Review of: Katja Krause, Richard Taylor (eds.), Albert the Great and His Arabic Sources. Medieval Science between Inheritance and Emergence, Brepols, Turnhout 2024 (Philosophy in the Abrahamic Traditions of the Middle Ages, 5), 473 pp., ISBN: 9782503609379.
Review of: Daniel De Smet, Les Fatimides. De l’esoterisme en Islam, Cerf, Paris 2022, (Islam. Nouvelles approches), 265 pp., ISBN: 9782204151535.
Seetzen’s name is not typically included on the list of Europeans who first introduced the West to the religious movement known as Wahhabism and the political developments associated with it in the Middle East. However, an analysis of his diaries and correspondence reveals him to be a keen observer, capable of correcting his preconceived notions while still on his travels through the region. Though he initially subscribed to the hypothesis put forth by Niebuhr and Volney that the Wahhabis were a sect of armed deists, Seetzen eventually became convinced that they were a faction of Muslims hostile to forms of worship that they considered superstitious and attributed to other Muslim groups. Seetzen’s premature death, leading to the loss of his Arabic diaries, has likely deprived us of a wealth of rich first-hand observations that could have easily competed with the accounts of the French consuls Rousseau, Corancez, and Mengin, as well as the Catalan Badía y Leblich, the English Brydges, and especially the Swiss Burckhardt: none of whom, it should be noted, visited Najd firsthand.
Review of: Alfarabi, Book of Letters (Kitāb Al-Ḥurūf), English Translation with Introduction, Interpretive Essay, and Annotations, Plus Muhsin Mahdi’s Revised Edition of the Arabic Text by Charles E. Butterworth, Foreword by Hamza Yusuf, Zaytouna College, Berkeley, CA 2024 (The Zaytuna Curriculum Series), 576 pp., ISBN: 9781733836340.
This article discusses the shared content of three interrelated astronomical manuscripts from late medieval Italy, arguing that certain elements of this shared content trace their origins to Maghribī sources. This includes two tables of geographic coordinates with a pronounced focus on locations in North Africa as well as a gnomonic table for the latitude of Tunis. One of the coordinate tables is known to resemble an Arabic table in a zīj by Ibn al-Raqqām, who was active in Tunis, Béjaïa, and Granada in the period 1280–1315. It will be argued that a likely explanation of this knowledge transfer lies in the documented mercantile and diplomatic contacts between the Republic of Venice and Ḥafṣid Tunisia in the decades around 1300.
The article explores U. J. Seetzen’s perspective on renegades in the Ottoman Empire in 1802/03, when modernist hierarchies had not yet become an irrefutable truth. For emigrants from Western Europe’s society of estates, the Ottoman Empire still offered opportunities for a fresh start in life, or for refuge. The contribution contextualises the perception of renegades, their motives and attitudes as apparent in Seetzen’s diary entries. He characterises his acquaintances in an unflattering way, employing appropriate topoi, but also sympathises with many of them, and indicates ways of social converting and integrating.
Review of: Mario Casari, Monica Preti, Michael Wyatt (eds.), Ariosto and the Arabs: Contexts for the Orlando Furioso, I Tatti – Officina Libraria, Firenze – Roma 2022 (I Tatti Research Series, 4), 468 pp., ISBN: 9788833671529.
Review of: Richard L. Kagan, The Inquisition’s Inquisitor. Henry Charles Lea of Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 2025, viii, 364 pp., ISBN 9781512825985 (Hardcover), 9781512825992 (Ebook).
Seetzen’s word lists of African languages, compiled during his stay in early 19th-century Cairo, contributed to the expanding interest in global linguistic diversity at the time but were long overlooked and only recently rediscovered as historically significant. This paper examines his encounter with Tigriñña – spoken in the northern Ethiopian highlands and modern-day Eritrea – which was then virtually unknown to European scholars. His documentation drew on Cairo’s multi-national diversity and Egypt’s wide-ranging connections, based on conversations with travelers from Northeastern Africa, including a Tigriñña speaker. The dialect, likely from central Tigray and influenced by Muslim terminology, contains valuable cultural insights. Notably, the word list includes geographic and ethnic references that reflect an ‘oral geography’ still relevant today, as recent research confirms.
