Papers by Boušek Daniel
Samaritans Through the Ages. Studies on Samaritan History, Texts, Interpretation, Linguistics and Manuscripts. Edited by József Zsengellér, 2024
Šihāb ad-Dīn al-ʿUmarī, the secretary of the dīwān al-inšāʾ (the central chancery) in Damascus an... more Šihāb ad-Dīn al-ʿUmarī, the secretary of the dīwān al-inšāʾ (the central chancery) in Damascus and Cairo, wrote in 1340s al-Taʿrīf bi-l-Muṣṭalah al-Šarīf, the administrative manual intended for the employees of the court chancery of the Egyptian Mamlūk sultans. The manual contains also special oaths to be sworn by ḏimmīs, or protected non-Muslim communities, including the Jewish one. In Egypt and Syria, this included the Rabbanites, Karaites, and Samaritans. The text of Samaritan oath (yamīn al-sāmira), contained in al-Taʿrīf bi-l-Muṣṭalah al-Šarīf, is verbatim copied in later Mamlūk manuals of secretaryship, such as Taṯqīf al-Taʿrīf biʾl-Muṣṭalaḥ al-Šarīf by Ibn Nāẓir al-Ğayš (1326–1384), Al-Ṯaġr al-Bāsim fī Ṣināʿat al-Kātib wa-ʾl-Kātim (1443) by al-Saḥmāwī, and, most famously, Ṣubḥ al-Aʿšā fī Ṣināʿat al-Inšāʾ (1355–1418) by al-Qalqašandī. The article explores the content of Samaritan oath and aims to show that the authors of the manuals evinced a good knowledge of the basic principles of the Samaritan faith. Among the People of the Book, Samaritans are seen as a sort of Jewish subgroup, which was viewed separately from the Rabbanites and Karaites, and thus needed its own version of the oath. Thus, they confirm the Samaritans’ position on the margins of a minority.
Jiřina Šedinová a kol., Dialog myšlenkových proudů středověkého judaismu: Mezi integrací a izolací. Praha: Academia, 2011
Steven Fine (ed.), The Samaritans: A Biblical People, 2022
At this time [of Muhammad's coming] there were three men, astrologers very skilled in their profe... more At this time [of Muhammad's coming] there were three men, astrologers very skilled in their professions. The fi rst was a Samaritan called Sarmasa from Askar. The second was a Jew whose name was Kab al-Aḥbar. And
Transfer and Religion Interactions between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, 2020
The Muslim-Jewish polemics is a phenomenon as old as Islam itself, and the Qurʾān was its very fi... more The Muslim-Jewish polemics is a phenomenon as old as Islam itself, and the Qurʾān was its very first source. Its sūras contain, explicitly or implicitly, a germ of major topics of the Muslim medieval polemics against Judaism and Hebrew Bible that the later generations of Muslims will further develop and reformulate: the Hebrew Bible contains a prophesy of Muḥammad’s coming; the Hebrew Bible is a falsification; and the new revelation of Islam has abrogated Jewish Law. While the Muslim side of the polemical encounter between the Muslims and Jews in the Middle Ages has been already sufficiently studied, the Jewish apologetical response has received comparatively little attention. The essay, therefore, based on the wide range of the Muslim and Jewish polemical literature, juxtaposes their entangled arguments and motifs and explores their inter-religious transmission. It focuses mainly on Ibn Ḥazm’s polemics in his Book of Opinions on Religions to whose thorough and scathing arguments responded Solomon ibn Adret of thirteenth-century Barcelona in his Hebrew Treatise against the Muslims. Similarly, the specific Spanish background can be assumed for the anti-Islamic polemical treatise Bow and Shield of Shimʿon b. Ṣemaḥ Duran that is contrariwise rooted in the Christian-Islamic polemics.
