Books by Camilla Adang
Muslim Perceptions and Receptions of the Bible. Texts and Studies
Atlanta, GA: Lockwood Press, 2019
The articles brought together in this volume deal with Muslim perceptions and uses of the Bible i... more The articles brought together in this volume deal with Muslim perceptions and uses of the Bible in its wider sense, including the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament as well as the New Testament, albeit with an emphasis on the former scripture. While Muslims consider the earlier revelations to the People of the Book to have been altered to some extent by the Jews and the Christians and abrogated by the Qurʾān, God's final dispensation to humankind, the Bible is at the same time venerated in view of its divine origin, and questioning this divine origin is tantamount to unbelief. Muslim scholars approached and used the Bible for a variety of purposes and in different ways. Thus Muslim historians regularly relied on biblical materials as their primary source for the pre-Islamic period when discussing the creation as well as the history of the Israelites and the prophets preceding Muḥammad. Authors seeking to polemicize against Jews and Christians were primarily interested in the presumed biblical annunciations of Muḥammad and his religion and / or in perceived contradictions and cases of internal abrogation in the Bible. These various concerns resulted from and had an impact on the ways in which Muslim authors accessed the scriptures.
Muslim Writers on Judaism and the Hebrew Bible deals with the way in which Judaism and its holy s... more Muslim Writers on Judaism and the Hebrew Bible deals with the way in which Judaism and its holy scriptures were viewed by nine medieval Muslim writers representing different genres of Arabic literature: Ibn Rabban al-ṭabarī, Ibn Qutayba, al-Ya‘qūbī, Abū Ja‘far al-ṭabarī, al-Mas‘ūdī, al-Maqdisī, al-Bāqillānī, al-Bīrūnī and Ibn ḥazm. After an introductory chapter on the reception of Biblical materials in early Islam and a presentation of the authors under review, the book focuses on their knowledge of Judaism and the text of the Hebrew Bible, and subsequently discusses issues frequently debated between Muslims and Jews, namely, the claim that the Torah contains references to Muḥammad, and the assertion that the Torah has been both abrogated and falsified. In the appendix, texts by Ibn Qutayba and al-Maqdisī are offered for the first time in an English translation.
Islam frente a Judaismo: La polemica de Ibn Hazm de Cordoba
En la España árabe no faltaron, por supuesto, las criticas islámicas contra el judaísmo. Precisam... more En la España árabe no faltaron, por supuesto, las criticas islámicas contra el judaísmo. Precisamente, uno de los autores musulmanes que más atención prestaron al judaísmo y a los judíos fue el polígrafo cordobés Ibn Hazm (siglo XI), en parte movido por una controversia que mantuvo con el visir de la Granada zirí, el hebreo Samuel ha-Naguid. La Dra. Camila Adang ha examinado toda la amplia obra de Ibn Hazm, ha estudiado también un buen número de autores islámicos de épocas anteriores (desde el siglo VIl) y ha contactado con los especialistas de las diferentes naciones, de modo que está en grado de ofrecer un trabajo original, de primera mano, totalmente fiable.
Edited Volumes by Camilla Adang
Islam at 250: Studies in Memory of G.H.A. Juynboll is a collection of original articles on the st... more Islam at 250: Studies in Memory of G.H.A. Juynboll is a collection of original articles on the state of Islamic sciences and Arabic culture in the early phases of their crystallization. It covers a wide range of intellectual activity in the first three centuries of Islam, such as the study of ḥadīth, the Qurʾān, Arabic language and literature, and history. Individually and taken together, the articles provide important new insights and make an important contribution to scholarship on early Islam. The authors, whose work reflects an affinity with Juynboll's research interests, are all experts in their fields. Pointing to the importance of interdisciplinary approaches and signalling lacunae, their contributions show how scholarship has advanced since Juynboll's days.
