Knowledge Collaboration among Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and Muslims in the Abbasid Near East

This thematic section unearths several ways professionals from a variety of religious communities in the Near East collaborated with one another during the medieval period. Modern scholars of intellectual history have often attempted to trace connections in medieval texts across the religious spectrum, but it has been difficult to pin down the interpersonal circumstances behind these and other interactions. This is at least in part because scientific, philosophical, and theological treatises rarely refer to these personal relationships explicitly, leaving researchers to turn to other kinds of works for such details: biographies, chronicles, hagiographies, and documentary sources. But it then remains to come to terms with the historiographical perspectives of the authors of these works. For example, the authors of Arabic biographical dictionaries (ṭabaqāt literature) have provided some of the richest sources for person-to-person exchange in Near Eastern intellectual history, but they filter and taxonomize their subjects to focus on individuals, overwhelmingly men, who can be seen as formative for particular classes or categories (ṭabaqāt) of society. Disciplinary segmentation has made it especially difficult to answer questions such as how much »neutral« space there was in interreligious knowledge exchange in the Near East, or whether fields such as medicine became »Islamicized« through the exclusion of non-Muslims in the teaching, study, or practice of the field. The authors of the research articles here (contributors to a virtual forum hosted by the BMBF-funded »Communities of Knowledge« project) take various approaches to these problems of explicating silent sources, interpreting historiographical constructions, and bridging disciplinary segmentation. Some put particular texts under the microscope, pointing out new evidence of specific interactions on the basis of close readings or the examination of texts in a palimpsested manuscript. Some zoom out slightly on these interactions by making fresh comparisons between sources in differing genres or languages. All focus on the interreligious dimensions of exchange and, wherever possible, on the interpersonal engagements that brought these about. Reports from two research projects complement these by taking macro-level approaches that involve multiple languages, several genres, and broad regions. Overall, this thematic collection highlights the interpersonal and collaborative aspects of work by Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and Muslims during the Abbasid caliphate (132-656 AH/750-1258 CE) with the aim of stimulating new research approaches that overcome previous genre limitations and disciplinary boundaries

From manuscript catalogues to a handbook of Syriac literature: Modeling an infrastructure for Syriaca.org

Despite increasing interest in Syriac studies and growing digital availability of Syriac texts, there is currently no up-to-date infrastructure for discovering, identifying, classifying, and referencing works of Syriac literature. The standard reference work (Baumstark's Geschichte) is over ninety years old, and the perhaps 20,000 Syriac manuscripts extant worldwide can be accessed only through disparate catalogues and databases. The present article proposes a tentative data model for Syriaca.org's New Handbook of Syriac Literature, an open-access digital publication that will serve as both an authority file for Syriac works and a guide to accessing their manuscript representations, editions, and translations. The authors hope that by publishing a draft data model they can receive feedback and incorporate suggestions into the next stage of the project.Comment: Part of special issue: Computer-Aided Processing of Intertextuality in Ancient Languages. 15 pages, 4 figure

Inquiring of ‘Beelzebub’

This study juxtaposes the concerns of Catholios Timothy I (r. 780–823), leader of the Church of the East, with those of al-Jāḥiẓ (about 776–868/9), a popular Muslim writer, regarding the dangers for each community when Christians appear as plaintiffs or defendants in Islamic courts. Timothy’s Canons attempt to obviate some of the reasons Christians might voluntarily appeal to Islamic courts rather than resolving disputes within the church, and Canon 12 in particular uses a biblical turn of language to condemn this practice. By contrast, cases involving a Muslim disputant had to be tried in Islamic courts, and al-Jāḥiẓ argues that judges who mete out sentences favorable to Christians in such cases jeopardize the rightful social order of Muslims in regard to ahl al-dhimma (protected people)

Cross-communal scholarly interactions

This chapter traces cross-communal interactions in the fields of medicine, mathematics and what the historical actors called the natural sciences. It discusses various modern interpretations of those interactions and engages with a number of historical problems researchers face when studying the extant sources. After a substantive survey of the current state of research, the chapter addresses four areas which offer fascinating evidence for interactions between scholars adhering to different faith communities: textual practices; teaching; patronage; workplaces. The chapter ends by suggesting future research directions

Modeling a Born-Digital Factoid Prosopography using the TEI and Linked Data

Although the TEI has traditionally been used for encoding text, its combination of structured and semi-structured data has made it a compelling choice for born-digital, linked-data resources as well. Our intent here is to demonstrate the advantages it offers for digital prosopographies along with a model that can be used for them. Syriac Persons, Events, and Relations (SPEAR) is a born-digital prosopography project in the field of Syriac studies. Where traditional prosopographies focused on prose descriptions of individual persons of significance, SPEAR follows recent developments in research methodologies that instead produce prosopographical factoids. Factoids are structured data about persons drawn from the analysis of historical texts. Most factoid prosopographies use relational databases to model data. Instead, SPEAR uses a customized TEI schema to model factoids that can be queried and visualized in an XML database as well as serialized in HTML for human viewers and in RDF for data sharing. The TEI’s provisions for structured and semi-structured data make it ideal for encoding data from heterogeneous historical source material. Moreover, its linking capabilities connect SPEAR data to related data sets. By modeling prosopographical factoids, and not the source texts themselves, SPEAR offers an example of how a born-digital, data-oriented approach to using the TEI can circumvent some of the challenges posed by the tree structure of XML. It also disrupts traditional understandings of data and stand-off markup through combining linked open data approaches with the use of the TEI

