Anna Akasoy
Biographic Data
| ID | 1125041 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Anna Akasoy |
| GIVEN NAMES | Anna |
| FAMILY NAME | Akasoy |
| SIGNATURE | AKASOY A |
| AFFILIATIONS | The Graduate Center, CUNY |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 23 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Fixers: Agency, Translation, and the Early Global History of Literature
Falconry at Medieval Islamicate Courts: Open-Air Practice and Backstage Knowledge
Falconry at Islamicate courts of the pre-Ottoman period involved a complex set of practices, traditions and institutions. Evolving as part of the royal hunt from the late Umayyad period onwards, it included a body of scientific, mostly medical literature from early Abbasid times. A corpus of falconry poetry developed from around the same time. In Fatimid contexts, falconry images appear prominently in the visual arts. In Mamluk times, the connect…
Philosophy in the Narrative Mode: Alexander the Great as an ethical character from Roman to medieval Islamicate literature
Histories of Arabic and Islamic philosophy tend to focus on texts which are systematic in nature and conventionally classified as philosophy or related scholarly disciplines. Philosophical principles, however, are also defining features of texts associated with other genres. Within the larger field of philosophy, this might be especially true of ethics and within the larger body of literature this might be especially the case for stories. Indeed,…
Prophets, Viziers and Philosophers: Wisdom and Authority in Early Arabic Literature Edited by Emily J. Cottrell
Philosophers, Sufis, and Caliphs: Politics and Authority from Cordoba to Cairo and Baghdad . By Ali Humayun Akhtar
‘Violence is the only lever big enough to move the world.’ These are the words of Elwood, protagonist of Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys, a haunting novel set in a Florida reform school, the described abuse all the more shocking on account of its historical basis. Those who study the past in a professional capacity, as academics, will recognize in Elwood the desire to reduce human history to a single principle which drives it or at least which…
Das Kitāb Sidrat al-muntahā des Pseudo-Ibn Waḥšīya: Einleitung, Edition und Übersetzung eines hermetisch-allegorischen Traktats zur Alchemie. By Christopher Braun
Das Kitāb Sidrat al-muntahā des Pseudo-Ibn Waḥšīya: Einleitung, Edition und Übersetzung eines hermetisch-allegorischen Traktats zur Alchemie. By Christopher Braun. Islamkundliche Untersuchungen, vol. 327. Berlin: Klaus Schwartz, 2016. Pp. 160. €39.80 (paper
Islam and Buddhism: The Arabian Prequel
Conventionally, the first Muslim-Buddhist encounters are thought to have taken place in the context of the Arab-Muslim expansions into eastern Iran in the mid-seventh century, the conquest of Sind in 711 and the rise of the Islamic empire. However, several theories promoted in academic and popular circles claim that Buddhists or other Indians were present in western Arabia at the eve of Islam and thus shaped the religious environment in which Muh…
The Mystics of al-Andalus: Ibn Barrajān and Islamic Thought in the Twelfth Century
The Mystics of al-Andalus: Ibn Barrajān and Islamic Thought in the Twelfth Century. Yousef Casewit. Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. xvi + 356 pp. $125. - Volume 72 Issue 3
Jean Dangler. Edging toward Iberia
Leafing through an atlas of Islamic history, one typically sees maps representing the presence or predominance of Muslims at different historical junctures. Relevant areas are regularly marked in color, often green. There is hardly a professional historian who would not readily agree that the social, cultural, and political realities visualized in these seemingly simple binaries are much more complex. They are often better described in terms of s…
Paradise and Hell in Islamic Traditions By Christian Lange
Discursively, doctrinally, and psychologically, paradise and hell constitute topics of great significance in Islamic literature. While the subject has already inspired a fair amount of scholarship, the present monograph offers a significantly broader and more thorough survey than other publications. The author covers texts from a great variety of intellectual perspectives that deal with the afterworld or ‘otherworld’ (ākhira) and its relationship…
Islam and Tibet – Interactions along the Musk Routes
