Research Journal of Islamic History
Year:2019 | Volume:9 | Issue:34|Papers Count:6

Islamic civilization as a reality and having an independent identity (civilization as reality) or validity coming from the social life of Muslims (civilization as a situation) is one of the most challenging and deliberative issues in civilization research. From topics related to Islamic civilization, is its historical revolution or vital periods. Some have considered it in the course of history, and some have considered a vital pattern for it and enumerate it of stages such as genesis, growth, flourishing and development, cease and stagnancy, and also degeneration or decline. However, they do not agree on the historical order of stages. The common point among them is acceptance of its flourishing in the fourth century AH. The present article by a critical method and in a comparative way respond to this basic question that what are the advantages and disadvantages of the views expressed about Islamic civilization periods? The result of the research is that most of the existing views had no defensible scientific strength and require a serious and fundamental review because of having ambiguities and combination of conceptual boundaries, the uncertainty of the indicator, undefined historical basis, and also theoretical shortcomings specifically in the interlaced boundary of real or valid existence of civilization. From the perspective of this article, a vital revolution cannot be identified for Islamic civilization, rather it has to be considered in different periods and different lands without being able to indicate an immutable pattern for it.

Knowledge production at any moment in history is the result of the powerful historical agent’ s role. Therefore, considering the proportion of knowledge and power would have a fundamental significance in the historical period’ s discourse atmosphere recognition. According to the assumption that knowledge implies everything that users of a community deem as knowledge, this article considers the proportion of knowledge and power in the Umayyad period. The theoretical framework of the article is Michel Foucault’ s model in analyzing the proportion of power and knowledge. Using this model indicates that the Umayyad lacked the necessary religious legitimation to rule the Islamic society. Therefore, they needed a new form of knowledge to regulate the social behavior of Muslims in new power by filling the religious legitimation vacancy. For this reason, they tried to take advantage of knowledge most significant sources in the early Islamic Society that is Hadith, poetry, and storytelling to recover their religious legitimation crisis. Hence, by forging the hadiths, prohibiting the narration of hadiths on the virtues of Ahl al-Bayt, and composing poetry and storytelling to their honor, they produced a knowledge that while showing Ahl al-Bayt to became deviated from Islamic beliefs principles, provides a background to marginalize the Shiites from power to achieve the necessary authority to sustain the government.

Early Isma'ilis, after the death of Isma'il ibn Ja'far al-Sadiq (AS), donated the Imamate to his son Mohammed and were separated from Imamiyyah. They succeeded to establish the Shiite caliphate called Fatimid in Maghrib in 297 AH. Fatimids conquered Egypt in 358 AH and succeeded in expanding the influence scope of Isma'ili Shiite government to Maghrib, Yemen, Sham, Iran, Iraq and even India and promoting Shiite identity. One way of understanding the extent of attention to Shiite identity components in the Fatimid government is to consider the content of the sources written by Isma'ili writers and missionaries at the time. Among them, Iftitah Al Dawat of Qazi Nauman that is one of the main sources of Isma'ilis is very significant. This book has compiled in 346 AH and contains the beginning of Ismaili’ s invitation to Yemen and the establishment background of the Fatimid Caliphate in Maghrib. The main question of this research is that how much attention is paid to Shiite Identity components of Isma'ilis and Fatimids in Iftitah Al Dawat of Qazi Nauman? by using content analysis method, it became clear that in this book components such as Imam Ali (AS), Ahl al-Bayt, Imam Hassan (AS), Imam Hussain (AS) have the most repetition and components such as Wisayat, Reja'at, Arba'in, Ghadir Khum, Fatemeh Al-Zahra, Shiite lawyers, Shiite mosques and Shiite scholars have the least attention and repetition.

Mihrab existed before Islam. This word became one of the main components of Islamic mosques after the Islamic conquest. Structure and function changes of Mihrab during these two periods could be considered in various methods. Considering conceptual changes is one of the historical studies methods. This article aims to investigate a part of conceptual changes that reflects Mihrab’ s structural and functional changes over time through collecting Islamic sources data such as dictionaries, interpretive texts, geographical and historical sources of the third and fourth centuries AH in which this word has been used many times. In this research, the method of studying time passage (historical semantics) has been used that study semantic changes in four types of narrowing, widening, degeneration and elevation. Using this method in studying semantic changes of the word Miharb in texts indicates that this word has changed semantically from implication of the whole to implication of the component, from general meaning to specific meaning (semantic allocation), and also from secular meaning to merely religious one (semantic promotion).

Wonder book writing has been of customary traditions in Islamic historiography. Wonder book writing first emerged as one type of Islamic geography and cosmology and in fact, it is the common product of natural history and geography. ʿ Ajā ʾ ib Namah could be considered as unique forms of encyclopedias that are remarkable in terms of literary, cosmology, geography and natural history. In ʿ Ajā ʾ ib Namah real thing is usually interlace with the unreal and phenomena are explained in a literary and exaggerated way without research and criticism. Multiple ʿ Ajā ʾ ib Namah has been written in Islamic civilization. One of the most complete and comprehensive among them is Zakaria Qazvini's ʿ Ajā ʾ ib al-Makhlū qā t. In this work, Qazvini has appeared as a natural scientist and has explained common scientific topics. The key question is whether ʿ Ajā ʾ ib Namah could be considered as scientific works? This study by using the analytical-comparative method explains that ʿ Ajā ʾ ib Namah belongs to that part of the Islamic knowledge system that is opposed to rational-critical and empirical approaches. In other words, considering the text of Qazvini's work and other similar works indicates that to what extent the concept of science in the Islamic world from the sixth century onwards has changed and degenerated from the one that Islamic scholars contemplated in the third and fourth centuries. According to the findings of this study, wonder book writing is the product of the science degeneration period in Islamic civilization and getting away from rational, critical, empirical and observational approaches.

Coin is of the most important sources for studying societies in the past and can shed a light on dark aspects of society’ s political-religious and economical status. The short period of Afsharid is of particular importance in the history of coin due to the various coinage from the perspective of engravings, concepts and written words on them, in geographical landscape from Caucasia to India’ s states. The main question of the research is that how were the Afsharid coins engravings and how they differ from those of before and after periods? This research through a comparative method has studied the coinage process in Afsharid Period from being influenced by Safavid king’ s tradition and coinage method in the Indian subcontinent to specific innovations of Afsharid mints, and its coinage has been compared with other coinage before Afsharid period. The finding of research indicates that Nader’ s approach in coinage was defending Iran’ s corporeality, royal authority, conquest and realism in applying labels and titles, whilst his successors had returned to the coinage tradition of Safavid period.