Topgül M. E. (Executive) , Karagözoğlu M. M. , Atçıl A., Yılmaz H.
TUBITAK Project, 2021 - 2024
This project titled
“Constructing the Second/Eighth Century Hadith Circles” sets out with a
proposition of studying the classical Islamic sources in the context of
digital humanities for the first time in Turkey and aims to track the
scholarly mobility and construct the ḥadīth circles in the centers of
knowledge of the second/eighth century with a new method. This project,
boundaries of which are clearly set in terms of time, place, and schools of
knowledge, will advance in a three-stage process, each stage supporting or revising
the others. In order to lay the foundation for developing a comprehensive
narrative about the history of ḥadīth, the scattered information in
the classical sources will be compiled and classified, then rendered into
data, and finally be subjected to an extensive analysis not only in the
specific context of each city but also in the interregional context. The aforementioned
new method has been applied to a specific city and a time period, and yielded
convincing results. Applying this method to every center of knowledge in the
second/eight century, when the Islamic sciences began to form, will render it
possible for researchers to see the changes in the attitudes and tendencies
of Ahl al-Ḥadīth in different time periods, as well as to put the said
group through classification. Besides these two outputs, the issues that were
subjects of heated scholarly debates in different cities will be detected and
the rise and fall of these cities in terms of centrality will be analyzed; consequently
paving the way for an inclusive account of the second/eighth century, which
is an era handled vaguely and superficially in the works concerning the
history of ḥadīth. This project necessitates
many shareholders’ working simultaneously. Hence, so as to provide
synchronization, weekly meetings will be held and the participant researchers
will attend these meetings in person if they are in Istanbul, via online
platforms if they are not. These meetings are not only going to ensure the
sharing of information about different cities between the researchers, but
also teach them how to work cooperatively; thus, strengthening the
collaborative culture of academia. The phenomenon of travel (al-riḥla)
in the early Islamic scholarly community makes it difficult to relate a
scholar to only one city; so, gathering data about different cities and
discussing these data together will reveal the connections between them. The project’s main
output, an edited book comprising of seven chapters and a detailed
introduction, will not only make a great contribution to the academic ḥadīth
studies conducted in the field of theology, but also fill in a significant
gap current in the mass-education curriculum. Furthermore, researchers from
ranging areas of humanities and social sciences are going to be able to apply
the method used in this project to their own research. Also, as a second
output of this project a website, which will contain network diagrams, isnād
trees, maps, 3D architectural visualisations, timelines about the cities and
important ḥadīth scholars, travel routes, is going to be created, providing
the transmission of results to the wider scholarly community and opening new
doors for asking questions to the data which are not possible to ask to its written
form. |