European tradition from Ibn Rushd, the theologian, jurist and philosopher of the Islamic tradition?

Anna Akasoy; Stefan Georges; Muḥammad ibn ʿAbdallāh al-Bāzyār

Die Zeit der frühen Abbasiden ist bekannt für ihre kulturelle Blüte. Auf allen Gebieten wurde das Wissen der Griechen, Perser und anderer Kulturen zusammengetragen und ins Arabische übersetzt. Das neu erschlossene Material wurde zugleich Ausgangspunkt eigenständiger Werke. Zu wenig ist freilich über die Werke selbst bekannt. Viele gingen später verloren oder harren noch der Wiederentdeckung. Der vorliegende Band macht ein weiteres davon zugänglich. Muhammad ibn 'Abdallah al-Bazyar verfasste es für den Kalifen al-Mutawakkil (847-861) und trug seinem Herrn darin zusammen, was über Falken und Hunde bekannt war, insbesondere über deren Behandlung bei Krankheiten - ein großes Bedürfnis, denn die Beizjagd, die Jagd mit Falken und Hunden, zählte nicht nur zu den liebsten Freizeitbeschäftigungen der Kalifen, sondern war geradezu ein höfisches Ritual. Im 13. Jahrhundert wurde das Werk des al-Bazyar unter Friedrich II. (1194-1250) ins Lateinische und wohl unter Alfons dem Weisen (1221-1284) ins Kastilische übersetzt und entwickelte sich in der Folge im Abendland zu einem der meistverbreiteten Handbücher seiner Art. Der Vergleich der bereits gut erschlossenen Übersetzungen mit dem nunmehr zugänglichen arabischen Original bietet neue Einsichten in den Prozess des orientalisch-okzidentalischen Wissenstransfers in dieser Zeit.

Al Kindi gilt als der Begrunder der arabischen "falsafa", also der aristotelisch gepragten Philosophie im Islam. Er war massgeblich an der philosophischen Bewegung im Bagdad des 9. Jahrhunderts beteiligt, wo ein Ubersetzerzirkel im sog. Haus der Weisheit (Bait al-hikma) die Schriften griechischer Philosophen ins Arabische ubertrug. Al-Kindis Metaphysik-Schrift, die hier als erste seiner bedeutenden Schriften in einer deutschen Ubersetzung vorgelegt wird, ist grundlegend fur sein Philosophieverstandnis.

Anna Akasoy and Wim Raven 

The history of Islamic thought in the Middle Ages, the impact of Greek philosophy and science, and the formation of an own theological tradition, is a long and complex one. The articles in this volume dedicated to Hans Daiber, one of the pioneering scholars in this field, offer new insights from a variety of perspectives: philological, philosophical, and historical. The subjects range from Islamic philosophy and theology, over the history of science, the transmission into other medieval cultures to language and literature. In addition to their specific discoveries, they give an impression of the dynamics of medieval Islamic intellectual history as well as of the diversity of approaches needed to understand this dynamics.

Anna Akasoy; Charles Burnett; Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim

The book is a collection of essays offering a glance at the contacts between astrology and medicine across different cultural contexts, and at different periods of time.
The volume includes the following articles:
Nils P. Heeßel, “Astrological Medicine in Babylonia”;
Vivian Nutton, “Greek Medical Astrology and the Boundaries of Medicine”;
Hilary M. Carey, “Medieval Latin Astrology and the Cycles of
Life: William English and English Medicine in Cambridge, Trinity College MS
O.5.26”;
Concetta Pennuto, “The Debate on Critical Days in Renaissance Italy”;
Y. Tzvi Langermann, “The Astral Connections of Critical Days. Some Late Antique Sources Preserved in Hebrew and Arabic”;
Anna Akasoy, “Arabic Physiognomy as a Link between Astrology and Medicine”; Vivienne Lo, “Heavenly Bodies in Early China: Astro-Physiology in Context”; Audrius Beinorius, “Astral Hermeneutics: Astrology and Medicine in India”; Vesna A. Wallace, “A Convergence of Medical and Astro-Sciences in Indian Tantric Buddhism: A Case of the Kalacakratantra”;
Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim, “Tibetan Medical Astrology”;
Dorian Gieseler Greenbaum, “From Lilly to Steiner and Jung: Temperament in
Astrology and Psychology, Seventeenth and Twentieth Centuries.”

