Co-authored by Kathryn Babayan, Ph.D. 1993.

1860647219

The Safavid dynasty represented the pinnacle of Iran's power and influence in its early modern history. The evidence of this - the creation of a nation state, military expansion and success,…

Islamicate Sexualities: Translations across Temporal Geographies of Desire explores different genealogies of sexuality and questions some of the theoretical emphases and epistemic assumptions affecting current histories of sexuality. Concerned with the dynamic interplay between cultural constructions of gender and sexuality, the…

Focusing on idealists and visionaries who believed that Justice could reign in our world, this book explores the desire to experience utopia on earth. Reluctant to await another existence—another form, or eternal life following death and resurrection—individuals with ghuluww, or exaggeration, emerged at the advent of Islam, expecting…

Edited by Kathryn Babayan, Ph.D. 1993.

This book rethinks the Armenian people as significant actors in the context of Mediterranean and global history. Spanning a millennium of cross-cultural interaction and exchange across the Mediterranean world, essays move between connected histories, frontier studies, comparative literature, and…

Kathryn Babayan, Ph.D. 1993.

Household anthologies of seventeenth-century Isfahan collected everyday texts and objects, from portraits, letters, and poems to marriage contracts and talismans. With these family collections, Kathryn Babayan tells a new history of the city at the…

Co-authored by Barbara Sude, Ph.D. 1975.

This monograph analyzes the finances of the militant group al-Qa'ida in Iraq (AQI) in Anbar province during 2005 and 2006, at the peak of the group's power and influence. The authors draw on captured documents that give details on the daily…

This volume has its origins in a conference held at the UCLA G. E. von Grunebaum Center for Near Eastern Studies in October 2013 and brings together scholars from various disciplines and fields to consider Islamic revelation, with particular focus on the Qur'an. The collection provides a wide-ranging survey of the development and current state…

Co-edited by Adam Abdelhamid Sabra, PhD. 1998.

This is the first publication of the official correspondence of the leading religious scholar and literary figure, Shaykh Muhammad ibn Abi al-Hasan al-Bakri al-Siddiqi al-Shafi'i Sibt Al al-Hasan. It provides a window into the world of an influential religious scholar in sixteenth century…

Adam Sabra, Ph.D. 1998

This article encourages a reevaluation of the role of Anatolian Muslim merchants and notability in the Turkish nationalist movement after World War I. It offers the political career of Gümüşhane merchant Kadirbeyoğlu Zeki Bey (1884–1952) as one step toward such a reevaluation. Zeki is known to historians of Turkey for his seemingly unusual…

Translated by David Selim Sayers, Ph.D. 2014.

 “In the midst of the daily toil for food and shelter, the struggle for survival and their daily bread, in indescribably harsh conditions, the Turkish-speaking Anatolian refugees penned poetry whose inner depths portray it all. The death of loved ones during the flight from their…

Co-edited by Abderrahmane El Moudden, Ph.D. 1992.

Karl Barbir, Ph.D. 1977.

On the basis of new evidence from the Ottoman archives in Istanbul, Karl Barbir challenges the current interpretation of Ottoman rule in Damascus during the eighteenth century. He argues that the prevailing themes of decline and stagnation — usually applied to the entire century — in fact apply only to the…

Although Iraqi Jews saw themselves as Iraqi patriots, their community—which had existed in Iraq for more than 2,500 years—was displaced following the establishment of the state of Israel. New Babylonians chronicles the lives of these Jews, their urban Arab culture, and their hopes for a democratic nation-state. It studies their ideas…

The Other Iraq challenges the notion that Iraq has always been a totalitarian, artificial state, torn by sectarian violence. Chronicling the rise of the Iraqi public sphere from 1921 to 1958, this enlightening work reveals that the Iraqi intellectual field was always more democratic and pluralistic than historians have tended to…

Orit Baskin, Ph.D. 2005.

Co-Winner of the 2018 Nikki Keddie Book Award, sponsored by the Middle East Studies Association.

Between 1949 and 1951, 123,000 Iraqi Jews immigrated to the newly established Israeli state. Lacking the resources to absorb them all, the Israeli government resettled them in maabarot, or…

Medieval interpretations of the Qur'an often serve as points of reference for Muslim thought; yet Qur'an commentaries were shaped not only by the Qur'an itself, but also by their authors' ideological viewpoints, their theories of interpretation, their methods, and the conventions of the genre…

Karen A. Bauer, Ph.D. 2008.

“This book explores how medieval and modern Muslim religious scholars ('ulamā') interpret gender roles in Qur'ānic verses on legal testimony, marriage, and human creation. Citing these verses, medieval scholars developed increasingly complex laws and interpretations upholding a male-dominated gender…

Karen Bauer, Ph.D. 2008

In June of 1964, three young, white blues fans set out from New York City in a Volkswagen,…

Slave of Desire explores the medieval Arabic work The Thousand and One Nights, drawing on the ideas of Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Slavoj Zizek for its literary criticism. While psychoanalytic thought provides an important theoretical frame, the analyses also make reference to the ideas of such thinkers as Hegel,…

To better understand the diverse inheritance of Islamic movements in present-day Turkey, we must take a closer look at the religious establishment, the ulema, during the first half of the twentieth century. During the closing years of the Ottoman Empire and the early decades of the Republic of Turkey, the spread of secularist and anti-religious…

Amit Bein, Ph.D. 2006.

