Education and Learning in the Early Islamic World, edited by Claude Gilliot

Year 2015, Volume: 6 Issue: 1, 123 - 125, 20.02.2016

Asma Afsaruddın

https://doi.org/10.12730/13091719.2015.61.125

Abstract

First paragraph: This is a hefty collection (381 pages) of nineteen essays edited by Claude Gilliot, a scholar of medieval Islam. The essays have been written by Western Orientalist scholars on the topic of Education and Learning in the Islamic World between 600 to 950 CE. The editor divided the collection into five parts: 1) Pedagogical Tradition, 2) Scholarship and Attestation, 3) Orality and Literacy, 4) Authorship and Transmission, and 5) Libraries. The authors included in the volume are: Ignaz Goldziher, Christopher Melchert, Albert Dietrich, Richard Bulliet, Sebastian Guenther, Johannes Pedersen, Gilliot himself, Jan Just Witkam and Georges Vajda, Fritz Krenkow, Stefan Leder, Richard Walzer, Johann Fuch, Isabel Fierro, Adolph Grohmann, Ruth Mackensen, David Wasserstein, Max Weisweiler, and Manuela Marin. All these articles have been published before. Gilliot appends a fairly lengthy Introduction to the volume in which he provides an overview of Orientalist scholarship on education and learning in Islam and includes, perhaps less explicably, a discussion of the early history of the Arabic script. The editor provides a helpful bibliography at the end of the volume on medieval Islamic education which includes sources in Arabic and Western languages. Sources in Persian and Turkish, however, are conspicuously missing which is a pity since they would have considerably enhanced the usefulness of the bibliography.

Education and Learning in the Early Islamic World, edited by Claude Gilliot

Abstract

First paragraph:
This is a hefty collection (381 pages) of nineteen essays edited by Claude Gilliot, a scholar of medieval Islam. The essays have been written by Western Orientalist scholars on the topic of Education and Learning in the Islamic World between 600 to 950 CE. The editor divided the collection into five parts: 1) Pedagogical Tradition, 2) Scholarship and Attestation, 3) Orality and Literacy, 4) Authorship and Transmission, and 5) Libraries. The authors included in the volume are: Ignaz Goldziher, Christopher Melchert, Albert Dietrich, Richard Bulliet, Sebastian Guenther, Johannes Pedersen, Gilliot himself, Jan Just Witkam and Georges Vajda, Fritz Krenkow, Stefan Leder, Richard Walzer, Johann Fuch, Isabel Fierro, Adolph Grohmann, Ruth Mackensen, David Wasserstein, Max Weisweiler, and Manuela Marin. All these articles have been published before. Gilliot appends a fairly lengthy Introduction to the volume in which he provides an overview of Orientalist scholarship on education and learning in Islam and includes, perhaps less explicably, a discussion of the early history of the Arabic script. The editor provides a helpful bibliography at the end of the volume on medieval Islamic education which includes sources in Arabic and Western languages. Sources in Persian and Turkish, however, are conspicuously missing which is a pity since they would have considerably enhanced the usefulness of the bibliography.

Keywords

Education, Islam, Orientalist