Ursula Hammed
PhD in Arabic Studies (University of Vienna 2015). Former "Imperium et Officium" and APD researcher. 2018-2019 Holder of an Erwin Schrödinger PostDoc research scholarship from the FWF (Austrian Science Fund). LMU Munich Arabic Studies Faculty Member.
Supervisors: Prof. Andreas Kaplony
Supervisors: Prof. Andreas Kaplony
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Talks by Ursula Hammed
Heiligkeit wird im Narrativ des erwähnten Dokuments parallel zu genealogischen, stammesgeschichtlichen und pseudohistoriographischen Berichten zur Legitimierung einer Gruppe verwendet. Den Nachkommen eines gewissen Saʿd b. ʿUbāda wird zuerst über genealogische Aspekte, dann zusätzlich noch über Erscheinungsformen von Heiligkeit ein verdientes, ehrenvolles und hohes Prestige zugeschrieben.
„Heiligkeit,“ oder anders ausgedrückt außergewöhnliche Ereignisse, die auf eine spirituelle Begabung der Beteiligten schließen lassen, finden sich im Narrativ der Schriftrolle in Form von Männern, die in Träume von anderen einsteigen können, die posthum Wunder an ihrem Grab bewirken und Bittstellern im Traum erscheinen und deren Bittgebete von Gott augenblicklich erhört werden. Diese Manifestationen übernatürlicher Ereignisse entsprechen mehr oder weniger klassischen Topoi, wie man sie in mündlich weitergegebenen Erzählungen zu islamischen „Heiligen“ in Ägypten findet. Eine andere Form von „Heiligkeit,“ von spiritueller Höhe, wie sie im Text aufscheint, ist mit der islamischen Mystik, dem Sufismus, verbunden. Da der Text vermutlich im Umfeld eines Sufiordens entstanden ist, sind in den Text auch aus diesem Bereich spezielle Manifestationen von außergewöhnlicher, spiritueller Begabung eingeflossen.
In my talk, I will treat the written agreements between the monks at St Catherine’s monastery and the tribes inhabiting the Sinai Peninsula.
The documents, which have been taken by D.S. Richards from ʿAṭīya , date from the 15th and 16th century CE, but closer analysis will encompass only the earlier documents.
The following three aspects will be discussed on the basis of the documents and Richards’s commentary:
First, there is the topic of “land and power” itself and specific questions linked to it, like in which relation we must place land possession and responsibility for the safety of those crossing said land or which duties and rights were incumbent on which party of the agreements.
The second area that deserves our interest is the question of administration at the periphery. Neither the monks not the Bedouin were backed by government officials when drawing up their agreements on livelihood, travel and safety on the Sinai Peninsula. Furthermore, the documents had to cross the conceptual gap between the monastery’s hierarchy and legislation and Bedouin law, which was (and is) in many aspects not based on Islamic law, but has its own origins and regulations.
Then another interesting point is how and where the agreements were preserved. They were found in the monastery, but since they are mutual agreements binding two parties to their content one must ask if the Bedouin were granted access to them in order to read the content up or if there were copies or a least one copy for the shaykh al-ʿarab. If not we must assume that the documents’ text was made known to every single member of the Bedouin tribes in a way which at the same time made everybody adhere to its content.
Considering these facts, one must speak of a kind of “unofficial administration,” whose authority was in the agreements and their execution. The agreements administered what the government did not take care of: daily life in an outlying region.
Thirdly, the documents (one on parchment, the others on paper) will be studied from a papyrological viewpoint. Here the main topics to deal with are document type and structure, the formulae employed and linguistic questions, e.g. the extreme tendency towards dialectal expressions.
Papers by Ursula Hammed
ISBN 978-3-406-82244-5
Heiligkeit wird im Narrativ des erwähnten Dokuments parallel zu genealogischen, stammesgeschichtlichen und pseudohistoriographischen Berichten zur Legitimierung einer Gruppe verwendet. Den Nachkommen eines gewissen Saʿd b. ʿUbāda wird zuerst über genealogische Aspekte, dann zusätzlich noch über Erscheinungsformen von Heiligkeit ein verdientes, ehrenvolles und hohes Prestige zugeschrieben.
„Heiligkeit,“ oder anders ausgedrückt außergewöhnliche Ereignisse, die auf eine spirituelle Begabung der Beteiligten schließen lassen, finden sich im Narrativ der Schriftrolle in Form von Männern, die in Träume von anderen einsteigen können, die posthum Wunder an ihrem Grab bewirken und Bittstellern im Traum erscheinen und deren Bittgebete von Gott augenblicklich erhört werden. Diese Manifestationen übernatürlicher Ereignisse entsprechen mehr oder weniger klassischen Topoi, wie man sie in mündlich weitergegebenen Erzählungen zu islamischen „Heiligen“ in Ägypten findet. Eine andere Form von „Heiligkeit,“ von spiritueller Höhe, wie sie im Text aufscheint, ist mit der islamischen Mystik, dem Sufismus, verbunden. Da der Text vermutlich im Umfeld eines Sufiordens entstanden ist, sind in den Text auch aus diesem Bereich spezielle Manifestationen von außergewöhnlicher, spiritueller Begabung eingeflossen.
