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Fritz Meier (10 June, 1912- 10 June, 1998) was a Swiss Orientalist with a focus on Sufism.
Fritz Meier was born on 10 June 1912 in Basel. He grew up in the Canton of Basel-Landschaft and attended the Humanistisches Gymnasium. Beginning in 1932 he studied Greek philology, Semitics, and Assyriology at the University of Basel. [1] He soon switched to Islamic studies and became a student of the Ottomanist and historian Rudolf Tschudi (1884-1960), under whose supervision he earned his doctorate, with a thesis on the life of the Sufi Abu Ishaq al-Kazaruni. [2] In 1935 he followed Hellmut Ritter (1892-1971) to Istanbul, where he made his way to academic work. In 1963 he was habilitated. Meier was granted an honorary doctorate by the University of Tehran in 1974 and by the University of Freiburg in 1992. From 1986 on he was a corresponding member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
His writings exerted a great deal of influence on the academic world. He wrote about the many forms of Islamic mysticism, Islamic manuscripts of the Persian and Arabic languages, the relationship between the Middle East and European cultural history, the history of religion in general, and popular culture.
His works on the great Persian mystic Abū-Sa'īd Abul-Khayr and the Persian poet Mahsati are considered some of the most comprehensive research available on the subjects. [3] He died in Dornach on 10 June 1998.
Abū al-Faraj Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq an-Nadīm, also Ibn Abī Yaʿqūb Isḥāq ibn Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq al-Warrāq, and commonly known by the nasab (patronymic) Ibn an-Nadīm, was an important Muslim bibliographer and biographer of Baghdad who compiled the encyclopedia Kitāb al-Fihrist.
Safi-ad-Din Ardabili al-Kurdi(Persian: صفیالدین اسحاق اردبیلی Ṣāfī ad-Dīn Isḥāq Ardabīlī; 1252/3 – 1334) was a poet, mystic, teacher and Sufi master. He was the son-in-law and spiritual heir of the Sufi master Zahed Gilani, whose order—the Zahediyeh—he reformed and renamed the Safaviyya, which he led from 1301 to 1334.
The Qarmatians were a militant Isma'ili Shia movement centred in Al-Ahsa in Eastern Arabia, where they established a religious—and, as some scholars have claimed, proto-socialist or utopian socialist—state in 899 CE. Its members were part of a movement that adhered to a syncretic branch of Sevener Ismaili Shia Islam, and were ruled by a dynasty founded by Abu Sa'id al-Jannabi, a Persian from Jannaba in coastal Fars. They rejected the claim of Fatimid Caliph Abdallah al-Mahdi Billah to imamate and clung to their belief in the coming of the Mahdi, and they revolted against the Fatimid and Abbasid Caliphates.
Abū Yazīd Ṭayfūr bin ʿĪsā bin Surūshān al-Bisṭāmī (al-Basṭāmī), commonly known in the Iranian world as Bāyazīd Basṭāmī, was a Persian Sufi from north-central Iran. Known to future Sufis as Sultān-ul-Ārifīn, Bisṭāmī is considered to be one of the expositors of the state of fanā, the notion of dying in mystical union with Allah. Bastami was famous for "the boldness of his expression of the mystic’s complete absorption into the mysticism." Many "ecstatic utterances" have been attributed to Bisṭāmī, which lead to him being known as the "drunken" or "ecstatic" school of Islamic mysticism. Such utterance may be argued as, Bisṭāmī died with mystical union and the deity is speaking through his tongue. Bisṭāmī also claimed to have ascended through the seven heavens in his dream. His journey, known as the Mi'raj of Bisṭāmī, is clearly patterned on the Mi'raj of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. Bisṭāmī is characterized in three different ways: a free thinking radical, a pious Sufi who is deeply concerned with following the shari'a and engaging in "devotions beyond the obligatory," and a pious individual who is presented as having a dream similar to the Mi'raj of Muhammed. The Mi'raj of Bisṭāmī seems as if Bisṭāmī is going through a self journey; as he ascends through each heaven, Bisṭāmī is gaining knowledge in how he communicates with the angels and the number of angels he encounters increases.
Zakariyya' al-Qazwini, also known as Qazvini, , was a cosmographer and geographer.
