Ursula Hammed
PhD in Arabic Studies (University of Vienna 2015). Former "Imperium et Officium" and APD researcher. 2018-2019 Holder of an Erwin Schrödinger PostDoc research scholarship from the FWF (Austrian Science Fund). LMU Munich Arabic Studies Faculty Member.
Supervisors: Prof. Andreas Kaplony
Supervisors: Prof. Andreas Kaplony
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Talks by Ursula Hammed
In my talk, I will treat the written agreements between the monks at St Catherine’s monastery and the tribes inhabiting the Sinai Peninsula.
The documents, which have been taken by D.S. Richards from ʿAṭīya , date from the 15th and 16th century CE, but closer analysis will encompass only the earlier documents.
The following three aspects will be discussed on the basis of the documents and Richards’s commentary:
First, there is the topic of “land and power” itself and specific questions linked to it, like in which relation we must place land possession and responsibility for the safety of those crossing said land or which duties and rights were incumbent on which party of the agreements.
The second area that deserves our interest is the question of administration at the periphery. Neither the monks not the Bedouin were backed by government officials when drawing up their agreements on livelihood, travel and safety on the Sinai Peninsula. Furthermore, the documents had to cross the conceptual gap between the monastery’s hierarchy and legislation and Bedouin law, which was (and is) in many aspects not based on Islamic law, but has its own origins and regulations.
Then another interesting point is how and where the agreements were preserved. They were found in the monastery, but since they are mutual agreements binding two parties to their content one must ask if the Bedouin were granted access to them in order to read the content up or if there were copies or a least one copy for the shaykh al-ʿarab. If not we must assume that the documents’ text was made known to every single member of the Bedouin tribes in a way which at the same time made everybody adhere to its content.
Considering these facts, one must speak of a kind of “unofficial administration,” whose authority was in the agreements and their execution. The agreements administered what the government did not take care of: daily life in an outlying region.
Thirdly, the documents (one on parchment, the others on paper) will be studied from a papyrological viewpoint. Here the main topics to deal with are document type and structure, the formulae employed and linguistic questions, e.g. the extreme tendency towards dialectal expressions.
Papers by Ursula Hammed
(zuhd) may now be added the papyrus P.Vindob. AP 1854a–b of the Austrian National Library in
Vienna, which is edited, translated, and annotated in this article. Its two incomplete and damaged
leaves contain four texts that constitute a small anthology of meditations on the imminence of
death and judgment: psalms 7–13 of the Islamic ‘Psalms of David’ (Zabūr Dāwūd); a collection of narratives surrounding the death of the Prophet Muḥammad; a collection of material about grief over
the deaths of the Prophet and Fāṭima and over the slaughter of al-Ḥusayn’s party at Karbala; and a
dialogue between God and the prophet David about the rewards of the afterlife. The papyrus confirms that the long Muslim tradition of rewriting the ‘Psalms of David’ originated in early renunciant circles. It also illustrates the process whereby a ninth-century preacher could compile a
notebook of sermon material from a wide range of sources, including poetry, hadith, and an apocryphal scripture. It also shows how much the still-underdeveloped study of early Islamic piety
stands to benefit from the even less-studied resource of Arabic literary papyri.
ISBN 978-3-406-82244-5