26 Alina Kokoschka and Birgit Krawietz
not huge building blocks, of more or less direct quotations. Appro-
priation is the central rubric under which we look at the immense scale
of discernable processes.
We understand appropriation as a set of practices that – conscious-
ly or unconsciously – occupy meaning. An object, figure, sign, for-
mulation, topic, narrative, style and so forth is turned into something
that, within the logic of the personal life practice, is “made one’s own
(proprius)” and by this “appropriate”. This is beyond any notion of
“copy and paste” or of mere repetition or imitation. Thilo Schwer
distinguishes three different types varying in the degree of appropria-
tion and creativity: (i) small “seemingly obstinate” gestures of iden-
tification with the object, (ii) individual combination and “recod-
ing”, and (iii) encompassing modifications, after which the original
object cannot be recognized anymore.^99 “Recoding” in particular has
the power to question hierarchies of appropriate and inappropriate,
“high” and “low”, “orthodox” and “heterodox”. So what is being
appropriated in our case of the two Shaykhs of Islam? There are, for
instance, (i) concepts, styles, arguments, terms, (ii) biographies and
historical figures, (iii) narratives, (iv) practices, and (v) material, like
manuscripts. Ibn Taymiyya appropriates Greek philosophers’ writ-
ings; Ibn al-Qayyim appropriates the writings of Ibn Taymiyya, but
not necessarily his style; Muslim authors and activists appropriate
both of them in order to underline their Salafi or Wahhabi claims and
a myriad of detectable facets. Translation and thereby transforma-
tion of meaning is another issue pertinent to this broad set of pos-
sibilities.^100 While the ideas of intertextuality in a Kristevan sense are
the basis of our understanding, this approach must be extended to
include a notion of the subject/agent, thereby tracing practices rather
99 Schwer, Thilo: Persönliche Aneignung versus kommerzielle Verwertung im
Möbeldesign, in: Birgit Richard and Alexander Ruhl (eds.): Konsumguerilla.
Widerstand gegen Massenkultur?, Frankfurt and New York 2008, pp. 55–68,
here p. 55. Referring to A. I. Sabra and others, Tzvi Langermann depicts appro-
priation as the first phase within a process that leads to a “naturalization” of
science (The Naturalization of Science in Ibn Qayyim al-Ǧawziyyah’s Kitāb
al-Rūḥ, in: Bori and Holtzman, A Scholar in the Shadow, pp. 211–228, here
p. 211). We, however, work with a much broader and complex understanding
of appropriation pertinent to art history, anthropology and others fields that
avoids the expression naturalization.
100 See especially the chapters of Arif, Böttcher, Özervarli, Preckel and Riexinger
in this volume, although the findings of Translation Studies have not yet been
applied in research on Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya.
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