Category Archives: Publications

The Kitāb Sībawayh of ʾAbū al-Ḥasan ʾAḥmad b. Naṣr

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Jean Druel, “The Kitāb Sībawayh of ʾAbū al-Ḥasan ʾAḥmad b. Naṣr: A non-Sīrāfian recension of the Kitāb”, in Zeitschrift für arabische Linguistik 71 (2020), pages 29‒56.

The Milan-Kazan codex of SĪBAWAYH’s (d. ca 180/796) Kitāb is a 5ᵗʰ/11ᵗʰ century North-African parchment today split between three collections: 1) Milan, Ambrosiana, X 56 sup. (115 folios), 2) Kazan, National Archives of the Republic of Tatarstan 10/5/822 (48 folios), and 3) London, Bernard Quaritch Ltd catalogue 2018/3, item number 11 (6 folios). When put together, these three manuscripts contain only one fourth of the whole text of the Kitāb. This codex sheds a new light on the gradual stabilisation of SĪBAWAYH’s text. Its recension is linked to a certain ʾABŪ AL-ḤASAN ʾAḤMAD B. NAṢR, mentioned on the first folio of the Milan fragments.
Focusing on one specific issue, namely the possibility to form the diminutive of the names of the days of the week, this paper compares SĪBAWAYH’s teaching according to the text as accepted by scholars to date (as in DERENBOURG 1881‒1889), along with the early commentaries and the recension of the Milan-Kazan codex according to its four successive hands.
At this point, it is impossible to say that this recension is pre-Mubarradian, that is to say one that escaped the “authoritarian stranglehold” on the text by AL-MUBARRAD (HUMBERT 1995:92). However, the Milan-Kazan codex surely contains a non-Sīrāfian recension of SĪBAWAYH’s Kitāb, that is a recension which, unlike the “received” text of the Kitāb, was not influenced by AL-SĪRĀFĪ’s commentary.

A sparkle in the debate about the word ʾāmīn

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Jean Druel, “A sparkle in the debate about the word ʾāmīn used in supplication and its rules in Arabic, by ʾAbū Muḥammad Ibn al-Ḫaššāb (d. 567/1172), an annotated translation”, in Beata Sheyhatovitch & Almog Kasher (editors), From Sībawayhi to ʾAḥmad Ḥasan al-Zayyāt: New angles on the Arabic linguistic tradition, Leiden & Boston: Brill, pages 123‒140.

Il martirio dell’ospitalità

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Claudio Monge et Gilles Routhier, Il martirio dell’ospitalità. La testimonianza di Christian de Chergé e Pierre Claverie, Bologne, EDB, 2018, 160 pages.

È negli anni terribili del «decennio nero», che in Algeria contrappone islamisti e forze armate, che si colloca la straordinaria testimonianza di due uomini. Sono Christian de Chergé, priore del monastero trappista di Tibhirine, rapito e ucciso nel 1996 con altri sei confratelli, in circostanze non ancora completamente chiarite, e monsignor Pierre Claverie, vescovo domenicano di Orano, assassinato lo stesso anno, con il suo autista musulmano Mohamed, per aver condannato apertamente tutte le forme di violenza. Si tratta di due figure particolarmente luminose nel cuore della Chiesa d’Algeria, fortificata nella sua volontà di restare con i musulmani algerini, anche dopo l’indipendenza del Paese, dalla personalità del cardinale Duval e dall’impegno di sacerdoti, consacrati e laici.

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A Qurʾānic apocalypse

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Michel Cuypers, A Qurʾānic apocalypse: A reading of the thirty-three last Sūrahs of the Qurʾān, Atlanta: Lockwood Press, 2018, 384 pages (collection “International Qurʾānic Studies Association, Studies in the Qurʾān”, 1).

The present volume closes a trilogy devoted to the exegesis of the Qurʾān analyzed according to the principles of Semitic rhetoric, a method of textual analysis developed in the field of biblical studies. It studies the shortest sūrahs of the Qur’ān, which are traditionally dated to the beginnings of the preaching of Muḥammad in Mecca. The reference to the initial vision of Muḥammad in Sūrah 81, the point of departure for his career as Prophet, provides the starting point of the study of this group of sūrahs. The analysis shows that the redactors who assembled the textual fragments of the Qurʾān into a book were guided by precise intentions. In the end, it is these intentions that the rhetorical analysis of the text enables us to discover and better understand.

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