2023

Jelle Bruning – Slavery in Byzantium and the Medieval Islamicate World

In het themanummer Slavery in Byzantium and the Medieval Islamicate World: Texts and Contexts in het tijdschrift Slavery & Abolition bestuderen zes auteurs verschillende aspecten van slavernij zoals die zich uitte in verschillende gebieden rond de Middellandse Zee, in het Nabije Oosten en in de Iraanse wereld tussen ca. 500 en 1000 n. Chr. In de loop van deze tijd ontwikkelde in deze gebieden een gedeelde slavernijcultuur met unieke regionale vormen die nog weinig bestudeerd is. De artikelen in het themanummer bestuderen een selectie van tekstuele bronnen die kenmerkend zijn voor historisch onderzoek naar de regio waarop dat artikel zich richt: kronieken uit Andalusië, grafstenen uit Egypte, testamenten uit het Byzantijnse rijk, een geschiedschrift uit Irak, juridische handboeken uit Perzië en documenten uit Bactrië. De Juynboll Stichting heeft de publicatie van dit themanummer financieel ondersteund.

—

Mahmood Kooria – Lineage and Gender in Islam: Perspectives from the Indian Ocean

The workshop-cum-conference, “Lineage and Gender in Islam: Perspectives from the Indian Ocean World,” convened specialists in religion, gender, and lineage from the Middle East, South Asia, and East Africa. Over two days, fifteen speakers, representing approximately 12 countries, explored diverse dimensions of gendered narrative strategies, truth regimes, and social consequences within and beyond Muslim communities along the Indian Ocean littoral.

The papers delved into the ways lineage and genealogy served to unite people across different places and periods, while also highlighting how these concepts could divide Muslims within the same location and era based on pre-existing and new notions of class, caste, and ethnicity. The participants drew comparisons across geographical and temporal borders, with a notable focus on the contrast between East Africa and South Asia, especially in comparison with the Hindu, Jewish, Christian, and Buddhist traditions.

—

2024

Mehdy Shaddel – Apocalypse, Empire, and Universal Mission at the End of Antiquity

Apocalypse, Empire, and Universal Mission at the End of Antiquity: World Religions at the Crossroads is an attempt at interrogating the relationship between world empire and universal ideology in Late Antiquity. It argues that universalism is a recurring, and almost inevitable, condition of any aspiration for global domination, a pattern that emerged in early Christianity and still animates political ideologies of today—such as liberal democracy and socialism. It also argues that the nature of such global ambitions requires the universal ideology they espouse to be supersessionist, which invariably results in an ideological, and occasionally physical, clash with other systems of thought. Furthermore, it posits that such beliefs most commonly manifest themselves in eschatological and apocalyptic thinking, for the obvious reason that in commenting about the end of the world and the fate of humanity, it is impossible to avoid talking about ‘the other’. As a case-study, the dissertation focuses on early Islam, which it attempts to show emerged as a non-supersessionist movement before transitioning to supersessionism after becoming the religion of a world empire. In the final chapter, it deals with the impact of such global thinking on the two ethno-religions of Judaism and Zoroastrianism, arguing that under such circumstances ethno-religion can have a tendency to become semi-universal, thus revisiting our understanding of the notion.

—

Jake Benson – The Advent of Abrī: The ‘First Wave’ of Paper Marbling

Originally trained as a bookbinder, conservator, and paper marbler, Jake Benson’s dissertation “The Advent of Abrī: The ‘First Wave’ of Paper Marbling During the Long 16th Century, ca. 1496–1616” examines debates over the origins and clarifies the enigmatic early development of the art of paper marbling. Technically a form of monotype printing technology currently enjoying a worldwide resurgence, marbling artists or “marblers” manufacture them by dispersing colours on aqueous baths, then sometimes manipulating them before imprinting the floating design. Chapters address not only marbling but also other types of decorated papers preserved in late Timurid, Safavid, and Shaybanid dynasties in Greater Iran and Transoxiana, the Mughals and Deccan Sultanates in South Asia, the Ottoman Empire in West Asia, as well as nascent European collecting and manufacture. Benson also translates and analyzes the earliest Persian and Ottoman Turkish technical accounts and compares them with the first Dutch one published in 1616 to identify materials,  methods, and labour expended in both economic and scientific terms to create the vast surviving material corpus examined. It closes by exploring perceptions of marbled paper by Turco-Persian and European artists, intellectuals, and nobility as evinced by a range of drawings,  calligraphy specimens, and even German wunderkabinetten.

—

Peter Webb – Good-looking poems: the physical beauty of early Arabic poetry

It is difficult to overstate the importance of poetry in Arabic culture. Some 1200 years ago, Ibn Qutaybah (d. 276/889) made the case in the plainest terms, declaring: “Poetry is the Arabs’” (li-l-ʿarab al-shiʿr), and his view has remained steady and constant across the generations of scholars ever since. Poetry established itself, alongside the Quran, as the most cherished icon of Arabic and Middle Eastern culture, and for centuries people of worth have been expected to memorise the Quran and as much poetry as they can to demonstrate learned attainment. Modern scholars justifiably directed much attention to the texts and meanings of Arabic poetry, but what of its materiality? Poetry clearly was enjoyed for its sound and meaning, but it also was written down and it seems that premodern audiences derived enjoyment from the look of poetry too. My project initiated the first study of medieval-period aesthetics and physical representation of pre-Islamic and early Muslim-era poems, focusing on 50 manuscripts of exceptional calligraphic quality preserved in the rich manuscript collections of Istanbul, Leiden and London.

The findings revealed a definite fashion for lavishing elaborate calligraphy to record a certain set of Arabic poems originally composed before Islam or in the very early Islamic era. Across the 500-year period from 1050-1550 a special style of writing these classic poems of an ancient past was developed, ramping up the text size to fit two, or, at most, three lines of poetry on a page, and filling in part of the space between lines with explanations in a smaller-sized and different calligraphic style. The result transforms the poem into an artistic image. The complex and large-size calligraphy inhibits swift reading: a reader must instead take time, pause and concentrate, absorbing one line at a time, and not very quickly at that. The manuscripts are not meant to be read as much as they are to be beheld. The format elevates the poetry from a text to an icon of Arabic, which precisely matches the status of old Arabic poetry amongst medieval audiences – they apprehended a certain magic in the language of the earliest Arabic poetry, and their calligraphers developed a means to visually impart that magic as an image. The style also developed further: shortly after the emergence of the earliest poetry collections, the style was transferred to copy the Quran, the other undisputed hallmark of Arabic’s greatness. This project has pioneered a new study into how medieval Middle Eastern audiences translated their reverence for the meanings and sounds of the Arabic language into a visual form.