Muslim Studies (book)
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''Muhammedanische Studien'', or in its English title, ''Muslim Studies'', is a seminal and founding two-volume work in the field of
Islamic studies Islamic studies is the academic study of Islam, which is analogous to related fields such as Jewish studies and Quranic studies. Islamic studies seeks to understand the past and the potential future of the Islamic world. In this multidiscipli ...
by
Ignác Goldziher Ignác (Yitzhaq Yehuda) Goldziher (22 June 1850 – 13 November 1921), often credited as Ignaz Goldziher, was a Hungary, Hungarian scholar of Islam. Alongside Joseph Schacht and G.H.A. Juynboll, he is considered one of the pioneers of modern aca ...
(1850–1921), originally published in German in 1889–1890, and translated into English from 1966 to 1971 by C.R. Barber and S.M. Stern. The first volume focuses on the reaction of
Islam Islam is an Abrahamic religions, Abrahamic monotheistic religion based on the Quran, and the teachings of Muhammad. Adherents of Islam are called Muslims, who are estimated to number Islam by country, 2 billion worldwide and are the world ...
to Arab tribal societies, the reaction of Islam to the nationalities of the territories conquered early on (primarily the
Persians Persians ( ), or the Persian people (), are an Iranian ethnic group from West Asia that came from an earlier group called the Proto-Iranians, which likely split from the Indo-Iranians in 1800 BCE from either Afghanistan or Central Asia. They ...
), and finally the reactions of newly conquered peoples, especially the Persians, to emerging notions of Arab supremacy (especially as manifested by the '' shuʿūbiyya''). The second and most well-known volume is a study on the development of
hadith Hadith is the Arabic word for a 'report' or an 'account f an event and refers to the Islamic oral tradition of anecdotes containing the purported words, actions, and the silent approvals of the Islamic prophet Muhammad or his immediate circle ...
. This study is prominent in the field of
hadith studies Hadith studies is the academic study of hadith, a literature typically thought in Islamic religion to be a record of the words, actions, and the silent approval of the Muhammad as transmitted through chains of narrators. A major area of inter ...
for being the first academic work to seriously introduce the view that the hadith are not a reliable source for the biography of Muhammad. A final and third essay occurs at the end of the second volume, on the role of the cult of saints in early Islam. ''Muslim Studies'' has been said to have launched a "paradigm shift" in Islamic studies and Goldziher's studies on hadith as a whole have been called the "crown jewel" of his work in this field.


Overview


Volume 1

The first volume of Golziher's ''Muslim Studies'' focused on tensions between Arab and non-Arab Muslims in early Islamic history, as well as the '' shuʿūbiyya'' movement. Around the same time, Goldziher also published a separate paper in the journal ''
Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft The ''Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft'' () is a peer-reviewed academic journal An academic journal (or scholarly journal or scientific journal) is a periodical publication in which Scholarly method, scholarship relatin ...
'' about the ''shuʿūbiyya'' in
Al-Andalus Al-Andalus () was the Muslim-ruled area of the Iberian Peninsula. The name refers to the different Muslim states that controlled these territories at various times between 711 and 1492. At its greatest geographical extent, it occupied most o ...
in the 11th century AD, with a special focus on the figure
Ibn Gharsiya Abū ‘Āmir Ibn Gharsīyah al-Bashkunsī () (died 1084), popularly known as Ibn Gharsiya or Ibn García, was a Muwallad poet and ''katib'' (writer) in the Taifa court in Denia. Ibn Gharsiya is known as a proponent for the shu'ubiyya polemi ...
. As a reaction to sentiments of Arab supremacy, the ''shuʿūbiyya'' arose as a political faction and a genre of literature, especially among elements emphasizing Persian nationalism, that expressed the opposite: that non-Arabs were superior to Arabs. According to Goldziher, the non-Arabs and their traditions were depicted positively and used to contrast against the more negatively portrayed lifestyle and traditions of the Arabs.