The first encounters between the Islamic world and Tibet took place in the course of the expansion of the Abbasid Empire in the eighth century. Military and political contacts went along with an increasing interest in the other side. Cultural exchanges and the transmission of knowledge were facilitated by a trading network, with musk constituting one of the main trading goods from the Himalayas, largely through India. From the thirteenth century …
Ibn Ḥazm of Cordoba: The Life and Works of a Controversial Thinker Edited by Camilla Adang, Maribel Fierro and Sabine Schmidtke
Ibn Ḥazm (d. 456/1064), prolific and controversial Andalusi litterateur, theologian, philosopher, religious polemicist, and legal scholar, has long been known in Western academic literature, mostly as the author of a treatise on love, The Ring of the Dove (Ṭawq al-ḥamāma) and prime representative of Ẓāhirism after its eponymous founder. Within the last two decades, however, scholars have shed new light on Ibn Ḥazm’s extensive corpus as well as on…
Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic By Ryan Szpiech
Journal Article Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic By Ryan Szpiech Get access Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic By Ryan Szpiech (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, The Middle Ages Series, 2013), xi + 228 pp. Price HB £39.00. EAN 978–0812244717. Anna Akasoy Anna Akasoy Hunter College, City University of New York Search for other works by this au…
Mysticism and Philosophy in al-Andalus: Ibn Masarra, Ibn al- Arab and the Ism l Tradition By Michael EBSTEIN
The impression that mysticism and Sufism in the Muslim West differed from their variants in the Mashriq is an old one. Ibn ʿArabī (560–638/1165–1240) mentions in his Epistle on the Spirit of Holiness (Risālat rūḥ al-quds) an encounter with Eastern Sufis. Enjoying a comfortable lifestyle, they described themselves as ‘people of the path (ṭarīqa)’ whereas their Western brethren were ‘people of the truth (ḥaqīqa)’. Ibn ʿArabī neither approved of the…
The Misty Land of Ideas and the Light of Dialogue. An Anthology of Comparative Philosophy: Western & Islamic Edited by ALI Paya
In his introduction to the first two volumes of his Bibliography of Islamic Philosophy, Hans Daiber asked, ‘What is the meaning of and to what end do we study the history of Islamic philosophy?’ These questions still attract fairly little interest among those committed to an academic engagement with the history of philosophy in the Islamicate world. Methodologies and purposes are frequently taken for granted. While some scholars focus on texts an…
German Literature on the Middle East. Discourses and Practices, 1000-1989 By Nina Berman
Journal Article German Literature on the Middle East. Discourses and Practices, 1000–1989 By Nina Berman Get access German Literature on the Middle East. Discourses and Practices, 1000–1989 By Nina Berman (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2011), ix + 244 pp., notes, indices. Price HB £60.95. EAN 978–0472117512. Anna Akasoy Anna Akasoy Ruhr–Universität Bochum Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Jour…
Al-Andalus Rediscovered: Iberia's New Muslims By Marvine Howe
The Iberian Peninsula deserves for several reasons the attention of those studying the history and culture of the Islamicate world. Although al-Andalus became part of Dār al-Islām fairly early, it turned into an outlier in the mid-eighth century when Umayyad rule survived the ‘Abbasid revolution in the far West. The Iberian Peninsula is also the only major landmass among the Umayyad conquests which did not remain under Muslim rule. The Muslims an…
The Reception of Aristotle's Ethics
Aristotle's ethics are the most important in the history of Western philosophy, but little has been said about the reception of his ethics by his many successors. The present volume offers thirteen newly commissioned essays covering figures and periods from the ancient world, starting with the impact of the ethics on Hellenistic philosophy, taking in medieval, Jewish and Islamic reception and extending as far as Kant and the twentieth century. Ea…
Andalusi exceptionalism: The example of “Philosophical Sufism” and the significance of 1212
In both medieval and modern times, al-Andalus was often seen as distinctive or even exceptional within the Islamic world and within Islamic history. Among its distinctive features figure the almost uniform Malikism and the long-lasting support for the Umayyad cause. Others are associated with the end of Muslim rule over al-Andalus. In this context, 1212 can be seen as a prelude to the iconic event, 1492. The defeat of the Almohads can also be con…
