Liz a publié : »Stories have the power to change the world … they inspire us, teach us, connect us. This is the thirty-third installment in the “Stories That Change The World” series. I have a private Facebook group for moms of LGBTQ+ kids. We have more than 1,400 mom »
viggo1 a publié : »Je crains que le monde civilisé doit enfin réalisé qu’il est en guerre contre les islamistes, A commencer par revoir leurs relations avec le berceau du DAESH i.e. l’Arabie Séoudite. Amicalement Viggo «
Je crains que le monde civilisé doit enfin réalisé qu’il est en guerre contre les islamistes, A commencer par revoir leurs relations avec le berceau du DAESH i.e. l’Arabie Séoudite.
Amicalement
Viggo
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St Andrews Special Collections a publié : »This week we have a one-off post by Dr Keelan Overton, reporting on her work as a Visiting Scholar during 2016. You can apply to the 2017 Visiting Scholarship Scheme here: https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/library/specialcollections/researchandenquiries/visiti »
This week we have a one-off post by Dr Keelan Overton, reporting on her work as a Visiting Scholar during 2016. You can apply to the 2017 Visiting Scholarship Scheme here: https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/library/specialcollections/researchandenquiries/visitingscholars
Figure 1 (left). Front doublure of the binding of the St Andrews Qur’an. Figure 2 (right). Detail of the rear scalloped tooled medallion associated with Ibrahim ‘Adil Shah II of Bijapur (r. 1580-1627), St Andrews Qur’an.
In an essay in an edited volume on Indo-Persian culture (2000), Francis Richard observed the following critical connection between the St Andrews Qur’an and a manuscript preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France: “On fol. 3a [of the Paris manuscript], a very large round seal bears a short citation from Sura II, 129 [actually 2:130], of the Qur’ān, concerning the religion of Ibrahim, the true believer. It is the seal of the library of Ibrahim II of Bijapur [Ibrahim ‘Adil Shah II, r. 1580-1627], visible on some other manuscripts, and even as a central medallion, stamped on the binding of books, as is the case with a Timurid Qur’ān of AH 845, now MS. 0.19 of the St. Andrew’s University Library of Scotland (Richard, 244).” Indeed, both doublures (interior covers) of the Qur’an’s binding feature a large scalloped medallion (figs. 1-2) framing an epigraphic circle that closely replicates the seal of the ruler in question (fig. 3). The quality of these medallions – caused by pressure stamping with a metal tool – is extraordinary.
Figure 3. Impression of the Qur’anic seal of Ibrahim ‘Adil Shah II (inscribed with Qur’an 2:130; diameter: 41 mm.), from a Divan of Jami, Museum of Islamic Art, Doha, Ms. 260 (Photograph by the author, 2009)
Figure 4. Detail of gold-flecked paper and illuminated chapter (surah) heading, St Andrews Qur’an. (Photograph by the author, 2016)
Figure 5. Lower right corner of a standard text panel and gold-flecked margin, St Andrews Qur’an. (Photograph by the author, 2016)
In the field of Islamic manuscript studies, the St Andrews Qur’an is well known as a luxury codex of the highest caliber. Its gold-flecked paper, calligraphy in at least four scripts, and meticulous illumination are the finest of their kind (figs. 4-5). The manuscript’s illuminated incipit pages exemplify the sober technical perfection of fifteenth-century Timurid Herat (fig. 6.1 6.2, 6.3 and 6.4), and this stylistic association seems supported by the colophon’s date of 845/1441-42 and naming of Abu Sa‘id (r. 1451-69), a ruler linked to fine examples of tilework and book arts. The Qur’an’s Timurid provenance has been emphasized in two momentous exhibitions: the British Library’s The Qur’an of 1976 and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery’s Timur and the Princely Vision of 1988-89. The former’s catalog also highlighted the manuscript’s later owner, Tipu Sultan of Mysore (r. 1782-99), who ruled in India three centuries after the supposed Timurid patron. The doublure stamps associated with Ibrahim II, the early modern ruler of the Deccani city of Bijapur, therefore imply a critical intermediary sojourn in the biography of the book.
Figure 7. Front cover of the binding of the St Andrews Qur’an, with a small note written by Tipu Sultan (r. 1782-99) of Mysore.
