Tag: Arabic

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Discovering Universal Salvation

Little is more exciting to a medievalist than the discovery of a lost text preserved in a forgotten codex in some neglected archive. Or, in some cases, the text is right under our nose: In 1983, the great Syriac scholar Sebastian Brock came across an unknown work of Isaac of Nineveh in a manuscript at Oxford’s Bodleian library. Isaac was a monk who lived in Qatar and Mesopotamia during the seventh century (the first century of Islamic rule). In the Bodleian text, Isaac weighed in on a central topic of medieval thought: What happens after we die?

For many Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the premodern Islamic world, the answer to this question was similar, at least in its basic outlines. After an intermediate period in which souls sleep or have a foretaste of their future state, God will raise the dead and pass judgment on every person who has ever lived. Some will suffer eternal punishment, while others experience eternal joy. Poets, preachers, and artists across the medieval world delighted in imagining the exquisite pleasures of paradise and the equally exquisite pains of hell.

Virgil shows Dante the suffering of the simoniacs (15th c.).

As Brock discovered, Isaac rejected the idea of eternal punishment and argued instead for universal salvation. God, he wrote, punishes as a father does, to teach and correct. Punishment in hell is therefore temporary, and God will have mercy on all people. Even the Devil will be saved![1]

Arabic Icon of Isaac of Nineveh.

As I became more interested in Isaac’s views, I found that Brock’s discovery was (as is so often the case) a re-discovery. Around 1100 years earlier, a Christian in ninth-century Iraq named Ḥanūn b. Yūḥannā b. al-Ṣalt went hunting for Isaac’s books. He would later describe his quest in an Arabic paraphrase of Isaac’s writings. As Ḥanūn tells it, he was consumed with questions raised by his study of the Bible: Does God really grow angry? Do temporal sins deserve eternal punishment? Or does God have mercy on all people?

Ḥanūn asked these questions to anyone who would listen: “They gave me answers,” he wrote, “but their answers did not satisfy me!” Eventually, a monk suggested that Ḥanūn’s views resembled those of Isaac of Nineveh. Ḥanūn immediately rushed off in search of Isaac’s books, not stopping until he came to a monastery in the city of al-Anbār. Al-Anbār lay in central Iraq (near modern-day Fallujah), a region dotted with Christian monasteries.

Syriac Orthodox monastery of Mor Mattai, near Mosul, Iraq.

There, at last, Ḥanūn discovered Isaac’s teaching that the punishments of hell will end and all people will be saved.[2]

When I first read Ḥanūn’s account of Isaac’s views, I was surprised to find how much of it is shaped by the words of the Qur’an, sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, and other Islamic texts.[3] As I read further, I realized that the ways in which Ḥanūn wrote about God and salvation reflected broader debates in ‘Abbasid Iraq.

My research at the Medieval Institute examines these debates. They reveal a shared Jewish, Christian, and Islamic conversation about salvation and the related topics of divine mercy, justice, and punishment. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim authors posed the same questions (“Does God punish to deter evil?” “Is divine mercy universal or particular?”) and often answered them in similar terms. Their discussions probed the limits of deeply held religious convictions and were enlivened by colorful metaphors: the condemned delight in hell, as an early Muslim thinker put it, “like vinegar worms in vinegar.”[4] Universal salvation was a minority position in the medieval Islamic world, but the questions and debates surrounding it formed an important part of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thought and of interreligious exchange.

Discovering Universal Salvation, Part 2:

Entrance to the Egyptian National Library (Dār al-Kutub al-Miṣriyya).

In 1995, Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Simharī discovered a manuscript in the Egyptian National Library containing the full version of a treatise on universal salvation by Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), a highly influential scholar from medieval Syria.[5] The publication of this text has helped spur a surge of interest in Islamic views of universal salvation, including in the writings of towering figures such as Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240) and Mulla Ṣadra (d. 1640).[6]

But how did these authors develop their ideas? One aim of my research is to show how the seeds of Islamic universalism developed in the earlier debates of the Umayyad and ‘Abbasid eras. This does not, of course, take away from the creativity of later thinkers, but it will help us understand more precisely how these thinkers wove together elements from earlier Islamic tradition in new ways that shaped the trajectory of Islamic thought on salvation.

The wonderful resources and community of the Medieval Institute have been a tremendous boon as I examine these Jewish, Christian, and Islamic conversations and the vibrant intellectual culture that fostered them.

John Zaleski
A. W. Mellon Junior Faculty Fellow
Medieval Institute
University of Notre Dame

[1] Sebastian P. Brock (ed. and trans.), Isaac of Nineveh (Isaac the Syrian). ‘The Second Part’, Chapters IV-XLI, CSCO 554/5, Syr. 224/5 (Leuven: Peeters, 1995), esp. 148–71 (Syriac) / 160–82 (English).