Sprache und Verstehen. Al-Gahiz uber die Vollkommenheit des Ausdrucks, Diskurse der Arabistik, 14 * By Lale Behzadi
Among the numerous discrepancies between the historical significance of a subject and the attention devoted to it by modern scholars, al-Jāḥiẓ (776/7–868) is but one example. Although his importance is universally acknowledged, the number of in-depth studies is fairly small. Not least because of the volume of al-Jāḥiẓ’s work, he is known under a variety of labels, most prominently as an author of adab and as a Muʿtazili. His reputation does not c…
Travellers from Europe in the Ottoman and Safavid Empires, 16th-17th Centuries: Seeking, Transforming, Discarding Knowledge
Materialien Zur Alten Islamischen Frommigkeit * by Bernd Radtke
For centuries, the historical roots of Sufism have been a matter of great interest to Muslims and non-Muslims, Sufis and non-Sufis alike. Behind this interest has often been the assumption that essence lies in origins. Those who noted parallels in other traditions, most notably Christian monasticism or Indian asceticism, often argued that these influenced Sufism. ‘Foreign’ legacies are also adduced by those who consider Sufism heterodox, while th…
Al‐Ghazālī, Ramon Llull and Religionswissenschaft
L'adaptation des savoirs byzantins à la cour ottomane après la conquête de Constantinople
Introduction Le 29 mai 1453 fut une journée qui changea le monde. Après un long siège, Constantinople tombait aux mains de ses conquérants ottomans. L’Empire byzantin avait disparu pour toujours. Si l’on doit en croire les légendes modernes, l’événement serait surtout le succès d’un homme, le sultan Mehmet II qui venait d’avoir vingt-et-un ans et qui allait par la suite être nommé Fatih, « le conquérant ». Rempli d’une ambition tenace, celui-ci s…
Die Religionen der Araber vor und in der fruhislamischen Zeit (Arabisch-Islamische Welt in Tradition und Moderne, 5) * By Huseyin Ilker Cinar
The subject of Çinar’s book, based on a dissertation submitted in 2002 to the University of Heidelberg, is the religious landscape of the Hijaz at the time Islam emerged there. As the author points out, the significance of this subject is obvious in a number of aspects of early Islamic history such as the elements of pre-Islamic Arabian religious culture which survived, often in a transformed shape, in Islamic times; the way in which religions sh…
Convivencia and Its Discontents: Interfaith Life in Al-Andalus
Historians of Europe often declare that Spain is “different.” This distinctiveness of the Iberian peninsula has many faces and is frequently seen as rooted in its Islamic past. In the field of Islamic history, too, al-Andalus is somewhat different. It has its own specialists, research traditions, controversies, and trends. One of the salient features of historical studies of al-Andalus as well as of its popular image is the great interest in its …
Along The Musk Routes: Exchanges Between Tibet and The Islamic World
From as early as the ninth century onwards, Arabic literature praises the quality of a typical and highly desirable product of Tibet, musk. In Arabic and Persian as well as Tibetan and Hebrew texts musk is discussed in a variety of genres such as geographical, zoological, religious and medical literature as well as in travellers' and merchants' accounts. These sources reveal an active trade route, which existed between Tibet and the Islamic world…
Islamic Attitudes to Disasters in the Middle Ages: A Comparison of Earthquakes and Plagues
By comparing two natural disasters, earthquakes and epidemics, in particular the plague, this article tries to reconstruct general features of debates around disasters in medieval Islam. It points out several similarities such as the function as a punishment and warning in the early Islamic tradition, the apocalyptic dimension and the status of victims of both disasters as martyrs and comparisons with the problem of flight and desertion. Furtherm…
The Arabic Version of the Nicomachean Ethics
This volume offers a critical edition of the only extant Arabic manuscript of the Nicomachean Ethics. A comprehensive introduction by the late Douglas M. Dunlop describes the influence this major Aristotelian work had on Arabic literature. Dunlop’s annotated English translation includes important references to the Greek text of the Ethics. The appendix includes a select Greek-Arabic glossary.
