Duncan Black MacDonald

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Duncan Black MacDonald (born April 9, 1863 in Glasgow , Scotland , † September 6, 1943 in Glastonbury , Hartford County , Connecticut , USA ) was an American theologian and orientalist of Scottish - Calvinist origin. The Macdonald Center for the Study of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations at Hartford Seminary in Hartford , Connecticut, is named after him.

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Duncan Black MacDonald was born in Glasgow in 1863. He studied Semitic languages in Glasgow and Berlin . He later became Professor of Semitic Languages ​​at Hartford Theological Seminary . He established the discipline of Islamic Studies in the United States in 1893. His efforts resulted in the establishment at Hartford Seminary, now known as the Duncan Black Macdonald Center for the Study of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations . He came to Hartford, Connecticut in 1893 | and convinced the seminary to establish a school for missionary work among Muslims in the Middle East . It quickly became the largest Protestant US mission school in the Muslim world. The magazine The Muslim world ( The Muslim world: a quarterly review of history, culture, religions & the christian mission in Islamdom ) has been published by the Duncan Black Macdonald Center since 1911. Despite its age, his book Development of Muslim Theology, Jurisprudence and Constitutional Theory is considered a successful introduction to Islamic law . It also contains various translated primary texts.

He assumed that the stories from the Arabian Nights were an expression of Islamic popular piety. After Hermann Zotenberg , he was the second orientalist to study the underlying manuscripts. He was planning a critical edition of the three-volume manuscript in the Bibliothèque nationale that Antoine Galland had used for his French translation of the Arabian Nights . The project did not materialize, however, and the critical edition was not produced by Muhsin Mahdi until 1984 . MacDonald contributed various articles to the Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed., 1911) and the First Encyclopaedia of Islam . He spent his entire academic career (1892-1925) at Hartford Theological Seminary and in particular at the Kennedy School of Missions at this institution. He continued her as "Honorary Consulting Professor of Muhammadanism" until his death in 1943. He was succeeded (as Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies ) at Hartford Seminary by Edwin Elliot Calverley (1882–1971), who had returned from Kuwait .

MacDonald was one of the formative figures in his country for the view of Islam , comparable to the influence of Ignaz Goldziher (1850–1921), Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857–1936), Carl Heinrich Becker (1876–1933) and Louis Massignon (1883 –1962) in European countries.

Publications (selection)

  • Development of Muslim Theology, Jurisprudence and Constitutional Theory. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1903 (The Semitic Series) ( digitized )
  • The religious attitude and life in Islam . New York: AMS Press, [1970]: Haskell lectures on comparative religion, University of Chicago, 1906 ( digitized version )
  • A selection from the Prolegomena of Ibn Khaldūn. 1905 (Semitic Study Series) ( digitized version )

See also

References and footnotes

  1. ↑ cf. The Duncan Black Macdonald Center for the Study of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations
  2. ^ The Islamization of Hartford Seminary - accessed May 16, 2017
  3. ^ The Muslim World Journal
  4. ↑ Asaf Hussain, Robert W. Olson, Jamil A. Qureshi: Orientalism, Islam, and Islamists. Brattleboro, Vt .: Amana Books 1984, p. 169.
  5. ↑ David A. Kerr: "Calverley, Edwin Elliot". In: Gerald H. Anderson (Ed.): Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions . 1999, p. 110.
  6. ↑ cf. Jean Jacques Waardenburg ( Islam in the Mirror of the West: How some Western Orientalists dealt with Islam and formed an image of this religion , French)

literature

Web links

Wikisource: Duncan Black MacDonald (English original texts)  - sources and full texts
personal data
SURNAME MacDonald, Duncan Black
ALTERNATIVE NAMES MacDonald, Duncan B.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American orientalist and missionary
DATE OF BIRTH April 9, 1863
PLACE OF BIRTH Glasgow , Scotland
DATE OF DEATH September 6, 1943
Place of death Glastonbury , Hartford County , Connecticut , USA