The Bible in Arabic among Jews, Muslims and Christians
Intellectual History of the Islamicate World, 2013
The present volume—the first of its kind—deals with takfīr: accusing one´s opponents of unbelief ... more The present volume—the first of its kind—deals with takfīr: accusing one´s opponents of unbelief (kufr). Originating in the first decades of Islam, this practice has been applied intermittently ever since. The nineteen studies included here deal with cases, covering different periods and parts of the Muslim world, of individuals or groups that used the instrument of takfīr to brand their opponents—either persons, groups or even institutions—as unbelievers who should be condemned, anathematized or even persecuted. Each case presented is placed in its sociopolitical and religious context. Together the contributions show the multifariousness that has always characterized Islam and the various ways in which Muslims either sought to suppress or to come to terms with this diversity.
With contributions by: Roswitha Badry, Sonja Brentjes, Brian J. Didier, Michael Ebstein, Simeon Evstatiev, Ersilia Francesca, Robert Gleave, Steven Judd, István T. Kristó-Nagy, Göran Larsson, Amalia Levanoni, Orkhan Mir-Kasimov, Hossein Modarressi, Justyna Nedza, Intisar A. Rabb, Sajjad Rizvi, Daniel de Smet, Zoltan Szombathy, Joas Wagemakers
A Common Rationality. Muʿtazilism in Islam and Judaism
Papers by Camilla Adang
Ana Echevarría, Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala and John Tolan (eds.), Law and Religious Minorities in Medieval Societies: between theory and praxis , 2016
Cette publication est réalisée dans le cadre du projet de recherche RELMIN « Le statut légal des ... more Cette publication est réalisée dans le cadre du projet de recherche RELMIN « Le statut légal des minorités religieuses dans l'espace Euro-méditerranéen (ve -xve siècles) » La recherche qui a abouti à cette publication a été financée par le Conseil européen de la recherche sous le septième programme cadre de l'Union Européenne (FP7/2007-2013) / ERC contrat no 249416.
The present contribution offers, for the first time, an English translation of al-Risāla al-hādiy... more The present contribution offers, for the first time, an English translation of al-Risāla al-hādiya, a polemical tract written by ʿAbd al-Salām al-Muhtadī al-Muḥammadī, a Jewish convert to Islam who lived in Istanbul in the early Ottoman period. Apart from the information provided by the author himself in the tract-from which we learn that he converted during the reign of Sultan Bāyazīd II (ruled 886/1481-918/1512)-we find additional data in the well-known bibliographical survey Kashf al-ẓunūn by Ḥājjī Khalīfa, also known as Kâtib Çelebi (d. 1067/1657). In this work, which lists books according to the alphabetical order of their titles, two entries may be found on our author, or rather his tract, one under al-Risāla alhādiya, the other under al-Hādiya. The tract is described as a short refutation of Judaism in three parts (whose titles are given by Ḥājjī Khalīfa); the author is named as ʿAbd al-Salām al-Muhtadī or al-Daftarī, who converted to Islam from Judaism, and who knew the entire Torah by heart. During the reign of Sultan Selim I (ruled 918/1512-926/1520) he became a daftarī (that is, an official in the Ottoman financial administration), and he founded a mosque and a number of religious endowments. 2 Unlike other converts to Islam, ʿAbd al-Salām al-Muhtadī does not provide a detailed explanation of the reasons or circumstances of his conversion to Islam. As various others before and after him, he suggests that it was the very Torah that inspired him; if only people would understand it correctly, they would become convinced of the truth of Muḥammad's mission, as he himself had. He mentions the encouragement received from Sultan Bāyazīd, but it is not clear to what this amounted. An identical claim is made by the author of a very similar, though less sophisticated tract, who goes by the name of Salām ʿAbd al-ʿAllām. 3 1 I use the opportunity to thank the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, which funded the research for this article. I am grateful also to Judith Pfeiffer, Yaron Ben-Naeh and Yasin Meral for providing me with bio-and bibliographical details about the author of the tract presented here (or his namesake), as well as to Sabine Schmidtke for her valuable comments. 2
