History of Oriental studies

This volume brings together the leading experts in the history of European Oriental Studies. Their essays present a comprehensive history of the teaching and learning of Arabic in early modern Europe, covering a wide geographical area from southern to northern Europe and discussing the many ways and purposes for which the Arabic language was taught and studied by scholars, theologians, merchants, diplomats and prisoners. The contributions shed light on different methods and contents of language teaching in a variety of academic, scholarly and missionary contexts in the Protestant and the Roman Catholic world. But they also look beyond the institutional history of Arabic studies and consider the importance of alternative ways in which the study of Arabic was persued.

Contributors are Asaph Ben Tov, Maurits H. van den Boogert, Sonja Brentjes, Mordechai Feingold, Mercedes García-Arenal, John-Paul A. Ghobrial, Aurélien Girard, Alastair Hamilton, Jan Loop, Nuria Martínez de Castilla Muñoz, Simon Mills, Fernando Rodríguez Mediano, Bernd Roling, Arnoud Vrolijk.

This collection of essays brings together some of the papers given during the study day Celestino Schiaparelli (1841-1919): His Legacy and the Oriental School of Sapienza that took place on 8 December 2018, at the Odeion of the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy
at Sapienza University.
In addition to the papers presented on this study day, the present work also includes texts that help uncover various aspects of Celestino Schiaparelli’s career and interests.

When it appeared in Paris in 1697, the Bibliothèque Orientale of Barthélemy d'Herbelot de Molainville (1625–95) became the most complete reference work about Islamic history and letters in the West. Writing in French, d'Herbelot drew on an impressive variety of Arabic, Persian and Turkish manuscripts that he had read in Florence and in Paris. This article examines the Bibliothèque Orientale's idiosyncratic organisation, which has elicited comment over the centuries, and investigates whether it restricted the book's reception, as has sometimes been claimed. The book's peculiar form is explained by comparison with the Bibliothèque Orientale's most important source, the bibliography of the seventeenth-century Ottoman scholar Katib Çelebi: his work not only provided much of the Bibliothèque Orientale's content but inspired its organisation as well. Antoine Galland's previously unstudied manuscript additions to the Bibliothèque Orientale show how this collaborator of d'Herbelot understood the work as a guide to the literary history of recent Muslim peoples. The Bibliothèque Orientale remained a valuable resource for understanding Islamic topics well into the nineteenth century, as demonstrated by the marginalia of prominent European scholars of Arabic, including Johann Jacob Reiske. More than this, the Bibliothèque Orientale offered a unique view of Timurid, Safavid and Ottoman literary culture—an unusual emphasis among European scholars, who tended to be more interested in the early centuries of Islam. D'Herbelot's achievement compels us to take seriously the ability of the Catholic scholarly culture of late-seventeenth-century France to study a foreign intellectual tradition.

https://www.degruyter.com/view/product/475898

Very soon after its official announcement, photography was introduced to the Near and Middle East. The new medium became a global phenomenon of the nineteenth century, and its themes, visuality, and practices were arguably shared wherever it was used. The techniques and their uses in a studio or outdoors created certain requirements that were universal, thus spreading European norms of depiction across the globe. As a discipline, the history of photography, through this inception, has foregrounded early photography in Europe and North America. While this narrative has emphasized the global diffusion and universal impact of European photography, it has underexposed local photography in other regions where the new pictorial medium was quickly adopted. This volume brings current scholarship on local photography of the nineteenth century in the regions of the Near and Middle East to an international discussion....

A kötet a bengáli és magyar irodalmi kapcsolatok részletes áttekintése és elemzése különös tekintettel Tagore magyar fogadtatására. Mivel sokáig a bengáli irodalom jelentette számunkra az élő indiai kultúrát, ezért a könyv egyben tükör is a magyar-indiai irodalmi kapcsolatokra általában. Az egyik központi kérdés, hogy a magyar szerzők mennyire álltak a nyugati orientalizmus hatása alatt, és hogy létezett-e sajátosan magyar hozzáállás.
A könyv áttekinti egymás szövegeinek fordítását és azok fogadtatását, a magyar utazók véleményét a bengáli kultúráról, Tagore magyarországi visszhangját, és a költő magyarországi programját. A kötet közöl továbbá számos vonatkozó dokumentumot vagy azok magyar vonatkozását.

