14246

WiSe 14/15: (S)The Intellectuals of 10th Century Baghdad: Jewish, Christian and Muslim.

Sidney Griffith

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Open only for students enrolled

Additional information / Pre-requisites

Online (no room)!

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By the turn of the ninth century CE, Baghdad, founded some forty years earlier as the capital city of the Abbasid Caliphs, had become a flourishing cosmopolitan metropolis. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scholars from all over the Arabic-speaking world flourished there for a time in a scholarly convivencia unmatched anywhere else in the World of Islam, unless it be Cairo in the thirteenth century. The high point of intellectual fame was achieved in the tenth century, the era of Saadia Gaon, Yahy? ibn 'Ad?, and Alfarabi, not to mention the flowering of ?ilm al-kal?m in all three communities. Through careful reading of primary and secondary texts, the purpose of this course is to highlight the understudied interaction of scholars from the several communities in their philosophical and religious pursuit of knowledge and the ways of humane conduct in the de facto religiously plural society of Abbasid Baghdad. Beginning with a review of the intellectual riches infused into Arabic scholarly circles through the translation movements of the ninth century, the course focuses its attention on the works and topics that occupied the major Jewish, Christian, and Muslim ?ulam?' of the tenth century, finally extending the view into the work of their successors up to the middle of the eleventh century CE. close