Suchergebnisse

From the Prophet Mohammad's family tree to the present, ideas about kinship and descent have shaped communal and national identities in Muslim societies. So an understanding of genealogy is therefore vital to our understanding of Muslim societies, particularly with regard to the generation, preservation and manipulation of genealogical knowledge. These case studies link genealogical knowledge to particular circumstances in which it was created, circulated and promoted. They stress the malleability of kinship and memory, and the interests this malleability serves

Debates about the value of digital methods often return to the nature of knowledge itself. Specifically, do not digital methods tell us what we intuitively already know? Or, if we do not know something yet, is it trivial or discoverable through other more traditional humanistic modes of analysis?

The varied textual traditions of the premodern Islamicate World represent an opportunity and a problem for the Digital Humanities (DH). The opportunity lies in the sheer extent of this textual heritage: if we combine the textual output of premodern Persian and Arabic authors (not to mention Turkish and other less well-represented Islamicate languages), this body of texts constitutes arguably the largest written repository of human culture. Analytical methods developed for other linguistic heritages can be repurposed to make use of this wealth of texts, and efforts are now underway to apply to them a series of computationally enhanced methods that derive from a variety of disciplines (e.g., corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, the social sciences, and statistics). The application of these forms of analysis to these large new corpora promises new insights on premodern Islamicate cultures and the improvement of existing digital tools and methodologies.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Figures and Tables -- Introduction -- Part One. The Generation of Genealogical Knowledge -- Chapter 1 Keeping the Prophet's Family Alive: Profile of a Genealogical Discipline -- Chapter 2 Motives and Techniques of Genealogical Forgery in Pre-modern Muslim Societies -- Chapter 3 The Genealogy of Power and the Power of Genealogy in Morocco: History, Imaginary and Politics -- Part Two. Empowering Political and Religious Elites -- Chapter 4 Berber Leadership and Genealogical Legitimacy: The Almoravid Case -- Chapter 5 Ways of Connecting with the Past: Genealogies in Nasrid Granada -- Chapter 6 Embarrassing Cousins: Genealogical Conundrums in the Central Sahara -- Part Three. Genealogy as a Source for Writing History -- Chapter 7 Was Marwan ibn al-Hakam the First "Real" Muslim? -- Chapter 8 Genealogy and Ethnogenesis in al-Mas'udi's Muruj al-dhahab -- Chapter 9 Genealogical Prestige and Marriage Strategy among the Ahl al-Bayt: The Case of the al-Sadr Family in Recent Times -- About the Contributors -- Index