Trying and Killing Christian Martyrs

2018 ◽  
pp. 160-198
Author(s):  
Christian C. Sahner
Keyword(s):  
Capital Punishment ◽  
The State ◽  
Judicial System ◽  
Social Functions ◽  
Early Date ◽  
Islamic Period ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Social ◽  
Early Islamic Period ◽  
Early Islamic

The previous chapters examined behaviors that precipitated violence against Christians in the early Islamic period. This chapter turns to the nature of the violence itself: How did Muslim officials execute Christian martyrs, what were the social functions of capital punishment, and did the violence amount to a broad-based persecution of Christians by the Muslim state? The chapter is divided into three sections, each of which describes a different stage of the martyr's journey through the judicial system. The first explores how martyrs came into the custody of the state and, once incarcerated, how they were tried and sentenced. The second examines the implementation of Qurʾanic punishments against martyrs, showing that specifically Islamic forms of punishment were being used against apostates and blasphemers at a very early date. The third section highlights one of the most common forms of punishment against neomartyrs: punitive burning.

A New Architectural Survey of Qaṣr Burquʽ, Eastern Jordan

1991 ◽  
Vol 71 ◽  
pp. 191-215 ◽  
Author(s):  
Svend Helms
Keyword(s):  
Economic History ◽  
Time Range ◽  
Islamic Period ◽  
The Third ◽  
North East ◽  
The North ◽  
Dry Steppe ◽  
Architectural Survey ◽  
Early Islamic Period ◽  
Early Islamic

Qaṣr Burqu⃓ is one of the most remote of the Jordanian so-called ‘desert castles’ (quṣūr) of the early Islamic period: it lies some 200km east of⃓Ammān (figs. 1–4). However, it is neither a castle, nor is it in the desert, rather it represents a variety of building types and lies in the dry steppe (areas receiving less than 100mm of rainfall per annum) of the bādiyat al-šām (literally, the steppe lands of Damascus). Furthermore, most of the architectural elements are not necessarily attributable to the early Islamic period, namely the Umayyad Caliphate of the seventh and eighth centuries, despite a ‘building’ inscription (E4: see below, pp. 206–7) of Walīd b. ‘Abd’l-Malik (Caliph AD 705–15), dated AD 700 (H. 81). Rather, the various architectural entities at the site, and their use, span the time from about the third-fourth (probably a little later) to the eighth centuries AD. This time range and the Qaṣr's remote location are significant in relation to the political and economic history of the Near East, particularly in regard of nomad-state relations across the verdant-steppic interface. The time range of the various constructions includes the period following the dissolution of the limes arabicus which had been extensively refurbished and augmented under Diocletian and later under Justinian in the third and sixth centuries AD. Many of the more remote erstwhile fortlets, forts and legionary fortresses were colonized by villagers and nomads, as well as monks and pious hermits. Between the fourth and sixth centuries (particularly in the sixth century under the Ghassānids), purpose-built monasteries and ‘residences’ for hermits were established throughout greater Syria, some of them far out in the steppe. The military station at Nemāras about 80km to the north-east of Qaṣr Burqu⃓, for example, may have become one of several centres, functioning as a παƍεμβολή νομάδον of the Lakhmids in the region, under the leadership of Imru'l-Qays who was called ‘king of the Arabs’ and who was buried there in AD 328. Places like Qaṣr Burqu⃓ and Deir al-Kinn, on the other hand, may have been founded or re-established as monasteries.

scholarly journals Dēnkard III Language Variation and the Defence of Socio-Religious Identity in the Context of Early-Islamic Iran

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gianfilippo Terribili
Keyword(s):  
Religious Identity ◽  
Language Variation ◽  
Coherent System ◽  
Cultural Environment ◽  
Comprehensive Overview ◽  
Islamic Period ◽  
The Third ◽  
Early Islamic Period ◽  
Early Islamic

AbstractThe aim of the present paper is to illustrate as a case study, the linguistic and stylistic peculiarities characterizing the third book of the Dēnkard, one of the most authoritative texts in Zoroastrian Pahlavi literature (9th-10th CE). The analysis will consider these features as part of a coherent system, styled to serve the dialectic strategies pursued by the Zoroastrian high priests in response to the pressures their own community was facing in the early Islamic period. In order to provide a more comprehensive overview on DkIII language distinctiveness, the research will underline the outward/inward dynamics, addressing both the relation of this theological dialectic with the surrounding socio-cultural environment and the leadingrole claims of a group within a politically subordinated community

Agriculture in al-Hamdānī's Yemen: A Survey from Early Islamic Geographical Texts