This paper examines the theoretical foundations of astrology within the Islamic intellectual tradition, with a particular focus on the adaptation and transformation of Aristotelian cosmology through key texts and figures. It analyzes the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm (Picatrix) and Fī l-tadbīrāt al-falakiyyah, attributed to Alexander of Aphrodisias and adapted by the circle of al-Kindī, tracing their role in the conceptual development of astrology as a science. The study investigates how al-Kindī, his intellectual circle, and Abū Maʿshar al-Balkhī contributed to the integration of astrology within a broader philosophical and theological framework, emphasizing the cosmological and providential roles of the heavenly bodies. By contextualizing the influence of Baghdad as a centre of translation and synthesis, the paper highlights the gradual development of astrological thought that later found resonance in 10th-century al-Andalus. The analysis revisits the notion of the ‘astrologization of the Aristotelian cosmos’ and examines the relationship between astrology, providence, and human free will, offering new insights into the ways medieval Islamic scholars reconciled celestial influence with metaphysical doctrines. Ultimately, this paper situates astrology within the broader trajectory of medieval Islamic philosophy, shedding light on its epistemological and practical dimensions.
In his novel Empty Quarter – Rub ’al-Khali, published in 1996, Berlin writer Michael Roes tells of a fictional traveller to the Orient, Ferdinand Alois Schnittke, who is searching for Moses’s Tablets of the Law in the late eighteenth century. The reflections of the nameless, first-person narrator living in Yemen serve as a contrafaction to Schnittke’s narrative. The postmodern anthropologist has discovered Schnittke’s travel records and also starts a journey in search of the Western ‘self’, anthropological dimensions of games and gaming, and the roots of Orientalism in modern times. Echoing the style of Umberto Eco, Roes has written a brilliantly told postmodern adventure novel, which was also submitted as a Habilitation thesis in the subject of Ethnology at the Free University of Berlin. Moreover, in the appendix, Roes not only listed the various games that he observed and described in Yemen, but also he meticulously breaks down the sources used in the historical narrative section, including Ulrich Jasper Seetzen’s Travels through Syria (posth. 1854–1859). My essay addresses the question of how (1.) Roes’s protagonist can be identified with Seetzen and (2.) how orientalism, anthropology, and postmodern self-reflection are related in the novel.
Der Mediziner und Naturforscher Ulrich Jasper Seetzen (1767–1811) bereiste zwischen 1802 und 18011 mehrere Städte und Regionen des Osmanischen Reiches und führte dabei Tagebücher, in denen er seine naturwissenschaftlichen, völkerkundlichen und alltagsbezogenen Beobachtungen ausführlich niederschrieb. Das von Seetzen gezeichnete Bild der Ärzte untersucht dieser Beitrag hinsichtlich der Darstellung von ‘Eigenem’ und ‘Anderem’ bei den Beschreibungen der europäischen und einheimischen Ärzte. Außerdem betrachtet er die Frage von Wissenstransfer sowie die Rolle Seetzens als Vermittler zwischen verschiedenen Kulturen. Die Studie zeigt die markante Trennlinie zwischen einheimischen und fränkischen Ärzten, Seetzens geringes Wissen über jüdische und muslimische Mediziner sowie die Übertragung der europäischen Typologie von akademischen Doctoren und handwerklichen Heilern auf Ärzte im Osmanischen Reich.
The fifth vision (II.1) of Hildegard’s of Bingen Liber divinorum operum presents a model of worldly geography. The present paper examines possible early medieval referents for this vision, such as the idea of the five climatic zones of the world, the place and form of the earth, and the Isidorian rotae of the year and of the mundus-annus-homo. These antecedents, transmitted through works on natural knowledge, are deeply transformed in Hildegard’s vision. She describes first a distinct model of the world as having five parts and then correlates these parts with the five senses and the human acts. Furthermore, the climatic zones are transformed into places of reward and condemnation in the afterlife. Through the five senses Hildegard accomplishes thus a shift from the outer geography towards the soul and its actions.
Ulrich Jasper Seetzen’s scholarly contribution to knowledge-making on the Near East remained limited at this time to the articles he published in various European periodicals. Yet it appears that this highly-scattered source material has been neglected in scholarly literature, which tends to focus instead on his diaries, published over forty years after his death. These articles, however, prove an invaluable source in order to analyze not only his contribution to the scholarly debates of his time, but also to explore the role played by European periodicals in the construction of knowledge about the Near East in the early nineteenth century. Accordingly, this article examines Seetzen’s contributions on the Bedouin tribes and their desert-bred horses, which were arguably of interest to the scholars of his time who commented on and translated them but have been overlooked by previous research. By focusing on these intertwined topics, this article thus aims to examine the significance of his contributions and assess their contemporary reception.
Review article of: Carlo Ginzburg, The Soul of Brutes, Seagull Books, Kolkata, India – London – New York 2022.
