by Vevian Zaki In 1892, Jūrjī Zaydān, a Lebanese historian and novelist, inaugurated from Cairo his magazine al-Hilāl or ‘the Crescent.’[1] This magazine soon reached a high rank among the educated class, attracting elite authors to write for it, and … Continued
by Peter Tarras Saint Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai has preserved the single most important collection of early Arabic Bible translations and, more generally, of Christian writing in Arabic. One of the most curious manuscripts of this collection bears the … Continued
by Rachel Hasson The Karaite Abū Yūsuf Yaʿqūb ibn Isḥāq al-Qirqisānī lived in the first half of the tenth century in Babylonia; he is indisputably considered knowledgeable and educated of stature. Unlike his contemporary R. Saʿadya Gaon, who composed a … Continued
by Miriam Lindgren Hjälm In 2018, Gabriel Said Reynolds published a valuable reference work with the title The Qurʾān and the Bible: Text and Commentary.[1] In this book, Reynolds accumulates research on what is commonly known as the biblical subtext … Continued
by Nil Palabiyik Scholarly collaboration is important. It was as important in the seventeenth century as it is now. This blog post is about how I deciphered, almost by sheer coincidence, an arcane reference in an early modern letter and … Continued
by David R. Vishanoff The history of the Bible in Arabic includes not only the reception of its textual content, and the reworking of its stories and themes in various forms of “rewritten Bible,” but also the reimagining of the … Continued
by Ronny Vollandt The presence of Christian Arabic texts in the Cairo Genizah corpus is well attested.[1] In her survey, Krisztina Szilágyi classes the compositions of Christian Arabic provenance which circulated among Cairene Jews into two groups. The first includes … Continued
Were there Arabic translations of the Bible before Islam? In the early 1930s, Anton Baumstark outlined an argument which he believed ‘mathematically proved’ that such translations existed.[1] His thesis was that the lectionary headings in some Arabic manuscripts of the … Continued
by Sameh Hanna1 In an interview published in 1927 in the Cairo-based monthly al-Hilāl, Egyptian intellectual and reformist Salama Musa (1887-1958) asked a retired British civil engineer, among other things, about what made him happy at the end of his … Continued
by Roy M. McCoy III On the cusp of the early modern period, one Muslim scholar in late Mamlūk Cairo quoted liberally from the scriptures of the religious “other.” Ibrāhīm b. ʿUmar b. Ḥasan al-Biqāʿī (d. 885 AH/1480 CE) used … Continued