This paper sets out an ambitious critique of contemporary political scientists, political historians and others concerned with the history of democracy. It argues that overwhelmingly the history of democracy relies on an overtly Eurocentric narrative that emphasizes the keystone moments of Western civilization. According to this narrative, democracy has a clear trajectory that can be traced from ancient experiments with participatory government in Greece and to a lesser extent in Rome, through the development of the British parliament, the American Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution, and then finally onto the triumphant march of the liberal model of democracy across the globe over the last 200 years, particularly under Western tutelage. Histories of democracy that focus exclusively on these events not only privilege Europe and its successful colonies, but also miss the broader human story of the struggle for and achievement of democracy.

This presents us with a distinct challenge. For those whose heritage does not include a direct link to Greek assemblies, the American Congress or the French Revolution, the 'standard history of democracy' provides a distant and exclusive narrative, which limits one's ability to embrace democracy. This paper concludes by noting that, as democracy spreads out across the world today, political scientists not only need to break down the intellectual orthodoxy that democracy has exclusively Western roots, but also to embrace a more global view of democracy as a political practise that has been present at various times and in sometimes unfamiliar ways in the complex histories and rich cultural traditions of most of the people of the earth.

This introductory article follows one of the most widely read and used Qur’an editions in Christian Europe, Theodor Bibliander’s Machumetis Saracenorum principis, eiusque successorum vitae, ac doctrina, ipseque Alcoran, printed in Basel in 1543 and in a second edition in 1550. The article analyses some of the interpretations, appropriations, and polemical uses that this Qur’an version was exposed to during an age of confessional rivalry and political fragmentation. By doing so, the article tries to show the deep entanglement of the Qur’an in European religious and political discourses. It argues that with regard to the transformations that the Qur’an underwent in its transition from the Islamic-Arabic world to the various Latin and vernacular versions in Europe, as well as with regard to the ways that the Qur’an is read, used, and adapted in Christian and Jewish European contexts, we are confronted with a text genre sui generis–—the European Qur’an.

Réduire le schisme ? Ecclésiologies et politiques de l’Union entre Orient et Occident (XIIIe-XVIIIe siècle), éd. Marie-Hélène Blanchet et Frédéric Gabriel, Paris, Centre d’histoire et civilisation de Byzance (Collège de France-CNRS), 2013, p. 197-236.

В статье рассматривается история ведущего востоковедного журнала, выходившего под названиями "Советское востоковедение" (1955-58), "Проблемы востоковедения" (1959-60), "Народы Азии и Африки" (1961-90), "Восток. Афро-азиатские общества: история и современность" (1991- н.в.).
Zakharov, A. O. "From Soviet Oriental Studies to Vostok/Oriens: The Story of a Journal", Journal of the Institute of Oriental Studies RAS, Issue 3 (2018), pp. 10-26.

On March 3, 1878 was signed the peace of Santo Stefano at the end of the Russo-Turkish War, which caused a political crisis, financial and military Ottoman Empire. Constantinople in those years was aided by some major European powers that were aimed at preserving the international balance. The Santo Stefano Treaty, however, disappointed several Western powers, primarily the Austria-Hungary, and thanks to the leadership from Germany was organized the Congress of Berlin (1878). The Ottoman Empire was able to limit the territorial losses than decided in Santo Stefano. That the international landscape that frames the study that tries to reconstruct the events of the Ottoman society on the eve of the First World War.

Katharina Otto-Dorn gehört zu den wenigen deutschen Kunsthistorikerinnen, die in den 1960er und 1970er Jahren auf dem zu dieser Zeit weitgehend von Männern beherrschten Gebiet der Islamischen Kunstgeschichte geforscht und publiziert haben. Während sie in Deutschland (Habilitation an der Univ. Heidelberg) keine angemessene, dauerhafte Stelle erhielt, wurde sie durch ihre Professuren in Ankara (1954-1967) und Los Angeles (1967-1978) auch international wahrgenommen. 
Bleibenden Einfluß hat sie auf die Türkische Kunstgeschichtsforschung genommen, durch die Ausgrabung eines seldschukischen Sommerpalastes in Kubababad am Beysehir See, vor allem aber durch die Ausbildung zahlreicher türkischer Studenten und Studentinnen, die später als Dozent:innen und Professor:innen über Jahre hinweg das Fach (Türkisch Islamische Kunstgeschichte) an verschiedenen türkischen Universitäten vertreten haben.