To better understand the lasting legacy of international relations in the post-Ottoman Middle East, we must first re-examine Turkey's engagement with the region during the interwar period. Long assumed to be a period of deliberate disengagement and ruptured ties between Turkey and its neighbours, Amit Bein…

Joseph Norment Bell, Ph.D. 1971.

Table of Contents

Tables

Acknowledgments

1.   Introduction

2.   Selection and Organization of Literary Material: Ibn Al Jawzi's Dhamm al-Hawa

3.   The Reaction to Ash'arism: Ibn Taymiya

4.   Divine Will and Love in the…

Co-editor Abderrahmane El Moudden, Ph.D. 1992

Co-author Leila Bisharat, Ph.D. 1976.

Co-authored by Lewis B. Ware, Ph.D. 1973.

The United States must improve its ability to cope with low-intensity conflict. We must become a great deal better at fighting this kind of war. We may learn quickly, in which case we will be able to cope with low- intensity conflict in the near-term; or we may learn slowly, in which case we…

Co-authored by Lewis B. Ware, Ph.D. 1973.

Co-authored by Lewis B. Ware, Ph.D. 1973.

Addresses the ideals and institutions through which Middle Eastern societies have confronted poverty and the poor.

Offering insights and analysis in a field that has only recently come into existence, this book explores the ideals and institutions through which Middle Eastern societies—from the rise of Islam in the seventh century C.E…

Modern Algeria has been, in many ways, a harbinger of events and trends that have affected the Arab and Muslim worlds. The country's bold experiment in democratization broke down in the early 1990s, largely over the question of whether the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) should be permitted to come to power following its victories in local,…

The Byzantine Empire was the Islamic commonwealth’s first and most stubborn adversary. For many centuries it loomed large in Islamic diplomacy, military operations and commerce, as well as in Islamic representations of the world in general. Moreover, the ways in which early Muslims and Byzantines perceived one another ” both polemically and…

What is jihad? Does it mean violence, as many non-Muslims assume? Or does it mean peace, as some Muslims insist? Because jihad is closely associated with the early spread of Islam, today’s debate about the origin and meaning of jihad is nothing less than a struggle over Islam itself. In Jihad in Islamic History, Michael Bonner provides…

Co-edited by Fred McGraw Donner, B.A. 1968, Ph.D. 1975.

The papers in this first volume of the new Oriental Institute series LAMINE are derived from a conference entitled “Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians in the Umayyad State,” held at the University of Chicago on June 17–18,…

Translated by Lewis B. Ware, Ph.D. 1973.

Table of Contents

Introduction

1. The sword and destiny

2. The conditions of revolution

3. The fear of Islamism

4. The magic potion

5. The totalim of Islam

6. The Ulama of power and the power of the Ulama

A collection of essays written by scholars invited to the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania in 2003–2004.

Over the past several decades, the field of Jewish studies has expanded to encompass an unprecedented range of research topics, historical periods, geographic regions, and…

Co-edited by Norman Itzkowitz, Ph.D. 1959.

Drawing on a wealth of previously unstudied primary sources in several languages, Vahid Brown and Don Rassler map the anatomy of a group frequently described as the most lethal actor in the Afghan insurgency. The Haqqani network has for decades operated at the centre of a transnational nexus of Islamist militancy, lending support to the…

“From its beginnings in the wake of the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan, al-Qa’ida has been at war with itself. In disputes that have largely been invisible to the broader public, its leadership has been in a constant battle over what al-Qa’ida should be, what strategy it should pursue, even who its real enemies are. Very early in al-Qa’ida’s…

"After 13 years in America, Abu Saheeh has returned to his native Iraq, a nation transformed by the American military presence. Alone in a new city, he has exactly what he wants: freedom from his past. Then he meets Layla, a whimsical fourteen-year-old girl who enchants him with her love of American pop culture. Enchanted by Layla's stories and…

Edited by Lawrence I. Conrad, Ph.D. 1981

This volume presents a selection of twenty-seven studies by the late Marwan R. Buheiry, whose premature death in 1986 deprived Arab scholarship of one of its most original and stimulating thinkers.

An avid student of political power, economics, and the arts, he was keenly aware of the…

Cole Bunzel, Ph.D. 2018.

While the Islamic State dominates headlines through its brutal tactics and pervasive propaganda, there is little awareness of the unique ideology driving the group's strategy. Drawing from private correspondence, statements, speeches, and Islamic theology, Cole Bunzel unpacks the ideology of the Islamic State…

Cole M. Bunzel, B.A. 2008, Ph.D. 2018

An essential history of Wahhābism from its founding to the Islamic State.

In the mid-eighteenth century, a controversial Islamic movement arose in the central Arabian region of Najd that forever changed the political landscape of the Arabian Peninsula and the history of Islamic thought. Its…

Co-editor Edmund Burke III, Ph.D. 1970.

The landscapes of the Middle East have captured our imaginations throughout history. Images of endless golden dunes, camel caravans, isolated desert oases, and rivers lined with palm trees have often framed written and visual representations of the region. Embedded in these…

Co-editor Edmund Burke, III, Ph.D. 1970.

Since around 1500 C.E., humans have shaped the global environment in ways that were previously unimaginable. Bringing together leading environmental historians and world historians, this book offers an overview of global environmental history throughout this remarkable 500-year period. In…