Directory of Research and Expertise

Chapters

Co-authored with Arianna Dalla Costa, in Media Technologies and the Digital Humanities in Mediaeval and Early Modern Studies, edited by Katharine Scherff and Lane Sobehrad, Taylor and Francis, forthcoming December 2022.

Review

For the Journal of Islamic Studies, Oxford University Press, forthcoming October 2022. 

Review

For The Oxford Critical Comparative and Translation Review, March 2021.  

NonPeerReviewed

What is the function of language? Is it merely a tool for communicating thoughts, or can we understand it as something more—as a medium that structures our engagement with the world? These are some of the questions that underpin Ibn ʿArabī’s magnum opus al-Futūḥāt al-makkiyya, ‘The Meccan Openings’, and wider work. However, Ibn ʿArabī (1165 – 1240 CE/560 – 638 AH) was by no means an anomaly in his own time. Such semantic concerns were central to the work of scholars across disciplines in the premodern Islamicate world. Questions around the purpose and limits of language intersected not only with discussions of semantics and hermeneutics, but also metaphysics, epistemology, and pragmatics, and thus drew a variety of responses. The study of logic and grammar has tended to dominate scholarship of the philosophy of language in the premodern Islamic world. However, recent scholarship has highlighted the significance of theories of language developed in other domains. In parallel, scholars of the occult sciences in premodern and early modern Islamic world have examined the importance of approaches to language that theorised the cosmological significance of letters and called attention to their role within the development of practical techniques in the fields of, for example, medicine, political forecasting, and alchemy. For Ibn ʿArabī, language was more than just a vehicle for human thought; the relationship between linguistic forms and mental contents offered a model for investigating the world. Ibn ʿArabī drew on premodern understandings of human speech and writing in order to articulate overlapping networks of correspondences between letters and components of the material, celestial, and social realms. These networks provided a framework not only for investigating the world, but also intervening within it through practical techniques. In his theory of language, Ibn ʿArabī drew on diverse sources and approaches, which reflected his interaction with extensive social and educational networks that stretched across the premodern Islamicate world. Ibn ʿArabī’s theory of language would in turn go onto form part of a larger corpus of theories and texts that later scholars, including Ṣāʾin al-Dīn Turka Iṣfahānī (1369 – 1432 CE/771 – 835 AH) and ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Bisṭāmī (d. 1454 CE/858 AH), employed to frame and legitimise their own theories and practices of language. These scholars were engaged in an informal intellectual network that developed a shared corpus of texts and techniques across the Timurid, Ottoman, and Mamluk courts. In this way, the later reception of Ibn ʿArabī’s theory of language also offers a lens through which we can examine continuity and change in how scholars of the Islamic tradition perceived and constructed the relationship between language, mind, and reality across periods and geographies.

An online reading and conversation with poets & translators Yasmine Seale, Robin Moger, and Professor Marina Warner. Organised by Beatrice Bottomley (Warburg Institute PhD) and supported by the University of London John Coffin Memorial Trust.

Born in Murcia in 1165, Ibn Arabi was a prolific philosopher and poet. He travelled extensively before settling in Damascus, where he died in 1240. Tarjumãn Al-ashwãq, or ‘The Interpreter of Desires’, is a cycle of sixty-one Arabic poems. They speak of loss and bewilderment, a spiritual and sensual yearning for the divine, and a hunger for communion in which near and far collapse. Agitated Air: Poems after Ibn Arabi (published by Tenement Press, February 2022) is a correspondence in poems between Istanbul and Cape Town, following the wake of The Interpreter of Desires. Collaborating at a distance, Yasmine Seale and Robin Moger work in close counterpoint, making separate translations of each poem, exchanging them, then writing new poems in response to what they receive. The process continues until they are exhausted, and then a new chain begins.

Marina Warner writes of the collection ‘Antiphonal, intimate and virtuoso, these variations respond to the sense that the interpretation of desires can be endless. [...] This is translation as intrepid and inspired re-visioning, a form of poetry of its own, as forged by Edward FitzGerald, Ezra Pound and Anne Carson.’ In this online reading, Yasmine Seale and Robin Moger give voice to these poems, bringing to life the imagery and sounds that punctuated their exchange. The reading is followed by a discussion between the poet-translators and Marina Warner.

Yasmine Seale is a writer and translator. Her essays, poetry, and translations from Arabic and French have appeared widely—in Harper’s, Poetry Review, Wasafiri, Apollo and elsewhere. Current projects include a new translation of The Thousand and One Nights (W. W. Norton) and a translation of the poems of Al-Khansa (NYU Press). After five years in Istanbul, she lives in Paris.

Robin Moger is a translator of Arabic to English recently moved from Cape Town to Barcelona. His translations of prose and poetry have appeared in Blackbox Manifold, The White Review, Asymptote, and others. He has translated several novels and prose works, most recently Haytham El Wardany’s The Book Of Sleep (Seagull) and Slipping by Mohamed Kheir (Two Lines Press).

Professor Marina Warner is a writer of fiction, criticism and history; her works include novels and short stories, as well as studies of art, myths, symbols, and fairy tales. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a Distinguished Fellow at All Souls College, University of Oxford.

How do pre-modern theories of language and signs interact with early modern theories of semiotics and cryptography, which would later be foundational in the development of computer science? What reflections do these theories offer on writing, or more broadly language, as technology? This workshop examines these questions through the development of a technique – the combination of symbols through rotation – and its manifestation in three objects: the za’ijra, Llull’s ars, and Alberti’s cipher disk.

In his 1476 treatise De componendis cyfris, Leon Battista Alberti described a cipher disk, which was made up of two concentric disks attached by a common pin. The disks could be rotated in relation to one another in order create a system of polyalphabetic substitution that could be used to encode messages according a unpredictable law of correspondence. Alberti’s cipher disk revolutionised cryptography. Kahn (1997) traces the inspiration for the cipher disk back to Ramon Llull’s ars combinatoria, which he described in his Ars Magna, published in 1305. The ars combinatoria took the form of a paper machine operated by rotating three concentrically arranged circles to create combinations of a symbolic alphabet. Llull claimed that these combinations would show all possible solutions to questions concerning any discipline - from astrology, to law or medicine. Llull’s ars combinatoria not only served as a source of inspiration for Leibniz’s 1666 Dissertation on the Combinatorial Art, but also piqued the interest of Pico della Mirandola, Giordano Bruno, Agrippa von Nettesheim and John Dee. It has been suggested that Llull derived his disks from the Kabbalistic tradition, and in particular from the disks of alphabets used in the Sèfer Jetzirà. However, Link (2010) also suggests that Llull’s ars combinatoria was in fact inspired by the za’ijra. Ibn Khaldun (d.1406) describes the za’ijra as a diagrammatical representation of the universe used as a divinatory device. Consisting of a series of concentric circles, often enclosed in a square and divided by twelve rays, the za’irjah enabled the diviner to derive answers to questions in rhymed verse.

At the basis of these three objects - the za’ijra, Llull's ars and Alberti’s cipher disk- is the production of combinations of symbols through rotation. By briefly outlining and demonstrating these three objects, and the contexts of their production and usage, we hope to open up discussion to the ‘mechanisation’ of thought and reality through systems of symbols, the potential benefits and pitfalls of attempting to trace transmission and reception, and the surprising interactions between the more ‘logical’ and the ‘esoteric’.