Jan Dušek (ed.), The Samaritans in Historical, Cultural and Linguistic Perspectives (Studia Samaritana 11, Studia Judaica 110), Berlin: De Gruyter., 2018
In the year 756/1355 Abū l-Fatḥ ibn Abī l-Ḥasan al-Sāmirī al-Danafī wrote the Samaritan chronicle... more In the year 756/1355 Abū l-Fatḥ ibn Abī l-Ḥasan al-Sāmirī al-Danafī wrote the Samaritan chronicle Kitāb al-Tārīkh, which concludes with a cycle of legends narrating the rise of Islam. Their narrative focuses on the story of the prophet Muḥammad’s encounter with three astrologers, representatives of three Abrahamic religions: a Samaritan, a Jew, and a Christian. They saw in the stars the end of the rule of Byzantium and the rise of the rule of Ishmael, i.e., Islam, and therefore came to Muḥammad in Medina to find out whether he was the man from the stock of Ishmael with whom the rule of Islam in the world had begun. When assured that Muḥammad was the king promised in the Scriptures, so the story goes, the Jew and the Christian converted to Islam, whilst the Samaritan stayed steadfast in his religion and negotiated with Muḥammad full protection for the Samaritans under Islam.
Abū l-Fatḥ’s narrative presents a unique Samaritan version of a polemical story that was widespread among the Christians and Jews in the Middle Ages. The paper compares the Samaritan version of the story with the Christian and Jewish ones, and sets the story of Muḥammad’s pact with the Samaritans into the context of the mid-14th century Mamlūk society and the Samaritans’ position in it. The thesis of the paper is that the Samaritan version responds to the increasing social and religious pressure of Islamic society directed towards the conversion of non-Muslims to Islam and the expropriation of their houses of worship.
Dvarim meatim. Studie pro Jiřinu Šedinovou. Daniel Boušek, Magdalena Křížová a Pavel Sládek (eds.), Filozofická fakulta Univerzity Karlovy, 2016
Moše ben Majmon - Maimonides. Filosof, právník a lékař. Dita Rukriglová a kolektiv. Editor Pavel Sládek, 2014
Archiv Orientální, 2018
The anonymous author of Elleh ha-Massa'ot (These Are the Travel Routes), a vademecum for Jewish p... more The anonymous author of Elleh ha-Massa'ot (These Are the Travel Routes), a vademecum for Jewish pilgrims originating from the Holy Land (between the mid-thirteenth century and 1291), mentions that on the altar of Elijah on Mt. Carmel "the Ishmaelites [i.e., Muslims] kindle lights to the glory of the holy place." 1 Similar statements are made by him, as well as others, concerning a number of sacred places. Both Jewish and Muslim medieval sources frequently mention or allude to the fact that the graves of Jewish saints were also revered by Muslims, and, in the period of the Crusades, also by Christians. 2 Followers of the three Abrahamic religions intermingled easily, not only at the graves of saints but also at holy places in general, or on the holy days of a particular community. Pilgrimage to the tombs of saints, i.e., ziyāra (lit. "visitation") was a fundamental aspect of religious life throughout the medieval Near East and an expression of both elite status and popular piety.
Predictions of the Coming of the Prophet Muhammad and of Islam in the Hebrew Bible: Ibn Qutayba’s... more Predictions of the Coming of the Prophet Muhammad and of Islam in the Hebrew Bible: Ibn Qutayba’s “Dalā’il al-Nubuwwa” (“Proofs for Prophethood”)
This study attempts to outline the Biblical citations in Dalā’il al-Nubuwwa by Ibn Qutayba. The discussed and translated citations demonstrate that Ibn Qutayba often changed and Islamized the biblical text. This, however, did not impair the reliability of the citations in the eyes of Dalā’il al-Nubuwwa’s Muslim readers. On the contrary, the Islamization of the biblical passages guaranteed the popularity of Ibn Qutayba’s text and the use of ample quotations from it by later authors. Ibn Qutayba considered even thus Islamized citations to be part of the earlier revelations possessed currently by “the people of the Book”. The people of the Book use these citations and do not deny their verbatim meaning; they only suppose that the Prophet is not explicitly mentioned by name in the Hebrew Bible. Yet, according to Ibn Qutayba, it won’t help them, for the mshabbahā in the Syriac Bible means the same as muhammad. Moreover, all testimonies of the Scripture obviously correspond, according to Ibn Qutayba, to the circumstances of the Prophet’s life, his time, his emigration and his law; all this excludes the possibility that these testimonies could point to someone else. Finally, Ibn Qutayba invokes the infallible authority of the Koran: if it claims that Muhammad is mentioned in the Torah and the Gospel, there simply must be such testimonies in these books.