This paper sums up some of my reflections, presented during a symposium on “The History of Egyptology in the Low Countries”, held at the Nederlands-Vlaams Institute in Cairo, in November 2019, and a roundtable discussion, forming part of the BSHS Global Digital History of Science Festival 2020: “A welcome guest? Egyptology in History of Science – an interdisciplinary study: networks, narratives, and resources” which was followed by troubling (re-)actions from some members of the audience. – I would like to thank the respective organizers of the two events for the opportunity to present my research and the majority of participants who engaged in constructive and respectful discussion.

Jean Gagnier’s De vita, et rebus gestis Mohammedis (1723) was the first substantial biography of the Prophet Muhammad translated by a European author directly from an authentic Muslim source. Familiar to Edward Gibbon and Voltaire, Gagnier’s work significantly shaped European understandings of the origins of Islam well into the nineteenth century. Yet Gagnier’s scholarship has not been examined in any depth since it was closely read by his contemporaries. This article provides an analysis of Gagnier’s strategies and competencies as a translator and reconstructs his attempt to exploit the Arabic manuscripts then available to an Oxford scholar. It argues that the case of Gagnier is a cautionary reminder that philological approaches to the study of the Muslim past did not necessarily occasion sympathy for Islam. Old prejudices continued to influence Gagnier’s decisions as a translator and were passed on in new forms to later readers. Moreover, aspects of the Muslim historiographical tradition discovered by Gagnier did not necessarily incline his readers to a more positive view of Islam. The increased accessibility of Islamic historical texts could just as easily serve the Christian polemicist as the Enlightened historian.

“Osmanlı Sarayında Japon Rüzgarı” sergi kataloğu, Dolmabahçe Sanat Galerisi, 23 Şubat - 21 Mart 2013 s.17-29 (In Turkish, “Japanese Wind at the Ottoman Palaces”, Exhibition Catalogue of Japanese Art Collection at Dolmabahçe Palace, Dolmabahçe Art Gallery, 23 February – 21 March 2013 pp.17-29)

Gershom Scholem in Deutschland
Zwischen Seelenverwandtschaft und Sprachlosigkeit
Hrsg. v. Gerold Necker, Elke Morlok u. Matthias Morgenstern

Die Biographie des in Berlin geborenen und ab 1923 in Jerusalem lebenden Kabbala-Forschers Gershom Gerhard Scholem ist von den Katastrophen und Umbrüchen des 20. Jahrhunderts geprägt. Im Horizont des für Scholem ambivalenten deutsch-jüdischen Verhältnisses nehmen die Autoren des Bandes seinen Werdegang im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik in den Blick sowie die Bedeutung, die er als israelischer Gesprächspartner für die Zeitgeschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland hatte. Die Beziehungen zu Walter Benjamin und Hannah Arendt, zu dem Theologen Otto Michel und dem Verleger Siegfried Unseld dokumentieren auf unterschiedlichen Ebenen Scholems Verbindung zu Deutschland, die ihn auch bei persönlicher Lyrik und sogar bei seiner wissenschaftlichen Prosa zur jüdischen Mystik begleitete.

Uncovering The Past Towards the Future, Uniting Experiences
and Values.
Kurdistan in Western and Eastern Research Tradition.
24-26.10.2016
Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland
Collegium Maius, Jagiellońska Street 15,
Michał Bobrzyński Conference Hall, Kazimierz The Great Conference Hall

The abundantly illustrated article elaborates the history of Armenia paleography from its inception to modern techniques, discussing the contribution of each individual paleographer from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. The essay represents the introduction to the vast Album of chronologically arranged examples from some 200 select manuscripts. There is a clear presentation of the evolution of the four major Armenian scripts. The work is accompanied by the detailed bibliography of the subject.

В основе данной публикации лежат материалы одноименной международной конференции, состоявшейся 16-17 сентября 2011 г. в Париже. Книга рассматривает участие французов в таких областях жизни в России как славистика и литературоведение, пресса и книгоиздательское дело, живопись, музыка, инженерное дело, архитектура, география, этнология, востоковедение, зоология, палеонтология и некоторых других. Книга предваряется вступлением (на фр. яз.), написанным Ф.Д.Лиштенан и В.С.Ржеуцким.

