Crisis and Continuity at the Abbasid Court

Berkel, M.L.M. van; Cheikh, Nadia Maria El; Kennedy, Hugh; Osti, Letizia

doi:10.1163/9789004252707

Cited by 21 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…31 In certain historical moments, viziers were believed to be the link between the ruler and the people (see VAN BERKEL 2013), if not scholars, and major actors in statecraft.…”

Section: Failed Viziership Successful Readingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can Reading Animate Justice?

Khansa

2022

JAIS

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In this study, I make audible a conversation in Alf Layla wa-Layla (The Thousand and One Nights) on the meaning and application of justice. Without assuming that Alf Layla constituted an organized whole, the study identifies, in the frame narrative and the first two chains of stories—all three understood to belong to the earliest bundle—a debate on the coincidence of successful interpretation and just rulership. By the end of these tales, i.e., by the twenty-seventh night, a complete tale is told. In these stories, I propose, Alf Layla adopts an attitude that privileges multiplicity over singular interpretation, in a fashion that affirms thecontingency of ethical questions. The popularity of Alf Layla and the afterlives it enjoyed up to our present times—in the Arab world and the West—need not eclipse or substitute the Arabo-Islamic character the work came to exhibit, and the ethical questions it set out to address. In what has been read as fate, arbitrary logic, enchantment, magic, irrational thinking, and nocturnal dreamlike narratives, I suggest we can equally speak of a concern for justice. The study looks at Alf Layla’s affinity with advice literature, but stresses the need to read it as a work of (semipopular) literature that pays witness to societal debates on justice. Alf Layla, I suggest, belongs to Islamic culture in that the act of reading has been construed within hermeneutics that are largely informed by the ethical implication knowledge sharing entails. In how the stories find resolution to the crisis of the king, Alf Layla understands justice as an artificial and communal enterprise. The stories, more urgently, seem to suggest reading gears us towards a concern for the greater good. Keywords: The Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights, 1001 Nights, Alf Layla wa-Layla), Adab, Justice, Rulership, Readership, Advice Literature, Interpretation, Multiplicity, Legitimacy

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“…31 In certain historical moments, viziers were believed to be the link between the ruler and the people (see VAN BERKEL 2013), if not scholars, and major actors in statecraft.…”

Section: Failed Viziership Successful Readingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can Reading Animate Justice?

Khansa

2022

JAIS

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Abbasid Caliphate

Nawas

2016

The Encyclopedia of Empire

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After wresting power from the Umayyads, the Abbasid Caliphate reigned over a territory that extended from the Iberian Peninsula in the west to the borders with China in the east. Heavily centralized at the outset, Abbasid supremacy continuously weakened as their income started to decline while losing power to local dynasties. The Abbasids ruled from 750 to 1258 ce from Baghdad, a city they founded as their capital. Their permanent contributions to humankind include preserving and building on the classical Greek heritage, and many important discoveries in the sciences and arts, as well as Islam as a religion.

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Friends of the Emir

Yarbrough

2019

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Crisis and Continuity at the Abbasid Court

Cited by 21 publications

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Can Reading Animate Justice?

Can Reading Animate Justice?

Abbasid Caliphate

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