Marek M. Dziekan

Classical arabo-islamic culture. Basic issues

The article begins with an attempt to define the concept of Arabic and Islamic culture. Therefore its main purpose is to present the beginnings of Islam, Islamic community (umma) and the basic elements of Islamic faith and their nature. The most significant feature of the Arab-Islamic culture is its strong connection with the Islamic law – sharia, based on the Koran and Sunna. For this reason the presentation of its principles takes an important place in this text. The Islamic law determines all sides of this civilisation in macro and micro scale. It plays a crucial role in the development of the state, but also in the behavior of the ordinary man. The other point of interest in this article is the development of sciences in the Islamic world in the classical period. The classical or Medieval Arabo-Islamic culture developed subsequently in a specific way. The reevaluation of this development is currently an important axis of analyses in Arabic and Islamic studies..

Museums in the Arab World. A Reconnaissance

The present paper is an attempt to present selected examples of museums in the Arab World. In the introduction I present shortly the history of collecting and museums in this region. Afterwards I try do describe some sorts of Arab museums. They are national museums: Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Bardo Museum in Tunis, Iraq Museum in Baghdad and National Museum in Damascus; two small museums in Sousse (Tunisia) – The Oil Tree Museum and the Dar as-Sid (Dar Essid) Museum; biographical Museum of the writer and painter Gibran Khalil Gibran in Bisharri (Lebanon), and three museums or galleries of contemporary art in Algiers (The Museum of Contemporary and Modern Art), Doha’s New Modern (Qatar) and Safar Khan Gallery in Cairo. I close my article with some reflections concerning the role of museums in contemporary Arab culture.

Not only Houris: wildān muḫalladūn and ġilmān in the Koran and Muslim Religious Literature

In descriptions and discussions of the Muslim concept of paradise, much space is always devoted to the famous – as well as infamous – Houris. My article, however, is devoted to another paradise thread, that is, an analysis of fragments of the Koran where “immortal youths” (wildān muḫalladūn) are mentioned. These are verses 56: 17–19 and 76: 19. In slightly different words (ḡilmān muḫalladūn) they are also referred to in verse 52: 24. This topic has not yet been sufficiently covered in the studies in the field of Arabic and Islamic studies. Christian Luxenberg devoted some space to him in his controversial work on the Syro-Aramaic reading of the Koran. Much more space has been devoted to “immortal youths” by Muslim scholars, both classical and modern, not avoiding references to the ambiguities that may arise in connection with these verses.