Figure 8. Marginalia by a professional scribe, period of Tipu Sultan, St Andrews Qur’an. (Photograph by the author, 2016)
During its peripatetic life between Greater Iran, India, and the United Kingdom, the St Andrews Qur’an was routinely modified, annotated, and “improved” to satisfy the needs of distinct contexts and audiences. The most indelible, and at times intrusive and personal, interventions transpired at the court of Tipu Sultan. The ruler himself composed the small note on the front cover (fig. 7), as attested by comparison to a British Library manuscript (my thanks to Jake Benson and Ursula Sims-Williams for this connection), and a professional scribe wrote detailed instructions for liturgical use throughout the margins (fig. 8). Comparable marginalia is found in other Qur’ans associated with Tipu, including an example today in the University of Edinburgh. The link between the Edinburgh and St Andrews Qur’ans rests in a seminal period in the history of Indian and British book collections. Upon Tipu’s defeat by the East India Company at Srirangapatna in 1799, his library was transferred to the College of Fort William in Calcutta, and by 1805-6, his Qur’ans and other volumes were selected for dispersal amongst British collections. St Andrews was the lucky recipient of this example, as documented by two inscriptions on an opening folio (fig. 9).
Figure 9. Endpaper with inscriptions dated 15 August 1805 and 1806, St Andrews Qur’an.
My study of the St Andrews Qur’an began in 2010, while I was completing a dissertation on book culture in Ibrahim’s Bijapur. The notion that a version of the ruler’s large seal, for impression on paper, was also used to mark the leather doublures of his books was intriguing. In the late medieval and early modern context (Mamluk, Safavid, Ottoman, Mughal, ‘Adil Shahi), ownership was generally conveyed on the binding’s spine or envelope flap, meaning it would be visible to an external viewer. On the initial pages of the book, it could also take the form of an ex libris in the shape of a shamsa (sunburst). In both types of documentation, the phrase “made for the library (or treasury) of” was typically followed by the ruler’s name and titles. To date, I have only located one other example of ownership occurring in a comparable format on doublures (see Ohta, fig. 11). In this Mamluk instance, the ruler (then an amir) is explicitly named, whereas in the St Andrews example, Ibrahim is simply alluded to via a Qur’anic verse honoring his namesake, the prophet Ibrahim/Abraham (2:130). This verse was also selected to decorate Ibrahim’s tomb, the Ibrahim Rauza, and was part of a larger effort to present the ruler in an orthodox mode (Wannell).
Ibrahim’s scalloped seal stamp
A lower quality corner stamp
Although I included a brief section on the Qur’an’s binding in my 2011 dissertation, it remained elusive in many respects. What explained the discrepancy in quality between Ibrahim’s scalloped seal stamp and the four surrounding corner stamps? What stimulated this apparently novel approach to conveying ownership? Was there anything else in the book that could be confidently linked to Bijapur? As for the textblock within, the colophon had clearly been altered, and several clues indicated that this canonical manuscript was perhaps little understood. It became clear that a holistic reassessment (textblock and binding and afterlife) was imperative and that such a comprehensive “archaeology” would require interdisciplinary collaboration. I hence invited Kristine Rose Beers, an expert in Islamic bookbinding, and Bruce Wannell, a linguist who had recently concluded an epigraphic analysis of Ibrahim’s tomb, to join the project.
Keelan Overton and Kristine Rose Beers
Figure 10. Detecting papers inserts with the use of a light sheet. (Photograph by the author, 2016)
Figure 11. Detail of a paper insert in the vertical panel flanking the text in black naskh. (Photograph by the author, 2016)
During the August 2016 residency, our team investigated the codex from multiple angles. Kristine conducted an extensive structural analysis, including identifying endpapers, examining the technique of gold-flecking, parsing through the binding’s layers, and assessing areas of inserts (figs. 10-11), heavy sizing (fig. 12), and effaced inscriptions. This examination was facilitated by the use of basic imaging tools (UV torches and light sheets), but it became clear that multi-spectral imaging might help to recover now lost inscriptions (the team continues to work toward this end, with the kind support of the Library staff).
