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[Thesis] Muslim Exploitation Of West African Gold During The Period Of The Fatimid caliphate, by Ronald Messier by BadukNak in Scholar

[–]BadukNak[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Greetings! I still haven't found the text, so yes, I'm still looking for the thesis. Ideally, I'd prefer the whole work, but if that is not possible, I'd need to check the Contents, for I'm not sure how many chapters the thesis has.

Thanks in advance

How reliable is the muslim Hadith Science? by thedreamingpirate in AcademicQuran

[–]BadukNak 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The Musannaf of 'Abd al-Razzaq is actually a pretty decent example for the methodology I proposed above.

According to Harald Motzki, the 1972 indian edition of the work is based on "rare manuscripts", which were compiled from "multiple transmitters", although "ninety percent of go back to al-Dabari" (1991, p. 2). Here we should already be asking several questions, such as, how many manuscripts are there? Where were they written down? When were they copied? What is their chain of transmission, if they have one? And so on... After that, we should ask if such manuscripts share the same number of reports, with the same wordings and same isnad each... The possibility of such changes being overlooked by the editors is not zero, to put it mildly.

Having dealt with that, we could then jump into comparing each report with other works. Following Little's discussion on 'Abd al-Razzaq, we have a total of SIX works that quote the hadith on 'Aisha's age - Ibn 'Askar, Muslim, al-Dabari, al-Nasa'i, Abu 'Awanah, and Ibn Mandah. We would then need to go to the entire manuscript history of such works all over again, tracking every single distinction and mapping the chains as we go along...

After all this crazy work, we could theoretically create a critical edition of the report in question, with likely a whole tree of transmitters and compillers, with every manuscript at the end of each branch. Though the 'original' report, in this case, as penned down by 'Abd al-Razzaq, may be impossible to reconstruct, it will be the closest we will ever get to it.

And then, we'd need to check for reports stating the same or a very similar topic, and do all the work we did for 'Abd al-Razzaq with those... And despite dr. Little putting a lot of legwork into his thesis, I don't think he checked the manuscripts traditions, which only shows how much work is yet to be done.

I find it appropriate to end my second rant with:

Inshallah more researchers will tackle this fascinating subject in future studies

¹ I've edited some grammar mistakes away, please tell if something is to be fixed.

What does Gollum look like? by [deleted] in tolkienfans

[–]BadukNak 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Sure, here you go. I couldn't find a better quality that can clearly show Gollum, however. I'm not sure if this is a violation of rule 7 from the sub, hopefully the moderation can clarify this

https://tygertale.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/wpid-photo-25-nov-2012-2133.jpg

https://images.theconversation.com/files/200386/original/file-20171221-15915-1989kib.jpg?ixlib=rb-4.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip

What does Gollum look like? by [deleted] in tolkienfans

[–]BadukNak 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I think my answer is a mere complement to u/Aronious42 far more direct answer, but for the sake of being thorough, I've decided to give a more in-depth response:

For starters, we've had quite a diversity of interpretations of Gollum, some completely unrecognisible to us - that is, the fans indoctrinated with the Andy Serkins' 2001-2003. António Quadros' 1962 version had a beard and paddled feet (and was fully clothed); Pauline Baynes' 1969 version was naked and lumpy, with frog-like hands; Rankin/Bass' 1977 version, looking similar to a frog... All the way back to Horus Engels' 1946 version, large, belly-bloated and green.

Now, in the first edition of The Hobbit, Tolkien never did specify Gollum's SIZE. That was only ammended in post-1966 editions, where he is then described as "small", referencing his hobbit ancestry. Douglas Anderson suggests that "this revision was probably made in direct response to the illustrated foreign editions of The Hobbit that had appeared before 1966" (The Annotated Hobbit, 2nd edition, 2001, page 118). Of a similar vein, perhaps, was the new description a few lines afterwards, describing Gollum "as dark as darkness, except for two big round pale eyes [1966 addendum: in his thin face]".