2009 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 382-412 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Martin Varisco
Keyword(s):  
Water Resources ◽  
Arab World ◽  
The State ◽  
Islamic Period ◽  
Historical Texts ◽  
Primary Focus ◽  
Early Islamic Period ◽  
Agricultural Regions ◽  
Early Islamic

AbstractThe area of Yemen has been one of the most productive agricultural regions in the Arab World since the beginning of Islam. This article surveys the available knowledge from Arabic geographical and historical texts on the state of agriculture in Yemen during the early Islamic period up through the 10th century CE. The primary focus is on the work of Abū Muhammad al-Hasan al-Hamdānī, including translation of a section on Yemeni agriculture from his Sifat jazīrat al-Arab. In addition to discussion of rain periods, water resources and agricultural methods, information on the known cultivated crops is provided. Depuis le commencement de l'ère islamique le Yémen constitue la région agricole la plus fertile du monde arabe. Cette contribution étudie l'agriculture au Yémen jusqu'au Xe siècle EC en exploitant les textes géographes et historiques arabes disponibles, tout d'abord les écrits de Abū Muhammad al-Hasan al-Hamdānī, y inclut la traduction de la section qui traite de l'agriculture yéménite de son Sifat jazīrat al-Arab.Des considérations sur les pluies saisonnières, les ressources d'eau douce, et la méthode de culture, l'étude nous révèle en outre des détails sur la nature des produits agricoles connus.

Zoroastrian law and the spread of Islam in Iranian society (ninth–tenth century)

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Christian C. Sahner
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Islamic Period ◽  
The Social ◽  
Questions And Answers ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Islamic Period ◽  
Early Islamic

Abstract This article explores three important Zoroastrian legal texts from the ʿAbbasid period, consisting of questions and answers to high-ranking priests. The texts contain a wellspring of information about the social history of Zoroastrianism under Islamic rule, especially the formative encounter between Zoroastrians and Muslims. These include matters such as conversion, apostasy, sexual relations with outsiders, inheritance, commerce, and the economic status of priests. The article argues that the elite clergy responsible for writing these texts used law to refashion the Zoroastrian community from the rulers of Iran, as they had been in Late Antiquity, into one of a variety of dhimmī groups living under Islamic rule. It also argues that, far from being brittle or inflexible, the priests responded to the challenges of the day with creativity and pragmatism. On both counts, there are strong parallels between the experiences of Zoroastrians and those of Christians and Jews, who also turned to law as an instrument for rethinking their place in the new Islamic cosmos. Finally, the article makes a methodological point, namely to show the importance of integrating Pahlavi sources into wider histories of Iran and the Middle East during the early Islamic period.

scholarly journals NEW INSIGHTS ON THE ROLE OF ENVIRONMENTAL DYNAMICS SHAPING SOUTHERN MESOPOTAMIA: FROM THE PRE-UBAID TO THE EARLY ISLAMIC PERIOD

Iraq ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 81 ◽  
pp. 23-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Altaweel ◽  
Anke Marsh ◽  
Jaafar Jotheri ◽  
Carrie Hritz ◽  
Dominik Fleitmann ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Negative Relationship ◽  
Early Holocene ◽  
Islamic Period ◽  
The Third ◽  
Third Millennium ◽  
First Millennium ◽  
Early Islamic Period ◽  
Early Islamic ◽  
Southern Iraq

Recent fieldwork and archival sedimentary materials from southern Iraq have revealed new insights into the environment that shaped southern Mesopotamia from the pre-Ubaid (early Holocene) until the early Islamic period. These data have been combined with northern Iraqi speleothem, or stalagmite, data that have revealed relevant palaeoclimate information. The new results are investigated in light of textual sources and satellite remote sensing work. It is evident that areas south of Baghdad, and to the region of Uruk, were already potentially habitable between the eleventh and early eighth millennia B.C., suggesting there were settlements in southern Iraq prior to the Ubaid. Date palms, the earliest recorded for Iraq, are evident before 10,000 B.C., and oak trees are evident south of Baghdad in the early Holocene but disappeared after the mid-sixth millennium B.C. New climate results suggest increased aridity after the end of the fourth millennium B.C. For the third millennium B.C. to first millennium A.D., a negative relationship between grain and date palm cultivation in Nippur is evident, suggesting shifting cultivation emphasising one of these crops at any given time in parts of the city. The Shatt en-Nil was also likely used as a channel for most of Nippur's historical occupation from the third millennium B.C. to the first millennium A.D. In the early to mid-first millennium A.D., around the time of the Sasanian period, a major increase in irrigation is evident in plant remains, likely reflecting large-scale irrigation expansion in the Nippur region. The first millennium B.C. to first millennium A.D. reflects a relatively dry period with periodic increased rainfall. Sedimentary results suggest the Nahrawan, prior to it becoming a well-known canal, formed an ancient branch of the Tigris, while the region just south of Baghdad, around Dalmaj, was near or part of an ancient confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates.