Ibn Qutayba’s Dalā’il al-Nubuwwa, along with the works of other Muslim authors who rendered to readers signs of Muhammad’s prophetical office, show, that Islamic interpretation of the Scripture was simplistic and undeveloped both compared with Christian typological and allegorical exegesis of the Bible and Muslim exegesis of the Koran. However, we have to take into account the fact that this exegesis never became an independent literary genre and did not even play any important role in medieval Islamic theology.
Saʿīd ibn Ḥasan of Alexandria: The Jewish Convert to Islam and his proofs of Muḥammad’s prophetho... more Saʿīd ibn Ḥasan of Alexandria: The Jewish Convert to Islam and his proofs of Muḥammad’s prophethood
The article deals with a polemical treatise Masalik al-nazar (1320) of Saʿīd ibn Ḥasan, a Jewish convert to Islam from Alexandria. Since Saʿīd did not succeed with his attempt to organize a disputation with the spiritual leaders of the Jews and the Christians, he put his polemical arguments on paper. The author gives in the treatise a long list of putative prophecies concerning the prophet Muhammad and Islam culled from the Hebrew Bible, which bear witness to Saʿīd’s unfamiliarity with the Muslim polemical literature. In so doing, when unable to shut down the houses of prayer of “protected people” altogether, he aimed at least to persuade the Muslim authorities to eradicate the pictures and the statues from them.
Masalik al-nazar contains inter alia interesting biographical parts describing the author’s process of conversion which was triggered by a dream vision urging him to convert. The treatise offers a valuable testimony to aggravating social conditions of the non-Muslim minorities in the Mamluk Egypt and Syria.
The Abrogation of the Mosaic Law in the Medieval Jewish Polemics with Islam: Saʿadia Gaon, al-Qir... more The Abrogation of the Mosaic Law in the Medieval Jewish Polemics with Islam: Saʿadia Gaon, al-Qirqisānī, and Maimonides.
The aim of the present study is to outline the response of Saʿadia Gaon, al-Qirqisānī, and Maimonides, three foremost Jewish thinkers of the Middle Ages, to the accusation of the Islamic polemics concerning abrogation (naskh) of the Mosaic Law. The question of the abrogation of the Mosaic Law, i.e., the Torah played central role in the medieval polemics between three monotheistic creeds, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. It is obvious from the works of the Jewish scholars under the concern that they discussed more or less the same set of Biblical passages and rational arguments pro and con the abrogation which we meet in the works of Muslim authors such as al-Bāqillānī or Ibn Ḥazm. Since we cannot suppose that these authors were familiar with the works of the Jewish theologians, it is more likely to assume that they got acquainted with these Biblical passages and arguments in the multi-confessional polemical sessions which took place in the 10th century in the places like Baghdad or Cairo. The Christians, who also took part in these disputation salons, possessed better knowledge of the Hebrew Bible than Muslims and at the same time could draw arguments from copious Christian polemical literature with Judaism, and thus supply the needed polemical material to their Muslim counterparts. The polemical theses of the Jewish skeptic Ḥiwi al-Balkhi indubitably served as another channel of information. The Biblical passages and rational arguments, propounded by al-Balkhi for abrogation and the change in God’s mind (badāʾ), resound both from the works the studied Jewish scholars, and Muslim polemists.
