Hinrich Biesterfeldt is a retired professor of Arabic and Islamic studies in Bochum (Germany). He studied Semitic languages, Persian and Turkish, philosophy, and ancient and medieval history at the universities of Freiburg im Breisgau, Munich, and Göttingen. His doctoral dissertation (Göttingen 1970, an edition and analysis of the Arabic translation of an essay by the Greek physician Galen on the relation between body and soul) was published in 1973. He spent a postdoctoral year at Yale University, two years at the German Orient-Institut in Beirut (Lebanon) and two further years at the University of Heidelberg, before he came to Ruhr-Universität in Bochum where he eventually became director of the Arabic branch of the Institute of Foreign Languages and taught Oriental languages and courses in the intellectual history of Islam at the Oriental Institute until his retirement (2008). He has pursued his interest in, and published widely on, the transmission of Greek philosophy and medicine to Arabic culture. His other fields of research include the early history of classifications of knowledge in Islam and classical Arabic prose literature. Together with Charles Manekin and Tzvi Langermann, he is the editor of a series of parts of Moritz Steinschneider’s monumental Die hebräischen Übersetzungen des Mittelalters […] (Berlin 1893) in English translation.  

Course Title: Political Theory in Classical Islam between Plato & Aristotle and al-Māwardī (and beyond)

Course Description:

It is well known that political thought in Islam is a synthesis of ancient Greek theory, Iranian ideas on statecraft and specific Islamic concepts of the Caliphate and the ideal government. The texts that we shall read and discuss will concern the classics such as al-Fārābī, Averroes, and al-Māwardī, but will go beyond these in three respects: chronologically (authors from the Mamluk and the Ottoman period), concerning literary genre (including mirrors for princes, poems in praise of a ruler, historiography, satire, etc.), and concerning denominational boundaries, i.e. including Jewish and Christian sources.

Introductory Literature:

Erwin I. J. Rosenthal, Political Thought in Medieval Islam. An introductory outline, Cambridge U P 21968; Patricia Crone, God’s Rule. Government and Islam, New York 2003.