{"title":"Luminescent Lotuses: Mimesis in Miḥrābs and Micro-architecture at Maklī","authors":"Fatima Quraishi","doi":"10.1163/24519197-bja10031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24519197-bja10031","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article focuses on the lotus motif employed as an architectural decoration in the monuments of the Maklī necropolis from the late fourteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries. Through a close analysis of the form and its particular use in micro-architecture, a use connected with allusions to light and divine radiance, I explore the formation of a distinctly local aesthetic idiom in Sindh. This article demonstrates that builders and artisans at Maklī engaged in a practice of architectural citation that involved the serial replication of specific forms and their meanings. In so doing, it argues that history was and is seen as cumulative at the Maklī necropolis.","PeriodicalId":36525,"journal":{"name":"Philological Encounters","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47423665","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Following Richard Burton: Religious Identity and Difference in Colonial Sindh","authors":"U. Shahani","doi":"10.1163/24519197-bja10028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24519197-bja10028","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Richard Burton, soldier, ethnographer, translator, philologist, and colonial intelligence-gatherer spent the early years of his career in Sindh and was the first and primary colonial ethnographer of Sindh. Burton was clearly attracted to the ecumenical complexity of Sindhi religious practice but was hostile in his descriptions of Sindh’s Hindus whom he viewed as a corrupt and scheming “race,” subjecting the Muslims of the province to their tyranny. The article examines how Burton’s racialised ethnographies of Sindh cast Sindh as distinct from “India” and Hindus as outsider immigrants to the province. Paradoxically, Burton’s narratives also created Sindh as the space par excellence of the negation of religious categories. However, this categorisation of Sindh also highlighted it as a space distinct from India. In conclusion, the article shows how the idea of Sindh’s separate identity maintained a strong afterlife in colonial Sindh, rearticulated in certain key contexts.","PeriodicalId":36525,"journal":{"name":"Philological Encounters","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-02-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42145545","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Engagement of Nineteenth-Century Scholars with Jirmānūs Farḥāt’s Baḥth al-Maṭālib: An Early Modern Textbook for Ottoman Schools","authors":"Rossella De Luca","doi":"10.1163/24519197-bja10024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24519197-bja10024","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article focuses on the engagement of three scholars of the nineteenth century, later to be called scholars of the nahḍa, with an Arabic grammar manual titled Baḥth al-maṭālib wa-ḥathth al-ṭālib (“The Pursuit of the Questions and the Encouragement of the Student”), supposedly written in 1705 by the Maronite monk Jibrīl (later Jirmānūs) Farḥāt (1670–1732). The scholars considered in this contribution are Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq (d. 1887), Buṭrus al-Bustānī (d. 1883), and Saʿīd al-Khūrī al-Shartūnī (d. 1912). They engaged with this text by editing and printing it, and by making it available for use in Ottoman public schools. Through a close reading of representative excerpts from their printed editions, this article explores the three scholars’ philological engagement with Baḥth al-maṭālib and its multiple uses in nineteenth-century schools. The ways in which they worked on the text, it is argued, illustrate their different pedagogical approaches towards the teaching of the Arabic language.","PeriodicalId":36525,"journal":{"name":"Philological Encounters","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-12-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44767836","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Nahḍa, Iraqi Style: The Original Contribution of Father Anastās Mārī al-Kirmilī","authors":"H. Kilpatrick","doi":"10.1163/24519197-12340078","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24519197-12340078","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The subject of this article, Father Anastās Mārī al-Kirmilī (1866–1947), is a central figure in the Iraqi nahḍa. Although a Carmelite monk, he devoted his life in a non- confessional spirit to the study and reform of the Arabic language and the development of a specifically Iraqi historical and cultural consciousness. He wrote on linguistics, history, and folklore, he edited texts, published a journal and corresponded with Arab and European scholars. He is still a figure of reference for Iraqi intellectuals. By presenting his work in some detail, this article seeks to integrate him into the society of the nahḍawīs while demonstrating his particular contribution.","PeriodicalId":36525,"journal":{"name":"Philological Encounters","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-12-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45446970","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Family of Books: The Damascene Shaṭṭīs and Textual Transmission","authors":"Torsten Wollina","doi":"10.1163/24519197-12340079","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24519197-12340079","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The article explores continuities between manuscript and print culture by way of an investigation into the book-related practice of three members of the Ḥanbalī al-Shaṭṭī family. By using a diverse set of sources, it presents a view on the turn from manuscript to print during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that moves beyond technological determinism. By examining authorship, manuscript collections, and print publication, it proposes to include the institution of the family as well as the emerging global market for Arabic manuscripts into research of this medial shift.","PeriodicalId":36525,"journal":{"name":"Philological Encounters","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-12-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42225250","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Louis Cheikho and the Christianization of Pre-Islamic and Early Islamic Ascetic Poetry","authors":"Nora K. Schmid","doi":"10.1163/24519197-bja10025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24519197-bja10025","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Using the Jesuit scholar Louis Cheikho’s (1859–1927) work on pre-Islamic and early Islamic ascetic poetry as a focal point, this article examines two strategies which contemporary and later scholars accused Cheikho of using to falsify the Arabic literary heritage. Cheikho de-Islamized Arabic language texts