The Shu'ûbîyah Controversy and the Social History of Early Islamic Iran

1976 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy P. Mottahedeh
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Islamic Period ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Many ◽  
Early Islamic Period ◽  
Legal Fictions ◽  
Early Islamic

“In a state of rude nature”, wrote Edmund Burke, “there is no such thing as a people… The idea of a people is the idea of a corporation. It is wholly artificial; and made, like all other legal fictions, by common agreement. What the particular nature of that agreement was, is collected from the form into which the particular society has been cast”. Whether the Iranians in the early Islamic period — that is, the period from the seventh to the twelfth century — were in Burke's sense a “people” is a question that the cautious scholar would be eager to disregard and loath to handle. After all, those specialists on early Islamic Iran who have, directly or indirectly, expressed opinions on this subject have all too often projected events from the life of their own nation and times back to these earlier centuries. In no case is this projection more obvious than in the many essays written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which see this question only as a question of “national liberation”: did the Iranians hate the Arabs, and did they hope to regain their empire by destroying, or profoundly reshaping, the empire of the Muslim caliphs?

Scribal Repertoires in Egypt from the New Kingdom to the Early Islamic Period

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Historical Sociolinguistics ◽  
Islamic Period ◽  
The People ◽  
Modern Egypt ◽  
Early Islamic Period ◽  
Early Islamic ◽  
Point Of Departure

This volume deals with the possibility of glimpsing pre-modern and early modern Egyptian scribes, the people who actually produced ancient documents, through the ways in which they organized and wrote those documents. Breaking with the traditional conception of variation in scribal texts as ‘free’ or indicative of ‘corruption’, this volume reconceptualizes scribal variation in pre-modern Egypt from the point of view of contemporary historical sociolinguistics, seeing scribes as agents embedded in particular geographical, temporal, and sociocultural environments. This volume comprises a set of studies of scribal variation, beginning from the well-established domain of scribal variation in pre-modern English as a methodological point of departure, and proceeding to studies of scribal variation spanning thousands of years, from Pharaonic to Late Antique and Islamic Egypt. This volume introduces to Egyptology concepts such as scribal communities, networks, and repertoires, and applies them to a variety of phenomena, including features of lexicon, grammar, orthography, palaeography, layout, and format.

Maritime trade in early Islamic-period glass: New evidence from the Maʻagan Mikhael B shipwreck

2021 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 102903
Author(s):  
Eyal Natan ◽  
Yael Gorin-Rosen ◽  
Agnese Benzonelli ◽  
Deborah Cvikel
Keyword(s):  
Maritime Trade ◽  
Islamic Period ◽  
Early Islamic Period ◽  
New Evidence ◽  
Early Islamic

USE OF THE GALAXY AS A TOOL FOR SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL ORIENTATION DURING THE EARLY ISLAMIC PERIOD AND UP TO THE 15TH CENTURY

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-44
Author(s):  
Andreas Eckart
Keyword(s):  
Milky Way ◽  
The Other ◽  
Temporal Orientation ◽  
Islamic Period ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Galaxy ◽  
Early Islamic Period ◽  
Early Islamic

AbstractWe study to what extent the Milky Way was used as an orientation tool at the beginning of the Islamic period covering the 8th to the 15th century, with a focus on the first half of that era. We compare the texts of three authors from three different periods and give detailed comments on their astronomical and traditional content. The text of al-Marzūqī summarises the information on the Milky Way put forward by the astronomer and geographer ʾAbū Ḥanīfa al-Dīnawarī. The text makes it clear that in some areas the Milky Way could be used as a geographical guide to determine the approximate direction toward a region on Earth or the direction of prayer. In the 15th century, the famous navigator Aḥmad b. Māǧid describes the Milky Way in his nautical instructions. He frequently demonstrates that the Milky Way serves as a guidance aid to find constellations and stars that are useful for precise navigation on land and at sea. On the other hand, Ibn Qutayba quotes in his description of the Milky Way a saying from the famous Bedouin poet Ḏū al-Rumma, which is also mentioned by al-Marzūqī. In this saying the Milky Way is used to indicate the hot summer times in which travelling the desert was particularly difficult. Hence, the Milky Way was useful for orientation in space and time and was used for agricultural and navigational purposes.

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