The Reception of Biblical Materials in Early Islam
BRILL eBooks, 1996
Ibn Hazm de Córdoba sobre los Judíos en la sociedad islámica
La sociedad Andalusi y sus tradiciones literarias, 1994
Intellectual History of the Islamicate World , 2024
This article offers a contribution to the study of polemics between Muslims and Jews in the Middl... more This article offers a contribution to the study of polemics between Muslims and Jews in the Middle Ages. It presents an annotated translation of the extant fragments of a reply by an unknown Jew to the polemical tract Ifḥām al-Yahūd in which the mathematician Samawʾal al-Maghribī (d. 570/1175), who converted to Islam in 558/1163, virulently attacks his former religion. Samawʾal's tract had a significant impact both on later Muslim polemicists and on Jewish thinkers, who defended their religion against his strictures. The unique manuscript of the anonymous refutation, written in Judaeo-Arabic, is part of the Firkovitch collection kept at the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg. It is included in a codex that also contains an incomplete version, in the same hand, of Samawʾal al-Maghribī's tract. While the codex can be tentatively dated to the fourteenth century and was presumably written in Egypt, we cannot know with any degree of certainty when and where the refutation itself was composed, nor whether the unknown author had access to a complete copy of Samawʾal's work. Although at times the author quotes Ifḥām al-Yahūd verbatim, paraphrases and indirect references to Samawʾal's arguments are more common. In order to contextualize the unknown author's counterarguments, we provide a running commentary, including quotations of the passages from Ifḥām al-Yahūd that are being refuted.
Collectanea Christiana Orientalia 21, pp. 1-28, 2024
The present article discusses the Muslim legal scholar and theologian ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn al-Bājī (631-7... more The present article discusses the Muslim legal scholar and theologian ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn al-Bājī (631-714/1233-1314) and his polemic against the Pentateuch, which he read in at least two Christian Arabic translations that were in use among Rūm Orthodox Christians (Melkites). It aims to identify the recensions of the Pentateuch that al-Bājī had access to, and to understand how the differences between these recensions contributed to his view that the shared Jewish and Christian scripture had undergone changes. The article suggests that al-Bājī used a combination of arguments to undermine especially the Christian reception of divine revelation, pointing out apparent inconsistencies and illogicalities in the biblical stories themselves as well as text-critical cruxes caused by discrepancies between different versions that circulated side by side within the Eastern Christian communities. Finally, some of the “irrationalities” he describes seem to be particular of the copies of the texts he had in front of him.
Al-Bājī, Book against the Torah
Bloomsbury Academic eBooks, 2022
Ibn Ḥazm, Judgement regarding the religions, inclinations and sects
The Bloomsbury Reader in Christian-Muslim Relations, 600–1500, 2022
Omslag, bulletin van de Universiteitsbibliotheek Leiden en het Scaliger Instituut, 2007
Hans-Jürgen Becker, Kinga Dévényi, Sebastian Günther and Sabine Schmidtke (eds.), Building Bridges: Ignaz Goldziher and His Correspondents. Islamic and Jewish Studies around the Turn of the Twentieth Century, Leiden, Boston: Brill, 9-51, 2024
