1. Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient
  2. Publications
  3. Publication Search
  4. Communities of Knowledge: Interreligious Networks of Scholars in Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa’s History of the Physicians (Project Report)
Publication Search

Gibson, Nathan P.; Schmahl, Robin

Communities of Knowledge: Interreligious Networks of Scholars in Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa’s History of the Physicians (Project Report)

Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna, 2023

Medieval Worlds, 18
State Debate & Knowledge Collaboration among Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and Muslims in the Abbasid Near East, II

p. 196-218

ISBN 2412-3196
DOI: 10.1553/medievalworlds_no18_2023s196
Abstract

The project »Communities of Knowledge: Interreligious Networks of Scholars in Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa’s History of the Physicians« aimed to examine the social encounters of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish scholars in the Abbasid Near East, in the period 132-656 AH/750-1258 CE. The Arabic biographical dictionary of Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa (b. after 590/1194, d. 668/1269 or 1270) provides rich accounts of such interactions, sometimes occurring directly between scholars, but other times involving much larger networks of people with a wide variety of religious affiliations. Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa weaves these figures throughout his biographical entries, revealing networks of scholarly interchange. In our project, we wanted to discover which people, places, and types of communication he shows as most central to exchange between communities of differing religious affiliations. The networks themselves we understand to be historiographical presentations by a physician who wished to trace the art of medicine through elite practitioners to his present day, relying in the process on both Islamic and other sources, as well as on information from his own broad range of acquaintances in the field. In this project report, we describe three processes crucial to our project. First, we identified and »tagged« people and places in Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa’s text. This included creating entries for each person or place, which also served as authority data to which we could link using tags in the text of the History of Physicians. Second, we created prosopographical »factoids« for passages we wanted to study in detail. These are information nuggets that record in a machine-readable way what we understand the text to be asserting about people, relationships, and events. Finally, we loaded the tagged text and factoids into networks to help identify which persons, places, or features call for in-depth qualitative study in regard to exchange between religious communities.