Search results for "tag:"Author Joel Blecher""

Book SynopsisAlthough scholars have long studied how Muslims authenticated and transmitted Muhammad's sayings and practices (hadith), the story of how they interpreted and reinterpreted the meanings of hadith over the past millennium has yet to be told. Joel Blecher takes up this charge, illuminating the rich social and intellectual history of hadith commentary at three critical moments: classical Andalusia, medieval Egypt, and modern India. Weaving together tales of public debates, high court rivalries, and colonial politics with analyses of contemporary field notes and fine-grained arguments adorning the margins of manuscripts, Said the Prophet of God offers new avenues for the study of religion, history, anthropology, and law.Trade Review"In his marvelous new book, Said the Prophet of God: Hadith Commentary Across a Millennium, Joel Blecher, engages with tremendous lucidity and brilliance the topic of Hadith commentaries in Muslim intellectual and social history across time and space. Traversing the pre-modern and modern periods in sites ranging from the Middle East to South Asia, this book presents in remarkable detail and with considerable nuance the intellectual, social, and material stakes of the discipline and performance of the Hadith commentarial tradition." * New Books Network *"Blecher’s text will come in handy as classroom reading for courses on a range of topics, and it will open doors for new scholars to further explore the uses and limits of hadith collections and the scholarship of Hadith glossators." * Reading Religion *"Historians regularly trace the ways in which some argument or practice unfolds in a given tradition—that's just what Joel Blecher's (2017) book Said the Prophet does in relation to hadith commentary. The book spans centuries and continents to tell us something extraordinarily illuminating not only about the figures it treats but about the tradition that helps define them." * Religious Compass *“With an admirable expertise and impressive knowledge of minute detail, Blecher traverses the exegetical reception and commentarial reenactment of al-Bukhari’s Sahih across space and time.... Blecher’s treatment of hadith commentary by a combination of methods from the fields of social history, intellectual history, and social theory is commendable, as is his aspiration to foreground the performative and interactional aspects of the commentator’s activity. This approach yields excellent results.” * Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies *"The temporal and geographic breadth of Blecher's canvas is supported both by his rigorous textual study and by ethnographic work in both the Middle East and South Asia. . . . This is certainly a foundational study in the field of Islamic social and intellectual history." * Religious Studies Review *“​"This is certainly a foundational study in the field of Islamic social and intellectual history." * Reading Religion *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Note on Transliteration and Conventions Introduction I. ANDALUSIA IN THE LAST DAYS OF THE UMAYYADS 1. The Perils of Public Commentary 2. The Inner World of the Interpretive Tradition II. EGYPT AND SYRIA UNDER THE MAMLUKS 3. For Sultans, Students, and Scholars 4. Rivalry and Revision in the Manuscript Age 5. Oratory in the Shade of the Sultan’s Garden 6. Gatekeepers of the Law 7. Mysteries of the Thresholds 8. The Art of Concision III. EARLY MODERN INDIA AND BEYOND 9. Trustees across the Ocean: Gujarat to Deoband to Bhopal 10. Lost in Translation: Arabic to Urdu to English Epilogue: Islamism, ISIS, and the Politics of Interpretation Acknowledgments Notes Works Cited Index of Names and Titles Index of Subjects and Terms

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Book SynopsisThe preeminent meditation on plagues and pandemics from the Islamic world, now in English for the first timeA Penguin ClassicSix hundred years ago, the author of this landmark work of history and religious thought—an esteemed judge, poet, and scholar in Cairo—survived the bubonic plague, which took the lives of three of his children, not to mention tens of millions of others throughout the medieval world. Holding up an eerie mirror to our own time, he reflects on the origins of plagues—from those of the Prophet Muhammad’s era to the Black Death of his own—and what it means that such catastrophes could have been willed by God, while also chronicling the fear, isolation, scapegoating, economic tumult, political failures, and crises of faith that he lived through. But in considering the meaning of suffering and mass death, he also offers a message of radical hope. Weaving together accounts of evil jinn, religious stories, medical manualTrade Review“This is the first English-language edition of his work, deservedly bringing it to a wide new audience. . . . Having lost three of his daughters to the Black Death, [Ibn Hajar] reflects with empathy and grief on examples of plagues from the time of the Prophet Muhammad to his own. . . . At a time when many ruins of the coronavirus pandemic are yet to be rebuilt, Merits of the Plague helps us to place our experience of the disease in a longer arc of history.” —The Times Literary Supplement“Remarkable . . . A landmark work of history and religious thought . . . Surprisingly modern and has a lot to say to us in the era of coronavirus.” —History Unplugged Podcast“A valuable addition to our understanding of the pandemic and how people reacted to it . . . This book offers a much-needed perspective from the Islamic world.” —Medievalists.net“A unique, non-Western medieval perspective on the Black Death and pandemics in general.” —Jara News

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