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Beyond the Crystal-Image
(2016)
The concept of three journeys as a way to denote spiritual development was introduced
by Dhu al-Nun, one of the founding fathers of Islamic mysticism. The use of this
concept was later refined by combining it with the Sufi technique of adding different
prepositions to a certain term, in order to differentiate between spiritual stages. By
using the words journey (Safar) and God (Allah) and inserting a preposition before the
word God, Sufi writers could map the different roads to God or the stations (Maqamat) on this road. Ibn al-'Arabi, in the beginning of the thirteenth century, speaks of three
different ways: from God, toward God and in God. Tanchum ha-Yerushalmi, the Judeo
Arabic biblical commentator from the end of this century, speaks of the three journeys
as three stations of one continuous way. A nearly identical description we can find in
the writing of the Muslim scholar Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, a generation later. Later in
the fourteenth century, in the writing of the Sufi writer al-Qashani, the three travels
become four, although the scheme of three prepositions is preserved. Near the end of
the fourteenth century, in the writings of R. David ha-Nagid, we find only two journeys:
to God and in God. All this tells us that Judeo Arabic literature can help us map
with greater precision the historical development of Sufi ideas.
Theses
(2016)
After the mass immigration to Israel from 1948 to 1950, about 2000 Jews remained
in Yemen. These Jews lived in small communities and continued to maintain their
religious environment as it was. In the years that followed, many of them, however, moved from Yemen to Israel with the assistance of the Jewish Agency and the Joint
Distribution Committee (JDC). The community was of a small size and the fact that it
was dispersed throughout the predominantly Muslim areas, created a certain closeness
between the two groups. About ten percent of the Jews chose to convert to Islam, many
of them in groups. In about twenty cases, the husbands chose to convert to Islam while
their wives emigrated to preserve their Judaism. Some of the converts refused to grant
their wives a divorce, because, according to Muslim law, conversion is enough to sever
the marital relationship. This procedure is called ʿAgunot. Meaning, women bound in
marriage to a husband and they no longer lived together, but the husband didn’t formally
‘released’ her from marriage union. The article follows the efforts undertaken
to release the ʿAgunot, and shows that Jewish and Muslim scholars were able to find
solutions to the ʿAgunot problem and, at times, managed to bridge the gap between the
two religions.
A Conjunction of Mysteries
(2016)
Recent work in semantics has shown that languages can vary in whether or not they include degrees (that is, elements of type < d >) in their semantic ontology. Several authors have argued that their languages of study lack degrees, including Bochnak (2013) for Washo (isolate, USA), Pearson (2009) for Fijian (Austronesian, Fiji), and Beck, et al. (2009) for Motu (Austronesian, Papua New Guinea). In this paper, I follow the tests proposed in Beck, et al. (2009) to assess the status of degrees in Warlpiri (Pama-Nyungan, Australia).
I use Warlpiri data collected following the Beck, et al. survey to argue that Warlpiri gradable predicates do not combine with a degree argument. (Like many other Australian languages, adjectival concepts like big and small are expressed using nouns in Warlpiri (Dixon 1982, Bittner & Hale 1995, among others). I refer to these lexical items as “gradable predicates” in this paper.) This paper represents a first pass at assessing the status of degrees in an Australian language, which have otherwise been unexamined from the point of view of degree semantics.