The period from 1882 to 1914 has been termed the “Golden Age” of Egyptology. Under Adolf Erman, the successor of Carl Richard Lepsius, one of Egyptology’s “founding fathers,” who had died in 1884, Egyptology  experienced the inauguration of the Ancient Egyptian Dictionary Project in 1897 and the founding of the German Oriental Society in 1898. Erman’s successful effort to send Ludwig Borchardt to Egypt in 1895 was the prelude to a permanent presence of German Egyptology in Egypt. The implementation in 1898 of an international project to create
the Catalogue Général (CG) was followed by Borchardt’s appointment as scholarly attaché at the German Consulate General in Cairo in 1899, the construction of “German House” in Western Thebes in 1904, the establishment of the Imperial German Institute in Cairo between 1906 and 1907, and the initiation of a program of excavations and research in Egypt. In 1912 the painted bust of Queen Nefertiti was discovered. During the same decades, the Zeitschrift für Ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde (ZÄS), under Erman’s editorship, remained the single most prestigious journal for matters Egyptological. The far-reaching and
long-term influence of the “École de Berlin” (Berlin School), headed by Adolf Erman, is a hallmark of the era.

The Euro-cannibals
False concepts, ideological and theoretical confusion, treachery, corruption, inducement into high treason, and comprehensive conspiracy against the colonized peoples are all constituent parts and fundamental pillars of the European colonialism. To understand why all these evildoings have been perpetrated worldwide by the Euro-cannibals, one must see the map of the world in three dates: 1490, 1785 and 1920.
Before 520 years, there was still an Islamic state in Spain, there were still great indigenous kingdoms in America, and the Islamic world was ruled by many local authorities and kings, spanning from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Africa was constituted in a myriad of rather modest states, whereas China was living with the fresh memory of Emperor Yongle´s expansion up to the easternmost confines of Central Asia. Russia was an insignificant realm that had just managed to deter the Great Horde, and Western Europe was a multi-divided, poor, barbaric and uncivil circumference in turmoil.
Before 225 years, America was occupied by and divided among five European colonial powers (Spain, Portugal, France, England, and Holland), after terrible genocides had taken place due to the forced Christianization of many subjugated indigenous peoples. The then recent formation of the US was viewed by the Founding Fathers as key to the elimination of the colonial scourge from the Western Hemisphere. The Islamic world was mainly under the control of three huge kingdoms, namely the Ottoman Empire (Islamic Caliphate), Safavid Iran, and Mughal India, although the latter had started being disintegrated due to the English – promoted Maratha Hindu kingdom and the increasing colonial presence of the English and the French. Islamic – Ottoman control over North Africa was still firm, and only in Africa´s coastal lands, European colonial presence was attested. Qing (Manchu) China was on the eve of the Messianic White Lotus rebellion that weakened the Manchu rule. Russia had risen to a significant European power due to the expansion in Siberia, the Far East, and more importantly, in the South (the Black Sea and the Caucasus region), although Central Asiatic Islamic states were still independent. Contrarily to almost the rest of the world, Europe was significantly stronger and wealthier due to the exploitation of the natural resources of the colonized territories, mainly in America and secondarily in India.
First published in the American Chronicle, AfroArticles and Buzzle on 16 February 2016
Republished:
https://shorkaror.wordpress.com/2010/06/23/fake-sudan-real-ethiopia-and-fake-ethiopia-real-abyssinia-what-is-at-stake/

Joseph von Hammer (1774-1856) sadece Türkolojinin değil Şark araştırmalarının bütün sahalarında çalışanlarca hâlâ saygı duyulan bir alimdir. Hammer esasen Habsburglar için tercüman yetiştiren bir okuldan mezun olmuştu. Fakat diplomatlık kariyerinde ilerleyememiş, diğer yandan yaşamı boyunca tercüme ve telif binin üzerinde eser kaleme almış ve ölümünün ardından Şarkiyat sahasında büyük bir miras bırakmıştı. Böylesine büyük bir mirasın sahibi olmasına rağmen ve yaşadığı çağda takdir gördüğü halde, hatıratı ölümünden sonra hacmi ve Hammer’in sivri üslubu nedeniyle yayınlanamamış, ancak Bachofen’in çabalarıyla ilk günden itibaren akademisyenlerin eleştirilerine maruz kalacak bir şekilde kısaltılarak basılmıştır. Bu basım son yıllarda Graz Üniversitesi tarafından Hammer’in evrak-ı metrukesi ve hatıratı üzerine yapılan araştırmalar sırasında ortaya çıkarılan metnin yayınlanmasına kadar itibar görmüştür.
Bu makalede, Bachofen’in hazırladığı fakat basılmayan, Graz Üniversitesi tarafından çevrimiçi olarak yayınlanan Hammer’in hatıratının tam metni kaynak olarak kullanılacak ve Şarkiyat araştırmalarına yön veren bir alimin, Habsburg diplomat okulundaki günlerine mercek tutulacaktır.