Figure 12. Detecting areas of heavy sizing with the use of a light sheet. (Photograph by the author, 2016)
Kristine Rose Beers and Erica Kotze using a camera with an infra-red filter with Maia Sheridan, manuscript archivist looking on
A second major task focused on a complete reading of the lengthy colophon (Bruce being the Arabic specialist), and Bruce and I also strove to identify the Tipu-period interventions, a task that led to additional research of manuscripts in Edinburgh, Cambridge, and London. Although I had presumed that two weeks would be sufficient to “mine” all physical, stylistic, linguistic, and biographical aspects of the volume, it was only on the last day that my eye centered on a series of major discrepancies between the left and right-hand pages of the famous illuminated opening. The residency thus concluded on an enigmatic note that exemplifies the layered and multivalent manuscript in question.
In October, I presented our research at the Historians of Islamic Art Association Biennial Conference at the Courtauld Institute of Art and received excellent feedback. We are close to offering a reattribution and reassessment of the manuscript’s constituent parts, as well as a detailed history of its life over four centuries. Our findings will be published in about a year, in an interdisciplinary volume that I am editing on cultural exchange between Iran and the Deccan. Until then, the detective hunt continues.
Acknowledgements
I am sincerely grateful to the Library team (Gabriel, Maia, Rachel, Briony, Erica, Moira, Sean) for awarding and accommodating the 2016 residency, as well as several earlier visits. I also thank Jake Benson, Sheila Blair, Francis Richard, and Ursula Sims-Williams for invaluable insights that have informed this project.
-Dr Keelan Overton
University of California, Los Angeles
Works cited and further reading
Beers, Kristine Rose. “Toward an Archaeology of Islamic Bookbinding.” Presentation given at the Hamad bin Khalifa Symposium on Islamic Art, Doha, 2015.
Lentz, Thomas W. and Glenn D. Lowry. Timur and the Princely Vision: Persian Art and Culture in the Fifteenth Century. Los Angeles and Washington: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, 1989.
Lings, Martin and Yasin Hamid Safadi. The Quran: Catalogue of an Exhibition of Quran Manuscripts at the British Library 3 April – 15 August 1976. London: British Library, 1976.
Ohta, Alison. “Filigree Bindings of the Mamluk Period.” Muqarnas 21 (2004), 267-76.
Overton, Keelan. “A Collector and His Portrait: Book Arts and Painting for Ibrahim ‘Adil Shah II of Bijapur (r. 1580-1627).” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2011.
___. “Between Herat, Bijapur, and Mysore: The Layers and Lives of the St Andrews Qur’an.” Presentation given at the Historians of Islamic Art Association Biennial Conference, London, October 2016.
___. “Book Culture, Royal Libraries, and Persianate Painting in Bijapur, circa 1580-1630.” Muqarnas 33 (2016), 91-154.
Overton, Keelan, Kristine Rose Beers, and Bruce Wannell. “The Layers and Life of the St Andrews Qur’an.” In Iran and the Deccan: Persianate Art, Culture and Talent in Circulation, c. 1400-1700, ed. Keelan Overton. Indiana University Press, forthcoming.
Richard, Francis. “Some Sixteenth-century Deccani Persian Manuscripts in the Bibliothèque nationale de France.” In The Making of Indo-Persian Culture, eds. Muzaffar Alam, Françoise ‘Nalini’ Delvoye and Marc Gaborieau. New Delhi: Manohar, 2000, 239-49.
Wannell, Bruce. “The Epigraphic Program of the Ibrahim Rauza in Bijapur.” In Sultans of the South: Arts of India’s Deccan Courts, 1323-1687, eds. Navina Najat Haidar and Marika Sardar. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011, 252-67.
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On Sunday, my wife and I held a birthday party for our daughter, who was turning four. It was supposed to be something small and affordable, but it inevitably spiraled out of control, with balloons, customized cupcakes, and a winged princess dress that combined Tinker Bell with Belle from Beauty and the Beast. (Beatrix dubbed it her Tinker Belle party, which made her old man proud.) Before long, we were forced to consider the problem of party favors. The guest list consisted mostly, but not entirely, of little girls—a couple of boys had been grandfathered in, if that’s the right word, from the precedent of prior birthdays. This presented a dilemma. I wanted to be consistent with the party’s theme, just because I’m insufferably obsessive, but I didn’t want to ask a boy to accept a bag full of fairy and princess trinkets. For all the obvious reasons, I also didn’t want to designate separate bags for boys and girls, so the favors had to be both fun and gender neutral. At last, I hit on the idea of a nature theme, since the party was being held at the Oak Park Conservatory. I cobbled together some goodie bags with toy cameras, stickers, fruit snacks, and a selection of vintage Golden Guides that I remembered from my childhood, which I bought at bargain prices online. Looking at the results, which were undeniably a bit twee, my wife said: “You really went full Wes Anderson on these, didn’t you?”