In my talk, I will treat the written agreements between the monks at St Catherine’s monastery and the tribes inhabiting the Sinai Peninsula.
The documents, which have been taken by D.S. Richards from ʿAṭīya , date from the 15th and 16th century CE, but closer analysis will encompass only the earlier documents.
The following three aspects will be discussed on the basis of the documents and Richards’s commentary:
First, there is the topic of “land and power” itself and specific questions linked to it, like in which relation we must place land possession and responsibility for the safety of those crossing said land or which duties and rights were incumbent on which party of the agreements.
The second area that deserves our interest is the question of administration at the periphery. Neither the monks not the Bedouin were backed by government officials when drawing up their agreements on livelihood, travel and safety on the Sinai Peninsula. Furthermore, the documents had to cross the conceptual gap between the monastery’s hierarchy and legislation and Bedouin law, which was (and is) in many aspects not based on Islamic law, but has its own origins and regulations.
Then another interesting point is how and where the agreements were preserved. They were found in the monastery, but since they are mutual agreements binding two parties to their content one must ask if the Bedouin were granted access to them in order to read the content up or if there were copies or a least one copy for the shaykh al-ʿarab. If not we must assume that the documents’ text was made known to every single member of the Bedouin tribes in a way which at the same time made everybody adhere to its content.
Considering these facts, one must speak of a kind of “unofficial administration,” whose authority was in the agreements and their execution. The agreements administered what the government did not take care of: daily life in an outlying region.
Thirdly, the documents (one on parchment, the others on paper) will be studied from a papyrological viewpoint. Here the main topics to deal with are document type and structure, the formulae employed and linguistic questions, e.g. the extreme tendency towards dialectal expressions.
ISBN 978-3-406-82244-5
Part of this paper is a response to C. Sahnerʾs ‘The Monasticism of my Community is Jihad: A Debate on Asceticism, Sex, and Warfare in Early Islam’ (Arabica 64 (2017), 149-83), as it wants to show how the omission or inclusion of similar accounts from Islamic tradition can give a very different understanding of historic circumstances, namely ideological currents prevalent during the early Islamic centuries.
Referencing works by Livingston, el-Leithy, Tillier
Through a comparison of selected key features, groups and clusters of documents can be combined into corpora and sub-corpora. The webportal as working tool of the project aims not only at an intuitive and simple way to select documents based on specific characteristics, but also at displaying their relational proximity to other documents. Published and unpublished material can be grouped according to various criteria and tags, which will provide an easily accessible research basis for experienced Arabic papyrologists and PhD and graduate students alike, as well as for scholars of related studies interested in aspects of medieval Egypt.
times. The text calls itself nasab and tārīḫ, meaning a work of genealogy and historiography.
Locals refer to it as to a hagiography describing the life of the local saint. It was kept in a private household in the Eastern Nile Delta and is now lost. The
only existing copy is a photocopy in possession of the author of this thesis.
Even a quick examination of the text shows that it is not really (or not only) a “simple”
hagiography, but a highly complex text. It focuses on genealogy by tracing a family tree that
starts with the ṣaḥābī Saʿd b. ʿUbāda and gets affiliated with the tribe of Ǧuḏām. Tribal
history is another point the text features to a great extent. It describes tribesʾ journeys and
feuds as well as allotment of land to them by rulers in medieval Egypt. Tribal identity is
nevertheless not the means of legitimation the scribe wanted to convey to the reader, but it
is social affiliation with the group of the anṣār, whom the text glorifies.
The other aspect the document emphasizes is the aspect of holiness. Some descendants of
Saʿd b. ʿUbāda have exceptional spiritual powers, although the above mentioned local saint
is not described in this way as much as his son Rašdān.
There is also a Sufi order, called the Ṭarīqa Ghunaymiyya, that is somehow connected to the
text. The mentioned local walī is the father of the orderʾs founder Ghunaym and has even
received his nisba from him. It is highly possible that the text originates from the realm of the
Sufi ṭarīqa, since its last copyist, Muḥammad al-Qayṭūnī (the original author is unknown), was
an accomplished Sufi himself. The narrative shows traits and terms akin to Sufi terminology,
which strengthens this assumption. In the years 2012 and 2014, fieldwork was carried out in
Egypt and Morocco in order to gather more information on the ṭarīqa and its possible ties with
the text. While not being able to accomplish this task due to the situation of the order, who
has no representative nowadays and whose last shuyūkh have passed away, the author of
this thesis could acquire the handbook of the order as well as certificates issued by it, which
shed light on the possible religious and political sphere the order originated from.