Anna Akasoy; James Montgomery; Peter Pormann

Islam as a cultural, intellectual, and religious venture appears in the popular imagination as a monolithic entity. Orientalists of the traditional ilk have tended to describe it in essentialist terms, whilst many fundamentalist Muslims themselves promote their construction of a pure and unadulterated Islamic past, to which they strive to return by purging foreign or unauthentic elements from their religion. Next to these attempts, another more traditional view sees the influence between the Western and the Islamic world in linear and teleological terms. Knowledge was transmitted, so to speak, from Alexandria to Baghdad, and hence to Toledo and Paris. The present volume challenges both these concepts regarding the development of Islamic cultures. To do justice to the complexity of structures within which the Muslim Middle Ages unfolded, it approaches the questions of interaction and influence through a novel conceptual framework, that of crosspollination. Instead of telling the story of the transmission of Western works from Greece via Islam into the Latin world, a number of case studies highlight the plurality of encounters between Islam and other adjacent cultures.

Anna Akasoy, Alexander Fidora; Douglas Dunlop; Aristotle

This volume offers a critical edition of the only extant Arabic manuscript of the Nicomachean Ethics.
A comprehensive introduction by the late Douglas M. Dunlop describes the influence this major Aristotelian work had on Arabic literature. Dunlop’s annotated English translation includes important references to the Greek text of the Ethics. The appendix includes a select Greek-Arabic glossary.

This study of the Sicilian Questions of the philosopher and mystic Ibn Sabٴ īn of Murcia (ca. 1217-1270) reads the text, allegedly composed as an answer to questions sent by Frederick II as a reflection of intellectual life in the late Almohad Arab West.

The first part of the book is dedicated to the author, his political and intellectual context and his impact. The second part analyses the structure and method of the text and relates it to Islamic and Jewish philosophical and mystical traditions in the Arab West. Furthermore, its literary category, context of composition and readership are discussed. The third part deals with the sources of the Sicilian Questions and their position in the Arab West.

The appendix consists of a German translation of the Sicilian Questions including detailed philological and philosophical notes as well as a revised edition of the Arabic text.

Anna Akasoy and Ibn Sab'in

Ibn Sab'in (ca. 1217-1270), aus Murcia stammend, verband in seinem Werk Logik, Metaphysik und Mystik in einzigartiger Weise und gehört damit zu den bemerkenswertesten Gestalten der arabischen Philosophie. Sein erstes großes Werk, das er in Antwort auf die sog. Sizilianischen Fragen Friedrichs II. verfasste, gilt als einführendes Kompendium in die arabisch-islamische Philosophie Andalusiens.

English summary: Due to his cycle of poems On the carpet of the wind the Lebanese Fauzi al-Maluf (1899-1930) is considered one of the most outstanding representatives of Arabic romantic poetry in the Latin American exile. His multi-faceted works comprising spiritualistic and political as well as love poetry is the subject of the topo- and typological analysis in this study. A comparison with European romantic and contemporary Arabic poetry is the basis of a historical contextualization of Maluf's works. German description: Wegen seines Gedichtzyklus Auf dem Teppich des Windes wird der Libanese Fauzi al-Maluf (1899-1930) als einer der herausragenden Vertreter der arabischen romantischen Dichtung im lateinamerikanischen Exil betrachtet. Sein facettenreiches Werk, das spiritualistische und politische Dichtung ebenso wie Liebespoesie umfasst, ist Gegenstand der topo- und typologischen Analyse in dieser Untersuchung. Vergleiche mit der europaischen romantischen und der zeitgenossischen arabischen Dichtung ordnen das Werk Malufs in den weiteren Kontext der Literaturgeschichte ein.