14285
Seminar
WiSe 15/16: An Introduction to Hadith Criticism
Islam Dayeh
Comments
Did Homer really compose the Odyssey? How do we account for the discrepancies among the canonical gospels? Fabrication, oral tradition or multiple sources? These are some of the questions that have been treated by the discipline of textual criticism, a discipline which began to emerge in Europe during the renaissance and would gradually become a fully-fledged science in the 18th and 19th century in classical and biblical studies. The counterpart to text criticism in the Arabic-Islamic intellectual tradition is the discipline known as 'ulum al-hadith, the sciences of hadith. Although originally emerging as a critical method for documenting and verifying sayings and actions attributed to the Prophet Muhammad and his companions, it gradually developed into a comprehensive and systematic science, whose objective was the examination of any historical and literary report and thus constituted one of the pillars of classical and early modern Arabic philology and historiography. The discipline covered a wide range of topics such as the establishment of authorship, textual transmission (the theory of the isnad), the detection of plagiarism, methods of verification, codicology, palaeography, editing and publishing, and the ethics and pedagogy of research. This course offers an introduction to the discipline's main authors, genres and concerns, with a special focus on the Mamluk period (13th - 15th centuries) and consequent periods. close
17 Class schedule
Regular appointments
Thu, 2015-10-15 10:00 - 12:00
Thu, 2015-10-22 10:00 - 12:00
Thu, 2015-10-29 10:00 - 12:00
Thu, 2015-11-05 10:00 - 12:00
Thu, 2015-11-12 10:00 - 12:00
Thu, 2015-11-19 10:00 - 12:00
Thu, 2015-11-26 10:00 - 12:00
Thu, 2015-12-03 10:00 - 12:00
Thu, 2015-12-10 10:00 - 12:00
Thu, 2015-12-17 10:00 - 12:00
Thu, 2016-01-07 10:00 - 12:00
Thu, 2016-01-14 10:00 - 12:00
Thu, 2016-01-21 10:00 - 12:00
Thu, 2016-01-28 10:00 - 12:00
Thu, 2016-02-04 10:00 - 12:00
Thu, 2016-02-11 10:00 - 12:00
Fri, 2016-02-12 10:00 - 18:00