But I’d do it again. And it rekindled my love of Golden Guides, the line of paperbacks edited by Herbert S. Zim starting in the early fifties for Western Press. The first thing you need to know about a Golden Guide is that it has a pair of printed rulers on the edges of the last two pages, one calibrated in tenths of an inch, the other in centimeters. When I was younger, this feature impressed me mightily, and it immediately enhanced each book’s apparent usefulness. I often engaged in vaguely apocalyptic daydreams about what book I would keep if I were allowed just one one, and while a Golden Guide was never at the very top of the list, the fact that it was a book and a ruler at the same time was a definite point in its favor. The second thing you need to know about these guides is that they’re all the same size. To be specific, they’re four by six inches, which you can verify—as I’ve just done—by using the ruler in one Golden Guide to measure another. These dimensions were once fairly common for paperbacks, but they’ve fallen out of style, which is a shame. It’s a beautiful size, just large enough to fit comfortably in the palm of your hand or in a pocket, and it’s particularly pleasant to hold a stack of four or five Golden Guides at once. Each one is exactly one hundred and sixty pages long, a length that is somehow just right to contain all useful information about Botany and, oddly, its subsets like Flowers and Trees, too. It’s a lesson, if you like, on how all knowledge can be expanded or contracted to fit the space available.
But the most important thing about the Golden Guides is that the illustrations are paintings, all gorgeous and finely detailed, and I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that they’re unforgettable. I’ve just glanced at the four titles that I have left over from the party, and I want to record the names of these artists: James Gordon Irving, Dorothea and Sy Barlowe, Nicholas Strekalovsky, George Sandström. Irving, who provided the pictures for eight guides, gets his own Wikipedia page, and I was delighted to discover that the Barlowes illustrated the classic Dinosaurs: A Pop-Up Book. Of Sandström, I’ve only been able to find a short obituary, which notes:
His son Cortright said that when he was growing up, his father’s studio was full of stuffed animals and strange objects—including a moon rock—which he was using as a model for an illustration.
I love the casualness of that aside. Including a moon rock! George Sandström once held a piece of the moon in his hands. As for Strekalovsky, I haven’t been able to find out much, but I’ll never forget his painting of the emperor scorpion in Spiders and Their Kin, which I immediately sought out as soon as I got my hands on my new copy. It was just as revolting and beautiful as I remembered.
And it’s because of their illustrations and design, I think, that these books continue to mean so much to me. When you leaf through an authoritative volume like Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson’s The Ants, which is like a Golden Guide expanded to its ultimate Proustian dimensions, you can see why nature illustrations are often preferable to photographs: they allow you to depict idealized scenes and specimens that might be impossible to capture on film, heightening reality so that you can more easily understand it. (As Wilson writes of Sarah Landry’s illustrations for Sociobiology: « Her compositions are among the first to represent entire societies, in the correct demographic proportions, with as many social interactions displayed as can possibly be included in one scene. ») You get much the same feeling from these Golden Guides. A photograph of an emperor scorpion—which is a harmless species, by the way—is so insistently horrifying, for good or for bad, that it’s hard to get past your instinctive reaction. Strekalovsky’s painting is easier to study at length, and you can scrutinize its details until you realize that it looks rather nice. When you flip rapidly through any of these books, you get a soothing sense of a world that has been observed, recorded, and neatly labeled in a way that may have only been possible in the fifties. Its picture of reality may not be entirely true, but it’s reassuring for a child, and even for a grownup who feels overwhelmed by all the information that he hasn’t yet mastered. I may never be able to identify trees at a glance, but thanks to Trees, I’m confident that I could. Judging from the response of the kids at the birthday party, they seemed to feel it, too, or at least to respond to the pleasures that these guides afford. One of the two boys in attendance looked at the books and whispered: “Do I get one of these?” He did. But I was tempted to keep them all for myself.
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Stories have the power to change the world … they inspire us, teach us, connect us.This is the thirty-third installment in the “Stories That Change The World” series.