Islamic Attitudes to Disasters in the Middle Ages: A Comparison of Earthquakes and Plagues
By comparing two natural disasters, earthquakes and epidemics, in particular the plague, this article tries to reconstruct general features of debates around disasters in medieval Islam. It points out several similarities such as the function as a punishment and warning in the early Islamic tradition, the apocalyptic dimension and the status of victims of both disasters as martyrs and comparisons with the problem of flight and desertion. Furtherm…
Translatio Libri Albuzale de Medicinis Simplicibus
Along The Musk Routes: Exchanges Between Tibet and The Islamic World
From as early as the ninth century onwards, Arabic literature praises the quality of a typical and highly desirable product of Tibet, musk. In Arabic and Persian as well as Tibetan and Hebrew texts musk is discussed in a variety of genres such as geographical, zoological, religious and medical literature as well as in travellers' and merchants' accounts. These sources reveal an active trade route, which existed between Tibet and the Islamic world…
Las Cuestiones Sicilianas de Ibn Sab‘īn: El texto, sus fuentes y su contexto histórico
Las Cuestiones Sicilianas son el primer texto conservado del filósofo y sufí Ibn Sab‘īn de Murcia (c. 614/1217-668/1270). Aunque el prólogo del texto pretende que se trata de respuestas a preguntas mandadas por Federico II al mundo árabe, parece más probable que se trate de un manual introductorio para estudiantes árabes de filosofía, discutiendo cuatro problemas específicos y controvertidos como manera de presentar conceptos generales de la filo…
Alexander in the Himalayas: Competing Imperial Legacies in Medieval Islamic History and Literature
Die Religionen der Araber vor und in der fruhislamischen Zeit (Arabisch-Islamische Welt in Tradition und Moderne, 5) * By Huseyin Ilker Cinar
The subject of Çinar’s book, based on a dissertation submitted in 2002 to the University of Heidelberg, is the religious landscape of the Hijaz at the time Islam emerged there. As the author points out, the significance of this subject is obvious in a number of aspects of early Islamic history such as the elements of pre-Islamic Arabian religious culture which survived, often in a transformed shape, in Islamic times; the way in which religions sh…
Convivencia and Its Discontents: Interfaith Life in Al-Andalus
Historians of Europe often declare that Spain is “different.” This distinctiveness of the Iberian peninsula has many faces and is frequently seen as rooted in its Islamic past. In the field of Islamic history, too, al-Andalus is somewhat different. It has its own specialists, research traditions, controversies, and trends. One of the salient features of historical studies of al-Andalus as well as of its popular image is the great interest in its …
Sprache und Verstehen. Al-Gahiz uber die Vollkommenheit des Ausdrucks, Diskurse der Arabistik, 14 * By Lale Behzadi
Among the numerous discrepancies between the historical significance of a subject and the attention devoted to it by modern scholars, al-Jāḥiẓ (776/7–868) is but one example. Although his importance is universally acknowledged, the number of in-depth studies is fairly small. Not least because of the volume of al-Jāḥiẓ’s work, he is known under a variety of labels, most prominently as an author of adab and as a Muʿtazili. His reputation does not c…
Travellers from Europe in the Ottoman and Safavid Empires, 16th-17th Centuries: Seeking, Transforming, Discarding Knowledge
Materialien Zur Alten Islamischen Frommigkeit * by Bernd Radtke
For centuries, the historical roots of Sufism have been a matter of great interest to Muslims and non-Muslims, Sufis and non-Sufis alike. Behind this interest has often been the assumption that essence lies in origins. Those who noted parallels in other traditions, most notably Christian monasticism or Indian asceticism, often argued that these influenced Sufism. ‘Foreign’ legacies are also adduced by those who consider Sufism heterodox, while th…
Al‐Ghazālī, Ramon Llull and Religionswissenschaft
L'adaptation des savoirs byzantins à la cour ottomane après la conquête de Constantinople
Introduction Le 29 mai 1453 fut une journée qui changea le monde. Après un long siège, Constantinople tombait aux mains de ses conquérants ottomans. L’Empire byzantin avait disparu pour toujours. Si l’on doit en croire les légendes modernes, l’événement serait surtout le succès d’un homme, le sultan Mehmet II qui venait d’avoir vingt-et-un ans et qui allait par la suite être nommé Fatih, « le conquérant ». Rempli d’une ambition tenace, celui-ci s…
The Reception of Aristotle's Ethics
Aristotle's ethics are the most important in the history of Western philosophy, but little has been said about the reception of his ethics by his many successors. The present volume offers thirteen newly commissioned essays covering figures and periods from the ancient world, starting with the impact of the ethics on Hellenistic philosophy, taking in medieval, Jewish and Islamic reception and extending as far as Kant and the twentieth century. Ea…
Andalusi exceptionalism: The example of “Philosophical Sufism” and the significance of 1212
In both medieval and modern times, al-Andalus was often seen as distinctive or even exceptional within the Islamic world and within Islamic history. Among its distinctive features figure the almost uniform Malikism and the long-lasting support for the Umayyad cause. Others are associated with the end of Muslim rule over al-Andalus. In this context, 1212 can be seen as a prelude to the iconic event, 1492. The defeat of the Almohads can also be con…
