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"Transmission of Knowledge in Arabic Biographies of the 13th Century AD. Computer Aided Analysis and Documentation of Life Courses of Ibn Khallikân and his Contemporaries."

German version

Project of German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft)

Keyword: "Knowledge and Arabic Biography"

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Renate Jacobi

Researcher: Dr. Gerhard Wedel (gwedel@zedat.fu-berlin.de)
Dept. for Semitic and Arabic Languages in the Faculty for Historical and Cultural Sciences of the Free University Berlin, Germany / Seminar für Semitistik und Arabistik Fachbereich Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften der Freien Universität Berlin, Altensteinstr. 34, 14195 Berlin; Tel. 8385-2698, -3567

Time of Funding: February 2000 - January 2002


Summary
Aim of this project is to detect the relationship between individual 'life course' and knowledge and its transmission by way of exploring the biographies of a group of about 90 men and women in the Islamic Near East of the 13th century AD.

This group consists of Ibn Khallikân's contemporaries and is part of a total of about 900 persons Ibn Khallikân (608-681 AH / 1211-1282 AD) described in his biographical lexicon "Wafayât al-a`yân wa-anbâ' abnâ' az-zamân" (Obituary notices on noble and famous persons and news on contemporaries). Their lives will be reconstructed from the biographical entries and that of the author himself from autobiographical remarks he inserted in several articles.

The research subject 'knowledge and its transmission' is not restricted to traditional religious knowledge like Qur'an, Hadith and Fiqh, but includes all kind of knowledge which people used as their 'cultural capital'.

The project has an interdisciplinary outlook in that it combines linguistic and socio-historical approaches. All source texts and results will be analysed and documented with computer aid.

Aims in particular
  • to understand the special language of Ibn Khallikân, which is the language used by Islamic scholars in Arabic biography
  • to explore the social strategies of learned people in the 13th century AD of how to combine the transmission of knowledge with the maintenance of their economic and social status
  • to contribute to the history of Islamic societies with focus on transmission of knowledge and Arabic biographies
  • to analyse systematically and to document Arabic biographies in a digitalized text corpus in the universal compatible data format UniCode
Methods
The central research question "Which factors of an individual biography are responsible for specific forms of knowledge and transmission of knowledge in an Islamic society?" needs two methodical considerations:
  1. All research on medieval Islamic culture must be based on a linguistic analysis of source material.
  2. Biographical reconstruction of individual 'life courses' has to include the social and historical settings of the individuals.
In order to ensure a maximum of results and to respond to the complex topic the following set of methods will be applied:
  1. analysis of language: reconstruction of special meanings of semantic fields
  2. qualitative content analysis: reconstruction of social and cultural settings
  3. analysis of social networks: reconstruction of personal networks with different parameters like kinship and tribe (biological genealogy), transmission of knowledge ('genealogy of knowledge' = isnad of the relationship between transmitter and receiver of traditions), affiliation to religious groups (madhhab, sufis etc.), dependency on dynastic rulers
Strategy of research
All research will be done by aid of computer. This is indispensable because of the size of the Arabic source material (ca 3000 pages) and for the systematic search and retrieval of data.
  1. all texts will be scanned and recognised by Arabic OCR = qualitative basis of data in full text
  2. building a biographical database = quantitative basis of data (full text corpus)
  3. linguistic analysis of text aiming at building of semantic fields = splitting full text base into sortable word lists: KWIC-Index, display of Collocations etc.
  4. content analysis of biographical articles = creation of historical categories
  5. synthesis: representation of research methods and results
  6. documentation of source texts, research tools and research results on CD-ROM
Preliminary articles published for this project by Gerhard Wedel
  • Linking Arabic Biographical Data to Reconstruct Arabic History. Proposals to Design a Biographical Information System. In: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference and Exhibition on Multi-lingual Computing ICEMCO. Cambridge 11-13 April 1996. Convenor: Dr. Ahmad Ubaydli, 7.4.1 - 7.4.14.
  • Content Analysis Versus Text Retrieval or Hypertext Linking. Qualitative Analysis of Arabic Biographical Texts from the 13th Century AD In: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference and Exhibition on Multi-lingual Computing. University of Cambridge ICEMCO, 17-18 April 1998. Convenor: Dr. Ahmad Ubaydli, 4.4.1 - 4.4.18.
  • Zur Terminologie der islamischen Wissenstradierung. Probleme bei der computergestützten Inhaltsanalyse arabischer Biographik. In: Akten des 27. Deutschen Orientalistentages (Bonn - 28. September bis 2. Oktober 1998). Norm und Abweichung. Hg. Stefan Wild und Hartmut Schild. Ergon Verlag Würzburg 2001, pp. 257-268
Further articles and papers related to the project by Gerhard Wedel
  • Lebensweg, Wissen und Wissensvermittlung. Arabische Biographik im 13. Jahrhundert. (Vortrag in der Sektion: Selbstzeugnisse in transkultureller Perspektive. 43. Deutscher Historikertag in Aachen 2000)
  • Turning Arabic Texts into Active Documents. (Vortrag: Workshop 'ARABIC Language Processing: Status and Prospects' Juli 2001 in Toulouse (http://www.elsnet.org/acl2001-arabic.html; Text online: http://www.elsnet.org/arabic2001/stede.pdf )
  • Die Selbstdarstellung Ibn Khallikans in seinem biographischen Lexikon Wafayat al-A'yan. (Vortrag auf dem 28. Deutschen Orientalistentag in Bamberg 2001, Sektion Arabistik)
  • Interkulturalität in arabischen Biographien in Ibn Khallikans Wafayat al- A'yan (13. Jahrhundert). (Vortrag auf dem 28. Deutschen Orientalistentag in Bamberg 2001: Panel Interkulturalität und Intertextualität: Die Entstehung von Genres durch transkulturlle Interaktion)
  • Ibn Khallikan als Literaturkritiker? Zur Rezeption von Dichtung in der Biographik. (Vortrag: im Internationalen Symposium: Rezeptionsprozesse im Kontext der arabischen Literatur. Seminar für Semitistik und Arabistik der Freien Universität Berlin 2001)
  • Medicine as an integrative factor in Medieval Islamic societies. Physicians as mediators in multi-religious, multi-ethnical and multi-cultural social environments? In: Alain Touwaide: "Science at the Frontiers - Medicine and Cultures in the Ancient World". Mexico: XXI International Congress of History of Science. (Science and Cultural Diversity) 2001 (im Druck)
Cooperation
Prof. Manfred Stede (Professor of Applied Computational Linguistics, University of Potsdam: http://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/~stede/
http://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/people/index.html)

joint project: "Retrieval of ancient-arabic texts"
Further information: http://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/cl/cl/res/forsch_arabic.html/SiCoPS/id_fa/SiCoPS.html

Publication:
Turning Arabic Texts into Active Documents. (Vortrag: Workshop 'ARABIC Language Processing: Status and Prospects' Juli 2001 in Toulouse (http://www.elsnet.org/acl2001-arabic.html;
Text on-line: http://www.elsnet.org/arabic2001/stede.pdf)