Volume 2

The second volume of ''Muslim Studies'' concerned the history, origins, and development of the hadith literature. In contrast to earlier approaches, Goldziher thought to fundamentally rethink the origins of hadith and the role they can play as a source for Islamic history. Contrary to the traditional position (including how it had been taken in by the academics of his time), Goldziher did not believe that hadith stretched back to the time of Muhammad or the years that followed his death, but instead emerged in the second Islamic century in the context of the political and theological aspirations, debates, controversies, and polemics of the second Islamic century. Therefore, Goldziher underlined the utility of hadith in regards to their previously acknowledged, but greatly informative nature about the intellectual and social history of the Islamic religion during a still early, but more matured phase of it. Holtzman and Ovadia write, summarizing ''Muslim Studies'':
In his monumental ''Muhammedanische Studien'' (published in 1888–1890, two years after “Ueber Geberden”), Goldziher devoted the majority of the second volume to an exploration of the development of the ''ḥadīth'' literature. Approaching the ''ḥadīth'' as the reservoir of Arab memory, Goldziher noted that in his reading method "the Hadith will not serve as a document for the history of the infancy of Islam, but rather as a reflection of the tendencies which appeared in the community during the mature stages of its development." Goldziher saw the ''ḥadīth'' as "the typical product of the religious spirit of the epoch." By "the epoch" Goldziher meant the first century of Islam, when " e pious cultivated and disseminated in their orders the little that they had saved from early times or acquired by communication." He adds: "They also fabricated new material for which they could expect recognition." As is well known, the fabrication of ''ḥadīth'' material, which is broadly discussed in ''Muhammedanische Studien'', became a cornerstone of Goldziher’s perception of the formation of the ''ḥadīth''. This perception, however, does not contradict Goldziher’s basic approach to the ''ḥadīth'' as "a rich source for the intellectual history of early Islam and a record of how Muslims sought to establish their sense of self-identity as individuals and as a community of faith." And indeed, when he writes about gestures in the ''ḥadīth'', his approach is clearly non-skeptical: He does not criticize the sources but conveys their content faithfully.


Impact and reception in Islamic studies

While Goldziher's own work focused on the hadith literature,
Joseph Schacht Joseph Franz Schacht (, 15 March 1902 – 1 August 1969) was a British-German professor of Arabic and Islam at Columbia University in New York. He was the leading Western scholar in the areas of Islamic law and hadith studies, whose ''Origins of M ...
extended his findings to
Islamic law Sharia, Sharī'ah, Shari'a, or Shariah () is a body of religious law that forms a part of the Islamic tradition based on scriptures of Islam, particularly the Qur'an and hadith. In Islamic terminology ''sharīʿah'' refers to immutable, intan ...
(Shariah) in a seminal publication of his own, the '' Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence'' (1950). Among academics of hadith in
Turkey Turkey, officially the Republic of Türkiye, is a country mainly located in Anatolia in West Asia, with a relatively small part called East Thrace in Southeast Europe. It borders the Black Sea to the north; Georgia (country), Georgia, Armen ...
, Goldziher's work has been one of the primary loci of engagement with respect to the Western study of hadith, among those who are either generally in agreement or in disagreement with its conclusions. Although less influential, the first volume of ''Muslim Studies'' was also an important contribution to Islamic studies, being the first to tackle questions of hierarchical versus egalitarian tendencies in early Islam, as well as the first serious study of the '' shuʿūbiyya'', both as a movement and as a genre of literature. In the twentieth century, some parts of Goldziher's analysis were criticized by the Arabist H.A.R. Gibb (d. 1971) and Roy Mottahedeh. For Gibb, Goldziher had overemphasized the Persian element of the ''shuʿūbiyya''. Mottahedeh believed that Goldziher (a Hungarian Jew) was reading contemporary Hungarian national problems into the history of the ''shuʿūbiyya'', especially with respect to how the Hungarian nationalism of his time was posing an enlarging threat to local Jewish population from the end of the 19th century onwards. But for Mottahedeh, this was anachronistic: nationalism as an ideology only emerges in the 19th century. In response, Larsson has defended Goldziher, arguing that there is nothing in his works to suggest that his argument or thought emerged from or was related to concerns of contemporary nationalism.


References


Citations


Sources

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Further reading

* {{Cite book , last=Goldziher , first=Ignaz , title=Muslim Studies, Volume 2 , date=1971 , publisher=State University Press of New York , editor-last=Stern , editor-first=Samuel M. , translator-last=Barber , translator-first=Christa R. , translator-last2=Stern , translator-first2=Samuel M.


External links

* Full translation of Muslim Studies, 2 Vols (Internet Archive) Hadith studies Non-fiction books