The Motif of Abrogation of the Mosaic Law in Medieval Islamic Polemic with Judaism
The aim of the... more The Motif of Abrogation of the Mosaic Law in Medieval Islamic Polemic with Judaism
The aim of the present study is to outline the Muslim attitude to the abrogation of the Mosaic law as portrayed on works of four leading medieval Muslim scholars, al-Bāqillānī, Ibn Ḥazm, Samaw’al al-Maghribī, and al-Qarāfī. The Jews rejected abrogation (naskh) and any suggestion of a new dispensation, be it through Jesus or Muhammad, on the basis of the argument of God’s omniscience and immutability of His decree, which is not liable to sudden change. The notion of a new dispensation is based on such a sudden change (badā’) in God’s will, and thus contradicts the idea of God’s omniscience. The contra arguments of Muslim authors revolve around the premise that precepts of the Mosaic law are commands to perform certain acts for a definite period, and when that defined period has passed, the command may turn into its opposite. To prove this they put forward arguments based both on the Hebrew Bible and rational grounds.
It is clear from the proposed arguments for abrogation and change in divine will that they are based on a standard set of arguments from an old polemical tradition going back to Jewish scholars such as al-Qirqisānī and especially Sa‛adya Ga’on. The last-named responded to the arguments advanced by Ḥīwī al-Balkhī, a Jewish sceptic, who lived in the second half of the ninth century CE and allegedly wrote a polemical work in rhyme against the Hebrew Bible, listing 200 questions and problematic passages. His arguments for abrogation and change in divine will mostly correspond to those introduced by the studied Muslim authors.
The need to respond to Ibn Hazm’s and Samaw’al al-Maghribī’s arguments was felt even several centuries later, as we can reason out of the works of two Jewish authors from the 13th century, Sa‛d ibn Kammūna and Abraham ibn Adret. Their direct response contains the old stock of polemical themes shared by the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim authors living in the Islamic countries.
Středomoří v historii, 2012
Campaign against "The Propected People" in the Mamluk period: Ghazi ibn al-Wasiti and his "Respon... more Campaign against "The Propected People" in the Mamluk period: Ghazi ibn al-Wasiti and his "Response to the Protected People"
ACTA FF ZČU 13 (2013)
The aim of the present study is to outline the image of the Jewish physicians and pharmacists of ... more The aim of the present study is to outline the image of the Jewish physicians and pharmacists of the Mamlūk period in the Muslim literature. The ample presence of the Jewish physicians and pharmacists in the Islamic society is vividly documented in biographical lexicons of physicians and findings of the Cairo Genizah starting from the 10th century. Their names figure in the classical period of Islam among members of entourages of caliphs, sultans, viziers, generals, or governors. The tolerant attitude has changed in the 13th century. The worsening of the social and legal position of the Jews and Christians during the Mamlūk period in Egypt and Syria is reflected also on the attitude of the Muslim society towards non-Muslim and particularly Jewish physicians. The contemporary Muslim literature portrays a Jewish physician as someone whose only aim is to harm Muslims by false or poisonous drugs and who deprives Muslim physicians of work. The paper documents this bias, which has its counterpart in medieval and renaissance Christian literature, on citations from various Arabic sources with different agendas, and tries to outline its origins and the impact on the attitude of the Muslim society towards the Jewish minority in the studied period.
inter-religious polemics by Boušek Daniel
Saʿīd ibn Ḥasan of Alexandria: The Jewish Convert to Islam and his proofs of Muḥammad’s prophetho... more Saʿīd ibn Ḥasan of Alexandria: The Jewish Convert to Islam and his proofs of Muḥammad’s prophethood.
The article deals with a polemical treatise Masalik al-nazar (1320) of Saʿīd ibn Ḥasan, a Jewish convert to Islam from Alexandria. Since Saʿīd did not succeed with his attempt to organize a disputation with the spiritual leaders of the Jews and the Christians, he put his polemical arguments on paper. The author gives in the treatise a long list of putative prophecies concerning the prophet Muhammad and Islam culled from the Hebrew Bible, which bear witness to Saʿīd’s unfamiliarity with the Muslim polemical literature. In so doing, when unable to shut down the houses of prayer of “protected people” altogether, he aimed at least to persuade the Muslim authorities to eradicate the pictures and the statues from them.
