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This essay is the first scholarly exploration of slavery's visual representation in medieval Islam. Close examination of thirteenth‐century paintings from Arabic manuscripts, considered alongside textual sources, reveals how images may contribute to the study of slavery in the premodern Middle East. In particular, these paintings confirm the link between domestic service and the trade in black African slaves. They also suggest that if skin colour did not determine enslavement, it might have shaped the perception of slaves and the division of labour among them. This essay further attends to the semantic operations of slavery within the picture. One of its suggestions is that images of slaves functioned as signs of pure labour, as well as liminal figures, framing, highlighting, and creating a contrast with light‐skinned Arab characters, mostly seen engaged in acts of discourse and leisurely activities. A visual dialectic seems to be at work, creating a series of asymmetrical relationships, between light‐skinned and dark‐skinned, freedom and slavery, speech and labour, high culture and servitude. Such a dialectic may ultimately be read as a comment on the mechanisms and limits of archival power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on two Arabic paper folios kept in the manuscript collection of Hamburg State and University Library. The folios were tentatively identified by Oswald H. E. Khs-Burmester as the only Arabic manuscript witness to the Life of Adam and Eve, a biblical pseudepigraphon extant in several other ancient languages. As the Hamburg folios had been reported as missing, the accuracy of Burmester's identification could no longer be checked. However, the recent reappearance of the folios offered the author an opportunity to examine the text. This article shows that Burmester's identification is to be rejected, as the Hamburg leaves feature portions of another biblical pseudepigraphon about the life of the protoplasts, the Conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan (CAVT 14). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses reading marks in within Kufic manuscripts from the 8th to 10th centuries (or 2nd to 4th centuries in the Islamic calendar), including the diacritic reading mark referred to as shadda, the reading of Kufic manuscripts and coloured-coded dashes. An overview reading marks within the Kufic manuscripts of the Qur'ān is provided.

The article discusses the illustrated Islamic manuscript "Maqamat" by Arab poet Abu Muhammad al-Qasim al-Hariri as a means to examine how such popular texts embraced medieval social life through their orality. The author explains the poetic works such as the "Maqamat" were meant to be read aloud, thereby combining the aural and written aspects of Arabic literature. Information is provided on the audience of readings of the work, which was largely composed of elites and scholars. It is noted that such illustrated works were popular despite Islamic rules against the creation of figural representations.

This paper investigates the concept of ‘presence of God’ according to Shams al-Dīn-al Sumatraʾī (d. 1630), a seventeenth-century Malay Sufi scholar and a member of the court of the illustrious Sultan Iskandar Muda of Acheh (d. 1636). He is known to have been a follower of Hamza Fansuri, but where Hamza was a master of utilizing poetry in his teachings, Shams al-Dīn utilized prose. The teachings of Shams al-Dīn discussed here aretaken from a newly discovered manuscript attributed to him, Ḥaqq al-yaqīn fī aqīdat al-muḥaqqiqīn. The overall structure of this text is presented here for the first time in English. The content of this work are a mixture of theoretical and practical Sufism. This paper focuses on the theoretical part in which Shams al-Dīn expounds the views held by the verifiers (muḥaqqiqūn) in regard to the conception of God and God’s relation to the world. How does God manifest Himself to the world? What is the meaning of the world (ʿālam) to the verifiers? What is the difference between Shams al-Dīnʾs view of the presence of God and that of the main exponent of Ibn ʿArabʿ, Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qunawī? Was Shams al-Dīn a mere imitator of the writings of Muḥammad ibn Faḍl Allāh al-Burhānpūrī via the Tuḥfa almursala ilā rūḥal-Nabī as some have asserted? These are some of the questions raised in the article, which includes an annotated translation of the relevant chapter of Ḥaqq al-yaqīn. What is found in the end is that, even though influence of Persian—Arabic mysticism permeated Malay mysticism, Shams al-Dīn managed to produce a fresh, original synthesis of metaphysical teachings and insights. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A correction is provided to the article "The Archive of Orientalism and its Keepers: Re-Imagining the Histories of Arabic Manuscripts in Early Modern Europe," by John-Paul Ghobrial, which appeared in a previous issue.

: Background and Aims Beginning in the last two decades of the 14th century, richly illuminated versions of the Tacuinum Sanitatis, the Latin translation of an 11th-century Arabic manuscript known as Taqwim al-Sihha bi al-Ashab al-Sitta, were produced in northern Italy. These illustrated manuscripts provide a window on late medieval life in that region by containing some 200 full-page illustrations, many of which vividly depict the harvest of vegetables, fruits, flowers, grains, aromatics and medicinal plants. Our objective was to search for and identify the images of taxa of Cucurbitaceae and Solanaceae. : Methods We have located all reported illustrated Tacuinum Sanitatis and similar or related manuscripts, searched through printed or electronic reproductions of them, categorized six of them that display full-page illustrations as archetypic, and established the identity of the Cucurbitaceae and Solanaceae appearing in these six manuscripts. : Key Results and Conclusions Of the Cucurbitaceae, Cucumis sativus (short-fruited cucumbers), Cucumis melo (including round as well as elongate melons), Citrullus lanatus (both sweet watermelons and citrons), and Lagenaria siceraria (including bottle-shaped as well as long gourds), are illustrated. Of the Solanaceae, Solanum melongena (egg-shaped purple aubergines) and Mandragora sp. (mandrake) are illustrated. These depictions include some of the earliest known images of cucumber, casaba melon (Cucumis melo Inodorous Group) and aubergine, each of which closely resembles an extant cultivar-group or market type. Overall, the botanically most accurate images are in the version of the Tacuinum located in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, cod. ser. n. 2644. Similarities and differences in botanical accuracy among the images of Cucurbitaceae and Solanaceae in the six archetypal Tacuinum manuscripts suggest to us that another illustrated Tacuinum, now lost, may have antedated and served as a model or inspiration for the six surviving archetypic manuscripts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]