The ghulāt were a branch of early Shiʿa. The term mainly refers to a wide variety of extinct Shiʿi sects active in 8th and 9th-century Kufa in Lower Mesopotamia, and who despite their sometimes significant differences shared several common ideas. These common ideas included the attribution of a divine nature to the Imams, metempsychosis, a particular gnostic creation myth involving pre-existent 'shadows' whose fall from grace produced the material world, and an emphasis on secrecy and dissociation from outsiders. They were named ghulāt by other Shiʿi and Sunni Muslims for their purportedly "exaggerated" veneration of Muhammad and his family, most notably Ali and his descendants, the Imams.
Abu Ishaq Ibrahim ibn Muhammad al-Farisi al-Istakhri was a 10th-century travel author and Islamic geographer who wrote valuable accounts in Arabic of the many Muslim territories he visited during the Abbasid era of the Islamic Golden Age. There is no consensus regarding his origin. Some sources describe him as Persian, while others state he was Arab. The Encyclopedia Iranica states: "Biographical data are very meager. From his nesbas he appears to have been a native of Eṣṭaḵr in Fārs, but it is not known whether he was Persian".
Gregor Schoeler is an Arabist and Islamicist with German and Swiss citizenship. His areas of research are the biography (Sīrah) of Muhammad, the Islamic system of teaching and transmission, Hadith, classical Arabic and Persian literature, especially Arabic poetry, belles-lettres and literary theory, the description of Arabic manuscripts and the classical heritage in Islam. In his research on the biography of Muhammad, he used individual examples to reconstruct the ways in which the accounts of Muhammad were transmitted, and showed that many of these accounts can be traced back to Urwa ibn al-Zubayr, the nephew of Muhammad's wife ʿĀ'isha bint Abī Bakr. He also helped develop the method of isnād-cum-matn analysis.
Heinrich Suter was a historian of science specializing in Islamic mathematics and astronomy.
Ṣāʿid al-Andalusī, in full Abū al-Qāsim Ṣāʿid ibn Abū al-Walīd Aḥmad ibn Abd al-Raḥmān ibn Muḥammad ibn Ṣāʿid ibn ʿUthmān al-Taghlibi al-Qūrtūbi, was an Arab qadi of Toledo in al-Andalus, who wrote on the history of science, philosophy and thought. He was a mathematician and scientist with a special interest in astronomy and compiled a famous biographic encyclopedia of science that quickly became popular in the empire and the Islamic East.
Heinrich Ludwig Julius Heppe was a German Calvinist theologian and church historian.
Friedrich Zacharias Schwally was a German Orientalist with professorships at Strasbourg, Gießen and Königsberg. He held the degrees of PhD, Lic. Theol., Dr. Habil., and the Imperial honour of the Order of the Red Eagle, Class IV. He was one of the first significant academics in the field of Quranic studies.
Ibrāhīm bin Shahryar bin Zadan Farrokh bin Khorshid, better known by his pen-names Abū Ishaq (ابواسحاق) and Sheykh Abū Ishaq of Kazerun and Nicknamed Sheykh Murshid, was one of the famous Iraninan Sufis of the late 4th and early 5th century AH. He was the founder of the Kazeruniyeh sufism, which spread to India and China on one side, and to Anatolia and Baghdad on the other side.
Kurt Flasch is a German philosopher, who works mainly as a historian of medieval thought and of late antiquity. Flasch was professor at the Ruhr University Bochum. He was / is a member of several German and international Academies. In 2000, he was awarded the Sigmund Freud Prize by the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung.
Klaus Koschorke is a German historian of Christianity and was a Professor of Early and Global History of Christianity at the University of Munich in Germany from 1993 to 2013.
Rüdiger Schmitt is a German linguist, Iranologist, and educator. He was a professor of Comparative Indo-European Philology and Indo-Iranian Studies at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Saarland, Germany, from 1979 until 2004.
Heidemarie Koch was a German Iranologist.
The Umm al-Kitāb is a syncretic Shi'i work originating in the ghulāt milieus of 8th-century Kufa (Iraq). It was later transplanted to Syria by the 10th-century Nusayris, whose final redaction of the work was preserved in a Persian translation produced by the Nizari Isma'ilis of Central Asia. The work only survives in Persian. It contains no notable elements of Isma'ili doctrine, but given the fact that Isma'ili authors starting from the 10th century were influenced by early ghulāt ideas such as those found in the Umm al-Kitāb, and especially given the influence of these ideas on later Tayyibi Isma'ilism, some Isma'ilis do regard the work as one of the most important works in their tradition.
Fritz Volbach was a German conductor, composer and musicologist.
Hud ibn Muhakkamal-Hawwari, Arabic: هود بن محكم الهواري, was an Ibadi Quran exegete from North Africa.