Ignác Goldziher
Ignác Goldziher · Philosophy & Social Sciences
Founder of modern Islamic studies in Europe, whose critical analysis of the hadith reshaped the understanding of Islam — kept from a university chair for thirty years as a Jew
22 juin 1850, Székesfehérvár, Hongrie — 13 novembre 1921, Budapest, Hongrie
Budapest, Le Caire, Damas
Ignác Goldziher is recognized among Jewish contributors to Philosophy & Social Sciences — Founder of modern Islamic studies in Europe, whose critical analysis of the hadith reshaped the understanding of Islam — kept from a university chair for thirty years as a Jew
Origins and early life
Ignác Goldziher was born in Székesfehérvár, in Hungary, on 22 June 1850, into an observant Jewish family of Spanish descent, and remained a Jew all his life — for thirty years the secretary of the Neolog Jewish community of Budapest, a post he took because the university of his own country would not give a Jew a chair, and held with bitterness until, at fifty-four, in 1905, Budapest finally made him a professor. He had studied in Berlin and Leipzig under the great Arabists of the age, and in 1873 and 1874 travelled through Syria, Palestine and Egypt, where he became the first European admitted to study at the mosque-university of al-Azhar in Cairo; the Oriental Diary he kept records a young Jew praying in a mosque and finding there 'the only religion in which superstition and heathen elements are proscribed by rationalism'.
Work and career
His work made him the founder of the modern study of Islam: Muhammedanische Studien, in two volumes of 1889 and 1890, showed by historical and philological criticism that the hadith — the traditions of the Prophet's sayings and deeds on which Islamic law rests — largely reflect the disputes of the generations after Muhammad rather than his own words, a conclusion that has governed the field, in agreement and in argument, ever since; his Lectures on Islam of 1910 and his studies of the Zahirite school, of Quranic exegesis and of Islamic sects completed it.
Later years
Honored by every academy of Europe and by the gold medal of the Stockholm congress of orientalists in 1889, he refused chairs at Cambridge and Heidelberg to remain in Hungary, and died in Budapest on 13 November 1921. His scholarship on Islam was that of a Jew who studied another faith with respect and rigor, and Muslim scholars have read him for a century as one of their own interlocutors.
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Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ign%C3%A1c_Goldziher
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Founder of modern Islamic studies in Europe, whose critical analysis of the hadith reshaped the understanding of Islam — kept from a university chair for thirty years as a Jew
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ign%C3%A1c_Goldziher
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