Россия и Арабский мир: к 200-летию профессора Санкт-Петербургского университета Шейха ат-Тантави (1810–1861)

202 belong to the five classes or kinds of harmful animals. Later Hadith reported about dogs, waterfowl and infertile animals. It is interesting that killing the snake named jānn , which is similar to a silver tube, is forbidden, because these snakes were considered to be transformed djinn s. There are descriptions of good places and cities in historical sources with the use of the xrafstra images ( Mu‘jam al-buldān by Yāqūt, Kitāb athār al-bilād by al-Qazwīnī). There is a story in the Kitāb athār al-bilād about the foundation of Bayda, built by ifrit s from white stone for King Solomon. The city is rich with numerous good things, bread, fresh water, fertile soil, fruit of improbable sizes, while snakes, scorpions and other «harmful creatures» are not found there. Thus, the city characteristics are Zoroastrian, especially in connection with the absence of harmful creatures in it. According to the Zoroastrian beliefs, the xrafstras as daevic creatures of Ahriman were regarded as unclean. The subject of the most purity laws was resistance to the greatest uncleanness of disease and death. Even a piece of unclean creature can become a cause of death. We can find this topic e.g. in a Hadith from the Mukashafat al-qulūb by al-Ghazali. Besides, some traces of a Zoroastrian image of Nasush can be found in the Hadith corpus. Nasush is a she-demon of decay. Nasush is the single cause of pollution in the world. She flies from the North and settles in the body of the deceased, flitting from part to part, from the undergarment to his bed, home and even relatives. Gad Gilbar (Department of Middle East History, University of Haifa, Israel) Paradigms of Trade and Finance in Ottoman Historiography: The 19th and 20th Centuries 1 Introduction Scholars are attracted by the notion of paradigms. It holds great power. Once paradigms are established, they become scientific foundations of a given field of study. The idea underlying this term emerged in the context of the history of the natural sciences, but it is also applied in various disciplines of the social sciences, and even the protégés of Clio have adopted it. Historians attach different meanings to the term, but there is a common denominator: it addresses a generalization embracing a broad historical phe- nomenon from both a thematic and a chronological standpoint. The impor- tance of a historical paradigm is that it offers an explanation for develop- ments or phenomena which show a degree of regularity or pattern, and which 1 This study was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (grant no. 865/06).