Rivista degli studi orientali (2022). Vol. 4: Investigating the silences of muslim medieval and early modern written sources

What can silences, or the unsaid, that we come across so frequently when reading primary sources, tell us about how people from a different age and culture thought? How to make sense of those silences of written texts identifiable as not accidental, yet also as not intentional, unlike what may be the case, for example, with the esoteric character of a text? And, first of all, how can we establish what a silence in a written text is? In the present collection of essays the silences of written sources are addressed as an issue in itself, observed from different vantage points and within different textual frameworks. As the variety of silences in written sources is one of the most engaging issues in historical research overall, «Rivista degli Studi Orientali» has devoted a special issue to this topic, with reference to Islamic medieval and later written sources. The issue consists of a collection of case studies by a group of scholars, mainly, but not only, specialists in medieval Islamic history and literature. Despite the diversity of themes covered by the six contributions included in the volume, as well as the differences in their author's approaches, there are various underlying threads connecting these studies that investigate a wide range of silences which have rarely been tackled as a topic in itself in the frame of Islamic studies. To conclude the contributions, related to different fields of research, are the result of a common background of reflections and readings and aim to fill, "from within", that is starting from a close reading of the texts, voids which are not void of meaning.