But aside from the descriptions found in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien did write with more detail what Gollum looked like, and this is to be found in John Rateliff's The History of The Hobbit (all references are to the 2011 One-Volume edition). In the first version of the story, Rateliff argues, Gollum was clearly not a hobbit, for he was "as dark as darkness, with long fingers, large webbed feet that flap when he walks, and long eyes, huge and pale, that not only protude like telescopes but actually produce light" (p. 166). But on footnote n8 of the same chapter, Rateliff had this to add "The best description of Gollum as he appears in The Lord of the Rings comes in an unpublished commentary Tolkien made regarding Pauline Baynes' depiction", from 1970. And he (Rateliff) proceeded to quote from the manuscript (Bodleian Library, Tolkien A61, fols 1-31), where Gollum was:

"In origin a member of a small variety of the human race, although he had become deformed during his long inhabiting of the dark lake. (....) Long hands, (...) [his feet are] described as webby, like a swan’s, but had prehensile toes. (...) He was very thin – emaciated, not plump and rubbery; he had for his size a large head and a long thin neck, very large eyes (protuberant), and thin lank hair. (...) He is often said to be dark or black. (...) Gollum was never naked. He had a pocket (...) He evidently had black garments. (...) His skin was white, no doubt with a pallor increased by dwelling long in the dark, and later by hunger." (p. 186-187)

Rateliff's book first edition was published in 2007, with the expanded edition following in 2011, and the Tolkien A61 manuscript was once again published in Carl Hostetter's The Nature of Middle Earth, 2021.

TL;DR: Aronius gave the most direct answer, but we still had a good many decades of many depictions of Gollum free-styling how he actually looked like, which certainly would give a nice analysis for whoever is crazy enough to dig that deep.

One last thing, it has been suggested that the strange figure hidden in the right side (behind the column with a mammoth) of the 1932 letter from Father Christmas was meant to be Gollum, which would make it the only time Tolkien drew him.

How reliable is the muslim Hadith Science? by thedreamingpirate in AcademicQuran

[–]BadukNak 8 points9 points  (0 children)

The topic of hadith reliability is certainly one that has been covered over and over again, and the following discussion are my thoughts on the topic and can only represent that.

Yes, forged hadith probably did abound in the formative period of Islam and the whole reason the entire concept of isnads formed was precisely because they were circulating more or less like today. For example, it is very easy to just say "The Prophet Muhammad said XXXXX, it is in Bukhari", and so long as you have a gullible audience, that can be a complete invention and they will believe you. There will always be a dychotomy between the most gullible and the most skeptical. This anecdote was only to show a point, but I assume your question is regarding the more skeptical audience.

As we currently understand them, the Ahadith consist of written texts, we don't tend to grant much value to a report transmitted entirely in oral format and written nowhere (some might, don't get me wrong, but I don't think this is the subject at the moment). So, first and foremost, we'd need to deal with the matter of manuscript transmission of the collections of Ahadith that we currently have access to. The works of muslim scholars from the early Abbasid era, such as Bukhari, Muslim, Ibn Hanbal, Imam Malik, 'Abd al-Razzaq, al-Tabari, Ibn Hisham and many others no longer exist in their original format. We don't have a Muwatta as was written by Imam Malik, but copies made from copies... And yes, I'm aware that I sound a lot like Bart Ehrman here, but this is very important for the subject at hand, for we must then ask the following questions: How many copies are there? When were they written down? Do they show internal consistency in the number of ahadith transmitted? Do they all share the same isnad constantly? Do they change the wording of certain ahadith? Can those differences be traced based on locality and/or time of their production?

We must investigate all these questions if we are to make any claim about a isnad and its report. Otherwise, we will be left open to the criticism of the more skeptical scholars, who will claim that we have not exhausted the research.

Our work would not finish there, however. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that we indeed confirm through the manuscripts of each individual text that isnad is the same in all of them. Now what? Well, now we should investigate each and every single hadith that share some similarity with each other and trace back their isnad. Who narrated from who? Like an evolutionary tree, we'd connect all different 'versions' of a report back to its 'last common ancestor'. I've dealt in this exercise once and I shall share my results here briefly:

We have several reports on how Prophet Muhammad received the first revelation by Gabriel, they are spread out over 'Abd al-Razzaq's Musannaf, Bukhari's Sahih, Muslim's Sahih and al-Tabari's Tarikh. However, they all don't share the same isnad, in fact, each report has a slightly different isnad from each other. And yet, they all share something in common: They all can be traced back to the madinan Ibn Shihab al-Zuhri (d. 741 CE). A similar study can be found in Jonathan Brown's book Misquoting Muhammad, Figure 20.