Masalik al-nazar contains inter alia interesting biographical parts describing the author’s process of conversion which was triggered by a dream vision urging him to convert. The treatise offers a valuable testimony to aggravating social conditions of the non-Muslim minorities in the Mamluk Egypt and Syria.
Books by Boušek Daniel
Book of Comfort after Distress, 2022
ISBN 978-80-200-3225-6, 2021
Simanej kitvej ha-qvarot, s. 4. 15 e. reiner tvrdí, že teqo‛a nebyla na počátek textu zařazena au... more Simanej kitvej ha-qvarot, s. 4. 15 e. reiner tvrdí, že teqo‛a nebyla na počátek textu zařazena autorem, nýbrž opisovačem z důvodu nedostatku místa na konci listu ("mi-pihem ve-lo mi-pi kitvam", s. 323, pozn. 37). 16 viz e. reIner, ‛Alija ve-‛alija la-regel, s. 247-248. I pro křesťanské poutníky bylo od počátku 13. století akko centrem jejich pobytu a výchozím bodem jejich poutí po Svaté zemi, přestože nebylo považováno za součást Svaté země. viz a. GraboIS, ziqa ve-zarut be-jaḥasam šel ha-ṣaljanim le-ereṣ jisra'el bi-tqufat masa‛ej ha-ṣlav, s. 50-51. 24 Ele ha-masa‛ot vydal poprvé e. carmoly (brusel 1841), jeho edici přetiskl a. m. luncz v Agudat agadot (jerušalajim 1885) a dále e. l. Grünhut jako přílohu k edici Masa‛ot r. Benjamin me-Tudelo [!], Frankfurt a/m. 1904, s. 145-164, z níž budu citovat (dále: Ele ha-masa‛ot). 25 Ele ha-masa‛ot, s. 145. 39 a. Ja‛arI, Ha-dfus ha-‛ivri be-Qušta, jerušalajim 1947, s. 79. 40 Ha-me‛amer 3 (1920), s. 224-230. Jiḥus ha-ṣadiqim vytištěný rabi Geršomem měl 104 stran. m. Iš-Šalom vydal rovněž seznam svatých míst Elu jiḥusej ha-ṣadiqim z''l ve-ṣijunam, JPOS 8 (1940-1941), s. 10-17, který je velmi podobný seznamu Jiḥus ha-ṣadiqim vydanému lunczem, ovšem zaznamenává pouze svatá místa v Galileji. 41 luncz ve své edici otiskl pouze seznam svatých míst a modlitby vynechal. 42 Stavba jeruzalémských hradeb se započala na příkaz sultána Sulajmána roku 1537 a ukončena byla roku 1540. hlavní podíl na provedení stavby měl sultánův pokladník v egyptě, nagid avraham castro. viz z. vIlnaJ, Enṣiqlopediat Vilnaj li-Jerušalajim, I, jerušalajim 1993, s. 482-483. Seznam byl opsán v Safedu roku 1564 rabi urim bar Šim‛onem z biella ,)בילא( avšak prvně jej vydal tiskem s latinským překladem německý teolog a hebraista j. h. hottIn Ger v knize Cippi Hebraici. Genealogia Patriarcharum, heidelberg 1659 (2. vyd.: heidelberg 1662). toto vydání doprovázejí mědirytiny s kresbami u příslušných svatých míst. text seznamu přetiskl blasio ugolini v Thesaurus antiquitatum sacrarum. XXXIII, venetiis 1767, s. 1033-1053. citovat budu z edice a. m. luncZe, Ha-me‛amer 3 (1920), 209-223. 43 Igeret Jiḥus ha-ṣadiqim u-ve-ḥasidim ‛''h ha-niqbarim be-ereṣ ha-qduša be-Ereṣ Jisra'el mi-šnat rm''t, ed. a. david, Qoveṣ ‛al jad 17 (2002), s. 201-221. Stáří tohoto seznamu je možné vyčíst ze zprávy, kterou podává o jeruzalémské synagoze, jež měla být muslimskými úřady zbořena před 14 roky. jelikož ke zboření této synagogy došlo roku 1474, vychází datum sepsání seznamu na rok 1489. k zboření jeruzalémské synagogy viz e. StrauSS, Toldot ha-jehudim be-Miṣrajim ve-Suria taḥat šilṭon ha-mamlukim, II, jerušalajim 1951, s. 401-416. a. david se domnívá, že pramenem, na němž je tento seznam založen, je seznam Ṣijunej qvarim be-Ereṣ Jisra'el (ed. z. ‛aMar, Qoveṣ ‛al jad 14 (24) (1998), s. 275-296), který editor datuje do konce 13. a počátku 14. století. e. reiner seznam datuje do 16. století (tradition of holy places in medieval palestine-oral versus Written, s. 19).