The present contribution deals with the letters sent to Ignaz Goldziher by his younger colleague ... more The present contribution deals with the letters sent to Ignaz Goldziher by his younger colleague Israel Friedlaender, who shared Goldziher's passion for Jewish Arabic studies. Friedlaender was born on 8 September 1876 in Włodawa, a small town in Poland ("Russisch-Polen"), and raised in the Praga suburb of Warsaw. Since Jews were barred from attending public schools, he received his education in Hebrew and Jewish topics at the local Cheder and on secular topics at home, from private teachers. In 1896 he moved to Berlin to study at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität as well as at the Hildesheimer Rabbiner Seminar für das orthodoxe Judentum.1 In addition, he attended classes at the Ephraim Veitel-Heine Stiftung. Four years later we find him at the Kaiser-Wilhelms-Universität in Strasbourg, pursuing his studies in Semitics, in the widest sense, under Theodor Nöldeke (1836-1930).2 It would seem that it was Nöldeke, who was on excellent terms with Goldziher, who first encouraged Friedlaender to write to him in Budapest, and it was Goldziher who suggested the topic of Friedlaender's dissertation. The Oriental Collection of the Library 1 He was never ordained a Rabbi. 2 Autobiographical details are supplied by Friedlaender in the Vita at the end of his dissertation (see note 5) and in a nine-page document that forms part of the Friedlaender Papers kept at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York (arc. 39, Box 8). Both include lists of his teachers at the different institutions he attended. In the jts document Friedlaender moreover describes his readings, his early publications, and plans for future research. I thank Sabine Schmidtke for providing me with digital images of this important document, which was also used by Baila Round Shargel for her detailed biography of Friedlaender entitled Practical Dreamer. Israel Friedlaender and the Shaping of American Judaism, New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1985. Shargel has not used the letters presented here. Additional information on Friedlaender's life, scholarship and activism may be found in Kohn,
Dorothee Pielow, Jana Newiger and Yassir El Jamouhi (eds.), Teachers and Students: Reflections on Learning in Near and Middle Eastern Cultures. Collected Studies in Honour of Sebastian Günther, Leiden, Boston: Brill, 340-370., 2024
The present contribution offers the first full translation of Bayān zaghal al-ʿilm, a little-stud... more The present contribution offers the first full translation of Bayān zaghal al-ʿilm, a little-studied tract by the famous Mamluk historian, biographer and ḥadīth expert Shams al-Dīn al-Dhahabī (d. 748/1348) which reflects the author's pessimistic outlook on the state of knowledge, particularly religious knowledge, in his own period. Quran reciters, ḥadīth scholars, representatives of different schools of law, grammarians, lexicographers, exegetes, scholars of legal methodology and theologians are criticized for their superficial knowledge and their tendency to show off or to abandon scrutiny of the sacred scriptures; the dangers lurking in the ancient disciplines of logic and philosophy and potentially in mathematics and medicine are spelled out, and secular or semi-secular disciplines like epistolary composition, poetry, arithmetic, administrative law, the preparation of notarial documents and finally sermonizing should, to the extent possible, be employed to further the cause of Islam, in the author's view. More than just taking stock of the situation, al-Dhahabī's tract may in fact be a warning of what is bound to happen if the situation is not reversed and appears to reflect his concern about a move away from the traditional towards the rational sciences.* The famous Mamluk historian, biographer and ḥadīth expert Shams al-Dīn Abū ʿAbdallāh Muḥammad b. Aḥmad b. ʿUthmān b. Qaymāz b. ʿAbdallāh al-Turkumānī al-Dhahabī of Damascus (d. 748/1348) is known mainly for his bio-* Research for this contribution was carried out during a sabbatical semester at the Dipartimento di Studi sull'
“The Man Who Fled From Ibn al-Naghrīla”
Omer Michaelis and Sabine Schmidtke (eds.), Religious and Intellectual Diversity in the Islamicate World and Beyond. Essays in Honor of Sarah Stroumsa, Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2024,190-211. , 2024
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Books by Camilla Adang
Edited Volumes by Camilla Adang
With contributions by: Roswitha Badry, Sonja Brentjes, Brian J. Didier, Michael Ebstein, Simeon Evstatiev, Ersilia Francesca, Robert Gleave, Steven Judd, István T. Kristó-Nagy, Göran Larsson, Amalia Levanoni, Orkhan Mir-Kasimov, Hossein Modarressi, Justyna Nedza, Intisar A. Rabb, Sajjad Rizvi, Daniel de Smet, Zoltan Szombathy, Joas Wagemakers
Papers by Camilla Adang