#oneabstractaday

This book is the first in English to survey indigenous #knowledge of seasonal, astronomical, and agricultural information in Arab Gulf almanacs. It provides an extensive analysis of the traditional information available, based on local almanacs, #Arabic texts and poetry by #Gulf individuals, ethnographic interviews, and online forums. A major feature of the book is tracing the history of terms and concepts in the local seasonal knowledge of the Gulf, including an important genre about weather stars, stemming back to the ninth century CE. Also covered are pearl diving, fishing, #seafaring, and pastoral activities. This book will be of interest to scholars who study the entire #Arab region, since much of the lore was shared and continues through the present. It will also be of value to scholars who work on the #IndianOcean and Red Sea Trade Network, as well as the history of folk #astronomy in the Arab World.

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-95771-1#about-this-book

@islamicstudies #islamicstudies

Blind trust in (poorly understood) machine learning algorithms leads to thoughtlessness - we need a counterculture based on agential realism, acknowledging the entanglement of the observer and the observed and where 'people and communities are involved in both setting the questions and determining the meaning of what is found'

McQuillan, D. (2018). Data Science as Machinic Neoplatonism. Philosophy & Technology, 31(2)
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs13347-017-0273-3

#OneAbstractADay #DataScience
#Philosophy

#oneabstractaday

As far too many intellectual histories and theoretical contributions from the ‘global South’ remain under-explored, this volume works towards redressing such imbalance. Experienced authors, from the regions concerned, along different disciplinary lines, and with a focus on different historical timeframes, sketch out their perspectives of envisaged transformations. This includes specific case studies and reflexive accounts from African, South Asian, and Middle Eastern contexts. Taking a critical stance on the ongoing dominance of Eurocentrism in academia, the authors present their contributions in relation to current decolonial challenges.

(...)

From their particular vantage points of (trans)disciplinary and transregional engagement, they sketch out potential pathways for addressing the unfinished business of conceptual #decolonization

https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110733198/html#overview

#academicchatter @academicchatter @academicsunite #justpublished

#oneabstractaday #justpublished

The diversity of #modernities that can be observed in our world is linked to the claim of living in a global #modernity, in a world society. The book underpins this claim with numerous excursions into Islamic history. It criticises the view that #modernisation can be equated with westernisation and considers different projects of specifically Islamic modernities as integral parts of world society.

From this perspective, the study contributes to the "provincialisation" of European history in contemporary social scientific thought. Contrary to the theories of #postcolonialism associated with the call for the provincialisation of Europe, however, this book adheres to essential traditions of classical sociology. It thus aims to make a contribution to the social theoretical discussion on modernity.

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-658-39954-2

@islamicstudies @sociology #globalhistory #islamicstudies #sociology

#oneabstractaday

This book considers an important and largely neglected area of Islamic law by exploring how medieval Muslim jurists resolved criminal cases that could not be proven beyond a doubt, calling into question a controversial popular notion about Islamic law today, which is that Islamic law is a divine legal tradition that has little room for discretion or doubt, particularly in Islamic criminal law.

Through examination of legal, historical, and theological sources, and a range of illustrative case studies, this book shows that Muslim jurists developed a highly sophisticated and regulated system for dealing with Islam's unique concept of doubt, which evolved from the seventh to the sixteenth century.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/doubt-in-islamic-law/3F33884C01782919E73DC857A504D434#fndtn-information

@islamicstudies #islamicstudies #islamiclaw #evidence #doubt #truth

#oneabstractaday #justpublished

This volume discusses the origin and structure of the universe in mystical Islam (#Sufism) with special reference to parallel realms of existence and their interaction. Contributors address Sufi ideas about the fate of human beings in this and future life under three rubrics: (1) cosmogony and eschatology (“where do we come from?” and “where do we go?”); (2) conceptualizations of the world of the here-and-now (“where are we now?”); and (3) visualizations of realms of existence, their hierarchy and mutual relationships (“where are we in relation to other times and places?”).

https://brill.com/edcollbook/title/39557

@islamicstudies @sufistudies #sufism #cosmology #newbooks

#oneabstractaday

“In Compliance with the Old Register”: on Ottoman Documentary Depositories and Archival Consciousness

"The article examines multiple approaches to archived documents and documentary depositories in the Ottoman Empire. By exploring a range of views that reflect a sense of archival consciousness among different groups and individuals throughout the Ottoman lands, the essay seeks to better contextualize the Ottoman quite successful attempts to regulate the imperial paper trail and to promote a specific view of the archive. More generally, by tracing the emergence of a particular form of archival consciousness among members of the imperial administrative and judicial elites as well as Ottoman subjects, the article intends to offer a framework for a comparative study of the archival practices throughout the eastern Islamic lands."

https://brill.com/view/journals/jesh/62/5-6/article-p799_2.xml

#oneabstractaday

"The Tijaniyya is the largest Sufi order in West and North Africa. In this unprecedented analysis of the Tijaniyya’s origins and development in the late eighteenth century, Zachary Valentine Wright situates the order within the broader intellectual history of Islam in the early modern period. Introducing the group’s founder, Ahmad al-Tijani (1737–1815), Wright focuses on the wider network in which al-Tijani traveled, revealing it to be a veritable global Islamic revival whose scholars commanded large followings, shared key ideas, and produced literature read widely throughout the Muslim world. They were linked through chains of knowledge transmission from which emerged vibrant discourses of renewal in the face of perceived social and political corruption. Wright argues that this constellation of remarkable Muslim intellectuals, despite the uncertainly of the age, promoted personal verification in religious learning."

https://uncpress.org/book/9781469660820/realizing-islam/

@islamicstudies

#oneabstractaday

"The Tijaniyya is the largest Sufi order in West and North Africa. In this unprecedented analysis of the Tijaniyya's origins and development in the late eighteenth century, Zachary Valentine Wright situates the order within the broader intellectual history of Islam in the early modern period. Introducing the group's founder, Ahmad al-Tijani (1737 - 1815), Wright focuses on the wider network in which al-Tijani traveled, revealing it as a veritable global Islamic revival whose scholars commanded large followings, shared key ideas, and produced literature read widely throughout the Muslim world. They were linked through chains of knowledge transmission from which emerged vibrant discourses of renewal in the face of perceived social and political corruption.

Wright argues that this constellation of remarkable Muslim intellectuals, despite the uncertainly of the age, promoted personal verification in religious learning."

https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/40109

@islamicstudies

#oneabstractaday

"This is the first book in English to provide a comprehensive account of the rise and fall of the Almoravids and the Almohads, the two most important Berber dynasties of the medieval Islamic west, an area that encompassed southern Spain and Portugal, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. The Ṣanhāja Almoravids emerged from the Sahara in the 1050s to conquer vast territories and halt the Christian advance in Iberia. They were replaced a century later by their rivals, the Almohads, supported by the Maṣmūda Berbers of the High Atlas.

Although both have often been seen as uncouth, religiously intolerant tribesmen who undermined the high culture of al-Andalus, this book argues that the eleventh to thirteenth centuries were crucial to the Islamisation of the Maghrib, its integration into the Islamic cultural sphere, and its emergence as a key player in the western Mediterranean, and that much of this was due to these oft-neglected Berber empires."

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-almoravid-and-almohad-empires.html