The person of the founder of Ukrainian oriental studies, Ahatanhel Krymskyi (Agathangel Krymsky) is the focal point of the present studies. A. Krymskyi was an extraordinary figure of the humanities of the Russian Empire at the very end of XIX and emerging Ukrainian science of the first half of XX century. He was an orientalist (Arabist, Iranist, and Turkologist), as well as a researcher of Ukrainian and Russian linguistic and ethnography, politician, one of the founders of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and its permanent secretary, as well as a writer and a poet.
His unusual sexual identity was an objective of special interest of some Ukrainian essayists, who created a series of homophobic mythos around the person of A. Krymskyi, and around the persons with unusual sexual orientation as well. The critical reviewing of this mythology and researching the facts from the private life of A. Krymskyi  on the basis of the archival documents of textual and visual character within the historical context is the objective of the present paper. Archival documents from the different archives, mainly from the Institute of Manuscript of V. Vernadskyi National Library of Ukraine  gives opportunity to observe the main features of the character of A. Krymskyi, and his relation with the his family, friends, colleagues and other peoples. The significant point of the studies was his relation with women, in particularly, his affaire d’amour with Ms. Maria Kamenskaya, a teacher of the Institute for Noble Young Ladies in Beirut, as well as documented relations of different kinds  with other ladies, and with men. In contrary to the myth about the scholar as “weak neurotic character”, narcissus and hysteric person, the documents prove that A. Krymsky was a rational, able person, with rather positive vision of the life, and stoical position during the late period of his life, as well as generous, high-minded, empathic, kind, able to help to the other person in resolving of their problem, defender of his friends, relatives and colleagues from the pressure of Soviet system.

Ibn Baṭūṭah (Arabic: أبو عبد الله محمد بن عبد الله اللواتي الطنجي بن بطوطة‎, ʾAbū ʿAbd al-Lāh Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Lāh l-Lawātī ṭ-Ṭanǧī ibn Baṭūṭah), or simply Ibn Battuta (ابن بطوطة) (February 25, 1304 – 1368 or 1369), was a Moroccan explorer of Berber descent. He is known for his extensive travels, accounts of which were published in the Rihla (lit. "Journey"). Over a period of thirty years, Ibn Battuta visited most of the known Islamic world as well as many non-Muslim lands. His journeys included trips to North Africa, the Horn of Africa, West Africa and Eastern Europe in the West, and to the Middle East, South Asia, Central Asia, Southeast Asia and China. Ibn Battuta is considered to be among the great travellers of all time.

List of mainly Oriental manuscripts from the library of Adriaan Reland, based on the auction catalogue of 1761 and other sources, with the identification of who owned them and their present location if known. The whole volume of The Orient in Utrecht is open access available online.

Ce travail profite de l’exceptionnelle richesse des fonds romains (archives de la congrégation de Propaganda Fide et de l’Université la Sapienza). Il porte tout d’abord sur le fonctionnement institutionnel des écoles de langue arabe. Sous le contrôle de la congrégation de la Propagande, certains établissements accueillaient des chrétiens orientaux pour les former au catholicisme tridentin, d’autres formaient des religieux qui se destinaient à la mission. Parmi les professeurs, on comptait de nombreux maronites, eux-mêmes éduqués à Rome. Cette recherche envisage ensuite les méthodes pédagogiques, grâce à l’étude des manuels de langue et des imprimés en arabe, et grâce au témoignage de Giuseppe Luigi Assemani, qui enseigna pendant une trentaine d’années à Rome. Les milieux orientalistes romains avaient aussi développé une représentation diglossique de la langue « vulgaire » et « doctrinale ».

Independent Algeria's rehabilitation of a French « Orientalist » painter, who died in 1929, raises questions about how important the colonial heritage is in the making of Algerian identity. After examining the difficulties encountered in a biography that cannot be reduced to the interpretation of a spectacular conversion to Islam, facts are placed in their political and cultural contexts. Other figures, who have also sucessfully passed on from colonial to independent Algeria, are used to shed light on the issues involved in the portrayal of Algerian native life and in the ways this legacy has been passed down.