[2] Ḥanūn’s account is edited in Paul Sbath, Traités religieux, philosophiques et moraux, extraits des oeuvres d’Isaac de Ninive (VIIe siècle) par Ibn As-Salt (IXe siècle) (Cairo: N.G. Thamaz, 1934).

[3] On this, see Alexander Treiger, “Mutual Influences and Borrowings,” in Routledge Handbook on Christian-Muslim Relations, ed. David Thomas (London: Routledge, 2018), 196–97.

[4] Attributed to Abū Ismāʿīl al-Biṭṭīkhī, in, e.g. al-Ashʿarī, Maqālāt al-islāmiyyīn, ed. Helmut Ritter, 3 vols. (Istanbul: Maṭbaʿat al-dawla, 1929–1933), 2:475. See also al-Jāḥiẓ, Kitāb al-Ḥayawān, ed. ʿAbd al-Salām b. Muḥammad Hārūn, 7 vols. (Beirut: Dār al-Kitāb al-ʻArabī, 1969), 3:396.

[5] Ibn Taymiyya, Al-Radd ʿalā man qāla bi-fanāʾ al-janna wa-l-nār, ed. Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Simharī (Riyadh: Dār al-Balansiyya, 1415/1995).

[6] See especially Mohammad Hassan Khalil, Islam and the Fate of Others (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

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Viking Eyeliner from Sea to Sea

The first written description of the personal appearance of the Vikings comes from a letter written by tenth-century English abbot Ælfric of Eynsham:

Ic secge eac ðe, broðor Eadweard…þæt ge doð unrihtlice þæt ge ða Engliscan þeawas forlætð þe eowre fæderas heoldon and hæðenra manna þeawas lufiað…and mid ðam geswuteliað þæt ge forseoð eower cynn and eowre yldran mid þam unþeawum þonne ge him on teonan tysliað eow on Denisc, ableredum hneccan and ablendum eagum.[1]

I say likewise to you, brother Edward…that you do unrightly when you forsake the English customs which our fathers held and hold dear the customs of heathen men…and by that make manifest that you scorn our kind and our forefathers with that evil practice by which you, to their shame, dress yourself in Danish fashion, with bald neck and blinded eyes.

Bayeux Tapestry Detail
Shaved necks and blinded eyes on the Bayeux Tapestry. Image in the Public Domain.

The verb ablendan means “to blind,” and the long bangs hanging onto the foreheads and perhaps impeding the vision of certain warriors on the eleventh-century Bayeux tapestry might explain these “blinded eyes.” Other options for this “blinding” hinge on the description of the inhabitants of the city of Shalashwīq (Hedeby) given  in the later tenth century by Ibrāhīm ibn Ya’qūb al-Isrā’īlī al-Turtūshī, a native of the Cordoban city of Tortosa,[2] who noted that “both men and women [there] use a kind of indelible cosmetic to enhance the beauty of their eyes.[3]

Speculation based on this and similarly loose translations has suggested white lead or even eye drops containing the alkaloid atropine, a compound present in deadly nightshade and henbane, as the “indelible cosmetic.” Both Dionysian furies and the ladies of the medieval Spanish court knew the pupil-dilating effect of the first substance, its association with beauty suggested in the name belladonna. Called hennebane, hennedwole, or hennebelle in Middle English herbals, black henbane was used in medieval England and Viking Scandinavia, and its seeds—their psychoactive effects linked to berserker behavior—have been found in some quantity in Viking graves.

Despite the attractions of these toxic European plants, a closer look at the original text gives a reading that points in another direction. Ibrāhīm writes:

 وبها كحل مصنوع اذا اكتحلوا به لا يزول ابدا ويزيد الحسن في الرجال والنساء[4]

“…on them is fabricated kohl, if they color their eyes with it, which never vanishes and beauty increases among men and women.”

Egyptian Musicians with Kohl
Detail of Kohl-Wearing Musicians and Dancers at the Tomb of Nebamun. Image in the Public Domain.

Ibrāhīm actually describes the Danes at Hedeby as lining their eyes with kohl (كُحْل‎ kuḥl), a cosmetic widely used in the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and north Africa and particularly recommended by the prophet Muhammad. Though we will likely never know how exactly the Danes “blinded” their eyes, Ibrāhīm’s description points to fascinating global connections in the tenth century, from Scandinavian raiders in England to Cordoban Jews visiting northern Germany, suggesting a more inclusive picture of history than traditional narratives tend to imagine and reminding us that the middle ages really were the crossroads of everything.