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Papers by Boušek Daniel
Abū l-Fatḥ’s narrative presents a unique Samaritan version of a polemical story that was widespread among the Christians and Jews in the Middle Ages. The paper compares the Samaritan version of the story with the Christian and Jewish ones, and sets the story of Muḥammad’s pact with the Samaritans into the context of the mid-14th century Mamlūk society and the Samaritans’ position in it. The thesis of the paper is that the Samaritan version responds to the increasing social and religious pressure of Islamic society directed towards the conversion of non-Muslims to Islam and the expropriation of their houses of worship.
This study attempts to outline the Biblical citations in Dalā’il al-Nubuwwa by Ibn Qutayba. The discussed and translated citations demonstrate that Ibn Qutayba often changed and Islamized the biblical text. This, however, did not impair the reliability of the citations in the eyes of Dalā’il al-Nubuwwa’s Muslim readers. On the contrary, the Islamization of the biblical passages guaranteed the popularity of Ibn Qutayba’s text and the use of ample quotations from it by later authors. Ibn Qutayba considered even thus Islamized citations to be part of the earlier revelations possessed currently by “the people of the Book”. The people of the Book use these citations and do not deny their verbatim meaning; they only suppose that the Prophet is not explicitly mentioned by name in the Hebrew Bible. Yet, according to Ibn Qutayba, it won’t help them, for the mshabbahā in the Syriac Bible means the same as muhammad. Moreover, all testimonies of the Scripture obviously correspond, according to Ibn Qutayba, to the circumstances of the Prophet’s life, his time, his emigration and his law; all this excludes the possibility that these testimonies could point to someone else. Finally, Ibn Qutayba invokes the infallible authority of the Koran: if it claims that Muhammad is mentioned in the Torah and the Gospel, there simply must be such testimonies in these books.
Ibn Qutayba’s Dalā’il al-Nubuwwa, along with the works of other Muslim authors who rendered to readers signs of Muhammad’s prophetical office, show, that Islamic interpretation of the Scripture was simplistic and undeveloped both compared with Christian typological and allegorical exegesis of the Bible and Muslim exegesis of the Koran. However, we have to take into account the fact that this exegesis never became an independent literary genre and did not even play any important role in medieval Islamic theology.
The article deals with a polemical treatise Masalik al-nazar (1320) of Saʿīd ibn Ḥasan, a Jewish convert to Islam from Alexandria. Since Saʿīd did not succeed with his attempt to organize a disputation with the spiritual leaders of the Jews and the Christians, he put his polemical arguments on paper. The author gives in the treatise a long list of putative prophecies concerning the prophet Muhammad and Islam culled from the Hebrew Bible, which bear witness to Saʿīd’s unfamiliarity with the Muslim polemical literature. In so doing, when unable to shut down the houses of prayer of “protected people” altogether, he aimed at least to persuade the Muslim authorities to eradicate the pictures and the statues from them.
Masalik al-nazar contains inter alia interesting biographical parts describing the author’s process of conversion which was triggered by a dream vision urging him to convert. The treatise offers a valuable testimony to aggravating social conditions of the non-Muslim minorities in the Mamluk Egypt and Syria.