through editorial interventions, as evinced by his edition of the Dīwān of the Abbasid ascetic poet Abū al-ʿAtāhiya. Furthermore, he overtly laid claim to the past by Christianizing pre-Islamic poetry. In his work al-Naṣrāniyya wa-ādābuhā bayna ʿarab al-jāhiliyya, Cheikho tried to establish the “origins” of Arabic cultural and literary production in Christianity. He did so in response to Arab and European intellectuals who challenged the Christian contribution to Arabic. Above all, he rejected racist ideas embedded in nineteenth-century European philology, notably the denigration of Semitic languages and their speakers based on the “Aryan”/“Semite” binary in Ernest Renan’s (1823–1892) work.","PeriodicalId":36525,"journal":{"name":"Philological Encounters","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-12-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48969201","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Past and its Possibilities in Nahḍa Scholarship","authors":"Feras Krimsti, John-Paul A. Ghobrial","doi":"10.1163/24519197-12340080","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24519197-12340080","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This introduction to the special issue “The Past and its Possibilities in Nahḍa Scholarship” reflects on the role of the past in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nahḍa discourse. It argues that historical reflection played a pivotal role in a number of scholarly disciplines besides the discipline of history, notably philosophy and logic, grammar and lexicography, linguistics, philology, and adab. Nahḍawīs reflected on continuities with the past, the genealogies of their present, and the role of history in determining their future. The introduction of print gave new impulses to the engagement with the historical heritage. We argue for a history of the nahḍa as a de-centred history of possibilities that recovers a wider circle of scholars and intellectuals and their multiple and overlapping local and global audiences. Such a history can also shed light on the many ways in which historical reflection, record-keeping practices, and confessional, sectarian, or communalist agendas are entwined.","PeriodicalId":36525,"journal":{"name":"Philological Encounters","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-12-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41318184","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"An Incomplete Journey Away from the Past: The Life and Ideas of Antonius Ameuney (1821–1881)","authors":"A. Edwards","doi":"10.1163/24519197-BJA10022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24519197-BJA10022","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article recovers a dissonant voice from the nineteenth-century nahḍa. Antonius Ameuney (1821–1881) was a fervent Protestant and staunch Anglophile. Unlike his Ottoman Syrian contemporaries, who argued for religious diversity and the formation of a civil society based on a shared Arab past, he believed that the only geopolitical Syria viable in the future was one grounded in Protestant virtues and English values. This article examines Ameuney’s complicated journey to become a Protestant Englishman and his inescapable characterization as a son of Syria. It charts his personal life and intellectual career and explores how he interpreted the religious, cultural, political, and linguistic landscape of his birthplace to British audiences. As an English-speaking Ottoman Syrian intellectual residing permanently in London, the case of Antonius Ameuney illustrates England to have been a constitutive site of the nahḍa and underscores the role played by the British public in shaping nahḍa discourses.","PeriodicalId":36525,"journal":{"name":"Philological Encounters","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-08-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45914832","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Scribal and Commentary Traditions at the Dawn of Print: The Manuscripts of the Near Eastern School of Theology as an Archive of the Early Nahḍa","authors":"Salam Rassi","doi":"10.1163/24519197-bja10023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24519197-bja10023","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article focuses on the Arabic manuscript collection of the Near Eastern School of Theology (NEST). The NEST library contains several manuscripts that were donated, copied, or read by important Christian-born intellectuals of the nahḍa. Given these men’s role in the emergence of modern publishing in the Middle East, I examine the intersections between their scribal and printing activities. I also discuss works of grammar, logic, and rhetoric in the NEST’s collection. Most of these are by late medieval and early modern authors and contain extensive commentaries and glosses. This commentary culture was a key site of learning throughout the early modern Ottoman Empire and endured among Christian as well as Muslim intellectuals of the nahḍa movement. The persistence of these scribal and intellectual traditions reveals a longue durée of Islamicate scholarly traditions that is only beginning to be understood by historians of Arab modernity.","PeriodicalId":36525,"journal":{"name":"Philological Encounters","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-08-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44072756","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Printing the Goddess: Intersections of Language, Place, Technology, and Agents of Transmission in Nepali Manuscript and Early Print Culture","authors":"J. V. Birkenholtz","doi":"10.1163/24519197-bja10018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24519197-bja10018","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000In late nineteenth-century Nepal, the advent of print and mass reproduction marked a critical and as yet understudied junction in Nepal’s literary history and attendant manuscript and print cultures. This article employs Nepal’s popular Svasthānīvratakathā to illuminate key shifts and intersections between language of composition, technologies of writing, places of composition or reproduction, and the agents of transmission that are emblematic of local manuscript practices and paradigmatic of the emergent print culture in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Nepal. The practices and actors involved in Svasthānī transmission shifted the text away from the private, domestic sphere to the public, translocal realm on multiple levels. Attending to these shifts as evidenced in one living devotional tradition indexes significant developments and intersections that deepen our knowledge of the changing linguistic, technological, geocultural, and socioeconomic aspects of the literary landscape in Nepal and South Asia more broadly.","PeriodicalId":36525,"journal":{"name":"Philological Encounters","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49299293","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}