Rebecca West, PhD Candidate
University of Notre Dame

[1] Mary Clayton, “An Edition of Ælfric’s Letter to Brother Edward,” in Early Medieval English Texts and Interpretations: Studies Presented to Donald G. Scragg, ed. Elaine M. Treharne, Susan Rosser, and D. G. Scragg (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002), 280, 282.

[2] Schleswig, (Hedeby), now in northern Germany but even into the modern period intermittently under Danish control. The section discussed here is transmitted in the 1068 Kitāb al-masālik wa’l-mamālik (Book of Roads and Kingdoms) of Hispano-Arabic geographer, botanist, and historian Abū ‘Ubayd al-Bakrī.

[3]  Aḥmad Ibn Faḍlān, Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travellers in the Far North, trans. Paul Lunde and Caroline Stone (London: Penguin, 2012), 163.

[4] (wa-bihā kuḥl maṣnū‘ idhā ktaḥalū bihī lā yazūlu abadan wa-yazīdu l-ḥasan fī l-rijāl wa-l-nisā’) Zakarīyā ibn Muḥammad al-Qazwīnī and Ferdinand Wüstenfeld, Zakarija Ben Muhammed Ben Mahmûd El-Cazwini’s Kosmographie, vol. 2 (Göttingen: Verlag der Dieterichschen Buchhandlung, 1849), 404. Thanks to Alexander Beihammer for his help with the Arabic text.

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Arabic’s Gutenberg: Defining an Era Through the Lens of Print

As thousands of scholars make our pilgrimage to the 52nd annual meeting of the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo (known to many affectionately as “the ‘Zoo”) we look forward to the largest gathering of medievalists in North America. Over the course of yesterday (Thursday) through this Sunday, many scholars have and will make contributions to the field that amplify our knowledge and transform our critical understanding of our craft. Since I am privileged with the mic during this auspicious time, I will take this opportunity to address a fundamental question that was raised at one of yesterday’s roundtables: where and when do we locate the “Middle Ages” in a global context? In other words, how can we reevaluate our Eurocentric biases and take into account cultures around the world that don’t fit traditional definitions of medievalism?

The organizers of the Kalamazoo roundtable, the University of Virginia’s DeVan Ard and Justin Greenlee, created a forum to discuss the fraught term “medieval” from various perspectives, including Buddhist art in China (Dorothy Wong), the pre-Islamic Jahiliyyah period (Aman Nadhiri) and the challenges of accurately representing the Middle Ages in the classroom (Christina Normore). The speakers and moderator Zach Stone strove to challenge the artificial boundaries that are often used to constrict the idea of the medieval and to consider, in the words of Nadhiri, “the Middle Ages as a period without the parameters of time.” I offer here an adapted version of my own presentation, which considers the limits of the term “medieval” through the history of the printing press in the Muslim world.

Of all the metrics that various disciplines use to demarcate the end of the Middle Ages—shifts in military tactics, game-changing historical figures, scientific discoveries, etc.—the arrival of Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press in Germany is often seen as the critical moment when Western culture was ‘reborn’ into a new era. Medievalists know well that the effects of this new technology were not as immediate or as clear cut as many outside the field sometimes think, but the ability to disseminate materials more efficiently and more widely led to changes in the economy, literacy, and writing practices rivaled only by the recent progress of the digital age.

The first printed edition of the Qur’an, printed in Venice by Paganino & Alessandro Paganini​ between 1537-38​.

The history of movable type in Arabic provides a point of departure for wider discussions of how to bookend a historical era in the Middle East and North Africa as well as other predominantly Muslim populations. Although the printing press made its way to the Ottoman Empire not long after its introduction in Europe, it was almost immediately forbidden to print in Arabic. Among the various political, social, and theological reasons for this legislation, I argue that the sanctity of the Arabic language itself created resistance to movable type. According to Islam, Arabic is the direct language of God communicated through the angel Gabriel. Many believe that translations of the Qur’an are no longer the holy book, and throughout the early centuries of Islam there were meticulously-enforced rules for the style of writing that could be used for certain texts.

The clumsy attempts of early printers to negotiate the connectors, diacritics, and shape-changing letters of Arabic writing could not hope to represent the word with the accuracy and beauty that it required. Continuing attempts to this day to create functional Arabic fonts and Turkey’s twentieth-century switch from Arabic to Roman script demonstrate that these challenges are still being negotiated. This narrative of technical and literary development, so vastly different from that of Western Europe, offers a lens through which we can consider other intellectual and cultural differences that complicate comparisons between Western Europe and the Arab world.

Erica Machulak
PhD in English
University of Notre Dame
Founder of Hikma Strategies