The Greek mathematician Pythagorus, considered the founder of mathematics, left his home in Samos for Egypt in 535 BCE. A decade later he was captured and taken prisoner to Babylon. In 520 he was able to return to Samos and started a school there and later in southern Italy. While looking over some texts in the megasite archive.org, I came across an oddly titled 1839 book of essays on past “worthies” from the biblical patriarchs to Lord Nelson. A poem on Pythagorus caught my eye…
The image of an Islamic scholar engaged in memorization, collection or engagement with the many traditions (hadith, singular) of the Prophet Muhammad is invariably that of a male. After all, one of the most important collections is that of the Persian Muhammad b. Ismail al-Bukhari (d. 870 CE). But over the centuries there have been thousands of Muslim women who studied these traditions. For example, one of these scholars, Zaynab bint al-Kamal, is reported to have taught some 400 hadith works in 13th century Damascus. Many of these women are known, but most have not been recognized outside biographical sources.
Earlier this year Dr. Mohammed Akram Nadwi from the Cambridge Islamic College published a 43-volume work, al-Wafa’ bi-asma’ al-nisa’ (Biographical Dictionary of Women Narrators of Hadith) on over 10,000 female hadith transmitters and scholars. The text is currently in Arabic, but there is an English translation of the first volume available on Amazon.
For a talk in Arabic on Youtube about his book, click here.
More and more maps of Yemen and the Arabian Peninsula are appearing in digital resources on the Internet. One of these is the David Rumsey Map Collection, housed at Stanford University. This overall collection with downloadable images in high resolution contains over 150,000 images, including some on Yemen, as well as other parts of the Middle East. The search function is easy to use. The maps are available under the Creative Commons License but not for commercial use.
Below are two closeups of maps that include Yemen.
In 1928 my mother, who was 6 years old at the time, received a coloring book from a neighbour. It was called “Big Circus Painting and Crayoning Book” and published in Cleveland, Ohio. On most of the pages there was a color image with the same image below it meant to be colored or crayoned in. The image above seems rather distant from the idea of a circus, but other non-circus images are of the military, a grizzly bear and Scotland.
Brill has recently published a Handbook of Sufi Studies. One of the editors, Alexander Knysh, discusses the new volume here.
Joseph Osgood was a Black American sailor who visited the Yemeni port of Aden about a dozen years before the start of the American Civil War. He offers a rich, descriptive account, including information on the coffee cargo that may have brought his ship to this Red Sea port in the first place. You can read the book online here. I attach excerpts on his visit to Aden. This is part 2. For Part 1, click here.
Joseph Osgood was a Black American sailor who visited the Yemeni port of Aden about a dozen years before the start of the American Civil War. He offers a rich, descriptive account, including information on the coffee cargo that may have brought his ship to this Red Sea port in the first place. You can read the book online here. I attach excerpts on his visit to Aden.
more to come
I am a fan of 19th century lithographs of images about the Middle East. One of the books with a plethora of such images is Story of the Bible Animals by the Rev. J. G. Wood, published in 1888 and available on archive.org. In the 700 pages of this book, the largest space (pp. 248-290) is devoted to the camel, drawing on traveler accounts. It is a fun read, full of all the Orientalist prejudices you might image. For example:
“As to the movement of the animal, it is at first as unpleasant as can be conceived, and has been described by several travellers, some of whose accounts will be here given. One well-known traveller declares that any person desiring to practice Camel-riding can readily do so by taking a music-stool, screwing it up as high as possible, putting it into a cart without springs, sitting on the top of it cross-legged, and having the cart driven at full speed transversely over a newly ploughed field.”
