Suchergebnisse

The Ottoman biographer, historian and former career military officer Kātib Çelebi (d. 1067/1657), better known as Ḥājjī Khalīfa, completed his Taqwīm al-tawārīkh in Istanbul in 1058/1648. Begun as an excerpt of his earlier history Fadhlakat aqwāl al-akhyār , he expanded it to cover personalities and events up to the days in which it was written. Composed in a mixture of Ottoman Turkish and Persian, it became a popular 'desk reference' that received various upgrades by different eighteenth-century authors. The work was printed for the first time in Istanbul by İbrahim Müteferriqa in 1146/1733. The Taqwīm al-tawārīkh was translated into Latin, Italian and French, besides the anonymous Persian translation contained in this volume, completed in 1075/1664, well before any of the other translations. It is one of the rare historical works in Persian to have the form of a chronology, most of them being histories of dynasties or general histories

Since times immemorial man has been fascinated by his dreams. This is true of western civilization as it is true of any other civilization, including Islam. In the Qurʾān and the traditions, dreams and visions are frequently mentioned as instruments of divine guidance and instruction. This sanctification of the pre-existing oral tradition around dreams and their interpretation created room for this tradition to further develop, both in a religious and in a secular context. Dream interpretation remained unsystematized and mostly oral until Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq's (d. 260/873) Arabic translation of Artemidorus' (2nd cent. CE) Oneirocritica and Dīnawarī's al-Qādirī fi 'l-taʿbīr (commissioned in 397/1006) that it inspired. From then onwards, a vast literature developed. The work published here is an important early text from the Persianate world, based on more than fifteen declared and other sources, most of which are lost. It is a compilatory work, with an introduction followed by an alphabetical inventory of themes. 2 vols; volume 1

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

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 four volumes published here contain the history of the Mongols up until Ghāzān. Section: Mongols; 4 vols; volume. 2

Not much is known about ʿIzz al-Dīn Zanjānī's (d. 660/1262) personal life other than that at different times in his career he was in Mosul, Baghdad, Bukhara and Tabriz, where Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsi (d. 672/1274) wrote his Tadhkira fi 'l-hayʾa at his request. To posterity Zanjānī is maybe best known for his work on Arabic morphology, the Mabāḍiʾ al-taṣrīf , also known as Taṣrīf al-Zanjānī and al-ʿIzzī , on which many commentaries and supercommentaries were written. Zanjānī has four more works on linguistics, besides one work on astronomy and six treatises on mathematics, two of which are published in facsimile here. The first of these is his ʿUmdat al-ḥisāb on arithmetic and the second the Qisṭās al-muʿādala on equations. Following Zanjānī's own statements at the beginning of these treatises they were written for practical reasons, people in general standing in need of a good text on arithmetic, while the text on equations was especially relevant for jurists