The aim of the present study is to outline the response of Saʿadia Gaon, al-Qirqisānī, and Maimonides, three foremost Jewish thinkers of the Middle Ages, to the accusation of the Islamic polemics concerning abrogation (naskh) of the Mosaic Law. The question of the abrogation of the Mosaic Law, i.e., the Torah played central role in the medieval polemics between three monotheistic creeds, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. It is obvious from the works of the Jewish scholars under the concern that they discussed more or less the same set of Biblical passages and rational arguments pro and con the abrogation which we meet in the works of Muslim authors such as al-Bāqillānī or Ibn Ḥazm. Since we cannot suppose that these authors were familiar with the works of the Jewish theologians, it is more likely to assume that they got acquainted with these Biblical passages and arguments in the multi-confessional polemical sessions which took place in the 10th century in the places like Baghdad or Cairo. The Christians, who also took part in these disputation salons, possessed better knowledge of the Hebrew Bible than Muslims and at the same time could draw arguments from copious Christian polemical literature with Judaism, and thus supply the needed polemical material to their Muslim counterparts. The polemical theses of the Jewish skeptic Ḥiwi al-Balkhi indubitably served as another channel of information. The Biblical passages and rational arguments, propounded by al-Balkhi for abrogation and the change in God’s mind (badāʾ), resound both from the works the studied Jewish scholars, and Muslim polemists.
The aim of the present study is to outline the Muslim attitude to the abrogation of the Mosaic law as portrayed on works of four leading medieval Muslim scholars, al-Bāqillānī, Ibn Ḥazm, Samaw’al al-Maghribī, and al-Qarāfī. The Jews rejected abrogation (naskh) and any suggestion of a new dispensation, be it through Jesus or Muhammad, on the basis of the argument of God’s omniscience and immutability of His decree, which is not liable to sudden change. The notion of a new dispensation is based on such a sudden change (badā’) in God’s will, and thus contradicts the idea of God’s omniscience. The contra arguments of Muslim authors revolve around the premise that precepts of the Mosaic law are commands to perform certain acts for a definite period, and when that defined period has passed, the command may turn into its opposite. To prove this they put forward arguments based both on the Hebrew Bible and rational grounds.
It is clear from the proposed arguments for abrogation and change in divine will that they are based on a standard set of arguments from an old polemical tradition going back to Jewish scholars such as al-Qirqisānī and especially Sa‛adya Ga’on. The last-named responded to the arguments advanced by Ḥīwī al-Balkhī, a Jewish sceptic, who lived in the second half of the ninth century CE and allegedly wrote a polemical work in rhyme against the Hebrew Bible, listing 200 questions and problematic passages. His arguments for abrogation and change in divine will mostly correspond to those introduced by the studied Muslim authors.
The need to respond to Ibn Hazm’s and Samaw’al al-Maghribī’s arguments was felt even several centuries later, as we can reason out of the works of two Jewish authors from the 13th century, Sa‛d ibn Kammūna and Abraham ibn Adret. Their direct response contains the old stock of polemical themes shared by the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim authors living in the Islamic countries.
inter-religious polemics by Boušek Daniel
The article deals with a polemical treatise Masalik al-nazar (1320) of Saʿīd ibn Ḥasan, a Jewish convert to Islam from Alexandria. Since Saʿīd did not succeed with his attempt to organize a disputation with the spiritual leaders of the Jews and the Christians, he put his polemical arguments on paper. The author gives in the treatise a long list of putative prophecies concerning the prophet Muhammad and Islam culled from the Hebrew Bible, which bear witness to Saʿīd’s unfamiliarity with the Muslim polemical literature. In so doing, when unable to shut down the houses of prayer of “protected people” altogether, he aimed at least to persuade the Muslim authorities to eradicate the pictures and the statues from them.
Masalik al-nazar contains inter alia interesting biographical parts describing the author’s process of conversion which was triggered by a dream vision urging him to convert. The treatise offers a valuable testimony to aggravating social conditions of the non-Muslim minorities in the Mamluk Egypt and Syria.
Books by Boušek Daniel