The Bible in Arabic

The aim of this contribution is to review some of the major areas of current research on the Arabic Bible, along with the factors and trends contributing to them. Also we present some of the tools that are currently under development in the Biblia Arabica team, Munich. We provide here a very condensed survey of the transmission of traditions, as well as ways that biblical manuscripts in Arabic have been analysed and classified, covering both Old Testament/ Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Overall, the lack of critical editions for Arabic biblical texts in general reflects not just the overwhelming number of versions and manuscripts, but also the fundamental challenge these translations present on the level of textuality. Standard paradigms of authorship and transmission break down in the face of the complex reuse, revision, and layering of paratexts seen in these texts. It is the careful study of manuscripts, not simply as texts but also as physical objects, which holds promise for reconstructing the practices of producers and consumers of the Arabic Bible. A union catalogue of Arabic Bible manuscripts will gather the paleographic and codicological information necessary for further research. Moreover, it will link manuscripts, translators, and scribes to the online Bibliography of the Arabic Bible, which is intended to be a comprehensive, classified, and searchable reference tool for secondary literature. In conclusion, scholarship of the Arabic Bible now has considerable momentum, but must continue to keep its fundamental resource – that of manuscripts – in the foreground of research

Modeling a Born-Digital Factoid Prosopography using the TEI and Linked Data

Although the TEI has traditionally been used for encoding text, its combination of structured and semi-structured data has made it a compelling choice for born-digital, linked-data resources as well. Our intent here is to demonstrate the advantages it offers for digital prosopographies along with a model that can be used for them. Syriac Persons, Events, and Relations (SPEAR) is a born digital prosopography project in the field of Syriac studies. Where traditional prosopographies focused on prose descriptions of individual persons of significance, SPEAR follows recent developments in research methodologies that instead produce prosopographical factoids. Factoids are structured data about persons drawn from the analysis of historical texts. Most factoid prosopographies use relational databases to model data. Instead, SPEAR uses a customized TEI schema to model factoids that can be queried and visualized in an XML database as well as serialized in HTML for human viewers and in RDF for data sharing. The TEI’s provisions for structured and semi-structured data make it ideal for encoding data from heterogeneous historical source material. Moreover, its linking capabilities connect SPEAR data to related data sets. By modeling prosopographical factoids, and not the source texts themselves, SPEAR offers an example of how a born-digital, data-oriented approach to using the TEI can circumvent some of the challenges posed by the tree structure of XML. It also disrupts traditional understandings of data and stand-off markup through combining Linked Open Data approaches with the use of the TEI.National Endowment for the Humanities and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Researc

From manuscript catalogues to a handbook of Syriac literature: Modeling an infrastructure for Syriaca.org

Despite increasing interest in Syriac studies and growing digital availability of Syriac texts, there is currently no up-to-date infrastructure for discovering, identifying, classifying, and referencing works of Syriac literature. The standard reference work (Baumstark's Geschichte) is over ninety years old, and the perhaps 20,000 Syriac manuscripts extant worldwide can be accessed only through disparate catalogues and databases. The present article proposes a tentative data model for Syriaca.org's New Handbook of Syriac Literature, an open-access digital publication that will serve as both an authority file for Syriac works and a guide to accessing their manuscript representations, editions, and translations. The authors hope that by publishing a draft data model they can receive feedback and incorporate suggestions into the next stage of the project.National Endowment for the Humanitie

Measuring Infrared SurfaceBrightness Fluctuation Distances with HST WFC3: Calibration and Advice

We present new calibrations of the near-infrared (near-IR) surface brightness fluctuation (SBF) distance method for the F110W ( ) and F160W ( ) bandpasses of the Wide Field Camera 3 Infrared Channel (WFC3/IR) on the Hubble Space Telescope. The calibrations are based on data for 16 early-type galaxies in the Virgo and Fornax clusters observed with WFC3/IR and are provided as functions of both the optical and near-infrared colors. The scatter about the linear calibration relations for the luminous red galaxies in the sample is approximately 0.10 mag, corresponding to a statistical error of 5% in distance. Our results imply that the distance to any suitably bright elliptical galaxy can be measured with this precision out to about 80 Mpc in a single-orbit observation with WFC3/IR, making this a remarkably powerful instrument for extragalactic distances. The calibration sample also includes much bluer and lower-luminosity galaxies than previously used for IR SBF studies, revealing interesting population differences that cause the calibration scatter to increase for dwarf galaxies. Comparisons with single-burst population models show that as expected, the redder early-type galaxies contain old, metal-rich populations, while the bluer dwarf ellipticals contain a wider range of ages and lower metallicities than their more massive counterparts. Radial SBF gradients reveal that IR color gradients are largely an age effect; the bluer dwarfs typically have their youngest populations near their centers, while the redder giant ellipticals show only weak trends and in the opposite sense. Because of the population variations among bluer galaxies, distance measurements in the near-IR are best limited to red early-type galaxies. We conclude with some practical guidelines for using WFC3/IR to measure reliable SBF distances