German Literature on the Middle East. Discourses and Practices, 1000-1989 By Nina Berman
Journal Article German Literature on the Middle East. Discourses and Practices, 1000–1989 By Nina Berman Get access German Literature on the Middle East. Discourses and Practices, 1000–1989 By Nina Berman (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2011), ix + 244 pp., notes, indices. Price HB £60.95. EAN 978–0472117512. Anna Akasoy Anna Akasoy Ruhr–Universität Bochum Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Jour…
Al-Andalus Rediscovered: Iberia's New Muslims By Marvine Howe
The Iberian Peninsula deserves for several reasons the attention of those studying the history and culture of the Islamicate world. Although al-Andalus became part of Dār al-Islām fairly early, it turned into an outlier in the mid-eighth century when Umayyad rule survived the ‘Abbasid revolution in the far West. The Iberian Peninsula is also the only major landmass among the Umayyad conquests which did not remain under Muslim rule. The Muslims an…
The Misty Land of Ideas and the Light of Dialogue. An Anthology of Comparative Philosophy: Western & Islamic Edited by ALI Paya
In his introduction to the first two volumes of his Bibliography of Islamic Philosophy, Hans Daiber asked, ‘What is the meaning of and to what end do we study the history of Islamic philosophy?’ These questions still attract fairly little interest among those committed to an academic engagement with the history of philosophy in the Islamicate world. Methodologies and purposes are frequently taken for granted. While some scholars focus on texts an…
Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic By Ryan Szpiech
Journal Article Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic By Ryan Szpiech Get access Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic By Ryan Szpiech (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, The Middle Ages Series, 2013), xi + 228 pp. Price HB £39.00. EAN 978–0812244717. Anna Akasoy Anna Akasoy Hunter College, City University of New York Search for other works by this au…
Mysticism and Philosophy in al-Andalus: Ibn Masarra, Ibn al- Arab and the Ism l Tradition By Michael EBSTEIN
The impression that mysticism and Sufism in the Muslim West differed from their variants in the Mashriq is an old one. Ibn ʿArabī (560–638/1165–1240) mentions in his Epistle on the Spirit of Holiness (Risālat rūḥ al-quds) an encounter with Eastern Sufis. Enjoying a comfortable lifestyle, they described themselves as ‘people of the path (ṭarīqa)’ whereas their Western brethren were ‘people of the truth (ḥaqīqa)’. Ibn ʿArabī neither approved of the…
Islam and Tibet – Interactions along the Musk Routes
The first encounters between the Islamic world and Tibet took place in the course of the expansion of the Abbasid Empire in the eighth century. Military and political contacts went along with an increasing interest in the other side. Cultural exchanges and the transmission of knowledge were facilitated by a trading network, with musk constituting one of the main trading goods from the Himalayas, largely through India. From the thirteenth century …
Ibn Ḥazm of Cordoba: The Life and Works of a Controversial Thinker Edited by Camilla Adang, Maribel Fierro and Sabine Schmidtke
Ibn Ḥazm (d. 456/1064), prolific and controversial Andalusi litterateur, theologian, philosopher, religious polemicist, and legal scholar, has long been known in Western academic literature, mostly as the author of a treatise on love, The Ring of the Dove (Ṭawq al-ḥamāma) and prime representative of Ẓāhirism after its eponymous founder. Within the last two decades, however, scholars have shed new light on Ibn Ḥazm’s extensive corpus as well as on…
Paradise and Hell in Islamic Traditions By Christian Lange
Discursively, doctrinally, and psychologically, paradise and hell constitute topics of great significance in Islamic literature. While the subject has already inspired a fair amount of scholarship, the present monograph offers a significantly broader and more thorough survey than other publications. The author covers texts from a great variety of intellectual perspectives that deal with the afterworld or ‘otherworld’ (ākhira) and its relationship…
Islam and Buddhism: The Arabian Prequel
Conventionally, the first Muslim-Buddhist encounters are thought to have taken place in the context of the Arab-Muslim expansions into eastern Iran in the mid-seventh century, the conquest of Sind in 711 and the rise of the Islamic empire. However, several theories promoted in academic and popular circles claim that Buddhists or other Indians were present in western Arabia at the eve of Islam and thus shaped the religious environment in which Muh…
The Mystics of al-Andalus: Ibn Barrajān and Islamic Thought in the Twelfth Century
The Mystics of al-Andalus: Ibn Barrajān and Islamic Thought in the Twelfth Century. Yousef Casewit. Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. xvi + 356 pp. $125. - Volume 72 Issue 3
Islam (20 works) · History (17 works) · Islamic Studies and History (17 works) · Philosophy (17 works) · Philosophy (17 works) · History (16 works) · Art (13 works) · Ancient history (12 works) · Archaeology (12 works) · Theology (12 works)