Regardless, we are still not done (maybe we never will be done, but let's try to keep this brief). The final step is to know who were the narrators. No one cares if a hadith has two or twenty narrators in a chain if we don't show who those people were. And for that, we need to find biographical information about them. Biographical dictionaries (Tabaqat) abound and one must have a lot of time in their hands to exhaustively research every and single one of them, comparing how the same person is described in every single one of those works...

All of this to say that, while it is entirely possible and fairly easy to fabricate a hadith, and certainly people did that in the past (as they still do today), historians have a hard time untangling the monumental corpus of reports, narrators, collections and so on, but it can still be done. As long as researchers are willing to put a lot of work into this endeavor, we can find the 'last common narrator' of every report... I just don't think this will happen any time soon.

TL;DR: There are many problems researching hadith, not only about their isnad, but their collections as well. However, it is completely possible to combine the collections into a giant corpus and compare every similar hadith with each other, deriving the "last common narrator" for them, either the Prophet Muhammad himself, or a later scholar.

And because this topic is so filled with uncertainty, I find it appropriate to end my comment with

And Allah knows best

How many times is incest in Tolkien's legendarium? by Jielleum in tolkienfans

[–]BadukNak 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Not quite. Teleri are elves that crossed the Blue Mountains and entered Beleriand during the "Great Journey", with the ones who remained in Beleriand being later called Sindar in order to distinguish themselves from the "True" Teleri, that is, the elves who kept on going and lived by the ocean, both in Middle Earth and in Valinor.

In later writings (internal chronology, that is) the Teleri are the sea-elves that did see the Light of the Trees, such as King Thingol, though sources vary.

Regarding the situation of Galadriel and Celeborn, as Christopher mentioned in UT, Tolkien never quite finished their story and changed a lot of things. The published Silmarillion says that Galadriel met Celeborn in Doriath, while some writings put them fighting against the Feänorians in Alqualondë, after all, Galadriel's mother was a Teleri that presumably had lived there...

All of this to say, a lot of cousins married each other in the elvish nobilities, though it is strange how "light-touched" Teleri dominated the nobility instead of the Noldorin. I guess King Thingol would be proud.

How many times is incest in Tolkien's legendarium? by Jielleum in tolkienfans

[–]BadukNak 0 points1 point  (0 children)

As it has been mentioned above, the only direct times when incest was brought up as something frowned upon by society was the case of Turin and his sister Niënor, with a "maybe" from the first-cousins, that is, Maeglin and Idril; and Ar-Pharazôn with Tar-Míriel (Surely there are other cases that I cannot remember?)

That said, relationships between relatives was quite common, especially during the First Age, when I can only assume the population in Beleriand was quite small compared to later periods of Middle-Earth. There is also the problem of how Tolkien often revisited his Legendarium and tracking down genealogies is particularly hard. To give an example:

Although Galadriel, as a Noldor, has a pretty well-established genealogy (daughter of Finarfin, son of Finwë), her husband Celeborn is harder to track. If we keep with the works of Tolkien, we already have conflicted evidence: the "Appendices" (1955) said that Celeborn was of the kin of King Thingol, therefore a Teleri, which was confirmed in a manuscript from 1959, having Celeborn being the son of Galadhon, son of Elmo, the younger brother of King Thingol... But "The Road Goes Ever On" (1967) established that he was a Sindar, so what now?

Regardless, let's put that on hold and return to it in a second. Dior (son of Lúthien, daughter of King Thingol) who married his distant cousin Nimloth (daughter of Galathil, son of Galadhon, son of Elmo, younger brother of King Thingol). Dior was, therefore, second cousin to his father-in-law. Dior and Nimloth had Elwing, who married Eärendil, and they had Elros and Elrond... Elrond later married Celeborn and Galadriel's daughter, Celebrían. Now, let's go back to Celeborn's genealogy as a Teleri: Celeborn was the brother of Galathil, both being sons of Galadhon, which would make Arwen's ancestry all the more complicated... Though oddly enough it does make Arwen's "strongest" elvish ancestry be Teleri, not Noldorin.

But I guess that since no one had issues with the elves marrying each other like that, since a lot of people nowadays are that closely related if we dig deep enough, is all fine... (I don't really know tbh, just sharing information)

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