I have a private Facebook group for moms of LGBTQ+ kids. We have more than 1,400 moms in the group and continue to grow. The group was especially created for open minded Christian moms of LGBTQ+ kids. One thing we often discuss among ourselves is how we reconcile our Christian faith with supporting and affirming our LGBTQ+ kids. My own journey of reconciliation was one of the main things that led me to create Serendipitydodah for Moms. Here is the short version of how I reconciled my faith with being affirming. This process took place between one and two years.
When my son came out at age 19 he told me he had come to the conclusion that the bible did not condemn loving, committed same sex relationships. I fully expected to be able to prove him wrong.
I was accustomed to « studying » scripture as I led women’s ministry in church for many years and also wrote and taught women’s bible studies during that time. I knew what it meant to dig into original language and consider the historical context of the verses I was studying. I was shocked to find that my son was right … there was no clear condemnation of the kind of same sex relationship that my son was talking about. None of the « clobber » verses were speaking about a loving, monogamous, healthy same sex relationship – my son had not forsaken God nor was he living some kind of lustful life. There was nothing in scripture that spoke of a same sex couple falling in love, marrying, building a life and a family together. Therefore, in light of insufficient evidence in scripture I had to ask myself…How should I respond to something if scripture doesn’t clearly condemn it?
The only thing I could think is that I needed to know if there was any evidence that same sex relationships were hurting people in real life. I took time to meet and get to know same sex couples and families and I couldn’t find evidence that they were any different than opposite sex couples – the evidence I discovered was that healthy same sex relationships had the same potential to be good and healthy and life giving that opposite sex relationships had.
When I was going through all of this study, research, thought and prayer Micah 6:8 became a focal point for me:
« He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good;
and what doth the Lord require of thee,
but to do justly, and to love mercy,
and to walk humbly with thy God? »
It was one of those verses that I kept being drawn back to and became one of those verses that ended up being « written on my heart »
The lack of evidence to condemn same sex relationships and Micah 6:8 led me to this:
If scripture doesn’t clearly condemn it and there is no evidence that it is harmful to anyone it would be unjust for me to condemn it and I know how God feels about injustice.
Shortly after I realized it was unjust to condemn same sex relationships due to insufficient evidence I also began to understand that good theology should produce good fruit.
I knew that scripture says that we (followers of Christ) will be known by our good fruit or good psychology.
I knew the good news should produce life giving fruit and if my theology was producing depression, hopelessness, self-loathing and suicide I had to come to grips with the reality that my theology must be wrong.
As I pondered the « good theology = good fruit/good psychology » principle and began to connect with a lot of Christian LGBT people I began to see a pattern … when LGBT people were connected to non-affirming faith communities they were typically very broken, desperate, hopeless, unhappy people and many times they were living out their brokenness in self destructive ways – but when they were connected to affirming faith communities they typically were a lot healthier and living much healthier lives. The evidence was clear and convicting.
I had to let go of the theology that was producing death (emotional death, spiritual death, relational death, physical death) and embrace theology that was producing healthy ideas, healthy choices, healthy living .. theology that was producing health, wholeness and life.
At some point I realized that I could no longer reconcile my Christian faith with the idea that same sex relationships were sinful – the two just didn’t go together.
I became affirming through my faith, not in spite of it. I support equal rights and protection of LGBT people not “even though” I’m a Christian or “in spite of” of being a Christian, but BECAUSE I’m a Christian. I haven’t had to compromise or choose – I have fully embraced my faith throughout this journey.
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Serendipitydodah for Moms is a private Facebook group created as an extension of the Serendipitydodah blog. The group is secret so that only members can find it or see what is posted in the group. The group was started in June 2014 and presently has more than 1,400 members. The space was specifically created for open minded Christian moms who have LGBT kids and want to develop and maintain healthy, loving, authentic relationships with their LGBT kids.
For more info email lizdyer55@gmail.com
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nationalisme, le racisme, la xénophobie, et plus généralement l’altérophobie. Toutes les tyrannies de la terre et les ennemis de la démocratie ont un intérêt patent à entretenir cette haine de l’autre. Seuls les terroristes djihadistes l’auraient-ils bien compris, en ciblant des symboles de l’occident visibles et lisibles par tous, afin de nous liguer les uns contre les autres, à leur seul misérable profit ? Ceux qui entretiennent ce poison en sont les complices, jugeables et condamnables. Et ceux qui instrumentalisent politiquement cette haine sont encore plus condamnables que d’autres, ayant une responsabilité collective.
MENSUEL NATIONAL D'ALGÉRIE 