Suchergebnisse

Rashīd al-Dīn Hamadānī's (d. 718/1319) Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh has been described by many as the first world history ever. Composed in Persian for the Mongol Il-khans Ghāzān (r. 1295-1304) and Öljeitü (Uljāytu, r. 1304-16), its aim was to set out the history and condition of the Mongol people, conquerors of the world (part one), followed by a description of the other peoples and nations of the world and their histories (part two). Given its unprecedented scope, Rashīd, vizier to both rulers, mobilized a whole team of specialists, informants, and collaborators to assist him in his task. Making use of written and oral sources, the part on the Mongols is a key source on the emergence and organisation of the Mongol empire, while the second part constitutes the first attempt ever at writing a history of the world. The section published here describes the history of the Salgharids of Fārs

?One Word ? Yak Kaleme? is one of the first treatises in the Middle East to demonstrate that Islam is compatible with modern western forms of government, and specifically that sharia principles can be incorporated in a codified law comparable to that found in Europe. Unlike many fellow Oriental travellers, the author observed that European dominance is not derived from a few technological advances, but primarily from the organization of society. In ?One Word?, the author argues that the principles underlying constitutional government can be found in Islamic sources. ?One Word? is a significant text during the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906, but its message is relevant today

For over a hundred years, between 1507 and 1622, the island of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf was in the hands of the Portuguese. It was only under Shāh ʿAbbās I that the Safavids were able to recapture Hormuz and the neighbouring island of Qishm, under the leadership of general Imām Qulī Khān and with the unexpected help of some forces of the British East India Company that happened to be in the area at the time. The two epic poems from the 11th/17th century published in this volume, one by an otherwise unknown 'Qadrī' and the other by an anonymous author, deal with the recapture of Qishm and Hormuz under Imām Qulī Khān. While not of high literary quality, the poems show some interesting local and historical features, especially the longer one on Hormuz whose author had a great admiration of Imām Qulī Khān, whom he appears to have known personally

In the history of Islam, Muslim-Jewish polemics have been documented from the earliest times and studies on this subject abound. The present work is a case in point. In the spring of the year 1211/1796, the famous Shīʿī scholar Sayyid Muḥammad Mahdī al-Ḥusaynī al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī (d. 1212/1797) was on his way from Mashhad to visit the holy shrine of Imam Ḥusayn in Karbala, accompanied by a flock of his senior students. When they reached the town of al-Kifl, less than 20 km north of Najaf and home to a community of over 3.000 Jews, a delegation of the latter came to see Ṭabāṭabāʾī in the caravanserai where was staying, wishing to engage in a debate with him. The text presented here is an account of Ṭabāṭabāʾīʾs detailed listing of the contradictions and errors in Judaism as seen by him, a listing that remained largely unanswered. Arabic text, with a Persian translation from before 1238/1822-3

The author of this epic poem, Ḥakīm Zajjājī (alive in 676/1277), was a glassmaker who also had a talent for poetry. At some point, for reasons that remain unexplained, his life took a turn for the worse. He lost all his friends, and his wife became estranged from him. It is in this period of emotional distress that he decided to break with his previous life and move to the Charandāb district of Tabriz. This district was home to the famous house of Juwaynī, whose members held high administrative offices under the Saljūqs, the Khwārazmshāhs and Īl Khānids. Zajjājī hoped to attract the attention of this family with his masnavi, in order for them to get him out of his miserable situation. For twenty years he worked on this versified history of Islam from its earliest times until his own day. Edition of part one, part two having been published seven years earlier by the same scholar