Considering how much work has been done on the early ḥadīth, it may seem surprising that there is still a big gap that was never bridged: There is no systematic, comprehensive study of the early ḥadīth based on original documentary evidence.
Collections around the world host tens of thousands of Arabic papyri from the first three Islamic centuries, but little attention has been given to the fact that these texts do not only mirror how the early Islamic Empire was governed. They also shed light on the literary production during that time, a time that was not only before (or slightly into) the canonization of Islamic law and ḥadīth, but also during the material shift from sheet/scroll to codex.
A new project’s aim is to present the first comprehensive study of the early ḥadīth based mainly on original papyrus texts from that time, unrivaled witnesses of early Islamic literary production. The project will start from February 2018 at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge and will be funded by an Erwin Schrödinger research fellowship from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF).
This paper will present the first results on how early muḥaddithīn learned, taught and passed their knowledge on, how they worked with their written records, and how and whom they cited as authorities.
Literature
Al-Abawān al-Faġālī, Būlus & ʿAwkar, Anṭūn (eds.): al-ʿAhd al-qadīm al-ʿibrī: Tarǧama bayna s-suṭūr, ʿibrī - ʿarabī. Al-Ǧāmiʿa al-Anṭūnīya, Ǧūniya 2007.
Griffith, Sidney H.: The Bible in Arabic: The scriptures of the ‘People of the Book’ in the language of Islam. Princeton – Oxford 2013.
Khoury, R.G..: « Quelques réflexions sur les citations de la Bible dans les premières générations islamiques du premier et du deuxième siècles de l’Hégire . » Bulletin d’études Orientales 29 (Mélanges offertes a Henri Laoust) (1977) : 269-78.
Lindgren, M. & Vollandt, R. : « An Early Copy of the Pentateuch and the Book of Daniel in Arabic (MS Sinai – Arabic 2): Preliminary observations on codicology, text types, and translation technique.” Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 1 (2013): 43-68.
McAuliffe, J.D. : “The Quranic context of Muslim biblical scholarship.” Islam and Christian-Muslim relations 7/2 (2007): 141-58.
Polliack, M. : “The Karaite inversion of ‘written’ and ‘oral’ Torah in relation to the Islamic arch-models of Quran and Hadith.” Jewish Studies Quarterly 22 (2015): 243-302.
- ,“The Medieval Karaite tradition of translation the Hebrew Bible into Arabic : Its sources, characteristics, and historical background.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (Third Series) 6/2 (1996): 189-96.
Schmidtke, S.: “The Muslim reception of Biblical materials: Ibn Qutayba and his Aʿlām al-nubuwwa.” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 22/3 (2011): 249-74.
Sifr al-Mazāmīr. British Bible Society, London 1871.
Vollandt, R.: Arabic versions of the Pentateuch: A comparative study of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim sources. Leiden – Boston 2015 (Biblia Arabica 2).
We commonly expect documents to state simple, straightforward, “neutral” content, but we should not ignore the fact that even historical records were written by people with an agenda, by people who transported their own view on past, but also on present events into the texts they were producing. At the same time, “literature” or mainly narrative texts also have their own ideological framework in which they act. Deviations from an otherwise established text must therefore be regarded as a result of deliberate manipulations; of manipulations whose aim was to lead the prospective audience towards certain ideas. The use of terminology in texts; be they primarily documentary or literary, also points to possibilities of shaping the perception of e.g. a profession or a group of individuals over time.
The shared aim of this panel’s papers is showing the interactions and influences that often occur between texts that receive the categorization “documentary” or “literary,” i.e. narrative. Its disadvantage is that it creates a dichotomy that is mostly based on shape and outer appearance of the texts, but does not take their multiple functions into account. We will present texts and developments that show the interplay between “documentary” and “narrative” aspects of text genres, and the strategies by which writers integrated them into each other.
While we still don’t know much about women’s lives in late antique and early medieval Egypt, documentary sources can grant us valuable insights on daily life during that time period. Original texts on papyrus, paper and other materials can help us understand the roles and functions women took up in a multireligious and multilingual society, away from stereotypes of women’s confinement to the household on the one hand and to the palace on the other hand. Contrary to literary sources often prone to idealizing and normative elements or projections, documentary texts are direct witnesses of their time. We will look at the overall representation of women’s lives that we can see in documents, as well as showing some special cases.
Focusing mainly on the Arab world, we will look at some aspects of magic, divination, customs related to the evil eye, visiting shrines, belief in jinn, and popular medicine that, though in part older than Islam and even older than monotheism, have formed an integral part of daily Islam in the MENA region throughout the centuries.
Both historical and modern documents and objects will help us explore Islamic popular religion and its often fluid boundaries to magic and the occult on the one hand, and to an often self-proclaimed orthodoxy on the other hand.