Az arabok es az iszlam: Valogatott tanulmanyok (The Arabs and Islam: Selected Studies), 2 vols.

• Author: Hamori, Andras

Goldziher meant to be understood by the scholarly community and wrote his masterworks in German, but he meant also, all his life, despite decades of neglect on the part of the university establishment, to participate in Hungarian cultural life. These two volumes in the Budapest Oriental Reprints series offer a generous selection of his Hungarian essays and lectures.

A number of the essays can be regarded, the editor rightly says, "as preparatory studies for the great fundamental works." Thus "The Arabs and the question of nationalities" (1873) foreshadows much of the first volume of Muhammedanische Studien fifteen years later; "The poetic traditions of the pagan Arabs" (1892) and the less important "The poet as perceived by the ancient Arabs" contain the ideas about shacir, qafiya and hija more widely known from the Abhandlungen zur arabischen Philologie; "The various trends in Quranic exegesis" (1912) is developed in the Richtungen der islamischen Koranauslegung. Of the studies Goldziher did not revisit, several, perhaps the most important, are now accessible in English: "On the history of grammar among the Arabs," translated, with commentary, by K. Devenyi and T Ivanyi, Amsterdam 1994; "The Spanish Arabs and Islam" and "Historiography in Arabic literature," translated by J. de Somogyi in Gesammelte Schriften, and "Muhammadan public opinion," translated by J. Payne and P. Sadgrove in JSS (1993).

The titles of the remaining essays are as follows. Vol. 1: "Report on the books brought from the Orient for the library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, with regard to printing conditions in the Orient"; "On Muhammadan travelers" (the Arab interest in travel, modern travelers to the West, such as Mirza Abu Taleb, Tahtawi, and Shidyaq); "The oriental manuscripts in the library of the Hungarian National Museum"; "On popular etymology in the oriental languages"; "On the origins of Muhammadan jurisprudence" (argues for the detailed influence of Roman law: the opinio prudentium and racy, the principle of corrigere leges propier utilitatem publicam, analogy, the consensus doctorum ecclesiae, Tertullian's statement quod apud multos unum invenitur non est erratum sed traditum, the analogue of which is a sheet-anchor of Muslim legal thought; suggests that faqih and fiqh may be reflexes of prudens and iuris prudentia); "Abulwalid" (=Ibn Janah); "Address in commemoration of H. L. Fleischer"; "Journeys to Mecca" (from the 16th century to Burton and Snouck...